He ran to the shelter at the rear where Khmun was slamming his fist on the balustrade in anger.
“Should have stayed away from the shore, Samir. What was I thinking?”
Samir shook his head.
“My fault sir. I dragged us into this. Question is: how do we get out?”
The captain shrugged
“There’s no simple solution there, Samir. Whichever way we turn there’s trouble. Best hope is to pick a target and try and break through where the cordon’s weakest.”
“That’s not going to work, captain, and you know it. By the time we meet them, even the thinnest area will mean three to one odds. There has to be another way. Come on sir, you can do this.”
Samir tried to keep the note of desperate hope from his voice, but had clearly failed by the look on his captain’s face.
“You wanted to fight Pelasians, Samir. Now might be the time.”
The young first officer growled and shook his head.
“I didn’t mean a suicide engagement, captain.”
Khmun shrugged again.
“Nothing else for it. At least we’ll take one or two of them with us.”
Turning to the deck, the captain began bellowing orders. Samir ignored them, settling down to think as quickly yet clearly as he could. West and north there were ‘haraq’-class warships; south was the coast, and east was the fleet he’d mistaken for M’Dahz…
Mistaken as a blur on the coast.
The coast.
He turned back to the captain, taking a deep breath.
“Pardon this, sir, but…” he turned to the crew and raised his voice. “Belay those orders! Take us in toward the coast at full speed.”
There was a strangled silence. Khmun stared at Samir but, noting the grin spreading across his first officer’s face, he nodded.
“Do as he says, lads!”
As the changes were made swiftly and efficiently and the Dark Empress gave up pursuit of the scout, angling directly toward the coast, still two miles away, the captain dropped down from the raised deck platform to where Samir stood, grasped his shoulder and pulled him over to the rail.
“What’s your plan?”
“We can slip by them, sir” he shrugged.
“Are you mad?” Khmun blinked at him. “Slip by where?”
Samir grinned.
“Alright, sir. I’ve got good eyes, but it took me a while to realise that black smudge was ships and not the town. The heat haze on the land makes everything a little blurred and uncertain from out at sea. We need to get to shore as fast as possible. Then we’ll turn sharp west and head out deeper into Pelasian waters. With any luck, they’ll continue to close on where they think we’ll be. I’m sure they won’t expect us to head further west.”
Khmun slapped his forehead.
“You know why that is, Samir? Because there’s more and more Pelasian warships that way. We’ve no idea what we’ll be sailing into. Besides, you mistook the fleet because it was black against the brown land. Our sails are white. We’ll be visible for miles!”
Samir laughed.
“I’d rather sail into the unknown than into what we do know. And if we furl the sails and rely on the oars, we’ll be almost invisible against the shore. Trust me, captain. I know we can do this.”
Khmun stared at him for a moment and finally shook his head in amazement.
“You really are something, Samir. If you and that brother of yours were on the same side, no other ship on the ocean would be safe. Very well, let’s do it your way. Better than being sunk by a Pelasian haraq while trying to break out.”
They returned to the raised command platform that gave a clear view to every direction not obscured by a mast. The coast, brown and speckled, with rocky coves and inlets and low headlands, raced toward them, growing every moment. Samir smiled to himself. For every foot the coastline seemed to grow to him, the Empress would shrink to the slower warships closing in behind. Any moment now, even the masts would be visible against the backdrop of cliffs rather than sky.
Now was the time to pull his little manoeuvre.
“Furl the sails!”
The crew, taken by surprise, rushed to follow orders and, in a testament to their abilities, moments later, the three heavy sails crashed to the deck and were shuffled out from underfoot.
“Alright, men” Samir shouted. “Keep the sails ready. We’ll need to raise them sharpish when we’re out of danger, so that we can run. We’re going to head toward land for another minute or two and then bank sharply west along the coast. During that minute I want anything white or colourful or brightly polished below deck level. We’re going to blend in with the coast and slip past them, so we need to be as brown and unobtrusive as possible.”
There was a note of relief to the low comments and affirmative noises among the crew. Clearly they had been hoping for one of Khmun and Samir’s miraculous ruses and it looked as though the first officer had a trick up his sleeve.
As Samir watched tensely, the men went about their tasks, stowing anything that might draw unwanted attention and preparing everything for a sudden turn of speed the moment it was needed.
Counting down under his breath, Samir watched the cove and the headland looming ever closer. This had to be done right. They had to be as close to land as it was possible to be, but not quite close enough to beach, or they’d really be in trouble.
In his head he tried to estimate the distance to shore and then calculate the depth of the water. A dromon had a shallow draft for such a large ship, but this was still very tight.
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment, expecting the crunch of gravel at any time.
“Starboard sharp!”
