The Mark of Ran

by Paul Kearney

  West-southwest was their course, along the green coast of Auxierre. They gave themselves a clear ten leagues of sea room so that all they could see of the land was the blue haze of the Mamertine Hills running northeast to southwest, the spine of the kingdom. It was the spring of the year, and the herrin yawls were out in large numbers, towing their glass-buoyed nets behind them and accompanied by clouds of screaming gulls. The Cormorant sailed past them like a racehorse gliding by a flock of sheep, and Riparian altered course to due west so they had the breeze on the starboard quarter and could unfurl the mizzen-course. The land bulged north here in a slow, curved sweep of wooded lowlands, and there were reefs to port, calling for a hand at the bow and another in the foretop, both scanning the undulating surface of the sea for the telltale flash of foam or a darkness near the surface which would rip the keel out from under them. Riparian took the helm himself at times like these, and when the lookouts yelled aloud their sightings he would swing the ship’s wheel one way or another, eyes half closed, feeling the movement of his vessel under his hands, gauging the answer of the rudder.

  By late evening of their first day out of Mamertos they had the reefs and rocks behind them and were in green water. They had covered thirty-five leagues, so brisk had been the northeaster and so attentively had Riparian pushed his ship. Now they were clear of the Auxierre coast and were in the Armidon Banks proper, running southwest with the wind aft again, the stem pointed toward the Caverric Straits which separated the northernmost tip of Cavaillon from the southern extremity of Armidon. The Straits had been the site of naval battles for centuries as the sea-canny Armidians sought to invade Cavaillon. Sometimes they had succeeded, sometimes they had failed, but their attempts at annexation and colonization had never taken. Perhaps it was because of the character of the Cavaillans—men like Prothero who would never forgive a slight or forget an injury.

  Beyond the Straits was the Inner Reach, one of the Great Seas of the world, and a haven for pirates since time immemorial. Depending on the winds, Riparian would either follow the coast of Cavaillon around its periphery or cut straight across the open sea to Ordos in Oronthir, their destination. The former was more usual, for it meant less outlay on provisions and a chance of fresh food and water from the fishing villages along the coast to the Gut. Either way, the Cormorant had a good four weeks of sailing ahead of her, if the winds were kind.

  The ship’s officers had dinner together that night in the master’s cabin, with the brig’s wake phosphorescent as moonlight in the stern windows at their backs. Riparian was no gourmet, but he liked to keep a few chickens and goats on board for eggs and milk, and they were rarely so far from land that they must subsist on the salt horse and hardtack that were the staples of the foremast hands. He was not a wine drinker, though, and the glasses were filled with Kassic rum, well watered and flavored with lemon.

  They pushed the plates back whilst Riparian lit his pipe and then they indulged in the small talk of a ship at sea, discussing the crew, the provisions, the weather. It was virtually a tradition, and Rol listened much more than he talked. But as well as the concerns of the Cormorant, Prothero and Riparian also liked to debate the matters of the world, as though they had some say in them.

  “It’s a world of men,” Riparian said. “I don’t think much of these myths we hear of the Elders and such—where the hell are they now, is what I want to know? All bedtime tales for children. Rol—have some more rum.”

  Rol and Prothero smiled at each other. Riparian was a blunt, straight man with nothing in his life except his ship and the cargoes she carried and the men who made that possible. In this he was almost admirable. Sometimes Rol envied him his certainties.

  “The world is what men have made of it, that’s plain,” Prothero said. “But who knows what was here in times before men walked the earth? The history of Umer is longer than we give it credit for.”

  “What are you now, a seer?” Riparian asked with a contemptuous snort.

  “Would you call Kull a figment of the imagination?” Prothero countered.

  “The Mage-King is a fact of the waking world, there’s no denying that. But who’s to say what he is? Who has ever seen him and lived to tell of it? He may just be some reclusive madman with a madman’s following. There are many examples in history of half-baked ne’er-do-wells hoodwinking the gullible and declaring themselves king of this and heir to that. Look at Bionar now. I had word off Gilcom of Omer before we sailed that it’s at war again.”

