Maeve

by Clayton, Jo;

The Actor patted her shoulder. “Get moving, lass. You’re on salary now and our esteemed employer has been known to dock pay for wasting time. What’s worse, he’ll go after my poor inadequate stipend.” The beard split again in a tragic grimace and the big man’s eyes took on the sadness of a deserted puppy’s gaze.

  Clutching at his arm, swallowing to overcome her nervousness, she slid off the stool and looked around. “Which one?”

  The Actor nodded at a table where three men were sitting, older types with the harsh lines of authority in their faces. “Bunch of ship captains there. Three of them, so they won’t be looking for action; besides, it’s early yet. But expect to listen to a lot of windy tales. Each one’ll try to outdo the others.”

  “That I can take. Come on.”

  Chapter V

  Treforis laid his hand on Gwynnor’s shoulder. “You can stay. You know that.”

  “I know. We went over that back and front.” He touched his brother’s hand then moved away and swung down into the boat beside Sioned. “Your children, the farm. I won’t set them at risk, brother.” He looked up, smiling into Treforis’ troubled face. “Besides, someone has to go see what the Synwedda will do for us.”

  Treforis slipped the rope loose and tossed it to Sioned. “A smooth journey, brother.”

  Gwynnor waved, then leaned on the tiller, moving the boat into midstream. Crouching beside him, Sioned let the sheets run through her hand as the sail swung round to catch the night breeze that flowed over the plain toward the sea. Rope caught once around her hand, she leaned against his knees, looking apprehensively at the lowering sky. The cloud cover this night was heavy and black, casting a deep pall over the land. The wind blew fitfully, driving them along fiercely awhile, then dropping away until only the current pulled the boat along.

  “It’ll be raining soon.”

  Gwynnor touched her head with soothing fingers. “Another wet night.”

  “But safer.”

  “Probably.”

  Sioned sighed and rubbed her head against his hand. The little boat jerked down the river in explosive spurts as the wind rose and died. The darkness grew more intense, interrupted by occasional flashes of lightning. One struck so close they could smell it and hear the sizzle of the water. She huddled closer to Gwynnor. He stroked the springy coils on the top of her head, feeling her terror.

  Then the rain came down, hard and heavy, driven by whirling winds so there was no way to shelter from the deluge. After fighting the tiller a short while, Gwynnor hauled Sioned onto the seat, pushed the tiller bar into her grasp and stumbled forward to take in the sail, sloshing through several inches of water. The cycling winds sent breaking waves over the sides and the clouds emptied themselves, rain falling so thick and hard it was a steady, befuddling pressure. He fought the sail into a compact bundle around the boom, binding it in place with clumsily tied reef knots. Then he sank to his knees and began scooping the water out with the bail.

  Since the storm was too violent to cover much space, the wind blew them from under the center and the boat settled at last to a steady slide along the main channel. Gwynnor scraped the bail over the floorboards for the last time. There was still a thin film of water on the boards but it was seeping through the cracks into the space between the floor and the keel. In any case, it was too shallow now for profitable bailing. With sore and shaking fingers he worked the swollen knots loose and raised sail again. Then he settled at the tiller beside Sioned.

  “You all right?” He took the bar from her and watched as she flexed cramped fingers.

  “I’m alive.” Sioned scraped the water from her face and shook her hands to flick the water off.

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I am.” She glanced back upstream, wincing as the lightning walked in jagged legs over the land. “I’d rather be under roof in storm time.”

  He chuckled. “And in bed, love.”

  “Ha. You laugh now. I didn’t see you laughing back there.”

  She plucked in disgust at the soaked tunic and flicked at the beads of moisture weighing down the silky fur on her arms.

  “Look. There.” He pointed to a dark mass rearing up against the faint sprinkle of stars where the clouds thinned out.

  Sioned dropped her hands onto her legs. “Caer Seramdun?”

  He nodded. “Starman’s hold.”

  “She’s up there.”

  Gwynnor watched the dark bulk slide closer. “I don’t know.”

