The Castle of the Winds Read online

  He did not miss the way his master’s face fell at the reminder. ‘He was headed southward still, the trackers say. Still on the Dunmarhas road. We’ll be after him at first light tomorrow.’

  ‘What if we lose him?’ grunted Olvar. ‘If he gets too far ahead, reaches his own land ahead of us? Which he surely might. It’s a long haul, longer than we’ve come so far. As well you face that now, Mastersmith.’

  Kunrad frowned. ‘No! There’s still Dunmarhas. It’s a big town, bigger than Rasby or Thuneborg.’

  ‘So you think he’ll get up to his tricks there?’

  Kunrad hesitated, visibly; the prentices exchanged sharp glances. ‘No; I’d guess not. Dunmarhas has links with the Southlands, that might make him wary. Beyond it there’s nothing but the Debatable Lands and the Marshes, where he can’t travel fast – unless he takes the long inland way, and that’s little easier. Even if he steals more horses, he’ll have a heavy load. And the Dunmarhas town guard is more like a small army these days, they tell me, and as used to the Marshes as anyone can be. He’d risk being overhauled and losing everything. More likely he’ll rest his men a few days, and head south quite peacefully.’

  Gille shuddered at the mention of the Marshes. ‘What then? How far’ll we be behind him? A week? We’ll never overtake those big sothran warhorses with our breeds, they’re too long in the hair and short in the leg. He’ll hardly linger so long! Mastersmith, be reasonable – all that way, and you’ll have to give up just the same. Unless you’re proposing to follow him across the Marshes? Into Suderney itself?’

  ‘In Niarad’s name, don’t suggest it!’ groaned Olvar.

  Kunrad was silent. Gille, looking at him, thought that his face had changed in these past weeks. It was leaner, slightly, less vague in its look, but its frown graven deeper.

  ‘If he escapes over the border …’ The smith looked like a man whose teeth are being drawn. ‘Then we’ll see. Then, maybe – maybe! I’ll have to call a halt. For now. Unless …’ His gaze seemed to range out past the guest-room’s painted walls. ‘You’d better get some sleep. I need to think. We may be heading along unexpected ways – who knows?’

  He blew out the smoky little lamp, and slumped gratefully back on his bolster.

  ‘Unexpected?’ said Gille’s voice in the dark. ‘You maybe think you’ve left me anything to expect?’

  But at breakfast next morning he almost overset his bowl of cornmeal when a heavy hand clamped on his shoulder. Kunrad looked down at the prentices, and though his eyes were shadowed, there was a light in them that had not been there these last few weeks. ‘Suppose we turn aside,’ he said, sitting himself down beside them. ‘Head for the coast. Will that hold your whingeing awhile?’

  Gille looked stunned, then deeply suspicious. ‘You mean … you’ll quit the chase? Leave the armour?’

  ‘Let the bastard go?’ spluttered Olvar.

  Kunrad was openly grinning now. ‘You sound as if you’re disappointed in me! No. I’ll never give up, not wholly. I dreamt …’ He shrugged. ‘But you convinced me, you’re right; we’ll never catch him up in time. And believe me, I’m no more anxious to try the Marshes than you. There may be another way; I can’t see it straight, not yet. Maybe I will, if I don’t have the burden of the chase forever upon me, eating up my thoughts. And – well, Olvar, you’ve always been telling us that we should see the Sea. So here’s your chance to show us.’

  Olvar beamed, messily. ‘That I will! Sink your worries in that sight awhile!’

  Gille’s eyes remained narrow. ‘We could,’ he suggested, ‘always find a port – Saldenborg, say. Sell the horses, take ship for home.’

  ‘That’s one choice,’ agreed Kunrad, pouring himself a mug of table-ale and breaking off a yellow-crumbed chunk of corncake from the steaming platter. ‘Though there’s little enough sea traffic, I hear, with this corsair business shrivelling the trade. It’s not my choice, I’ll allow, not for now. But maybe I’ll come to feel differently, by then.’

  Gille said nothing, but bent to his porridge.

  The seaward road, winding westward down a wide river valley, was well made and well travelled, with villages and inns along its way. At first the smiths had little money to spare for these, and spent more time in stables and haystacks; but they rode in better spirits now, and in better harmony. Now that the immediate burden was off his shoulders, Kunrad became more his old self, and even took some heed of the world around him. Indeed, it was hard not to do so.

