Spellbreakers (15 page)

They left the
Neversinks
and his jolly mate very cheerfully, with the recommendation to bring the damn
nags well before midday the next day.

****

The next morning, after another thundering great
breakfast, they settled accounts with their landlady, and they left the inn
early, obviously much regretted by the two daughters of the house, who sat in a
window upstairs waving handkerchiefs until a bend of the street brought them
out of sight. Daria rode not towards the docks but towards the seaward,
north-east gate of the town.

“Let’s take the horses out to have a good buck first.
I’d rather they can play their humors off before we bring them to the ship.”

They rode out of the wall, along a sandy road in a
light-filled forest of tall spindly pines, and out onto the very shore of the
sea, past dunes of loose sand where the horses struggled and puffed. Then they
climbed over the last dune and the sea was in front of them. The beach was a
strange alien place, and the open sea an even stranger view.

Leal and Daria, born and grown in the mountains, had
never seen a perfect straight line in the landscape before. It looked more
unnatural and ominous than anything they had seen so far on their journey.

Escarra had no access of its own to the sea. The closest
seaports were all in Andalou. The Andalouan sea was much closer to Escarra than
the Narrows, a mere three days’ ride south and east of Castel Argell, but the
Escarrans had always been an independent mountain people and seldom traveled to
the coast, even in time of peace.
 
Leal
knew however, mostly from her mother’s tales, that the sea of Andalou was
sapphire blue and sun-kissed, and the brackish fens and salterns along its
green rich coast were dotted with pink flamingos and white egrets, and even the
rare blood ibis from the far southern islands.

This northern coast and sea were altogether wilder,
wind-swept sand dunes in front of an empty, grey-green, heaving immensity,
boundless and unearthly under a pale sky where tall grey clouds sailed in
majestic silence, casting dense blue shadows on the curling waves beneath. The
sound of the slow crashing surf was a somber hypnotic lullaby, studded with the
melancholic cry of the seagulls. Leal was teetering between a deep dread of the
sea and sublime ecstasy. She had never imagined anything so grandiose.

Their horses, that had behaved so impeccably during
the whole trip so far, danced and capered when they walked closer to the surf.

“They think the ground is moving away and coming
back,” said Daria laughing. She spurred her horse on, until his hooves almost
touched the sea, and he skipped sideways at each incoming wave. Leal’s mare
sniffed at the strange water, took a sip, spluttered, and pawed at the waves.
Leal laughed and spurred her on the packed, shell-studded, wet sand. She had
never ridden on a better ground, and they galloped on and on. She heard Daria
behind her, hooting, and the bay gelding soon overtook them with his long legs.

It was exhilarating. They galloped until the horses
began to flag and all the morning silliness was well out of them. After the
gallop, they were more curious than alarmed by the water, and they splashed
around in the shallow surf quite happily.

“I tell you, Leal, I could love the sea!”

The sun was getting high. It was almost midmorning,
and they turned back towards the city and the harbor.

****

Their ship was still moored to the pier but
perceivably lower in the water than it had been the day before. The space
amidships was full of cargo, bales, barrels, casks, a more amorphous mass
covered with oiled cloth. Everything was securely lashed down. There was a
gangplank to get on-board, and they led their horses to it a bit nervously.

The mate caught sight of them and waved a hand,
grinning.

“I thought you’d be late. I thought I’d have to sail
without you,” he shouted.

“But we aren’t, are we?” said Leal.

“No. Come aboard. Can you lead your screws in by
yourself, or should I get a couple of boys to help?”

“We’ll manage all right,” said Daria.

But for once she was wrong. Her gelding stuck his
hooves squarely on the gangplank and refused to step across. No amount of
pulling, chivvying, treating, reasoning, or threatening did any good. He stood
there, his nose stretched all the way out as Daria pulled him by the reins, by
the nose piece of his halter, by the lead rope, his eyes wild, his nostrils
flaring. It was a pitiful and comical sight.

“Let’s try another way,” said Leal. With the gelding
back on the quay, she led her mare up to the gangplank. The mare glanced around
diffidently and shied when her hooves cluttered on the plank, and then she took
an explosive bound forward and practically jumped on-board, almost knocking
Leal in the sea.

“Whoa, whoa, hold fast on that beast before it smashes
the barky to kindling!” bawled the mate.

Two sailors came to Leal’s aid, and the mare was half
dragged and half pushed with her chest hard up against a hurdle abaft the
cargo, where she could neither bolt nor prance around. Once the mare was
on-board, the trembling gelding let himself be led up the plank with a
perfectly dejected expression on his long face, and was tied beside his
companion. Three more hurdles were erected around them, lashed together, tied
down to ringbolts on the deck, with a couple of stout lines tied all around for
good measure, and that was it. Leal and Daria felt terribly embarrassed by the
very poor show, but the sailors made no comments. They were obviously used to having
beasts on deck, and once they were secured they took hardly any notice of the
horses.

“As for you two,” said the mate, “you’d better stay
out of the way until I tell you. Landsmen are worse than loose cattle on a
boat. Sit on this here barrel and stay put. Here is a bucket, in case. Once we
are out o’ port, and under sail, you can puke overboard all you like, but right
now I need the rails free.”

Leal and Daria climbed onto the designated barrel,
part of the cargo lashed down just abaft the mast, with their buckets in their
laps, feeling like parcels of merchandise.

A few last things were coming on board, to be stowed
here and there in odd corners. Sailors were unmooring the ship, jumping on
board, stowing the gangplank. There were calls and oaths as the mooring lines
came on-board and were coiled down, a clash of wood on wood as oars were pushed
out of the oarlocks and the ship shoved off with long poles from the pier. A
few men on the quay took notice of their departure and waved, calling out words
of good luck, goodbyes,
godspeed
, and a few ribald
gibes that Leal did not quite get. The horses stood in their enclosure tense
and wide-eyed, straining on their ropes, but not frantic. Leal felt small,
useless, and insignificant. By looking at Daria’s face she could tell that her
friend was also somewhat troubled.

