The Ships of Merior (48 page)

Primed to denounce the first sign of geas-bent aggression, the Mad Prophet kept beady-eyed vigilance in those maudlin moments between binges.
But the Master of Shadow could maintain seamless subterfuge, as his disguise as Medlir had well established.

Since patience was never Dakar’s strength, his wits were well sodden on the day the patched sloop engaged to ship the new planks reached the southernmost call on her route. Jostled semi-conscious by a lurch, disturbed further by the muttered creak of towlines rigged to warp the weedy hull hard aground for her yearly refit and careening, Dakar fumbled to discover his flask lay empty. Too bone-lazy to regret the oversight, he lapsed back, eyes closed, and eavesdropped on the conversation currently in progress on the main deck.

Clear above the cries of gulls, and the thump of sailors’ feet over the pawl of the turning capstan, he heard the Master of Shadow announce his intent to disembark in the tiny cove at Merior.

Too bored to examine s’Ffalenn motives; fuddled beyond recall that Merior was a sleepy, tropical backwater comprised of little but fishermen’s shacks, the Mad Prophet crawled from his shadowy lair between decks. He wove past piled cargo crates, Arithon’s lashed spruce from the sawmiller’s, and smacked both shins and one elbow in ascent of the companionway ladder. Undeterred by bruises, or by the scathing oaths of sail-hands who sprang to untangle the lines left befouled in his wake, Dakar blundered onward, while at safe remove from the rigging above, other seamen called cheerful encouragement.

‘Hold your grief! If the fat lubber’s going ashore, let him take his sandy boots, and good riddance!’

Dakar swayed on in a reeling cloud of whisky down the newly-set gangway to the beachhead.

The whitewashed cottages of Merior nestled in a little crescent cove, fringed with sea oats and palms, and notched into the narrow peninsula that bent like a hook to enclose the aquamarine basin of Sickle Bay. Here, the
great combers that rolled in off the Cildein’s vast deeps burst white and unravelled against a landspit scarcely three leagues across. Shadowed day and night by their thunder, this village offered the last, lonely settlement. Beyond, a wind-raked ribbon of barrier sands dwindled into bars and scattered coral reefs, where surf churned and creamed at Scimlade Tip. The neat, seaside anchorage was too cramped for trader ships. It boasted no breakwater and dock. The slatted wooden tower burned a beacon light for fishing craft, which moored in bad weather to battered cork buoys scattered like beads amid the chop.

The instant Dakar’s step met immovable dry strand, he staggered, tripped backward, and sat. A grunt of forced air entangled in his throat, and a hiccup squealed through his larynx.

The only folk at hand to marvel were two barefoot, tow-haired urchins who sat on a barrel and smirked, then burst into shrieking gales of laughter.

Dakar blinked at them owlishly. Peevish before ridicule from children scarcely eight years of age, he unhooked a trailer of seawrack from one ankle and clasped his head to ease its gruesome pounding. The sky was blue and cloudless enough to hurt. Against a serried mesh of palm fronds spread a smelly, drying hatch of fishnets, jewel-strung with glass floats and stamped clay seals to repel iyats. A dog’s distant yaps pocked the bawl of a lighterman who ferried another line from the ship. Fierce southern sunlight glared off sugar sands, and other things suspect and glistening strewn amid the jetsam at the tidemark. Too fordone to care if he sat in something noisome, the Mad Prophet flopped back on his elbows. To the sniggering towheads, he said, ‘I don’t see what’s so funny.’

A shadow darkened his face, cast by Arithon, just come ashore with an unwieldy beam braced across his shoulders.
‘Are you cap’n?’ shouted the nearer child. The pair looked alike as halved oysters, all brown legs and grey eyes and simmering curiosity. Their unbleached trousers were grimy and ragged, and each wore a smock shirt, clumsily cut down from a man’s size. The coltish angles of forearms and shins were sequinned in iridescent cod scales, and the narrow feet with their sturdy, splayed toes had likely never seen shoes.

‘I’m not this ship’s captain,’ Arithon declaimed. He sounded as though he was smiling.

Then you’re captain of a bigger one, surely,’ the other chimed in, while the first interrupted in shrill-voiced, point-blank demand. ‘Who are you?’

‘“He’s master of all things bleak and dangerous”,’
the Mad Prophet misquoted, inspired by faulty memory of a gate arch inscription on an initiate’s hostel that attrition had degraded to a brothel.

‘The master, the master, the master,’ chattered one child in monotone. The other sprang up and awarded Dakar a petulant frown. ‘He’s
not
Daelion Fatemaster!’

