The Ships of Merior

Something Halliron said raised a round of knee-slapping laughter. The Mad Prophet stood, and sidled, and in a move that bespoke long practice, worked his bulk between the countertop and the broached barrel. His eyes turned innocently elsewhere, he trawled through the suds in the washtub, hooked up a tankard, and positioned it upright for filling. No one looked his way, even through the ticklish task of twisting the spigot behind his back.

Dakar darted a glance toward the fireside. Aware to a hair’s-breadth of the interval needed for a large-sized tankard to brim over, and ready with a vacuous smile, he rolled furtive eyes to make sure of the passage to the kitchens.

A shadow loomed at his flank: the bard’s hazel-eyed apprentice, arrived without sound, and all but standing on top of him. The Mad Prophet gave a violent start that slopped foam in cold runnels down his backside.

‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced,’ he assayed, caught up meanwhile in a disastrous grab to stem the copious gush of the beer. He fumbled the twist. Brew rose hissing over the tankard brim and pattered over the frayed heels of his socks.

The apprentice minstrel gave a wicked grin, leaned across, and deftly turned off the spigot. ‘I’m called Medlir. And I suggest you’re mistaken. I’m very certain I know you.’

‘From some bad line in a ballad, maybe,’ Dakar said, plaintively concerned with rescuing a soap-slicked tankard from upset as he juggled it from his backside to his front. That small victory achieved, he looked the bard’s apprentice in the eye and began pouring beer down his gullet. When the tankard was three quarters empty, it belatedly dawned that the odd little man was going to keep quiet about his theft. Dakar stopped swallowing to catch his breath. His sodden hose squelched in puddled beer as he pressed forward, intent now on making his escape.

Medlir side-stepped and blocked him. ‘Don’t be a fool.’ He tipped his head a surreptitious fraction to show the barmaid, shoving toward them in outraged determination.

The Mad Prophet’s dismay darkened to a glare shared equally between the girl and Halliron’s obstructive apprentice. ‘Ah, damn!’ He prepared in martyred pain to scuttle his purloined brew into the washtub.

‘Not so fast.’ Medlir stopped the move with long, slender fingers and flipped a silver with clanging accuracy into the bowl on the bar wench’s tray. ‘Drink to my health,’ he invited Dakar. ‘The change should pay for the spill on the floor, and keep your throat wet through this evening.’

Startled speechless, the Mad Prophet let himself be ushered away and seated with a squish of wet clothing at a trestle off to one side. Oddly uneasy with the way his luck had turned, he sucked a long pull from his tankard, licked foam from his moustache, and grimaced at the lye taste of soap. ‘Surely a ballad?’ he ventured obliquely.

Medlir sat very still, his lank hair now dry and fallen in fronds against his temples. ‘Actually not. I met your master.’

A nasty, tingling chill started in Dakar’s middle and ended in raised hair on his neck. ‘Asandir? Where?’ He twisted on his bench, his eyes edged white like oyster buttons. Then, in stinging suspicion, he said, ‘But of course! You travel with Halliron. ‘The Masterbard’s friendly with the Fellowship.’

‘Should that trouble you?’ Medlir signalled across a slat of shadow to draw the attention of the barmaid.

‘Oh no,’ Dakar said quickly. The girl arrived, annoyed to a hip-switch of skirts that extended to grudging service in replenishing the now emptied tankard. The Mad Prophet grinned at her, raised his drink to Medlir, and added, ‘To your health.’

The door banged open to admit yet another knot of villagers, men in boots stained dark from the byre and cloaks that in dampness exuded an aroma of wet sheep. Matrons carried baskets of dyed fleece for carding, or distaffs and spindles and tablet looms, or nubby old socks to be darned. The unmarried young came dressed to dance. The village’s cramped little tavern quickly became crowded, and the laughter and chat by the fireside mounted to a roar of jocular noise.

Aware that the trestles were filling, Medlir arose in clear-eyed regret. ‘I’m needed. Perhaps later, we can find time to talk.’

Ever and always agreeable to the man who would keep him in beer, the Mad Prophet grinned lopsidedly back. ‘Here’s to later,’ he said; and he drank.

Day progressed into evening. Half sotted, still in his stockings, and wedged like a partridge between a swarthy little gem-cutter with a squint, and a fresh-faced miner’s wife, Dakar roared out a final, bawdy chorus in excruciating, tuneless exuberance. Overcome by wine and good spirits, the woman beside him flung an arm around his shoulders and kissed him. Dakar, beatific, alternately sampled her lips and his tankard, by now refilled enough times that it no longer tasted of washing suds.

