by Hugh Cook
Ever since the hanging at Ink, Guest Gulkan had shown a tendency to shy away from absolute adult responsibility. And, after Witchlord and Weaponmaster had made an alliance at Babaroth,
Lord Onosh had accelerated this tendency by deliberately minimizing Guest's involvement in all decisions - even those which might well have been within the young man's competence. As adult authority had passed from his hands, Guest had increasingly reverted to a childish irresponsibility which vexed his father sorely; and Lord Onosh showed unexpected strength of character in being able to control his temper in the face of his son's many provocations.
Avoiding the easy opportunity for uproarious argument, Lord Onosh now said:
"The plan, the original plan, was a feint toward Favanosin, followed by an eastward arc to Gendormargensis. We are now too weak to do any such thing. Yet even if we abandon hope of capturing Gendormargensis, I believe we must still turn east to have hope of safety. Let us make for the shores of the Swelaway Sea. Let us take passage to Safrak's islands. Let us there settle - or, if denied refuge by Safrak, let us take the trading route to the free city of Port Domax. So say I. Now what say you?"
There was silence, as if one and all were so battered by the successive shock of events as to have lost all powers of initiative and self-determination.
"Well," said Lord Onosh, with some impatience, and with a harshness which betrayed the stress he was under. "You have heard me speak. Must I parrot out the whole business three times over?
Or have you opinions to submit? What is your counsel?"
As a child may sometimes feel over-burdened by adult responsibilites, so too may an adult; and, though Lord Onosh had long sought absolute power, in the difficulties of defeat he was finding the solitary burden of such power to be a weight most uncommonly difficult to bear.
"I say," said Thodric Jarl, speaking first since he thought all duties of battle were primarily his, "that we are in no state to fight our way to the south. Furthermore, what we know of Favanosin is written in smoke. None amongst our number has been there. Some say that ships from that harbor venture to Argan, to Ork, to Ashmolea, but nobody can vouch for this of a certainty. I believe more is known of Port Domax, though the knowledge belongs to others, not to me." Sken-Pitilkin cleared his throat.
"Mighty is the wisdom of the Rovac," said Sken-Pitilkin, "and Jarl has truthed of Favanosin of a verity. All we know of Favanosin is that it clutches the sea's shore like a very whore's egg. But Port Domax - why, I've been there myself."
"Port Domax exists, certainly," said Pelagius Zozimus, denying Sken-Pitilkin the fullness of his intended oratory. "Sken-Pitilkin has seen it, and as for me - why, I once ran a small eatery in that very city. That was half a thousand years ago, true, but I've been there often enough since then. Its language is Toxteth; its business is trade; and the city is well-connected in enterprise with Safrak and Ashmolea, with Wen Endex and with the more southron parts of Yestron. I vote for Port Domax."
"If a witch can agree with a wizard," said Zelafona, who had the shortest voice of any in that council, "then I vote likewise."
"And I - " said Glambrax.
"Hush yourself!" said Jarl. "Nobody here asked opinion of a dwarf."Guest Gulkan and Rolf Thelemite took that as a cue for violence, and so grabbed the dwarf and sat on him, though not without difficulty, for Glambrax was prodigiously strong for his size, and could have mastered either one of them in single combat.
"My sister speaks with reason," said Bao Gahai; and, though she had nothing new to add to the discourse, she reinforced the dignity of her own authority by rehashing at length all the arguments which had been so far presented.
"Well," said Guest, seated panting atop a struggling dwarf,
"now we're talking sense, though I hope we find footing on Safrak.
I've no wish to run to the Sea of Salt, assuming the thing to exist, so I'd far more happily settle on Alozay, or some such similar island. Khmar can't bring his horse against us, not there, whereas we, why, with time to spare we can - Glambrax! - we can - grief of gods, the thing's biting! - we can plan - Rolf! Get his head, man! - we can plan Khmar's destruction and - ya! - and think to brute back the empire. Gods! The thing's biting!"
"Obviously," said Lord Onosh, observing the course of Guest Gulkan's oratory, "the energy of the young and of the dwarves who play with them is truly prodigious in its optimism. Yet I think
Khmar secure, and doubt that the empire's reclamation lies within our power."
