by Sylvia Kelso
I had no time to panic. Her stern came right into the wind, she wallowed, and Rathi bellowed, “’Bout face!”
Only an immaculately skilled and experienced crew could have managed it. But all fourteen of them shipped oars together and whipped round on their benches to grab the looms again, dropping the blades back, heaving in exact unison to Rathi’s shout of, “Give way!”
Anfluga plunged forward. Bow first this time, coming about in a short sharp curve to her previous course, but this time, with the steering oar where it belonged, astern. Balanced, poised, to meet whatever came.
I had just seen a manoeuvre, I realized, that all Dhasdein’s navy could not emulate.
Then I looked into the oarsmen’s faces, and shut my eyes and prayed the Mother: Let me not have brought them to their end with us. As I, as we did, with Deoren. With Verrith. And Azo.
Therkon was immobile. Eyes shut, the black smoke of lashes the only thing intact in that ravaged face. He needed food, my wits clamored, proper warm reviving food, and dry warmth, safe rest, somewhere off a ship where his stomach would settle, where I could get him clean, tend his wounds.
At the thought memory replayed: the image of that hillside charnel house, the bodies living and dead. The corpses that blade of light had left.
I just managed to make the leeward gunwale before I started throwing up.
When I finally slid back from the side and dragged myself together, the faces looked different. Rathi was still tense, the oarsmen still straining to the utmost. But something had altered, in the way they looked at me.
I put a hand on the nearest strake, that moved and worked like the muscles of a running horse, and heaved myself up. The wind hit me like a blow across the face. Spume and snow shrieked past, louder than the seabirds, and the cliffs of Skall loomed
toward me, once again charcoal-grey as ghosts.
But almost abeam now, the Gnufe’s southern arm ran down into a white rim of breakers, and beyond showed a flat horizon of white-flecked, raveled, menacing but open grey sea.
I looked at Rathi. He gave one brusque nod.
We were almost out. We would not be leed, we would escape the Gnufe. And Skall. I had Therkon back at last. For a little, we would be safe.
I inched myself upright at Rathi’s elbow and croaked, “Munen? How long?”
He spared me one fractional glance. “Not Munen,” he answered gruffly. “We’d ne’er round Oddi. I’ll not kill rowers tryin’.”
“Not—?” I tried to keep calm. “Where then? I have to get him warm! Clean, dry, ashore—! How long—!”
“Aye, lass.” He was still gruff, but not hostile. “But wi’ a north wind makin’, we’ve no choice. Clear the Gnufe, ’n we can at least run down-strait. Wind like this, Gildair’ll be less than a day.”
Saving his rowers, and I could not dispute that. Anfluga ran stably, I had felt that for myself. “Gildair, where is that? What is it?”
He visibly remembered that I did not know the Isles. “South Sandouin. Gildair’s t’far end o’ Skall strait. No’ Eithay, but no’ Yinstey, either.” He spared me another fractional glance. “They’ll help ye fettle him, there.”
I looked once into the shifting wind’s eye. Southward, it was pushing us. Southward, and I dared not think by what means, with what intent. I could not face the questions yet. I looked to Rathi instead and gave my silent, all but irrelevant consent.
* * * *
When we were clear enough to wear ship, Rathi put Anfluga before the wind, they shipped oars, the sail went up, and we tore past the Gnufe’s point like a hound unleashed. Segil took the tiller. Someone broke out rations, and as the water mugs passed, Rathi dropped down by me at Therkon’s head.
“Let him sleep,” he said, when I asked about trying to give him food as well. “Happen he needs that more.” He laid his own head back against the side as if exhausted. But every muscle in his body was still wringing tense.
Someone brought him the usual helping of dry biscuit—hard-tack, the Dhasdeinis would have called it—and a moment later, with just visible constraint, offered a second to me. Rathi snapped a piece to bite-size, and began, less for need than recreation, as was the usual jibe, to chew.
Then he swallowed, and said, “Lass?”
When I twitched he made a gesture: No harm meant, be still. “Lass . . . There was eight, nine dead men up there.” A wry kind of snort. “Ye’ve broke the back o’ Yinstey, an’ every straits passager’ll thank ye. For that if nothin’ else.”
