Knights of the Crown

Chapter 6

Golden Cup loomed against the cloud-hazed sky above the skiff like a castle curiously set afloat. From her massive bulk, Pirvan thought she might better deserve the name Golden Kettle.

The breeze had risen since they had left the quay. The creaking of the timbers and the rigging almost drowned out the splash of the oars as they carried the skiff the last few yards to the gangway.

Pirvan slung his new seabag over his shoulder and looked forward, counting the other crates and bags among the feet of the rowers. He didn’t think they had orders to drop his gear overboard, but he intended to guard against both that and accidents as well.

The ship loomed higher in a darkness that seemed to have grown deeper. They were well out in the harbor now, where the largest ships anchored, waiting for a fair wind outbound or, if inbound, for space at the deep-water quays their draft required. The ship had no neighbors, and none of them were lit up except for the common bow, stern, and gangway lanterns.

The ship seemed all lumps and lines, and apart from its great size Pirvan could not have said much about it. He had never lived by the waterfront, where one could not take a five-minute stroll without seeing a dozen different ships. Lodgings there were apt to be cramped and noisy, and sailors and harborfolk in general not overly fond of men of his profession.

(It did not matter that they were hardly adverse to practicing it themselves, nor that Pirvan would never have stooped to robbing a working sailor. Neither would have saved him, if his luck was out, from a quick voyage to the bottom of the harbor with old shackles bound to his feet.)

“Ahoy, the boat!” split the night as someone on the gangway spotted them.

“Passenger for Golden Cup!” one of the rowers shouted.

“Come alongside and be recognized.”

Pirvan hoped that the ship was as well kept as it was big. Poor shipkeeping, worse seamanship or navigation, drunkenness, fire-all could prematurely end this voyage (which Pirvan rather hoped would succeed) as well as Pirvan’s life (which he intended to preserve for longer than House Encuintras had any use for it!)

The gangway rose as high as a two-story house, and the railing was higher than a man, solid timber, and loop-holed for archers. As Pirvan climbed the last steps, a splash and a curse rose from below.

He looked down. Someone had opened a port and emptied a bucket into the harbor, without looking out first. Some of the bucket’s contents had caught the boat and the second rower, who was handing cargo to the first rower and a sailor on the bottom of the gangway.

A large man was suddenly before Pirvan, but ignoring him. He leaned over the side.

“Hush your noise there, or you’ll have a bath afore you’re back to shore!”

The rower hushed, but the cargo came aboard remarkably quickly afterward. The man kept looking upward, as if wondering what might fall on him next.

The big man now turned to Pirvan.

“You’re Pirvan, with the Encuintras party?”

“The same.” Pirvan pulled a medallion out of his purse and showed it to the man. A lantern hanging from either side of the gangway gave just enough light to examine it.

“Well and good,” the man said with a grunt. “You’re being the last. Follow this boy to your cabin, and stow your baggage right quick. We’ll be upanchoring as soon as the last shore boat brings the drinkers.”

A boy of twelve or so had apparently sprouted from the deck at the big man’s wave. He looked Pirvan up and down with an unnerving maturity.

Probably wonders how much he can persuade me to give him, Pirvan thought.

“Baggage?”

“Over there,” Pirvan said, pointing. “Trunk with copper bands, crate with one red side, the green bag. I’ll carry this.”

The boy snatched up the bag and dashed toward-the stern, Pirvan thought. He followed as fast as he could, not without barking his shins on protrusions from the deck, stumbling, and hastily leaping out of the path of parties of sailors on urgent business.

There were enough people scurrying about the ship’s deck to garrison a castle. Pirvan wondered if the last few men were all that important, or if someone or something valuable was in the boat. Not greatly his to worry about, either, and if he stayed out on deck much longer, he would be as conspicuous and as unwelcome as a sober cleric at a drunkards’ revel.

Pirvan caught up with the boy well inside the aftercastle, which was on the same scale as everything else about the ship. Pirvan had stayed in smaller inns, and his cabin was a more comfortable accommodation than such inns often provided to even the fat-pursed traveler.

