He walked off, with a servant beside him lugging the equipment, and he left us there.
It is Lowcanton’s misfortune that it has so few good harbors, and its great misfortune that it alienated its best to the point of revolution. After a stop to load at Kast (which is drear), we passed by mile after mile of picturesque black rocks breaking the surf into snow, and behind them rose green slopes and vineyards without towns, for commerce was strangled by lack of transport. Lowcanton has an old culture—some would say too old—and it is the last nation in the Northwest to have bound peasants as well as foreign slaves.
It also had gentry and a great number of aristocracy, but what was entirely missing from their society was Canton Harbor’s specialty: the decent burgher.
“Papa—I saw something. In the water. It had a head like a horse and a neck like…”
“It’s actually called a rostrum,” I said to Navvie. “And the whole animal is called Pilot Pol. He helps ships through the rocks.”
She stared at me, and at the now-empty sea. “Pilot Pol is a dolphin. This was no dolphin.”
I joined her at the rail. The sun was going down again, and soon Lowcanton would be behind us, and Ighelun, which owes allegiance to Rezhmia but has a language related only to that of Sekret, would take its barren place. “I only know what I’m told. The captain said it was Pilot Pol.”
She shook her head. “Amazing.”
It was that night after dinner that the captain told me he had arranged our escape from the vessel. I remember I was the first passenger to leave the table, probably because most others were making up for yesterday’s lost time with the victuals.
“I’ve prepared to drop one of the boats,” he spoke into my ear as I stood on the single deck, watching a calm sea. “We can have you and your daughter on land before the man knows you have left us.”
I had almost forgotten his offer of help the night before. “Do you think it is still necessary, Captain?” I asked in surprise. “The count doesn’t seem to wish us any harm after all.”
He shook his round Felonk head soberly. “That is not what my men say. And they have been talking to the nobleman’s own servant. He means to murder you in your bed tonight.”
I thought about this. “But the painting. And what about my daughter; does he plan to kill her, too?”
The captain shrugged. “So he took your likeness. Now he will take your life. As far as your daughter—I didn’t hear. He has no need to bother killing a young woman, has he?”
“Yes, he has,” I said with some confidence. “If he is going to assault me, he has. But he might not know that. Still…” I stared down at the darkening water. It was easier to see into the depths than into the motivations of men. “What’s that?” I asked.
The captain also looked. “Oh, it’s Pilot Pol at last. I was worried about him.”
The spearhead shape of the dolphin was a good fathom under the waves, and so it was hard to make out specifics, but I knew without doubt I was not. looking at the creature I had seen yesterday. This was no time to share this information with the captain, however. “If you send us to shore, we’ll be in Lowcanton. The reason I came on this ship was to avoid Lowcanton.”
“You are within twenty miles of the border, and close to the only navigable shoreline we will reach before midnight. And, Sir Nazhuret, if we wait until Ighelun, we will have waited too long.”
I did not move from my position at the rail. “If you send us to shore, the count will know you conspired with us. He is a murderer. Does that not frighten you, Captain?”
The captain hit the wooden rail in irritation. “What do I have to be afraid of? I have eight men, and the ship is mine. If he killed me, could he sail it? Could he even row to shore? He’d be a dead man in five minutes, once my crew discovered.”
The light was failing, slowly, but the wind was very gentle. “Then, Captain, why don’t we just clap the man in irons now and avoid any inconvenience?”
He met my eyes only for a moment. “I have no proof. My men—they would fight for me like tigers, but in a court of law I would be abandoned,” Now his pale brown eyes were stern and fixed. “I want very much to avoid murder on my own ship. You know what it means to have unlawful death on a Felonk vessel; some would demand we burn her.”
“To sink my spirit. I know. But there is one thing I don’t believe you know, Captain, and that is, in a duel between the count and me, it is not certain he would win.”
“I agree,” said the count, standing at the open doorway of the main cabin. His arms were folded over his chest and he smiled. He was armed with a rapier. “It is not certain I would lose, either.”
