“Sir?” the man said.
“Round up the crew. We sail in a half-hour.
“Sir?”
“You heard me. Get going!” Nollin sent him sprawling with a back-handed cuff, as he’d often seen Hilan do, then watched as the man climbed to his feet and bobbed his head nervously.
“Yes, sir!” He turned and ran.
Nollin called to the half-dozen other sailors on deck, and they putdown whatever they were doing and gathered around.
“Most of you have seen my brother Nollin,” he said. “We’re joining up with him. Now jump to it!”
They jumped. Nollin watched for a minute, then grunted and turned to the captain’s cabin. Removing a key from his waist pocket, he fitted it into the lock, turned, then pushed into the room.
He sat at the small desk and waited. His muscles knotted and he felt sick at his stomach. Time slipped by. How long would the witch’s magic last? How long could he fool Hilan’s crew? He stared at the looking glass on the wall as if daring it to betray him.
Feet pounded past his door from time to time; men shouted and swore as they climbed the rigging. The decks creaked and shifted against the waves.
He knew the time had come when a light knock sounded on the door.
Opening it, he stepped out and found a tall, thin, square-jawed man standing there. He dressed in brown and black: Rilal, the first mate.
“Sir,” Rilal said, “the ship’s ready.”
“Good.” He looked across the deck at the men, nodding slowly. “You will follow the Serpent. Keep a close watch on her. Make sure no tricks are pulled. I trust my brother, but not far enough to risk my life. Eh?”
He nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“I’ll be aboard Nollin’s ship. We sail in five minutes. You’re in command until I get back. Any questions?”
He grinned. “No, Captain.”
III
HILAN LAMMIAT
I heard a soft tread and looked up. My muscles ached from strainingagainst the ropes, and though I hate to say it, I welcomed the excuse to stop.
It wasn’t Nollin, returned to gloat, but the old woman…what had he called her? Loanu?
She knelt beside me and ran her soft fingers through my hair.
“Cut the ropes,” I said.
“There are no ropes.” Her voice was soft, almost sing-song, and she didn’t look at me.
“Look—on my arms. See them?”
“The time has come. Do you not hear the winds? The end is here. The Tyrant has come.”
I strained, but heard no more than the waves and the creaking of the deck.
“He is near. I feel his presence. Shon Atasha protect me!”
Weeping, she collapsed at my side. Her sobs became hysterical. Again I strained at my bonds with no result. If nothing else, Nollin knew how to tie knots.
The door swung open and he stood there, sweating heavily, a knife in his hand. The Serpent lurched, suddenly, and I knew the moorings had been cast off. Then I noticed the scar on his face—my face!
“I’m going to kill you!” I screamed at him. “Nollin!”
“It’s here,” he said softly. There was a stunned look on his face.
“Let me loose!”
“Yes…yes.” He looked down as if noticing me for the first time. “Yes—there’s no time. You must help with the ship. We have to get out of port—the fighting’s started!”
I stared at him as he bent and slit my ropes.
“Fighting?”
“All up and down the docks. We barely got away in time.”
I stood, shoving him out of the way. You bastard. Kill you later.
Clamboring out onto the deck, I stared in shock at Zelloque.
The entire city blazed with light. The houses burned. The shops burned. Flames danced among the tall, splendid buildings. Dark shapes moved through the smoke-filled streets and down the piers, throwing torches onto the ships. The proud schooners and galleys flared brightly. Over the distant slap-slap of waves, I heard the screams of dying men.
I shivered. Nollin was suddenly standing beside me.
“Look,” he said, pointing.
I turned. A hundred yards away, the Falcon slipped through the darkness, as silent as a ghost, sails white and full. My ship. Nollin had saved it. If he’d allowed me to stay in Zelloque.…
Suddenly I didn’t know what to say. I turned and looked at him. His face shimmered for an instant in the starlight, then the scar faded and he was Nollin again, the same as ever. He grinned back like nothing had happened between us.
“Blood’s thick,” he said.
