Slaves of Socorro

by John Flanagan

  ‘Ulf, Wulf, give them a hand to cut that mast loose. Thorn, you can help with that.’ Thorn was perfectly capable of wielding an axe with his left hand, Hal knew – in fact, he was far more efficient than most right-handed axemen. He peered more closely at the men for’ard on the ship. There was a ragged, triangular rent smashed in the side of the ship.

  ‘Stefan, Edvin, get out the tent canvas. We’ll fother it over that hole in the side.’

  Fothering entailed sliding a large piece of canvas, usually a sail, under the ship at the bows and sliding it aft until it sat over the hole. When the canvas was pulled tight, the flow of water into the ship was greatly reduced. It was a technique they had learned during their brotherband training, and which they had used before – when Wolfwind had been rammed by the pirate ship Raven in the waters off the town of Limmat.

  ‘Can I do anything?’ Lydia asked. She understood that this was one of those situations for which she wasn’t trained. It was a matter of seamanship and sailing craft. The boys knew what they had to do, and she would only be in the way if she tried to help.

  Hal glanced around the horizon before he answered.

  ‘Stay here and keep a lookout,’ he told her. ‘We want to be sure that whoever did that to her isn’t anywhere around.’

  ‘You think they might be?’ she asked.

  He chewed his lip for a second, then answered. ‘To be honest, probably not. But it would be very embarrassing if they came back and sank us while we were trying to save her.’

  A faint grin touched her mouth. ‘Very embarrassing indeed. I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen.’

  Hal nodded, but he was preoccupied now as they approached the wallowing trader. The men on board had seen them coming and rushed to group together in the waist of the ship. Several of them were shaking their fists, or pieces of wood as makeshift weapons. They gesticulated for Heron to keep her distance.

  ‘Allez-vous en!’ one of them shouted.

  ‘Oh, Gorlog’s socks, they think we’re going to attack them,’ Hal said. ‘Anyone speak Gallican?’ he asked, recognising the man’s language. It was a vain plea. He knew none of the brotherband did.

  Lydia stepped to the rail, cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted back. ‘Ne paniquez pas! Nous voulons vous aider.’

  Hal looked at her, impressed. ‘That sounded good,’ he said. ‘What did it mean?’

  ‘I told them not to panic, and that we wanted to help them,’ Lydia said. Then she frowned. ‘At least, I think I did. I’m a bit rusty on my Gallican.’

  But it appeared that she had said what she hoped to. That, and the fact that the message was delivered by a girl, seemed to calm the Gallican crew’s fears. They lowered their weapons and gestured for the Heron to come alongside.

  ‘Let go the sheets! Down sail!’ Hal yelled, and swung the Heron so that she slid in neatly alongside the wallowing trader. Ingvar snagged the boat hook into the other ship’s rail and drew the two ships closer. The hulls ground together, the timbers groaning and squealing as they did.

  Kloof barked at the foreign ship. To prevent any more unexpected excursions overboard, Hal had ordered her to be tied firmly to the mast. He was glad now that he had. If she’d gone leaping onto the stricken Gallican ship, she would have caused pandemonium.

  He paused to collect his satchel of tools and led the way aboard the other ship. Jesper and Stefan, carrying the bundled canvas tent between them, followed, with Stig bringing up the rear.

  Ulf, Wulf and Thorn came after them, heading for the tangle of wreckage and snapped shrouds alongside the starboard rail.

  The stocky man who had hailed them stepped aside as they came aboard. The Gallican ship’s rail was lower than Heron’s, Hal noticed. He gestured towards the bow, and the canvas roll Jesper and Stefan were carrying, sliding one open palm over the other to indicate what they were planning.

  ‘Fother?’ he said, hoping the word would be understood. Then, in an attempt to translate the word to Gallic, he said: ‘Fother-o? Tent-o? Understand-o?’

  ‘Why do you think that adding o to the end of a word turns it into Gallic?’ Stig asked, with some interest.

  Hal looked at him and shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I just think it sounds more Gallic that way. Why don’t these dopey Gallicans speak the common tongue?’

  There was a common tongue that most nations used for communication, in addition to having their own individual languages.

