Lord of the Isles (10 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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“
W
e'll need more light, surely?” Lora dithered as she set her candle in the wall sconce inside the door of what was normally her room. “I'll go fetch—”
“Be silent, woman,” Asera snapped. “Better yet, get out and stay out unless I call you.”
Instead of obeying, Lora backed against the sill of the dormer window with a fixed expression on her face. Sharina put the wooden candleholder on the three-legged table. The room's other furniture comprised a bed, two clothes chests, and a round pine chair made by hollowing out the upper half of a section of tree trunk. She glanced at her mother in unvoiced surprise: she'd have guessed that if the procurator asked Lora to jump out the window, she'd have done so.
“No, no, get that off there,” Meder said in distracted snappishness as he lifted a flat ironbound box about a foot long onto the chair seat. “I'll use the top for the written invocation.”
He knelt and inserted a key with four pins of varying length in line with the shaft. They rotated a quarter turn as Meder murmured something under his breath.
Sharina took the candle off the table. She thought the box glowed faintly, as if it were reflecting light from a hearth.
“Bring it near,” Meder ordered as he lifted the lid. The interior was broken into small compartments, each holding an object in neat isolation. A knife of ruddy copper, its handle
marked in the ornate curlicues of the Old Script, was clipped to the inside of the lid.
The young magician took out the knife. When he turned and saw Sharina leaning close with the light he said, “No, not you—I need you for the summoning! Give it to one of the others.”
Asera opened her mouth to protest at being grouped dismissively with a maid from the hinterlands, but she closed it again without speaking. It was clear to everyone that when Meder focused on his task, he had no consideration for any of the ordinary social parameters.
Sharina gestured to her mother and stepped away as Lora silently took her place with the light.
Meder took out a lump of what looked like ordinary chalk, placed it on the table, and again closed the box. He straightened and looked at Sharina. He appeared taller than he had in the dining room below.
“I'm going to prick your finger with the athame and touch the chalk with a drop of your blood,” he said brusquely, gesturing with the copper knife to make his meaning clear. “It's not really necessary to write the entire phrase in blood; the attraction is quite sufficient for the purpose. And I'll take a lock of your hair.”
Sharina looked at her mother. There was nothing in Lora's still face: as well look at the tabletop for help.
“All right,” Sharina said, extending her left hand. She wondered what Meder would do if she refused. Judging from the way he spoke, the thought literally hadn't crossed his mind.
Meder's touch was surprisingly warm. He glanced up and locked eyes, seeing Sharina as a person rather than a piece of paraphernalia for the first time since he and the procurator had discussed the rite.
He frowned and said, “Hold still,” in a return to his former manner. He stabbed the copper point into the ball of her thumb. There was a burning sensation that Sharina's imagination screamed was subtly different from what she'd felt the
times she made a mistake with a needle when sewing.
A dome of blood swelled from the slight wound like a mushroom breaking the ground after a rain. Meder traded the athame for the chalk and rubbed it in the blood. He turned and began to write around the tabletop with quick, firm strokes. The phrase had no punctuation nor any gap between individual words. It was in Old Script, like the symbols on the athame's hilt.
Men in the common room spoke in raised voices, quarreling or simply cheerfully enthusiastic. Sharina felt separated from the activity below by more than just the thick oak flooring. A cold wall was rising between her and everything familiar from her past.
Meder scraped the blood from the chalk's surface with the athame and put away the remainder of the lump. “Here,” he said as he stepped close to Sharina again. “I'll take the hair now.”
He had to saw several times, pulling the roots painfully, before he was able to separate a few strands. The knife was sharp, but hair is tough and quickly dulled the copper edge.
Meder put the honey-colored lock in the center of the little table, surrounded by the chalk writing. “No one speak,” he ordered.
Touching the athame's point against the wood, he muttered, “
Huessemigadon iao ao baubo eeaeie
…”
To Sharina the words sounded like frogs on a summer night, or the grunting of penned sheep.
“
Sopesan kanthara ereschitigal sankiste
…”
Meder shifted the point of his copper knife at each tortured syllable. He moved to the left around the table so that he never had to reach over the surface to touch the next chalked symbol.
