Ashling

by Isobelle Carmody

  "I wonder what Ariel got out of the bargain. Coin?" Rushton murmured. "He would not aid the slaver for nothing."

  Daffyd's expression hardened. "Perhaps. They are as like to one another as two buds from the same plant. Both are secretive. Both love pain and desire power."

  The desperation returned to his face.

  I laid a hand on his arm. "What will you do now?"

  "Survive," he said harshly. "If Salamander wants me dead, I will live to spite him. He will have the city scoured for me when he returns and it pleases me to think that he will be thwarted. We will have our day of reckoning. And when I am done with the slavemaster, I will find Ariel."

  XXXVI

  It did not take much persuasion for Daffyd to let himself be shown to a bed. He was clearly exhausted far beyond his endurance.

  It was late but his words had given us much to consider, and the rest of us sat up talking and trying to understand what Ariel could have to do with Salamander. It was grim talk, and unsatisfying, for nothing could be resolved by it Though no one said it out loud, we all thought Daffyd's search for Gilaine hopeless.

  At last Rushton rose and stretched, saying his bed was yearning for him. Hannay got up to help the twins clear away the remnants of our meal, then all three retired. Kella went to see if Dameon wanted anything before going to her own bed.

  Only Fian and I remained in the ship's salon. I felt too nauseous to sleep, and me teknoguilder was so engrossed in his studies that he had not even looked up when the others went out.

  I watched him for a while, half wishing I could lose myself in books as he did. Truly it was a gift. Like the empaths he had been only slightly affected by sea, but he had refused treatment for fear it might take the edge from his thoughts.

  I decided to go out on deck. Perhaps some fresh air would make me feel better.

  The wind had risen and it fluttered my clothing, and snapped the sailcloth. The sea was higher too and slapped against the wooden hull in a broken rhythm. I shivered and pulled my cloak about me, trying to imagine what it would be like to do as Powyrs suggested, and give myself to the sea.

  "Wet, doubtless," a voice clove into my thoughts.

  I started violently for draped languidly on a mast strut right in front of me, licking one paw fastidiously, was Maruman!

  "How in Lud's name did you manage to get aboard?" I demanded. "And where have you been?"

  For once my questions did not rouse his ire. He stretched with slow and infuriating feline grace and jumped lightly to the deck to rub against my leg.

  "There you are!" Powyrs bellowed and swooped over to scoop him up.

  I froze but, instead of scratching the seaman, the bedraggled feline lay quiescent in his arms, an alarming mixture of complacence and thwarted mischief in his single gleaming eye.

  "I wondered where he had been hiding," Powyrs said, pretending severity. He looked at me and winked hugely. "The fools I have working for me think he is a bad omen, but he is too smart for them to catch and throw over the edge as they would like. He torments them, the naughty thing. Darting out and scaring them. Twice he has made seamen fall overboard." He beamed at Maruman with paternal pride and I could barely stop myself laughing aloud.

  I stood up and reached out to pat him. Powyrs' muscles tightened as mine had done moments before, but he relaxed as the cat allowed himself to be petted.

  "Well, you are honored. Usually he will suffer no one to touch him but me," he said, sounding astonished.

  "He is magnificent," I said, repressing a grin at how utterly Maruman had beguiled the burly seaman.

  "Of course," Maruman sent haughtily.

  "He can be savage," Powyrs warned. "You'd best leave him be, except when I'm holding him. He's used to me. Reminds me of the sea he does. My father said to me when he advised me against being a seaman: The sea is a wild beast that eats the lives of those who would try to tame it."

  "You didn't listen then?" I smiled.

  He shrugged. "I never liked tarnish things, even as a boy. Turned out my father was right about the sea being wild, but he didn't understand that being a seaman isn't about taming the sea and controlling it. You can't make it do anything or get mad at it when it doesn't do what you want. It's not like people, acting out of spite or anger or desire. It just is and you have to learn its moods and let

  them carry you.... " He glanced over and noticed one of

  his seamen mending a sail. Snorting in derision, he set Maruman down gently before stomping over to instruct the seaman on his deficiencies.

