David Drake - Lord of the Isles 06 - Master of the Cauldron

MASTER OF THE CAULDRON

[Lord of the Isles Book 6]

by David Drake

DEDICATION

For Dorothy Day

A friend, resource and archive

Also a darned good cheering section

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Dorothy Day and the Seattle Weavers Guild more generally were enthusiastically helpful on this

one. They provided not only advice but many hanks of yarn dyed with berries, etc (which draped my

clothes line for weeks as I checked lightfastness), and also some remarkable swatches of double weave

and other exotic fabrics. Believe me, what a skilled hand-weaver can do really is magical.

Dan Breen was as usual my first reader. He pointed out not only where I dropped words but

also where sentences I thought were clear did not appear so to an intelligent and educated person outside

my head.

My webmaster, Karen Zimmerman, and Dorothy Day both archived my text at stages in the

process. One can never tell when one's computer will die.

Which brings me to the fact that No Computers Were Killed in the Writing of This Novel.

However a couple of them got very sick. My son Jonathan, with Mark L Van Name and Allyn Vogel as

his backup, kept me going.

I don't ordinarily mention secondary sources I've used in writing (and I use a lot of them), but Dr

Andrea Berlin is still alive to thank. Her What's For Dinner?, in the Nov-Dec, 1999, Biblical

Archeology Review was not only informative but evocative. I got two separate settings from the article.

My British editor, Simon Spanton, provided me with some Lord Dunsany material that wasn't

already on my shelves. Any reader of Master who's already familiar with Dunsany will realize how great

my debt is to the Tales of Wonder. Those of you who aren't familiar with Dunsany really ought to give

him a try (and Orion Books will accommodate you).

My wife Jo kept everything going at home while I was writing Master; which, given that the

process of writing coincided with the repainting of the interior of the house, is pretty remarkable.

My thanks to all of you.

Dave Drake

david-drake.com

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Those of you who've read previous books in the Isles series will note some repetition in these

notes, but I go to a good deal of effort to make each book accessible to people who've never read

anything of mine before. Bear with me.

The religion of the Isles is based on that of Sumeria. The magic, however, is derived from that of

the Mediterranean Basin during classical times (and probably originally Egyptian). The words of power

are the voces mysticae of real spells, intended to get the attention of demiurges whom the wizard is

asking for aid. I don't believe in magic myself; but a lot of other people, folks who're just as smart as I

am, did and do. I'm not comfortable speaking the words of power aloud.

I use classical models for the literature of this series. For the most part this isn't important for

Master of the Cauldron, but Celondre is modeled on Horace; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles were the

template for some of the documents; and there's a brief echo of the Ullman-Henry elementary Latin texts

on which I learned to love Latin a very long time ago.

Dave Drake

david-drake.com

PROLOGUE

Water dripped somewhere within the cavern. It echoed among the stalactites into the sound of a

distant stream, but the basalt on which Countess Balila of Sandrakkan stood with her companions was

dry. Their two lanterns did little to illuminate the high dome, but the flames raised occasional iridescence

from the pearly flow rock deposited there before the volcanic upheaval of a thousand years before.

The wizard Dipsas squatted before the eight-pointed figure she'd traced on the basalt in

powdered sulphur. She tapped one angle with her athame as she called in a cracked voice, "Phrougi

panton!"

To Balila, only a few feet away, the Words of Power were lost in the murmur of the cavern

breathing and the earth's unfelt trembles. She hugged herself and trembled also, though the air in the

chamber was warmer than that of the palace from which she and her companions had descended not

long after sunset.

Balila had taken good care of her appearance. In the cave's dim light she could even now pass

for the pink-cheeked, strawberry blond of fifteen who'd married Earl Wildulf of Sandrakkan twenty

years before. She was fearful and uncomfortable in this place, but she remained here because of the same

determination that had preserved her looks through exercise and control of her appetite for sweets. Balila

wasn't ambitious for herself, but there was nothing she wouldn't do to make her husband King of the

Isles.