While fingers slim and dirty as a thief’s entangled in a wisped, sun-bleached curl, the first child intoned in changed rhythm, ‘The fat man’s a liar, the fat man’s a liar.’

Dakar tucked in his chin, the better to glare down his nose. ‘Boy, you know little, In a contest of falsehood, I would certainly lose to this black-haired mountebank you champion.’ His attempt to defend his impugned character met with indignant failure.

‘I’m no boy!’ The urchin shot erect beside her sibling. ‘My name’s Feylind.’

Dakar raised his brows. ‘Well brat, I’m sorry.’ A scuffed-up shower of grit pattered over the holed knees of his hose. ‘Tell your sister to stop flicking sand on me.’

‘He’s not a girl, he’s my brother!’ Feylind shrieked, to her twin’s renewed peals of glee. ‘Are you stupid? You must be, to he in the sun like a sausage.’ This pearl of
wisdom delivered, she turned her inquiry elsewhere.

Arithon had lowered his burden. Braced upright against hip and shoulder, the beam threw his angled features into shadow. Too pert for shyness, the child addressed him. ‘Will you go back on the sloop?’

‘I thought I was taking wood off her.’ Apparently not in a hurry, he added, ‘Your brother must have a name, too.’

‘Fiark,’ that small person supplied. ‘Would you take us aboard?’

‘The fat man can carry the board instead of you.’ Feylind elbowed a place at her brother’s side. ‘Anybody can see he’s a layabout. The work should do him good.’

‘I’m no man’s servant,’ Dakar pronounced, dropped bonelessly prone with his eyes closed.

For answer, the monstrous beam walloped flat on the strand a handspan from his right ear. Riled to a leap of shocked nerves, Dakar unwisely scrambled upright. A ticklish flood of sand grains trickled down his collar and clung to his sweat-dampened skin. ‘Damn you! I won’t fetch and haul as your labourer!’

Alone with a vacant barrel and a gouged smattering of footprints, the Mad Prophet spun around to find the Master of Shadow halfway back up the gangway. On his heels, irrepressible, Feylind capered, with Fiark behind, stamping on the planks to make them bounce.

Dakar cupped his temples to contain his throbbing agony and shouted, You can’t take those youngsters on board! The captain will never allow it.’

Arithon ignored him. Feylind twirled about and stuck out her tongue, while Fiark screamed back an obscenity, then taunted, ‘He’s master. He’ll do as he pleases!’

Dakar shrugged in a last, fruitless effort to jog the grit out of his clothing. Through the pounding in his skull and the reeling assault of strong sunshine, a chill stabbed over his skin. For just an instant, the salt breeze in his nostrils hung tainted with fire-caught smoke.
Too cross to sort whether his distress was due to overindulgence, or some stillborn pang of gifted prophecy, he slapped his forehead and hauled off in pursuit.

The tide had turned. Sluiced by receding waters, the sloop’s keel grounded and wedged fast. Her sails were inelegantly stripped. Agleam in a coat of wet varnish, her bare gaffs creaked and swung as her decks laid over and canted. Her waist was a cat’s-cradle of lines and topping lifts, unstowed since her spars were unshackled. Progress for the inebriated became a trial of slipped steps and hooked ankles, overseen by jeering, half-naked sailors. Wise enough not to assay the slope of afterdeck companionway, the Mad Prophet latched his hands to the ladder’s top rung and fastened himself upright to eavesdrop.

The vessel’s grizzled captain braced against the dazzle of white decking, one brawny arm crooked through the backstay. ‘The lighterman will ferry your dowels of locust wood,’ he was saying to Arithon s’Ffalenn. ‘The heavier planks will be delivered by a fisherman who hires himself out as stevedore. That covers the last of your lading list. I saw your plans. Shell be a pert little craft.’

‘Thank you.’ Attended by the twins, Arithon fished out a small pouch. ‘The arrangements are sufficient.’ Fiark admired the clever fingers as they dealt out smart payment in royals. ‘If you’re willing, I need another service.’

The coin changed hands and vanished into a greasy leather purse. Politely attentive, the captain said, ‘Name your wants.’

‘Shipwrights.’ Bored by the talk, the twins began to tag each other’s toes around the pinrail, while Dakar strained his ears over their rowdy noise to catch the last of Arithon’s request. ‘… and one master craftsman if he brings journeymen versed in his trade.’

The captain’s leathery forehead furrowed. ‘Whatever for? You’ve got only one set of took.’
They’re prototypes.’ Arithon sidestepped to avoid getting clobbered as the twins fell reeling into giggles and tussled like puppies at his feet. ‘The smith here at Merior will be skilled enough to make more.’