  ‘They’ve always been a stubborn lot,’ Stig said.

  ‘As a matter of fact, we do speak the common tongue,’ the stocky man told them, speaking with a thick Gallican accent and turning a withering glare on them. ‘I take it you plan to stretch that canvas over the hole in the hull?’

  Hal flushed, realising the man must have understood his comment about ‘dopey Gallicans’. No point in apologising, he thought. What’s done is done.

  ‘Um . . . yes,’ Hal told him. ‘My men will help cut away the mast, once the hole is plugged.’

  ‘I appreciate your help – if not your comments,’ the Gallican captain said stiffly. Then he led the way for’ard. Jesper and Stefan unrolled the tent and folded it into a double layer. They tied ropes to each corner and slid the canvas around the ship’s bow then, with three of the Gallican crew helping, began to work it down under the keel, towards the rent in the hull.

  As they did so, Hal opened his tool satchel and took out a heavy hammer. The hole in the hull was a metre high and roughly triangular in shape. The widest part of the triangle was at the top, where the bulwark itself was smashed. He could see the side of the ship flexing around that gap as the hull moved with the action of the sea. If that continued, he thought, there was a chance that the constant flexing would cause the rent in the hull to crack right down to the keel until the ship broke apart. He cast around and saw a broken oar rolling back and forth on the deck. He put it in place across the gap in the rail and quickly hammered nails in at each end to fasten it, bracing the upper side of the hole and stopping that dangerous flexing movement.

  Once he had done that, Stig, Jesper and Stefan, assisted by two of the Gallican crew, pulled the canvas into position over the hole and hauled the ropes tight, tying them off when the canvas was as taut as they could make it. The water flowing into the hull slowed to a trickle, seeping slowly through the canvas.

  ‘That should hold it,’ Hal told the Gallican captain. ‘You’ll need to keep baling her out, but she won’t sink.’ He turned to the group standing ready by the fallen mast. ‘Cut it loose!’ he called.

  They went to it with a will, axes and knives rising and falling in a steady rhythm, cutting through the tangle of stays, shrouds and halyards that held the mast alongside. Finally, there was only the backstay left. It was a heavy tarred rope, about as thick as a man’s forearm. Thorn stepped forward and swung his axe.

  THUNK!

  The rope parted and the shattered mast, sail and tangle of cordage slipped free of the ship, drifting away. As the weight was released, the ship rolled upright, then to port, then settled. Hal watched the makeshift patch carefully. Now that the ship was on an even keel, the rent in the hull was below the waterline for half its depth. Fortunately, that meant that the widest part was above the water. A little more water made its way past the sail, but nothing to worry about, so long as the weather remained good. Hal looked around the horizon, searching for any sign of storm clouds.

  The Gallican captain seemed to divine his purpose. ‘Weather should be all right for a few days,’ he said.

  Hal nodded, then studied the ship more closely. The mast and sail were gone, of course, already fifty metres away from the ship and drifting further with each minute. The stump of the mast was too short to jury-rig a mast, even if there had been timber available to do so. But there was no sign of any spars or timber. Not even any oars – other than the broken one he’d used to repair the bulwark.

  The Gallican captain held out a hand. ‘Thanks for your help,’ he said. ‘We were dead men if you hadn
’t turned up. My name is Jerard. This is my ship, Hirondelle.’

  Hal clasped the proffered hand. ‘Hal Mikkelson.’

  Jerard regarded him with suspicion. ‘Skandian?’ he asked, although the slim young man before him didn’t look like the stereotypical bulky, heavily muscled northman.

  Hal nodded.

  ‘Then it was your countrymen who did this to us,’ Jerard said bitterly.

  Hal sat down on one of the rowing benches, frowning at Jerard’s words. He had a dreadful feeling about who might have been responsible for the attack on Hirondelle, but he didn’t voice it.

  ‘Tell me what happened here,’ he said.

  The other Herons clustered around, along with the trader’s crew, as Jerard began his tale.

  ‘We were taking a cargo of hides and furs to Gretagne. You know it?’ he asked.

  ‘Not well,’ Hal said. ‘I’ve been there once, some years ago.’

