Curt Benjamin - [Seven Brothers 03] - The Gates of Heaven

by Curt Benjamin

  “Ahoy, there, get those boys into the boat before the fleet sees the smoke and comes calling!”

  Master Den, in the wide striped trousers of a pirate and a sash tied around his naked head, strode toward them with with a gleaming sword flashing in his hand. When he drew closer, Llesho saw that he wore a gold ring threaded through a hole in the side of his nose.

  “Down you go, boy, by ladder or by air. Unless you can fly, I’d start climbing.” Not a flicker of a lash gave a clue that the huge figure was anything but what he seemed—a giant among pirates—or that he recognized Llesho.

  “We have to help put out the fire!” Llesho called to him. Flames were leaping into the sky from amidships, and already smoke curled from just above the waterline.

  “The fire will go out on its own soon enough,” Master Den the pirate said, as if this were an obvious fact.

  “Magic?” Llesho asked hopefully.

  “Water,” the trickster scoffed, “When the ship sinks. Now go before I change my mind about you and feed you to the fishes.”

  There couldn’t be two of them. Master Den’s warning, so like the threat of becoming food for the pigs on Pearl Island, told him this must be the teacher he knew. As he began the long climb down to the pirate ship bobbing below, however, Llesho wondered. Could the trickster have an evil twin? Or had he grown so used to Master Den the teacher that he’d forgotten the nature of a trickster god? What was he supposed to learn from this, or had all the time from Pearl Island to Edris been some elaborate prank? Would he pay for his adventures not only with Tayy’s life, but with the lives of all aboard theGuiding Star? With the freedom of all Thebin, too, if he didn’t get out of this in one piece?

  He doubted anyone less familiar with his moods would notice, but it suddenly struck him that the trickster god looked more nervous than Llesho had ever seen him. He glanced over his shoulder as if to hurry his fellow pirates to their work, but his eyes strayed to the bridge of the ship. Llesho stole a glimpse in the same direction and felt his heart stutter in his breast. The fighting had moved on and Master Markko stood alone above the fray, looking down on the clash of swords on the deck.

  Reflexively, Llesho ducked his head below the rail, letting his mind process the information as it could. What was the magician doing here? The answer struck him as forcefully as the mind of the magician. Pontus, of course; Menar was on the other side of the Marmer Sea. It had always been a race to find him first. If Kaydu was right, Master Markko was going back to the place of his own first enslavement in search of Menar and the prophetic rhyme that would tell him how to win the gates of heaven.

  Master Markko wasn’t looking his way, but seemed to be focused on the fire burning amidships with a combination of frustration and anger that made him wonder how the fire got started in the first place. The magician had the power to conjure flames, but he’d never seen him put a fire out, by magical or any other means.

  Master Markko had always been capable of mistakes. Llesho figured setting fire to your own boat had to be one of his smaller ones. That didn’t help the innocents who huddled together at the stern, unsure where their greater danger lay—the sea or the burning ship. When he turned back, Master Markko had disappeared, but in his place a monstrous bird rose out of the flames. No phoenix, he guessed, but the magician himself escaping his own fire in the shape that had nearly killed Llesho in the battle of Shan market. With a blood-chilling cry the horrible creature wheeled overhead. Catching sight of Llesho, he dove to the attack.

  Llesho pulled at his chains but bound to his companions, and with no weapon but the chains that held him, he could do nothing to protect himself.

  “Ahhhh!” screamed the boy who had lately stood in shock at the blood of a dead sailor on his hands. Llesho grabbed his shoulder and pulled him down to make a smaller target of them all. The stranger who moved like a soldier narrowed his eyes as if measuring an enemy in combat, but weaponless against the magician he was as helpless as the rest of them.

  Master Den had to do something, however; why else was he here? From the trickster’s direction he heard a whistle, as master might call a favored hunting bird. Across the looming disk of the moon the sleek shadow of a great-winged osprey passed. Kaydu! It had to be, and he watched as she dove at the awful half-bird, half-beast creature that Master Markko had become.

