The Bristling Wood - Katharine Kerr [168]
On the fourth day, though, she was in for a surprise. They left the water’s edge and turned inland to find another road. Long disused, it was only a narrow track through the sea meadows of tall grass, but it ran straight and purposefully. Just at noon, they came to an orchard gone wild, where under the tangle of unpruned trees apples lay rotting. Just beyond was a circular grassy mound that looked like the remains of a village wall; inside it Jill could pick out dimpled circles on the earth where houses had once stood. As soon as they came close to the ruins, the Wildfolk vanished.
“What happened to this place?” Jill said. “Do you know?”
“It was burned by pirates.”
“Pirates? What would they want with a farming village? I’ll wager there wasn’t any fabulous plunder here.”
“No gold nor jewels, truly, but wealth all the same. Slaves, my innocent turtledove, slaves for the Bardek trade. The raiders would kill all the men as being more trouble than they’re worth, and take the women and children over in the carracks. Deverry slaves are rare in the islands, you see, exotic and therefore expensive, like Western Hunters in the Eldidd horse trade. There used to be a lot of small villages out here, scattered up the river into the Auddglyn. All gone now.”
“By all the ice in all the hells! Didn’t the local gwerbret put a stop to it? Why did it take him so long?”
“The local gwerbret is about a hundred and forty miles away, my sweet. The pirates finally ended it themselves. They’d overhunted the place, and there weren’t any villages left that were safe to raid.”
“Oh. You’d think that blacksmith in Cinglyn would’ve know about this.”
“Of course he did. He refused to mention it, that’s all. That whole town must live in fear that one day the scum will be bold enough to come take them.”
The biggest surprise of all lay two more days along. Here the coastal cliffs became lower and lower, finally fading out into a long stretch of dunes, scattered with coarse grass. As they rode east, the grass grew thicker; tiny streams appeared; the ground grew damp, and here and there trees stood beside ponds and rivulets. Quite suddenly they found a road made of logs laid down in the muck. Whenever Jill tried to get some information out of Salamander, he would only grin and tell her to wait. After a couple of hours more, the road brought them to a straggle of fishermen’s huts in a sandy cove at one side of a broad, shallow estuary. Drawn up in the harbor were ships, a few tattered fishing boats, and then three sleek carracks and two galleys, all with suspicious-looking accouterments on their prows.
“By the Lord of Hell himself,” Jill said. “Those look like corvos and ballistas.”
“That’s exactly what they are. Remember those pirates I told you about? This is where they winter. They’ve got a whole town here, they do, just upriver, and farther on farms to feed it. This, my dearest turtledove, is Slaith.”
For a few minutes Jill sat on her horse in something like shock and stared at the peaceful harbor. Through the scattered trees along the riverbank she could see other buildings, and far beyond what appeared to be the roofs of a sizable town. Finally she found her voice again.
“Since you know so much about this place, why haven’t you told one of the gwerbrets in the Auddglyn about it?”
“I tried. They wouldn