The Mark of Ran

by Paul Kearney

  “And have you raped and pillaged and murdered, as sea lore has it?” Rol asked.

  Gallico looked at him. “Yes. Yes, I have murdered and pillaged. The Adder took fourteen ships before they ran us to earth here on the rocks of the Goliad, and every one of them was a Mercanter. We killed only those who resisted us, set the crews adrift in ship’s boats, took the cargoes, and burned the ships. That is how privateers do business.”

  “Where did you get rid of the cargoes?”

  Gallico paused, looked away. “Anywhere we could. The Mercanters may be controlling trade, but there will always be goods of dubious ownership to be bought and sold. Some cities have black markets for the Black Ships.”

  They walked on in silence after that. Rol’s shipmates kept their distance from the halftroll—especially now they knew he was a privateer. Only Creed seemed unfazed, as might be expected. Rol caught Elias staring at him as if wanting to say something, but whatever it was, the ex-convict thought better of it. They trudged along without further talk, their tongues sticking to the roofs of their mouths, and the air burning cold on their sunburnt faces.

  Gallico stopped and they straggled to a halt around him. They had been walking for well over two hours and were perhaps two leagues inland. The Goliad was a barren, sandblasted plain strewn with formations of brindled rock, the only vegetation low-growing plants with leaves like knives. Here and there odd piles of rubble were heaped in lines, and gullies spoke of a time when there had been heavy rains to carve the parched dirt of the land.

  “Water,” Gallico said, tongue rasping over his lips.

  “Where?”

  “Nearby.” His nostrils flared, snorted. “I smell it.”

  He traced the elusive scent to the side of one of those gullies, a deeper blade of shadow under the stars. While the others stood about sceptically, Gallico went to his knees and, with his huge talon-tipped paws, began to dig.

  Rol and Creed climbed up to the lip of the draw and looked north, to where the mountains rose dark against the sky. The Myconians, greatest heights of the northern world. Some great convulsion of the earth’s heart had punched them up in sliding shelves of tilted stone, fifteen thousand feet from foundation to peak. They were sheer as a wall here, though Rol knew that they grew less fearsome as one went farther north and west. Myconn, the Imperial City, stood in a highland vale in their heart, reachable only by a few passes, considered so impregnable that for centuries she had never built walls to protect herself. And Rowen was out there in those heights—for a moment he thought he could almost touch her sleeping mind. Rowen, fighting to become one of the powers of the world—and she would succeed, or die trying. The demons that gnawed at her heart would never let her do otherwise.

  There was a quiver at Rol’s hip, and he set his hand upon his sword-pommel. Fleam slept uneasily. Perhaps she sensed more violence to come.

  There was a life in the sword; Rol knew that now. It was avid, savage, and it had a voice that he half understood. What sorcery had created the blade he could not guess, but it had long passed from this world of men.

  “They say the Goliad was once paradise on earth,” Creed said quietly, staring up at the mountains but seeing different things. “A garden of the ancient world shaped by the hands of the Creator Himself. And in it He set the fathers of the first men, while the angels watched over them in their sleep.” Creed’s eyes snapped darkly to Rol’s face. “They say some with the blood of angels still walk the earth.”

  “I was not sure if you’d noticed.”

  “It’s in the eyes. They are not truly human.”

  “Gallico and I, we are the same, under the skin. Does that bother you?”

  Creed shrugged, smiling. “We all have our burdens to bear. Myself, I think I shall feel the shackles on my wrists for the rest of my life—and the lash of the overseer’s whip.”

  A cry, a tattered chorus of laughter from below. Rol and Creed ran and jumped down the side of the gully to find their shipmates gathered close about the kneeling Gallico. The halftroll was still shoveling earth out of a fair-sized hole, but his hands were glistening black now with mud and there was a tiny bell of sound at his knees, a trickle.

  “Water, by all the gods,” Elias breathed. “Gallico, I salute your nose.”

  “The hell with my nose. Get down here and help me dig.”

  Another quarter of an hour and they had a pool of water shining in the gully bottom and were taking turns to cup it in their hands and gulp it greedily down their dry throats. It was muddy and full of grit, but tasted sweet and cold. They filled their flaccid waterskins and drank pint after pint. One or two of the men threw it up directly, and then went back to drinking again. It sat like liquid ice in their stomachs but was welcome for all that. Finally Rol called a halt.

