The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1) Page 16

  But it wasn’t over. Deftly, the bow Wolf brought his legs up, pushing with all their tremendous coiled strength so that the little rowboat popped free of the thick planking it had impaled. It left a gaping, ragged hole that obviously simulated a breeched hull. The boat spun agilely, whirling back to the stern of the Seamoon, which was obligingly turning broadside so the Mermaidon had a perfect view of what was happening. Again the bow Wolf moved swiftly, securing the little boat to the side of the ship with a few quick coils of rope—Ari couldn’t see around what—and almost throwing himself up against the side of the ship. As the other two Wolves followed, it became obvious from the way they climbed that they held stout knives or spikes or something. They scaled the side of that ship in less time than it took to describe it, all the while the crew of the Seamoon pretending they had no idea what was going on at their stern. What the goal was, Ari couldn’t even imagine, but the Wolves were barely on deck an instant before they were discovered and engaged, disappearing under a press of Merranic bodies.

  The Mermaidon crew had finally quieted down, chuckling and talking and going back to their routine as if the fun was over. A group of them stayed close, some of them tablemates from dinner last night, and Ari asked them, “What were they trying to do?”

  He was answered readily—he didn’t think he’d ever get used to Northern aloofness again. “Those fireship decks are packed with pots of oil and open flame, lad. They’re lobbing fire missiles at us the whole time we’re closing, and us, well, we’re lobbing iron back at them. Keeping ’em busy-like ’til the Wolves can cripple their ship and hopefully sneak up on deck and overturn an oil pot or two.” He winked, baring his teeth in a ferocious grin. “Have us a nice fireworks display, we would, then.”

  “Or, in this case,” another added dryly, “we’ll get to board her—”

  “And that’s good, too!” a bunch of Fleetmen joined in, in what was obviously a cherished communal goal.

  The boys looked at each other. “Do the Wolves usually survive this?” Loren asked doubtfully.

  “Not usually,” about five of them said in unison. “Wartime, we run through a powerful lot of Wolves.”

  It was several minutes before the rowboats returned and the Wolves climbed back over the stern rail, making their glum way to the bow. The Commodore, Captain, Master-at-arms, and a few others stood waiting for them, and the boys and Selah backed off a couple of yards. Jaegor looked mad.

  The Master-at-arms didn’t waste time discussing the weather. “Is this the best the quals have to offer any more?!” he bellowed at them. He let his displeasure sink in for a second, then demanded, “Who’s chiefing the starboard boat?”

  “I.” Jaegor stepped forward, eyes snapping, mouth tight.

  “Did they not teach you to wait until we’re straight on to jump to? Don’t have the discipline to wait? Just thinking with your brawn?” the Master shouted. “Not only do you waste your energy trying to make up that extra distance, you run the risk of giving the Enemy plenty of time to deal with two SEPARATE targets!” He paced in front of them, throwing his arms around with enough energy to brain a horse if they were ever to connect. He had a huge, impressive voice, even for a Merranic.

  “Your ramming was good enough, I s’pose, if that’s as much speed as you can muster! You’d have probably been fire-lobbed out of the water at that rate, but your technique was all right—’course you had plenty of time to perfect it, at that speed! But, really, the worst of it all was your ship-top performance. They call it ‘dash-and-burn,’ lads, for a reason. You’re supposed to dash. Then burn.”

  “He called ‘dead’ arbitrarily!” Jaegor burst out as if he could no longer control himself. “I was winning that knife fight!”

  “YOU”RE LISTENING!” the Master thundered, looming over him instantly, in his face. “I’m talking! Keefas marked you dead because there were three others at your back that would’ve had you! You’re not there to engage a ship full of Enemy—you’re there to destroy her! Maybe you need a little fresh air to clear your empty heads, you brainless sheep! TO THE ROPES!”

  Instantly, sullenness forgotten, the six made a wild dash for the nearest rigging. Several encouraging cheers went up from various corners of the ship. The Wolves leaped for the network of ropes, lunging desperately upwards, shoulders and chests bulging, legs and feet hanging free. In an unbelievable amount of time, they were far overhead, then coming in almost a free-fall back down. They leaped off and stood panting, faces red, staring at the Master warily.

