Anderson, Poul - Novel 18 Read online

  CHAPTER 2

  Tornado alive, Josserek Derrain burst from his prison cabin. Behind him, Second Mate Rigdel Gairloch sprawled bloody-faced. His sheath knife gleamed in Josserek’s grasp.

  Sailors at work around Skonnamor saw the huge man come bounding, and yelled. Three of them moved to stop him. He left the deck in a leap. His right foot smote a belly. The sailor fell backward and lay clawing for breath. With his own weapon, Josserek blocked a thrust, while he stiff-armed the companion. He reached the starboard rail, snatched a belaying pin from a rack, whirled, and laid it across the scalp of a fourth shipmate who was almost upon him. A final spring, and he went overboard.

  His dive crashed water aloft and shocked back through his bones. When he opened his eyes, yellow- green murk enclosed him. He could just make out a shimmer on the surface, and the freighter’s dim hull. Tucking blade under belt, he strove deeper into chill and heaviness. Pass below her keel—he scraped against barnacles; a trace of blood trailed after—port side, wharf-—

  When his lungs felt about to erupt and darkness thundered in his skull, he sought upward again. Barely did he let nose and mouth poke forth, and he struggled not to gasp. The air was full of harbor smells, salt, smoke, tar, fish. He heard soles thump swiftly on planks, angry shouts, alarmed gulls. He was beneath the dock where Skannamor lay, far back in a cave of shadow which it made. Pilings and a clutter of moored boats gave added concealment. Thus far we’re on course, he thought.

  For a while, then, he let himself float and rest, holding onto a painter. The racket ended overhead. No crewman had really cared to hunt the escaped mutineer: a dangerous quarry. The officers must regret losing him, since to take him back for trial and punishment in Eaching would have set an example. However, tracking him was now a job for local patrollers. If they failed, it was not too important. An outlaw alien, Josserek had no place to go but the underworld, and probably could not prosper there. Likeliest his gullet-slit corpse would soon be found in an alley or on an ebb tide. If his ship had not already departed, that might prove a healthier lesson than his sentence to a labor gang.

  Still, chances were the Barommians would do their best to catch him. As soon as the commandant here got word, he’d set the Watch out searching. Possibly he’d not be content with native police, but order some of his soldiers to the task as well. Authorities never welcomed the idea of a violent man at large in their jurisdictions. Besides, it’d be a goodwill gesture; and the gods knew how strained relations had grown between Killimaraich and Rahfd.

  Therefore, son, we’d better make Arvanneth, and fast.

  Josserek poised peering and thinking. He’d been confined to a spare compartment in the after deckhouse, tethered to a staple, since before his ship entered the Dolphin Gulf. Through the portholes he’d barely gotten glimpses as she reached Newkeep and was warped into her berth. This refuge was little better.

  Skonnamor blocked most of his view. She was a big vessel, a four-master with a powerful auxiliary to drive a screw propeller, meant for months-long journeys. Her trip here had exceeded the usual. As a rule, merchantmen between Killimaraich and Rahfd simply crossed the Mother Ocean to one of the Empire’s west coast harbors. But then, Arvanneth had not been in the Empire till a year and a half ago. Rather than risk Damnation Straits, Captain Bahin had navigated his command south of Orenstane, then west over the Feline Ocean till he rounded Eflis, and finally northwest across the Rampant to his goal. He brought hides, wool, and pickled meat, always in demand, especially so in the aftermath of war. (Why didn’t the barbarians who roamed northern Andalin take advantage of the market? Travellers said that earth shook beneath the mass of the wild herds yonder.) But, while lengthy, his voyage was not extraordinary by standards of the Seafolk.

  Josserek’s glance sought past bow and stem, right and left and behind. Docks and warehouses lined this mouth of the Jugular River. Many were in use, and more craft rode out at anchor. Skonnamor was the only real blue- water ship. The rest were coastal schooners and luggers, fishing smacks that never went outside the Gulf, clumsy steamboats that plied upstream. Inshore, Newkeep raised walls, towers, battlements. The light of a newly risen sun glowed on lichenous brick, flashed off high windows, gave back red and gold from the Imperial standard which flew above.

