8 Eleasias
"My great-great-grandmother came to the shore on the ship-home, but lived not long," Durlyle said, and I wanted him to continue. "I was born not a leap to the south of here, long after the beasts were cast out of the village, and here I live. I learn history from old bruxo, teacher in lore and healing. I learn much from him, but he keep stories as stories, and I wish to know of...truth."
The wolfwere pup slept in a rough cradle in Durlyle's hut, rocked with a foot. It had been a...busy day; guiding elders back to the wolfweres' ship and having to kill some grown monsters who had escaped, and the blue witch on the eastern shores. The Sirine Queen.
"I think that's important," I said. "Sometimes I've read two texts and seen two opposite ideas of what really happened—so you have to work out what the historian was trying to say, and where they learned what they say they learned. Even while we've been travelling I found two versions of the History of the Dead Three, both actually by real historians—" one in Beregost, the second in Ulcaster; the story's usually only treated as half theology and half tale instead of a proper look at the ancient time. "—It mustn't be very interesting to you, I'm sorry, that story's about three very nasty people who've been dead since I was little—"
"Please do not apologise," Durlyle said, holding up a broad hand. "You are fascinating. Both warrior of fire sword and clever historian."
He...liked what I'd helped to do for the village. "Balduran founded my city," I said. "Why do you scorn him so for the past?"
Durlyle looked thoughtful, gazing out of his square window to the air at the tranquil night beyond his cabin walls. It was cool already, though still summer; and I wondered how he could bear winter. He lit a rough lamp upon a wooden table, which warmed the room and shed golden light between us and across the fur of the wolfwere pup. "He shipped and collected, but that of no value to us. We use land for needs only, a few things for beauty or history but all share alike in labour we make. Balduran took and would rather scuttle than free. He lived with beasts for all that we care, for his traits were more in common with they." Soft shadows flitted across his face like the wings of birds while he spoke seriously; of what no Baldurian would ever have said.
His traits: more in common with those monsters? "He was much cleverer than they were, and obviously travelled far and tested himself against a lot more," I said. "He discovered Anchorome and Sossal, and fought sea elves and giant whales and all sorts of things, and made the best maps of the Trackless Sea and brought back gold and treasures for our city..."
My father tried to sail to Anchorome after Balduran himself before I was born. Balduran was brave to do it...
(And if—when—I ever told him that I'd gone to where Balduran's last ship really was...)
"Whose treasures did he bring back?" Durlyle said.
"I thought he traded for them," I said. "Because the natives have different value systems, so there are stories that he'd give them things like wine, that they didn't have, in return for the gold that they had in abundance."
The natives, I thought, and took another look at Durlyle. He was somewhere between Kaishas Gan and fair-haired Maralee in feature: brown-haired, brown-eyed, and broad-faced, with darkened skin not solely from working outdoors. Part descendant of the Sword Coast; part those natives Balduran had travelled with, once...
I hadn't fully read the remains of Balduran's logbook, and there were sections of the text i needed to consult other books to properly understand. But I remembered parts that I had deciphered, returning through my mind as I watched Durlyle's face.
Here this land is almost for the taking, with only a measure of 'diplomatic' discussions as the cost, 'diplomatic' phrased for deliberate sarcasm.
The death of so many of the crew...I shall conscript replacements this night from local populace...
One hundred and fifty new hands...their eyes are resigned...
I dislike a crew with no fire in their bellies, but I do suppose it is better than a fire in the hold...
"He took," Durlyle said simply. "My mother-of-mothers came as slave."
There had been manacles and whipping-posts on board the ship. Not sufficient in number to carry an entire crew in chains, as was the case of rowers of the old Chondath empire. But more than enough information to feel as sickened as the Cloakwood.
Balduran was from a different time...but that is not an excuse, any more than for me...
"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't realise...I do now. In the city itself we have never allowed slavery, even before the Grand Dukes. I know it's evil." Historians are supposed to challenge what is wrong of perceptions of the past.
