29 Flamerule
Viconia vomited noisily, and thoroughly, over the side of the cutter that bore the recent-painted name of Discovery. We were sailing through endless blue, under kind skies, the sort of merchant adventure that any child of Baldur's Gate can imagine. Imoen was fast to start to climb the rigging and look out from the crow's nest. She and I had both talked to the crew and thought them rather nice men, though none of them know much about Mendas, or where that accent comes from. You'd think in a city as cosmopolitan as Baldur's Gate one ought to recognise it by now; hints of the vowel pronunciation in Old Chondathan, perhaps, if Mendas had learned that language before he learned Common. Founders' Common was based more closely on Old Chondathan than is the language we speak today, the tongue Balduran spoke and wrote in.
"Water everywhere," Viconia spat, "niar rivel'klar; you surfacers are uncivilized, undisciplined—in the caves in the black rivers of home, our mighty ozamen vessels sailed but not like this; it was between black crags on either side, treacherous reefs that extended from the deep ground; none of this ridiculous open below sunlight..." She retched again. She'd been willing to extend her knowledge of the surface world, until we'd left the sight of shore. Angrily she barked an order to Faldorn, who summoned fresh water from the air to clean her face.
Shar-Teel stood with us on the aftdeck, in loose shirt and trews, though she wore her sword behind her back. There were pirates in the Trackless Sea, still; for that reason Mendas had been interested in adventurers who could cast spells, and Imoen had talked to the men about what a ship's mage ought to be doing. For a ship's druid, Faldorn so far liked to lean over the deck and stare into the waves below the hull, watching the sea as if it was to her as a wizard's scroll to Imoen, sometimes whispering to it.
"I have done little sailing before," Ajantis said, stepping to the railings, the sea air blowing through his fair hair. "But 'tis...peaceful, here. I would see purpose in it." Aquerna was below, remaining in his cabin where she could not see the waves; like Viconia she proclaimed a distaste for it, but announced that since she was no ordinary squirrel she would become accustomed. Like Liia Jannath's monkey, I suppose; they're from the jungles, although they're more often pets for sailors than squirrels.
"Just you wait until there's a storm," I said. In truth my own history of ships was but short voyages, albeit frequently enough, and those with other nobles rather than freely, like this; but I'd seen bad weather and the noble barque tossing and turning on winds and heavy, fresh rain soaking wooden decks. I found an odd kind of exultation in it, putting on an old coat to protect my clothing, one of few to dare the decks above. A storm can be exciting, with a strange beauty all its own. When grey clouds toss and turn they have vitality and a life that belongs to them and them alone, while a blue sky is only empty; and rain can revive even while it pelts down hard. An adventure like sneaking away from home to see more of the city, perhaps.
"I hope there will not be, for the trouble it would bring upon the good men of the crew," Ajantis said. I thought that he could be ponderous like that, stiff and formal because he preferred to understand the world using the rules of his order. His symbol of Helm was above his tunic, the silver chain bright in the sunlight and the eye within the gauntlet watching. "I still feel nothing in my prayers," he said to me. "No reassurance; no knowledge. Perhaps it would have been better, otherwise—for the cause of destroying a demon bent on causing harm—and yet in this world I wish to live."
"You have friends," I replied. I'm...well, I'm really sorry that I volunteered to kill you but, after the debt we both owe... I don't think that I wanted to be killed myself, even in that time just after the Cloakwood. "Look after yourself, Ajantis, we care about you. It's a beautiful day." That was trite, of course. But I thought that perhaps Ajantis could see better when he was not seeing evil everywhere. Or perhaps he was only blind.
"The priest of Ilmater instructed me that life is suffering." Ajantis' hands slid along and around the deck's edge, clutching it almost as he might take up a quarterstaff. "But also that there is mercy, and there is hope... Seosamh told me that I ought to try to do good, simply because it is."
He wasn't looking at me, but instead wide out to sea. "A wise man," I said. Above in the unclouded sky, a wide-winged seabird wheeled and turned in a flash of graceful white. Then I saw it it swoop down to the surface of the waves, and retreat with a grey fish that flopped and struggled in its beak. It spiralled away on the winds with its prey.