"Picale zamadon!" Dipsas intoned, tapping her athame, a knife of black horn cut out of a scale

from the back of a huge reptile. Dipsas herself didn't understand some of the symbols carved into the

blade. The athame had been found in the sarcophagus of a wizard of millennia past. As she dipped and

raised the point in time to her Words of Power, quivers of vivid red and blue shone through its opacity.

"Alithe zamadon!" said Dipsas, her voice rising. Her wrinkled face had the settled blankness of

burgeoning fear. Her pronunciation of similar syllables had changed during the course of the incantation.

The ancient words, the language of the demiurges who could adjust the powers on which the cosmos

turned, were twisting themselves on her tongue.

The Countess' pet and bodyguard was a flightless, hook-billed bird from the island of Shengy far

to the southeast. It wore a silver collar with a staple to attach a chain, but she'd left it free to pace; its

claws clicked on the basalt. The angry bird's head, as large as a horse's, darted from side to side like a

grackle's. Occasionally it kicked viciously at something hinted in the shadows, but the blows never found

a target.

Balila was of middling height for a woman. The bird was taller even when it stood relaxed; now

the great bronze feathers of its crest were raised, glittering higher than the helmet of any human

guardsman.

"Alithe atithe hupristi!" Dipsas said. She held an open scroll, but her left hand trembled too

badly for her to read the vermilion writing. Nonetheless the words curled off her tongue; partly from

memory, partly from the weight of their own power. "Thestis!"

The last of Balila's companions was a three-year-old boy. His hair spilled down his back like

molten gold, and his only clothing was the harness which attached gilt wings to his shoulders.

The boy alone was unaffected by the psychic atmosphere. He ran prattling from the lamplight to

the shadowed darkness, then back to clutch the Countess' skirts and urge her to play with him. He had

no more intelligence than a puppy, but like a puppy also his disposition was sunny and laughing.

Dipsas' athame touched an angle of the figure again. A spark of red wizardlight snapped from the

blade, igniting the sulphur. Tiny blue flames crawled in both directions from the point of contact. They

provided almost no illumination, but smoke spread in a choking cloud just above the stone floor.

"Darza!" the wizard said.

"Darza," the deeps rumbled. "Badawa balaha!"

The bird screamed in fury, spreading its stub wings as its tongue shrilled between the black

shearing edges of its beak. The child bleated in wide-eyed surprise.

The Countess stopped hugging herself; her face was set. She had a notebook of waxed boards in

her left hand, a bronze stylus in her right. She was as literate as most women of her class. Though not

enough of a scholar to write in the cursive Old Script, modern minuscules were sufficient to jot down the

earth's responses phonetically.

Balila held her notebook so that light from the oil lamp in a niche beside her fell across the waxed

surface as she began to write. When she'd filled one page, she flipped it out of the way on its leather

hinges and went on the next.

Dipsas coughed as she chanted, but her cracked voice and the thunderous antiphony from below

continued for so long as the sulphur burned. Only when the blue flicker dimmed and finally died did the

responses end.

The wizard slumped forward, her sleeve smearing the molten residue of the sulphur. If it burned

her, she was too exhausted by the effort of her spell to react.

Balila tried to close her notebook. The thin maplewood boards clicked against one another; then

the whole assemblage dropped to the floor. She bent to pick the notebook up, aware for the first time of

the child bawling at her feet. She knelt, hugged him to silence, then put the notebook in the sleeve of her

robe before walking over to the wizard.

"Dipsas?" she said. She shook the other woman's shoulder. Balila wasn't strong enough to carry

the wizard back to the surface, and the child would probably need help as well. "Dipsas, get up. I have

the responses. You can copy them off for the next time we come."

The wizard lifted herself with difficulty. For a moment her face was that of an ugly, frightened old

woman; then she consciously reformed her features into a mask of cunning and power. "Yes, yes," she

said, her voice gaining strength as she spoke. "I'll be ready in a moment."

