David Drake - Lord of the Isles 01 - Lord of the Isles

LORD OF THE ISLES

By David Drake

PROLOGUE

Tenoctris the Wizard paused on the spiral stairs to catch her breath and twitch a strand of gray hair back

behind her ear. The crowd in the courtyard below cheered wildly: the Duke of Yole and his advisors must have

come out of the palace to tell his people of the victory that rumor had already proclaimed.

Six months ago Tenoctris would have been one of the inner circle standing with the duke on the palace

steps. The Hooded One had replaced her in Duke Tedry's favor.

Tenoctris sighed and resumed her climb. If she were still Yole's court wizard, the people wouldn't have a

victory to cheer. Not a victory like this one, at any rate.

Tenoctris wasn't a great wizard in the practical sense. She had a scholar's mind and a jeweler's soul;

large-scale works were for other folk. She saw and understood the forces which had to be shifted; she simply

didn't have the psychic strength to manipulate them.

And perhaps she saw and understood too well. Tenoctris couldn't possibly have struck the blow that the

Hooded One had delivered; but she realized that actions of that magnitude must have consequences beyond

those the wizard intended. Consequences that even Tenoctris couldn't predict.

A slit window facing the harbor lighted the next turn of the staircase. Tenoctris paused again, “though the

top of the tower was only one further spiral above her. She wasn't a young woman, and she'd never been an

athlete.

It was a bright, brilliant day. When the sun rose higher the courtyard would be a shimmering inferno, but for

now the high walls of the citadel shadowed the ground and cooled the air with the mass of their chill stones.

Duke Tedry had come outside to address his people because the audience hall within the palace wasn't

nearly large enough for the crowd this morning. Everyone in the city below the walls had tried to squeeze into

the citadel, and many of the folk from the countryside had come hotfoot as well when the story winged its

way across the island.

Rumor said Duke Tedry had defeated—had utterly destroyed—King Carus and the royal fleet. That much

was true. King Carus—Carus who had crushed a dozen usurpers; Carus, the greatest King of the Isles shice

King Lorcan, the founder of the line—was drowned and all his fleet drowned with him. The other part, the

rumor that in a few months the Duke of Yole would have consolidated his position as the new King of the

Isles ... that was another matter.

Tenoctris opened the trapdoor and climbed out onto the small platform she used for observing the courses

of the stars. She could see the many miles to the horizon in all directions.

Tenoctris was perspiring, more from nervous tension than as a result of the climb. She could feel the

powers building, focused now on Yole itself. She didn't know what was going to happen, but the feeling boded

a cataclysm as surely as the hair rising on the back of one's neck gives an instant's warning of a lightning

bolt.

Below Tenoctris the hats and caps and bonnets of the citizenry of Yole solidly filled the courtyard. Duke

Tedry stood in silvered armor in the deep doorway to the palace proper. Behind him were five of his closest

advisors; and below the duke, seated in an ornate black throne that servants had carried from the audience

hall to the base of the steps, was the hooded figure of Yole's court wizard.

“My people!” cried the duke a big man with a voice to match. Besides his natural speaking ability, three

arches of expanding size framed the doorway and formed a megaphone to amplify his words. “This is the

greatest day in your lives and in the history of Yole!”

The cheers of the crowd echoed within the stone walls, frightening seagulls from the battlements. The birds

wheeled, crying a raucous accompaniment to the human noise.

Tenoctris shook her head. A week ago the people of Yole would have jeered their duke except for fear of the

soldiers quartered throughout the city. At least the seagulls held to a consistent opinion.

Duke Tedry wasn't a popular ruler, because his taxes and fines squeezed all classes of society to the edge

of poverty— and sometimes beyond. The warships drawn up on stone ramps around the harbor were” costly

to build and even more costly to crew and maintain. The professional soldiers who would fight aboard the

triremes at sea and in armored regiments on land were a greater expense still... but those soldiers and the

well-paid oarsmen guaranteed the duke would stay in power for as long as there was something left on Yole

to tax for their pay.

“My might has overwhelmed Carus, the so-called King of the Isles, with all his ships and men!” the duke

said. “Carus and his forces came to face me. They perished every one beyond the sight of land! My power

destroyed them before they could strike a blow!”

The crowd cheered again. Tenoctris wondered if any of them understood what the duke was saying. Duke

Tedry himself didn't—of that Tenoctris was certain. As for the Hooded One...

The Hooded One refused to give his name, but he'd claimed that the chair he brought to Yole with him was

the Throne of Malkar. One who sat on the Throne of Malkar became Malkar, became the essence of the

black power that was the equal and opposite of the sun.

Tenoctris knew the Hooded One's throne was a replica, built according to descriptions given by the great

magicians of ancient times who claimed to have seen or even sat in it. The original was rumored to be older

than mankind; older even than life.

King Lorcan had ended ages of chaos when he and a wizard of a prehuman race had hidden the Throne of

Malkar forever. The Hooded One was only a wizard himself; but he was a wizard whose power Tenoctris found

amazing, even at this time when the forces available for an adept to manipulate were so much greater than

they had been for a thousand years.

