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Authors: David Drake

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BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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“I'm a vegetarian,” the old man said. “I—and I don't mean to preach, good sir, please don't take what I'm saying
as disapproval of whatever philosophy you may hold. But for me it wouldn't be right to preserve my life by taking the life of another creature.”
He smiled in embarrassment. “It was part of the purification, you see. I live on the sea's bounty: the currents carry weed of many varieties onto the beach here, as regularly as the sun rises. I like to think that Nature herself aids those who live in harmony with her.”
“Ah,” Cashel said in soft-voiced amazement. He looked around the hut again, wondering how the old man had managed to move anything as heavy as these petrified bones. “I couldn't … I mean, I don't eat off gold plates myself. But this …”
The hermit smiled shyly. “I don't miss it,” he said. “The food; the, well, ‘comforts' people would call them. I have my studies.”
He nodded toward the books Cashel squatted beside. “I've achieved many of the purposes for which I came here,” he went on. “I'll admit, though, that I've been lonely at times. Very lonely, I'm afraid.”
Cashel heard the desperation in the poor man's voice. “How long have you been here, sir?” he asked.
They hadn't exchanged names. Cashel wasn't sure how he'd respond if the old man asked his name; perhaps understanding that, he
hadn't
asked. There was power in being able to call something, someone, by the right name.
Cashel wished Mellie was with him. He missed her, missed her more even than he'd have expected to; but especially he missed her advice on the situation. Mellie would understand the things that Cashel felt pressing down on him.
“A long time,” the hermit said. His soft voice trembled; he forced a smile. “Longer than I can say for sure. At first I wasn't interested in time, and after a while … I'm afraid I can't even guess.”
Cashel had heard a widow weeping over the grave of her only child. The old man's words were even sadder, even lonelier.
“You know …” Cashel said. Did he sound suspicious? “My friend that I'm looking for, most people don't see her.”
The hermit smiled at the implied question. “You're puzzled that I do?” he said. “Really, good sir, it's scarcely more amazing that you do see her than it would be if I didn't. I've given a long life over to the study of such matters, while you …?”
He let his voice trail off delicately.
Cashel managed to chuckle. “I've studied sheep,” he admitted. “And woodcutting and a few other things. But no, I can't even read—though I've a friend who does.”
He blushed, aware as he spoke the words that bragging to this man that Garric could read was about as silly a statement as had ever come out of his mouth. “I don't know how it is that I see Mellie,” he added. “I just did.”
He looked directly at the old man. “I know a lady who's a wizard,” he said. “I guess you're one too, sir?”
The old man smiled. “More of a philospher, I would say,” he replied. “But there's a point where all knowledge joins, I admit.”
Cashel felt the pressure growing. The thick stone walls seemed strangely insubstantial but the world beyond the doorway—the sand, the rustling tamarisks—squeezed in on him. The air itself thickened, changing the quality of the light.
“I've got to go find Mellie,” he said hoarsely. He felt as if he were buried in wet sand. He could move but it weighed him down.
“Have some tea, please, and I'm sure you'll see your friend again,” the hermit said as he leaned toward Cashel with the bowl. The fluid was probably cooked from some form of seaweed; certainly it wasn't tea, but it had a spicy, pleasant odor.
“Please, good sir,” the hermit said. “I've been alone for so long. Drink with me.”
The old man lifted the bowl to his lips, sipped the dark liquid, and swallowed. His eyes were on Cashel. Cashel started to get up, struggling against a weight as great as the world itself.
“Please …” the old man pleaded.
Blue light. A tiny figure of blue light, a bright
shadow
thrown on the inside of the upturned iron pot.
Mellie!
Cashel snatched the pot away and flung it clanging against the stone ribs of the roof. Mellie leaped onto his hand and danced up his bare arm, caroling her joy.
The pottery bowl lay overturned on the ground; the hermit cringed back. Cashel stood, pressing upward against the roof and sidewall.
“
Please
—”
Cashel roared, lifting his arms. A blue glare enveloped him. The stones were light as thistle down, light as spiderweb. He thrust his hands to either side, ripping apart the walls of the world that held him. Sunlight and wind and the waxy green leaves of tamarisks locked into focus with Cashel's shouting triumph.
Words drifting in limbo as the blue light faded into the black peace of unconsciousness: …
so very lonely …
 
The ground on which he lay was in darkness, but only a few stars shone in the purple sky. Cashel heard the Highlanders' happy chatter as they came down the gully toward him. He raised his head.
“Shall I ask them to help you?” Mellie offered. “You must be very tired, Cashel. Even you.”