“Blood’s thick,” I agreed, and shivered again. The breeze had grown colder; I stood there in my undergarments. “I want my clothes back, though.”
He turned toward his cabin. “They’ve too large for me, anyway.”
I didn’t follow him. Though we would never speak of this night again, I’d always remember what Nollin had done for me, and I’d never be the same.
I watched the city die, and with it, my hatred. I knew I should have burned there as well.
My brother, my brother. Why do you love me?
He came back in a minute and slipped a blanket around my shoulders. Together for the first time, we waited for dawn.
SEA-CHILD, by Cynthia Ward
When the pirates attacked, they came by land, where the villagers of Grunnett kept no watch.
Vekki and her mother were the last to know, when the raiders’ axes struck door and wall, cracking open their lonely shack on the isolated spit. The pirates broke in, laughing and bloody from their assault upon the village, and they fell upon Vekki and her mother almost before they could rise from their pallets in the lone room of their salt-bleached shelter.
“Do not fight a man who would force you,” the fishwives liked to say, but the old herbwoman told the village girls, “Fight, because it may stop the rapist, and not fighting never did.”
So Vekki fought, shouting, writhing, clawing. She struggled to win free, to go to her mother’s side and defend her. But five pirates bore Vekki down painfully upon the hard sand floor, more men than even a girl as sturdy and strong as the seventeen-year-old could oppose.
“The blubbery sea-cow has sharp claws,” cried the pirate straddling Vekki, whose beard-patched face dripped blood from the furrows she’d dug.
“I’ll not have a female so unnatural,” said another pirate, looking on. “There’s skin between her fingers.”
Vekki remembered overhearing the old herbwoman scolding gossips, when they’d speculated upon whom Vekki’s unknown father might be, long years ago.
“Not one of our men,” one of the gossips had been saying. “With the webbed fingers, she’s one of the fish-people--”
“Vekki’s no scaled mer,” the herbwoman had said. “Nor seal-girl, either, with that long, blue-touched hair. Her father’s a nereus. And you don’t want to anger the nerei. So be silent. Don’t even think of them.”
The patch-bearded reaver pulled the cutlass from his belt and pointed the notched and bloodied blade at one of Vekki’s pinned wrists. “I’ll clip the sea-cow’s talons for her--”
But a pirate hung with gold, higher-ranking than the crudely dressed men who had invaded the shack, stuck his head through the shattered boards and driftwood of the wall. “Belay that,” he cried, “there’s an Imperial warship on the horizon. They’ll see the smoke of this stinking village. Fall back to the ship, or be left behind!”
Most of the pirates cursed and rose up, binding Vekki’s mother’s wrists to carry her away with them, for she did not look as old as her thirty-two years, and was pretty and hale; she could be sold to some distant merchant or nobleman of the Imperium. But the marauders marked by Vekki’s nails lingered, four of them holding her fast as the patch-bearded reaver laughed and raised his cutlass for the swing that would sever Vekki’s hand from her wrist.
But as the cutlass rose and the retreating pirates bore Vekki’s mother through the door, she screamed at t
he threat to her only child.
The scream and disappearance of her mother raised new heights of anger and fear for her mother in Vekki, as if raising a storm in her very soul. And the sensations she felt became strange. For it seemed that the storm poured out of her, invisibly, yet with the shattering fury of a winter northeaster, which brings the gray ocean surging out of its bed, to drown villages and smash cabins and snap great pines many miles inland.
And the five pirates’ faces twisted suddenly, and their hands rose to their throats, releasing Vekki. The cutlass, dropping abruptly from loosened fingers, thumped upon the pale sand. And in the red dawn light pouring through the open doorway and split walls, the pirates’ expressions turned to confusion and terror; and each man’s hands clutched at his throat, as if he were strangling upon a too-large draft of ale.
The five men opened their mouths, as if to scream, and water spilled over their lips. It drenched their beards and shirts and the entirety of their bodies, and spread in puddles that joined in a pool on the sand. Dark streaks and swirls, as of blood, showed in the dawn-lit pool. And there were seaweeds in the pool, and in the water bursting from the men’s gaping mouths; and the smell of brine filled the broken shelter.
