by Col Buchanan
Clouds gathered overhead, darkening the autumn sky with a promise of more rain. Ash passed carts on the road laden with goods or families; individual travellers carrying packs on their backs; herds of livestock driven by dour, pipe-smoking herders. By early afternoon he crested a rise of ground and saw the Bay of Squalls and the city of Bar-Khos spread out before him.
It felt as though it had been years since he’d visited this besieged city of the Free Ports. Yet it had only been a handful of months ago when he had stopped here with the Falcon for its much-needed repairs, and encountered Nico for the first, fateful time.
A stiff sea breeze blew across the rugged edge of the coast, beyond which heaved the white-capped waters of the bay. He could see the Lansway running out into the bay, with the dark walls of the Shield shrouded in a haze of smoke, brief flashes in the midst of it that were the belches of cannon fire.
Of all the cities to be returning to, he thought. It should be Nico coming back here, with a few scars and a dozen stories to tell, not you.
Ash plodded down the busy road towards the eastern gatehouse. To his right lay the city skyport with its fluttering windsocks and sprawling warehouses. Half a dozen skyships lay berthed on the ground with their envelopes deflated, repair crews swarming around them.
As the gatehouse grew nearer, he could hear above the noise of the traffic something different now – the distant din of battle on the Shield. They could all hear it, everyone who was trying to get through the bottleneck of traffic at the open gates, where each cart was being checked by a soldier before being allowed through.
Ash was carried through the bustle without inspection into the streets within.
It began to rain as he made his way towards the heart of the city. Life seemed to be carrying on as normal beneath the distant crash of artillery fire, though the atmosphere was more tense than before, more agitated. Several times he passed someone shouting in anger with their tempers unravelling.
With money from his purse he bought a paper bowl of rice from a street vendor, and was wolfing it down even as he turned away. He walked on through the Quarter of Guilds then through the Quarter of Barbers, coming out at last into the wide thoroughfare that was the Avenue of Lies. The street was less busy than usual. People scurried by under their paper umbrellas or sheltered beneath the dripping eaves of buildings, glumly watching the covered carts that passed, carrying wounded soldiers, and dead ones.
From a small bazaar, Ash purchased an oiled longcoat and a wide-brimmed hat woven of grasses, which curved all the way down to the level of his eyes. Properly garbed against the weather, he next sought out an apothecary, for the air had grown heavy with the press of clouds, and in turn it had brought a return of his head pains. He heard the relief in his own voice as he bought a fresh supply of dulce leaves from a pair of brothers in their little shop in a narrow side street, interrupting them in the midst of a quarrel. Stepping out of the place he stuffed one of the leaves into his mouth. He tasted the bitterness of it, and chewed some more while the pain refused to diminish. Ash took four more of the leaves before his head began to lighten, not dwelling on what that might mean.
Ahead, through the mists of rain, he saw the Mount of Truth rising up above the flat roofs of the district. He turned away from the sight, heading into the alleyways of the Bardello, the little enclave of musicians and poets and artists, finally stopping outside a wooden building that leaned out badly over the cobbled street, its windows shuttered and dark. A metal bracket was fixed over the door, where a wooden sign should have been hanging, sporting the picture of a seal on a neck-chain.
Ash looked about him to make sure he was in the right street. Mystified, he tried the door and found that it was locked.
‘Hermes!’ he shouted out and pounded his fist against it.
After a moment he heard feet shuffling and the sounds of bolts being drawn back. The door tugged open, and Hermes the agent poked his head around and squinted up at him through a thick pair of spectacles.
‘Ash!’ hollered the tiny man with his eyes widening in surprise.
‘You old dog! Is it really you?’ And he opened the door further and beckoned him inside.
‘What is left of me,’ Ash replied. He stepped into the dim dusty space of an empty room, a few chairs arranged around the walls beneath sketches of the bay. Birds were squawking loudly from the neighbouring rooms. ‘What is going on here? Why are you closed for business?’