“Tomorrow my fleet will sweep westward, bringing every island under my control!” Duke Tedry said. “All the

way to Carcosa, the city that for centuries has usurped Vole's rightful place as home to the King of the Isles!”

The people cheered. They were cheering their throats raw.

The Hooded One had used his violet wand to stir the mud of a pool in one of the gardens here in Yole,

working sympathetic magic. His spell had collapsed the sea bottom beneath the fleet which bore King Carus

across the Inner Sea in response to the Duke of Yole's threats and pretensions. Tenoctris had watched the

incantation from her high platform as she now watched the duke's announcement of his success.

The Hooded One focused forces that Tenoctris saw as planes of cleavage within the cosmos; to laymen

they were shimmering veils of blue light. The hues were subtly different, proving to Tenoctris that the wizard

who supplanted her wasn't as completely in control of his magic as he claimed; but the remarkable strength

of the forces he sent cascading toward his chosen target nonetheless took her breath away. If she hadn't

seen it herself, she would never have believed that a wizard of such ability could exist.

“The wealth which flowed into Carcosa will come now to Yole!” the duke said. “All my people will dress in

silk and eat from golden dishes!”

Tenoctris didn't mind being replaced as court wizard. The duke kept her on, perhaps out of sheer

forgerfulness that she existed. Her needs were simple: enough food to keep her spare body alive, and the use

of Yole's ancient library, which interested no one else in the palace anyway. She didn't care whether Carus

was king or Tedry was king, and she would have done what little she could to prevent royal forces from

crushing the rebellious Duke of Yole.

But though a victory for King Carus would have disrupted Yole and caused the deaths of many, Tenoctris

knew that the Hooded One's success was a much greater danger than ever flame and swords could be. A

wizard who used powers beyond human comprehension could not have the judgment to use those powers

safely.

“When I was the Duke of Yole I led thousands,” Duke Tedry said. “Now that I'm King of the Isles, I'll have a

hundred thousand under my banner and the seas will be black with my triremes!”

The crowd cheered wildly. Did none of them feel the planes of force shifting, bearing now on Yole rather than

on some stretch of empty seabed? The Hooded One's fingers twitched slightly on the arm of his throne, but

even he showed no real sign of understanding the climax of the events he'd put in motion.

Tenoctris understood only too well. She felt the tower shiver beneath her and turned her head. An

earthshock had raised wavelets like a forest of spearpoints from the harbor's surface. Neither the duke nor

those listening to him in the courtyard appeared to have noticed.

“I am the future!” Duke Tedry cried, raising his armored fist. “All will follow where I lead!”

The second shock hit Yole like a giant hammer. Red tiles rained from roofs in the town below the citadel. A

dozen buildings collapsed in mushrooms of dust, shot through with winking shards of window glass.

The tower on which Tenoctris stood waved like a tree branch. Chunks of stone shook from the walls, pelting

the crowd into sudden terror.

Tenoctris knelt on the platform and used her plain wooden athame to sketch symbols on the weathered

boards. She could do nothing to save Yole. She didn't expect she'd be able to save herself either, but at such

a nexus of force there was a chance for even a wizard of her limited practical abilities.

Duke Tedry drew his sword and waved it in defiance at the empty air. He shouted, but that sound and the

shouts of the thousands packing the citadel's courtyard were lost in the rumble of the earth.

“Zoapher ton thallassosemon,” Tenoctris said, speaking the words of her incantation calmly, as she did all

things. She couldn't hear her own voice, but the effect of the syllables would be the same nonetheless.

The Hooded One jumped up in wild amazement, realizing at last the results of his own magic. His false

throne split in half, then crumbled to a pile of black'sand rippling with the ground shocks and spreading

across the wizard's ankles.

The tower lurched as the earth—the citadel, the town, the whole island of Yole—sank fifty feet straight

down. Heavy slates slid from the north roof of the palace, shattering on the pavement to fill the passage

between the palace and the citadel's outer wall.

Water from the harbor poured through the streets. The sea rose in white foam all around the horizon,

poising for the tidal surge that would carry it across the island. The ground dropped again, as inexorably as a

rock sinks through hot tar.

“Eulamoe ulamoe lamoeu,” Tenoctris said as the earth and sea roared in raging triumph. As her lips formed

each syllable her athame touched the corresponding symbol that she'd drawn on the platform. “Amoeul

moeula oeulam...”

Yole continued to sink with a smooth inevitability. The tower on which Tenoctris knelt wavered but didn't

topple. The sea rushed from all sides with a thunder greater than that of the earthshocks that preceded it.

Waves broke on the walls of the citadel, then overwhelmed the stone in spray turned to rainbows by the

brilliant sunshine.

“Amuekarptir erchonsoi razaabua,” Tenoctris said. She no longer felt the tension that had gripped her earlier

in the morning. The forces which caused her psychic stress were being released in the material plane. The

walls partitioning the cosmos had broken; the pressure faded even as it swept all Yole into ruin.

“Druenphisi noinistherga—”

The sea rolled over what had been dry land, bringing life-forms with it. Only a few yards beneath her

platform's coping, Tenoctris saw long cone-toothed jaws seize the body of a drowning man and twist away

through the foaming water.