"But the journey to Safrak does," said Thodric Jarl, rising to his feet, and so bringing their council to an end.
Thus on the following day the Witchlord's army turned east, making for the Swelaway Sea. And a hard going they had of it, what with the difficulties of the terrain, the lack of provisions, the squalor of mud, and the frosts and snows.
For they had all seriously underestimated the derelictions of the wilderness which lay between the road to Favanosin and the shores of the Swelaway Sea. In that wilderness, there was nothing to buy and there was nothing to pillage. There was frost, mire, muck, swamp and weather-hardened thorn. Now the army saw desertions in truth, and it had been reduced to a bare 400 men by the time it arrived at the Swelaway Sea in the snow-shod bleakness of a season of withered sun.
Ah, that winter! That snow! Even now, the mere memory of it tempts the chronicler toward an exercise in self-pity. Even now, the worst of dreams recall the bite of that season. The army had become a rat-rag troupe of beggars, of cripples and convalescents, of blank-staring refugees and muttering derelicts. The bellies of the greatest lords amongst them were sick with the desolations of hunger. Numb fingers and bone-poke ribs. Fumbling dreams. Hope- wreck and delusion. They were all in, finished, exhausted, their last resources gone.
Yet they reached the freshwater sea.
Here a memory, very clear and sharp. The Witchlord Onosh, seated on a lakeside boulder, with his knees to its flanks as if he were seated upon a horse. The dirt of unwashed fatigue crusted in the big, fat, deep and inexplicable gouges which track their way down his slanting forehead. The black of his eyes catching the gray depressions of the everstretch waters of that horizon- exceeding inland lake. He sits; and watches; and breathes; and the smoke of his breath dissipates in a silence unbroken by any sound saving that of the rasping fatigue of his lungs.
It is the silence which stands out in memory: the silence which oppressed that army as it first absorbed the stare-stretch impact of the presence of so much water. For his own part, the Witchlord thought that everstretch of gray a very monstrosity in its insolence. Surely there should not be so much water in the world.
Though the vastness of the Swelaway Sea was but a commonplace matter to Guest, since he had grown well acquainted with it during the time of his exile on Alozay, never in all his life had Lord Onosh seen either this freshwater sea or the far greater Sea of Salt which was said to exist on the borders of the continent which contained his empire. For, though Lord Onosh had supervised the enforcement of law and taxes in the seaport city of Stranagor, he had always done so from Gendormargensis. And, though the Weaponmaster was said to have been born in Stranagor, the Witchlord had never been to that seaport, and knew no more of the Hauma Sea than he did of the Sea of Salt or this present freshwater sea.
"It is a dream," said Lord Onosh.
Who was so fatigued that fragments of dream were ever spilling into his reality. Unpleasant fragments, for the most part. The heads of horses. Bloody blades. And -
Even as Lord Onosh sat there upon his horse, a dream reconfigured the world in fancy's fashion. Bloodred hairs sprouted from the glabrous glaciations of the lake. Oozing and creaming, a slow-headed slug in the fullness of its monstrosity -
The Witchlord dismounted from his rock.
"Wa," said Lord Onosh, shaking the dreams out of his head.
Then, bootstep by bootstep, he crunched across the thin and narrow lakeside beach, his weight bearing down on smallstone and shellbreak. He kicked a stone into the
lake, and was splashed for his pains.
"It is real," said Lord Onosh.
It was real, and it was cold. The entire Swelaway Sea seemed one vast sink of cold. The lake was fringed with a lacing of frozen ice; and, indeed, knowledgeable geographers aver that only the underground upspout of hot volcanic water keeps the lake in its entirety from freezing to a single block of ice in the rigors of Tameran's continental winter.
The Witchlord Onosh took off the battle-gauntlets which he had worn for days. With his bare fingers, he picked up a fragment of ice. He held it up to the watery sun then discarded it to the water. The ice sliced into the water with a clean-slick splash.
Plunged. Then upfloated. Lord Onosh stooped to the water, cupped his hand, dipped for water, and drank.