The oarsmen and the rudder master responded instantly and, without the wind in the sails to push them off course, the ship turned tightly and, mercifully, without the sound of wood grazing on gravel. Within a heart-stopping half minute the ship was turned and racing along the coast toward Akkad and the heart of Pelasia.
“Hold it steady now, lads.”
He and the captain shared a look for long moments and, as the ship battered on in silence, Khmun glanced up and called to the lookout.
“What are they doing?”
The lookout remained silent for a moment and then replied.
“I think they’re continuing on, sir…”
There was a long, tense pause.
“Yes, sir. They’ve not turned. I think they’ve lost us.”
An explosive venting of air echoed round the ship as almost every member of the crew released the breath they had held for over a minute.
“Samir, there are times when you surprise even me.”
The young first officer grinned at his captain and turned to look along the deck. Things were back under his control, where he liked them. A quarter if an hour’s journey along the coast and they’d be well away from any pursuers. Then they could set sail once again and head out into the open sea. His need to see his home town had almost cost them…
His train of thought was interrupted as an arrow came from nowhere and thudded into the railing a few inches from his head. He snapped his head round in shock to see a scout party of Pelasian riders on the headland, firing from horseback. There were only perhaps a dozen, but Pelasian horse archers were renowned the world over for their accuracy and rate of fire from the saddle. The Empire had employed them as mercenaries many times and, with the speed the Empress was currently achieving, the archers would have no trouble choosing targets.
“Get us out of arrow range of the coast, but no more!”
Scanning back along the deck, he spotted the artillerists loading the fire thrower and growled loudly.
“Stop that! If you fire that thing we’ll be spotted five leagues away!”
The artillerists, taken aback by the ferocity of his tone, changed tasks and began loading the bolt throwers and taking pot shots at the horsemen. They would never hit them, a moving target from on board a moving vehicle,
but it was making the Pelasians wary and causing them to pull back a little, which would give the Empress time to get out of range. Once that was done in half a minute, nothing would catch them.
He turned, sighing with relief, to ask the captain’s opinion on keeping the bolt throwers loaded while they travelled the shoreline and realised in horror that Khmun was not where he had been.
His eyes dropped to the deck. The captain lay propped where he had fallen by the railing, an arrow protruding from his neck and blood running down his throat and back and soaking his tunic.
“Captain!”
Khmun issued a wheezing noise and grasped Samir’s breeches, hauling him down to deck level. In a hollow voice, accompanied by an unpleasant bubbling noise, the captain addressed him face to face and very quietly.
“Get them home, Samir. Get them to Lassos. You know where the compass is and how to use it now. Time to practice the hard way.”
Samir nodded absently, as he started to pull away.
“I’ll fetch the doctor…”
Khmun rasped what could have been a laugh.
“I’ll be dead before he gets here, Samir.”
The young man suddenly found he had tears in his eyes; most unfitting for a pirate officer. And yet, it had happened again. Every father figure he found was taken from him. Every father figure he found was taken from him by Pelasia! He growled and the flow of tears stopped.
“I will get them back for this, captain. I will string up every last Pelasian east of Akkad for this.”
Khmun made that rasping, bubbling sound again. It was a laugh.
“Oh, Samir…”
Whatever had been the captain’s last planned words, however, would never be heard. With a rattling sound, Khmun passed to the other world, supported by the rail and his trusted Lieutenant. And now Samir had to do the worst thing imaginable: to tell the crew their captain had died.
Captain Samir of the Dark Empress, his face bleak and angry, bent and gathered up the body of the fallen captain.
“All free hands to the stern!”
Another death for which to repay Ma’ahd. The focus of the Dark Empress was about to narrow.
In which Asima progresses
The harem was a place of rules and discipline, but those rules changed depending on the position and rank of the occupant and, if one knew how to play the game well, they were surprisingly flexible.
Asima had learned early on in her days as an official concubine of the God-King that she had a great deal more freedom and authority than before, though the women who lived at this exalted rank took various differing viewpoints on their newfound power. Tanita, one of the other two women who had been chosen alongside Asima, seemed to drift happily along, content with her role and enjoying what freedoms she had. Sharra, as always, continued to complain about her captivity and seemed to have taken this authority and used it to separate herself from the others.
Asima saw in the relaxing of control the opportunity to advance.
It had taken her a couple of years to get to know all of the wives and concubines, their foibles and traits, and to work out exactly where in the line of seniority they all stood. This was only partially important to her plans, of course, since some who were considerably more senior than Asima were now old or ugly or both, and therefore posed no great threat to her… barring one.
Keshia was now sixty three and, frankly, not looking her best. Asima had initially placed her under the ‘people not to care about‘ heading, but had learned quickly that Keshia held a special place in the heart of the God-King. She had been his first wife and they had married before he had even ascended the high throne. He must have been so like Prince Ashar in those days.
