The Mark of Ran Read Free Page B

the headland. “There is a storm coming by land as well as sea, and you will be in the eye of it. This cockleshell of yours had best be a weatherly craft.”
    “I have to go now,” Rol said uneasily. “They’ll be missing me up at the house.”
    The stranger nodded, and his manner brightened, became mocking. “One thing more, my lad. This idyll of Ardisan’s is at an end. Fate has come knocking at the door. I have a gift for you now that may ease your passage in the world. Hold out your hand.”
    Rol immediately closed his free fingers into a fist and backed away. “Stay back, or you’ll have a face full of pitch.”
    “I doubt it. The stuff in that pot is cold as a witch’s cunny.”
    And somehow the man had darted forward, quick as a heron’s lunge, and had grasped Rol’s free hand in his own. His fingers were like cold iron, and they burned. Rol cried out and fell to his knees in the shingle. The stranger bent over him and forced open the fist, matched palm for palm. It felt as though the flesh of Rol’s hand were being seared through the very bone to the marrow. He screamed, but the sound was lost in the omnivorous roar of the wind. When he was released he fell backwards and a foaming wave crashed over him, the salt water pouring into his eyes, his ears and mouth. He rolled onto his side, staggered to his feet, and the next wave smashed into the backs of his thighs, toppling him once more. The man was gone, but Rol was sure he saw something sleek and black and shining leap into the rabid waves and disappear, before the salt spray blinded him once more.
    He was floundering in waist-deep water—somehow he had rolled down the beach into the riotous breakers. He fought himself upright, his whole world a black and white storm of fuming water. The waves seemed to be trying to drag him out to sea, and there was cold laughter in their thunder. Finally he found himself by
Gannet
again, and he wrapped an arm about the wood of her sternpost. Staring at his pain-racked hand he thought he could make out a shape, a scallop of scar on the palm, but the light was going fast and his eyes were stinging with salt. He stumbled inland, up the face of the little cove, and did not stop until he had grass under his feet again and the bellow of the sea was muffled by the frowning cliffs below.
     
    Lightning played about the headland, and there was a bright red glow that perplexed Rol. Then he heard shouting over the wind and the pelting rain, and broke into a run toward Eyrie.
    A mob of men with torches were milling there, perhaps a hundred on foot and another score on horseback, their cuirasses shining in the stormlit rain. They had surrounded the shuttered house and various of them were hammering at the closed door. Rol saw Serioc the Headman of Driol there, carrying a half pike and hitching at the weight of an ancient mail shirt on his back. He looked both self-important and embarrassed, like a man caught out giving charity. But the obvious leader of the crowd was a fully armored figure on a black destrier, his face almost invisible beneath the bedraggled plumes of his helm, which he kept twitching aside in irritation. Now and again he would lean in the saddle and speak to one of the other horsemen who clustered deferentially about him, and they would nod solemnly.
    Rol wondered if he had slipped into some fevered, dream-lit madness. Clutching his injured hand to his breast, he dropped into the sodden heather a cable from the house, and watched as the pigs were run off squealing, Ayd’s vegetable garden was trampled, and Eyrie’s stout shutters were dunted and thumped by the butts of pikes and halberds. The more enterprising of the mob scrambled up onto the roof of the cottage and began thrusting pike-points down through the turves of the roof. However, they all scrambled hastily to the ground again when one of the penetrating pike-shafts was whipped out of its owner’s grasp and disappeared, only to re-emerge point first and