The Ships of Merior

Which should not have surprised, Dakar thought, in a passing break between reels. Halliron had auditioned candidates for apprenticeship lifelong. This man he had chosen in his twilight years had been the sole applicant to match his exacting standards. Medlir applied himself with abandon to the lyranthe, spinning for sheer pleasure the ditties, the drinking songs and the dances that an upland village starved for entertainment in an ice storm could serve him in bottomless demand.

Midnight came and passed. Two casks had been emptied to the dregs, with a third one drained nearly dry. The innkeeper out of clemency finally elbowed to the fore and pressed a plate of stew on the musician. Medlir flashed him a fast smile, bent aside in consultation with his master, and at a nod from the old man, surrendered the lyranthe to Halliron.

The hum of appreciation dropped to sudden, awed silence.

Halliron Masterbard arose and regarded his audience in wry delight. ‘By Ath, you had better make some noise,’ he said, his voice pitched for the sleepy child who slumped in a young matron’s lap. ‘Too much quiet, and the folks near at hand will notice my knuckle joints crack.’

Medlir arranged the stool and the Masterbard sat. He adjusted the lyranthe in blue-veined hands, and tested the strings for tuning. The pitch was perfect; Medlir knew his trade. But the old man fussed at the peg-heads out of performer’s habit.

The stillness swelled and deepened. From the rear of the tavern, a reveller called out, ‘Master singer! Folk passing out of Etarra speak of a battle fought in Deshir some years back against that sorcerer prince who shifts shadows. Do you know aught of that?’

Halliron’s hand snapped off a run, distinct as a volley of arrows.’ ‘Yes.’ He locked eyes for a second with Medlir, who set aside his meal and said something contrite about forgetting to check on the pony. To the rough-clad miner’s request the Masterbard replied, ‘I can play that ballad. No one better. For in fact, I was there.’

A stir swept the room, loud with murmurs. Folk resettled in their seats, while Halliron damped his strings, bent his head, and veiled in a fall of white hair, sat through a motionless moment. He then made the lyranthe his voice. His fingers sighed across strings to spill a falling minor arpeggio, from which melody emerged, close-woven and transparent as a spell. Notes climbed, and spiralled, and blended, drawing the listeners into a fabric of shared tension.

‘You won’t feel too drunk when he reaches the ending of this one,’ Medlir said to Dakar as he passed on his way to the door.

The Mad Prophet was too besotted to respond beyond a grunt, but the gem-cutter beside him ventured comment. ‘How so? Won’t we be stirred by the war’s young hero, that blond-haired prince from the west?’

Medlir’s lips thinned to tightness. ‘What is any war but a massacre?’ Through the drawing beat of the secondary chords, he shrugged off introspective impatience. ‘Even without lyrics or story, Halliron’s melody by itself could wring tears from a statue.’

The balding gem-cutter looked dubious; while Medlir melted into the crowd to resume his course for the stables, Dakar tangled fingers in his beard, fuddled by thought that the eyes of Halliron’s apprentice should be some other colour than grey-hazel.

Then the spangled brilliance of the Masterbard’s instrument was joined by his beautiful voice, haunting and rich and clear-toned; in its thrall every listener was transported to a morning in spring when the mists had lifted over the marshes of the river Tal Quorin. The odds in their favour ten to one, a town garrison had marched on the forest bred clansmen who dared shelter Arithon s’Ffalenn, the renegade Prince of Rathain also called Master of Shadow.

‘What law has sanctioned a war for one life, when no bloodshed was sought at Etarra? Shadow fell in defence, for no man died by command of the prince to be harrowed.’

There came an uneasy shifting of feet, of creaking boards, and flurried whispers that Halliron’s art skilfully reined back short of outrage. For this ballad’s course commemorated no beloved saviour in glittering gold and sapphires, avenging with righteous bolts of light. This spare, driving, tragic account held no bright hero at the ending, but only men ruinously possessed by their hatreds to grasp the first reason to strike down long-standing enemies.

‘Who shall weep, Lord Steiven, Earl of the North, for the refuge that failed to spare your clan? The prince in your care once begged to fare forth, then stayed; his liegemen were fate-cursed to stand.’