The long fin on the killer's back rippled from side to side in a motion like that of a snake swimming. The

creature was a seawolf, one of a species of predatory lizards which had returned to the water. They were rare

everywhere in the Isles and almost unknown here in the eastern reaches. For the most part the seawolves

preyed on fish in the open waters, but occasionally they returned to land to snatch unwary victims from the

shore.

The seawolves would feast well today.

“Bephurorbeth!” Tenoctris concluded.

Though the incantation's final word was inaudible in the thunderous clamor, the cosmos itself vibrated in

tune with the shifting powers. Forces met from a thousand angles in perfect balance around Tenoctris. The

tower sank beneath the curling waves, but the platform and Tenoctris upon it separated from the remainder of

the crumbling structure.

She couldn't save Yole. Perhaps she could save herself.

Bodies and pieces of wood bobbed amid the foam. Tentacles dragged under a window sash, then released

it as inedible and fastened on the gray-headed man who had been in charge of tax collection for the Duke of

Yole. A huge ammonite rose, its body concealed within a curled shell with all the shimmering colors of a fire

opal. Tenoctris stared into one of the great slit-pupiled eyes behind the forest of twenty or more tentacles.

The ammonite sank again, carrying the tax collector with it. Its tentacles were sliding the body toward the

parrot's beak in the center of the ammonite's head.

Searing blue light surrounded Tenoctris. The stars spun above her for a thousand years, wiping her memory

the way pumice grinds a manuscript clean for another hand to write upon the surface.

Unimaginably far from her in time and space, ocean roiled above the fresh grave of Yole.

BOOK 1

CHAPTER 1

When she looked at the game board in the first light of dawn, she saw that a new piece had been added.

She grew very still.

The game board was a vast slab of moss agate, its patterning natural but precisely chosen by the wizard

who had cut and polished it in the ages before mankind. She kept the board secret, not behind bars and

locks but on a plane of its own from which she alone could summon it for meditation.

To an untrained eye the pieces were assorted pebbles of precious tourmaline, uncarved or barely carved by

some barbaric gem-cutter with crude vigor but little skill. To a trained eye, to a careful eye ... to a wizard's

eye like hers, the pieces displayed all the subtle differences of the living creatures on whom her will worked;

the human pawns that she moved and her unseen opponent moved, and whose movements in turn shifted the

pieces on the board.

She had put infinite time and art into studying the tourmaline pieces so that she could perfect her strategy

in dealing. with the living beings they mimicked. There were hundreds of them on the board, all of some value;

but the skill of the game lay in identifying these few pieces which controlled the path to victory. Last night

there had been four.

Two were pieces of great power. The hard, brittle stone of which they were shaped was sea green on one

end, red with the fire of ruby on the other. The form of the crystals differed from top to base, and in aspect

from one piece to the other.

They were Halflings: the offspring of a human and a creature human only in shape, hybrids who had abilities

which neither parent shared. They were not wizards, but they could work with forces no human wizard could

shape however great her skill and power.

The Halflings would be dangerous if her opponent directed them, but they had no art of their own. If she was

unable to turn them to her own ends, she could at worst set them out of play.

The other two pieces were spirals twined as though the pair had been carved from the same tourmaline

prism... which they had not been, could not have been. One piece had the brown metallic hue of a crystal

with a large admixture of iron in its structure. It was darkly translucent, and shapes swam in its depths. The

other helix was water-clear, though like water it had the least tinge of color; in this case the gleam of dawn's

first rosy figurings.

She touched her fingertip to the twin spirals. They felt cold or hot, but she could not be sure which; in all the

time she had spent studying the pieces, some of their aspects remained an enigma. She must separate and

examine them individually, for one was the key: the piece that would uncover the Throne of Malkar where

Lorcan of Haft had hidden it a thousand years before.

All the power in the cosmos lay with that piece, and the piece could be controlled. It would move as she

directed or to the direction of her opponent, the hooded figure she sensed but never saw. There was no third

player in the game!

And yet...

This night between dusk and dawning a spike of blue tourmaline had appeared on the board in conjunction

with the four pieces of power. She must learn what it meant, that slim piece, and still more the fact that the

piece was here.

She tossed a thin silken coverlet over the board and strode to the outer door. The only apparent bolt was a

wisp of spi-derweb, but anyone attempting to force the panel from the outside would find himself in a place

other than where he intended—and very little to his liking.

She opened the door. The cold-faced servitor nodded obsequiously.

“I'm not to be disturbed for any reason,” she said. She nodded toward the tray of covered salvers waiting on

the small table beside the door. “I'll be fasting, so get that away.”

The servitor nodded again. “As you wish, milady queen,” he said.

She closed and sealed the door. Her hooded opponent could not have placed the new piece on the board....

And if not him, who?

CHAPTER 2

Garric or-Reise tossed in his bed in the garret of his parents' inn, dreaming of a maelstrom. The water was

icy and so thick it seemed solid. Strings of dirty-white foam marked spirals like the bands of an agate.

Garric's head and right arm were lifted from the swirling currents but the rest of his body was caught like that

of a fly frozen in amber.