He could touch the walls while standing in the middle of it, but every bit of space was cunningly used. One side held stout racks for baggage; a second a small table with a washbasin and pitcher and more racks, with lockers under.

The third side held a bunk, with drawers under it, and above the bunk two sets of hooks. From one of them a hammock was already slung, with a blanket roll in it.

Pirvan was no stranger to hammocks, but if someone was going to yield the bunk without a word, no thief ever refused what was freely given. (Honest men were much the same, too.) He stretched out, more to give the boy room to work than because he was tired.

Intentions were one thing, the state of his body another. He must have dozed off, because the next thing he knew, the boy was standing by the bunk, wrestling the trunk on to a rack and lashing it in place with a complicated harness of brass chain and leather thongs. It looked enough to drive an embroiderer to drink, but the boy made quick work of it.

Pirvan pulled out a copper ten-piece and tossed it to the boy. He snatched it out of the air, gaped, bit it, then grinned as his teeth told him he’d been offered genuine coin.

“Well, Master, that’s a good sign for our voyage together. We’ll be upanchoring before you need the head again, so snug yourself down and be easy.”

He was gone without another word, though he had said enough. More than enough to make Pirvan concerned that Grimsoar One-Eye might not have made it aboard, and that he would be sailing on this voyage with no friends and indeed no one aboard who would not toss him to the fish the moment his work was done. Of all the places on Krynn where it was easy to make murder look like an accident, a ship was notoriously the best.

Snugging himself down was impossible, with that on his mind. Wandering around the ship without being noticed would be as difficult as ever. The cabin had no portholes to give Pirvan a view, either.

What it did have, he discovered quickly, was a small grating in the ceiling-no doubt the deck above. There were also places where a man as agile as Pirvan could arrange himself, to listen to anything that came through the grating.

He quickly memorized the best position, then blew out the hanging lamp to give a stronger impression of sleep. A moment later, he was half hanging, half standing, with a bit of crouch thrown in, bracing himself so that his ear was against the grating.

It was a while before he heard anything but ship’s work, a confused and confusing din of shouts, grunts, creaks and groans, thumps of wood and squalling of metal, and numerous mostly irreverent remarks about gods, women, and shipmates. After one particularly loud outburst, which seemed to be connected with emptying a boat and getting it aboard, Pirvan heard that which made him listen with more attention.

“Wrung the wine out of everybody?” That was a male voice with authority in it.

“Almost everybody.” That was the voice of the big man who’d met Pirvan at the gangway.

“Almost may not be good enough.”

“Oh, don’t fret, Captain. The lad’s found a new hand, worth two of the old ones. He’s that big.”

“We’ve orders about new hands. Has he his papers?”

“Signed by Berishar, or I’ve forgotten my own name.”

A moment’s silence, then the sound of numerous booted feet, diminishing as they headed forward.

“That him, the big one?”

“Aye, Captain. The one with the red cap and the red trim on his jacket. And-you can’t see it from here, but he’s got the lucky eyes.”

“One blue and one green?”

“The blue eye’s more brown, but close enough.”

“It’ll be enough if he’s not unlucky, for himself or for us. This is a canny enough voyage, with so many women passengers aboard.”

“Should I make an extra offering at the temple of Habbakuk in Karthay?”

“You should get out of my sight and start lashing things down. Including your tongue, if you can’t make it wag sense!”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

Pirvan stifled laughter and let himself down on to the bunk, reassured. Grimsoar normally wore a patch over his ruined eye, but had a selection of glass and crystal ones to give him the appearance of two eyes. Also, his good eye was an unusual shade of blue with tinges of brown (or brown with tinges of blue), and he’d said that he would be wearing red headgear.

Altogether, Pirvan felt that he could sleep in peace, knowing he was not alone. That knowledge and scant sleep in the two days since he had signed on for this voyage took him down almost before he could hang up his outer clothes.

* * * * *

Pirvan awoke to the knowledge that Golden Cup was at sea, or at least no longer at anchor. All the movements and sounds had changed.

Less expected and much less welcome was the fact that he was no longer alone in the cabin. A man was sitting on the deck, back against the door, head sunk on his chest. It was a bald head, but the face below looked no older than Pirvan’s, and the body in the sailor’s clothes looked both well fed and well muscled.

