by John Daulton
The song ended, but Ilbei stared into the fire, thinking back over all the decades since that time. He couldn’t quite shape her young, pretty face anymore, but he could feel how pretty she had been inside. Such stark contrast to that potameide. It was the difference of a moment and a century.
“Decia, you’re sucking the light right outta Luria with that depressing shite,” someone called from the other side of the fire. “Like enough we’ll be feeling sorry for our feet come end of the week. Save that sap for the blisters we’ll get climbing up and down these hills.”
“Yeah,” someone else said. “Play something merry.”
The two sisters turned to each other and shared a brief exchange, and soon the fiddle was set ablaze nearly as bright as the fire itself, sparks of music rising up out of the forest into the black river of the night, which flowed around the treetops like salted ink. A few of the lads were struck to dance by the song as others tried to accompany it, and soon after the woods were filled with the howling, off-key bawdiness of their revelry.
Ilbei, less inclined to song than the rest, having been disinclined to wine that night, sat on his log, tapping his toe and measuring with a practiced eye all that he could glean about the men and women of his company. And it was as he made his mental notes that he heard the sentry’s shrill whistle, coming from down by the river.
The whistle came again, the note rising high and short, followed by a longer warbling one, signaling that a lone boat approached from downstream. Ilbei called for Kaige, Meggins and a young soldier sitting nearby stringing a bow. “Come,” was all he said, and the four of them ran toward the river.
They found the sentry crouched in a low fork of an alder. He pointed at orange spots of light issuing from lanterns that hung at the stem and stern of a riverboat. The oars dipping in the water splashed audibly, an even sequence of splash and silence, stroke after stroke.
The light of the moon, pink Luria above, was little use in a fight here, given the forest overhang, but since the boat made no attempts to conceal its approach, Ilbei allowed himself to be somewhat at ease. “Run fer camp if they make any move, Meggins,” Ilbei said in a low voice. “But I expect these here are harmless enough.”
They waited patiently, the man with the bow jumping down from his place in the tree and moving back to a tree a little farther up the bank, where he sank into the shadows and was gone from sight. Eventually the longboat came close enough that its lamps revealed its crew: twelve men at the oars, a coxswain at the back and one man in the center, astride a horse so black that for a time it looked as if the rider were levitating a span and a half above the deck.
“Run fer a torch,” Ilbei ordered, and Meggins was off like a rabbit. By the time the boat was drawing parallel to Ilbei’s position on the bank, Meggins was back, his breathing hardly up despite the sprint.
“Hallo,” Ilbei called. “A fine night fer a row then, is it?”
“Sergeant Spadebreaker, I presume?” came the reply from the mounted man.
Ilbei took the torch from Meggins and held it aloft, squinting in the light. He saw in it that the man was an officer, a major by the crossed lances on his sleeves, though a young one by the lack of lines upon his face. There was a cleanliness to him that bespoke wealth, and a rigidity of spine that promised noble blood. Ilbei had seen enough of them in his time. A black cloak was fastened by a golden clasp at his throat, the rich fabric draped like a sable waterfall, flowing off him and cascading over his horse’s flanks and rump. “Right, sar. That’ll be me.”
“I am Lord Cavendis, major in Her Majesty’s Eleventh Cavalry. I am now in command of this expedition.”
The helmsman tossed Ilbei a mooring line, which he caught reflexively in his free hand. He pushed the torch out over the water, amplifying its light by the reflection. He passed the line off to Kaige, continuing to stare up at the officer as the burly soldier hauled the vessel to shore. The coxswain threw another line to Meggins, who did as Kaige had done, and soon the boat was moored and joined to the bank by a stretch of sturdy plank pushed out by the crew. The young Lord Cavendis, upon his black horse, eschewed such conventions. Rather than clatter down the ramp, he chose to leap free of the vessel in a great bound of equestrian finesse that left the oarsmen groping the gunwales lest they be dumped out by the recoil of the boat. It was a large boat, but not that large.