  "Well, I see how you managed to get yourself aboard," I sent grinning at him.

  Maruman made no response. He leapt up onto a box beside me and I felt a surge of pure happiness as he climbed onto my arm and clawed his way up to my shoulders to drape himself about my neck. I breathed deeply, taking in the slightly fishy smell of his coarse fur, as if it were the scent of fresh flowers. Oddly, I no longer felt sick.

  I yawned and decided I would go to bed. For the first time in many days I felt really content.

  "I am glad to see/carry/smell you," I sent, repressing my usual instinct to cuddle him close and tell him I loved him.

  "I am glad also," Maruman sent with rare sweetness.

  The tiny cabin I had chosen possessed only one bed and was no more than a closet. Its virtues were that it was situated on the main deck, which meant there was no need to grope my way down ladders in the darkness, and I would have some privacy. In a short time I was leaning down to let Maruman jump onto the narrow bed, which was fixed to the wall under a small round window looking out to sea. The moon slid out of its envelope of cloud, and the old cat sniffed suspiciously at the pillow where its silvery light fell. Then he turned to me, his eye seeming to to be filled with moonlight.

  I froze in the act of taking off my sandals.

  "The oldOne sent ashling to Maruman/yelloweyes. Say come. Maruman coming. Say: tell Innle. Maruman tells," he sent.

  "Tell me what?" My heart pounded.

  "Maruman flew the dreamtrails with the oldOnes. Saw Innle on blackdeathroad. Going to the endmost means end of barud. Obernewtyn finished and allgone for Innle."

  I stared at him. Atthis had sometimes called my quest a black road. Maruman seemed to be saying that if I completed my quest, Obernewtyn would not be there anymore. But what did that mean? That it would be abandoned? Destroyed? And why would Atthis want him to tell me this now?

  I took my sandals off and climbed into the bed, shifting Maruman to make room for myself. Maybe I was misunderstanding him. After all, beastspeaking obeyed no rules. Communications were entirely idiosyncratic, dependent on how much Talent a beast possessed, their mood at the time of communication, their relationship to the human with whom they communed, and, sometimes, even on what was to be told. Beasts interchangeably used their own odd dialect, imagepictures infused with emotions and human words, enhanced by empathized emotions. This was what made beastspeaking such a complex Talent to master. And Maruman was harder than most, because of the distortions of his mind. The question was how his words about the black road and Obernewtyn might be interpreted.

  The simplest reading was that if I fulfilled my quest, this would somehow prevent my returning to Obernewtyn.

  The Agyllians had warned me that it would draw me away from the Land and all that I had cared about in life. Help your friends, Atthis had advised, but she had said nothing about my return to Obernewtyn. I had always assumed that, when my quest was over, my life would be my own, and it disheartened me to think this might not be so.

  In that second, I remembered Ariel saying in my dream, "Do what you wish and you do my bidding." Was mat my mind's way of warning me that free will was an illusion, and that my life would never be mine to command?

  "It would be a little late now to decide that we would not live our lives by the whimsical wisdoms of futuretellers, don't you think?' Rushton had asked the previous day.

  And it was too late. My sworn quest was the central and defining trut
h of my life now. Just as Daffyd's long search for Gilaine shaped him, so my quest shaped me. I could no more fight it than fight the wind that rustled the trees. If there was a black road, then I was on it already; had been all the days of my life. And I would walk it to the end—no matter where it led me. Even if it meant I could not go back to Obernewtyn.

  Then it came to me. Perhaps Atthis had sent Maruman to test my resolve.

  "Rest/sleep," Maruman sent insistently. "All things seem dark under the whiteface." He curled into my chest and slept.

  But I could not sleep.

  I turned to lie on my stomach, knowing it was not physical weariness that sapped me, so much as an endless draining of my spirit that seemed to have begun with Jik's dreadful death and, perhaps even before that, with me death of my parents and of my brother, Jes. So many, many deaths, and was not Matthew dead to me now in a way?

