by Tim Stead
Genardy walked up and squinted into the dawn light at the distant man. “Unstring the bows then?” he asked. “Looks like he went past us in the night.”
“Let’s get after him then,” Taranath said, and the preparations were reversed. When their small cavalcade finally began to move again Taranath looked once more for the distant figure, but the man on horseback was gone. The hill was empty.
18 A Contract
Sam Hekman had spent the better part of an hour tidying his rooms. This was remarkable because Sam was a tidy man by nature and owned very little. Tidying was a matter of moving the few things he owned from a table to a shelf and back again, of arranging his clothes – about five sets of what he usually wore to work – several times in a cupboard, and of polishing his few weapons and then hiding them away in a long box at the foot of his bed.
His rooms were spotlessly clean – they always were. He had little else to do when he was at home but cleaning and tidying. Unlike Arla he had not taken to reading. His preferred source of wisdom was the street and he regularly visited six or seven taverns within a few blocks of his home and watched and listened. He liked to walk through the various old town markets doing the same. He knew the people of Samara as well as anyone could, or so he believed.
He was sitting in one of his three chairs – he had bought the third for this occasion – when a brisk knock sounded on his door. He rose and opened it to reveal Ishara accompanied by a thin, bald man of advanced years, dressed in black, carrying a leather-bound box.
“Come in,” he said, stepping back.
The bald man entered and stood looking around the room. Ishara did likewise, but her face was a picture of disbelief mixed with disgust.
“You live here?” she asked.
Sam thought of his old rooms. They had been so much smaller, so much more miserable in every way.
“I like it here,” he said. “The city is all around me.”
Ishara dusted one of his spotless chairs and sat without being asked. Sam waved to the second seat and the scribe sat beside her, opening his case and pulling out a thin sheaf of papers. He offered them to Sam.
The papers were a contract. It said so at the top of the first sheet: Contract between Ishara Fandakari and Sam Hekman. He flicked through the eight pages, picking out a few words, titles, phrases.
“Does it need to be so wordy?” he asked.
Ishara smiled. It was a slightly condescending smile, a smile that said she expected no more from a man who lived in rooms like this in a neighbourhood like this.
“It’s a standard contract,” she said. “To protect both of us under the law.”
Sam turned back to the first page. “Why is your name first?” he asked.
“Because I’m paying the scribe,” she replied.
He moved his chair over to his table and turned up the lamp, the second page held more, and the language was thick with long sentences and unfamiliar words. It was a kind of lie, he thought, a kind of trick. He picked up his pen and dipped the nib in ink. He would go through it word by word if necessary, phrase by phrase, but he was determined to understand all of it before he signed anything. He pointed to the first phrase.
“Explain this to me,” he said. “Durandian partnership – what does that mean?”
Ishara leaned forwards. “It’s a partnership where the first named partner has operational control of the business,” she said. “We agreed this.”
“And the term is recognised under Samaran law?”
“It’s understood,” Ishara said.
Sam scratched the phrase out and wrote in his understanding of it above. “Not by me,” he said.
“Are you going to do this with the entire contract?” Ishara asked.
“Yes.”
“We’ll be here all night!”
“If that’s a problem you can come back again tomorrow,” Sam said. “And so on until we finish.”
She looked at him again, and she smiled again, but this time there was no condescension in the smile. “Very well,” she said. “We’ll finish it tonight.”
Sam did not enjoy the next three hours, but it was an education of sorts. The contract gradually changed from a neat, elegantly presented document into an ink spattered nightmare, annotated with Sam’s comments, changes and clarifications. It would have to be rewritten.
“Well,” he said finally. “That seems clear enough now.” He handed the crumpled papers back to the scribe. “Can you read what I’ve written?” he asked.
The scribe nodded. He turned to Ishara. “When do you want this?”
“Now,” she said.
“It’s the middle of the night,” the scribe said.
“So you should have it done by morning,” she replied.
The scribe didn’t protest, but gathered up the papers, put them in his leather box and left with it under his arm. Ishara leaned back in her chair with a sigh.
“Do you have any wine?” she asked “Any drinkable wine?”
“I don’t drink at home,” he replied. “I don’t eat at home. In fact I spend very little time here – just sleeping.”
Ishara pulled a face. “I can see why,” she said. “You should get somewhere better.”
Sam was puzzled. “Why?”
“You’re one of the most powerful men in Samara. It’s just… odd that you should live like this.”
Sam looked around his room. The bed chamber door was shut, but it all seemed perfectly functional to him. It was what he needed, what he expected, but he knew that it wasn’t enough – not for a woman like Ishara. She expected some display of wealth, and even though Sam didn’t think of himself as wealthy, he supposed that he was.
“How do you think I should live?” he asked.
Ishara’s eyes twinkled, and Sam had never seen that before, not in any woman looking at him.
“What can you afford?” she asked.
“Per week? Two or three gold, I suppose…”
“To buy,” she said. “You should have a house of your own.”
