The War With The Mein (26 page)

The young captain stood at the edge of the room and recounted the details of the raid. He named the men who had been lost, saying a word of praise for each of them. He described the taking of the ship, the damage the Ballan suffered, the performance of the nail. It had worked well, he said, but they should put it on a different ship and probably use it only against smaller vessels. In truth, it had almost torn the Ballan to pieces. He described the brawl that took place on the brig’s glistening white deck and detailed the treasure they had found inside. By league standards the ship was empty, but their standards were out of all natural proportion. His men had stripped it of every gold fixture they could find, all the silver cutlery, the ornate mirrors, the woven rugs, carved furniture, beautiful glass lanterns: all the trappings normal to a league vessel. Also, they had found a safe room and coerced the captain into opening it. He must have thought it was empty, because he seemed surprised to find a small shoebox-sized chest of league coins in it, the same chest Spratling now held in his two hands.

“How many did you kill?” the bedridden form asked.

“Ten men. Two boys. And…one girl. Theo cut her neck before he knew. I don’t blame him.”

“And what did you do with the others?”

“Bound them and locked them in the steerage. They’ve enough food and water to live for weeks, but I imagine the league will find them in a day or two.”

“It’s good that you show mercy.”

Spratling smiled. “You taught me that, as you taught me how and when to kill. Anyway, a raider likes to leave a few witnesses alive to spread word of his deeds.”

Dovian made a sound at this. Perhaps it was a guffaw or perhaps a cough. He motioned with the bear paw that was his hand. Spratling moved across the room, placed a knee on the rug-covered floor, and looked into the large man’s face. Dovian stared back at him, bulky featured, creviced by time in the sun in the manner of Candovians. He had lost weight steadily for weeks now, but he was still a formidable figure. He lifted one hand and dropped the weight of it on Spratling’s shoulder. He squeezed the slim muscle of it with pressure enough to be painful. But it was not an admonishment, and Spratling did not wince.

“You’ve done me proud, lad,” Dovian said. “You know that, don’t you? I wasn’t sure you were coming back from this one.”

Spratling smiled wryly and acknowledged, “It was a bit dicey.”

Dovian studied him, weighing the implications of this, perhaps imagining the understatement it represented. “It is no joy to me that your work is as bloody as it is, but that is nothing we can change. We did not make the world, did we? Did not give it shape and substance and set one man against another. None of that was our doing, was it, lad?”

The young man nodded agreement.

If this was meant to make the older man happy, it failed. It seemed to do just the opposite. The large, unwieldy components of Dovian’s face twisted as if physically pained. He planted a knuckle of his other hand in his eye as if to gouge it out. “I guess my work is done, then. I’ve taught you everything I could. Now look at you: eighteen years of age and already a leader. I’ll not complain now that I know for certain you are a man who can thrive in the world. That’s the best I could do. I’m sorry if it’s no life for a prince—”

“Stop it! Come now, I won’t stay if you’re going to blubber like last time. I come back having taken a league brig and you start in moaning about the past again? I just will not have it. Do you want me to leave?”

Dovian stared at him for a long moment. “At least the men see the royalty in you. No, they do. And don’t you go; you’re not dismissed yet! They do see royalty in you. They don’t know what they’re seeing, but you have got a command over them that’s grand to behold. They follow you where they would never follow other men. I named you Spratling so that none would imagine you are royal. Just one tiny fish like a million others in the sea. But there is no denying it, lad, you’ve nobility spilling out of your eyes, out of your mouth each time you open it.”

“Even when I’m cursing?”

“Even then…” The man seemed to sink farther back into his pillows, pleased by whatever image filled his head. “Even then you were still my Dariel, the prince who sought out the likes of me in the caverns below the palace. Why did you do that, lad? Such a strange thing for a boy like you to be up to, roaming the dark underneath. I’ve never understood it.”

“Don’t try to. Anyway, I cannot remember enough to enlighten you.” Spratling indicated the box he had placed at the edge of the bed. “Would you look at what’s in this chest?”

