This Forsaken Earth

by Paul Kearney

  On the wharves, word had gone round that something was afoot. A great, silent crowd stood there in the ship-cavern and watched as Rol was escorted to the quaysides.

  “Quite a send-off,” Canker murmured.

  Gallico and Elias Creed and most of the Revenants were there also, standing in a compact body with cutlasses and ship’s pistols in their fists. They made a wall which brought Miriam and her cohort to a halt.

  “What’s this, Miriam?” Gallico called. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen so many of your lads in one place at one time.”

  It was Canker who answered. “We’re to board the Astraros, bound for Bionar. Rol has agreed to come with me for the war there.”

  “And the Revenant?” Creed asked. His voice echoed off the cavern walls along with a gathering murmur, the muttered whisperings of the attentive crowd.

  “The Revenant stays here, to defend the Ka,” Canker said calmly, though sweat had come out on his brow.

  “Why will the captain not speak for himself?” a woman’s voice called out. It was Esmer, her face white and hostile.

  “Who commands the Revenant, then?” demanded a one-eyed mariner who had once worked on the ship.

  The murmurings rose, like a sea-storm seen off on the horizon that might presently draw close. “Talk to them,” Canker hissed in an undertone.

  More shouts, the crowd growing restive. The Revenants and Miriam’s musketeers faced one another with growing hostility, while about them the temper of the multitude gathered form like a cloud.

  “Cortishane.” It was Miriam, at his shoulder. “Cortishane, say something. Do you want to see what will happen next? There will be blood on the ground—and who will be the winner then? Don’t do this, do not destroy this place to get your own way.”

  Rol stared at her. Miriam had been a household slave, freed by Artimion some eleven years before. Ganesh Ka and its lord were her life, as this place was life for many thousands of others. Rol had never before seen such desperation written across that proud face of hers. At the same time, he knew that there was a loaded musket pointed at the small of his back. He smiled at Miriam, and then raised his voice to shout across to his ship’s company.

  “Revenants! Stack arms, and finish this foolishness. For shame, Gallico—did you think I walked down here like some kind of hostage? Make the Astraros ready for sea. We set sail on the evening tide. The Revenants will stay here for the time being, and will try to help Artimion remember how to steer a ship. Do you hear me there? Make a lane for us and stop standing about like a bunch of moonstruck sheep. Gallico, Creed, set these men back to work.”

  And it was done.

  Six

  BOATS IN THE MIST

  UNKNOWN FACES. SIXTY MEN WHO HAD NEVER SAILED together before, and a ship that still carried a reek of suffering about her, for all her sleek lines. The Astraros had been a quick, lively, responsive vessel, but that was before they had chopped eight gunports in her sides and set ten tons of iron and timber on her deck; it was as though a thoroughbred had been harnessed to a farm-wagon. For the first few days, Rol, Gallico, and Creed were on deck day and night, assessing her capabilities and becoming accustomed to her foibles. They had a fitful breeze from the southeast to contend with, some vagary of the Cavaillic Trades, and they pointed the xebec’s stem north-nor’east to keep it on the starboard quarter, trying to come to terms with the fore-and-aft rig, which seemed so odd to them after the square-rigged yards of the Revenant. The Astraros was flush-decked, and it seemed wholly strange to Rol to look forward from his station by the ship’s wheel and see the unbroken sweep of her extend forward to the bowsprit. More strange still to look up and see the great lateen yards with their triangular sails looming above.

  “This gull-winged lark is all very well if we’re close-hauled, but I’ll be damned to it when sailing large,” Gallico said discontentedly. “We have to square-rig her on the foremast.”

  “Agreed,” Rol said. His eyes were smarting with tiredness, but in his mind the wheels still turned within wheels. The anger smoldered. “We have some spare spars in the hold that might suit if we reshape them. Get Kier on it.”

  “Kier stayed with the Revenant,” Creed said quietly. “It’s Aveh now, the old slave.”

  “Damn. I hope he’s up to it.”

  “You were quick enough to foist him on me,” Gallico said, and his big paw took Rol at the back of the neck and shook him in good-natured admonishment.

