Master of the Cauldron (21 page)

“Tawnser, you bloody fool!” Earl Wildulf snarled. He wasn't an intellectual giant, but he'd seen enough of war to know what would happen if real fighting started in a courtyard where only Garric and his guards had been allowed to carry weapons. “Get out of here and sober up. No, by the Shepherd—go back to your estates and don't leave them until I give you permission! Do you hear?”

Tawnser didn't move for a moment; his face could've been cast in glowing iron. He turned abruptly and strode toward one of the arches on the east side, shoving aside the people in his way with as little thought as a man walking through a field of waving oats.

The Blood Eagles crossed their spears to block that exit. “Let him go!” Garric called. The spears went vertical again. Tawnser stalked through, apparently oblivious of the guards and everyone else present. He disappeared into the hallway beyond.

Garric took a deep breath and let go of Attaper. Liane picked up the stylus she'd dropped when she drew her small, razor-sharp dagger. The knife was back in its ivory sheath now, wrapped invisibly in the lustrous silken folds of her sash.

Garric turned and gave Wildulf a trembling smile. “Well, milord,” he said. “Now that we've taken care of that business, perhaps you'd be good enough to introduce me to your courtiers?”

It's good to have advisors who make sure the room you're going sleep in tonight is defensible,
Garric thought; and, thinking that, broke into a broad,
real
smile.

 

The
Star of Valles
sailed through the void. Constellations blazed down on Sharina and up at her. That depended on whether she leaned back and
looked at what should be the sky or craned her neck over the side to peer toward what'd been the depths of the sea.

She'd wrapped a shawl over her head. The air wasn't cold, but she wasn't used to feeling it on her bare scalp. She'd get used to it, she supposed, and of course her hair would grow back…but not as long as it had been. Not for a decade and more.

The rowers had shipped their oars and were sitting with the vessel's deck crew on the outriggers and narrow catwalks. In a reversal of the order of things before the
Star of Valles
left the waking world, the soldiers were mostly huddled in the hollow of the ship with their eyes cast down so that they could pretend they didn't know what was happening.

Sharina sat at the front of the starboard outrigger, overlooking Tenoctris in the ear timber and the nymph who perched on the frame of the box, talking to the old wizard. There wasn't room for three in such tight quarters, and in all truth Sharina felt nearly as queasy about the situation as the soldiers did.

She supposed that Tenoctris was able to see the nymph now, since they'd entered the void. She smiled to herself: it seemed a void to her human senses, but she didn't suppose it really was one. Certainly things lived in it, and swam….

Master Rincale, the sailing master, chatted with sailors as he came forward. He nodded when he caught Sharina's eye; she smiled in response and looked forward again.

The worm about whose bluntly rounded head the trireme's anchor cable was tied had a broad, flat tail fin. Spines, scores of them, stuck out from its body. While the nymphs were harnessing the creature, Sharina had seen that conical teeth ringed its circular mouth. The worm undulated as it drew the
Star of Valles,
its tail fin driving up and down just beyond the vessel's bronze ram.

Sharina grimaced and turned away. Master Rincale leaned against the railing at her side. “A strange business, isn't it, your ladyship?” he said. “Or maybe it isn't for you. I suppose you've gotten used to this sort of thing in your, well, travels, so to speak.”

“I wouldn't say I was used to it, Master Rincale,” Sharina said, keeping her tone neutral. What did people think of her?
She
wasn't a wizard, she was the daughter of the innkeeper in Barca's Hamlet! Things had happened to her, that was all.

Sharina's eyes turned unbidden toward the huge worm.
Things are still
happening to me
. She giggled. She supposed she must be on the edge of hysteria, but she preferred this reaction to the tinge of nausea the sight'd induced earlier.

Subsiding to a proper smile, Sharina said, “Your men are taking things well, I notice. I'm…well, frankly, Master Rincale, I had the impression sailors were likely to be superstitious. I thought that something like this would, well, disturb them.”