Three Highlanders came around a twist in the passage, moving jauntily despite the fact that each of the little men carried across his shoulders a goat of at least half his own body weight.
They halted in surprise when they saw Cashel lying on the ground. The rate of their chattering increased like that of chicks in the nest when the mother bird appears.
“No, I can …” Cashel said.as he rolled to plant his hands flat on the ground. Existence rippled like cloth in the wind. He'd never felt so weak before in his life. What had happened to him?
“Cashel, don't—” the sprite said.
“I
can,”
Cashel grunted. Everything closed down to the feel of his palms against the gritty soil. He didn't want to live if he couldn't get up. He wouldn't lie here like a foundered horse.
“I can!” and he pushed his torso up, rising to his knees, lurching back and upright all as part of the same motion. He swayed, towering before the astounded Highlanders.
The world was firm again and Cashel's feet were set firmly on it. He began to laugh in relief. The Highlanders twittered about him like a flock of birds; Mellie trilled merrily, caressing his ear.
“Oh!” she said. “You're so strong, Cashel. The pot was iron!”
There was no sign of the hut. Cashel sobered. He turned, thinking it must be behind him.
The hut wasn't there. Bending over, he could see his own faint footprints despite the twilight, but the gigantic bones and the fire-blackened ground that
couldn't
have vanished—
Had vanished.
“Was I dreaming?” Cashel said, as much to himself as to the sprite on his shoulder. “There was an old man, a philosopher …”
The Highlanders closed around him, touching him with friendly hands and tugging him gently toward the ship. The long-haired goats they carried were still warm.
Cashel spread his arms. The muscles ached but they moved normally. He walked along with the little men, glad of their company and Mellie's.
“I dreamed I tore his hut apart,” Cashel murmured. Fires gleamed on the beach; the western horizon was a pall of red flame that threw the
Golden Dragon
into ungainly silhouette. “I shouldn't have done that.”
“If you'd eaten or drunk anything, Cashel,” Mellie said, “we could never have left.”
The Highlanders trotted toward a group of their fellows who'd already begun grilling their prey with the hides still
on. Hair singed with a stench the cooks didn't seem to notice. Frasa and Jen rose in greeting at a fire placed upwind of the Highlanders.
“He was just a lonely old man,” Cashel said.
He glanced at Mellie. The sprite stared back at him in wonder and puzzlement.
“
W
e'll pay our port duties in Erdin!” bellowed Aran, the captain of the two-masted trading vessel. His voice was louder than Garric would have thought a man's could be without aid of a megaphone. “Go play navy with somebody who's got the time to waste!”
“There's a wizard aboard her,” Tenoctris said to Garric and Liane, who stood with her along the merchantman's lee rail. She grinned minutely and added, “He probably calls himself a wizard, at least.”
The officer in the bow of the single-banked warship
did
use a megaphone. “Lay to,” he thundered, “or we'll sink you and you can try your wit on the fishes!”
“It's a royal vessel from Ornifal,” Liane said quietly. Her hands rested lightly on the railing, the fingers spread. “Do you see the eagle on the pennon? If they were from Sandrakkan they'd have a horse's head there instead.”
“Fah!” Aran snarled. “The first time this year the wind's fair to take us up the River Erd without tacking and some nobleman's by-blow decides to hold us up. Till the tide turns, I shouldn't wonder.”
He glared at his waiting crewmen and added, “Yes, drop the sails! The fool with the kettle on his head insists!”
Garric eyed the warship paralleling the merchantman's course fifty yards away. Its twenty-five oars per side moved
with the rhythm of a millipede's legs. The stroke looked slow to Garric because he was used to the smaller, lighter equipment of a fishing dory, but he didn't doubt that it could drive the ship's bronze beak through the merchantman's hull with no difficulty.
“What's a royal ship doing here?” Garric asked. “Isn't the Earl of Sandrakkan an enemy of the king?”
“It's not open war,” Liane said, “but the Earl of Sandrakkan is about the worst enemy the king has. Except perhaps for the queen.”
Garric looked sharply at her to see if she was joking. There was nothing but polite interest on the surface of the girl's face, though the muscles below were hard as marble.
The mainspar clattered down. Sailors grabbed handfuls of the sail, furling it and cursing the breeze. It was fair for their destination, Erdin, and strong enough that it had bellied the canvas against the forestay. Sandrakkan sailors believed that a bulging sail held the wind like water in a pail, though the Haft fishermen Garric grew up with swore by board-flat canvas.
