The Mark of Ran

by Paul Kearney

  Rol turned and looked back inland, to where the hill of Ascari loomed and Psellos’s Tower stood half a league away, a monolith silhouetted against the sky. “Yes, that’s just where I have been.”

  The Seahorse pulled out of Ascari harbor, past the whitewashed stone of the mole, and the southerly picked up and began to make the caravel dance under their feet. By the time Rol could look up from his work on the yards again, Ascari was a white smudge overhung by a dark one, and Gascar was an island in truth, just one part of a larger horizon.

  Fifteen days to Borhol, and Port Borr, for the southerly failed at last, and the winds, though strong, boxed the compass for near on a fortnight, and Gavriol’s caravel was an unhandy vessel with a tendency to make as much leeway as headway. For a time they were close to being blown onto the rocks of western Dennifrey, but they clawed clear on a black, spray-flashed night and managed to beat out to sea again. In the hold the passengers spewed and wailed by the dozen and in their seasickness pleaded with the captain to let the ship sink, but Gavriol laughed, and congratulated Rol on his seamanship, and stood watch after watch at the tiller with his eyes red and smarting while the Seahorse did her best to send them all to the bottom.

  Port Borr at last, one evening as the rags of the gale blew themselves out behind them and the western sunset burst in a calm fury of flaming cloud that filled half the sky. A small, mean place after Ascari, a fishing port loud with squalling gulls and peppered white with their guano. Stone-built quays with the fish boxes piled high and stinking all about them, and thirty or forty fishing yawls and bankers moored snug up against them while their crews haggled with inshore fish merchants and smoked whitherb in silver-lidded pipes. Gavriol was known here, and recommended Rol’s abilities to the master of a small brigantine, the Westauk, and thus before his legs had even accustomed themselves to the unmoving nature of the land Rol was at sea again, bound for Corso with a cargo of sheepskins and several barrels of Borholian beer. From there it was a gaff ketch to Arbionn, and he was entrusted with command of a watch. And then an ancient carrack with rotten yards and a hair-raising passage to Osca across a white, furious Westerease Sea, with Rol commanding the ship after the master lost himself in the bottom of a bottle five days out and the first mate was washed overboard. In Osca, the land of the White Horses, he halted awhile and hiked inland through the grazing sheep to where the Ancients had carved vast pictures out of the turf of the hills, the white chalk underneath rendering them visible for miles. Horses indeed, but also winged lizards and sea-serpents and walrus and bears, the inhabitants of men’s primitive dreams. And Rol slept without covering on the soft grass of the chalk downs, heedless of the autumn rains washing over the world. In the gray mornings he rose and walked himself dry and accepted the hospitality of shepherds’ bothies, for they like all primitive men believed in showing unstinting hospitality to strangers. He would leave them some copper minims nonetheless, and part with a wordless nod.

  He walked west because the brash sunsets of the fading year drew him, and so came to a region of deep, rock-strewn inlets bitten out of the raw stuff of the earth’s bones. He was looking at the Bionese Sea, last of the charted seaways of the world. Beyond this horizon was the great mountainous country of Gidior, famed for its ores and its metalworkers and its deep mines, and beyond that was Tethis, the limitless ocean which girdled the world of men, unknown, uncharted, uncrossable. He sat for a long time on the shore there, while the sea crashed in white-fanged fury on the rocks about him and the gulls circled shrieking overhead. When he rubbed his hand over his face, yawning, he could feel the stubble of a beard on his chin, and scratched at it in wonder. Finally he rose in the dark of the night, set the wind at his back, and began retracing his steps to the fishing villages of the east coast, where he might work a passage back to the crowded places of the world.

  PART TWO

  THE SEA

  Fourteen

  USSA’S MANE

  THE HAMMERING ON THE DOOR JOLTED HIM OUT OF sleep. Beside him his scented bed partner groaned and tried to snuggle closer, but he was already out of bed and on his feet. His scimitar was naked in his fist before he said: “It’s open.”

