An Empire Unacquainted With Defeat

by Glen Cook

  During the exchange Student's eyes never left his book.

  It was one we had taken off a Daimiellian two-master months earlier. We were due to take another vessel soon. (Maybe The One. I hoped. I prayed. Colgrave had vowed to remain at sea till he found her.) Our stores were running low. There was mold down to the heart of the bread. Maggots were growing in the salt pork, which had gotten wet in a recent storm. There was no fruit to fight the scurvy. And we were down to our last barrel of grog. One lousy barrel would not last me long.

  I had no stomach for a beach raid just there, much as I wanted to feel earth and grass beneath my soles. We were a half-dozen leagues north of Cape Blood, off Itaskian coasts. Those were shores Trolledyngjans habitually plundered. And it was their season for hell raising. Coast watchers were, likely, considering us with cold, hard eyes at that moment.

  "Sail ho!"

  Men scrambled, clearing the decks. I glanced up. As usual, Lank Tor, our chief boatswain, was in the crow's nest. He was as crazy as the Old Man.

  Colgrave stalked from his cabin. As always, he was armed and clothed as if about to present himself at court. The boatswain's cry, like a warlock's incantation, had conjured him to the weather decks. "Where away?" He would not go below till we had caught her. Or she shook us. That seldom happened.

  I peered to seaward. There were always squalls off Cape Blood. That day was no exception, though the storm was playing coy, lying on the horizon instead of embracing the coast. Prey ships liked to duck in to escape. The rocky shoreline offered no hope better than drowning amidst wreckage and thundering surf.

  "On the bow!" Tor shouted. "Just round the point and making the landward tack."

  "Ah-ha-ha-ha," the Old Man roared, slapping his good thigh.

  His face had been destroyed by fire. The whole left side was a grotesque lava flow of scar tissue. His left cheekbone showed an inch-square iceberg tip of bare bone.

  "We've got her. Had her before we ever saw her."

  Cape Blood was a long, jagged, desolate finger of rock diddling the ocean across the paths of cold northern and warm southern currents. If the ship were round the point and on a landward tack, she was almost certainly caught. We had a strong breeze astern. She would have to shift sail for a long seaward tack, coming toward us, piling onto the rocks round the headland. That turn, and bending on sail, would take time too.

  "Shift your course a point to starboard," Colgrave roared at the helmsman. Toke, our First Officer, so summarily relieved of his watch, shrugged and went to watch Hengis and Fat Poppo, who had the chip log over the side.

  "Making eight knots," he announced a moment later. The Old Man eyed the sails. But there was no way we could spread more canvas. With a breeze like the one we had we always ran hell-bent, hoping to catch somebody napping.

  "She's seen us," Tor shouted. "Starting to come around. Oh! A three-master. Caravel-rigged." We were a caravel ourselves, a stubby, pot-bellied vessel high in the bows and stern.

  The Old Man's face brightened. Glowed. The ship we were hunting was a caravel. Maybe this was The One.

  That was what we called her aboard Vengeful Dragon. No one knew her true name, though she had several given her by other sailors. The Ghost Ship. The Hell Ship. The Phantom Reaver. Like that.

  "What colors?" Colgrave demanded.

  Tor did not answer. We were not that close. Colgrave realized it and did not ask again.

  I did not know if the phantom were real or not. The story had run the western coast almost since the beginning of sea trade, changing to fit the times. It told of a ghost ship crewed by dead men damned to sail forever, pirating, never to set foot on land, never to see Heaven or Hell, till they had redeemed themselves for especially hideous crimes. The nature of their sins had never been defined.

  We had been hunting her for a long time, pirating ourselves while we pursued the search. Someday we would find her. Colgrave was too stubborn to quit till he had settled his old score. Or till we, like so many other crews who had met her, fed the fish while she went on to her next kill.

  The Old Man's grievance involved the fire that had ruined his face, withered his left arm, and left him with a rolling limp, like a fat galleon in a heavy ground swell. The phantom, like so many pirates, always fired her prey when she finished with them. Colgrave, somehow, had survived such a burning.