Pirvan counted to ten, holding his breath while he drew his dagger from under the straw-stuffed pillow. Then he looked at the hammock above and said, very slowly:

“I seem to be in the habit lately of waking in strange places and in strange company. That you may cease to be strange, please tell me who you are and what you are doing in my cabin.” Without my having to ask twice, either, or I will try the pommel of my dagger across the bridge of your nose as the next question.

The man gave a whuff like a dwarf with a hangover and straightened. Dark eyes opened in an amiable, round face, framed from ear to ear in a close-cut dark beard. Cautiously, as if he had sensed Pirvan’s dagger and readiness to use it, he drew from the neck of his shirt a medallion.

It was hammered red metal, with silver-filled signs etched into it. The front was the mark of the Towers of High Sorcery, the rear the open book of Gilean.

Pirvan put his feet on the deck without taking his hand off the dagger. “Ah, the mage-”

“Neutral, my friend. Neutral, in spite of what the Black and White Robes may say, does not mean renegade.”

The man sounded as though he were wearily correcting a common mistake, rather than looking for an excuse for a fight. Since Pirvan had used much the same tone on certain persons ill-informed about the thieves, he found himself both eased and amused.

“I apologize for that error. May I ask one from you, for slipping into my cabin like-shall we say, a thief?”

The man choked down laughter. “I crave your pardon. But I am aboard this ship as a stowaway. I thought you might be the least inclined to turn me over to the captain.”

“That will depend on why you are here. Please don’t expect to subdue me by magic, either. I can probably knock you senseless before you can complete a major spell. Even if I couldn’t, using magic would be about as prudent as setting the ship on fire. You would be lucky to be thrown overboard in one piece.”

The man stood up and looked down at Pirvan. “Gilean forbid I should do any such thing,” he said. “For these moments I trained by handling drunks in my father’s tavern. I trained well, too, little as I knew it at the time.”

Pirvan looked up at the wizard. He did resemble a smaller edition of Grimsoar One-Eye, and might be enough faster to take advantage of being a smaller target. A brawl with this man might be one-sided for a good many, even without spells thrown in.

“Very well. We neither of us throw the other overboard. With that settled, who are you?”

“Tarothin, Red Robe Wizard,” the man said, and sat back down. “Stowaway aboard Golden Cup, as I told you. Why I am here is a long story.”

“So tell it. I haven’t heard the dawn whistle yet.”

“You won’t for quite a while. It’s still dark outside, though we’ve been under way for several hours.”

“Then we have time for a very long story.”

“As it may please your lordship,” Tarothin said, but his grin took the edge off the words.

Tarothin must have been accustomed to remarkably laconic people, because his “long story” took less than the time from one bell to another. Luckily, Tarothin had resisted the temptation to make it complex. Pirvan began to suspect that he and Tarothin might well get along splendidly, for that virtue if none other.

“… So, in the end, the Towers suggested that I had gone against law, custom, and my own philosophy. Not by serving it in a way careless of the consequences to others. I admitted that I had been in haste, but they called that explanation rather than excuse, and indeed a sign that I needed discipline more rather than less.”

Pirvan disagreed with nothing in this summary, but it did not quite explain why Tarothin was here. His look asked that without words, and the wizard continued.

“Now, I wished to avoid danger from the thieves and also a course of discipline in the Towers. It might have lasted years, and to be trapped in Istar that long-but I run ahead of myself.”

“No harm done.” At least, no harm done if he finishes the tale I hear in those words some other time, Pirvan mused.

“I disguised myself, quite naturally, and went aboard while Golden Cup was still alongside the quay. After we sailed, I left my hiding place and came up here, having heard that your cabin had space and that you had honor.”

“As to the space, the hammock is yours-”

“I’d rather sleep on the floor.”

“As you wish, but don’t complain if I step on you when I visit the head.”

“Never fear, as long as you go barefoot.”

“Let’s discuss the proper footgear for stepping on you some other time. I do have honor, which brought me on this voyage to make recompense to House Encuintras. Now it requires me to take you to their representatives.”

“Why?”

