This Forsaken Earth

by Paul Kearney

  Gallico’s good humor evaporated. “Get out of the fucking way! Can’t you see these people are dead on their feet? Make a lane there! You, Sorios, get word to Artimion and Miriam. We need food for these people. Get the goddamned spits turning. Lend a hand there, you damn fools.”

  Somehow they made it down to the stepped tunnel leading to the square, the bright day cut off and torchlight taking its place. By then almost every soul who had made it over the mountains had a pair of helpers to prop him up, and around Gallico half a dozen vied for the honor. In the massive hollowed cavern Rol and his fellow travelers were at last allowed to sink to the ground, whilst people ran to and fro seeking out blankets for them, jugs of wine, barley-bannock, honey, goat’s cheese, and anything else they could get their hands on. Within the square itself, the raised stone hearths were set blazing and the heat mounted. It seemed suffocating after the weeks out in the open. The travelers snatched greedily at any food offered to them, only to become sick after a few mouthfuls. Their stomachs had shrunk, and no longer knew what to make of civilized fare.

  A raucous cacophony of voices rose round them. Questions flailed through the air. People pressed clothing upon them. Some of the women took it upon themselves to try and wash their faces. One large matron held Giffon between her ample breasts and spooned soup into his mouth. It dribbled down his chin. He was saying something, but it was lost in the hubbub.

  “Out of my bloody way.” Esmer pushed through the crowd. She stared at Rol unsmilingly a second, then knelt beside him, black hair swinging in greasy plaits. “Well, Captain, you have come home again, I find.”

  “Home, Esmer.”

  She ran a hand over his face like a man testing the muscle-tone of a horse. “What in the world have you been doing to yourself?”

  The press, the heat, the noise were too much for him. Something like a snarl flitted across Rol’s face. He stood up, leaning on Esmer’s sturdy shoulder. As she tried to rise with him he pushed her down again.

  “No. Leave me be.”

  He shoved Elias flat as the dark man tried to rise also, exchanged a rueful smile with Gallico, and then made off for the exit to the square—a tall, linteled doorway that led toward the seafront.

  It took him some time, but he had learned patience of late, and he was able to pause and rest every so often without chafing too much at the delay. People went past him in bustling crowds. He hitched up the old sea-cloak some nameless benefactor had given him, and covered his face. He saw Miriam stride by like a warrior queen, russet hair flaming behind her and musketeers trailing in her wake. Ganesh Ka had been stirred into something near frenzy by their return. It seemed to Rol absurd, and almost unbearable after the open spaces of the high country. He tacked away from the crowds, anonymous under his hood.

  The ship-cavern at last, and at the far end of it the three tall sea gates through which light still flooded to kindle the water eddying round the docks. Rol breathed in the smell. After the sterile mountains, this barrage of stinks assaulted his senses. Old fish, tar, wet wood, salt, and a hundred other odors clamoring for his attention. There were several ships tied up at the quays, and with a leap of his heart, Rol recognized the sleek lines of the Astraros. He made his way to her gangplank and walked aboard, letting fall his cloak. The xebec seemed forlorn and deserted, and the ship-cavern itself was oddly untenanted. The entire population of the Ka, it seemed, was converging on the square to view the prodigals. Well, that was just fine.

  Rol leaned against the bulwark and knotted an arm in the larboard mainmast shrouds. The tarred rope seemed to fit his hand somehow, and under his feet the minute movement of the ship upon the water brought peace to his mind.

  Footsteps on the planking. He opened his eyes in time to find himself falling over, but was caught by a strong pair of arms before his face hit the deck. The arms set him down gently on his back and he found himself looking up at a bearded face that seemed oddly familiar.

  “I know you.”

  “Yes, you do. Stay here. I’ll be back.” The man left him, cushioning his head upon a coil of rope. Rol lay there, content to stare up at the rigging lines of the Astraros, and the roof of the cavern above with the writhing bright snakes of water-shadow playing upon it.