  His entire family, though, had gone down with the vessel.

  The Captain, apparently, had been a rich man. Swearing he would find The One, he had purchased the Vengeful Dragon. Or so the story went, as it had been told to us.

  None of us knew how he had gotten rich in the first place. All we knew about him was that he had a terrible temper, that he compensated for his disfigurement by dressing richly, that he was a genius as a pirate, and that he was absolutely insane.

  How long had we been prowling those coasts? It seemed an age to me. But they had not caught us yet, not the Itaskian Navy, or the witch-mastered corsairs of the Red Isles, or the longshipmen of Trolledyngja, nor the warships of the many coastal city-states. No. We caught them, like spiders who hunted spiders. And we continued our endless hunt.

  Always we hunted. For the three-master caravel with the deadman crew.

  II

  "Steward!" Colgrave called. "Half pint for all hands." The Old Man seldom spoke at less than a bellow.

  Old Barley flashed a sloppy salute and went looking for the key to the grog locker. That was my cue. Grog had been scarce lately. I shuffled off to be first in line.

  From behind his book Student remarked to Little Mica, "Must be rough to be a wino on the Vengeful D."

  I threw him a daggers look. He did not glance up. He never did. He was not interested in observing the results of his razor-tongued comments.

  As always, Priest fell in behind me, tin cup in hand. Service aboard Vengeful Dragon and a taste for alcohol were all we had in common. I suppose, though, that that made him closer to me than to anybody else. He was universally, thoroughly hated. He was always trying to save our souls, to renounce sin and this mad quest for a phantom killer little more evil than we.

  Priest was strange. He was blue-assed hell in a boarding party. He went in like he meant to cutlass his devil right back to Hell.

  The Kid and my friend Whaleboats jockeyed for the third position, till the Old Man turned his one ice-blue eye their way. The Kid did a fast fade. He was supposed to be on watch.

  Kid had not been with us long. We had picked him up off a penteconter in the Scarlotti Gulf. We had taken her in full view of Dunno Scuttari's wharves. Their little navy had been too scared to come out after us.

  Kid was crazy-wild, would do anything to get attention. He and I did not get along. I reminded him of the headmaster of the orphanage he had been fleeing when he had stowed away aboard the penteconter.

  I had heard that that headmaster had been murdered, and arson, that had taken a score of lives, had been committed on the orphanage. The Kid would not say anything one way or the other

  We kept our sins to ourselves.

  Few of us got along. Dragon remained taut to her main truck with anger and hatred.

  Ah. A life on the rolling wave, a cruise of the Vengeful D., buccaneering with sixty-eight lunatics commanded by the maddest captain on the western ocean . . . . Sometimes it was Hell. Sheer, screaming Hell.

  Old Barley was having trouble finding the key. The old coot never could remember where he had put it so he would not miss it next time he needed it.

  "Shake a leg down there, buzzard bait. Or I'll bend you to the bowsprit for the gulls."

  That would get him moving. Barley was a coward. Scared of his own shadow. You told him something like that, and he thought you were serious, he would carve you into pieces too small for fish bait. He was the only man aboard meaner than Colgrave and deadlier than Priest.

  Curious what fear could do to a man.

  Little Mica, leaning on the rail, said, "I can see her tops."

  "So who cares?" Whaleboats repli
ed. "We'll see all we want in an hour." He had been through the stalking dance so often it was all a dreadful bore for him now.

  Whaleboats had picked up his nickname long ago, in an action where, when we had been becalmed half a mile from a prospective victim, he had suggested we storm her from whaleboats. It had been a good idea, except that it had not worked. They had brought up their ballast stones and dropped them through the bottoms of our boats. Then the breeze had freshened. We had had to swim back to Dragon while they sailed off. That vessel was one of the few that had gotten away.

  Mica persisted. "Why's she running already? She can't know who we are."

  "What difference does it make?" Whaleboats growled. "Barley, if you're not up here in ten seconds . . . ."

