The Amaranth sailed closer. Arrows flew. Several bit into Emre’s shield. Hamid’s as well. One grazed Frail Lemi’s shoulder. He flinched from the pain, but kept the anchor spinning. Then one took him above the knee. Another sliced his forearm. The hawser slipped, but with a great roar of pain and singular focus Lemi pulled it back, regained the rhythm of his swing, and with an almighty heave launched the anchor through the air.
The hawser trailed like a snake behind the anchor. The arc of its flight carried it just to the right of the foremast, at which point Frail Lemi snapped the rope to his left and tugged sharply. The anchor’s forward momentum was arrested and it slipped around the foremast, wrapping clumsily once, twice, then catching the hawser’s own trailing length like a grapnel.
“It’s caught!” Emre bellowed. “Be ready!” Then he leapt onto the foredeck of the passing desert sloop.
Hamid followed. The two of them rolled over one shoulder and came up at the ready, swords and shields in hand as they advanced on the approaching guards. There were five of them, but the first two were old, and no swordsmen at all. Both were felled with quick sword cuts to legs and chest.
The others were more skilled, and blunted Emre and Hamid’s advance. They even began pressing them back. The key thing, though, wasn’t to win the battle outright, but to prevent the guards from reaching the foremast and cutting the tow rope.
Behind Emre came a sizzling sound—the rope had pulled tight around the Amaranth’s mainmast and its slack was letting out. Emre felt the deck of the prison ship move beneath his feet. He braced for it, as did Hamid.
“Watch out!” one of the Malasani guards called, but too late.
The ship lurched into motion, and two of the soldiers fell. The others twisted and windmilled their arms as they tried and failed to keep their feet. Emre was back up in a flash and engaging the man who’d called out the warning, who’d also regained his feet. Hamid, meanwhile, dispatched a gangly fellow with a merciless slash to his unprotected neck.
When the hawser’s slack finally ran out, it thrummed low, like the string of some grand instrument. They’d all worried, even Old Nur, that the hawser might snap, but it held and the prison ship was yanked into faster motion. Nur had measured the length perfectly. The prison ship’s snub bowsprit was nosing over the stern of the Amaranth, which allowed Emre’s crew to leap aboard, swords and shields at the ready.
Two of their crew were taken down by arrow fire, but the others crowded the deck and the Malasani guards had no choice but to surrender. They dropped their swords and raised their hands, but Hamid roared and cut his man down anyway. The lone man standing watched Emre nervously.
Emre pointed over the side of the ship. “I’d leave now if I were you.”
Before Emre had even finished, he was heading for the gunwales. Over the side he went, landing with a soft thud and a spray of sand.
Soon enough Emre, Frail Lemi, Hamid, and the others had dispatched the soldiers. For a moment, Emre could only stare. By the gods, the ship was theirs.
Two of the crew had remained aboard the Amaranth with Darius and were launching fire pots at ships they passed, largely to sow confusion and buy them time. Old Nur’s laughter filled the dry desert air as the pots crashed onto the decks of several dhows. Ship after ship, fire coughed and black smoke billowed.
“And fuck your mother, too!” Nur called.
The rest of Emre’s crew set about the business of readying the prison ship to sail, focusing on raising the foresail first. Emre and Hamid, meanwhile, headed belowdecks.
There was a moment when Emre was sure he’d been lied to, that this was all an elaborate joke, or a trap, and that neither Haddad nor King Ihsan would be found in the cells below. His heart crawled into his throat as he landed on the floor and peered into the darkness.
Then at last, at the far end of the hold, he saw them. The Honey-tongued King, his neck and clothes filthy with his own blood, and in the cell across from him, Haddad.
Hamid found the keys in the gaoler’s cabin and threw them to Emre with a look that made it clear he refused to be the one to free them. As Emre opened Haddad’s cell, a twinge of regret ran through him. She had massive purple bruises and deep cuts across her face. One along her neck glistened, still weeping after the beating she’d received from King Emir.
“Well?” she asked. “Are you just going to fucking stand there?” The expression on her face was unreadable. There was relief in her eyes, but the rest of her, especially the way her fingers kept flexing, spoke of anger, of grim determination.
