by Chris Bunch
A moment later, he could see dim light.
Enough of creeping along, he thought. I’m tired of always running.
“Nomios,” he said, “steer for that light.”
“But — ”
“Do as I order!”
“Yessir!”
The bosun gave quiet orders, and the helmsman spun the wheel.
The light grew brighter. Gareth went to the railing and leaned over.
“What’re you loaded with?”
“Grapeshot,” came back.
“Good. Aim at the light, and fire when I order. Reload with solid shot, and aim below the light, into the hull, for your second shot.”
He went back to the wheel.
The light was very close. The Steadfast was closing on a Linyati — at least Gareth hoped it was a Linyati — from the stern, on the Slaver’s port side.
“Ready …” Gareth shouted, and the ship was close enough for him to see startled figures on the ship’s deck turn toward him …
“Fire!” The two starboard cannon bellowed, and men on the Linyati ship screamed and fell. There was confusion on their deck as the Steadfast sailed past, not twenty yards away.
“Bring her about, Nomios! We’ll have another taste of that!”
“Aye, sir,” and the Steadfast came about.
“Bring her down close alongside!”
“Aye, aye.”
“Port cannon,” Gareth ordered. “You can’t miss! Ready …”
And the Linyati ship was close aboard. Sailors aboard her jumped back from the railings, afraid the Steadfast was intending to ram.
“Fire!” And the two guns crashed. Gunsmoke swirled as the grapeshot scattered across the Slaver’s maindeck, and Gareth heard men shriek.
“Load solid shot, and fast,” Gareth said, and again brought the Steadfast about.
“Ready … Fire …” And this time the port guns slammed their tiny broadside into the Linyati’s stern.
“Up her port side,” Gareth called.
Just as they closed on the Slaver, one of its sternchasers blasted, and the round whirred past, scant feet overhead, and thudded into the Steadfast’s sterncastle. Fire sparkled along the Steadfast’s starboard railing, and Gareth saw men — his men — unordered, firing muskets at the sternchaser’s crew, and two Linyati went down. His starboard guns fired, aiming low as ordered, and they were even with the Linyati ship just as Gareth saw a small robinet on the quarterdeck fire.
The round came close enough so he felt the rush of wind, then the splatter of something warm on his face, his arm. He glanced up at clear skies, no rain, then saw the helmsman stumble back from the wheel.
He was missing his head, and Gareth knew what the rain had been, tried to keep from throwing up as he took the wheel, steering the Steadfast past the Linyati as the Slaver lost headway and fell away to port.
Then the fog was gone, and the sea ahead was clear. Gareth ordered full sail, and a new course:
Due south.
• • •
Two days later, the Steadfast lay in the lagoon off a tiny tropic island. The horizon to the north was empty, and there’d been no signs of pursuit after Herti.
The thirty-seven sailors were gathered in the waist. They’d buried Kelch and the helmsman the morning after the battle with the Linyati ship.
Gareth, before he’d told everyone to gather and decide what to do next, had sent a boat ashore to gather limes and a barrel of absolutely fresh water from a creek that purled into the ocean. He ordered the cook to make a cool punch from the fruit, some sugar, and brandy, served a moderate amount to each man.
Knoll N’b’ry had come to him as the others were lined up around the barrel.
“I’m starting to think you’re a dangerous man, Gareth Radnor.”
“Oh?”
“I think it’s most interesting that you take the time to make sure we’re all refreshed — with a fruit no one but a nobleman might ever see in Saros — before we discuss the future. A hint of the good things to come.
“Just as I think it’s interesting you set the course south after Herti, instead of north, toward home.”
“I just figured,” Gareth said with an honest smile, “that would be the least likely direction for the Linyati to think we were headed.”
“But of course.” Knoll sipped from his pewter mug. “I was just thinking about some things you used to talk about when we were boys.
“Do you want it to be my idea, or yours?”
“What are you talking about?”
Knoll didn’t answer, but smiled mysteriously, and found a place to sit on a cannon.
