The hammering on the door jolted him out of sleep. Beside him his scented bed partner groaned and tried to snuggle closer, but he was already out of bed and on his feet. His scimitar was naked in his fist before he said: “It’s open.”
“Who were you expecting?” Prothero asked with a raised eyebrow. He stopped in the doorway and leaned against the jamb, a jaunty, dark figure with a face as triangular as that of a stoat. His eyes flicked appreciatively to the girl in the bed who was groggily coming awake.
“You never know,” Rol said. He scabbarded Fleam and began to get dressed. To the girl he said, “Get out. The money’s on the chest by the window.”
Sitting up now, she pouted, and glared at the grinning Prothero who watched her dress with much relish. She took the minims from the chest-top and stalked past him with her head high. “You’re no gentleman,” she huffed at him as she left the room, and he laughed.
“You have me there, child.”
Rol buckled his sword belt, yawning. “What’s the time?”
“An hour to the turn of the tide, is what the time is. Riparian is tugging out his hair in wonder and dismay at the absence of his first mate.”
“He worries too much. He might have known I’d be here.”
“If it’s Mamertos, then it must be the Flamingo House. Yes, you are a creature of certain habits. Who was she?”
“She’s new, only started last month. If you like, I think you have time to-”
“Not now. I had my fill last night after we split up.”
“Aha. Where’d you lay your head?” Rol was stuffing oddments into his canvas seabag and scratching his hair into a shaggy mop of gold. He leaned his face into the ewer by the bed and emerged with water dripping from his beard.
“Mother Abbe’s.”
“That hole? You’re lucky they didn’t smother you.”
“There’s a girl there has this trick-”
“All right, all right, tell me on the way. We’d best be off before Riparian sails without us.”
Mamertos was a bustling port of some quarter-million people, the capital of lovely Auxierre. Rising in white-walled tiers from the waterside, the city resembled nothing so much as an onion sliced into rings and spread out on its side. It was stone-built, for there were rocky hills just inland, and extensive quarries had been burrowed into these for generations. Mamertine marble was sought after all over the world, and Auxierre’s rulers had made free use of it in beautifying their capital. Red clay tiles covered the roofs of the houses from hovel to mansion, and gangs of city-sweepers kept the filth on the streets within acceptable levels. The city was an ordered place of tree-lined avenues and public parks. Even the waterfront was tamed, and all the brothels and inns thereon were licensed by the Crown. There were still a few independent operators, however, and both Prothero and Rol had always preferred these to the more sanitized license-holding establishments.
“Not a patch on Urbonetto,” Prothero said, looking around him. They were within a stone’s cast of the wharves and everywhere before them the masts of ships rose in a long forest webbed with a million lines of rigging.
“I’ve never made it that far,” Rol admitted.
“No? Ah, that’s right, you joined us just after the last of the Bionese runs. You were lucky. We used to have all the Westerease to beat across, and never a sight of land between Perigord and Bionar itself, except for Kull black as smoke on the horizon. Ever since Riparian won that Mercanter contract it’s been glorified coast-following, and long may it last.”
“I don’t know,” Rol said. “I don’t think I’d mind a spell on the open ocean.”
“The Armidon Banks are open enough for me,” Prothero snorted. “You’re young, that’s all.”
“You’re my elder by a bare three years, you little squint. Don’t try to pull the hoary old mariner act with me.”
Prothero laughed. Rol’s shipmate was a native of Laugro in southern Cavaillon, Cavaillon of the Vines, where the world’s best brandy was made. The region of his birth was a backward, insular land so mountainous that the vineyards were planted on terraces hacked out of the sides of the hills. A place where the women were brown-skinned and black-haired and the men all bore the long knives known as sabrons and lived by a code of honor so arcane that feuds between neighboring families might last hundreds of years. One such feud had so disgusted the young Jaime Prothero that he had run away to sea, and had never been back since. When drunk, he would sing mournful songs of his own hills and tearfully speculate as to the fate of his brothers and sisters, his elderly mother, his stern father. And then he would spit on the floor to avert any bad luck for them. He was a small, lean man, deadly quick with the sabron he kept tucked in his sash, utterly fearless, and incapable of betraying a friendship. He had been Rol’s shipmate for going on seven years now.
Seven years. In that time Rol had worked his way up from deckhand to first mate, and now he knew the seas from Corso to Aringia as well as any man could. He had sailed the Westerease, the Caverric, the Armidon Banks, the Inner Reach, and the Southern Wrywind, and he knew the fleshpots that lined half a hundred ports up and down their shores. The passage of time had seen his already formidable frame bulk out with muscle and reach its full height. He was a swaggering, bearded mariner now, with spiderweb wrinkles at the outside of his eyes that spoke of years peering into the wind.