  “Well, Chief,” he half-sneered, “since you’re bent on engaging the Enemy instead of doing your job, you’re going to need some practice—” and with no more warning than that, he lunged as Jaegor’s bare belly, knife drawn.

  Ari and Loren both sucked in their breath, stepping back instinctively, but the Wolf Chief was obviously in a mental place they were not. His long knife was in his hands in time to meet the Master’s, even as he leapt back. The sound of steel rang out across the deck, and the Northerners leaned forward in fascination as the two commenced a circling, fast-paced knife fight. The knives were so long they were almost shortswords, but balanced different, more agile. It was close work, the two combatants throwing punches, even grappling, while their steel flashed in the sun.

  “Different, eh?” a voice rumbled in their ears. It was Banion.

  “Faster-paced,” they agreed, then turned to lean companionably on the rail with him as the two abruptly broke off their skirmish, the Master sending the Wolves racing down the deck.

  “I can’t believe this training,” Loren breathed. “Ari and I have rowed all over the lake near my place, and we never came close to those speeds—and then to climb the side of the ship, and come back here and climb rigging…” Ari’s shoulders burned just thinking of it.

  “They did well for their first time,” Banion said approvingly. “As long as they can improve, though, Torfanal will stay right up on ’em.” He chuckled. Good times, good times.

  They talked casually awhile, told him about some of the tales they’d heard last night—to which he grunted. They’d sort of hoped he’d wave them off as exaggeration, but he looked rather disturbingly disturbed and said, “It’s a shame those stories aren’t heard in the North. It’d be easier for them to believe the Enemy is real—flesh and blood, terror and pillage real—if they remembered them.”

  They stood quietly for a few minutes, full of rather dark ponderings. Ari had to admit, the whole Ages of War thing seemed a lot less like a fairytale since he’d left Archemounte. If war had once been, was it so impossible that it could come again?

  “But,” Banion boomed out irrepressibly, “You’ve got a brave little Queen, wise for being so young and a Northerner to boot. The Archemounte Council is about as skeptical a cynical body as you can get, too, and I’ll bet she’s having to fight every one of them to get this Kingsmeet to happen.”

  “Yeah,” Loren said, just as Ari opened his mouth to ask the same thing. “What’s a Kingsmeet?”

  “An old, old ceremony,” Banion rumbled, settling his beefy arms comfortably onto the Mermaidon’s railing. “Not long after Rach Kyle dug in at the Sheel, King Kendrick realized the Realms needed better contact than the short-lived human messengers or homing pigeons, or even the royal raptors, could provide. He called the first meeting, in a fairly central location so no one King would have to be longer from his Realm than another. He and Kyle were killed shortly after, and part of the ceremony that developed had to do with the bonding between constantly changing monarchs. The whole world moved at a faster pace back then, and they just needed some better way to compare notes, plan world-wide strategies, gauge the strength of the Enemy. Once the Peace came, the practice died out, of course, and the most recent ’Meets, almost two centuries ago, were mostly for nostalgia’s sake.” “So now is a perfect time for Her Majesty to call another one…” Ari observed slowly. Selah, so adept at remaining inconspicuous that he’d almost forgotten she was there, stirred next to him o
n the rail.

  “Aye…except for that little detail about her being a queen, it’s ideal,” he agreed drolly.

  The boys looked at him, wondering if he was going to expand on the infamous Merranic chauvinism.

  “Now, don’t get me wrong,” he protested mildly, reading their minds. “This has nothing to do with a woman’s being as good as a man, ‘twice as competent, half as distractible,’ which is probably what she’s thinking after King Kane got done with her. But that’s not it at all. There’ve been women leading the North for a thousand years…but not a one of them at the head of its armies. A Kingsmeet is nothing more than a fancy war council, and women have never been war leaders.”

  “I’m surprised,” Loren observed. “With women like Cerise around…well, I’d run if I was the Enemy.”

