The Bristling Wood - Katharine Kerr [178]
In a few minutes he heard a small commotion on deck, and the ship rocked once as voices called out. Someone’s boarding, he thought. It occurred to him that he’d been on ships before, that he knew a certain amount about them, provided they were small ships, like a galley. He remembered, then, being on a war galley, standing near the carved prow and feeling the spray break over him. What was a merchant’s son doing on a war galley? He had no chance to examine that disturbing question any further, because someone threw back the hatch at the bow and light spilled into the hold.
The mute climbed down the ladder and made the gurgling sound in his throat that did him for a greeting. A bent and wizened black crab of a man, he’d had his tongue cut out many years before, or so Gwin had said, without adding why. Behind the mute came the man called Briddyn, with his oily hair and even slicker beard, and behind him a tall, dark brown Bardekian whom Taliaesyn had never seen before. Dressed in a fine white linen tunic with one red sleeve, the fellow carried a pair of wooden tablets, smeared with wax, and a bone stylus. As Briddyn gestured at various bales and crates, the other began jotting down figures and symbols on the wax. Customs officer, Taliaesyn thought.
The mute knelt down and unlocked the ankle chain. Taliaesyn’s relief at having it gone died abruptly when the old man handed him a collar and pointed at his neck. When Taliaesyn hesitated, Briddyn turned to him.
“Put it on. Right now.”
Taliaesyn buckled it round his neck and made no objection when the mute padlocked on the chain. Although he had trouble remembering the details, he knew that Briddyn had caused him pain—intense pain—once before. The not-quite-memory persisted as a gut-wrenching fear whenever Briddyn looked his way with his pale, lashless eyes. The customs officer cleared his throat, then asked a long question, of which Taliaesyn understood nothing.
“Yes.” Briddyn handed over a strip of the thin-beaten bark the Bardekians used instead of parchment. “Here.”
Nodding, lips pursed, the customs officer read it carefully, glancing Taliaesyn’s way every now and then.
“Expensive piece of goods,” he remarked.
“Barbarian slaves are rare these days.”
It was then that Taliaesyn realized that the officer had been examining his bill of sale. His cheeks burned as the shame overwhelmed him: here he was, a Deverrian and a free man, sold like a horse in a foreign land. Yet already Briddyn and the officer had turned their attention elsewhere. To them he was nothing but a routine transaction, worth neither pity nor mockery. When they were done in the hold, the mute led Taliaesyn up onto the deck after them. While Briddyn and the port officials haggled over duties and taxes, the prisoner got his first good look around him in weeks.
The harbor was a narrow inlet about half a mile wide, cut into tall cliffs of pale pink sandstone. Four long wooden piers jutted out from the shallow beach, where a jumble of shacks and sheds stood among beached fishing boats and palm trees. Up above on the cliff tops were what seemed to be more substantial buildings in the long rectangular Bardekian style.
“A city?” Taliaesyn said.
The mute nodded yes, and a nearby sailor glanced their way. “Myleton. It’s called Myleton.”
Taliaesyn repeated the name and added it to his small store of facts. As he remembered, Myleton was on the island, Bardektinna, that had mistakenly given part of its name to the entire archipelago when Deverry men had first sailed its way. Shading his eyes with one hand, he studied what few of the cliff-top buildings he could see. One in particular interested him, an enormous wooden structure at least a hundred feet long and three stories high, its roof curved and swelling like the overturned hull of a ship. Standing next to it was a wooden statue, some forty feet tall, of a man with a bird on his shoulder.
“Temple?” Taliaesyn asked the sailor.
“Yes. Dalae-oh-contaemo. The albatross guide, the