Beggar's Flip

by Benny Lawrence

  We were finally beyond the cheering villagers, so I dropped my arm and rubbed sore muscles while I recalled that golden moment.

  “And my clothes were dry,” I said. “Lynn had spent days hoarding everything she could find that would burn. She chipped wood from the undersides of biscuit boxes and barrels, collected some straw from the middle of packing cases, where the water hadn’t seeped in. She managed to get an armful together, just enough for a tiny fire, and she got the galley stove going long enough to dry out a shirt and stockings and trousers. They were dry, and warm, and clean, and they smelled halfway like wood smoke and halfway like heaven. When I pulled them on, I almost . . . cried.”

  That was not true. In actual fact, when I pulled the dry clothes on, I almost . . . well, did something other than crying. Let’s just say that my happiness extended to my pants.

  Ariadne did a sort of over-the-shoulder wave to acknowledge the crowds behind us. “If there was a point to that story, Darren, I missed it.”

  The glow of the memory faded. I scowled a pirate-queen scowl. “Look, you asked me to explain and I’m explaining, but you’ll never get it. What do you know about being bone-tired? What do you know about being cold to your marrow? What do you know about the things that you give someone when you haven’t got anything to give? Lynn and I, we don’t buy each other jewellery and flowers. But I’ve bled for her, and she’s drowned for me. And you want to know why we don’t use the words? Lynn doesn’t have to tell me that she loves me. Lynn doesn’t have to tell me a thing.”

  A rough hand clapped me on the shoulder. “Easy there, captain. Don’t break the princess on the first day ashore.”

  I redirected my scowl towards Regon. “If I was trying to break her, she’d have fewer fingers.”

  Ariadne gave a loud huh of contempt. “If I were you, I wouldn’t do anything to these fingers without talking it over with Latoya. She’s got a very personal interest in keeping these fingers intact.”

  “Well, well, don’t we think a lot of ourselves. Don’t give yourself too much credit, princess. Latoya could have anyone she wanted, if she made up her mind to ask. One of these days, she’ll figure out exactly how much of a catch she is. When that happens, she’ll straighten her back, snap her fingers, and all the single women in Kila will fling their clothes off in unison.”

  Behind us, somebody coughed, and I wheeled around. “What?”

  I had not intended my reunion with Konrad to take place while I was yelling obscenities on his front doorstep. It was supposed to be in the throne room, with firelight and trumpets, Konrad dressed in the cloth-of-gold robe that our grandfather brought back from Tavar in his first voyage. I would be serene, a bit distracted, oh so unimpressed, while my hand rested lightly on my cutlass hilt.

  But here we were, and I gaped at my oldest brother. He was wearing riding gear rather than court clothes, and his boots were grubby with sawdust. His face didn’t have the pale flabby look of a man who spent all his time indoors, groping servant girls and gorging on pastries. Instead, it was tanned and weather-lined. If I’d seen him out of the corner of my eye, I could have mistaken him for myself, at the end of a long day.

  I tried to pull myself together, but without warning, my eyes started to leak. I don’t remember making any decisions. I just stumbled forwards, and then strong arms were around me, gripping.

  It took Konrad and me a second to realize that we were hugging each other. When we did figure it out, we drew back, looked at each other in embarrassed confusion, and then quickly turned the emotional moment into a macho one by pounding hard on each other’s backs.

  “Pirate queen?” Konrad said, pounding me one more time for good measure. “Really? What happened to the girl who was frightened of puppets?”

  The mere mention of puppets made me shudder. I stuttered out a gulpy sort of laugh, wiping my eyes.

  “Welcome back,” he went on, with a squeeze to my arm. “Welcome home.”

  THE HOUSE OF Torasan—my house, as I suppose I should say from now on—was a newcomer in Kila. They—we—had ruled our corner of the islands for only three hundred years, while families like Bain and Jiras could trace their lineage back for thirty generations or more. It was my grandfather who built the stone wall that surrounded the courtyard of Torasan Keep, nearly bankrupting the family to do it. Before that, the fortress was defended by nothing but a palisade of mud-caulked logs and a few soldiers who hadn’t yet accepted better-paying jobs elsewhere.

  And the Keep was the jewel of the Torasan holdings, the crown of the empire. It all went downhill from there. Besides the Keep itself, we had the fishing grounds, a few villages of wattle-and-daub huts, and some meagre farmland that produced the occasional cabbage and a whole lot of bugs. There were mountain steppes where goats grazed and charcoal-burners made their camps. Finally, there was the hill fort built by my great-great-grandfather. He’d meant it to be a bolt-hole, a place to safeguard livestock and children if the Keep came under attack, but it was so far inland that we almost never used it. Not for military purposes, anyway. My older brothers and sisters would go there sometimes when they wanted to spend a few days getting drunk without any nosy adults around to interfere.

  Torasan, like most of the smaller houses, had been eager for the war to begin. In fact, Torasan played a part in the assassinations, backstabbings, and general assholery that got the bloodshed started. It was supposed to be this magnificent opportunity, a chance to wipe out the weakest of the noble families and sap the strength of the greatest. All this was supposed to leave vast swathes of land empty and ripe for plundering by the houses that remained after the cull.