The bird screamed. Sensing departure, it stalked toward the fissure by which they'd entered this

dome, calling its challenge ahead.

Balila suddenly began to tremble, but she caught herself at once. Wildulf the First, King of the

Isles....

CHAPTER 1

Ilna could see her reflection in the silvered backplate of the man who'd been her childhood friend

Garric, the innkeeper's son--but who now was Prince Garric of Haft, the King of the Isles in all but

name. He was speaking to his fiancée and secretary, Lady Liane bos-Benliman, as she jotted notes onto

a thin board with a small gold pen.

As she watched, Ilna's fingers knotted and unknotted patterns from the lengths of cord that she

kept in her left sleeve. The patterns were simple, as simple as so many knives; and like knives, they could

be tools or weapons if the need arose.

Ilna's reflection was distorted, of course. She smiled--not bitterly, or at any rate without any

more bitterness than her usual expression. Ilna prided herself on clear thinking, but there'd been a great

deal of distortion in her view of her possible future a few years ago when she lived in the backwater of

Barca's Hamlet on the east coast of Haft. For example, she'd imagined then that she'd make a suitable

wife for her neighbor Garric.

"Easy!" bellowed the sailing master, leaning out from the pintle of the port steering oar. The

Shepherd of the Isles was backing toward the beach on the reversed strokes of only one of its five

banks of oars. "Easy! Easy!"

"Now you see why the men who aren't needed on the oars crowd into the bow, child," said

Chalcus at Ilna's side. He held her ward, the nine-year-old Lady Merota, on his shoulder. "With their

weight in the bow, we can back up onto the beach instead of crunching into it."

"Crowd more, you mean!" said Merota. "Will we have real rooms here, Chalcus?"

"Depending on the words our friend the Prince has with the Earl of Sandrakkan," Chalcus said

laughing, "we'll have rooms or at least ground to pitch a tent on, I'm sure. The Shepherd of the Isles is as

big as a warship gets, but I'll grant that with four hundred souls aboard you could find more room in a

clothes press."

Chalcus dressed in as many different bright colors as a clown and had a clown's smile and

cheerful laughter. As he spoke, he gestured with his free hand to point out this or that part of the business

of landing which only an expert would see.

He was indeed an expert sailor. He'd learned his skill in the same hard school that taught him to

use the slim, in-curved sword he carried stuck through his sash of vivid orange silk. As a youth he'd

roamed southern waters with the Lataaene pirates, where the wrong choice meant death and the right

choice didn't guarantee survival.

Under his long-sleeved saffron tunic and his red-dyed leather breeches, Chalcus' body bore the

scars of wounds that should have been fatal a dozen times over. That he'd survived said as much for his

will as it did for the undoubted strength of his tautly muscular body.

Ilna smiled again. Lady Merota was her ward, as amazing as that seemed to an illiterate peasant

girl. Chalcus was her friend and her lover and... well, not her man, because he wasn't the sort to be

anybody's man save his own, but a man; and even at age nineteen Ilna was aware of how rare a thing

real men were in this world.

Ilna's fingers wove, then opened the coarse fabrics to weave again. She'd always had a skill with

cloth. She could run her hand over a bale of wool and hear it murmuring of meadows and clover, of the

brook south of Barca's Hamlet and the insistent warmth of the lamb nuzzling your udder.

Then she'd made a mistake, a wrong turning that took her to Hell and brought her knowledge fit

only for demons. She'd returned to the waking world without leaving Hell, becoming Evil's most skillful

minion for a time. It hadn't been long by most reckonings, but Ilna knew that if she lived forever she

couldn't undo the harm she'd done while Evil rode her like a mettlesome horse.

"Here we go, child," Chalcus said in an eager voice. The Shepherd scrunched onto the sand,

beginning to wobble as it ground to a halt.

The officers wore broad leather belts over their short tunics instead of sashes or simply

breechclouts like the oarsmen who came from Shengy, Sirimat, and perhaps a few of the other southern

islands. They shouted a confused medley of orders, but so far as Ilna could see the crew was already in

motion.