  Scant information. Josserek must rely on memory of maps and books and sailors’ tales. Despite its name, as commonly translated by the Seafolk, Newkeep was over three thousand years old. Before, Arvanneth had been its own port; but the retreat of the sea, the ever deeper channeling of the river, the silting of the delta, had finally made that impossible. Now the Ancient of Ancients lay almost a hundred miles inland.

  Now? Whole civilizations had lived, and died, and from their ashes engendered new, while that “now” lasted.

  Josserek shook his wet head. Time to stop gathering moonbeams.

  The hunters would expect him to seek a hiding place in Newkeep. Small and engirdled, it didn’t offer much. Arvanneth had more holes and burrows than a hull the teredos had been at, as well as an estimated half million people among whom to vanish. Not to speak of—Let that wait. First he must get there, undetected. Later he’d see about surviving there.

  A throb in air and water reached his senses, grew, brought him alert. Yes, his chance, better than many he’d taken in his thirty-two tumultuous years. A tug was bound his way, hauling three barges. It was a sidewheeler; to judge by the smoke from the tall stack, its engine ate wood. Those things meant it was built in these parts. Short of timber on their plains, the Rahfdi- ans had mostly burned oil in their comparatively few machines, till the Barommian conquerors reserved that precious stuff for military and naval use. Today the Empire copied the alcohol and methane motors of the Sea-folk... . The barges carried barrels that smelled like fish, and assorted boxes of goods which must be from the coastwise trade, unloaded here for transshipment to the queen city.

  Josserek struck out on an interception course. His crawl kept most of him submerged, unlikely to be noticed amidst the trash bobbing about. As the tug threshed nigh, he went altogether below, let it pass, rose by the rearmost barge on the side opposite his ship. Freeboard was a bare two feet. He reached, caught hold of a lashing on deck, let himself trail. The water gurgled around him, cold when the heat of escape had died away. Sharktoothed cold.

  He risked chinning himself sufficiently high for a peek. A couple of pikemen lounged by a shack on the forward barge, guards against bandits. They weren’t looking aft, and nobody else was outside. Josserek came aboard in a swift slither.

  Three crates made a wall to hide him, a niche for comfort. And, yes, he could pull a flemished line in there to sit on, pleasanter than planks. He noticed his fingers snap. That was a habit he’d picked up in his wanderings, a gambler’s gesture of thanks to the elves when they made dice fall right. Superstition? Maybe, maybe not. Josserek had no formal faith. His nation’s cult of gods forever at strife—not good against evil, but simply opposed, like summer and winter—seemed reasonable to him; however, he hadn’t made a sacrifice since boyhood.

  He removed his garments and spread them to dry. Except that he was barefoot, they were too characteristic of eastern Orenstane for him to display hereabouts, a male’s loose blouse and bell-bottomed trousers, colorfully woven. From an ankle hung the stump of the cord which had restrained him. Seated among the crates, he cut it away. A chance-found rag made a loincloth; it would be stupid to shock people. Thereafter, senses fine-tuned, he let his thews ease off.

  He was a big man, even among his home folk: six and a quarter feet in height, broad to match. His features were craggy, gray-eyed, curve-nosed. By choice he went clean-shaven, but during his confinement had grown a beard which partly hid the scar seaming his left cheek. Black hair was bobbed just under his earlobes, which carried small brass rings. A snake coiled around an anchor was tattooed on the thick right forearm, an orca on the left. Where clothes had shielded his skin, it was pale brown; like most Killimaraichans, he had among his ancestors some
people of that country’s tributaries in western Orenstane. The weathered parts of him were much darker.

  We’ll pass plenty of crews today who’ll spy us, Josserek, me bucko, he thought, and we can hardly pretend we’re a short, slim, saffron-colored Arvannethan—or a stocky, red, nearly whiskerless Barommian—can we? But we might well be taken for a Rahidian by whoever doesn’t squint too close; and the bulk of the Imperial army is Rahidian by descent; and maybe it’s not strange that, say, an Imperial soldier would commandeer a ride, and be so boorish as to relax semi-naked in public after a swim. Hey? He lounged back as if he owned the whole rig. To the occasional stare he did draw, he returned a cheery wave of his hand.

  Water traffic wasn’t as dense as at a major port of Seafolk. But it was more than he had expected. Conquest didn’t seem to have damaged commerce for very long. Rather, the Barommian overlords were encouraging new activity in the stagnant old city-state.