“You really don’t?”

“No. All I remember and all I want to remember is this life. This—what we have here—is all that matters,” he said, infusing the statement with all the certainty he could muster.

He tried all the harder because it was not true. Not exactly, at least. It was rather that he could not make sense of the memories preceding his life with Dovian. He could not understand them with any sort of clarity. The very thought of those early times seemed to weaken him. They pulled on him with a melancholy power otherwise absent from his days. When he did allow himself to think back to when he was still called Dariel Akaran it was his flight from the war and Val’s role in saving him that he wished to recall.

He had left Kidnaban in the care of a man who called himself a guardian. This soldier had lifted Dariel straight out of slumber one morning and walked away with the boy in his arms. He had explained himself as he walked, though Dariel had been groggy and later could not remember what the man had said to soothe him. They had sailed from Crall to the mainland in just a few hours and were on their feet for two days thereafter. By the third, the man bought a pony for Dariel to ride, as the boy was exhausted, his feet blistered. He was apt to cry at any moment and often asked after his brother and sisters and begged to go back to them or to go home. The guardian was not unkind, but he seemed uncomfortable around children and often stared at the boy as if he had never seen a person cry before and could not for the life of him understand the waste of moisture.

The man explained that his father had arranged for him to be cared for by a friend in Senival. All they had to do was reach him and the boy’s ordeal would be concluded, everything safe, all explained. They headed west and for several days wound their way through a scarred landscape similar to what he had seen of the Cape of Fallon mines, mountainsides bored into, whole swathes in which all the land in view had been maimed by human butchery. These, the guardian explained, were the Senivalian mines. All around went dust-covered laborers, men and boys mostly but also women and some girls. They wore the rags of their lot and all seemed busy, although they paid little heed to their usual work. He heard them shout bits and pieces of frantic news, full of import that he could not fathom, except that none of it seemed good.

Of this place and its significance to his father’s empire Dariel had not the slightest inkling, except that his guardian, on taking in a view of the land tainted crimson by the setting sun, said, “What a hell we’ve made here. A hell with a golden crown that calls itself—” The guardian had stopped short, remembering Dariel, and said that they had better head on. They were almost to their destination.

Coming down a winding road into the mountain town to which Dariel was supposed to have been delivered, the guardian paused. “What’s this?” he asked.

The village had a lovely aspect to it, sitting as it did in a flat valley rimmed by peaks. For a few moments Dariel thought it pleasant to look on, until he noticed the stillness of the place. Nobody moved about the streets. No animals or farmers worked the fields. Not a single puff of smoke escaped the chimneys of the houses. “This isn’t right,” the guardian said. Dariel could not dispute it.

What happened to the townspeople Dariel never knew. They were simply gone, and try as he might the guardian found no sign of the man he sought. He sat down on a log stool, taking in the place, and then he folded his head into his hands and stayed silent in thought for what seemed like hours. Dariel stood nearby, holding the pony’s reins as it cropped the sweet mountain grass.

When the guardian looked up, he was full of purpose. He would go to the next town, he declared. It was over a day’s ride farther west. If he left at that moment he could reach the place by sunrise, and if he found the answers he needed to there, he would be back by nightfall. Perhaps somebody was looking for him. Best that the guardian check things out and return with a better idea how to proceed. He would have to ride fast, though, so he arranged to leave Dariel in a hut just a little way out of town. He left his shoulder bag for the boy, and said this was all for the best.

The man rode away. Dariel heard the clack of the pony’s hooves for some time, and when the sound eventually faded, he was filled with dread. He had not even protested, said not a word. How could he when he knew the man was lying to him?

He spent that night in blackness, trembling and fearful, as small as a mouse and just as helpless. It rained steady and chill for some hours, and when it abated, mist crept through the valley like wraiths. He made no fire, did not think to fetch the blanket from the pack the guardian left, did not even fully recognize the hunger in his belly for what it was. As the bleak reality of his situation was so beyond his power to face, he balked from doing so. Inside, he fantasized his father lived again and was on the way to rescue him. He entertained all sorts of fancies with ravenous hope. Perhaps it was a good thing, too, because when salvation came it was no more predictable or likely than any of his fancies, but he was ready to accept it with open arms.

