The Mark of Ran (21 page)

There was a mob in front of the Tower. They had forced the postern and were already inside. On the ground in their midst lay the bodies of two Feathermen, their blood trodden into a mire. Canker had at least tried to keep his word.

Lying beside them and beaten into raw meat was the body of Gibble, a kitchen knife still clutched in one bloody fist.

The last rags of Rol’s restraint blew away. He let the training take him over completely, and a white-hot sun of grief and rage within him fueled it to the brink of madness. Fleam was a thing of pure, bestial joy in his fist, and as he fell upon the rear of the mob like some berserk angel, he heard the sword singing.

Those who were intent on forcing their way within the fabled Tower saw a bright light behind them, and then a storm of steel broke upon their ranks, and it smashed bodies to right and left, cutting men in two, amputating limbs, decapitating, disemboweling, blinding. They streamed away from the Tower in panic and the thing came after them, cutting them down, making a charnel house of the street, splashing blood as high as the eaves on nearby houses. Bodies and limbs and the ropes of entrails were strewn in scarlet ruin for a hundred yards and the survivors fled down the hill in abject terror, climbing over one another to get away from the light, the singing blade, the terrible eyes.

The light faded as quickly as it had come. A boy was left leaning on a bloody scimitar in the street, his face a wilderness of pain streaked with other men’s blood, his clothing soaked scarlet. He dropped the sword, fell to his knees in the puddled gore, and began to weep.

There were crowds of townsfolk on the wharves mobbing the gangplanks. Every ship’s master docked in Ascari had jettisoned his cargo onto the quays and was taking on passengers instead, charging a fortune for every square foot of his hold. Enterprising longshoremen were taking others out in cutters and longboats, sculling them down the coast to quiet backwater Gascar.

Rol had entered the Tower and chased out the looters within. It had not been necessary to shed more blood; they had taken one look at his eyes and had made off, dropping their plunder. He had walked the gutted corridors, treading on priceless manuscripts and the tattered remains of ancient paintings and hangings, kicking aside empty bottles, crunching over broken glass. There was little left of the gear he and Rowen had gathered together to aid them in their proposed journey; the bag of money was long gone.

He gathered up what he could, nonetheless. An oilskin cloak, a tinderbox, a change of clothing, a loaf of bread, a wooden flask which he filled with Cavaillis and drank a swallow of in memory of Gibble. Then he went to the uppermost levels—the looters had not ascended this far—and managed to scrape together a purseful of copper minims, and a few silver, from Psellos’s apartments.

He entered Rowen’s room, a place whose threshold he had never crossed before. It was bare as a hermit’s cell. A narrow bed, a table, a chair, a rack for her swords. A wardrobe which he opened. Hanging within were all the fine gowns Psellos had insisted on buying her. Rol buried his face in them, smelling her, unwilling to leave off the pain, like a dog that will lick a wound into fresh rawness. His heart was a burnt-out cinder. There was no one left even to hate.

Rol secured a berth on the
Seahorse,
a leaky, overcrowded caravel that was bound for Borhol to the southwest. The only reason he was allowed aboard was because they were shorthanded, and he was able to convince the captain that he knew his way about a ship. As they cast off, a collective wail went up from the crowds on the quays. He belayed a loose point and staggered slightly as the wind took the caravel and nudged her from the dock. A southerly, it was blowing fresh and true and had been all day. Just as well, for all the harbor cutters were ferrying passengers and were too busy to tow anything beyond the mole.

“Why are they so desperate to take ship?” Rol asked the captain, a lanky, gray-haired Vryhedi named Kyle Gavriol. “They could just walk out into the countryside. The rest of Gascar is peaceable enough, isn’t it?”

Gavriol spat over the ship’s side. “Peaceable for some, not for all. There’s an army has arrived in the west, mercenaries from Andelys hired by the council. Rumor has it they’re to purge Ascari of everyone the council dislikes or is afeard of, and that’s a long list of people. Running to the hills won’t help—once your name is on the list they’ll hunt down the whole island for you. So half the miscreants in town are running mad and the other half are trying to get to sea in anything bigger than a rowboat. It’s a sorry state of affairs. Where have you been not to know this, my lad, under a stone?”

Rol turned and looked back inland, to where the hill of Ascari loomed and Psellos’s Tower stood half a league away, a monolith silhouetted against the sky. “Yes, that’s just where I have been.”

The
Seahorse
pulled out of Ascari harbor, past the whitewashed stone of the mole, and the southerly picked up and began to make the caravel dance under their feet. By the time Rol could look up from his work on the yards again, Ascari was a white smudge overhung by a dark one, and Gascar was an island in truth, just one part of a larger horizon.

Fifteen days to Borhol, and Port Borr, for the southerly failed at last, and the winds, though strong, boxed the compass for near on a fortnight, and Gavriol’s caravel was an unhandy vessel with a tendency to make as much leeway as headway. For a time they were close to being blown onto the rocks of western Dennifrey, but they clawed clear on a black, spray-flashed night and managed to beat out to sea again. In the hold the passengers spewed and wailed by the dozen and in their seasickness pleaded with the captain to let the ship sink, but Gavriol laughed, and congratulated Rol on his seamanship, and stood watch after watch at the tiller with his eyes red and smarting while the
Seahorse
did her best to send them all to the bottom.

