The Fox

by Sherwood Smith

  It took Fox and Cook together to bring him down, fighting to the limits of their dwindling strength, but bring him down they did, until he lay a hacked and bleeding mess on the deck. Fox bent, hands on knees. Cook spun and threw his blood-smeared carving knife into the sea.

  After the bodies were gone, they had to finish smoothing the mast and step it. The sky was full of marching lambkins, heralding more rain somewhere beyond the curve of the horizon.

  Tau drifted up to Inda where he leaned for a few moments against the taffrail, rewinding a blood-soaked bandage around his upper arm. He said in a private voice, “Coco keeps offering promises to those who go below. Some of them have gotten into the drink and want to let her out for either sex or torture.”

  Inda sighed. “Will letting her free settle ’em?”

  “No. She’ll suborn the weakest and start trouble.”

  Inda looked up, his eyes bloodshot, but his face eased of the closed-in blankness of the previous weeks. Tau wondered if he would ever find out what had caused the sudden change in Inda.

  Inda squinted up, as the men chanted an old sea song, ropes tentacling out fore and aft. “There. Soon as that mast is fidded and the shrouds rattled down, we’re under way. So let’s get rid of her. We’ll give her the rowboat, as all the others took too much damage, and I want the longboat for us.” Inda fought a jaw-cracking yawn. “Oh. And Tau. If there are any others you think ought to go in that boat with her, let me know.”

  Taumad shaped the word “Fox” but did not speak it.

  Barend and Fox climbed up to their old retreat, the foremast head, to bend the new topsail. When they were up on the masthead together, Barend cast an assessing glance at Fox, whose sweat-streaked profile was hard as he stepped onto the footropes either side of the gaff. “Are you going to turf Inda?” He was too tired for anything but bluntness.

  Fox’s head turned, a sharp movement.

  Barend’s head pounded, but he knew everyone else’s head ached the same, if not worse. They kept moving, despite thirst, hunger, and heat. “Command. You used to talk about the heavy mantle of command. You could kill Inda,” he said. Hating the question, almost hating Fox. But he had to know—and he would warn Fox if he could. “Inda’s fast with his hands, but you’re much better. Proved that when we first took them.”

  Fox was busy seizing the sail to the gaff. One, two, three, he tightened with expert knots, as though he hadn’t heard the question. Barend returned to his own task; he worked by sign with the mainmast crew, who were raising the new topping lift for the foremast. He’d only known Fox a couple of years, if you could call this furtive life knowing. But he’d come to understand some of his ways.

  They kept working in tandem with the mainmast crew. The pendant was spliced to the end of the boom, an eyebolt hooped to the front, the tackle linked to both, and then let fall, to be belayed to the mast. The sultry breeze was slowly shifting into the east and cooling; the sail hoisted at last, with those below chanting hoarsely. The last of their strength rapidly gave out, leaving them just enough to seek the promised rest.

  Fox and Barend were now alone on the masthead.

  Fox leaned back against the mast and clasped his hands around one knee, face angled into the rising wind. “I dreamed for years of my mutiny. Taking this ship.” He talked fast, a restless stream of words. “But when the time came Inda saw it. I didn’t. Then out of nowhere comes that short, dark-browed . . . Jeje, is it? She crossed the ocean just in case Inda needed her. He’s what, sixteen, and he’s got that kind of loyalty.”

  Barend frowned at Fox’s faint, mocking smile, and said, “Are you going to turf him or not?”

  Fox turned his head. His bloodshot eyes looked very green, reminding Barend of Sponge and the Sierlaef. But then the two kingly families had intermarried before the civil war that put one family in inland exile, and the other on the throne.

  Fox drawled, “Why do you ask? Would you?”

  Barend snorted. “I’ve spent enough time around kings and brothers of kings and heirs to kings to hate, and I mean really, really hate, what your shit-stinking heavy mantle does to people. So, in case I’m not clear, no.”

  “So . . . what?” Fox gave him a long, sardonic look. “You planning to go after me if I do?”

  “Probably,” Barend admitted.

  His tone made it clear he knew as well as Fox did that he had little chance of success.

