Cashel couldn't feel anything, not even the water when he bellyflopped with a splash that would've been immense under most circumstances. Since the sea still roiled with the creature's death throes, he guessed nobody'd notice even that.
He plunged beneath the surface. The cold shock of the sea hadn't revived him, but not being able to breathe did. He tried to flail his arms and realized he was still holding his quarterstaff. He let go with one hand and paddled. Though he still couldn't feel anything and he knew he was very weak, his face lifted into the air again and he was able to gasp in a breath.
Like the whale, Cashel thought and might've laughed, but his nose dropped underwater. Breathing salt water seared his lungs worse than near suffocation had moments before. He kicked to the surface again, knowing that he'd shortly drown.
The water was red with the whale's blood and blotched with crimson froth. The monster lay on its back between Cashel and the Shepherd, floating low. Rhythmic spasms rippled down the creature's belly muscles; its underside was a pale contrast to the blotched gray-black of the upper surfaces.
A huge flipper Cashel lifted, then slammed back into the sea only inches from Cashel's face. He grabbed it instantly. He could feel bones beneath the slick, gristly surface.
The whale would probably sink also; Duzi, he could see that it was already sinking! But it didn't sink quite as fast as Cashel alone—all bone and muscle, with no fat to buoy him up in the water—so he clung to it and waited.
He might be rescued after all, though he didn't care much. Struggling with a monster the size of a ship had burned all emotion out of him. How long had the fight gone on, anyway?
Because Cashel lay so close to the whale's carcase, all he could see of The Shepherd was its mast top. The ship had continued on ahead after Cashel and the whale tore loose, swinging in a wide circle to port. It was so big that it kept going for a long time, even after the oars'd stopped.
Cashel could see and hear fine, and his muscles did what he told them—though not nearly as well as he expected. The numbness in his body was passing too, though of course all he could really feel now was pain.
Something was going on to Cashel's other side also. He'd have to turn his head to see what it was. With a real effort of will—it meant ducking his face underwater again— he did.
The Flying Fish was nosing back toward the whale, its prow smeared with blood and its ram skewed upward. Cashel had a vague recollection of the little ship hitting the whale at the moment everything let go in his mind and the world around him. Now its oars were backing to bring it to a halt in the crimson water.
Ilna stood in the bow with a coil of rope in her hand. "Can you catch if I throw this to you, brother?" she called. Her voice would've sounded unemotional to somebody who didn't know her as well as Cashel did.
"I can catch," he croaked, the first words he'd spoken since he shouted a warning as the whale arrowed up from the depths. Ilna tossed the coil underhanded, landing it in the water so close that Cashel could've grabbed it with his teeth if he'd needed to.
He used his right hand instead, letting go of the whale's flipper. Just then Ilna's man Chalcus dived off the bow, stripped naked and holding the end of another coil of rope.
"I'm all right!" Cashel said, but Chalcus cut the water cleanly and didn't reappear for the long moments. Ilna didn't look worried so Cashel figured things must be all right, but where was the fellow? A sailor on deck continued to pay out rope; a second coil was spliced onto the first.
The Flying Fish halted, drifting slowly toward Cashel. Ilna'd tied her rope to a stanchion, but Cashel wasn't quite ready to clamber up the ship's sheer side. The fight with the whale had taken a lot out of him; almost more than there'd been. He tried to remember exactly what'd happened after he thrust the staff into the monster's jaws, but it wasn't so much a blur as tiny broken pieces of a scene painted on glass.
Sailors at the stern of the Flying Fish were dragging a fellow dressed like an officer from the sea at the patrol vessel's stern. Had he fallen from the Shepherd the way Cashel had? There might've been more things going on than just the whale, too.
"Hoy!" somebody shouted. Cashel turned his head. Chalcus stood on the whale's twitching body, spinning the end of his rope overhead; it must have been lead line, loaded to sink quickly to check the depth. He'd gathered a triple loop in his left hand. "Ready?"
"Read—" called the sailor on deck. Chalcus loosed the line in an arrow-straight cast that took it into the hands of the waiting sailor. As soon as the fellow caught it, Chalcus jumped feet-first into the sea and bobbed up beside Cashel.
Cashel had begun to shiver. Not from the water, he thought; the sea wasn't nearly as cold as nights he'd watched his sheep through storms of early winter with no shelter but his sodden cloak. He'd strained even his own great strength; it'd be good to get some food in him, if he could keep it down. Or at least a mug of ale to sluice the foul dryness out his mouth. Right now it tasted like an ancient chicken coop.
