Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Sea Watch

She had come to him as he prepared to embark. As she reached for his arm, he had turned to see her: Paladrya, his fellow prisoner, his fellow questor after the lost heir. They had been through a lot together, in a strange way, and been through more while apart. They had suffered and lost, both of them, moulded into soldiers from unlikely clay.

She had looked into his eyes, and her lips parted, but the words had failed her. She had it all now: most trusted adviser of the young Edmir, her wisdom balancing out Heiracles’s ambition. Her student, her surrogate child, had come home in glory at last. Stenwold knew all that, but he would have guessed none of it from her expression.

And at last he had given in, felt the walls within him crack at last, letting past the intolerable admission: That witch in Princep Salmae was right, curse her!

It was not the fierce passion he had known for Arianna, born from an old man’s glee at his young and clever lover, that had fired him, and near-destroyed him when it all went wrong. He felt that such love had been burned from him now. But here was a woman that he could have lived with, and grown old with, and respected. Here she was, kind and loyal and quick, a woman to aid him in his wars, and not tire of him come peacetime.

And she was of the sea.

‘Will you… come back?’ Paladrya had asked, and he saw from her face that she knew the answer.

‘Would you come with me?’ was his reply. In his mind had been the brooding oppression of a life there without the sun, a life where he would be a cripple, the only adult capable of drowning in a world saturated with water. In her mind, he was sure, was the parching dryness of the air, the scorching sun, the sheer horror of that vast and empty sky.

‘If I live,’ he had said, ‘I shall send word by Wys. I’m sure she’ll not object to carrying…’ And he had stopped there, because he knew that she could not read his script, nor he hers.

And there had been no tears – at least not there and then. She and he were alike in that, too. She had just nodded sagely, fencing away that part of her mind that cared for him, because she could not have him, and there was other work still to do. Seeing that, her workaday bravery and sacrifice, he came closer than he could imagine to swearing that he would return.

Now he rested his oars, looking eastwards into the morning sky, where the horizon was lost beneath a vast spread of canvas. The painted sails of Seldis and Siennis and a dozen satrapy ports had arrived, a force four times as great as the one which Teornis had led to lift the Vekken siege. The Spider-kinden were taking no chances. Their armada had come to Collegium at last.

Alone in his little boat, Stenwold waited for them, rowing only enough to keep him directly in their path.

Here goes nothing, he thought, as their shadows fell across him.

The first hull, a one-masted vessel of the Tidenfree’s size, knifed through the water and past him. What if they don’t stop? he wondered, imagining himself bobbing along in his little boat, left behind in the armada’s wake, abandoned and irrelevant. Then another vessel, a larger one, was heeling around, Spider-kinden sailors appearing at the rail.

‘Hoi, Beetle, who are you?’ one of them demanded, as the ship turned and slowed ponderously.

‘I’m the Collegiate navy!’ he shouted back. Not long after, they threw him a line and, when he had clambered up, he found himself at sword’s point. They took him that seriously.

They searched him, but found not even so much as a knife. Then they gave him over to a copper-skinned Ant-kinden, who searched him again, looking for devices or explosives that the Spiders might have missed. Stenwold was impressed by the thoroughness of it all.

‘I am a representative of Collegium,’ he informed them, frequently. ‘I would speak with your leader.’

They kept him below decks for some time, and he felt the ship shudder and creak all around him as its crew put it through its paces. He had some sense of these things, now, and he knew when the vessel was turning, and when it was taking on more sail to regain its place in the armada’s progress. Later, he would know when it was slowing, the sail being reefed in. He made his calculations and, when they led him abovedecks again, he found he had it almost exactly right. The armada had taken anchor within clear sight of the Collegium sea wall, well out of range of any artillery. On every ship there were men preparing, and Stenwold had a good view of them all: mercenaries or conscripts from a dozen satrapies, together with hundreds of the Spider-kinden themselves. He saw flying machines being assembled on the decks of some ships, ballistae and leadshotters on others. The pace was leisurely, though. It was past noon already, so it was plain that the Spiders were intending to commence festivities on the morrow.

‘You’re on your way to her ladyship,’ said a Spider woman, who was presumably master of the vessel that had taken him on. She was a lean, sun-weathered woman with a scarred chin, and she grinned at him. ‘Collegiate navy, I like that. You speak nice to Herself, and you’ll come away with an intact hide, you hear?’

Stenwold thanked her courteously, and they put him in a boat that was somewhat bigger than the last one, so that four Spider marines could row him over to a nearby ship of the armada. It was a large, strongly made vessel, but by no means the grandest or the largest, and he was glad that his recollections about Spider-kinden shipping had proved accurate. Things might have become difficult otherwise.

So it was that, by passing through a succession of firm hands, Stenwold found himself before the admiral of the armada.

She was a woman of perhaps his own years, with the usual caveat that Spiders aged gracefully, and hid their age more gracefully still. Her hair was silver, but intentionally so, and there were perhaps a few lines on her face that no amount of craft could hide. In the privacy of her cabin, she was dressed in a simple white gown, without decoration or ornament. She wore it like a queen, and Stenwold had no doubt of her authority from the moment he saw her. She was a woman for whom the world turned, such was her invulnerable self-assurance. Beside that, the fact that she kept the marines at hand became a mere detail. There was no suggestion in her behaviour that they might be necessary.

More than this, though, he recognized a resemblance in her face, and he felt his heart sink slightly.

‘Good afternoon, Sieur Beetle,’ she addressed him, and a Fly-kinden servant that Stenwold had not even noticed was already at his elbow, pouring him some wine into one of the tall, narrow goblets that the Spider-kinden preferred.

‘They tell me that you are the Collegiate ambassador,’ the woman continued, taking up her goblet as soon as it was filled.

Stenwold lifted his own, letting the two silvered vessels clink together. ‘That may as well be true, for I have come to speak for my city.’

‘I had hoped someone would,’ she acknowledged. ‘I am the Lady-Martial Mycella of the Aldanrael. Whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?’

‘My name is Stenwold Maker.’

‘Good.’ She nodded politely. ‘A serious envoy, then, for serious times. My son writes approvingly of your acumen, Sieur Maker.’

No more, he does. Something obviously showed in Sten-wold’s face, because abruptly she was very still.

‘Your son is Teornis,’ he said heavily.

‘One of them.’ She saved him further confession, already reading it from his face. ‘Then he is dead.’ At Stenwold’s nod, she asked simply, ‘And did you slay him?’

‘I did.’ For she would have seen it in him, deny it as he might.

Had there not been a heartbeat’s pause then, when she remained utterly without expression, he would never have known. That was all she let him see of her loss.