‘If not, there’s a chandler’s downcoast in Shaddorn. That harbour’s more sheltered, if you want my opinion, and the southcoast trade galleys call there.’ The captain chewed his moustache, distracted from inquisitive speculation by a shout and a lurch as the ship keeled another three degrees and a loose object banged belowdecks. He leaned sidewards to bellow down a hatch grating. ‘I thought you had everything stowed!’

The cabin steward’s invective spiralled up.

‘Well blight take your excuses! Get a line and lash the forsaken thing down!’ He turned back to his client with scarcely-veiled interest and no measurable improvement in temper. ‘When do you want these craftsmen?’

‘Spring will do.’ Jostled by eight-year-old exuberance, Arithon knelt, flung out an arm, and rescued Fiark or Feylind from a skidding slide through the cordage. Blond curls mingled with black as he arose with the child pinned in his embrace.

The captain scratched his ear. ‘Autumn would be easier. Skilled men without ties are tough to come by.’

Arithon swayed as the other twin fastened like a lamprey to his thigh. ‘I can offer rich pay, for everybody.’ The coins he produced with the finesse of a spell arched through the air, light licking gold faces as they fell.

The captain fielded the bribe and bared his sly teeth in a smile. ‘Your shipwrights shall arrive with the violets.’

‘What are violets?’ shrieked the twin who pounded on Arithon’s hipbone.

Feylind, presumably, answered. ‘They’re flowers, fishhead. The ground here’s too salty to grow them.’

‘You don’t know everything,’ Fiark retorted.

‘No, she doesn’t,’ Arithon agreed, and silenced the
fracas by prying the sister off his neck. ‘Don’t bicker, or you won’t get your tour belowdecks.’ To the captain, laughing, he added, ‘Would you mind?’

Drawn grinning into conspiracy, the hard-bitten waterman relented. ‘Take them yourself, but go lively. In another half hour, this bitch’ll be aground hard as Sithaer, and ornery as a half-skint wyvern for the pinch o’ the sand in her planks. Keep clear of the hold lest the ballast shifts.’

Slithered in a heap at the base of the companionway to evade notice as the conference ended, Dakar hugged his knees in stark misery. ‘I knew it,’ he mused in private conclusion. ‘I just knew it! He’s brought planks to build a damned war fleet.’

Immediately above, Arithon’s face eclipsed the light. ‘Right now, just one small sloop. You needn’t fret. We haven’t the coin left to arm her.’ Under pressure from Feylind’s impatience, a malicious glint stirred the green eyes. ‘You’re not in the mood to get stepped on, I trust.’

‘The fat man’s in the way again!’ the insufferable Fiark proclaimed. Forced to give ground in a cloud of ill grace, Dakar heaved up his tipsy bulk and moved.

From the stem, his weathered face crinkled in calculation, the sloop captain tracked Arithon’s answers to the children’s eager questions. ‘Knows his lines and halyards like a man born to blue water.’ The old salt cast his moody gaze at the horizon as though stalked by invisible foul weather. ‘Why in the name of mayhem would anyone found a shipyard in a site that grows not a stick of native timber?’

But the fat drunkard who might have lent insight now snored in an oblivious sprawl by the gangway. The captain spat downwind in disgust, then dispatched a sail-hand to heave the sot ashore before he tumbled overboard and drowned underfoot in the shallows.

In obstinate refusal to permit the earlier, unsettled stir through his senses to give rise to his spurious talent for prescience, Dakar slept off his binge. Wakened to an aftertaste of dread, as if the visions jammed irresponsibly beyond recall had scalded their imprint in dreams, he sat hunched over dinner at a split-plank trestle in Merior’s only boarding house.

The tea grounds in his mug streaked the landlady’s white porcelain in ominous, unlucky patterns, and his brooding bought no peace of mind. While southern moths like antique lace battered the smoke-hazed tin lantern overhead, Arithon plied thread and needle to patch his second-best shirt.

‘Shipwrights!’ Fired by long-delayed pique, Dakar curled his cup in a rocketing slide that scattered through knives, chinked the honey pot, and caromed off a platter littered with fish bones.

Arithon shed his mending on hair-trigger reflex and rescued the mug before it shot off the table rim.

Balked of even that destructive satisfaction, the Mad Prophet raged, ‘Who’s going to finance your fool’s notion, anyway? There’s not enough coin in this whole village for you to sing for your upkeep.’

Then you might be more gentle with the landlady’s crockery. Or tomorrow we’ll eat baitfish served raw on a cutting block.’ Green eyes regarded him, thoughtful; and in the same tone as the banter came the answer Dakar least expected. ‘I thought the crown of Rathain should bear the expense.’