by David Bell
Kanesh picked up a tablet and ran his eye over the marks.
“This one by itself would be enough,” he said.
“Enough, I suggest, also to ensure the safe return of the Lady Akusha to Kallista, and on your ship, Captain, I should think.”
Kanesh was reading another of the tablets. He looked up and saw Koreta watching him. “The identity of the writer is quite clearly shown here.”
“The name will give some authenticity to the contents,” said Koreta blandly. “As for the writer himself, I do not think he will waste any of his time worrying about the consequences. Come back to see me again before you sail, Captain. There will be a despatch for you to deliver to Lord Sekara that should give him pause for thought. Good. That is the matter dealt with, do you agree? Lord Kanesh, did I tell you that Sharesh was here yesterday? He plays the pipes well. He offered to return the bloodstone seal I gave him before you sailed. I said it may yet have a use and he should keep it. May we now talk of mortar and bricks?”
The Davina made two more crossings to Kallista before the Hunter rose to chase the seven blue-robed sisters down beyond the horizon and Potyr declared the seas were no longer safe for passage. On the first of these voyages she carried Merida.
“Different times, Dareka,” he said as he stepped onto the jetty and looked around. “Different times. When I left here a skipper had to fight to find a berth. Ships anchored in the harbour, others standing offshore, waiting to be let in. Look at it now. Place is too tidy, too quiet. When did your last ship come in from Telchina? Tell me if I’m wrong: before the longest day?”
“You are not wrong, but this morning a ship was sighted from the Mountain, coming from the direction of Telchina.”
Merida’s face lost its gloomy look. He straightened up and began pacing about, snapping his fingers. “If she’s the one I think she is, you’ll be unloading cargo for us tomorrow: timber, corn, oil and wine, if the thieves haven’t drunk it and pretend they had to pour it overboard because it went sour.” He came close, put his arm round Dareka’s powerful shoulders and muttered confidentially into his ear. “We should do well with this one, Dareka, and even better with what’s in the Davina’s hold. By the look of things here there’ll be no lack of customers.”
“The Governor has given strict orders about the distribution of food.”
“He won’t interfere with the trade.”
“No, but Kanesh tells me he has said that if prices rise, so will the landing taxes.”
“Kanesh, eh? I want a word with him and Potyr together. Taking my ship without me knowing: she might have been wrecked or burnt or seized by pirates! Now Lord Sekara, there’s a different sort of man. He could have taken her over if he’d cared to. In fact I got wind he was going to do just that. There was plenty of work for her in Keftiu, I can tell you. But no, I was told she wouldn’t be wanted, not after she’d brought back all that tin from what do they call the place, Pherethan? I wonder what made him change his mind? Anyway, here she is and here I am.”
“Has Captain Potyr told you much about the voyage to the Tin Islands?”
“This and that, but if you mean the whole story, like about where they had to sail to get there, no, not yet.”
“In that case, until he and Kanesh do give you a description, it might be wise to say nothing about them taking the ship to free Kallista from the pirates.”
Merida changed the subject. “What about my houses, Dareka? What did the earth shaking do to them? And the bloody pirates, now we’re on the subject, what about them?”
“You’ve come out of it better than a lot of people, like me for instance; my house needs a new roof but yours hardly suffered at all. The mansion stood up to the shaking well and the pirates left it alone. I don’t know why. Maybe they had other plans for it. But that wouldn’t be like pirates, would it? They usually just smash everything they don’t steal. Dorejo has a gang of them working for him now. Their leaders were taken back to Keftiu on the warship that was here, and good riddance to them, I say.”
“What about Anchor House: you know it’s built on top of an old house that fell down in an earth-shaking long ago?”
“Nothing much happened to it this time: only a few cracks above the door. Some of the pirates lived in it but apart from piling the looms in a corner and using the bales of cloth to sleep on they didn’t do much harm. Now isn’t that odd? They used charcoal to scrawl on some of the pictures and pressed hand marks all over the one of Lady Tuwea.”
“She hasn’t seen it, has she?”