  This was a mild, fruitful land compared to Athalby, its soils laid down deep and soft by long slow rivers, its vales wooded with trees they had never seen the like of. The ancient, high-crowned dawn redwoods that grew around their home had seemed tall; but here were their successors, giants of their kind, monsters seeded before even a rumour of the returning Ice was heard in the land. For many a thousand years they had grown undisturbed by beast or man; and not by ones and twos, but in vast shadowy ranks that dwarfed even the stands of bristlecone pine about them, to be felled only by the hand of wind or lightning, nothing less. Few men would ever dare, for the danger and the sheer awe of them, and perhaps also the lingering fear of the power that lay upon the vast gloomy forests at the land’s heart, the hand of Tapiau.

  So it was that farms and villages had grown up among them, sometimes between the very risings of their enormous roots, or in the wide jagged ring left by a fallen trunk, where its seedlings already formed a natural palisade. Such ruined majesty dwarfed mere human habitation, but these were wealthy communities, eager to pay well for the labour of three good smiths. And since Kunrad no longer counted every second, and seemed content to leave his purpose to work itself out, they were free to take more work, and live in greater comfort. Yet often, whether they lay among the hay of a stable or in the featherbeds of a homely inn, Gille, stealing off to seek out the serving girl he had winked at, would hear the mastersmith muttering to himself, half in and out of sleep. ‘Not flank-rings!’ came the words, in tones of quiet anguish. ‘Not lame or leather, pauldron or tasset, staple or stop-rib! Not lining … planishing … not oil wanting or loose fastening, no! What, then? What? What …’

  It almost took the edge off Gille’s appetite.

  When the sun rose, though, Kunrad seemed as cheerful as ever, looking forward to the end of their road, and claiming to scent the sea in the warm west wind. Spring was shading into summer now, the early frost fading from the ground; and to men from the north of the land it already seemed warm. The bushes were glossy and green, and the first few flowers already spotting them with colour. In the ploughed fields the corn shoots were rising, and the hoes were hard at work, spades turning over the vegetable plots, rakes and forks spreading dung and clearing the orchards, axes and saws felling timber for seasoning and charcoal, metal-tyred wagon wheels bouncing along the roads. Spring was a busy time for smiths, too, and there was always work when they wanted it.

  ‘We can buy some new clothes when we come to the coast!’ said Gille cheerfully, shedding his cloak in the sunlight. ‘Make a better impression. You can get rid of that dead sheep, for a start!’

  ‘Leave it alone!’ said Kunrad angrily, as he twitched the fleece on his jerkin back into place. ‘I like it! It’s comfortable in all weathers!’

  ‘Makes him look tough!’ rumbled Olvar. ‘Huh!’

  Kunrad snorted contemptuously, but there was more than a grain of truth in it. Against the belted black tunic and trousers that were a smith’s garb, the bulky, old-fashioned jerkin sat rather oddly; still more so, with the gold-embroidered mastersmith’s insignia around the collar. But it bulked out Kunrad’s already broad chest and shoulders, and together with the plain sword tapping at his side made him a formidable figure, not one to trifle with. When local smiths felt inclined to whittle down his piecework rates, it was his look as much as his skill that dissuaded them.

  ‘That’s enough out of you!’ he snapped at Olvar. ‘Times were when a Mastersmith could expect decent respect from a prentice!’
/>   Olvar knew exactly how serious Kunrad’s anger was; and besides, he was almost as tall, and heavier. ‘Times were when they didn’t drag a prentice the length and breadth of the land after a wild goose!’ he retorted. ‘And clad like a mangy bellwether, at that!’

  ‘Clad in a mangy bellwether!’ added Gille, and then, quickly, lightly, ‘And pressgang them off to sea, too!’

  ‘One more word,’ growled the smith, ‘and I’ll trade the pair of you for my passage! You may not be much use for rowers, but you’d make fine float-bladders!’

  ‘Temper, temper!’ said Gille cheerfully. ‘So you do mean to take ship, then?’

  ‘He’s seen the light!’ boomed Olvar.

  Kunrad rounded on them, eyes suddenly not at all vague, so intense that Gille reined back in dismay.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Mastersmith slowly. ‘Yes, Gille. I do. I always have. That was not the part of my plan I doubted.’

