Greylady Read online

  There were ships everywhere.

  They surrounded his own vessel as closely as gnats around a lantern on a midsummer evening: big, beamy merchant ships and little fishing-boats, handsomely appointed ocean-going pleasure yachts and even three lean, rakish battlerams. Out towards the east they clustered closely enough that the reflected dapples of sunlight on water had almost to fight for space. Dozens of them. Scores. Hundreds… His brain rejected the thought of thousands, but for all that, his eyes suggested such a number might not be so far from the truth.

  Bayrd had not been of sufficient rank to attend the Lord Albanak’s last council, but the word had come down: Take ships. As many as are needed. He would not have believed that there were so many ships in all the world, much less that they could all have been gathered here after such a storm as last night. But here they were. Narrowing his eyes against the atrocious glare of the new-risen sun, Bayrd hunted for something familiar: a face, a robe, a banner. Anything to tell him that the others of his name had made the journey as safely as he had done.

  Those that still had mastheads – or masts at all, and Bayrd began to understand how fortunate his own ship had been in that regard – were flying pennants. It was perhaps too dignified a word for the scraps of cloth hanging in the near-still air, but since they carried the various clan and family Colours, it was good enough. Some were hard to see, what with the glare and all, but the scarlet and green of ar’Lerutz was plain enough. That was a banner indeed, a forty-foot length of silk usually hung from a citadel to celebrate high or holy days. Hanging as it did from a snapped mainmast, most of the fabric trailed across the surface of the sea; but its Colours were undimmed.

  Once Bayrd’s eyes had sorted them from the glitter of reflected light, clan ar’Sanen’s sombre purple and dark blue were just as striking; even though they were less handsomely presented. Someone had been sent to the top of their ship’s mast with two buckets of the appropriate paint and then, for want of courage to stay there – or maybe just for want of a brush – had emptied the pigments in two long streaks down either side of the ship’s tattered mainsail. Bayrd wondered idly where they had found such things, or taken the time to load them aboard, then dismissed the thought as pointless. None of these were the Colours he wanted to see.

  Nor was the Lord Albanak’s green tree on blue. Bayrd eyed it, raised one eyebrow and, with no-one to see him and report the expression back to unfriendly ears, allowed a sardonic grin to cross his face at the implications of what he saw. No makeshift pennants here, or hasty splatters of paint. Albanak-arluth’s dignity would never have allowed such half measures. The Overlord’s symbol was flaunted on a sail so complete and undamaged that it must have been kept in reserve and rigged only when the storm was over.

  It said more about the workings of the Overlord’s mind, and the esteem in which he held himself, than Albanak probably realized. Little of that did him any credit.

  Do you really think we’d believe that you and you alone survived the storm unscathed? thought Bayrd. Or that we place more value on your peacock display than on our own survival of last night? You’re too obvious, my lord. And it lessens your grandeur instead of adding to it, no matter what you might think.

  Then he saw what he had been looking for, and felt a surge of relief in his chest and his throat as though he had been lost in a forest and emerged not only to safety but close to his own home. The pennon was tattered, having snapped savagely against itself for Heaven alone knew how many hours, but the Colours it bore were still bright. Blue and white, separated by thin stripes of black that served only to make the brighter tinctures more distinct. They meant little enough to any outside the blood, but to Bayrd they were as comforting as shade on a hot day or fire in the depths of winter. Those Colours had been defended for years, as a rallying-point, a line of safe retreat, even a place to gather for a last stand that would mingle the blood of the family with the blood of its enemies, and do honour to both. Bayrd leaned against the rail of the stubby, ugly ship, waving at people who were still too far away to see him, and if he had been younger or older, he might have cried with relief.

  Clan ar’Talvlyn was still alive – and if whoever was doing that yelling was telling the truth, they would have a land to live in again.

  * * * *

  They had come from Alba of the south-east long, long ago. It was a vast open country, an ocean of endless grass and endless sky, where trees were an event and the most obvious feature of the world was the horizon at its edge. Apart from the blue heaven above and the green land below, there had been little else to look at – and since one was out of reach, they took the name of the other.

  Alba meant The Land, and Albans, the Dwellers in the Land, had been their name ever since. If the old stories could be believed – and they couldn’t all be lies – the Albans had become capable horse-masters just as soon as the first father developed the first blister from walking to visit a married child who had moved too far from home. It was only necessary to look once at the wide plains to see that everywhere was too far from home.

  The truth of it was probably more complex than that, but their skill with horses could never be denied. It became a saleable commodity; first the trained horses, then the training of horses, then the trained horsemen themselves. It was not an unusual sequence of events. The Albans became mercenaries, selling their talents as mounted archers and heavy shock cavalry to the highest bidder; but after that, they became unusual. Indeed, they became unique.

  Because they stayed bought.

  It was a troubled time in the many little domains of the Old Country, in Tergavets and Vlekh and Kalitz, Drosul and Yuvan and Vreyar. A time that became known as the Age of the Country at War. Philosophers and historians mocked such a sweeping designation, claiming that there had never been an Age of the Country at Peace. Small rulers rose and fell like flowers in the springtime, jockeying desperately for power and prestige, their followers turbulent and chronically untrustworthy men who could all too easily visualize themselves as rulers in their turn.

