Читать книгу Warhost of Vastmark - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 11

The twins stowed away. No one discovered their absence until dawn, when the luggers sailed out to fish. By then, the bayside mooring that had secured the Khetienn bobbed empty. The line of the horizon cut the sea’s edge in an unbroken band, Arithon’s sloop Talliarthe long gone.

The widow’s tearful questions raised no answers. No one had seen the children slip into the water by moonlight the previous night. No small, dripping forms had been noticed, climbing the wet length of a mooring chain, and no dory was missed from the beach.

‘They could be anywhere,’ Jinesse cried, her thin shoulders cradled in Tharrick’s burly arms and her face pressed against his broad chest. Memories of Innish’s quayside impelled her to jagged edged grief. ‘Ten years of age is far too young to be out and about in the world.’

Tharrick stroked the blonde hair she had been too distraught to bind up. ‘They’re not alone,’ he assured her. ‘If they hid in the sloop, they’ll come to no harm. Arithon cares for them like an older brother.’

‘What if they stowed aboard the Khetienn?’ Jinesse’s voice split. ‘Ath preserve them, Southshire’s a sailor’s port! Even so young, Fiark could be snatched and sold to a trade galley! And Feylind -’ She ran out of nerve to voice her anxieties over brothels.

‘No.’ Tharrick grasped her tighter and gave her a gentle shake. ‘Arithon’s two most trusted hands sailed with that brigantine. Think soundly! His discipline’s forthright. His men fear his temper like Dharkaron himself, or believe this, I’d have found my throat slit on the first dark night since he freed me.’

Every labourer in the yard knew their master’s fondness for the twins. The measure of his censure when rules were transgressed, or a mob grew unruly with drink, was an experience never to be forgotten. Arithon’s response to Tharrick’s rough handling had been roundly unpleasant, had left joiners twice his size and strength cowed and cringing. It would be worth a man’s life to misuse the widow’s children, or allow any harm to befall them.

While Jinesse’s composure crumpled into sobs, Tharrick bundled her close and swept her out of the fog and back to the snug comfort of her cottage.

‘It’s eighty leagues overland to Southshire!’ he cried as she lunged to snatch her shawl and chase the fish wagon. ‘You won’t make it off the Scimlade peninsula before that army’s sealed the roads.’

Which facts held an unkindly truth. Made by plodding oxcart, such a journey would take weeks. A fishing lugger might reach the south-coast in a fortnight, but to seek out the Khetienn with an army infesting Alland was to jeopardize Arithon’s anonymity. Jinesse sank down at her kitchen table, her face muffled in her hands and her shoulders bowed in despair. If the twins were away with the Talliarthe, their position with the Shadow Master would become the more endangered through a search to attempt their recovery.

Tharrick’s large hands rubbed the nape of her neck. ‘I share your concern. You won’t be alone. Once the little brigantine’s launched, I’ll take it upon myself to sail to Southshire.’ The promise felt right, once made. ‘Whether your young ones have gone there with Khetienn, or if they’ve thrust their bothersome presence upon Arithon, I’ll track them both down and see them safe.’

The days after solstice passed in an agony of worry for Jinesse. She could not confide the extent of her distress to the villagers, who knew Arithon only as a respectable outsider with a talent for music and well-founded interests in shipbuilding.

The boardinghouse landlady awarded her moping short shrift. ‘Yon man is no fool, never mind the fat drunk who keeps his company. He’ll bring your twins back, well scolded and chastened, and they’ll be none the worse for their escapade.’

Tharrick, who knew the dire facts behind her fear, lent whatever comfort he could. Through the labour that consumed him day and night at the shipyard, he took his meals at the widow’s, and sat up over candlelight in the hours before dawn when the ceaseless tension spoiled her sleep.

