Servant of the Dragon (16 page)

"No," Ilna said. She didn't snarl because she knew the offer was well-meant as well as being polite. "This is my monument to those who died while I lived. I can't take your money, any more than I could sell their bones."

She smiled. The expression was terrible. "Not that their bones are in any place they could be found now, I'm afraid."

No one spoke for a moment. Ilna cleared her throat and went on, "However, there's a favor I would appreciate if it's practical. I too would like to get to Erdin quickly."

She sneered mentally at her words. The truth was that she wanted to leave Valles, where seeing Liane and Garric together ate her bowels like a cancer.

"If there's room on your vessel that I could buy passage...?"

"Buy, no," Lord Tadai said. "But to travel as an honored member of my suite, yes of course. The ships leave tomorrow afternoon, however."

"It can't be too soon for me," Ilna said grimly. "It can't be too soon."

CHAPTER SEVEN

"Pull for the wife who's glad to see the back of you!" sang the scarred sailor calling the cadence. He wasn't one of the ship's officers: Ilna noted that each of them wore a broad leather belt as a mark of authority. She supposed the chanteyman just had experience and a good voice.

"Pull!" roared the lines of men on the ropes.

The two triremes had been rigged from the Arsenal and loaded with the extensive baggage of Tadai bor-Tadiman and his suite. Now seamen were sliding the first of the vessels down the ramps of the drying shed.

Ilna stood on the pier, waiting with the other passengers to board when the ships were afloat. She held her own baggage—a cloak rolled tightly over an extra tunic, and a modicum of cheese and hard biscuit because she didn't care to be without provisions of her own in event of shipwreck. Besides food, the only things she needed in life were yarn and a loom. She'd be able to buy them in Erdin.

"Pull for the child who'll never see your face again!" sang the cadence caller. The sheds were supported by pillars instead of walls so that air could circulate freely among the warships' slender pine hulls. His voice echoed down the colonnades, becoming at last a whispering descant to itself.

"Pull!" bawled the men on the ropes.

The keel of the trireme smoked and squealed even though workmen had tallowed the grooved skidway before they began drawing the vessel down it. Ilna smiled faintly to watch the mechanism that cranked the ship forward while the chanting sailors lunged in place against the drag. The tracery of ropes and pulleys wasn't as complex as the patterns she wove, but the sheer scale of the hawsers gave it a certain majesty.

And perhaps some thing or some one wove with human lives. Ilna could only hope that whoever that was, God or Fate or Chance, knew what it—

She smiled more broadly.

—what
She
was doing.

"Pull for the girl who's waiting at the other shore!" the chanteyman sang. He was a short fellow, less than a hand's breadth taller than Ilna herself, but he had broad shoulders over a trim waist, and he strutted like a cockerel as he called cadence.

He saw Ilna looking in his direction. Sweeping off the bandanna he wore as a cap, he waved it to her in a flourish. Her face went glacially cold.

"Pull!" called the sailors, hauling on the ropes.

Lord Tadai stood with a group of aides and the two ship's captains. The latter wore helmets and gorgets of polished brass. Neither of them looked any more nautical than Ilna herself was, and she didn't even
like
sea travel.

She thought,
"Be fair. Ypu don't like most things
," and grinned at herself.

Tadai's niece Merota wore what her minders had been told was proper garb for a sea voyage: tunic and breeches of tightly-woven linen, waxed and secured to her wrists and ankles by ties. The poor child must be sweltering! You had to be rich to be that
stupidly
miserable, though the poor seemed to manage the business well enough.

"Pull for the fish that're waiting for their bite of you!"

Merota was under the charge of a severe-looking companion whose black garments looked equally uncomfortable but weren't obviously intended to be waterproof. The companion suddenly pushed through the cordon of Blood Eagles around the delegation, shouting to a sailor aboard the slowly-moving trireme. Apparently he was doing something—or she thought he was—to her baggage.

"Pull!"

Merota glanced sideways at her uncle, saw that he was occupied in his discussion, and ducked through the guards. One of the Blood Eagles started to grab her, then snatched his hand back. They weren't baby-sitters, and Lady Merota bor-Roriman was a noblewoman—albeit a young one.

