At the Dawn’s side, Jute heard some astounding offers shouted in accents out of Quon Tali, Malyntaeas, Falar, and even Seven Cities. Half the cargo in return for transport, one fellow bellowed. A tempting offer; but the large armed crew of hireswords surrounding the heaped crates put Jute off.
Buen suggested, ‘Perhaps we should pick ’em up. Easy money.’
Jute shook his head. ‘They’d swamp us. Probably try to take the Dawn.’
The first mate sighed wistfully. ‘Too bad. All that cargo brought all this way just to rot. Might be kegs of wine from Darujhistan out there…’
‘Drop it.’
Buen pushed himself away from the side. ‘Thought we came to make some money,’ he grumbled as he went. Jute ignored the muttering. Always griping; it was the man’s way. He walked back to the stern and Ieleen next to Lurjen at the tiller. He studied the vessels following. The Malazan Ragstopper had swung in behind, the Resolute next, while the Supplicant followed far offshore. Seemed Lady Orosenn wished to keep some distance between herself and everyone else.
‘What do you see?’ Ieleen asked.
Jute scanned the shore once again. He saw … futility. And greed. ‘Blind stupid avarice,’ he said.
‘We’re here.’
He snorted. True enough. And what had they brought in their hold to the largest gold strike in living memory? Food. Not weapons or timber or tools or cloth. Food. Flour and molasses, crates of dried fruit, stoneware jugs of cheap spirits. Goods for sale. And once the hold was empty, why, what to fill it with but sacks of gold, of course!
Jute shook his head at the stunning naïvety of it. It had all seemed so easy back in Falar.
Now … well, now he believed they would be lucky just to get out of this alive.
The coast passed in a series of flats and lingering sheets of ice. They passed vessels drawn up on the shore and raised on crude log dry docks, while crews worked alongside sawing logs into planks and burned fires to reduce resin to recaulk seams.
Then the stranded vessels and would-be fortune-hunters thinned. Those ships that couldn’t limp along any further had all pulled in or sunk by this point. Those that could continue did so, leaving their fellows behind. The old unspoken law of reaching out to take what one could and damning the rest to Hood’s cold embrace.
The raw ugly ruthlessness of it sickened Jute. What a waste! What a stupid urge to enslave one’s fortune to – the empty promise of unguarded riches to be picked up by anyone. Where was the merit in any such gathered power or riches? Merely because you were first to snatch it up? Could not the second person there simply kill you and take it for himself?
Best not to invest in such easily transferable value, Jute determined. His gaze fell to the blind face of his love and he rested a hand upon hers.
‘I feel your eyes on me,’ she murmured. ‘What’s on your mind, luv?’
‘I just realized that I’ve risked everything to reach a destination I don’t even want to be at.’
A secretive smile broadened Ieleen’s lips. ‘Glad to hear that, luv.’
Jute frowned. ‘But you didn’t object…’
‘That’s what journeys are for, my love. You have to take the path to learn where you want to be.’
‘The philosopher wife speaks.’
She gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘We mates sit and wait. And, if we’re lucky, our partners finally catch up to where we’ve been all the while.’
Jute crossed his arms. ‘Oh? Been a long wait, has it?’
‘Damnably long. But now that you’re here, maybe we can go home.’
‘Certainly, light of my life. We’ll just sell our goods at outrageously inflated prices, load up with successful fortune-hunters groaning beneath the weight of all their gold, and head home.’
‘We should just cut out the middle and turn round now.’
Jute laughed. ‘And what would the crew think of that?’
Her frosty orbs shifted as if to look ahead, and though he knew her to be blind, Jute couldn’t shake the feeling that her sight was penetrating all the distance to their goal. She sighed. ‘We’re sailing into a nest of pirates, thieves and murderers.’
Jute tried to shake his premonition of trouble. ‘Then it’s a good thing we have a mercenary army with us, isn’t it?’
She shook her head. ‘A last mission, Tyvar said. Have you not thought about that?’
Indeed, it hadn’t occurred to him. He waved it off, then remembered, and made a non-committal noise. ‘Don’t you worry. We’ll raise anchor and ship out if we must, don’t doubt that.’