  “Of course. But it’s my own valuable carcass we’re talking about now—and Canker’s, of course. How is our supercargo? Still puking?”

  “Like a drunken schoolboy. It would seem that Feathermen do not always sailors make.”

  “He must be hungry. We should perhaps send him down some salt-goat and weeviled biscuit.”

  “If we did, they would soon be sent back up again.”

  “All right. Get this Aveh at work on the new yards, main and top, and rouse out the larboard watch to help. Gallico, who in hell is that up on the mainmast?”

  They looked up to see a slight figure clambering about the shrouds of the maintopgallantmast high above their heads, hooting and laughing to himself and waving down at them.

  “That’ll be the boy, the half-wit,” Creed said. “He seems to like it up there.”

  “He’ll like it less when he’s broken his blasted neck. Send up a good topman, Elias, and get him down.”

  “He’s agile enough,” Creed protested. “He can run the rigging along with the best of them—first time I’ve seen him laugh since he arrived at the Ka.”

  “Well, well, all right. But keep an eye on him. We don’t want the carpenter to see his son go over the side.”

  The xebec was turtle-decked, to let the seas run off her into the scuppers, and the sharp overhang of her bow and stern meant she cut through the waves, as opposed to shouldering her way over them as a round-bowed ship might. The deck was thus continually running with water, and so her builders had rigged gratings clear across her beam to help keep the crew a little drier. This construction also meant that she was not a ship in which one could ride out a severe storm; a following sea would find it easy to swamp her, and the great breakers of the Westerease would sweep clear across her bows. But with a moderate sea, and the wind forward of her quarter, she would be one of the fastest ships in the Reach, and it was the seas of the Reach for which she had been built. Rol admired her spirit, but he could not find a match in her for the bluff courage of the Revenant.

  She worked her crew harder, for one thing, the long lateen yards heavy to lift and brace, the sails massive and unwieldy to one used to the sensible courses of a square-rigger. For another, she seemed cramped below, the master’s cabin lacking the graceful dimensions of that in the Revenant. But it was, if nothing else, a further education in the ways of the sea and the crafting of ships to make her go where he wanted, and to work out which way she liked best to be driven.

  “Wind’s dropping. It’ll have faded away to nothing by nightfall, you mark my words,” Gallico said gloomily.

  “Whistle up another one, then. Elias, take a reading, will you? And bring it down to me. I’m going below.”

  All ships stank, by their very nature. In severe weather, seamen would sometimes sneak down into the hold to relieve themselves rather than squat in the heads at the bow of the ship. And then there were the combined smells of tar and stagnant seawater, damp timber, and the mud on the cables that were stowed forward, slime from fifty different harbors. But belowdecks in the Astraros was different. Here, there had been a foulness beyond anything in Rol’s seagoing experience, and though much reduced by constant scrubbing and painting, the dregs of it remained. Use made master, of course, and in a few more days they would no longer notice it, but for now it was one more mark against the xebec, filed away in some private corner of Rol’s mind. He wondered that Aveh had been willing to work on this ship, which had housed him in such degradation.

  Unbidden, there came into Rol’s mind a picture of
Artimion on the quarterdeck of the Revenant. It was akin to a man imagining his home inhabited by strangers.

  The great cabin was a triangle with a flattened point, that being the stern. The stern-windows were mean and narrow, but there were also scuttles to larboard and starboard, and a skylight through which Rol could see the mizzen, and the backs of the quartermasters at the wheel. He bent over his chart-table with a pair of dividers and with them pricked away in a series of steps the distance from Ganesh Ka to Arbion, their destination. As he did, he felt the way come off the ship slightly, the water gurgling past her sides taking on a lower tone. He tossed the dividers onto the chart in disgust just as Elias Creed knocked and entered, cross-staff under one arm.

  “Well?”

  Elias consulted his figures and pointed to a spot on the chart midway between the coasts of Ganesh and Armidon.

  “Could be worse.”

  “Could be. Pull up a chair, Elias. Gallico’s prognosticating is on the button, as usual.”

  “Yes; it’s dropping fast. Do you want to make more sail?”

  “No. The men are tired, and I’m not in that much of a hurry. I want to have the new yards ready and swayed up before we make landfall.”

