The Wayward Knights

Chapter 7

To landward, Pirvan saw mostly the early-morning mist, hiding not only the hills beyond Karthay but the greater part of the city itself. Only the tallest towers and the topmasts of the greatest ships thrust dark above the pearly grayness of the mist.

To seaward all seemed brightness. A spring sun cast golden light that danced across the tops of the swells rolling in from the northwest. The swells hinted of storms farther off, but here they barely had the power to make Wavebiter's deck sway under Pirvan's feet.

Indeed, it looked too peaceful a sea to bear the weight of a fleet sailing to war.

Pirvan forced his mind away from that thought, as he would have forced a stubborn horse away from a flooded ford in a river. Too many in the ships bound for Suivinari Island seemed persuaded that they were outward bound not to penetrate its mysteries but to fight any minotaurs there.

The knight did not know what the captains of the fleet might think on this matter. He was certain that if a fleet determined on fighting minotaurs met minotaurs whose honor would, as always, require them to fight back, much blood would be shed to little purpose.

It was a pity that Vuinlod's motley population did not include some minotaurs, but they had never been great ones for settling in human lands. Nor would free minotaurs have been welcome of late in those lands, and not only because they would have doubtless tried to liberate their enslaved comrades.

At least the fleet had Darin, raised by the minotaur Waydol and more capable of thinking like one than any human Pirvan had known. A pity that he was likely to find no counterpart among any minotaurs the fleet would encounter. Waydol might not have been unique in his notion that honor required one to learn as much as possible about one's foes before one drew a weapon, but his breed was certainly rare-and not only among minotaurs.

Pirvan thought of his son and home, now menaced by those who seemed unwilling or unable to learn. He hoped that Sir Niebar's knights and men-at-arms had a safe and swift journey to Tirabot, and that once there they discouraged House Dirivan and anyone else from folly.

Without foreswearing his part in this quest, however, Pirvan could do no more than hope that the loud beating of the drums of war would not drown out reason.

Someone was beating a ship's drum now, not far off. Pirvan heard a drum aboard Wavebiter reply, and looked over the railing.

Off to port, a high-prowed Karthayan boat was approaching under six oars, heading straight for Wavebiter. A man with a mate's formal sash sat in the stern sheets, with features betraying his sea barbarian ancestry, hung about with fine Karthayan weapons.

The boat pulled alongside; the rowers tossed oars. The mate leaped from the boat's gunwale to the ladder built into Wavebiter's side and scrambled lithely to the deck. It was almost like watching the ghost of Jemar the Fair.

The mate's scramble was quick. For all her three masts Wavebiter was not high-built. She was of a new breed of ship, designed for sailing but with sweeps that could keep her off shoals in a calm, fit to carry loads that a galley could not with fewer hands than a galley needed, and at the same time shallower of draft than a deep-built merchanter.

Pirvan could see how such a ship might be useful, but also saw reason in the complaints of old sailors, that such a ship could be a villainously bad sea boat. No storms had blown to test Wavebiter in the voyage from Vuinlod, but Pirvan was aware that both he and Haimya had thoroughly lost their sea legs.

If a storm did blow, he feared that his lady would hardly be seen on deck. Even he might need luck to uphold the honor of the knights and keep down his own food.

But now the mate was striding aft, drawing his sword, and saluting Pirvan with the blade held against his lips. As was his own custom as well as that of the knights, he returned salute for salute.

"Sir Pirvan, Knight of the Rose," the mate said evenly, "you are bidden to accompany me in my boat, to the ship Shield of Virtue."

"Is this a council of war?" Pirvan replied. "If so, Sir Niebar is by law appointed to speak for the Knights of Solamnia."

The mate grinned-and Pirvan realized that the man could hardly be older than Gerik. Increased commerce by sea was doing more than creating new breeds of ship. It was making mates and even captains out of youths and maidens.

"A council," the mate said, "but those who invite you are not thinking of war."

"You make me curious. Have you names for them?"

"Do Tarothin Red Robe and Sirbones, priest of Mishakal, have a place in your memory?"

Pirvan's jaw dropped too far for a knight's dignity. He had heard in a letter from Tarothin that his old companion and his friend might be sailing with the fleet, but had thought this a pious hope. Neither was much in the grace of the kingpriest, and made no secret of it.

"An honored place," Pirvan answered finally. "But if they are asking for me, then Lady Haimya must be with me."

"Ah-I am in haste, with other duties-"

"She will not delay us. She will, however, push me over the side some dark night, or perhaps even some bright day, if I do not bring her to see our old friends."

