Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

  Rathi ran Anfluga in under oar, hovering a hundred yards offshore for the precise wave that would carry her furthest up the beach. The bow rowers leapt over and ran calf-deep in foam to lasso boulders, the rest heaved her clear. Then small cables

  replaced the carry-lines.

  And Rathi turned from the tiller to meet my eyes for the first time that morning, and said, “Now, lass. What do ye mean to do?”

  He sounded more than dour. My own belly squirmed, as it had since Skall hove in sight. But I made my voice as calm as I could.

  “I’m going to Yinstey. To find my brother. And get him free.”

  Rathi very near bit a lip. “Are ye so? Just like that?”

  “I’ll pay you the rest of the passage first.” I had assumed he would know that. I bit off, Did you expect me to renege now? “You, the ship, whenever you’re ready, you can leave.”

  Rathi tugged hard at his beard. “An’ ye’ll be off, into that nest o’—gull-gropers—strand-lopin’ gangrels, an’ fetch y’r brither off. All by y’rself?”

  He spoke too near the core of my own fears. I blurted, “You’ve done as you agreed.”

  He scowled overside. “Agreed, aye.” He scuffed the deck with a boot. “Lass, ye’ve a knife or two, an’ a fine hand with ’em, Fiskri told me. But there’s likely twenty, thirty men up there. Sea-scum. Wreck-pickers. As fell a pack as the Isles hold. An’ ye’re only one.”

  Two found the words a fraction before me. “More than one will only make it worse.”

  Rathi threw up his chin and stared. “Aye,” he said in a

  moment, sounding startled. “Happen, ye’re right. Bring a tail, raise a brawl. But.” He maltreated his beard again. Then literally flung both hands in the air.

  “Ah, pest on it! Go then, lass. But we’ll stay for ye. Be sure ye tell ’em that. Ye’ve a sail waitin’, an’ eighteen hands aboard it. An’ Yinstey’s whistlin’ trouble if they try aught amiss wi’ ye.”

  For a moment my throat shut. There was only the wind’s

  fluctuating ice, the screams of seabirds that gyred above us like feathered mist. Then I gulped and managed, “But if the wind turns?”

  “Pest take the wind too.” He lowered at me. “An’ the payment. Get y’r gear, lass.” He thrust his chin out suddenly. “Get y’r gear and move.”

  I had the knives already: the packs I had to leave in trust, but when the moment came, I found I had pulled Nouip’s cloak from the pile. He’ll need clothes, Two or I were thinking, or at least, warmth.

  Then my hand met the hilt of the sword.

  Over my head Rathi said, “Take that too.”

  Startled, I looked up at him. He glowered, but repeated firmly, “Take that too.”

  A new gust howled round us amid flecks of snow. Half Anfluga’s crew were already at shelter under the ship-side. I looked from Rathi to the uncommunicative remaining faces. Then my hands began to move, without, it seemed, even direction from Two.

  Lifting, donning the seal-fur over my own cloak. Swinging Hvestang’s baldric over it, so the hilt rode above my shoulder. Drawing the hood up, over my head.

  Rathi took a sudden pace back. From an eye-corner I saw the port stroke oar push his fingers into the horns.

  I stood up, trying not to see their faces. Rathi said huskily, “Aye,” and I heard in his voice what they saw. What the three men in that Grithsperry shipper’s office had seen, what Skatir had seen and named for us. What Yinstey would see.

  Rathi did not make the horns, but he did not invoke the Mother’s aid for me either. He merely repeated, barely audible, “Go.”

  * * * *

  “They’ve to ship in their wood along with their flour,” Rathi had said about Yinstey, “an’ they eat gull when there’s nothin’ else.” Toiling up under the soaring cliff-planes, I could see why. On every cliff-face, every ledge, every niche, seabirds plumed or squabbled or brooded, and they all screamed and excreted

  continuously, including those expelled or abroad, circling like bees round a hive. The easterly only partly curbed the stench, and did nothing for the noise.

  When the slope topped Two halted us, no more than my head above the crest. We looked into a shallow upland valley, treeless as usual. A circle of rough wall divided ploughed fields from

  probable pastures, with a central string of low grey roofs imitating a street, and the biggest building at its end.