“Since there's a wizard aboard,” Tenoctris said with her usual detachment, “I think we can assume they're looking for us. For your father at least, Liane.”
Two sailors were drawing in the foresail and its spar. They couldn't let gravity do the work because the mast slanted like a bowsprit so that the yard was attached well forward of the hull. That was a necessary but awkward adaptation to the fact the mainsail bellied so far, though Garric admitted that the foresail's leverage meant the tubby merchantman was remarkably quick to change tacks.
“The
king
is looking for us?” Liane said.
“If this is a royal ship as you say,” Tenoctris said, “then yes, I think he is.”
Liane looked as though she were sucking something sour. “I wonder if my father was working for the queen,” she said.
Tenoctris shrugged. “There're more parties than two involved,” she said. “Though I'm afraid if you followed most
of them back you'd find the same thing at the end of all the chains.”
“The Hooded One?” Garric said, his eyes on the nearing warship. Only a few oarsmen in the bow and stern were rowing.
“No,” Tenoctris said, “though he'd like to pretend otherwise. I mean Malkar.”
The oarsmen sat on separate benches divided by a central runway so narrow that sailors would have to turn sideways to pass one another along it. There was a mast step at midkeel, but the vessel didn't carry a mast and spar at present; probably they'd been landed on shore so as not to be in the way while the vessel patrolled under oar power. A small sail was furled against the jib boom projecting above the ram.
A single helmsman in the narrow stern handled the paired steering oars. Two belt-wearing officers, one in the bow and the other seated near the helmsman with a drum between his legs, were the only deck crew. Presumably rowers got up from their benches when it was necessary to adjust the sail.
The merchantman lost way, wallowing in the swell. Because the hull was short and the stern higher than the bow, the vessel began to rotate slowly counterclockwise. That complicated the task of coming alongside for the warship's captain.
“Toss us a line,” he shouted. When Captain Aran ignored him he added, “Toss me a line or the Sister take me if I don't pull your rails off with a grappling iron!”
“Playing navy!” Aran sneered, but he stepped to the rail beside Garric and lifted the coil of one-inch docking hawser there. He threw it with a sidearm motion that spun the coil open as it flew through the air. The warship's captain caught the last of the coil with equal skill and took a turn around a jibsail bitt, binding the vessels as the oarsmen eased them the last of the way together.
The sheep in the merchantman's hold blatted. They'd been generally docile during the voyage, but the vessel's present nervous pitching would make a veteran sailor queasy. Garric
thought of going below, but there wasn't much he could do to help their discomfort. Even with the hatch open the hold was dimly lit and the sheep were packed more tightly together than the warship's oarsmen. There wasn't any good reason to subject himself to that.
The warship carried three men in addition to the rowers. The military officer who'd hailed the merchantman wore a brass helmet and brass cuirass which mimicked a demigod's muscles. The fellow—more likely his servant—must polish the metal every morning to keep it so bright in the salt air.
The second soldier wore an iron helmet and a coat of mail. He looked glum, as he had every right to do. The armor must be terribly uncomfortable in the sunlight. Besides, the man probably realized as Garric did that the weight of the iron would carry him straight to the bottom of the sea if he managed to fall in.
Both men carried swords, and the line soldier had a spear besides. The weapons were merely for show: Aran's eight-man crew could easily have tossed both soldiers over the side and gone about their business if that had been the only constraint. It was the ram that provided the warship with its real authority.
The vessels' prows touched, the merchantman's starboard to the warship's port side. Even at the bow the merchantman was three feet higher than the other. The officer grimaced with distaste, but he and his subordinate clambered up without having to ask help from sailors who weren't going to volunteer it. They must have gotten plenty of experience in the recent past.
Garric's eyes were on the third member of the boarding party, a scrawny old man in deliberately outlandish costume. Instead of a tunic, he wore pinned at the throat a cape made from the skins of dozens of different wild birds and animals. He carried a staff carven intricately from wood so dark that it was almost black.
As soon as the fellow scrambled over the merchantman's rail he began to hop on one foot while snarling and gesturing
at the sky. His staff had a knob on one end and a point on the other.
“Playacting,” Tenoctris muttered with disdain. “The times being what they are, he has more power than he ever dreamed was possible. Unfortunately he's still a hedge wizard with no more understanding than he had when he was hunting for lost brooches and mixing love charms in some crossroads village.”
Garric had brought out his weapons when the warship hailed them, but he hadn't strung the bow and the sword was still within the oilcloth wrapper where he'd packed it for the sea voyage. He was tense. He knew that he could hand the problems over to King Carus simply by grasping the sword hilt, but that was the wrong response here. Besides, Garric or-Reise would never be completely out of his depth in a place where sheep bleated nearby.