"We run free now," Durlyle said. At that moment, the wolfwere started to whine; he picked him up to give comfort. There seemed already less fur on the pup's body. Perhaps it—he—was gradually becoming more human-like; Durlyle fed the baby with a pottery flask of thick goat's milk. Only five beside him had offered to preserve the lives of the wolfwere young ones. "I ought to give him name if he is to belong," he said; the pup still did not look human, but even pets had names. "Ajantis, perhaps, for one of his rescuers."
Flattering—or not. "His name probably comes from the word for a beautiful island in Chessentan myths," I said. "So I—suppose it suits this place."
The pup at last settled from the milk. Durlyle calmly placed him back to rest.
"What do you mean when you say you belong?" I said, curious. He looked into my eyes, answering.
"The words for it are...difficult," he said. "We are a people who live as one. You would understand if you were one of us. Those who stay must belong..."
It was a good place, to be here; but we'd done this in part because we wished to leave it.
"There are outsiders, like the beast, and there are us," Durlyle said. "Outsiders have good and evil as we do, but we are respecting. You are alike us in some ways. We belong, and there is little more to it than that." He shrugged with rippling shoulders, openness in his face even though he had managed to express little.
"Do you worship a god?" I said; perhaps it was religious ecstasy of some sort they talked of. "A divinity, a spirit above." I pointed vaguely to the sky outside his hut.
"There is mother spirit in sun-warmed earth," Durlyle said, "and in harvest we burn sweet grasses for her." Then it was natural that Faldorn liked them; and I did too, for it sounded that their rites were much less extreme than her ideas. "And in skies there are stories of those among them: in winter there is shape of celestial woman with sword of fire," he said.
Perhaps that was the constellation of Cassima the Phoenix, or the Swordsman that is called Cymrych Hugh by the Moonshae people. A warmth grew in my face, remembering his earlier words of that particular celestial.
"We know of spirits of the sky by the before," he said, a certain pride gradually infusing into his voice. "Marks of a people even before us, long-gone. Those parts were close to the lair of the beasts; but now way is free to—"
I spoke before he'd finished his sentence. "And will you take me?" I asked, holding out a hand as if to seal a bargain; and he enfolded mine in his warm, broad palm for a moment that seemed longer than it was.
—
I could hear our Ajantis snoring in the longhouse allocated us to sleep; Imoen studied the ships'-mage's spellbook by the pink magelight over her head. She wore Balduran's sword, since it was enchanted so that even the wolfweres had not damaged it and either the gold or the magic interested her; or both. We had regained the emaciated Evan, I remembered, seeing Faldorn's brow deeply furrowed in her meditation. Next to her Viconia prayed in a strikingly similar pose, half-kneeling and half-crosslegged, her hands upon her holy symbol rather than rooted in the earth as Faldorn's. Shar-Teel ran a rough whetstone across her blade, purple sparks flickering sharply from it. She sat close to those of the crew who were still awake, and whispering to each other.
"They're showing us their ship tomorrow or we take it," Nowell said gruffly, and to my shock even Tellarian seemed to agree with him.
"We can't take it if it's not even built; and they're holding the celebrations tomorrow," I said.
"What care we?" Lorancs gestured widely in the air. "It's a damned creepy place. You come; they teach you their ways; and you don't get to go away again."
"Amnian called Taloun in a hut by the shore," Shar-Teel said brusquely. "Castaway. Scared to tell too much." She scowled as if it had been a personal insult to her. "Came; stayed too long; became one and never made it back."
"Kaishas promised," I said. It would be all wrong for there to be a fight here. Durlyle and Maralee were nice; it wasn't their fault about Kaishas and her husband—which I guessed that Imoen hadn't let on about, which was good in terms of avoiding bloodshed. "She ought to show us that she has a boat, you're right. And when she does that, we've two copies of the sea-charts to get free by."
Tellarian nodded. "Uppity chieftainess took mine," he said, "but the job can be done with the other." He'd a look of grim resolution; Evan at the least showed that there were perils to men on the island.
