The Blue Star, Fletcher Pratt [essential books to read .TXT] 📗
- Author: Fletcher Pratt
Book online «The Blue Star, Fletcher Pratt [essential books to read .TXT] 📗». Author Fletcher Pratt
The thin woman was still talking when a man with an engraved smile touched Lalette’s arm and said that the Initiate would like to see her. The man’s face was calm as though carved in stone; he asked her whether she was married? Had read the First Book of the Prophet? Drank fortified alcohols? Practiced the Art? He looked at her as though his glance would bore straight through when she answered the last honestly that she had done so, but would practice it no more. Then he pronounced a discourse as incomprehensible as that he had given to the company, ending by saying she must be reborn into purest love.
At the close of this he told her that he had looked into her heart and believed her honest, but that she must carefully study the Prophet’s First Book. He gave her a letter for the cargo-overseer of a vessel even then at the wharf; the book, he said, would be furnished to her aboard by the third mate of the vessel. Dame Domijaiek had been her guarantee; love would be her protector. She was kissed on the forehead and they all went out into a spring twilight with drizzles of rain.
At the wharf someone was trying to lead a protesting horse into the ship, among stampings and confused shouts. Lalette huddled in the shadow, as close as she could get to the widow Domijaiek and regarded the masts running up into the grey, with their climbing triangles of rope tracery. A wide plank led through a gap in the bulwarks before them, but now the horse was disposed of, the ship’s people were engaged in some bargle at one end of the vessel; no one paid any attention to the two women who tripped to the deck and stood uncertain. At last a man detached himself from the group with a cheerful farewell and came along the deck toward them, cap on head and munching a piece of bread. He would have passed with a brief stare in the assembling gloom, but the widow halted him with outstretched hand and asked where was the overseer of cargo?
He halted with mouth open and cheek puffed out with food. “By the lazarette,” and before either could put another question, disappeared round a wooden structure that rose from the planking. A few spurts of rain fell. Lalette shivered more snugly into her cloak (wondering whether “witch” might not be written on her forehead to make all shun her save those whom others shunned, as Amorosians and Zigraners). Now the chatter broke up and three or four men together came toward the head of the plank, porters mainly with their iron hooks in their belts. The exception had broad but stooped shoulders, a close grey mat of beard and an unlighted lantern in his hand. To him Dame Domijaiek addressed herself, inquiring where the lazarette might be.
He waved a hand. “Aft of the tri-mast, leftward”; then glanced at Lalette, stepped close and peered at her so directly that she shrank away. “For Ser Brog, mother?” he said, and turned to the older woman. “Looky here, mother, I ha’n’t seen you before along Netznegon dock, eh? You come to see me when you finish with Ser Brog, and maybe we do business, eh? At Casaldo’s.” The porters laughed and one of them bubbled a derisive sound through his lips (Lalette was already repenting her undertaking).
A voice behind a door told them to enter. It belonged to a tall man with white hair, whose black fuzzy eyebrows leaped up a long face when he saw that his visitors were women. He did not rise, but cast a half-regretful glance at the sheet of computations on a leaf let down from the wall before him. The letter he at first held far away as though it were an affiction of proclamation; when he grasped its purport and had seen the signature, he rose, all courtesy. “Aye, hands must wash face,” he said. “I trust you left Ser Kimred well? Will you be having a little wine?”
Dame Domijaiek excused herself, since she must return to her child, but as she embraced Lalette farewell, the girl felt thrust into her hand a little cloth pouch with coins in it, and was suddenly at the edge of weeping. When she turned, Ser Brog had set out a pair of pewter cups and was drawing the cork from a bottle of wine. He bowed her to the single chair, himself taking the edge of the built-in bed, which was so hedged about by cabinets that he must bend.
He said; “So you are seeking a sea-voyage, Demoiselle Issensteg?” (This was the name the letter had given her.) “Are you one of the inland Issenstegs from Veierelden? I hear there have been troubles in that region.”
(Was he trying to draw her into indiscretion, and how much did he really know of her origin and purpose?) She said that she was not of the Veierelden branch and waited. He asked her politely whether she had had a joyous festival and were a good sailor. When she said that she had not been at sea before, his face took on some concern, and he regretted that the captain’s wife, who usually sailed with them, would not do so this voyage. There were no other women aboard. He would provide her with a bell for summoning someone when needed—“not that you will be molested, demoiselle, but I will say the third mate is as strange—as a dog with two heads.”
With this, Ser Brog finished his wine and rose to light her to a duplicate of his own tiny cabin. She decided she had been mistaken about the question, he was only expressing interest in the friend of a friend. It was nice not to have to be afraid. An hour or so later, as she sat curled up on the bed, but not yet disrobed, came a demonstration of how well the Amorosians cared for their own. A knock on the door turned into a porter with a neatly-strapped small trunk, painted with her assumed name. It held an assortment of body-linens, shoes and a dress in her size, new and of good quality.
