The Ships of Merior. Janny Wurts
Medlir redistributed the mud-flecked blankets over the Masterbard’s knees. ‘If these townsmen have execrable taste, I could always try those ballads we heard in the sailors’ dives at Werpoint.’
Halliron returned a choked cough, whatever he had in mind undone by Dakar’s antics as he fell off the same stone twice trying to remount the brown gelding.
‘You’ll break your neck getting on that way!’ Medlir called, his fingers busy taking the pony’s surcingle up a hole.
Puffing, beet-faced, in no mood for criticism from a man who understood nothing about the trials of being fat, Dakar clambered back up the rock. ‘Since when do you know so much about horses?’
‘Maybe my parents were drifters,’ Medlir said.
‘Hah!’ The Mad Prophet achieved precarious balance on one foot. ‘Foxes, more like. You say crafty little about yourself.’
A shallow smile touched Medlir’s features, accompanied by ingenuously raised brows. ‘Foxes bite.’
‘Well, I know I’m prying.’ Dakar poised himself, leaped, and grabbed, while his steed staggered into a clattering half-passe. The Mad Prophet landed astride through a miracle, both fists balled in mane-hanks to arrest a pitch over the saddle’s far side. As his mount was coerced to cease milling, he added, ‘Faery-toes makes better company.’
‘Faery-toes? That?’ Halliron poked his nose out of his blankets and fixed dubious eyes on hooves that were round and fluted as meat platters.
‘Well of course,’ said Dakar, offended. ‘The name suits him fine, don’t you think?’
The party moved on; into shadows that lengthened to grey dusk, swallowed early by fog off the bay.
Darkness had fallen as they rounded the bend before Jaelot’s wide gates. Situated on a beak-head of land that jutted out into the bay, the town was walled with black rock. Torches in iron baskets burned from the keeps, which were octagonal, with slate roofs buttressed by gargoyles that loomed and leered and lolled obscene tongues over gate-turrets chiselled from white quartz. These were emblazoned with rampant lions, each bearing a snake in its mouth.
‘Ugly.’ By now querulously tired, Halliron regarded the carvings with distaste while the tarnished strips of tin hung as ward talismans jangled and clinked in thin dissonance. ‘The Paravian gates torn down from this site were said to be fashioned of agate, and counter-weighted to swing at a hand’s touch.’
This was a Second Age fortress?’ Medlir asked. ‘How surprising to find it inhabited.’ He soothed the cross-grained buckskin to a halt as the gate watch called down gruff challenge. He had to answer without hearing his master’s return comment. ‘We’re wayfarers, two minstrels and a companion. We shouldn’t be stopping here at all, except the old man needs shelter.’
‘Pull aside then.’ The watch captain lounged in his niche, his breath plumed in flamelight. ‘The post courier’s overdue from Tharidor, and the gates’ll be opened when he’s in.’
‘There’s courtesy for you,’ Halliron said between sneezes. ‘I knew we should have made camp. If the courier hasn’t come to grief in the dark, well have our choice of three inns, all of them cavernously dim and dirty, and not a one of them honest.’
‘Which has the best ale?’ asked Dakar.
‘Who knows?’ The Masterbard sighed. ‘In Jaelot, they cut the brew with water.’
By chance, their wait became shortened. While Medlir fussed over his master, and Dakar communed with his mount, a barrel-chested wagonmaster in sheepskins rolled in, swearing at his team and unhappy to be missing his dinner. He brandished his whip at the gate house, while his sweated horses sidled and stamped and struck blue-edged sparks from the pavement. It’s that thrice-cursed shipment from the mill I’m carrying, the one with the mayor’s seal on it.’
The gates were opened very swiftly indeed, while something clicked in the brain of Dakar’s camel-necked chestnut that said stable, and comfort, and oats. It pinned back rabbity ears and lunged to harry the wagon team through.
The lead pair were blinkered. The first the near one knew of Faery-toes’ attentions was a nip of yellow teeth at its flanks.
It veered to a bounding grind of singletrees, while Dakar, howling mightily, sawed nerveless mouth with both reins and fell off. He had the aplomb to roll clear, while the carter whipcracked and cursed.
The lash caught the gelding on the nose. He wind-milled sideways on splayed feet, rat-tail flailing. Eyes rolled white, his nostrils expanded into a snort that blew steam, he half-reared and reversed to a thunderous clatter of hooves. His gaunt rump jammed the wheel horse in the shoulder. It staggered, squealing. The rest of the team careened sideways and jack-knifed the dray between the gate turrets with Faery-toes folded amidst them like a misguided log in a torrent.
Oaths became lost in the crack of shod hooves as a brief show of stamping coalesced to a five horse brawl amid the traces.
The carter clung to his swaying box like a man on a half-foundered vessel, plying his lash and a poisonous stream of threats upon his scuffling team to no avail. Leather parted; tenets burst from collar stuffing to a scream of splintering wood. Unnoticed atop the swaying wagon bed, lashings creaked and shifted loose. A springy bundle of cypress teetered, then tipped like an unfolding set of shears and swan-dived onto the pavement.
The splintering crack of impact raised stinging reverberations under the confines of the gate arch. The wheel pair parted sideways in a violent shy and the carter threw down his whip, crying murder, as eighty board feet of rare moulding custom-carved to please the mayor’s wife became milled to pale slivers beneath his wheels.
Through a small, stunned second, the torches dimmed in a swooping gust of wind. Under their demonic flicker, the carter turned red and tare at his sideburns with his fists. The draught team milled, netted in. slackened traces and flighty as shoaling fish; while the mis-shapen cause of the disaster stood nonplussed, conversing in great sucking gusts with the wheel horses.
‘Curse of a fiend!’ The carter unfurled from his box in a frog-leap that landed him beside the russet-brown bundle that was Dakar. ‘What in Sithaer will you do about that misbegotten insult of a horse?’
‘Misbegotten? Insult?’ Dakar inspected the burly antagonist planted over him, fists cocked for mayhem, and his hair screwed free of an oiled felt cap like tufts of snarled wool on a shuttlecock. ‘You’re pretty ugly yourself, you know.’ Through the half-breath while the carter was stunned speechless, the Mad Prophet pushed past, retrieved trailing reins, and hauled Faery-toes out backwards from the tangle of shafts and shredded harness.
While Halliron and Medlir watched amazed, a safe distance removed in the pony cart, Dakar came back, towing horse. He poised before the irate carter, oblivious to the pounding from the adjacent gate houses, as the watch on duty pelted downstairs in armed readiness to forestall an altercation.
‘I suggest you forgive the old boy.’ When the nag butted a congenial head against the carter’s shoulder and knocked him a half-step back, Dakar added, ‘How could you not? He likes you.’
The carter purpled and swung. The suet-round face of his target vanished as Dakar ducked and fled beneath the saddle girth. Bunched knuckles smacked against the barrel-sprung ribs of the horse, who responded from both ends with a grunt and a fart like an explosion.
‘Oh my,’ cried Dakar, stifling a chortle. ‘Your wife’s nose must look like a pudding if that’s your reaction to her kisses.’
The carter dove under the gelding’s neck in a fit of killing fury while the horse, ears flat, parted gaunt jowls and snapped.
Teeth closed over greasy fleece, and the breeches of the carter burst a critical seam. The Mad Prophet sidestepped around the chestnut’s churning quarters, blithe in rebuke as he passed, ‘Leave him alone, Faery-toes. Your affection’s a wee bit misplaced. You know this fellow