“Broke?” Then I understood. Nineeen, twenty men on that hillside, and Two—I and Two had killed the half of them. Half a village’s manpower, half a skaw’s rowers. Half a raider’s crew. Yinstey, Skall, the fell pack of the Isles, might never raid again.
“I’d no’ wonder,” Rathi added after the next mouthful, “if they had to emigrate.”
Appalling visions flew past me, Veenn talking about Kaastria desolated, Fiskri about hunger and slavery, the dispossessed boats at Eithay. But this loss, this emptying of a homeland, however wretched, had been my work alone.
“I never meant—I never thought—!”
“Nay, lass.” Rathi sounded so sure I believed it myself. “We all saw ye. Back here aboard. Ye ne’er meant it so. An’, I’d lay odds, ye ne’er did such before.”
I could only shake my head and bite my lips desperately at the memories: Be still, go back, don’t rise now. Not that windrow of mangled flesh on the hillside, not the cut-short cries, the bodies falling, the sick jerk of a light-cutter meeting flesh.
“But, lass. Segil stowed the sword for ye.” I had not thought to ask how Hvestang came there, shielded against the bulwark, in its usual place. “An’ he said. He said: there’s no’ a mark on it. No’ a spot. But I know. I know ye’d but the two knives, an’ one—I saw where that was. So.” He looked out across the farther gunwale and the constraint in his voice told me how much this mattered. “Can ye just tell me. What did ye do?”
Not curiosity. Not to ease his own fear, if any such remained. He needed an explanation to keep the trust, and maybe, even the onward co-operation of his crew.
He was not of Iskarda. He was not Therkon, or even Fiskri, who in those few days I had come to trust more than anyone else. At thought of repeating the explanations, of their possible outcome this time, my very soul cringed. But I owed Rathi, owed his crew, who had gone with me further than Fiskri ever had to, not merely brought me to Skall but waited for me, come ashore to help me, and were now, unhesitatingly, carrying me on to refuge. Not for money, but simply because the weather dictated it. In answer to my and Therkon’s need.
“I . . . have a companion,” I said.
Rathi’s face changed and Two shot me an exasperated collage of meanings, companion here equals familiar, witch, witchcraft, solitary old women with cats twisted round their legs—Two cut in before I could stop her. “We are of Amberlight.”
Rathi lacked Fiskri’s ear for the change of voice, and the name meant nothing. The pronoun was another matter.
“There’s two o’ ye? But where’s t’other? Who are ye? What are ye?” His hand went down on the plank beside him, unconscious prelude to springing up. “How can ye be—”
“We are together.” I felt the spark kindle, ominously familiar, tried to snatch control and failed. “For what we are.” The familiar quotation. “Your words do not work, do not work, do not work.”
Rathi was growing white-eyed, but the threat was unmistakable. He kept quiet.
“We are of Amberlight. In Amberlight, they learned to call the fire.”
“Fire?” Rathi sat up straight. “That up there was no’ fire. What d’ye—”
“Not your fire. Mine.”
Let me do this! I bawled. Do you want them to lynch us? And for the first time in my life Two bawled back at me: Be still!
Then she lifted my hand, and I fel
t the spark gather as it had far too often, and tried to pull away before it jumped.
But this time, the thunder rose and the building spark hung, coruscating at my fingertips, white as the lightning, pure as the light in that retrieved memory.
“In Amberlight, they used it.” A far too-familiar image in memory, the great blades of light-guns sweeping a glacis free of attackers, leaving a swathe of dead and dying that paled mine to insignificance. “To defend the city. If there is a vessel, we can use it now.”
She slid Verrith’s wrist-knife clear and held it point up, and the light rose above us in its perilous white scythe.
“The fire can—jump. If we are—surprised. But when need came, it woke.”
Very, very delicately, delicately as a cutter or shaper with a qherrique blade, she inclined my hand. The very tip of the blade traced across the top-board of the gunwale, and a thread of smoke furled from the black mark in its wake.
Rathi had recoiled against the bulkhead. Every other man was a statue. Some had forgotten to chew.
The light vanished, swift and completely as I had seen a cutter or light-gun die when its Crafter signaled release. Two ceded me control. I shoved the knife into its wrist-sheath and tried to sound neither beseeching nor desperate. Only, at best, halfway composed.