“Help me!” he cried, but roaring currents smothered his voice. The pressure squeezing his chest prevented

him from drawing in a further breath.

Other creatures were trapped in the maelstrom's slow gyrations. Most were monsters.

A seawolf struggled almost directly across the funnel of water from Garric's dream viewpoint. Seawolves had

raided the pastures around Barca's Hamlet several times during Garric's lifetime, but this beast was twenty

feet long—twice the length and many times the mass of any that he'd ever heard of. The beast's skull alone

was as long as Garric's arm, and the yellow teeth could shear a man's body in half if they closed on it.

Higher on the spiral was a segmented creature whose flattened, chitinous body was longer than a fishing

boat. Its scores of paddle legs trembled in vain effort against the gelid water. It had two pincers like those of a

nightmare scorpion, and the facets of its bulbous eyes shimmered in the wan light.

Far below was a tentacled ammonite whose shell was the size of a farmhouse. Its yellow eyes glared up at

Garric with unreasoning hatred, but it too was a prisoner in the maelstrom's grip.

On the bottom of the sea, infinitely distant, a human figure stood casting a hooked line of quivering violet

fire. The figure wore a long black robe with a cowl that hid its face. The crackling purple fire arched upward,

ever closer to Garric as the figure laughed louder than the iaaelstrom. Closer...

Garric woke up with a shout trapped in his throat to choke him. He was twisted into his sweat-soaked

bedclothes, not bound by the coils of a whirlpool. The glass of his small-paned window was pale with the

half-light of the hour before dawn.

“May the Lady and Shepherd protect me,” Garric whispered as he waited for his heart's pounding to slow.

“May Duzi who watches our flocks watch over me also.”

He pulled the window sash open to let the air cool him. The bull's-eye glass of the panes distorted images

too greatly to show anything but changes in the general level of light. When Garric looked through the

opening he saw a robed figure sprawled on a raft just short of the shoreline.

Garric pulled himself free of the linen sheet and light blanket he'd been sleeping under; the storm had

brought cool nights even this late in the spring. He didn't bother to cinch a belt over the tunic he slept in, and

like everyone else in Barca's Hamlet he went barefoot as soon as the ground thawed.

He swung from his window and dropped to the ground a few feet below. He didn't call out to rouse the

others, because he was afraid he was still dreaming. Garric's first thought was that the figure in the surf was

the hooded fisherman of his nightmare. If there was a real person floating offshore on a raft, Garric wouldn't

need help to carry him to solid ground. If his imagination was tricking him, then he didn't want other people to

know about it.

He ran easily down the retaining wall to the gravel beach, his tunic flapping around his legs. Garric was big

for a seventeen-year-old, though he was rangy and hadn't filled out. His sister Sharina was tall also, but with a

willowy suppleness that matched the curls of her long blond hair, while their friend Cashel was built like an

oak tree. Cashel was so thick and solid that he looked squat despite being almost as tall as Garric.

Fishermen had dragged their six-oared cutters to the top of the wall, but the surge of yesterday's storm had

flung them farther. Three were overturned, and the other two were stacked like a couple cuddling—the upper

one smashing the thwarts of the lower.

The Inner Sea rubbed against the beach with its usual hiss. The sound was louder than' you realized until

you went far enough inland that the first line of hills finally blocked it. Wavelets slapped against the raft as

well. It and the woman lying facedown on it were as real as the knee-high water Garric splashed through to

reach them.

The raft had grounded on a bar of shells and gravel so slight that at low tide you could miss it on the

generally flat strand. To Garric's surprise the raft was part of a building, not a ship's hatch cover as he'd

assumed.

The woman moaned softly as he lifted her; at least she was alive. She was older than Garric's mother,

though he couldn't be sure quite how old in the dim light. She weighed very little in his arms, although

seawater washing over the raft's low edge had soaked her robe's thick brocade.

Garric turned and plodded up the sea-washed slope, careful not to lose his footing and dunk the poor victim

again. A wave tugged the hem of his tunic as if in a spiteful attempt to bring him down.

“Here's a castaway!” he bawled at the top of his lungs. He couldn't expect anyone to hear him until he

reached the inn, though there might be a fisherman looking over damage from the terrible storm of the night

and day before. “Get a bed ready and water!”

Garric couldn't imagine where she'd come from. There wasn't another island with heavy-timbered buildings

on it within fifty miles of Haft's east coast. If the storm had driven the makeshift raft—and it must have done

so—it was a wonder that the castaway had the strength to cling to a flat wooden platform for so long in the

worst weather to flail the Inner Sea in a generation.

“Help, I've got a castaway!” He climbed the sloped wall with long, supple steps. Garric had pulled a

full-grown sheep from a bog and carried it up a steep bank on his shoulders. This old woman was nothing by

comparison.

Garric had done most of the jobs in Barca's Hamlet at one time or another. He and Sharina would own the

inn together someday—their father, Reise, had made that clear. Garric didn't know that he wanted to be an

innkeeper, though, and as for Sharina—who knew what Sharina wanted? The way their mother, Lora, treated

her, Sharina was too good for anything on this earth!