“Akourbore kodere dropide …”
The partition which isolated Sharina from the rest of the world was growing thicker. A red mist suffused the air above the table, though when she blinked the color faded for a moment
before seeping back into her consciousness.
“
Tartarouche anoch anoch!”
Meder shouted. He thrust his athame into the lock of Sharina's hair.
Deep red fire billowed soundlessly from the copper point. The cold flames touched the ceiling, then shrank back and coalesced into a head: a man with shoulder-length hair, aristocratic features, and a precise goatee. The image rotated, not as a man turns but instead like a bust displayed on a turntable.
Lora put her left hand to her mouth and bit her knuckles to keep from screaming. The candle in her other hand trembled like a leaf in a windstorm.
The image vanished as suddenly as a lightning flash. The candles, dimmed by the ruby glow, were again the room's only illumination. Meder sank back onto the chair on top of his ironbound box. The color had drained from his face.
“
That
was your father, girl,” Asera said with satisfaction. “Not the innkeeper downstairs.”
Sharina turned and opened the clothes chest behind her in the corner of the room. She reached down the side, feeling past the layers of shifts and outer tunics to the oval bronze canister she'd first seen when she was a child playing while her mother was downstairs. Lora whimpered but didn't attempt to stop her.
The small container was packed with a scrap of purple satin. Within that nest was a gold-hinged locket. Sharina opened the ivory panels and held the miniature paintings of a young couple out toward her mother in the palm of her hand.
“It's him, isn't it?” Sharina said. “I'm their child, not yours and Reise's!”
The man's features were those of the image Meder's incantation had raised. Above the head of the painting was the legend NIARD, COUNT BY THE LADY'S GRACE. Over the stronger, darker face of the woman was TERA, COUNTESS BY THE SHEPHERD'S GRACE.
Asera dusted her hands together in a gesture of completion.
“We've found the heir we were looking for,” she said.
“You'll go with us to Valles, girl!”
Meder looked up from the chair with exhausted eyes. “It's your destiny, Sharina,” he said.
G
arric dreamed,
A man was coming toward him through a foreground that seemed to change with every stride. At first it was a meadow; a moment later the man walked in a grove of hard corals, ducking beneath their branches. The reef's vivid colors were dimmed to pastel as if by light filtered through clear water, but the man strode on unaffected.
“Who are you?” the dream Garric called, though a part of him was sure it already knew the answer. His own voice seemed very distant.
The man was a youthful-looking forty years old, with muscular arms and thighs. He wore boots to midcalf and a rich blue tunic; where his skin was bare it was tanned as dark as Haft shepherd's.
The man waved; his lips moved, but Garric couldn't hear the words. He was in a forest now, stepping in and out of shafts of sunlight that waked dazzling richness from his tunic and the metal ornaments he wore.
He smiled broadly. His face looked as though he laughed often and with roaring abandon, the sort of laughter that Garric had heard in his mind all this evening and night.
The dream Garric closed his hand on the coin hanging around his neck on a silken cord. The warm, smooth metal in his fist wasn't a dream.
In rougher clothing the man would pass for a resident of Barca's Hamlet, though he was taller than most and his shoulders
broad enough to rouse notice. He looked like an older version of Garric or-Reise, dressed in shimmering cloth. The dark ringlets of his hair were bound with a simple gold diadem.
“Who
are
you?” Garric repeated. His shout sank into fathomless space. His dream self stood in nothingness, separated by eternity from everything and everyone.
“I'm Carus, King of the Isles, lad!” the man called in a distance-muted voice. He splashed through a swamp in boots of leather dyed the same brilliant blue as his tunic.
“You
know me.”
Garric stared at the man. It was like looking into a mirror which distorted not images but time itself. “But you're dead,” he shouted.
“Am I, lad?” Carus said. His laughter boomed like far-off thunder. Sand blew off a dune and skirled through the air around him, glinting on his sweaty skin like a dusting of jewels. “
Am I?”
The figure of the ancient king remained the same size, but his voice grew stronger with every stride he took toward Garric. His face showed the tired determination of a man who had journeyed far and would go farther yet—as far as the road led—before he rested.