Conversationally Chalcus said, "We'll be towing our prize in with us; the harbor's not so far, after all, and I've never seen or heard of a creature like this one. Have you, friend Cashel?"
"I never saw anything like it," Cashel muttered. "It's a whale, but it's nothing like the ones that pass in spring by Barca's Hamlet."
Talking helped; he suddenly understood why Chalcus paddled beside him in the bloody water, chatting like they were relaxing on a sunlit hillside. The sailor's tone was cheerfully mild, but his eyes missed nothing. If Cashel suddenly lost consciousness, Chalcus would grab him before he sank and keep him up till he could be hauled on deck like a netful of cargo.
"Neither have I seen its like," agreed Chalcus. "Nor heard of such, more to the point, for my dealings have been more in southern waters and the east than in these western wastes."
He grinned wickedly. His arms floated motionless on the surface, but his legs must be windmilling to keep him so high in the water. Chalcus' nude body looked like a deer skinned at the end of a hard winter. There was no fat on his scarred frame, none at all. His muscles stood out like the individual yarns of a hawser.
"Though perhaps I shouldn't say that, you being a western lad yourself," he added.
Cashel shook his head. "I'm from Barca's Hamlet," he muttered. "I don't know anything about oceans. As for Carcosa, if we get there—"
"Indeed, we'll get there, lad," the sailor said, bobbing like a child's toy in a puddle.
"—all I could say about it is, I've passed through the city and I was glad to get to the other side."
The mild banter was bringing Cashel back from the abyss his struggles had taken him to the edge of. He was aware of himself as a person again. Raising his head, he tried to find Sharina; the huge carcase was still a quivering wall between him and the Shepherd.
"Come on, you lazy buggers!" Chalcus bellowed at the crew of the Flying Fish as they tugged on the rope he'd tossed them. They were using the light line as a messenger to draw an anchor cable around the whale just behind the flippers. "The sun'll have set before we've got this brute to land, and where's the honor if folk can't see our trophy?"
"Can you really carry this on the Flying Fish?" Cashel asked, pitching his voice low so that no one on the deck above would hear the question. "It looks to me like it's as heavy as the whole ship."
"Aye, as heavy and more," Chalcus agreed. "But we'll be all right towing the toothy devil, so long as he doesn't sink; which may happen yet, if they don't make that hawser fast some time soon. I think perhaps I...."
He looked sidelong at Cashel, judging how far he'd recovered.
Cashel laughed, snorted salt water from his nostrils, and laughed again. "I think I'm ready to go aboard, Master Chalcus," he said. "I may not have all my strength back, but I think what remains will prove an aid to hauling that rope."
He looked at his sister on the deck above. "Ilna?" he said. "See to it that this line is snubbed off, will you? I'm coming aboard, and I don't look forward to spilling myself in the water again because something slipped!"
Cashel tugged to test the line himself, then walked up the side of the vessel using his left hand on the rope to steady him. Oh, yes; he was ready for work again!
Sharina swung down from the fighting tower's battlements with a great deal more care than she'd displayed climbing it. She'd sheathed the Pewle knife; it hadn't been required as a weapon but its smooth steel weight had settled her mind at a time she needed that. Now that she had leisure and both hands, she worried that her billowing robes would catch a projection and she'd break her neck as she fell.
"Mistress?" said the balista captain as he bent to grab her hand. "Princess, I mean! Let me—"
"No!" Sharina said. As if she didn't have enough problems already!
She dropped to the deck with no problem except that her robes flew up. She smoothed them and looked around to see if anybody was laughing at her. They weren't, of course: quite apart from her being Princess Sharina of Haft, everybody aboard the Shepherd was too shaken to laugh at anything for the moment.
Tenoctris had a hand on the railing, but she'd recovered to her normal state of indomitable fragility. She said, "Your Cashel is really quite remarkable. What he did just now was...."
She shook her head, then grinned wryly and added, "Our friend Cashel, and very definitely the world's friend Cashel. The wizard who made that attack won't have expected anyone to be able to block it. Quite remarkable."
"Yes, he is," Sharina said, a smile of contentment spreading over her face. She hadn't had time to be frightened till it was all over. Before she hopped down from the tower, she'd seen Cashel catch his sister's line. Now with the Flying Fish at a wobbly halt beside the monster, there was nothing to worry about.
"Was it a demon, Tenoctris?" she added, then frowned. "Is it, I mean. It's still there, after all."
