The Mark of Ran (13 page)

The Merry Leper. Rol had to smile as Woodrin clapped him on the back and ushered him in.

The place was low-beamed, foggy with whitherb smoke, close and hot as a steam room, and fetid with the smell of spilled beer, ill-washed men, and stale food. The roar of noise from the motley throng within struck Rol like a wave as he entered, but it subsided somewhat as he was studied closely by those whose noses were not too deep in their tankards. No veil of shadow here. He stood an ordinary man amongst men, returning their stares warily.

A huge, startling shape rose from beside the fire, where it had been turning a spitted pig. “Woodrin—what’s this with the blood and the shit and all? I told you I should have come with you.”

The speaker was a thing the like of which Rol had never seen before. Some fathom and a half tall, it had to crouch under the beams of the Leper, its knotted knuckles resting on the flags of the floor. In its head burned two green lights which blinked under a frowning crag of bone, and blunt tusks arced out above the lower lip. Its flesh was a mottled olive, lighter on the chest, darker on the forearms and face. It wore loose cowhide breeches with the hair left on, and a hide waistcoat. The creature’s great, splayed feet were bare, each toe as wide as Rol’s wrist.

“Fear not, Gallico; I had an angel guarding me. This is—a man of the city—who saw fit to preserve me from some overfriendly footpads.”

The thing called Gallico lumbered forward, rocking on its fists like a boat chopping through swell. Bent though it was, its eyes were on a level with Rol’s. The light in them moderated somewhat, and Rol could see that there were golden flecks in the green, and black pupils which were not round, but lozenge-shaped. Surrounding the eyes was a massive frame of bone, the olive skin stretched tight across it, speckled with tiny golden hairs. The thing’s scalp was entirely bald, but it had grown a sparse goatee on its chin, and there were gold rings in its earlobes, wide enough to settle comfortably about a man’s thumb.

The creature raised its arm (thicker than Rol’s thigh) and set a hand on his shoulder. “Well, now,” it said, and its voice was low, like a bass lute. “What might this man of the city’s name be?”

“My name is Rol, Rol Cortishane.”

“Rol Cortishane, I am Peor Gallico.” The thing grinned horribly. “I believe I shall buy you a beer.”

The fight in the street was a story now, which found a worthy teller in Woodrin, once his comrades had stopped up his broken head and wiped the worst of the filth from his clothes. Rol drank the good beer that came foaming up from the cellar below in tall wooden pitchers. In Psellos’s Tower the Master and Rol and Rowen drank wine, and beer, suitably watered, was the preserve of the lower orders. It tasted nothing like this.

Gallico was watching him, one paw turning the pig on the spit as easily as if it were a chicken.

“Why, Woodrin, he’s naught but a boy. Are you sure it was three desperate thieves, not just some shirttailed urchin who caught you unawares?”

A gale of laughter met this sally. Woodrin was indignant. “I tell you it was three professionals, licensed and all. This boy took them on cool as you please, slew one and sent the others limping off with broken bones and busted noses.”

“He’s somewhat young to be a killer of men,” Gallico said, but there was no humor in his voice now. The green glitter of his eyes had sharpened. “But, yes, I see it. I see—” He stopped, and supped mightily out of a wooden tankard which seemed small as a thimble in his fist. “I need some air, and to stretch the kinks out of my backbone. You there, our heroic rescuer, lend me a hand out of the door.”

The talk and laughter fell, and Gallico looked round, smiled. “Why the long faces? I will not bite him. Come, Rol Cortishane. Bear with me.”

For the first time in his life, Rol was reluctant to leave a tavern. It was something to be a hero, or at least it was something to be accepted, and brought into the edges of a brotherhood. It was new, and he liked it.

The streets were black and full of running water, but the rain had stopped, and in this lightless corner of the city it was possible to look up and see the stars. Gallico straightened to his full height upon leaving the tavern, and Rol stepped back a pace, shocked by the sheer bulk of the creature. His hand went to Fleam’s hilt, naked training kicking in.