They sailed through the day and night. The Ragstopper and the Resolute kept pace, while the Supplicant held out in deeper water, far offshore. Jute wondered at Lady Orosenn’s strategy, but it was the listing Ragstopper that held his attention; the vessel was so low in the water, so sluggish and lumbering, it was a wonder that it still held its bows above the surface. The collection of rotted timbers that it had crumbled into seemed little more than a glorified raft.
Late on the second day, smoke hazed the air further up the coast ahead. A stink reached them, the commingled reek of human settlement: smoke, excrement, rot, and cooking. Jute had been long from it and it churned his stomach. They rounded a low headland still gripped in ice and there ahead lay a broad bay fronted by wide mud flats. An immense tent city swept in an arc all along the shore. Smoke rose from countless fires. What must be a hundred vessels lay pulled up on the flats, or anchored in deeper water out in the bay. The coast swept up from here in broad forested valleys and ridges that climbed to foothills obscured by hanging banners of fog. Above this vista reared the snow-draped shoulders of a range of mountains. The Salt range, according to sources he’d heard recounted.
Jute was astounded by the number of ships that had succeeded in the journey – yet this must be the barest fraction of the entire fleets of vessels that had originally set out. All testament to the driving power of greed and the lure of easy riches. He felt saddened by the spectacle though he himself was a merchant, a businessman; it struck him as a damning condemnation of humankind.
‘Which way?’ Lurjen asked from the tiller.
Jute shook himself from his reverie. He gestured ahead. ‘Make for one of the docks there near the centre.’
‘Aye, aye.’
Lurjen chose one of a number of log docks that stood tall above the flats and extended out over the water. The Silver Dawn came alongside, ropes were thrown and secured to log bollards. His crew wrestled with a gangplank. Jute studied the jumbled mass of countless tents, the men and women coming and going, the crews cutting wood to repair vessels, build more docks, and raise buildings. He estimated the numbers here in the several thousands. A city. An instant city utterly without planning or organization, as far as he could see. Tents lay like fields of mushrooms, all without logic or order. No straight thoroughfares existed, no streets or lanes; all was a chaotic mess. He was dismayed to see men and women squatting over latrine pits right next to open-air kitchens where the steam from boiling pots melded with the steam rising from the pits to waft over the entire mass of humanity.
A far worse reek rose from the flats where cadavers lay rotting, most having sloughed their flesh. An open-air graveyard where the dead were obviously simply thrown from the docks and shore. Hordes of ghost-crabs wandered from corpse to corpse like clouds of locusts, gorging themselves.
The ragged fortune-hunters who crowded the dock waving and shouting were no more reassuring. Ragged and starving they were, in tattered shirts and canvas trousers, with mud-caked bare feet. They shouted their services as stevedores. Jute wouldn’t trust a pot of shit to any one of them.
Lurjen gestured further along the dock and Jute was relieved to see the Ragstopper coming alongside. Thank the gods for that. He peered around for the Resolute and was troubled to see she had dropped anchor in mid-bay, not far from the Supplicant.
The crowd actually had the temerity to try climbing the gangway. Buen was pushing them back. He cast
a questioning glance to Jute, who shook a negative. ‘No work,’ Buen yelled. ‘Not today. G’wan with you!’
‘Bastards!’ one shouted back.
‘You’ll get yours! You’ll see!’
Buen pulled his truncheon and waved them off. Someone new pushed through the crowd: short, grey-haired, in rags just as dilapidated and dirty. Cartheron Crust. Jute hurried down the gangway to meet him.
‘How are you?’
‘Better. Been better.’
‘Recovered?’
The old captain pulled a hand down his patchy beard. ‘Somewhat. Hard bein’ reminded of one’s mortality like that. Feelin’ old now, have to say.’
Jute gestured to the shore. ‘What do you think?’
‘Fuckin’ mess.’
‘Quite.’
Cartheron waved him on. ‘C’mon, let’s go see who’s in charge of this dump.’
Jute held back. ‘Just the two of us?’
Cartheron didn’t stop. ‘Yeah. Trust me. It’ll be just fine.’
Jute shouted back to Buen on the gangway: ‘Making arrangements!’ and hurried after him.