They spoke of the lives they had led, Jinesse married to a man too spirited for her retiring nature to match, and the emptiness of the house since his boisterous presence had been claimed untimely by the sea. Tharrick sharpened her carving knives, flame light playing over knuckles grown scarred from his former years of armed service. The blades across the whetstone slid in natural habit, as sword steel often had before battle. Yet his voice held very little of regret as he talked about a girl who had married a rival, then the heartbreak that led him to enrol in the duke’s guard. Summer campaigns against Kalesh or Adruin had kept him too busy for homelife after that.

They discussed the twins, who had inherited their father’s penchant for wider horizons. Often as not, the conversation ended with the widow shedding tears on Tharrick’s shoulder.

The shortened winter days passed in swift succession to the ring of caulker’s hammers; and then in a rush that allowed neither respite nor relief, the small hull was complete and afloat. She was named the Shearfast. In a ferocious hurry that hazed the villagers to unease, the few men still employed at the shipyard fitted her out with the temporary masts and rigging to ready her for blue water.

The grey, rainy morning her sails were bent on, the first war galleys breasted the northern horizon.

Ashore, like wasps stirred up by the onset of cataclysm, the four hired men still caught on the Scimlade spit raced in grim haste to carry through their master’s intent to fire what remained of his shipworks. Damp weather hampered them. Even splashed in pitch and turpentine, the thatch on the sheds was slow to catch. By the time the last outbuilding shot up in flames, the oncoming fleet drew in close. The eye could distinguish their banners and blazons, the devices of Avenor and Alestron in stitched gold, on fields red as rage, and ice blue. The clarion cry of trumpets and shouted orders from the officers pealed over the wind-borne boom of drums. The oarsmen on the galleys quickened stroke to battle speed, thrashing spray in cold drifts on the gusts.

Thigh-deep by the shoreline with a longboat held braced against the combers, the nimble little sailhand hired in to captain Shearfast screamed to hurry the men who sprinted down the strand and threw themselves splashing through the shallows. Tharrick had time to notice the widow’s forlorn figure, bundled in black shawls by the dunes, as he hurled himself over the gunwales and grabbed up oars.

He knew Jinesse well enough to guess the depth of her misery, and to ache in raw certainty she was weeping.

‘Stroke!’ yelled the grizzled captain. He balanced like a monkey in the stern seat as the longboat surged ahead to the timed dig of her crew. ‘Didn’t flay my damned knuckles patching leftover canvas to see our spars get flamed in the cove!’

A crewman who muscled the craft toward deep water cursed a skinned wrist, then flung a harried look behind. The galleys had gained with a speed that left him wide-eyed. ‘Must have demons rowing.’

Tharrick dragged hard on his loom. ‘Those are Duke Bransian’s warships. His oarsmen won’t be a whipped bunch of convicts, but mercenaries standing short shifts.’

‘Rot them,’ the hired captain gasped through snatched breaths. ‘Just row and beg luck sends a squall line.’

The newly launched hull wore a lugger’s rig. In dimmed visibility, half-seen through dirty weather, she might be passed over as a fishing craft. Distance offered a slim hope to save her. Once she lay hull down over the horizon, the duke’s fleet would see scant reason to turn and pursue what would look like a hard-run fishing smack.

Tharrick shut his eyes and threw all his weight into the pull of his oar. Better than his fugitive companions, he knew the efficiency of Alestron’s training and assault tactics. Cold horror spurred his incentive. He might suffer a fate more ruinous than flogging should his former commanders retake him. This time he would be caught beyond doubt in collusion with Arithon s’Ffalenn.

By the time the longboat slewed under the Shearfast’s sleek side, the burn scars on Tharrick’s palms were broken open with blisters. He winced through the sting as he clambered on board, then snarled curses with the seamen as he shouldered his share and caught hemp slivers hauling on halyards. The temporary masts carried no head-sails, only two yards rigged fore and aft with an unwieldy, loose-footed lugsail. The sorry old canvas made over from a wreck was patched and dingy with mildew.

