The Starfollowers of Coramonde (26 page)

That evening
Gil returned to the harbor, doing his best to help a half-loaded Skewerskean
guide the weaving, gloriously drunken Wavewatcher. The harpooner had won a
contest, hurling his throwing iron, in a whaler’s tavern called the Golden
Fluke, and made much of the celebration with his winnings. Gil had tagged along
through the noisy, prosperously frenetic harbor town while the partners made
the bars, paid off their many debts, bellowed songs, pinched cup-girls, gambled
emotionally, traded lies with other Mariners and threw away an amazing amount
of money. They sang him their ballads and chanteys and clamored to hear his,
and taught him the hornpipe. Somewhere along the way—he couldn’t remember
where—he’d acquired a tambourine.

But they’d
torn themselves away from it all when the hour came to hear their Prince. After
boozy negotiating, a dory and boatman were hired for a scandalous sum. The two
chivvied Gil aboard and loaded the cask of ale they’d brought, refreshments for
the cruise. The harbor had filled and overflowed. The fleet was aglitter with
lanterns and torches, spread to the sea-gates and beyond. The sky was still
clear, with a slice of moon among the stars.

An immense
dredging barge, lit with cressets, had been brought to the center of the
harbor, where shipmasters had gathered in hundreds to sit in a profusion of
costumes and attitudes, giving ear. If the popular response was too evenly divided,
it would be the captains who cast ballots to choose what answer the Prince was
to receive.

The boatman
had to work carefully to get near the barge; the water was carpeted with craft,
so that a person could have walked from side to side of the bay. As they
waited, Gil told the two about Landlorn’s concern over Yardiff Bey, and
whatever it was that the sorcerer had done to destroy the Inner Hub.

“Verily,”
agreed Skewerskean, “ten thousand voices in the Outer Hub are whispering to
each other about just that. One hears the words Acre-Fin.”

“Well, I
haven’t heard. What’s that?”

“Acre-Fin,
every bugaboo of the oceans, the fear and dread of sailors made real, the sea’s
violence incarnate, its oldest denizen. New worries call up an old terror, the
fish that eats whole ships and crushes islands. What the truth is, I do not
claim to know, but you will hear that name tonight.”

They were
quiet for a time. Gil, muddled, speculated if that might be the secret of
Arrivals
Macabre.
But no, the attack on the Inner Hub had happened before Bey’d won
his prize at Ladentree.

Wavewatcher
was humming, a fair imitation of a courting walrus. “What was that ditty you
sang, Gil-O?” he rumbled. “About the watering hole on the road to the
underworld that is exclusively for horse soldiers?”

Gil leaned
his head back and broke into “Fiddler’s Green,” dolefully.

Marching past, straight through
Hell, the infantry are seen,

Accompanied by the engineer,
quartermaster and Marine

For none but shades of cavalry
dismount at Fiddler’s Green…

He was
stopped by resonant notes from a massive gong on the barge. Silence pre-empted
every song, greeting, toast and argument, so the only sounds were the creak of
rigging, the knock of hulls and the plaints of sea birds. Landlorn came into
the circle of light; Serene was at his side. Ovation began, but he waved it
aside with the narwhale staff. The Prince’s face was morose in the rippling red
light of the barge’s cressets.

“Salutations,
you Children of the Wind-Roads. I bow to you in your thousands, your
ten-thousands.” He lowered his head in homage. “I bear tidings no Mariner can
like. Though the seas are ours again, there is unchecked danger from the land.
We have ripped the Flaming Wheel down from Death’s Hold, sending southern ships
and sailors to the floor of the ocean, but the evil that moved them still
thrives.”

Murmurs blew
through the crowd, fanning louder.

“I cringe to
see our keels exposed to the cruel rams and rostrums of the enemy. I loathe the
fire that burns our sails, and the wailing that lifts in the quarters of our
slain. Our foemen are gathered, making new plans. It is my thought that we
strike against them now. Thither too went Yardiff Bey, who wrought our every
injury.”

Gil tried to
gauge the Prince’s success from the faces around him. Many were dubious,
drained by their battles. If they rejected Landlorn’s proposal, the American
would have no choice but to rejoin the Crescent Landers.

