The Sacred Band

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The day of his departure arrived so quickly that Dariel felt he had barely rested at all. He had not gotten to visit any but the nearest other village, though over the week he was in residence-on display, really-at the elder’s village, a steady stream of pilgrims from the lose network of settlements stopped by to gawk at him. He had not learned a fraction of the things he had hoped to, but he did not imagine that another week or two or a month or more would be enough. The People’s history was too tied with Auldek history, with the Lothan Aklun, and with aspects of his own kind that he was yet coming to grips with.

“I don’t like leaving you unprotected here,” Dariel said to Yoen as they strolled toward the edge of the village and the path that the others had already taken down to the river, a tributary of the Sheeven Lek and the fastest method for returning to the coast. “I know the Auldek are gone, but I wouldn’t put it past the league to cause you grief.”

“I don’t think so. The league is going to cause you grief. That I believe.” Yoen touched him on the shoulder. With a gentle pressure, he turned him toward the path to the river. “We will be fine, Dariel. Nobody will attack us here. We have nothing to fear but the cathounds and freketes and… dou worms.” He clicked his tongue. “Truly, Dariel, do not think us weak. Just do what you have to for the People. That’s what matters. Go now. You have many miles to travel, and you must be quick if you’re going to be there for the gathering the clans have called. It is your only chance to address them all at once. Don’t be late!”

“Are you coming down to see us off?”

“Of course. Now go.” He caught sight of something that drew his gaze. “Anira is there, waiting for you. Go to her.”

She was. She appeared from around a wall, her sack slung over her shoulder. Dariel acknowledged her with a wave and started toward her. A few steps on, he turned to say something to Yoen, a non-parting that promised a proper one down by the water.

The old man had turned away already. He did not hurry. His back was not unkind. Yet Dariel felt emotion pour into him, a sadness like he had not felt since he was a boy.

The crafts they were to travel in were oval boats about twenty feet long, deep in the hull, with good storage space within. A frame of the white-bark trees crosshatched their centers, strapped in place by cords that wrapped down around the hull. The lines of the hulls had an ornate elegance. The keel was a gentle ridge from which smooth, organic contours flowed upward. Something about them reminded him of something, though Dariel had never seen a craft even remotely like them. It was only when he saw one overturned on the rocky beach that it occurred to him what they reminded him of.

“They look like turtle shells.”

“Very observant,” Anira quipped. She hefted a bundle and moved to load it into one of the boats.

Dariel did the same, double-time to keep up with her. “You don’t mean… that they are turtle shells, do you?”

Anira tossed the bundle in and turned to face him, showing him the full measure of her amusement. “What did Birke tell you about the Sheeven Lek?”

“Not to swim in it.”

“Why did he do that?”

“Because other things swim in it. Bigger things.”

“Exactly. Things like turtles.”

“There are turtles this size in the river?”

“No.” She tossed a leg over the gunwale and began to shove and wiggle the new bundle into place. “They’re no more. Died out a long time ago.” Before Dariel could expel the relieved breath he had at the ready, she added, “The scale leeches killed them off.”

Scale leeches? Dariel thought it sounded like something she had made up on the spot. He said so, much to her amusement.

T hey floated free of the riverbank by midmorning. Yoen did not come down to see them off, but it seemed as if the rest of the village did. They crowded on the beach, down onto rock outcroppings. Some of the children tossed flowers to them from a tree house high on a branch overhanging the water. He barely knew these people, but watching and waving to them, touching the rune on his forehead, he felt a weight of responsibility to them. He had agreed to help them, to try to secure this land for them to prosper peacefully in. He had agreed to try to become the hero they all hoped for. It felt right that he did so, but as he floated toward it, he feared he faced an enormous task that he still did not understand the shape of.

The seven shells were to carry the party of five back toward the coast from which they had so recently come and to take with them the young and hardy from the nearby villages, any who could help in the fight they all knew awaited them. Each boat went captained by a rower skilled at handling it. Perched on the thwart, the rowers moved the crafts with a quiet efficiency of effort. In the quiet pools of still water-of which there were many the first day-they drove the vessels forward by leaning their backs into timed pulls on the oars. When the current picked up, when pressed through rocks or down steeper sections, they turned the boats with a touch of an oar on the green water or spun them like tops with a cross-cross pull. There was an elegance to it that Dariel admired from where he lay among the bundles of supplies.