  Early on, Josserek saw a barge train come downstream laden with slabs and rails of rusty iron. That would be metal the Northfolk supplied in return for manufactured goods and such luxuries as spices. But this consignment was scarcely for Rahid, whose dealers had always bought their share from Guildsmen in Arvanneth and transported it home overland. If anything, dominion here would reinforce their style of operating. They were landlubbers at heart, reluctant to trust valuable freight to the sea.

  Barommians, horsemen and mountaineers from the bleak country south of Rahfd, had had no maritime interests at all ... till they overran and reunified the Empire. Now—Hm. Josserek scratched in his beard, which itched as it dried. They were stimulating the expansion of Imperial enterprise beyond the Gulf, among the islanders of the Hurricane Sea and the forest folk along the Tuocar coast. And that forbode trouble, because traders from Killimaraich and allied realms in the Mother Ocean had developed a strong interest of their own in those same regions.

  Well, we knew this already, he thought. Yon outbound iron cargo is a symptom, not a surprise. He was nevertheless fascinated. Nowhere else did excavation yield metal in as prime a condition. What fabulous ruins did the barbarians mine?

  Other craft included rowboats, log rafts, a patrol galley whose fighting men gave him a sharp second look but didn’t question him. When the gilt-arabesqued many-oared yacht of what seemed to be an aristocratic lady, or a favorite concubine, passed by in music and perfume, he got a stare more appraising. Twice, in stretches of reed and gray-behung cypress, a canoe glided from a creek, manned by a short-legged grass-skirted savage from the Swamps of Unvar. Elsewhere the land lay flat, ditched, cultivated in great plantations belonging to the city’s Lords. At this springtide it was delicately green, save where orchards flamed and snowed. It smelled of growth. Occasionally it smelled stronger, when he passed a clutch of workers’ huts and henyards behind a rickety wharf.

  At sunset the tug wheezed to a halt for the night. Men came from below to set out anchors and riding lights. Josserek was ready for this. He slipped into the water and swam ashore, his clothes on his head. Somebody called through swift-falling dusk, “Hoai, what’s that?” but another voice answered, “An alligator, I think, immigrated early this year.” Brush concealed his re-entry onto land; the bank was steep and overgrown. Not far inward from the top, he found a highway and struck off along it, pad-pad on paving blocks where uncounted generations of feet had wom faint channels. He was soon dry again, and dressed himself. Stars bloomed big and soft, but tendrils of fog which sneaked forth across the plowland were nastily chill.

  Emptiness growled in his guts. He could ignore that. However, he’d better start thinking how he, a wanted man with not a bronze in his pocket, might get through the next few days. First came a swifter means of reaching town.

  When he was fifteen years old, Josserek had been sentenced to a labor gang for assault on a naval officer who taunted him in his raggedness. The gang went to a sheep ranch in central Orenstane. After two years he escaped, wandered starving, eventually reached the coast and got a berth on a tramp ship whose master was too short of crew to quiz him. Later he had done many different things. But he remembered the ways of horses.

  The one he lifted was too good for the ramshackle bam that held it, on the edge of the next hamlet he came to: a spirited gelding which whickered softly as he led it out, danced around him while he put on the bridle he had also found in the dark, and carried him bareback at a fine, ringing clip. No doubt the plantation owner had left it to be pastured on fresh grass after winter’s hay. Josserek regretted that at first he’d had to kill a noisy dog, drag the carcass off, and wait while an aroused tenant decided there had been a false alarm and went back to sleep. Had the mongrel been a pet of whatever children lived in that hovel?

  Toward morning he reached Arvanneth.

  Towers climbed gaunt or squat, bulbous or jagged, the mingled works of more centuries than history had counted, up from among crowded walls, roofs steep or flat, lanes full of night, till they loomed athwart fading stars. Mostly the city was blackness and silence; a few places there glimmered a lamp or prowled a whisper. The water around sheened oily and rank. Eras past, Arvanneth had been circled by a bight of the Jugular, and the moatlike remnant of this was still called the Lagoon. But now the river ran no closer than five miles. Canals crossed the land in between. A single causeway ran from the end of the Grand East Highroad. Josserek saw how lanterns burned on posts along it, and a fortified checkpoint scowled at its end. He decided he’d better abandon his mount. The ferry service which at dawn would leave the inn at this terminus of the New- keep road was not for a pauper like him, either. Yet he dared not swim. The wizards of a vanished glory time had bred strange and gluttonous creatures to inhabit those depths ... or disease brewed in filth might be a worse danger.

