Lord of the Isles (7 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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“The Blood Eagles are the king's personal bodyguard,”
Nonnus said without emotion. “If he sent a detachment of them with this Asera, then she's of higher rank than I'd expect of a procurator sent to handle the king's business affairs on Haft.”
The breeze died. Villagers and strangers were mixing freely; some of the newcomers started to wander into the hamlet itself. The hermit watched the scene.
“What does the writing on the flag say, Nonnus?” Sharina asked. “‘Stand,' I think?”
Nonnus looked at her. His eyes were as gray as light glancing off an ice floe. “It says ‘We stood,' child,” he said tonelessly. “They were with King Valence when he fought the Earl of Sandrakkan at the Stone Wall twenty years ago. When the right flank of the king's forces broke, the Blood Eagles stood and guarded him.”
Very deliberately the hermit turned and spat toward the sea. “And the king put ‘We stood' on the Blood Eagles banner,” he continued, “because of the honor they gained that day.”
He walked away without speaking again, his heavy knife wobbling at his side. Sharina watched him until he vanished in the direction of his hut in the woods. She wanted to cry, but she didn't know why.
“
C
oming through!” Garric shouted into the bedlam of the kitchen. He stepped crook-legged beneath the transom—the ceiling was high enough to clear the iron cauldron on his shoulder, but the doorway wasn't—and advanced toward the hearth deliberately. “I'm going to hook this on the crane!”
Daya and Tilgar, farmwives used to cooking for large groups at harvest time, were helping prepare meals for the
soldiers. Garric couldn't see to his right nor turn his head normally because of his burden, and with extra people it'd be easy to trip over somebody. The cauldron was massive and the present ten gallons of water almost doubled the considerable weight.
“Garric, that's too heavy, I
told
you to fill it with buckets and not bring it full from the well!” Lora cried.
Garric knelt very carefully and brought the cauldron's handle onto the wrought-iron crane that pivoted out from the hearth to hold such vessels. The cooks would immediately start simmering soup stock, for tomorrow and however many later days the ship remained.
The crane groaned as it took the weight. Garric rose and stepped back, suppressing a gasp of relief.
He'd been sure he could carry the full cauldron instead of making many trips with a yoke of buckets into the crowded kitchen. He'd succeeded, but his right calf throbbed and the big muscles of both thighs felt cold and flabby as soon as the stress came off them. This was one of those cases where his mother hadn't been wrong.
Sharina had lighted a lamp because the corner where she was chopping vegetables was shaded from the setting sun. Food preparation would go on long into the night; a stick of light wood in the holder at the top of the firedogs wouldn't be enough for the multiple cooks. Tilgar bumped open the inside door with her hips and turned with her basket of fresh bread into the common room.
“You can walk, I see,” Reise said, catching the door before it could swing closed. “Can you row?”
“If you're going to talk, do it someplace else!” Tilgar said as she pushed past Reise on her return. “If you want to stay here, then I could use four more hands kneading dough.”
Reise smiled faintly. He led Garric into the common room, now full of soldiers and sailors.
“Row?” Garric said. He hunched his shoulders, loosening the muscles, and rubbed his collarbone where the weight of the cauldron had rested.
Reise opened the seaside door for his son and followed him through. “Yes, the dinghy Tarban uses to net bait. Are you up to it?”
“Yes sir,” Garric said. He didn't know what else to say. Reise wasn't an outgoing man at the best of times; even his anger was a cold thing. But Garric had never seen his father in a mood quite like this before.
“Good,” Reise said, “because I'd probably overset us, as you know. Another of the skills I lack. We won't go far, just out beyond where the waves break.”
Firelight gleamed down the beach in both directions as sailors cooked food they'd bought from villagers. The trireme still looked huge to Garric, but he realized that it couldn't carry more than a day or two's rations for so many men. If they'd been at sea ever since the storm, then they had a right to be hungry.
By an unstated decision, the trireme's crew camped here on the beach instead of above the seawall. Barring another great storm the tide wouldn't come so high at this time in the moon's cycle. Despite their segregated living area the sailors weren't without local visitors—many of them women.