Notes struck the air now like mallet-blows. No one spoke. None moved as the ballad unfolded, each stanza in pitiless stark cadence unveiling fresh atrocity. There were no heroics, but only desperation in a Shadow Master’s talents bent to confuse and detain; in unspeakable measures undertaken in a defence without hope, when the dammed-back waters of Tal Quorin were unleashed in reaving torrents to scythe down Etarra’s trapped garrison. Nor did there follow any salve of vengeance, but only bitter brutality, when a band of head-hunter survivors lashed back in a frustrated foray of slaughter against the encampment that concealed the clan women and their children. The spree of rapine intended to draw their defenders into open ground for final reckoning had seen abrupt and terrible ending.

‘Deshir’s butcher and Prince Arithon’s bane, Lysaer s’Ilessid loosed his gifted light Sixty score innocents writhed in white flame for miscalled mercy, blind justice, and right.’

Halliron’s tones dipped and quavered, searing the pent air with images of horror and tragedy. His lyranthe in an unrelenting, lyrical sorrow bespoke senseless waste and destruction. In Deshir, by design of the Mistwraith, the extraordinary talents of two princes had collided to devastating losses, with nothing either proven or gained.

‘This day, under sky unthreatened by dark, the Etarran ranks march to kindle strife. Headhunters search the wide woodlands to mark one fugitive who owns no wish to fight.’

The last, slashing jangle of chords rang and dwindled in dissonance.

For a suspended moment, nothing stirred. Only when Halliron arose and made his bow, then bent to wrap his fine instrument did the shock of his weaving fall away. Listeners paralysed in unabashed tears cracked into an explosion of talk.

‘Ath’s own mercy! What a skill! The lyranthe herself was made to weep.’ A belated fall of silvers clanged across the boards by Halliron’s stool, mingled with a few muted bravos. The Masterbard had not played for an encore; no one held doubts that this ballad had been his last performance for the evening. Though one maudlin fieldhand shouted for the bar wench to bring out spirits, the rest of the patrons arose and pressed, murmuring, toward the tavern door. As the room emptied, a woman’s tones pierced through the crush. ‘Had I not lost my jewels to those murdering clan scoundrels in Taernond, I could almost feel sorry for the Deshans.’

Dakar simply sat, eyes round as coins fixed morosely on the hands that cradled a tankard of stale beer. In time, some minutes after Halliron had retired upstairs to his room, Medlir arrived, and sat down, and unstoppered a cut-glass decanter. He produced two goblets of turned maple and poured out three fingers of peach brandy, the rich smell piquantly sharp in the heated sea of used air.

One the bard’s apprentice pressed upon the Mad Prophet; the other, he nursed for himself.

In companionable sympathy for a well-timed escape to the stables, Dakar sighed, ‘These folk will go home tonight and maybe think. By tomorrow, over sore heads, they’ll say the Masterbard must have exaggerated. Deshir’s barbarians are best off dead, they’ll insist, and shrug off what they heard entirely when the next Etarran wool factor passes through. What did your master hope to gain?’

Medlir swirled his brandy, his face without expression and his eyes veiled under soot-thick, down-turned lashes. ‘Why care?’

Dakar bestowed a shrill hiccup into a pudgy, cupped palm. ‘You met my Fellowship master, so you said.’

Strong brandy could make anybody patient. Medlir waited. Presently Dakar tucked up his stockinged feet and propped his bearded chin on one fist. ‘Well, you’ll know Asandir’s not the sort to be lenient when he’s crossed.’

‘No wonder you’re driven to drink.’ Medlir hooked the flask from between his knees and refilled Dakar’s goblet. ‘What have you done?’

‘Nothing,’ Dakar said. ‘That’s my problem. That bastard of a sorcerer, the one the Deshans fought for? I was sent off to find him, and save him being mauled by his enemies. But let me tell you, Halliron’s ballad aside, if you’d met him, you’d cheer Etarra’s garrison.’

Medlir took a sip from his goblet, leaned back against the trestle, and closed his eyes. ‘Why so?’

‘He’s crafty,’ Dakar said, fixed on the sway of the bar wench’s hips as she made rounds to darken the lanterns. ‘Secretive. He doesn’t at all take to company that’s apt to meddle in his business.’

‘And what would his business be, do you think?’ Medlir asked from the darkness.

Dakar stuck out his lower lip and choked through a spray of fine spirits. ‘The Fatemaster himself only knows! But Arithon’s a vindictive bastard with self-righteous aversions to liquor and ladies and comforts. I’d sooner take Dharkaron Avenger to be my drinking companion.’

