Many waves cannot quench love, neither can the
floods drown
it.
The Song of Songs,
which is Solomon’s
There’d been no disabling wounds among the Gal’s crew, nor anyone slain except Gale-Baiter. Replacements were put aboard the brig and her own personnel, Gil included, transferred to the four-masted barque, the Osprey. The Prince Who Sails Forever had questions for all of them.
Wavewatcher and Skewerskean appointed themselves the American’s unofficial custodians. They helped him up the boarding ladder and hustled him below decks, out of the way of busy crewmen. The forecastle was crowded, the ship having manned for war, but the two partners found Gil room to stow his gear and rig a hammock alongside theirs in a converted storeroom.
Osprey and her half-score escorts, smaller two- and three-masted vessels, were working toward the Outer Hub, scouring the coast, insuring that no enemy had eluded them. The fleet had been late for its rendezvous with the Long-Dock Gal, apparently arriving shortly after the Hand of Salamá had fled south. The Prince had sent a party ashore at the opposite side of the delta, to assure that Death’s Hold had been completely gutted. The party, spying the Gal’s predicament as she neared the Wheywater’s mouth, had rushed to tell their Liege. Swift ships were being sent after Yardiff Bey’s even as Gil boarded Osprey.
Wavewatcher and Skewerskean had to make their full report to the Prince, explaining that the Lord of Sailors was eager for any news off the wind-roads.
“What are wind-roads?” Gil wanted to know.
The harpooner was shocked by his ignorance. “Why, the breezes of the air, which are thoroughfares of the oceans. In that wise, we Mariners call ourselves Children of the Wind-Roads.”
“Never heard it before. How long till we get to this Isle of Keys?”
“Scuttlebutt aboard of here says this flagship will soon join the rest of the fleet at the Outer Hub. But the seas are ours once more, and many Mariners would rather put aside further enmities with landlubbers. Um, nothing personal.”
“No offense.”
“Most feel, though, as does the Prince, that no trace of Salamá should be tolerated, especially on the strategic Isle of Keys.”
“What will the Prince do?”
“Put his recommendation before a gathering of masts, as when we voted for war after the Inner Hub was razed.”
Gil made a sour face.
“Bey got what he wanted in Glyffa. Salamá is ahead of the game.”
The partners frowned at one another. “The Prince will want to hear this,” Wavewatcher concluded. Both got up to go. Gil stripped off his blood-spattered byrnie and reclined in his hammock.
The storeroom was dim, filled with the smell of Osprey’s wood and odors of a thousand cargoes and sailors, smoke of lamps, and the bite of incense. Two Mariners, off watch, were throwing dice for IOUs. They noted the stained byrnie, nodded to the American’s casual greeting, and left it at that.
Osprey was making way now, her bow rising and falling on the open sea. Gil thought for awhile that he might grow seasick from the hammock’s sway, but depleted by the Rage, he fell asleep instead. Skewerskean shook him awake, saying the Prince wanted to speak with him. The American rose unsteadily, having no sea legs, and followed the two through narrow passageways and ladderwells.
He emerged at last, to take his first good look around the barque. High overhead, cirrus clouds were torn and shredded by the winds, in shapes of stress and speed. Down at sea level though, there was only a light breeze to carry the sails. Low swells rolled, the color of blue ink, and Osprey’s bow sliced the water at a leisurely five knots.
By Crescent Lands standards, the barque was a giant, a quantum leap in marine design. She had four tall masts, rigged with what looked to Gil like ten square miles of canvas and duck. It risked vertigo for him to peer up the six courses of sail on the mainmast, to the ship’s summit. The mazework of creaking rigging held the eye, bewildering it, as wheeling seabirds called out over the sheering of the barque’s bow wave.
Men were scrubbing down the deck, coiling line and doing other work, but there were racks of javelins, cutlasses, pikes and shields close to hand. He made his way aft and stopped when Wavewatcher did, the harpooner calling for permission to mount the quarterdeck. An officer in trim blue silk granted it. The two partners waited behind, as Gil clambered up the ladder.