The captain summed up Shearfast’s prospects with language that damned in rich epithets. ‘Bitch’ll hide herself roundly in a fogbank or storm, but lumber like a spitted pig to weather. Shame that. Hull’s built on glorious lines. Rig her out decent, she’d fly.’

‘She’ll need to fly,’ groused the deckhand who returned at speed from unshackling the mooring chain. ‘They’re onto us, busy as sharks to bloody meat.’

As the yards were hauled around squealing to brace full to the wind, Tharrick saw the oncoming galleys deploy in smooth formation, one group to give chase and harry, and a second to turn wide and flank them. In a straight race of speed, Shearfast was outmatched.

The grizzled little captain bounded aft to the helm, a whipstaff that, given time and skilled carpentry, would be replaced by cables and wheel. ‘We’ve got one advantage,’ he said, then spat across the rail in madcap malice. ‘We know the reefs. They don’t. Fiends take the hindmost. Stay their course to sound the mark, and they’ve lost us.’

Wind cracked loose canvas, then kicked sails in taut curves with a whump. Shearfast bore off and gathered way, a pressure wave of wrinkled water forced against her lee strakes as the lugsails began sluggishly to draw. The quiet, cove harbour of Merior fell behind, while east gusts spat rain through the rigging. Tharrick did not look back, nor allow himself to think of other chases in the past, when he had held a captaincy among the troops aboard the galleys.

A hare before wolves, Shearfast wore ship and spread her patched rig on a reach to drive downcoast. The men Arithon had entrusted to crew his last vessel owned the nerve to stand down Dharkaron’s Chariot. On guts and desperation, they shouldered the challenge of an untried hull, shook her down in an ill-balanced marriage with ungainly sails, set at odds with her keel and the free-running grace of her lines. The drag of the whipstaff to hold her on course would have daunted the strength of most helmsmen. Her captain bared teeth and muscled her brute pull. Mastered through wits and determination, and an unerring gut instinct for seamanship, Shearfast danced a dainty course through the reefs. She flirted with the wind and courted the lee shore like a rich maid in rags, caught slumming in dangerous company.

Behind her, voracious, the galleys chewed away her lead in a flying white thrash of timed oars.

The first of them ran aground on a coral head in a grinding, grating screech of smashed timbers. Like a back-broken insect, her looms waved and splashed in clacking disunity, then snarled in misdirected stroke. Shouts re-echoed across the open water. A bugle wailed a frantic call for aid.

‘Hah!’ Shearfast’s captain loosed a wicked laugh. ‘There’s one belly-up and another bogged down to tend her.’

In the waist, the one crewman not busy easing sheet-lines strung a bow and began wrapping tips onto fire arrows. His stripped palms bound in cloth, Tharrick passed lint and short lengths of twine to tie the wisps in place. Fitful drizzle added drops to the sweat misted over his face. Cold water fingered runnels down his collar. He leaned to the buck of the deck. The captain steered to headings as gnarled and tortuous as any chased prey, with the galleys relentlessly gaining.

A curtain of rainfall dusted hazed mercury over the narrowing span of sea left between them. The captain shot a hurried, wild glance at the clouds, leaden and low-bellied as a strumpet’s hiked petticoats above the snapped crests of the whitecaps. The squall which struck now would bring no salvation. Any gain through reduced visibility would come offset by increased risk. Underwaters frayed to froth by driving bands of precipitation, the reefs Shearfast skirted would be treacherously hidden, the greener shallows that warned of submerged sandbars and coral hammered out into uniform grey.

Rising winds slewed and heeled her, close-hauled. The heavy, broad lugsails made her sloppy, and the rooster tails clawed by sideslip at each gust showed the Shearfast could not maintain leeway against the coast. The mazed shoals that granted her marginal protection would turn forces and present renewed hazard. If she wrecked or ran aground, no man aboard held false hope. To be stranded ashore was to die, first run down by tracking dogs, then butchered on the swords of Skannt’s headhunters.