  And, in the end, what did all of those deaths mean?

  When I finally did sleep, it was to dream I was clinging to a frail raft on a wild, storm-tossed sea, paddling with leaden arms and legs toward land masses that were always illusions.

  I woke at one point to find myself bathed in moonlight, but almost at once fell back into sleep and a new dream. I was on land, walking through country as Ludforsaken and desolate as the drear vista of the Blacklands I had once seen from the top of the high mountains with Gahltha by my side.

  The road beneath me was black, and I saw that the darkness of it had climbed into my limbs, staining them a sickly purplish-yellow—the livid shades of advanced rotting sickness that told me the road was poisoning me.

  I wondered, then, if Maruman had meant that I would not be able to return to Obernewtyn because I would be dead.

  "I will pay the price whatever it is," I whispered.

  "But what if your life is not the price," a voice whispered back. "What if the life of your friends is the price you must pay. What if Obernewtyn is the price?"

  I woke to unexpected stillness.

  It felt as if the ship were not moving at all and I wondered if at last my senses had realigned to shipboard life. There was a weight against my arm, and I opened my eyes to find Maruman sprawled alongside me, his head resting on my elbow.

  I felt a burst of joy at the sight of him, for I had thought it must be a dream that he had come with us on the ship. Then I remembered his cryptic message, and my dream. But in the daylight, they did not seem so terrible.

  It was an obscure interpretation of his words to think they had meant I would not return to Obernewtyn because it had been destroyed. How could disarming the death-machines cause the destruction of Obernewtyn? Far more likely that Maruman had been instructed to warn me that if I failed, Obernewtyn would be destroyed along with all other life.

  I eased myself out from under him and turned on my side to watch him sleep. Poor, dear, muddled Maruman filling me up with his garbled thoughts and gloomy predictions.

  I leaned forward and kissed him very softly, knowing he would be furious if he caught me.

  Kella poked her head in the door, her face excited.

  "Oh good, you're awake, Elspeth. Come and see this."

  I put a hasty finger to my lips and pointed to Maruman. The healer's eyes widened at the sight of the cat asleep in the rumpled bedclothes and she backed out of the room. I climbed out of the bed, ran my fingers through my hair and laced on my sandals.

  Kella was waiting for me outside. "How in Lud's name did he get here?" she demanded, pointing at the door.

  "He must have had a true dream because he knew we were going to come on the ship. He just got aboard and settled himself to wait. He's the mascot old Powyrs was looking for in the salon last night! Maruman's got him twisted around his paw."

  Kella's eyes shone. "I'm so glad he's all right. Oh, Elspeth, maybe it's true what Powyrs says about them being good luck. Maybe everything will be well from now on."

  I stared at her, baffled. Did she mean Maruman? "Them?" Powyrs had said cats were good luck.

  She beckoned, and I followed her to the edge of The Cutter. "Look, out there," she said, pointing.

  I looked and was startled to see that the ocean was utterly still, stretching away like a mirror on all sides of us. Now I understood why my nausea had abated; why it felt as if we were on land. Not a breath of air stirred the sagging canvas sails or rippled the glass sea. We were so completely becalmed that a reflection of the ship and my face stared back with perfect clarity from the water. There was no sign of the coast, but Powyrs had explained to us the previous night that he would have to set a course directly away from land to begin with, in order to avoid the shoal beds clustered thickly in the sea between the Land and the Sadorian plains.

  There were some stone spikes rising up a little distance away and, at first, I thought Kella was pointing to them.

  "I don't see how rocks could be good luck." I murmured. "Seems to me, Powyrs sees luck in everything."

  "Not the rocks. Beside them."

  And then I saw three sleek, satiny silver-gray fish, as big as a grown men, propelling themselves high into the air, somersaulting and plunging back into the water.

  I gaped, astounded at their strength and agility.

  "Why are they doing that?" I whispered, struck by the queer unreality of being at the side of a ship on an ocean of glass, watching strange giant fish leap out of the water as if they were moon fair acrobats. Truly the sea was another world.