Reise didn't seem to care whether or not his children kept the inn when he was gone. It was his duty to

teach them to run the property he left them; what they did with their lives after he gave them that start was no

concern of his.

Reise or-Laver never did less than his duty. He was an educated man who'd come from the royal capital of

Valles on Ornifal to become a cleric in the court of Count Niard in Carcosa here on the great island of Haft.

When Niard and Countess Tera died during the riots seventeen years before, Reise came to Barca's Hamlet

with two infants and his wife, Lora, a local girl who'd gone to Carcosa to serve in the count's palace. The folk

of Barca's Hamlet still treated Reise as a foreigner, but he'd bought the run-down inn and made it into a

paying proposition.

Reise had provided for his children and personally taught them literature and mathematics, not just the

ability to read their names and count on their fingers. He worked without complaint and paid his debts without

whining. Everybody in Barca's Hamlet respected him—

But Reise was a pinched, angry man whom no one really liked; not even his own son.

The ordinary houses of Barca's Hamlet were simple ones— two or three rooms below a half-loft, with a shed

and perhaps a summer kitchen in the yard outside. Their walls were made of wicker woven around vertical

posts and chinked with clay and moss, then plastered over for waterproofing. The roofs were steeply

thatched, and the fireplace chimney might be either stone, brick, or—for the poorer folk—sticks and clay with

a constant hazard of disastrous fire.

The inn was a centuries' old two-story building, built of tawny yellow brick. Wisteria vines as thick as peach

trees climbed the western side; in May they dangled sprays of bell-shaped purple flowers. The enclosed

courtyard could hold several coaches at the same time, and there were stalls for twenty horses in the stables

on the north side. Garric had never seen more than half of them filled, even at the Sheep Fair, when

merchants came to buy wool and drovers purchased the excess of the flock that couldn't winter over for lack

of fodder.

The hamlet's other large building was the grain mill next door to the inn. The inn was old; the mill was

ancient, a structure built of close-fitting stones during the Old Kingdom. Sluices filled the mill's impoundment

pool at high tide; gates then drained the pool into the spillway to drive the wheels whenever the miller chose.

Tidal power was far more certain and controllable than wind or a running stream, because the tide came and

went regardless of drought or the whims of the atmosphere; but only the strongest constructions could

withstand the rush of spring tides when the sun and moon were in conjunction. No one on Haft in a thousand

years had dared to build a similar mill.

“Where am I?” the castaway said. Her voice was so cracked and thin that Garric only heard the words

because he'd rested the woman's head on his shoulder to keep it from dangling as he carried her.

The back door of the inn opened. Reise stood there with a lighted hemlock stem soaked in fat to give a

hasty yellow illumination.

“You're in Barca's Hamlet,” Garric said. “We'll have you in bed in a moment, mistress. And some milk with

a whipped egg.”

“But where's Barca's Hamlet?” the woman whispered. “Am I on Yole?”

Reise threw the door fully open and stepped aside. Lora was in the central corridor, and Sharina leaned over

the balustrade to see what was happening.

“Yole?” said Garric. “What's Yole?”

“Yole?” his father repeated in a questioning tone. “Yole sank into the sea a thousand years ago!”

CHAPTER 3

Sharina tied the sash around the waist of the tunic she'd been wearing as a nightdress. “Sharina! Go get the

hermit!” Garric called as he stepped through the doorway sideways to keep the dangling legs of the person he

carried from knocking on the doorposts. “This lady needs help!”

“I'll get him!” Sharina said. Her cape was upstairs, but the air's slight chill wasn't worth the delay. She'd be

running most of the way to Nonnus' hut, though the last of the path twisting down to the hut at the creekside

had to be walked with care even in full daylight.

“No, you can't go out at this hour, Sharina!” her mother cried. “And not dressed like that!”

“Take a light, Sharina!” Reise said, waggling the hemlock stem for emphasis. He couldn't raise it inside

without searing the ceiling.

Sharina ignored both Lora and Reise. She didn't need a light any more than she did a cape ... though she

might have taken both if she hadn't known her parents would want her to do that. Sharina was through the

front door and into the courtyard before either of them could stop her.

The double gates of the courtyard hadn't been closed in so long that high grass grew beneath the edges of

both and one sagged away from its upper hinge. The part-moon was clear above her, but the sky was already

too pale for stars to show.

The only real street in Barca's Hamlet followed the line of houses which backed up to the shallow bay. A flat

stone bridge crossed the impoundment pool itself; it had been built at the same time as the mill. For the rest,

the street was dirt, dust, or mud depending on the weather. After the huge storm of the previous day, water

stood in the ruts that ages of traffic had pounded into the surface. Sharina splashed across the road with the

ease of long practice and headed up one of the lesser paths out of the community.

Barca's Hamlet didn't have physical boundaries except for the coastline. Houses straggled in all directions,

making it hard for a stranger to say where the hamlet ended and outlying farms began. There were tracts of

pasture and forest attached in common to certain households, however, and those households made up what

the folk of the region themselves thought of as Barca's Hamlet.

The path Sharina followed plunged almost immediately into common woodlands where hogs foraged for

acorns and certain families had the right to cut deadwood for their fires. Only one person lived in the forest,

and he in a sense was owned in common as well.

