The Ships of Merior

‘You’ve been there?’ The mercenary captain stared at the minstrel through the curling flame of his spill.

‘No.’ Medlir launched off a sprightly jig, foot tapping, and a gleam to his eyes at strange odds with his earlier humour. ‘Ath grant I never live to see the place.’

The following morning dawned to grey, misty rain and a clammy east wind off the bay. In the tidewater region of the coast, winter’s hold settled lightly. The mild airs drawn north by ocean currents could brew the occasional warm day. Above Jaelot, the road lay softened to muck, through which cartwheels sucked and splattered to the fitful grate of flint-bearing gravel. Medlir strode at the buckskin’s head to steady the bridle as the pony skated and slid through league upon league of soupy footing. Swathed in faded quilts on the driver’s board, Halliron sat looking tired.

‘I’ve no wish at all to stop in Jaelot,’ he insisted, unusually quarrelsome. ‘The town’s a cesspit of bad taste. I won’t have you wasting your talents there.’

‘Well, at least that’s a first.’ Medlir steered the pony cart toward the verge to allow a packtrain bearing southern spices and silk bales to make its laboured way past. Over the yips of the drovers, he said, ‘Not long back, I recall your phrasing the matter quite the other way about, that my fingering was too clumsy to inflict on a tinker, never mind any public audience.’

‘Well, that was then.’ Halliron blotted his dripping nose and sniffed. ‘You still have a great deal to learn.’

Through the jingle of gear and harness, and the whip-snaps as carters forced their ox teams from drifting to scent the horses as they passed, Medlir kept a weather eye on Dakar, perched like a woodchuck on a bony chestnut gelding won over dice with the mercenaries. More accustomed to pack straps hung with cooking pots than to bearing saddle and rider, the creature had wall-eyes and knock-knees and a tail stripped of hair like a rat’s. The buckskin pony shied well clear. More a shambling liability than a source of reliable transport, the chestnut changed nature like a weathercock, friendly and fiendish by turns.

Dakar’s indifferent horsemanship was hampered further by short thighs that stretched like a wrestler’s to straddle his mount’s width of barrel. Watching the pair careen through the pack beasts and drays, reins flying loose and heels drumming to indignant slaps of the silly, naked tail, Medlir was hard pressed not to chuckle.

Halliron looked in danger of swallowing his lips, until he resorted to muffling his whoops behind quilts.

The last laden mule in the cavalcade passed, with the gelding spinning left, and then right, in some doubt of its proper orientation. Dakar thwacked its goose rump with his rein ends and hauled, to no good effect. The narrow, bony head on a great pole of ewe neck swivelled back to stare where the leather had stung, its expression determinedly flummoxed.

Medlir shut brimming eyes.

‘What’s so funny?’ howled Dakar. He stabbed the gelding in its cavernous ribs with his heels and flapped elbows until it ambled in a sequence of steps by no means definable as a gait.

After one prolonged gasp against the buckskin’s wet mane, Medlir tucked his chin in his mufflers and stared without focus straight forward. ‘Ah!’ He made a manful effort, clutched his ribs, and said, ‘No one’s laughing. Halliron has a terrible cough. I could be suffering the same.’

Dakar’s reply unravelled into oaths as the gelding’s racketing shy sallied the width of the roadway. A stiff-featured Medlir applied himself to guiding the pony cart from its parking place amid the burdock, while Halliron wheezed and wiped rheumy eyes and murmured, ‘Ath, now my stomach is aching.’

Their journey resumed under mists spun to gold under late-breaking sunlight. Flocking gulls rose and wheeled in the sea-breeze off the tide flats. To the right, at each turn in the road, steep-sided valleys of evergreens yawned into gorges, some threaded with falls that spilled like frayed floss, and others with deep, narrow lakes lying polished as moonstones.

The country was beautiful, but wild, the foothills scarred by old rockfalls and too steeply pitched to grow fodder. Under sky like lucid aquamarine, the storms seemed remote, that could lash without warning off the bay and hurl salt spume against the mountains. The trees and the moss bore the scars in broken branches, and rock abutments burned clean of lichens. An equinox gale could wreck a steading in a night, with the buildings rebuilt again out of the splintered rubble, or ship’s planks, washed in by the tide. Hostels and posthouses were widely spaced and nowhere inside a day’s ride of a walled town.

When the sun swung behind the peaks and purpled shadow hardened the road in the grip of early cold, Halliron began to shiver with chills. His nose was buffed red, and his eyes shone too bright, and his thickest quilts lent no comfort.

Medlir said nothing, but watched his master in concern through the pause as they watered the horses.

Embarrassed at last by his own misery, Halliron capitulated. ‘Oh, all right. We’ll shelter in Jaelot, to spare you the bother of tending an invalid in the open.’

‘What bother?’ Medlir redistributed the mud-flecked blankets over the Masterbard’s knees. ‘If these townsmen have execrable taste, I could always try those ballads we heard in the sailors’ dives at Werpoint.’

Halliron returned a choked cough, whatever he had in mind undone by Dakar’s antics as he fell off the same stone twice trying to remount the brown gelding.

‘You’ll break your neck getting on that way!’ Medlir called, his fingers busy taking the pony’s surcingle up a hole.

Puffing, beet-faced, in no mood for criticism from a man who understood nothing about the trials of being fat, Dakar clambered back up the rock. ‘Since when do you know so much about horses?’

‘Maybe my parents were drifters,’ Medlir said.

‘Hah!’ The Mad Prophet achieved precarious balance on one foot. ‘Foxes, more like. You say crafty little about yourself.’

A shallow smile touched Medlir’s features, accompanied by ingenuously raised brows. ‘Foxes bite.’