Sam thought about that. Owning a house had never been a dream of his. That went without saying for a Gulltown boy, but he’d owned a warehouse – a small one – and a boat, but that had been before the fall and he’d lost it all. He hadn’t thought to put his money in property again.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It depends how much you’re going to make me.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “You can’t even spend what you’re earning. How much will you have left in the bank when you’ve paid me the hundred and fifty?”
“You ask the most personal questions,” he replied.
“A hundred?” she pressed. “Two hundred?”
“More,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow. “I suppose living in this fleapit has some advantages. How much?”
“Four hundred and fifty,” he said, having no idea why he was confiding in her.
Ishara smiled. “Excellent,” she said. “You should spend the lot.”
“On a house?”
“Of course. You could get something decent for that.”
“Decent? For four hundred and fifty?” His warehouse had cost him fifteen gold, but that had been in Gulltown and he’d thought it the most money he’d ever spend in his life. He wasn’t ready. He didn’t have the time to go looking for a house, and besides, he didn’t know how he’d even start. “I think I’ll keep the money.”
“Why?”
He struggled for the words. It was the first time in his life that money hadn’t been an issue. He had too much, and that was a fine and easy feeling. He could live in comfort for the rest of his life on what he’d earned in two years, and besides, he had a guilty feeling about the money, as though he hadn’t really earned it. He’d worked harder as a fisherman, been in more danger as a militiaman. But most of all it was something else.
“It embarrasses me,” he said.
Ishara laughed. It was a proper belly laugh, not mocking, but because she genuinely found h
is statement funny.
“You poor rich man,” she said. “What are you going to do when you start raking in a fifth of my profits? You’ll die of shame!”
When she laughed she looked different, almost girlish and innocent. Sam found that he wanted to make her laugh again. But she had a point. He was forced back to the question: why had he offered her the money? He didn’t need what she was going to pay him – he already had more than enough – but he could hardly have given it to her. That would have been wrong, or it felt that way. She wouldn’t have respected the gift or the giver.
“I’m sure I’ll manage,” he said.
Ishara shook her head. “In the morning you’ll sign a piece of paper and we’ll be partners. I’ll have to come here at least once a month to deliver your payments, and I confess I’d rather not. I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll find you a house, and if you like it you can buy it – that’s simple enough, isn’t it?”
“Won’t you be too busy trading?” he asked.
“It’s not as though I’ll be captaining a ship. I already have good contacts and trading partners in all the ports that matter. I know what sells and who wants to buy it. I’ll have plenty of time.”
Sam looked around his room again. A house? What would he do with a house? He’d seen houses, of course. He’d been in the Saine house and many others. Houses were for families.
“If you want to show me a house then I’ll look at it,” he said. “But I promise nothing.”
Ishara stood. She smiled. “Thank you,” she said. She opened the door and left.
What on earth had she thanked him for?
19 Punishment
On a ship dawn is just another time of day. The sailors come and go, the officers at the stern change, but the ship goes on as though night and day are hardly different at all. It was something that Arla found difficult. She didn’t like the feeling that she was sleeping through something, and so she had spent an uneasy night in her swaying bunk.
She was up on deck with the first light of the rising sun, and stood in the bows to watch the faintest glimmer change into a bright line and then in an instant to the edge of the sun itself, a blinding brilliance. It was like that with investigations, too. Hints and shadows led to greater understanding and often there was that moment when you finally saw the truth, like the sun coming up. Arla loved that moment. She longed for it but she knew it did not come in every case, and doubted it would in this one.
But the sunrise was a distraction. She was here to see a man die. She had inspected the whip that the ship carried, and a dozen strokes, the usual punishment, would be sufficient to injure a man. She did not see how Duro could survive fifty.
When the crew began to assemble by the grating she didn’t join them. She’d brought her bow up on deck with a single arrow and toyed with it. The bow was strung and she fitted the arrow to the string and drew it back. This was a small vessel. Even in the bow of the ship she was less than twenty paces from any of the crew and at that range she could hit a button.
She lowered the bow again, relaxed the string. What was going to happen here was wrong. Duro had done something bad, but he wasn’t a killer, and she couldn’t see the point in whipping a man to death for making a couple of crewmates ill. What cook would survive that kind of justice?
Yet for all that there was no way she could stop it. Even her bow, which had been able to solve any problem when she was a guard, was useless. There was nobody to shoot and all her wit could find no way to avert this senseless death.
They brought Duro out onto the deck as soon as the sun was above the sea, and Arla was surprised to see that Corin and even Seer Jud came up on deck just behind him. They weren’t required to witness this. Arla, too, was excused because she was not a member of this crew, but she could not hide away from ugly things. If you never saw injustice how could you summon the spirit to oppose it? Imagination was not enough – not for her.
Duro was shirtless, and they strapped him face down on the grating, binding his ankles and wrists with leather straps. The cook seemed unnaturally calm, as though he was drugged or had somehow accepted his fate. Arla supposed that either was possible.
Corin stood close to the grating but the Shan slowly strolled forwards to where Arla was standing. He stopped next to her and turned.