Gerik lurched up from the depths of sleep like a drunkard climbing a hill. His first sensation was that he must have slept fearfully late for the day to be so bright. Then came a thought that perhaps they would have a fine day at Tirabot. Even this far south, spring did come in time, and with it such fine days.

At last came the knowledge that he was not alone in his bed, that the person beside him was a woman, and that she was holding him.

"Ellysta, I hope?" he whispered.

"You doubt it?" came her sleepy reply.

"I hope that any time I share a bed with a woman, I remember her name the next morning," Gerik added playfully. "To do otherwise is rude."

"I knew you were gentle of character as well as blood."

Gerik looked at the dust motes dancing in the sunlight. "Blood is what the council will have," he said. "Ours, if we are late for the meeting."

Too many thoughts of that meeting crashed in on his still half-mazed wits. He groaned.

"You look as if you would like to go back to sleep, meeting or not," Ellysta said.

Gerik sighed. "Perhaps I would. I was having a lovely dream. I was in a garden, and a woman and I were picking roses.

"I don't know if it was you," he added, and she stuck out her tongue at him. "She wore a veil and a long robe."

Ellysta sat up. Sunlight played across fair, freckled skin that had largely healed of its wounds and was hidden by neither veil nor gown. "Go on," she urged.

"We were picking roses, as I said. Then we found this purple one, as big as a cabbage. We wouldn't have dared pick it, but it floated off its stem all by itself. It floated up like a soap bubble, until it was between us, and its perfume-it drew us both toward it until our lips touched on opposite sides of the rose."

"And then?"

"I started waking up," Gerik said, climbing out of bed.

Ellysta propped herself up on the cushions, draping a blanket over her legs. "It's more than the meeting that troubles you, Gerik. Is it the message from your father?"

His suspicions that she was a spy for his enemies twitched briefly, but did not come back to life. "Yes," he answered.

"I do not ask more. If I did, and you answered because we were bedmates, others would be jealous."

Gerik grinned. "Bertsa Wylum, do you suppose?"

"Pah!" Ellysta said, miming spitting. "She is old enough to be your mother. No, I mean jealousy of what you tell me, not of what else we do."

Gerik realized that he had just been given an unsubtle piece of advice in a most subtle manner. Ellysta, he decided, could make her fortune going on embassies. She could probably persuade minotaurs that it was honorable to let someone else have what they wanted.

But he had now told her either too much or too little. "The message holds no bad news," he went on. "But it was-my father wrote it in a secret language, lawful only among the Knights of Solamnia. He also told me where to find the key that let me read the letter.

"I am the son of a knight, but not one myself. My father has-well, some would say that he has broken Oath and defied Measure."

Ellysta put her chin on her knees and wrapped her arms around her legs. This was her pose of meditation. It also dislodged the blanket, which made her a rather distracting sight for Gerik. He hoped she finished meditating soon.

"You are keeping a knight's holding, are you not? Or even the property of the Order of the Rose?" she asked suddenly.

"Some of both," Gerik said. "It would take too long to explain."

"I will listen some other time," she said, which was as close as Gerik could imagine to being an order without actually using words of command. "But the Oath and the Measure also allow you to act in your father's place in certain matters."

"Some, yes. Not all."

"Then by common law, responsibility implies authority and authority gives rights. Rights to know what is needed to carry out your tasks."

"And reading that letter was, therefore, one of my rights?"

Ellysta clapped her hands, then kissed him. Gerik stopped feeling like the pupil to her teacher and instead more like a man with a woman.

Ellysta's eyes widened, and she asked, "You have already read the letter, you say?"

"Yes."

"Good."

Then she kissed him in a way that made further talk both needless and impossible.

Tarothin and Sirbones were aboard Shield of Virtue, which was the largest ship Pirvan had ever seen. She loomed above the boat like a keep above a rider on a pony, and she seemed to have more people aboard her than Pirvan had hairs in his beard.

High-built from fore to aft, with a bowsprit as long as some seagoing ships and four masts, she clearly needed every bit of sail those masts could spread to move. Pirvan hoped her size gave her seaworthiness in proportion, or she would only be a way of taking more sailors to Zeboim's realm than any ship before her.

They met their friends in Tarothin's cabin, which was the only place aboard ship safe from eavesdroppers.

"Let us make haste," Tarothin began without preamble. "I have a warding spell on this cabin that not only shuts out ears and magic but hides its own existence. It only lasts about ten minutes at full strength, though, and renewing it would take an hour. I'm not as young as I was."

Tarothin had to be rising sixty, but looked far better than he had when he and Pirvan parted two years ago. Sirbones, on the other hand, looked neither better nor worse, neither more robust nor more frail. The priest, Pirvan decided, had doubtless looked middle-aged when he was an apprentice.