“I'll help you become King of the Isles, lad,” Carus said. “And you'll bring me to Duke Tedry of Yole, who has unfinished business with me.”
Garric watched the figure, now being lashed by rain on a rock-strewn slope. Pine trees bent in the wind; Carus hunched against the blast, and his legs scissored forward with the regularity of a pendulum stroking.
“Yole sank a thousand years ago!” Garric cried. “King Carus is dead!”
Carus threw his head back and laughed with the fullthroated enthusiasm of a man who took joy wherever he found it: whether in a sunset or the steel-sparkling air of a battlefield.
Garric spun away, his dream self rejoining with the youth sleeping on the straw of his father's stable, wrapped in a thin blanket and clutching the ancient coin he wore around his neck.
T
he mockingbird perched on the dogwood continued its series of liquid calls even when Sharina rattled the clackers only ten feet away. It was a mild, brilliant morning, and the dogwood buds had opened to surround the bird in white profusion.
The weather had done something to lift Sharina's own mood, though it couldn't help cure her confusion. She skipped down the slope to the hut calling, “It's me, Nonnus. I need your help!”
The hermit stood at the creekside where he'd been smoothing an ash sapling held horizontal in a pair of forked stakes. Bark shavings patterned the ground and hung in the reeds at the margin of the creek. The water was no more than six inches deep except for the pool Nonnus had dug out and covered with a bed of colored stones, to make it easier for him to bathe and dip his copper kettle.
“Not because of your health, I trust, child?” he said as he wiped his knifeblade on the hem of his black tunic. He gave Sharina the craggy smile that she saw more often than anyone else in the hamlet. “No, not the way you're cantering along.”
Nonnus viewed the edge of his knife with a critical eye, tilting it up and down to catch the light. Satisfied, he slipped it back in its sheath.
Every peasant on Haft carried a knife for a variety of tasks: cutting rope, prizing a stone out of a sheep's hoof, marking a tally stick—the myriad needs of an agricultural community.
Peasants' knives were mostly forged by a local smith from a strip of wrought iron; their scales of bone, horn, or wood were riveted to a flat tang. The blade was typically six or eight inches long, its point rounded, and the edge sharpened at need on the nearest smooth stone.
The hermit's knife was unique, though it was no less practical a tool. Its blade was polished steel, over a foot long and the thickness of a woman's little fingeracross the straight back. The edge moved in a graceful curve, forming a deep belly near the point to throw the weight outward.
Nonnus used his knife for everything from skinning game to large projects for which the locals would have chosen an axe, a billhook, or a spokeshave. The blade had a working edge, sturdy enough not to bend on tough jobs but sharp enough to trim his hair and beard. Sharina had sometimes watched as the hermit chopped wood with the knife, using an effortless mechanical stroke that sent chips flying onto the far bank of the creek.
“Not my health, no,” Sharina agreed. She jumped up, caught a branch, and chinned herself on a whim, then dropped to the ground again.
“Nonnus,” she said bluntly. “They want me to go to Ornifal—Asera and Meder do. I want you to come with me because I trust you. And you've been in cities before.”
Nonnus smiled faintly. “One way and another, yes,” he said. “But I'm not a city man, Sharina. Your father is. He should go with you, or your mother should.”
He reached into the creek and lifted a bucket of bark sewn with sinew and waterproofed with tree gum. It was full of birch beer; the hermit kept it almost submerged so that the running water cooled the drink on even the hottest days of August. Two bark cups dangled from the container's handle. He dipped them full and handed the white one—Sharina's cup—to her:
“If Reise or Lora came with me, it'd be for their own reasons,” Sharina said morosely into the cup. “I need someone who worries first about me.”
Nonnus turned, surveying his hut and garden. “Haft's been kind to me,” he said. “I came here because it was as far as I could go without falling off the edge of the world—”
He fixed Sharina again with his eyes and gave her a grin like sunlight glinting from an iceberg.
“—which I was not quite ready to do. It's a long time since I was on Ornifal.”
