by Paul Kearney
“You damned fool, how do you think we had word of them? Timian and Gan are out there in their own ships, shadowing this flotilla. The Osprey and the Skua carry nine-pounders. With their help we’ll take the brigs and sink the transports.”
“How many soldiers in these transports?”
“There are eight troopships in the convoy, so bank on a full regiment, sixteen hundred men.” Another murmur, disquieted and more widespread. Some women began sobbing. Artimion held up his hands.
“They’re still thirty miles out at sea, so if we’re quick we can meet them a good distance from the Ka. There is no reason to believe they know where we are, not yet.”
“Then why embark a marine regiment?” a burly mariner called out. “They’re not on board those troopships for their health.”
Artimion’s face grew grim and closed. “We must sink them all; drown every one of the bastards in the Reach. Not one must get back to Bionar, not one. We do that, and Ganesh Ka’s secret is safe.”
A general growl of approval met this.
“But we must plan for the worst also. We’re clearing the decks and holds of every fishing boat and launch in the Ka, and I want all those not in a ship’s company to prepare to leave the city.”
A roar went up; fear and anger in the wordless chorus of a thousand voices. Once again Artimion raised his hands amid the upcry, and the levelheaded about him began shouting for silence and cursing their more histrionic neighbors.
“Those who cannot or will not find a berth in the boats must take what they can inland, into the hills. When this fleet has been destroyed we will make contact with you as soon as we can. You shall return to your homes, I swear it. I will sink these enemies of ours in the Reach, down to the last man, or I will die in the attempt.”
A stillness fell over all that serried host of men and women. Some were nodding determinedly, others seemed sunk in resignation. A child cried out and was silenced by its mother.
“That is all. We are getting under way now, the men of the ships. May Ran be kind to us, and may Ussa of the Swells watch over us.”
Artimion jumped down from his box and the crowds began to part reluctantly. There was no panic, only a purposeful current of movement. The mariners began filing to their ships, and the decks of the Prosper, the Swallow, and the Albatross were at once crowded with busy men. Rol, Gallico, and Creed looked at one another, and then as one they left the Revenant and began forging through the milling throng to Artimion’s brigantine. They caught up with Ganesh Ka’s de facto ruler just before he boarded the gangplank.
“Where do you want us?” Rol asked.
Artimion turned round, eyes bright in his black face. “You are free to leave the Ka without obligation, as we agreed. I do not hold you to its defense.”
“The hell you don’t, Artimion,” Gallico began.
“Ask your captain, Gallico. You are his man now, not mine.”
“We’ll take our place in the line of battle with the rest of you,” Elias said hotly.
“No. I do not want you in it.”
“Why not?” Rol asked. “Surely this is no time to allow personal animosity to sway judgment.”
“My judgment is sound,” Artimion flashed. “Your ship has not even undergone sea trials. You are short in your complement, and your men have not yet worked together under your command—you would be more of a liability than an asset. This is not your fight, Cortishane. Stay out of it.”
“Is that your last word?”
“If you wish to be of use, take on as many of the common folk as you can and get them out of here until the thing is done. Otherwise, you’re just wasting my time. Go waste your own elsewhere.”
He turned and walked over the gangplank, closely followed by Miriam and half a dozen of her musketeers. Rol watched him go white-faced, but he put an arm out to stop Gallico following. “It’s no use.”
“I never thought Artimion small-minded until today.”
“He may be right. We’re not ready to take on Bionese men-of-war in open battle. Not yet.”
“We have a ship and a crew to sail her.”
“Oh, we’ll sail her, all right. Never fear.”
The little flotilla of vessels left the Ka towed by lighters from the wharves and cheered from the dockside by almost the entire population. Rol’s crew stood watching from the decks of the Revenant, sullen and low-spirited. Gallico was clenching and unclenching his mighty fists as though eager to wrap them round a throat. Elias came running along the packed dockside and pelted up the gangplank as though pursued.
“Well?” Rol asked, still watching the yards of the departing ships, stark silhouettes against the bright sunshine beyond the sea gates.