Pirvan spoke briefly of what had befallen him and Haimya during the last two years, of their reasons for sailing to Suivinari Island, and of the peril facing Gerik at Tirabot. He had no intention of spending more time than necessary in the cabin, spell or no spell. It had less than enough space and hardly more than enough air to keep four people comfortable.

Tarothin was reassuring. "It will be more than a while before the kingpriest sanctions private war," the mage said, "even for such as House Dirivan. New to his office, he cannot be sure that all who turn their household guards into private hosts and wall in their estates will be his friends.

"By the time he can tell whom to loose and whom to bind, you will be home and feasting by your own fire. And Grimsoar One-eye will stand strongly by your lad, if I remember rightly. A young wife will make an old man a lad again."

Sirbones looked eloquently at the cabin beams. "Doubtless you know better than I," he said.

Tarothin smiled, then continued with his old briskness: "I said we have little time, and here I am wasting it. The first and last message for you is that neither you nor Haimya nor Gildas Aurhinius should go aboard an Istaran ship, or ashore. Lady Eskaia might be safe aboard ship, but I would not wager for the shore."

"Eskaia remains behind in Vuinlod," Pirvan said. "She oversees the affairs of the town, and if need be its defense."

Everyone made gestures of aversion at the last words. Tarothin nodded. "A pity," he said. "We were hoping she would be here to bring her influence to bear on sending us aboard her son Torvik's Red Elf. It is hardly a secret that he is likely to be sailing in the vanguard of the fleet."

"Such a post of honor, for one not friendly to the kingpriest?" Haimya asked. "How so?"

"The captains?" Pirvan asked, and wizard and priest nodded.

"They are all for virtue," Tarothin added, "but in unknown waters, prudence and experience are the virtues they prize most. Torvik has these, plus Jemar's blood. Perhaps you can speak in Eskaia's place, even if they do not listen as well to you as they would to her."

"As you wish," Pirvan said, as he and Haimya exchanged looks. Both plainly wished that their magicworking friends were not so intent on rushing into danger, and thought that it was as much curiosity as duty driving them. Just as plainly, they would be deaf to even old comrades' counsels of prudence.

"We will do what we can," Pirvan said. "And Gildas Aurhinius had Torvik's respect even before wedding his mother. Now he might even have the man's ear."

They went on deck after that, ducking under a netload of kegs thundering down the after hatch into some storeroom far below. Then Pirvan and Haimya strode to the railing and hailed the boat waiting a half-bowshot to leeward.

Unknown to Pirvan, his son was also enduring a meeting at Tirabot Manor with too many people in too little space. The warded tower chamber was cozy for three; it was definitely cramped for more than five. When there were seven and one of them was Grimsoar One-Eye, stout and sleek on his lady's cooking and potions, it grew positively stifling.

The weather did not help, for it had blown up a gale of wind, bringing rain that was rapidly turning to sleet. The temperature had dropped so fast that Gerik privately wondered if they faced weather magic or one of Chislev's bad moods interrupting the advance of spring. The closed shutter and door kept out chill drafts and spattering icy water, as well as every breath of fresh air.

"You ought to shrink down to normal size," Horimpsot Elderdrake told Grimsoar. "Then I might not have to worry about my ribs every time you took a deep breath."

Grimsoar snorted. "When I shrink down to common size, little one, it will be from decay after I die. Or from starvation after Serafina passes on. Starvation and grief," he added, squeezing her hand.

"We may none of us leave this chamber alive if we do not speak quickly and to the point," Gerik said. "Now, how do we stand if it comes to a fight?"

Bertsa Wylum shrugged. "No worse than yesterday," she said simply, "maybe better, but I don't know whose side time is on. We have forty men and women fit to fight, although we've weapons for more."

"Start training as many more as we can arm," Gerik said. "Take volunteers from the villages, as well."

"Some might be spies."

"They won't be inside the manor unless we stand a siege," Gerik said. "Riding the roads to halt bandits and chicken thieves taking advantage of troubled times will tell them none of our secrets. And make no mistake: our enemies will be counting on such penny-a-handful allies to wear us down."

Bertsa Wylum nodded. "There's sense in that."

"Forin?" Gerik said, looking at the steward.

"Forin" was short for an appallingly long name in the elven style, for all that the steward seemed to have more human than elven blood. But what a man chose to call himself was between him, his ancestors, and the gods.

"We do well enough, and would do better if we could hope this were settled before there's green forage around about," Forin said. "When they can feed their beasts, then they'll come. We're not worth spending stored fodder over, I wager."

Gerik hoped that was true. But it seemed unlikely that peace, if it came, would come so quickly. At least there was hope that the men Sir Niebar was sending would come before the campaigning season opened.