"Not a demon," Tenoctris said, shaking her head. "It's an animal, but one that doesn't belong in this world or time. The wizard who could bring such a thing so far could have opened the way for a demon, of course; but demons are hard to control. Generally impossible to control. Though there's no end of fools with more power than sense who might have tried it anyway."
The old wizard smiled with a mixture of humor and disdain for those who had the great powers which she lacked, but who themselves lacked her judgment and knowledge. Sharina stepped close and hugged Tenoctris. She was inexpressibly glad to have a friend who understood the powers which were threatening to overwhelm the Isles.
The forces which turned the cosmos were neither good nor bad; but when they were at their peak, human evil and human error had an immense capacity for causing destruction. Mistakes as much as malice had shattered the Old Kingdom; similar mistakes and malice could grind the slowly-rebuilt civilization of the present too deep into the mud to ever revive.
"Sharina?" Tenoctris said, touching the back of the girl's wrist.
Sharina came to herself again; her fingers had knotted so tightly that her nails were cutting the backs of her hands. "Sorry!" she said with a bright smile. "I was thinking about things that we're not going to let happen."
"No, we're not," agreed Tenoctris approvingly. She patted Sharina's wrist again before looking over the scene around them.
The fleet that'd been arrayed like pieces on a chess board was now clumped like a crowd watching a street fight. At least a dozen warships were close enough that Sharina could've flung a stone aboard them. Officers shrieked to their own crews and to the Sister-cursed idiots! on other vessels. She heard oars break as ships fouled one another, and the chance of accidental ramming must be making the sailing masters scream.
Sharina gave faint smile. She was an excellent swimmer; needs must, she could strip off her robes and make it to shore. She smiled even more broadly. If she had to pull Tenoctris along with her, she could manage that too.
Horns and trumpets began to call, issuing orders instead of just adding to the noisy chaos. Flutists blew time to the rowers, and on a trireme from Third Atara—not all the royal fleet was from Ornifal—a drummer beat a similar rhythm. The clot of ships edged apart, their prows pointing again toward the harbor mouth.
Big as quinqueremes were, they carried more of their weight above the waterline than a merchant captain would think was safe or even sane. The Shepherd's deck wobbled when Garric and his entourage of Blood Eagles started forward. He grinned as Sharina raised her hand in greeting.
"We're heading for the harbor along with the whole First Squadron," Garric said conversationally, nodding toward the Admiral Zettin's flagship. "I don't know that we'll be any safer with ten other ships around us than when we were going to enter in lonely majesty—"
He grinned again. For the moment he was the brother Sharina'd grown up with, not the prince ruling the Isles with a quick mind and hard hand. Garric was both those things, of course; but when he was being a boy, Sharina could let herself be somebody younger and perhaps happier than the princess in court robes.
"—but Admiral Zettin made it clear that the only way I'm going to get rid of my escort is to sink every one of them. He's a former Blood Eagle, you know."
"And he's got the right bloody idea," the captain of the bodyguards aboard the Shepherd muttered out of the side of his mouth.
Garric glanced at the man, paused, then smiled. "Yes, I think maybe he does," he said.
The Shepherd got under way again. The five banks of oars stroked together to get the rhythm, their blades barely rippling the sea's surface. On the next stroke they bit deeper and the vessel shuddered, though Sharina wouldn't have been able to say that it'd resumed forward motion.
"There won't be another attack today," Tenoctris said with a nod of certainty. "No matter how powerful the wizard who attacked you may be, he won't be able to follow that very easily. Though he is powerful. He is, or she is, or it is. And clever as well."
"That's good to hear," Garric said, in the absent fashion that people mouth pleasantries that aren't going to change their behavior in the least. "That there won't be another attack for a while, I mean."
He touched the pommel of his sword, and Sharina smiled brightly because at the same moment her fingers were outlining the hilt of the Pewle knife beneath her robe. They were brother and sister, and their instincts were the same. "Of course it leaves the ordinary business of dealing with Count Lascarg and the factions in Carcosa. That'll be unpleasant enough."
The Shepherd was moving at a walking pace; other warships stayed close by either flank. The harbor mouth drew rapidly closer. The sailing master shouted to the starboard vessel, "Watch yourselves, Capsana! We don't have a portside rudder any more!"
"Should we be leaving Ilna and Cashel?" Sharina said, bending over the rail to look toward the patrol vessel still wallowing beside the monster's carcase. Its oars had just begun to move again. "Are they damaged?"