“I spoke to one of Artimion’s master’s mates. The enemy are sou’-sou’east of here, nine leagues. The wind’s from the west-nor’west, a fresh breeze. They’re beating up into it, tack on tack.”
“So that’s why he’s so confident,” Gallico said. “He has the weather-gage. He’ll swoop down on them at the time and place of his choosing.”
Rol stood considering. “We’re putting to sea, all the same. We’ll make some offing from the coast and take a wide course down their starboard flank, make sure everything is going to plan.”
“And maybe get in a few licks of our own?” Gallico asked, eyes dancing.
“If we can. We’ll play it by ear. Elias, go you to the far docks and hunt us up another lighter—we’ll need a tow to get out of the bay same as Artimion. But we’ll leave it until he’s made it beyond the cliffs. No sense in antagonizing him. He has enough on his mind.”
Ganesh Ka was not yet in a panic, but it was a close-run thing. Its population had divided into those who sought safety on the boats now being cleared at the wharves, and those who were fleeing pell-mell for the hills. Experienced mariners were numbering folk off to each and every fishing smack, cutter, launch, lighter, and hoy that stood at the docks. It was an ordered process, but in the queuing lines there was the growing stink of desperation. Rol did not doubt that it would turn ugly before long.
A gaggle of men and women turned up on the dock alongside the Revenant and hailed the ship in shrill voices. The gangplank had been taken up preparatory to casting off but now these unfortunates were wailing in a body at the busy ship’s company.
“Take us aboard of you, sirs!”
“I worked three weeks on this here ship!”
“For pity’s sake, you have room enough in the hold; let us aboard.”
“Lower the gangplank,” Rol said to Creed, his hand on his sword hilt. “Gallico, how many could we get below the waterline?”
“We pack ’em in tight among the cable-tiers and the water casks, I’d say fifty maybe.”
“Count the first fifty on board and then raise the plank.”
Those on the docks cried out their thanks and came aboard in single file, their arms full of their meager possessions. Men, women, and bewildered children, some sobbing bitterly as they boarded. Creed led them below bearing a ship’s lantern and stowed them in the depths of the hold, where they lay weeping and gabbling in the near-darkness. When the gangplank was raised on the last of the fifty the remainder of the crowd stood staring hopelessly at the ship for a while, and then shouldered their burdens and left quietly. Rol felt a kind of shame as he watched them go.
“No lights to be allowed below,” he snapped as Creed came back on deck bearing his lantern. “We may have loose powder coming and going later on. Gallico, how long can we fight?”
The halftroll scratched his chin. “We’ve enough for eighteen or twenty full broadsides, fighting only one side of the ship. Both broadsides are loaded, though, and we’ve plenty of match, no fear about that.”
“If we haven’t won with twenty broadsides we’re beat anyway,” Rol said. “Sidearms?”
“A brace of pistols in your cabin, courtesy of the magazine. For everyone else it’s cutlasses, pikes, and axes, and don’t they hope we won’t need ’em.”
&n
bsp; The lighter was alongside, its twelve-man crew resting on their oars. They had their seabags piled about the thwarts; clearly, once they had towed the Revenant out of the bay they meant to keep going.
“Cast off fore and aft!” Rol shouted. His heart was thumping madly. “Bear a hand with the towline forward. Helmsman, stand by at the wheel.”
His orders were well-nigh superfluous, for every one of the crew was an experienced seaman, and they had anticipated him. Beneath their feet, the ship began to move. Achingly slow at first, she built up a momentum through the water as the lighter crew strained at their oars. They edged away from the docks, toward the blazing brightness of the sea gates and the wide blue disc of the bay beyond.
The sunlight made them all blink like owls as they passed out of the shelter of the stone. Rol had almost forgotten that it was early summer, and the day was not yet old. He let fall topsails as a shimmer of a breeze passed over the enclosed bay, wrinkling the water, and the lightermen made better speed with the help of the sails. They steered directly for the gap in the encircling cliffs.
“We’re on the tail of the ebb,” Creed said, shading his eyes with his hand. “Lucky for us. Another hour and they’d have been hauling against the tide.”