The deck was moving skittishly under them now, as the ship
bobbed unsteadily on the lapping waves. It was a sort of motion neither Leal
nor Daria had ever known before, and they exchanged a look of mixed exultation
and alarm. They had been traveling for almost four weeks, and yet they had
never felt so much abroad and away from home.

The sailors took to their oars and began pulling. It
was hard work, because the ship was fully loaded and low in the water, and with
so much cargo amidships there were only a few useful banks well aft and well
forward of the single mast. Even with the help of the current and the ebb, the
ship crawled slowly among the small craft in the harbor, at the sound of a drum
that a slim young boy beat slowly, giving the sailors their rhythm. The master,
an altogether more taciturn man than his mate, steered. The mate was perched
high on the prow, a hand on the stay, balancing easily, conning the ship. He
brought them respectfully to the lee of any larger vessel and loudly berated
any smaller boat that did not speedily get out of the way. But when, in
midstream, they crossed the wake of a long low Hassian war galley, with slaves
chained at the oars, he remained silent.

The two low headlands that enclosed the estuary of the
Yll passed slowly by, and the city became smaller and smaller astern. They were
in the middle of the bay now, rowing slowly but steadily towards the entrance
of the harbor. The waves were higher here, even in the shelter of the
headlands, and Leal, who gazed alternately ahead towards the sea, and back
towards the fading Enskala, turned to Daria to make a comment about the sea,
the ship, the water, the strange beauty of it all. But the smile died on her
lips.

 
Daria was
looking wholly pale. She stared in a vaguely horrified way to the prow of the
ship, and the mate balancing there as the bulwark rose, rose and rose under
each wave, and then fell back down on the other side, in a smother of foam. Her
face became paler and paler.

“Tell you what, little brother,” she said, in a
strained voice, “I ain’t feeling all that well about this.”

Leal smiled and then chuckled irresistibly. “I think
that’s what the bucket is for, big brother. Please turn in the other direction,
there’s a good boy.”

Outside the estuary the open sea took them. Leal could
only think of it in these terms. The waves were higher and longer here, and the
ship motion increased threefold. The rowing sailors could hardly make any
headway in the swell. Daria was violently sick behind her, but Leal was
enchanted with the empty blue purity of sea and sky, and the gulls flying free
overhead. The opposite shore was wholly invisible, despite the clear day. They
sailed into a perfect blue immensity. She wished she could stand on the prow by
the mate with her face to the horizon ever receding in front of her, and the
sea parting under the ship’s bows.

Finally, as they came out of the lee of the western
point the breeze buffeted the top of the mast. The lashings of the sail clashed
and snapped.

“Avast rowing,” called the master. The drum gave a
final triple boom, a cheerful little flourish. The men stood up, groaning and
rubbing their backs, but they quickly went back to business, storing their
oars, and running up the mast to loosen the single, vast, brown square sail. It
came down with a reek of damp raw wool, and as soon as it was sheeted home the
ship steadied on her course, and its motion changed entirely. All the wild
bobbing and rolling and pitching and nodding changed to a steady, purposeful
forward surging and gliding, surging and gliding, water rushing faster and
faster along the sides with a thrilling, living urgency. Leal had never known
anything so beautiful, not even on horseback.

Daria felt visibly better when the ship steadied under
the sail. “Argh, what I said about coming to love the sea, well, I take it
back. That was a good breakfast when it passed the other way.”

Leal laughed and laughed, because for once she was
doing better than Daria, and because the living spirit of the sea, made of
waves and wind and the ever-fleeting blue horizons, and the imaginings and the
sea-lore of all the men and ships who had ever sailed before her, had gotten
into her.

It was all she could do not to weep with happiness.

“Well, boys,” said the mate cheerfully, “you can come
down and stretch your legs now. It is straight sailing without touching brace
or sheet from here to Nevraan in a breeze like this.” He touched a wooden pin
at this, just for good measure. “We’ll be there before supper time if this
breeze holds. You could not have picked a better day to cross the Narrows.
Still as a duck-pond too, right?
Right?”
He laughed hugely, slapping Daria’s shoulder so hard that she nearly fell into
her bucket.

“Come, child, empty
that thing
overboard before you slop
it all over the place. No, to leeward, damn
it, to
leeward
!” he laughed again, but not unkindly.

****

The sun set late this far north on summer nights, and
a gleam of gold still shone in the west when they ghosted in the bay of Nevraan
on the gentle evening breeze.

It was perhaps the most blessed time of day to see
Nevraan for the first time. Even the
Neversinks
’s
sailors, who must have seen this sight a thousand times, were quiet for a time
as they sailed easily towards the white curtain walls of the fortified harbor,
rising sheer from the sea like an ice cliff. They were a powerful
fortification, and appeared twice as high, standing as they did over their
mirror image on the water.

Within its pale walls Nevraan
rose
high over the water of the bay, tier after tier of white houses and slender
stone towers clinging improbably from the almost vertical crags that encircled
the bay. The air was alive with white seabirds, and the white city gleamed in
the sunset, gazing down upon its shimmering reflection on the still waters of
the bay. Seen like this, it was easy to see why Nevraan was called the Swan
City of the Narrows.

It was without exception the most beautiful place Leal
had ever seen, a city and a fortress that put Castel Argell to shame. She felt
suddenly as small and provincial as the wildest little shepherd in the Llers
hills, and she gazed in unfeigned wonder on the approaching town.