"The Flying Fish's in fine shape, better than we are," Garric said. "Master Chalcus, who appears to have taken command—"
There was cynical humor in his smile. Sharina judged that Chalcus would take almost anything he chose to, and apparently her brother shared that opinion.
"—has decided that he wants to bring the whale to the quay in order to amaze folk. He's something of a showman, that fellow, but I think he's earned the right."
Garric's expression sobered. "As have you, sister," he added. "You saved my life when you shot. And Cashel's too."
"The crew—" she said, nodding her head to indicate the men in the fighting tower above "—cocked and aimed. But they were afraid they'd hit you. I was afraid too, but I knew that if I didn't take the chance...."
Garric nodded, grim and far older than his nineteen years. "Yes," he said. "The risk you don't take is the most dangerous one of all."
He cleared his throat, looking toward the harbor. The Shepherd and its consorts were passing through the entrance, the lighthouse and its time-wrecked twin were to the left and right of them. The crowds on the mole had fallen silent when the monster attacked; now they resumed cheering. The docks of the inner harbor were covered with spectators wearing their brightest and most expensive garments.
"Well," Garric said, hitching up his sword belt. "Count Lascarg won't try to swallow me whole. But I don't mind telling you, sister, that I'd be happier if Liane were here to keep me from making some terrible blunder in etiquette. Father gave us a wonderful education in the classics, but he didn't teach us how to behave when meeting counts."
"No," said Sharina. "But I doubt that matters. Lascarg will know how to behave when his king comes with twenty thousand soldiers at his back."
And as she spoke, she realized that Garric wasn't the only one who'd changed. That wasn't the observation of Sharina os-Reise, the girl who'd grown up in a village inn.
She gave her brother a smile—of a sort.
Carcosa's harbor was huge, more a lake than an anchorage to Garric's eyes. Barca's Hamlet had only a rocky, steeply sloping beach. Above that stood a seawall, built during the prosperity of the Old Kingdom and the only reason winter storms hadn't washed the village away during the past thousand years.
This harbor was magnificent: stone quays framed slips where merchant vessels of a thousand tons could lie. To the south were stone ramps where the crews of warships could drag their fragile vessels out of the water and pillared sheds to house those same warships safe from the weather.
"It's a ruin!" King Carus said, the thought despairing and out of keeping for a spirit to whom wrath and laughter were common but sadness almost never. "Oh, lad, I did this with my haste and my anger. Would I'd never been king so I wouldn't have to see this!."
As Carus spoke, Garric saw the harbor through his ancient ancestor's eyes. The harbor should've been thronging with merchant ships from every port in the Isles; instead there were less than fifty—
"Thirty-nine," snapped Carus. He had a warrior's eye for numbers and location.
—vessels above the size of a rowboat. Half of what had been harbor was now a marsh, silted in where the Olang River entered the bay from the north; it hadn't been dredged in a thousand years.
And why should it have been? Even constricted, the harbor had room to anchor many times the present traffic. The sheds that had sheltered half a thousand triremes, the fleet that had scoured pirates and usurpers from the Inner Sea, were half fallen; not one retained its roof of red tiles.
The city beyond, rising in terraced steps up the hills surrounding the harbor, was a half-populated wasteland to eyes that remembered Carcosa when it ruled the Isles. This Carcosa looked as though it had been sacked by an enemy... and so it had, Garric knew from Gostain and Wylert and the other historians of the Dark Age that had succeeded the Old Kingdom. The city had been sacked a score of times, but the worst of the damage that'd thrown Carus into despair was caused by time, not human enemies: a thousand years, overpowering the hand and will of men.
"We'll build it again," Garric whispered under his breath. "Or our grandchildren will."
"Garric?" Sharina asked, not so much concerned as... interested. She knew Garric shared his mind with his ancestor, though he doubted she understood how complete the intertwining of soul with soul was.
"I was just thinking about how much work we have before Carcosa's back to what it once was," he said, telling the truth if not quite the whole truth.
Count Lascarg and the chief folk—the most richly dressed, at any rate—of Carcosa stood six feet above the level of the docks which lowlier residents thronged. "Did they build a reviewing stand?" Sharina asked, her eyes narrowing.
Garric viewed the scene superimposed with Carus' memories. "No," he said. "That was the base for the statues of the Twelve Nymphs who guided King Car to the place the Lady had blessed for his new colony."