  "Ask Student," I suggested. "He's got all the answers." But some he would not tell, like how to retire from the crew.

  She was running because she had to. Anyone beating round Cape Blood who encountered a vessel running before the wind did so. Nine times out of ten, the second vessel was a pirate who had been lying in ambush behind the headland. I had never understood why the Itaskian Navy did not keep a squadron on station there, to protect their shipping. Maybe it was because the weather was always rotten. That day's fairness was unusual in the extreme.

  Nervously, I glanced at the squall line. Had it moved closer? I hated rough weather. Made me sick. Grog only made it worse.

  Old Barley showed up with the bucket he had tapped off the barrel. There had better be some on the three-master, I thought. Doing without made me mean.

  The Old Man stood behind Barley, beaming at us like a proud father. For that moment you would have thought he had completely forgotten his prey in his concern for his crew.

  Dragonfeathers. The hunt was all that ever mattered to him.

  He would sacrifice everyone and everything, even himself, to fulfill his quest. And we all knew it.

  I thought, I could reach out with my fish knife . . . schlock-schlock, and spill his guts on the deck. End it all right now.

  I would have to remind Tor to get sand up from ballast before we closed with the caravel. To absorb the blood. He never remembered. He forgot a lot from day to day, remembering only his name and trade. He came to every battle with the eagerness of a male virgin.

  It would have been easy to have gotten Colgrave. He was so vulnerable. Crippled as he was, he was no infighter. But I did not try. None of us ever did, though we all thought about it. I could see the speculation on a dozen faces then.

  So easy. Kill the crazy bastard, run Dragon aground, and forget hunting spook ships.

  You'll never do it, never do it, echoed through my mind.

  Any other crew on any other ship would have strangled the insane sonofabitch ages earlier.

  III

  "I can see her mainsail," said Little Mica. "She's shifting sail again."

  "Speed it up, Barley," said the Old Man. He put that cold eye on me as I tried to sneak my cup in again. A half pint was barely enough to warm the throat.

  Better be hogsheads full on that three-master, I thought.

  "Looks like she's trying for the squall," Tor called down. "I make her a Freylander. She was showing personal colors but got them in before I could read them."

  Ah. That meant there was someone important aboard. They thought maybe we would not try as hard if we did not know.

  Freyland lay west of Cape Blood, a dozen leagues to seaward where it came nearest the mainland. The caravel must have been making the run from Portsmouth to Songer or Ringerike, an overnight journey.

  We seldom prowled the coasts of the island kingdom because the ghost ship seldom appeared there. We left Freyland to our competitors, the Trolledyngjans.

  Colgrave's expression—what could be read through the scars—was deflated. Not The One. Again. Then he reconsidered. The flight and flirting with colors could be a ploy. He had done the same himself, to lull a Red Islander or Itaskian.

  "Shift your heading another point to starboard," he ordered. "Bosun, come down and prepare the decks."

  Lank Tor descended as agilely as an ape. Only the Kid scrambled through the rigging more quickly. But Kid sometimes fell.

  A loud thump on the main deck, waking you in the night, told you he had been showing off again.

  As Tor hit the deck he began growling orders through a grin of anticipation.

  He enjoyed these bloodlettings. They were the only times he felt alive. The boring interim periods were the devil's price he paid for his moments of bloody ecstasy. The lulls were not bad for him, though. His memory was so weak it seldom reached back to our last conquest.

  One of his mates began issuing weapons. I took a cutlass, went below for the bow and arrows I kept by my hammock, then repaired to my station on the forecastle deck. I was the best archer aboard. My job was to take out their helmsman and officers.

  "I'd shoot a lot straighter with a little more grog in me," I grumbled to Whaleboats, who had charge of the forward grappling hooks.

  "Couldn't we all. Couldn't we all." He laughed. "Talk about your straight shooting. I ever tell you about the thirteen-year-old I had in Sacuescu? Don't know where she learned, but she came well trained. Positive nympho. Male relatives didn't approve, though." He drew back his left sleeve to expose a long jagged scar on the roll of muscle outside the shoulder socket. "Two hundred fifty yards, and me running at the time."