“She hasn’t been there. She’s spent all her time in Lagoon House with your manservant, the cupbearer, after Namun brought her back with the Governor and the others. You needn’t worry: I did have the pictures cleaned up but you will have to get the painter back to do the job properly.”
“I’ll have him come on the next ship: the Telchina ship’s skipper can carry word to him. I have an idea that will interest him: a painting in Anchor House like nothing anybody’s done before. And that reminds me: I want to see Sharesh. He was in the fight for the town, wasn’t he? I want to know what he saw and what he did so the painter can put it in the painting. Where is the boy?”
“He’s not a boy any more; you’ll know what I mean when you see him. He seems to spend quite a lot of his spare time at your mansion, these days.”
“Right; I’ll look out for him. Now I’d better go up there and give my wife the good news. With the sort of profit we’re making on the tin and the amber, she can have the whole roof covered in those new tiles. You can deal with all this cargo and I’ll be back tomorrow. There’s a lot of thinking to do, Dareka. You know the people in Keftiu want us to send the Davina back to the Tin Islands, don’t you? And if we’re the only ones who know how to get there, we can really make them pay, can’t we? What, do you mean to say there aren’t any donkeys? Do I have to walk all the way to Lagoon House? Make sure donkeys are on the cargo list for Potyr when he sails back to Keftiu.”
When the Davina tied up after her last crossing from Keftiu to Kallista before the sailing season ended, Akusha was the first of her passengers to step ashore. Dareka handed her down from the ship’s side and Sharesh stood beside him, eager to embrace his mother. He told her that the Governor had offered rooms in the Residence for her until her own house had been repaired. With a ship just in and likely to be the last one until spring came round again,
Dareka had much work to do so Sharesh went arm in arm with Akusha for the short walk along Ship Street that led to the Residence. Unnoticed by either of them, the painter followed them for a little distance before turning into Telchina Street and making his way towards Anchor House, where he had been told he was to meet Merida. His had left instructions for his equipment and materials to be brought up to the house later in the day by his assistant.
Akusha stopped before almost every house on the way to see what damage the earth-shaking had caused and to speak a few words to anyone she found there. She stopped in the square in front of the Residence and looked about her.
“Was it very bad, Sharesh?”
“We were still at sea when the earth shook, Mother, so we felt nothing. We learned of it when we came ashore at Paitoia and saw what it had done there, and later we saw other bad things on our ride across the mountains to the Palace.
“A fisherman from Kallista brought the news to Keftiu. I was there when he was lifted from the sea, more dead than alive. His mind was full of the pirate attack and he said very little of what went before. When we came here ourselves, what we saw, what we did,” his voice faltered and he began taking deep, rapid breaths like someone near exhaustion at the end of a long race. He stared at her and she was shocked by the misery in his eyes and the way he gasped his words. “What we did was, I don’t know, Mother, it was terrible. What was worse: what the pirates did, or we did, or the earth shaking did? It was horror on horror on horror.”
She went to take him in her arms but as quickly as he had given way, he was himself again an
d smiled tearfully at her.
“Now it’s better. Every day it gets better. Most of the streets have been cleared; houses are being worked on; we have some food, just about enough to see us through the winter and we have work to do. That’s what Kanesh says.”
She put a hand on his arm and said quickly. “Where is he, Sharesh?”
“I don’t know: with the Governor, or at the quarry, or with the smiths, or anywhere. He seems to be everywhere, working and making others work. Namun says but for Kanesh and the Governor we’d still be staring at the ruins, wondering what to do. He has a room in the Residence as well and he spends a lot of time with the Governor. Sometimes they talk all night. He could be here at any time: I sent someone off to search for him as soon as the Davina was sighted.”
“Shall we go in? You can show me where I am to stay. I want to know everything you did and saw and found when you sailed to the Endless Ocean.” She took his hand, squeezed it hard. “We can talk all night as well, if we want to,” she said, looking up at him with an arch little smile.
It was a different doorkeeper but he knew Sharesh and made way without a word. He bowed deeply to Akusha as she passed into the Residence. The hall was darker than she remembered, with hardly enough beeswax lamps to lighten the gloom. The slender urns that had once held fresh lilies were nowhere to be seen and, instead of perfume, the air was full of the dry smell of dust that drifted down from cracks in walls and ceiling. Akusha looked around as she drew her foot across the stone slabs with a faint, grating sound.