  “Bionar at war,” Prothero said. “That’s about as remarkable as sunlight in summer.”

  “Ah, but this is different—Bionar’s not invaded Oronthir again, or such as that. This is a civil war, Bionari killing each other by the thousand, and armies marching across the Myconian Mountains, and Urbonetto has closed her landward gates.”

  “What’s the occasion of all this?” Prothero asked, interested despite himself.

  “Some girl has been going about the kingdom saying she’s the rightful heir to the throne, and Bar Asfal naught but a usurper, a killer of his own kin.”

  Rol looked up from his glass. His face seemed to have grown suddenly cold.

  “A beauty, she’s supposed to be, but a killer also. She leads her followers from the front rank, and slays Bionar’s doughtiest champions like sheep. It’s been brewing for years, apparently—she’s seduced half a dozen of the mountain cities to her cause and they’re where Bionar gets its iron, where the royal manufactories lie. So she’s outfitted her forces in the best gear the kingdom can produce, and I hear she’s even brought a few pieces of artillery down out of the mountains with her to batter the walls of Myconn with.”

  “There are madmen for all seasons, I suppose,” Prothero said, draining his glass. “If she stops the Bionari from marching over half of Umer, I for one will be well pleased, so good luck to her. And now, gentlemen, I believe it is my watch on deck.”

  “Don’t trip over your own feet,” Riparian warned, for Prothero was swaying where he stood.

  “My feet can mind themselves, old man.”

  The Caverric Sea went by in a succession of fresh sunrises. Rol liked taking the morning watch, from the fourth hour to the eighth, and watching the sun begin as a gray hint in the dark, and rise red through the cloud until it was broad yellow day and his body seemed to cast off the weariness of the dark hours as though the sunrise itself were some form of roborant.

  His mind had been busy all through the dark hours, gnawing on memory, savoring past pain. Rowen was trying to make herself ruler of the most powerful kingdom in the world—for it was Rowen Riparian had been speaking of, he had not the smallest doubt. The Lost Heir of Bionar—it was like something out of an old story. As he often had over the course of the last seven years, Rol wondered how it was for her, if she had any peace at night, or any kind thought in her mind for him. The memory of her scalded his very spirit—her face, her taut body straining against him. Her smile, the rarest gift in the world.

  And as always, when he could bear it no more he finally halted the arid conjecture and wondering in their tracks by staring out at the early morning on the surface of the waters, and finding there some form of quietude.

  Elias Creed was supposed to be holystoning the quarterdeck but he got up off his knees and bent a crick out of his back with a faint groan. A year or two older than Rol, give or take, he had the face of a worn middle-aged man. His body, though lean, was a framework of pure muscle, the result of years spent breaking stones in the quarries of Keutta. The convicts had been issued sailcloth and had made their own clothing with the aid of a few of the other crew members who were handy with a needle. They had shaped up well, despite regaling the fo’c’sle with gory tales of past misdeeds. The men they were boasting to had heard it all before, however, and were not so easily impressed. Creed in particular was turning into a valuable hand, uncomplaining and swift to anticipate the orders of the ship’s officers. Now he looked out at the birthing morning much as Rol did.

&nbs
p; “I never knew the Caverric so well,” he said. “For us it was the Inner Reach, the Westerease. We never went beyond the Gut either. The seas of my youth. I will see them again soon.” He looked at Rol inquiringly.

  “Within a few days, if we make it through the Straits without mishap, and Ran is kind.” He paused. “What happens to you once we reach Ordos—are you to stay with the ship?”

  Creed shook his head, smiling. “They have quarries in Oronthir also, the Mercanters. Your captain will register my comrades and me with the harbormaster in Ordos and we’ll be in shackles again, breaking stone. Still, it’s been something, to have had a deck under my feet again, no matter for how short a time.”

  Rol turned away, frowning.

  “You think I am a murderer and a thief, do you not, sir?”

  “You were a privateer. That’s what they do, I hear tell.”

  “Yes. Yes, they do. But they are not all monsters. They are merely men, most of them left without a choice in the manner they live their lives.”