"I was quite ashamed that Shar-Teel was so discourteous to him," Ajantis said, drawing me back to the conversation. "She was leaving the temple at the time that I came to it..."
She was behind us. "A useless priest of an even more useless male god. He needed reminding of his place."
How very like her to be bitter about the way the priest had helped us. Thank Sune Ajantis had met him afterwards and tried to sort things out. There'd been little time for us to prepare to leave, though we hadn't needed much; we'd gone to Therella's home in the dead of the night, storing armour and possessions we wouldn't need on board ship in her cellar, warded against theft by Imoen and Viconia. Mendas at least seemed to know how to provision a ship, from what I'd seen in the galley when I started the journey by helping Aatto the cook distribute the lime-juice.
Tellarian called my name; he was the ship's navigator, formerly apprenticed as a journeyman to the Counting House ships. I'd one of Mendas' copies of the sea-charts in a waterproof oilcloth myself, studying them and confirming that the route marked was indeed close to the accounts of Balduran's last voyage that I knew of. The navigator seemed to know what he was about, though he was quite young and prone to nicknaming. A long nose dominated his broad, cheerful face.
"Lesson in swabbing the deck, Skybird?"
Only six crew-members, besides us; a long-decked cutter, fast through the waves. Not that one could see many waves bent over with mop and seawater bucket; Shar-Teel tightened ropes and pulled on the lower windlass, probably stronger than any of the sailors. She seemed comfortable with being at sea, and somewhat knowledgeable about what we had to do.
"And fetch me ten feet of waterline from the quartermaster," Tellarian added—
"After you lend me some compass fuel?" I knew that one. "Or show us the grand line between the Sea of Swords and the Trackless Sea?"
Tellarian laughed, flinging the mop across. "Baldurian. Is she one too?" He jerked a thumb in Shar-Teel's direction. "Or Pinky?" He looked up admiringly at Imoen in the rigging, her hair loosened and blown by the wind, still brightly dyed. She'd laid aside her mage's robes for simple leggings and tunic, acrobatic and aloft. I'd join her in the crow's nest, running across the spars to work the rigging and furl the sails.
"Imoen's from Candlekeep—and not that I know of." The mop swept further across the front deck's solid boards. Shar-Teel mentioned battles she'd fought in the past, but never enough detail to identify exactly when and where; and as for family background, she might as well have grown out of a tree. Or some especially thorny bush that regularly impaled people with swordlike branches. But it was because of that she was reassuring to have around; we wouldn't be alive if she hadn't fought, and taught us.
At last I'd managed to get into a rhythm with the mop; hard work, but no harder than Shar-Teel's lessons. If you kept your movements efficient, and watched what you were doing; in that way, not so different from picking a lock or turning a trap harmless.
"You're from Velen, aren't you?" I said.
"Aye. Not a seaman by blood, as most in that city—but a runaway since I'd my thirteenth year. Better than a butcher to ghosts."
That was an interesting story; ghosts haunt Velen, and it's local custom there to leave cuts of meat for them so that they're pacified away from people. "Have you ever heard Mendas' accent on your travels?" I asked.
Aatto born in the Moonshaes hadn't, and Halderwin the captain hadn't.
"No. Funny bloke, isn't he? But if I sailed one more time with that drunkard Cap'n Kieres it'd have meant my death when the ship went down." His eyes flickered down to the copper wedding ring he wore on his right hand; he said he'd married the lady he called Rosythorn but a month past, on getting his papers for journeyman. Most likely he was right to leave the employment of the Counting House, I thought; what I knew of Ulf its functionary was that he seemed a cold man as well as ill-mannered, though it's also true my meetings with him were few. "Ah, well, Tymora and Umberlee dispose as they will. You're an educated parrot yourself for us seatars."
"I'm an adventurer," I said carefully. Ajantis was a noble, but there was no point to claiming to other people that I was any more. "But I grew up in the Gate; I like history. As you like your charts." Tymora's chances, other people's choices that set me here; Imoen's foster uncle, Sarevok Anchev with his mines flooded, my own father, Dalton's danger, Hurgan Stoneblade asking the dagger from the tower. But this certainly was something I wished to do only because of who I was—and that was thinking too much about it, I decided, suds moist over my hands and the rough spots of the mop's wood beginning to make themselves felt on my palms.
