Corsair

by Chris Bunch

“You mean an alternative,” Knoll N’b’ry said glumly. “Right now, we’ve got none at all.”

  • • •

  Gareth woke to the thump of running feet and the shouts of the crew. He pulled on pants, started out of his tiny cabin, then buckled on the sword belt Cosyra had given him and went on deck.

  Standing close on either side were two Linyati warships, low, black, rakish hulls with red lateen sails, three guns on a side, two more in the prow, and two sternchasers. The rails were lined with Linyati sailors, some with belted cutlasses, others with ready muskets.

  Gareth went to his gun, found someone had already yanked the canvas cover off, and moments later one of the hands trotted up with a stand of balls and another with bagged powder.

  “Stand by your guns,” Kelch shouted from the quarterdeck. “But don’t load. Yet.”

  The Linyati guns were ready for action, already run out.

  Gareth had done some arranging of the watch list, so his friends were on his gun crew.

  “Grapeshot, like in the stories,” Thom said in a low voice. “Sweep their quarterdeck clean.”

  “That’s stupid,” Knoll objected. “Chainshot, for certain. Cut a mast down, and that ship’ll fall back in confusion.”

  “Don’t go for easy,” Labala said. “Put one of those big bastard cannonballs under his waterline and sink him as he floats.”

  “Thank you, my admirals,” Gareth said. “We’ll do whatever the captain orders.”

  For long moments nothing happened as the three ships sailed side by side.

  “Look at that damned lantern,” Knoll said.

  Its green light flared, now clearly visible in daylight.

  A small square hatch slid open in the rear cabin of the nearest Linyati ship. He tried to see who was looking out, but there was nothing but blackness to be seen.

  Suddenly a high, ululating squealing came, Gareth thought from the cabin. The Linyati along the railings ran to winches, lines, and the ship tacked right, away from the Steadfast. The second ship on the other side did the same, a mirror image, turning away.

  “Guess we passed muster?” Gareth hazarded.

  “Probably,” Thom said. “Wonder what that screeching was. Sounded like somebody doing something awful to a Pig.”

  “Maybe,” Labala said, and there was a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. “Maybe that’s something we hope we never know.”

  An hour later, a lookout sighted land, rolling hills and a desert scape. Luynes gathered the crew, and confirmed what Gareth had heard: Herti was a neutral port, but controlled by the Linyati. There’d be no shore leave for the hands, for they’d be docked for no more than half a day.

  • • •

  Herti was an old, evil city, white, low buildings baking in the wind that came in from the desert behind. Ships of many nations sat at anchor, rolling in the slight swell that came into the wide-mouthed harbor, but many of them were Linyati, either warships or broadbeamed merchantmen, three-masted, triple-deck galleons, twice as big as the Steadfast.

  Gareth noted this didn’t seem to be a trusting port. There were plenty of open wharves, yet most ships preferred to tie up to one of the buoys scattered around the harbor and deal with the landsmen via boats. Most of them also kept swivel guns manned, and aimed at the lighters that came alongside to load or unload.

  Luynes seemed to have no fear … or, more likely, Gareth thought, was a firm friend of whatever depravity held sway here. He brought the Steadfast neatly to a large wharf in the middle of the docks. The wind was blowing from a distant ramshackle building, evidently a fish plant.

  Labala wrinkled his nose at the reek.

  “Hope those aren’t any of the supplies we’re layin’ in,” he said.

  “They’re not,” Rooke said, having padded up behind them. “Purser, the captain and us have business ashore. Have a detail clear out number two hold to take on new provisions. The water hoy’ll be alongside in a bit.”

  Luynes came thudding down the ladder to the main deck.

  “Hern Radnor, we’ll also be taking on some of the … tools we’ll be needing in our ventures. See they’re properly stored in my cabin. You’re in charge of the ship, so put out a gangway detail. Armed, if you please. I want no one aboard, not officials, not whores, not visitors, not bumboat boys, without me being on board.

  “And I certainly don’t want any of the men playing tricks and going ashore against orders. Herti’s a tricky place, and matters are a bit delicate for any Sarosian here. If any man disobeys, I’ll set him ashore on the spot, with nary a copper nor a weapon to protect him.”