He smiled without humor. "The statues were bronze," he added. "I suppose after the Collapse, some warlord or another decided he needed coinage more than he needed art—or the Lady's blessing either one."
The Shepherd slowed as the sailing master and his petty officers snarled orders to the crew. Only one bank of oars was still moving and even those stroked slowly, just to keep steerage way. The rest of the squadron held station; the nearest ships were so close that Garric found it hard to tell who was shouting what.
"Are they all so angry?" Sharina said. She'd wrapped her arms around her torso, hugging herself unconsciously. "They sound as if they were."
Garric put an arm around his sister's shoulders. The gesture'd probably raise eyebrows among the spectators used to the formality of court etiquette. Nobody'd say anything to Garric—and if they did, they'd find themselves swimming in the harbor faster than they might think possible.
"They care about their duties," he said. "The officers, I mean, though the men do too. They're nervous that things'll go wrong, and the Shepherd knows how much there is to go wrong maneuvering like this."
Sharina reached up to squeeze his hand, then relaxed. They eased apart. "They're pretending to be angry because they're frightened?" she said with a grin. "Well, I guess that's a good choice for soldiers. Fighting men."
Blood Eagles from the trireme which'd entered the harbor ahead of the rest of the fleet had cleared the quay below where Lascarg's party waited. The black-armored guards stood facing the crowd with their shields locked. Gilded wooded balls turned their spearheads into batons for the occasion, but when the monster attacked Garric had seen how quickly how quickly the blunts could come off.
"Hold up there!" a man bellowed from the water. "Don't let this ship dock till you've taken me aboard! Do you hear me?"
The petty officer conning the quinquereme from the bowsprit looked down, spat, and said, "Keep clear of Prince Garric's ship, pretty boy, or you'll swim back to land where you belong."
Sharina understood at the same time Garric did. "That's—" she said.
"Right!" said Garric, squeezing between two sailors and the stanchions bracing the butt of the bowsprit. He grabbed a rope coiled from the railing and bent over the side. Lord Attaper, the Blood Eagles' commander, stood in a skiff which two paddlers—armored infantrymen like himself—were trying desperately to balance.
Garric snubbed his end of the rope and tossed the coil. Attaper caught it, then dragged himself and the skiff six feet across open water to the quinquereme's bow. As he started to climb the ship's side, the lead oar swung forward and swatted his legs away; he dangled like a toy on a string, pulling himself up hand over hand.
Two of the guards on the Shepherd hauled their commander aboard; Attaper was cursing with a fury Garric wouldn't have expected in the man. Planting himself on the deck before Garric, Attaper said, "What happened here? I heard there was an attack! I knew I shouldn't have gone ashore! Didn't I tell you that?"
Lord Attaper was a stocky man in his forties, taller than most, and extremely fit for someone whose duties were largely administrative. All the Blood Eagle officers were nobles, generally younger sons from minor houses, but they and the men they commanded were also veterans who'd been promoted to the royal bodyguard as a reward for exceptional service in the regular regiments.
Garric sometimes wondered how much of a reward it really was. The Blood Eagles got higher pay, fancy armor, and the right to swagger in any military company... but their casualty rate was several times that of the other regiments, especially now that they had to guard a prince who was determined to lead from the front. There was no lack of recruits to fill vacancies, though.
"And after all, boy," whispered the image of Carus in his mind, "you're no more the man to tell them they're fools to go where it's hottest than I was. Good soldiers like to serve with a leader they can respect, and these are some of the best."
"Good morning, Lord Attaper," Garric said. He kept his tone mild—he wanted to shout back, a natural reaction like the snarling anger of the ship's nervous officers—but he knew this was a time to quietly remind Attaper who was the prince and who was the servant. "We went fishing on our way into harbor; Master Chalcus is following with the catch. Now I have business with local dignitaries, so—"
"It's too dangerous for you to go ashore here if there's already been one attack!" Attaper said. "We'll—"
"Lord Attaper!" Garric said. "My duties as prince require me to greet local dignitaries. Hold your tongue now, or you'll find your duties will involve running the Valles city administration five hundred miles from here."
Attaper paused, his face blank. Then he gave Garric a grim smile and an officer's salute, crossing his right forearm over his chest with the fist clenched. A regular soldier would clash his spear against his shield face instead. "I understand, your majesty," he said.
The Shepherd of the Isles bumped against the dock. The starboard rowers had shipped their oars to keep from breaking the shafts, and the deck crew had hung straw-stuffed leather fenders between the outrigger and the stonework. Despite the crew's skill, Garric heard the ship's timbers complain. Lightly-built warships weren't intended to be tied up against stone quays; every extra ounce had been pared from the Shepherd's hull to increase her speed and the endurance of her oarsmen during battle.