Sailors from the lower oarbanks stepped to the outriggers, leaped into the sea, and splashed

shoreward carrying ropes. Those from the top bank had already withdrawn their oars from the rowlocks

on the outrigger; they thrust the blades down into the sand, bracing the vessel which for the moment

rested only on its narrow keel.

"Put your backs into it, Shepherds!" Chalcus shouted as though he was still a sailor instead of

being one of Prince Garric's companions. His right arm pointed to the ship sliding onto the beach beside

them, the five-banked flagship of Admiral Zettin, the fleet commander. "You're not going to let those

scuts from the City of Valles berth ahead of us, are you?"

Ilna's brother Cashel stood across the narrow deck from her, one hand on his hickory

quarterstaff and the other on the waist of his fiancée Sharina--Princess Sharina of Haft and Garric's sister.

She was lovely and blond-haired and tall; taller than most men in Barca's Hamlet, though a hand's

breadth shorter than Cashel and with a willowy suppleness that made her seem tiny beside him.

Cashel was a massive oak of a man, his neck a pyramid of muscle rising from his massive

shoulders. He looked anxious. Ilna knew his concern wasn't about what was happening, just that he

wasn't part of it. For choice Cashel would be down in the surf, gripping a hawser and helping drag the

Shepherd up the beach with the strength of any three other men.

He couldn't do that because he'd become Lord Cashel, a nobleman by virtue of being Garric's

closest friend during the time they both were peasants growing up in Barca's Hamlet. If he jumped into

the water and grabbed a rope, the officers would be embarrassed and the common sailors shocked and

worried; so he didn't, because the last thing Cashel would willingly do was to hurt or embarrass anybody

unnecessarily.

Of course when he thought it was necessary, Cashel's iron-bound hickory quarterstaff could do

quite a lot of hurting.

Seated cross-legged on the deck between Cashel, Sharina, and the railing was Tenoctris, an old

woman whose talents included being generally cheerful despite the things she'd seen in her long life. Here

she'd drawn a figure on the deck planking with a stick of red lead. She was muttering the words of a spell

as she gestured with a thin split of bamboo.

Tenoctris was a wizard. A wizard of slight power, she repeatedly noted, even now that the forces

on which the cosmos turned were reaching another thousand-year peak, but a person whose

craftsmanship had gained her Ilna's respect.

Tenoctris' art never did anything that she didn't mean it to do. At a time when the hedge wizards

of a decade ago could rip mountains apart--generally by accident--Tenoctris' care and scholarship had a

great deal to do with the kingdom's survival.

With the Shepherd firmly aground, the men from the lowest oarbank came up from the hold,

sweating like plowmen. They stepped onto the outriggers. Many of them poised there a moment instead

of dropping immediately to the sand into the knee-deep water nearer the stern.

They'd backed the great warship onto the beach by themselves, while the men of the other four

oarbanks stood on deck to slant the stern into the air. Though the deck gratings had been removed

before the vessel began these final maneuvers, there'd still been very little ventilation in the hollow of the

hull.

The largest stern anchor was a stone doughnut attached to a section of cypress. The trunk was

reeved through the central hole, and the three branches spreading just below the stone were trimmed to

points to grip in the sea bottom. A pair of sailors lifted the anchor from where it'd been stowed beneath

the tiller of the starboard steering oar and walked to the rail.

The sailing master leaned over the side and shouted, "Ware below!" then nodded to the sailors.

They half-dropped, half-threw the anchor onto the sand.

"Chalcus?" said Merota. She pointed toward the strait separating the little islet where they were

landing from the mainland of Sandrakkan. "Why are those ships there still rowing? Isn't there room for

them here?"

The child's high, clear voice cut through the scores of male shouts and snarls. For some reason,

people always sounded angry at times like this. Maybe they were angry, frustrated by the complexity of

what was going on.