The man looked up as though he had just been struck across his face, blood flushing to his round cheeks. His eyes blinked and watered behind the glass of his spectacles. He cleared his throat, wiped a strand of curly hair from his forehead. ‘You mean . . . you don’t know?’
‘Know what?’
Hermes wrung his hands in some distress. Ash didn’t like how the agent was staring at him; as though Hermes was staring at the ghost of a dead man who had not yet been told he was dead.
‘Come,’ Hermes said gently – much too gently – and led Ash by the arm towards the inner door. ‘You should sit down first. Let us go and sit by the fire, shall we?’
Hermes liked birds more than people, and every room of the house seemed filled with cages of the screeching, flapping creatures. Ash sneezed more than a few times as he listened to what the agent had to tell him. His hands gripped the arms of the chair ever harder as he listened. Hermes sat opposite, in his own armchair specially crafted for his small frame, the light of the fire washing over him. Despite the heat, Ash felt chilled to the bone.
He still could barely believe it.
‘I wasn’t certain what was happening at first,’ the agent was telling him. ‘I was waiting for a batch of fresh seals to be sent, but nothing came through. No seals, no carrier birds, no letters. After a while I sent a letter to Cheem myself, through one of the usual blockade runners that we use. Still I heard nothing from Sato. That’s when I truly began to worry.’
He paused to take his spectacles off, to wipe his eyes.
Gone, Ash was thinking. All gone.
‘Last week, I finally received a letter. It was from Baracha. He told me to cease business until I heard from him further. He wrote that Sato had been attacked by the Imperials, that they had put it to the torch. Killed all they found there. Apparently he was away at the time. When he returned he found everything in ruins. That’s what he said, Ash. That’s how he put it. In ruins.’
‘Survivors?’ Ash heard his distant, impossibly calm voice ask in reply.
‘He didn’t say. I don’t think so. Oshō, though . . . he said that that Oshō had been slain in the fighting.’
Ash closed his eyes, while all around him the birds called out and rattled around in their cages.
Ché, he thought. They used what he knew to find us.
For the longest of times he could not move, could not even speak.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Bilge Town
The forest was a world within a world, his mother, the Contrarè, had liked to say.
As he staggered into its outer treeline, dripping wet from his river crossing and with the rags hanging off him, he sensed the difference in the air, the change of scents in his nostrils, the softening of light as it fell through the high canopy, and realized that it was true.
He ventured onwards, deeper into the Windrush until his legs would carry him no further. He collapsed onto the soft floor of leaves and dirt and slept a dreamless sleep of oblivion.
When he awoke, Bull knew he could go no further without first regaining some strength. He set about making a camp for himself not far from the trickles of a wide, shallow stream. He burned dead-wood that was wet and smoky, moved a large log in front of it for a seat. For food he ate berries and caught what fish he could with a sharpened stick, even chanced the mushrooms that looked familiar enough to his city eyes. Nuts too, of all kinds, were in abundance, though they lay heavy in his stomach if he consumed too many.
When he fell asleep those first nights on a carpet of soft moss, with t
he stars shining through the leaves overhead, and the trees surrounding him like the walls of a home, he knew the world beyond the forest was diminishing in his mind, its troubles and conflicts no longer his own. He was at peace at last in this quiet, lonely place of his mother’s people. He wished never to leave it.
On the fourth morning of his convalescence, Bull was wakened by a sharp stab to his side, and he sat up to find a group of male Contrarè gaping down at him. Warriors, by the looks of their painted faces, striped green and black from ear to ear, and the crow feathers and bone charms adorning their long dark hair.
‘Chushon! Tekanari!’ One of the men demanded as he jabbed his spear at him again. The warrior seemed the youngest of them all.
Bull grabbed the shaft of it and plucked it out of his grip.
At once, a dozen spear-tips were pressing against his flesh.
‘Whoah,’ Bull told them as he held up a hand. He tossed the spear back into the hand of the startled warrior.
‘Calm down. I’m one of you, see?’ And he gestured to his face as though it was obvious.