Ilbei kept his thoughts on the display to himself and instead pointed the smooth-faced officer toward the bawdy songs being sung several hundred paces through the trees. “Camp’d be that way, sar,” he said. “We’ll see to yer gear, and to yer men. Get y’all fed up good.”
“They’ve provisions enough to get them back to the garrison at Twee. Just get my things.”
“Twee, sar? Have ya been rowin up so far as that?”
“Spadebreaker, let us get off on a good foot, shall we?”
“I should like that just fine, sar,” Ilbei said.
“Good news, then. So we’ll start by you not questioning me as if we were long-lost chums.”
“Right, sar. I just thought yer boys might like a hot meal afore headin back, fer to see to their strength and all. There’s more fish cooked up there than our boys can eat, and more than a few spits of fine, greasy quail too. They’re everywhere out here.”
“And there goes our good footing already, Sergeant. But then, what should I have expected from the man who’s been knocked back down to strip sergeant how many times now? Eleven? Or was it twelve?”
Actually it was only six times, and all six for insubordination—all six incited by baby-faced lordlings blowing out bad orders on breath that stank of mother’s milk as the ink on their commissions dried—but Ilbei wasn’t going to tell him that either. “Right, sar. My apologies, sar. Shall I cut em loose now or give em long enough to clear their bowels if’n they need to?”
It was a bit of good fortune for Ilbei that the officer’s eyes were not crossbows, for that might have been the end of him on the spot. But rather than rebuke Ilbei, the young lord turned back and gave the order himself. “Hand over my gear and off with you. If I get word that you were longer back than two days, I’ll have your pay docked the missing time, all of you.”
Ilbei’s eyes narrowed dangerously, but he kept his head low enough that shadows concealed it. The men on the boat made similar angles of their own faces, but they saw well enough to hand off the major’s crates and to catch the ropes that Meggins and Kaige tossed back to them. Understanding flashed between them as Meggins shot the coxswain an apologetic glance, but that was all.
When the boat had slipped back into the main channel, Ilbei turned back toward camp. “This way, sar,” he said, wondering privately why nobody in Hast had told him there was an officer coming up from South Mark. General Hanswicket’s last words on the problem of the highway robberies had simply been: “See to it, Spadebreaker. Make it go away.”
Meggins had apparently been having the same thoughts, and he asked about it as they were heading for their tents. “Why didn’t anybody say they were sending an officer from Twee?” His breath blew misty in the chill night air, the plume of it turned pale pink by the moonlight. Ilbei hissed at him to keep his voice down. The man shrugged in the shadows. “I’m just asking, is all,” he said, his voice lower but still audible enough to make Ilbei uncomfortable. “I thought we was just after bandits. What do we need a Twee major for? A cavalryman, no less?”
“Our job is to do what we’re told and not ask questions,” Ilbei said. “If’n blokes like us get to needin whys and wherefores every time a command comes down, the whole army’d lock up and fall in on itself.”
“South Mark officers got no call in Valenride.”
“Them two silver lances on his lapels says different, so just mind yer yap and do as you’re told.”
“Of course I will. But I don’t see why this mission needs some damned major come along. ‘Specially one fresh off his mother’s dugs.”
“Listen up, son. I reckon I done waxed his
back as it is, and there ain’t no room fer sass from the likes of you. So stow that bile and keep to what they pay ya fer, which ain’t fer thinkin. Hear?”
“I hear.”
“I hear, Sergeant,” Ilbei said.
“Yes, Sergeant,” Meggins said. He turned and went off to find his dreams.
Ilbei would have found his own dreams if he could, but the day’s events prevented him from sleeping straight away. Ilbei was a man of order. He didn’t like chaos, and he didn’t like surprise. This mission was supposed to be simple: get to the hills, ask a few questions, track down the bad guys, and bring them in. In, out, easy. He figured a short skirmish was the worst there would be. And yet, here he was, his boot socks hanging above him, drying from his encounter with a potameide—he’d never even heard of a damned potameide before today—and now they had a nobleman from Twee taking over before they’d even had breakfast on dry land. So much for simplicity. By the time Ilbei finally fell asleep, he’d concluded that the two of them, the river nymph and the major, counted up to bad luck.
