The Mark of Ran

by Paul Kearney

  “We’ve jury masts now with a yard apiece, the mainmast lateen-rigged, which is good. But there’s no way we could beat out of this bay in the teeth of that onshore gale. We wait it out. Provisions are not a problem—a soaking makes little difference to salt horse. It’s water I’m worried about. It’s so damn dry here, and there’s sand in the air too. We have to land a watering party whatever the risks.”

  “With a fair wind we could cruise down the coast to Ordos in four, five days,” Prothero protested.

  “With a fair wind. Given our luck on this trip so far, I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for one. No. Since the casks were bilged in the storm we’ve water for another two days, that’s all. I can cut the ration, but I’d rather try to find a spring inland.”

  “For such a big, bloody-minded bastard, you are the very soul of caution,” Prothero said irritably. “If it were me—”

  “Sail ho!” came the cry from on deck.

  The three were on their feet in a second and piled out of the door to the waist. Rol was first up the quarterdeck ladder. “Where away?”

  “Large on the port bow, sir,” Mihal, a young topman, said. “Just coming round the headland—and don’t they wish they may make it.”

  The entire crew was on deck staring intently southward to the tip of the promontory that sheltered their bay. Half a league away perhaps, a lateen-rigged two-master was trying to beat clear of the rocky shore in the teeth of the wind. The men on deck held their breaths, feeling for the crew of the strange ship, willing it onward.

  “Come on, come on,” someone whispered.

  She struck amidships, and the waves at once broke over her starboard side. They watched as first one mast toppled, then the other. The hull was lifted by the savage surf and dumped full onto the rocks. The vessel’s back broke. For perhaps half a minute she was a black, turning shape in the white surf, then she was gone.

  “Blood of God,” Prothero said through clenched teeth. “That bastard wind-mongering whoreson. Curse you, Ran, you—” Creed laid a hand on Prothero’s good arm and he caught himself, nodded.

  “There may be survivors,” Rol said, eyes hot and glaring. No man bred to the sea could watch the death of a ship with equanimity. “We’ll start inland at once. Prothero, you stay here with a harbor watch. Elias and I will take half a dozen of the fittest men up that headland and look for her crew. We’ll hunt out water while we’re at it.”

  “It’s late in the day,” Creed ventured.

  “All the more reason for haste. Get that fucking cutter fixed, and let’s be on our way.”

  It was dusk by the time that Rol, Creed, and six of the fitter, steadier survivors among the crew were rowing away from the side of the Cormorant. They all carried cutlasses, Rol his scimitar, and a long-barreled wheel-lock pistol he had found in the master’s cabin. He had enough dry match and powder for only a few shots, but thought he might try potting a bird with it. Salt pork was beginning to stick in everyone’s throat.

  Elias sat at the tiller and steered them through the gap in the reef he had navigated earlier in the day. The former pirate had become a quietly effective leader of men and Rol had made a vow to himself that Creed would never be breaking rocks in a quarry again. He belonged at sea.

  The bottom of the cutter kissed the sand, and Rol felt a wall of heat hit his face: the close, baking dryness of the land. After being at sea, the deadness of the air seemed bizarre, enervating. They ran the cutter up the beach and stood on the sand in the empurpling light like men confused. Under their feet nothing moved, and each step jarred as though they were missing a stair. It did not seem right that the earth should be so solid.

  “Matiu and Haim, stay here with the boat,” Rol said. “You might want to get the casks out of her and up the beach a way. We’ll make for the headland to see if any survived the wreck, and then we’ll come back down if we find water.”

  The soft sand was hard work and they trudged up the curving strand in silence as the night quickened about them. Looking out to sea they could see the deck-lanterns glowing on board the Cormorant but no other sign of human activity in all that wide sweep of sand and sea and stars.

  The tall cliffs reared up to one side like the walls of a fortress, and there were masses of broken rock and gravel at their feet where high tides had battered. Elias led the party without hesitation to a place where a landslide had created a precarious way up to their summits.