  “Back to the beach. We have to fill the water casks. The rest of the crew are as thirsty as we, and it’ll be dawn soon.”

  The way back seemed shorter with the good water seeping through their parched bodies. Gallico raised his head and sniffed the air again.

  “The onshore breeze has dropped. It’s backing round now, northeast or nor’-nor’east.”

  “A fair wind for Ordos,” Mihal, one of the younger sailors, said.

  They were still a mile from the coast when they caught sight of a strange glow on the horizon, a saffron glare like that of a tiny setting sun. They studied it in puzzlement as they walked.

  “Perhaps the men at the boat lit a fire to keep themselves warm,” Elias said.

  “What are they burning, sand?” Gallico retorted. His face had clenched shut again.

  It was Mihal who said it.

  “It’s the ship. The Cormorant is burning.”

  Such a stupid thing to say. Ships sailed, they went aground, they capsized, they sank. Ships did not burn. Men burned ships.

  Rol began to run.

  “Do not do it!” Gallico shouted, loud as a trumpet blast in the night.

  Rol ran. The land dipped under his feet and he sped through a hollow filled with black stunted trees. Their sharp leaves furrowed his brow for him but he did not slacken his pace. He ran as fast as the burgeoning fury in him could catch light. He found the cliff path and scrambled and half fell down it, a cloud of stones and gravel tumbling with him, racing past his feet. His boots hit soft sand and he ran on. He ran past the bodies of the men he had left on the beach, the stove-in timbers of the ship’s boat. He hit water with a white flare of spray, and began swimming as though water were a necessary irritation, another medium of transport. He swam as he had run, without thinking, his mind one big white space.

  Prothero.

  The Cormorant was ablaze from truck to waterline, and crucified to her sides were Prothero and the shipmates Rol had left behind to look after her. A dozen men twitching in the flames as their muscles and sinews contracted into cinders, their skin already blackened, hair alight. The pitch on the end of Prothero’s stump blazed like a torch, so that it seemed he was bleeding fire. His eyes were already withered and the heat had shrunk his face to the size of a child’s.

  Rol swam to the ship’s side and trod water, staring up at the conflagration. The Cormorant groaned and creaked in her final agony and flaming pieces came tumbling off her jury-rigged yards like little comets, hissing into the sea all about him. There was a sharp bang on board, and the brig shuddered, timbers fountaining up into the air like fireworks as one of the small powder-charges for the swivels caught light. The ship began to list and the fire hissed venomously at the waterline, fighting the cool dark of the sea.

  Rol dragged his gaze away from Prothero’s shriveled face and swam around the Cormorant’s stern. The glass in the stern windows was exploding with high-pitched cracks and the flames rushed out hungrily to lick round the taffrail. His fury cooled, sank cold into ash. He peered out at the horizon where the lightening sky spoke of morning, but could see nothing. He was too low in the water, weighed down by his sword and the master’s wheel-lock at his waist.

&nb
sp; He floated there by the dying ship that had been his home, ignoring the pleas and cries of the shore party as they found their own way down onto the beach. Finally, as the sunrise paled the roaring flames, he turned in the water and began swimming for the shore again, tired to the depths of his bones.

  Seventeen

  THE BIRTHPLACE OF MAN

  “WE SAW THEM. FROM THE SEA CLIFFS THEY WERE HULL-DOWN on the horizon,” Elias Creed said, his face pale beneath the red peel of his sunburn. “Two Bionese cruisers, sailing sou’-sou’west. They must have sent boats in through the reef during the night.”

  “We were a Mercanter ship,” young Mihal protested. “What were they thinking?”

  “No pennant—it went in the storm,” Rol told him in an even voice. “They mistook us for the privateer’s consort, and sent in the marines without asking too many questions. They crucify pirates, and pirates is what they thought we were.” He looked at Creed and Gallico as he spoke, and then looked away again, ashamed of the meanness of his thinking.

  “I do not blame you if you are bitter,” Gallico said. “The Adder brought this upon you, and for that I am heartily sorry.”