‘Ah,’ said Medlir. He raised his lids and smiled, his eyes caught like a cat’s in the dying gleam from the fire. ‘If you fear Asandir might catch up with you, why not share the road with us? We’re headed into the low country, then southward to Shand in easy stages.’ He arose, stretched, then set the half-emptied flask companionably by Dakar’s left knee. ‘Halliron’s fingers get sore in the cold and lengthy hours of performance tax his strength. We seldom play long at one tavern. As our guest, you’d have free beer and most of the comforts you could wish.’

‘Oh, bliss.’ Dakar laughed, drained his goblet and licked the sweet dregs from his moustache. ‘I’ve just been kissed on the lips by lady fortune.’ He hefted the decanter with slurred thanks, and savoured the brandy by himself until he passed out in a heap beneath the bench.

The Mad Prophet awakened thick headed and tasting a tongue that felt packed in old fur. If lady fortune blessed him with her kiss the night before, she had stomped on his head the next morning. Peach brandy dealt a hangover to rival the most horrible torments of Sithaer. He could hardly have felt less miserable if somebody bad sunk a pair of fleecing shears up to their handles in both eyes.

His discomfort was not improved by the fact he sat wedged between bundles of baggage in a jostling, low-slung conveyance that just now was rolling downhill. Small stones and gravel cracked and pinged under iron-rimmed wheels that made as much noise as a gristmill. Poked in the ribs by something hard, buffeted to sorry chills by winds that smelled of spruce and fresh ice, Dakar groaned.

‘Oh, your acquisition is alive, I see,’ somebody observed with jilting humour. ‘Should we stop and offer him breakfast? Or no. Better ask first if he needs to piddle.’

Dakar cracked open gummed eyes. Granted a retreating view of a switched-back road edged with evergreen, he groaned and rolled back his head, only to be gouged in the nape by a flat griddle. He was in the Masterbard’s pony cart, inveigled there by Medlir’s sweet tongue and imprudent consumption of alcohol. Being stranded and broke in a backcountry tavern in hindsight began to show merits.

The brandy had spun him wicked dreams.

Badgered through his sleep by a quick-tongued man with green eyes, black hair, and the sharp-planed features of s’Ffalenn royalty, the Mad Prophet wondered what prompted his mind to play tricks and prod him with memories of the Shadow Master.

Then the cart jerked to a stop, which taxed his thought to a standstill. A shadow fell over him. Somebody not much larger than his nemesis in build, but with intentions infinitely kinder said, ‘Do you have to pee?’

Dakar rubbed crust from his lashes. Medlir leaned on the cart side and watched him with eyes of muddied hazel. His smile was sympathetic. ‘I don’t imagine you feel hale. Who’d have thought you the hero, to drain that flask to the dregs?’

‘If there’d been another just like it, I could’ve emptied that one as well. You would too, if you knew the man I’m supposed to be protecting.’ Dakar added with thick urgency, ‘Since you asked, the bushes are a very good idea.’

Medlir let down the tailgate, whose fastening pins and boards and battered binges combined to make a terrible racket. Holding his head, Dakar levered himself up and out from his nest amid the camp gear. He staggered into the roadway, not to relieve himself, but to find himself a cranny in which to crouch and be sick. He managed to reach the ditch by the roadside. There Medlir’s thoughtful grip was all that kept him from pitching head-down into puddles scummed over in ice and stitched with brambles.

That wretchedness finished, back upright on unsteady legs, Dakar realized his feet were no longer unshod. Somebody had kindly, if carelessly, restored his mislaid boots. The beer-damp stockings inside had crumpled in a way sure to chafe him a wicked set of blisters.

Still, Dakar concluded as he hauled himself back to the wagon, he would perish of a million wasting hangovers before he would bend to Asandir’s will concerning the Master of Shadow. If my life wasn’t bothered by sorcerers, maybe then I could stop drinking,’ he confided as he moled his way under a carriage rug.

Halliron unbraced the brake and clucked to the shaggy buckskin between the shafts. The cart rattled south down the Eltair road, that ran like a track of unreeled string, pinched between the black rock shores of the bay and the snow-bearded range of the Skyshiels. Cold winds scoured with salt off the water parted the pony’s rough coat. Halliron drove with his hands layered in mittens, while Medlir walked, his stride loose and long, and his mind preoccupied with recitation of ballads, or some lilted line of melody to which his master would often contribute comment.