  How had Torasan coped during the war? The image that comes to mind is that of a bad boy who tries to ride his father’s stallion after being told about twenty times to keep away from it. The experience is exhilarating for six seconds at most. After that, he just holds tight and blubbers, wishing he’d never set foot out of the nursery, and wondering, in a dazed sort of way, why his trousers are so wet.

  That’s what the war was like for me, back when I was still bearing arms for my father: a pretty much constant state of panic. No matter what I was doing—coiling a rope, charting a course, eating a peach—there was a shadow over my mind, a feeling of creeping doom that never really went away. Whenever my father sent me from the Isle on a trading voyage, I couldn’t be certain that the Keep would still be standing when I came back. Hell, there were days when I hardly believed that the island itself would be there to greet me.

  My father had fun, though. He poured money and ships and men into his damn campaigns the same way he sloshed gravy over his batter cakes. He talked about things like Five Year Plans and The Expansion Of Our Sphere Of Influence, and he wore a sword that he would draw and flourish every now and then, as if he had a clue what to do with it. It was out of character for him, but I guess he enjoyed the break in his normal busy schedule of fondling every backside in reach.

  Fortunately, I never had to put up with his antics for very long, because I was never at court for more than a week at once. The time did seem to stretch endlessly when I was sitting through formal dinners, yawning through dances, or enduring business meetings with my father during which he would try, and usually fail, to remember my name. But then it would be over. My silk and velvet would be laid away in a sandalwood chest, with camphor packed into every crevice to keep the vermin away. I’d trudge down to the harbour, hands in my pockets, while the sun rolled into an orange sea and gulls screamed their welcome from the cove. All the fancy fakery of court would disappear, like a whiff of bad perfume, in the first gust of salt breeze. And I would feel like I could manage this thing called life.

  Then I’d sail back into the war zones, and the feeling of life-management-ability would vanish pretty quickly.

  Had the war been good for Torasan? One word: No. Three words: Really, really no. The Keep hadn’t yet burst into flames and fallen into the sea, but that was about the only positive. Month by month and year by year
, my father poured men and ships down the drain of his imperial ambitions, and seemed happily oblivious to the fact that we had nothing to show for it. If someone had taken a map and charted out the movements of our troops, all the advances and retreats, then a thick black zig-zag of ink would have formed all around Torasan Isle. For years on end, our men had been surging forward and pulling back, surging forward and pulling back, over the same few yards of land and sea.

  “NO TROUBLE GETTING here, I hope? Did you have good weather?”

  “Good weather? Ah yes. I have heard tell of this miraculous thing called good weather. One day I hope to see it with my own eyes.”

  “Ha. Yes. My captains tell me that it’s been brutal this year. Tam, bring wine for my lady sister.”

  Konrad and I were in what had once been my father’s study. It had undergone some changes since my father’s time. My father was not what you would call a scholar—to be honest, I’m pretty sure he couldn’t read—so he used his study as a place to ambush the women who had already learned to avoid his bedchamber. Back then, a ratty old bearskin rug covered the study floor, and it was mottled with stains that none of us wanted to look at or think about very hard. He did leave a few books on his desk, for the look of the thing, but a furry coat of dust built up on their covers over the years.

  That was all gone now. The place was scrubbed clean from stone floors to beamed ceiling, the bearskin rug conspicuously absent, wooden surfaces gleaming with beeswax. There were real pens on the desk, with real ink stains which showed that Konrad actually used them, and ledgers and a counting frame. The leather seat of the desk chair had a shiny smudge at the centre, proof that it had spent many hours in close contact with Konrad’s rear end.

  At the moment, the owner of that rear end was over by the windowsill, raking his hand through his sweaty hair. He hadn’t bothered to change out of his riding clothes.

  The servant Tam whispered across the floor, soft-footed in calfskin shoes, and passed me a silver goblet. Nervously, I rubbed my hand dry on my trousers before taking the shiny cup between two fingers. Tam made as if to return to his post by the door, but at a gesture from Konrad, he reversed direction and bowed his way out of the room instead.

  It had begun to rain, slow steady drops that blattered on the sill. The light through the window was grey and shifting. I moved my weight first to one foot, then to the other.

  When Konrad did turn, he gave me a rueful smile. That was very un-lordly of him. We had always been taught to maintain bland expressions, to never give away anything that we could manage to hide.

  “Well,” Konrad said, without any preamble. “This is awkward, isn’t it?”

  “That’s one word for it, I guess.”

  “Do you have a better way of describing the situation? I suppose you do. You sailors use the most vibrant language. What would you call it?”

  “Um. Fucking awkward?”

  “Ah. Yes. Crude, but apt. It would probably be easier to talk if we could go for a stroll, but we can’t, I’m afraid. This is the only place in the Keep that’s secure enough to talk business.”

  “Oh, hell. Is talking business a thing that has to happen?”

  He smiled, and the skin around his eyes crinkled, as though he smiled a lot. “Alas, my sister, it must. How shall we fortify ourselves for the ordeal? Shall we get drunk? Is that the solution?”

