Then many things happened all at once. Tomiyano and one-armed Katanji guided the ends of oars through the ports as Wallie stepped down and struck the sorcerer on the head with a bar of wood. Voices yelled on the dock. Nnanji grabbed Katanji's oar and heaved, while Tomiyano heaved on his. Holiyi took a running jump through the cargo hatch and his feet hit the gratings with a crash. Griffon surged and began to move, propelled by the oars pushing against the dock. Wallie went to help Nnanji; Holiyi to Tomiyano. The clatter of the falling gangplank mingled with a scream and a splash—possibly a sorcerer had gone to the Goddess—then the oars fell uselessly through the ports and the ship was adrift . . . and no one else had boarded.
"Down!" Wallie yelled, but the others were already dropping to the smelly gratings. A fusillade of shots made three small holes in the planking and a shower of splinters spattered. Then the sound of chaos, familiar from Ov—horses screaming, people yelling, wagons overturning . . .
Griffon rocked gently and calmly. The sunlight below the hatches moved as the ship turned in the current and the wind. How long to reload the pistols? Would the wind hold for their escape? Would Griffon foul another vessel and be invaded by a troop of outraged sorcerers? The prisoner was unconscious. Awkwardly, and without rising, Wallie reached over and tied the man's hands behind his back.
The noise from the dock was fading. The sorcerers should have been able to reload by now. What were they doing instead? Wallie rose to his feet and dashed for the ladder. Two rungs up he saw rigging over the gunwale, but far away. Then the tower came into view, and the tops of warehouses, all black against the darkening sky. He decided he was out of reasonable musket range and finished his climb to the deck.
At once he saw what Tomiyano had meant about plenty of room. There were many ships at both ends of the harbor, leaving the center strangely empty. The slimy masonry of the dock itself was visible, and the road and the warehouses beyond it. The captain had moored in that long gap—any captain would.
It was a trap!
Wallie bellowed for the sailors and began to fumble inexpertly with ropes. Crowds had been running for shelter, horses bolting and rearing at the noise, but the road was clearing rapidly.
Tomiyano and Holiyi appeared and began to hoist sail. There was wind, but not very much. Griffon acknowledged it sluggishly, swinging her bow toward open River with reluctance. As nasty crawling feelings ran over his skin, Wallie studied the dock and waited. He was out of range for pistols, but not for cannon. The two closest ships were flying red flags, so the orders had been to stay out of the flagged area.
Nnanji and Thana came scrambling up the ladder, and Wallie yelled to them to take cover again, but Doa was coming up behind them, free of her bonds.
Almost simultaneously, three columns of black smoke jetted skyward beside the warehouses. Two more followed at once. The roar of cannons thumped at his ears and he saw the horses panic once more. Vertical? He raised his eyes and thought he saw one black speck in motion.
"Those were very big thunderbolts, brother," Nnanji said judiciously. Then waterspouts reared all around and Griffon staggered. A spray of mist blew over the deck. Close!
Mortars would not take long to reload. Wallie was about to order everyone below again, then decided that a cannonball could kill all of them just as easily there as here. They all began coughing as the cloud of gray smoke overtook the ship. Black powder made an astonishing amount of smoke.
"Tack!" he shouted. Tomiyano started to argue and Wallie yelled at him. Griffon changed course slightly as two—four—five more explosions mushroomed from the roadway. This time he certainly saw a couple of the balls in flight and pointed them out. They seemed to take a long time falling. Mortars would have less chance of hitting a ship than cannons, but they would do far more damage, knocking a hole in the keel. Traveling horizontally, a cannonball would merely go straight through the hull, unless it was lucky enough to hit a mast.
Waterspouts again—and one just off the bow. A torrent of water fell against the sails and over the deck, making the ship shudder and heel. Katanji and Thana were hurled down and everyone was soaked. Tomiyano swore angrily and changed course slightly again. Now he could see the need to dodge. Wallie peered into the hatch, but there was surprisingly little water in the hold. He hoped that piranha could not survive being carried aboard in that rough fashion, or the prisoner would be nibbled to tatters.