  “Yes, sir. I understand, sir.”

  “We’ll be back in two, perhaps three, turnings of the glass.”

  The three went ashore, Rooke hiding a smirk, and Gareth remembered what the mate had said about cutting loose with slave whores.

  But the ship’s officers weren’t back in three and then four turnings.

  The hulk with its fresh water was brought alongside, and men — slaves, obviously — ran hoses across to the Steadfast’s tanks, after Gareth had carefully tasted the water and was a bit surprised to find it fresh and pure. The slaves manned pumps, and in less than an hour had finished their task, and lighters rowed the hulk away.

  In spite of Luynes’s warning, no one approached the ship. A few boys peered at the strange sailors, darted back into the city, shouting.

  The waterfront was quiet, very quiet. There were no vendors’ cries, no beggars shouting, no orders from the ships nearby. It seemed as if Herti was napping in the heat.

  Gareth wondered what would come out at night, decided he wasn’t that curious.

  Time passed.

  Too much time … five turnings of the glass.

  Gareth, feeling he was probably being overcautious, ordered muskets broken out from the stores and half a dozen men assigned to stand by as reinforcements to the two pistol-armed men on gangway watch.

  Luynes’s tools arrived, wooden boxes carried by half a dozen men. Gareth ordered them taken to the captain’s cabin, and chanced opening one after the porters had left. They were tools indeed … ugly tools. Pinchers. Irons. Half a dozen whips, some with metal tips. Manacles. Gareth shuddered, went back on deck.

  Another turning of the glass passed.

  Then one of the men on the gangway called to Gareth. He ran to the ship’s side, saw a man reeling toward them.

  He was hunched over, as if he’d been struck in the side. Then Gareth saw the blood dribbling down his leg, leaving blotches of red on the planking as he stumbled toward them.

  The man straightened, and Gareth recognized Kelch, saw the great sword-gash across his stomach. Kelch reeled, clawed at the air, and fell on his back.

  Gareth was down the gangway and kneeling beside him.

  The man’s eyes blinked open.

  “Bastards,” he managed. “Frigging Linyati … never trust ‘em …”

  “What happened?”

  “We did … what we’d come for … got our sailing directions … in my pouch … and went for wine. Godsdamned Linyati … I guess some other faction than the one the skipper’d made his bargain with … or maybe ones who just didn’t like Sarosians … didn’t like what we were … or maybe what we were there for … what we were …”

  Kelch broke off, gasping for air.

  “Bastards, bastards … know they killed me … kill some of ‘em back for me, Pusser … they cut down the captain … guess they got Rooke too.”

  “What do we do?”

  Kelch managed an awful grin, opened his mouth, and blood poured out. He coughed, turned his head to the side, spat.

  “On’y one thing to do, boy. You’re in their hands, so you’ll have to …”

  His body contorted and strained back. More blood rushed out of his mouth, and his bare feet drummed on the stone. He jerked once more and lay still.

  “Shit,” Nomios the bosun said somberly. “Now we’re for it.”

  Gareth ignored him.


  “Four men! Carry the mate aboard and to the sailmaker.”

  Among that man’s duties was making a canvas sheath for a coffin.

  Gareth stood, trying to figure out what to do next. “Nomios,” he said in a low tone. “Have more muskets loaded, two to a man, but keep them hidden belowdecks.”

  “Yes, sir. What else, sir?” Gareth found it strange that the man, twice Gareth’s age and more than that in experience, instantly fell under his sway.

  “Take this pouch,” Gareth said, picking up the leather purse beside Kelch’s body, “and put it in the captain’s cabin.

  “We won’t load the main guns until dark,” he went on. “But single up to the main sheet, and have the topmen standing by. We might have to leave in a hurry.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Gareth turned to get back aboard as the four sailors grabbed Kelch’s arms and legs and lugged him up the gangway.

  He saw three Linyati warships gliding toward him, close inboard. But their guns weren’t manned. The ships moved past the Steadfast in that eerie silence. None of the Linyati along the rails said anything, showed anything in their expressions.