For complex it was. Ilna couldn't count beyond the number of her fingers without beans or

pebbles for a tally, but she knew that there was a ten of tens of ships in Garric's fleet, the royal fleet--and

perhaps several tens of tens. Many were backing onto the beach to either side of The Shepherd of the

Isles; others had anchored well out in the channel, sending the soldiers they carried to land in small boats.

In a few cases swimmers had dragged lines from vessels to the islet and tied them to the columns

of ruined mansions lining the shore. Tunic-clad skirmishers armed with javelins and a hatchet or long knife

clung to the lines with one hand as they splashed to land, safe even if they weren't able to swim any better

than Ilna herself could.

"Sandrakkan hasn't any real fighting ships, dear one," Chalcus said, speaking to the child on his

shoulder but pitching his voice so that Ilna could hear also if she wanted to. "Just some fifty-oared patrol

boats to chase smugglers, you see. But somebody had the notion, Lord Attaper I shouldn't wonder, that

even little ships might attack Prince Garric while he's all tangled up with landing."

Chalcus laughed. "Attaper is a fine man, to be sure," he went on, "but I think he worries lest a

stone fall out of the clear sky and strike the Prince down. Regardless, there's thirty triremes sloshing the

sea between Garric and the mainland. It's good practice, I'm sure, and there's never a crew that wouldn't

benefit from a little more practice."

Ilna allowed herself a slight smile at Chalcus' description of the commander of Garric's

bodyguards, the Blood Eagles. Attaper was a fit, powerful man in his forties. At the moment he stood

watchfully just behind the Prince. Ilna was sure he was ready to react if Lady Liane tried to stab Garric

with the nib of her pen.

Ilna's fingers knotted a tracery of cords, then undid them before their pattern was quite complete.

Had she finished the design, a man who saw it clearly would hurl himself away, shrieking and trying to

claw the horror out of his eyesockets. She didn't need such a thing here and now; but it was available,

like the warships patrolling the strait and like the curved sword at Chalcus' side.

The equipment of all the Blood Eagles was blackened bronze, but Attaper's helmet and cuirass

had been chased with gold so that they looked more like parade armor than anything meant for war. His

swordhilt, though, had the yellow patina that ivory takes when a hand grips it daily at the practice butts if

not to wield against living foes.

Ilna couldn't fathom the minds of men who made it their life's work to kill other men--and that

was what soldiers did, when you boiled away all the nonsense about duty and courage and honor put on

the business by the Old Kingdom poets that Garric so fancied. She couldn't understand, but she knew

craftsmanship and honored it above all other things.

Craftsmanship meant doing a thing the single right way instead of any of the unnumbered wrong

ways others might do it. The Blood Eagles were volunteers, veterans who'd proved themselves in other

regiments before they were even permitted to join. By the standard of craft, the only standard that had

ever mattered to Ilna os-Kenset, the Blood Eagles were worthy of her respect.

Lord Waldron, commander of the Royal Army, stood on the stern of another five-banked

warship backed onto the beach a few places down from The Shepherd of the Isles. His aide raised a

silver trumpet and blew a ringing note that was answered a moment later by the deeper, richer calls of

several curved horns from the shore. The troops who'd already landed were milling like ants from a

stirred-up hill, an image of hopeless chaos.

But it wasn't chaos, Ilna knew. Those scrambling troops were forming shoulder to shoulder with

their fellows, under the standards of their proper units. Many were soaked to the waist and some had lost

their shield or spear or helmet in the process of coming ashore, but even so they were an army rather

than a mob.

Sailors were bracing the Shepherd's hull upright with spars so that the crewmen who'd steadied

her when she first grounded could ship their oars and jump down. Half a dozen men under a bosun's

mate hauled the anchor and its trailing hawser farther inland to hold the ship even if an unexpected storm

raced down the strait.

Ilna knotted her pattern, shaking her head in marvel at the scene around her. It was as if every

thread in a loom had its own mind, but they chose to weave themselves into a complex tapestry instead

of twisting off each in its own direction. It was a marvelous thing, but she didn't understand it, didn't

understand how it could even be possible.