The men glanced at the young warrior. They wanted to kill Bull here and now, he could see.
With graceful movements the young warrior planted the end of his spear in the earth and plucked at the knees of his trousers to bend down before him. Tentatively, he grasped Bull’s face and turned it one way and then the other. He studied the sharpness of his cheeks, the swarthy complexion of his skin. He peered closely at the horns tattooed on his temples, and nodded his head in appreciation.
‘Then welcome home, brother of the tribes,’ the young man said in rough Trade, and helped him to his feet.
Ash wandered through the rain, lost and aimless. His mind had sunk into his feet, and he released himself to the feel of the hard rounded cobbles against the soles of his boots, letting them take him wherever they would.
Hermes the agent had offered him a room to stay in for as long as he needed it. Numbly, Ash had thanked him but declined, and had left the man standing at the front door with the birds shrieking behind him.
‘I’m not certain what I do now, Ash. Are we finished then? Is it over?’
Ash had only waved a silent farewell.
He didn’t realize he’d been walking south towards the Shield until he sniffed the scents of fish and seaweed and brine, and looked up from beneath the brim of his dripping hat, and saw the Sargassi Sea and the calmer waters of the east harbour before him. The countless ships that sheltered there bobbed and rocked in the gentle swell, while gulls wailed forlorn and hungry, sweeping back and forth through the sheets of rain. Men with fishing rods sat on stools along the waterfront, clad in hooded ponchos to protect themselves from the weather. Their demeanours were calm and patient as they chewed on tarweed or smoked from clay pipes.
To Ash, just then, they looked like the most contented men in the world.
The Shield was visible from here above the huddle of All Fools. The Lansway it stood upon stretched out across the water into a dull obscurity. He could see little of the ongoing assault itself out there; just plumes of smoke rising from the outermost wall, and the occasional flash of fire. The scene was muted, the sea breeze carrying the sounds elsewhere into the city.
Pressing onwards, he came to a busy junction overlooked by inns and merchants’ storehouses. The junction was the scene of a vagabond street market. Fancy carriages attempted to force their way through the crowds, which were mostly street vendors, brash prostitutes, the occasional gang of roaming urchins. A hill rose steeply ahead of him into leafy streets and high, marble mansions fronted by spike-topped walls, an enclave of Michinè and wealthy common-born. The Congress of the council could be found up there, he recalled.
Ash saw little point in going that way. He carried on along the seafront, the road curving out to skirt the base of the hill. After a row of rowdy taverns and sleep-easies, the road eventually petered out into a shingle track, with the hill on his left fronted by limestone cliffs.
The coastline here was a narrow, windswept strip of rock between the cliffs and the sea. Shanties had been erected amongst pools of brackish seawater that plopped and shimmered in the rainfall. Ash meandered between the shacks, stepping over the occasional crab or bundle of seaweed. The flimsy domiciles were propped high on stacks of flattened stones, and wooden boards ran between many of them.
He’d heard of this district in his previous visits to the city, though he had never visited before. The Shoals, the city-folk called it, due to the tides that swamped it in heavy weather. It was said to be the poorest district of the city, the place where people landed when they could fall no lower. Many penniless sailors came here and waited for news of ships hiring men. They had their own name for the place.
They called it Bilge Town.
Ash smiled without humour, wondering at the irony of his life.
The area stank of running sewage and rotting fish. Picking his way along the rocks, he risked straining his neck by looking up to the very top of the cliffs. Seabirds were spinning in the updraft rising past the Michinè villas, where orchards overhung the crumbling edges of limestone. Kings had once lived up there. For a thousand years they had lived in the Pale Palace with their families and courts, ruling over all of Khos.
Ash slipped on something beneath his heel and caught himself just in time. He looked down at a sour apple, fallen from one of the high overhanging trees of the orchards, smeared flat and brown beneath his boot. A gust drove the rain into his face. Ash shivered.