Of his boyhood, he thought as little as he could, pushing down the memories, bright and dark. The pain of Rowen’s rejection, once all-consuming, had become a barely registered ache. He still had a weakness for tall, dark girls with quiet smiles, but in seven years he had never spent more than one night with any of them.
“Where in the name of the gods of the Twelve Seas have you been, you cold-eyed big bastard?” Riparian was furious. He leaned over the quarterdeck rail of the Cormorant and shook one veined fist at Rol and Prothero.
“Saying good-bye to your mother,” Rol snapped back, and stalked up the gangplank. “What’s this?”
A group of sorry-looking ragged men were standing in the waist of the brig whilst the ship’s company went about their tasks all around them.
Riparian shrugged. “Extra hands. We’re short this trip.”
“They look like convicts.”
“That’s because they are. Privateersmen, if you please. The gaol released them to me-given a choice, they elected to serve out some of their sentence aboard the Cormorant rather than rot in the quarries.”
“Pirates now?” Prothero was scowling. “You trust these sons of bitches not to slit our throats in the graveyard watch and take the ship for themselves? We’ve run the gauntlet of bastards like these up and down the Westerease, and had we been caught they’d have tossed us overboard without a second thought. And now we give them a place before the mast and are supposed to share our grog with them?”
“Yes,” Riparian said flatly.
“All right, then.” Prothero grinned.
“You men,” Rol said to the ragged group, “what were you? Able seamen?”
One touched his forelock. “I was a carpenter, your honor.”
Riparian clapped his hands together. “Capital! I shall rate him carpenter’s mate. Gastyn has been crying out for one this age.”
“What about the rest of you?” Rol asked. He did not like the look of these fellows. Pirates were the curs of the earth, murderers and rapists all, and he would have as soon tossed them overboard as have them pollute the planks of his ship.
“I was a quartermaster.”
“I was a topman.”
“I was a master’s mate.”
Rol looked sharply at the one who had said this. “An officer? On what ship?”
The man hesitated. He looked to be in his forties, and his hair and beard were black, streaked badgerwise with gray. He had eyes dark as sloes and a scar broke one eyebrow in two. There were unhealed sores on his wrists and his bare feet were black with ingrained dirt.
“Come now, don’t be backward. It’s all in the past, we know. You’re a Cormorant now, it seems. But what was your ship before you were captured?”
“I was master’s mate on the Barracuda. ”
Prothero whistled softly. “Mathuw Creed’s ship. I thought the Armidians crucified the lot of you.”
“They did, mostly, but I was only fourteen at the time, so my sentence was commuted to life in the quarries of Keutta. Then the Mercanters of Auxierre took over the penal contract, and I wound up here, breaking stone for them instead of the Armidians.”
“Fourteen? That’s too young for a master’s mate. How long have you been in the quarries?”
The man looked up at the towering masts of the Cormorant, and his chest inflated so that Rol thought he was about to shout. But he only said quietly, “Eleven years.”
Rol and Prothero exchanged a glance. “We’ll rate you able seaman for now, in the starboard watch,” Rol said. “Rest for a couple of days and get those sores seen to.” He looked at Riparian, and the master nodded. The penal quarries of the Mamertine League were widely regarded as a delayed sentence of death. Most men survived two or three years before succumbing to disease, starvation, or the sheer brutality of existence there.
“What’s your name?” Rol asked the man.
“Elias Creed.”
“Mathuw’s brother?”
“His son.”
“I’m surprised you weren’t crucified, youth or no.”
“They never suspected who I was. The survivors told our captors I was a cabin boy.”
Rol studied the man. There was a calm purpose to him he liked, but his late unlamented father had been the bloodiest pirate-captain for half a century, plunderer of at least sixty ships before the Armidians dispatched a flotilla to hunt him down. If there was anything of the father in the son, he would bear watching.
They cast off from the wharves and were towed out of the harbor of Mamertos by a pair of twelve-scull cutters. As soon as the wind began to creak the yards Riparian had them let fall the topsails. These were sheeted home and braced round with the smooth efficiency of a veteran crew. The cutters were cast off and waved away with the traditional catcalls deep-ocean sailors reserved for inshoremen. The Cormorant took the wind like a greyhound on a scent and her stem began to throw back packets of spindrift along the fo’c’sle as her pitch increased and the tall swells of the Armidon Banks began to roll under her hull.