"It is sweet," said Lord Onosh. "It is bitter cold, but it is sweet."
Then the Witchlord filled a drinking horn with water and jangling ice, and passed it round that others might drink thereof.
The horn came last to Sken-Pitilkin.
"It is sweet," said Lord Onosh, watching as Sken-Pitilkin drank. "Sweet. Is it not?"
"It is, my lord," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Yet you have told me a thousand times if you have told it me once that the sea is not sweet but salt."
"I meant not this sea, my lord."
"Then what sea?" said Lord Onosh.
"He meant the true sea," said Bao Gahai.
"The true sea?" said Lord Onosh.
"He meant that real sea of salt which girdles the entire world," said Bao Gahai. "This is not that true sea."
"No?" said Lord Onosh. "Then what is it? Something I have conjured from dream for my own self-delusion?"
"The Swelaway Sea is but an over-large lake, my lord," said Bao Gahai.
"Lake!" said Lord Onosh. He looked across the waters. The distant horizon promised nothing but an eternity of water. "This so large yet you call it a lake?"
He knew it, he had heard it, he had been told it a thousand times, yet in the face of the fact he found it hard to believe.
"The true sea is larger yet," said Bao Gahai. "In the true sea, my lord, there are storms which maul the shores and tear from the cliffs rocks which are larger than houses. In the true sea, my lord, the kraken uprises from the lurching depths, and swallows down ships in their entirety. In the true sea, my lord, there live birds which never rest but which fly eternally, born and dying on the wing. That is the true sea, compared to which this is but a little cup of nothing."
Lord Onosh closed his eyes, squeezed hard, dismissed the visions Bao Gahai had conjured, then opened his eyes again. There lay the Swelaway Sea, gray and placid, a pool of ominous quiescence. Lord Onosh felt the gray eternities of water sapping his will, and had a premonition that he would die here. Not quick death clean, not death made battle-axe, but death made slow, death made a bone-picker, death dragged out over years. The Witchlord envisioned himself picking his way along the beach in his rags, picking his way in the wind and the rain, eating spoilt eggs half- formed into birds, eating the udders of rats and the bellies of worms, his very name in time forgotten by his own tongue.
He shuddered.
Upon the beach of that bleak and barren lake in the heartland of Tameran, there were shells of a bleached blue fringed with the last traces of violet. Lord Onosh had no name to specify the particularity of these shells, just as he had no name for the foreign waterbird which he saw briefing its way across the sky.
This was a place without language, a place of utter desolation.
"Yet rock is still rock and water still water," said Lord Onosh.
"My lord," said Thodric Jarl, interrupting the Witchlord's extended personal confrontation with the realities of the freshwater sea. "My lord!" gray beard, gray hair, gray eyes - Jarl, unkempt and derelict after the rigors of the march, his features seamed with dirt and his eyes shot through with blood, why, Thodric Jarl right then looked like a very prophet in the grip of revelation. It was then the winter of the year Alliance 4307, and Thodric Jarl was but 27 years of age, yet such was the battering which this warrior had taken that he could easily have passed for 50.
"My lord!" said Jarl.
"Yes?" said Lord Onosh, squaring off against this fevered prophet, and bracing himself to receive commands from the gods, or a great diktat concerning the conduct of affairs amidst that living death which we call life.
"My lord," said Jarl, "I have for my lord's inspection the first spoils of our latest conquest."
So spoke the Rovac warrior, solemnly displaying a double handful of water-snails for his liege lord's inspection.
For, after the initial silence which had struck the army as it contemplated the lake, Jarl had got busy with practical investigations while his emperor was still indulging himself in metaphysical despairs.
"We can eat these?" said Lord Onosh, making a dubious inspection of Jarl's wet and somewhat slimy trophies.
The Witchlord Onosh, disturbed in his moody philosophizing, tried to sound enthusiastic about the dripping molluscs heaped in the swordsman's calloused hands, though in truth he resented the brusque commonsense intrusion of this Rovac mercenary.
"Can we eat them?" said Jarl, half-echoing his emperor. "One would presume so." Then, as Lord Onosh turned back to the lake:
"One would presume they might make a very good meal, my lord."