The men toppled over, one by one, as if felled by powerful cutlass blows. In wonderment and apprehension, Vekki touched each man upon the wrist, seeking a pulse as the herbwoman had taught her, after pirates had struck the village five years ago. And as Vekki confirmed that each man was dead, a fierce elation rose in her breast; and she ran out of her mother’s shack, seeking the pirates who had captured her mother.
They were not in sight.
“All the pirates are gone,” Vekki whispered in horrified realization.
Upon the horizon she saw a war-galley of the Imperium, a vessel seldom seen in northern waters, but always recognizable with its grand size and purple sails and great banks of oars. On the land above the rocky shore, villagers wandered through the burning ruins of Grunnett, or saw to the wounded, or wept over the dead. But Vekki was alone on the barren spit where her mother’s shack stood, as isolated as she and her mother had been since Vekki’s birth. Yet large footprints showed where the pirates had fled, and Vekki, running, followed them to the edge of the forest, which hemmed in the village and its fields and orchards on three sides.
“They have gone into the woods,” Vekki whispered; shy and shunned, she had the developed the habit of talking to herself. “And I know little of woodcraft.”
She sometimes wandered the woods alone, since the other children had rarely played with her, and her isolation had increased as a woman’s budding curves made her more shy. The villagers were not supposed to hunt or forage in the forest, which belonged to the count. But Grunnett was far from the county castle, so many of the villagers hunted or gathered, and knew the forbidden wood-skills. Save occasionally for the herbwoman, no one had seen fit to teach these skills to Vekki.
But, looking more closely, Vekki realized she had learned enough to follow the pirates’ flight through the forest. For in their hurried retreat, they broke branches and pulped rotten deadfalls. They left footsteps in the dust of decayed pine needles and disturbed fallen leaves so their undersides showed wet against the dry leaf-mold. They rubbed moss and lichen from the dark trunks of trees and the gray outcroppings of granite.
“But I move so slowly,” Vekki whispered as she searched for the signs of the pirates’ passage.
Grunnett and its sheltered cove were enclosed to the north by a long, low, thickly forested point of land. Vekki came to the far side of the point, drawn by the damage of the raiders’ flight to the place where their little caravel had stealthily moored. But when she emerged from the forest, she saw no pirates or boats or captives upon the shore; only the caravel, under sail, absconding before the Imperial war-ship might spot them.
“They are fled with my mother,” Vekki cried. “And surely they have taken others. But perhaps I can still--”
She tried to rouse the strange surging storm in her soul; and she felt a stirring within. But it was weak, and the sensation never flowed out of her. She realized she could not use her newfound power over such a distance.
“I might have drowned the pirates,” she concluded in despair, “were I not too slow--”
She fell silent, for the cold gray waves were calling to her, as they always did when she looked upon them. She might not run fleetly, with her muscular, clumsy-looking body; but she had always swum swiftly and well, so that the other children of Grunnett, and even the adults, had quickly learned not to race her in either river or cove. And so, with a wild, impossible hope kindling in her breast, Vekki flung herself into the ocean.
She swam with strong, rapid strokes. Her arms cleaved the ocean as if they were slim oars. Her long, webbed fingers and toes seemed to grip the water as if it were so many deep handholds in the cliff that rose south of the village. Her skin, which seemed curiously sleek and slightly blue in bright sunlight, shed the water more readily even than that rare foreign substance called glass. Her lungs took in great breaths and held them longer than anyone else in the village might. Her wool shift, however soaked, did not impede her progress. Nor did she mark the cold that would have sapped the vigor from the muscles of the other villagers, trapping them in a strong current or sinking them to watery graves while Vekki continued steadily onward, warm and unwearied.
Gods, grant me aid, Vekki prayed as she swam. God of sea, keep me buoyant. Goddess of earth, keep me strong. God of sky, fill my lungs.