“Nasdir,” the officer snapped to the wizard. “Quit jumping around and get to work.”
The wizard raised his chin in an attempt to look imperious. His drooping mustache was white, though the sparse hair on his scalp was still black. “You don't understand my art,” he said.
“I understand that the quicker we find this Benlo, the quicker we can leave a spit of rock that's baking when it's not wet,” the officer said. “Get to work!”
“
And
leave off wondering whether what comes over the horizon next'll be a storm or couple hundred Sandrakkan troops to cut our throats,” the line soldier said. He glared at Nasdir as if deciding where he'd stick his spear if the wizard gave him the slightest excuse. The warship's base off the shore of the duke's domains might not be quite as bad as the soldiers implied, but it was obviously bad enough that tempers had begun to fray during the time this search operation had gone on.
“You're not the duke's customs inspectors?” Captain Aran said. He shaved his black hair short, but he had a great bush
of a beard that bristled as he considered the situation. “Just who are you then, you Sister-loving rats?”
“We're the representatives of your king,” the officer said coldly. “We're looking for a man, Benlo bor-Benliman; and I'll tell you right now that if he's aboard your vessel you'll save yourself trouble and maybe worse to hand him over at once.”
Liane stood a little straighter; her lips curled in a dismissive sneer. Garric couldn't imagine that anyone looking at the girl wouldn't realize that she was of noble birth. Mostly people didn't look, though. They saw and heard what they expected, and nobody expected a young noblewoman to be traveling from Carcosa to Erdin on a freighter full of sheep.
Aran grunted. “You're seeing everybody aboard,” he said. “None of us is named Benlo as best I know, but if you see him you go ahead and take him off. And take yourselves off, so an honest man can get on with his business!”
“Let's see your palms,” the officer said, tapping the back of Aran's right hand with his paired index and middle finger.
“And you two as well,” he added, gesturing toward the pair of middle-aged sailors who'd taken in the foresail. Neither they nor their captain looked anything like Benlo, but they were close to the right age. The others were too young, except for the helmsman with brown skin, spiky hair, and no tongue.
The officer glanced at the three men's palms. Ropes and oarlooms give a sailor calluses like those of no other profession; a nobleman like Benlo couldn't possibly hope to pass for a seaman if his hands were examined.
“Now,” Aran said, “do you want me to show you my bum too, or can I maybe raise sail with a prayer of making the tide?”
“Not yet,” the officer snapped. He looked around to find the wizard; Nasdir squatted on the other side of the mainmast with several sailors staring intently at him. He'd drawn a six-pointed star on the deck planks with the tip of his hardwood staff.
The warship's captain slacked the line so that the vessels no longer rubbed in the swell. Four oarsmen kept up a slow stroke to hold the ships' relative positions.
The officer looked at Garric with narrowing eyes. “And what have you got there, boyo?” he demanded, pointing to the oilskin bundle. “Looks like a sword to me.”
“It's a sword,” Garric said, deliberately thickening his voice into the accent of the most rural of his neighbors in the borough. “And a bow, too, if you're as blind as you're daft and you can't see for yourself. And down below there's fifty sheep, the cargo I'm taking to Sandrakkan for Master Hakar or-Mulin.”
He turned and spit over the side. With the wind favoring it, the gobbet splashed not far from the warship's oarblades. Sullen disrespect was the natural reaction of a peasant being troubled by authority, and it also served to hide Garric's fear.
“I don't guess any of the sheep're named Benlo,” he continued, “but you'd better ask them.”
Captain Aran guffawed and pounded Garric on the back. “Yeah, you do that, soldier boy!” he said. “Maybe you can find some recruits down in the hold, too. Baaaa! Baaaa!”
The officer flushed but he wasn't fool enough to start trouble he was sure to lose personally, even if the merchantman's crew came out of it badly as well. The line soldier grinned, though his face stiffened when his superior glanced around.
The wizard stood; he began a shuffling dance around his hexagram. Garric stepped back so that he had a better view of the proceedings. Everyone else aboard was also watching Nasdir.
“
Salbathbal authgerotabal basuthateo!
” Nasdir shouted. At every word he rapped the staff's black tip against the deck. Garric noticed that the wizard hadn't written the words around the hexagram, only marked a dimple between each pair of points. He wondered if Nasdir could read the Old Script. Was he literate at all?
“Aleo sambethor amuekarptir!
” cried Nasdir, his motley cape flapping as he pranced. He was naked beneath it.
BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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