Sitting now on the stool beside his savior’s sickbed, Spratling asked, “Do you remember the night you found me?”

“Like it was yesterday, lad.”

“That is where I begin, you know? You were a shadow that pushed through the door and found my hiding place—”

“That hovel!” Dovian interrupted. “A disgrace that you ever spent a night there.”

“I remember your words exactly,” Spratling continued. “You said…”

“Who would have thought,” the shadow had said, pushing into the hut behind a yellow lantern held high, “that you could find a prince just anywhere these days? I guess some of us are lucky.”

Dariel might have remembered the words well, as he said, but that night it took him a moment to realize what was happening. He had been three days in hiding. Some portion of him still thought the guardian might return, though in deeper regions he had already started to give up on all hope. What a familiar voice, he’d thought. But whose was it, and how was it here? Dariel knew he recognized it, but for a few frightened moments he could not place it within the context of this mountain hut.

The shadow moved closer. “Are you all right, rascal? Don’t be scared. It’s Val. It’s Val come to help you out.”

Val? Dariel thought. Val from the caverns below the palace—the feeder of the kitchen ovens…His Val! He got to his feet, stumbled forward, and fell against the man’s chest. Once he inhaled the salty, pungent, coal-smoked largeness of him, he released a horde of pent-up fears in great sobs. He clenched Val’s shirt in his fists and rubbed his tears and snotty nose into the fabric, as would a baby ill to the point of delirium with cold and fever.

“Oh, don’t do that, lad,” Val said softly. “Don’t do that. Things will be all right now.”

And, true to his word, they were. At least, they were as all right as possible in the circumstances. It turned out that Val had been on his way home to Candovia, one of many in the migration spurred by the war. He had happened upon Dariel’s guardian by pure chance in a makeshift camp pitched at the side of the highway of fleeing refugees. The man was well into a bottle of plum wine and did not mind confessing to anyone around him that he had been personal guardian to one of the king’s children. Val had situated himself close enough to smell the man’s sickly-sweet breath. He probed him until he confessed just who he had been looking after and where he had left his duty and turned coward. He could not find the person he was meant to deliver the boy to! He was gone, probably dead, and the guardian had no further instructions as to how to proceed. And with the news coming from all around—Maeander in Candovia, Hanish having destroyed the army at Alecian Fields—there was nothing he could do for the boy anymore. Sure, he’d left him to his own fate, but what else could he have done?

Val never exactly described what he did to the guardian, except to mutter something about how he would have to gum nothing harder than goat cheese for the rest of his days, or something like that. It did not make a bit of sense to the boy, but the visual image it conjured in him held his perplexed attention for much of the long walk Val led him on. He knew just the place for them, Val had said, a grand and expansive place in which to disappear. For much of the journey the boy rode atop the Candovian’s shoulders, a leg to either side of his neck, fingers intertwined in the man’s curly mass of hair.

They were three days coming out of the mountains, and by the fourth Dariel could smell the salt in the air. That afternoon, half asleep on the man’s shoulders, Dariel heard Val say, “Look, lad. That’s no sea, there. That’s a place a whole race of men could hide upon.”

They had paused on a bluff with a view of all the world to their west. Even though Dariel had lived all of his years on an island he could tell in a glance that the body of water before them was different. It was not the turquoise blue or the marine green that he was used to. Instead, the water was a slate-dark color a shade under black, undulating with swelling surges that conveyed their force through slow bulk. Near the shoreline, crests of countless waves rose like liquid mountains, seemed to hang stretched to the air for a moment, then curled over into a foaming chaos. Occasionally, the clap of the wave’s impact slapped against his ears, always strangely timed, in a way impossible to match sight with the sound. Staring from atop his giant’s shoulders, Dariel had never seen anything as awesome in its power and scale.