“The men of
Veganá and the women of Glyffa are on the march,” the Prince was saying, “and
it may be that they will go beside us against the Isle, but we may not rely on
it. With them or not, it falls to us to unseat Salamá from its island.”

Wavewatcher
and Skewerskean were on their feet now, rocking the dory, bellowing support.
Others were doing the same, but many more were quiet, unconvinced. Landlorn was
grim, unwilling to put war-fervor into his people.

“The Inner
Hub is smoke and ruin,” he reminded them. “Many of your kin and shipmates are
sped. There are those who say we have taken our vengeance in full, and I would
not nay-say them; what I ask is not simple recompense. There must be no taint
of the Masters outside their own shores.”

People were
vacillating. Gil was about to ask how much longer this could go on, but
Wavewatcher was pointing into the sky, nearly upsetting the dory. “See! See
there, in the south!”

A line of
light had appeared, like a comet, brightening the night. Its brilliant head
shone; its tail cut a path of splendor down through the darkness, straight at
Shardishku-Salamá. Legends were preserved here, just as in the Crescent Lands.
The same word being taken up at that moment before the Temple of the Bright
Lady was being repeated through the Outer Hub.

“What are you
guys talking about? What’s the Trailingsword?”

They
explained to him as the first shock subsided. It was eloquent of Landlorn’s
status that he had their attention again quickly.

“I cannot
tell what mystical portent this is, though I hear you call it Trailingsword.
Perhaps it is, proclaiming the seven times seven days left to us, or perhaps
not. But it is some great sign, demanding our heed. What is your will? Do we
purge the Isle of Keys?”

The Mariners
split the air with their consent. Cutlasses flashed in the light of the
Trailingsword as Wavewatcher, Skewerskean and the boatman chanted Landlorn’s
name. Joylessly content, Gil studied the Omen. With its pommel-head uppermost,
it mirrored his Ace of Swords, reversed. What had Gabrielle told him months
ago, that the tarot’s meaning in that alignment could be tragedy?

Unimportant
now. It was enough that the Children of the Wind-Roads would sail south.

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul…

Emily Dickinson

“Hope is the Thing with Feathers”

FERRIAN, onetime Champion-at-arms
of the Horse-blooded, Defender of Corrals, was fond of taking a scroll or book
high into the uppermost parts of the library complex at Ladentree.

His wound had
mended slowly, over weeks. He would never lose his limp, but he could walk, and
sit a horse. The Healing Sages had advised him to stay for a time, to complete
his recuperation, and he’d complied, reckoning his role against Salamá ended.
The Trailing-sword had declared as much. Seeing its splendor in the sky each
night, he’d been moved with a profound new mood of hope.

Now he sat
cross-legged in the tower of a silent bell so large a dozen men might have
sheltered beneath it. Its bronze was green, its rope decayed away long ago, for
the Birds of Accord nested nearby. The place had a solemnity that appealed to
Ferrian, a thoughtful freedom he held especial. At times he heard the songs of
the Birds, pure trilling like no other sound in the world. There was an airy
view for miles, and an intimacy with the weather he’d missed in the Chambers of
Healing.

Sitting with
a folio in his lap, he heard the voices of the Birds again. This time there was
unfamiliar cadence to it, a disorderly intrusion of other, shriller notes. He
put the folio aside carefully and rose, pulling himself up with his left hand,
to spare his leg. Following the sounds, he rounded the giant bell to a far
corner of the tower. He trod carefully; rotting boards made treacherous
footing.

Bracing
himself with his left hand and leaning out carefully, he spotted Birds
fluttering at the eaves of a lesser tower, darting in at nests there. Interest
became surprise; they behaved like parents bringing food to their young, but
the Birds of Accord had bred no offspring since they’d been driven out of the
branches of the Lifetree.

The
Horseblooded cocked an ear and listened. The shriller, more disorderly notes
came from beneath the eaves. He recovered the folio and hurried off to find
Silverquill. The Senior Sage had been a willing tutor, anxious to hear about
life on the High Ranges. It was now their habit to seek each other’s company
when the mood struck, a mutual privilege.