  The man returned, and set a hand under Rol’s head, raising it. “Drink this.”

  A leather nozzle was against his lips. Rol put his lips about it as though it were a teat, and wine was squirted into his mouth, cold and warming at the same time. He swallowed it down: acrid, resinous wine from the shores of the Inner Reach. It was rough laborer’s drink, the kind ten thousand small-holders made for themselves up and down the southern seas, and it seemed to Rol in that moment that he had never tasted better.

  The wineskin was taken away. Rol was propped up and a flat barley-bannock was placed in his hands. “Eat.”

  He broke the bread, and took a chunk in his mouth. As he swallowed, he remembered the face that was smiling at him.

  “You’re Aveh, the carpenter.”

  “Welcome home, Captain. You look like you have traveled a hard road.”

  Rol ate more bannock. It seemed to be swelling in his meager stomach. He coughed, and Aveh set the wineskin to his mouth again, poured in another stream of the brown liquid. Rol swallowed it down, and felt the warmth of the humble stuff course through his innards.

  “The mountains. We came over them. Thef got the Astraros home, then. I’m glad.”

  “Yes. We put in almost seven weeks ago. They’ve all gone to the square to see you. I was left alone here, as harbor watch.”

  “Alone? You have your son. Where is he?”

  Aveh’s face clouded. “My son is dead, Captain.”

  Something sank in Rol’s heart. “How?”

  “A Bionari cruiser chased us past Windhaw, firing its chasers as it pursued. It could not catch us, but a lucky shot came aboard.”

  “I’m sorry, Aveh.”

  “These things happen. It’s the way of this world.”

  “This world is a filthy sty.”

  The carpenter had a strange look in his eyes—not sorrow, not anger. It was a kind of judicial detachment. “Perhaps it is,” he said.

  Aveh helped Rol below, and he tumbled into the hanging cot of the xebec’s stern-cabin, dead to the world, his travel-stained clothes still wrapped about his bony limbs and Fleam cradled in his arms. For a while there was nothing, only a darkness without dreams. Black sleep, and within it the slow repair of his blood-starved muscles and overworked bones.

  Rol slept the clock around, and when he woke, he washed himself in a bowl of fresh water brought into the cabin by Aveh. The old carpenter would have left him to his ablutions, but Rol asked him to stay while he washed and changed into some of his own clothes, left in the cabin since he had turned the ship over to Thef Gaudo, off Arbion. It seemed a long time ago, but it was only a matter of months. Now, back on board the xebec, it seemed that his sojourn in Bionar must be only some form of unquiet dream, less real than the memory of capturing this ship, of sailing the Revenant, of climbing through the slave-hold that once had festered here below his very feet, and seeing Aveh’s simpleminded son smiling at him through the filth and manacles, the degradation wrought upon him by men simply trying to turn a profit.

  The world was indeed a sty, and mankind a herd of pigs rooting through it. Rol sat on the edge of the swinging cot with the water still dripping from his face and stared at the stump on his right hand where his invisible finger still ached and wriggled. This was not the triumphant homecoming he had imagined.

  “We have Osprey and Skua docked at the moment, after barren runs to the east of the Reach,” Aveh said. “Artimion cruises two or three weeks at a time, then puts in for a few days to give the crew a run ashore. He’s chased off a couple of Bionari sloops, but has seen nothing big since you left. A longboat has just put in from the Revenant. I think Artimion has sent some news. The ship is in peak condition; I’ve worked upon her myself. It’s fine timber, that black
teak that makes her hull. I doubt I’ve seen better.”

  Rol’s clothes hung on him like sacks. He could make thumb and forefinger meet about his forearm, and had made a fresh hole in his belt with Fleam’s keen point to stop his breeches from sliding down his hips.

  “What time of day is it?”

  “Past noon.”

  “And what’s everybody doing?”

  The carpenter smiled. “They’re trying to struggle along, Captain, same as usual.”

  “Aveh, if I had not taken this ship, your son might still be alive. A slave, but alive.”