Gareth climbed up a couple of steps on the ladder to the quarterdeck.
“All right, men,” he said. “I think we’ve got to decide what to do next.”
“Get our sorry asses home,” somebody said.
“That’s the most obvious plan,” Gareth agreed. “The seas are wide and empty, and we should be able to slip past any Linyati. I don’t think they’ll be looking for us too hard. Or anyway I hope not.”
“We go out from Saros,” Knoll said in a musing tone, as if to himself, “and then we rush right back, two months later, with our tails between our legs. What proud seafarers we be.”
Men looked at him, some frowning in agreement, some puzzled.
“What about the Steadfast?” Thom Tehidy asked. “Who owns the ship?”
“I’d guess Captain Luynes’s heirs, if he had any.”
“I don’t rec’leck,” Bosun Nomios said, “the skipper ever talking about kin. Though that don’t mean he had none.”
“If that’s true,” Gareth said, “we could put in to the King’s Courts, and perhaps end up owning the ship, and being able to sell it. Or sail it out again on shares.”
A rough-looking man, one of Luynes’s original hands, snorted.
“Men like us bein’ allowed to own somethin’ this fine? Not in Saros, not ever. Likely there’s outstanding debts and writs and we’ll end up on the beach wi’ nothing but our dicks in our hands.
“I’d say we should carry on with the skipper’s original plan and go slavin’, but I can count noses as good as anybody, and know there ain’t no likelihood of that bein’ allowed. Even if we could somehow get ahold of whichever Linyati the captain dealt with, and try to cut some sort of deal again.”
“I don’t think that’d work,” Gareth said. “Plus, I’m no slaver, as I’ve said again and again.
“Another option is that we could take our chances,” he went on, “and stay in these seas, looking for cargo we could barter the swords and muskets for to take back.”
“That’s an idea,” somebody said.
“I’ve got a better one,” Knoll said, and jumped down off the cannon. “We could say screw it, and run up the black flag and make ourselves rich, fast.”
There were gasps — from the less experienced men, Gareth noted — and exclamations.
“I’ve no desire to see a thirteen-wrapped knot about my neck,” the ship’s cook said. “Or worse.”
“Pirating …” Gareth said, as if considering the idea for the first time. “But maybe there’s a safe way to go about it.”
“Like what?” somebody said skeptically.
“What happens if we only prey on the Linyati? Take and loot their merchant ships where we find them. If we’re successful enough and the cargoes are rich enough, we keep their ship, if we haven’t sunk it in battle, and send it home to Saros with a prize crew.”
“Or, better,” the rough man said, “we anchor any such ships we take — not that I think we’d have that great a luck — away from Saros, mebbe in Juterbog, till the Steadfast sails back. Just in case the king or some godsdamned nobleman thinks of seizing our booty before we reach home.”
“I don’t understand,” a sailor said. “If we just pirate against Linyati, how’ll that keep us away from the King’s Justice?”
“I think what we’d do is go to my uncle,” Gareth said, “who’s got ot
her friends in high places. If we petition the king, and say that we’ve gone against known enemies of the kingdom — ”
“Not to mention offering him a cut of the loot,” Labala said.
“That too,” Gareth agreed. “We could stand a chance of pulling it off.”
“My parents were taken by the Linyati,” Thom Tehidy said. “As were Knoll’s. And Gareth’s were killed. I wouldn’t mind cutting a piece out of them. A big piece.”
“I lost an aunt in a raid,” another sailor said.
“And two ships I used to sail on,” one of Luynes’s toughs said, “just vanished. I guess m’mates’re wearing Linyati chains now. If they still live.”
“We’d have to talk more if you like the idea,” Gareth said. “Come up with our own set of articles, assuming the majority like the idea.”
“What about somebody who doesn’t want in?”
“I guess,” Gareth said, “he’ll just have to ride along with us, and take his chances until he could go back north with a prize crew, or be set ashore in the first civilized port we come to.” He grinned. “Pirating, eh? I never thought of that.”
“Better think of it,” a man shouted. “For I vote you’d best be our captain.”