A second galley struck with a thud against a sandbar, this one near enough to savour the chaos as the consternation of her crewmen resounded in shrill oaths across the water. A horn pealed in warning. The ship just behind her backwatered her stroke, then glanced off her exposed side in screaming collision. Oarshafts sheared off, to the cries of crushed men as leaded beech stove their chests like so many rows of burst barrels. Blood painted streaks down the oarports, and the drummers abandoned their beat.

‘Just hope she’s beached hard enough they’ll lighten the chase manning windlasses and kedging her off,’ said the captain, licking salt off his teeth in a bent of incurable optimism.

Of fifteen galleys packed with troops that converged to tear into Shearfast, three left disabled was scarcely a change in bad odds.

‘Well, what good is moping,’ snapped the captain to the crewman who pointed this out. ‘Have to find some joy to cheer about. Not for any stinking galleyman’s fun will I pass the Fatemaster’s Wheel with a stupid, glum look on my mug.’

The pursuit had slowed behind, fleet captains warned by the two crippled vessels to thread the narrow channel with more care; the strike force split off on an oblique angle to flank and then intercept were far enough away that the blurring, heavy deluge had dulled their rapacious outlines.

‘I’d take that squall now and chance the damned reefs,’ confided one crewman to Tharrick above the hissed spray off the waves.

In blind answer, the cloudburst redoubled and drummed the decks silver. For the first moment since the galleys turned their course to give chase, there seemed a faint glimmer of hope.

Then a horn call blared above the thunder of strained canvas. Through splashing spindrift thrown off the forecastle, a shouted challenge hailed the Shearfast. ‘Heave to and surrender all hands!’

‘Over my still bleedin’ carcass,’ cracked Arithon’s game captain from the helm. ‘Old storm’s going to hide us, and those poor harried bastards hard-set on our tail have to know it.’ He yelled for the men at the braces to belay their lines and move forward. ‘Jump lively! I want bearings on every shoal you can see off our bow.’

Even as the pair raced up the forward companionway, a light bolt arced out. It scribed from the rambade of the hindmost galley, a line that unreeled like incandescent wire to a shriek of hissed protest through the thickened fall of rain.

‘It’s the Prince of the West, curse him!’ Shearfast’s helmsman dragged the whipstaff alee in last-ditch, defiant evasion.

The vessel slewed, mired by her yards and too sluggish. Lysaer’s light-cast assault struck the straining canvas of the stern lugsail and seeded a starburst of fire.

The foresail still left whole to draw wind veered the Shearfast off heading to starboard, and stempost and rudder and the timbers of her quarter slammed with a crunch into coral. Sparks showered the deck and spat answering flame from fresh oakum. Then the evil, swollen clouds opened up and unburdened. The downpour unleashed in a thundering cascade and thrashed out the burgeoning conflagration.

Through smoke and white water, the captain leaped from the helm, one arm pressed to bruised ribs. The whipstaff had taken charge upon impact and dealt him a buffeting clout. Half-stunned and labouring, he grunted phrases of blistering invective. Then, above the whining howl of wind and the battering of the squall, he dispatched swift instructions to his men. ‘She’s a loss! No use but to fire her, and damn the weather now. We’ll have to use pitch flares and torch her sorry timbers belowdecks.’

Tharrick stumbled as a crewman blundered into him and shoved the guard of a cutlass in his hand. ‘You’ll need this. It’ll be hand-to-hand when they board us. Do as you like for yourself. The rest of us agree, we don’t fancy being taken alive.’

Appalled to chills through the cataract of water, Tharrick shouted, ‘Ath in his pity! The duke’s men aren’t merciful, but hope isn’t lost. While the hull burns, the storm could still hide your escape.’

The sailhand paused, eyes narrowed with anger. ‘Won’t risk a capture. I’d rather die fighting on open water then running like a dog through the briar.’

‘If you had cover,’ Tharrick broke in, ‘if I gave you the means to delay them, you might row for the beachhead. Claim sanctuary at the hostel of Ath’s Brotherhood and no enemy of Arithon’s could touch you.’

