Act of Will

SCENE XXV Seaholme

Somehow, Greycoast was luckier than Shale. We hadn’t been traveling long that day before the ground started to look greener, and we were soon crossing fields of grazing sheep.

Mithos rode Tarsha, the overpriced bundle of muscle and mane they had spent our reward on.

“Are you doing all right, Will?” he asked, apropos of nothing.

“Of course,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“No reason,” he said. A moment later he added, “When we get to Seaholme we will have to organize a large defensive force and be ready for anything. No more blind terror or curious solo forays, all right?”

“All right.”

As if that was something I had planned. Has telling anyone not to panic ever helped in the slightest? No one chooses to panic. No one says, “Oh, what a good idea: panic will not achieve much in this situation, so I opt to stay calm instead.”

I swear, they might be strong and courageous, but sometimes they talked like they knew nothing about anything that really mattered.

It was late afternoon when we reached Seaholme, and Duke Raymon was waiting for us.

“You have made good time,” he boomed. “You have no idea how reassured I am to see you. The barges are expected around nine o’clock tomorrow evening. There’s a sizable force awaiting your instructions.”

“How many?” said Mithos, swinging down from his horse.

“A hundred,” Raymon answered. “Sixty cavalry and forty infantry.”

“Excellent,” said Mithos warmly. “I had not dared to hope for so many.”

“Frankly,” said the duke, “I can’t really spare them. But this is an important cargo and worth the extra caution.”

“If the raiders are as careful as everyone suggests,” added Mithos, “they will not risk an attack on so large a force.”

The duke nodded, but he didn’t say anything. I don’t think anyone else noticed, but it bothered me.

The following day I dressed carefully and tried to carry myself with the bearing of one who knew what he was doing. It wasn’t easy, partly because I didn’t, and partly because Seaholme was a maze of ancient streets packed with fishermen and soldiers from the moment the sun came up. I felt almost as lost and inadequate as I had in Stavis, but this time I had to strut around and look composed. I gave it a shot, throwing my shoulders back and stalking about like a rooster. Bill the tactician. The renowned General William Hawthorne. The names didn’t feel right, like I was wearing someone else’s clothes and they were all too big. I remembered the riders in the burning village and, thinking that I didn’t want the responsibility of arranging how we faced them, dropped the military swagger, hunched my shoulders, and tried to keep a low profile. For that part I was a natural.

The soldiers looked good in their blue tunics and capes, but their armor was light, and they lacked, even to my inexperienced eye, an air of efficiency and confidence. As we were introduced to the platoon captains I couldn’t help noticing a pair of young soldiers handling two-handed spears as if they were unsure what they were supposed to do with them. Still, they looked impressive from a distance, and maybe that would be enough.

In the harbor the myriad fishing boats had been moved to clear the dock for when the barges came in. Drawn up in vast warehouses close by, ten large wagons stood empty and waiting. In fact, waiting was what we did a lot of that day. Mithos and Orgos looked over the troops and drew up plans with their leaders, but they looked less happy at the end of it than they had at the beginning.

“I don’t see what more we can do,” Mithos said as we sat by the docks, eating grilled fish, “but if the raiders call our bluff and attack. ”

“What’s that over there?” I said.

“What? The lighthouse?” said Orgos, squinting in the direction I was pointing, but only getting as far as the round towerlike structure that dominated the harbor. “It’s used to guide ships into the port. ”

“No, further down the coast. It looks like another port.”

It turned out that the other port had been called Shelton. I say “had been” because, according to Duke Raymon, it was now a ghost town, and had been since the bay had been closed off to sea traffic by an immense sandbar. The people had just shut up shop and moved away. It was exactly the same as what had happened to Shale, but here the fishermen had just moved a couple of miles down the coast to Seaholme.

“It’s like the town here, but on a smaller scale,” said the duke. “Why?”

“I was just thinking,” I said, “that if the raiders were massing for an assault, they would need to do it in a place where they wouldn’t be noticed-”

“Will’s right,” said Lisha hurriedly. “We should ride over immediately.” She paused and added, for the benefit of the duke, “Don’t you think, Mithos?”

It took us less than ten minutes to ride over to the derelict port of Shelton. It was populated only by terns and gulls that swooped and dived at us as we walked our horses through its empty streets, fixing us with their hard, unafraid little eyes as if ensuring we were in no doubt as to who owned the place. The entire town was caked with the greenish white and grey of their droppings, and the air rang with their raucous voices.

We split up and searched the streets of silent shops. Garnet and I wandered along the harbor and poked our heads into decaying boathouses. The water had receded from the seawall and, farther out, you could see where it shallowed to nothing, barely covering a great reef of sand, dotted with the bones and split hulks of the ships that didn’t get out in time. We found nothing but puffins and razorbills nesting in the boathouse walls, and air heavy with the scent of rotting seaweed. We tried the lighthouse door. It was open, and we spiraled our way up the stone tower to the open top with its wood-filled brazier and its view of Shelton. There was nothing to see but the sister lighthouse down the coast in Seaholme. I leaned disconsolately over the guano-caked side, harried by hovering terns and great, screaming gulls. The noise was giving me a headache.

It was evening before we got back to Seaholme, where the dock-hands were amassing slowly on the quay and rolling out the wagons with studied caution. I had actually thought I was being useful, for once, but since we had nothing to show for our afternoon bird-watching expedition I resigned myself to my usual role: useless Bill, Will the waste of space.

The infantry had been sent in groups of ten to hold the main roads down to the harbor. The cavalry stood close by. Everyone looked anxious and a little bored, including the horses, which chewed on their oats, waiting for something to happen.

We dined in our tavern on local cod with rice and lemon juice. Lisha gave us a last-minute summary of the situation. “Mithos, you will oversee the loading of the wagons with me. Orgos, you stay with the infantry. Garnet and Renthrette, join the cavalry. Will, you are to carry messages between all the other units.”

Great. Will the errand boy. I looked out of the window, noting how quickly it had darkened. It was now half past eight and the last of the sun had disappeared ten or fifteen minutes ago. Mithos was talking: “There are two large barrels of seawater on the roof of each wagon. The raiders can’t expect to get away with a cargo like this, so they will probably try to burn it on the road. We should hack the barrels open as soon as the raiders appear and drench the coal: drown it. If one of those burning arrows gets in. What’s the matter, Will?”

“Burning. ” I repeated, getting to my feet.

“What?” said Lisha.

“Garnet and I went up the lighthouse today,” I said. “The one in Shelton. The brazier-”

“Had wood in it,” said Garnet, getting to his feet. He looked even paler than usual.

“The town is deserted,” I said, “but the lighthouse brazier is stocked with new, dry timber. The raiders aren’t going to attack the wagons at all.”

“They are going to lure the barges into the wrong port-” said Garnet.

“And wreck them on the sandbar,” I concluded. “They aren’t going to burn the coal. They are going to drown it.”