  It seemed half a small fort, half a natural green mound: a turf roof, I realized, turf growing down over some of the walls, its dome-like shape a cross between the Ve Pool brech and Vithre’s house. Before it a half-circle of stone walls met at a solid timber gate. Open, at the moment, with people moving in and out.

  Angrir’s hall, or brech, or whatever he called it. If I had caught up at last, that was where Therkon would be.

  I took a deep breath and relaxed every muscle as before combat. Then I pulled the hood up high, lifting my shoulders with it. And started to walk.

  If I was five finger-widths shorter than Therkon, I was still tall for a woman, let alone a girl. The cloak-hem did not drag. The hood would hide my features, my entire face. All that Yinstey would see was the cloak, the tall, anonymous, advancing figure. The hilt of the sword.

  I had time to wonder what they had done with their lookouts, why no-one even noticed we were ashore. I did not know that Yinstey watched the outer strait from the southern cliffs for passing shipping, when they watched at all. For the beach, the neglect had other cause.

  The first to notice me were four ragamuffinly boys with sticks and loops on long poles. Approaching the street end, they first stared at me. Then pointed. Then stopped, then stared again, and then ran like literal hares. I could hear their cries diminish,

  blurring into the skreel of gulls.

  If adults confirmed their reports, nobody showed themselves to do so. By the time I reached the first houses, the street was deserted. Up its length came the last faint clap of slamming doors.

  The courtyard had been abandoned too. The gates were open, but along with the traffic, any possible sentries had fled. I paused in the gateway, trying not to tremble, both Two and Azo already flicking my eyes frenetically around.

  An ordinary court would hold bothies and guest-cells, storesheds, the smithy, perhaps a byre. And people, all the hold-folk about their work. This one held motley heaps of planks, beams, oars, or anonymous sea-junk. Rusted metal, bits of net. A couple of pens, a sheep-stink, but no animals. And no people. Except one old man, squatted under the unshaped lintel, on the single step.

  I walked across. The cloak swirled round me in a twirling gust. The old man cringed. From the hood’s dark I said the words that came to me, and Two deepened them near a masculine bass.

  “Where is Angrir?”

  The ancient howled thinly and tried to hide his face. Doubtless he would have run, had he the legs for it. I pulled the sword-sheath slightly forward and he gabbled, “Not here, not here. Away, he’s away up the ceat—!”

  “Where?”

  He crawled to show me. Literally crawled, on hands and knees to the gate side, where he got one wavering hand up to point along the wall. “On the head there. At t’prospect . . .Lord, d’ye no’ . . .”

  Do not touch me, see me, notice me. He was already curled like a frightened porcupine, arms folded over his head. He did not have to say it out. Ignore me, as your greatest favor. Pass over my cowardice, my complete lack of loyalty. Take my lord Angrir instead.

  I swung the cloak and walked away.

  I had no idea what a ceat was, let alone where to find it. I

  simply skirted the yard and followed the building side, heavy

  going among untilled earth and ancient grass. Before I reached the rear wall the bay of male voices told me I had found Angrir. And the gate guards, perhaps, and the beach watch as well.

  It was the whole “fell pack
o’ the Isles.” Fifteen or twenty of them, massed on the right-hand slope that would rise, beyond the wall and the brief pastures, into the great shoulder of the first inland hill. Some tall frame towered above the crowd, cutting the line of dull brown and green and grey-patched slope that glistened with rain and wind-spume, towering bleak as the livid sky.

  The wind snatched around me, swirling the cloak in sharp little gusts like a winded man’s gasps. The crowd of backs, dun and grey and brown, homespun cloaks or weather-dark canvas, heaved like wreckage on a wave and more noise came out of them. The bay of hounds, of beasts scenting more than blood.

  I opened my mouth and Two spoke for me. A truly masculine bawl.

  Backs whipped about but not as alert fighters do. These were men caught in some private pleasure, unawares.

  They were uniformly squat and broad and almost a caricature of saga villains: unkempt, unshaven, straggling dark hair, low foreheads, ugly mouths, porcine eyes. And porcine temper, surly and perilous as boars. Among them Angrir stood as a living refutation of the archetype, tall and straight, pale-skinned as sunlight, fine-featured, with deep blue eyes and beautiful red hair.