The captain snagged my left arm and began to haul me over the deck. “I don’t want bloodshed on my ship!” he shouted.
“I’m sure you don’t,” said Dinaos agreeably. He stepped forward.
I released myself from the captain’s grasp and pushed the man away from me. I stared at the Lowcantoner noble and could think of nothing to say.
The captain ran to the other rail, where two sets of cranes held the lifeboats, and it seemed he was planning an escape of his own, for he leaped headfirst into the first one. Out of it came sailing my own inelegant dowhee, which clattered across the boards and skidded to a stop five feet in front of me. I let it lie.
“You were in my cabin, Captain? You loaded our belongings?”
Dinaos, from his central vantage point, could see over the gunwale of the boat. “If so, Aminsanaur, you and your lovely daughter have very few belongings.” Casually he strolled over and peered over the rocking edge of the lifeboat. “Two canvas bags, a long roll, and what looks like a telescope. How interesting: a telescope.”
He stood between me and the boat. The captain, pressed warily against the bow of the lifeboat, drew a flageolet and blew on it. I heard hurrying footsteps.
Now the count drew his rapier and I picked up my dowhee. I had not fought many left-handed duelists, for there are not so many. I wondered if that was part of his strength as a swordsman.
There appeared from the stern four men, three of them barefoot Felonks. Two had clubs in their hands, but one carried the islanders’ famous sling and one held a small throwing net. They approached together, like beaters on a hunt.
A sword of any kind outreaches a club, but is no defense against lead shot from a sling. Most swords, such as the rapier, are worse than useless against a netsman, but not the broad-bladed, handy dowhee. A Felonk weapon after all. I watched them come and I watched Dinaos.
“You don’t really have any friends here,” he said lightly, and he cut the air in a pattern that made the attackers pause.
“I know,” I answered and moved toward the netsman.
“Kwaff a rudet-el!” shouted the captain from his perch in the rocking boat. Translated from the Felonk, that means “Kill the blond.”
The net whirled at my face, but I hit the deck, skidding forward, and cut it out of the sailor’s hands. He screamed; my cut wasn’t clean. I heard a thud as a round of shot hit someone—Dinaos—and I heard the captain scrambling out of the boat.
A wooden truncheon was descending toward my head. It rang against my blade, and then I cut the throat of the man who held it, dousing myself in sickening blood. I heard an explosion, and a second later a weak scream, full of breath and quickly over. I pulled my feet under me on the slippery red deck.
The captain had a hole in his forehead. It was very neat and without powder. The back of his head was less neat. He lay spread on the deck almost behind Dinaos. Also on the deck was another dowhee: one I had never seen before.
The count was braced as well as could be against the side of the lifeboat. His right arm was flat against his body and he was working his hand tentatively. The rapier in his left hand had a slight tinge of red along its length, and the sailor gasping on the deck before him had a small red hole in his chest. The man whose hands I had sliced knelt in his own blood and cried, while another lay on his stomach with the jeweled hil
t of a little dagger just below and to the right of the junction of neck and shoulders. There was no blood to be seen around it.
Navvie came up to us on tiptoe, feeling the barrel of her pistol for heat. She looked at the weeping sailor, and then at the one she had killed. “I was off in aim, here, Papa. The pistol makes me overconfident, and…” She glanced at the gory deck like a housewife in dismay. “… Enemies rarely come singly.”
Count Dinaos wiped his rapier on the shirt of his dead man and with awkward care, put it into its scabbard. “I am in your debt, my lady. I have never been in such debt to a woman before.”
Navvie sighed and produced from her bag her little powder funnel. In the same calm manner in which she mixed tinctures for medical use, she filled the gun with powder, wadding, and shot. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. She took the arms of the man with sliced hands and looked at the injuries. “Clean,” she said. The rapier-impaled man she looked at, but said nothing. Neither did she try to move him. She hopped over the body of the one she had killed, pulled out her mother’s dagger, and with no modesty, took the count’s right hand in hers and started an examination. She had difficulty, being less than his shoulder in height, and she pulled him down by the other shoulder. He met my gaze in astonishment, and then he laughed. It was an uncertain laugh.