  “How so?”

  “I know that on the Barracuda the main part of the crew, my father’s veterans, were refugees from the Oronthian borders, some from the Goliad. They did not choose the sea; they had all other choices taken away from them. Bionese armies had sacked their towns and carried off their wives and daughters and starved out their fathers. Perhaps our ship was a little different, but we only ever preyed on Bionar and her allies. We killed and raped in our turn, but only the Bionari and their fellow-travelers.”

  “Very discerning of you,” Rol said dryly. He turned and regarded Elias Creed closely for the first time. The man had the same sense of calm confidence about him that Rol had remarked at their first meeting. He had possessed it then even though he had been standing in shackles. He had trimmed his hair and beard since and was dressed in sailors’ canvas and his sores were on the way to healing. But the eyes had not changed. Somehow Creed had not lost faith in the goodwill of strangers, even after eleven years in Keutta.

  “If you were not returned to the quarries, what would you do?”

  Creed did not hesitate. “I would take to the sea.”

  “As a pirate?”

  Here, Creed looked away. He turned to the ship’s rail and leaned thereon, the muscles bunching around his shoulder blades.

  “I don’t know.” And then: “Have you ever heard tell of Ganesh?”

  Rol searched his brain. “It’s an old name, is it not? For the southeast coast of Bionar.”

  “Yes. The Myconians come down to the sea there in steep woods and high crags of granite. There are a thousand coves and bays in that part of the world, and though the Bionari have claimed it, they have never truly set a footprint on the place.” He turned back to face Rol. “That is where I would go, where no marching army could ever reach me. There is a city in Ganesh, it’s said, a secret city to which no road leads. Ganesh Ka.”

  “I’ve heard of it. It’s a legend among mariners.”

  “Yes.” Here Creed drew closer, as if he were imparting a secret. He lowered his voice so the quartermaster at the wheel might not hear him.

  “My father told me he had been to Ganesh Ka in his youth. He said it was a real place. A pirate city where free men lived who could not stomach the hegemony of Bionar. They had a fleet of warships, and they ruled their own affairs and welcomed all the lost and fleeing peoples who came to them in desperation or despair and gave them succor, and a new homeland.”

  “You believed him?”

  Creed’s nostrils flared. “He was my father. He went to the scaffold having never told a lie in his life.”

  More gently, Rol said, “You believe it still exists? The Bionari have tramped their bloody bootprints over most of the continent at one time or another, and this place cannot be more than a hundred and fifty leagues from Myconn itself.”

  “The Myconian Mountains have shielded it, and the impenetrable forests on their slopes. Ganesh is no place for armies. It is there, believe me.”

  Rol nodded. It was not his place to convince Creed of the absurdity of his beliefs. The convict had the face of a man who has not yet lost hope, despite having nothing to hope for.

  Fifteen

  THE PASSAGE OF

  THE NARROWS

  “WHAT’S TO HAPPEN TO THE CONVICTS ONCE WE PUT into Ordos?” Rol asked Riparian in the middle watch that night. The two stood by the taffrail watching the stars wheel round overhead and listening to the nighttime creaks and plashes and murmurs of the living ship beneath their feet.

  The master yawned and scrubbed at his beard with one hand. “I turn them over to old Haremn at the docks. He’ll put them to shifting cargoes or something until the Mercanters decide.”

  “They’ll go back to breaking rocks?”

  “Most probably. Piracy is not something the Mercanters look kindly upon. It’s a pity; there’s one or two of them have shaped up well, biddable as goddamned lambs.”

  “Rip, they’re our shipmates now. Is there no other way?”

  The master looked sharply at his first mate. “Don’t start getting ideas on me now. I admit it’s a damned shame such men are to rot their lives out in the mines and quarries of the penal towns, but they made their own bed when they began slitting throats and burning ships up and down the Twelve Seas. There’s naught to be done about it, not by such as us.”