Chapter 5
It turned out that “bad luck” was not an entirely accurate description of Major Cavendis, which, in its particulars, came as something of a surprise to Ilbei. On the third day of marching, as the foothills grew steep enough that they might be deemed mountainous, the platoon arrived at Cedar Wood. It was the closest of the mining camps that made up Three Tents and hardly more than a cluster of plank buildings and log cabins. And it was on that first evening in Cedar Wood that Ilbei discovered that Major Cavendis—the very young and very noble Major Cavendis—had quite a gift for cards.
Miners, like sailors and soldiers, were famously fond of games of chance, and premier among them was ruffs. Ruffs was a game of luck and bluffing, and the better a man was at bluffing, the better his luck turned out to be. For the most part, the game was simple. The deck was made up of sixty-five cards with five suits of thirteen cards each, the suits being: orcs, elves, harpies, dwarves and men.
When Ilbei was a boy, he’d played it with the other mining camp kids. Unlike their parents, the boys usually played for acorns or trinkets, learning the skills required to one day compete with the adults. However, there had been one especially memorable game, very high-stakes in the minds of boys, in which he and his mates wagered real money against a peek in on Gervon Gravelstack’s sister when she was having a bath. Ilbei, a natural at the game, had won that pot gleefully. In payment, he was shown the location of a knothole in the Gravelstack family abode, done so on the promise that he would never tell another living soul.
Oh, such a victory that had been! And as adolescent Ilbei settled in for a second night enjoying the profits of his fine play, old man Gravelstack caught him looking in. Seldom had Ilbei encountered such rage as that, and the broad-backed miner beat poor Ilbei black and blue, so badly he lost a tooth, a permanent one, which had to be replaced in gold—gold that his own father took out of him in toil that went far beyond the value of Ilbei’s original bet. Despite the net loss, however, Ilbei never regretted his win, and his skills at ruffs had only improved in the century since. But ruffs was a commoners’ game. It was a game for blanks and ruffians. Firstly, because a player with magic most likely had telepathy, and where there were telepaths, poker-style games were fraught with cheating of the worst kind; and secondly, where there was ruffs, there was fighting. The game got its name from the tacit understanding that it sometimes became violent, and as far as anyone could tell, it had always been that way. Which is why the arrival of Major Cavendis asking for a game caught Ilbei entirely off guard.
Ilbei himself had come to Cedar Wood’s dilapidated tavern to question the locals about the highway robberies. He’d found himself with a pair of them and, using money the army had provided for just such a thing, plied them with Her Majesty’s generosity, learning what he could about the bandits’ activities. He’d just begun getting details of heists along a track the locals called Deer Trail Road when in came Major Cavendis in all his silver lances and golden clasps.
“I was informed there is a game here,” the major said simply to the tavern keeper. The arrival of the young lord and officer set nervousness dripping from the barman like ale foam down an overfilled mug. He dabbed at the pine-board counter before him, wiping away nothing with a filthy cloth as he stammered something unintelligible.
The major swung his gaze around the room and spotted the ruffs game right away, five miners seated around a table made from rough-hewn planks set atop four flat-cut logs. To the last of them, they were doing their best to cover their cards with dusty sleeves, or set mugs down as obstacles to the major’s line of sight. The two nearest to the bar stared into the wood, pretending they hadn’t noticed the resplendent officer enter. The major called their bluff, saying, “Ah, there it is,” which set them to shifting in their seats.
“At ease, gentlemen,” the major said as he approached. His silver spurs jingled at his boot heels with each long stride. “I’ve not come to stop you. I’ve come to play.”
Eyes darted from man to man, lips pursed, then the group together gaped as the young lord pulled a chair from a nearby table and inserted himself into their game.
There followed a period of sputtering and stammering, a few milords interspersed with dissembling and unintelligible remarks, clearly protests, though muffled to indecipherability for fear and duty to noble blood. Fear and duty were things not much to the taste of men who’ve gone to the trouble of choosing a life so far from anything “civilized.”