  A skiff was chained near the ferry. Josserek whittled links and lock free of bollard and stempost both, because the metal ought to fetch a good price in Thieves’ Market. Oars were absent, but he found he could pry a board loose from the half-rotted dock and paddle across with that.

  He didn’t go directly over. There lay Treasure Notch, where rivercraft and warehouses must have better guard than here. Instead, he circled left. His plank worked slowly and tiringly. But he was soon too caught by everything he saw, as false dawn turned sky and waters pallid, to notice his body much.

  He passed New Canal, which divided a forested game preserve and the grounds of a moldering mansion; more estates, some of which kept their elaborately trimmed gardens; Royal Canal, where traffic already stirred; West Canal, its especially high-arched bridge, the road that paralleled it; and further on, the Westreach, weeds, bushes, bog, scrub oak, pine running on toward unseen Unvar. Opposite, the canals continued from the Lagoon into the city. At each entrance hulked walls, turrets, portcullis: Seagate, the Grand Bastion, the Little Bastion. Cannon, catapults, helmets, spearheads caught light and sparked. Imperial banners drooped in damp hushed air.

  Sunrise had unfurled when he decided he’d come far enough. By all accounts, this part of town held the Lairs, where honest folk did not go if they could help it. He might be safe on the north side—the Hollow Houses district was said to be almost wholly abandoned—but what would he eat there? He pushed to a small pier. Stone, it had not decayed like the ferry slip, though iron cleats and mooring rings were long gone and the building behind it gaped vacant. Josserek stood for a moment in his boat, wondering if he should secure it somehow: might get a price for it too. No, likeliest it would disappear the instant he left. Let it drift free. Hope the owner could reclaim it.

  He jumped ashore. “Stand quiet,” said a voice. “Drop that chain. Don’t bring your hands anywhere near your knife.”

  Very carefully he obeyed, before he turned to meet the three men who had taken him.

  CHAPTER 3

  Here snowfall of winter had given way to rain, or to fog that sneaked through twisty streets, turned walls to shadows and folk to phantoms. Almost since the day when his army rafted over the water, hewed over the cause
way, raised its standards in triumph above antiquity and the slain, Sidfr had longed elsewhere. He thought less of lacquered splendor and Imperial court ceremony in Nafs—though there Nedayin, his young wife bestowed on him out of old Rahfdian nobility, dwelt with the one thin child of theirs who lived—than of Zangazeng the Black, where Ang the wife of his youth abode with her sturdy brood of six, in sight of white-crowned volcanoes; and mainly he remembered the high country around that town, Haamandur itself, pastureland of horses, Barommian encampments where firelight and merriment twinkled under diamond-brilliant stars, herds guarded by cowboys or shepherdesses who were alike armed and fearless, a windy gallop to the music of hounds till wild boar or stag stood at bay and he laid hand on spear. In Arvanneth he often wryly recalled a saying of his mountaineer kin: “The bobcat has captured the cage.”

  This morning had been clear, but about noon clouds massed and moved on a wind that blew off the Swamps of Unvar and smelled of them. Now heaven hung low and leaden, gloom walled the west and rolled ever closer, lightning winked, thunder grumbled. Despite broad windows, the Moon Chamber had already gone nighted in its comers, and elsewhere the phases painted in silver upon violet shimmered only dully. Rather than freshening air, the oncoming storm prophesied summer’s dank warmth.

  Sidfr leaned forward. His fingers tightened around the carven water moccasins along his chair arms. “Do I understand you, your Wisdom?” he asked. In months of viceroyalty, his Arvannethan had become fluent; but it was still roughened by the Barommian accent he could never quite get out of his Rahfdian either. “The Council would naysay this next Imperial enterprise?”

  I hope that struck the right note, he thought. Not overharsh—I could sweep the whole weird theocracy aside with a few beheading strokes, except that I need, the Empire needs its cooperation. At the same time, I must keep it reminded who’s master. Should I have spoken softer? These people are so cursed alien!