  “Lord,” he said. And while the others stood petrified, he made a perfect courtier’s reverence. “Ye’re a little before y’r time.”

  The pack gasped. I nearly gasped myself at the effrontery. The perfection of the retrieval. The speed.

  In my own shock, I made the perfect retort.

  When I stayed silent, the curve deepened in that smile.

  “But ne’ertheless, welcome,” Angrir said. His voice was light as Stokka’s but far cooler. The ice in it nearly froze my blood. “We’re just halin’ the badger from his lair.”

  He gestured. The pack were stunned, but not so stunned as to disobey him. They parted right and left and I saw the ceat.

  A low, open-stonework shed, its turf roof straggling long blades and seedheads into the wind. Hardly high enough for a sheep, let alone a human. Swinging open before it, a rough-made but solid wooden door.

  And running from the dark within, a rope.

  An ordinary ship’s rope. With the curls of its last use still in it, and some of the cabling marked with dark, fitful patches. Too red for tar.

  Angrir did not give me time to react then either. He waved to the men either side, and shouted to them as he must have on numberless ship-decks. “Haul!”

  They had been stunned with shock, with fear, with his profane audacity. But this they understood. Had done before. With shouts and yells they tallied on the rope.

  Angrir called the pull. The men heaved, the rope jerked, once, twice, thrice. On the third, “Ho!” they almost fell backwards as a heap of debris flew out of the ceat.

  It thumped down among their feet, a tangle of black and brown and Isabella dun that might once have been white cloth, a sprawl of suddenly identifiable limbs and trunk. A living, moving entity, a man with his hands bound before him at the rope end, shoeless, naked but for something like a breech-clout, filthy as a midden, with black animal eyes glaring from a cave of half-grown beard and elf-locked hair.

  And bare skin dark with bruises, with half-scabbed wounds. Fresh scrapes on shoulder and thigh, and the slashes of older whip-work visible over his ribs.

  The men bawled. The captive spat at them. Angrir took one long stride and kicked him solidly under the rib cage and shouted, “Heave him up!”

  The timber frame stood right beside the ceat. A gallows, Two blazed a lightning trail of images past me, L-shaped wooden frames laden with men hung by the neck, or with butchered heel-hung sheep—At that vision of naked red flesh sense nearly left me. But the Skall men already had a toss of rope over the hook on the frame and were hauling on its end.

  Therkon came willy-nilly onto tiptoe and hung there, stretched ribs heaving, glaring like a cave-wight through the mat of hair. And Angrir glanced round to me and laughed.

  I took two paces neither Two nor I remembered and flung the hood back and shouted, “Let him go!”

  The pack nearly went on their backsides. For a moment even Angrir’s mouth fell wide. In the hush I could hear birds screaming, far down over the cliffs.

  Then Angrir seemed to rise on his own toes. His head came forward and he almost hissed, “Who’re ye?”

  “Never mind who I am.” I could barely control my rage. “I will make you an offer. One offer. Name your price, and let him go.”

  Angrir’s brows shot up. Thin brows, well-shaped brows. So handsome, surely they should have signaled a goodness as extreme as the evil looks of the men he led. “Ye’re offering a price?”

  “One price.” Both Two and I had got a better look at Therkon: his head had fallen forward. He hung limp as a butchered sheep, and the edges of my vision were swimming in a red fog of rage. “One!”

  “Ye . . .” Angrir lost words in the contentions of understanding, outrage, temptation. His eyes slitted. Then his jaw dropped again. “Ye’re no’ a man at all!”

  I was past caring for anything but Therkon. I snorted at him fiercely as Iatha might. “Name a price and be done!”

  “Ye—ye—” Angrir started forward and the pack started with him and my hands went without my volition up, back and over, so Hvestang whistled as it left the sheath. I opened my mouth for a war-scream to match any Isle man’s, and Angrir brought up with a jerk.

  Not fear. Not even caution. The eyes suddenly glowed like back-lit sapphire. Then the face changed, and abruptly, dazzlingly, he smiled.

  And waved both hands, signaling the pack away. Outward, opening space, flanking us, an audience, to either side. Before he drawled, almost silkily.