  “Awk!” The great sea eagle screeched her terrible battle cry. With talons extended, Kaydu dove on the creature’s neck, shaking him in her beak as he lashed about him with his scaly tail. He escaped her hold on him but left a bleeding chunk of flesh which she spit out onto the deck below. Llesho ducked as the steaming flesh fell on the hot planks.

  Master Markko advanced his own attack, but Kaydu, in her osprey form, stayed just out of reach, harrying the monster when he dove for Llesho who watched from below. It might have gone on longer, but each bird had suffered wounds in the battle that sapped the strength they needed to hold their magical shapes. With the ship in flames below and hostile pirates everywhere in the sea around it, there could be no safe landing place. Soon Master Markko broke off, heading back in the direction from which theGuiding Star had come. When it seemed that he had been vanquished for the moment, Kaydu likewise made for shore.

  Llesho wished that she could have delayed for a word before leaving him again to fate, but he knew that was impossible. Her father might have taken on the shape of a dragon and plucked him off the ship in his talons, but Kaydu didn’t have that skill or that strength yet. He was stuck here until his cadre came for him in a boat, and only now did he begin to wonder if he’d live until that help came.

  But the string of chained slaves was moving again and Llesho had to move with them or take the whole line down in a heap. Slowly he made his way down the knotted ladder to the high prow at the front of the pirate galley. The little boats, he saw, had decking only at the two ends. At the stern, the helmsman and the beater sat. The high prows on their galleys acted as a bridge over which the pirates could swarm their prizes like an army of ants rising out of a dozen tiny anthills. From there, pirate captains directed the boarding and as was happening now, the return with loot and slaves.

  “Not there.” Master Den leaned over the rail. With his sword he gestured directions at his fellow pirates. “I want the young brown one—no, not him, the other one. Right,” he said when Alph grabbed Llesho’s shoulder. “And that one, with the scar.” He pointed to the man Moll had brought back with her after selling the women at market. The one with battle-tested nerves.

  “Aye, Captain ChiChu,” Alph answered with as much of a bow as he could manage in a bobbing boat. He held Llesho steady long enough to unlock his chains, then he gave him a shove in the direction that Master Den had indicated with his sword.

  It wasn’t the next boat over, but the galleys were set with their sides one against the other. Old reflexes learned on Pearl Bay took over. Llesho measured the roll of the swell and the movement of the boats. At their closest point he stepped down with his right foot and up with his left, matching the pitch of the sea. He reached the boat that was his goal without incident while the second man followed him over. His new companion had the sea legs of a native sailor and moved from boat to boat as if crossing the unmoving floor of some rich mansion on shore.

  The pirates herded Llesho and the new man onto the fore-deck, pushing them down to sit out of the way of the slave who beat a drum to set the pace of the oars. Suddenly, a shout went up, “Captain, ’hoy!”

  Llesho looked around him, trying to find out what the warning was about. What he saw left him slack-jawed and speechless: Master Den—Captain ChiChu to the pirates, who might know the trickster as a god or as a man named after the patron god of pirates—stood on the burning deck of theGuiding Star. When the shout went up, he hooked a loop of rope around his foot and swung far out on it, over the sea. More precisely, Llesho realized with horror, over the boat he himself sat in. The rope was attached to a boom, and as ChiChu the pirate dropped toward the boat, a burning sai
l rose on its mast behind him, slowing his fall. A second before his foot touched down Den slipped from the rope and stepped lightly to the deck.

  Freed of his massive weight, the rope whipped back up again, releasing the sail which bellied and fell with the sound of strained rigging and beating canvas.

  “To the oars!” Captain ChiChu called out. The galley slaves didn’t ship oars, however, but instead used them like punts to nudge their light, swift vessel away from the burning ship. When they had cleared their own boats as well, the beater set up a flurry of sound on his drum that signaled the order of the stroke. Oars rose and fell in sequence and the boat leaped forward, paused, leaped again. If Llesho hadn’t been sitting down, he’d have fallen. With only a hand resting lightly on the side to steady him, however, Master Den shifted his weight into the motion, as unmovable where he stood as a lighthouse.

  “We can at least save the people in the water!” Llesho cried as the galley moved into the night. In their wake, the burning ship shed an orange glare over the black water. “You can’t just leave them to die!”

