This Forsaken Earth

by Paul Kearney

  “Some of them think of Ganesh Ka as home.”

  “Ah, yes.” Rol stared up at the towering intricacies of the mainmast as it loomed above them. All those tons of timber and canvas and cordage, balanced and designed to take the wind and with it move the little world that sustained them across this vast inimical wilderness that men named the sea.

  “Sometimes it doesn’t profit a man too much to know where his home lies. It’s just one more thing that can be taken away from him,” Rol said with some bitterness.

  “A man must fight for something, or somewhere or someone, or else he is no more than an animal,” Creed said quietly.

  “We are worse than animals,” Rol answered him. “We will fight for nothing, simply for the joy of fighting; and if our conscience pricks us afterward, some will give that joy a name, and call it patriotism. That’s where it leads you, Elias, that possession of a home to call your own.”

  “A man may fight for many things,” Creed countered. “What he thinks is right or wrong—”

  “And who are we to judge what is right and what is wrong, Elias Creed, convict, pirate? Killer of men. Right and wrong is a matter of opinion—or of fashion.”

  “Are you trying to tell me—” Creed began with some heat.

  “Do you smell that?” It was Gallico. He had joined them at the quarterdeck rail with that odd graceful speed it was so remarkable to see. He had lifted his head and was sniffing the wind.

  “What is it?” Rol asked at once. They had learned long ago to trust Gallico’s nose.

  “I smell shit.”

  “We’ve been talking it this last glass and more.” Creed grinned.

  “No. It’s coming down the wind. Human shit.”

  The smile slipped off Creed’s face. “A slaver?”

  “Must be. The stink can drift for miles with a good breeze.”

  Rol went to the taffrail and stared over the ship’s wake, slightly phosphorescent under the sickle moon. Nothing on the horizon, not so much as a gull. The starlit night was vast and empty. Yet Gallico was seldom wrong.

  Then Rol caught it himself. A land smell, heavy and alien to the cool freshness of the sea-breeze. “They’re astern of us. Masthead there! Look aft. What do you see?”

  The lookout was perched comfortably in the foretop. At Rol’s hail, he started, and quickly swarmed up the shrouds to the cap of the foretopmast. “Nothing, sir!”

  “He’ll see damn-all from there, looking aft,” Gallico muttered.

  Rol turned to the quartermasters at the wheel, one of whom was old Morcam, a foul-smoking pipe clenched between his carious teeth.

  “Starboard two points.”

  The wheel was spun without question or comment. The ship turned right through some twenty degrees. Watching the yards Rol saw the courses slacken and bulge and crack as the mizzen ate into their wind. He stepped forward. In the waist, Amertaz had stopped singing, and the ship’s company was staring aloft, wondering. Then all eyes came to rest on their captain.

  “Take in the mizzen-course,” Rol said. He glanced aloft again, his mind working with the variables. “Take in topgallants. Douse all lights. Lookouts to all three mastheads. Imbro, fill cartridge for two broadsides. Quirion, arms chests to the waist.” Then, slightly louder, “All hands. All hands on deck.”

  The crowds of men who a moment before had been sitting listening, smoking, exchanging banter, broke up at once. The decks rumbled with the smothered thunder of their bare feet, and the mizzen topmen came scampering aft. Within a few seconds the ratlines were black with climbing figures, deck-lanterns had been blown out, and the gunner, the master-at-arms, and their mates had disappeared below. It never failed to give Rol pleasure to watch this—his crew going about their business with the purposeful efficiency of true professionals.

  As soon as the mizzen lookout was up in the topgallant shrouds, Rol hailed him. “Generro, what do you see astern?”

  Generro was a lithe, dark-haired young man with the eyes of a peregrine, the arms of a moderate ape, and an absurdly pretty face. “Vessel on the horizon, skipper, dead astern! She comes and goes, nowhere near hull-up yet.”

  “Odds are she won’t have seen our lights. Damn that fool moon. Gallico, what do you know of slavers?”

  The halftroll bared his fangs a little farther. “They’re swift sailers; they have to be to get their cargoes to port alive—or half-alive, at any rate. I’d say this fellow is bound out of Cavaillon, one of the great markets there such as Astraro. And on this course he’ll be making for ancient Omer, biggest auction-port of live flesh you’ll find north of the Gut.”