  The three ships put on sail, tacked toward the harbor mouth and the open sea.

  • • •

  Not a half-glass later, a dozen men came down the docks toward the Steadfast. All but one wore armor. They carried muskets and had swords at their waist. The unarmed man was a thin, tubercular-looking sort carrying a scroll.

  The dozen stopped a stone’s cast away.

  “Ahoy the ship.”

  Gareth was on the quarterdeck. He walked to the landward side.

  “We hear you.”

  “It is the decision of the rulers of Herti that, because of a matter of blood, you are required to leave this city at dawn.

  “We pride our neutrality, and do not wish to become involved in any private dispute.

  “This order is in congruence with international custom, and if disobeyed will be met with the appropriate responses … including violence.”

  He stumbled a little on the last word, then turned, and the formation moved away, a bit faster than it had come.

  “And the godsdamned Linyati are outside the harbor, waiting for us,” Nomios said.

  Gareth nodded.

  “We might as well get ready to put on the chains we wuz ready to put other people into,” the bosun gloomed.

  “No,” Gareth said, wondering at his certainty. “No, that’ll not happen. None of us will be anyone’s slave, not now, not ever.

  “Ready the ship for sailing.”

  Seven

  Labala,” Gareth said. “You told me once you could bring up a harbor full of mist. Were you yarning, or were you telling the truth?”

  “I don’t lie,” Labala said. “I sometimes just can’t keep my memory straight as to tales.”

  “Good,” Gareth said. “Get whatever you need ready. I’d like a spell when it falls dark.”

  He turned to the crew, who were assembled in the waist. For some reason, he was utterly unafraid, and felt very calm, as if he’d been born to live in this kind of emergency.

  “Four men,” he said. “No. Three and you, Thom Tehidy. Get five bags of gunpowder, and ten bottles of brandy. Not the good stuff, the raw kind, with the most alcohol.

  “At full dark, I want you four to go ashore, just as Labala’s mist hopefully rolls in, and burn that fish plant at the end of the wharves. That’ll give the locals something to keep them occupied.

  “As soon as our bonfire fiends leave the ship, everyone not on watch get into the armor that’s stored up forward. We’ve already got muskets loaded and ready.

  “Rig boarding nets and load the main guns, but we won’t run them out until we cast off. The wheels make too much noise on the deck.

  “Bosun, plot a compass course that we can use blind to get us out of the harbor.

  “Now, set to.”

  A smile came to Gareth as the crew bustled about its business. Following orders. His orders.

  Tehidy came to him.

  “It’ll be a bit of a burden with the four of us and the extra brandy and gunpowder.”

  “No,” Gareth said. “I’ll be the fifth man.”

  • • •

  Gareth looked at the Linyati lantern on the mizzen mast as it grew dark.

  No greenish glare came.

  Now, he wondered, was the lantern keyed to Luynes, and had it gone out when he was killed? Or did the Linyati wizards, and there must be some aboard the Slavers’ ships still in the harbor, cancel the spell? That might mean they have some kind of contact with the lamp, then. Contact enough, maybe, to use it like a lodestone to locate the Steadfast?

  He unhooked the lantern, carried it down to the deck, and slipped up the gangway. He left the lantern next to a bollard, came back aboard.

  If they’re “watching” that, he thought, maybe they’ll think we’re still at the dock when we’re not.

  Torches flared along the waterfront, with no human lighter to be seen, and a wind from the land made them flicker. Then, as it got darker, they dimmed slowly. Gareth realized they weren’t fading. Rather a dank mist, drifting slowly, unobtrusively in from the water, was masking them.

  Either Labala’s lucky … or we’ve got ourselves a real wizard, Gareth thought.

  “All right,” Gareth said to Thom and the three others. “Let’s go.”

  They slid over the gangway, keeping low, and crept along the wharf, rats avoiding the light. Ramps led up toward land, and they followed them.

  Gareth, wishing he had some of a soldier’s skills, kept peering into the shadows, knowing Herti must have sentries posted.

  But he saw no one. Maybe these people kept themselves truly disinvolved, and were true neutrals. Or cowards.