The common room had grown from close to stifling, every available table and chair crammed beyond sane capacity. Planks sagged and swayed to the weight of packed bodies. The floor bricks glistened with slopped spirits. The air smelled of sweaty wool and hung thick enough to cut, and the clientele, either standing, sitting, or comatose in its half-unlaced linens, no longer bothered with decorum. Halliron had not played, but his apprentice was skilled, and possessed of an energy that made the trestle planks bounce to the beat of their stamping.

Which should not have surprised, Dakar thought, in a passing break between reels. Halliron had auditioned candidates for apprenticeship lifelong. This man he had chosen in his twilight years had been the sole applicant to match his exacting standards. Medlir applied himself with abandon to the lyranthe, spinning for sheer pleasure the ditties, the drinking songs and the dances that an upland village starved for entertainment in an ice storm could serve him in bottomless demand.

Midnight came and passed. Two casks had been emptied to the dregs, with a third one drained nearly dry. The innkeeper out of clemency finally elbowed to the fore and pressed a plate of stew on the musician. Medlir flashed him a fast smile, bent aside in consultation with his master, and at a nod from the old man, surrendered the lyranthe to Halliron.

The hum of appreciation dropped to sudden, awed silence.

Halliron Masterbard arose and regarded his audience in wry delight. ‘By Ath, you had better make some noise,’ he said, his voice pitched for the sleepy child who slumped in a young matron’s lap. ‘Too much quiet, and the folks near at hand will notice my knuckle joints crack.’

Medlir arranged the stool and the Masterbard sat. He adjusted the lyranthe in blue-veined hands, and tested the strings for tuning. The pitch was perfect; Medlir knew his trade. But the old man fussed at the peg-heads out of performer’s habit.

The stillness swelled and deepened. From the rear of the tavern, a reveller called out, ‘Master singer! Folk passing out of Etarra speak of a battle fought in Deshir some years back against that sorcerer prince who shifts shadows. Do you know aught of that?’

Halliron’s hand snapped off a run, distinct as a volley of arrows.’ ‘Yes.’ He locked eyes for a second with Medlir, who set aside his meal and said something contrite about forgetting to check on the pony. To the rough-clad miner’s request the Masterbard replied, ‘I can play that ballad. No one better. For in fact, I was there.’

A stir swept the room, loud with murmurs. Folk resettled in their seats, while Halliron damped his strings, bent his head, and veiled in a fall of white hair, sat through a motionless moment. He then made the lyranthe his voice. His fingers sighed across strings to spill a falling minor arpeggio, from which melody emerged, close-woven and transparent as a spell. Notes climbed, and spiralled, and blended, drawing the listeners into a fabric of shared tension.

‘You won’t feel too drunk when he reaches the ending of this one,’ Medlir said to Dakar as he passed on his way to the door.

The Mad Prophet was too besotted to respond beyond a grunt, but the gem-cutter beside him ventured comment. ‘How so? Won’t we be stirred by the war’s young hero, that blond-haired prince from the west?’

Medlir’s lips thinned to tightness. ‘What is any war but a massacre?’ Through the drawing beat of the secondary chords, he shrugged off introspective impatience. ‘Even without lyrics or story, Halliron’s melody by itself could wring tears from a statue.’

The balding gem-cutter looked dubious; while Medlir melted into the crowd to resume his course for the stables, Dakar tangled fingers in his beard, fuddled by thought that the eyes of Halliron’s apprentice should be some other colour than grey-hazel.

Then the spangled brilliance of the Masterbard’s instrument was joined by his beautiful voice, haunting and rich and clear-toned; in its thrall every listener was transported to a morning in spring when the mists had lifted over the marshes of the river Tal Quorin. The odds in their favour ten to one, a town garrison had marched on the forest bred clansmen who dared shelter Arithon s’Ffalenn, the renegade Prince of Rathain also called Master of Shadow.

‘What law has sanctioned a war for one life, when no bloodshed was sought at Etarra?Shadow fell in defence, for no man diedby command of the prince to be harrowed.’