‘Speak your piece and fast,’ snapped the captain, arrived that moment in the waist. ‘We have only minutes. I’ll burn this blighted vessel to her waterline with all of us aboard before she’s risked to enemies as a prize.’

So simple, Tharrick thought; the hoodwink he proposed should be obvious. He steeled his resolve and explained. ‘I was the duke’s man. I wrecked your master’s shipyard. Who could believe I would be here alive, except as Arithon’s bound prisoner?’

‘Right, aye.’ The captain grinned through the stumps of front teeth, chipped in some past scrap in a brothel. His levity faded. ‘Ye’d do this for us? It’s fair risky. The hull’s to be left blazing regardless.’

‘Do it.’ Tharrick forced reason over fear, though his nerves felt dissolved into jelly. ‘Who’s to know my loyalty ever changed? If the duke’s men find me before I burn, there’s every likely chance I can mislead them long enough for the Brotherhood to grant you Ath’s protection.’

‘Right aye, belowdecks we go, then.’ The captain snapped out his rigging knife and slashed off a sheetline for binding the volunteer victim. Like all blue-water seamen, he could tie knots in his sleep. Over his ongoing rattle of orders, and the crackle of pitch flares, and the hellish, drowning pound of rain on wooden decking, Tharrick found himself thrust down a companionway and lashed in total helplessness to a hatch ring over his head.

‘All right, listen up!’ cracked the captain. ‘I stay, and one other. We’ll draw straws to see who bids for shore leave.’

Tharrick voiced an immediate protest, cut silent as the captain yanked the sash off his waist to twist into use as a gag. ‘There has to be a sacrifice,’ he said as he tied off the cloth in desperation. ‘If we leave an empty ship, your place will be questioned. Then they’re sure to mount a search for survivors.’

A brisk hand clapped his shoulder, while the sailhands drew lots for the longboat. ‘Off we go, mate, and Dharkaron avenge.’ The captain threw Tharrick a bright-eyed, fierce wink. ‘We’ll send prayers from Ath’s sanctuary, and me from past the Wheel. Bless you for bravery. It’s grand luck yell need. Ye’ve charted fair course fer bad waters.’

Shearfast’s crewman raced light-footed from the hold. Behind, for cold necessity, they left the whispered lick of flame and a poisonous, pitch-fed haze of smoke. Tharrick coughed. His throat closed and his eyes ran. The thick fumes sickened him to dizziness. He felt as though he were falling headlong through the very gates of Sithaer. Driven senseless by the metallic taste of fear, dazed beyond reason by poisoned air, he did not remember giving way to terrified screams, muffled to whimpers by the gag. Nor did he keep any shred of raw courage as he wrenched like a beast at the rope ties.

Awareness became wrapped in an inferno. Skin knew again the blistering kiss of agony as the red snap of fire chewed through the planks overhead. The thumps of a distant scuffle made no sense, nor the mazed clang of steel, followed by the defiant last shout of the gamecock captain. ‘Kill the prisoner!’

The cry that bought Tharrick his chance for salvation rang through the steel clash of weapons. A fallen body thudded, kicking in nerve-fired death throes. Then a dying man choked out a rattling gasp and slammed through the companionway door, the blade through his chest a glistening reflection doused in fresh running blood.

‘Merciful Ath, hurry on!’ someone cried with the bite of authority. ‘They’ve got some wretch lashed in the hold!’

Two officers in gold braid kicked past the downed corpse. They staggered across canted decking and barked into bulkheads, fumbling through the murky, coiled smoke to cut his bonds. Tharrick scarcely felt the hands that grasped and steadied him onto his feet. Cramped double and choking, he lost consciousness as they dragged him like a gutted fish up a reeling companion-way into clear air and rainfall.

Whether he lay in the hands of the duke’s officers or those of the Prince of the West, he had no awareness left to care.