Lord of the Isles (5 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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His torn leg collapsed beneath him, throwing him to the ground. His face was suddenly white with shock.
Cashel dropped the quarterstaff and scooped his friend up in both arms. He began running toward the hamlet with the stumping, powerful motion of an ox headed for the creek after a day of plowing.
“Get the hermit!” Cashel bellowed, knowing no one could hear him yet at this distance. “Get the hermit for Garric!”
G
arric saw two worlds as if painted one in front of the other on walls of clear glass. Part of him wondered which image was real. The other part knew that both were.
He lay on a straw bed in the inn's common room. He could see and hear. He believed he could walk and talk if he wanted to, but the part of Garric's mind that made decisions within its glass walls didn't see any reason that he
should
do those things, or anything.
Nonnus, Tenoctris, and the members of Garric's family were nearby. Even Lora's face bore a look of concern, though for the most part she showed her worry by complaining peevishly about things that didn't matter.
Cashel sat in a corner with his head in his great hands, mumbling apologies for what had happened. Garric would have said—truthfully—that it was his own fault, if he'd chosen to speak. He'd had eyes only for the monstrously large seawolf in front of him. Nobody would have guessed five seawolves together; but nobody would have guessed four either, and the arrows he'd put through the pair in the marsh might not have anchored them so solidly that they couldn't waddle out to attack.
Ilna bustled to and from the common room, doing the necessary
work of the inn that the family was too distracted to handle. When Ilna caught Garric's eyes on her, she nodded calmly. Her face was expressionless, but there was a tight line in the muscles of her jaw.
Other members of the community passed through to commiserate, to drink a mug of ale, and mostly to be entertained by the excitement. Garric was well-liked, but this attack was the biggest event to have occurred in Barca's Hamlet during the lifetime of the oldest resident.
“Five of the monsters! And the storm like never a storm before. I tell you, Rasen, this is a portent. I'm going to inform Count Lascarg.”
“Katchin, you said it was a portent when the big sea bass jumped over the spillway before you could net him, when all it was is you're as clumsy as a hog on ice. Did you inform your friend the count about the bass too?”
Garric's right calf muscle was badly chewed; the whole leg felt like a block of ice. Nonnus had cleaned the wounds, but instead of cauterizing the deep penetrations with glowing iron he'd packed them with spiderwebs and smeared ointment on top.
“Shouldn't you stitch the tooth marks closed?” Reise's voice, frightened and diffident.
“Piercing wounds have to drain,”
Nonnus
replied quietly. “Especially when they're made by teeth, and seawolf bites are even worse than human bites for festering. With the Lady's help, these will close into nothing worse than a dimple.”
Tenoctris wore a different shift from that in which she'd been treated the day before, though this one was patched as well. Her right cheek and the backs of her hands were bright red with the sheen of fresh salve, but she appeared otherwise to have made a full recovery from her ordeal. Her skin was startlingly white where she wasn't sunburned.
While the others stood aside, Tenoctris and the hermit worked on Garric in parallel. The castaway had written on a thin board, then chanted as she burned the wood in one of
the charcoal braziers Reise kept to heat the upstairs rooms during the winter. The smoke curled about Garric in a ring which air currents didn't seem to disturb. Sometimes he read words in the haze, though the meanings trembled away like fish glimpsed in the depths.
The flames flickered blue; the smoke had a coppery odor very different from the usual resinous warmth of burning pine. Garric knew Tenoctris' actions were part of the reason he felt so oddly dissociated, but the thought didn't disturb him.
Nothing disturbed him now; not even the realization that the woman he'd pulled from the surf was a wizard.
The flames died. The smoke continued to rotate slowly around Garric, but he thought that might be an illusion like the words he read in it. Nonnus rose from where he'd been kneeling beside the inn's stone fireplace and joined Tenoctris by the bed on which Garric lay.
“Will he be all right?”
Ilna asked from the door of the kitchen. Garric smelled stew prepared with a wider range of spices than his mother used. The odor was pleasant, but hunger was as foreign to him as it was to a corpse.