There was a moment of silence, then a cheer.
Gareth came down from the ladder. The waist was a mass of excited, arguing men.
Knoll N’b’ry worked his way through the throng.
“Never thought of that? Gareth, you’re still one shitty liar.”
“I am not. A liar, I mean.”
“I thought it was very smooth, the way I brought the idea up, since of course you don’t know what the hells I’m talking about.”
“And I still don’t.” But there was a peculiar grin on Gareth’s face.
“It’s just like the old days, when we used to play,” Knoll said. “Except this time, the gold’ll be real, not bits of carved wood.”
He held out his mug.
“Cheers, Captain Radnor.”
Eight
Gareth read the pages of foolscap carefully. The writing might have been scrawly, the grammar shaky, and the style florid, but the intent and meaning was clear:
… We, the Crewe of the Ship known as The Steadfast, do Hereby Agree on the Following Artikles of Piracy, Which is Also to be Considered Privateering Against the Enemies of His Most Gracious King Alfieri of Saros, to be Held Proper by All Members of the Crew, on Paine of the Most Severest Punishment, and Also Pertaining to the Divigation of Shares in Our Enterprize …
No one would receive any money unless they took prizes. Gareth, as captain, would receive five shares, as would the ship itself, for maintenance. The elected mates, Thom Tehidy and a rough-looking older seaman who’d served under Luynes, Froln, would receive three shares each.
Some had wanted Knoll N’b’ry as a mate too, but he refused, saying quietly he didn’t know enough to do the job. Perhaps later.
The ship’s quartermaster, Galf, being the crew’s representative, got three shares. Bosun Nomios had been put up for the post, but violently opposed the idea: “I’ve never been more’n what I am, and what I am is what I’ll be.” Gareth took that for no.
Labala was given two shares, and protested that, saying he still wasn’t a proper wizard. But he was shouted down, everyone remembering how his fog had saved them and hoping his magic would keep them alive in the future, as well as sorcerously leading them to rich prey.
The ship’s carpenter got two shares. Everyone else got one.
Then the wrangling became serious, covering more than three days:
What about sailors on captured ships who wanted to join them? What shares would they get, assuming there’d been prizes taken before they came aboard? Did the crew have to chip in for food and drink, or did that come from the ship’s share?
What would be the compensation for a crippled pirate? That was settled as one hundred pieces of gold for the loss of a right arm, fifty for a left arm, which provoked a shouting argument about what that meant to left-handers. The right leg went for fifty pieces of gold, but the left was only good for forty. A finger or an eye, ten gold pieces.
Then came the penalties: death for murder, rape, holding out of any loot. The penalty was to be enforced by shooting or marooning.
Lesser penalties, such as being made to run a gauntlet, fines, or even losing shares were chosen for lesser offenses.
Gareth noted that the men refused to permit the usual penalties to apply: hanging or the lash.
“We’ll save that for our enemies,” Froln said. “Rememberin’ ” — and he wriggled his back without realizing it — “how often the whip was laid on us.”
By the time matters were settled, Gareth had learned that the term “sea lawyer” wasn’t an empty phrase.
He wondered what it would be like if everyone, everywhere, were permitted to choose their companions and their pay, instead of always being at the will of a king, circumstance, or the nearest man with a sword or a title.
And thinking of that matter, he went to the men setting up the Articles and suggested that they write in a phrase saying something like: “All circumstances being proper, we agree that our Gods-Protected Monarch, whom we hold most dear, shall also receive six shares of our enterprise.”
This attracted some howls, but one sailor, thoughtfully feeling his neck, said: “Could nay hurt, lads. If it doesn’t come to that, it doesn’t come to that. But if we’re in some dungeon, down with the rats, awaitin’ the torturer, the fact we thought good of ol’ King Alfieri might stand us good, eh?”
Much argument, but the logic of guarding one’s back was accepted by a majority, and so the king was granted his share.
Gareth thought Cosyra would find all this quite interesting and probably funny, and had a sudden pang of loneliness that he was hard-pressed to set aside.
