S
harina stood at the edge of the surf, staring as the huge ship maneuvered in the shallows. It looked more like a building which floated offshore than something intended for the sea. The whole community had turned out to watch, and the lone vessel dwarfed them.
The ship's sides were bright crimson; Katchin had painted his window sashes that color, but no one in the borough had ever seen it applied over so broad a surface. More than fifty oars stroked from either side, bringing the vessel's curved stern shoreward for beaching; the blades quivered like the fins of an injured fish. Empty ports indicated that the ship was intended to have nearly twice as many oars as she did at present.
There were other signs of storm damage, even to eyes as inexpert as Sharina's were. The crew had managed to get the mast and yard down and lash them on the raised deck running the length of the vessel's centerline, but tatters of what had been the sail fluttered from the cordage. In several places bright yellow splinters stood out from the brown paint covering the deck railing; waves had carried pieces away. Seen end-on, the vessel canted noticeably to starboard, suggesting damage to the hull beneath the waterline.
The rowers began to stroke in unison, backing the ship toward the beach. Water trailed like strings of jewels from the rising oarblades. Villagers gasped in wonder at the sight.
Sharina was alone, or as much alone as one could be in a crowd that included everyone she knew. Even Garric stood at the back of the inn, leaning against the wall but upright; Reise was to his right and Tenoctris on the other side. Lora was nearby, her arms crossed to indicate that she was angry
about something, and Ilna had stayed close: She'd gone to check Garric's condition as soon as she and Sharina had shouted their news to the hamlet.
Sharina stayed apart from her family. She felt a fluttering of fear and anticipation, something more physical than emotional, as she watched the warship. She didn't know why she felt as she did, but she was sure it had nothing to do with her kin.
She looked around. Nonnus was at the edge of the crowd, far enough forward that the larger waves curled about his knees as they ran in. He nodded when he caught Sharina's glance. She started toward him; to her surprise, he waded inshore to join her.
A drum in the ship's interior thumped time to the stroking oarsmen. Sixty or eighty men stood on deck, many more than could have worked there while the vessel was under way, but Sharina didn't see any sign of confusion. The ordinary seamen wore only breechcloutsâand headbands for those men who hadn't shaved to bare scalp or mere stubble. Many of them were poised on the outrigger that carried the topmost of the three oarbanks. Officers in tunics cinched by broad leather belts shouted commands, but there was no anger in their harsh voices.
The vessel grounded with a rasp like that of a huge wave combing in while still offshore by her own length of more than a hundred feet. Seamen leaped into the surf. Officers tossed down coiled hawsers, then jumped over the sides also.
The oars slid in through their ports and vanished. More half-naked figures appeared on deck from the ship's interior, then sprang overboard to help with the lines.
“Those are the rowers,” Nonnus said, raising his voice to be heard over the rhythmic cadence called by officers and bellowed back by the straining seamen. “There's only twenty or so deck crew to steer and trim the sails, so the heavy work of beaching the ship for the night is the oarsmen's job.”
The tide was just short of full. The ship began to inch ashore, each step timed with the rise of the incoming surf.
Now that the deck was no longer crowded by men waiting to haul the drag ropes, Sharina had a better view of the figures still remaining. A stouter, gray-bearded version of the officers who'd jumped into the sea was shouting commands from the curved sternpost: almost certainly the captain. A few other sailors remained on board.
Twenty-odd soldiers in black armor stood in a close mass near the bow. One of them held a banner. There wasn't enough wind to stream the fabric from its pole, so Sharina could see only that there were red markings of some sort on a black field.
She turned to ask Nonnus about the troops, but the question stuck in her throat when she saw his face. The hermit was looking at the soldiers also. His body was still, and his expression was as starkly terrible as an oncoming thunderstorm. There was no emotion in it; nothing human at all.
“Nonnus?” Sharina said in a small voice. She touched his arm.
For a moment the corded muscle had no more give than a briarwood staff; then the arm relaxed and the face relaxed and Nonnus said in a voice with a playful lilt, “The woman there in the red cloak in the bow, she's a high court official indeed, child. Barca's Hamlet is being honored by her presence, as I'm sure she'll be the first to say.”
Then in almost the same lilting toneâand “almost” can be the difference between life and deathâhe added, “The Lady has a bitter sense of humor, it seems, to send them here.”
The ship came the rest of the way up the beach in a grating rush. It was lighter by the hundreds of men now pulling it, and the better traction the crew gained from firm beach beneath their feet more than equaled the decreasing buoyancy as the hull left the water.
When the crewmen ended their forward pull, the sternpost was hard against the seawall near the inn's door. Though the vessel was as high on the beach as possible, waves still washed the bronze beak that made the ship's bow a weapon.
Four of the sailors on deck lifted a boarding ramp and pushed the end of it to a pair of their number ready on top of the seawall. The men on board lashed their end to deckposts while their fellows braced the other with callused feet.
“Not taking any chances with Her Ladyship having a tumble,” Nonnus said in a grimly musing voice. “She wouldn't have liked the voyage even before the storm, not in the least. A trireme's not a palace suite, no matter how rich and powerful you were on land.”
Sharina touched his arm again. Some of her earliest memories were of the hermit who'd lifted her when she fell, washed her knee clean, and covered the scrape with a salve that drew away her pain with the sudden ease of grass lifting after a storm has wet the meadow.
Nonnus was always reserved and perfectly controlled, to Sharina as well as to everyone else with whom he came in contact. To hear him joking with catlike humorâunderlain by catlike crueltyâbothered Sharina worse than had the look of his bleak visage a moment before.