  “Who were you expecting?” Prothero asked with a raised eyebrow. He stopped in the doorway and leaned against the jamb, a jaunty, dark figure with a face as triangular as that of a stoat. His eyes flicked appreciatively to the girl in the bed who was groggily coming awake.

  “You never know,” Rol said. He scabbarded Fleam and began to get dressed. To the girl he said, “Get out. The money’s on the chest by the window.”

  Sitting up now, she pouted, and glared at the grinning Prothero who watched her dress with much relish. She took the minims from the chest-top and stalked past him with her head high. “You’re no gentleman,” she huffed at him as she left the room, and he laughed.

  “You have me there, child.”

  Rol buckled his sword belt, yawning. “What’s the time?”

  “An hour to the turn of the tide, is what the time is. Riparian is tugging out his hair in wonder and dismay at the absence of his first mate.”

  “He worries too much. He might have known I’d be here.”

  “If it’s Mamertos, then it must be the Flamingo House. Yes, you are a creature of certain habits. Who was she?”

  “She’s new, only started last month. If you like, I think you have time to—”

  “Not now. I had my fill last night after we split up.”

  “Aha. Where’d you lay your head?” Rol was stuffing oddments into his canvas seabag and scratching his hair into a shaggy mop of gold. He leaned his face into the ewer by the bed and emerged with water dripping from his beard.

  “Mother Abbe’s.”

  “That hole? You’re lucky they didn’t smother you.”

  “There’s a girl there has this trick—”

  “All right, all right, tell me on the way. We’d best be off before Riparian sails without us.”

  Mamertos was a bustling port of some quarter-million people, the capital of lovely Auxierre. Rising in white-walled tiers from the waterside, the city resembled nothing so much as an onion sliced into rings and spread out on its side. It was stone-built, for there were rocky hills just inland, and extensive quarries had been burrowed into these for generations. Mamertine marble was sought after all over the world, and Auxierre’s rulers had made free use of it in beautifying their capital. Red clay tiles covered the roofs of the houses from hovel to mansion, and gangs of city-sweepers kept the filth on the streets within acceptable levels. The city was an ordered place of tree-lined avenues and public parks. Even the waterfront was tamed, and all the brothels and inns thereon were licensed by the Crown. There were still a few independent operators, however, and both Prothero and Rol had always preferred these to the more sanitized license-holding establishments.

  “Not a patch on Urbonetto,” Prothero said, looking around him. They were within a stone’s cast of the wharves and everywhere before them the masts of ships rose in a long forest webbed with a million lines of rigging.

  “I’ve never made it that far,” Rol admitted.

  “No? Ah, that’s right, you joined us just after the last of the Bionese runs. You were lucky. We used to have all the Westerease to beat across, and never a sight of land between Perigord and Bionar itself, except for Kull black as smoke on the horizon. Ever since Riparian won that Mercanter contract it’s been glorified coast-following, and long may it last.”

  “I don’t know,” Rol said. “I don’t think I’d mind a spell on the open ocean.”

  “The Armidon Banks are open enough for me,” Prothero snorted. “You’re young, that’s all.”

  “You’re my elder by a bare three years, you little squint. Don’t try to pull the hoary old mariner act with me.”

  Prothero laughed. Rol’s shipmate was a native of Laugro in southern Cavaillon, Cavaillon of the Vines, where the world’s best brandy was made. The region of his birth was a backward, insular land so
mountainous that the vineyards were planted on terraces hacked out of the sides of the hills. A place where the women were brown-skinned and black-haired and the men all bore the long knives known as sabrons and lived by a code of honor so arcane that feuds between neighboring families might last hundreds of years. One such feud had so disgusted the young Jaime Prothero that he had run away to sea, and had never been back since. When drunk, he would sing mournful songs of his own hills and tearfully speculate as to the fate of his brothers and sisters, his elderly mother, his stern father. And then he would spit on the floor to avert any bad luck for them. He was a small, lean man, deadly quick with the sabron he kept tucked in his sash, utterly fearless, and incapable of betraying a friendship. He had been Rol’s shipmate for going on seven years now.