The Revenant passed through the gap, the shadow of the cliffs cutting out the brilliant sunshine for a few minutes. But then she was through, and at once her motion changed, grew livelier. There was a stiff west-nor’west breeze blowing from the land and she had it on the port beam. The topsails bellied out taut and the creak of the rigging picked up a note.
The lighter crew cast off the towrope and stroke oar rose in his seat and waved his cap at them as they pulled away from the smaller craft. He shouted something but it was lost on the wind. Rol breathed deep. He could see Artimion’s ships fine on the starboard bow, some three or four leagues away already. He would keep his distance.
“Jib and courses—but reef the mizzen, lads,” he called out to his crew, and the men started up the shrouds, their sullenness evaporated. They were grinning and laughing as they climbed out on the yards, and the huge creamy masses of canvas fell like clouds, to be braced round and sheeted home with a minimum of fuss. Rol met Gallico’s eye, and nodded.
“Well, they’re seamen, all right.” He turned to the quartermaster at the wheel. “East-southeast.”
“Aye aye, sir. East-southeast it is.” The quartermaster was smiling like a man whose wife has given birth.
“Now let’s see what she can do,” Rol said to Gallico. “Get a log-line to the forechains.”
The Revenant was chopping through the swells, rolling and pitching as the offshore breeze met the eastward-rolling waves of the Inner Reach. She rose nobly, her heavy construction a bonus. Rol stood on her quarterdeck and grasped a backstay as was his wont, feeling the living movement of her beneath his feet, gauging the pressures working on her hull and masts. The spray raised by her bows came as far aft as the waist and in the white wake of her passage a miniature rainbow bloomed. Out here in the sunshine her hull timbers seemed even darker than in the gloom of the ship-cavern, such was the contrast with the blue sea, the unclouded sky. She was truly a black ship. His ship, the first he had ever truly taken to heart, having sweated and agonized over her resurrection like a midwife at a breech birth.
Rol closed his eyes, and felt her move under him. Felt the long creak and groan and fall and rise of her. It was like taking a strange woman into one’s bed, a new body to explore.
“By God, she has a heart,” Gallico said.
He opened his eyes at once. “Yes, she’s remarkably stiff. They knew what they were doing, those shipwrights who cursed over the teak in her ribs. Log-line there, what’s she making?”
The beardless youth who was being soaked in the forechains held on to the knotted log-line and shouted back aft. “Seven knots and one fathom!”
Gallico thumped the quarterdeck rail in sheer satisfaction.
“We’d best take in sail,” Rol said with studied casualness, “or we may well overtake master Artimion.” And then they both laughed like simpletons.
Rol sent lookouts to the mastheads; on a day like this they could survey a twenty-mile horizon. He looked back over the starboard quarter at Ganesh Ka, and saw a strange formation of mighty stone, the towers mere geological curiosities, the gap in the cliffs almost invisible. He realized in that moment that Ganesh Ka had always been a place of refuge, even back in the far distant days of its building. The Ancients had windows and fireplaces, they needed stairs and roadways, but their motives and concerns were utterly lost, completely alien. How old was Ganesh Ka? Ten thousand years? Twenty? No one knew. There was something maddening in that, not because of the Ancient blood that ran in his own veins, but simply because the loss of this knowledge, which he felt to be important, seemed almost criminal. What a world, he thought, what an awesomely crass world that can have such monuments erected in it, and not wonder about the minds that made them.
He faced forward again, the ship rising and falling under his feet. There was something in the sea, some ageless rhythm, which all men hearkened to even if none understood. He did not know if Ran’s Mark had put the sea yearning in his heart or if it had always been there, but he knew that here, now, at this moment, he was as happy as he had ever been in his life.
He looked skyward, and in his mind the bright ocean became a flat gaming board upon which pieces moved in obedience to the vagaries of the wind. There was the ragged Ganesh coast; deep-bitten and rock-strewn, death for vessels that did not know it well. There was Artimion and his ships, swooping down upon ten other vessels, the Bionese regiment and its protectors. Rol breathed in slow, remembering what Psellos had told him.