There came an uneasy shifting of feet, of creaking boards, and flurried whispers that Halliron’s art skilfully reined back short of outrage. For this ballad’s course commemorated no beloved saviour in glittering gold and sapphires, avenging with righteous bolts of light. This spare, driving, tragic account held no bright hero at the ending, but only men ruinously possessed by their hatreds to grasp the first reason to strike down long-standing enemies.

‘Who shall weep, Lord Steiven, Earl of the North, for the refuge that failed to spare your clan?The prince in your care once begged to fare forth, then stayed; his liegemen were fate-cursed to stand.’

Notes struck the air now like mallet-blows. No one spoke. None moved as the ballad unfolded, each stanza in pitiless stark cadence unveiling fresh atrocity. There were no heroics, but only desperation in a Shadow Master’s talents bent to confuse and detain; in unspeakable measures undertaken in a defence without hope, when the dammed-back waters of Tal Quorin were unleashed in reaving torrents to scythe down Etarra’s trapped garrison. Nor did there follow any salve of vengeance, but only bitter brutality, when a band of head-hunter survivors lashed back in a frustrated foray of slaughter against the encampment that concealed the clan women and their children. The spree of rapine intended to draw their defenders into open ground for final reckoning had seen abrupt and terrible ending.

‘Deshir’s butcher and Prince Arithon’s bane, Lysaer s’Ilessid loosed his gifted lightSixty score innocents writhed in white flamefor miscalled mercy, blind justice, and right.’

Halliron’s tones dipped and quavered, searing the pent air with images of horror and tragedy. His lyranthe in an unrelenting, lyrical sorrow bespoke senseless waste and destruction. In Deshir, by design of the Mistwraith, the extraordinary talents of two princes had collided to devastating losses, with nothing either proven or gained.

‘This day, under sky unthreatened by dark, the Etarran ranks march to kindle strife.Headhunters search the wide woodlands to markone fugitive who owns no wish to fight.’

The last, slashing jangle of chords rang and dwindled in dissonance.

For a suspended moment, nothing stirred. Only when Halliron arose and made his bow, then bent to wrap his fine instrument did the shock of his weaving fall away. Listeners paralysed in unabashed tears cracked into an explosion of talk.

‘Ath’s own mercy! What a skill! The lyranthe herself was made to weep.’ A belated fall of silvers clanged across the boards by Halliron’s stool, mingled with a few muted bravos. The Masterbard had not played for an encore; no one held doubts that this ballad had been his last performance for the evening. Though one maudlin fieldhand shouted for the bar wench to bring out spirits, the rest of the patrons arose and pressed, murmuring, toward the tavern door. As the room emptied, a woman’s tones pierced through the crush. ‘Had I not lost my jewels to those murdering clan scoundrels in Taernond, I could almost feel sorry for the Deshans.’

Dakar simply sat, eyes round as coins fixed morosely on the hands that cradled a tankard of stale beer. In time, some minutes after Halliron had retired upstairs to his room, Medlir arrived, and sat down, and unstoppered a cut-glass decanter. He produced two goblets of turned maple and poured out three fingers of peach brandy, the rich smell piquantly sharp in the heated sea of used air.

One the bard’s apprentice pressed upon the Mad Prophet; the other, he nursed for himself.

In companionable sympathy for a well-timed escape to the stables, Dakar sighed, ‘These folk will go home tonight and maybe think. By tomorrow, over sore heads, they’ll say the Masterbard must have exaggerated. Deshir’s barbarians are best off dead, they’ll insist, and shrug off what they heard entirely when the next Etarran wool factor passes through. What did your master hope to gain?’

Medlir swirled his brandy, his face without expression and his eyes veiled under soot-thick, down-turned lashes. ‘Why care?’

Dakar bestowed a shrill hiccup into a pudgy, cupped palm. ‘You met my Fellowship master, so you said.’

Strong brandy could make anybody patient. Medlir waited. Presently Dakar tucked up his stockinged feet and propped his bearded chin on one fist. ‘Well, you’ll know Asandir’s not the sort to be lenient when he’s crossed.’

‘No wonder you’re driven to drink.’ Medlir hooked the flask from between his knees and refilled Dakar’s goblet. ‘What have you done?’

‘Nothing,’ Dakar said. ‘That’s my problem. That bastard of a sorcerer, the one the Deshans fought for? I was sent off to find him, and save him being mauled by his enemies. But let me tell you, Halliron’s ballad aside, if you’d met him, you’d cheer Etarra’s garrison.’