Instead of going himself, Garric had told Sharina to fetch the hermit Nonnus. Everyone knew that Sharina

was the only pqrson whom the hermit seemed to treat as a person rather than an event like springtime or the

rain.

Sharina's honey-blond hair and gray eyes set her apart from everyone she knew, her parents included.

Perhaps it was her looks that made her feel like, an outsider among the locals despite her having lived in

Barca's Hamlet for all but the first week of her life. The simple acceptance which Nonnus offered her was as

reassuring as the feel of the bedclothes when she woke up from a dream of falling.

The path meandered on to join the drove road near Hafner's Ford, but almost no one came this way through

the woods except to see Nonnus—which meant almost no one at all. Brambles waved from both sides,

occasionally snagging Sharina's shift. She pulled free without slowing, because she knew a life might depend

on her haste.

Nonnus acted as the community's healer. Granny Halla said he'd arrived from no one knew where some few

years before Lora returned to Barca's Hamlet with a foreign husband and newborn twins.

“Thought he was a bandit, we did,” Granny used to. say, “but the bailiff back then was the same sort of

puffball as Katchin is today. Nobody had enough backbone to interfere when the fellow grubbed himself a

place by the creekside. When Trevin or-Cessal's son broke his leg—that's the boy who died of a fever the

next year—the feller heard the squeals and set the bone neat as neat. That's how we .learned he was a holy

hermit. But he still looks like a bandit, if you ask me.”

If you didn't ask Granny Halla something, she was likely to tell you anyway. To have told you, that

is—Sharina had to remind herself that the old woman was dead five years this winter; found in her bed when

the neighbors noticed no smoke rose from her chimney.

Even Sharina found it hard to think of Nonnus as a holy man, though he'd knelt so often at the shrine to the

Lady which he'd carved in the bark of a tall pine that the ground was packed to the consistency of stone.

Besides praying, Nonnus tended his garden, fished, and hunted. When folk asked for his help he gave it. He

took produce or the occasional flitch of bacon in payment if someone offered it, but in truth he was as

self-sufficient as the squirrels who provided much of his diet.

Priests of the Lady and her consort, the Shepherd, made a tithe circuit through the borough once a year.

Nonnus didn't walk the way they did. He moved like a guard dog, always alert and as direct as the flight of the

short, all-wood javelins with which he struck down his prey.

A pair of hardwood batons hung on a cord of plaited willow bark where the path to the hermit's hut branched

from the common track. Sharina paused long enough to clatter the rods together. “Nonnus?” she called. “My

brother's found a lady thrown up from the sea who needs your help!”

The last of the path was down a gully and up the steep other side. Sharina used her hands to slow her, then

to tug herself up by the roots of a mighty beech growing on the opposite rim.

If you didn't ring the clacker when you came to see Nonnus, you found him waiting for you just the same.

There was one difference: those who hadn't been polite enough to announce their arrival met the hermit with

three javelins in his left hand and a fourth poised to throw in his right. No one in the hamlet even claimed to

have sneaked up on Nonnus unseen.

The hermit came out of his low hut with a wicker basket of medicines in one hand and his staff in the other.

“Broken bones, child?” he asked. His smile of greeting looked as though it had been carved in a briar root.

Nonnus was below middle height for a man—shorter than Sharina even—and had a waist the same

diameter as his chest. There was some gray in his hair and more in his beard. Sharina supposed the hermit

must be over forty years old, though there was nothing except the hair to suggest so great an age.

He twisted the strap of his basket around the end of the staff and dangled it over his shoulder. His

square-cut tunic was of naturally black wool, woven as thick as a cloak and as harsh as horsehair to the

touch.

“I don't know, Nonnus,” Sharina said, gasping now that she had a moment to pause. “Garric just said she's

been cast away.”

Nonnus wore a belt of weatherproof willow bark like the rope that held the clackers. From it hung a long,

heavy knife—the only metal tool he appeared to own—in a flapped and riveted sheath.

“Well, you know where my comfrey grows,” he said as he plunged down the path ahead of her at an

awkward, shuffling pace that nonetheless covered ground. “You can come back and dig enough roots to boil

for a cast if we turn out to need them.”

Nonnus planted annuals near his hut. Perennials and vegetables cropped in their second year—parsnips,

turnips, and adult onions—grew in a separate plot beyond. Though he had only a sharp stick to cultivate his

garden, the early growth showed a pattern as regular as a fish's scales.

“Nonnus?” Sharina called to the hermit's back as she hurried after him. His speed had nothing to do with

haste; he simply never made a false move. “Where do suppose she came from? The castaway, I mean.”

“Ah, child,” the hermit said in a suddenly distant voice. “I don't suppose anything about other people. Not

anything at all.”

His solid black form strode down the path. And no one should suppose anything about me, his back said

silently to Sharina, who bit her lip in embarrassment as she followed.

CHAPTER 4

Ilna os-Kenset carefully arranged the castaway's robe to catch the afternoon sun on the drying rack outside

her entrance to the millhouse. Embroidered symbols stood out against the background; they reminded Ilna of

die carvings on old stones reused for the foundation of the inn. The fabric shone green from one angle but blue

when she looked at it the other way.