A bard’s apprenticeship involved rigorous study, as Dakar came to appreciate in the hours while his hangover lifted. Although Halliron wore his age well, his years numbered eighty-seven. The damp bothered more than his hands, and although he seldom complained of his aches, he was engaged in a desperate race to train his successor before vigour failed him.

In an afternoon stop at a post station, where a room was engaged to allow the old man to rest, Medlir admitted to Dakar that the trip to Shand was for sentiment.

‘The Masterbard was born at Innish on the south coast, where River Ippash meets the sea. He would see his home before he dies and have his ashes laid by the canals near his family.’

‘He has family?’ Dakar said, surprised. As many years as he bad known Halliron, he had never heard mention of roots.

‘A daughter, I think.’ Medlir picked at a plate of sausage and bread, too considerate for unrestrained gossip. ‘The mother preferred not to travel.’

Thoroughly familiar with every road in the continent, Dakar weighed distances and miles. ‘You could make the south coast by the summer.’

‘Well, yes.’ Medlir smiled. ‘We hope to. If every tavern in between can stop flinging us blandishments to tarry.’

The common room was nearly empty, the last relay of messengers from Highscarp being mounted outside in the yard. Flushed from the morning’s raw winds, or maybe the heat of the fire, Medlir appeared not to mind the way Dakar surveyed him relentlessly: from slim, musician’s fingers that tapped whistle tunes on the edges of the crockery, to the unique way he chose to style his shirts, with sleeves full and long to the forearm, the cuffs tight-laced over the wrists to end at the heel of his hands.

In the hour of the Mist wraith’s curse, Arithon bad once fielded a strike from a light-bolt that left him welted from right palm to elbow, Dakar remembered. The unbidden association made him frown. He stared all the closer at Halliron’s apprentice, who leaned back to stretch in the sunlight that sloped through the casement.

His hands proved unscarred on both sides.

Dakar stifled an oath of self-disgust. Paranoia was making him foolish. The Master of Shadow was mage-trained. To another eye schooled to know talent, his aura should have blazed with unshed power against the darkened panelling of this room. By now sobered up enough to use Asandir’s teaching, Dakar squinted and peered, but detected nothing beyond the life-force that should halo the form of an ordinary man in prime health. He relaxed and started to sit back, then swore beneath his breath as he realized: such a detail could be masked with shadow.

‘What?’ Medlir regarded him inquiringly. ‘You seem bothered. Are you certain you won’t share my meal?’

The Mad Prophet looked into the man’s guileless face, then on impulse raised his hands and summoned power until his fingers streamed trailers of mage-fire.

Grey eyes ticked with mustard flecks watched him back, neither dazzled nor curious. Not a lash or a lid quivered at Dakar’s display; the minstrel apprentice’s pupils, widened in the dimness, failed to narrow so much as a hair’s-breadth.

‘Forgive me,’ Medlir said. ‘I wasn’t thinking, of course. You must still be feeling quite shaky.’ He pushed aside his plate, leaned on his elbows, and peeled a flaked callus from a fingertip well thickened from fret board and lyranthe string. ‘We probably won’t be moving on today, anyway. Halliron slept poorly last night. Since he’ll do best if he rests until tomorrow, I will play in the common room to satisfy the landlord. You can have a bed and hot soup.’

Now Dakar grinned slyly back. ‘Actually, I’d rather hear you sing me the ballad of the Cat and the Mead.’

‘Which version?’ Medlir reached across the bench, lifted Halliron’s instrument, and began with enthusiasm to untie wrappings. ‘There’s the one that’s suitable for little children, and the one fit for nowhere but the bawdy house, and a half dozen variations that fall in the range in between.’

‘Oh, try the one that’s obscene,’ Dakar said, his plump chin propped on folded knuckles and his cheeks dimpled in contentment over his scraggle of red beard.

‘The one with eighty eight verses and that awful repetitive chorus?’ Medlir tucked the lyranthe on his lap, made swift adjustment of the strings, and caught Dakar’s nod as he dashed off a run in E major to test his tuning. ‘Well,’ he said with a long-suffering patience that Arithon s’Ffalenn had never owned. ‘About verse fifty, please remember, you were the one who insisted.’

Tribulation

When Halliron took a chill that left him unfit to travel for two days, Medlir accepted the setback in stride. In no haste himself to reach Shand, he regarded his requisite nightly performance in the posthouse taproom as time well spent in extra practice.

