Dragonspell: The Southern Sea

‘I see. Does your – I mean, our mistress entertain a lot?’

‘Oh yes, and also you’re going to be her footman. She needs an escort when she goes out, and I’ve got too much to do here as it is.’

‘I’ll do whatever you want, as long as you explain things to me. I don’t understand all the customs of the country.’

‘You haven’t been here long?’

‘No sir.’ Rhodry realized that he’d better come up with some convenient story. ‘I came here as a bodyguard for a rich merchant and got way over my head in debt, gambling. That was only a couple of months ago.’

‘Your merchant wouldn’t buy the notes back?’

‘No sir. I was nothing to him, only a kind of mercenary soldier called a silver dagger. Ever hear of them?’

‘No, but I take it they have no status to speak of. Well, that’s too bad.’ He paused, looking shrewdly at the axe. ‘Let me tell you something, boy. Do you know what happens if a slave murders his master?’

‘They hunt him down and torture him to death.’

‘Oh yes, but they also kill every other slave in the household, whether they had anything to do with the murder or not.’

‘What?!’

‘They drag them out and slit their throats, except for a few that they torture to give evidence in the courts.’ Porto’s voice had gone flat and soft. ‘I saw it happen once, in the house across the street from the one where I was born. The master was a beast, a sadistic animal, and everyone knew it, but when one of his men killed him, the archon’s men slaughtered the whole household, dragged them screaming to the public square and killed them all, right down to the cook’s babe-in-arms. I’ll never forget that. I see it in nightmares still, even though it was over fifty years ago.’ He shook himself like a wet dog. ‘I can’t imagine why anyone would lift a hand against our lady Alaena, but if she accepts Pommaeo, he’ll be lord and master here. I warn you, if I ever think you’re so much as dreaming of violence, I’ll turn you over to the archon myself. Understand me?’

‘Yes sir, but as we say at home, don’t trouble your heart over it. I’d never do anything that would put the rest of you at that kind of risk.’

‘I think you mean it, and you know, Rhodry, I think you’re a good boy at heart. Too bad about the gambling, it really is. I’ve always heard that you barbarians are too fond of the dice.’

‘Barbarians? We’re barbarians, are we? Ye gods, your wretched laws sound savage from what you’ve just told me.’

‘Savage? Oh no, merely practical. Slaves who murder their masters are very, very rare in the islands.’ And yet he looked away with a world of sadness welling in his eyes.

About the middle of the morning, Rhodry got his first taste of his new duties when Alaena decided to pay a call before Pommaeo returned to her house. Porto gave Rhodry an ebony staff with a heavy silver knob at one end and a small leather whip – the whip for the litter slaves, the staff for the beggars and other riff-raff who might block the lady’s way. When the litter came round to the courtyard, he finally saw these supposedly bestial dregs of slavery: four boys, not more than fifteen, who shrank back at the sight of the whip. Paler than most Bardek men, they had strange yellow eyes, oddly slit and staring. With a shock Rhodry wondered if they had elven blood in their veins. As if they’d heard his wondering, some of the Wildfolk appeared, and the boys’ eyes moved, following them as they strolled around.

‘They come from Anmurdio,’ Porto said, meaning of course the slaves, not the spirits. ‘It’s a horrible, primitive place, lots of small islands, all infested with disease. They say the people there are cannibals.’ He shrugged, dismissing the island group and its inhabitants both. ‘Here’s a rag. Take it and dust off the litter. The mistress is almost ready.’

The litter itself was a beautiful thing, made of ebony like his staff, painted with floral garlands on a dark blue background. The cabinet in which the two passengers rode was fastened to the poles by cast brass fittings of monkeys, whose paws and tails joined to form the enclosing circle. Inside were more of the purple velvet cushions that the lady seemed to favour. Rhodry had just handed the rag back to Porto when Alaena appeared, dressed in a brocaded, knee-length tunic, a large number of emeralds at her throat and a scarf of green silk gauze wrapped round her head to keep the sun off her face. In the sunlight she definitely looked in her mid-thirties, but beautiful all the same. When Rhodry helped her into the litter, she gave him a little pat on the cheek. Disna followed right after, carrying a carved wooden box about two feet square but only some four inches deep. When Rhodry helped her in as if she were a fine lady, he was rewarded with a brilliant smile.

Although Porto rattled off a long string of directions, Rhodry would have been lost if it weren’t for the litter boys, who seemed to have followed the route many a time. As he strode along, scowling at passers-by, the closest bearer called out where they were supposed to turn in a voice shaking with fear. It occurred to Rhodry that if they all got lost, the boys would be whipped, not him, thanks to the rigid hierarchy among the slaves. He decided to try to get them some extra food that evening; he could think of no other reward that would have any meaning in their desolate lives.

