“On the beach,” I said, “they have met the foe, and have some sense of his prowess and numbers.”
“True,” said Cabot.
“Muchly then,” I said, “have the odds shifted.”
“Doubtless,” said Cabot.
“Further,” I said, “the lockers of the men, their kits, their sea bags, from the despoiling of a hundred ships in the Vine Sea, already burst with treasure, with silver, with gold, silk, pearls, and jewels.”
“That is my understanding, at least substantially,” said Cabot.
“Have they not then already been paid, have they not already acquired more loot than war might augur?”
“Particularly,” said Cabot, “if the war seems foolish and dangerous, and the prospects of victory thin, if not hopeless.”
“I do not think the men will fight,” I said.
“They may have to,” said Cabot.
“I do not understand,” I said.
“They may have no choice,” he said.
“I do not understand,” I said.
“I think,” said Cabot, “we can better see the holding of Lord Temmu now.”
“Yes,” I said. It was more toward noon now, and the fog had been largely dispelled.
“We should enter the cove by nightfall,” said Cabot. “Lords Okimoto and Nishida will go ashore, to greet Lord Temmu, to gain intelligence, and prepare for the sheltering of tarns. In the morning, most of the men will follow, including the slaves, suitably coffled. Weapons and supplies will be also disembarked. Little will be left on the ship.”
“The treasure?” I said.
“That is to remain on the ship,” said Cabot, “at least for now.”
“I see,” I said.
Some men will betray a Home Stone before a tarn disk, being more willing to forsake the one than the other. So simple an arrangement can minimize desertion. To be sure, it is one thing to desert in Victoria, in Market of Semris, in Besnit, in Temos, in Ar, and quite another at the World’s End.
“Tonight, under the cover of darkness,” said Cabot, “the tarns will be flown.”
“The treasure remains on board?”
“Yes.”
“Our voyage then is ended?” I said.
“It seems so,” said Cabot.
“Men will soon think in terms of another,” I said.
“Lords Okimoto and Nishida,” said Cabot, “are well aware of that.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The stone-set walls were high, on both sides of the steep, winding, cobbled trail, some ten feet in width, better than a pasang in length, leading tortuously upward to the castle of Lord Temmu.
Ashore the men were armed.
Some Pani folk, shuffling, heads down, ill-clad, had threaded their way past us to where lay the wharf, against which, last night, we had moored the great ship. These new Pani, so different from the aloof, proud warriors with which we had become familiar, seemed scarcely to exist. At the wharf, under the direction of higher Pani, in trip after trip, they would gather burdens, hundreds of bundles, bails, and boxes. These were lowered in nets, swung out by booms, to the wharf. These, shouldered, or hung on poles, or sometimes on yokes, they began to transport up the trail. The only paraphernalia we were allowed to carry were weapons and accouterments. The lower Pani, so to speak, were discouraged from touching such things. I had earlier shouldered a box, but one of the ship’s Pani warned me to leave that for others. I gathered we were armsmen, and not the bearers of burdens. Perhaps Lord Temmu wished it to be clear that warriors had landed, and not porters. The Pani world was one of complex arrangements and degrees, and many proprieties, and formalities, at least to me, were mysterious. Whereas all natural societies are characterized by rank, distance, and hierarchy, acknowledged or not, I think there is no Gorean caste, from the highest to the lowest, which does not regard itself as the equal or superior, in one way or another, to that of every other. Where would society be without the Builders, the Merchants, the Metal Workers, the Cloth Workers, the Wood Workers, the Leather Workers, the Peasant, with the great bow, the ox on whom the Home Stone rests?
The trail upward was steep.
I was with the second contingent landed, some two hundred men, making its way down the ropes and rail nets.
Tarl Cabot, commander of the tarn cavalry, and his men, were not with us. Last night, under the cover of darkness, the tarns had been flown, to some undisclosed location.
We had seen no sign of the fleet of Lord Yamada.
I regarded the great ship.
Tersites had insisted, in the cove, that it come about, so that its bow might point toward the sea. This seemed to have met with general approval, certainly amongst the men. Treasure in hand, from the Vine Sea, what more was to be gained on a dangerous shore, at the World’s End?
The orientation of the great ship, bow to sea, would allow it, should the fleet of Lord Yamada be sighted, to slip its moorings and escape the cove, to the security of the open sea. The orientation also, of course, would facilitate an expeditious departure at any time, independent of some emergency, perhaps one conducted at night, in haste, by stealth.
Did not the great ship, in its way, seductive and beckoning, constitute a temptation?
I lingered on the wharf, past the fourth and fifth contingents.
Interestingly, nothing was permitted to leave the ship through the galley nests, which, if opened, might have provided a convenient access to the wharf. The nests remained closed, almost invisible in the hull, and, I had little doubt, were fastened shut, and guarded, from the inside, by Pani. Opened, they would provide a breach into the ship, quickly and easily exploited. Aside from Tersites and Aetius, who refused to come ashore, some officers, and a handful of mariners, only Pani were allowed on board, and their role, one supposed, was to prevent a general return to the ship, if not now, later.
I feared for the ship.
And, I suspect, I was not the only one. I saw Tersites at the high starboard rail, that of the stem castle, looking over the side. Then he had turned back, and I could see him no longer.
I feared for the ship.
Had it not served its purpose? Had it not traversed Thassa? Had it not vindicated the madness, the bizarre faith, the superstition and conviction, of its malformed master, half-blind Tersites, a jest amongst the islands, a joke in a hundred ports, who had sent it eyeless upon the open sea? I had long thought this omission, that he would not give the ship eyes, to the uneasiness of many, was cast down as a challenge to Thassa, that it was in its way a defiance, a boast that so mighty a structure had nothing to fear from mother Thassa, from whose womb the land was born, from her moods, her violence, her turbulence, and wind. But now it struck me, and eerily, that this seemingly fearful omission, the denial of eyes, was not so much a bold repudiation of common marine practice and lore as a concession to it deeper than was easily understood. She had been denied eyes that she might not understand how daunting were the long sea roads stretched before her, the perils into which she would be introduced. So, too, might a kaiila be hooded before being raced through the flames of a burning forest, in which arrested, it and its rider would perish.
I saw Tyrtaios stride by.
He was muchly independent now, as Lords Okimoto and Nishida were elsewhere, I supposed in attendance on the shogun, Lord Temmu.
“Tal, noble Callias,” said he to me.
“Tal, noble Tyrtaios,” I said.
He was followed by some eleven or twelve men. I did not know them. They hailed from more than one deck. This made me apprehensive. Tyrtaios, I suspected, was of the Assassins.
I looked up from the wharf toward the castle.
It would be a long, unpleasant climb.
The walls of the narrow trail, I had supposed, were to protect the passage from the castle to the water.