  Sioned was silent, her brooding gaze fixed on the defining mass as the river pulled them closer. “I see the landing,” she said suddenly. “Are you going to stop?”

  “No. I told you that.”

  “I thought you might change your mind now that we’re here.”

  He sighed. “You mean you thought I couldn’t stay away from her. Sioned,” he said wearily, “don’t be a fool. There’re more important things to think of than the state of my urges.”

  “Fool!” She flounced impatiently, sending the responsive craft into a complex series of yaws.

  “You’ll have us capsized if you don’t hold steady,” he snapped. “Sit still!”

  Ahead, they heard the slow pound of the surf. Another few minutes and they were sliding past the sandstone cliffs. The boat began to jerk about as the estuary began to influence the current. Gwynnor caught Sioned’s hand and closed her fingers around the bar. “Keep the nose straight. I’ll get the sail down, then pilot us through.”

  With Gwynnor standing watch in the bow, the little boat rode the main channel into the bay. Sail up again, they headed for the island visible as a low black cloud on the horizon.

  Chapter VI

  Shadith laid the harp on the bar and retreated. Aleytys stretched, fitting herself back into her body. She leaned on her elbows, scanning the room. More of the tables were filled tonight. Dryknolte stood, arms folded across his massive chest, looking pleased. Aleytys felt pleased herself at this evidence of her success.

  Then the pleasure chilled in her breast. The little gray man came from the foyer and moved to a narrow bench in a dark corner. He didn’t bother to look at her. He didn’t need to. Everywhere. He popped up everywhere. In the cookshop an hour ago when she was talking to Bran. Outside Tintin’s place this morning. Chu Manhanu. It had to be. But why? She shivered. What did he want? And why was he waiting? It didn’t make sense.

  She pushed away from the bar, heading out at random, stopping at the first table she came to. A thinnish, dark-haired man with a clever, smiling face. Sitting alone. “Will you join me?” His voice was deep and pleasant.

  She hesitated. He fitted too closely the description of Lovax. A few hours ago Bran had warned her again about the man, saying he was sniffing around trying to find out more about her. She glanced at Dryknolte. He was placidly polishing the bar and talking with a long, lean man with a shock of gray-white hair. Reassured, she sat down. “You must buy me a drink.”

  “I know the rules.” He nodded to the Actor. “Bring the despina what she wants.” As the big blond man moved off, he focused on Aleytys. “They call you Amber.”

  Aleytys nodded. “And you?”

  “Grey.” He lifted his glass and sipped at the wine as the Actor set her drink beside her and took the price from the pile of coins in the center of the table. When the big man was back at the bar, Grey spoke again. “Your songs interest me.”

  “Oh?” There was a raging curiosity in the man that he was holding in precarious check. He lusted to know who and what she was.

  “I have a sister. Some years older.”

  “A songsmith?”

  “No. A scholar. Specialist in ancient languages.”

  “So?”

  “What’s that language you were singing in?”

  “Why?”

  “Answer a question with a question?”

  “Why ask the first question? It’s none of your business.”

  “Curiosity, Amber. About how you know that language and that particular song.” He raised an
eyebrow, his mouth stretching into a sardonic grin. “There’s a cycle of poems from Before Time, recorded in an almost forgotten tongue. My sister came on them in the course of her work. Interesting. The products of a wandering poetess, a red-haired wench drifting from world to world, too restless to settle in any one place, her origins obscure.”

  “So?”

  “The cycle is several thousand years old. Far as I know, my sister’s the only one to hear and translate those poems.”

  “Interesting.”

  “That all you’re going to say?”

  “One song. Couldn’t two song-makers have the same inspiration?”

  “Same words? Same language? And it’s not one song, it’s all the songs you sing. Every one belongs to that cycle. The last time we met, Marishe made me sit and listen to her recordings. Every damn one of them. While she raved about them.” He leaned back in his chair and lifted his glass in a mocking salute. “Same language, same sound, even same phrasing as on the recordings. Fascinating.”