Near one of the larger fires a man with one ear missing and a gold ring in the other was dancing to music another sailor plucked on an instrument carved from whalebone. At intervals all the sailors around the fire would shout and the dancer would turn a backflip.
The man's earring and broad grin winked in the firelight. Village girls—and at least one wife Garric could see—cheered in delighted amazement.
The men of the borough watched from a little distance, some of them wearing deep scowls. There'd been a scuffle or two earlier in the day, but there were too many men in the trireme's crew for the villagers to make real trouble. For as long as the ship remained at Barca's Hamlet, the women would make the choice of where they spent their time and what they did. Afterward, well, there'd be shouts and very likely violence within families; but you couldn't expect girls
to behave normally when such an exotic wonder appeared on the beach.
The dinghy was upended on the seawall below Tarban's house, well down the beach. Garric untied the painter from a peg hammered between two courses of stone to hold the little boat against winds and unusually high tides.
The painter was frayed. Tarban had been lucky that the storm hadn't snatched off his dinghy, leaving him with the peg and a tag of rope.
Garric righted the boat and lifted it by the bow thwart. “Should I take the other end?” Reise asked.
“Just bring the oars,” Garric said with a shake of his head. He began to drag the dinghy seaward. There were no good ports or even sand beaches on this side of Haft. Boats built here had wear strakes—edge keels—that acted as runners when they slid on the shingle. The strakes could be replaced whenever the harsh gravel beach had worn them down.
Men born in the borough were amazed at Reise's physical ineptitude. He was willing and not weak, at least by town standards, but he could be expected to overset the boat he was rowing—as he'd said—or misharness a carthorse, or even spill a bucket of water he tried to carry. Even when something didn't go wrong, Reise was tense from fear that it would. Garric had come to believe that this fear of looking awkward was the reason for much of the anger that simmered in his father's eyes.
The sea rolled as high as Garric's ankles, then foamed back. The tide had turned an hour ago. Garric met the next wave and shoved the boat out in it. “Jump in the bow quick!” he called to his father.
Reise ran alongside and managed to roll over the gunwale without snagging himself on the oarlock; he even kept hold of the oars, for a wonder. Garric braced the dinghy, now fully afloat, from the next wave, then swung over the stern transom and turned to seat himself. He reached back, took the oars from his father, and stroked powerfully out into the breakers.
It was strange to see dozens of orange bonfires winking
across the beach. Occasionally a dancer or dancers would caper in front of the light. The seawall reflected cheerful cries outward.
“There'll be more coined money in the hamlet than there has been since the days of the north-south coaches when the inn was built,” Reise said. “Provisions will be short for the next month till the crops start to come in, though. You can't eat silver.”
With cold amusement he went on, “The noble procurator said that because they hadn't made provision with a banker on this side of the island, she'd have to pay me with scrip—royal warrants that I could go to the chancellor on Ornifal to redeem for coin. I told her—very politely, of course—that I hoped she liked stewed cabbage for all her meals and didn't mind sleeping in the stables.”
“But if they didn't have money … ?” Garric said, glancing over his shoulder as he rowed.
Reise snorted. “Oh, they had gold,” he said. “Their own rather than the king's, maybe, her and her companion Meder. Nobles like them don't travel without money. It'll be hard enough to change gold without going to Carcosa. As for Ornifal—it'd still be worth my life to show my face in Valles, even if I were willing to make the voyage.”
Garric blinked and felt his face stiffen. He concentrated on his rowing. He'd known his father came from Ornifal and had spent his early life in Valles, the royal capital there; but Reise had never talked about that period, to Garric or to anyone else.
“This is far enough,” Reise said. “Turn around and face me, Garric.”
Garric shipped the oars and shifted his legs to the other side of the thwart he sat on. The dinghy rose and fell slowly, but the breaking water was inshore of them and the empty sky above muted even the rustle of waves on gravel. The moon was past the first quarter. It reflected from the water without really lighting more than the occasional trail of white foam.