  Banion grunted. “Times have changed. We’ve the luxury now to think of things that never would have occurred to anyone, man or woman, born in the war years. You’ve got to remember, the Enemy was pervasive, vicious, an unending tide of destruction. No matter how many of them were killed, three more came to take each place. Their greatest weapon wasn’t their steel or their skill—it was their numbers. So, women were utterly precious to the Realms, more than money,” he added ironically, possibly for their sakes. “More and more desperately we needed men, and women became much more than just objects of companionship or desire—they were the mothers of our warriors, the saviors of the Realms themselves. No man in his right mind would ever countenance putting one of them at risk.”

  The boys said nothing, minds on the troubled, violent heroics of the past.

  There was more drilling that afternoon, and some of the knife-wrestling, as Loren called it, then after dinner everyone came back up on deck. It was a perfect, starry night, moon-bright and warm, with just the right amount of breeze to freshen it. One of the Fleetmen pulled out a set of pipes and the deck turned into a laughing, stomping dance floor. The music was light and lively—nothing like the stately, measured symphonies of the North—and almost impossible to stand still to. Merranics whirled and leaped and stamped in time, bare feet thudding in thundering unison on the wood planks, kicking out all at once in accompaniment to great lung-bursting shouts. Ari, trying his own rough jig in the midst of them, was suddenly awash with euphoria, encircled by dancers hanging suspended for a second against the moonlit indigo of the Merranic sky, breastbone thrumming with the current of pulsing, ecstatic, heart-soaring life.

  Rodge, despite his predictions and fervent convictions to the contrary, refused to be seasick. After two days of nothing but his own company and the relentless snores from the off-duty hammocks, he finally came out of the hold.

  There was an awkward moment when he met up with Jaegor shortly afterwards. Like the other Seawolves, Jaegor had been doing nothing but eating, sleeping, and drilling, and had lost about thirty pounds. His big frame rippled like a Dra’s with defined muscle, but his thinned-down face was tired and his eyes empty of anything but determination. He stared at Rodge for a minute as if trying to remember him from a far-distant past, and then he did something surprising. He held out his big hand.

  “I’m sorry for pushing you around in the Post. Life’s too short to be angry, and I guess there’s more important things out there than my pride…”

  Ari and Loren glanced at each other, shamed to the quick. Rodge, cushioned from such inconvenient sentiment by his upbringing in Archemounte, answered, “Yeah, you were a little rough.” Loren jabbed him ungently in the ribs.

  Reluctantly, Northerner hand met Merranic. “Don’t worry about it,” Rodge said awkwardly, taking his cue from his friends’ stony faces. “You’re, uh, doing good things out there…”

  “You’re doing good things out there?” Ari demanded in a hiss as Jaegor moved off. “You can’t even lift one of their oars!”

  “I can lift it,” Rodge said defensively. “It was just heavier than I expected.”

  It was heavier than Ari expected, too, a great, thick oaken thing that wouldn’t snap under the tremendous torque of Wolf strokes. It wasn’t long before Ari and Loren learned how the Fleetmen stayed in such incredible condition. The Master-at-arms caught them racing up the rigging one day, laughing because they were so clumsy, and threw them into the thick of the training. It was a fantastic outlet for all the energy they were building up just sitting around eating the good food.

  The rigging races, which Ari got very fast at, his chest and shoulder muscles bigger than Loren’s, were only part of it. There were boat races, both in the water and on deck. The rowboats were loaded down with barrels of water and odd bits of iron and steel and heavy coils of rope, then lifted and raced down the length of the deck. Ari’s legs were so sore after his first race that he could hardly climb up out of the hold the next morning. There were swimming races and hull-scaling, where they used heavy dirks to leverage their way up the side of the ship, knife fighting, knife throwing, wrestling, sprinting. They ate like they’d been starved for a week, crawled into their hammocks exhausted, and were happier than they’d been in all their long months at the University combined.

  Rodge had no time for any of this.

  “Can you imagine this life,” he drawled one afternoon after a very successful Wolfing.