A knot of eight armed men and women blocked the base of the dock. They wore styles of leather armour from all over: the detailed engraved and enamelled leathers of Seven Cities; the plain layered leathers common to south Genabackis; even an expensive set of leaf-shaped scaled leathers clearly crafted in Darujhistan. The probable leader stepped up. He was a big black-bearded fellow in a long coat of mail. A longsword hung shoved through his wide leather belt.
‘Welcome to Wrongway,’ this fellow announced as they neared.
‘Wrongway,’ Cartheron echoed. ‘Funny.’
The bearded fellow grinned. ‘Yeah. Lying Gell thought so.’
‘Lying Gell…?’
The man hitched his belt up his broad fat belly. ‘Lying Gell, Baron of Wrongway.’
Cartheron turned to Jute. ‘There you go – that didn’t take so long, did it?’ He addressed the spokesman: ‘And you are…?’
The man’s grin widened over broken browned teeth. ‘They call me Black Bull.’
‘Black Bull? Why’s that?’
The grin sank into a scowl. ‘That you don’t want to find out.’
Cartheron waved the man off. ‘If you say so. Thanks for the welcome.’ He moved to pass.
Others of the eight shifted to block the way. Black Bull chuckled. ‘You don’t get it. Docking fees.’
‘Docking fees?’
‘Aye. Docking fees.’
Cartheron shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘How much?’
The spokesman cast a lazy glance over to a scarred woman with long hair the colour of straw. She wore the expensive Darujhistani leather armour. She supplied, ‘Two vessels – forty hundredths-weights.’
‘There you go. Forty hundredths-weights.’
Jute asked: ‘Forty hundredths-weights of what?’
Black’s grin became crafty. ‘Why, of gold dust, a’course.’
‘But we just got here. We don’t have any gold dust.’
Black shrugged his humped shoulders. ‘Well … that’s just too bad. Have to escort you to our exchange tent.’
Cartheron raised a hand for a pause. ‘Listen, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not exchange money in a tent owned by a guy named Lying Gell.’
Black pursed his lips. ‘Fine. You can just turn round and go home then.’
‘How about coins in equivalency? Silver?’
Black shot a glance to the woman, rubbed his chin. ‘Well now, that’s highly irregular. Have to be a surcharge on that. An extra fee of…’
‘Fifty per cent,’ the woman said. To Jute, her grin was far hungrier and scarier than Black Bull’s.
‘Fine,’ Cartheron sighed. He gestured to Jute. ‘Pay the man.’
Jute blinked. ‘Pardon? Me? Pay?’
Cartheron waved him forward. ‘’Course!’
The hireswords parted to reveal a table. The woman in the expensive armour leaned against it and urged Jute onward. Jute pulled out his purse and started setting coin on the scarred wood planks. The woman crossed her arms, counting. Upon closer inspection, the scars appeared to be knife slashes. As if someone had deliberately savaged her face. She caught Jute eyeing her and pointed a finger down. He quickly lowered his gaze. In the end, it took every silver coin he possessed to satisfy her. Sighing her irritation, she finally waved him off and brushed all the coin into an ironbound wooden box.
Black Bull held out an arm, inviting them onward. ‘There you go. That wasn’t so hard, was it? Wrongway welcomes you.’
Cartheron pushed forward and Jute followed. The old Napan captain picked what seemed a random narrow mud trail that led up the gently rising slope of the shore. Before they’d made five turns Jute had had to step over three bodies. One he was certain was dead, what with his throat slit and the stream of blood that stained the already ochre-red mud a far deeper crimson. The other two, a woman and a man, he suspected to have merely passed out dead drunk in the muck.
Cartheron appeared to be making for the noisiest – and largest – tent nearby. Within, under the raised eaves, was the equivalent of a tavern. A band, of sorts, played stringed and wind instruments. The crowd roared their encouragement from tables assembled from wave-wrack and ship’s timbers. Fights broke out and spilled into the mud surrounding the great tent. A long bar separated the patrons from the kegs of spirits. On the counter stood several fine weight scales of the sort one might find in a goldsmith’s.
The skinny old captain mortified Jute by stepping right up on to the nearest table. The men and women drinking there yanked their leather and earthenware tankards from beneath his muddy boots. ‘What in the name of the Matron you doin’?’ one huge bear of a fellow bellowed and Jute flinched – an ex-Urdomen from the old Pannion Annexation, for certain.