“That doesn’t happen with, with—friends.”
For a second the very planks beneath us seemed to have
solidified. An ice ship, a stone ship, manned by a stone crew, caught upon a distantly heaving sea.
Then Segil gave the tiller a slight twist. Spat, accurately but remotely, to leeward. And remarked, with all the straight-faced irony of which Isle men are masters, “That’s ta’en a load off m’mind.”
I gaped. Someone else gasped. Then we all collapsed in a squall of laughter that nearly strained our ribs.
Stress, fear, a release less humorous than far too near
hysterical. But as the men moved again their eyes told me just what Segil had done for me: caution, those looks showed, and rightful wariness, but every time it shifted toward fear I could hear those words recur, and the fear would slither helplessly into mirth.
Except on Rathi’s face. Where in the ebb of laughter, it was not fear or fear’s recollection that had resurfaced behind the common amazement. In his eyes the shock had become wonder. And with it for an instant, inexplicable but unmistakable, something else.
Greed.
Chapter XIV
Therkon came around just at the verge of dusk, about an hour, Rathi estimated, out of Gildair. It was colder than ever, and the wind had worked round nor-nor-easterly, buffeting Anfluga’s flank like fists. Sitting at Therkon’s head, I saw his lashes flicker, almost imperceptible in the dingy light. But then his face shifted. A moment later, he opened his eyes.
Straight upon the gripping beast atop Anfluga’s stern post, the leach of the straining sail, and Rathi, upright and tense at the steering oar.
Therkon gave a gasp that strangled at birth, squeezed his eyes shut and tried to curl up with both arms over his head. I had just time to catch at a shoulder and almost exclaim, “Therkon?”
His eyes shot wide. The curling motion froze.
“We’re at sea but they’re friends, it’s all right—”
He turned suddenly onto his back. A hand groped inside the cloak and he murmured, sounding half-dazed, half-dreaming, “Chaeris . . .”
I shut my hand over his. His eyes flew wide again. He almost yelped, “Chaeris?” Then he jack-knifed up and grabbed for me. “Chaeris!”
He smelt like the bottom of a dungeon, his beard scratched, his arms hurt, his hands were rougher than the stones they used for sanding planks. I seized him like a Heartland python, hard enough to start both our ribs. And then we both wept as if we were still on Evva beach.
Eventually I had to let him loose: I wiped my streaming eyes down the seal furs, my nose on the back of a wrist, and fastened the other hand back in the cloak collar. He was still clutching me, murmuring prayers, gratitudes, vows of devotion to every known god. But when I moved, the burthen changed.
“Oh, Dhe,” he whispered into my unwashed, half-undone hair, “It was my fault. All my own benighted fault.”
Before I could burst out in excuses and denials Two said, “No.”
“What?”
“Not the choice,” Two said precisely. “Not at the cliff. Not with those facts.”
Therkon made a fraught, dissenting noise. “But after—!”
“After, yes.”
It stopped him on something like a grunt. I almost felt the fall of imperial frost. He had been half out of himself as I had seen him on Evva beach, and as on Evva beach, more than ready to blame himself for everything. He had not expected blame.
“Two didn’t mean—” I stopped before Two could cut me off. Because at the point, I could not lie to him. Two had forecast, I had feared, Thralli’s report affirmed it: what happened from Ve Pool onward had been, must have been, partly his own fault.
He was too honest to deny it. He had already dropped his head against my shoulder with a single wordless groan.
“It doesn’t matter.” I overrode Two and grabbed him, cloak and all. “It’s over and there’s no use blaming anyone. Oh, my—oh, Therkon,” my dear, my heart’s ease, my darling, Two recited the endearments while I prayed he had not been conscious to hear them on Skall beach. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve got you back.”
I tightened my arms. He drew me in against him. For an uncounted span of time we had nothing but a seal-fur cloak and some odorous clothes and dusk falling in the ice-wind on an open heaving boat. And I would not have changed them for anything on the Mother’s whole wide earth.