  They began climbing on all fours, eyes straining in the starlight, stones crumbling and ticking under their feet. Once Rol’s foothold gave and he slid five yards down the steep slope, but was brought up short again by a solid outcrop of rock. Breathing heavily, he started up again.

  It took them over an hour, by Rol’s guess, to make their way to the head of the cliffs. They stood wiping the sweat from their faces and rubbing the raw places, and looked out at the star-shimmered sea and the Cormorant, a twinkling toy, a jewel set upon it. They could feel the wind here, and it quickly cooled their hot backs and made them shiver. A good reefed-topsail blow hammering in from the open ocean. Farther out in the bay they could see surf glimmering white as fangs on the reef. Had it not been for the sheltering promontory, that wind would have broken Cormorant’s back as it had the other vessel’s. As Prothero had said, it was sheer luck they had made landfall in the lee of the headland and not on the windward side.

  Almost, Rol thought he saw something else out at the uttermost reach of his sight. Lights out at sea, a line of them. The wind made his eyes water, and when he rubbed them clear he could see nothing. A couple of low stars perhaps, making their way up the sky from the sea’s brim.

  They turned their eyes inland and saw a wide, pale plateau carved with night-blue gullies and pocked with scattered knuckles of weathered stone. It rose steadily, until they could make out the shapes of mountains dark against the stars to the northwest. The Goliad was a vast bowl of desert upland hemmed in by the Goloron and Myconian Mountains on all sides. Beyond those mountains lay Bionar, mightiest and most hated of the realms of men.

  “We’ve our work cut out for us, finding water here,” Jude Mochran, one of the sailors, said gruffly. “It’s dry as a corpse’s cough.”

  They paralleled the beach. The others tripped over rocks and uttered muffled curses, but Rol could see as easily as if he were abroad in daylight. In the years since leaving Psellos’s Tower he had neglected his exercises and his training had become little more than a memory, but he still had the sight of a cat at night. Unlike the others, he was able to see that many of the jumbled stones that dogged their shins had once been reared up in walls. They were walking through the ruin of some ancient settlement, so old that not two stones of it now stood one atop the other, and the very stones themselves had been rounded by centuries of desert wind, losing their sharply masoned edges.

  The wind was stronger out on the headland, which jutted perhaps half a league into the Reach and was no more than four cables wide. There were writhen trees growing here and there in more sheltered places, their branches tilted away from the sea as though in revulsion. Their bark was gray and scaled and the leaves upon them were narrow as the tines of a fork.

  Another half hour brought them to the tip of the headland. Below them the boom of the surf was loud as the massed guns of a fleet action, and they could see white flashes of foam in a line to the southwest where a second reef ran alongside the shore. The wrecked ship had been trying to beat along this, fighting for leeway, but the wind had been too determined.

  “Rope,” Rol said mechanically. “Who’s brought rope?”

  One of the shore party began unwrapping a coil of one-inch cable from around his shoulder. “You’re not going down there?” Creed said.

  “I am. Lower me down and I’ll have a look about.”

  “Nothing could survive on those rocks.”

  “If it were my ship wrecked, my crew cast into the sea, I would hope that fellow mariners would do more than wring their hands over me from a safe distan
ce.”

  With the rope tight under his armpits the men lowered Rol down the cliff-face. It was not sheer, and in many places he was able to take his own weight. The thunder of the breakers grew ever louder as he descended. When he had come down some ten fathoms the rope gave out. He untied it and coiled the end about a large boulder, then began scrambling the last few yards with the spray of the waves cool on his face. Elias had been right—there was nothing here, not even a shard of wreckage. The murderous waves had swept the rocks clear of any remnant of a wreck. He had wasted his time.

  But now something was moving feebly in the white of the breakers, something huge and glistening. Were it not for his night-sight, Rol would never have seen it. It was not a man. Some great beached fish perhaps. Rol edged closer, until the waves were soaking him and the spray was exploding all about his knees.

  Two green lights winked on, watching him. He thought he heard a voice in the tumult of the sea. Startled, he clambered and slithered over the black rocks and wiped seawater out of his eyes. Not a man, but manlike, huger than any man had a right to be.