  “You cannot know that; no man alive can. You did the right thing at the time. That’s all anyone can do.”

  Some kind of foreboding was upon Rol. It was as oppressive as anything he had ever known.

  “Is it enough, you think, just trying to do the right thing?”

  “It’s more than enough.”

  “I was brought up to think of ordinary men as cattle, not worthy of consideration. Their lives and deaths were without meaning or significance. How can it be otherwise, in a world where death ends everything? Why do the right thing, if the wrong thing is easier, and in the end no one is made to pay for their misdeeds?”

  “I think some men—good men—will always do the right thing, Captain; or at least they will wish they had. Consideration of life or death does not come into it, not in the day-to-day business of their lives.”

  “I am not a good man, Aveh,” Rol choked, remembering. Rowen’s face on the battlefield at Myconn. Rafa’s body with the stones piling up upon it. Those men and boys he had had blown from the guns of the Revenant—out of anger, and because it was simply in his power. In his travels he had met with death many times, but now the collective weight of all those killings seemed to hang leaden about his heart.

  “Then try to be better,” the carpenter said. He laid a hand on Rol’s shoulder for a moment, and then got up and left.

  Rol wiped his face, nodding.

  The febrile tumult of the day before seemed to have cooled. Men and women greeted Rol as though he had never been away. They told him it was good to have him back, and by their eyes they meant it. There was not the same joyous welcome that they gave to Gallico, or even to Elias Creed; it was a subdued reception, something else. Rol realized with a flash of insight that they looked upon him with hope. They did not love him, but he reassured them somehow. He had no idea how this could have happened, but accepted it without question.

  He made his slow, painful way through the subterranean passages of the Ka, up into the light aboveground, until there was blue sky above him and the soaring towers of the city reared up against it, serene and eternal. A cool air was blowing, and as he sniffed at it, looking out to sea, part of him registered that it had backed round. The easterlies had faded, and in their place there came a cold north wind off the Winterpack at the top of the world. A fair breeze to clear Windhaw. He felt the chill of it steal into his bones.

  People walked by him in knots and ribbons. Farmers on their way to the lower fields, woodsmen out to tend the charcoal-kilns. Grubby children following their mothers with halloos and cries. He nodded at them, accepting their stares and their greetings, some murmured, some shouted. For the first time in his life he felt he fitted someplace. He had earned his right to be here.

  He walked on, and climbed one of the Ka’s crumbling cyclopean ramparts, sitting atop it like a conqueror. He had a view of the sea to the east, a wall of blue so intense and bright it watered the eyes to look upon it. In the beginning, it was said, the sea was the first thing that had come into being, a life to itself in the yawning gulf below the stars. And his grandfather had told him it would be there at the end, when all other things would be taken to its depths, to sink into the darkness there.

  “I found you,” a woman’s voice said, and he started, lost in his own imaginings. Turning, he saw Esmer looking up at him.

  “You found me,” he said.

  She climbed up beside him and took a seat on the mustard-pale stone. In the clear winter sun he saw the lines about her nose and mouth. She was sloe-eyed, smelling of sweat and woodsmoke, and her woolen robe was only slightly darker than the waves that rolled to the horizon.

  “I hear you were in love with your sister,” she said.

  “I heard that too.”

  “Gallico told me. It must be true, then.”

  Rol smiled. “Gallico always tells the truth.”

  Esmer chewed the end of one of her black braids. “I do not love you,” she said.

  “I know,” Rol retorted, surprised.

  “Just so we understand. I’m not some fresh-faced girl, and as it happens, you’re not a youngster yourself anymore.” She took his hand, speaking through her white teeth with the braid of hair still hanging from them. “But it’s good to have someone, now and then,” she went on. “We all need someone. Because there’s the here and now, and that’s all. We take what we can from the world, before the world gets what it wants from us.” She paused. “Memories are only poison.”

  Rol set an arm about her strong shoulders. “Some memories,” he said.