The sea. Ussa’s Mane, some called it, and half a thousand other names besides. It seemed to Rol in this moment that a life spent entirely on land was a life only half lived. There was an eternity in the sea, something about the endlessness of the movement in that vastness that both set the soul at rest and kindled within it the desire to emulate, to rove the changing face of the waters, to travel for the sheer novelty of new horizons.
Riparian packed on sail steadily, the brig staggering as each new stretch of canvas was unfurled and her speed increased. He looked up at the mizzen above him. They had a northeaster, a following wind, and the mizzensail had been brailed up to let the air at the main and forecourses. The master met Rol’s eye and they grinned at each other. Three days in the taverns and brothels of Mamertos had been enough. This was where real life began.
The Cormorant was a sleek packet-brig, a low-decked, sharp-nosed vessel built like her namesake. Her cargo was compact: the return correspondence of a thousand prosperous letter-writers from Osmer clear through the Mamertine. Land deeds, bills of credit and of sale, the reports of spies and merchants and soldiers, the haggling of diplomats; they were all packed in waterproof bags in a sealed cell below the waterline, bound for greedy readers in Oronthir. The Cormorant flew the pennant of the Mercanters, that worldwide network of secretive, sophisticated businessmen who, it was said, could buy and sell whole kingdoms if they chose. They had commissioned Riparian to carry their correspondence in safety and with dispatch and in return he collected a fat fee, plus better than usual cooperation from harbormasters up and down the Mamertine, who liked to keep on the right side of those with money and influence. Hence the swift compliance of the local authorities when Riparian had told them he was short of his complement. Rol was willing to bet that the local gaolers had looked down their muster-rolls for those with maritime experience and had not concerned themselves too much about how that experience had been gained.
As soon as the Cormorant was out on the open ocean, naval routine took over almost every aspect of the lives of the ship’s company. Riparian had once been a quartermaster in the Armidian navy, and he liked to try to run things naval fashion-the crew divided into two watches instead of three so that each man worked four hours on and then had four hours off, round the clock. The brass of the little four-pounder swivel-guns was to be kept gleaming, as was that of the ship’s bell, and officers of the watch handed over to their relief with a formal statement of the ship’s course, her speed, and the behavior of the wind. It was all very man-of-war, though the Cormorant carried no heavier metal than the swivels, and Prothero for one thought it all an absurd eccentricity of the master’s. Rol liked it, however; the men were easier to manage than on some ships he had served upon, and obeyed all orders without question. He and Prothero had been with the Cormorant for almost two years now, having sailed in a variety of vessels and under some truly execrable masters. For all his foibles, Riparian was a fine seaman, and he valued his first mate and master’s mate enough to indulge their occasional late return from shore leave.
At two hundred tons, the Cormorant was on the large side for a brig-a two-masted, square-rigged vessel. As a rule Mercanter ship’s companies averaged one man per ten tons of ship. Riparian had thirty men under him, including the convicts. The heavier crew meant, however, that sail-plans could be altered with greater speed, and the efficiency of the ship was increased. At times speed was everything in this game, as there were sometimes large bonuses for making the run in a certain number of days. But by and large there was time on most runs for a couple of days onshore-if all the company made it back to the brig in time to catch their tide.
West-southwest was their course, along the green coast of Auxierre. They gave themselves a clear ten leagues of sea room so that all they could see of the land was the blue haze of the Mamertine Hills running northeast to southwest, the spine of the kingdom. It was the spring of the year, and the herrin yawls were out in large numbers, towing their glass-buoyed nets behind them and accompanied by clouds of screaming gulls. The Cormorant sailed past them like a racehorse gliding by a flock of sheep, and Riparian altered course to due west so they had the breeze on the starboard quarter and could unfurl the mizzen-course. The land bulged north here in a slow, curved sweep of wooded lowlands, and there were reefs to port, calling for a hand at the bow and another in the foretop, both scanning the undulating surface of the sea for the telltale flash of foam or a darkness near the surface which would rip the keel out from under them. Riparian took the helm himself at times like these, and when the lookouts yelled aloud their sightings he would swing the ship’s wheel one way or another, eyes half closed, feeling the movement of his vessel under his hands, gauging the answer of the rudder.