  As a boy, Hal had spent several summers working on trading ships. He remembered Gretagne as a rather noisome, unfriendly little Gallican harbour town on the southern shore of the Stormwhite. The main industry was leathermaking and at least a dozen tanneries lined the harbour foreshores. All of them discharged their unpleasant residue into the harbour itself so that the water was discoloured and foul smelling. He felt it might be untactful to mention that now, particularly in the light of his earlier comment about ‘dopey Gallicans’.

  ‘Barely two hours ago, the Skandian ship came up on us – a vaisseau du loup, I think you call them?’ Jerard continued.

  ‘A wolfship,’ Jesper supplied.

  Hal looked at him curiously and the former thief shrugged.

  ‘I know a few words of Gallican,’ he explained.

  Hal nodded then signalled for Jerard to proceed.

  ‘We weren’t alarmed at first. Everyone knows the Skandians aren’t pirates any more.’

  ‘We never were,’ Thorn growled. There was a fundamental difference between raiders and pirates. Raiders attacked coastal towns and villages. Sometimes the inhabitants might put up a fight and there would be casualties. More often, they retreated into the countryside and left the raiders to it.

  Pirates, on the other hand, preyed on lone ships at sea. They made sure they had overwhelming numbers – most traders had less than a dozen men in their crews – and they took everything of value. Then, since they wanted no word of their presence to be known, they either killed the crews outright or left them to die on their sinking ships.

  Jerard shrugged at Thorn’s words. To him the distinction was a minor one. ‘In any case, we didn’t see it coming until it was too late to escape. The ship was dark coloured and it came out of the east.’

  Involuntarily, Hal glanced to the horizon. It was late in the day and the eastern sky and sea were almost in darkness. By contrast, the lowering sun blazed brilliantly in the west.

  Thorn studied the heavy, wide-beamed lines of the Hirondelle.

  ‘Doubt you could have outrun a wolfship anyway, even if you’d seen it coming.’

  Jerard nodded morosely. ‘True enough. It came straight at us, ramming its bow into us –’ he indicated the repaired hole in the bow ‘– then its men swarmed over us. Two of my crew were killed before I could surrender. There were only eight of us and more than twenty of them.’

  Hal and Stig exchanged a glance. Hal could tell that Stig had also guessed the identity of the rogue wolfship. And he was sure Thorn knew as well. He turned his attention back to Jerard.

  ‘They took our strongbox, and our furs. The hides they threw overboard. Then they chopped down our mast and threw all our oars and spars over the side. Our weapons, axes and knives went the same way. They left us sinking, with no way to repair the ship. Their captain even joked about it. “We won’t kill you,” he said. “We’ll leave you for the sharks – and I know sharks.” That seemed to be some special joke with him.’

  ‘Tursgud,’ Hal said finally and the rest of his crew nodded agreement. Tursgud’s brotherband had chosen the shark as their symbol when they had competed with the Herons nearly two years prior.

  ‘You know him?’ Jerard asked.

  ‘Oh yes. He’s an old friend,’ Hal said heavily. Jerard didn’t quite understand the sarcasm and Hal had to explain. ‘He’s not really a friend. But we know him only too well.’

  ‘Looks like he’s gone rogue,’ Thorn said. ‘Just what we need. Another pirate loose on the Stormwhite.’

  ‘You said their ship was dark coloured. Was it dark blue?’ Stig asked and Jerard nodded confirmation.

  ‘We need to get after him,’ Stig said. ‘If one Skandian ship has turned pirate, people are going to think we’ve all gone that way.’ He looked at Jerard. ‘Which direction was he heading when you last saw him?’

  The Gallican pointed. ‘West.’

  Stig turned to Hal urgently. ‘They can’t have too much of a lead on us,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to get after them.’

  Jerard coughed meaningfully. Stig turned back to him, sensing the Gallican had something to say. But it was Thorn who spoke first.

  ‘I think you’re forgetting something. We can’t leave these people here. We’re going to have to help get them to port.’

  Stig subsided, all sense of urgency gone. In truth, he hadn’t considered that. They couldn’t leave the crew of the Hirondelle with their ship damaged and drifting helplessly. The Herons would be no better than Tursgud and his men if they did that.