‘Well, I know I’m prying.’ Dakar poised himself, leaped, and grabbed, while his steed staggered into a clattering half-passe. The Mad Prophet landed astride through a miracle, both fists balled in mane-hanks to arrest a pitch over the saddle’s far side. As his mount was coerced to cease milling, he added, ‘Faery-toes makes better company.’

‘Faery-toes? That?’ Halliron poked his nose out of his blankets and fixed dubious eyes on hooves that were round and fluted as meat platters.

‘Well of course,’ said Dakar, offended. ‘The name suits him fine, don’t you think?’

The party moved on; into shadows that lengthened to grey dusk, swallowed early by fog off the bay.

Darkness had fallen as they rounded the bend before Jaelot’s wide gates. Situated on a beak-head of land that jutted out into the bay, the town was walled with black rock. Torches in iron baskets burned from the keeps, which were octagonal, with slate roofs buttressed by gargoyles that loomed and leered and lolled obscene tongues over gate-turrets chiselled from white quartz. These were emblazoned with rampant lions, each bearing a snake in its mouth.

‘Ugly.’ By now querulously tired, Halliron regarded the carvings with distaste while the tarnished strips of tin hung as ward talismans jangled and clinked in thin dissonance. ‘The Paravian gates torn down from this site were said to be fashioned of agate, and counter-weighted to swing at a hand’s touch.’

This was a Second Age fortress?’ Medlir asked. ‘How surprising to find it inhabited.’ He soothed the cross-grained buckskin to a halt as the gate watch called down gruff challenge. He had to answer without hearing his master’s return comment. ‘We’re wayfarers, two minstrels and a companion. We shouldn’t be stopping here at all, except the old man needs shelter.’

‘Pull aside then.’ The watch captain lounged in his niche, his breath plumed in flamelight. ‘The post courier’s overdue from Tharidor, and the gates’ll be opened when he’s in.’

‘There’s courtesy for you,’ Halliron said between sneezes. ‘I knew we should have made camp. If the courier hasn’t come to grief in the dark, well have our choice of three inns, all of them cavernously dim and dirty, and not a one of them honest.’

‘Which has the best ale?’ asked Dakar.

‘Who knows?’ The Masterbard sighed. ‘In Jaelot, they cut the brew with water.’

By chance, their wait became shortened. While Medlir fussed over his master, and Dakar communed with his mount, a barrel-chested wagonmaster in sheepskins rolled in, swearing at his team and unhappy to be missing his dinner. He brandished his whip at the gate house, while his sweated horses sidled and stamped and struck blue-edged sparks from the pavement. It’s that thrice-cursed shipment from the mill I’m carrying, the one with the mayor’s seal on it.’

The gates were opened very swiftly indeed, while something clicked in the brain of Dakar’s camel-necked chestnut that said stable, and comfort, and oats. It pinned back rabbity ears and lunged to harry the wagon team through.

The lead pair were blinkered. The first the near one knew of Faery-toes’ attentions was a nip of yellow teeth at its flanks.

It veered to a bounding grind of singletrees, while Dakar, howling mightily, sawed nerveless mouth with both reins and fell off. He had the aplomb to roll clear, while the carter whipcracked and cursed.

The lash caught the gelding on the nose. He wind-milled sideways on splayed feet, rat-tail flailing. Eyes rolled white, his nostrils expanded into a snort that blew steam, he half-reared and reversed to a thunderous clatter of hooves. His gaunt rump jammed the wheel horse in the shoulder. It staggered, squealing. The rest of the team careened sideways and jack-knifed the dray between the gate turrets with Faery-toes folded amidst them like a misguided log in a torrent.

Oaths became lost in the crack of shod hooves as a brief show of stamping coalesced to a five horse brawl amid the traces.

The carter clung to his swaying box like a man on a half-foundered vessel, plying his lash and a poisonous stream of threats upon his scuffling team to no avail. Leather parted; tenets burst from collar stuffing to a scream of splintering wood. Unnoticed atop the swaying wagon bed, lashings creaked and shifted loose. A springy bundle of cypress teetered, then tipped like an unfolding set of shears and swan-dived onto the pavement.

The splintering crack of impact raised stinging reverberations under the confines of the gate arch. The wheel pair parted sideways in a violent shy and the carter threw down his whip, crying murder, as eighty board feet of rare moulding custom-carved to please the mayor’s wife became milled to pale slivers beneath his wheels.

Through a small, stunned second, the torches dimmed in a swooping gust of wind. Under their demonic flicker, the carter turned red and tare at his sideburns with his fists. The draught team milled, netted in. slackened traces and flighty as shoaling fish; while the mis-shapen cause of the disaster stood nonplussed, conversing in great sucking gusts with the wheel horses.

‘Curse of a fiend!’ The carter unfurled from his box in a frog-leap that landed him beside the russet-brown bundle that was Dakar. ‘What in Sithaer will you do about that misbegotten insult of a horse?’

‘Misbegotten? Insult?’ Dakar inspected the burly antagonist planted over him, fists cocked for mayhem, and his hair screwed free of an oiled felt cap like tufts of snarled wool on a shuttlecock. ‘You’re pretty ugly yourself, you know.’ Through the half-breath while the carter was stunned speechless, the Mad Prophet pushed past, retrieved trailing reins, and hauled Faery-toes out backwards from the tangle of shafts and shredded harness.

While Halliron and Medlir watched amazed, a safe distance removed in the pony cart, Dakar came back, towing horse. He poised before the irate carter, oblivious to the pounding from the adjacent gate houses, as the watch on duty pelted downstairs in armed readiness to forestall an altercation.

‘I suggest you forgive the old boy.’ When the nag butted a congenial head against the carter’s shoulder and knocked him a half-step back, Dakar added, ‘How could you not? He likes you.’