“I don’t think we have time for this, Navvie,” I said. “There are other crewmen here—at least four of them, and then the passengers. I don’t know what they’ll think.”
Dinaos slipped his right hand into his belt and drew swagger over him like a cloak. “By God, my reputation is foul enough already, my duke, my lady. All will believe I slaughtered these men as a postprandial.”
Navvie leaped up and looked into the lifeboat. “Are we going somewhere, Papa? You should tell me things.”
Now the rest of the crew began appearing, and one Cantoner burgher—a silk trader, if memory serves me—appeared from the cabin, stared, and vanished again. The crewmen did not seem disposed to violence, but hugged the outer wall of the main cabin, mouths open.
“How so, when nobody tells me anything? But whether or not I planned this flight, I think we’d better take it, or spend the next few days where we stand, like aurochs in a circle, waiting to be attacked by wolves.”
“Another reason for leaving,” added the count. “We’ve killed the captain and half the crew. Who is going to manage the ship? Are you nautical? I am not.”
I shook my head.
“I can only handle a small sailboat,” said Navvie. “More than ten square feet of sail and I’m lost.”
Count Dinaos laughed once more, as though my daughter had made a joke. He laughed very often when Navvie was being serious.
“So, my new friends. I suggest we take this boat and go, as the so-kind captain intended for you to do. Only perhaps we should not sail into the most convenient harbor, eh?”
“You think he has an ambush waiting?” I asked, and at the same time Navvie said, “But what about the other passengers?”
“I think that was his intention from the beginning, my duke. These Felonka despise us, Lowcanton and High Velonya alike. They take money from one to kill the other with the practicality of a Harborman and no more scruples. And lady, I say to hell with the other passengers on this ill-disposed tub. At any moment one of them may try to kill us.”
“You don’t know that,” said Navvie, frowning.
I could see no good end to this discussion, so I held up my hand portentously and the gesture did what no amount of argument could have done. In silence I approached a terrified sailor, who was still pressed against the wall of the main cabin. “Fellow, are you well disposed to my companions and I?” I asked him, and he nodded fit to loosen his head from his neck.
I continued. “Have you any skill for sailing this ship?” and his affirmative reply was equally vehement. “Will you be able to see her to shore without the presence of the captain?”
Navvie stepped forward and crossed her arms over her bosom, regarding the little Felonk, hardly larger than she. “Are you a rich man?” she asked him, and added, “Have you palaces in every port? Do the ears of kings wait for your pronouncement?”
Still the sailor nodded. “Make what you will of that,” she said to me. “I’d be surprised if he speaks any Cantoner or Velonyie at all.”
The count had his servant by the arm and whispered to him for a few seconds before releasing him. “What matter, my lady, whether any of these can sail, when none of us can do better? Do they need our company in their difficulty?”
My little daughter set her chin in a manner that only I knew. “No, my lord. Not our company, but our lifeboat. If we take one, there will not be enough room on the other in case they wreck. We will be guilty of murder: many murders.”
Count Dinaos had pale brown eyes, which were flickering from Navvie’s face to my own in meditative fashion. His hand, not tense in any way, rested near the hilt of his sword. “And yet, pretty thing, I want to take the boat. How do you propose to stop me?”
Navvie was twelve feet away from the count, and that by no accident. “With this,” she said, and aimed her pistol at him. At his crotch, to be exact.
Dinaos surprised me utterly by smiling. “You would kill one man who has stood your friend, to save others you do not know from a danger that may not even exist?”
“I don’t have to kill you,” she said, and the barrel of the pistol moved almost imperceptibly. “You are already injured, and an extra laceration in the foot or knee will be sufficient.”