  “Is that what ye’re wantin’? A price?”

  I jerked up my chin. It was the only retort I could manage without losing control.

  Angrir retired a step, and then another. Softly, suavely, never taking his eyes off me, but never losing his bearings either. In another moment he was almost at Therkon’s side.

  “An’ what’s this one,” he half-murmured, “to ye?”

  “Enough to pay for.” Two fenced for me. How, I was trying not to cry aloud, has he not heard? Did Stokka not pass it on to Thralli, the tale of the missing sister? Or Thralli to the Lady of Eithay? How can he not know?

  Because for a slave, Two answered from the wells of remembered atrocity, neither Thralli nor the Lady cared.

  “But ye came here for him.” Angrir was almost whispering. The pack’s eyes were glued to him: wits to match their looks, a pack’s eagerness. They could not fore-guess his ploys, but they did not have to. They need only expect them, and wait to be fed.

  “Ye came here, from—Sandouin, was it? Or Eithay?” Angrir was smiling now in almost pure joy. “Or even earlier? Aye.” A long-drawn-out sigh. Of pleasure. Of anticipation. He put a hand out and casually as a lout with a worthless cow, slapped Therkon in the ribs. “Oh, no, ye stravagin’ hussy, you. Ye tell me what ye’ll pay.”

  Therkon’s grunt ended on a half-choked cry and Hvestang was ready before I knew it, gripped two-handed and drawn back for the sweep-stroke that would lift the red-rimmed target clean off its supporting shoulders. Angrir’s head.

  But Angrir had skipped faster than a snake clean behind Therkon, yanking his captive’s head back by a handful of hair and yelling, “See ye!” with a dagger pressed to Therkon’s ribs.

  It was not Two that stopped me, but Azo. One flash of trouble­crew judgment that clamped my muscles at fire-point, bawling, Wait!

  All three of us panted. Therkon with shock, perhaps. Angrir, in pure excitement. For me it was head-swimming rage.

  Angrir had the wit not to goad me then. To wait till the

  extreme last moment before someone else acted, and then to drawl, “Ye said, a price.”

  The red fog ebbed. He was grinning at me round Therkon’s shoulder, the blue eyes brilliant, the white teeth a sparklin
g grin. His hand still clamped Therkon’s hair, the dagger-tip was still in Therkon’s ribs.

  Slower than thawing ice, I slid Hvestang’s point to ground. My throat was full of ash, but I sounded no more than husky.

  “Let him go.”

  Angrir assessed that, and took its worth. The grin widened, but he let Therkon’s head fall forward, and took one graceful step, not entirely aside. With the dagger still inches from Therkon’s side, he cocked his head and asked brightly, “Aye?”

  Bargain now, Azo said in my ear’s memory. Never mind

  saving face. No hope of a strike yet. Bargain, work for better odds, and wait.

  While Two shot zigzags of memory, white-hot flashes of Amberlight Heads haggling with kings and lordlings, past us both.

  I said, “One hundred Phaerean silver.” The equivalent of Dhasdeini darrins, though I did not know the proper name. But if a hundred had bought a ship-load of salted herring, it was an opening bid for a man.

  The pack rustled. A wave of intaken breath: too high, I thought as my belly plummeted, too high and reminding them too well that what I offered, I must possess. And I am a woman, here alone.

  Angrir’s grin brightened. “Aye?”

  I stared at him, blank-faced as a basilisk, and let my eyes say the rest.

  For a fraction of a second the grin drooped. Then he laughed, soft as a sleepy cat.

  “That’s the best ye’ll do?”

  I went on staring, for reply.

  “F’r a man ye’ve hunted clear from—Phaerea, is it?” The eyes widened, almost the clear cobalt of a sunlit sea. Wind waved a toss of red hair over his forehead, bright cornelian against the wet stone, the oncoming rain. “Or,” the brows contracted, “is it further than that?”

  I let him see my jaw clench, and hoped my eyes looked poison. And made the silence add, Your price?

  “A hundred, ye say?”

  I jerked up my chin. A Dhasdeini gesture, but intelligible enough.

  “Nothin’ more?”

  “I said,” it came out almost as low as his own voice, “name your price.”