The pier made was of coarse volcanic stone. Years of foot traffic and wheeled carts had worn it down, but the stone's porous surface gave a good grip even now when wet from an early-morning rainshower. Merota's sandals had gold appliques and bells on the upturned toes, a concession to fashion even when the rest of her costume was so absurdly 'practical'. Her feet skipped
skritch
/tinkle,
skritch
/tinkle, as she trotted quickly toward Ilna.

"Good morning, Mistress Ilna," Merota said with a little bow. "I'm glad that you're travelling with us."

"Good morning," Ilna replied. She wasn't going to call this child
Lady
Merota. The sudden realization that perhaps Merota expected the honorific hardened Ilna's expression and froze her tongue, though she hadn't intended to be unfriendly.

The girl looked nervous and miserable. With a bright falseness that should have been beyond her years, she said, "Will you be boarding the same ship as Uncle Tadai and me, mistress? It's the
Terror
."

Ilna looked at Merota in puzzlement. Probing questions got Ilna's attention in an unpleasant fashion, but the girl seemed so desperately earnest.... "I really don't know," Ilna said. "That's up to your uncle and I suppose the ships' officers. I rather assumed I'd be travelling on the other ship with the soldiers."

Tadai's embassy required two triremes. The warships were being used to carry passengers because they didn't depend on the vagaries of the winds, which at high summer on the Inner Sea were whimsical at best. The problem with triremes—apart from the pay of the oarsmen—was that a full crew of 170 rowers, plus a score of officers and riggers for the sail, completely filled the belly of the vessel. Tadai—Garric, really—had gotten around that by manning only one of the three oar-banks, but even so the enormous paraphernalia of a high nobleman's suite was more than a single ship could accommodate.

In addition to Tadai's dozen civilian aides, a rank of thirty Blood Eagles—a tenth of the royal bodyguard—accompanied him. The Blood Eagles weren't intended to protect the ambassador from a real attack. The Earl of Sandrakkan had several thousand troops in his standing army, and it took nothing away from the courage and skill of Garric's bodyguards to say that they couldn't win against odds of a hundred to one.

Their presence with Lord Tadai emphasized his status, however: only those closest to Prince Garric would be accompanied by members of his black-armored elite. Even so, Tadai and his friends wouldn't want to be bothered by the presence of uncouth soldiers during the voyage. There wasn't much they could do about the presence of uncouth sailors, of course.

Ilna's smile didn't have anything to do with Merota, but the girl took it as a friendly sign anyway and said with obvious relief, "Oh, mistress, won't you please come with me? I'd so like you to be with me!"

"Why on earth do you say that?" Ilna said. Surprise washed away all her previous grim thoughts about rank and society.

Merota opened her mouth to answer. At that moment the black-clad woman noticed the girl was gone. She let out a wordless shriek, then called, "Lady Merota! Lady—ah, there you are!"

She plunged through the waiting Blood Eagles. "You come away from that person immediately!"

Ilna smiled. The girl squeezed closer to her, but Ilna wasn't really aware of Merota for the moment. "Excuse me, mistress, but did I hear you address me as, 'that person'?" Ilna asked in a pleasant voice.

"I—" said the companion. Ilna had stepped forward to meet her. The older woman was probably twice Ilna's size, tall and thick-boned if not precisely fat, but at the instant they looked like cicada facing a small, furious scorpion.

The companion stopped. "I'm Mistress Kaline, Lady Merota's tutor," she said. "I'm responsible for the child's safety and instruction."

The shriek had drawn Tadai's attention. He looked around, frowned; then, realizing the confrontation for what it was, strode over with a professionally opaque expression. His suite and the guards followed like the wake foaming behind a vessel's cutwater.

"Mistress Ilna," Tadai said as he swept past Kaline, "I hope you're not being inconvenienced?"

"
Her
inconvenienced!" said the older woman.

"Not at all," Ilna said. "Your niece and I were having a pleasant conversation. Is there any problem with that?"

"Of course not," the plump nobleman said in relief. "Mistress Kaline, come away if you please."

He made a curt motion with his right hand, as though he had a gaff in it and was jerking the tutor along with him.