"If you're agreeable, your majesty," Attaper said in a formal voice, "my men will conduct the locals past you as you stand on the dock, rather than you climbing the plinth to join them."
Garric smiled with a mixture of humor, amusement, and pride. "Thank you for the suggestion, Commander," he said with equal formality. "I believe your plan will be more consonant with the dignity of the Prince of Haft."
A pair of Blood Eagles on the dockside were struggling to a makeshift boarding bridge between the quay and the quinquereme's deck. It'd started life as a door and wasn't long enough to reach the deck safely because of the outrigger for the upper banks of rowers.
Instead of waiting for the soldiers to figure out an answer, Garric stepped on the outrigger and hopped up to the dock. The ship shuddered, rolling to boost his departure. Sharina had Tenoctris to look after, so she stayed where she was.
Attaper swore—under his breath this time—and followed Garric. Drawing his sword, he bellowed to an officer wearing a captain's red plume, "The prince will receive them down here. Start our distinguished hosts moving!"
Two aides—they'd been clerks of Lord Tadai—came quickly toward Garric. Attaper raised his bare weapon by reflex.
"Please!" one of the aides said. Both carried notebooks of thin boards hinged with leather straps. "We're his highness' nomenclators! We have to be at his side to tell him who he's meeting!"
"Let them pass, milord," Garric said, again irritated by the bodyguard's caution; the nomenclators could scarcely have looked more harmless if they'd been mice scurrying on a pantry floor.
He remembered what he'd just said to Sharina, though, and kept his tone level. Whatever his rank now, Garric knew very well that he was nervous about meeting those who'd been his distant rulers while he'd grown up in Barca's Hamlet.
"The first will be Count Lascarg," the aide on Garric's right murmured. His index finger marked a place in the notebook, though he didn't bother referring to it. "His twin children, the honorable Tanus and Monine, were to accompany him, but they don't appear to be present."
The Blood Eagles had started the line of dignitaries moving before Attaper bothered to ask Garric about the plan. That was all right; good subordinates had to be able to take initiative—within limits.
Count Lascarg's scabbard was empty and a guard walked to either side of him. They were more likely to have to support the count than to restrain him: he was a tired old man, overweight and—Garric had served in his father's taproom since childhood—more than half drunk.
Lascarg knelt before Garric, bracing himself with his hands to keep from falling over. He looked up, avoiding Garric's eyes, and said in a rusty voice, "Your highness, I offer the loyal submission of Haft to the Kingdom of the Isles."
"Rise, Lord Lascarg," Garric said. "The officials who've preceded me have made arrangements to allow you and your personal servants quarters in the west wing of the palace. So long as you remain there until I've made permanent dispositions, I can guarantee your safety. Of course you're to take no further part in the government of the island."
"Of course," Lascarg muttered. He didn't sound regretful; perhaps he was even relieved. He rose to his feet more easily than he'd knelt and walked away straight-backed.
Garric watched him go without expression. Lascarg had been commander of the Household Troops the night riots in Carcosa had led to the death of the Count and Countess of Haft; afterwards Lascarg had seized the throne himself. That didn't prove he'd been behind the riots in the first place, but the best that could be said was that the Household Troops hadn't protected their employers as they were sworn to do.
Garric wouldn't have had much liking or respect for Lascarg under any circumstances, so nothing important changed when Garric had learned that Countess Tera was his real mother. He'd been born the night she died, and Reise had carried the infant to Barca's Hamlet on the opposite coast with his wife and her own newborn daughter.
The next dignitary through the wall of Blood Eagles was an older man in priestly robes of the traditional gleaming white. Instead of the bleached wool which priests in Valles wore in at least the affectation of modesty, this man's garment was of silk trimmed with ermine.
"Lord Anda, Chief Priest of the Temple of the Lady of the Sunset," said the left-hand nomenclator, "and head of the congregation of the Lady on Haft."
Anda knelt before Garric with the deepest respect, but as he did so he looked over his shoulder with a sneer of triumph toward the next person in line. He said, "The prayers of the servants of the Lady are always with you, your highness."
"He and Lady Estanel, Priestess of the Temple of the Shepherd of the Rock, nearly came to blows over precedence!" the other aide added in shocked amazement. "Can you imagine that? Of course the priests of the Lady have precedence!"