IVShe was roused by feet beating in rhythm and the sound of distant shouts; a big round spot of light swung slowly from side to side across the door. Last night had shown her a jug and a basin beneath the let-down leaf that formed a writing table, but the water was so cold it gave her goose-pimples. The new dress would need taking in at the shoulders, so after trying it, she returned to the old before stepping toward the deck along a passage that held three more doors like her own. Two men in yokes were pushing and relaxing on opposite sides of a pivoted bar (to steer the ship, she supposed), under the orders of an officer in a green cap. One of the workers was the curl-bearded man who had accosted Dame Domijaiek the evening before. He relaxed one hand to touch his forelock and had the grace to look sheepish. The officer hardly looked at her; he was watching the masts that rose on every side and the small boats about, for they were well out into the Bredafloss, moving steadily downstream, though the sails hung so flat, it seemed they could contain no air at all.
Lalette stepped past the steersmen to watch the slow pageant of river moving by, and heard a step. Ser Brog; he touched his cap and invited her to breakfast, down a flight of steep stairs and along another passage to an apartment at the rear of the ship. A skylight threw dappled gleams across a table laid for five, with food already on it. Another man was standing by; Ser Brog presented the second mate, and as he did so, a big officer with a firm chin and bags under his eyes came in with an air of great hurry and sat down without waiting for the rest. This was the captain, Ser Mülvedo; he bounced half an inch from his seat when his name was mentioned, and fell to eating while the rest were taking their places.
Lalette thought his courtesy somewhat strange to one who wore a badge of good condition, and it was stranger still when a youngish officer entered, to be greeted by the Captain with; “You are tardy. You know the rule of the ship. Take your meal with the crew.”
The young officer went out sourly, but not before Lalette recognized him as the one who had directed her toward the lazarette. The meal went on in silence; when the Captain rose, so did the others, and Ser Brog touched Lalette’s arm to take her to the deck again. The spring air was fine, the stream-bank all tricked out in tender green. Lalette looked (and felt with a thrill of delight that all was really now spring for her, she was free from the old life and everything to win), but Ser Brog was speaking.
“I am sorry to dream,” she said.
“Why, dreams do be what we grow by. I would be saying that you had brought luck and fair weather on our leave-taking—for all but Tegval.”
“The one sent from his breakfast?”
“He.” The cargo-overseer laughed. “Our third mate is an admirable young man, with only one flaw—that he has discovered how admirable he is and does not stint his own admiration.”
(The third mate would give her the book.) Said Lalette, watching a tall unpainted barn without a window that walked slowly past along the shore; “Yet your captain seemed very harsh with him for so light a fault.”
“Oh, that is only the rule of the sea. On a ship one learns early that in this world there is no such thing as following one’s own desire; it is all a pyramid of orders.”
“You are grim.”
“No, I only see things as they are.” Now he began to make remarks which she must have answered, for he smiled and continued (but now her mind had leaped far away, and she was wondering whether she would see Rodvard again ever, or recover her Blue Star? Bound out to sea and away; it was his fault, who had given her unfaithfulness and desertion in exchange for the offered kindness and the abandonment of her mother. And now she wondered why she had embarked on the counter-witchery without even questioning whether she should; she felt a tear behind her eye, and hoped he had come to know what resources of fidelity and good will he had lost in her. No, not again, I’ll never let another have the making of my joy.)
A whistle was blown; men moved along the deck of the ship, and Tegval came toward them with his cap insouciantly on one side to be presented. He had the same look of inner peace as the Amorosians of the conventicle, but mingled with it an air of dash and recklessness.
14THE EASTERN SEA; THE CAPTAIN’S STORY
A frond of white had spread across the sky as they talked. Lalette went to her room in the round covered-house that rose from the deck, and applied herself to the needle. Making the new dress right was a problem, since she had done little but broidery before, and she became so taken with fitting and clipping as not to note the tick of time; then felt drowsy, and lay down to be roused by a knock at the door.
It was Tegval, third mate. “May I lead you to supper?” The ship had no motion when they reached air; here they were in the middle of a brown-blue tide, with flat shores stretching to green-blue on either flank. Tegval helped her graciously down the stair, and was this time prompt enough so that all of them were waiting when Captain Mülvedo came in. This officer was now at ease, cracking his face into a smile for Lalette and trying to converse with her about people a demoiselle of condition might be expected to know. Some of them she did know, but was forced to avoid the issue lest he learn the falsity of her name.
Tegval offered her his arm after the meal, and showed her around the deck as far forward as the tri-mast, his discourse being of the parts of the ship and
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