But anger at whom? Emre wondered, me or King Emir?
King Ihsan smiled as Emre unlocked his cell, and waited with a pleasant expression on his handsome, middle-aged face. Were it not for the dried blood marking his skin and the Silver Spear uniform, one might think he was heading for cardamom tea and biscuits. The effect was so smug Emre was tempted to leave him aboard the ship, but he and King Ihsan both knew he wasn’t going to do that, which made it all the more infuriating.
“What?” Emre said to him. “Nothing smart to say?”
It was a crude insult, but Emre was annoyed that he’d fallen into the Honey-tongued King’s plans. His god-given power might have been taken from him but the man still knew the way to the hearts of men. When Ihsan, clearly sensing Emre’s discomfort, allowed his smile to widen, Emre grabbed him by the front of his stained surcoat and shoved him into the passageway ahead of him.
“Get on, then.”
With Emre following, and Haddad coming last, they filed up the ladder to the deck, then toward the Amaranth.
The prison ship’s foresail and mainsail were set, and with the wind waxing in the growing heat, both ships were gaining good speed. The sun was cresting the horizon dead ahead while the alarm bells chorused behind them. The first few ships of what was likely to be a small armada were setting sail, preparing to give chase. Indeed, nearly two dozen, mostly swift Malasani dhows, were soon cutting lines in the sand, hounding the Amaranth’s wake.
As the encampment dwindled into the distance, Emre ordered every yard of canvas on the prison ship set, but it was not a fleet ship, so they did the only thing they could. Emre waited for the first cluster of Malasani ships to approach, then tied the wheel into position so it would veer into their path. As Emre sprinted across the foredeck and leapt onto the Amaranth, Lemi brought Umber down across the gunwales and cut the towing rope.
It worked better than they could have hoped. The Amaranth’s crew shouted in joy as the prison ship crashed sidelong into the lead dhow, forcing it wide of its chosen path and catching two more ships in the mess. But even three ships down they still had a score of others to lead the chase.
As the sun rose, the wind began to bluster. Sudden gusts lifted sand and blew it across the dunes in great swaths. Emre prayed to Goezhen for a sandstorm to hide them, but it was not to be. An amber haze was beginning to form, but it wasn’t nearly enough to mask their position. Plus, as the sun continued to rise, the wind’s strength peaked and began to ebb.
Slowly but surely, the Malasani dhows were closing the distance.
Frail Lemi couldn’t take his eyes from them. “Not long now,” he said said, gripping Umber’s haft.
“No, Lem. Not long now.”
Instead of watching the ships behind, Emre moved to the foredeck and studied the way ahead. Along the horizon, an angry line of black rocks separated sky from sand. Last night he’d been so sure they could make the hills before the Malasani. Now it was looking more and more grim.
Emre scooped up a bit of dust and sand from the deck and gripped it in one hand. He brought it to his lips and allowed it to sift between his fingers. “I’ve never asked you for anything,” he whispered to Bakhi, “you know this. But if you were ever to grant me anything, grant me this. Let us reach those bloody black hills.”
“There!” Darius called, waving two points off
the starboard bow with his good arm. “There!”
Emre looked where he was pointing and whooped. In the sand ahead of the Amaranth, stretching all the way to the low hills, was a rare pattern in the sand, a light chop that was difficult to navigate if you didn’t know how.
“We sail crisply!” Emre bellowed. “We need to make the defile before they do!”
“Aye!” the crew cheered, knowing they had a chance now.
“What?” Emre leapt to the gunwales and stared about, taking in every crewman. “Do I sense doubt?”
“Nay!”
He thrust a finger at the trailing ships. “Will you allow those jelly-boned curs to catch us?”
“Nay!” It was a roar this time.
“Then accept what the Great Mother gives us! Ride the dunes smartly. Embrace the wind. For you know those clumsy dogs can’t sail her as we can!”
There came a chorus of whistles and laughs. “Dead right!” one of them yelled.