Pirvan suited bald answers to the bald question. “Because you stowed away, and a wizard aboard ship can make sailors nervous. Nervous sailors can be bad sailors, and bad sailors wreck ships.”

Tarothin nodded. Pirvan had the notion that he’d just passed a test of his own knowledge, rather than adding to the wizard’s. He almost hoped so. Worldly wizards and clerics were the butt of any number of rude jokes, but they were the sort you wanted to have along on a voyage like this.

“I will go gladly, though more so to Lady Eskaia. She commanded my spells, so will be the best judge of what I must do. Indeed, she commanded me without-”

“Without speaking to her guard-maid?”

Tarothin’s vexed look confirmed Pirvan’s suspicions. That definitely made Eskaia the better woman for this business.

“Then I suggest that we finish our night’s sleep,” Tarothin went on. “Haimya is about at all hours-learning her way around the ship, she says. But Eskaia takes a lady’s privilege and puts in a full night. Is there any reason we shouldn’t do the same?”

Pirvan saw none, and slept again soon after Tarothin started snoring.

* * * * *

“That’s Freshwater Point over yonder,” Mate of the Tops Kurulus said. “No matter how high the tide, the water’s fresh from there on back to Istar.”

“How long before we reach the Delta?” Pirvan asked.

“We’ll have it in sight in another two hours,” Kurulus said. “But we’ll be anchoring overnight. Nobody runs the Delta by night unless he’s in a smaller ship or wants to run aground-or worse.”

“Worse?”

“Pirates, ogres, sea trolls, or so they say-never seen one myself, but I can swear to the others.”

“This close to Istar?”

“Close is as close does,” the mate said. “There’s plenty of places in the Delta. Might as well be on Nuitari for all the soldiers can reach them. Then there’s razorflies, strangleberries, black willows if you’re foolish enough-”

He broke off and looked down. “Hoa. I think we’re about to have company.”

Pirvan looked down Golden Cup’s mainmast and saw Haimya climbing the rope ladder toward the top, where he and Kurulus stood. From fifty feet above, he could see that she wore an expression of grim determination.

Probably no worse than I had this morning, he thought.

Pirvan had first gone aloft after seeing Tarothin to Lady Eskaia’s cabin and being graciously dismissed. Kurulus had said it was a good way to wake up, and would give him a better name among the crew.

About the crew, Pirvan knew nothing. As to the waking, he had to agree. There was a certain degree of fear that left no room for early morning fuzziness, only for total concentration of mind and body on a single task-in Pirvan’s case, not falling out of the rigging like a ripe apple from a wind-shaken tree.

He had, in fact, been higher than the maintop, on cliffs and walls and in trees. But none of these swayed as the mast did, even in the calm waters of the Istar River. His climb was slow, though his recovery afterward was mercifully quick.

Now it was complete, his head for heights had entirely returned, and he stood with one hand on the rail of the top. Haimya was now so close that she would notice him looking at her and resent it, so Pirvan turned his eyes out over the river.

Two miles wide here, it had room for a hundred vessels between green-furred shores. These ranged from at least one ship as large as Golden Cup down to fishermen’s row-boats. There was even one odd craft with two triangular sails, crewed by figures too short to be human.

Pirvan pointed at the strange two-master. “Dwarves, kender, or gnomes?”

“Cursed if I know,” Kurulus said. “Dwarves mostly don’t go on water-you know they can’t swim, though some use floatbelts. Kender will go anywhere and do anything that promises an adventure, so it could be they. No gnome craft ever sailed as well as that one, and I’ve heard they’re giving up sail anyway.”

“Sailing? They’re building galleys?”

“The better for them if they were. No, I’ve heard they’re working on contraptions of levers moved by steam from giant teakettles that turn wheels either side of the hull.”

“Trust a gnome to run one like that.”

“Aye. Word is, so far they haven’t launched one that didn’t burn or sink. Us old sailorfolk have a few years yet before we need to put oars on our shoulders and walk inland to take up farming.”

A big Istarian galley swept by to port as Haimya climbed over the starboard railing of the maintop. For a moment, Pirvan thought she was going to fall, and resisted the temptation to put out a hand to her. She was seldom rude, save when a man offered unsought help; then she could rattle ears or even teeth with her reply.