  ‘If you could spare us some canvas and a couple of spars, perhaps we could jury-rig something to get us under way?’ Jerard suggested. He was less than enthusiastic about the idea, but he hated the thought of the rogue Skandian and his men escaping scot-free.

  Hal thought about it but shook his head. ‘We’re heading out on a long cruise,’ he said. ‘We’ll be away for a year and we’re going to need all the supplies we have. I think the best answer is for us to tow you into harbour. Which is the nearest port?’

  ‘Well, Gretagne, of course,’ Jerard told him.

  Hal sighed. In his imagination, he could smell the vile little harbour already.

  ‘I was afraid of that,’ he said. ‘Well, we’d better get busy and rig a tow.’

  As they climbed back aboard Heron, Jesper caught up with Hal and touched his arm.

  ‘What’s so bad about Gretagne?’ he asked.

  ‘You’ll find out,’ Hal told him heavily.

  With the Gallican ship in tow, Heron’s speed was drastically reduced. It took them the rest of that night and halfway through the following day to tow Hirondelle in to Gretagne.

  As they approached the shore, houses and buildings slowly came into view. Yet the town also made its presence felt in another way. Predictably, Kloof noticed it first. She whined in protest, then lay flat on her belly, rubbing her forepaws over her muzzle in a futile attempt to mask the smell coming from the shore. The rest of the crew took a minute or two longer to sense it. Then cries of protest broke out throughout the ship.

  Predictably, Ulf and Wulf blamed each other.

  ‘Why don’t you wash your socks occasionally?’ Ulf said belligerently. (Or perhaps it was Wulf, Hal was never sure.)

  ‘Why don’t you wash yourself occasionally?’ his brother shot back. Then he added, ‘Besides, you know what they say. First to smell it usually did it.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, you probably did smell it first, but you just didn’t say,’ said the other twin. By this time, Hal had lost track of who was who.

  ‘It’s neither of you,’ Hal said sharply. ‘So shut up. It’s the tanneries onshore.’

  Stig was holding his hand over his nose, unconsciously mimicking Kloof. ‘What makes them smell so bad?’ he asked.

  Hal glanced meaningfully at him.

  ‘It’s a combination of the old hides, and what they use to treat them,’ he said, adding quickly as he saw the question rising to Stig’s lips, ‘You don’t want to know.’

  Thorn was standing by them. He wrinkled his nose in protest. ‘Reminds
me of me – before Karina took me in hand.’

  Hal looked at him. Some years back, Thorn had been a little remiss in his personal hygiene, to put it mildly. Karina had solved the problem by having Hal throw a bucket of water over him as he lay snoring in the snow.

  Hal shook his head now. ‘Even you were never that bad. Trust me.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ Thorn said in a heartfelt tone.

  The vile smell became stronger as they approached the town. But they also became more accustomed to it. They plodded heavily through the harbour mouth, with Jerard directing them to a beaching area that was – thankfully – situated away from the row of grim-looking tanneries, and upwind of them.

  Two longboats came out from the beach at a signal from Jerard and took over the tow, dragging the crippled Hirondelle in to shore and beaching her. Hal, grateful to have lost the nagging dead weight behind Heron, ordered the sails down and followed the trader in under oars. The prow grated gently on the shingle beach and they came to rest.

  Once his ship was safely beached and propped up to remain level, Jerard walked over to them and climbed aboard Heron. He walked back to the command position in the stern, where Hal, Stig, Thorn and Lydia were gathered.

  ‘I owe you my thanks,’ Jerard told them sincerely. ‘You saved my ship and all our lives and I’m more grateful than you can imagine.’

  He shook hands with all of them, then turned back to Hal, an embarrassed expression on his face. ‘Unfortunately, that’s all I can offer you. Your countryman stole everything I own.’

  Hal shrugged off his apologies. ‘It’s the law of the sea,’ he said. ‘We don’t leave other sailors in danger. You’d do the same for us.’

  Jerard nodded his head. ‘That’s true. But if I can ever do anything for you . . .’ he began.

  Thorn stepped forward. ‘There is one thing,’ he said. He jerked a thumb at Kloof, who was watching the proceedings while she chewed on an old boot she had found.