“Na, na,” Gallico said equably, “you need not fear me. We are all in your debt, and mariners do not forget. Keep your sword blade hid.” His nostrils widened as he sniffed the air. “A change is in the wind. It will have backed round to due east by morning. We will have it on the port beam.”

“You sail tomorrow?”

“We sail today, youngster, at dawn.”

“For Osmer.”

“Yes, sunny Osmer of the Singers. A twelve-day trip, if Ran is kind.”

“And where then?”

“Wherever our next cargo takes us, wherever the wind suffers us to go. Wind, cargo, and the thews of men, that is all a good ship needs, if it is to make a profit in this godless world of ours.”

There was a sudden painful yearning in Rol, a desire to take ship with this thing and this company whose fellowship had blossomed all around him back in the tavern. To tread the seaways of the world and leave behind the Tower of Michal Psellos, the unending training for an unknown purpose. Rowen. To be clean and free and at sea again.

“You were a sailor of sorts yourself once,” Gallico ventured.

“How do you know?”

“Something in the way you look up at the stars. Most men spare them a glance and no more, but you study them as if you knew them.”

“I have sailed by them, a little. Coastal sailing mostly.”

“So you know the sea.”

“I lived my life by it and on it once. Seems a long time ago now, but it is not so long.”

“Time goes slower when one is young. I have seen out a century, and am but half-grown.”

“What—forgive me—what are you?”

Gallico laughed, a great boom of good fellowship. “I am a relic, a piece of flotsam. Men call my kind halftrolls, but that is only a name. I have Old Blood in me.” Gallico stopped, considered. “As have you, my young friend.”

They stared at each other, Rol in dawning wonder, Gallico nodding.

“The Elder Race, of whom it is better not to speak. That ancient blood reveals itself in strange ways, odd forms. Demon or angel, it is in us all.”

“You know, then, how I was able to save your wages.”

“You preserved Woodrin, which means more to us. But yes, I am not so surprised. Men do not fear us for nothing.”

“Your shipmates do not seem to fear you.”

“That is because we are of the company, Seahawks one and all.”

“Seahawks?”

“The name of our brig, though to my mind she’s more of a pigeon. We are of a dozen different nations and races but our allegiance is to our ship, and each other.”

Once again that odd pain in Rol, the feeling that he was somehow missing something, lacking a quality Gallico and his shipmates possessed.

“I must go now,” he said.

“Are you truly a man of this city, Rol?”

“I’m not a man of anywhere.”

“Then you could do worse than seek a home on the sea. We’re short several hands. The company would welcome you, I know.”

Rol bowed his head, realizing how easy it would be. By this time tomorrow he would be at sea with men who seemed to esteem him. He would be
clean.

“I cannot. I have things to do here in Ascari. Unfinished business.”

Gallico’s paw was surprisingly light on his shoulder. “I thought as much. But if the business becomes too bloody, make your way to Spokehaven on Osmer. Every year at the fall of the leaves, captains from all over the Wrywind put in for refitting there.”

Rol looked up, his face very young in the starlight. “The Seahawks also?”

“We also. Fare well, my friend.” And Gallico turned, bent, and re-entered the tavern at their backs, the door closing behind him on the lamplight, the laughter, the reek of beer and sweat of men.

Rol gathered his cloak about him, and began walking uphill, out of Eastside. Away from the sea.

Nine

THE FEAST OF HARVEST

TIME PASSED, THE SEASONS FOLLOWED ONE ANOTHER IN
their particular order. Summer came and went, and the snows on the Ellidon Hills receded, and then began to creep seaward again toward the flushed fires of the turning woods. The coastal fishermen brought in their wherries and beached them beyond the reach of Ran’s Rages, and in the markets of Ascari apples and hazelnuts and half a hundred other foodstuffs were mounded in colorful profusion on the stalls. Another harvest had been brought in, another season on the sea survived. Men gave thanks in drunken feasts up and down the city, where city-dwellers who barely knew what it was to plant a thing and watch it grow and harvest it sat down with fishermen and farmers and gave thanks for the largesse. It was a tradition as old as mankind itself.