“Seta must come, Sharesh, and the maid and others, if you can find them. The Residence ought to be made fit for Lord Koreta. Amaia: I must speak with her; I have medicines from Keftiu for her work. There are so many people for me to see. The Priestess… why do you look like that? What has happened to the Priestess? “
Sharesh told her. He hesitated for a moment and then also told her what he had seen in the ruins of the temple on the slopes of Jaduktas. She did not weep or cry out. She stood as straight and proud as she always did. But the look on her face disquieted him. It was shocked, yes, but more perplexed, disconcerted. She turned troubled eyes on Sharesh.
“The temples and the priestesses and servants of the Lady Mother: why have even they been thrown down? Tell me why, Sharesh, because I do not know.”
“I cannot tell, Mother, but are they not walls and people like all the others that lie still and dead here on Kallista?”
“So many things have died, my son; some we loved, some we hardly knew and some things we thought could never die. Do you know, Namun once said that to me?”
“Namun is here, Mother, and now captain of a ship, no less.”
“He is?” she said, a little smile relieving her sadness. “Tell me about him too, and leave nothing out. Where am I to sleep? Tomorrow we must start work.”
“You brought him back to me, as you said you would, my Lord.”
“Did you ever doubt it?”
“Doubts seem to have grown in me against my will but that was never one of them.”
“Do not be worried about doubts over matters that deserve to be doubted.”
“To think that I watched you and Sharesh riding along the road to Setuja!”
“To think that we were sure you were here on Kallista. Leilia’s message reached me only after we had put to sea. I have a score to settle with Sekara about that.”
“Whatever he had in mind, I am here. You are here. Let it rest at that. Kallista is now our concern.”
“I must leave this house now that you are here. Potyr will have the Davina dragged up on the sand outside the harbour ready for cleaning and repair. She will be snug enough for the two of us in the winter. If not, Namun will find somewhere for us in the town.”
“I had some talk with the Captain while on the ship. He mentioned the name of a woman who was of help to you in Pherethan.”
“Eluwena, mother of the headman, and of Luzar who was once a slave, taken by pirates.”
“And now passes for Pasipha’s gardener, although I hear he is secretly learning the mystery of bull-leaping.”
“Without Luzar, I doubt if we should ever have reached Pherethan. I know we would never have survived the passage back. Bull-leaping, you say? Then all other leapers should bid farewell to their chances. Luzar will become the bull himself and make it dance to his tune.”
“I sense there is much more to this than you are prepared at present to tell me. I sensed something of the same in Captain Potyr. There is a change in him. Why has caused that?”
“It may be that in Pherethan he finally found help in explaining something that has long troubled him.”
“I see. Must you leave now? You have told me nothing yet of Sharesh.”
The painter worked as quickly as he could. There were not many days left before the last ship would set sail for Keftiu and Kallista with its cold and dusty winds was not the place where he wanted to pass the winter. But this was a work that could not be rushed. There were no life-size ladies in flounced saffron gowns to paint, no more young fishermen showing of their catch like the twins he had painted in this very same room, no frisking antelopes, nothing that could be brought to life swiftly with sweeps of the filled sponge. In this work he was a storyteller, telling his tale in miniature pictures of tiny, painstaking detail, some real, some fancied; a tale of crowded, busy life in town and country, on hillside, by riverside, but most important of all, at sea and in harbour: the life of Kallista. He had had his instructions, and frequent interruptions from Merida, so many in fact, that at last he flung down his brush and threatened to leave that instant and never return unless he were allowed to get on with his work.
He had the whole story in his head. He knew what Merida wanted him to put in: scenes from his travels that would impress chosen friends. Well, he would paint a lion stalking deer on the hilltops to let people know something of what Merida might have seen in the Black Land or Kinaani and a griffin, of course, like those he told Merida he had painted in the Palace. Lion and griffin: strength and courage; Merida would approve of that. The griffin would chase deer along the riverbank. The river was already done. It had a winding course but if date palms were added as well as the fig trees and wadij plants, and a cat, a blue cat with a ringed tail, chasing wildfowl, then who could say the river was not the Iteru, the great river that fed the Black Land?