He headed towards the cliff face, where the rocky shore rose sharply and the shanties huddled together more densely than they did below. The shingle paths wound between dwellings both small and weatherworn, leaning against each other for support, clinging to the slopes all the way to the face of the cliffs. In the cliffs themselves, within depressions in the chalky face of stone, structures were perched in enclaves that seemed impossible to the eye. High above them caves had been carved out, connected by ladders and swaying gantries.
He trod upwards along a path that switchbacked between shanties and the occasional two-storey structure. Women hung clothes out to dry beneath stretches of tarpaulin, their heads and shoulders wrapped in shawls, faces reddened by the wind. Babes cried indoors. The street children chased after dogs or skipped to odd chanting rhymes, or struggled with bulging waterskins up the slopes. There seemed to be fewer men than women, he noticed.
Already the ache in his head was returning, despite the leaves still bundled in his mouth. His eyes swam with a kind of fog, and Ash blinked hard to try and clear them. He took more of the dulce leaves, and stood for some moments until his vision cleared a little, though the pain remained, stabbing his forehead to the beat of his heart. He began to feel sick with it.
He stopped a local – an old, hungry-looking, grey-haired man carrying a straw umbrella – and asked where he might find some room and board. The old man looked at him curiously, but was helpful enough. Ash followed his directions, climbing ever upwards.
The Perch was a ramshackle establishment that occupied a shallow ledge on the cliff wall. The sign above the door swung creaking in the wind, as old and decrepit as the rest of the long, narrow building. The flaking picture showed a rat squatting on a sea-tossed barrel, its own tail clamped in its mouth in apprehension.
Smoke was billowing from the taverna’s central chimney. Laughter could be heard from within.
Ash pushed through the doors into the taproom. A squall of rain followed him in, causing the lantern light in the dim, smoky space to flicker against the walls. A few heads turned to appraise the newcomer.
‘Shut that door!’ shouted a man behind the bar, a fat bald-headed man with thick tattooed arms. ‘You’re letting the cold in, man!’
Ash pushed the door closed, warped and ill-fitting in its frame, and shook his coat dry as a pool of water gathered at his feet, soaking into the rushes that covered the floor. It was hot in the narrow room. A log fire crackled fitfully in the hearth. Ash removed
his hat and stepped to the bar, trailing water.
The proprietor was playing a game of ylang with a woman sitting on a stool and wearing an expression of boredom. The man moved one of his black pebbles across the board, and looked up at Ash as he approached.
‘What can I get for you?’ he asked.
‘Cheem Fire, if you have any.’
His eyes brightened. ‘Then you’re in luck. I probably have the last case in the whole city.’
The bottles were hidden behind the bar in a locked strongbox chained to the floor. The proprietor fumbled with a ring of keys that hung from his belt, then unlocked it and removed a bottle with an exaggerated show of care. The cork squeaked as he pulled it free with his teeth. He swirled the contents of the bottle, allowing the aroma to waft into his flaring, hairy nostrils.
‘Only the finest,’ he purred as he trickled out the tiniest of portions into a glass tumbler, chipped but reasonably clean. He was about to add some water into it when Ash held his hand over the glass.
‘And leave the bottle,’ Ash told him.
Suspicion, suddenly. ‘It costs half an eagle for a bottle of this stuff. It isn’t watered down already, you know.’
The coin skittered across the bar, turning every head in the room.
The proprietor licked his lips. He took the gold eagle and hefted it for weight. His tongue poked out and he dabbed it against the coin.
‘Very good,’ he proclaimed with satisfaction. He left the bottle where it stood and took out a chisel and small mallet from beneath the bar. The eagle, like all eagles, was stamped with two deep lines across its face, one crossing the other so as to divide it into quarters. He aligned the end of the chisel with one of the lines and pounded once, hard, with the mallet. The coin broke in two. He scooped up one half, returned the other.
Ash swirled the contents of the glass for a moment, took a sniff, then downed it.
The swarthy woman was studying him with her kohl-lined eyes. She looked Alhazii, he saw. Her eyes seemed overly fascinated with his skin.