Sharina raised her eyes to the hermit's, then looked down again with a nervous twitch of her mouth. “Nonnus?” she said. “Reise and Lora aren't my parents. Count Niard and Countess Tera are.”
Nonnus snorted with mild amusement. “You're a wise girl to be so certain about your parentage,” he said. “I've never found it so clear a matter, nor have I ever seen it a useful question to pursue.”
“There isn't any doubt,” Sharina said. Part of her was irritated that the hermit took her revelation with so little concern. “Meder held a summoning rite. He's a wizard.”
“A very powerful one, from what Tenoctris tells me,” Nonnus agreed, “but I wouldn't stake my life on what a wizard said or did.”
His voice was lightly musing at the start of the spoken thought but by the end the words cracked. The hermit's face had a wooden stiffness.
“Nonnus?” Sharina said. “I don't know anything about wizards. But I think this was real.”
Nonnus hooked the cup back onto the bucket with the deliberation of extreme control, then deliberately faced away from Sharina. “Oh, I don't doubt the boy is real,” he said in a thick voice. “His sort think they make the world turn with their spells. But they're wrong!”
Sharina held her cup in both hands, no longer drinking from it. She feared that any motion she made would further disturb the hermit in this unexpected mood, so she stood as still as the image of the Lady carved in the trunk of a living tree.
“The Earl of Sandrakkan had wizards on the high walls of
his camp when he met King Valence at the Stone Wall,” Nonnus said. His voice was a growl that could have come from a beast or out of a blizzard-driving wind. “The wizards sacrificed chickens and sheep as the armies advanced, cutting their throats so the blood ran down the walls. And they chanted, and the earth shook.”
He glanced at the Lady's simple image and smiled minutely. Turning again toward Sharina, he resumed, “Their spell made the ground ripple like cloth in a breeze. What did that matter? Waves rise and fall a hundred feet when they smash Pewle Island every storm! But the Ornifal militia on the right wing panicked, and the Sandrakkan cavalry got through the gap to surround King Valence.”
He was trying to speak normally, but emotion thickened his tongue and slurred the words. He looked at Sharina. Because she knew she had to speak she said, “But the Blood Eagles stood, Nonnus?”
“Oh, aye,” he said in a thin, despairing voice like nothing she'd heard from a human throat. “They stood.”
Sharina extended a hand toward the hermit the way she would have reached out to touch fabric of unimaginable fineness. He didn't meet her fingers, but he smiled. His staff leaned against a tree near where he'd been working. He took it in his hands.
“The nobles want to carry you to Valles,” he said conversationally. “Do you want to go?”
Iron ferrules capped both ends of the hollywood staff. Nonnus looked at them critically, then laid the staff down with one tip on a flat stone.
“Meder tells me it's my destiny,” Sharina said with embarrassment. Folk in Barca's Hamlet didn't have destinies, only lives. “Besides, I don't think they'd let me refuse. They have the soldiers, you know.”
“So they do,” Nonnus said in a tone she couldn't read. “But I asked you what you wanted.”
He set the tip of a hardwood peg on the rivet holding the ferrule, then gave it a sharp rap with the butt of his big knife.
The rivet head popped a quarter inch from the other side. Nonnus gripped the head and pulled the rivet out; he had enough strength in his fingers to straighten cod hooks.
“I think I want to go, Nonnus,” she said. “I'm afraid because I've never been out of the borough, but I want to go.”
Instead of replying immediately, the hermit twisted the fearrule off and walked into his hut with it. He returned with a slender package of oiled linen that Sharina had never seen before.
“They're …” she said. “They're readying the ship today. They'll leave tomorrow morning.”
Nonnus squatted and unwrapped the packet, holding it so that Sharina could see the contents. Within the linen was a socketed steel spearhead with two deep edges and two narrow ones. The point was needle sharp.
He fitted the head to the end of his staff, then looked up at Sharina. “I don't know anything about destiny, child,” he said. “But I know about death, and I'll do what I can to keep death away from you.”
He smiled gently. He'd always been gentle, with her and the other villagers. But she'd never confused gentleness with weakness.
“Go on back, child,” the hermit said. “I'll be there when the ship's ready to sail.”

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