  “And you’d like an explanation.” With a low, amused laugh, she stood. “How dull your life would be if you understood everything.” She moved off to a table where three humanoids greeted her with boisterous appreciation.

  The evening passed calmly enough. At times, she looked up and met the gray man’s bored gaze. And each time she turned away with a hollow feeling in her midsection, moving on to another table. Blue Halevan! Actor had to escort out two drunk ursinoids, two travelers of indeterminate sex who made her a proposition startling in its complexity. A captain of a privately owned space yacht. A catman from Sesshu …

  She shook her head, smiling at the furry catman. Speaking in his own tongue, she murmured, “You honor me, Sslassa, but my honor does not permit. There are many others on the Street who can accommodate your needs.” Still smiling, her face aching with the need to maintain the stretching of her lips, she stood and walked quietly away as his eyes reddened with rage. He half stood to go after her, but the Actor was there, a blond meat mountain half a meter taller than the small-boned felinoid, his square white teeth gleaming between mustache and beard in an amiable smile that didn’t come close to reaching his chill brown eyes. Grumbling under his breath, the catman slammed out of the tavern.

  Aleytys leaned on the bar, feeling a little weak in the knees. Actor came up beside her.

  “Thanks.”

  “My job. The three over there by the door. Came in about fifteen minutes ago. Tipped me good to get you over. You want to go?”

  She looked into the mirror, searching for the ones he meant. “My god, they’re hideous, Actor. Like six-foot spiders …” Her voice died as a chilling suspicion danced across her brain. RMoahl?

  Actor was at her shoulder looking into the mirror, also. “Might make a change from the itchy types you been getting the last hour. At least those oids won’t be trying to get you in the sack with them.”

  Aleytys closed her hands into fists. “Ever seen their kind here before?”

  “No. Anything wrong?” He touched her shoulder. “Want me to chase them?”

  For a minute she was tempted, then she shook her head. “Dryknolte’d like that! He’d have your beard off hair by hair if you went around chasing off the paying customers. No. Go tell them I’ll be over in a minute.”

  As Actor left, she glanced once more at the mirror. “RMoahl,” she whispered. “The Hounds on my trail.” She shifted her gaze and caught sight of the wizened face of the little gray man. “Damn. Everything piling up.…” She beckoned Dryknolte over. “I need a minute to myself.”

  “You had your hour.”

  “You want to see me come to pieces in the middle of the floor?”

  He jerked his head at the door behind the bar. “My offices.”

  “Thanks.”

  He followed her, stood in the doorway as she sank down into one of the chairs. “Something wrong?”

  She felt the antagonism he awakened in her flare up, wondered if he felt it, too. “Nothing a little peace and quiet won’t cure.”

  The yellow eyes glittered. “You’re doing a good job, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

  “No.” She rubbed her hands over her face. “I know that.”

  “That Company spy?”

  “You saw him?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “I’ll deal with him when I have to.” She looked down and found her hands clenched into fists. Carefully, she straightened her fingers. “I can’t explain. Let me have a little peace, will you?”

  Offended, he stepped back and shut the door with a controlled anger, just avoiding slamming it, which was twice as frightening in its implications of violence barely checked.

  Aleytys sighed. She let her head fall back and closed her eyes. “Harskari.”

  The golden eyes opened and the thin, intelligent face formed around them. “You were right, Aleytys. They are RMoahl.”

  “Damn. Why didn’t I sense them before?”

  “When we lost them at Lamarchos, we forgot about them. Foolish.”

  Aleytys crossed her arms over her breasts. “That doesn’t matter now. They’re here. What do I do about them?”

  Harskari was silent, eyes focused on distance.

  “Well?”

  “They want the diadem back.”

  “So? You know I can’t take it off.”

  “I imagine they plan to take you with the diadem. Put you in that hole where we sat for four hundred interminable years.”

  “Can they do that?” She jumped to her feet and began pacing back and forth across the small room. “How’d they get the diadem in the first place?”