  Thus it was also the age of the mercenary, the hired sword, whose contracts became increasingly elaborate and complex as months became years and border skirmishes became full-scale battles in an undeclared war. It was a merchant’s war, fought with silver as much as with steel. Courage was purchased with coins by men not bred to bravery, and a common tactic before battle became the attempt to buy an enemy’s mercenary cadre by the offering of better terms. Some battles were won that way, without a sword being drawn or an arrow being loosed, when a greater or lesser percentage of one side changed their allegiance to the other.

  But not when there were Albans on the field. Their contracts were as carefully worded as those of any other mercenaries, but once they were signed – and the Albans signed in blood, a touch that observers thought no more than melodrama the first time they saw it, but never more than once – the clauses were honoured to the letter. They never ran away, they never changed sides, and they never broke their word. The contracts were signed in blood, and the service they promised, whether in victory or in defeat, was as often paid in blood.

  What had begun as simple business acumen among foreigners seeking work, to be honest when honesty was rare, became more than that. The honouring of a contract became the honouring of anything. A given word was kept, duty was faithfully maintained – and that was only to the petty kings and merchant princes who scrambled over one another like crabs in a bucket, each pulling all the others down so than none could reach the top and escape from the never-ending cycle of conflict. Having seen the deceit born of coins whose value could be lessened simply by putting less silver into each minting, the Albans resorted to a currency that could not be cheapened. It made them trusted, respected – but never really loved. There was always an air of superiority about an Alban when he dealt outside his immediate name-kin, the sort of superiority that irks ordinary men with ordinary failings, as though their worth was being silently called into question with every loo
k, every word, and every breath.

  Time passed and the wars ended. Those who could not accept peace in life found it in the grave, and the kings and princes who remained found trading more profitable than raiding. They raised palaces instead of war-camps, built towns instead of burnt them, made laws instead of threats, and settled down to profit from this new Age of the Country at Peace. And the historians and philosophers…

  Wisely kept their mouths shut. Kings whose grandfathers had been bloody-handed brigands did not take kindly to that sort of scholarly little joke, and had painful ways of saying so.

  Loved or not, the Albans came to be relied upon by their employers in a way those petty kings did not – or would not – trust their own families. The mercenary horsemen became bodyguards, the last line of protection against ambitious retainers, or were granted small fiefs along debatable borders so that they became lords in their own right and the first line of defence against ambitious neighbours.

  They married, but their wives seldom came from among the local people: lords they might have become, but they were still no more than hired servants. Instead, the women and children they had left behind began travelling up from the steppe country to join their menfolk. The families grew and intermarried, so that name-kin became blood-kin; they made alliances with one another as lordly houses might, and became clans; but otherwise the Albans stayed where they were. They remained bodyguards or border guards, neither asking for advancement nor expecting it since such conditions were not in their contracts, and the privileges they had received already were no more than equivalent to the land grants and golden battle decorations given as service rewards to lesser men. They had no Alba, no Land of their own to live in – but what they had was more than enough. They had their honour.

  Until Hospodar Skarpeya became the king’s advisor in Kalitzim.

  The Albans were honourable, trustworthy, decent, honest, obedient, lacking in all but the most ordinary and forgivable human vices and, when not slaughtering their various employers’ enemies, were reputedly kind to children and small animals. They were, in short, sickeningly wholesome, and tended to be just as sickeningly righteous.

  There had been rumblings of discontent about them among the other retainers for a long time now, but those noises had been dismissed as no more than envy. It was not a dismissal guaranteed to win them any support among the noisemakers. Especially when Skarpeya appeared on the scene and the Albans began making noises in their turn.

  The reason was simple enough: the Albans disapproved of sorcery. It therefore followed like night after day that they disapproved of Skarpeya, because he was rather more than just the king’s political confidant. Skarpeya was a wizard. Whether he was good or bad – in whichever sense of those words – mattered not at all to the Albans. They disapproved on principal, and said so loudly.

  And once too often.

  * * * *

  That was what had Bayrd ar’Talvlyn – and every other Alban man, woman and child who had survived the storm – floating about in their mismatched fleet. King Daykin of Kalitz had listened reasonably enough to both sides of the argument. Then – quite unreasonably in their opinion and in direct violation of several early-termination clauses – he had torn up all the Alban contracts and given them twenty days to be beyond the borders of his realm, or lose all their possessions and be enslaved.

  Those twenty days would not have been enough for them to return to their ancestral plains, even if any had wanted to. After two hundred years of reasonable comfort, of eating meat that they hadn’t needed to hunt first, and bread made of flour that someone else had grown and ground, the prospect of returning to the wilderness had been distinctly unappealing. The Albans who moved westward had grown soft; or at least, sensible.

  Daykin’s impossible restriction had been deliberate, the justification for it no more than an excuse to act against retainers whose honesty unsettled him, no matter that it had been good enough for generations of his ancestors. That callous reasoning – and the repudiation of mutually-agreed service contracts – had been enough for Albanak, overlord of the Alban clans. He did nothing for ten days of the allotted time, then issued his commands.