Much too close for comfort! Their escape was agonizingly slow. The sorcerers would be able to get in at least one more good shot before Griffon was out of effective range. Why was it taking them so long?
His friends were battle-tested veterans. They were tense and most of them were clutching the rail very firmly, but there was no panic. He looked to see how Doa was reacting and saw at once that he need not worry. She was soaked, her hair bedraggled, but her face glowed with excitement. Her eyes were shining. She noticed his attention, smiled happily, and said, "Wonderful!" She was an astonishing woman!
Obviously Griffon had arrived while the sorcerers were rehearsing their reception for the arrival of the tryst. A wide empty space would attract the unsuspecting ships and allow a clear field of fire. That might even explain why a Seventh had been down at the docks.
"Nnanji?" Wallie said in the calmest voice he could muster. "We never heard of a sorcerer city having more than one Seventh, did we?"
"No, brother."
"Then you realize who that is in the hold?"
"Rotanxi!" Nnanji shouted. "The wizard! The man who sent the kilts to the lodge?"
Before Wallie could answer smoke gushed once more from the warehouse doors where the cannons were; but this time the jets were horizontal, and there were no waterspouts. As the noise arrived, so the River boiled—astern of Griffon and off to each side. White clouds of mist rose and then faded again. Grapeshot! Wallie shivered convulsively.
The gods might have ruled out miracles, but they were not withholding good luck. The sorcerers had been prepared to repulse an approaching attack, not to destroy a departing fugitive, so initially the cannons had been set in mortar position and armed with balls, for distance. Probably it took time to reset them for their close-range use as cannons, firing grapeshot. Against ships full of swordsmen the grape would be a hundred times more deadly—it would sweep the decks clean. Had the grape come first, while Griffon was nearer, then she would have been blasted to sawdust.
Slowly, so slowly, they were retreating from the dock.
"Get below!" he roared. "All of you!"
He tried to take the tiller from Tomiyano while the others obeyed orders, there was an argument. Before the matter was settled, the sorcerers tried again. This time the shots fell short. Wallie relaxed and wiped his brow. They were out of range of the grape and only a very lucky shot with a ball could hit them now. Today the luck was with the swordsmen.
* * *
Conscious and wearing his cowled gown, the sorcerer would be an imposing figure. He was tall and ruddy-faced, with eyebrows like snowbanks and stark, craggy features. Wallie guessed that he was a well-preserved seventy.
He was beginning to stir and groan. Wallie untied his hands and stripped off the heavy robe. As Katanji had noted long ago, a sorcerer's gown was lumpy. It held innumerable pockets, bulging with mysterious clunky objects. Wallie thrilled with satisfaction at the thought of unmasking the sorcerers' craft with this evidence.
His victim was not imposing now. He was a pathetic figure in a short cotton shirt that failed to hide a potbelly and spindly old-man's legs, blotched with varicose veins. His white hair was thin and matted in two places with dried blood, but his injuries seemed to be confined to those. Wallie dressed him in the fake gown that Lae had made, slung him over his shoulder, and carried him up to the deck.
Pulse, pupils . . . the old man was apparently in fair shape and now he was starting to come around, blinking, groaning, and drooling. Wallie leaned him against the upturned dinghy and turned to Nnanji, whose face bore enough satisfaction to embellish a victorious army.
"Watch him, master!" Wallie said. "He'll be over the rail in a flash if we let him—and we want him alive!"
Then he went below to fetch the mysterious robe and a flask of wine.
The wind was rising again. The sun balanced still on the horizon, bloodied by volcanic dust, so obviously the whole escapade had taken much less time than it had seemed to. Triumph! Heroes were certainly allowed to be lucky. Remembering how close to Griffon the grapeshot had foamed, Wallie dampened his self-congratulation with a silent prayer of thanksgiving. The gunnery had been impressive—but so had the good fortune.