“I’m sorry you had to see this, Seer Jud,” she said.
“It is barbaric,” the Shan said. “We would never kill someone with so much mess and effort.”
With Duro secured the whip was produced. The captain had chosen the most powerfully built member of his crew to wield it, and the sailor swished the whip through the air several times to get the feel of it. It was a wicked thing, a leather stock with a dozen separate tails, each knotted several times along its length. It was a weapon designed to gouge flesh, to tear muscle, to scar.
The captain had yet to appear, but the mate was on deck, and left the group around the grating to join Arla and Seer Jud.
“You don’t have to witness this,” he told them. “You can go below decks and I’ll let you know when it’s over.”
“I’ll stay,” Arla said. She glanced at the Shan, who seemed a lot less troubled by the spectacle than she’d expected. She supposed it conformed to his general view of humanity.
“Tell me,” Jud said. “Am I correct in understanding that if he survives this his punishment is at an end?”
“Yes,” the mate agreed, “But quite frankly it’s unlikely that he will.”
“So the captain means him to die.” Arla said.
“Fifty lashes – yes, I should say so.”
“And if he does survive,” the Shan went on, “will he be free to travel with us to the nearest safe port?”
“Of course,” the mate said. “He will no longer be a member of the crew, but I must warn you that he will in all probability not survive twenty five lashes, never mind fifty.”
The Shan shook his head. “Aki, I hope that you will come to understand that time and chance take umbrage at the certainties of Shan and men. They have about them more whimsy that the whole city of Samara.”
Arla looked sharply at the Shan. There was something in his tone, a smug satisfaction. He had done something. That was why he was on deck. But she couldn’t ask him, not with the mate standing next to them.
She turned her attention to Duro once more. The captain was there now. He had mounted the steps to the raised deck and stood by the wheel. She couldn’t see the cook’s face. He was turned away and the sailor with the whip was taking up his position just behind him. The rest of the crew were gathered around, hushed in expectation.
“For betrayal of his crewmates,” the captain said, “the sentence is fifty lashes. Begin punishment.”
The whip-man raised his arm and unleashed a powerful blow. The sound of leather on flesh carried easily across the deck and Jud winced. Arla took a step closer. Duro didn’t seem to have reacted at all.
A second blow, and still no reaction. Arla could see the cook’s back between two men, and shifting a little to her right gave her a better view. She saw red marks, but no blood.
She watched a third blow, a fourth and a fifth. Still there was no blood, and Duro had not shown any sign of discomfort.
It went on and on, the whip rising and falling to the captain’s count, his voice increasingly ragged as the spectacle unfolded below him. It was like magic. The cook seemed untroubled by the blows, and the skin of his back reddened but did not break.
“Fifty,” the captain cried, and the whipper stood back, his face dripping with the sweat of his work, and the crew stood around silent with amazement.
“Worked better than I expected,” Seer Jud said. “You never quite know how a Shannish potion will work on a man.”
“What in all blood and fire did you give him?” Arla asked.
“Something we call The Crab’s Back, mixed with water and a little extract of Sleep Weed.”
The mate had clearly heard what Jud said. The Shan wasn’t being coy
about it. Indeed, he seemed proud.
“You cheated the whip,” the mate said.
“I civilized it,” Jud said. “If you’re going to kill a man, Aki, you should kill him, not make a bloodthirsty song and dance of it.”
“He wasn’t sentenced to death,” Arla said to the mate. “And he’s taken the fifty lashes.” She noticed that Corin was untying the straps that held Duro to the grating. Somehow they had become the protectors of a man who’d poisoned his fellows, a man who was working for a killer, but it didn’t feel wrong. Duro was a pawn, and a pawn might be turned.
Arla walked forwards. Someone needed to make sure that this was the end of it and she could think of nobody else. She walked up the steps to the captain’s deck and stood next to him.
“He is ours now,” she said.
“Aye, he is,” the captain said. “And good luck with that. I don’t know what you did but it was wholly unnatural. That man should be dead.”
Arla watched Corin take the man below. Corin had known, she was sure, what Seer Jud had done, but he had not seen fit to share the plot with her. She would have to speak to him about that.
“How long until we dock in Jerohal, captain?”
“We’ll be there tomorrow,” he said. “Probably after noon and before sunset.” He looked up at the sky. “It depends on the wind.”
One day, or a day and a half.
Arla followed Corin down the stairs and found that he and the Shan were pouring yet another potion down the cook’s throat. The man looked delirious.
“Is he all right?” Arla asked.
“He will be,” Jud said. “He needs the answer.”
Answer in Shannish meant antidote. Arla remembered that much.
“You poisoned him?” Arla asked, incredulous.
“To save his life, yes,” the Shan said. “The Crab’s Back is a slow poison. Another day without this,” he waved a small, green bottle, “and he would have died.”
Arla sat down in the corner of the cramped cabin, her back against the ship’s hull. “Now all we have to worry about is the other man,” she said. “After this he’s sure to try to kill you.”