A Song for Arbonne Read online

  "Are you fools?" The second voice from the sailboat was a woman's, and cold as the ocean waters. "Do you think you can make redress for trespass in the waters of the goddess by offering a load of fish?"

  Blaise grimaced. The priestesses of the goddess were always harsher than the priests; even a short time in Arbonne had taught him that much. He heard the sound of flint being struck, and a moment later, cursing silently, saw a lamp lit in the sailboat. A glow of orange light fell upon the water but offered only slight illumination. Praying that the six corans in the skiff would have the sense to keep their heads down and faces hidden, he gestured for Hirnan to move closer. Then, treading silently in the sea, he put his mouth to the other man's ear and told him what they had to try to do.

  Holding the lamp high while Maritte guided their craft, Roche the priest peered ahead into the night. Even with the flame, even by the light of the waxing pale moon, it was difficult to see clearly. Certainly the skiff they were approaching was one such as the fisherfolk of the shore used, and he could make out the lines of the trawling nets over the side, but there was still something odd about this encounter. For one thing, there seemed to be too many men in the skiff. He counted at least five. Where were they going to put their catch with so many men on board? Roche had grown up by the sea; he knew more than a little about trawling for lampfish. He also loved—more than a little—the taste of the succulent, hard-to-find delicacy, which is why he'd been shamefully tempted by the offered tithe. Maritte, mountain-born, had no such weaknesses to tempt her. Sometimes he wondered if Maritte had any weaknesses at all. He would not be particularly unhappy when their shared tour of duties ended next week, though he couldn't claim to regret the three obligatory nights in bed together. He wondered if she had conceived by him, what a child born of the two of them would be like. It really did seem to be a fishing boat. Manned by too many men, most likely because they were afraid, venturing so near the island. It happened more often than it should, Roche knew. The deep waters around Rian's Island were a known ground for lampfish. A pity, he sometimes thought-aware that this was perilously near to heresy—that all fish and fauna on or about the island were sacred to the goddess in her incarnation as Huntress, and so not to be pursued in any way by mortal man or woman.

  One really couldn't entirely blame the fisherfolk of Arbonne for occasionally yielding to the lure of that rare and delicate taste and once in a while venturing perhaps a little nearer the island than they ought. He wondered if he dared turn to Maritte and offer that thought, in the spirit of compassionate Rian. He forebore to do so. He could guess what she would say, mountain-born, hard as mountain rock. Though not so much so in the dark, mind you, surprisingly softened by passion and its aftermath. The three nights had been worth it, he decided, whatever she'd have said now to his suggestion.

  What Maritte did in fact say in that moment, her voice suddenly harsh, was: "Roche, these are not fisherfolk. Those are only ropes, not nets! We must—"

  That was all, lamentably, that Roche heard. Even as he leaned quickly forward to peer more closely at the skiff, Roche of the Island felt himself pulled bodily out of their small boat, the lantern flying from his hand to douse itself hissing in the sea.

  He tried to cry out, but he hit the water with a smack that knocked the wind from his lungs. Then, as he desperately sucked for air, he went under an advancing wave, swallowed a mouthful of salt sea water and began retching and coughing. There was a hand holding him from behind in a grip like a blacksmith's. Roche coughed and gasped and coughed, and finally cleared his lungs of water.

  He drew one normal breath and then, as if that had been a patiently awaited signal, received a blow from the haft of a knife on the side of his head that rendered him oblivious to the icy chill of the water or the beauty of moonlight on the sea. He did have an instant to realize, just before all went black, that he hadn't heard a sound from Maritte.

  Blaise was briefly afraid, as he manoeuvred the unconscious priest back into the sailboat with Hirnan's help, that the other man, anxious not to err, might have killed the woman with his blow. After he had clambered with some difficulty into the boat he reassured himself. She would have a lump like a corfe egg on her temple for a few days, but Hirnan had done well. He spared a moment to grip the other man briefly on the shoulder in approbation; such things mattered to the men one led. He had some experience of that, too—on both sides of the equation.

