Master of the Cauldron Read online

  The child's high, clear voice cut through the scores of male shouts and snarls. For some reason, people always sounded angry at times like this. Maybe they were angry, frustrated by the complexity of what was going on.

  For complex it was. Ilna couldn't count beyond the number of her fingers without beans or pebbles for a tally, but she knew that there was a ten of tens of ships in Garric's fleet, the royal fleet—and perhaps several tens of tens. Many were backing onto the beach to either side of The Shepherd of the Isles; others had anchored well out in the channel, sending the soldiers they carried to land in small boats.

  In a few cases swimmers had dragged lines from vessels to the islet and tied them to the columns of ruined mansions lining the shore. Tunic-clad skirmishers armed with javelins and a hatchet or long knife clung to the lines with one hand as they splashed to land, safe even if they weren't able to swim any better than Ilna herself could.

  "Sandrakkan hasn't any real fighting ships, dear one," Chalcus said, speaking to the child on his shoulder but pitching his voice so that Ilna could hear also if she wanted to. "Just some fifty-oared patrol boats to chase smugglers, you see. But somebody had the notion, Lord Attaper I shouldn't wonder, that even little ships might attack Prince Garric while he's all tangled up with landing."

  Chalcus laughed. "Attaper is a fine man, to be sure," he went on, "but I think he worries lest a stone fall out of the clear sky and strike the Prince down. Regardless, there's thirty triremes sloshing the sea between Garric and the mainland. It's good practice, I'm sure, and there's never a crew that wouldn't benefit from a little more practice."

  Ilna allowed herself a slight smile at Chalcus' description of the commander of Garric's bodyguards, the Blood Eagles. Attaper was a fit, powerful man in his forties. At the moment he stood watchfully just behind the Prince. Ilna was sure he was ready to react if Lady Liane tried to stab Garric with the nib of her pen.

  Ilna's fingers knotted a tracery of cords, then undid them before their pattern was quite complete. Had she finished the design, a man who saw it clearly would hurl himself away, shrieking and trying to claw the horror out of his eyesockets. She didn't need such a thing here and now; but it was available, like the warships patrolling the strait and like the curved sword at Chalcus' side.

  The equipment of all the Blood Eagles was blackened bronze, but Attaper's helmet and cuirass had been chased with gold so that they looked more like parade armor than anything meant for war. His swordhilt, though, had the yellow patina that ivory takes when a hand grips it daily at the practice butts if not to wield against living foes.

  Ilna couldn't fathom the minds of men who made it their life's work to kill other men—and that was what soldiers did, when you boiled away all the nonsense about duty and courage and honor put on the business by the Old Kingdom poets that Garric so fancied. She couldn't understand, but she knew craftsmanship and honored it above all other things.

  Craftsmanship meant doing a thing the single right way instead of any of the unnumbered wrong ways others might do it. The Blood Eagles were volunteers, veterans who'd proved themselves in other regiments before they were even permitted to join. By the standard of craft, the only standard that had ever mattered to Ilna os-Kenset, the Blood Eagles were worthy of her respect.

  Lord Waldron, commander of the Royal Army, stood on the stern of another five-banked warship backed onto the beach a few places down from The Shepherd of the Isles. His aide raised a silver trumpet and blew a ringing note that was answered a moment later by the deeper, richer calls of several curved horns from the shore. The troops who'd already landed were milling like ants from a stirred-up hill, an image of hopeless chaos.

  But it wasn't chaos, Ilna knew. Those scrambling troops were forming shoulder to shoulder with their fellows, under the standards of their proper units. Many were soaked to the waist and some had lost their shield or spear or helmet in the process of coming ashore, but even so they were an army rather than a mob.

  Sailors were bracing the Shepherd's hull upright with spars so that the crewmen who'd steadied her when she first grounded could ship their oars and jump down. Half a dozen men under a bosun's mate hauled the anchor and its trailing hawser farther inland to hold the ship even if an unexpected storm raced down the strait.

  Ilna knotted her pattern, shaking her head in marvel at the scene around her. It was as if every thread in a loom had its own mind, but they chose to weave themselves into a complex tapestry instead of twisting off each in its own direction. It was a marvelous thing, but she didn't understand it, didn't understand how it could even be possible.