Gerik now read the letter from Pirvan. He did not mention that it had been in one of the Solamnic's secret languages; what they did not know would not weaken their trust in him.

"Once the knights are here, I doubt we'll have much to fear. The weight of law, custom, tradition, and good sense are already on our side, simply because we hold a manor granted to a Knight of the Rose. With the weight of men actually sworn to the Orders on our walls, I think we are the masters.

"But they may take longer to come than our enemies take to gather. So Ellysta has suggested that we fight a war of laws and words, until we can take up the sword."

Form's eyebrows rose. "How came she by this knowledge?" Gerik heard in the question the further query, "How came she to a place here, other than through sharing your bed?" But Form grumbled much about women.

"My father was a law counselor, and my mother his clerk until they wed," Ellysta said. "I know the common law of Istar, and much merchant law."

Serafina nodded. "I begin to understand," she said. "Grimsoar knows more merchant law, and I know much of what governs the healers."

"I know the laws and customs governing sell-swords," Bertsa Wylum said. "And I know that if I say to Floria Desbarres that someone should be banned from her service, it carries weight."

"Good," Gerik said. "I think we can raise points of law in the path of any move against us, save by main force. It will be like digging ditches across roads an enemy may use to approach."

He looked at Ellysta and said, "Is there any chance of finding evidence that your friend was innocent of the accusation against her? If we do that, you become a valiant friend and a victim of injustice, and your questing here is no crime."

Ellysta shook her head. "That asks too much. Even if we could find it-"

"Does 'we' mean just humans, or are kender-?" Elderdrake began.

Shumeen elbowed him in the ribs, then put her hand back on his knee. The kender healer seemed to have laid claim to Elderdrake, rather as Ellysta had to Gerik. This did not keep her from backhanding him thrice a week or as more often as she thought his tongue wagged too freely.

"If you want to go spying again, once you heal, I doubt we could stop you," Gerik said. "But you could put all the kender hereabouts in danger, whether they are with us or not. Also, you would have to hold your tongue with those kender, and do you have that in you?"

"I can't not talk, but it isn't always important what I talk about. I mean, I can't be rude, but if I can be polite without telling them anything they shouldn't know…"

Shumeen looked ready to stamp on her friend's foot before he subsided. By then Gerik was satisfied that he could trust Elderdrake and the five fugitive Spillgather kender. He noted in his mind the need to keep watch on the rest of the clan, lest the fugitives' befriending Ellysta bring vengeance on their kin.

He would have a hard enough time defending Tirabot Manor. He would have little steel and less help from the law defending kender.

"So," Gildas Aurhinius said. "I am not safe aboard ships of the land I served in arms for nearly forty years. As a pension, it lacks justice."

"Who dispenses justice in Istar these days?" Haimya said. "Too many, I think, who would not know it if it came up and bit them in-" She made an explicit gesture.

"Too true," Aurhinius said. He looked out to sea. "Is Torvik himself vowed to lead the fleet to Suivinari?"

"I have not spoken with him," Pirvan said. "And rumor often lies. But it is what I would expect of him. As son to both Jemar and Eskaia, he has strong friends all through the fleet, as well as his own reputation."

Aurhinius nodded and added, half to himself, "And a mother whose heart would break if he falls leading the fleet."

"Her heart would break sooner if he held back from leading," Haimya said. Even Pirvan gave back a step at the edge in her voice. "Your head would break, too, if Eskaia thought you had aught to do with Torvik's holding back."

Pirvan remembered that Haimya had known Eskaia longer than any of them, from when both women were scarcely older than Eskaia's namesake was now. How much steel had always lain beneath that fair, even girlish outside, Haimya doubtless knew better than all of them.

"I will hold my peace," Aurhinius said, looking out to sea again.

Drowning out the rattle of blocks and oars, and the calls of the sailors, a long crescent of broad-winged birds soared overhead. The sunlight struck fire from their red wings, so that they held the eye until they were but distant specks on the horizon and their cries had faded to equally distant echoes.

"Red cranes," Aurhinius said. "Some fly north, out to sea, every spring about this time. Some say it is the females, to nest on unknown islands far to the north, close to the minotaur lands. Others say it is only the old ones who fly north, to a clean death far out to sea. I like the second one better."

Pirvan stopped Haimya as she was about to reproach Aurhinius for ill-luck words or make a gesture of aversion, probably both. They were indeed old birds, some of them, but there were too many young ones making the flight to Suivinari for Aurhinius to have uttered a true prophecy.

Still, in his innermost heart and mind, Pirvan uttered a short prayer to Habbakuk, friend of those faring by sea, and Kiri-Jolith, friend of justice.