  “Loyalty.” Fox lifted his fingers and flickered them through the air. “Here’s the irony. Inda never said anything about wanting command. But today he said to each person, Do this, or that will happen, and what he said made sense— built a picture everyone could see—so everyone fell right into line.”

  Barend opened a hand, too tired even to grunt in agreement.

  “Let’s pretend I saw the right moment, too. I probably would have taken Walic’s place on the captain’s deck and rapped out general orders, and they all would have looked at one another, or asked questions, and I would have lost whatever it is that makes followers choose the next leader. Or maybe they would have challenged me. Then either I have to fight what was supposed to be my own crew, and if I win they’d see me as another Walic, and if I lose, I’m dead. Or I’d wish I were dead.” He strove to sound detached, but Barend noticed the flexing of his long hands. “So command passed me by and settled itself on his shoulders. At least, today it did. Shall we see what he does with it?” He moved swiftly, as he often did after talking like that, sliding down the backstay before Barend could draw enough breath to answer.

  Barend followed him to the deck, leaving the subject up there in the air. He’d gotten as much of an answer as he ever would.

  They sailed away from the island, bearing northwest on the strong east wind; within a watch the island was out of sight, though it had taken two wearying days to beat their way up to it. The Vixen glided in their lee.

  The wind dropped just before midnight, and thin rain came down, a weepy cold sky promising an end to the long summer. Most of the crew was asleep, exhausted after unremitting labor from the time the storm hit them.

  The new recruits from Freedom watched sail and wind. Inda’s followers bound and gagged Coco and brought her up, lowered the boat by torchlight, and put her over the side, along with two men whom Tau had named to Inda in private, the two whose whispered conversation had been witnessed by the bawdy-boy they despised.

  The two men fought until they realized that they were not to be dragged to the cabin for diversion, but set adrift. They’d submitted to binding and gagging. Now both sat in the stern sheets, their eyes wide and manic in the torchlight. When they saw Coco lowered down, her ruffled skirts flagging in the rainy wind, they shifted, their bodies tense.

  On Inda’s command Jeje had helped Thog store a precious bucket on that boat, one that had enough magic to purify a month’s water, plus several dozen of the hard, long-lasting biscuits called rocks, and a jug of cabbage-slurry.

  After the boat was boomed off, Inda tossed down a knife, then turned away, not caring who got to it or what they did with it afterward.

  As the two hands struggled to capture that knife with their bound hands, Coco wailed, “Taumad! I’ll do anything, I love you!”

  She peered up at him through her tears. His river of golden hair gleamed in the ruddy light; she clasped her hands, willing him to say a word. Just one. Gaffer Walic was already a memory, for once she’d gotten over her fascination with the powerful pirate captain he’d never been anything more than convenience. Taumad, born of sunlight and clean water, why did he not love her when she had been so good to him?

  He stared down, not speaking, then wrapped that glorious hair round one fist, gripped a sword blade from somewhere, and hacked off his hair in one stroke. The long locks he flung to the wind. They fell on the water, where they drifted, briefly fire-lined, and vanished. Then, making the first violent gesture she’d ever seen from him, he threw the sword to thunk, humming, in the mast.

  And then he was gone. />
  “Taumad!”

  A noise behind her. She whirled, saw a blood-smeared hand holding a knife, the face above it grinning.

  Chapter Nine

  THOG vanished below to finish cleaning the cabin for Inda. It had been her self-appointed task.

  Jeje spotted Tau climbing slowly up the foremast. She hesitated—he paused, looked back, and beckoned. So she climbed up and sat beside him on a furled sail. “What happened? ” she said, trying not to stare at the short hair drifting into his eyes.

  Tau jerked his head, an impatient movement. She pressed her forearms across her middle to squish the hot flare of desire ignited by the sight of those silken strands sliding back over his forehead. She’d fought that battle and won, the prize being his friendship as it had been when they were all children, without the constraints of physical awareness.

  “It’s been like living in a very bad play that does not come to an end, and if the watchers do not get their money’s worth, they will take you apart in pieces.”

  Jeje was shocked. Tau rarely exaggerated.

  He added with more of his old irony, “I had the fool’s role, but it’s not as if my ma didn’t warn me.”