  “They found it where Swardheld’s bones had gone to dust.”

  “Mn. I don’t want to sit around some damn museum waiting for my bones to rot.”

  Harskari nodded. A sudden smile lit her face. “According to your mother, that might be a long, long wait.”

  Aleytys threw herself into the chair. “There isn’t much you don’t know about me, is there?” She struck at her temples in sudden anger. “My god, everything!”

  “More than we want to know, young Aleytys. That’s the way things are and none of us can alter it.”

  “Ay-mi, Harskari, what am I going to do?”

  “Consider. The RMoahl sit peacefully at their table. And they have made no hostile move toward you yet.”

  “You think I should go talk to them?”

  “Yes. Information is always useful. We’ll be watching.”

  With sharp, angry movements, Aleytys jerked herself from the chair and stalked to the door, muttering, “Watching. Always watching. Don’t I know? I know …”

  Dryknolte glanced briefly toward her, then turned away.

  “First things first,” she muttered. She walked over to him.

  He scowled down at her. “Well?”

  “A man your size looks silly when he pouts.” She smiled at him when he opened his mouth to protest. “Look. You offered. Thanks. But there was no way you could help. A woman’s problem.”

  He relaxed, patted her shoulder. “You all right now?”

  “Yeah.” She saw the glow in his eyes and was abruptly glad she didn’t plan to stay around long. With a mumbled apology she moved around him, hesitated at the end of the bar, then walked across the room to stand, smiling her professional smile at the three RMoahl.

  “Will you join us, woman?”

  She nodded at the Actor and sat in the chair he placed across the table from the largest of the RMoahl. “If you buy me a drink, despoites.”

  When the Actor had set the glass in front of her and retreated, she sipped at the cold cha and looked briefly at each of them. “Suppose we start by exchanging names. I am called Amber.”

  The sensory antenna growing from the orange pompons on both sides of the largest RMoahl’s head twisted in gentle ripples as his wide mouth spread in an appreciative open-mouthed smile. “I am koeiyi Sensayii.” He clicked a nipper claw at the RMoahl on his right. “The sec
ond is Mok’tekii. The other is Chiisayii. As to who and what we are, you know that. As to why we are here, you know that, also.”

  Aleytys suppressed a queasy fluttering in her stomach and kept an impassive face as she nodded. “You don’t waste time.”

  “We want what is ours.”

  “You must know I can’t give it to you. It has grown into me.”

  “We will take you with it.”

  “Sorry. I don’t see it that way.” She leaned back in the chair, sipping at the cha, smiling her meaningless, professional smile.

  “Then we have to force you to come. We would prefer not.”

  “No doubt.” She tapped her fingernails on the glass. “How do you plan to accomplish that? Point a weapon at me and order me to your ship?”

  “That would be ineffective.”

  “You’re damn right. How far would you get?” She flicked a hand at the room. “There’s a few here might object.” She glanced at the door. The gray man had acquired a companion, a tall, skinny type with dark hair and shiny dusky skin. He was dressed in a wrinkled matte black tunic and baggy tights and looked like a broom handle wrapped in a shroud. As she watched, Grey walked past her without a glance and went out. The skinny spy went out after him. She frowned.

  “You’ll make your life much easier if you come with us.”

  “What? Oh.” She shook her head. “No.”

  “Our ship waits. Make up your mind to this, Amber. We will have you, one way or another.”

  “No. I’ve got things I need to do. And I don’t plan to sit out the rest of my life in some dusty hole.”

  “The diadem is ours.”

  “Well, dammit, I didn’t steal it. Why the hell should I suffer for your ineptitude!”

  “You got in the way, so you take the consequences of your act. The diadem belongs to the RMoahl.”

  “It belongs to the wearer. Do you have any idea what it really is?”

  Sensayii clicked his nipper claws impatiently. “What does it matter? We will never let slip away what is ours.”

  “You bare your ignorance. The diadem is not a thing …” She examined him over the rim of her glass. “No, I’m wrong. You know much more about it than you want to say.”