Lord Onosh saw that he was not going to be left alone to meditate on the derelictions of his fate. He was a lord of men, after all, albeit a lord of defeat, and such a luminary has certain responsibilities, even in the dampness of his extinguishment. Lord Onosh noted that Guest had made no move to give any orders.
"Zozimus!" said Lord Onosh, rousing his voice to the challenge. "Come here! Come here, and pronounce upon on our scavenging!"
His chef came hurrying over to examine the spoils of Jarl's lake-plundering.
"This is the water snail Mabarakorabantibus Dontharpis," said Zozimus, holding a sample to the light. "Or so the beast is named in the Ilapatarginath system of taxonomy, though it is known elsewhere as the edible helmet. It is of wide distribution, and even occurs on the shores of the Araconch Waters, where Barglan of the Empire once made a notable feast of the things."
Such was the loquacity of Pelagius Zozimus when he was showing off. It was truly amazing that the Witchlord Onosh stood still for such nonsense; and, indeed, to move from specifics to generalities, it is amazing how a mere slug-chef can always and ever so easily and so impudently command so much of the time of his lord and master, when a scholar can scarcely get a hearing at all. Zozimus commanded the Witchlord's time as if it was his by right; and Lord Onosh listened to Zozimus with the patience of a very rock.
Then:
"So," said Lord Onosh, weighing one of Jarl's lake-morsels in his hand, "we can eat these."
"We can, my lord," said Zozimus. "Furthermore, the water weed which grows from the rocks is also edible."
And you can bet all the gold in your pockets, and bet your favorite slave as well, and your wife, and your mother-in-law's walking stick, that Zozimus went on to name that weed, and to mention five or six occasions on which the cookery of that weed had been well received, and to state a dozen recipes for its preparation - for when the show-off mood was upon Zozimus there was no stopping him.
"So far, so good," said Lord Onosh, when he had absorbed great quantities of this advice. "Snails and water weed. Very well. But I warrant it would still make a thin meal."
"True, my lord," said Zozimus, grabbing Glambrax by the ear,
"but it would go very well with some dwarf."
At that, the dwarf kicked and struggled so much that Zozimus had to let him go. But such was the cunning of the slug-chef's timing that the dwarf, impelled by the violence of his own efforts to escape, rolled over and over and plunged into the crackle-ice sweetwaters of the Swelaway Sea. He struggled out, cursing, and immediately went on the attack with tinder and flint, striving to make himself a fire.
"As you can see," sai
d Zozimus, observing the dwarf's prompt success, "we have fire already. We will shortly also have fish."
Then Zozimus produced from his robes a vial of something he claimed to be fish poison.
"Do you always travel with such?" said Lord Onosh in astonishment.
"But of course, my lord," said Zozimus blandly.
And poured the stuff upon the waters, where it worked as smoothly as a miracle, for very shortly there were any number of dead fish belly-up and gaping.
Thus the Witchlord Onosh came to the shores of the Swelaway Sea with the ragtag remnants of his army, and the sea provided for him fish, and waterweed, and the snails to flesh out the meal, and so a banquet was had.
When the banqueting was done, talk turned to the future.
"The question now," said Thodric Jarl, "is how we conquer the Safrak Islands."
"Pardon?" said Lord Onosh.
"My lord means conquest, does he not?" said Jarl. "Surely he did not bring us all this way just for the pleasure of poisoning a few fish and watching a dwarf make vomit of them."
So spoke Jarl, casually dismissing their dead, their defeats, their retreats, the pangs being suffered by Glambrax (who had grossly over-indulged himself by eating the eyes from the head of each and every fish which had gone toward the feeding of an entire army) and all the sundry embroilments of the catastrophic nightmare which they had so recently and so strenuously lived through.
"One considers," said Lord Onosh, choosing his words carefully, "one considers that the wetness of the Swelaway Sea has certain implications for our future actions. I scarcely think to ride to battle across the waves, nor do I think the seizure of a few boats would do us much good beneath the invincible cliffs of Alozay."
"My father has spoken well," said Guest Gulkan. "The Safrak
Islands are defended beyond all possibility of conquest."