"Rise, Lord Anda," Garric said. "My friend Lord Tadai will shortly discuss with you the means by which the office of the Chancellor in Valles will improve its oversight of the temples here on Haft."
"In fact if you have a moment, your highness...," Anda said, rising smoothly. He had the sharp features and bright eyes of a falcon. "My associates and I have a proposal which you as a Haft native yourself will find very—"
"I do not have a moment," Garric said, suddenly so angry that his vision blurred. "Lord Tadai will instruct you."
The priest opened his mouth to speak further. Garric felt his right hand fall to his sword hilt. If the whale's attack hadn't drained him so completely....
Lord Anda was too good a politician to push on where he could see there was no hope. He bowed and smiled, passing back through the guards with his dignity undiminished.
Carus was a calming presence in Garric's mind. The ancient king knew more about gusts of rage than most men did. Garric's anger didn't frighten him. "Just priests being priests, lad," the ghost murmured. "Part of life, like rain running down the inside of your cuirass."
"Lady Estanel is next," a nomenclator said. "She entered the priesthood after the death of her husband, a major landowner to the south of Carcosa."
The priestess of the Shepherd was short and round. The collar of her white silk robe was trimmed with sable, and her magnificent ivory combs were arranged to give the impression of a tiara.
She curtseyed with supple ease; though fat, Lady Estanel was obviously in good health. "We servants of the Shepherd are delighted to greet you, Prince Garric," she said. "We look forward to discussing methods to reform the current religious situation with you."
"Your discussions will be with my agent, Lord Tadai," Garric said; he heard his voice coming from a thousand miles away. "And milady? You'd best arrange matters so that I don't have to get involved, because you'd like that result less than anything Lord Tadai tells you."
Garric couldn't see the priestess' expression through the red haze that clouded his vision, but she passed on quickly. He felt a touch on his right elbow. He turned. Sharina was there. Though relief made him stagger, he could see clearly again.
Attaper must have signaled to the guards, because the line of dignitaries in embroidered brocade stayed on the other side of the black shields. A good bodyguard observes everything, and Garric didn't guess he'd ever meet anyone better than Attaper.
"I'm a little dizzy from the voyage," Garric called with a cheerful smile toward the waiting nobles. "A moment, please, and I'll be with you."
He turned again and muttered into Sharina's ear, "We weren't god-ridden in Barca's Hamlet, you know that. A pinch of meal and a sip of ale to the household altar at meals—for the people who could afford that. And we gave when the priests from Carcosa came around with the statues for the Tithe Procession every summer. But we worshipped the gods, and these people are just politicians. Politicians who think they'll make me one of them!"
"Yes," said Sharina, holding his wrist as she scanned the nearby spectators with a harsh expression. "Well, they're not going to do that."
Garric looked at the crowd also, really for the first time. He'd been too concerned with the dignitaries on the raised plinth to think about the rest of the folk waiting. Those close by were retainers of the nobles. They stood in discrete blocs of six to twenty-odd men—all men, of course—wearing their employers' colors as cockades. They weren't openly armed, but Garric knew their caps had metal linings and there were truncheons—if not swords—concealed under their tunics.
He'd expected that; there'd have been similar men at a levee in Valles or Erdin or any other community in the Isles big enough to have a range of wealth and therefore rivalry. What he hadn't expected was that the two largest groups would be those of the priesthoods, big scarred men in white tunics. The Lady's gang carried censers on the end of three-foot metal rods, while their rivals held similar rods bent into the shape of a shepherd's crook.
"If any of them saw a sheep in their life, it was as roast mutton," Garric grated under his breath.
Then he straightened, smiled, and said, "Lord Attaper, I've recovered from my indisposition. I'll be pleased to meet the rest of those waiting to offer their respect to the kingdom."
Still grinning, he added to Sharina in a voice only slightly less audible, "You know, sister, for the first time since I became...."
He gestured with his palms upturned. Prince, regent; leader. It didn't matter what word he used or if he didn't bother to speak; Sharina understood.
"Anyway, for the first time I'm really looking forward to making changes in the way a government works!"
Garric laughed aloud. His sister laughed with him, squeezed his hand again, and then stepped aside so that the horrified nomenclators could resume their duties.
"Look, you fine folk of Carcosa!" Chalcus called from the bow to the crowd filling the waterfront. "Come look at the dreadful monster which your prince vanquished without so much as mussing his hair! Ah, the kingdom is blessed indeed to have such a ruler as Prince Garric of Haft!"