  “The carpenter is a good man. Doesn’t say much, but knows his trade.”

  “Have you ever known a carpenter who didn’t?”

  Elias shrugged. In the graying light from the skylight Rol caught a different aspect of him. He was tired—they all were—but age had bitten more deeply into Creed’s face than those of his shipmates. He could pass for forty, though he was not much older than Rol himself. More of his beard had silvered, and the lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes and nose looked deep enough to have been carved with a knife.

  “You should eat more,” Rol admonished him, “fill out a bit. I’ve seen portlier scarecrows.”

  “I’d rather drink something, Mother.” Rol tossed him a bottle from a wall-locker, and he gulped from the neck of it with his eyes closed. He sighed without opening his eyes, and said, “We’d have fought for you, there on the wharves. Not to keep the ship, but for you.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you think, Rol, that you’re going to your death?” Creed opened his eyes now. They were black as sea-scoured slate, and almost as hard.

  “I think…I think I am doing something inevitable. Rowen and I were always going to meet again, one way or another. The gods have a way of arranging these things.” He rubbed at the scar on his palm.

  “I admit, after all I’ve heard, I’m rather looking forward to meeting this woman myself.”

  “No. I won’t get you and Gallico embroiled in all this. Canker and I will leave the ship, and you will take her back to Ganesh Ka.”

  “As my captain, you can feel free to order me to do many things. As your friend, I feel free to ignore certain of your orders, and that is one of them.” Creed tossed back the bottle, and stood up. “You bloody fool—you think you can get rid of us that easily? Think again.” He left the cabin. Rol stared blindly at the tabletop before him, the bottle forgotten in one hand.

  “I’ll take a slug of that.” It was Canker, whey-faced and gaunt, but with some of his old smugness already wrapped about him like a cloak.

  “I should charge admission,” Rol told him. “Most people knock.”

  “The door was ajar. Give us a drink, will you, and stop being so high and mighty.”

  Once again the bottle changed hands. “I suppose you heard all that,” Rol said.

  “The dropping of eaves is part of my trade. That’s a good man you have there. You’re lucky in your friends, Cortishane.” Canker wiped his mouth and peered down at the chart on the table. “Where are we?” When Rol pointed, he raised his meager eyebrows. “We’re running out of map.”

  “I’ve not had much call to sail this far north.”

  “Aha. Why have we stopped? Is something wrong with the ship?”

  “Alas, yes. She’s running out of wind. Perhaps I should plant you on the quarterdeck to aid our progress.”

  “What a wit you are, to be sure. How long before we arrive in Arbion?”

  “If we had a fair wind, we could run it off in a week.”

  “A week! Excellent. And to think of the time it took me toiling over the mountains. Now here’s—”

  “Sail ho!”

  Rol cocked his head at the shout, then pelted out of the cabin and up the companionway without further ceremony. “Where away?”

  The lookout at the masthead shouted down again. “Fine on the starboard bow, a ship, topsails up.”

  All about the deck, men paused in their work. The wind had fallen entirely, and now the Astraros was the epicenter of a glass-calm ocean. Off to port black-headed terns were diving, and the oily ripples they produced circled out for hundreds of yards.

  “Break out that Mercanter flag,” Rol told Gallico. “Make all sail, and then prepare to lower the boats.” He ran up the mainmast shrouds as though they were a set of stairs and joined the lookout at the maintopgallant cross-trees, some ninety feet above the deck. “Point her out to me. What’s your name?”

  “Phelim, sir.”

  “Well caught, Phelim. Point her out to me.”

  “Which it was the boy as saw her first, sir. He deserves the credit.” Rol saw to his surprise that Aveh’s son was above them, clinging to the maintopgallant backstay like a monkey and chortling. When he caught Rol’s astonished eye he slid down the cable out of sight, like a bead on a string.

  Three masts, limp topsails just nicking the horizon. The vessel was perhaps five leagues away, it was hard to tell. There was a haze thickening about the brim of the sky, and the light was going. No top-lanterns, which meant she was not a merchantman. A man-of-war, then, and in these waters almost certainly Bionese.

