“But it’s not my country!” Sterren protested. “I was born and raised here in Ethshar, of Ethsharitic parents!” He looked from the sailor to Lady Kalira and back.
The sailor shrugged, a gesture that was getting on Sterren’s nerves. Lady Kalira said, in halting Ethsharitic, “You, the heir.”
Sterren looked despairingly at the two soldiers; he could see no chance at all that he could outrun or outfight either of them, let alone both. The one on the left slid a few inches of his blade from its scabbard, in warning.
“Hai! No bloodshed in here! Take him outside first!” The innkeeper’s voice was worried.
No one paid any attention to his outburst — save that, Sterren hoped he would call the city guard.
Hoping for the city guard was a new experience for him.
Even if they were summoned, though, they could not possibly arrive in time to do him any good. He had no way out. Struggling to smile, Sterren managed a ghastly parody of a grin as he said, “I guess I’ll be going to Semma, then.”
Lady Kalira smiled smugly.
CHAPTER 2
Sterren stared at the decaying, sun-bleached town of Akalla of the Diamond in dismay. It lived up to his worst imaginings of what the barbaric Small Kingdoms would be like.
He had been given very little warning of what to expect. His captors had spirited him out of the tavern, paused at his room on Bargain Street only long enough to gather up his few belongings, and then taken him, protesting vigorously, onto their chartered ship.
He had looked desperately for an opportunity to escape, but none had presented itself. At the last minute he had dived off the dock, only to be fished ignominiously out of the mud and dragged aboard.
After that, he had given up any thoughts of escape for a time. Where could he escape to from a ship? He wasn’t that strong a swimmer. Instead, he had cooperated as best he could, biding his time.
His captors had separated him from the interpreter and made it plain that they expected him to learn their barbaric tongue, Semmat, they called it. He had swallowed his revulsion at the thought of speaking anything but proper Ethsharitic and had done his best to oblige. After all, if he couldn’t understand what was being said around him, he would have little chance of learning anything useful. His language lessons had not covered very much when the ship docked in Akalla of the Diamond, just ten days after leaving Ethshar of the Spices. The weather had been hot and clear, and fairly calm, which is why it took ten days just to cross the Gulf of the East and sail the South Coast. One of the two immense Semman soldiers, the one who called himself Alder d’Yoon, told Sterren in a mixture of baby Semmat and sign language that the voyage in the other direction had taken only four days because the ship had been driven before a storm much of the way, a very expensive storm, conjured up for that very purpose, if Sterren understood him correctly.
Alder guessed the total distance between the two ports at less than a hundred leagues, a figure that surprised Sterren considerably. He had always thought of the Small Kingdoms as being a very long way off, on the far side of the ocean, and a hundred leagues across a mere gulf didn’t seem that far.
Of course, Sterren was not absolutely certain that he had understood Alder correctly. He knew he had the numbers straight, because he had learned them from counting fingers, but he wasn’t completely sure of the Semmat terms for “day” and “league.” He wished that he could check with the interpreter, but Lady Kalira, or rather, Aia Kalira, in Semmat, had expressly forbidden the man to talk to him in any language, and she was paying enough that the sailor would not take any chance of losing his job.
Several members of the crew spoke Ethsharitic, but Lady Kalira had paid each of them to not speak it to Sterren except in emergencies. He was to communicate in Semmat or not at all.
Too often, it was not at all, leaving him unsure of much of his limited vocabulary.
Whatever the exact distances, there could be no doubt that on the afternoon of the tenth day their ship put into port at Akalla, in the shadow of the grim pile of guano-whitened stone the Semmans called Akalla Karnak. Sterren thought that karnak probably meant castle, but again he was not quite sure. He had never seen a castle before, and the forbidding fortification at Akalla did not encourage him to seek out others.
He had gathered that Semma lay somewhere inland, and that Akalla of the Diamond was the nearest seaport to it. He was not yet clear on whether Akalla was a separate country, a conquered province, or a district within the kingdom of Semma. The truth was that he didn’t much care, since it did not seem relevant to any plans to escape back to Ethshar.
And Akalla looked like a place that very few people cared about. It consisted of three or four streets lined with small shops and houses, all huddled onto a narrow stretch of beach in the castle’s shadow, between two jagged stretches of broken cliffs.
The buildings of the town were built of some sort of yellowish blocks that looked more like brick than stone, but were far larger than any bricks Sterren was familiar with. The joints all seemed to be covered with faded greenery, brown mosses or gray lichen or half-dead ivy climbing the walls. The roofs were of turf, with thin, scorched brown grass on top. He saw very few windows. Flies buzzed in clouds above the streets, and the few people who were visible on those streets seemed to be curled up asleep, completely covered by dirty white robes. The whole place smelled of dry rot.
Sterren was not at all impressed by the town.
The castle was far more impressive, but it, too, was streaked with dying plant life and seemed lifeless, almost abandoned.
As Sterren watched the sailors tying up to the dock, he asked the soldier beside him, not Alder, but the other one, Alder’s comrade Dogal d’Gra, how far it was to Semma.
Rather, he tried to ask that, but his limited knowledge of Semmat forced him to say instead, “How many leagues is Semma?” That assumed that he was using the correct word for leagues and hadn’t screwed up the grammar somewhere.
What he had thought was a simple question plunged his guard into deep concentration; the Semman muttered to himself, saying in Semmat, “Akalla, maybe one; Skaia, four or five; Ophkar, hmm.”
Finally, after considerable calculation, he arrived at an answer. “Twelve, thirteen, maybe fourteen leagues.”
Sterren knew the numbers up to twenty beyond any question, and a good many beyond with reasonable confidence, but to be sure he held up his ten fingers and said, “And two, three more?”
Dogal nodded. “Yeah.”
Horrified, Sterren stared back out at the port. Thirteen leagues? The entire city of Ethshar was little more than a league from corner to corner, yet he had never managed to explore it all. It took a good hour just to walk from Westgate to the Arena, more, if traffic was heavy. They would have to walk all night to reach Semma!
In the event, as he later learned, they would not walk at all, and certainly not at night. Instead, when the ship was secured at bow and stern and the gangplank in place, he found himself escorted not out onto the highway to Semma, but to a small inn near the docks, small by Sterren’s standards, that is, since it was, except for the castle, the largest structure in town.
The interpreter, to Sterren’s consternation, stayed behind on the ship; he had fulfilled his contract and would not be accompanying them further.
Upon learning this, Sterren suddenly wished he had tried even harder during his language lessons. Now if an emergency arose he would have to rely on his limited command of Semmat, rather than finding an interpreter. He felt more cut off than ever.
Once inside the inn, out of the hot sun and into the cool shade, Sterren looked around, and his opinion of Akalla went up a notch. The inn was laid out well enough, with several cozy alcoves holding tables and one wall lined with barrels. A stairway at either side led up to a balcony, and the rooms for travelers opened off that. A good many customers were present, eating and drinking and filling the place with a pleasant hum of conversation, while harried but smiling barmaids hurried hither and yon.
Most of the customers wore the thin white robes Sterren had seen on the street, but here they were