  “Sorry!” Jude Mochran said, red-eyed. “My brother was on that ship. He made it through the storm when many another didn’t—and then they killed him like a common murderer!” Mochran was a small man, but he bunched his fists as though he meant to take on Gallico there and then.

  “Enough,” Rol said sharply. “We’ve two shipmates to bury, and we must salvage what we can from the cutter.”

  “We’re on the shore of a desert hundreds of miles away from anywhere,” Bartolomew Geygan, a young sailor from Corso, said, quiet but cold. “What in the world is the use?”

  “You can sit here and cry into the Reach if you want,” Rol snapped, “but I intend to live through this. Now get on your feet, all of you.”

  “You can’t command us,” Mochran said, “your commission went down with the ship. You’re nothing to us now.”

  “Then go your own way, Jude,” Rol said calmly. “I won’t stop you.” He knelt in the sand and began to dig with his hands. At once, Gallico and Elias joined him, and after a few moments the other four Cormorants did so also. The tears ran down Mochran’s face as he hurled the sand aside, but he said no more.

  Two years, Rol had been with the Cormorant, and many of those who had gone down nailed to her burning hull had been shipmates all that time. Prothero he had sailed with for three times as long. For some reason, as he knelt in the hot sand with the rising sun beating fierce and unpitying upon his back, he felt that his past had somehow caught up with him again. There was something to his life that would not let go of him, as unyielding and ineradicable as the mark on the palm of his hand. It had slept, these seven years, but now was waking again. So he dug deep in the sand, making a grave for things other than the two corpses. There were tasks to fulfill now, and the white fury of his rage would help him accomplish them.

  The cutter had had planks chopped out of her hull and her thwarts were smashed into splinters. Even if they had possessed a full complement of carpenter’s tools, it was unlikely they could ever have got her to float again. Most of the casks had been stove in also, but one was whole, and this Gallico roped to his back, straightening under it as lightly as if it were a rolled blanket. They also salvaged a few sheaves of dried fish which all the boat lockers of the Cormorant held against emergencies. Thinking of the Gannet, Rol smiled grimly, and made a pack for them out of a swatch of canvas, slinging them across his shoulder. The sailors had their knives and cutlasses, Rol the master’s pistol as well as Fleam, and there were two full waterskins and some tinderboxes in the party, but aside from that they possessed only the rags they stood up in. When they had mounded up the sand over their murdered comrades they stood about the graves like men amazed, and then their heads came up and all but Gallico stared at Rol for inspiration.

  “We make for Ordos, I suppose,” he said. “It’s three hundred miles as the crow flies.” But it did not feel right as he said it. Going to Ordos would not bring him quicker to any revenge.

  “There may be somewhere closer,” Gallico rumbled. “Northward up the coast from here there is a place where I know we will be welcome. But once we go there, there can be no going back. You should all know that.”

  “What is this place?” Creed asked, eyes bright.

  “Men call it Ganesh Ka, the Pirate City. I have been there in the past. It’s a hard road, by land, but shorter than the way to Ordos.”

  “Pirate City! It’s a tale told to children, and drunken landsmen in seafront taverns,” Mochran said.

  “No. It exists, believe me. But when a man enters the city, he cannot go back—from that moment on he must become a privateer or perish, for no one is allowed to leave unless they take to one of the Black Ships.”

  “So we must all turn pirate?” Sayed Rusaf said. The oldest of the remaining Cormorants, he was an experienced topman, and might find employment anywhere on the Twelve Seas with ease.

  “It is the law of that place,” Gallico said. He was watching Rol closely.

  “I’ll go,” Mihal said. He was young enough to perhaps find the idea exciting.

  “And I,” Mochran agreed. “For my brother’s death.”

  “I will not,” Rusaf cried. “The Bionari made a mistake, it’s true, and our shipmates paid for it, but we are still alive—no need to throw our lives away as well.”

  The last of the four original Cormorants was Bartolomew, the hot-tempered youngster from Corso. “How do we know this thing is telling us the truth?” he asked, eyes flashing under a ragged mop of black hair. “It could be he’s leading us into some kind of ambush where a few of his mates are laid in wait somewhere.”