By late evening of their first day out of Mamertos they had the reefs and rocks behind them and were in green water. They had covered thirty-five leagues, so brisk had been the northeaster and so attentively had Riparian pushed his ship. Now they were clear of the Auxierre coast and were in the Armidon Banks proper, running southwest with the wind aft again, the stem pointed toward the Caverric Straits which separated the northernmost tip of Cavaillon from the southern extremity of Armidon. The Straits had been the site of naval battles for centuries as the sea-canny Armidians sought to invade Cavaillon. Sometimes they had succeeded, sometimes they had failed, but their attempts at annexation and colonization had never taken. Perhaps it was because of the character of the Cavaillans-men like Prothero who would never forgive a slight or forget an injury.
Beyond the Straits was the Inner Reach, one of the Great Seas of the world, and a haven for pirates since time immemorial. Depending on the winds, Riparian would either follow the coast of Cavaillon around its periphery or cut straight across the open sea to Ordos in Oronthir, their destination. The former was more usual, for it meant less outlay on provisions and a chance of fresh food and water from the fishing villages along the coast to the Gut. Either way, the Cormorant had a good four weeks of sailing ahead of her, if the winds were kind.
The ship’s officers had dinner together that night in the master’s cabin, with the brig’s wake phosphorescent as moonlight in the stern windows at their backs. Riparian was no gourmet, but he liked to keep a few chickens and goats on board for eggs and milk, and they were rarely so far from land that they must subsist on the salt horse and hardtack that were the staples of the foremast hands. He was not a wine drinker, though, and the glasses were filled with Kassic rum, well watered and flavored with lemon.
They pushed the plates back whilst Riparian lit his pipe and then they indulged in the small talk of a ship at sea, discussing the crew, the provisions, the weather. It was virtually a tradition, and Rol listened much more than he talked. But as well as the concerns of the Cormorant, Prothero and Riparian also liked to debate the matters of the world, as though they had some say in them.
“It’s a world of men,” Riparian said. “I don’t think much of these myths we hear of the Elders and such-where the hell are they now, is what I want to know? All bedtime tales for children. Rol-have some more rum.”
Rol and Prothero smiled at each other. Riparian was a blunt, straight man with nothing in his life except his ship and the cargoes she carried and the men who made that possible. In this he was almost admirable. Sometimes Rol envied him his certainties.
“The world is what men have made of it, that’s plain,” Prothero said. “But who knows what was here in times before men walked the earth? The history of Umer is longer than we give it credit for.”
“What are you now, a seer?” Riparian asked with a contemptuous snort.
“Would you call Kull a figment of the imagination?” Prothero countered.
“The Mage-King is a fact of the waking world, there’s no denying that. But who’s to say what he is? Who has ever seen him and lived to tell of it? He may just be some reclusive madman with a madman’s following. There are many examples in history of half-baked ne’er-do-wells hoodwinking the gullible and declaring themselves king of this and heir to that. Look at Bionar now. I had word off Gilcom of Omer before we sailed that it’s at war again.”
“Bionar at war,” Prothero said. “That’s about as remarkable as sunlight in summer.”
“Ah, but this is different-Bionar’s not invaded Oronthir again, or such as that. This is a civil war, Bionari killing each other by the thousand, and armies marching across the Myconian Mountains, and Urbonetto has closed her landward gates.”
“What’s the occasion of all this?” Prothero asked, interested despite himself.
“Some girl has been going about the kingdom saying she’s the rightful heir to the throne, and Bar Asfal naught but a usurper, a killer of his own kin.”
Rol looked up from his glass. His face seemed to have grown suddenly cold.
“A beauty, she’s supposed to be, but a killer also. She leads her followers from the front rank, and slays Bionar’s doughtiest champions like sheep. It’s been brewing for years, apparently-she’s seduced half a dozen of the mountain cities to her cause and they’re where Bionar gets its iron, where the royal manufactories lie. So she’s outfitted her forces in the best gear the kingdom can produce, and I hear she’s even brought a few pieces of artillery down out of the mountains with her to batter the walls of Myconn with.”
“There are madmen for all seasons, I suppose,” Prothero said, draining his glass. “If she stops the Bionari from marching over half of Umer, I for one will be well pleased, so good luck to her. And now, gentlemen, I believe it is my watch on deck.”
“Don’t trip over your own feet,” Riparian warned, for Prothero was swaying where he stood.
“My feet can mind themselves, old man.”
The Caverric Sea went by in a succession of fresh sunrises. Rol liked taking the morning watch, from the fourth hour to the eighth, and watching the sun begin as a gray hint in the dark, and rise red through the cloud until it was broad yellow day and his body seemed to cast off the weariness of the dark hours as though the sunrise itself were some form of roborant.