  “Ride north,” he had said, “and take ships. As many as you need. Enough for all of us.”

  Bayrd and the other warriors of Clan ar’Talvlyn saw very little of that raid. Instead they were sent south and east from Kalitz, escorting a vast gaggle of wagons that were as mismatched in their way as the ships. Those wagons were supposedly carrying the families and blood-clan of ar’Talvlyn, ar’Lerutz, ar’Sanen and three others, to draw the eyes of Daykin’s other soldiers away from the seaports of the north.

  It was a mad gamble, far removed from any of the cool, considered stratagems that had won the Albans their military reputation. Perhaps because of that very madness, it worked. The ar’Talvlyn horsemen let the empty wagons scatter in a hundred different directions towards Tergavets and Vlekh, and swung back under cover of darkness, riding like a storm towards their prearranged rendezvous on the Droselan coast.

  That was the only time in the whole dangerous undertaking when Bayrd was almost killed. He had never before swum a horse out towards a ship standing offshore in deep water; and he had never dived under the beast’s belly to secure it with straps so that such a valuable resource could be winched aboard. The only familiar part about the whole undertaking had been when the horse, hoisted clear of the choppy waves, had expressed its displeasure of the whole procedure by lashing out with its hind legs.

  An iron-shod hoof had whipped past his face, peeled a long strip of skin from his forehead and came that skin’s thickness to removing any further need for hats in his wardrobe. Like the rest of his clan, Bayrd ar’Talvlyn had worked with fiery-tempered battle horses all his life. He had learned to sit astride a saddle, and not fall off too frequently, almost before he could walk – and that sensation had become entirely too familiar. War horses were trained to kill, and you were trained not to let them kill you. If the training went wrong and your brains were kicked over the landscape, that was just too bad – and your fault. It was as simple as that. Even so, there was something lacking in glory about being kicked to death by your own mount.

  Two nights later the storm hit the fleet, and demonstrated that there were still less glorious ways to die…

  * * * *

  There had been about thirteen thousand Albans in Droselan and Kalitzak service, and all – with their families, their horses and their goods – were supposed to have been aboard the motley fleet that must have included everything that could float along hundreds of miles of coast. As the ships gathered together and began moving towards the still-unseen shoreline, Bayrd wondered how many of them remained – and how many horses, how many bows, how many swords. All those things would be needed, sooner or later. When he issued his last commands, Albanak-arluth had made one thing quite clear: his people would no longer be given land to live in. Things given could be taken away; they had seen as much. From now on, they would do the taking.

  Aware that he was no more than an obstruction on deck, Bayrd got himself out of the way as sailors began hurrying to and fro with lengths of rope, lengths of canvas, lengths of wood, and all the other mysterious impedimenta of their trade.

  They looked busy and willing enough, and some of them looked downright happy – but not of them looked or sounded Alban. So how, he wondered idly, had they been persuaded to serve as crew on a blatantly illegal voyage?

  Then, as Bayrd sidestepped a trio of sailors carrying what looked to be a new sail, he chanced to glance straight towards a large, broad-beamed merchant vessel. Both its masts were shattered, hanging from one side of the hull in a tangle of cordage, and it was being towed to shore by one of the battlerams whose banks of oars made them independent of the need for wind. Despite the damage and the mess, it looked familiar, and Bayrd frowned as he tried to remember where he had seen such a ship before.

  The frown vanished as recognition took its place, and
he began to laugh for the first time in many days. That was a treasure-ship, just like the one his troop had been assigned to guard in Tanafen harbour three years before, on the memorable day when he came as close to seeing action in the king’s service as he had ever done. Which had not been very close at all. The presence of this treasure-ship went a very long way to explain both the presence of the Droselan seamen and their cheerful disposition, and it also told him why Clan ar’Talvlyn had been sent to risk their necks escorting what had felt like a fool’s errand.

  Overlord Albanak was nobody’s fool; distracting King Daykin’s attention from the north had been for another purpose than just to let the clans and families escape. He must have known where that ship was docked, and might even have been faithfully drawing up the assignments to guard it on the day King Daykin decided to exile his most faithful retainers. Those details didn’t matter any more. The old fox had known, and that was enough.

  As Bayrd’s quiet laughter subsided to a grin, he made a mental note for the future. When the honourable overlord of an honourable people decided it was time to set his honour aside and start to take instead of waiting to be given, he didn’t waste time with half measures.

  And with an unknown landfall just beyond what horizon he could see from the level of the deck, it was no time for half measures in defence. Better to be armed and armoured and not need it, than be caught trying to ward off an arrow with nothing but a wet shirt and a surprised expression. As he stalked towards the cluttered cabins in the stern, he finger-combed the long, still-wet strands of hair from his shoulders and fiddled at the nape of his neck for several minutes, trying to retie the warrior’s braid that had come undone during the storm. After three useless attempts he muttered venomously under his breath and gave up, tying it back instead in a lank horse-tail that he knew would be the very devil to unpick once it had dried.