  Chilled through and through by the keen norther, Rol and Esmer helped each other down below again. Those he had brought over the mountains were still in the square, eating, sleeping, staring into the cooking fires with bemused looks on their faces. As he entered the firelit cavern they turned toward him, and he saw the same thing in their eyes. All these people were his now. They looked to him for a direction, and for some kind of protection. He could give them neither of those, he was sure. But that no longer meant he would not try.

  Even Miriam looked at him differently. There was a new appraisal in her glance as he joined his friends at one of the fire-pits and was handed a cup of wine by Gallico. Miriam and Esmer measured each other a moment before the dark-haired woman left. “I’ve work to do,” Esmer said. “Unlike some. Later, Cortishane.”

  Miriam leaned on her musket and shook her hair out of her face. “You’ve been having adventures, it seems, Cortishane. Fighting wars and making kings.”

  Rol drank his wine. Gallico was reclining on one elbow, eyes glimmering in the flame-light. Giffon sat leaning against his huge bulk, head down, and Elias Creed stood to one side like a stripe-bearded scarecrow. There was something in the air among them, some knowledge hovering.

  “What’s happened?” Rol asked.

  They looked amongst themselves and over their shoulders, like people unwilling to share a secret. Finally, Miriam spoke.

  “You arrived in good time. Artimion sent in word this morning. There are ships out to the north, a large convoy. They may be Mercanters, they may not. He’s putting farther out from the coast to take a look. In the meantime, we are to discreetly make all ships in the Ka ready for sea.”

  Rol closed his eyes.

  “It’ll be a Mercanter convoy,” Gallico said gruffly. “The wind this time of year…” He trailed off, convincing not even himself.

  “The wind has changed,” Rol said. “It’s fair for the Reach now. Canker knows where we are. He’s finishing the job.”

  “What must we do?” Miriam asked him. Looking into her face, Rol saw fear there for the first time since he had known her. For himself, he felt only a kind of dull hopelessness. It was not over. There would be no end to it.

  “We must evacuate the Ka,” he said at last, hating the words as he said them, hating himself as he surveyed the motley, vagabond crowd about the cooking-fires who believed themselves safe at last.

  “We don’t have enough ships,” Creed said, tugging at his beard, his cheekbones sharp angles planed by the firelight.

  “We’ll get out those we can. The rest must take to the mountains, like last time.”

  Giffon groaned wordlessly and Gallico set a hand on the boy’s head.

  “Miriam, I leave it to you,” Rol said. “This word will spread soon enough, and when it does there will be panic. You know better than I what has to be done. I make only one st
ipulation.”

  She stared at him.

  “The people we took from the slaver, and those who have come over the mountains with me, they shall go into the ships.”

  “Indeed! And why should—”

  “They’ve suffered enough, Miriam.”

  After a moment, she nodded. “Very well. Gallico, if those are men-of-war out there, then how long do we have?”

  “I don’t know.” The halftroll flapped one taloned hand. “I haven’t so much as been outside to sniff the wind.” He spoke to Rol. “We must get out to the Revenant.”

  “We’ll take a cutter,” Rol agreed. “There’s one tied up next to the Astraros. But you’re not coming out, Gallico.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “You must assume command of the Astraros from Thef and start taking on passengers as soon as she’s outfitted for sea. As soon as you’ve taken on board as many as you can, bring her out and rendezvous with the Revenant.”

  “No, Rol,” Gallico said quietly. “I go with the Revenant. It may be we’ll have to tangle with these men-of-war, if that’s what they are. You need every able officer you can cram on board. Thef can handle the xebec; all she has to do is show a clean pair of heels, after all.”

  “What about Artimion? He commands the Revenant now,” Miriam said indignantly.

  “She’s my ship,” Rol told her. “And my crew. Artimion must come back to shore and look after the Ka; that’s his command, where he can do the most good. This is not bloody-mindedness, Miriam. There’s no time for that now.”

  Miriam finally nodded.