“Dead right,” Frail Lemi echoed. He was staring aft with that look he got when violence was near. He looked if he wanted to leap aboard the first enemy ship to come close and cleave every man who stood before him with his ruddy great spear.
As Emre leapt down from the gunwales, King Ihsan was looking at him as if he hadn’t quite expected that from him. He gave Emre a respectful nod. He actually seemed impressed, but Emre didn’t care what he thought. He had a crew to lead.
Darius set to it, calling out adjustments to the set of the sails to catch the fullness of the wind, and the crew responded with the sort of ease gained only from months of sailing together. Darius was a master pilot. This Emre already knew. But now he slipped into an almost trancelike state.
“A ship is like a ewer catching rain,” he’d once told Emre. “The larger the funnel the more rain you can catch. But capturing the water is only half the equation. Everything about the ship, the way you sail it, acts like cracks in the clay. The skis, how well waxed they are, how battered from the desert sea, the weight of the ship, the position of the cargo, they’re all cracks, leaking water you’d hoped to save. Some of it you can do nothing about, but catch the wind right and sail her properly, and it becomes art, a beautiful one if you can master it.”
Indeed, the Amaranth was like a yearling oryx, maneuvering the dunes with speed and grace. The dhows behind them, meanwhile, were like a pack of hyenas bounding over the desert. Time and time again they plowed mindlessly against the dunes, sending sprays of sand into the air. Often they got caught in the gutters, which slowed their speed considerably, and they slipped farther and farther behind.
But Emre could see that it would be a short reprieve. Closer to the hills the sand evened out, creating a flat stretch that would favor the dhows once again. Indeed, as they sailed closer to the defile between two long stretches of jagged, inhospitable rock, the dhows began to regain the distance they’d lost, rather too quickly for Emre’s tastes.
Using the spyglass, Emre scanned the defile carefully.
“Anything?” Hamid asked, standing beside Emre at the forward gunwales.
“No.” Emre shook his head. “But they’ll be there.”
“And if they aren’t?”
“Then our blood will feed the Great Mother,” Emre shot back. “Now get ready.”
Behind the Amaranth, the Malasani ships had fanned out in a wide, undisciplined arc. A lone arrow, dark against the blue sky, lifted from the lead ship. It fell short, but it was like a silent signal between a murder of crows. More lifted up. Then more still. Soon the sky was thick with an unsteady stream of them coming in from all angles.
The Amaranth returned fire. The ship had few cat’s claws to launch with its lone catapult, but Old Nur always seemed to know the right angle to use. Over and over the weighted ends of the claws would fly, the chain between them wriggling like a snake. With frightening accuracy it would wrap around a dhow’s forward struts and gouge furrows in the sand, slowing the ship and fouling its steering.
By the time the cat’s claws had run out, six dhows were falling behind the pack, with more slowed down by the suddenly hobbled ships ahead. Old Nur moved on to fire pots, but the Malasani had started launching them as well.
One crashed in the Amaranth’s wake. Another struck just short of the transom. A third smashed into the stern, sending a spray of burning oil across the quarterdeck, the transom, and the rudder below. As they neared the mouth of the defile, more struck to either side of the ship. By some miracle none of the Malasani cat’s claws managed to wrap the Amaranth’s struts. But the arrows were taking their toll. Darius’s bad arm was clipped. A crewman, drawing back an arrow of his own, fell to deck when one caught him deep in the abdomen.
They were just short of the defile’s mouth when a fire pot struck the center of the Amaranth’s deck. Old Nur had been going for the final few fire pots, stored in a reinforced locker, when it landed at his feet. Flames engulfed him. He screamed, flailed and ran, trying to escape the flames, and in his blindness fell overboard.
The rest of the crew were trying to douse the flames, but they’d caught along the foot of the mainsail. Hamid, Emre, and the rest worked quickly to spread the dousing agent, a blue powder, from the buckets staged all about the ship and it worked, but they were going to lose the sail. The flames licked upward, eventually burning a hole through it, but Emre still refused to order the sail down. They needed all the wind they could get.
Finally, blessedly, they entered the steep canyon, the Malasani ships just behind them. The soldiers aboard their ships, men and women alike, stood at the gunwales and roared, stabbing their swords into the air, their thirst to take the Amaranth at a peak now that the end of the chase was near.