  Chalcus and Merota laughed at some joke Ilna had missed in her reverie. She smiled also, though at a thought of her own.

  Ilna understood very little about the world in which she found herself living. No doubt people like Garric and Sharina, whose father had educated them far beyond the standards of Barca's Hamlet, understood more than she did, but she was sure that even their grasp was slight compared with the world's enormous complexity.

  Still Garric and Sharina and the others went on, guiding a kingdom through the darkness of their own ignorance; because if they didn't the kingdom—the people, the uncounted numbers of ordinary peasants and traders and fishermen—would surely be crushed into the mud by masterless chaos. Ilna didn't really believe in Good personified, but she had no doubt of the existence of Evil.

  So she'd act to help Garric and Sharina, Tenoctris and Attaper and yes, Liane—the people who knew more than she did. She'd act without hope, without real certainty except in one thing: that whatever Ilna os-Kenset did, she would do with all the skill at her disposal.

  Cashel looked over his shoulder. He gave Ilna the broad smile that was as much a part of him as cold stiffness was to Ilna's own lips.

  Ilna's fingers made a last knot; she raised the completed pattern into the air. Everyone who caught sight of it laughed and pointed it out to their neighbors. It was only a rough, knotted fabric, but it brought a flash of joy and hope.

  Even to the woman who'd knotted it.

  * * *

  Cashel, bursting with pride because his left hand rested on Sharina's waist, surveyed the island of Volita. From a distance the terrain looked rocky, but as the Shepherd approached the beach it became obvious that except for the granite crag near the center of the island the stones weren't natural outcrops. The shore was covered with the tumbled ruins of buildings which must've been palaces, even by the standards of what Cashel had seen in Valles on Ornifal, the capital of the Isles.

  Cashel flexed his right hand on the shaft of his quarterstaff. The touch of the stout hickory, polished both by labor and by use, reminded him of who he really was: an orphan who'd grown up in a borough which the rest of the world had ignored for a thousand years.

  His father Kenset had sold his share of their late father's grain mill to his brother Katchin and left Barca's Hamlet; seeking adventure, his neighbors remembered, and swearing he'd never return. When he did come back in seven years' time, he'd brought the infants Cashel and Ilna. People recalled that Kenset had left Barca's Hamlet with a song on his lips; but on his return he didn't sing, rarely spoke, and spent as many of his waking hours as he could drinking ale.

  Before long Kenset died in a ditch; too drunk to find shelter and very likely seeking the end he found in the frosty night. He'd never explained where he'd been while he was gone nor had he talked of the children's mother. His own mother had raised Ilna and Cashel; and after she died, they'd raised themselves.

  A peasant village has neither the taste nor the resources for luxuries like charity, but the orphans had made do. They had half the mill to sleep in, for by their grandfather's will neither son could sell his portion of the building; and they earned enough for their bread in one fashion and another. Cashel had a man's strength early, and Ilna's talent with fabric was a marvel from the first time her fingers twisted raw wool into thread.

  Cashel had never expected to leave Barca's Hamlet except perhaps to
badger a herd of sheep across the island to Carcosa, the ancient capital of the Isles on the other coast. Instead he'd seen Laut on the far side of the Inner Sea, and he'd lived in the royal palace in Valles, a sprawling park with more separate buildings in it than there were in Barca's Hamlet and the borough around it altogether.

  Cashel had gone to those places, and he'd gone to places that weren't in this world at all. He recalled how he'd felt scarcely a year ago when he'd first seen the crumbling walls of Carcosa. They'd been built during the Old Kingdom and used as a quarry by the city's remaining population for all the thousand years since the Old Kingdom fell. He'd been awestruck by the ruins that remained, almost unable to accept that so great a mass of stone had been created by men. Nothing in Cashel's previous life compared with those walls save for the sky overhead and the sea reaching eastward to the horizon from the shore of Barca's Hamlet.