  In the Revenant, with the crew he had formed and had come to trust and esteem, Rol would have felt keen anticipation, a kind of joy at the sight. In this ship, with this crew, his only thought was how to avoid any encounter. As he hung there above the placid sea, he cursed Artimion and Miriam and Canker with all the venom in his heart.

  All about him, the yards were filling with men as the ship’s company unfurled every sail they had. The canvas fell dead from the spars, however, with not so much as a zephyr to stir the reef-points.

  “Keep an eye on her for as long as you can, Phelim,” Rol told the lookout.

  “Aye, sir.” That would not be long. The thickening haze had turned to mist, and even as he watched, Rol saw the distant ship’s topsails disappear into it. He looked up, and saw that the first stars were already out. There would be something of a moon tonight, but the mist would hide it.

  “Could be worse,” he told Gallico and Creed back on deck. “We’ll tow her northwest, try and get her into a wind. I want both cutters in the water. We’ll change crews every four glasses.”

  The Astraroes were not veterans, but most of them knew the sea in some way or other, and all of them had passed time in small boats. The two cutters were hoisted over the side with a minimum of fuss, and both Creed and Gallico picked their crews in little more than a murmur. Rol saw Giffon standing by the ship’s rail, hoping to get picked, and called him aft.

  “No rowing for you, lad. We need those hands of yours to be as dainty as a milkmaid’s.”

  “I’ll do my share,” Giffon said stubbornly. Rol laid a hand on his arm.

  “It may be you’ll be sewing up a few of us tonight, or in the morning, Giffon. That’s your share, and we all value you for it. Any fool can pull on an oar.”

  The boy hung his head. “If you want to do me a service,” Rol told him, “get up to the foretopmast, and bring down the carpenter’s son in one piece, and deliver him to his father.”

  Giffon looked up, and smiled. “He seems happy there.”

  “And I’ll be happy when he’s down on deck. Be careful, Giffon.” The boy nodded. How old was he—sixteen, seventeen? What turns had his life taken to give him those eyes? He had
come aboard the Astraros without a word, lugging a goatskin bag almost as large as himself, and had set up a little sickbay in the forepeak without order or invitation. But it had warmed Rol’s heart to see him, like having some of the Revenant’s luck on board.

  The cutter-crews sculled their craft past the bows and took on cables from the fo’c’sle. The Astraros had a good bosun in Thef Gaudo, a small, seal-dark man from Corso, but there was no gunner on board, and some of the topmen had never handled anything bigger than a large fishing ketch. Still, the operation proceeded with not much more than the usual profanity. Everyone was talking in undertones now, and the men in the boats had muffled their oars with wads of sheepskin. The mist was thickening; it felt cold on Rol’s face, like a wet linen handkerchief laid across his forehead. Already, the Astraros’s upper yards had disappeared into blank vapor, and her bowsprit was a mere shadowed guess from the quarterdeck. One of the men at the wheel, attentive to the thinning sand in the hourglass, stepped forward and struck four bells, the end of the first dogwatch; the sixth hour after noon to a landsman.

  “Belay that,” Rol told him. “Wrap up the clapper.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The Astraros began to move as the men in the cutters took the strain. Luckily, she was a light ship with a narrow floor, easier to pull than the three-hundred-ton, bluff-bowed Revenant. Almost her only point of superiority over the Black Ship, Rol thought sourly. But it was good to hear the water whispering past her sides again. Nothing more unsettling than to be aboard a ship of sail in a flat calm. It felt almost like a form of death.

  The bosun came aft. “What do you think, sir, three knots?”

  “About that. Keep them quiet, Thef. Every sound will carry tonight, and we don’t know if yonder bastard saw us before the mist came down. See that the crews switch every two hours.”

  Rol walked forward. Fifteen paces, and he was on the fo’c’sle, where Aveh was busy trimming down the new foreyards with a few hands to help with the rough work. His son sat cross-legged beside him, watching the white curls of wood come shaving off the new spar with avid fascination. It was indeed a soothing thing to watch. The carpenter worked with a deft economy that was a pleasure to see, and his hands ran up and down the timber as though feeling out the best places to lay the edge of a tool.