Chalcus and Merota laughed at some joke Ilna had missed in her reverie. She smiled also, though

at a thought of her own.

Ilna understood very little about the world in which she found herself living. No doubt people like

Garric and Sharina, whose father had educated them far beyond the standards of Barca's Hamlet,

understood more than she did, but she was sure that even their grasp was slight compared with the

world's enormous complexity.

Still Garric and Sharina and the others went on, guiding a kingdom through the darkness of their

own ignorance; because if they didn't the kingdom--the people, the uncounted numbers of ordinary

peasants and traders and fishermen--would surely be crushed into the mud by masterless chaos. Ilna

didn't really believe in Good personified, but she had no doubt of the existence of Evil.

So she'd act to help Garric and Sharina, Tenoctris and Attaper and yes, Liane--the people who

knew more than she did. She'd act without hope, without real certainty except in one thing: that whatever

Ilna os-Kenset did, she would do with all the skill at her disposal.

Cashel looked over his shoulder. He gave Ilna the broad smile that was as much a part of him as

cold stiffness was to Ilna's own lips.

Ilna's fingers made a last knot; she raised the completed pattern into the air. Everyone who

caught sight of it laughed and pointed it out to their neighbors. It was only a rough, knotted fabric, but it

brought a flash of joy and hope.

Even to the woman who'd knotted it.

***

Cashel, bursting with pride because his left hand rested on Sharina's waist, surveyed the island of

Volita. From a distance the terrain looked rocky, but as the Shepherd approached the beach it became

obvious that except for the granite crag near the center of the island the stones weren't natural outcrops.

The shore was covered with the tumbled ruins of buildings which must've been palaces, even by the

standards of what Cashel had seen in Valles on Ornifal, the capital of the Isles.

Cashel flexed his right hand on the shaft of his quarterstaff. The touch of the stout hickory,

polished both by labor and by use, reminded him of who he really was: an orphan who'd grown up in a

borough which the rest of the world had ignored for a thousand years.

His father Kenset had sold his share of their late father's grain mill to his brother Katchin and left

Barca's Hamlet; seeking adventure, his neighbors remembered, and swearing he'd never return. When he

did come back in seven years' time, he'd brought the infants Cashel and Ilna. People recalled that Kenset

had left Barca's Hamlet with a song on his lips; but on his return he didn't sing, rarely spoke, and spent as

many of his waking hours as he could drinking ale.

Before long Kenset died in a ditch; too drunk to find shelter and very likely seeking the end he

found in the frosty night. He'd never explained where he'd been while he was gone nor had he talked of

the children's mother. His own mother had raised Ilna and Cashel; and after she died, they'd raised

themselves.

A peasant village has neither the taste nor the resources for luxuries like charity, but the orphans

had made do. They had half the mill to sleep in, for by their grandfather's will neither son could sell his

portion of the building; and they earned enough for their bread in one fashion and another. Cashel had a

man's strength early, and Ilna's talent with fabric was a marvel from the first time her fingers twisted raw

wool into thread.

Cashel had never expected to leave Barca's Hamlet except perhaps to badger a herd of sheep

across the island to Carcosa, the ancient capital of the Isles on the other coast. Instead he'd seen Laut on

the far side of the Inner Sea, and he'd lived in the royal palace in Valles, a sprawling park with more

separate buildings in it than there were in Barca's Hamlet and the borough around it altogether.

Cashel had gone to those places, and he'd gone to places that weren't in this world at all. He

recalled how he'd felt scarcely a year ago when he'd first seen the crumbling walls of Carcosa. They'd

been built during the Old Kingdom and used as a quarry by the city's remaining population for all the

thousand years since the Old Kingdom fell. He'd been awestruck by the ruins that remained, almost

unable to accept that so great a mass of stone had been created by men. Nothing in Cashel's previous life

compared with those walls save for the sky overhead and the sea reaching eastward to the horizon from

David Drake - Lord of the Isles 06 - Master of the Cauldron

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