  He stretched his arm to the hapless few who had escaped the massacre by leaping into the sea. The desperate passengers splashed helplessly in the water, calling to their loved ones over the thunder of the flames and the deceptively gentle sound of the surge striking the wood of ships.

  The pirates near enough to hear him snorted at his distress but said nothing. Master Den, however, turned a cold eye on him. “Pirates are not known for their mercy,” he pointed out in icy tones. “Nor could we take on any more if we wanted to. We would sink under the weight of those we tried to save. Or their fellows would overturn our boats in their desperation to board us themselves.”

  The trickster god stared out into the night of terror with a look that had no mercy in it—that was the province of a different god—but something more than indifference.

  “Some lessons are harder learned than others,” Master Den finally said. “When the fighting is over, the innocents have always paid the highest cost.”

  His teacher seldom gave him the answers to his lessons, leaving it to Llesho to figure out the meaning. This time, however, the cost for his tutelage was too steep to leave to the usual methods. “This will, I think, prove an educational voyage for you, oarsman.”

  With that, Master Den turned away. But Llesho wasn’t finished. “And what of Justice?” he demanded of the trickster god. In his journeys he’d found traces of the seven mortal gods wherever he looked. Some, like ChiChu himself, and the Lady SienMa, mortal god of war, he had met in person. Others he felt only in their touch on the land and people that crossed his path. In all this traveling, however, it seemed that this one god, the avatar of Justice, was marked most by his absence. Where was Justice?

  “When you know that,” Master Den answered with a glint in his eyes of secrets and lessons still to teach, “you will have solved the puzzle of your quest.” So much for confidences.

  They were well out from the wreck now. The beater struck a flurry on his drum like a warning to his rowers and then lifted his padded drumstick to his shoulder. As if each represented a single arm of one body, the rowers raised their oars in place. Suddenly, the boat was still except for the gentle rise and fall of the sea and the lazy movement of unseen currents. In the lull, Moll came rolling toward them. The disguise of her skirts gone, her pirate trousers hung about her thick legs in folds in the still air.

  “Last found, first claimed,” she said, jerking her chin at Llesho and her most recent purchase. “You owe me ten copper coins for the boy, old pirate. The man cost more—I had to trade a strong young woman and her crone for him at the market and transport him all the way from Edris. If you want him, it will take a plump and comely girl for the concubine market in trade, the next from the ship’s allotment.”

  “A fair price,” Master Den agreed. Llesho would have told him that she’d cheated him on his own price, and the other slave’s as well. Moll gave him a warning glare, however. He kept his mouth shut, remembering that she would mourn the loss of six coppers but not the loss of his sorry life if she felt the need to pitch him overboard. When it was clear that she would get her price, she added, “Where do you want me to put them?”

  “Set the youth to work next to the Harnish boy—” which explained what Llesho was doing on this particular galley. “I recognize his kind. Thebin, they are called, rare enough in the marketplace but stronger than they look. And he knows his way across a deck. At least he won’t capsize us when he drops his load over the side.”

  “You’re the expert.” Moll gave a noncommittal shrug. She wouldn’t sink a sale by naming her doubts, but he clearly hadn’t shown any signs of this Thebin strength to her.

  “His people have a grudge against the grasslands, so they are unlikely to conspire foolishness together,” Master Den added as if he were working out the placement at the oars as he spoke. “But they are of an age and well graded for height. Put him on the outside position, next to the block, the Harnish boy in the middle, and an older, more experienced hand to guide them on the aisle.

  “This one will take more watching, I think,” he added with a nod to the other man he’d brought aboard. “But he seems resourceful and strong. Not too resourceful,” he added a sharp warning in the glance he cast on the stranger with the eyes of a soldier. “Put him on a short chain, between two experienced hands. That will keep him from disappearing when the wind is ripe.”

  That meant, when the smell of land beckoned. The new slave looked back at the trickster god with cold calculation in his eyes, but said nothing. Llesho wondered who the stranger was, and why Master Den had wanted him nearby. It seemed unlikely he would find out until his old teacher wanted him to know, so he followed Moll down the narrow center aisle of the galley to his place on the bench.