Under the curved spanker sail an awning had been set, shading cushions and a sturdy-legged table burdened with food. A man waited there, a short, erect figure with a crisp white goatee and the bluest eyes Gil had ever seen, in a crinkled brown face. He wore a uniform of white linen and held a staff almost as tall as himself, an osseous twist of narwhale horn capped with a golden sea horse. Over his heart was pinned a golden broach shaped for his ship’s namesake, an osprey. The Prince Who Sails Forever.
“It is gracious of you to come,” he began, “for I know you have been through much. I am Landlorn, captain of the Osprey and of the Mariners too, it may be admitted. Will you sit and take your ease with me?”
When Gil was seated, the Prince of the Waves continued. “Gilbert MacDonald, I believe you are named? And they call you Gil? May I? Thank you. I should be much in your debt if you would relate more of the events current in this war being fought inland.”
“Oh, sure, your Grace. It—”
“Ah, please! Friends call me Landlorn; will you not do me that honor?”
Gil took to the Prince from the start, to the scrupulous courtesy extended to everyone. He was sure that anyone who led the rowdy Mariners could be a hard-case boss when he had to. Soon, he was telling Landlorn his story, of the Two-Bard Commission and of Yardiff Bey, Cynosure and Blazetongue and the Occhlon, and of Arrivals Macabre.
In the end, the Prince said, “You shall come into your chance to see the Isle of Keys, if the Mariners second my will of it; dislodging southerners from their sea-keep is work for the Children of the Wind-Roads, and therein lies tragedy, for I would rather they could stay out of it, unparticipant.” His expression showed private sadness, then he roused himself. “I trust you’ve been made comfortable?”
“Thank you, yes. But it’s all a bit strange for me; I’m a dry-land type.”
Landlorn’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, but I, too, am a landsman by birth.”
“You? Then how’d you end up here?” Gil saw immediately that it had been a gaffe. Gil had answered the Prince’s questions though, and Landlorn’s etiquette compelled him to do likewise.
“I come of royalty; one of the lesser kingdoms whose name you would not know. My older brother had the throne, and there was little liking between us. He proclaimed it my duty to fetch him the bride he’d been promised by a neighboring king. I was to bring her by sea, and was obliged to swear by oaths of honor and magic that I would make no other landfall until I had brought her to him, do you see?
“Her name was Serene. On that voyage she came to mean much to me. We were attacked by corsairs and our ship burned, leaving us two adrift on a hatch cover for days. Mariners picked us up at last, a rough-handed lot not much better than pirates themselves, then.”
He broke off, listening to men working to a long-haul chantey. Skewerskean’s clear voice joined in, holding to the higher notes playfully.
“We might have plead for ransoming, but I would not yield her up to my brother after all we had gone through, and Serene did not wish it either. I was sufficiently the swordsman that those nomads took me on. So you will understand, this royal scion started out lowly on the backs of the oceans. I thought the day must soon come when I should be free of my vow, and I would wait it out.
“But I had to shun the shore, so my crewmates dubbed me Landlorn. I acquired the ways of the sea, learned, mastered. I had been schooled, and so could resurrect lost lore from old books that had survived the Great Blow, and Osprey is one product of that. The Mariners put me at their head and I am content, though there was more to it than that. My brother is dead now, and the bonds of my vows eternal unless I become Oathbreaker and risk the magic that sealed them. But I love the oceans; much rather would I be sentenced to life at sea than the same on land exclusively. I have seen the waters in all their stations and offices; the Wind-Roads are my realm and Serene is mine, and I am fulfilled.”
Landlorn was speaking absently now, staring off over the sea. Gil said a fast good-bye and rejoined the harpooner and the chanteyman at the quarterdeck ladder. He marveled at the Prince’s story, wondering why it had left him with a deep, unidentified sadness.