“With things the way they are, I have to come out here to expect privacy when I talk to you,” Reise said. He didn't say, “for us to talk”; Garric would have been surprised if he had. “Maybe the things that have happened in the past days are all chance; maybe everything in life is. But …”
He rubbed his forehead with both hands. There was a neatness, a delicacy, to Reise that made Garric think of finches: perfectly formed little birds with smooth feathers and angry dispositions.
Reise raised his head again. “I'm a failure, boy,” he said. “Well, you know that. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn't been so weak.” He snorted bitterly. “I might better wish that I'd never been born.”
“Sir?” Garric said. “I've … Nobody thinks of you as weak, sir.”
He spread his arms to either side, holding the oars steady against the gunwales as the dinghy rocked in the swells. It gave him something to concentrate on to avoid listening, really
listening
, to what his father was saying.
Reise smiled again, an expression as faint as the moonlight on his smooth cheeks. “Nobody takes me for a fool in a bargain, you mean?” he said. “That's not what
I
mean, though. I've never been able to say no to a woman who begged me. I had to leave Valles because of that, and I had to leave Carcosa as well.”
His smile became as thin and cold as a winter breeze. “And I'm married to Lora, of course. That too.”
“Sir, you left Carcosa in the Troubles; there's not weakness in that,” Garric said. He looked at the purse on his father's belt, not his face. In a desperate attempt to change the subject he went on, “I've never understood what the Troubles were about, and why the count and countess were killed.”
Reise chuckled with something close to real amusement. “Well, boy,” he said, “I was personal secretary to Countess Tera at the time, and I can't tell you why either. The riots started over whether the statue of the Lady or the statue of the Shepherd would be first in the Midsummer Procession.
Lascarg was Commander of the Guard when it happened. He proclaimed himself count when things settled down; some think he was behind it.”
Reise shrugged. “The Guard didn't do much until after a mob had gone through the palace, that's true, but I've always found incompetence was a more likely answer than treachery when something goes wrong. Nobody even knows how Niard and Tera came to be killed. She was in the last hours of her pregnancy, so her death might even have been from natural causes.”
“I didn't know you were the countess's secretary, sir,” Garric said. He concentrated on the minute amount the dinghy rotated as the sea rose and fell.
“‘Were' is the important word there, boy,” his father said coldly. “In Valles I was an attendant to the Lady Belkala bos-Surman, ‘the special friend' as they put it, of the present king's father. What I am now is the innkeeper in Barca's Hamlet, married to a local girl with a tongue like a stone saw.”
“Sir, don't talk like this!” Garric said. His voice rose. Anger cleared his mind of the empty despair he felt as he listened to his father discussing his life with the dispassion of a butcher pulling the guts from a slaughtered pig. “You're a real man who's been places and seen things! There's no one else in this borough who can say that. When I'm an old man here in Barca's Hamlet I'll be telling my grandchildren that
my
father wasn't a hick farmer like everyone they know.”
“No!” Reise said. For the first time Garric heard in his father's voice the fierce determination that had to have been at the core of the man who'd made a success of this run-down inn. “No, you won't say that, boy, because whatever else I may have done I didn't raise you to be a fool!”
He gripped Garric's right wrist and turned the hand over, palm up. “Look at this,” he said. “You've read the epics, boy. When the Isles were great a thousand years ago, when the kingship
meant
something, those kings were men of Haft!
Hands like yours held the sceptre—and the sword, needs be. Never deny your heritage!”
Garric wet his lips with his tongue. A snatch of pipe music came from the beach, broken by the breeze that carried it. It could almost have been birdsong.
“I'm sorry, sir,” Garric said. “I'm sorry. But don't you call yourself a failure either, because you're not.”
Reise squeezed Garric's wrist slightly, then released it and leaned back on his own thwart. “We'll never know what might have been,” he said in a gentler, musing tone. “But many would have made a worse job of what I did do, that's true. Including raising a child to be a man.”
He laughed, to Garric's complete amazement, and added, “And who knows? Maybe Barca's Hamlet needed an innkeeper more than Valence the Second needed a chief steward, which it might have been otherwise.”

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