  The thing raised an arm and a white whirling mass of foam broke around it, tearing it from the rock. Rol saw the green lights shut off as it slid into the breakers. He clattered forward, and a club of water smote him about the head and shoulders, flattening him on the stones. He clung there as the wave receded, tasting blood, and when he was able to look up, the thing had hauled itself out of the water again. It was a fathom away, no more, and in its face—it had a face, after all—two great tusks glimmered and the emerald light of the eyes winked on and off as it blinked.

  “Give me a goddamned hand, will you?” Its voice was hoarse and cracked, but deep as a well.

  Rol reached out an arm and it was at once enveloped by the thing’s huge paw. Then the two of them lowered their heads as another wave broke about them. When it had passed the thing leaped up the rock convulsively, and Rol braced his boots on the stone, pulling with all his might. Its legs pumped and he could hear its talons ticking and scraping on the slick stone. When Rol thought his arm was about to leave its socket, one foot found purchase and the awful grip slackened. The creature boosted itself upward and slapped full length on the slimed stone. They lay side by side and watched a huge breaker come running at them in a slathering fury of white surf. As one, they turned and scrabbled up the rocks to the foot of the cliff. The wave sucked impotently at their feet and withdrew with a rattle of gravel and stone.

  The thing Rol had rescued sat panting heavily. There were scraped and broken places all over its huge carcass where the blood shone black in the starlight.

  “Thank you,” it said. “I’d held on there long enough.”

  “You’re from the ship?”

  “Where else?” It shut its perilous eyes and a dry black tongue licked about its tusks.

  Light dawned on Rol at last. A night in Ascari, an episode from another life. “I know you. You’re a halftroll. Your name is Gallico.”

  The thing’s head snapped round and the light in the eyes intensified. “What in the world—How could you know that?”

  “We met once, a long time ago. I had saved your purser from footpads in Ascari. I forget his name.”

  “Woodrin. By God, it’s the terrible youth, the one with the Blood in him. You have grown up, my lad—the name, now, the name would be Rol, I think.”

  “It would.”

  Gallico laughed, a barrel-deep, roaring laugh that rose even above the thunder of the breakers. “Here we are years later, met by chance upon the most desolate coast in the charted waters of the world. If there’s not some kind of fate involved in this, I’ll leave off beer for life. Boy, you are well met and very welcome.”

  “Was there anyone else?”

  Gallico’s good humor faded. “There were, but they could not hold on. The sea took them. Woodrin was one. He never did learn to swim.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s for later. For now we must get up onto drier land. I feel as though I’ve swallowed half the goddamned Inner Reach. I’m salt-blooded with the stuff. How did you get down?”

  “My crew are on the headland with a rope. They’ll haul us up.”

  It was approaching the middle of the night by the time they all stood on the clifftop, and when the shore party finally caught sight of the thing they had been sweating and groaning to haul up out of the breakers they stood shocked, like men who go fishing for trout and land a whale. They gave Gallico some of their precious water and Creed, who seemed less daunted by the halftroll than the others, helped bind up the creature’s wounds. Gallico had been scraped raw by barnacles, bloodied by the battering of the rocks, and generally smashed about for several hours as he fought the waves, but he was alert and upright. As soon as he was able, he limped to the brink of the cliff and peered out to sea.

  “That’s your ship, down there in the bay?”

  “Yes,” Rol told him. “The storm dismasted her, but we’ve a jury-rig up. As soon as this onshore blow dies down a little, we’re going to put to sea. But we need water.”

  Gallico nodded grimly. He was still peering out at the horizon. “You’d best be careful. There are two Bionese men-of-war out there sniffing for blood. They chased us down the wind, and by the time they had drawn off it was too late for us to claw clear of the rocks.”

  “We’ve a Mercanter commission. I doubt they’d trouble us,” Rol said, remembering now the half-fancied line of lights he had seen out to sea. He wondered why Gallico’s vessel had been fleeing the Bionese but was not sure how to ask. The halftroll looked down on him kindly.

  “Our ship, the Adder, was a privateer, Rol Cortishane. You had best know that right off.”