Their destination was no more than a mile away, another splendid compound whose outer walls were painted with an underwater scene of fish in a coral reef. Rhodry left the litter and the litter-boys in the care of a gatekeeper, but carrying the wooden box, he accompanied the mistress and Disna up to the house. An elderly maidservant, all toothless smiles, bowed them into a house even more luxurious than Alaena’s.

In a central chamber where the walls were painted with climbing roses, and four grey and black kittens chased each other among embroidered cushions, three women were waiting at a low table. Even though he’d never seen them before, Rhodry could tell immediately that they were a mother and two grown daughters; they shared the same beautifully shaped brown eyes and full mouths, as well as a certain way of tilting their heads and smiling. They got up to greet Alaena with a flood of chatter that was hard for Rhodry to follow, since most of it seemed to concern neighbours and friends of which he knew nothing. Then one of the daughters noticed Rhodry and gave a small, ladylike squeal.

‘A barbarian, ’Laen! Where did you get him?’

‘From the tedious Pommaeo, actually. He may talk about himself all the time, but he certainly does know how to buy gifts.’ She motioned Rhodry closer. ‘Look at his eyes. They’re blue.’

The daughters gawked and giggled while the mother merely smiled in a fond sort of way and Rhodry blushed, a response that only made them giggle the more. At last they’d satisfied their curiosity and all knelt on cushions round the table. Alaena took the wooden box from Rhodry and emptied out a set of little ivory tiles, painted with flowers and birds among other designs. With a rumbling sound of thunder the women began flipping them face down and mixing them up. As if at a prearranged signal, two servants appeared with brass trays piled up with sweetmeats and set them down at the corners of the table. When they started to leave, Alaena signalled to Disna to follow them, but an imperious wave of her hand kept Rhodry on the dais.

‘You may sit behind me.’

‘Thank you, mistress.’ Rhodry had the distinct feeling that she hadn’t seen quite enough of her present, like a little girl who won’t put a new doll down for a moment.

By then the tiles were apparently properly mixed, because the other three women had stopped scouring the table with them and were looking at Alaena expectantly. A few at a time, a small crowd of Wildfolk materialized to stare at the table as well, but as far as he could tell, anyway, Rhodry was the only one who saw them, even when a bold blue gnome laid a skinny finger on one of the tiles.

‘Do you want to be first, Malina?’

‘Age before beauty?’ the mother said comfortably. ‘Mine always is the dullest one, so we may as well get it out of the way.’

When the others laughed, Malina began picking out tiles, one at a time, and placing them, still face down, in a star-shaped pattern. Rhodry realized that what he’d been thinking a game was actually some sort of fortune-telling device. He felt a certain mild contempt, a condescension really, that these silly women would believe in this nonsense when there was real dweomer all around them. Suddenly he felt cold. What did he mean, real dweomer? How did he know that such a thing existed, how could he be more certain of it than he was of his own name? He felt like a man who, talking over his shoulder to some companion, walks himself smack into a wall – both confused and foolish. The only evidence for his certainty was the Wildfolk, settling down on the floor and unoccupied cushions to watch as Alaena leaned forward and turned the first three tiles face up to reveal a sword between two flowers.

‘A lover? Well, well, well – what do you mean, yours is always dull?’

At that all four of them laughed with sharp little cries like birds in an aviary, and the Wildfolk clapped soundless hands and grinned. Alaena helped herself to a sweetmeat, a gelatinous oblong covered in a dead-white powder. She took a thoughtful bite while she studied the tiles, then turned, motioned to Rhodry, and held the sweetmeat out to him like a treat for a dog. When he opened his mouth to make a polite refusal, she popped it in and patted his cheek. Rhodry had no choice but to eat it, but it was so sweet that he nearly gagged. Fortunately Alaena had returned to her tiles and never noticed. By all the ice in all the hells, he thought, the sooner I escape and start hunting Baruma down the better! I’d rather die than be a lapdog, even for a pretty wench like this. Then he set himself to the difficult task of staying awake as the long drowsy morning dragged on.

When they left Myleton, Jill and Salamander had opted for the direct if difficult route straight south from the city, and for over a week now they’d been winding their way through the hill country. Since the travelling was slow and tedious, and the imaging exercises kept her mind off Rhodry, Jill poured herself into the work and made such rapid progress that Salamander admitted he was impressed. Before they’d left Myleton, they had indeed found a picture scroll for her lessons. About a foot high and five long, it unrolled right to left, all backwards to Salamander’s way of thinking. Since she’d never read a Deverry book or scroll, to Jill the direction seemed as good as any other. She rather liked the paintings themselves, three scenes from the history of Myleton, showing the first colonists founding the new city, a famous tidal wave of some hundred years later, and finally, the election of an archon known as Manataro the Good. Each picture was crammed with small details, all cleverly arranged so that it seemed she was looking into a box, not down onto a flat surface.