I saw the figure of the count’s servant pattering up behind her, and moved to intercept him, but the man took one glance at the situation and swung wide. He was burdened with a set of good leather bags, which he dropped beside his master before retreating to the rail, where he stood and watched.
“This situation is piquant, but all in all, academic,” said Dinaos, and he bent to open the largest of the bags. Within I saw beautiful linen and lace: nothing with paint stains. “There is a perfectly good ship’s captain on board, and he will doubtless take control before he allows any harm to befall. Sieben, here, was captain of a crew of twenty-three before they caught him—weren’t you, my pet?”
The servant looked up at us without expression.
“Show them your arm, Sieben.”
The servant took off his leather jacket, and burned onto his upper arm was the split diagonal cross that indicated a man condemned to slavery. Most such pulled the oars for Lowcanton’s heavy oreships.
“Sieben was a pirate,” said the count, and in his voice was the pride of a man who brags that his dog—his smiling, fawning hound—is part wolf.
“You can handle this ship?” Navvie raised her voice to reach the servant—the slave—standing against the rail, just as I had asked the master. “You will leave him among this bunch?”
Again Dinaos said, “Sieben was a pirate,” and this time he sounded even more like the man claiming his dog was a wolf. The former pirate himself nodded at Navvie’s question, but in a more controlled manner than had the Felonk sailor. The wind was coming up, and he donned his jacket again.
“What if the others don’t obey you?” asked Navvie, but she was reassured enough to put the pistol up. I moved between her and the count, in case her persistence irritated him unduly.
Sieben glanced at his master, and there was human feeling in his face as their eyes met. “Sieben cannot speak, my lady. He has no tongue. But nonetheless he has no difficulty obtaining obedience aboard a ship. Ability will out. And—he has a certain reputation. Now. Can we make our escape?”
I was not sure this was a good idea. I was not sure of anything. We might have stayed till morning and made sure the land we struck was Ighelun, but we might not see the morning. The ship’s crew and passengers had begun to crawl out of the cabin, and there was no reading those wary faces.
Dinaos’s bags were dumped into the lifeboat, but he called a halt to everything and sat upon one of the boat’s crossplanks
and began to compose a letter. When he was done, he called for a flaming wood splint, melted wax, and sealed the thing with his carnelian signet. The slave took it, blew the seal hard, and thrust the sheet of paper under his shirt.
“It says he is acting for me. Otherwise, a man with the brand will lose his life for taking such authority.”
I knew this much, but Navvie had not grown up in the presence of slaves. She looked at the roughly dressed Sieben with a girl’s sympathy. “Should I leave him a pistol, Papa?” she asked.
Count Dinaos made great circles out of his eyes. “Your pistol, my lady? What a sacrifice. With what will you protect yourself against me if you give him such a gift?”
She sat by the midoars of the boat, her legs curled under her. “Well, my lord, you might find out.”
I asked both of them to stop this bickering. Navvie sighed, Dinaos stared, and the boat began to descend, winched down by the invaluable pirate. “Don’t you lose my oil study, Sieben,” shouted Dinaos. “And if it dries dusty, I will bury you in cinders!”
Sieben grinned back at the count, as though something very different had been said. I wondered at the empty cavern of the mouth behind those broken teeth, and I wondered what sort of loyalty a broken pirate might have.
The water seemed much rougher in a small clinker-built rowboat. I took a set of oars and Dinaos approached the other, to be immediately replaced by Navvie as his wound and the movement of the sea did their work on him.
The tall side of the ship receded very slowly, more from its own forward motion than that of our little craft. It seemed Sieben’s first act as captain was to throw the bodies of the slain into the water, where they floated around us. I wished he could have waited.
The light was low, but there was a moon just two days short of full, and by its light I could see the white glow of beach beyond the waves. Also the black of rocks. I wondered how much control we would have of the boat once it was pulled by the surf. I am an inelegant swimmer, and Navvie has had little opportunity to practice.
The Lens of the World Trilogy Page 59