In the afternoon he took a turn at the oars. He had rowed skiffs on enough occasions to be confident, and he figured the study he had made of it from a few hours’ watching had taught him what he needed to know. Wrong. He spent all his efforts on just moving the absurdly long oars. Just landing the blades in the water the right way proved difficult, and the right way never stayed right for long because the vessel was always in motion. When he lifted one oar to reposition it, he invariably pulled against the other, swinging the boat one direction or another. When he tried to correct on the other side, he found the water as immovable as setting concrete. If he managed to press down on an oar-thereby lifting its other end out of the water-the freed end flailed in the air with a life of its own.

“Anticipate, Dariel,” Birke called. “Anticipate. Feel the momentum starting to-”

“Would you shut up?” Dariel shouted, jerking his oars in frustration.

Listening to the jibes the others tossed around him, Dariel wondered if he needed to harden his demeanor. He imagined returning the taunts with fierce expressions of disapproval. Or sharp reprimands. Invocations of his name. No, not his name. Of his status as the Rhuin Fa! That’s what mattered here. Just look at his forehead! Of course, he got that status because of who he was in the Known World, not in this one. He had not done much worthy of a title yet. He still had no idea just how he would lead the People.

Other than that he could speak languages he had never learned, he could not say he felt any different having part of Na Gamen’s true soul in him. He knew that he was heading toward a clan gathering in which he would be presented to all the people of Avina, but nobody asked him what he would say or told him what he should say. Perhaps because of that, he had dreams each night in which he held long conversations with different people. In them, he listened to them, learned about their fears and worries. In them, he argued against the league’s vision for Ushen Brae. He encouraged the People to unite, to find strength together, and to reject the league’s enticements. Maybe, if he dreamed about it long enough, he would find the right words.

By the time he gave up on rowing, his face was wet with sweat and his shirt plastered to his chest. The other shells were far ahead, a few out of sight around a distant river bend. He nearly voiced a suspicion that the basic dynamics covering rowing were somehow reversed in Ushen Brae, but he knew a lame excuse when he heard one. He kept it to himself. He handed the oars back to Harlen, the captain of his shell, who had watched the entire show while chewing on a twig of sweet branch. He took the oars without comment and made up the time Dariel had lost in a few minutes, humming as he rowed.

When this brought new bursts of taunts from the distant shells, Dariel flipped his frustration over and gave in to it himself. Why not? He could not change who he was to them, even if he was mostly a walking invitation for mirth. He did not even want to, when it came down to it. If he was to be the hero these people needed, it could not be shaped by pretense. It had to flow from who he was, who they were, and what they could do together. As odd as it was to feel himself a constant source of humor, there was something he actually liked about it. A playfulness. A camaraderie that felt close to what he had experienced as an Outer Isle brigand.

“That can’t be a bad thing,” he said. He decided to build on it, to let it grow.

The rowing. The dou worms and tales of frekete nightmares, gagging on plee-berry juice, tripping in the whirling chaos that was Bashar and Cashen at play on the riverbank each evening: these were not the only things that kept the group laughing at the Rhuin Fa’s expense during the trip downstream.

O n the first day they confronted whitewater, he fell out of the boat at the very top of a long rapid. He had stood to take in the view, and a sudden rocking of the vessel threw him off balance. The minute he hit the water, he knew he was going to swim the entire long tumult of the rapid. He did. Had there not been a calm pool at the end of it, he might have drowned. Instead, he was able to crawl up on a rock in the slack current, panting, exhausted, fearful to the last moment that some creature was going to clamp its jaws down on his ankle and pull him back in.

He was the butt of jokes for the rest of that day. Did he really dislike the shells that much? Would he swim all the rapids, or was it only the largest ones that tempted him? Just what was it that he had dropped that made him so keen to go river diving? By the time he reached camp that evening, he was sure he had heard every variation of the earnest, perplexed questions his companions could possibly think of. He hadn’t. They were still at it the next morning. Was it true that the little people with gills lived in tiny houses along the river bottom…?

