Waist-high sailcloth curtains covered the lower half of the archways, concealing the seated wizard while allowing her light and air. Sharina was ready to hand Tenoctris anything she called for, though as yet she might as well have stayed in Valles. Occasionally wizardlight dusted the sunlight red or blue as Tenoctris chanted, but those escapes remained faint enough that the crewmen on deck could pretend not to notice.
The captain spoke to the flutist seated on a perch built into the sternpost. That man lowered the instrument on which he’d been blowing time; at a nod from the captain, a petty officer blew an attention signal on his straight bronze horn.
“Cease rowing!” said Ceius. “Shake out the sail!”
Officers on deck and in the crowded hold beneath relayed the orders in a chorus, generally with the added obscenities that Sharina had learned to expect when somebody was directing soldiers or sailors. The difference between the methods of junior officers and of muleteers, so far as she could tell, was that the former didn’t use whips—at least in the royal forces.
While deck crewmen grabbed ropes to unfurl the sail to catch the freshening breeze, the oarsmen released from duty came boiling up from their benches in the hold through the open beams that supported the deck and allowed ventilation below. The first of them, squirming like a snake hunting voles, was King Carus himself. He sprang to the deck beside Sharina.
Captain Ceius stepped forward in greeting, but Carus waved him back. “Carry on, Ceius!” he said. “You’ve got matters under control.”
Petty officers were dipping cups of wine mixed with two parts water from great jars in the bow and stern. Their strikers held waxed rosters to check off the name of each man served. Military personnel didn’t have to be scholars, but Sharina had been surprised to learn that even the lowest-ranking officers were able to read at least names or passwords scratched on a potsherd.
Carus winked at Sharina, then took his place in the line forming for the drinks. The men ahead of him immediately scattered in surprise.
“Get back as you were!” Carus roared, speaking so that the ship’s whole crew could hear him. “When I’m acting as your commander, I expect you to jump into the sea if that’s what I order you. But while I’m pulling an oar, by the Shepherd! I expect to be treated as an oarsman. Does anybody doubt me?”
He raised his big hands, his palms gleaming with the resin he’d dusted on them before gripping the oarloom. Nitker and his three aides in the bow, all noblemen, stared at the king in amazement, as did several of the nearby Blood Eagles. The bodyguards were recruited from the same class as the aides, though they were generally younger sons and of impoverished houses.
The sailors who’d been in line ahead of Carus drank quickly and stepped away, watching the king sidelong. Carus took the cup offered him—one of four, each chained to a different jar handle—and held it as an officer dipped it full. The striker holding the roster looked at the king in terror, and bleated, “But chief! He’s not on the list!”
“As commander,” Carus said, “I’m directing that you make an exception in my case.”
Laughing in loud good humor, he emptied the cup without lowering it and stepped away, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. The next man in line dropped the cup against the jar with clang of thin bronze on thick ceramic, then hid his blush as best he could.
Carus grinned at Sharina, rubbing his palms together. “I do it to show that I’m willing to,” he said in a low voice. He nodded toward Nitker and the aides, one of whom still stared as if transfixed. “I won’t order them to do manual labor unless I need to, but I want them all to realize that I don’t think any man’s too good for any job. Some of my nobles may feel otherwise, but they won’t dare say so now.”
His grin spread even broader. He added, “But I also like to row, now and again. It’s even better than fencing practice for using every muscle and letting your mind rest.”
He sighed, no longer buoyant. “Which I need now even more than most times,” he said.
“Have you been able to sleep any?” Sharina asked quietly. There was no real privacy on a two-hundred-foot vessel carrying four hundred men, but the very numbers created a background of noise that made it unlikely that they’d be easily overheard.
Carus shrugged. “No more than usual,” he said, which meant scarcely at all. “We’ll solve the problem soon, I expect.”
Sharina followed the line of the king’s gaze out over the sea, a sheet of pale green marked as far as she could see with ships and the white wakes foaming behind them. Most vessels had their mainsail set, though a few were proceeding under one bank of oarsmen and the pull of the small triangular boat sail set from their jib. The sky was clear except for a scatter of tiny clouds on the horizon ahead.
Carus crooked a finger toward the sky. “Clouds like that usually mean land,” he said. “They’re over the Dandmere Reefs, I’d guess. That was what we called them in my day, anyhow.”
He smiled wryly. “I never claimed to be a sailor,” he said, “but at the end I was spending half my time on a ship. Some of it stuck, I suppose.”
“I suspect Ilna’s friend Chalcus knows something about using a sword, even though he is a sailor,” Sharina said straight-faced.
The king’s expression froze; then he realized she was joking. He laughed with the suddenness of a thunderclap, drawing the eyes of everyone aboard.
“Oh, aye, I think Chalcus does indeed know swords,” Carus wheezed. “I’d say I wonder how he’s getting on—and I do—but I don’t worry, you see, the way I’d worry if I cared about any of those who might try to get in his way.”
He eyed the fleet again. “We’re scattered,” he said. “That’d be dangerous if the Confederacy had a fleet, but we’re better off with room between us in a storm, and that’s a greater risk.”
Sharina looked at the sky and frowned.
“No, not a great risk,” Carus said with a smile. “No, for now I’d say things were as much in proper order as any operation can be.”
He rubbed his temples; as he did so, his face went still again. Even a man with Carus’ spiritual strength and Garric’s youthful body needed more sleep than he was getting.
The interior of the fighting tower glittered azure. Sharina winced, hoping the king hadn’t noticed it.
He shrugged. “I didn’t have a wizard with me the last time I walked a ship’s deck,” he said with a grin that softened with use. “That was when the Duke of Yole’s wizard drowned me along with every man and ship in the royal fleet. I may have mixed feelings about what our friend Tenoctris is doing; but not very mixed, I assure you.”
Two of the quinquereme’s five banks of oarsmen had been rowing her. Those men, Carus among them, had been the first released from the benches. Now they dropped back into the hold through planks removed fore and aft, while the oarsmen who hadn’t been working came up around the side vents in turn. The oarsmen stayed below most of the time they were aboard ship: there simply wasn’t enough room on deck to hold them all.
Sharina looked into the eyes that had been her brother’s, and said, “Your highness? Do you…that is, are you glad to be—as you said, walking a deck again?”
Carus met her gaze. He smiled, but this time his expression had the terrible majesty of lightning leaping between cloud banks.
“Will I be sorry to give up the flesh again, girl, when Garric comes back?” he said. “For that’s what you mean, is it not?”
She nodded and swallowed. Her fists were clenched and her chest tight with fear of the answer.
“Girl,” the king said. “I’ve killed men because I was angry, and there’ve been times when my blood was up and I killed for no better reason than that I had an excuse and someone was in reach of my sword. But my worst enemy never called me a thief.”