  “It’s worth a try,” I agreed, and took a long draught from the goblet. The flavour hit me like a small explosion. On the Isle, there’s only one time of year when the sun can be relied on to shine: late summer, when the fruit ripens on our few wild cherry trees. It doesn’t last long, a handful of days, but our cherry wine captures all the warmth and spice of the brief Torasan summer. It’s sour-sweet, subtle but fierce, smooth but deadly, and it makes you want to dance and fight and yell and sing all at once. Imagine the first time you were in love, then imagine it juiced, fermented, bottled, and corked. It’s pretty much like that. The aftermath is more or less the same, too. Lots of groaning and whining and wondering where your trousers went.

  Konrad didn’t notice the tears in my eyes, or he pretended not to notice. He looked out the window again. “Why don’t we get the worst part out of the way? I’ll tell you about Father, you tell me about Alek.”

  I nodded, swallowed my mouthful of summer, and began.

  Telling the story wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Konrad already knew the basic outline from my letter to Father, so all I had to do was fill in the bits and pieces. That was plenty bad enough, though. Twice, when I was describing Alek’s wounds, my eyes went hot and stinging and I had to look hard at the ceiling to keep things businesslike. For some reason, sitting there in the serene calm of Konrad’s study, death seemed much like a much fouler and more terrible thing than it did on an ordinary day.

  Konrad listened with eyes half-closed, nodding slowly. When I was finished talking, he ran a finger down the barbs of his quill pen—it was just a goose feather, but it was painted in rings of blue and emerald like a peacock’s plume—and launched into an explanation I hadn’t asked for.

  “Father had this asinine plan,” he said. “Yes. Father, an asinine plan. Do your best to conceal your astonishment. He’d been trying for years to get a foothold on Cromm Tuach. The theory was that if he could land troops at the lighthouse, he could take control of—”

  “The shipping routes north from the iron smelters. That old fantasy. People keep trying. It never works.”

  “Really? When did someone last . . . never mind, I’ll pick your brain later. Father’s idea was to commit most of our ships to an attack from the north, to draw out the Tuach navy, and then send Alek winging around the far end of the battle line. He took the fastest of our war galleys—the Harrier, you remember it?”

  I winced, and not for show. It really did cause me pain to hear Konrad talk about a glorious beast like the Harrier as if she were a thing no different from a wagon or a doorknob. “Her. I remember her.”

  “You sailors and your superstitions.”

  “It has nothing to do with superstition. Ships are ladies and they deserve respect. You wouldn’t refer to your wife as an it, would you?”

  “To be honest, I speak about my wife as little as possible. It works out better for everyone that way. To return to the point, though, Alek took the Harrier around the end of the line with fifty picked men and the best steel we could spare. The plan, Father’s plan, called for him to make land, wipe out the undefended garrison, and hold it until we could send reinforcements . . . Darren, why exactly are you groaning? It may not have been an inspired strategy, but considering Father came up with it, it made a surprising amount of sense.”

  “That’s the worst kind of strategy. Plausible enough to get people moving, but nowhere near good enough to bring them home alive. You can’t use a strike force to defend a garrison. Fifty men? I wouldn’t even try to hold Cromm Tuach without two hundred. Minimum. Even then, I’d probably just buy the beer instead.”

  “The beer . . . ?”

  “Oh. Um. Sorry. It’s a silly thing that we came up with . . .” I caught myself just in time, remembering the strange order Lynn had given me just before I left the ship. “I mean, it’s something that I came up with a few months back. Sort of a thought experiment, a way to check yourself before you do something stupid. When deciding whether to risk life, limb, ships, and sanity in an act of desperate bravery, ask yourself whether you could achieve more for your cause by staying home and buying just a shitload of beer.”

  His eyebrows went up. “What would you do with the beer? Bribe your enemies to surrender?”

  “Sure. Or build morale among your own troops, either one. You’d be surprised how often buying beer is a sound tactical decision. Anyway, you were saying. Father surfaced from his whores and his wine cup long enough to send fifty men to certain death, with our brother lolloping happily in the lead. Did any of them make it back?”

  “Four or five, enough to tell us what had happened.”
Konrad pinched the bridge of his nose. “They didn’t even get as far as the coast. The Tuach commander had left part of his fleet in reserve around the far side of the island, where the cliffs hid them. They rammed the Harrier as soon as it rounded the point, and that was that. Alek ordered the longboats launched once the Harrier began to sink. The survivors who made it back to the Isle lost track of the boat carrying him. I suppose he drifted south, but I don’t know why he was alone by the time he reached you.”

  I frowned. “Alek said they were betrayed. Did you ask the survivors about that? Did they know what he meant?”

  “Yes I did, and no they didn’t—although they could guess and so can I. Someone must have tipped off the Tuach forces about the sneak attack. Alek must have figured out who the traitor was, though heaven only knows how.”

  “He would have had a lot of time to think.” I’d already tortured myself by picturing Alek’s last day alive, the hours he must spent drifting helpless and in agony under a cold sky. Plenty of time to dwell on the lost chances, the if-onlys and the might-have-beens. “What did Father say when he heard that his stupid plan had crashed and burned?”