  But marvelous as Cashel'd found the places he'd gone and the folk he'd met there, none of them were as wonderful as the fact that Sharina loved him and had allowed him to love her. Her father Reise was the innkeeper, a wealthy man as the borough weighed such things and a learned one by any judgment. He'd come to Barca's Hamlet from Carcosa, where he'd been Countess Tera's chamberlain; and before that he'd served the king himself in Valles.

  Reise had taught Garric and Sharina to read and to love the great writers of the Old Kingdom. They'd learned so well that Lady Liane had found the education she'd received at a school for the daughters of the wealthy made her no more than the equal of the innkeeper's children she met in Barca's Hamlet.

  Reise's daughter was far too great a person to wed an orphan like Cashel who couldn't write his name and who'd never handled a silver coin in his life... and besides that, Sharina was a long-legged beauty with blond hair as fine as spiderweb. Every year at the borough's Sheep Fair there'd been drovers and wealthy merchants who offered Sharina riches past a peasant girl's imagining if she'd come away with them.

  A thundercloud of memory shadowed Cashel's face. Sharina had told them 'no'. The ones who didn't like the answer were told it again, by Sharina's muscular brother Garric and her even more muscular friend Cashel. If they had bodyguards—and they generally did—so much the worse for them. A swordsman in an open courtyard hasn't a chance against a strong man with seven feet of iron-shod hickory and the skill to use it.

  Cashel's left hand rested lightly on Sharina's waist, not a claim but rather a badge of honor. He'd worshipped Sharina for as long as he could remember, but he'd never imagined that he'd be permitted to love her. Whatever else happened in Cashel's life, it'd already been more wonderful than he'd dreamed.

  He looked at the island. Volita didn't have much to see that Cashel cared about. Ruins were interesting to some folk, just as books were. Tenoctris could touch a carved stone and talk about where it came from, while Garric and Sharina nodded in understanding. But for Cashel, rocks were mostly important when they were where they'd grown, because then they gave him a notion about how good the grazing was likely to be.

  Garric was sailing his fleet slowly up the western arc of the kingdom, halting at each of the major islands. He was making what his advisors called a Royal Progress. Cashel didn't need anybody to explain the sense of it: a shepherd who kept his eyes open saw the same thing happen every Spring. Birds, squirrels—frogs, even—stared at each other and puffed themselves up, singing or screeching or croaking. All of them were trying to make their rivals back down.

  With dogs you might get a fight, but that was dogs. It could be a fight between men too, but not if they were as smart as Garric.

  Cashel was one of the people Garric talked to before he did things. Cashel hadn't understood why at first, him a shepherd who couldn't read or write sitting with nobles who were used to running things. He'd seen quickly that his knowing the things a peasant knows could be useful. With nobles, what they knew got mixed up with what they called honor. Honor to a noble generally meant acting like you didn't have any common sense.

  About fighting, for instance. A fight meant the winner was hurt too, like as not, and maybe the losers from earlier fights would pile in and turn it into an all-against-one thing that no 'one' could survive. It was a lot better in the long run to talk and posture and hop up and down—and not to have to fight, because you'd convinced your rival that he couldn't win but that you were going to let him not lose either.

  So Garric arrived at each island with a fleet and army that the ruler knew he couldn't defeat; but instead of attacking, Garric told him how glad he was to have a loyal supporter of the kingdom like him in this place; and by the way, here was the new schedule of payments that his island would be sending to Valles to support the fleet and army.

  That's what a Royal Progress was. That's why Garric and his huge fleet were here on an island just off the coast of Sandrakkan, whose previous ruler had claimed to be King of the Isles twenty-odd years ago; and who'd failed, but not by so much that his nephew mightn't have similar notions of his own.

  Tenoctris had finished the spell she'd been working. Sharina bent down to talk with her, but Cashel remained where he was as a wall between the women and the bustle on the ship's narrow deck. No sailor would bump Sharina or Tenoctris deliberately, but they might not notice them. Most everybody noticed Cashel. If they didn't, well, they bounced off.

  Cashel continued to scan Volita the way he would a new pasture. He'd seen a lot of places in the past five seasons. Many of them were cities, and the only parts of a city Cashel'd found he liked were the pictures city-folk, wealthy ones anyhow, had painted on their walls. But there'd been countryside too, none of it really nicer than the borough in springtime but nice enough regardless.