  For the first time Gallico’s temper rose. “You stupid little fool—what in the world do you have that is worth stealing? I am offering you a way to find a new life. Trek across the mountains to Ordos alone if you will—the eagles will be feasting on your eyes ere a week is out.”

  “What does the skipper say?” Rusaf asked. “Rol, what of you?”

  Rol looked over them all, his eyes lingering a moment on Creed’s transfigured face.

  “I believe Gallico. Unlike all of you, I have met him before. If there is a hidden city, he will lead us to it. There is nothing for me now in Ordos or anywhere else; the Cormorant was the only home I knew, and now it is gone. I want revenge. I will throw in my lot with the Black Ships.”

  “We have no choice, then,” Bartolomew said bitterly. “We must all turn pirate or else die here out in the waste.”

  “It is more of a choice than our shipmates had,” Rol told him. He looked sidelong at Gallico. “Perhaps something can be worked out when we get to Ganesh Ka, some deal struck. Do not give up hope—we are alive, after all, when so many are not.”

  They gave in after that, and grudgingly agreed to follow Gallico’s lead. There had been no need to ask Elias his opinion; it had been clear to see in his eyes. The little group labored back off the beach and up the cliff to the plateau above once more. They were tired now, having walked through the night, but Gallico insisted they make some distance between themselves and the charred, sunken hulk of the Cormorant. “We’ll rest at noon,” he said, “in the hottest part of the day, and then continue after dark. First we must go back to the spring I dug up, and fill this cask. One cannot dig out water every time one needs it.”

  So they trudged inland. Rol and Gallico took the lead, then Creed, and behind him Mihal and Mochran. Bringing up the rear were Rusaf and Bartolomew. They retraced their steps under the burning heat of the morning sun, their eyes screwed up against the glare of the light on the pale, naked earth. Rusaf, who had been born in Tukelar, plucked a dry leaf from a tree and held it between his teeth to prevent his lower lip from blistering. The others peeled off their ragged shirts and draped them over heads and shoulders against the blast of the sunlight.

  The spring had turned to cracked mud, but Gallico dug
it out once more and held the bunghole of the cask under the bubbling water. It was awkward going until they hit upon the solution of emptying their waterskins into the cask and refilling them. By the time the cask was full and their skins also, and they had all drunk as much as they could hold in their swollen bellies, the sun was halfway up the sky. Gallico shaded his eyes and peered north along the coast. The great plateau jutted out into the sea there for ten or fifteen leagues and then broke off suddenly in sheer sea cliffs. On the other side, clear to see even through the gathering shimmer of the heat haze, the Inner Reach bit into the land again in a wide blue firth.

  “We are north of Golgos, which is good, because there is a Bionese garrison there,” Gallico said. “I’d wager those two cruisers are going to put in there also to refit; our stern chasers mauled them somewhat before they ran us on the rocks. This plain ahead is named the Gorthor Flats; fourteen leagues across, and there will be no water there, but it must be faced. Beyond it is the Firth of Ringill. We must follow its shores northwest, toward the mountains. Across the firth is Ganesh, the ancient land which legend holds was once a fief of the Goliad, but which is now a wilderness. We have a journey of some two weeks before us at least, for Ganesh Ka is much farther to the north.”

  Rol looked at the desolation of the blasted land about them, a shimmering ochre waste where the only movement was that of wind-reared dust-clouds. “How in the world do armies fight in a place like this?”

  “By losing as many men to the heat as to the enemy,” Gallico said. “The Goliad is the only real place to land an armament between Ordos and Urbonetto; everywhere else is too mountainous for a baggage or siege train. Plus, if one heads inland there are passes through the Myconians that lead to Myconn itself. Battles have been fought for possession of those passes for time out of mind, with armies of Oronthir and Cavaillon and Armidon and the Mamertine League all seeking to come at Bionar through its underbelly. All have failed. Even a century ago, the Goliad was not the place you see now; it was a rolling savannah, with herds of deer and bison and wild asses. But the grazing of countless army horses and the feet of passing soldiers have stripped the grass from the earth and the wind does the rest. In this part of the world rain comes fast and hard in the autumn of the year, and the rest of the seasons are dry. With no vegetation to protect it, the rain washed the good soil away, and now the wet season brings no life to the place because the life is not there to germinate.”