  ‘Your plan?’ grunted Olvar in surprise. ‘But if you take ship—’

  ‘You said I could sink my worries in the sight of the Sea,’ Kunrad responded evenly. ‘At the village back there they said—’

  ‘I know, I know. From the next rise! I’ve heard that one before!’ Gille waved a hand at the ridge ahead. ‘And what’ll we see? The next rise after that! At this rate we’ll be old men before we reach this Ocean, for all you keep claiming you can smell it! Just the sweat-salt on our saddles, that’s all!’ He let an edge creep into his tone. ‘And Merthian’ll be back home and polishing up his armour for the front room, too!’

  He did not miss the way Kunrad’s hands clenched the reins. ‘Front room or castle keep, I’ll search it out. You can rely on that! And I won’t do it by losing heart over one hillock more or less!’

  ‘Then d’you mind telling us just how you do mean to find it – master?’

  ‘Hate to lower the level of the dispute,’ put in Olvar innocently, ‘but I know what the sea smells like. And I think I smell it too.’

  Kunrad was gone already, urging his horse to a canter up the steep road. The prentices, following more easily, saw him rein in at the top, and sit staring. ‘What’s got into him?’ demanded Gille.

  ‘Think I know,’ said Olvar, and nothing more, to Gille’s annoyance. But when they reached the ridge, he needed no explanation at all, but reined in at his master’s side, rapt.

  It was afternoon now, the sun westering low. No longer behind hills; there were none, for even the rise they stood on broke and dropped sheer and sudden to a grassy sward below. Towards an infinite hazy horizon the sun sank, and its long light traced a rippling track over the vast steely expanse of water, gilding the wave-crests that raced toward the wide shores far beneath their feet. Master and prentice alike were held close in thrall; infinity took their gaze. Olvar breathed deeper than he had for many a year, and rejoiced in the cool wind on his broad copper cheeks.

  ‘So wide,’ breathed Gille, wondering. ‘Endless. As if it could swallow all the land. Is there another shore, Mastersmith?’

  ‘So they say,’ said Kunrad dreamily. ‘Though it seems hard to believe, doesn’t it? Yet that’s the way Olvar’s ancestors came, from a land over there beyond the curve of the world, where the Ice has a far worse grip. And our ancestors crossed over another ocean, far in the east behind us, for the same cause. As if this was the crucible of the world, and we the metals to be smelted and alloyed within it …’

  ‘Coming over that!’ shuddered Gille, contemplating the white-capped churning, and the relentless beat and break along the shore. ‘Not through such waves, surely!’

  ‘That?’ laughed Olvar. ‘That’s but a light swell, an easy jog on a fine day. See, there’s craft enough around the harbour down there – the wakes, see, and the sails, skipping over the crests?’

  He stopped, startled. Even he had hardly noticed the sprawling stain along the far end of the bay, shapeless in the haze, as if it were no more than an extension of the sprawl of weed and debris along the tideline. Now the eye resolved it, stark against the low light, into spire and tower, turret and roof-peak, shadowed walls that stretched out to embrace a wide sea-pool, and calm it to blue glass that mirrored the sunset-reddened slopes above. Masts spiked out of the pool, like sea-thorns. ‘A harbour! Some size! Why, that’d be Saldenborg, no less!’

  ‘Saldenborg?’ said Gille, in swift excitement. ‘Then you do mean to head home after all, master?’

  At that point, it is said, Kunrad came nearest to abandoning his pursuit, seeing it as a paltry concern amidst all the vastness and variety of the world. But in that, though he had no way of knowing it, he was gravely mistaken.

  After a while, as the sea wind whipped his hair and plucked at his jerkin, his mood changed. Small he might be, before that great grey beast that breathed at the shore, or before the grim enormity of the Ice. But his life ran through them like a thread of warmth, swift and changing. A leaf that leaps up from the earth and is gone in a summer, perhaps; but for that time it was green and living, while the earth remained as still and grey as before. That life was all he had, and the part that was riven from him he must regain, or never fully live again. ‘Come then, if you’re coming!’ he said, and urged his horse down the long slopes that led to the sea.

  ‘Come? But come where?’ shouted Gille, as he and Olvar cantered to catch up. ‘There? And to what end? Where’s this plan of yours to lead us?’

  Kunrad glanced round. ‘I thought you might have worked it out by now,’ he said mildly. ‘I mean to take ship: but not for home.’

  Gille rose in his stirrups, and swore. ‘I wondered! I wondered, the River swallow it! But I thought not even you – foolhardy, boneheaded son of a—’ He choked with anger and disappointment. Olvar sat stolid and grim, but his eyes burned like coals under drooping lids.