  The sailboat was neat and trim and well equipped, which meant plenty of rope. There were also blankets against the night chill and an amount of food that might have been surprising had the priest not been so plump. He stripped the unconscious man of his sodden shirt, then swaddled him in one of the blankets. They bound and gagged both the man and the woman, though not so tightly as to cripple them, and then steered the boat towards their own skiff.

  "Maffour," he said, keeping his voice low, "take charge there. Follow us in. We're going up to find a landing place. Luth, if you prefer, you can kill yourself now before I get to you. It might be more pleasant." With some satisfaction he heard Luth moan in distress. The man believed him. Beside Blaise in the sailboat Hirnan grunted with a sour, chilled amusement. With a degree of surprise Blaise recognized within himself the once-familiar sensation of sharing competence and respect with another man on a task of some danger.

  Danger, yes, rather more evidently now, given what they had just done to two of Rian's anointed. But tonight's was still a quest of sheerest stupidity—as to that Blaise's opinion was not about to change simply because they had dealt neatly with their first obstacle. Shivering and wet, rubbing his arms in an effort to generate necessary warmth, he realized, though, almost against his will, that he had enjoyed the moments just past.

  And, as so often seemed to happen, the surmounting of a crisis seemed to incline chance or fate or Corannos the god—one or all of them—to show favour in the next stage of a difficult enterprise. Hirnan grunted again a few minutes later, this time with a note of satisfaction, and a second afterwards Blaise saw why. Gliding westward, as close to shore as he dared, Hirnan had brought them abreast of a small inlet among the rocks. Blaise saw trees above, their tops silvered by the high moon, and a gently sloping plateau beneath them giving way to a short cliff down to the sea. An almost perfect place for a landing, given that the beaches were barred to them. The inlet would offer shelter and concealment for the two boats and the climb to the plateau was unlikely to be difficult for men used to the steepness of the goat runs above the olive trees near Baude.

  Hirnan guided the two craft carefully into the cove. In the boat he quickly lowered sail and set about dropping anchor. In the skiff, Maffour, without a word spoken, looped one of the ropes about his shoulders and, leaping to the nearest of the rocks, adroitly scrambled up the short face of the cliff to the plateau. He tied the rope to one of the pines above and dropped it over for the rest of them. Two good men here, Blaise thought, realizing that he really hadn't given much thought at all, in the time he'd been here, to taking the measure of the corans of Mallin de Baude. He acknowledged inwardly that Mallin had been right in at least one thing: the truest test of a man's mettle was a task where the danger was real.

  Hirnan finished with the anchor and turned to Blaise with an arched eyebrow of inquiry. Blaise glanced down at the two tied-up clerics in the boat. Both were unconscious and would likely be so for awhile. "We'll leave them here," he said. "They'll be all right."

  The men in the skiff were already proceeding up Maffour's rope towards the plateau. They watched the last one climb, then Hirnan stepped carefully from the boat to one slippery boulder and then another before reaching the rope and smoothly pulling himself up the rock face. Behind him, Blaise did the same. The salt of the wet rope stung his palms.

  On the plateau he set his feet squarely on solid ground for the first time since leaving the mainland. The sensation was odd, as if there were a tremor in the earth beneath him. They were standing on Rian's Island, and illicitly consecrated, Blaise t
hought unexpectedly. None of the others seemed to have reacted, though, and a moment later he grinned with wry amusement at himself: he was from Gorhaut, in the god's name—they didn't even worship Rian in the north. This was hardly a useful time to be yielding to the superstitions that had afflicted Luth all night.

  Young Giresse, without a word, handed him his boots and sword, and Thiers did the same for Hirnan. Blaise leaned against a tree to pull on the boots and buckled his sword belt again, thinking quickly. When he looked up he saw seven tense men looking at him, waiting for orders. Deliberately he smiled.

  "Luth, I have decided to let you live to trouble the world a little longer yet," he said softly. "You'll guard the two boats here with Vanne. If those two down below show signs of rousing I want them rendered unconscious again. But conceal your faces if you have to go down to do it. If we are very lucky none of us will have been recognized when this is over. Do you understand?"

