David Drake - The Gods Return

"Hervir took over the prospecting, I suppose you could call it, six years ago when his father moved into the office. When he became head of the family at Halgran's death, he left the office work to his wife and mother and continued to handle contacts with suppliers all over the Isles. He kept me with him on all his journeys. He said my notebooks-" The secretary gestured again with the scroll. "-were invaluable. He was always very appreciative of my efforts for the company, in fact." Ilna kept her face blank as she digested what she'd just heard. The words alone could've been bragging-very possibly truthful, but bragging nonetheless. Ingens' tone, however, was either bitter or sarcastic. Or both, she supposed; there was no reason it couldn't have been both. She looked to her left-the boat's right; starboard to a sailor, she knew, but she wasn't a sailor. They were well into the channel, so she could see the far bank despite the blur of mist which the sun even now hadn't completely burned off. The trees and brush were gray-green, indistinguishable save by shades of color that she perhaps alone would note. "You were a friend of Hervir?" Ilna asked. Her fingers started to knot a pattern that would give her the answer, but she paused to let the secretary speak. She supposed she was being polite. "Master Hervir was my employer," Ingens said. "He was a considerate employer who paid me a fair wage and who was both in public and in private appreciative of my efforts for the company. As I said." He considered Ilna for a moment, either choosing his words or choosing the words he was willing to speak to her. "We were not friends, no," he said. "The relationship was not a personal one." "You didn't sail to Caraman with Sairg in the first place?" Ilna said. "I hired Captain Sairg on Blaise when I reached the river," Ingens said.

"He'd made the trip up the river twice already before. We sailed to Pandah on the prevailing wind; downstream we'll use the current. The sweeps are mostly for steering." The river was a muddy brown picked out by patches of scum and flotsam. The debris was mostly vegetable, including a large tree whose roots, washed clean by a flood, wriggled in the air like an ammonite's tentacles. Ilna saw the corpse of a dog, though, and a sheep so bloated that it looked like fleece mattress.

"We went overland from Valles," Ingens said. "Hervir's plan all along was to find a suitable ship for our return via the river. I simply followed his intentions. Though without the saffron, of course." And without Hervir, which is all that concerns me, Ilna thought. She wondered if it concerned Ingens. There was nothing in his words or expression to suggest that it did, but on the other hand hehad started back to find his employer immediately after delivering word of his disappearance. "The channel is constantly changing, Sairg says,"

Ingens said. He pointed with his whole arm toward the near shore.

"Even I can tell that. See that stand of cypress?" "Yes," said Ilna, when she was sure that she did. "There's only three trees left," the secretary explained. "I remember counting seven when we were coming upriver. Four were undercut and fell into the river. I don't think the others will survive much longer. The whole world is still in flux."

Ilna sniffed. "Trees have always fallen into rivers," she said.

"Things have always died." "Yes, buteverything is new now," Ingens said. "This whole river is as new as the lands it drains." He paused, then added, "Hervir was adamant about that. He said there was no end of what a bold man could achieve in this new world. Hervir was a very ambitious man. Marrying the sister of an Ornifal nobleman was barely the start of it." "Are you a bold man looking to better yourself, Master Ingens?" Ilna said, watching the secretary's face. How he chose to respond to the question would tell her more than the mere words he used. He snorted. "Me?" he said. "Boldness isn't enough, mistress, if you don't have money to back it up with. I have my salary; which is adequate to my needs, but not the sort of stake I'd need to set up as a spice merchant on my own." "Did you think of asking Hervir for a loan?" Ilna said. "You say that he valued you and respected your abilities." "Hervir valued me as an employee," Ingens said. He didn't try to hide the bitterness, perhaps realizing that he wouldn't succeed anyway. "He saw no benefit to himself or to Halgran Trading in having me as a rival. He laughed, in fact. 'I haven't spent six years training you, Ingens my boy, in order to have you undercutting me with my suppliers.'" The secretary's face worked; another man would've spit into the brown water. "Him trainingme," he said. "I see," said Ilna.

She might've said more, but at that moment Sairg chittered an order to the crew. "He's telling them to move us farther out into the channel,"

Ingens translated. "We're over a flooded forest here, and brushing a treetop the wrong way could tip the boat over." The oarsmen quickened their stroke. One started what was obviously a chantey even though Ilna didn't understand the words. Her mind flashed bright with an image of Chalcus bending over the stroke oar, his tenor voice floating, "To me, way, haul away-" And Merota's clear soprano answering, "We'll haul and hang together!" Ilna wasn't crying, shedidn't cry; but she closed her eyes and rubbed her face in the sleeve of her tunic until the moment was past. *** When Liane said she needed to meet with him and Rasile, Cashel asked her to do it sitting on the walls of Pandah. He was about as comfortable here as he would've been in any city: he could look out and see green. It wasn't the right pale green of the sheep-cropped meadows south of Barca's Hamlet, but it was close enough he could pretend. There hadn't been a lot of building here on the west side because the ground was so boggy. There were tussocks of grass and sometimes willows, but the road to the North River had to be the next thing to a bridge for most of its length. Crews had laid tree boles for stringers and pinned cross-logs to them with treenails. Putting up houses would've taken pilings, or maybe boats. "Dariada is the largest city state in Charax," Liane said. She'd opened her little portable desk and had three unopened books and a scroll laid out on it. "It's not the capital, though-the island, the region it is now, doesn't have a capital. There're seventeen states, and for the most part they don't get along well. Usually some of them are at war with one another."

Pandah was growing so fast that if the army-there was a city watch, but they weren't up to the job yet and the army was here-hadn't kept the battlements clear, there'd have been folks camping on them and in the streets below, for that matter. Lord Tadai wasn't going to have that, which Cashel was glad of for as long as he had to be in the city. For right now, a squad of troops blocked the staircase to the tower Liane had picked. Cashel smiled at a thought. Given half a chance, folks'd pack in as tight as sheep in a byre. Since sheep ate grass instead of meat, sheep manure didn't make near the problem human manure did. It was a good thing it rained a lot in Pandah, but that was another reason not to build in the bogs which storms washed the streets into. "That is…," Liane said, angry because she hadn't been as clear as she thought she ought to be, "that was true of Charax during the first three hundred years of the previous millennium. What we in our day call the Old Kingdom, though the cities of Charax were independent at the time. That's the situation since the Change, too."

Rasile watched Liane intently, which bothered Cashel a little to see: it reminded him of the way a vixen tenses toward a tuft of grass that she'd just seen move. As for Cashel himself, well, he was listening.

He'd learned long since that not much of what folks as smart as Liane said made a lot of difference to him, though. People didn't expect Cashel to talk politics or philosophy. The sorts of things they did take up with him, well, those weren't a problem. He knew how to deal with them, good or bad. "Dariada is the most important city of the region, though, because the Tree is there," Liane said. "It's sacred to all Charax, but it's still in Dariada." "Ma'am?" said Cashel, because trees were something he understood. "What kind of a tree, if you please?" Liane scrunched her face up over an unhappy thought. "I don't know," she said. "The ancient descriptions-" She lifted the scroll from the table and waggled it. "-aren't clear, and my agents haven't been permitted within the separate enclosure within the city walls. From the accounts, the Tree Oracle is a pod with the face of a man, and it gives responses to questions. The priests choose who can address the Tree, but the petitioner him or herself puts the question." Cashel frowned. "Rasile?" he said. "Do we need to talk to the oracle, or are we just going to the city to start out with?