It seemed to Ilna that the symbols changed with the light also, but she found the thought disquieting. The

feel of the garment disturbed her even more, though in ways she couldn't explain to another person.

She adjusted the wicker screen slightly so that it would continue to shade the fabric from direct sunlight for

another hour. By then it would be time to turn the garment anyway. There was enough breeze to dry even

such thick brocade before Ilna took the robe in at sundown to avoid the dew.

Pigeons rose with a clatter of flight feathers from the cote on the side of the mill she shared with her brother

Cashel. They circled overhead, then banked to settle again on the roof coping. What went through a bird's

mind? But it was hard enough to tell what drove another human being. Especially a man.

Especially Garric or-Reise.

Sharina had brought Ilna the robe in the morning, explaining that Garric had found the woman who owned it

tossed up on the shore and that the garment needed to be cleaned. Cleaning wasn't precisely the problem.

Ilna quickly determined that she didn't need to work oatmeal into the fabric to absorb dirt and body oils which

then could be beaten out with the meal. The fabric's colorfast dyes hadn't been damaged by soaking in the

sea, but now the salt residues had to be washed out in fresh water.

If the mill had been powered by a creek, Ilna would have suspended the robe in a wicker basket in the

millpond or even the spillway. Her uncle Katchin the Miller might have complained; his slatternly young wife,

Fedra, certainly would have. Ilna would have done it anyway as her right and no harm to anyone else—her kin

included.

Because the impoundment pool was salt, the question hadn't arisen. Part of Ilna—not the part she was

proudest of but part nonetheless—regretted the chance to force Katchin to give way even more than she

regretted the work of carrying buckets of well-water to sluice salt away under the gentle working of her

fingers.

Kenset or-Keldan had been the elder of the miller's two sons. “The adventurous one,” folk who'd known him

described Kenset. He'd gone away from the hamlet for a year, no one knew where. When he returned as

unexpectedly as he'd left, he had with him two puling infants—Ilna and her brother Cashel—but no wife.

Keldan had died while Kenset was away. Ilna had enough experience of her uncle Katchin to know how

furious he must have been to have to divide an inheritance he'd thought was his alone, but he'd done it. The

law was clear, and Katchin was a stickler for the letter of the law.

The same folk who'd described the young Kenset as adventurous said that the youth who returned with two

children was a different man—and less of one. Kenset had left searching for something; but after he returned

the only place he looked was the bottom of a mug of hard cider. He borrowed money from his brother against

the mill's earnings; and borrowed more money. He didn't pay much attention to anyone, least of all his

children; and nobody paid much attention to him.

Kenset died when Ilna and Cashel were seven, not of drink but from the cold of the winter night as he lay

drunk in a ditch a few miles from the hamlet. There was nothing left of Kenset's inheritance save an undivided

half-interest in the millhouse itself.

The children's grandmother had raised them while she lived. When she died in her sleep two years after her

elder son, Ilna took charge of her twin brother and herself. Cashel did jobs that required his growing strength,

and he watched sheep; he'd become chief shepherd for most of the fanners in the borough. Ilna wove with

such speed and skill that by now a dozen of the local housewives brought the yarn they spun to her rather

than weaving the finished cloth themselves.

And Ilna kept house. She took cold pride in the fact that when Katchin finally married—bought a wife, more

like— everyone in Barca's Hamlet could contrast the spotless cleanliness in which Cashel and Ilna lived with

the monied squalor of the other half of the millhouse.

In the early years charity for the orphans had been increased by the fact that nobody cared for their uncle.

Ilna had seen to it that every kind act was repaid with interest as soon as she and Cashel could.

Katchin had become bailiff, responsible for Count Las-carg's interests in the borough, because he couldn't

get respect from his neighbors any other way. The office hadn't changed anything. Katchin the Miller was by

far the wealthiest and most successful man in the community. His ancestors had lived in Barca's Hamlet for

ten generations. For all that, drunken Sil the Stutterer got warmer greetings from those who met him on

Midwinter's Day than Katchin did.

Cashel or-Kenset had grown into the strongest man most people had ever seen. His sister was so petite

she could pass for half her eighteen years if she hid her eyes from the person guessing. But if you asked

locals who the hardest person in the hamlet was, there wasn't a soul but would have named Ilna. She knew

that, and because it was true she told herself that it didn't matter.

Her sister-in-law was screaming at her two-year-old again; Fedra was no better a mother than she was a

housewife, and she'd never lose the weight she'd gained during pregnancy, either. Ilna smiled coldly. She

understood revenge as well as she understood duty. Sometimes the best way to pay someone back was to

let nature do it for you.

Ilna had fabric in the loom on her doorstep and no reason to bother with the robe until it was time to turn it

and reposition the shade. The cloth kept drawing her eyes nonetheless. Cautiously, almost as if she were

reaching toward a cat in pain, Ilna stroked the fabric again.

She'd seen silk before, though mostly as trim to the garments of wealthy drovers; there weren't to her

knowledge three silken garments in Barca's Hamlet, and those were sheer, very different from this heavy

brocade. But that wasn't what fascinated her about the robe.