"There's nothing like sitting at a table with the map and the dividers and the course before you, the calculation-books by your side and the way to turn the ship all up here, if you know where to look." Tellarian tapped his head. I was no navigator; mapreading and half-remembered geometry from my tutors was the most I knew. "And yet if'n I wasn't late to board the ship last Shieldmeet it'd never have happened..." He grinned, promising a story; and I tried to make sure the work was quick despite it, in case of Halderwin's captaincy noticing slackness.
"I was cabin-boy on the second ship I'd served on; an old tub that they called the Galante when the captain made the name-plate stick on straight. Actually, I'd my suspicions that what we were carrying wasn't always strictly legal, you understand. The captain was called Havarian, a slippery bloke if ever there was—and he'd go from Lantan or Chult up to Velen and then Athkatla, all sorts of goods locked in the hold that a humble cabin boy wouldn't ever open. The fairs, Havarian thought, were fine opportunity for the right kinds of cargo, and we made landfall a day before. Ever seen Athkatla?" I shook my head. "The streets might not be lined with gold as they say, but at fair-time they're lined with a kind of lime sweet that glitters like it, gold-green dust, sweetmeats flung at anyone passing by and hardly a citizen without a mask to be found. Fountains set to flow with wine in the nobles' districts, tumbling-shows with priests of Tymora performing luck-magic, jugglers and jongleurs with sleight-of-hand, a balladeer singing some tune on every corner.
"Fact of the matter, all that wine and ale flowing around, by the time the ship left I was still waking up from a hangover," he said, sheepishly. "Thought I'd have to turn to the streets and beg, for few were hiring and still fewer with nary a testament; but Tymora's luck that I met Tharwick, ship's navigator of the Numerical Dragon. Showed him I knew how to figure, then they took me on as prentice; and I sailed with the Counting House and a year later met my Rosythorn in port. She's a singer, she is; a voice rich as the petals of her name. Luckiest Shieldmeet I ever drunk at, in the end."
I remembered little of the Baldur's Gate celebrations four years ago; it felt as if I was much younger then. And because my father never let me out much, I was sure there were more exciting festivities than nobles eating heavy food and talking of merchantry. In two days would come the leap year once more, aboard ship and upon these blue waves; and there are poets who love the sea and say that one needs no more than that.
"—And we've finished?" I asked, hopefully, at the last corner of the upper deck.
"And you're qualified to do it by yourself, henceforth," Tellarian said, and winked.
Upon the other side of the boat rang a shout from Lorancs, the boatswain. We looked, and a blue woman rose by the cutter's side.
"Be calm," Faldorn said.
The figure, as we saw it, had the shape of a woman but was entirely of water, the blue-green sea of her body more transparent in the sun than the ocean's depth. She would have looked glasslike, as if an artist had crafted a clear form of a woman and filled it with water; but she moved, alive, seaweed and fish and white foam flowing through her. The waterfall of hair flowed constantly across her back; her eyes were smooth and liquid and uncoloured; and in all her shape she was close to an older and taller Faldorn. A spout of water rose spontaneously from the sea to bring her by the druid's side.
"She is a nereid, a spirit of the seas, sisterkin to dryads. Her name is Thalassa," Faldorn said.
Thalassa spoke with a sound like the inside of a shell pressed to the ear, and the turnings and never-ending motion of her form reminded me of the joy of dolphins I had seen playing at a distance in the seas near home.
"I greet you, little sister of the earth," she said. "May your voyage be a merry one, yes?" Her watery lips moved, and she returned Faldorn's smile; and then she dived into the air before the sun's light, flowing and shimmering and changing, the shape of a human woman slipping away like a mask from the living water that she was. She fell into the sea, the waves that had borne her up falling down; but by the bows and the waterline we could see traces of a shape to the sea, as if she danced with the ship for her stage.
Sailors say that nereids, rather than sirines, are good luck...
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Edwin opened his book, and rehearsed the spells.
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ozamen - drow ships
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