‘I could stand him if he didn’t deliberately go out of his way to be offensive,’ Sparhawk growled, scrubbing at the deck with his block of pumice-stone.
‘He’s paid to be offensive, my friend. Angry men work harder. Part of your problem is that you always look him right in the eye. He wouldn’t single you out the way he does if you’d keep your eyes lowered. If you don’t, this is going to be a very long voyage for you.’
‘Or a short one for him,’ Sparhawk said darkly.
He considered it that night as he tried, without much success, to sleep in his hammock. He fervently wished that he could get his hands on the idiot who had decided that humans could sleep in hammocks. The roll of the ship made it swing from side to side, and Sparhawk continually felt that he was right on the verge of being thrown out.
‘Anakha.’ The voice was only a whisper in his mind.
Sparhawk was stunned. ‘Blue Rose?’ he said.
‘Prithee, Anakha, do not speak aloud. Thy voice is as the thunder in mine ears. Speak silently in the halls of thine awareness. I will hear thee.’
‘How is this possible?’ Sparhawk framed the thought. ‘Thou art confined.’
‘Who hath power to confine me, Anakha? When thou art alone and thy mind is clear of other distraction, we may speak thus.’
‘I did not know that.’
‘Until now, it was not needful for thee to know.’
‘I see. But now it is?’
‘Yes.’
‘How dost thou penetrate the barrier of the gold?’
‘It is no barrier to me, Anakha. Others may not sense me within the confines of thine excellent receptacle. I, however, may reach out to thee in this manner. This is particularly true when we are so close.’
Sparhawk laid his hand on the leather pouch hanging on a thong about his neck and felt the square outline of the box. ‘And should it prove needful, may I speak so with thee?’
‘Even as thou dost now, Anakha.’
‘This is good to know.’
‘I sense thy disquiet, Anakha, and I share thine anxiety for the safety of thy mate.’
‘Thou art kind to say so, Blue Rose.’
‘Expend thou all thine efforts to securing thy Queen’s release, Anakha. I will keep watch over our enemies whilst thou art so occupied.’ The jewel under Sparhawk’s hand paused. ‘Hear me well, my friend,’ Bhelliom continued, ‘should it come to pass that no other course be open to thee, fear not to surrender me up to obtain thy mate’s freedom.’
‘That I will not do—for she hath forbidden it.’
‘Do not be untranquil if it should come to pass, Anakha. I will not submit to Cyrgon, even though mine own child, whom I love, even as thou lovest thine, be endangered by my refusal. Be comforted in the knowledge that I will not permit my child—nor thee and all thy kind—to be enslaved by Cyrgon—or worse yet, by Klael. Thou hast my promise that this will never happen. Should it appear that our task doth verge on failure, I give thee my solemn vow that I shall destroy this child of mine and all who dwell here to prevent such mischance.’
‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’
5
She was always tired, hovering at times on the verge of exhaustion, and she was nearly always wet and dirty. Her clothes were ripped and tattered, and her hair was a ruin. Those things were unimportant, however. She willingly submitted to discomfort and indignities to keep the madman who was their captor from hurting the terrified Alcan.
The realization that Scarpa was mad had come to her slowly. She had known from the first moment she had seen him that he was ruthless and driven, but the evidence of his insanity had become gradually more and more overwhelming as the endless days of her captivity ground on.
He was cruel, but Ehlana had encountered cruel men before. After she and Alcan had been hurried through the dank tunnels under the streets of Matherion to the outskirts of the city, they had been roughly shoved into the saddles of waiting horses, bound securely in place, and literally dragged at breakneck speed down the road leading to the port of Micae on the southwestern coast of the peninsula, seventy-five leagues away.
A normal man does not mistreat the animals upon which he is totally dependent. That was the first evidence of Scarpa’s madness. He drove the horses, flogging them savagely until the poor beasts were staggering with exhaustion, and his only words during those dreadful four days were, ‘Faster! Faster.’
Ehlana shuddered as she recalled the horror of that endless ride. They had. Her horse stumbled in the muddy path, and she was jolted forward, bringing her attention back into the immediate present.
The cord which tightly bound her wrists to the saddlebow dug into her flesh, and the bleeding started again. She tried to ease into a different position so that the cord would no longer cut into the already open wounds.
‘What are you doing?’ Scarpa demanded. His voice was harsh, and it came out almost as a scream. Scarpa almost always screamed when he was talking to her.
‘I’m just trying to keep the cord from cutting deeper into my wrists, Lord Scarpa,’ she replied meekly. She had been instructed early in her captivity to address him so and she had quickly found that failure to do so resulted in savage mistreatment of Alcan and the withholding of food and water.
‘You’re not here to be comfortable, woman!’ he raged at her. ‘You’re here to obey! I see what you’re doing there! If you don’t stop trying to loosen those cords, I’ll use wire!’ His eyes bulged, and she saw again that strange, bluish cast to the whites of those eyes and the abnormally large pupils.
‘Yes, Lord Scarpa,’ she said in her most submissive tone.
He glared at her, his face filled with suspicion and his mad eyes looking hungrily for some excuse to punish or humiliate his prisoners further. She lowered her gaze to stare fixedly at the rough, muddy track that wound deeper and deeper into the rank, vine-choked forest of the southeast coast of Daresia.
The ship they had boarded at the port of Micae had been a sleek, black-hulled corsair that could not have been built for any honest purpose. She and Alcan had been unceremoniously dragged below decks and confined in a cramped compartment that smelled of the bilges and was totally dark. After they had been two hours at sea, the compartment door had opened and Krager had entered with two swarthy sailors, one carrying what appeared to be a decent meal, and the other, two pails of hot water some soap and a wad of rags for use as towels. Ehlana had resisted an impulse to embrace the fellow.
‘I’m really sorry about all this, Ehlana,’ Krager had apologized, squinting at her nearsightedly, ‘but I have no control of the situation. Be very careful of what you say to Scarpa. You’ve probably noticed that he’s not entirely rational.’ He had looked around nervously, then laid a handful of cheap tallow candles on the rough table and left, chaining the door shut behind him.
They had been five days at sea and had reached Arian, a port city on the edge of the jungles of the southeast coast some time after midnight. Then she and Alcan had been hustled into a closed carriage with the pouchy-eyed Baron Parok at the reins.
During the transfer from the ship to the carriage, Ehlana had discreetly looked at each of her captors, seeking some weakness.
Krager, despite his habitual drunkenness, was too shrewd, and Parok was Scarpa’s long-time confederate, a man evidently untroubled by his friend’s madness. Then she had coolly appraised Elron. She had noticed that under no circumstances would the foppish Astellian poet look her in the eye. His apparent murder of Melidere had evidently filled him with remorse.
Elron was a poseur rather than a man of action, and he clearly had no stomach for blood. She had recalled moreover, how vain he had been about his long curls when she had first met him and had wondered what form of duress Scarpa had used to force him to shave his head in order to pose as one of Kring’s Peloi.