Yet, after days of staring at the historically renowned tidal wave and working on seeing it as if it were real in her mind, she was heartily sick of the scroll and the practice both. The banishing ritual she found more tolerable, even though Salamander drilled her mercilessly, because she could see its direct benefit, the control of the floods of imagery that threatened to overwhelm her whenever she was angry. First she would place those images in her mind as if they were practice lessons, then banish them with the sign of the flaming pentagram. At times she still failed, and the fires of rage would seem to burn around her unchecked, but every time she succeeded she felt her skill growing, and over the days the out-of-control images came less and less often.

On the afternoon that they reached the centre of the island, everything seemed to go wrong with her workings. First, she stumbled over the words of the ritual, drawing the gerthddyn’s scorn. Then, when she tried a new picture from the scroll, she could get only the barest trace of the image of Archon Manataro, and it seemed that all her hard work had gone for naught. When she complained to Salamander, he smiled in his most infuriating way.

‘You don’t dare give this up, you know. Or do you want to go slowly but inevitably mad?’

‘Of course I don’t! And I’ll follow orders, just like I always followed orders when Da was teaching me sword craft. I just don’t understand why these blasted pictures are so important. I mean, with Da, I always could figure it out – this exercise strengthens your arm, or that one worked on your grip, but this is all too peculiar.’

‘Ah. Well, what you’re doing is indeed like your Da’s exercises; you’re just strengthening mental muscles. Here, when the bards sing about dweomer, they always talk about strange powers, don’t they? Where do you think those powers come from? The gods?’

‘Not the gods, truly. Well, I suppose, you just get them. I mean, it’s dweomer, isn’t it? That’s what makes it magical.’ She suddenly realized that she was sounding inane. ‘I mean, magical things just happen.’

‘They don’t, at that, although that’s what everyone thinks. All those puissant powers and strange spells come out of the mind, human or elven as the case may be. Dweomer is a matter of mental faculties. Know what they are?’

‘I don’t.’

‘When you learn to read – and I think me we’d best start lessons in that, too – I’ll find you a book written by one of our Rhodry’s illustrious ancestors, Mael the Seer himself, called On the Rational Categories. In it he defines the normal mental faculties for humans, and most of them apply to elves, too, such as seeing, hearing, and all the other physical senses, as well as logical thinking, intuition, and a great many more, including, indeed, the very ability to make categories and generalizations, which is not a skill to be taken lightly or for granted, my petite partridge. These are, as he calls them, the rational faculties, open and well known among elves and men, although the elves have a few faculties that humans don’t, such as the ability to see the Wildfolk. Every child should develop them as he grows; if someone’s blind, say, or simply can’t remember things, we pity them and feel they’ve been robbed of part of their birth-right.

‘Then there are the buried, hidden, or occult faculties that exist in the mind like chicks in a new-laid egg. While every elf and human possesses a selection of them in potential, very few are born with them already developed. You can call these faculties “powers” if you wish, though it sounds perhaps too grand for perfectly natural phenomena. Do you understand the idea of a category of the natural? As opposed to the supernatural?’

‘Uh, what? Well, uh …’

‘The Maelwaedd’s book becomes a necessity, I see.’

‘Very well, but what do these rotten picture exercises have to do with all this grand-sounding stuff?’

‘Oh. Truly, I did ramble a bit. Well, if you want to awaken these sleeping powers, you use pictures, mostly, and names and sometimes music to go with them. Once you’ve awakened them, you can use them over and over. Perpend – once you’ve learned how to be logical, can’t you re-awaken that faculty whenever you’ve got a problem to solve? Of course. Just so, after you develop the scrying faculty, say, you can open it with the right images and words any time you want. A great master like Nevyn doesn’t even need the names and images any more, for that matter. For him the occult faculties have become manifest.’

Although his small lecture was so difficult to understand that Jill felt like a halfwit (as the organizing faculties go, Salamander’s were far from being the best in Annwn), everything he said resonated in her soul, with a hint more than a promise that here was a key to open a treasure-chest.

‘But I’ll tell you what, my robin of sweet song, you can try a new exercise if you’d like. Instead of using the scroll, make up your own image and try to realize it clearly in your mind. I don’t mean draw it or suchlike – we don’t have any ink, anyway – just decide on some simple thing and try to see it, like an inn you once stayed in, or your horse Sunrise, he who now eats the king’s bountiful oats – somewhat like that.’