  Rol nodded, and stared up at the uncaring brilliance of the stars, every one a red and blue flicker in the clear sea-night.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  They were two and a half weeks at sea, a slower passage than usual, and were coming up to the approaches of the Caverric Straits when Ran turned his face from them and began to build up black cloud in the skies over southern Armidon.

  Rol, Riparian, and Prothero stood on the quarterdeck and silently watched the weather close in. The rest of the ship’s company were going about their business as usual, but a few of the old salts had also paused to eye the growing threat of the sky. Elias Creed was studying the northeastern horizon with them, and then shifted his gaze to the trio on the quarterdeck. He could smell what was in the wind.

  “How long, you think?” Prothero asked the master.

  “A few hours, not more. We’d best get ourselves battened down, lads; we’re in for a blow or I’m a farmer.”

  All hands were called up on deck, the drowsy, cursing larboard watch roused out of their hammocks below and set to storm stations. The two small cutters on the booms were frapped with extra layers of cordage, the swivels secured, and hawse-bags laid over the cable-ports. Every scuttle and hatch on board was sealed and overlaid with a canvas covering, and to everyone’s obvious reluctance, they were ordered to shorten sail. Soon the Cormorant was flying along with a jib and the mainstaysail, no more. The wind veered round to east-nor’east, striking the brig on the starboard quarter near the stern. She began to dig deeper into the gray swells.

  The Narrows of the Caverric Straits were less than five leagues ahead, and were a hard passage at the best of times, for there the waters of the Caverric Sea came funneling in with a crash to meet head-on the currents of the Inner Reach. On a quiet day there was white water for ten square miles about the Narrows. Today the wind was whipping up that confused mass of ocean into a fury, and the Cormorant began to pitch and roll as the first white-tipped breakers broke under her keel and lifted her high into the air.

  The wind picked up further, a shriller note in the rigging. They rigged extra preventer-stays to the masts and deadman’s lines to the ship’s wheel. Already there were four men at its spokes, straining against the roll and push of the seas under the rudder to keep the brig on course.

  “Ran is restless today,” Riparian said with a grin.

  Cavaillon to port, Armidon to starboard, two dark, rocky masses with the sea wolf-gray and white between them. The clouds had gathered and thickened overhead with a speed that Rol would once not have thought possible, but he had seen storms come fastening upon ships quicker than this, bla
ck squalls that could pass over a vessel with the speed of a galloping horse to lay her on her beam ends, and then rush on. Ran in one of his rages, in a hurry to smash down on some distant coast, tossing ships aside in his wake like toys.

  There was a branched flare of lightning, as many-limbed as the roots of a tree. The thunder rolled after it seconds later. Over the Straits the knuckled mass of the storm stopped and hovered, thrashing up the Narrows into an intense fury of white water. There was no rain as yet; it was still boiling in the slate monsters ahead. The lightning flashed out in forked glee, beating what sunlight there had been from the sky. Rol saw the men at work about the decks of the ship in staggered instants of white light, roaring darkness between. He felt a backstay; the cable was rigid as wood. They would have to run before the wind and hope for the best—there was no beating back in the teeth of a blow like this. Thank the gods it was east-nor’east. There was a chance it would pop them through the Straits like a cork from the neck of a bottle.

  “Lifelines fore and aft!” Riparian bellowed over the shriek of the wind. The ship leaped up in the air under him, and he bent his knees with the unthinking reflexes of a man inured to the sea. Two of the convicts were not so quick, and left the deck bodily. One went rolling into the scuppers like a ball, and the other was flung over the ship’s rail, too astonished to even cry out.

  “Man overboard!” Rol yelled for form’s sake. There was no way to heave-to for him, not in this.

  “It’s times like these,” Prothero shouted in Rol’s ear, “that I wish we had a nice high sterncastle to cover our arse.”

  Rol looked astern. The waves following up behind them had metamorphosed into vast, murderous mountains, gray and solid-looking as stone with foam flying off their tips in smoking fringes. If the Cormorant could not keep her head to the wind, they would swallow her in a heartbeat and turn her end over end in their depths. A two-hundred-ton ship was a scrap of matchwood set against the brute majesty of those waves.