  Tehidy pressed prickly lips to Gareth’s ear.

  “We can navigate from here by the smell.”

  Thom was right Holding to the shadows, they found the plant, moved along its ramshackle walls, found a sliding door. There weren’t any lights visible through cracks in the planking.

  Gareth put his shoulder to the door, but it didn’t move. Thom pushed him aside, used his strength.

  The door came open, with a hinge-rusty screek Gareth thought was as loud, and alerting, as a trumpet blast. They froze, waited. But no one responded.

  They went inside the long shed a few feet, no further, for fear of stumbling over something with sharp edges. Gareth drew his knife, cursed that it had no point, as every ship’s officer he’d known had ordered, thought suddenly and irrelevantly that now he could carry any damned kind of blade he wanted, sawed at the burlap and let powder pool about. He tore off the wire seal and pulled the cork from a bottle of brandy, dabbled some here, there.

  Thom was holding out a hooded slowmatch. He saw the shadows of the four, waiting in the doorway, giving him the honor.

  The honor, he thought, of maybe going up in a great ball of flame. He uncovered the slow match and held it to the burlap, saw flames flicker, saw other emptied bags in the growing firelight, touched the match to them.

  “Come on,” Thom hissed, and they trotted away from the fish plant, flames growing behind them. The flame flashed as gunpowder caught here, then a bigger flare as the wood, soaked in long years of oily fish, took fire.

  They ran, then, up the gangplank onto the Steadfast. A sailor who’d held a boarding net wide for a passage let it fall.

  “Man the guns and send the watch aloft,” Gareth ordered. He went on up the ladder to the quarterdeck.

  “Very well, mister,” Gareth told Nomios. “Put us to sea.”

  “Yes, sir,” Nomios said. “For’rd! Let go the main sheet.”

  There was a splash as a rope dropped into the water.

  “Hard aport your rudder,” he said in a low voice to the helmsmen, and the current drifted the Steadfast a foot or so away from the dock.

  “Set the fores’l and mains’l,” and the barefoot men above sidled out on footropes. Y
ards clattered, and canvas rattled as it unfurled. Sails caught the wind and pulled the prow of the Steadfast away from the dock, toward the sea.

  “Helmsman,” Nomios said. “Th’ course is south by south-southeast. Hold firm, and you’ll be in the center of the channel.”

  “Aye.”

  “Labala,” Gareth called down to the main deck.

  “What, Gareth?”

  “Can you sense the Linyati out there?”

  “No,” Labala said. “Tried. Didn’t work. Sorry.”

  “Anyone in the waist with good eyes, up to the foredeck,”

  Gareth ordered. “Give quiet warning if you hear or see anything. Anything!”

  Gareth closed his eyes, listened, forced his mind away from the Steadfast, into the foggy dark. The wind was coming from due north.

  “’Nomios,” he said in a low tone, “correct the steering a point south or so. The wind might blow us a bit wide of the channel on this course.”

  “Aye, sir. I was just about to do that.”

  Gareth went down the ladder to the maindeck, called the four gun captains to him, Knoll standing in for Gareth.

  “We’ll be cutting through the fog sooner or later into clear air,” he said. “When we do, if you spot the Linyati, aim your guns, but wait, for the sake of the gods, until I give the command. Maybe we’ll be able to slide past them without being seen.”

  The men nodded, went back to their cannon. Knoll N’b’ry lingered for a minute.

  “What’re you grinning about?”

  “Just about how much you sound like a real captain.”

  Gareth tried to keep from laughing. “To your gun, sir.”

  Gareth went back to the quarterdeck, went back to listening. The Steadfast was mostly silent, except for the creak of her hull, a quiet splash as a wave broke against the prow now and again, the rustle of the sails.

  Labala came up the ladder.

  “Gareth,” he said, voice low, “I think my damned mist is staying with us!”

  “Is that possible?”

  “I dunno,” Labala said. “I’m making this up as I go along. Maybe it thinks I’m its daddy?”

  Gareth nodded. Maybe, just maybe, this would make things easier, and they wouldn’t have to —

  — He heard a shouted command to starboard, and the clatter of lines through blocks.