  “You’re a pirate?”

  Gallico grinned horribly. “For my sins.”

  “Were you a pirate in Ascari?”

  “Not strictly speaking, but times change. Now, would you rather I wandered off into the Goliad, or will you tolerate my kind in your company? You owe me nothing, whereas I owe you a life. I’ll take myself off if you do not want to befriend my sort, and think none the worse of you for it.”

  Rol looked at Creed, but the ex-privateer’s face was closed.

  “Stay with us. If it comes to it, we’ll find a space for you to hide belowdecks. I would not turn someone adrift in a desolation such as this.”

  Gallico set a paw on Rol’s shoulder. “Then you have my thanks again. I will not forget it. I am your man now to the death.”

  Despite his injuries, Gallico could keep pace with them with ease. They made their way back down to the base of the headland and moved inland. The night sky was entirely clear, awash with constellations. There was no moon, but the starlight was powerful enough to cast faint shadows. The shore party tramped steadily inland, their ears cocked for the telltale trickle of water. They were parched, and had only a cupful left in their skins. The heat of the day had evaporated and it was bitterly cold on the plateau. Their breath steamed out before them in gray clouds.

  “A cold desert,” Rol said. “I did not think there were such things.”

  “Only at night,” Gallico told him. “The heat is lost to the sky, sucked up by the stars to keep them bright.”

  “Have you been to the Goliad before?”

  “Not to speak of. But I have walked in Tukelar and Padrass, and I would surmise most deserts are alike.”

  “Why did you turn pirate?”

  Gallico paused a long time before answering, and watched his huge splayed feet as they stirred up the dust.

  “The Mercanters are becoming too greedy for their own good. They want a complete monopoly for their ships on some of the major trade routes of the world. You know the Free Cities?”

  “Some.”

  “They are independent, hence the name; city-states existing only for the purpose of commerce, and hence ideal bases for the Mercanters. But I have learned that the Mercanters actually control the Free Cities. Osmer, Spokehaven, Perigord, Graillor, even great
Urbonetto of the Wharves. In any case, Urbonetto and Spokehaven have barred ships from taking on cargo at their docks who do not have a Mercanter commission, and it is rumored the others will soon follow suit.”

  “They’ll bankrupt themselves.”

  “You underestimate the volume of Mercanter-commissioned trade, my friend. No, what is happening is that up and down the Twelve Seas, captains are scrambling for that red pennant, and paying tidy sums for the privilege of flying it. After that, they sail where they are told to sail, take on what cargoes are set out for them. There is no freedom, even for a shipowner, anymore. He is merely an employee of the Mercanters—and who are they anyway, to be set on taking over all the free trade of the world? Does anyone know?”

  “I have met their agents, ordinary men for the most part.”

  “Yes, but who are their leaders? No one can name them, and so long as everyone is growing rich, no one has thought to ask—it is not as though they have standing armies, or defended borders. They do not need them—other states will do the fighting for them, if that is called for. The Bionari love nothing more than to come crashing down on some small country with the complaints of the Mercanters to redress.”

  “You still have not told me why you turned pirate.”

  Gallico nodded, and the bone ridge of his brows came down almost to meet his jutting cheekbones so that his eyes glared green out of a crevice.

  “We traded illegally in Spokehaven, and our ship was forfeit. They took it on the very docks, and half the crew. Woodrin, a few others, and myself took off inland, and walked all the way to the southern tip of Osmer. There we worked as fishermen for a few months, until one day a gull-winged xebec put in for water flying the Black Flag. The fisherfolk fled, but we remained. It was the Adder, and her captain, Harun Secharis, agreed to take us on. Initially, all we wanted was passage off Osmer, but the privateers told us that we were blacklisted up and down the Westerease Sea. No captain would employ us—and it must be said that for me at least it is not simply a question of changing my name.” Here Gallico chuckled bitterly. “I have a tendency to stand out from the crowd. The others took their chances elsewhere, but Woodrin stayed with me, and I stayed with the Adder for want of a better alternative. That is how I became a pirate.”