“It’s been a long time,” I told Hadelin.
Sailors loosed the halyards, sail after sail dropped to the deck, and with the way remaining to her, the Alcyone slid toward her berth; hands with boat hooks stood on the grating decks that extended behind the sundeck and beyond the forecastle, ready to fend us from the wharf or draw us to it.
They were hardly needed. Half a dozen loungers scurried out to catch our lines and make them fast, and the helmsman laid us alongside so smoothly that the fenders of old cordage hanging from Alcyone’s quarter merely kissed the timbers.
“Terrible storm today, Cap’n,” one of the loungers called. “Just cleared away a bit ago. Water up over the street here. You’re lucky you missed it.”
“We didn’t,” Hadelin said.
I went ashore half-convinced that there were two villages with the same name — perhaps Saltus and New Saltus, or something of the sort.
When I reached the inn it was not as I recalled it; yet it was not so very different, either. The courtyard and its well were much the same; so were the wide gates that let in riders and carts. I took a seat in the public. room and ordered supper from an innkeeper I did not recognize, wondering all the while whether Burgundofara and Hadelin would sit with me.
Neither did; but after a time Herena and Declan came to my table, bringing with them the brawny sailor who had manned the aft boat hook and a greasy, close-faced woman they said was the ship’s cook. I invited them to sit down, which they did only reluctantly and after making it quite clear that they would not permit me to buy them food or wine. I asked the sailor (who I assumed must have stopped here often) if there were no mines in the area. He told me a shaft had been driven into a hillside about a year ago upon the advice of a hatif that had whispered in the ears of several of the principal citizens of the village, and that a few interesting and valuable items had been brought to the surface.
From the street outside we heard the tramp of booted feet, halted by a sharp command. They reminded me of the kelau who had marched singing from the river through that Saltus to which I had come as an exiled journeyman, and I was about to mention them in the hope of leading the conversation to the war with Ascia when the door burst open and a gaudily uniformed officer stalked in, followed by a squad of fusiliers.
The room had been abuzz with talk; it fell deathly still. The officer shouted to the innkeeper, “Show me the man you call the Conciliator!”
Burgundofara, who had been sitting with Hadelin at another table, rose and pointed to me.
Chapter XXXV — Nessus Again
WHEN I LIVED among the torturers, I often saw clients beaten. Not by us, for we inflicted only such punishments as had been decreed, but by the soldiers who conveyed them to us and took them from us. The more experienced shielded their heads and faces with their arms, and their bellies with their shins; it leaves the spine exposed, but little can be done to protect the spine in any case.
Outside the inn I tried to fight at first, and it seems probable that the worst of my beating took place after I lost consciousness. (Or rather, when the marionette I manipulated from afar had.) When I became aware of Urth again, the blows still rained down, and I tried to do as those unlucky clients had.
The fusiliers used their boots and, what were much more dangerous, the iron-shod butts of their fusils. The flashes of pain I felt seemed remote; I was aware mostly of the blows, each sudden, jolting, and unnatural.
At last it was over, and the officer ordered me to rise; I floundered and fell, was kicked, tried again, and fell again; a rawhide noose was slipped around my neck, and I was lifted with that. It strangled me, yet helped me balance too. My mouth was full of blood; I spit it out again and again, wondering whether a rib had punctured my lungs.
Four fusiliers lay in the street, and I recalled that I had wrested his weapon from one, but had been unable to release the catch that would have allowed it to fire — on such small matters do our lives turn. Some comrades of the four examined them and found that three were dead.
“You killed them!” the officer shouted at me.
I spat blood in his face.
It was not a rational act, and I expected another beating for it. Perhaps I would have received one, but there were a hundred people or more around us, watching by the light that streamed from the windows of the inn. They muttered and stirred, and it seemed to me that a few of the soldiers felt as they did, reminding me of the guardsmen in Dr. Tabs’s play who had sought to protect Meschiane, who was Dorcas and the mother of us all.
A litter was contrived for the injured fusilier, and two village men pressed into service to carry it. A cart filled with straw sufficed for the dead. The officer, the remaining fusiliers, and I walked ahead of them to the wharf, a distance of a few hundred paces.
Once, when I fell, two men dashed out of the crowd to help me up. Until I was again on my feet, I supposed that they were Declan and the sailor, or perhaps Declan and Hadelin; but when I gasped my thanks to them, I found that they were strangers. The incident seemed to enrage the officer, who fired his pistol into the ground at their feet to warn them away when I fell a second time, and kicked me until I rose again with the aid of the noose and the fusilier who held it.
The Alcyone lay at the wharf, just as we had left her; but alongside her was such a craft as I had never seen before, with a mast that looked too slight to carry sail, and a swivel gun on her foredeck far smaller than the Samru’s.
Seeing the gun and the sailors manning it seemed to put new heart into the officer. He made me stop and face the crowd, and ordered me to point out my followers. I told him I had none and that I knew none of the people before me. He struck me with his pistol then. When I got up once more, I saw Burgundofara near enough to have touched me. The officer repeated his demand, and she vanished into the darkness.
Perhaps he struck me again when I refused again, but I do not recall it; I rode above the horizon, futilely directing my vitality toward the broken figure sprawled so far away. The void put it at naught, and I channeled Urth’s energies instead. His bones knit, and his wounds healed; but I noted with dismay that the cheek torn by the pistol sight was that which Agia’s iron claw had once torn too. It was as if the old injury had reasserted itself, only slightly weakened.
It was still night. Smooth wood supported me, but leaped and pounded as though lashed to the back of the most graceless destrier that ever galloped. I sat up and found I was aboard a ship, and that I had lain in a puddle of my own blood and spew; my ankle was chained to a staple. A fusilier stood nearby with one hand on a stanchion, keeping his balance with difficulty on that wild deck. I asked him for water. As I had learned when I marched through the jungle with Vodalus, when one is a captive it does no harm to ask favors — they are not often granted, but when they are refused nothing is lost.
This principle was confirmed when (to my surprise) my guard lurched off toward the stern and returned with a bucket of river water. I stood, cleaned myself and my clothing as thoroughly as I could, and began to take an interest in my surroundings, which were in fact novel enough.
The storm had cleared the sky, and the stars shone on Gyoll as though the New Sun had been flourished across the empyrean like a torch, leaving a trail of sparks. Green Lune peered from behind towers and domes silhouetted on the western bank.
Without sails or oars, we skipped like a thrown stone down the river. Feluccas and caravels with all sail set appeared to ride at anchor in midchannel; we darted among them as a swallow flits between megaliths. Aft, two gleaming plumes of spray rose as high as the barren mast silver walls erected and demolished in a moment.