  Jeje shivered. “What do you mean?” How long ago that last visit to the Halian coast seemed. Tau’s mother—the Butterfly, they called her—had welcomed them into her exquisite pleasure house. Jeje remembered the extraordinary woman who stooped, scented with perfumes and glimmering with jewelry, to kiss them; nothing in her house seemed as exquisite as she.

  “My ma said if I don’t take them they’ll take me.” He shifted to Iascan, using “take” to mean “take advantage of.”

  Jeje sighed, remembering what she’d overheard his mother saying, My darling Taumad is a romantic. And the words after—to surround a romantic with greed, passion, the very desire to possess him, is to close his heart and lock it against you—confusing then, thought about many times since, all of which seemed to add up to one thing: though he might regard her as a friend, Tau would never love Jeje.

  She said, “You need to be rich. Only see who you want.”

  Tau laughed softly, his profile dark against the pale blue of the sail. “Ma told me that once. One of her lessons in human nature, given to me long before I should have heard them. She said that only the rich can afford to love. One of the reasons I ran off—those lessons—but maybe she’s right. At least the wealthy can afford to choose.”

  Jeje pleated her shirt as she thought back. When they were young and free of all desire or expectation he had talked all the time: to her, and Inda, and Dasta, and Yan. Then he had stopped. Now it seemed he could talk again. Though she had won her long struggle with hopeless expectation, she did not want him to go silent and remote again.

  But she would always tell him the truth. “Seems to me the danger of being rich is you get courted for your money.”

  Tau’s soft laugh evidenced less humor than self-mockery. “And some are never courted at all.”

  Jeje held her breath. It was so rare to hear that tone of voice from Tau, soft, full of regret.

  She said, low, “You don’t have to tell me if the sex was something horrible. Don’t think I want to know.”

  Tau smiled. “Sex is just a game. Coco was taught the same things I was. She knew I was in control, but she liked it that way—at least for a while. It was new for her. I think in her mind her letting me direct the games in the cabin meant I was courting her. Desired her.”

  “Ew,” Jeje said. Thog had whispered Coco’s history to her while they crouched on the masthead waiting for the return of the second mate with the spar.

  Tau waved a hand as though flicking away a buzzing insect. “It was between times that was the worst. I was always caught between her expectation and his suspicion, and the chief mates loved telling me in disgusting detail what happened to former favorites when Walic or Coco were crossed.”

  When she did not respond, he let out his breath in a long sigh. “That’s the good side of my upbringing, that I know how to run the game with anyone, even an enemy. But the bad side is . . . I see sex as a game, not a gift.”

  “Gift?” she repeated, confused.

  “I never wanted to sleep with my friends. And you all respected that. Never tried to possess me. Yet ever since Walic captured us I keep thinking about Yan.”

  Jeje knew what ground they stood on now. “Was different for him. He wanted sex with friends. For him sex was love.”

  “Had I had more grace, more forbearance, I would have complied,” Tau said softly. “A simple enough gift for Yan, who never asked for anything but our friendship.”

  Yan was gone, and his emotional tangles as well, so Jeje said, “I did.”

  Tau’s head turned, his pupils black, reflecting ruddy flames from the lantern overhead. “What? You slept with him? I thought it was men only for Yan. And, well, I thought you were like me. Not wanting to risk . . . entanglements, as my mother would have put it, with friends,” he added.

  She felt unsettled that he’d noticed that much of her own preferences. “Pretty much was men only, but we were talking, and drinking, and he told me how he loved—well, all his friends, and, well, it happened. I was glad it did, after.”

  Tau was silent, then he said, “You are a very good person, Jeje. You know that, don’t you?”

  She snorted, feeling her face heat up. “Nah. I wanted a pillow jig. And there he was.”

  Tau laughed, then veered from the personal, as if some inward weathervane sensed a shift in the winds of Jeje’s moods. “I take it Testhy showed his backside?”

  “Not at once. He was a good mate until we reached Khanerenth. But there were no orders after we had no success asking for help to go against Walic, because . . .” She frowned, wondering who knew about Inda’s real identity. She went on in haste, “Anyway, there’s a warrant out for Kodl, Inda, and Testhy, sworn by Ryala Pim. Said we’re all pirates, and they’re the ringleaders. So me and Testhy parted. He got himself hired as purser’s mate on a guild trader. Took him only a morning to find a berth.”