  “Omer of the black walls. Yes, I know it.”

  “They’re fore-and-aft-rigged for the most part, slavers, flush-decked and narrow in the beam. Everything for speed.”

  “They’d outrun us, then.”

  “Given anything like a fair wind, yes. But it’s a southerly we’ve got here, a stern wind—not good for his lateens, if that’s truly what he has shipped.”

  “How many would they carry?”

  “Slaves? A vessel much the same size as us would reckon on cramming in some five hundred.”

  Rol whistled softly. “Five hundred! How do they carry stores for so many mouths?”

  “They don’t,” Gallico said glumly. “A certain amount of wastage is acceptable.”

  “What kind of price do slaves bring on the block these days? We could be looking at a fortune here.”

  “You’re joking, I know.” Gallico looked positively dangerous.

  Rol smiled without humor. “Of course. Now, how’s about we figure a way to steal the weather-gage from this fellow?”

  It was a dreamlike night, the sea hardly chopping up under the steady southerly, the ship gliding along like a ghost, orders issued by the ship’s officers not in their usual bark, but in ridiculously low tones. Sound carried over the surface of the sea at night; a man’s sneeze might be heard a mile away downwind. Rol took the Revenant ever more steadily out to the west, and unfurled almost everything from the topmasts down; the topgallants were too high to risk their prey catching a glimpse of them over the horizon. The lookouts reported the progress of the slaver in hoarse, furtive shouts. She came on northward, expecting nothing, and being a private ship and not a man-ofwar, she had taken in a few reefs of sail for the night so as to reduce speed a little in the dark hours. Her crew had no inkling that out in the wastes of the sea close by there loomed a three-hundred-ton predator waiting for the moment to strike.

  Rol moved in just before dawn, packing on every sail the Revenant possessed. They had the southerly on the starboard quarter by then, and were coming up on the slaver’s larboard quarter. The sun rose up almost full in their faces, springing up out of the molten bosom of the ocean, and at the same moment the sleepy lookout on the slaver finally saw them, and the xebec—for such it was—came to startled life. Men hammered up her rigging like ants and began letting out the reefs in the big lateens. The slaver picked up speed at once, but the balance had already tipped against her. Rol had the guns run out and the crew of number-one starboard fired a twelve-pound ball across her bows that lashed her fo’c’sle with spray, so close did it skip to her hull. Men were running about the xebec’s decks, shouting and pointing at the black ship that was powering down on them with the sun rising upon her yards and her guns run out like the grin of so many teeth. The Revenant ran in under the slaver’s stern, stealing her wind, and there Rol backed topsails and lay-to with his broadside naked and leering at the xebec’s vulnerable stern. The big lateens fell slack, and banged against the yards impotently. Rol clambered forward into the bowsprit and yelled across two hundred yards of sea, “Heave to, or I sink you!”

  The Cavaillic ensign at the slaver’s mizzen jerked, then came down in submission, though the Mercanter pennant remained snapping and twisting at her mainmast. Her crew ceased their frenzied running about and stood silent on her deck like men condemned. And about the two ships, predator and prey, a terrible stench a
rose, and from the hull of the wallowing xebec there came the wailing of hundreds of voices, a host of people in torment.

  The Revenant possessed two eighteen-foot cutters, which sculled eight oars apiece. Getting these off the waist booms and into the sea by tackles from the yardarms took some time, however, and Rol went below to the great cabin while the ship’s company manhandled the heavy sea-boats overboard. He came back on deck with his cross-staff and took a reading off the swift-rising sun, grunting with satisfaction at the result. “Gallico,” he called. “Sidearms and swords to the cutter-crews. And Giffon is to come across also with whatever he thinks he might need. And get some water-casks out of the hold—whatever you think necessary.” The heavy stench had enveloped both ships now, swamping even the powder-smell of the burning match in the tubs, and the wailing aboard the slaver would bring out a cold sweat on the most hardened of men. The Revenants were no faint-hearts, but even they looked uneasy.

  “Elias,” Rol said. “Keep them busy, will you?” The ex-convict nodded. Under his deep tan, the blood had left his face.