  They seemed to. Luth looked almost comically relieved at the assignment. Vanne's expression by moonlight showed a struggle to conceal disappointment—a good sign actually, if he was sorry to be missing the next stage of their journey. But Blaise was not about to leave Luth alone now with any task, however simple. He turned away from them.

  "Hirnan, I take it you can find the guest quarters once we reach the temple complex?" The red-headed coran nodded briefly. "You lead then," Blaise said. "I'm behind you, Maffour's rear guard. We go in single file. No words unless vital. Touch each other for warnings rather than speak. Understood?»

  "One question: how do we find Evrard when we get there?" Maffour asked quietly. "There must be a great many dwellings in the complex."

  "There are," Hirnan murmured.

  Blaise had been privately worrying about the same thing. He shrugged though; his men weren't to know what was concerning him. "I'm assuming he'll have one of the larger ones. We'll head for those." He grinned suddenly. "Then Maffour can walk in and wake him with a kiss." There was a ripple of laughter. Behind him, Luth giggled loudly but controlled himself before Blaise could turn.

  Blaise let the tension-easing amusement subside. He looked at Hirnan. Without another word spoken the coran turned and stepped into the forest of the holy Island of the goddess. Blaise followed and heard the others fall into line behind. He didn't look back.

  It was very dark in the woods. There were sounds all around them: wind in the leaves, the chitter of small animals, the quick, unsettling flap of wings alighting from a branch above. The pines and the oak trees blocked the moon except in the occasional place where a slant of pale silver fell across their path, strangely beautiful, intensifying the blackness as soon as they had moved on. Blaise checked his blade in its scabbard. It would be close and awkward ground here if anything large chose to attack. He wondered if any of the big hunting cats made their home on Rian's Island; he had a feeling they did, which was not reassuring.

  Hirnan, threading his way around roots and under branches, finally struck a rough east-west track in the wood and Blaise drew a calmer breath again. He was surprisingly conscious of where they were. Not that he had any real superstition in him, but there was something about this forest that, even more than the thought of tawncat or boar, would make him very happy when they left. In fact, that same truth applied to all of this island, he realized: the sooner they left the more pleased he would be. Just then a bird of some sort—owl or corfe almost certainly—landed with a slight, rushing sound of wings in air in the tree directly above him. Luth, Blaise thought, would have soiled his clothing. Refusing to look up, he moved on, following Hirnan's shadowy form eastward towards the temples of the goddess worshipped here in the south as a huntress and a mother, as a lover and a bride, and as a dark and final gatherer and layer-out, by moonlight, of the dead. If we're luckier than we deserve, Blaise of Gorhaut thought grimly, more unsettled than he really wanted to acknowledge, even to himself, maybe he'll be outside singing at the moon.

  Which, as it happened, was exactly what Evrard of Lussan was doing. Troubadours seldom in fact sang their own songs; musical performance was seen as a lesser art than composing. It was the joglars who did the actual singing, to the music of varied instruments. But here on Rian's Island there were no joglars now, and Evrard had always found it a help when writing to hear his own words and evolving tune, even in his own thin voice. And he liked to compose at night.

  They heard him as they approached the sanctuary grounds, emerging from the blackness of the forest into moonlight and a sight of distant lanterns. Drawing a breath, Blaise registered the fact that there were no walls around the guest quarters south of the temple complex, though a high wooden palisade surrounded the inner buildings where the priests and priestesses would be sleeping. There didn't appear to be any guards manning the ramparts behind those walls, or none that could be seen. Silver light fell on the temples, lending a soft white shimmer to the three domes. They didn't have to go that way. On the extreme southern edge of the goddess's compound, not far from where they stood, there was a garden. Palm trees swayed in the gentle breeze, and the scent of roses and anemones and early lavender drifted towards them. So did a voice.

  Grant, bright goddess, that the words of my heart

  Find favour and haven in the shrine of your love.