He sat on the deck close to Tomiyano, facing the sorcerer. The others gathered around, chattering and grinning in victory and relief. Nnanji and Thana were cuddling each other, release of tension rousing other instincts. Doa, strangely solemn, was studying the sorcerer and absentmindedly tugging a comb through her wet hair, while Wallie ran his eye longingly over the wondrous length of her shapely legs, conscious of his own instincts in action. She noticed his attention and sent him a coquettishly inviting smile. It was probably no more genuine than its predecessors, but it still raised his heartbeat for a moment.
He passed the wine bottle around and studied the gown spread out before him. It was soaked and smelly with bilge. One of the lumps had seemed to twitch when he touched it, so he started with that. After a cautious peek in the pocket, he reached in, fumbled, and pulled out a bird, Tomiyano said he would be a barnacle's grandmother.
"Not just a bird," Wallie crowed. "It's a pigeon and it has a band on its leg." The others exchanged impressed glances. He put the bird back in the pocket and tried the next.
"And what's this?" He set his discovery upon his nose and the audience howled with laughter. Eyeglasses were the first step toward the telescope, of course. Everything had to be explained, and they all tried the glasses.
"And here's a . . . " He tried to say "quill pen" and stuttered into silence. "Quill . . . brush?" That came out. "Must be ink in this bottle? Right!" He knew the word for ink, although it meant only what came out of an octopus.
The same pocket also held tiny fragments of vellum, so fine that it might have been bird skin. Wallie chuckled, suddenly remembering his childhood and the Christmas parties when his father had hidden favors in a bran tub for the youngsters to find. This was more fun.
"Will you all promise not to tell anyone else about this?" he asked, and got a ballet of nodding heads. With the quill and the small ink bottle, he drew seven swords on one of the scraps of vellum and held it out for them to look at it.
"What does that mean?" he asked.
Chorus: "A swordsman of the Seventh."
Then he attempted to draw a griffon. It looked like a pregnant camel. "And what does that all mean?"
A puzzled, frowning silence was broken by Katanji. "The seventh sword?"
"Right you are!" There was still enough light for flying; Wallie waved the vellum to dry it, then retrieved the pigeon and slid the message into its band. "Let's send the sign back to the tower." He tossed the bird into the air. They watched it circle and climb and vanish in the direction of Sen.
"That is how they send messages," Wallie explained. "The ink comes from the squid. You tend to get it on your fingers, of course," he added ruefully as he recorked the bottle—he was not experienced with a quill. He studied faces. They looked impressed and happy. Nnanji and Thana were paying more attention to each other, sniggering again already. The sailors were grinning. Only Doa seemed worried and puzzled. Katanji was staring at the pen and the vellum, thinking.
"You are becoming a nuisance," the sorcerer said in a deep voice, glaring. "Lord Shonsu!" He looked around. "Master Nnanji, the wagon driver? And Novice Katanji, who understandably prefers being a slave to being a swordsman. The mendacious Captain Tomiyano, of course. Lady Doa, you keep strange company!"
The audience hissed at this sorcery. Wallie laughed and pointed at Holiyi. "What's his name?"
The sorcerer shrugged. "It is upon you that I shall set my curses," he said. "I have summoned demons—"
"Pigeon droppings!" Wallie said. "You have spies in Casr, so you know who we are. I don't scare with demons and curses, Lord Rotanxi."
The man was groggy still, or else too proud, for he did not deny the name.
Doa said quietly, "It is you who are in strange company, my lord."
"He probably has a sore head," Wallie said. "Would you like a drink of water? No? Just speak up if you want a blanket or something. Now, let's carry on." Carefully he reached into another pocket. "Any guesses on this treasure? Little sticks with something on the ends!" Matches? He struck one and his audience gasped. That meant phosphorus, so his guess had been correct. "Sorcerer, what's your name for the stuff you make these with? It's soft and yellow, and you have to keep it under water or it goes on fire. Come on, man, I know all about it! I just want to know what you call it."
Furious silence.
"Do you know how to make it safer by heating it?" Wallie asked. "It turns red."
Obviously the answer was yes. "How do you know these things?" the prisoner demanded, shocked.