  Eventually the two cutters put off for the xebec, filled to the gunwales with heavily armed men and all manner of stores. The slaver was low in the water, and the Revenants clambered over her sides with the agility of wharf-rats. Rol fought the urge to gag at the miasma of filth that shrouded the ship, and snapped at the petrified crew, “Where’s the master?”

  He came forward clutching his ship’s papers and setting knuckle to forehead like a peasant greeting his lord. “Here, Captain. Grom Mindorin, master of the Astraros.”

  “What’s your cargo?”

  “Three hundred and seventy-odd head, bound out of Astraro for Omer. Captain, we are a Mercanter ship.”

  “What of it?”

  “I thought perhaps—”

  “You thought wrong. Show me your hold. I wish to see the cargo.”

  They went below. The sun was climbing up a cloudless sky, and despite the lateness of the year the heat of it beat down on the decks. Rol felt sweat trickling down the small of his back. All the hatches had bolt-fastened gratings that let in almost no light or air. Mindorin, bobbing his head apologetically, led Rol first to the stern-cabin, where he lit a lantern, then he made his way forward along a gloomy companionway. The stench grew worse, if that was possible, though the wailing had given way to a low murmuring, punctuated by the odd sharp cry, like that of a rabbit taken by a stoat.

  They went through a reinforced bulkhead—every door in the ship had bolts to it—and at once the flame in the lantern burned blue and guttered low. Mindorin raised it up, his face streaming with sweat. The close, fetid air was hard to breathe, the smell almost a physical presence, pressing about their faces.

  “Gods of the world,” Rol croaked.

  The compartment ran almost the full length of the ship, some twenty-five yards. It had been divided up horizontally by a stout wooden platform, so that there were two decks in front of Rol, each less than a yard high. A thick carpet of bodies lay on both of these, chained by the ankles, feet to feet. Hundreds of people, turning feebly, twitching, moaning, sobbing, or lying inert. All caked in their own filth, bloodied by the chains that bound them. All in darkness. The lantern was of little use, but Rol’s preternatural vision spared him none of the details. There were men, women, and children here, mixed indiscriminately, all of them naked and plastered in their own excreta, dull eyes sunken in their heads, skulls shaven down to the skin. Corpses lying amid them with maggots working busily about every orifice. Lice in clusters the size of marbles, and here and there a venturesome rat crawling over the dead and the living unmolested.

  A wondering fury blazed up in Rol’s heart. He understood Gallico better now. But he stood there for a long moment, mastering the rage, beating it down. When he turned to Mindorin again, his voice was quiet, even.

  “You will unlock these chains, and get these people on deck.”

  The slaver’s master shrank from the light of those eyes. “Aye, sir, at once. I’ll get the keys. One minute, and I’ll have them—”

  “Get your crew down here, every last one of them. You will bring these people water and food. You will wash them.”

  “Anything, Captain, anything.” Mindorin scuttled away, falling over backward in his haste.

  Rol bent low and hunkered his way through the dense-packed morass of humanity, sometimes reduced by the lack of headroom to crawling on his hands and knees. Tar from the hot deckhead fell on his shoulders and his boots slipped and shifted in liquid filth. Here was a young woman, dead, staring. Between her legs the corpse of a baby, which had issued out of her long before full term. A clenched, gray, globular thing gnawed by rats and running with maggots. But Rol could still make out the tiny fingers closed in fists.

  Here, two men had strangled each other with their chains and were locked in a last embrace. Here a child, a girl not more than five years old, with the flesh on her ankles eaten down to the bone by the shackles. Rol could feel the eyes of hundreds on him as he made his noisome way down the compartment. People called to him hoarsely in languages he did not understand. Some struggled to their bloody and yellow-scabbed elbows, then fell back again. Just as he thought he could bear it no more his gaze was caught by that of a young boy, ten years old maybe. His limbs were stick-thin and lice-tracks were raw and red all over his narrow chest. The boy was smiling emptily. Beside him was an older man, the oldest Rol had seen here. For some reason he had been allowed to retain a full, gray beard. His eyes were dark, and lively with intelligence. They regarded Rol with grave appraisal, as though weighing up the defects and deliberations of his soul. Rol tried to speak to him, but his throat had closed.