One section of the canyon was so narrow and the gradient so steep that the shells ran a gauntlet of whitewater rapids. Dariel sprawled atop the supplies and clung to the web of ropes that secured them as Harlen made the shell do things that defied reason.

Near the end of the torrent, a flume of water collided with a solid stone wall at a sudden turn in the river. It created a raging maw of a whirlpool that Dariel was certain would gnaw them to death and then spit them out in pieces. He screamed the madness of it when Harlen steered the shell right down the flume, catching the water feeding into the upstream edge of the whirlpool. The shell rode upon the pillow of water, plastered vertically along the stone. Instead of dropping down into the whitewater just below them and being devoured, the craft rode the pillow of frothing water. It skimmed along above the growling mouth of the whirlpool, to be deposited on the other side of it, downstream. The maneuver seemed so improbable that Dariel turned to share his amazement with Harlen. But the other man just smiled and stuffed a mint leaf in his mouth, as if there had been nothing remotely dramatic about the moment.

At least he could say he had not squealed at any point during the rapids. The same could not be said of the first time he saw the slick side of a scale-leech. He did not actually notice when it happened, for the writhing in the water all around the shells drew all his attention. Long, thick eel-like things slithered beneath them, bumping against the shell and almost tipping Dariel in. Their heads, when he saw one gnawing along the rim of the shell, were entirely mouth, teeth, and sucking lips that were instantly the most horrible sight Dariel ever recalled having seen.

The others jumped into motion. The rowers took up oars and went to work. Passengers stayed low. Harlen shouted for Dariel to draw the river knife sheathed on the wooden rowing frame. Dariel twisted one wrist painfully in the rigging ropes. He had no intention of falling into the water now. Clutching the weapon with his free hand, the prince snapped his head from side to side each time one of the creatures appeared. Awkwardly off balance because of the rhythmic surging of the rowing, he fought to see past Bashar and Cashen, who darted around him, barking madly. He stabbed several of the leeches. They squirmed away all the faster when cut.

“That’s… the only problem… with the shells,” Harlen said, panting hard as he pulled. “The scale leeches… remember how tasty… their old owners… were.”

When the creatures finally left off their thrashing, Harlen explained that they lived in territorial groups. They had only to row through their territory to gain a reprieve before they passed into another group’s region, and then the same again. Despite the real danger of them, after that first encounter it was his squeal that the group most focused on, not the creatures themselves. He was not at all sure he had made any alarmed sound at all, and would not accept Birke’s effeminate imitation as accurate, but it was no use protesting.

Nor could he get any traction out of pointing out that Tam and Anira both took unintentional underwater excursions. Nor that two shells flipped over during the voyage. Nor that one of the young men passed too close to a flowering plant that made him break out in hives that, with his wolfish shivith spots, made him look truly bizarre. Nor that a couple, unfortunate in the spot they chose for their clandestine lovemaking, sprouted full-body rashes caused by the weeds they had bedded down in. None of that carried the humor of the frightened squeal Dariel doubted had ever escaped him.

Through it all Dariel came to laugh more easily at himself, with others, at the bizarreness of the world, and with a joy of discovery that shoved aside the burden of responsibility every now and then. He knew even as the days passed that the things he saw along the river would be lasting memories in his mind ever after. And he knew that the time spent with that small company would, someday, be just as precious to him as his days at Palishdock and sailing the Outer Isles.

So he laughed his way down the Sheeven Lek to the coast. He kept it up right until the river split into myriad channels of its delta. They floated through water growing brackish, patrolled by armored crabs, and leaping with prawns. They landed at a point not far from where he had watched the soul vessel go up in flames. They pulled the shells well up the bank, and stripped down their supplies for overland travel, and flipped them over. They hiked into the undulating ridgeline of sand dunes that hid the ocean. Reaching one of the heights, Birke, who was in the lead, stopped and crouched down. He motioned that there was something to see. Dariel sprinted with the others. He dropped flat on the sand as the wind coming over the peak mussed his hair and smacked blood into his cheeks. He saw then what Birke had seen.

Out there past the breakers, which curled in long, massive waves, stretched a rough sea dotted with vessels. League brigs, fast clippers, several of the sleek soul vessels. There went his enemy. Against them, his war was about to resume.