Janny Wurts - Warhost of Vastmark

In three weeks of mulish, unswerving effort, Arithon s’Ffalenn had rechannelled his loss into what skirted the edge of a miracle.

Struck by a stabbing, unhappy urge to weep, Tharrick held his chin in stiff pride. He would not bend before awe, would not spin and run to the widow’s cottage to hide his face in shame. The man who had forgiven his malice in mercy would be shown the qualities which had earned his past captaincy in Alestron. In hesitant steps on the fringes, Tharrick began to lend his help. If his mending ribs would not let him wheel a handcart, or his palms were too tender to wield a pod auger to drill holes for treenails in hardened oak, he could steady a plank for the plane on the trestles, or run errands, or turn dowels to pin timbers and ribs. He could stoke the fire in the boiler shed, and maybe, for his conscience, regain a small measure of the self-respect he had lost to disgrace and harsh exile.

On the third day, when he returned to the widow’s with his shirt and hair flecked with shavings, he found silver on the table, left in his name by the Shadow Master.

Tharrick’s unshaven face darkened in a ruddy burst of temper.

Drawn by the bang as he hurled open the casement, Jinesse caught his wrist and stopped his attempt to fling the coins into the fallow tangle of her garden. ‘Tharrick, no. What are you thinking? Arithon doesn’t run a slave yard. Neither does he give grown men charity. He said if you can’t be bothered to collect your pay with the others, this was the last time he’d cover for your mistakes.’

‘Mistakes?’ Poised with one brawny wrist imprisoned in her butterfly clasp, Tharrick shook off a stab of temper. The widow’s tipped-up features implored him. Her hair wisped at her temples like new floss, and her wide, worried eyes were a delicate, dawn-painted blue. He swallowed. His grip on the coins relaxed from its white-knuckled tension.

‘Mistakes,’ he repeated. This time the word rang bitter. He slanted his cheek against the window frame, eyes shut in racking distaste. ‘By Daelion Fatemaster, yon one’s a demon for forcing a man to think.’

‘More than just men.’ Jinesse gave a nervous, soft laugh and let him go.

His lids still squeezed closed, Tharrick asked her, ‘What did he do for you, then?’

She stepped back, swung the basket of carrots brought up from the market onto the table, and rummaged through a drawer for a knife. ‘He once took me sailing to Innish.’ In a confidence shared with nobody else, she told what that passage had meant.

Evening stole in. The kitchen lay purpled in shadow, cut by fiery, glancing sparkles from the bowl of Falgaire crystal which sat, unused, in the dish cupboard. Tharrick progressed from helping to peel vegetables to holding Jinesse’s cool hands as she finished her careful account. They sat together without speaking, until the twins clambered through the outside doorway and startled the pair of them apart.

The storm struck before dawn to a mean snarl of wind that flattened the sea oats and hurled breakers like bulwarks against the strand. Men rushed with lanterns through the rain-torn dark to drag exposed dories into shelter behind the dunes, and supplement moorings with anchor and cable. The brunt of the gale howled in from the north, more trouble to shipping upcoast, the widow insisted, clad in a loose cotton robe as she set the pot on the hob to make soup.

If she rejoiced in the delay of the war galleys or the army, she had the restraint not to gloat.

The shutters creaked and slammed against their fastenings, and their sharp, random bangs as the gusts changed direction caused Tharrick to flinch from edged nerves. ‘What of Arithon’s shipyard?’

The widow sighed and pushed back the hair that unreeled down her shoulders like limp flax. ‘There could be damage if the wind veers. A storm surge could ride the high tide. Should the gale blow through first, the beached hulls will be safe. The luggers may run aground off the Scimlade, where sandbars have shifted from their beds, but the hook in the coastline here usually shelters us. Just pray the wind stays northeast.’

Morning broke yellow-grey as an old bruise above the eastern horizon. Cold light revealed a cove racked and littered with palm fronds and the flaccid, corpse fingers of stranded kelp. Two cottages had lost their thatched roofs. Against the whining gusts, the ragged beat of hammers resumed.

Yet when Tharrick picked his way around puddles and downed sticks to the yard on its wind-racked spit, he found no joiners at work on the framing. He was told all three shifts had been sent to make repairs in the village.

Arithon was immersed in sweating industry, restoking the stove beneath the boiler.

Quiet to one side, his hair newly trimmed and yesterday’s stubble shaven clean, Tharrick ventured the first comment he had dared since making his own way at the shipyard. ‘It’s likely your generosity has doomed the last hull.’

Arithon crammed another billet into the stove, then yanked back his hand as the sparks flew. ‘If so, that was my choice to make.’

‘I’m not a green fool.’ Tharrick envied the neat, practised speed that hurled each split piece of kindling over the heat-rippled bed of hot ash. ‘I’ve led men. Your example makes them work until their hearts burst to meet an impossible standard.’

A slick, cold laugh wrung from the Shadow Master’s throat as he clashed the fire door closed. ‘You’re mistaken.’ He straightened, reduced to lean contours sketched out in a silverpoint gleam of wet skin. His eyes were derisive and heavy with fatigue as he regarded the former guardsman who offered his tentative respect. ‘I happen to have employed every wood-sawyer and carpenter inside of thirty leagues. Had I not sent the joiners, we’d have gotten every fishwife and her man’s favourite marlinespike fouling the works here by noon. In case you hadn’t noticed, the framing’s all done. It’s the caulkers I can’t spare, and I needed some excuse to keep the fasteners overtime with the planking.’

Unapologetic, ill-tempered, Arithon sidestepped and slipped past. Abandoned to an eddied whirl of air, Tharrick swallowed back humiliation. The widow’s observation was borne out with sharp vengeance, that if the Shadow Master’s generosity could be held beyond reproach, it was not to be mistaken for his friendship.

The day wore away in grey drizzle and a murderous round of hard work. The ragged thunder of the caulkers’ mallets as hot oakum was forced between the gaps in the brigantine’s decking winnowed the stink of melting tar on winds left tainted with storm wrack. At nighfall, the pace did not relent. Planks were run out of the steam box and forced tight against the ship’s timbers. Still hot, they were fastened with treenails of locust to lie below the waterline, oak above. Torches spilled a hellish, flickering light across the naked shoulders of the labourers, slicked through the dirt where sweat and cold water channelled in runnels off their bodies.

The joiners returned in grumbling small groups. Their senior craftsman sought Arithon to call him aside. Pressed by his mulish, exhausted reluctance, the stout-bellied journeyman who checked the yard’s measuring gave in to necessity and shouldered the end of the plank the Shadow Master had been carrying.

‘It’s only a ship,’ the master joiner exhorted to the spare, tired figure that confronted him. ‘Does losing her matter so much that you ruin yourself and break the very hearts of the men?’

Scathing in anger, Arithon said, ‘You brought me away just for that?’

‘No.’ The master joiner braced rangy shoulders against the urgency of those green eyes upon him. ‘You’re losing your sense of propriety. This morning Tharrick admired your judgment and you threw back his words in his face.’