“His humors are coming into balance very nicely,” Tenoctris said. “He's a strong young man. And the wounds themselves have been expertly cared for.”
She nodded to Nonnus; her short gray hair looked like a skullcap.
“He should come through with nothing more than a few scars.”
“With the Lady's help,”
the hermit agreed/cautioned.
“You were praying,”
Tenoctris said, her voice catching occasionally as though there were rust between the syllables. Garric couldn't identify her accent, even now when part of him seemed to understand the whole workings of the cosmos.
“When you worked on me as well.”
Nonnus shrugged.
“I hope the great gods exist,” he said. “I'm sure that the little spirits of place do. I pray because I hope the gods will help me do good, and because I need to hope.”
“I'll
go
now,”
Cashel said, rising with the awkward strength of a team dragging its plow through a boggy swale.
“The gear needs to be brought in from the pasture, Garric's book and bow and all. Beilin gathered the flock, or so he says.
”
He stepped over to the bed, knelt, and wrung Garric's right hand in both of his.
“We'll eat here tonight, Cashel,
” Ilna called from the kitchen doorway.
“As if I could eat!”
her brother muttered. Then he was gone.
“I see planes of force,
” Tenoctris said to the hermit, speaking as a specialist in conversation with a craftsman of a differing specialty.
“The other things folk talk about, gods and fate, good and evil—those things I've never seen.”
“Oh, I've seen evil,
” Nonnus said. His voice was soft, and his smile was as bleak as a winter sky.
“I've been evil, mistress.”
Two worlds drifted about Garric, both of them clear: his friends and family, and the whirlpool beneath a lowering fang of rock. The maelstrom's current was as slow as the stars turning. It gripped Garric and the monsters frozen with him in its toils.
On the sea's dry floor, a hooded figure cast for Garric's soul with a line of violet fire.
“
Y
ou watched your brother through the night,” Ilna said, scuffling gravel with her toes. A tiny black crab scurried to a new hiding place in the gaps between wavesmoothed stones; a castaway from a distant seaweed forest, tossed here like Tenoctris. “How did he seem to you?”
She and Sharina had gone out saying they were combing the beach for flotsam the storm threw up—a chest of silver tableware from a merchantman, or perhaps a chunk of shimmering amber scoured from a fossil tree once buried somewhere far across the Inner Sea. In truth Ilna had come to talk to her friend about the things that had been happening; and perhaps the same was true of Sharina.
“I've never seen anyone sleep so soundly,” Sharina said. Like Ilna, she kept her eyes on the beach. “It scared me, but he was breathing all right. He's got a little fever, but Nonnus says that's nothing to worry about; he'd expected much worse.”
Ilna looked at her friend. “You trust the hermit, then?” she said.
Sharina met her eyes. “Yes,” she said in a clipped tone. “I do.”
Ilna nodded and went back to toeing across the gravel. An upturned shell as delicate as a snowflake gleamed against the dark stone. Ilna turned it over, wondering that the five delicate spines hadn't snapped off.
There was a ragged hole in the shell's upper surface; something had gnawed through to devour the animal inside. Ilna grimaced and flung the shell into the sea.
“It was pretty,” Sharina said in mild protest.
“Until you look at the other side,” Ilna said. She swallowed a sigh. “Then it's like the rest of life.”
They walked on. “The woman Garric rescued is a wizard,” Sharina said in the direction of her feet. “She spoke a spell over Garric. Right in the open.”
“I saw that,” Ilna said. She'd felt a creeping coldness in her heart when she looked from the kitchen and saw Tenoctris chanting as smoke rose from the brazier. She'd wanted to say something, but Garric's family was watching as if it were all as natural as daybreak, and the hermit went about his business undeterred. Some of the visitors spoke in shocked whispers, but none of them tried to interfere.
Nor had Ilna.
