Read Online The Ships of Merior by Janny Wurts - Free Book Online Page B

tucked his chin in his mufflers and stared without focus straight forward. ‘Ah!’ He made a manful effort, clutched his ribs, and said, ‘No one’s laugbing. Halliron has a terrible cough. I could be suffering the same.’
    Dakar’s reply unravelled into oaths as the gelding’s racketing shy sallied the width of the roadway. A stiff-featured Medlir applied himself to guiding the pony cart from its parking place amid the burdock, while Halliron wheezed and wiped rheumy eyes and murmured, ‘Ath, now my stomach is aching.’
    Their journey resumed under mists spun to gold under late-breaking sunlight. Flocking gulls rose and wheeled in the sea-breeze off the tide flats. To the right, at each turn in the road, steep-sided valleys of evergreens yawned into gorges, some threaded with falls that spilled like frayed floss, and others with deep, narrow lakes lying polished as moonstones.
    The country was beautiful, but wild, the foothills scarred by old rockfalls and too steeply pitched to grow fodder. Under sky like lucid aquamarine, the storms seemed remote, that could lash without warning off the bay and hurl salt spume against the mountains. The trees and the moss bore the scars in broken branches, and rock abutments burned clean of lichens. An equinox gale could wreck a steading in a night, with the buildings rebuilt again out of the splintered rubble, or ship’s planks, washed in by the tide. Hostels and posthouses were widely spaced and nowhere inside a day’s ride of a walled town.
    When the sun swung behind the peaks and purpled shadow hardened the road in the grip of early cold, Halliron began to shiver with chills. His nose was buffed red, and his eyes shone too bright, and his thickest quilts lent no comfort.
    Medlir said nothing, but watched his master in concern through the pause as they watered the horses.
    Embarrassed at last by his own misery, Halliron capitulated. ‘Oh, all right. We’ll shelter in Jaelot, to spare you the bother of tending an invalid in the open.’
    ‘What bother?’ Medlir redistributed the mud-flecked blankets over the Masterbard’s knees. ‘If these townsmen have execrable taste, I could always try those ballads we heard in the sailors’ dives at Werpoint.’
    Halliron returned a choked cough, whatever he had in mind undone by Dakar’s antics as he fell off the same stone twice trying to remount the brown gelding.
    ‘You’ll break your neck getting on that way!’ Medlircalled, his fingers busy taking the pony’s surcingle up a hole.
    Puffing, beet-faced, in no mood for criticism from a man who understood nothing about the trials of being fat, Dakar clambered back up the rock. ‘Since when do you know so much about horses?’
    ‘Maybe my parents were drifters,’ Medlir said.
    ‘Hah!’ The Mad Prophet achieved precarious balance on one foot. ‘Foxes, more like. You say crafty little about yourself.’
    A shallow smile touched Medlir’s features, accompanied by ingenuously raised brows. ‘Foxes bite.’
    ‘Well, I
know
I’m prying.’ Dakar poised himself, leaped, and grabbed, while his steed staggered into a clattering half-passe. The Mad Prophet landed astride through a miracle, both fists balled in mane-hanks to arrest a pitch over the saddle’s far side. As his mount was coerced to cease milling, he added, ‘Faery-toes makes better company.’
    ‘Faery-toes? That?’ Halliron poked his nose out of his blankets and fixed dubious eyes on hooves that were round and fluted as meat platters.
    ‘Well of course,’ said Dakar, offended. ‘The name suits him fine, don’t you think?’
    The party moved on; into shadows that lengthened to grey dusk, swallowed early by fog off the bay.
    Darkness had fallen as they rounded the bend before Jaelot’s wide gates. Situated on a beak-head of land that jutted out into the bay, the town was walled with black rock. Torches in iron baskets burned from the keeps, which were octagonal, with slate roofs buttressed by gargoyles that