Cartheron ignored him. He set two fingers to his mouth and emitted the most piercing whistle that had ever punished Jute’s ears. The entire tavern became instantly silent. Every face turned to him. Even the musicians froze. Cartheron raised a hand, signed something, circled the arm overhead, then stepped down from the table and exited the tent. Jute, still somewhat stunned, hurried to follow.
Outside, he caught up. ‘What was that? What’s going on?’
‘Now we wait.’
The music started up once more. The crowd laughed and jeered, perhaps at Cartheron’s expense. After a few minutes two men came out, followed by a third. The first two were thick-shouldered and heavy, obvious ex-soldiers. Both possessed bushy flame-hued beards.
‘Names?’ Cartheron demanded.
‘Red,’ said one.
‘Rusty.’
‘How’s the gold-huntin’ business treating you?’
‘Piss-poor,’ said Rusty.
‘You in?’ Both nodded. ‘Okay, spread the word – Cartheron’s in town.’
Red’s arm rose to salute but he stopped his fist before it struck his chest and lowered it. ‘Sorry.’ They ambled off.
The third man approached. He looked like nothing more than a starving itinerant, thin unto emaciation. His mussed pale brown hair was going to premature grey. His face was pinched and his small close-set eyes were yellow with what Jute recognized as a heavy addiction to the khall leaf. Indeed, one cheek was fat with a ball of it.
‘You look like you are in need of some gold dust,’ the fellow called out, quite loudly.
‘No we’re not,’ Jute answered. ‘Get out of here, y’damned khallhead.’
Cartheron raised a hand to quiet Jute. He was studying the man closely, frowning in something like wary recognition. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘we’re lookin’ for gold dust.’
‘I know who has it – and who doesn’t.’
‘Good. Show us round and we’ll send some your way.’
The man smiled dreamily. Something in his lazy distracted manner made Jute’s skin crawl. It was as if he was moving underwater. And he was constantly brushing at his tattered shirt, tapping his fi
ngertips together, and shifting his weight from side to side in a kind of weaving dance. ‘Need to get some to have some,’ he murmured.
Jute thought he saw Cartheron sign something to the man before the fellow waved an arm, inviting them on. ‘This way,’ he said vaguely.
He started off ahead of them and Cartheron pulled Jute back, whispering, ‘You keep out of this one’s way, yes?’
Jute was utterly confused, but nodded. ‘Certainly. If you say so.’
The khall-head glanced back at them, a languorous smile on his lips, and urged them on. ‘Come, come. This way.’
He led them to a tent containing another of the informal bars and here Cartheron repeated his performance. Afterwards, he led them on a lazy walk round an intervening set of tents before squatting on his skinny haunches in the mud.
Three men and one woman came ambling in from different directions to join them. Jute was startled to see by the cut of their hair and facial scars the mark of north Genabackan tribals – Barghast half-breeds perhaps. But veterans, cashiered Malazan veterans. They stood stiffly before Cartheron but couldn’t stop shooting each other excited grins.
Cartheron looked them up and down then nodded to himself. ‘Make the rounds. Tap any old hands you can find. Spread the word. We’ll rendezvous at…’ He turned to their guide. ‘I’m looking for a place with a nice view.’
The man tilted his head to stare off into the distance. He smiled, but emptily. ‘Anna’s Alehouse,’ he said.
Cartheron waved the four away. ‘There you go.’ They nodded and their grins turned savage with glee. They wandered off in different directions.
Jute watched all this feeling his brows crimping harder and harder, and finally he had to ask: ‘What’s going on? What are you doing?’
‘Crewing up.’ Cartheron urged their guide onward. ‘Let’s go.’
The khall-head led them to three more tent-bars and three more times Cartheron repeated his performance. By this time, Jute noticed among the crowds of men and women coming and going about them a number of the ex-soldiers here and there, surrounding them, keeping pace. Like some sort of guard. At last, Cartheron turned to their guide. ‘Anna’s Alehouse now, I think.’
The Malazan Empire Series: (Night of Knives, Return of the Crimson Guard, Stonewielder, Orb Sceptre Throne, Blood and Bone, Assail) (Novels of the Malazan Empire) Page 369