• • •
“This might also help our cause with King Alfieri when we sail back to Saros,” Gareth said.
“Or else doom us as utter fools,” Knoll N’b’ry said cynically. “Flaunting our villainy in the king’s name and all.”
The crew examined Gareth’s creation that he’d had sewn up by the ship’s sailmaker. It was a Sarosian flag — horizontal bars of black, green, white. But where the proper banner would have had the crown of Saros in the center, Gareth had a leering skull, with crossed cutlasses below it.
“If the Linyati are superstitious,” Thom Tehidy said, “it’ll give ‘em a bit of hesitation.”
“I’m not superstitious,” Labala put in, “and it scares the bollocks off me.”
The flag was adopted unanimously as the Steadfast’s new colors.
• • •
Gareth was happy to let the crew devise its own ways and amusement. He was having enough trouble figuring out the maps.
The contents of Kelch’s pouch was, for quite a few hours, a mystery. He’d died saying he had the maps and “directions,” whatever they were, in his pouch. But all the pouch contained was a bit of paper and some small paper tubes.
He put them on Luynes’s desk to consider, and looked at the late captain’s charts. He had roll after roll of maps for regions south of Saros. Gareth noted they were well annotated, showing Luynes’s journeys in these largely unknown lands.
He found a projection of the Great Sea, hung it on a bulkhead, and oriented other, more detailed maps around it. Here, up to the right, was Saros, across the Narrow Sea, Juterbog. Then other known countries, which he didn’t concern himself with.
Moving south and west were large islands. Gareth knew of them, hadn’t traded with any. Scattered in a spray south of them were dozens and dozens of smaller islands.
One, he noted, had an inked-in name: Freebooter’s Island. Interesting.
On south and west was a great dumbbell-shaped continent. The lower bell was Linyati, but it was interesting that the only other chart of Linyati Gareth had seen had nothing but UNKNOWN TERRITORIES across it, and, to its north, the vaguest of dotted
lines demarking strange land.
On Luynes’s chart, Linyati had named cities, and the upper bell was precisely marked and named as Kashi. But there was very little detail on this part.
Below and to the east of Linyati, in open seas, was a circle, marked SPICE ISLANDS, with several question marks. Gareth made a face. Evidently the location of those islands was to have been part of Luynes’s bargain with the Linyati for being their slave transport.
He summoned Nomios and showed him the charts.
“Aye, sir,” the bosun said. “Luynes kept them current, as we sailed.”
Gareth touched one entry, in the middle of the isthmus connecting Linyati and Kashi.
“That, sir” — Nomios licked his lips hungrily — “that’s th’ treasure city of Noorat, Cap’n Luynes told. He said th’ Linyati raid Kashi for slaves, an’ more besides. He said he’d heard there are savage kingdoms there, where gold’s nothin’ but a dec’ration, and th’ people scorn silver as worthless.
“Once a year the Linyati collect all the booty they’ve stolen to th’ settlements along th’ coast of Kashi, and a fleet secures these riches, takes them on south, to Noorat, where the tale has it other treasure is brought, from across that isthmus and from the Unknown Seas beyond, all to be taken on to Linyati.
“He thought that’d be a fine taking, if you could convince enough men of spirit to trust each other long enough to sack the city.”
“That makes me wonder about something,” Gareth said. “If the Linyati have ships of their own sailing up and down the coast, why’d they want to charter the Steadfast?”
“Luynes never give me a reason, but I’ve heard th’ wild men of Kashi’ve got strange ways and sorcery, and are hard fighters. The Linyati lose men — and ships — in th’ trade, I was told, especially when they venture into some of th’ great rivers, like this one here.”
He went to the chart, touched a line leading into the interior of Kashi labeled the Mozaffar River. At its mouth was a dot labeled Cimmar.
“I guess there’s enough profit in’t so they’d rather hire us to take the risks an’ carry their prisoners,” Nomios went on. “Certain nobody’s ever said Linyati lack courage, even if they like usin’ it in groups of a dozen or so.”