Rincale laughed. “Superstitious, lady?” he repeated. “Oh, my, yes! The sea's bigger than any man, bigger than
all
men. Reason's all very well for landsmen, I suppose, but a sailor knows that reason won't get him anywhere but the bottom of the sea in a freak storm or the wind dragging his anchors toward a reef. There's not a man in the crew but has an amulet or a lucky garment or maybe”—the sailing master slid up the puffed sleeve of the tunic he wore to mark him as an officer—“a prayer tattooed on his wrist where the Gods can read it when he's too busy to pray properly himself. But why should we be afraid of the Ladies and their pets, princess? They came to help you, didn't they?”

“Yes, it seems so,” Sharina said, though she wasn't sure that the nymphs would've appeared if she'd been a brunette like most women in Barca's Hamlet. The one shaving her said the blond hair would string the lyres they played to sailors on far rocky shores….

“Mind,” Rincale added, “we'll be telling our grandchildren about this, that you can bet your inheritance on. Anybody who's been to sea for a while has seen things, but
this,
well, my own wife'll think I'm lying and wonder why I didn't do a better job.”

The nymph slipped from the ear timber with the fluidity of a drop of quicksilver. She dived deep under the ship, then curved upward to join the pair of her sisters who were guiding the great worm. Tenoctris watched her go before turning her face upward toward Sharina.

“Want to come on deck, milady?” Rincale offered cheerfully. “Blaskis and Ordos, get your asses outa the way so Lady Tenoctris has some room!”

Without waiting for an answer, the sailing master hopped onto the frame that the nymph had just vacated. Balancing on the balls of his feet alone, he gripped Tenoctris under the arms and lifted her like a woodpecker snatching a grub from its hole. Rincale was an older man, in his mid-fifties at least, but he'd obviously kept himself fit.

“Thank you,” said Tenoctris, as Sharina helped set her on the deck. She gave Sharina a wry grin that showed how startled she'd been to come
up in just that fashion. “I'd been wondering how I was going to get back here.”

She tucked into her satchel the wax tablet on which she'd been taking notes during her discussion with the nymph, then resumed, “I'd been hoping to talk to you, Master Rincale. Do you know anything about the people, the People, who invaded Ornifal from the sea forty-nine years ago? You wouldn't have been present yourself, I suppose, but perhaps you've talked to some who were?”

“Oh, I was sailing with my da then, milady,” Rincale said, smiling fondly with the memory. “Indeed I was. Had his own ship, he did, though that went to Foalz, my brother by his first wife.”

Tenoctris nodded, probably believing as Sharina did, that the story would come out faster without interruptions intended to speed it along. “Yes, the People,” Rincale said. “A right lot of liars they were, though”—he grinned broadly at Sharina—“I'm with my wife on this one. I can't imagine why they didn't tell a better one. You see—”

Rincale made a circular motion with his hand, gesturing to seaward. Well, it would've been seaward under normal conditions; at the moment it indicated a wasteland of stars.

“—the waters east of Ornifal, the seas, I mean?”

He paused to make sure these fine ladies understood so complicated a concept as “seas.” Sharina, trying to keep the exasperation out of her voice, said, “Yes, we understand.”

“Well, the People said,” the sailing master explained, “the ones who weren't killed, I mean, that they live on a floating island that sometimes swings close to Ornifal and sometimes swings away. Now, that's nonsense. There's no island in the channel between Bight and Kepulacecil, there isn't and there wasn't then. East of the channel there's reefs that I wouldn't want to thread a fishing dory through, let alone an island. Wherever they come from, it wasn't from an island!”

“Perhaps,” said Tenoctris carefully, “they didn't mean the island was floating in the sea.”

“What?” Rincale said with a frown. “What else is there to float in, milady?”

Tenoctris pursed her lips, considering what to say. Sharina gestured toward the great worm swimming ahead of them.

“Oh…,” she said with a lopsided grin. “I think we could all imagine other places if we put our minds to it, Master Rincale.”

“Ah,” said the sailing master. “Ah. I hadn't thought of that.”

The worm, undulating like the sea in a gentle breeze, swam onward through the stars.