Wavewatcher and Skewerskean gave him a hand in picking up what Mariner life was all about, and became his friends. They replaced his torn and bloodied clothes with new ones, a soft sealskin shirt and buckskin pants and jacket. The jacket had wing epaulets, sewn with metal lamellae to protect the shoulders from sword cuts.
Then the American was introduced to Mariner life. The Children of the Wind-Roads, under the care and dominion of the currents of air and ocean, were intimates with them. They had dozens of names for dawn, even more for sunset, cloud formations and portents of weather. Gil would point to swells in the morning and ask the Mariner name for them, but when he’d ask again at noon, the swells looking no different to him, the two would have a new answer. The nuances escaped him completely.
The sailors defined the subtlest variations in clouds, their height, texture, luminosity and drift. Weather predictions were extraordinarily accurate. Charts were exhaustive, and the shorelines on maps, but interiors were largely ignored; the Mariners merely called them “inlands.” When Gil mentioned it, Skewerskean countered, “Does the landsman’s map tell of reef, channel and shoal?”
Wavewatcher added, “And does the hawk concern himself with the rabbit’s warren?”
They had their own estimations of worth. A man could be unexcelled with weapons or bare hands, but if he lost equilibrium aloft or couldn’t steer by the stars, his status was lowly. Wavewatcher, who’d hunted the whale whose every part was valuable to the Mariners, was listened to with respect, but Skewerskean’s chantey’s made work easier, whether he sang a hand-over-hand to synchronize the tautening of the braces, or a long-haul ditty for heavier work. The little man was therefore the more welcome shipmate, with his gift for making drudgery bearable. His repertoire was staggering, though he could improvise endlessly on any subject, high or low.
“Mariners would sooner swear than discourse,” he told Gil, “but they would sooner sing than swear.” Tradition, law, philosophy and mythology were all bound up in memorized verses and sagas, chanteys and hymns. Restless voices poured out gratitude, humor, pride and pain.
Raised by one parent or the other, Mariner boys might spend their youngest years at sea or ashore. But early in life they began learning the lore of their peculiar tribe. When a Mariner youth took his first ship as a man, he swam to it, from shore or another ship. Naked, without one article from his former life, he made his rite of passage. His survival depended solely on his new shipmates; he might not see his loved ones for years or, in some cases, ever again. Among them he’d have to earn, beg or otherwise obtain all that he needed or wanted in life. Subsequent changes of berth would be more sedate, made as an adult. Yet, all Mariners were fond of exchanging stories about their frightening Free Plunge, as they called it, through menacing waters to an unknown world, their first ship.
Life in the closeness of Osprey was rigidly codified. Each person had a right to as much privacy as was feasible, under Ship’s Articles. The first things the two partners taught Gil were the priorities for right-of-way on deck and in the passageways and ladderwells. As supernumerary, the American classed among the lowest groups, having to defer to officers, men on duty, and virtually anyone else with anything useful to do. The pecking order was complicated: a junior officer off watch would be expected to yield way to a crewman on duty if the weather placed certain demands on the ship. There were dozens of individual rules. Gil simply let anybody who wanted to pass him go right ahead.
Sleeping accommodations, food, free time and shares of profit were governed by strict laws of propriety. Over everything loomed the sanctity of the Ship, holy of holies. Every thought and action must be considered in the context of its effect on that common bond, shared habitat.
Osprey’s crew was an elite. The barque was Landlorn’s greatest accomplishment, and there was always more to learn from her. Gil lost himself in blue days and starry nights, motionless gulls shedding air from their wings, the creaking and snapping of rigging. He was making decent headway after Yardiff Bey. The Prince wanted to go against the Isle of Keys, and the Southwastelanders were being driven from the Crescent Lands. At times, he was very nearly content.
But other sails began to appear in the sea around Osprey, a field of sailcloth bearing for the Outer Hub, to hear the rede of war.