Keshia, despite her age, was as much a threat as those eight years of chosen that followed Asima and the many that came before. And yet many of them were so mundane that they blended in with the wall decorations. There were, to Asima’s surprise, more than a hundred women in the harem that the King had apparently never sent for and who lived lives of anonymity and great freedom. It had been this that had given Asima her greatest idea.
There were one hundred and seventy of the God-King’s women in the harem. Of those, a little more than sixty ever actually saw him and those women were divided in Asima’s mind into those above her, those level with her and those beneath her.
The more than thirty women beneath her, she kept her eye on, just in case they decided to make a play. Of the others, six women Asima believed were as favoured as her in the God-King’s eyes, and only one of those was a wife rather than a concubine. The rest, eighteen women who outranked Asima, were all wives and, while a wife officially held higher rank than a concubine, such distinctions were quite blurred in the palace of Akkad.
Now, the only way to compete with the rest was to change her status completely, which meant either raising her own, or lowering that of those above her. Over the past six years, she had moved gradually up the ladder until it was often her that the God-King sent for when he needed companionship; moreover, flatteringly, it was as much her advice and conversation that he required as her beauty and her… other talents.
Now, however, she needed to become a wife. Once that happened, she would be perhaps tenth in line and would be in a position to jostle her way higher.
And so, here she was, strolling out of the great private palace at the centre of the complex, her hand resting lightly on the God-King’s arm. Timing was everything and it had taken every tool in her arsenal to keep the ruler of Pelasia busy until the appointed time. Finally, she had smiled and told him sweetly that she was ready to return to the harem now.
“What route shall we take, my dear?” the handsome man had asked. “The jasmine by the Loggia of the Winds is particularly fragrant at the moment.”
Asima had, as always, marshalled every argument and conceived of every possible problem before joining the God-King tonight. She shook her head quietly and, smiling, gestured out north.
“I would rather, if it suit your majesty, pass by the orchard. The smell of the lemon trees between the observatory and the harem is fresh and pleasing this time of year and, to visit the Loggia, we would have to pass the kitchens of the public palace at the time the slops are discarded.”
The God-King had laughed and squeezed her hand.
“Then the observatory and orchard it is. I might, if time allows, go inside and see what patterns the stars have formed for me tonight.”
She had smiled. That wouldn’t happen. Not tonight.
And so now they walked down a paved white path between rich lawns and toward the northernmost point of Akkad. Ahead, the great pentagonal towers of the palace walls rose up like the great horns of some silhouetted beast, the crown of its head formed by the dome of the observatory. Away to the left, beyond the citrus grove, stood the sombre bulk of the harem.
The moon was intermittently covered by scudding clouds that prevented too much silvery light from playing across the gardens and Asima had to narrow her eyes discretely to pick out any details on the observatory.
A relic from the days of the God-King’s grandfather, the observatory was a three storey structure of white marble and porphyry. Octagonal, each face was smooth, punctuated between floors with purple decoration and surmounted by a domed, grey roof with portions formed of delicate glass.
The ruler who had originally had the curious building constructed had been convinced that the stars held some power over events in the real world and that, if man only learned how to read their patterns, he could predict the future. It was a belief that was commonly held to be erroneous, though nobody would say so in relation to the God-King’s family.
Tonight, however, there was a certain ring of truth to this.
The observatory, if everything was going according to plan, would herald certain future trends and foretell at least one specific event.
They strode down the gentle slope from the palace toward the structure and its adjacent orchard, the King humming a tune that the
musicians had played through dinner, while Asima smiled and kept herself as calm and steady as possible. Periodically she looked up with her head lowered, casting surreptitious glances at the observatory. There was nothing to be seen there. Not a surprise. There would be in a minute, but not if the God-King kept up that irritating humming.
“Listen, majesty. Do you hear the gentle song of the nightingale?”
The God-King tilted his head slightly.
“You must have good hearing, Asima? I hear nothing.”
“It is faint, majesty, but beautiful.”
Her companion fell silent, listening intently for the birdsong that existed only in Asima’s head. At least he was quiet. He may be handsome and kind, but the ageing ruler of Pelasia had what Asima considered to be some of the world’s most irritating habits. She would cope with them in return for the power they brought, but really she would have to do something about changing him once she was in charge.
They approached the marble octagon, moving now into the shadow cast by the palace’s high walls. The paved route would take them around the building to the door on the north side and, from there they could walk across the springy turf between the citrus trees back to the harem.
Well, she could. The God-King would be busy.
Almost there and Asima found she was holding her breath. Silently, she admonished herself and tried to relax. Appearance was all too important right now.
Dark Empress Page 20