  Chapter Fourteen

  LESHO HAD never seen a galley ship before. Lord Chin-Shi had used fat, wallowing sailing boats in Pearl Bay, with oars on board only for the rare days when they found themselves becalmed by a freak of the weather. Most days the boats rode with the prevailing winds which blew out with the tide of a morning and in with the tide at night. His journeys since he left the pearl beds had been mostly overland, with the exception of a memorable river crossing on the back of Golden River Dragon.

  He’d heard of galleys, of course, but in stories they were great longboats each manned by hundreds of rowers pulling on oars long enough and thick enough around to form the corner posts of a seven-story temple. The narrow, sleek trim of the pirate galley seemed dangerously unbalanced and he walked cautiously, as if a misstep would overturn the small boat and land them all in the water. Moll had no such worries, however. She pushed him along, past a slim bronze gun affixed to the forward deck, into a cradle that took the recoil down a center aisle just wide enough for one to walk with caution.

  On either side of the aisle were benches of rowers resting at their positions while the pirates settled the newcomers. There were more rowers than pirates, but not the hundreds that rumor claimed. Across each bench the pole of a single huge oar was drawn, holding the blade out of the water at a pivot point off the side of the boat. The stories hadn’t lied about the size of the oars. Llesho tried to imagine the giant from which such a monster might be cut; only in the oldest forests might one find such a tree.

  Under direction of the pirates, rowers at the front carried loot from theGuiding Star to the rear, disappearing into what he assumed to be a shallow hold. A second gun amidships divided the groups of rowing benches across the narrow width of the boat. This gun was smaller than the forward artillery, since the cradle could only manage a lesser recoil on firing. Llesho knew about guns. The principle was similar to the fireworks of Shan, except that instead of explosions of colored lights, the guns hurled balls of iron or stone. He wondered if he might get a closer look, but Moll stopped just past the forward deck and nudged at the rower on the aisle.

  “Wake your center.” She pointed to the rower in the middle
. When he had roused from his dazed stupor, she gestured to the rear with her thumb. “You to the back,” she said, and leaned over to unlock the shackles that chained his right leg to a small step in front of the bench.

  At first, the man didn’t move, as if he’d been stunned by a blow to the head and couldn’t hear for the ringing of his ears. Llesho could see the bones standing out on his arms and across his throat. The rower’s ribs showed through the laces on his tattered shirt like the steps on a ladder. There were open sores on his hands and blood on the oar he had held.This will be me, if we don’t get out of here, Llesho thought.This will be Tayy. He wondered how his teacher could be party to the anguish that had passed beyond expression on the man’s face, into the numbness that preceded death. He wanted to believe that Master Den wouldn’t let it happen to him or to Tayy even if his plan didn’t work. But he wasn’t as certain of ChiChu the pirate.

  “Put this one in the middle for a shift or two,” Moll shoved Llesho forward. “When he has the knack of the oar, I’ll move him to the outside as suits his size.”

  The slave on the aisle seemed to have a higher status than those who manned the inner grips on the huge oar. Sensible, when all their lives depended on the rower who controlled the pace and the power of each stroke. The oarsman seemed to have that in mind when he turned a disgusted eye on Llesho.

  “This bank already has a new fish.” He snorted, a sound wet with snot, and thrust his jaw to the side where Prince Tayyichiut of the Qubal people huddled in his chains.

  “They are suited by size and too clever by half.” Moll took the time to answer his objection, but made it clear she would hear no more about it. “This one will pick up the pace quickly enough or Cook will grind him up into pies for the captain’s table.”

  He guessed that she exaggerated the punishment for failure. The man he replaced had looked like walking death, however, and Tayy’s shirt bore the scars of a struggle earned during his capture. He also wore the bloody stripes of the lash. If the plan worked, those open wounds would make his time in the water that much more painful. But the Harnish prince didn’t look up when his bench mate departed, and he didn’t look up now, when Llesho sat down next to him. The Harn avoided all bodies of water larger than a teacup and Prince Tayyichiut, for all his bravery on land, kept his eyes on his feet as if not seeing it could keep at bay the terror of water lapping at their sides.