  A ewe with a black body and an all-white face stood between half-raised pillars on the horizon, staring at the ships and men on the shore. She chewed a grass blade with the same rotary motion as a woman mixing bread dough. The hooves of sheep had cut narrow paths which wound among the ruins wherever Cashel looked, following the least possible grade across the landscape. Sheep could find a slope where water'd give up and make a pool instead....

  Cashel smiled broadly and rested his hand gently on Sharina's shoulder, his eyes still on the shore. Volita might not be Barca's Hamlet, but it'd do. Any place in any world would do for Cashel or-Kenset, so long as he was there with Sharina.

  * * *

  Sharina saw the crimson spark vanish from above the symbol Tenoctris had drawn on the pine planking. She put her hand out to steady the old woman, but Tenoctris didn't sway with fatigue the way she often did after an incantation.

  "I'm all right, dear," she said, though she raised her left hand for Sharina to hold and didn't look up for a moment. "I was determining the amount of power here, that's all. I'd never visited Sandrakkan before. In my former life, I mean."

  Now she did turn to smile. Tenoctris appeared to be about seventy. Indeed she'd lived some seventy years, but she'd been born more than a millennium ago. She'd been ripped from her time by the wizardry which had drowned King Carus and brought the Old Kingdom down.

  The Kingdom of the Isles today was only a shadow of the magnificence which had shattered a thousand years ago, the crudely rejoined fragments of the little that had survived the Collapse. Except for the help and direction Tenoctris had given Garric and the others who were trying to prevent it, a second, final Collapse would have destroyed what remained.

  And that Collapse could still occur. The forces which wizards tapped with their art waxed every thousand years, and they were swiftly rising to their peak again. Wizards who in the past could only wither a tree with great effort were now able to blast whole forests—and might easily do so by accident, because an increase in power didn't bring with it greater learning and wisdom.

  "I thought I must be mistaken about the skeins of force I felt here," Tenoctris continued, gesturing toward the ruin-speckled western slope of Volita. "I was right, though. Something really terrible must have happened, but—"

  She grinned.r />
  "—it was after I left my own age. Or I'd have been aware of it, even if there hadn't been time for human messengers to bring word."

  The wizard shifted her feet in preparation to rise. Sharina stiffened to help, either by lifting or just to provide a fulcrum on which the old woman could lever herself upright.

  After a moment's consideration, Tenoctris relaxed where she was. "Not quite yet," she murmured, mostly to herself.

  When Sharina was a child who'd never met a wizard, she'd imagined that wizardry involved muttering a few words and having all manner of wonders appear from the thin air. Now she'd seen wizards of many different types and abilities. The one thing they all had in common was the bone-deep exhaustion that they felt at the conclusion of a spell.

  A powerful wizard could do things that a lesser one couldn't even attempt, just as Cashel could lift a stone that wouldn't tremble if Sharina strained against it. That didn't mean lifting a heavy stone wasn't work for Cashel, though: just that it was work within his very considerable capacity.

  Tenoctris was a little old woman with limited physical strength and similarly slight ability to influence through her art the forces she saw so clearly. Even minor spells were an effort for her. At need, she could function on sheer willpower for long enough in every case which Sharina'd had occasion to observe; but there was no need for Tenoctris to do anything just now except to sit on the deck as sailors completed berthing arrangements.

  Volita lay in the Bay of Shelter. This western shore faced the mainland of Sandrakkan and the city of Erdin, the capital of the Earls of Sandrakkan from the founding of the Old Kingdom two millennia before. The surrounding water buffered the climate. Volita was close to one of the most vibrant cities of the realm, so during the Old Kingdom it'd become a summer resort for wealthy folk from the length and breadth of the Isles.

  Today the remains of those homes lined the island's western shore and, as Sharina had seen as the fleet approached, the eastern side as well. Most'd had a slip for the owner's yacht, but the waves of a thousand stormy years had crumbled the pilings and stonework. They wouldn't have been large enough to berth warships two and three hundred feet long anyway.