  Back up on deck, he breathed in the clear, clean air deeply. He could feel the vermin of the slave-hold crawling over his skin, and began plucking at his clothes. “Quirion!”

  “Aye, sir.” The burly master-at-arms had a naked cutlass in his hand, and the point of it twitched as though it ached to be in use.

  “The crew of this ship will unchain all the slaves and get them on deck. The slaves will be watered, fed, and hosed down. Then that crew will go below and clean out the slave-deck with swabs. On their hands and knees, Quirion.”

  “Hands and knees, sir.”

  Naked now, Rol sprang to the ship’s rail. “Get rid of those rags,” he said, and then dived overboard.

  The cold plunge of the water, the clean salt bite of the sea. He dived deep, deep as he had ever gone, trying to leave behind the filth that coated his skin, the filth he felt to be within.

  Three

  HOMECOMING

  11th Jurius, Year 32, Bar Asfal. Wind southerly, the Cavaillic Trades. Course WNW under all plain sail. With Dead Reckoning we are two leagues north of the latitude of Golgos, three leagues west of the Omer longline. Overtook a slaver at the end of the middle watch, a flush-decked xebec of some two hundred tons, the Astraros. On board were twenty-six crew, three hundred and thirty-two slaves, and two score corpses. I made the crew of the slaver clean out the hold of their ship, then had them bound each to a corpse and threw them overboard. The slaves remain on the xebec, which Gallico now commands with a prize crew of thirty men. I have not seen before a more pitiful collection of people. Before I drowned him, the Astraros’s master told me that many of them had already made a voyage before this—they are natives of every coast about the Inner Reach, some kidnapped from fishing villages, others taken in war. Gallico insists that all must be brought back to the Ka, and for once I agree with him.

  For all her dirty trade, the Astraros is a fine ship, and I think her hull will bear the nine-pounders we took from the Bionese man-of-war earlier this month. She would be a useful consort for the Revenant, keeping so close to the wind, though I think I may change her yards to square-rigged on the foremast.

  A knock on the cabin door, and Elias Creed put his head around it. “Ganesh Ka is in sight.”

  “Thanks, Elias. I’ll be up on deck presently. Where does the Astraros sta
nd?”

  “Fine on the starboard bow, some half a league ahead. She’s a flyer, all right. Gallico has reefed every sail she has, and still has the legs of us.” Creed sounded almost resentful, as if the Revenant’s honor had been slighted.

  “I’ll wager she stinks of shit, all the same,” Rol said, with a weak grin.

  Ganesh Ka. From the sea it appeared to be nothing more than some huge geological anomaly, a freak of soaring stone. Cliffs between two and three hundred feet high ran sheer and mustard-pale for over a league along the shore, the sea smashing in white breakers about their foot. But above them there reared up black, unearthly towers of volcanic stone—basalt and granite in poplar-shaped buttresses and barbicans, as variegated as the trees in a wood, and yet existing in some half-guessed symmetry. With the eyes half closed and the light behind them, they might almost become the castles of some rock-hewing titan, in places as rough as nature and the wind could make them, in others as perfectly smoothed as a sculptor’s dream. A man might marvel at the sight, without ever guessing that it had been built by artifice, and the imaginations of minds long dead.

  There was an opening in the sea-cliffs, invisible from more than a few cables away. They ran the ships in through the hundred-yard gap with four men to each wheel, all sails furled but for a few scraps of canvas to give the vessels steerage-way. Above their heads the seabirds—skuas and gulls and blue-eyed gannets in their thousands—wheeled and soared and dived, heedless of any human. This late in the year they had been joined by skeins of long-necked, raucous geese, black and white and gray, immigrants from the far, frozen north. No one ever hunted these geese; they were seen as part of the Ka’s luck.

  The wall of cliffs opened out before them into a great circular bay, a sight that never failed to take the breath out of Rol’s throat no matter how often he saw it. Before him the sea-cliffs on the landward side had been tunneled and crannied into a subterranean counterpart of the looming towers of stone above, and three tall ship-gates yawned black and cavernous in the sun-warmed rock of their faces, each massive enough to admit a fully rigged man-of-war.