"Ilna?" said Merota with a troubled frown. She was shouting so that Ilna, holding her hand in the prow of the Flying Fish, could hear her. It was a measure of Chalcus' lungs that much of the crowd was able to understand him over the noise not only of civilians but from the crews and equipment of the royal fleet as it docked.
"Yes, child?" said Ilna, turning to face Merota so that the girl could see her answer. Ilna didn't like either to shout or to be shouted at; a poor orphan gets enough of the latter early on.
Chalcus now openly commanded the Flying Fish. Captain Rhamis huddled amidships with a cloak over his soaked garments; water dripped from the tip of his scabbard to pool on the deck beneath him.
The harbor had scores of unoccupied docks, though many were only rubble cores which'd lost their facing stones. Instead of bringing the patrol vessel to one of them, however, Chalcus had anchored half a stone's throw out from the shore where more people could see it.
The crew, released from the oarbenches, was hauling the great carcase alongside and lashing it to the Flying Fish with a second loop. The whale had begun to sink even before they'd entered the harbor; water was filling the body cavity through the hole the ram had smashed.
Ilna smiled grimly. Chalcus was too fine a showman to lose his wondrous attraction because of inattention.
"Is Prince Garric really as great a man as Chalcus, Ilna?" Merota asked in her high, piercing voice.
The question so shocked Ilna that she burst out with a gust of loud laughter. Merota gaped: Ilna's reaction was almost as unusual for her as a fit of crying would have been.
Ilna's expression settled. A fit of crying was the other alternative. She'd always considered showing emotion to be a sign of weakness; but she'd never denied that she was subject to weakness, either.
Rather than raise her voice, Ilna lifted Merota to speak into the child's ear. Ilna was slightly built—all the bulk in the family had gone to her brother Cashel—but she did much of her work with double-span looms, which often as not she set up by herself. She took her physical abilities for granted.
"Garric is a great man, child," Ilna said. "The kingdom is lucky to have so wise and strong a leader, and Garric's friends are lucky too. As for Chalcus...."
She looked toward the bow. Chalcus stood on the railing, gesturing extravagantly as he described the way Prince Garric had winkled out the monster's brains with one thrust of his mighty sword and then had used his pommel to crush its ribs.
Ilna smiled. It was a lie and she hated lies, but from Chalcus' lips it sounded like one of the ballads he and Merota sang. It was a pattern of the sort that Ilna wove into her fabrics, one that made the listeners a little happier and the world around them better by some small amount as well.
"Chalcus is a great man also," she said. "But in a different way from Garric. As I am different from Princess Sharina, say."
"But you don't love Garric, do you?" Merota demanded.
Ilna laughed again. The choice is to cry, and that's not a choice. "I don't know what you mean by love, child," she said, squeezing Merota before she set her back on the deck.
Because she was looking toward the city to avoid meeting Merota's eyes or those of anyone else nearby, Ilna saw the procession enter the harbor area and make its way toward the waterfront where Garric stood. The escort was a platoon of Blood Eagles. They moved forward despite the crowd, using their shields to push people aside and their knob-headed spears to convince those who didn't want to be pushed.
Despite feeling miserable and empty, Ilna smiled wryly. The Blood Eagles had been set a task; they were doing whatever was necessary to get it done. Ilna could appreciate their attitude.
The guards had been sent to Barca's Hamlet. There they'd waited for the arrival of a party from Ornifal to make landfall and come overland to Carcosa. Ilna couldn't see the people in the party who were on foot because the escort's plumed helmets blocked her view, but the two chief members rode horses.
Could you carry a horse on shipboard all the way from Valles to Barca's Hamlet? But of course you could, if you were important enough; and this pair was important.
The middle-aged man rode stiffly. Ilna recalled that he'd been clumsy with any physical task when he was Reise the Innkeeper in Barca's Hamlet. He was Garric's, Prince Garric's, father. He was coming to Carcosa at his son's call to direct the nobleman who'd have the title of Vicar of Haft and Agent for the Prince.
The dark-haired woman beside Reise was supple and perfectly at ease. She looked about the crowd with the pleased smile of a goddess blessing her worshippers. Though she'd had a long voyage and a difficult trek across the across the island to reach Carcosa, she was more beautiful than any other woman Ilna had seen.
She was Lady Liane bos-Benliman, the woman whom Prince Garric was to marry.
I don't know what you mean by love, Ilna repeated in her mind; and hated herself for the lie.