The painter stepped up onto planks raised high enough up from the stone-flagged floor for him to reach above the window frames, the level at which the picture would run round three walls of the room. There was only just enough height for it, about a handspan for the river scene and not much more than twice that for all the rest. The plaster was ready, his bowls of colour, wispy brushes and sharpened paint sticks to hand: he set to work again on the long piece, the whole work clear in his head. The ships with their graceful upward-curving prows took pride of place, seven big ones, three with their masts stepped, one of them a cargo boat under sail, and all the others paddled along by sweating crews and gay with festoons and canopies to shade the privileged passengers from the sun. All were heading towards a large walled town, its houses, streets and quayside packed with waiting onlookers and leaving behind them a smaller town, whose inhabitants sat on their terraces or stood in the street watching them go. The painter dotted the places in the waves where his daughter would paint in the dolphins, sacred to the Lord Potheidan. He would leave the small boats and the drawing in of the stonework of the town buildings to her as well and perhaps, if he began to run out of time, the deer and the bounding lion on the hilltop. He had in his mind the scenes he had observed at the Festival when the harbour had been crammed with vessels for the Blessing of the Fleet and he wanted to catch with a few deft strokes the movement of the two lines of ships, the watchfulness of the helmsmen, the indolent ease of the white-robed passengers, the excited expectation of the people in the streets of the town for which the ships were bound.
On the opposite wall he would paint a very different story.
Merida wanted it; not that he had been there, but Sharesh had and he had told the painter what he needed to know. There would be drowned corpses floating in the harbour as they did after the pirate ship had burned and foundered. There would be small boats poled through the water to drag the bodies out. Away from the harbour there would be a line of soldiers in full war gear, boars’ tusk helmets, oxhide shields and lances at the ready, like the reinforcements who had marched up from the harbour only to be slaughtered by the waiting archers. There would not be many buildings in this picture. The earth-shaking had seen to that but there might be some scenes of life getting back to normal as it was still doing, with shepherds and herdsmen and women meeting to talk at the well and carrying the water away in jugs on their heads. His daughter could make such a scene very lifelike; perhaps he should leave it to her. What else? He was unsure: possibly a ceremony, a country ritual on a hill to give thanks for the coming of spring and the movement of flocks out to pasture?
As he worked on, dabbing, blotting, lining, moving quickly while the plaster stayed damp, the painter was already thinking of the fourth wall. The Davina had been in the harbour at the Festival but Merida would not allow her to be shown in this picture with the other ships. The fourth wall was for her alone and the voyage she had made to the Endless Ocean. Sharesh would tell him again about the sea monsters and the storms and the burning mountain of Sikelia and the passage of the Strait, and the women and the mines of Pherethan and the battles and the feasts and the scorched Libun shore and how they, Sharesh and Namun, his boxing boys, and Kanesh and Potyr and the surly helmsman and the great black man of stone, Kerma, had survived all and returned to Keftiu with their treasure in the ship that was like no other ship. He would tell their tale in his painting as Sharesh had started to sing it in his songs. But that would have to be next year. His daughter came into the room and without a word set to work on the frolicking, blue-backed dolphins.
Mercifully, the winter after the Return had been mild. There were some days that were almost springlike and one of these was the day when the sun stood still in a clear, pale blue sky. Some said the Lady Mother was looking on her people with renewed favour, comforting them after the anger of the Lord Potheidan. If she were, there was now no Temple on the Hill where offerings could be placed and no High Priestess to conduct the ceremonies of her sacred night, and no priestesses nor acolytes to carry the wands and pine cones, chant the hymns, or step out the solemn dance patterns. Akusha and Kallia sought out the painted room in the Crocus House, cleaned the dust from the basin and poured in a little water for the purification ritual. They had no goat’s head and no altar to place it on, so each dipped a finger in a cup of dark red pomegranate juice and drew the mark on the other’s forehead and lower lip. With a few unspoken words their ceremony was over. When they emerged into the street the moon was high above and Men of the Watch were lighting torches all over the town.