  Yours are the seafoam and the groves in the wood

  And yours ever the moonlight in the skies above…

  There was a brief, meditative pause. Then:

  And yours the moonlight that falls from above…

  Another ruminating silence, then again Evrard's voice:

  Yours is the moonlight and the stars overhead

  And the moonlit seafoam and each forest grove.

  Blaise saw Hirnan glancing at him, an ironic look on his expressive face. Blaise shrugged. "Mallin wants him back," he murmured. "Don't look at me." Hirnan grinned.

  Blaise stepped past the other man and, keeping to the shadowy cover at the edge of the wood, began working his way around towards the garden, where the thin voice was still essaying variants of the same sentiment. Blaise wondered if the clergy and the other guests of Rian minded having their sleep disturbed by this late-night warbling. He wondered if it happened every night. He had a suspicion, knowing Evrard of Lussan, that it might.

  They reached the southern end of the wood. Only grass, silvered by moonlight, open to view from the walls, lay between them and the hedges and palms of the garden now. Blaise dropped down, remembering with an eerie, unexpected vividness as he did the last time he'd performed this kind of manoeuvre, in Portezza with Rudel, when they had killed Engarro di Faenna.

  And now here he was, fetching a sulky, petulant poet for a minor baron of Arbonne so the baron's wife could kiss the man on his balding brow—and the god knew where else—and say how extremely sorry she was for chancing to scream when he assaulted her in bed.

  A long way from Portezza, From Gorhaut. From the sort of doings in which a man should properly find himself engaged. The fact that Blaise loathed almost everything about Gorhaut, which was his home, and trusted at most half a dozen of the Portezzan nobility he'd met was, frankly, not relevant to this particular truth.

  "Thiers and Giresse—wait here," he whispered over his shoulder to the youngest two. "We won't need six men for this. Whistle like a corfe if there's trouble coming. We'll hear you. Maffour, you've been told what speech to give. Better you than me, frankly. When we get to the garden and I give you the sign go in and try, for what it's worth. We won't be far."

  He didn't wait for acknowledgements. At this point, any halfway decent men would know as well as he did what had to be done, and if there were any legitimate point to this mission in Blaise's eyes, it was that he might begin to get a sense of what these seven Arbonnais corans he was training were like.

  Without looking back he began moving on elbows and knees across the damp cool grass towards the hedgebreak that marked the entrance to the garden. Evrard was still carrying on inside; something about stars now, and white-capped wave
s.

  In his irritation with the man, with himself, with the very nature of this errand, he almost crawled, quite unprofessionally, squarely into the backside of the priestess who was standing, half-hidden, beside the closest palm to the entranceway. Blaise didn't know if she was there as a guard for the poet or as a devotee of his art. There really wasn't time to explore such nuances. A sound from the woman could kill them all.

  Fortunately, she was raptly intent on the figure of the chanting poet not far away. Blaise could see Evrard sitting on a stone bench at the near end of a pool in the garden, facing away from them, communing with himself, or the still waters, or whatever poets did their communing with.

  Disdaining finesse, Blaise surged to his feet, grabbed the woman from behind and covered her mouth with one hand. She sucked air to scream and he tightened his grip about her mouth and throat. They were not to kill. He disliked unnecessary death in any event. In the silence he had been trained to by the assassins of Portezza, Blaise held the struggling woman, depriving her of air until he felt her slump heavily back against him. Carefully—for this was an old trick—he relaxed his grip. There was no deception here though; the priestess lay slack in his arms. She was a large woman with an unexpectedly young face. Looking at her, Blaise doubted this one would have been a guard. He wondered how she'd got out from the compound; it was the sort of thing that might someday be useful to know. Not that he planned on coming back here in a hurry, if ever.

  Laying the priestess carefully down beneath the palm tree, he motioned Maffour with a jerk of his head to go into the garden. Hirnan and Thulier came silently up and began binding the woman in the shadows.

  Yours the glory, bright Rian, while we mortal men

  Walk humbly in the umbra of your great light,

  Seeking sweet solace in the—

  "Who is there?" Evrard of Lussan called without turning, more peeved than alarmed. "You all know I must not be disturbed when I work."