Silverquill
was politely skeptical of Ferrian’s claim that the Birds had hatched young.
Still, the old savant dropped what he was doing—comparing several copies from
original manuscripts of
Arrivals Macabre
in an effort to learn what
secret Bey had been after—and went off with the brawny Horseblooded to see.

They
eventually found the correct face of the right tower. The issue was partially
settled before they got there; high chattering of young Birds filled the
confines of the peaked roof. They edged carefully around a last beam, and saw
slots of light from the eaves. Birds of Accord fed and nurtured impossibly
small, vocal hatchlings.

Silverquill
shook his head, dumfounded. “This is unprecedented! The Birds may breed only in
the branches of the Lifetree, and it was uprooted and destroyed an age ago,
when the Great Blow fell.”

“Demonstrably
untrue.” Ferrian grinned wryly.

“Even so. But
that is no explanation.” They drew back, so as not to disturb that amazing
scene.

Ferrian was
snapping his fingers distractedly. “The Birds roosted here when their Lifetree
was destroyed, and in all these years never bred. But now they have; it remains
to discern why. How long is it betwixt their mating and the laying of eggs, and
from that unto the hatching?”

“Who may say?
Yet, let us venture that those are much as with other birds. What is your
thought?”

“I bethink me
of only one incident here in any reasonable span of time, and that is when Bey
came, and we after him.”

The Senior
Sage stroked his trim beard. “Aye, yet what can that mean? Surely the small
glamour he used on Gil MacDonald cannot be the influence that has affected the
Birds. Nor can it be attributed to the Guardian, with its fiery destruction,
nor to Andre deCourteney’s Dismissal; they are of no nature to cause the Birds
of Accord to beget.”

“Perhaps the
terror of the day? Many of them perished from that.”

“All the less
reason to think it made them bring forth young.”

The
Horseblooded’s lips pursed. “What else then? I was wounded, and did not
participate in what came after.”

Silverquill
studied the weathered rafters, rubbing his thumb across his Adam’s apple. “The others
came the next morning, the Trustee and her troops and Lord Angorman. They all
met together in the rose garden and conferred. Thereafter, they parted ways.”

“Hmm, that
seems of no relevance either. Perhaps we are not—”

“Hold!” The
savant’s face lit excitedly. “There was another thing of it. All those
combatants were under arms, and I bade them put those aside; Ladentree had seen
enough of weapons. When Lord Angorman hesitated, the Trustee put him at ease,
laying her Crook of office with Red Pilgrim, against a trellis. I remember
seeing the Birds of Accord flitting round and round, alighting and hopping
about, even on the Crook itself.”

Ferrian’s
brow knit. “You are theorizing that the Trustee’s staff is crafted of wood of
the Lifetree? She never gave hint of that.”

“True. Well,
but, at least we have a glimmer of what drew the sorcerer here. The Lifetree is
connected with it; armed with that fact, we may plunge into the assembled
knowledge of Ladentree, and seek the rest.”

The tall
Horseblooded concurred eagerly. The Trailingsword had set many things in
motion, he saw. “Two men are often too many to keep a secret from Salamá; more
is too great a risk, for Bey may yet have ears here. This hunt across paper and
parchment falls to you and me, dear mentor.”

For all, that here on earth we
dreadful hold,

Be but bugs to fearen babes
withal,

Compared to the creatures in the
sea’s enthrall…

Edmund Spenser

Faerie Queene

COMMITTED to one more trial of
war, the Mariners amazed Gil with their unanimity.

Roping
needles darted unceasingly, turning out hills of extra sail. Fish and meat were
salted, fruit and vegetables barreled or dried, medicines prepared and leagues
of line and hawser run from the ropewalks of the Outer Hub. Shipwrights,
pressed for impossible labors, delivered.

Forges
clanged and glowed by day and night. From them poured new cutlasses, arrow- and
spearheads, shields, grappling hooks, axes and boarding pikes, and armor and
helmets hastily done up from metal lozenges on leather. Aboard the ships that
mounted them, fighting engines were refurbished. The Mariners prepared their
volatile fluid in giant vats for defense of the harbor. The stuff’s base
appeared to be naptha, but the seafarers had their own combinant secrets.