  Seven years. In that time Rol had worked his way up from deckhand to first mate, and now he knew the seas from Corso to Aringia as well as any man could. He had sailed the Westerease, the Caverric, the Armidon Banks, the Inner Reach, and the Southern Wrywind, and he knew the fleshpots that lined half a hundred ports up and down their shores. The passage of time had seen his already formidable frame bulk out with muscle and reach its full height. He was a swaggering, bearded mariner now, with spiderweb wrinkles at the outside of his eyes that spoke of years peering into the wind.

  Of his boyhood, he thought as little as he could, pushing down the memories, bright and dark. The pain of Rowen’s rejection, once all-consuming, had become a barely registered ache. He still had a weakness for tall, dark girls with quiet smiles, but in seven years he had never spent more than one night with any of them.

  “Where in the name of the gods of the Twelve Seas have you been, you cold-eyed big bastard?” Riparian was furious. He leaned over the quarterdeck rail of the Cormorant and shook one veined fist at Rol and Prothero.

  “Saying good-bye to your mother,” Rol snapped back, and stalked up the gangplank. “What’s this?”

  A group of sorry-looking ragged men were standing in the waist of the brig whilst the ship’s company went about their tasks all around them.

  Riparian shrugged. “Extra hands. We’re short this trip.”

  “They look like convicts.”

  “That’s because they are. Privateersmen, if you please. The gaol released them to me—given a choice, they elected to serve out some of their sentence aboard the Cormorant rather than rot in the quarries.”

  “Pirates now?” Prothero was scowling. “You trust these sons of bitches not to slit our throats in the graveyard watch and take the ship for themselves? We’ve run the gauntlet of bastards like these up and down the Westerease, and had we been caught they’d have tossed us overboard without a second thought. And now we give them a place before the mast and are supposed to share our grog with them?”

  “Yes,” Riparian said flatly.

  “All right, then.” Prothero grinned.

  “You men,” Rol said to the ragged group, “what were you? Able seamen?”

  One touched his forelock. “I was a carpenter, your honor.”

  Riparian clapped his hands together. “Capital! I shall rate him carpenter’s mate. Gastyn has been crying out for one this age.”

  “What about the rest of you?” Rol asked. He did not like the look of these fellows. Pirates were the curs of the earth, murderers and rapists all, and he would have as soon tossed them overboard as have them pollute the planks of his ship.

  “I was a quartermaster.”

  “I was a topman.”

  “I was a master’s mate.”

  Rol looked sharply at the one who had said this. “An officer? On what ship?”

  The man hesitated. He looked to be in his forties, and his hair and beard were black, streaked badgerwise with gray. He had eyes dark as sloes and a scar broke one eyebrow in two. There were unhealed sores on his wrists and his bare feet were black with ingrained dirt.

  “Come now, don’t be backward. It’s all in the past, we know. You’re a Cormorant now, it seems. But what was your ship before you were captured?”

  “I was master’s mate on the Barracuda.”

  Prothero whistled softly. “Mathuw Creed’s ship. I thought the Armidians crucified the lot of you.”

  “They did, mostly, but I was only fourteen at the time, so my sentence was commuted to life in the quarries of Keutta. Then the Mercanters of Auxierre took over the penal contract, and I wound up here, breaking stone for them instead of the Armidians.”

  “Fourteen? That’s too young for a master’s mate. How long have you been in the quarries?”

  The man looked up at the towering masts of the Cormorant, and his chest inflated so that Rol thought he was about to shout. But he only said quietly, “Eleven years.”

  Rol and Prothero exchanged a glance. “We’ll rate you able seaman for now, in the starboard watch,” Rol said. “Rest for a couple of days and get those sores seen to.” He looked at Riparian, and the master nodded. The penal quarries of the Mamertine League were widely regarded as a delayed sentence of death. Most men survived two or three years before succumbing to disease, starvation, or the sheer brutality of existence there.

  “What’s your name?” Rol asked the man.

  “Elias Creed.”

  “Mathuw’s brother?”

  “His son.”

  “I’m surprised you weren’t crucified, youth or no.”

  “They never suspected who I was. The survivors told our captors I was a cabin boy.”