I am a Queen among sirines; and you are but fools to dare to cross my path, she had said, and though it was but hours before the memory was as a swift-fading dream of enchantment and a painful beauty. Waves at my command fly higher than the seahawk's soaring zenith in the sky; the earth of the bottom of the seas is mine to crack and rend open as a thousand of land earthquakes in strength. Sharks rise at my wish to slay with teeth, and krakens are my pets in my pearl dwellings below the waves. You dare to challenge my rightful...possession?
She had been a woman blue and scaled, streams and rivulets of water flowing always about her body, her seaweed hair the pearlescent green of an oyster's shell deep underwater. Meiala of the Tower had been beautiful, but to the Sirine Queen she was as my Great-Aunt Cincilla compared to Viconia. Faldorn had purposefully instructed Ajantis to remain behind, for sirines chose men to attract through their songs and enchantments...
"Yeah," Imoen said, looking up from her spellbook, keeping the peace. "They're so nice they couldn't get rid of the beasts themselves, so there's nothing to worry about, right? We've weapons and spells and everything."
It was true enough that no arms had availed anything against the Sirine Queen. Even Faldorn did not dare to do anything; only went to her knees in reverence at the vision and respectfully requested the return of the man, for they had taken him for nigh three tendays.
But we sirines simply must mate with a human male, the Queen said, deep waters flowing in her light laugh of sunlight on the sea. They are happy to oblige when the song calls them; the song you hear even now. And I could hear the calling of voices like lyres, mother-of-pearl smooth sounds that drew to the ocean itself; one would go willingly to even a drowning by the summoning of such melodies. Viconia whispered fiercely below her breath, and that aided us to resist. It is our time and our right, spoke the Sirine Queen's flawless voice. Surely even land-dwellers understand that all have needs.
"Do not underestimate the concealments of pathetic weakness," Viconia said, opening her eyes upon her prayer's ending; her voice was rather flat over the insult. She'd categorically refused to play with Farthing, though she had handed over the doll on the grounds that obviously it was a useless object and little girls were better off playing with toy tentacle whips. Farthing and Solianna had been inspired to braid some shore-weeds together. She wore her hood down upon her neck while she was in the village. She looked across at me. "Simply observe what this jor wun l'golhyrr has become."
"Nobody's all-powerful, yes," I said, and only after realised the insult to her. Viconia simply shook out her white hair, stealing the attention of most of the crew.
In that sea-washed cleft of green-veined rocks opened to a sharp-edged rockpool at the western cliffs, Faldorn had replied to the Queen, pleading: "Your needs, Lady, must surely have been satiated within the time. By the lore I know of, I do not think it would harm you to return the man to us. For our—for one of our other companions has vows they would be concerned with." She did not reveal Ajantis as a man. "In return I can only offer this natural gift to you."
She offered a single seashell to the Sirine Queen, raising it forth between her hands as she knelt. I feared that it would be seen as insult: but instead the Queen brought it to one of her perfect-formed ears.
Ah, she spoke, a different kind of music to the song the dolphins echo.
"I gave to it wolves howling as one that I have heard in the moonlight; of my memory of the beating of an oaken heart that existed before even the first coming of the elves; of the wind through pine needles in autumn; and of the cry of a distant eagle," Faldorn said. The seashell shimmered briefly green-brown by her casting.
A present sufficient to bring us pleasure, the Sirine Queen said, and raised her hand simply in the air, a single and almost uncaring gesture. Four sirines carried a human man between them and laid him upon the sand. He was thin and starved, grey-haired and weakened almost to death. You may take him: and nothing else that lies upon my shores.
Then she had disappeared into the waves below, diving and vanishing with a dolphin's liquid grace; and I had to blink to clear my eyes, as if she was the reflection of light on the sea. Imoen put down a seashell that she herself had gathered, a long one of a violet colour with a glittering inner surface. Shar-Teel helped to carry Evan's wasted form to his brother. We returned to the village; and they welcomed us again for what we'd done.
"We've got to go back," Imoen said, looking at me.
—
Edwin felt her body on his, red lips touching first his cheek—
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jor wun l'golhyrr - rat in a trap
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