David Drake: Master of the Cauldron

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 fromThe 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 theShepherd '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 theychose 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-thepeople, 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 theShepherd 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 hereally 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.