Confounded by his good nature, for the apprentice bard spent both mornings and afternoons put to task under his master’s critical ear, Dakar warmed his feet by the hearth and his belly with flagons of ale. He listened to Medlir’s stock of drinking songs, ready to pounce if the repertoire suffered repeats. When the minstrel’s inventiveness did not falter, he snatched sleep in catnaps and escaped any dreams of vengeful sorcerers.

Their last night at the posthouse was made rowdy by a passing company of mercenaries, ten men under a surly, sword-scarred captain who demolished a platter of roast turkey in the best corner and smoked a pipe until the air around his head blued to fug. Still in their mail and rust-stained tunics, his fighting company drank and gambled, enthusiastically abetted by Dakar.

Between the jingle of gear and rattling dice, the bitten curses and sarcastic slurs and rounds of big-bellied laughter, there came the inevitable exchange of news.

‘You come from northwards,’ the captain bellowed across the taproom to Medlir. He paused to pick gristle from his teeth. ‘What’ve you heard? We’re bound that way into Etarra. Ship’s Port was thick with rumour that the Prince of the West is luring on swords to build a retinue.’

Medlir companionably shrugged, his hands in idle play upon his strings. ‘Why should he? The city council keeps him in comfort. Last I heard, he hadn’t yet tired of the garrison commander’s pretty sister.’

The mercenary captain hunched forward like a bear. Through the incisors clamped on toothpick and pipe stem, he said, ‘Well, the recruiter sent out by the head-hunters’ league claimed Prince Lysaer’s been deeded Avenor’s lands. The grant came from the Mayor Elect of Korias.’

The silvery spill of notes changed character, became thinner, brighter, more brittle. If so, the charter’s hardly legal.’

Nobody took umbrage,- the comment was scarcely out of turn, Athera’s Masterbard being a keeper of traditions often consulted to clarify rules of precedence. As Halliron’s probable successor, Medlir would be trained for the day the supreme title might fall to him.

‘Huh. Swords, and not paper, will settle that issue.’ The mercenary captain tossed away his toothpick and removed his pipe, which had stubbornly smouldered and gone out. ‘If there’s pay being offered for a winter position, we’d be fools not to go have a look. At worst, we’d weather till spring in Etarra, then sign with Pesquil’s headhunters when the new campaign season starts.’

‘Well, fortune to you,’ said Medlir, laughing softly. ‘Avenor’s a ruin. One of the old sites that folk won’t go near for the hauntings. There might be pay, if you fancy the chance to lay bricks.’

‘You’ve been there?’ The mercenary captain stared at the minstrel through the curling flame of his spill.

‘No.’ Medlir launched off a sprightly jig, foot tapping, and a gleam to his eyes at strange odds with his earlier humour. ‘Ath grant I never live to see the place.’

The following morning dawned to grey, misty rain and a clammy east wind off the bay. In the tidewater region of the coast, winter’s hold settled lightly. The mild airs drawn north by ocean currents could brew the occasional warm day. Above Jaelot, the road lay softened to muck, through which cartwheels sucked and splattered to the fitful grate of flint-bearing gravel. Medlir strode at the buckskin’s head to steady the bridle as the pony skated and slid through league upon league of soupy footing. Swathed in faded quilts on the driver’s board, Halliron sat looking tired.

‘I’ve no wish at all to stop in Jaelot,’ he insisted, unusually quarrelsome. ‘The town’s a cesspit of bad taste. I won’t have you wasting your talents there.’

‘Well, at least that’s a first.’ Medlir steered the pony cart toward the verge to allow a packtrain bearing southern spices and silk bales to make its laboured way past. Over the yips of the drovers, he said, ‘Not long back, I recall your phrasing the matter quite the other way about, that my fingering was too clumsy to inflict on a tinker, never mind any public audience.’

‘Well, that was then.’ Halliron blotted his dripping nose and sniffed. ‘You still have a great deal to learn.’

Through the jingle of gear and harness, and the whip-snaps as carters forced their ox teams from drifting to scent the horses as they passed, Medlir kept a weather eye on Dakar, perched like a woodchuck on a bony chestnut gelding won over dice with the mercenaries. More accustomed to pack straps hung with cooking pots than to bearing saddle and rider, the creature had wall-eyes and knock-knees and a tail stripped of hair like a rat’s. The buckskin pony shied well clear. More a shambling liability than a source of reliable transport, the chestnut changed nature like a weathercock, friendly and fiendish by turns.