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anybody's worry."
Denied cause for outrage, reft of every justification for his enmity against
the Shadow Master, Tharrick exerted his last, stubborn pride to arise from his
bed and recover. From his faltering first steps across the widow's cottage,
his progress seemed inextricably paired with the patching of the damaged
brigantine his act of revenge had holed through.
A fit man, conditioned to a life of hard training, he pressed his healing
strength with impatience. Reclad in castoffs from Jinesse's drowned husband,
Tharrick limped through the fish market. His path skirted mud between bait
casks and standing puddles left from the
showers that swept off the wintry, slate sea. The snatches of talk he
overheard among the women who salted down fish for the barrels made uneasy
contrast with the nighttime discussions over the widow's kitchen trestle.
Here, the strident squabbles as the gulls snatched after offal seemed the only
stressed note. Engrossed in homey gossip, Merior's villagers appeared utterly
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oblivious to the armed divisions bound south to storm their peninsula.
Tharrick maintained a stiff silence, set apart by his awareness of the
destruction Duke Bransian's style of war could, unleash. The fishwives'
inimical, freezing quiet disbarred him from conversation.
Already an outsider, his assault upon Arithon's shipyard made him outcast.
Disapproval shuttered the villagers' dour faces and pressured him to move on.
Tharrick felt just as uneasy in their company, uninformed as they were of
Dakar's noon scryings, which showed an outbreak of clan livestock raids
intended to hamper Alestron's crack mercenaries in their passage down the
coast.
Such measures would yield small delay. Once on the march, s'Brydion war
captains were a force inexorable as tide, as Tharrick well knew from
experience. A fleet pulled out of dry dock converged to blockade, manned by
cautious captains who took care to snug down in safe harbors at night. This
was not the fair weather trade season, when passage to
Scimiade Tip might be made without thought in a fortnight. Through the uneasy
winds before each winter's solstice, no galleyman worth his salt dared the
storms that could sweep in without warning. Years beyond counting, ships had
been thrashed to wreckage as they hove into sight of sheltered waters. The
passage between Ishlir and Elssine afforded small protection, where the grass
flats spread inland and mighty winds roared off the Cildein Ocean. Even
Selkwood's tall pines could gain no foothold to root. What oaks could survive
grew stunted by breakage, skeletal and hunched as old men.
Bound in its tranquil spell of ignorance, unwarned by the cracking pace of
Arithon's work shifts, the folk of Merior walked their quiet lanes, while
their rows of whitewashed cottages shed the rains in a mesmerized, whispered
fall of droplets. For a rootless, directionless man accustomed to armed
drills and activity, the fascination with the herons that fished the shallows
of Garth's pond paled through one soli hour.
Tharrick startled the birds into ungainly flight on an oath spat out like
flung stone. Like Jinesse's twins with their penchant for scrapes, he felt
himself drawn beyond reason to wander up the spit toward the rocketing
industry of the shipyard.
There, under firm-handed discipline, the craftsmen his fires had caught
slacking labored to rectify their lapse. He strolled among them.
Brazen as nails, even daring retaliation for their master's hand in his
recovery, Tharrick meandered through the steam fanned from the boiler shack
chimney.
The crunch of shavings beneath his boot soles and his conspicuous, clean linen
shirt drew the eyes of the men, stripped to the waist, sweaty skins dusted by
chaff from the sawpits as they cut and shaped smooth reworked planks. His
trespass was noted by unembarrassed glances, then just as swiftly forgotten.
Even the master joiner, who had ordered his beatings and tried unspeakable
means to force his silence, showed no rancor at his presence. Arithon's will
had made itself felt. Enemy though he was, none dared to raise word or hand
against him.
All were ruled by their master's ruthless tongue and his feverpitched driving
purpose. The salvage effort on the damaged brigantine already showed a
near-complete patch at her bow; the one still in frames on her bedlogs lay
changed, half cannibalized for her wood, then lessened in length and faired
ready for planking. A less-ambitious vessel with a shorter sheertine took
shape, fitted here and there between the yellow of new spruce with the odd
checked timber fished together from the derelict lugger.
In three weeks of mulish, unswerving effort, Arithon s'Ffalenn had rechanneled
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
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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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]