Fabric spoke in images to Ilna, when she handled it and especially if she slept in it. For the most part wool

was placid in a way that she found calming; Ilna’s own personality had a birdlike jumpiness very different from

that of a sheep. Still—she'd only worn once the shift she'd been given by a grieving mother, though she'd

never told the giver why her daughter took the poison or who the child's father would have been. There had

been other visions as clear and certain, and as impossible to describe to others as the sunrise is to a blind

man.

The castaway's robe was different in another way. The scenes that shimmered through Ilna’s mind as she

touched the patterned weave were too brief to leave tracks in her memory, but they weren't disturbing in a

normal sense.

The trouble was that when Ilna touched the fabric, she was absolutely certain that it didn't belong in this

world.

CHAPTER 5

Garric returned to the inn at early evening with the shovel on his shoulder. The stars were barely visible in

the east; an early day for a field laborer, but Getha had insisted he'd done as much as two men already and

paid him in full. Getha was a widow with her eldest son only ten. The family could handle most of the farm's

chores, but grubbing the drainage ditches meant levering up rocks that might turn out to be the size of a

sheep. Getha and the children had helped as they could, but Garric had indeed done more than a man's

work.

Chickens clucked peevishly as Garric walked across the courtyard to the stables. For the most part the

hens fended for themselves, but Lora tossed a handful of grain into the yard at evening to train the fowl to

come where they could be caught and killed at need. Oats spilled when horses were fed in the stable served

the same purpose, but there were no guests at the inn at present and no coach in as long as Garric could

remember.

Garric hung the shovel on its pegs against the sidewall. The tool was shaped from close-grained hickory but

the biting edge of the blade had a shoe of iron. Garric felt the metal critically. It was worn to the wood at one

corner and should be replaced the next time a tinker made his rounds through the hamlet.

He heard water slosh and stepped out of the stables. His father was pouring a bucket into the stone wash

trough beside the well in the center of the courtyard.

“I saw you come in,” Reise said. “You took care of the widow?”

“Yes, sir,” Garric said. “She'd let the ditches go too long, so the storm made the lower field a bog. I think we

drained it soon enough that her oats'11 come through all right.”

He plunged his arms to the elbows in cold water and rubbed his hands together. He had the good tiredness

of a task that worked all the muscles and had been accomplished fully. He'd been bragging, really, with the

amount of work he could do in front of a woman and her four children. The last boulder Garric moved would

likely have broken bones if he'd let it roll back from the top of the ditch—and that had almost happened.

Reise handed Garric a loofah to scrub himself with. The gourd's dried interior was harsh on skin that wasn't

armored with callus.

“The woman you found is going to be all right, Sharina says,” Reise said. “I suppose the hermit told her. Her

robe is silk. I don't recognize the cut, but it's of higher quality than this inn has ever seen before.”

He paused, then went on, “Why did you ask about Yole, Garric?”

Garric looked at his father. It would have been hard to describe Reise or-Laver in any fashion that didn't

make him sound average, but for all that he stood out in Barca's Hamlet like silver plates in a cowshed. Reise

was the same height as most of his neighbors. He wasn't slender, not really, but beside him local men

looked somehow rugged. Compared with them his hair had been a paler brown before it went gray, his face

was slightly foxlike instead of a rectangle with a strong chin, and the sun turned his cheeks rosy instead of

deep tan.

Reise had lived in Barca's Hamlet for seventeen years, and in Haft's capital, Carcosa, for six before that.

The locals still referred to him as “the foreigner from Ornifal” when they spoke among themselves.

“Well, she thought that's where she was,” Garric said. “At least that's what I heard.”

Reise shook his head in irritation. “She's an educated person to have been able to say that,” he said, “but

she was clearly out of her mind. I only hope she becomes lucid enough to tell us who to send for to collect

her and pay for her keep. Her clothing's expensive, all right, but she didn't have a purse or any jewelry that

she could sell.”

Garric grimaced, though he knew that if his father had been another sort of man he'd never have been able

to make a go of an inn in this remote spot. Reise wouldn't refuse charity to a castaway, but he'd grudge it and

make no secret of the fact.

“Can I see her?” Garric asked.

“I don't see why not,” Reise said. “She's in my house, isn't she?”

Garric walked inside. Behind him his father muttered, “The roof's leaking in a dozen places from the storm,

and now I've got a madwoman to care for as well!”

Garric had laid the castaway on a truckle bed in the common room. There were smaller rooms upstairs for

drovers and merchants with a bit of money, but he'd been afraid of bumping her on the steep, narrow stairs.

She was still there; with no guests at the moment, there was no reason to move her.

Nonnus knelt beside the bed of rye straw plaited into thick rope and coiled higher on the edges to keep the

sleeper from rolling out. Lora and Sharina were both in the kitchen from the sound of voices. One wick of the

hanging oil lamp was lit to provide light to add to what still leaked through the mullionecl windows.

“She said her name's Tenoctris,” the hermit offered. He spoke in the slow voice of a man who spent most of

his time alone. “I think she'll be all right.”

David Drake - Lord of the Isles 01 - Lord of the Isles

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