Dragonspell: The Southern Sea

‘Just so.’ The red silk rustled as the master nodded his head. ‘Some of us in the various guilds wonder what the Old One’s up to. We wonder greatly. He is vastly old, my friend, well over a hundred at least, maybe two hundred for all we know. We wonder how the years have affected his mind. You’ve seen him recently?’

There was no use in lying.

‘Oh yes, fairly recently. He seemed as sharp and smooth as a well-oiled scythe. Physically he’s very slow, of course. But his mind still seemed … let us say, formidable.’

‘Ah. A fine choice of words, indeed. Now let me make one thing clear: I mean the Old One no harm, none whatsoever. If the blood guilds wished to dispose of him, we wouldn’t bother to take the risk of bringing you into our confidence. Is that clear?’

‘Very. Yet something’s troubling you?’

‘Oh yes. Why did he want Rhodry of Aberwyn kidnapped, then just set adrift here in the islands?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’

‘I was afraid that he hadn’t told you. He’s working on something, all right, something very convoluted and strange.’ The master got up abruptly. ‘I smell danger.’ He began to pace back and forth in front of the fresco. ‘And no one reaches my position in a blood guild without knowing danger when he smells it. All I want from you is this, that you go on to the Old One’s villa, just as you planned to do, and see if you can find out anything about this mysterious scheme. That’s all for now – just information. Later, who knows? But I promise you this, if anyone has to confront the Old One, that someone will be me, not you.’

‘Very good, because you know perfectly well that I could never stand against him.’

‘Just so.’ The way the hood twitched gave the impression that the master was smiling. ‘And in return, we put you forward as a candidate for the Outer Circle. Our backing carries great weight, you know.’

‘Oh yes, and as I say, I’m honoured beyond dreaming.’ One thin trickle of fear-sweat ran down Baruma’s ribs, but he forced himself to smile. ‘And I suppose someone will be keeping track of this mysterious Rhodry?’

‘Of course. The man you know as Gwin, actually. He’s the logical choice. He knows what the slave looks like after all.’

Baruma hesitated, wondering if Gwin were really trustworthy where Rhodry was concerned, but arguing with a Hawkmaster’s decisions ranked very low on his list of enjoyable pastimes.

‘Excellent. I have reason to believe that Rhodry’s a much more dangerous man than the Old One realizes.’

‘Indeed? Because he swore he’d kill you?’

The humour in the master’s voice made Baruma furious, but he kept his own voice steady and light.

‘I should have realized that Gwin would mention that little incident. Well, yes, partly because of that. Do you blame me? You know as well as I do that barbarians are more than willing to die if it’ll salvage their precious honour. No sensible, civilized man would try to escape his owner, but Rhodry of Aberwyn is neither civilized nor sensible.’

‘You’ve got a point. You know, I think it might be safer all round to have Rhodry in our hands rather than wandering round the islands with this spice trader.’

Baruma’s heart pounded once. The Hawkmaster already knew a great deal more than he’d realized.

‘I agree of course,’ Baruma said. ‘I suppose it’ll be easy enough for your men to take Rhodry alive. The Old One was adamant: we had to leave him alive.’

‘Oh, was he? That’s an interesting piece of news. Very well, kidnapping it is. I’ll put Gwin and some of my men on the trail on the morrow. We can probably learn a great deal simply by asking this Rhodry the right questions. He might be unwilling to answer, but then, we have ways of dealing with the recalcitrant.’

‘You certainly do, yes.’ Baruma was by now thoroughly frightened, but he knew that he had to speak the truth now rather than let the master find it out on his own later. ‘But Rhodry can tell you nothing. The Old One ordered me to crush his mind.’

The master spun around and stared straight at him. The lamplight struck the hood at an angle, allowing Baruma to get an impression of narrow eyes and a sneering mouth. Showing fear or grovelling now would be fatal.

‘I followed my orders, of course. I wish you’d come forward earlier with this proposal.’

‘So do I.’ The master’s tone was ironic rather than angry, and Baruma could breathe more easily. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any way to restore his memory?’

‘None. No human being could possibly break the ensorcelment I put upon him. No matter how long he lives, he’ll never remember so much as his own true name.’

‘That’s a pity, but well, we’ll have to work round it.’

‘Let me see, the man who was calling himself Merryc is still in Eldidd, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, and working out very nicely, too, judging from his last letter.’

‘And we at least know that Rhodry originally came from Aberwyn.’

‘You know, my friend, you and I might be able to work very well together. You think, and I like that. Curse this winter weather! There won’t be another ship across in months now, and that means no news from Merryc till spring. But at any rate, what do you think of my bargain?’

Since answering too quickly would be suspicious, Baruma made a show of considering. After all, he reminded himself, gaining the Old One’s backing was only hypothetical, while the Hawkmaster’s offer was very real indeed – for better or for worse.

‘I think that it’s a crucial turning of my Fate, and that I’d be a fool to refuse it.’ Also a dead man if I refuse it, he added to himself. ‘How shall we seal it?’

‘The way these things are always sealed, my friend: in blood.’

‘Very well.’ Although he went ice-cold, he managed to keep his voice calm. ‘Whenever you wish to begin.’