Most men think in one straight line. They see their own actions as a single thread unraveling, and the impingement of others upon their life as nothing more than stray knots in the thread. They look at things through one set of eyes: their own. It is a gift you must learn, to look at your own situation from the viewpoint of another. It is not hard, nor is it complicated. But it is necessary, if you are to survive.
For a moment Rol thought of Rowen, now a rebel queen vying for the possession of a kingdom. His sister. Why would she want him brought to her, now, seven years after she had walked away? He did not believe it was for love. Whatever she was now, it was not the woman she might have been had they remained together. He knew somehow that she was an enemy. That knowledge broke the boy Rol’s heart, but the man Psellos had trained nodded thoughtfully and filed it away for future use.
Then the training went to work on the task in hand. Assemble the information, and ask yourself how it all got there. Why is this happening? Crude questions, and pyramids of factors in the answers.
The Bionari are beating up the coast, into the wind, which means they have come from the south. What is in the south? They have a garrison in Golgos, and—and that’s it.
Rol opened his eyes.
The embarked regiment is the Golgos garrison, and it has taken ship because it has received intelligence about the region in which this elusive pirate city can be found. From where would it receive such intelligence?
And he knew. The knowledge leaped up in his brain even as his heart sank under the weight of it.
His erstwhile shipmates must have been picked up by the Imperials. For the first time, the Bionari knew in which region the Hidden City lay. And now they were sailing up the coast looking for it.
Artimion was right, he thought. I am bad luck. I have brought this on their heads. And his joy in the bright blue day and the ship leaping under his feet was diminished.
“Sail ho!” the lookout on the foremast cried.
His mind emptied. He was instantly alert. “Where?”
“Broad on the larboard beam, skipper. Topsails up. I believe she might be ship-rigged.”
Rol was running aft in a moment. He clambered up the weather shrouds of the mainmast, heaved himself into the maintop, and then started up the topgallantmast. He got c
lose to the truck, hooked an arm in the hounds, and peered east.
Yes, she was three-masted, though not ship-rigged. A barque, square-rigged on fore and main, fore-and-aft sails on the mizzen. More than that he could not make out.
He roared down at the quarterdeck. “Helmsman there! Bring her three points to larboard. Course due east!”
The Revenant turned smoothly under him, his lofty perch leaning and then straightening, dipping and rising. The strange ship could be a Mercanter, minding her own business, but somehow he did not think so. And in any case, she had the weather-gage of Artimion’s little fleet. Rol would have to intercept her if she was not to come upon the other ships of the Ka from the rear.
Ran, let her not be a man-of-war, he prayed silently. Not now.
It was a glorious day about him, a fine day to be at sea. After the confines of Ganesh Ka’s somber stone, the outside world seemed vast beyond measure.
This turning earth, as limitless as a madman’s imagination.
He could see five leagues in every direction, and if he looked east, this entire world was naught but a bubble of blue space. Turquoise sea, the breeze caressing it into a wrinkled swell that caught the sunlight in a vast shimmer. And a sky so dark above his head it might almost be purple, shading down to the far horizon and meeting the ocean, merging with it at the edge of sight. A blue world, empty of everything but air and water. And that nick on the edge of the horizon, the strange ship that might be harmless, or might spell his doom.
Heart rushing in his throat, he looked down. Far below him there pitched a tiny, crowded wooden world. The deck was covered with men, cordage, and the crouching shapes of cannon tied up close to the bulwark, like bronze beasts kept prudently in check. The men below paused, and he could see scores of faces tilted upward at him, and then out at the horizon.
He could not take the risk. Rol closed his eyes for a second, and bellowed, “Beat to quarters!”
A moment of stillness, and then the dry rattling of a drum started up, and the crowd of men on deck exploded into a circus of activity. The ship’s wake began to curve in a graceful arc behind her as she answered her rudder, and changed course to converge with the approaching vessel. Her bow dipped and plunged with a hissing roar and scattered packets of spindrift along the fo’c’sle. Below him, the rigging creaked and groaned, the timbers stretching and straining as though his ship were stirring into wrathful life, a woken titan.