  I daydreamed while pretending interest. He had told the story a hundred times. Without improving it, the way most of us did. I don't think he remembered having told it before.

  No imagination, Whaleboats. The sea ran in long, yard-tall, polished jade swells. Not a fleck of white. No depth. I could not see in. It must have been calm for days. There was none of the drifting seaweed usually torn up by the Cape's frequent storms.

  The next one would be bad. They always were when they saved their energies that way.

  The ship's pitch and roll were magnified on the forecastle deck, which was twenty feet above the main. My stomach began to protest. I should have saved the damned grog for later.

  But then there would have been less room for spirits from the caravel.

  The wind was rising, shifting. We were nearing the squall. Little rills scampered over the larger swells.

  We were getting nearer Cape Blood, too. I could hear the muted growling of the surf, could make out the geysers thrown up when a breaker crashed in between rocks, shattered, and hurled itself into the sky.

  The caravel was less than a mile away. She was showing her stern now, but we had her. Just a matter of patience.

  Barley and Priest came up, leading several of the best fighters. It looked like Colgrave planned to board forecastle to stern castle. That was all right by me. It was all over but the killing, once we seized their helm.

  Whaleboats spit over the rail. He was so unkempt he was disreputable even among us. "Maybe there'll be women," he mused. "Been a long time since we took one with women."

  "Save one for the Virgin." I chuckled. That was the Kid's other name. It got used mostly when somebody was baiting him.

  Whaleboats laughed too. "But of course. First honors, even." Then his face darkened. "One of these days we're going to catch another wizard."

  They had tried it before.

  It was our one great fear. Battles we could win when they were man against man and blade against blade. We were the meanest fighters on the western ocean. We had proven it a hundred times. But against sorcery we had no protection save the grace of the gods.

  "Itaskia. We've hurt them most. They'll send out a bait ship with a first-rate witch-man aboard. Then what good our luck?"

  "We managed before."

  "But never again. I might take Student up on it." He did not say what.

  The pirates of the Red Isles had tried it. It had been a close thing. We had been lucky, that time, that Colgrave was too crazy to run. Barley had gotten the sorcerer an instant before he could unleash a demon that would have scattered Dragon over half th
e western ocean.

  Our competitors in the islands were not fond of us at all. We showed their vessels the same mercy we gave any others.

  Each man of us prayed that we would find The One before some eldritch sea-fate found us.

  I could make out faces on the caravel. Time to get ready. I opened their waterproof case and carefully considered my arrows. They were the best, as was my bow. Worth a year's hire for most men. Time was, I had made their price hiring them, and myself, out for a month.

  I studied, I touched, I dithered. I finally selected the gray shaft with the two red bands.

  Whaleboats observed the ritual with amusement, having failed to entice anyone into a wager on which I would choose. I always took the same one in the end. It was my luckiest shaft. I had never missed with it.

  Someday I would exchange arrows with the archer aboard the phantom. They said he was sure death inside three hundred yards. I did not believe he could possibly be as deadly as I as long as I had the banded lady.

  It would be interesting, if dangerous, meeting him.

  The caravel was trying to trim her canvas. One of the cutlass men guffawed and shouted, "Fart in them! That'll give you all the wind you need."

  I wondered what it was like to look over your taffrail and see certain death bearing down. And know there was not a thing you could do but wait for it.

  IV

  The caravel ran straight away, under full canvas. But the gap narrowed steadily. I could make out details of weapons and armor. "They've got soldiers aboard!"

  "Uhm. A lot of them." That was Tor, who had the sharpest eyes on Vengeful D. He had known for some time, then.

  I turned. The Old Man had clambered up to the poop, stood there looking like some dandified refugee from Hell.

  "'Bout close enough for you to do your stuff," said the boatswain, tapping my shoulder.

  "Yeah?" It was a long, long shot. Difficult even with the banded arrow. Pitch, roll, yaw. Two ships. And the breeze playing what devil's games in between? I took my bow from its case.