Port Borr at last, one evening as the rags of the gale blew themselves out behind them and the western sunset burst in a calm fury of flaming cloud that filled half the sky. A small, mean place after Ascari, a fishing port loud with squalling gulls and peppered white with their guano. Stone-built quays with the fish boxes piled high and stinking all about them, and thirty or forty fishing yawls and bankers moored snug up against them while their crews haggled with inshore fish merchants and smoked whitherb in silver-lidded pipes. Gavriol was known here, and recommended Rol’s abilities to the master of a small brigantine, the
Westauk,
and thus before his legs had even accustomed themselves to the unmoving nature of the land Rol was at sea again, bound for Corso with a cargo of sheepskins and several barrels of Borholian beer. From there it was a gaff ketch to Arbionn, and he was entrusted with command of a watch. And then an ancient carrack with rotten yards and a hair-raising passage to Osca across a white, furious Westerease Sea, with Rol commanding the ship after the master lost himself in the bottom of a bottle five days out and the first mate was washed overboard. In Osca, the land of the White Horses, he halted awhile and hiked inland through the grazing sheep to where the Ancients had carved vast pictures out of the turf of the hills, the white chalk underneath rendering them visible for miles. Horses indeed, but also winged lizards and sea-serpents and walrus and bears, the inhabitants of men’s primitive dreams. And Rol slept without covering on the soft grass of the chalk downs, heedless of the autumn rains washing over the world. In the gray mornings he rose and walked himself dry and accepted the hospitality of shepherds’ bothies, for they like all primitive men believed in showing unstinting hospitality to strangers. He would leave them some copper minims nonetheless, and part with a wordless nod.

He walked west because the brash sunsets of the fading year drew him, and so came to a region of deep, rock-strewn inlets bitten out of the raw stuff of the earth’s bones. He was looking at the Bionese Sea, last of the charted seaways of the world. Beyond this horizon was the great mountainous country of Gidior, famed for its ores and its metalworkers and its deep mines, and beyond that was Tethis, the limitless ocean which girdled the world of men, unknown, uncharted, uncrossable. He sat for a long time on the shore there, while the sea crashed in white-fanged fury on the rocks about him and the gulls circled shrieking overhead. When he rubbed his hand over his face, yawning, he could feel the stubble of a beard on his chin, and scratched at it in wonder. Finally he rose in the dark of the night, set the wind at his back, and began retracing his steps to the fishing villages of the east coast, where he might work a passage back to the crowded places of the world.

PART TWO

THE SEA

Fourteen

USSA’S MANE

THE HAMMERING ON THE DOOR JOLTED HIM OUT OF
sleep. Beside him his scented bed partner groaned and tried to snuggle closer, but he was already out of bed and on his feet. His scimitar was naked in his fist before he said: “It’s open.”

“Who were you expecting?” Prothero asked with a raised eyebrow. He stopped in the doorway and leaned against the jamb, a jaunty, dark figure with a face as triangular as that of a stoat. His eyes flicked appreciatively to the girl in the bed who was groggily coming awake.

“You never know,” Rol said. He scabbarded Fleam and began to get dressed. To the girl he said, “Get out. The money’s on the chest by the window.”

Sitting up now, she pouted, and glared at the grinning Prothero who watched her dress with much relish. She took the minims from the chest-top and stalked past him with her head high. “You’re no gentleman,” she huffed at him as she left the room, and he laughed.

“You have me there, child.”

Rol buckled his sword belt, yawning. “What’s the time?”

“An hour to the turn of the tide, is what the time is. Riparian is tugging out his hair in wonder and dismay at the absence of his first mate.”

“He worries too much. He might have known I’d be here.”

“If it’s Mamertos, then it must be the Flamingo House. Yes, you are a creature of certain habits. Who was she?”

“She’s new, only started last month. If you like, I think you have time to—”

“Not now. I had my fill last night after we split up.”

“Aha. Where’d you lay your head?” Rol was stuffing oddments into his canvas seabag and scratching his hair into a shaggy mop of gold. He leaned his face into the ewer by the bed and emerged with water dripping from his beard.

“Mother Abbe’s.”

“That hole? You’re lucky they didn’t smother you.”

“There’s a girl there has this trick—”

“All right, all right, tell me on the way. We’d best be off before Riparian sails without us.”

Mamertos was a bustling port of some quarter-million people, the capital of lovely Auxierre. Rising in white-walled tiers from the waterside, the city resembled nothing so much as an onion sliced into rings and spread out on its side. It was stone-built, for there were rocky hills just inland, and extensive quarries had been burrowed into these for generations. Mamertine marble was sought after all over the world, and Auxierre’s rulers had made free use of it in beautifying their capital. Red clay tiles covered the roofs of the houses from hovel to mansion, and gangs of city-sweepers kept the filth on the streets within acceptable levels. The city was an ordered place of tree-lined avenues and public parks. Even the waterfront was tamed, and all the brothels and inns thereon were licensed by the Crown. There were still a few independent operators, however, and both Prothero and Rol had always preferred these to the more sanitized license-holding establishments.

“Not a patch on Urbonetto,” Prothero said, looking around him. They were within a stone’s cast of the wharves and everywhere before them the masts of ships rose in a long forest webbed with a million lines of rigging.

“I’ve never made it that far,” Rol admitted.

“No? Ah, that’s right, you joined us just after the last of the Bionese runs. You were lucky. We used to have all the Westerease to beat across, and never a sight of land between Perigord and Bionar itself, except for Kull black as smoke on the horizon. Ever since Riparian won that Mercanter contract it’s been glorified coast-following, and long may it last.”