“I thought wizards did things in the dark,” Sharina said in a miserable voice. “I thought they sacrificed babies and called terrible things out of the Underworld. She just burned a piece of kindling and spoke some words. I didn't know what I should do, so I didn't do anything. It seemed so harmless … . But she really is a wizard.”
“Yes,” Ilna agreed. The same thoughts had gone through her mind. The core of her being had decided that she wouldn't interfere with anyone who was obviously trying to help Garric, even if they had been practicing blood magic at midnight. “I knew she was … something. As soon as I touched the robe she came in. The cloth was different from anything in this world.”
Sharina nodded absently, accepting the comment as meaning there was something odd about the fabric rather than about where the fabric came from. She didn't question the statement any more than she'd have doubted something Cashel said about the behavior of sheep.
“Nonnus doesn't mind her,” Sharina said after a moment. “I asked him later. He said that he doesn't decide what's right for other people, but anyway Tenoctris wouldn't go any places he wouldn't go himself. I think I understand what he means.”
She didn't amplify the last comment, any more than Ilna would have tried to explain why the robe felt unusual.
“I'm afraid about the things that are happening,” Ilna said softly. She hadn't been sure she was going to speak. The noon sun flooded the beach and the dancing waves, but she pressed her arms close to her sides because her body felt frozen. “I feel it squeezing me and I don't know what to do.”
Sharina glanced at her in the sort of blank-faced silence with which one greets a friend's embarrassing revelation.
Something wriggled on the eastern horizon. Ilna straightened up. “That's a ship,” she said. “It's too big for a fishing boat.”
Sharina shaded her eyes from above and below with her hands held parallel, forming a slit that cut the glare from the
water as well as direct sunlight. “We have to get back,” she said in a tight voice. “Let's run.”
The girls broke into a trot, tunics fluttering about their legs. They'd strolled half a mile north of the hamlet; it seemed much farther, now that they wanted to return.
“It must be a big merchantman that was caught in the storm,” Ilna said as her toes kicked gravel behind her. “It wouldn't be putting in to Barca's Hamlet unless it had been damaged.”
“It's not a merchant ship,” Sharina said. She glanced over, coldly measuring her friend's stride and deciding whether to go on ahead.
Ilna lengthened her pace, knowing that Sharina could outrun anyone else in the hamlet over a distance this long. “It's too big for a fishing boat!” she gasped.
“It has hundreds of oars, not just a few sweeps like a merchantman,” Sharina said. “A merchant couldn't afford to pay so many rowers and still make a profit on his goods. This is a warship like the ones in the epics!”
A
metallic screech awakened Garric on what he first thought was bright morning. A moment later he realized that he was in the common room, not his own garret, and the sunlight flooding in the south-facing windows meant it was midday and past.
He tried to rise and found his senses spinning to the edge of gray limbo before his head even left the horsehair pillow. He couldn't even be sure of
which
day this was the middle of.
Garric tried to say, “What day is this?” His voice croaked, “Aagh!”
The hermit reached an arm like an oak root beneath Garric's shoulders and lifted him to a half-sitting position. “Here,” he said, holding a herdsman's wooden bottle to Garric's lips with the other hand. “Wet your mouth with this. It's ale.”
He turned and called toward the kitchen, “Bring a bowl of the broth and a small spoon. Now!”
Lora popped from the kitchen like a squirrel from its nest. “What?” she said. “Nobody gives orders to me in my own house! Certainly not some filthy outcast who lives in a cave!”
“I'll get it,” murmured Reise, who'd just entered by the courtyard door. The squealing hinges were probably what had awakened Garric. Lora moved only enough to let him pass in the doorway; husband and wife didn't exchange glances even when they were in brushing contact.
Because the ale was in a bottle, Garric could drink without spilling as he would have done from a mug. He sluiced the first sip through the phlegm which coated his cheeks and tongue, then spat it onto the floor before swallowing down the rest of the ale.
The rushes covering the room's puncheon floor needed replacement anyway. He'd intended to cut more fresh in the marshes but decided at the last moment to spend the morning reading and chatting with his friend Cashel.