And the old memory of the herbwoman scolding the gossips came back to Vekki, and brought her a new thought.
Father, if ever you cared for your shore-born child, aid me now!
She mocked herself. “Maybe the gods will help you. But your father, who has never cared to meet you? Who may not be within a thousand leagues of the Northern Ocean? Who may not even be nereus, despite what the herbwoman thinks? No,” she told herself, “he’s never had an interest in you. And you’ve no chance of catching up with a caravel under sail.”
But she prayed for her father’s assistance, as she prayed for the gods’ assistance.
Do the gods answer my prayer? she wondered, realizing that the winds had died, becalming the single-masted ship, which had neither oarsmen nor oar-ports. I pray you, gods of sea and earth and sky, keep the caravel dead in the water.
And the winds did not return, and Vekki drew close to the caravel. Then, worried that someone might glance over the side and spot the speck of her upon the ocean, she took a great breath and dove beneath the glassy surface.
Rising close beside the barnacled hull, Vekki rejoiced that she had not recently trimmed her nails. She hated her fingernails and toenails for being so thick, and for tapering to sharp, obvious points. Once, she had cut them often, trying futilely to hide her inhuman claws from the other villagers.
It is good I grew tired of forever trimming them, Vekki thought, sinking the points of her fingers and thumbs into the slippery planks of the hull. Then she drew her feet forward and sank their talons into the wood, and began to climb.
But she had labored long and hard in her lengthy swim into the open ocean with its powerful currents. And the cold had penetrated her slick hide and the thick layer of fat over her muscle. So she was shaking as she ascended the side of the caravel; and her muscles jumped under her skin, as she had seen muscles jumping under the coat of a messenger’s exhausted horse.
She rested, clinging to the wood. She ignored the ache in her fingers and toes as she bade the sun god to warm her. She prayed all the gods would fire her strength. She pleaded with her father to rise from the depths with all his nereus strength and magic, and use them to save the woman he had loved, at least for one night.
Then, as Vekki resumed her ascent, a corsair glanced over the side and saw her there. “Invader!” he shouted, drawing his cutlass. “A sea-woman boards us!”
“You’ll not harm another woman,” Vekki retorted, feeling the strange sensation ro
use to furious life in her soul.
A sudden waterfall poured from the pirate’s lips, and with a gurgling cry he swayed and toppled over the side, nearly striking Vekki as he plunged to the sea.
Then Vekki swarmed over the side of the caravel, and her heartbeat rose to a painful pace as she saw the deck. It was aswarm with pirates, near fifty men who were running to meet her with cutlass and hatchet and harpoon. And the pirates had no care for whether they trod upon the women and girls and boys who lay bound upon the deck, with Vekki’s mother among them.
“Stand down, you scurvy rogues!” Vekki said, feeling new strength at the sight of her mother alive. “And turn this ship for land, if you would spare yourselves the wrath of a nereus!”
Some of the pirates hesitated, and a few glanced back, as if they feared to find more sea-folk behind them. But they all came forward, roaring for the girl’s blood.
Then fear and anger grew in Vekki, enwrapped with the ferocious desire to rescue the mother who had loved her and protected her, despite all the hatred and suspicion of the villagers. The strange sensation swelled strongly within her breast. And water began to spill from the pirates’ mouths.
Screams rose from some of the villagers. The pirates could say nothing, only fall upon the deck. But most twitched or writhed upon the boards; for Vekki’s magic had not the strength or training to fill them all with brine sufficient to slay them.
Then the captain, who had been hidden by the ranks of his raiders, strode forward, a tall burly man with a four-foot greatsword. He was hung with gold and silver and gems, showing he had begun his reaving in the days when the pirates plagued the Central Sea, before the Imperium augmented its navy and drove the marauders to the hardscrabble north. In the morning light, his skin showed a tinge of blue, even to the top of his shaven pate, and he raised a hand from the grip, spreading his fingers to show the skin that stretched between them, and the claws that armed them. And no spot of water showed upon his skin or lip.
The Pirate Story Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Tales Page 348