Zandar’s caravan was working its way through hill country as they headed southwest along the spine of the island. On either side of the dusty road, field after field of dark green vegetables nestled in the valleys, criss-crossed with tiny irrigation ditches, sparkling with water. When the caravan rode by, the bent-back farmers would look up, stretch, and stare at the long string of pack mules and horses. Riding at the dusty end of the line, Taliaesyn would stare back and envy them: farmers or not, they were free men. Toward noon, the caravan came to a river, or more precisely, to a broad gulch, littered with rocks and small shrubs, where water ran down the middle in a small, mucky stream. Out in what current there was stood a huge wooden water wheel with buckets all along the rim. As, sweating in the sun, two slaves turned a crank under an overseer’s whip, the buckets dipped down, brought up the precious water, and emptied it into a wooden culvert that ran on stilts to the main irrigation ditch at the lip of the gulch. Seeing the scars on the slaves’ backs reminded Taliaesyn that he was lucky.

When Kryblano, a free man working as a caravan guard, dropped back beside him, Taliaesyn asked him the river’s name.

‘The En-ghidal. It’s dry now, all right, but soon the rains will start, and the flash-floods with them. We’ll be home by then, though.’

That night the caravan camped downhill from a farming village called Deblis, a tidy arrangement of some fifty square white-plastered houses, each with a little wooden fence around a vegetable patch in front and a chicken-coop behind. At sunset, Zandar took Taliaesyn and Kryblano in for the night-time market. Among the flower-blossom lights of oil-lamps, pedlars and local craftsmen squatted on the ground with their merchandise neatly arranged on pallets of woven rushes, but the local folk seemed to be standing around gossiping more than they were buying. Zandar’s goods, however, were a different thing. Once Taliaesyn got them unpacked and spread out, the village women clustered round to haggle for the little clay pots and packets of beaten-bark paper that held the precious spices.

After about an hour, as business was slackening off, Zandar sent Kryblano and Taliaesyn off to buy him some wine, and, generous employer and master that he was, gave Kryblano the money to buy himself and the slave a cup, too. After some poking around the village they found a tiny wine-shop set into the side of a house, a room smoky from oil-lamps where row after row of yellow clay jugs stood against the wall and patrons spilled out into the alley. While they sipped the flat cups of sweet red wine, Kryblano struck up a conversation with a pair of locals, but Taliaesyn stood a little behind him and spoke to nobody.

As they made their way back to the marketplace, Kryblano paused for a moment to slip down an alley and relieve himself in the dark. Carrying the wine jug for their master, Taliaesyn waited for him in the street, which was nearly as dark, and chewed over his continual nag of a problem: who am I, anyway? At a scrape of sandal on sand behind him, he turned and saw two men walking up to him, so purposefully and yet so quietly that he went on guard. Then he saw the bright gleam of a tiny dagger in one man’s hand, and the coil of fine silken rope in the other’s. Taliaesyn ducked to one side and kicked out as the steel flashed toward him, but he felt the dagger graze his arm. He threw the wine jug in his attacker’s face and grabbed the rope-carrier by the arm, twisting him round. When the man with the knife feinted in, Taliaesyn yelled an instinctive war-cry and shoved his struggling prisoner straight onto the blade. The man in his hands screamed and slumped forward with a gush of blood. As the second turned to flee, Kryblano came running, yelling his head off, and the alley filled with villagers drawn by the shouting. As they tackled the escaping assassin, Kryblano reached Taliaesyn’s side and grabbed his bleeding arm to look at the shallow wound.

Everyone was talking so fast that Taliaesyn had trouble understanding more than a few words. All at once he realized that his cut was burning and that he could no longer focus his eyes. By the light of oil lamps that shot up and wavered in great gobbets of flame he saw Zandar forcing his way through the crowd in the company of a stout man with grey hair. It was suddenly very hard to hear the voices around him. He did hear Kryblano, shouting in alarm; then there was a gauzy grey silence and a dark.

In the dark a light was burning. At first he thought it was the sun, but as he walked toward it he saw that it glowed red like a campfire, that indeed it was a fire, but a strange one, because in the middle of the flames crouched a tiny red dragon. Around the fire stood a black man holding the hand of a white woman and a black woman standing alone. When they saw him they laughed and waved to him. Instinctively he knew that he should complete the circle, and as soon as he’d linked up the partners, they all began to dance, circling round and round, faster and faster, until all four of them blurred together in a rush of silver light, and the dragon swelled up, huge and ominous in a roar of flames, calling out to him, calling his name …

‘Rhodry.’

He said the name aloud, and he was awake, lying on a blanket in the shade of a tree at the edge of the caravan camp. By the sun’s position he could tell that it was nearly noon. Although he was so dry that his tongue felt glued to the roof of his mouth, and his scratch from the night before still stung, he felt perfectly well and steady-headed, not at all like a man who’d taken a poisoned wound. When he spoke the name again, Zandar noticed that he was awake and came over with a waterskin.

‘So you’re alive, are you? Good.’

‘I’ve remembered my real name.’ Dry mouth or not, he felt his news so urgently it was like an ache. ‘It’s Rhodry.’

‘Well, by the gods and all their little piglets! Good, good for you. Here. Drink first; then we’ll talk.’

Taliaesyn drank as much as he could hold, waited a few moments, then found he could drink some more. Zandar hunkered down next to him and watched with a commercial sort of compassion.

‘There was some kind of poison on that blade,’ the trader said. ‘The village herbwoman was sure of that, but it couldn’t have been very strong.’