  “Yeah,” Ari and Loren breathed in unison, their eyes still bright and hearts pounding from all the recent excitement.

  “Running around like idiots all day, every day, no purpose in sight, no intellectual stimulation ANYWHERE,” Rodge continued disparagingly, though he’d at least learned to keep his voice down.

  “I think there’s probably a purpose,” Loren said.

  Rodge rolled his eyes at them. “The Wars are over. I see all this activity has not increased blood flow to your brains.”

  “It’s almost enough,” Loren said slowly, half to himself, “to make you wish they weren’t.”

  “Well, you’ve turned into quite the logical thinker,” Rodge observed scathingly. “Do let’s go back to loved ones being hacked to pieces, children tortured, friends and neighbors set on fire—do you realize the huge advancements we’ve made once we could do something with our minds besides plan the next battle? The worst part about those primitive Ages was the absolute absence of any kind of culture, scientific sophistication, technological development.”

  “Maybe not the worst thing,” Ari commented quietly. “A couple people died, here and there. I’ve heard.”

  “In the big picture,” Rodge, who’d just spouted the tragedy of human suffering in his own argument, said, “that’s really pretty irrelevant. People are going to die anyway, if you think about it.”

  “Sounds like Imperial wisdom being spouted over here,” Banion rumbled, lumbering up behind them. “I can smell it all the way aft.” Loren and Ari grinned. Banion was about their only connection with the old group anymore. Kai, improbably voluble, and Melkin were almost constantly in quiet conversation with the Commodore or other high-ranking officers, and Cerise and Selah had hardly been seen since that first day.

  “Why don’t you ever get in on this drilling?” Loren half-teased Banion, patently relieved at a chance to change the subject.

  “What? And haul all this muscle so far away from nice, solid decking?” He grunted in good humor. “I’m a Knight—no ropes and water for me. Horseback’s my element.”

  “We could tell,” Rodge said sarcastically. “Were you ever awake when you were on horseback?”

  “There was nothing that needed attending to,” Banion rumbled slyly, “just some baby-sitting that could be done with my eyes closed...”

  Rodge gave him a smile overflowing with false mirth.

  Ari asked hastily, “Why doesn’t the Mermaidon ever take the Wolfing? The other Seawolves have to practice, too, right?”

  “Oh, there’ll be plenty of practice, don’t worry. The Sapphire Crown’s under repairs right now—that’s why Kraemoor’s always over here—and they’re never gonna Wolf a ship he’s on.”

  “Kraemoor
, Kilchern, Kane,” Rodge muttered. “Can we get some Royal Line?”

  Banion’s whiskers moved in what they’d come to interpret as a smile. “The Northerners never were very hearty breeders,” he said indulgently.

  “That’s because we have more important, and cerebral, things to do,” Rodge said.

  Banion’s eyes went wide in affected surprise. “More important than Duty?”

  Rodge curled his lip and turned out to sea, there obviously being no answer to that.

  “Royalty is both more respected and less pampered here than in the North,” Banion said expansively. “Take Kraemoor, for instance. You will not see more respect for anyone in the Realm, excepting the King.”

  Privately, Ari thought that might have as much to do with the Commodore’s personal charisma as his rank.

  “But, when he falls, his title goes to the man best able to replace him, not necessarily his son, or any of his family.” Banion chewed his whiskers contentedly. “Only the Stone Throne’s inherited. His lands, now, the Castle of the Silver Hills, stay in his Line, just not the title.”

  There was a thoughtful silence. Loren was considering the strangeness of this—how disruptive it would be if the Archlordships of the North passed to a different noble every generation. And how would you tell who was best at Archlording? Rodge was thinking black thoughts best not put on paper, and Ari was thinking, irrationally, of the Commodore’s belt buckle and pennants.

  “These three ships don’t belong to him, either?” he asked slowly.

  “The Mermaidon’s his personal ship,” Banion allowed, “but she’ll no longer fly the Commodore flag. The flags, the Commodore’s Belt, all these belong to the office.”