 

“The Heroes, the men our friends are trying to emulate…,” Mab said, as she and Cashel sat at a table on the lowest of many terraces stepped up from the surface of a crystalline lake. Her hair was now a rich chestnut color, and she was nearly as tall as Cashel. “Were the great warriors who led the citizens of Ronn when the Made Men threatened the city in past ages. The last of them, Valeri, went down to the cavern where the Heroes sleep a hundred and fifty years ago.”

The walls of Ronn slanted back on all sides like steeply sloped mountains, shading the lake's surface even though the sky above was still bright. Cashel saw brightly colored fish, the largest of them as long as he was tall, swimming lazily through the pure water. Occasionally one rose to gulp air, sending ripples across the shimmering surface.

“Valeri was a general?” Cashel said. Generals like Lord Waldron decided where to move troops and how to line them up—and how to feed them, besides, all sorts of things that Cashel couldn't even imagine doing. But Garric did them too. It was wonderful the things Garric could do even though he'd been raised in Barca's Hamlet the same as Cashel.

“Valeri was a Hero,” Mab said, correcting him gently. “So far as generalship went, that was the queen's affair. There was no subtlety in the king and the minions of his creation, only numbers and savagery. Valeri
led.
The citizens of Ronn had weapons and the courage to fight; but without a leader, they would have huddled within the walls of the city, more fearful of making a mistake in their ignorance of war than they were of dying.”

The water of the lake below had darkened to the point that the fish were no longer colors, merely darknesses beneath the shimmer of the reflected sky. Lights appeared in the lake or…

Could they be
under
the lake? Balls of blue and red and yellow moved slowly from the edges inward in curving lines. Each was an even distance behind the one that preceded it. Occasionally a great fish swam above a light and hid it for a moment the way a trailing cloud might block the sun.

“Young people with lanterns dance beneath the lake in the evenings,” Mab said, pausing in her discussion of great issues to explain the thing that
had Cashel's attention. “There's quite a lot of competition to get on the teams. The floor of the lake is diamond; the dancers are below it.”

“Ah,” said Cashel, leaning forward to take in the patterns that the lights wove. He couldn't see the dancers themselves, but the colored lanterns had a stately grace.

As he watched he realized that the movements of the fish weren't random either. Somebody who fights with a quarterstaff learns to see the rhythms of things that at first glance just seem to be happening. You learn that if you're going to win, anyhow. “Ah!”

He turned to Mab and smiled, feeling apologetic for not paying attention to what she'd been telling him. He'd listened, but he couldn't pretend he'd cared much about it.

“Mistress,” he said, “it doesn't seem from what you tell me that Ronn has much needed heroes or armies either one in the past long while. Now that you do again, maybe they'll come along. Don't you think?”

“Ronn has had perfect peace for a hundred and fifty years,” Mab said. “Ever since Valeri led her citizens to drive the Made Men back into the Great Ravine in the northern mountains. The people of Ronn didn't see the need of soldiers, and it seems the queen must not have seen a need either. People believe what they want to believe; even people who've proved themselves in the past to be wise and very powerful. You can be born brave or at least learn to act brave quickly enough; but nobody's born skillful with weapons. Those arts take longer to learn than the Sons have, or than Ronn has before she needs a leader.”

Her smile took on a tinge of sadness; Cashel knew what she meant. Herron and his friends were puppies. Nice puppies, puppies that might grow up to be really good dogs. Trained right they'd be the kind of officials Garric wanted around him, bright active fellows with the good of the kingdom at heart.

They wouldn't be soldiers, though, any of them except maybe Stasslin. And Cashel didn't much like Stasslin as a person.

“The Sons would be willing to lead the people of Ronn,” Mab said. “In their hearts, they really believe that's what they're going to do when the rest of the citizens realize their danger. And if that happened, they'd be killed at once, and everyone who followed them would be killed. They don't have the skills.”

Cashel nodded. The Sons were young in a fashion that children brought up in the borough were never young. By the time you've survived
three winters in a peasant village, you know things that the youth of Ronn had never been forced to learn.

“Ma'am…?” Cashel said, his eyes on the dancers and the fish. The terraces were well filled with spectators, some foreign but mostly citizens of Ronn. From the talk he heard at nearby tables, the locals judged tiny variations from previous dances while Cashel himself was merely seeing the grace of the thing itself.