"That's a long story. I'm a better sorcerer than you are. I know that you can see a long way from your tower with a thing made of glass. And I know how to make messages with your quill and the ink, although I can't do it in your words."
The sorcerer seemed to shrink.
Wallie went back to the gown. "Now what's in this pocket? Ah, here we have the thunderbolt." He showed the others the pistol. It was a single-barrel muzzle loader. He had anticipated a flintlock, but the mechanism used a phosphorus-based friction cap—very ingenious. The workmanship was exquisite, the butt scrolled with silver and mother-of-pearl. More rummaging uncovered lead balls, but also measured packets of gunpowder like cartridges, and fortunately these had stayed dry, in a separate leather bag. He had expected a powder horn.
"This, I suppose, you would call thunderpowder. It's made from sulfur and charcoal and saltpeter." Wallie examined the balls and explained how the pistol shot them out, Nnanji scowled and the others were disgusted.
Rotanxi was pale. This display of knowledge must be more of a shock to him than the rough treatment had been. "Who are you?" he demanded.
"My name is Shonsu, as you said. I am on the side of the Goddess and the swordsmen and I am going to take you to Casr and show the tryst this weapon. That was what I came for, and you yourself are only a bonus. I hope that I can become leader, so that the tryst will not do stupid things like making frontal attacks on Sen."
The sorcerer straightened his back against the dinghy and attempted a triumphant sneer. He had an arrogant, aristocrat's face—deep-set eyes below those snowy eyebrows, high aquiline nose, long upper lip—a good face for sneering, a Roman fallen among Goths. "You are too late, Shonsu. Yesterday the swordsmen held their absurd ceremony of trying to kill each other to see who is the biggest butcher. The juvenile Boariyi won. How curious to choose a leader by the length of his arms!"
Nnanji muttered an oath and looked at Wallie to see if he ought to believe this.
"So they are on their way?" Wallie inquired.
The sorcerer hesitated, and then said, "They embark tomorrow at dawn."
"That's very quick work!" Wallie said as innocently as he could manage. "All that food and stuff . . . "
Rotanxi sneered. "They have no choice, because they have no money left."
"Well, then we shall intercept them and warn them about your big thunderbolts."
"Ha! You can't! They are going to Wal, not coming here. It is possible that they will change their minds, but Sen is ready if they do."
"Wal is much farther," Wallie said, frowning. "It seems foolish, especially since it was you who sent the kilts. Why Wal?"
"They think to outsmart sorcerers!" Rotanxi retorted with an ocean of contempt.
"Seems to me that Lord Shonsu outsmarted you easily enough!" Nnanji snarled. That broke the spell. The old man's lips tightened. He had said too much.
"But I had not thought Lord Boariyi capable of such subtlety!" Wallie thought for a moment that Rotanxi would say more, but he did not. Probably Wal had been the brainchild of Uncle Zoariyi, and the sorcerer's hesitation suggested that he might even be aware of that. He was extremely well informed about the tryst, even to its finances.
"So you have failed, Shonsu!" Doa said with satisfaction.
"I hope not, my lady." Wallie tried to convey a confidence be did not quite feel. "I took steps to prevent the tryst from departing."
She frowned doubtfully.
"My lord?" asked Katanji. "How does he know about Lord Boariyi being leader?"
"Pigeons!" Wallie said. "His spies release pigeons, which return to their mates in Sen. Of course birds fly three or four times as fast as even Griffon can sail, and they don't have to go around all the bends in the River."
"Pigeons can't talk my lord," Katanji protested. His face was growing vague in the fading light, but the doubt showed.
"You saw the little piece of vellum I sent with the bird we released," Wallie explained, his eyes on the sorcerer. "Well, they could have had a code arranged—a triangle for Boariyi, a circle for Tivanixi . . . "
He was not fooling the sorcerer, of course, but he did not want to explain writing to the others. That knowledge could be fatal if the sorcerers ever discovered that they had it. It would destroy the sorcerers' craft if it ever became widely known; it might disrupt the whole culture of the World. That was a threat he might find useful, and must keep in reserve. But he did not think he had convinced Katanji.