The defile was narrow but still wide enough for several ships to sail side by side. The deeper they went, though, the more the steep canyon walls closed in. The Malasani ships were forced to go two by two, then single file.
The Amaranth’s crew were just beginning to get the fire on the deck under control when two more fire pots crashed into the stern, engulfing the entire quarterdeck in flames and splashing Darius with burning oil. Frail Lemi smothered him with a blanket quickly, shouting with impotent rage all the while.
Ahead, the defile reached its narrowest point. It was barely wider than the Amaranth’s skis. But the ship was now madness. The crew were trying to put out the fresh flames with more blankets and the dousing agent, of which very little remained. Ihsan and Haddad were throwing the last of their buckets onto the fresh fire at the stern. Darius had fallen and rolled away from the pilot’s wheel. Hamid had followed, as had Frail Lemi, who was trying to pat out the flames with swats of his massive hands, leaving the ship without a pilot. Emre swept in and took the wheel, careful to avoid the flaming spokes.
The narrow gap ahead worried Emre more than the fire. The Amaranth’s sails might be aflame, but the wind through the defile was so strong it was carrying them forward at speed.
He glanced behind, then up to the flaming, smoking canvas above him. They stood no chance of fighting the Malasani. And when they’d passed this narrow gap, the valley opened up and they would never stay ahead of the Malasani ships, not as the Amaranth lost more and more wind to fire. Emre stared at the narrow path ahead.
“I have to crash the ship,” he said to no one in particular. “I have to crash it and block the way. We can stop their ships and make a run for it after.”
His decision made, he began angling the ship so it would come to a scraping halt against the rocks on the port side. But then he caught movement higher up. There was a young man in a red turban and thawb. Emre recognized him immediately. It was Shaikh Aríz, and he was waving a shamshir high in the air. When Emre waved back, Aríz used the tip of his sword to point farther along the defile.
Relief flooded through Emre. “Hold on!” he shouted as an arrow flew past him, making him flinch. He hoped the others were lis
tening, but he couldn’t spare a moment to look. “Just a bit longer!” He steered carefully but their starboard ski still jumped over an exposed rock, causing the entire ship to shift and rattle. The rocks came so close he could reach out and touch them. Then, by the grace of the gods, they were through.
Behind them, from the rocks they’d just sailed past, a dozen men in red thawbs and turbans rushed onto the sand. They hauled massive iron barricades across the narrowest point of the defile, then scattered as the first of the dhows came flying in.
Both of the dhow’s forward struts were shattered by the barricades. A great gout of amber sand splashed high into the air as the ship’s prow dove nose first into the ground. A moment later, the rudder was ripped free as well. The ship veered, then tilted sharply, the sudden pitch of the deck launching crewmen and equipment over the starboard side.
The next ship came crashing in, to be crippled by the combination of the barricades and the mangle of shattered wood left by the first ship. The next, though it did its best to avoid the barricades, suffered the same fate.
The ships behind them had seen the danger and had started to slow by means of the large rakes dropped from the sterns of their ships. Even so, five more were caught in the trap, and more beyond those sustained damage as they crashed into the mortally wounded ships. The rest came to a halt, the crew working feverishly to bring their sails in.
In that moment, several hundred warriors in red rose from their hiding places along the canyon walls and began firing arrows. More heaved fire pots onto the ships. In moments, every Malasani ship was aflame, engulfed to varying degrees by roiling orange fire and black smoke. The soldiers and crew who escaped the fire were taken down by arrows and, though some few tried to set up a defense with shields and return fire, Tribe Kadri’s numbers were simply too great.
In little time it was done. Only two ships managed to flee west.
Men and women rushed toward the Amaranth, many bearing buckets of dousing agent. They put out the ship’s flames and worked like fury to make the necessary repairs to the ship. They had a joyous reunion with Aríz, but this wasn’t the time or the place to celebrate. They needed to find a safe place for the tribe to rest. And there was more for Emre to do yet to see his plans through.
Beneath the Twisted Trees Page 55