Psellos hosted a grand feast in the finest suites of the Tower as he did every year, and so lavish were the preparations that it seemed he must denude the stocks of provender for miles around. Convoys of wagons brought in load after load of food and drink so that the lower levels were piled high with barrels and crates and sacks and earthen jars. Whole vintages were unearthed from the cellars, dusted, and set forth like ranks of soldiers; an entire bakery was hired to turn out pies, pastries, and cakes of every description; and as the fishing season was over, half a hundred deer were culled from the inland estates, along with pheasant, partridge, hare, and piled wicker baskets of larks and starlings.

The protracted preparations grated on Rol’s nerves, as did Psellos’s air of supercilious bonhomie. Rowen had taught him how to ride over the past few months, and he used every excuse he could find to saddle up the aged bay gelding that was his teaching mount, and trot up the hillside, beyond the sprawl of the city, into the green growing light of the hills and the clamor of the dying leaves. Once there, he would rein in and be able to see the whole shallow arc of Ascari bay, the headland beyond, and a world in which even Ascari’s teeming streets seemed a small and untidy blot on the hugeness of the earth and the mantling sea.

The sea, the sea. He had read stories of how the Weren had become enamored of the young world they had been born into, and how some had taken to the gray stone of the mountains, others to the deep fastnesses of the woods, and some to the shifting, ever-changing oceans of the world. Many of the creatures that roamed this diminished earth owed their existence to the early works of the Elder Race. Dolphins, it was said, had their origins in a dream of Ran. Horses were the puissant valor of the earth made flesh. And peregrines had been sired by the spirit of the west wind.

Legends only, but there was a rightness about them that made Rol hope they were true.

Another rider making their way up through the woods toward him, passing from light into shadow and back into light again, all dappled with the pattern of the sleeping trees. It was Rowen on her black mare. He mouthed the gelding backwards behind a wide gray beech and watched her as she gentled her mount up the root-strewn slope, kicking up saffron leaves as though they were flakes of autumn sparked by her horse’s hooves. She thought no one watched, and her face was open and alive—she loved her horse, all horses—and Rol heard her speaking to the young mare, cajoling, soothing, praising in tones warmer than she ever used with any human being. A small, helpless sense of mourning rose in him, and unwillingly he kicked the gelding forward again, out of the shelter of the tree.

Her head snapped round in a quarter-second and a long throwing knife appeared naked in one fist. The mare half reared and laid her ears back, alarmed by the change in her rider’s mood. But then Rowen saw who it was, and sheathed her knife, and clicked her mount onward.

“You are missed down in the Tower,” she said coldly. “I was sent to fetch you.”

“What use am I down there?”

“Perhaps they need another wine-pourer. How would I know? Come. The Master is waiting. The guests will arrive soon.”

“The guests? And who are they, I wonder? The great and the good of lovely Ascari, come to enjoy the largesse of the Monster of the Tower.”

Rowen looked at him. “Come, Fisheye. Time to go.”

He set his hand on Fleam’s hilt at the sound of the old nickname. Something white and cold and ugly seemed to rise up in his voice.

“And you, Rowen, what is your role in the festivities of the night? Will you take them two at a time in the Master’s bed? Or are the flags of the kitchen good enough for you? How many will you service tonight, Rowen? Will you let them beat you, or will they be more old-fashioned than that?”

Her pale face went paper-gray.

“When you are ready, get you back down. There is a change of clothes waiting in your room. No arms to be carried tonight, not even by you and me. The guests will begin to arrive at dusk.”

She turned her mare and with nudges of her heels set it trotting back down the slope to the city. Rol watched her go, black desolation burning a hole in the walls of his heart.

There was a bottle of Cavaillis, the fragrant brandy of Cavaillon, in his room. A gift from Psellos, it was older than half of Ascari. He broke off the seal of the bottle and slugged the potent liquor straight from its neck, feeling it burn a bright path down his gullet, warming the chill of his insides. He stank of horse, for he had pushed the old gelding hard at the last to get back to the Tower in time. A splash in the silver basin some maid had filled for him put paid to that, or so he hoped. He drank deeply of the brandy again, then turned his attention to the clothes lying neatly upon his bed.