The wind was growing chill. He turned his attention back to the gown. "Let's see what else we can find," he muttered. But the next thing he found was a wicked little knife. It looked sharp as a razor, and he thought that it was coated with something, probably a poison.
"On second thought, we'll leave the rest until tomorrow; when the light is better. Lord Rotanxi, you will be confined in the cabin. Probably you will be more comfortable in there than the rest of us will be in the hold. You will be allowed on deck by day, under supervision. You will be fed and well treated."
"Kept in good shape for the interrogation, of course!" The old man sneered.
"You will not be tortured, if that is what you fear."
Rotanxi snorted disbelievingly. "Indeed? The great Shonsu is well known for castrating men in brothel quarrels. Did you not once burn down a house because a child threw a tomato at you from the window? Your idea of good treatment may not agree with mine, my lord."
Wallie winced and could find no reply. It was Nnanji who spoke next.
"Those days are over, sorcerer. You can trust his word. If it were me, I should start at your toenails and work upward but Lord Shonsu will treat you well. Much too well, I expect."
Even in the blurred conflict of light from the fading sunset and the brightening Dream God, Nnanji's young face radiated sincerity. The sorcerer seemed surprised and was silent.
"Take him below," Wallie said. "Give him food and water and blankets. Let's eat; I'm hungry!"
He bundled up the sorcerer's gown and rose to his feet. Red flame flickered over RegiVul and the air stank again of sulfur. The Fire God was angry—as he should be, Wallie thought. With the evidence he had now, he could rip the mystery from the sorcerers' craft and destroy their mystique . . . if the swordsmen would listen.
The River was bright. Tomiyano would keep sailing, eager to return to his beloved Sapphire.
"I wanted to see you die."
Wallie turned and found Doa standing very close.
"My apologies for disappointing you, my lady."
"Now, I suppose, you expect me to create an epic for you?"
Her tone was sweet and she was smiling. With any other woman he would have taken her in his arms and tried to kiss her. The invitation was that obvious, and totally at variance with her words. Genius was next to madness—he was convinced now that she was mad. He wondered what Shonsu had done to her to produce this poisonous hatred and the uncanny fascination that seemed to accompany it. Probably any song she composed about the day's events would be murder to Shonsu's reputation—a verbal assassination set to some immortal melody. Even if she played fair, an epic about the day's events could help him little, for all he had done was use trickery. That would not disgust the swordsmen as much as the Katanji story, perhaps, but it would certainly not impress them, either.
Yet she was a lot of woman. Her extraordinary height excited him still. Having trouble keeping his voice calm, he said, "I should be honored to be mentioned in any of your works, my lady."
Her eyes seemed to flash in the night. "You think I can't? You think an epic without blood is impossible?"
"I think the gods have sent me a great victory today. I am very glad that there was no blood spilled."
"Bah!" she said, unconvinced. She stepped over to the rail to stare out at the last red glow over the western horizon. His feet moved to follow her, although he was not conscious of having told them to do so.
"Tell me about the first time," she said softly. "What happened to the forty-nine?"
"I don't know."
Startled, she turned to look at him. She edged closer—oh, so close! "You expect me to believe that?"
"It is true, Doa. I got a bang on the head. I remember nothing before Hann. I did meet with a god, as you were told. He did give me this sword. But I do not remember living in Casr, or leading the forty-nine . . . I do not even remember knowing you. That was why I did not acknowledge you in the lodge that day. I thought you were a boy."
Her tone stayed delicate as gossamer. "You are a contemptible bastard, Shonsu. You treat me as if I were filth, but you need not think I am stupid."
"That was another Shonsu, my lady."
"Swine."
Wallie threw ropes around his temper. "It is the truth—I swear by my sword."
"But I will show you. I will create the greatest epic the World has ever heard—even without blood."
"I shall be honored."
She paused, irresolute. "I must know about the forty-nine!"
"I can't help you."
"You are a bastard. Then I shall ask the sorcerer tomorrow." Doa spun on her heel and stalked away.
On the longest, loveliest legs in the World.