The major shocked them a second time—shocking Ilbei as well—as he explained that he was a lover of the game. “I simply can’t find a good round of ruffs back home,” he said. “The stuffy sorts who haunt the manor or would curry favor with my family are simply incapable of putting up a proper game.” He explained that he had to travel pretty far to indulge himself in a game with men of real skill, and finished by saying, “And I have it on good authority that there were none so gifted in the art of ruffs than those who dig their wagers out of the very flesh of the world.”
This compliment put half the game into a state of ridiculous vanity, and as easily as that, most of them were exacting promises on his oath that there would be no penalties upon them should they “bleed His Lordship dry.” This was met with a broad smile and a happy clap on the back for the nearest of them, and it was Ilbei’s turn to gape.
“There weren’t suppose to be no magicks at ruffs, Milord,” said one dusty old miner whose seat was in the corner, the one player who’d not been so quick to grin and extract oaths from the nobleman. “And if’n ya are the ruffsman ya say, then ya know it true.”
“I do know it,” the major said. He glanced once over his right shoulder, then his left—the good fortune of that sequence giving Ilbei time to turn his face toward the wall. The major then leaned in and told them in a low voice that filled the room, “On your honor, boys, this can’t get out, but, sadly, I am as magickless as you.”
The revelation brought a breath of collective surprise from the men. Many commoners—mainly the uneducated and the blank—believed the nobility could not be born without magic of at least some kind. Ilbei knew better, having encountered enough nobles in his time, and he’d heard plenty of stories about bitter nobles born blank and doomed to ridicule among that high class. While Ilbei had no experience living in high society or being peer to those folks with the blood in them, he could still imagine what it might be like to be a blank among them.
“It’s true, gentlemen. A sad fact. But one that has put me on my own road, and today that road has led me to you, the truest men of chance, carving your very existence out of rock. I came to test my game against yours, straight and fair.” He poured out a small purse filled with gleaming new coppers, the commonest coin in the realm, and beside the stack he placed one gold coin, a royal crown, as the coins were called. It was imprinted on one side with the likeness of the Queen, which he turned, orienting it so that Her Majesty might be said to watch them.
“Weren’t likely you’ll see game for that, Milord,” muttered one of the gamblers. The bobbing heads around the table agreed.
“So you say, my good man, so you say. And yet, I expect when time comes, one of you might surprise the rest, as is usually the case with men of chance. We’re all beggars, the lot of us, until the moment comes round. Then we wield our own sort of magic in procuring our next and our biggest bets.”
“Be that as it may, Lordship, I’m letting ya know straight off. So as ya won’t be disappointed after, and, ya know ….” The implication was left unsaid, but Ilbei knew they expected trouble from the major if the game didn’t go the way he wanted.
“Not at all,” the major said gaily, “not at all. On my honor, gentlemen, my coppers to you if you can take them. My gold as well. Nothing for you if you can’t, and no reprisals either way. The game is the game. That and, of course, you must promise never to say a word of my little secret to anyone.”
“Bugger me with Her Majesty’s broadsword if’n I say a word of it,” said the man who’d been apologetic just before.
“Right so,” said another. “Same fer me, twice.”
They were all in agreement and for the most part appeared eager to tap the coins of the rich officer, who they all quietly knew fancied himself a better player than they. Obsequiousness was a mask the lowly learned to wear early and well, but it’s not the countenance of truth. Ilbei watched them smiling and genuflecting with their eyes when the major spoke to them, but he saw them look differently to each other when the major’s eyes were away.
Only the old man in the corner remained reluctant about having the major in the game. “Now far be it for one such as myself to speak some impropriety, Milord,” he began, and from where Ilbei sat, he could see the man’s fingers twitching in his lap. “And I sure mean no dispute to your highborn assurances about, well, that secret you gone and shared, but as a rule of this here game—which I bank myself, mind you, and have steady and fair for the last twelve months—we always get the last say-so on the magic powers of newcomers through my old Abigail.”