  Rol studied the man. There was a calm purpose to him he liked, but his late unlamented father had been the bloodiest pirate-captain for half a century, plunderer of at least sixty ships before the Armidians dispatched a flotilla to hunt him down. If there was anything of the father in the son, he would bear watching.

  They cast off from the wharves and were towed out of the harbor of Mamertos by a pair of twelve-scull cutters. As soon as the wind began to creak the yards Riparian had them let fall the topsails. These were sheeted home and braced round with the smooth efficiency of a veteran crew. The cutters were cast off and waved away with the traditional catcalls deep-ocean sailors reserved for inshoremen. The Cormorant took the wind like a greyhound on a scent and her stem began to throw back packets of spindrift along the fo’c’sle as her pitch increased and the tall swells of the Armidon Banks began to roll under her hull.

  The sea. Ussa’s Mane, some called it, and half a thousand other names besides. It seemed to Rol in this moment that a life spent entirely on land was a life only half lived. There was an eternity in the sea, something about the endlessness of the movement in that vastness that both set the soul at rest and kindled within it the desire to emulate, to rove the changing face of the waters, to travel for the sheer novelty of new horizons.

  Riparian packed on sail steadily, the brig staggering as each new stretch of canvas was unfurled and her speed increased. He looked up at the mizzen above him. They had a northeaster, a following wind, and the mizzensail had been brailed up to let the air at the main and forecourses. The master met Rol’s eye and they grinned at each other. Three days in the taverns and brothels of Mamertos had been enough. This was where real life began.

  The Cormorant was a sleek packet-brig, a low-decked, sharp-nosed vessel built like her namesake. Her cargo was compact: the return correspondence of a thousand prosperous letter-writers from Osmer clear through the Mamertine. Land deeds, bills of credit and of sale, the reports of spies and merchants and soldiers, the haggling of diplomats; they were all packed in waterproof bags in a sealed cell below the waterline, bound for greedy readers in Oronthir. The Cormorant flew the pennant of the Mercanters, that worldwide network of secretive, sophisticated businessmen who, it was said, could buy and sell whole kingdoms if they chose. They had commissioned Riparian to carry their correspondence in safety and with dispatch and in return he collected a fat fee, plus better than usual cooperation from harbormasters up and down the Mamertine, who liked to keep on the right side of those with money and influence. Hence the swift
compliance of the local authorities when Riparian had told them he was short of his complement. Rol was willing to bet that the local gaolers had looked down their muster-rolls for those with maritime experience and had not concerned themselves too much about how that experience had been gained.

  As soon as the Cormorant was out on the open ocean, naval routine took over almost every aspect of the lives of the ship’s company. Riparian had once been a quartermaster in the Armidian navy, and he liked to try to run things naval fashion—the crew divided into two watches instead of three so that each man worked four hours on and then had four hours off, round the clock. The brass of the little four-pounder swivel-guns was to be kept gleaming, as was that of the ship’s bell, and officers of the watch handed over to their relief with a formal statement of the ship’s course, her speed, and the behavior of the wind. It was all very man-of-war, though the Cormorant carried no heavier metal than the swivels, and Prothero for one thought it all an absurd eccentricity of the master’s. Rol liked it, however; the men were easier to manage than on some ships he had served upon, and obeyed all orders without question. He and Prothero had been with the Cormorant for almost two years now, having sailed in a variety of vessels and under some truly execrable masters. For all his foibles, Riparian was a fine seaman, and he valued his first mate and master’s mate enough to indulge their occasional late return from shore leave.

  At two hundred tons, the Cormorant was on the large side for a brig—a two-masted, square-rigged vessel. As a rule Mercanter ship’s companies averaged one man per ten tons of ship. Riparian had thirty men under him, including the convicts. The heavier crew meant, however, that sail-plans could be altered with greater speed, and the efficiency of the ship was increased. At times speed was everything in this game, as there were sometimes large bonuses for making the run in a certain number of days. But by and large there was time on most runs for a couple of days onshore—if all the company made it back to the brig in time to catch their tide.