One of the soldiers raised a trumpet, a long cone of silvery metal rather than a cowhorn, and blew a piercing two-note call. The soldier whose helmet crest was whiteâthe others were redâshouted an order.
The whole troop marched forward in unison two-abreast across the boarding ramp. Their hobnailed boots crashed on the planking and the dangling metal fittings of their armor jingled together. Each time their left feet came down the soldiers banged their spearshafts against their shields and shouted to create a harsh cacophony. It made Sharina's muscles tense.
“The noise is to frighten an enemy when they attack,” Nonnus said in the same new voice. “It works with some, I'm told.”
The sailors still aboard pressed the rail trying to look inconspicuous as the woman followed the troops down the deck. A fillet of silver lace fastened with pins whose diamond embellishments blazed in the sunlight bound her gray hair.
Her face had fine bones and a look of bored resignation.
At the woman's side, a half-step back so that her flaring cape didn't brush his, was a young man in lustrous black: knee-high boots of polished leather, silk tunic, satin cape. His felt hat had rolled sides, three corners, and a black swan's feather waving from its band. His carefully groomed mustache and goatee were probably intended to give gravity to his delicate features; instead they looked as though they'd been painted on a child.
“Another of Omifal's finest,” the hermit said in that icy tone. “Watch them well, child. You'll want to tell your grandchildren about this some day.”
“Nonnus,” Sharina said. “Pleaseâplease don't use that voice. It ⦔
Nonnus flinched as though she'd stabbed him. He knelt in an attitude of prayer, head bent and hands crossed. “I'm sorry, child,” he added before rising again from the seafoam. “I remember what was and I forget what should be. With the Lady's help, I won't let it happen again.”
To cover her embarrassment, Sharina watched the young man. He'd paused at the stern to let the woman precede him off the ship. “He's only a boy,” she murmured.
“About twenty, I'd guess,” the hermit said, this time with dispassionate appraisal. “Nobles don't age as fast as common folk.”
As the youth strode across the ramp, his black cape fluttering in the sea breeze, Nonnus added, “It's a bad age for a man, twenty. You have the strength to do almost anything you want, but you don't have the judgment to know what the price of some of those things is going to be in later times.”
“Let's get closer,” Sharina said, in part because she didn't want to think about what Nonnus meant by what he'd just said.
They walked up the seawall's rough face with the ease of long practice and strong legs. The masons of the Old Kingdom built with such skill that even after weathering for a
millennium the courses were as tight as splits within individual stones.
The soldiers had formed a double rank between the mill and the inn. The two nobles frowned in puzzlement as they stood with the trumpeter, bannerman, and white-crested officer.
The hamlet's residents watched in a murmuring circle, but none of them spoke to the newcomers. The strangers were an apparition here, a wonder greater than a stranded whale. Katchin the Miller stood sideways at the back of the crowd as though ready to flee.
“Maybe he thinks they're royal tax collectors,” Sharina whispered to her companion. “Maybe they are!”
“Not them, child,” Nonnus murmured back. “There was never a tax collector who rated an escort of Blood Eagles.”
Aboard the ship, sailors brought packets of personal goods from below and tossed them down to their fellows on the beach. A team was attaching a small sail to a frame of oars for a shelter. The sailors seemed cheerful in contrast to the formal discipline of the armored soldiers. They were probably glad to have made a safe landfall despite the storm which battered their vessel.
After conferring with the woman, the officer shouted, “The procurator Asera bos-Gezaman demands food and lodging during the time she stays in this community. In the name of Valence the Third, King of the Isles!”
He turned his head slightly as he spoke so that his demands swept the onlookers in general. “She also requires food and lodging for twenty-five soldiers of the Royal Guard and food for two hundred sailors. Immediately!”
Sharina's father stepped forward. “I'm Reise or-Laver, the innkeeper here,” he said to the officer. “I can offer your mistress food and lodging, though not of the sort she'd find in Carcosa or the house of one of her peers.”
“Of course not,” Asera said, speaking for herself for the first time. “This is Haft, not civilization!”
Reise dropped to one knee, lowered his head, and made an
odd gesture with his outstretched right hand as though he were brushing something across the ground. Sharina had never seen her father do anything like that before. Then he rose and said to Asera, “As Her Ladyship says, of course.”
Asera chuckled in a reaction that smoothed her face and made her look unexpectedly attractive. “Court manners on the east coast of Haft?” she said. “Now you have surprised me, innkeeper. Let's go inside and see if your cooking can surprise me as well.”
Reise bowed again and started toward the door of the inn. “Are you the village chief or whatever he's called here as well?” Asera asked as she followed, accompanied by the young noble but not the officer. “That damned ship needs repairs and a new sail before we set off again for Carcosa ⦠.”
Katchin hurried after the others now that he was sure of the situation. “I'm the count's bailiff for this borough!” he called as the nobles went inside.
The officer gave an order that released his men from their rigid brace. They began looking around the community. The villagers' conversation grew louder, and one or two of the bolder locals approached the strangers with questions or offers.
“They were just blown here,” Sharina said, glad to have an explanation for the ship's presence. “Like Tenoctris and the seawolves, I suppose.”
“Yes, but more like which of those?” the hermit said. Sharina looked at him in such surprise that he added mildly, “There are times it's easier to deal with seawolves than it is with nobles. Folk with âbos' and âbor' in their names don't think they're the same race as commoners ⦠and perhaps they're right in that.”
A gust blew the troops' banner out from its pole. A few broad crimson strokes drew a stylized eagle's head against the black background. Beneath were words in red script that Sharina couldn't read because of the fluttering.