At last Haimya embraced the mast as if it had been a lover, and murmured, her voice half-lost in the tarred timber, “A fine day for a sail.”

Pirvan nodded. “And to think we’re having it all without paying a single horn for it.”

The mate threw back his head and howled with laughter. “Try calling it a pleasure cruise when a southwester hits, friends. If you do it then, I’ll call you madmen or sailors.”

Haimya turned toward Kurulus a face that was pale with a slight tinge of green. “I have always wondered how to tell the two apart.”

The mate laughed even louder. Haimya frowned. “Could you leave us, please?”

Pirvan was about to suggest a more polite way of making the request. It said much about Haimya’s state of mind and body that she only pressed her face against the mast again.

“Well and good,” Kurulus said cheerfully. “I won’t leave two lubbers like you alone, unless you really need it, and the top’s no place for that, let me tell you. Hitting the deck all wound together like that-”

That finally drew some barracks language from Haimya. The mate’s grin widened.

“I’ll see to some lashings on the mainyard. The worst storms always hit the day after you’ve decided everything is shipshape.”

He swung himself over the railing, dropped to the yard, and strode out along it as briskly as any shepherd ever drove sheep across a level pasture. Haimya closed her eyes. Pirvan didn’t altogether blame her. Sailors took being comfortable high in the air somewhat farther than he ever had.

“Lady Eskaia and Tarothin thank you for more than you know,” Haimya said at last.

“Am I to learn it now?” Haimya might be both dizzy and seasick; Pirvan was weary of riddles.

“My lady has it in her-she and Tarothin think-to be a cleric. But-she has never been allowed testing or training.”

“That is the Towers’ decision?” If the merchant princess and the peculiar wizard were going against such, they were renegades in fact and would soon be such in law. One did not need to be a sailor to be uncomfortable with that, aboard a ship on a voyage already likely to be sufficiently perilous.

“Her father’s. However closely held the secret, it would escape. Then there would be tongues wagging all over Istar, many saying Eskaia was rebelling against her house or refusing marriage.”

“Is she?”

Haimya’s eyes turned cold for a moment, then she swallowed. “I do not know. It is not a question one asks. If she wishes me to know, she will tell me.”

The tone made the words as close to an apology as Pirvan had received from Haimya since they had set sail. “It will need to be an even more closely held secret here than in Istar. We live closer together, and the sailors mostly do not care for anything except weather magic.”

“They are loyal to House Encuintras.”

“Loyal servants, yes, but not slaves.”

He wanted to ask aloud if her years as a mercenary had not taught her the difference, but he wanted to climb down from the top with all his teeth in his head. Haimya was no fool, nor even the first person he’d known made to sound like one by a queasy stomach.

“Will you keep the secret, and do whatever else may be needed to guard it?” Haimya asked.

“My oath did not-”

“Is your oath dung?”

“No,” the thief said. “Nor am I a slave, either.”

Pirvan hoped her temper would not flare beyond bounds. It would accomplish nothing except entertaining Kurulus, and Eskaia would have to play peacemaker.

“I will guard both your lady and her secret,” Pirvan said. That seemed to ease Haimya. She turned to climb over the railing into the rigging for the descent, then gripped the polished wood until her knuckles turned white. Just as Pirvan was about to reach for her, she swung herself over, as smoothly as a girl but for the white face.

“I can descend by myself, thank you,” she said to no one or everyone.

She went down considerably faster than she had come up, with Pirvan sneaking a look every few moments. As she touched the deck, Kurulus returned to the top. From his face, he might have heard nothing but seen a good deal.

“That’s a fine woman, and she’ll be finer when she gets her sea legs and loses that temper.”

“I think some of the temper is inborn.”

“Ah, that can be even better.”

“Or much worse.”

“A man can always hope,” the mate said.

“Hope is cheap,” Pirvan said. “Do you really think you’ve a chance with her?”

“Jealous?”

“You’ve no cause to insult me like that.”

“Aye. Forgive me. But what are my chances?”

“About the same as mine.”

“Which are?”

“None.”