  "They have been known to save the lives of humans who fall from deck," Kella murmured, riveted to the antics of the three.

  "Good luck for the drowning seaman," Powyrs said, coming up behind me.

  "What are they doing?" Kella repeated my question.

  Powyrs winked at her. "They are jumping out of the water."

  I turned back to watch the three. They must be incredibly strong to lift themselves out of the sea like that I had never tried to communicate with fish before but some instinct told me these might be capable of beastspeaking. The sea was utterly clear of tainting and I could have tried, yet I found I did not want to, for these lovely creatures were oblivious of the humans watching them, and I was content to have it so. Humans had caused so much sorrow for the beastworld, let these remain untouched.

  "They are nowt fish," Fian said, coming to stand beside me.

  I jumped, for I had not heard him approach.

  "Of course they are," Kella said.

  "They are warm blooded an' they suckle their babes on milk after bearin' them whole as humans do. An' they need air." He held up a thick book with a mottled green cover. "This book tells all about them. They are like humans."

  "Are they descended from the merpeople?" Kella asked. She had become fascinated with accounts in Beforetime books of a race of humans with gills and fishtails, who had dwelt under the sea.

  Fian frowned. "I dinna know. This books says nowt of them, other than that ship fish were sometimes thought to be merpeople. It does say that Beforetimers had boats that would go under water to cities."

  "Where the merpeople lived?"

  Fian frowned at the healer. "I told ye, it doesn't say. Perhaps this was written after they became extinct. These

  books say there were ruined cities under th' sea.... " His

  face changed abruptly and he looked across at me. "Which reminds me, Elspeth. You don't know about the city under Tor and the Reichler Clinic, do you?"

  I nodded, puzzled by his forgetfulness. "Of course I do. Garth took Rushton and me there, remember, just before I came away to Sutrium? I gather Rushton has told everyone about Hannah Seraphim and Jacob Obernewtyn by now?"

  Fian laughed. "It is all anyone has talked about since last guildmerge. You would be surprised what a difference it has made. Everyone feels as if we are carrying on a sacred trust now. The Teknoguild has been overwhelmed by requests for more information about Hannah and Jacob. Garth has had more applications than ever before from Misfits who have made up their minds to become teknoguilders." He looked down at the tome
in his hand. "I wish he could be here. You know Powyrs has even more books in a trunk in his room an' he has told me I may look through them."

  "So many books," the healer murmured.

  "And all about th' sea," Fian said. "Enough for a lifetime's study and I have only a few days." He cast a final long look at the ship fish and turned to hurry back into the salon.

  Kella shook her head. "Teknoguilders," she said in faint disgust. "How can he think of books when there is this to see.

  But a little later she grew tired of the ship fish antics and went in.

  I decided to climb up to the small upper deck, for it would give me a better view of the fish. It was piled with boxes and I sat on top of one, dangling my legs and looking out at the sea. I had never known such stillness. It seemed to accentuate the vastness of the world and, in contrast, my own insignificance, but it was not an unpleasant feeling.

  What had Powyrs said? "You can't fight the sea. It's too big.... It doesn't care.... "

  I began to have some inkling of what he meant. In me face of this endless sea I was no more than one of the ship fish, jumping in my bit of the ocean, making my little waves. There was a queer peace to be found in the thought and I tried to draw the immense calmness into my heart, to erase fear and anger and sadness.

  My concentration was shattered by a muffled explosion of laughter.

  "It tickles," I heard a female voice giggle. I recognized Freya's melodic voice and smiled, wondering who she was with.

  A moment later I saw Rushton stroll to the rail, and my amusement evaporated.

  Even as I watched, Freya stepped up beside him and shook her head, the springing golden curls catching and diffusing the morning sunlight into a pale halo. They had their backs to me, but I could see Rushton lean toward her to say something.

  They moved again, and I was torn between the desire for them to come closer so that I could hear what they were saying and the fear that, if they did, they would see me.