"But...," said Mistress Kaline. Tadai glared at her. One of the aides, himself an older man, reached for the tutor. She hopped away from Ilna to avoid the touch of the fellow's hands. "But I don't understand," she wailed.

"Obviously," Ilna murmured with a satisfied expression. Merota giggled and moved up from behind to beside her again.

"
You
understand things," the girl said. "I knew that as soon as I saw your tapestry. I don't understand anything at all."

Merota's cool demeanor broke. "Oh!" she wailed. "I'm so afraid. They tell me I'm going to find a husband in Erdin, and, and..."

"Your uncle tells you that?" Ilna said. She felt cold again, and her eyes followed Lord Tadai as he resumed his discussion with the captains.

"Mistress Kaline did," the girl said. "But it's true. My parents died. We had a house in Valles. The queen tried to buy it, but my parents wouldn't sell. Then the house burned and everyone in it, but I was off at school... and the queen bought the land to build her own mansion."

"Ah," said Ilna, without emphasis. "I've heard something about that. The queen is dead now."

"But so are my parents," said Merota reasonably. "There wasn't much money left after everything burned. Uncle Tadai's been taking care of me, but Mistress Kaline says it's only common sense that he marry me to a wealthy man who wants a noble wife."

"Ah," Ilna repeated. Her face had no more expression than a block of marble. Her eyes were on Lord Tadai, talking with his fellows. The tutor stood with her back to the others in feigned disregard for all that was taking place around her.

Tadai wasn't a bad man, as these things were judged. So far as Ilna was concerned that proved how low the standards of judgment were, since they permitted a fellow to sell his young niece to a newly-rich foreigner to save himself the trouble of looking after the child himself.

The first of the two triremes was fully afloat in the pool below the drying shed. Sailors were casting off the hauling tackle and making her fast bow and stern to the pier. Some of the aides started for the boarding bridge.

"Hold on!" called one of the brass-helmeted captains. "Wait till the
Ravager
's in the water and the crews're aboard. They'll climb right over you if you don't."

The aides stepped back, murmuring. Had they thought the scores of oarsmen would somehow levitate to their benches without disturbing the passengers thronging the vessel's limited deckspace?

"What do you think about my being married, mistress?" Merota said, staring up at Ilna's rigid face.

Ilna looked at her. "I don't think very much of it," she said. "But neither do I think that it's any of my business."

The crewmen were carrying the drag tackle to the other trireme. There was a noticeable sullenness among them. Because the vessels were part-crewed, the effort of launching was much greater for the men doing it. There seemed to be more to it than that, though.

The chanteyman caught Ilna's eye and gave her another ironic salute. She ignored him.

A squad of Blood Eagles approached the pier at a swinging pace. More passengers? That seemed pointless, but Ilna didn't pretend to understand things that were meant for show instead of for use.

There were several hundred spectators lining the levee on either side of the drying sheds. Some of them were simply layabouts who had no better place to be of a morning, but most were friends and kinsmen of sailors going off in the ships. The wives and friends of members of Tadai's suite were with the men on the pier, but the guards kept commoners at a distance.

Ilna thought about her friends. Sharina had been snatched off no one knew where. Cashel gone after her. Which left Garric, of course, but Garric had important things to do.

And Garric had Liane....

"May I call you 'Ilna'?" the girl asked. Her soft voice broke into Ilna's bleak revery.

"Of course!" she snapped. "What else would you—oh, sorry."

Ilna squatted so that she looked up rather than down as she met the girl's eyes. "There's no need for friends to call each other 'mistress'," she said. "Please call me 'Ilna,' Merota."

She cleared her throat. "Or would you prefer to be called Lady Merota?" she asked.

The child laughed brightly. Ilna hadn't realized she was capable of it. "Oh, no!" she cried. "Mistress Kaline calls me that all the time and I want to scream!"

Ilna straightened her legs and stood. "And as for helping you," she said, "I come from a place where people expect to help one another. I'll do what I can for you, and you'll do the same for me. That's how it works."

The squad of soldiers had stopped near their fellows around Lord Tadai. The commander was Captain Besimon; Ilna recognized him from previous meetings. One of the Blood Eagles came toward Ilna and the girl, his shield strapped to his back and a broad-bladed javelin in his hand. What on earth was he—