“I was the private maid to the Countess Tera herself,” Lora said to an audience which didn't really include anyone in the room. “The men said I was more beautiful than any of the fine ladies!”
Garric didn't doubt that was true. His mother was a small woman with delicate features. Even today her skin was smooth and had the lustrous creamy sheen of old ivory.
“I beg your pardon,” the hermit said. He sounded as though he meant the words, though he didn't turn his attention from Garric. “I misspoke.”
“There's something coming from the sea,” Tenoctris said. She'd stood so quietly by the sea-facing window that Garric hadn't noticed her until she spoke. He looked around, but
there was no one further in the common room.
“What's coming?” Lora said, her voice rising slightly and growing harder with each syllable. “Are more of those beasts coming, is that what you mean?”
Tenoctris lifted the latch, a wooden bar made sturdy to withstand eastern gales like the one that had recently punished the hamlet, and opened the door. The salt breeze stirred smoke and hinted memories of the wood she'd burned during her incantations. She walked seaward, out of Garric's line of vision from the bed.
Reise reappeared with a steaming wooden bowl and a horn spoon that ordinarily measured spices into a stew. Nonnus must have doubted whether Garric could handle mouthfuls of normal size.
“I think I'm all right, Mother,” Garric said. He did feel remarkably healthy now that his system had settled from the first shock of waking. Remarkable, because he'd gotten a good look at his leg as he levered the reptile's slavering jaws away from it with the bowtip. ‘He'd seen through the hole made by paired upper and lower fangs. It occurred to Garric that whatever Tenoctris meant about “balancing the humors” was surely part of the reason he could move.
Garric used the hermit's arm as a brace while he levered himself into a kneeling position with his hands. His bandaged right leg felt tight and ached as though it were cooking in a slow oven, but the knee bent normally and pain didn't stab up the thigh muscles.
“Garric, what are you doing?” his mother said. “You shouldn't be getting up yet, your leg's like raw bacon!” She turned to her husband and said, “Reise! Make your son lie down!”
“I'm all
right,
” Garric said. He bent forward, putting his weight over his feet so that he could stand up—or try to. His head spun momentarily, but his vision didn't blur and his breathing was normal after it caught the first time.
“You may be tough, boy,” Nonnus said quietly, “but the
seawolves were tougher yet and they're dead now. Don't overdo.”
Garric stood, letting his left leg do all the work of raising his body. The hermit's arm kept minuscule contact with his shoulders, not helping him rise but assuring him that he wouldn't be permitted to fall down.
“Should he be doing that?” Reise asked Nonnus. Perhaps by instinct he stepped between his wife and Garric.
Garric let the normal load shift onto his right foot. He still felt no pain, though pressure throbbed from the calf through his lower body in quick pulses like a shutter rattling in a gust of wind.
“Of course he shouldn't be doing that!” Lora said. “He's going to lose his leg, that's what he's going to do, and you're going to let it happen!”
“If he can move,” Nonnus said, ignoring Lora completely, “then that would be good for him and the wound both. More people have rotted lying in a bed than the spear killed the first time. But I didn't expect to see anyone
here
walk with injuries like that.”
“There's men on Haft, hermit,” Reise snapped. “And on Ornifal too, if it comes to that.”
Nonnus nodded. “Your pardon,” he said. The heavy knife hanging in its sheath on his belt wobbled as his stance changed slightly. “Pride is a worse sin than anger, I'm afraid, because it slips in unnoticed so easily.”
“If there's something coming,” Garric said, “I want to see what it is.”
He raised his right foot over the lip of the truckle bed and stepped down. The injured limb held his weight. He took another step; Nonnus followed at his side.
“I'll help him,” Reise said curtly. He set the soup and spoon on the edge of the bar and walked to his son's side. Lora turned and stamped upstairs, her back stiff.
Garric continued to move toward the door, putting one foot after the other. He was frightened but he felt he had to learn.
He had to learn whether the thing the wizard sensed coming from the sea was the hooded figure of his nightmare.

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