* * * *
Tacking to make Gildair’s harbour restored us to life. We both squeezed against the side as the ropemen heaved and swung and stamped to and fro, while the rowers stood by and Rathi, half-invisible in the twilight, called commands. Gildair was only a cluster of twinkles in the grey mass of western sea and sky, sliding above the gunwale, here and gone. I had my head shamelessly on Therkon’s shoulder. He was making his best effort, from inside the cloak, to grip me round the waist. And presently, in the eddy from others’ attention, the confessional of the half-dark, he began to talk.
“Ve Pool . . . Lord, I was such an idiot.” Two wanted to agree but I silenced her with ferocity. She had already stated the fact. Facts were not needed here.
“With the gate-guard. It was late afternoon, I could see no way to find someone, and still get back to you. Not by dark. I was half-crazy then. I would have drawn on them, except one clubbed me. From behind.” He massaged a shoulder, under the cloak. “But in the hall. That popinjay. That prancing, posturing, Archipelago fishmonger. And you somewhere on the hill, no-one to reach you, no-one to—I lost—I wholly lost my head.”
All too clearly I could picture it, the imperial Heir in a paroxysm of wrath and panic and outrage, gainsaid, flouted, trifled with, by what he would consider less than a backwoods autocrat.
Against my cheek he let out a sudden, silent air-shock of a laugh. “I hardly believed it when they threw me in the ‘dungeon.’ But when they took the lamp. And I remembered it was already evening. And I could not get out . . .”
I hugged him desperately and let that cry, Oh, my dear.
“I think,” he added ruefully, trying to rub his temple, “I actually beat my head against the door. But in the morning. Oh, Dhe.”
“If you’d only known, if only I could have told you,” I whispered back. “They came looking for me that morning. Skeag and Dath.” I told him about the night under the cliff, the whole saga of the ribs, the farm, the downhill trip, missing him by so few hours in Ve Pool itself. “I almost went crazy, when I couldn’t go on. And we almost knew what had happened to you.”
We made my-blame-was-greater noises for a while. But to have him
in my grasp, to know him intact in wits if not wholly undamaged in body, was sweet enough to counter horrors twice as bad. I did deliberately skip over his sale. I did say triumphantly, “Two tricked Stokka. I got Hvestang back.”
“You tricked Stokka? You got Hvestang?”
So then I had to tell that story, at full length, and add Vithre, and Fiskri. And the thieves in Fiskri’s house.
“You were set upon? You had to kill two?” His voice spoke more than naked shock. A Dhasdeini man, to whom women were almost irretrievably the slighter, weaker vessels, the beloved to be cherished, defended. From violence, whether others’ or their own.
I just kept from retorting, It was what I trained for, it worked, I’m alive, Azo would have been so pleased. Honesty compelled me to amend: at least, she might have said, Not bad. But I could recall, all too shudderingly, how the bodies had surfaced in the lantern-light, the vile sensation of a knife cleaving flesh.
The other memory fell like a boulder. The scissoring draw of a light-gun, slicing not one but eight or nine men apart.
“Chaeris? Chaeris, what is it? My—what is it, my dear?”
“Skall,” I said, and buried my face in the seal furs. “Two. We had to do it. It was them or us. And you.”
The sea threshed, the wind squealed over us, almost as high a keen as Skall’s gyring birds. His arm had tightened round me, but it was a good minute before he spoke.
“Chaeris? What did you . . .”
I tried to sidle round it. I went back to Ve Pool, and Aerful, and forward to Eithay. The Lady, the emptied cage. Anfluga, a fresh hope of pursuit. “I’m sorry, I had to sell two finghends, for the passage, for the fish.” He made a wordless, impatient noise. What did gems matter? What else were they for? “We were five days Eithay to Yinstey, I could hardly bear even that.”
Knowing Angrir still had a full seven days’ space for whatever he did to you.
“The slaver,” he said into a gout of spume, almost under his breath. “I was—still new, then. I could not believe someone—anyone could—do what they did.” My heart bumped against my mouth-roof. Don’t tell me, I wanted to cry, even to exorcise yourself. But I felt the quick, curt shake of his head. “Chains, and that—clout—they put on me. They took my boots.” The first note of true indignation. Of memory being sloughed. “I could have borne the clothes, even Hvestang. But my boots!”