  Kunrad looked at them. ‘I never promised you anything else. And I would not risk such a venture without a clear purpose. Merthian will be headed south now, no doubt – but suppose we come there before him?’

  ‘Come where – in the Southlands?’ gobbled Olvar. ‘To do what, by Saithana’s tits?’

  ‘Lay charges against him, of course. Formal charges. All the way to Ker Bryhaine itself, and the Syndicacy.’

  ‘Among his own fellows? Hold him, Gille, he’ll start barking any bloody moment!’

  ‘I’m … not so sure,’ said Gille, swaying in the saddle. ‘Master, you may have something here!’

  ‘The Guildmaster gave me the core of the idea, back at Rasby,’ said Kunrad cheerfully. ‘Talking about Merthian’s dignity, and about the causes of war. I’ve turned it over and over, and it makes sense still. His fellow lordlings, they’d see this raiding as pretty petty stuff, wouldn’t they? Jolly bad form. Beneath the dignity of a man who could pay for it.’

  ‘Even of Northerners?’

  ‘Especially of us, when there’s a war brewing. And over accusations of brigandage. Something that petty, that silly; yet something that could spark off a bloody quarrel, because it’s provable. They aren’t going to like it much, those Syndic fellows. Some of them will be against war, I hear; and they’ll be furious with Merthian. And the rest, well, in such a time it won’t suit them to be openly unjust. They’d lose their dignity, and give the North a real grievance. At least—’ Kunrad sucked his teeth uneasily. ‘At least, I hope I can convince them of that.’

  Olvar whistled. ‘A bold stroke, Mastersmith – and a better one than just flapping forever after Merthian’s shirt-tails. But it’s a risky one. You could be putting your head between the bear’s paws. You don’t know these lordie fellows, after all.’

  ‘No, but I’ve talked to some who do, the Guildmaster and others. They agree. And they tell me that although this corsair business has been shrivelling the trade, there are still captains making the passage. Since you say there are craft down there – I can’t make them out, not against the sun. Any big boats?’

  ‘Ships, you mean?’ Olvar squinted. ‘Now that’s odd, Mastersmith, because there aren’t.
A few smaller sails, coasters and so on; there’re some taller masts in the harbour, too many to pick ’em out clear. But round such a port I’d look to see one big merchantman, at least, bound south or north. Odd, indeed!’

  Kunrad tossed his head. ‘Well, we’ll get our answers the sooner we come there. No Guildhall for us tonight, lads, but an inn, one where captains and seamasters lodge ashore. We may have some searching to do!’

  Around every bend of the bay road the great port of Saldenborg grew clearer through the haze. The land was hilly to the sea’s brink, so the town itself rose and fell across it in a wave, like some vast brown hank of storm-flung kelp. From afar off the smiths marvelled at the sprawl of it, the rising reek of its chimneys and the eccentric wavering line of its outer wall that, wide as it was, could not contain the life within. Here and there the crazy pattern of streets spilled over it into a scattered undertown, straggling out along the roads that led in from every direction.

  As they drew closer, though, the brown stain resolved into a jagged jumble of rooftops, mostly wood-tiled as in their own town, but spattered here and there with richer cladding. The lowering light turned wood to copper, copper to glowing beryl and bronze to gold; and those tiles already gilded, for Saldenborg was rich, it ran with liquid flame. Towers they were, some of the roofs, and railed raised platforms where merchants could watch for their ships and captains their commands. Others, down towards the harbour, were lower but strong, hefty gable-ended houses for wares, fortresses against afflictions such as weather and thieves. And beyond them in the harbour itself gleamed summits of a different kind, the mastheads Olvar had seen. Masts naked of sail, unready to put to sea, great ships like basking seals cluttered the harbour, clustered along cramped moorings, rocking idle in the gentle swell.

  ‘You’d think they’d moor some in those pools along the shore!’ exclaimed Gille.

  ‘No,’ said Kunrad. ‘See how’ much bluer they are! That’s shallow water, over a white bed. Those must be the saltpans this place is named for, wider than the fields and richer. All the salt you’ve ever eaten comes from these parts, unless it were the expensive stuff ground from rock, or the cheapest from ashes. It’s here that your food is flavoured and preserved; and it preserves us too, from the ills that strike inlanders prived of it.’