  “Kodl died fighting,” Tau said, as soft rain beaded on his face. “And Dun. Either side of Inda. But Rig and the others died on the deck of Walic’s ship, refusing to turn pirate.”

  Jeje shifted. “I didn’t think about that. Inda did?”

  Tau waved a hand to and fro. “I didn’t hear what was said, but I caught a glimpse of Fox and Rat talking to him in the waist. As soon as I recognized the language Fox spoke—Marlovan—I kept Coco busy, hoping those two had some kind of mutiny plot. Afterward it turned out I was wrong, but whatever they said must have got Inda to agree to piracy though he might have been too stunned to know what was going on. He was in very bad shape and never talked about it afterward. He might not even remember. ”

  Jeje relaxed inside, a sudden release of tension that caused an uncomfortable flash of insight: even if Tau had told her Inda had jumped up waving his arms to volunteer, she would have found an excuse for him. And wasn’t I right? Didn’t I arrive just as he took this ship? she told herself. Yes, so what’s he going to do with it now he’s got it?

  She ignored that question: they would find out soon, wouldn’t they? “Lorenda will be glad Kodl died fighting, and not tortured by a damn pirate,” she said to Tau, who had been watching her face and had formed a fair idea of the direction of her thoughts. “They know about Walic at Freeport. When I went to see her for cordage she was already wearing a mourning scarf.”

  Tau turned on her. “Jeje. That’s what Inda meant! You didn’t come looking for us, you came to rescue us.”

  Jeje’s face burned. “Well, I know it was a stupid idea, but I thought maybe we could run that Toola ruse.”

  Tau shook his head. “I’m the stupid one. Though in my defense, I haven’t slept for days. You came to the rescue.”

  She said gruffly, “You thought I was actually going to offer to join up with Walic’s gang?”

  “I didn’t think at all. We’d fought a battle, a
nd then you were there. And Inda acted like he’d known you would come, as if there had never been a question.”

  Jeje winced at the tremor in his voice.

  “I’d about given up believing that there was any meaning to anything for a while, even Inda . . . No. I won’t say it, because he obviously did not give up.” Tau drew in an unsteady breath.

  Jeje glanced at his profile, half obscured by the raggedly cut hair ruffling in the wind and obscuring his eyes. So he too had feared Inda might turn pirate?

  Yes or no, the subject was obviously closed. All right. There were plenty of other questions.

  She asked one. “Fox and Rat. Marlovans. Those have to be the two with the home accents.”

  “You heard that, did you?” Tau faced her again, his eyes bright with a sheen of moisture. He dashed his sleeve across his eyes and it was gone. “How much have you learned about Inda?”

  Jeje whistled softly as she kicked her feet in the cool, misty wind. “I know he’s some kind o’ prince, or lord, or whatever. Testhy hopped out with that, after we were refused help in Khanerenth.”

  “Ah. Rat and Fox know him—they speak Marlovan with him when they think no one is listening or when no one can understand.”

  “Marlovan,” Jeje repeated. “You hear about it, but you never really hear it, outside that time the Venn came aboard us on Ryala.”

  Tau said impatiently, “It’s old-fashioned Venn, with Sartoran verb endings. You could probably understand it if you remember Iascan verbs have somewhat similar endings.”

  Jeje snorted. “Says you, who gets a lingo second time he hears it. Anyway—”

  “Jeje. Tau. Come into the cabin.”

  That was Inda, calling softly.

  And now for the big question neither of wants to ask, she thought grimly.

  They scrambled down the new foremast and Jeje followed Tau aft into the cabin. Tau’s jawline tightened; Jeje heard his breathing change when they walked into a clean-swept cabin.

  Tau braced himself. Gone were the bloodstains from Walic’s messy death at the hands of the cook; gone too were the furnishings: the big bed, the ornate pillows and hangings, and Coco’s carved cedar trunks of gowns and accessories. The cabin seemed larger, empty as it was except for a table dragged in from the wardroom, the bench built under the stern windows, and the swinging lamps overhead. Even the flower rugs were gone, and the deck boards were scrubbed clean, smelling of damp wood.