His mind had been busy all through the dark hours, gnawing on memory, savoring past pain. Rowen was trying to make herself ruler of the most powerful kingdom in the world-for it was Rowen Riparian had been speaking of, he had not the smallest doubt. The Lost Heir of Bionar-it was like something out of an old story. As he often had over the course of the last seven years, Rol wondered how it was for her, if she had any peace at night, or any kind thought in her mind for him. The memory of her scalded his very spirit-her face, her taut body straining against him. Her smile, the rarest gift in the world.
And as always, when he could bear it no more he finally halted the arid conjecture and wondering in their tracks by staring out at the early morning on the surface of the waters, and finding there some form of quietude.
Elias Creed was supposed to be holystoning the quarterdeck but he got up off his knees and bent a crick out of his back with a faint groan. A year or two older than Rol, give or take, he had the face of a worn middle-aged man. His body, though lean, was a framework of pure muscle, the result of years spent breaking stones in the quarries of Keutta. The convicts had been issued sailcloth and had made their own clothing with the aid of a few of the other crew members who were handy with a needle. They had shaped up well, despite regaling the fo’c’sle with gory tales of past misdeeds. The men they were boasting to had heard it all before, however, and were not so easily impressed. Creed in particular was turning into a valuable hand, uncomplaining and swift to anticipate the orders of the ship’s officers. Now he looked out at the birthing morning much as Rol did.
“I never knew the Caverric so well,” he said. “For us it was the Inner Reach, the Westerease. We never went beyond the Gut either. The seas of my youth. I will see them again soon.” He looked at Rol inquiringly.
“Within a few days, if we make it through the Straits without mishap, and Ran is kind.” He paused. “What happens to you once we reach Ordos-are you to stay with the ship?”
Creed shook his head, smiling. “They have quarries in Oronthir also, the Mercanters. Your captain will register my comrades and me with the harbormaster in Ordos and we’ll be in shackles again, breaking stone. Still, it’s been something, to have had a deck under my feet again, no matter for how short a time.”
Rol turned away, frowning.
“You think I am a murderer and a thief, do you not, sir?”
“You were a privateer. That’s what they do, I hear tell.”
“Yes. Yes, they do. But they are not all monsters. They are merely men, most of them left without a choice in the manner they live their lives.”
“How so?”
“I know that on the Barracuda the main part of the crew, my father’s veterans, were refugees from the Oronthian borders, some from the Goliad. They did not choose the sea; they had all other choices taken away from them. Bionese armies had sacked their towns and carried off their wives and daughters and starved out their fathers. Perhaps our ship was a little different, but we only ever preyed on Bionar and her allies. We killed and raped in our turn, but only the Bionari and their fellow-travelers.”
“Very discerning of you,” Rol said dryly. He turned and regarded Elias Creed closely for the first time. The man had the same sense of calm confidence about him that Rol had remarked at their first meeting. He had possessed it then even though he had been standing in shackles. He had trimmed his hair and beard since and was dressed in sailors’ canvas and his sores were on the way to healing. But the eyes had not changed. Somehow Creed had not lost faith in the goodwill of strangers, even after eleven years in Keutta.
“If you were not returned to the quarries, what would you do?”
Creed did not hesitate. “I would take to the sea.”
“As a pirate?”
Here, Creed looked away. He turned to the ship’s rail and leaned thereon, the muscles bunching around his shoulder blades.
“I don’t know.” And then: “Have you ever heard tell of Ganesh?”
Rol searched his brain. “It’s an old name, is it not? For the southeast coast of Bionar.”
“Yes. The Myconians come down to the sea there in steep woods and high crags of granite. There are a thousand coves and bays in that part of the world, and though the Bionari have claimed it, they have never truly set a footprint on the place.” He turned back to face Rol. “That is where I would go, where no marching army could ever reach me. There is a city in Ganesh, it’s said, a secret city to which no road leads. Ganesh Ka.”
“I’ve heard of it. It’s a legend among mariners.”
“Yes.” Here Creed drew closer, as if he were imparting a secret. He lowered his voice so the quartermaster at the wheel might not hear him.
“My father told me he had been to Ganesh Ka in his youth. He said it was a real place. A pirate city where free men lived who could not stomach the hegemony of Bionar. They had a fleet of warships, and they ruled their own affairs and welcomed all the lost and fleeing peoples who came to them in desperation or despair and gave them succor, and a new homeland.”
“You believed him?”
Creed’s nostrils flared. “He was my father. He went to the scaffold having never told a lie in his life.”
More gently, Rol said, “You believe it still exists? The Bionari have tramped their bloody bootprints over most of the continent at one time or another, and this place cannot be more than a hundred and fifty leagues from Myconn itself.”
“The Myconian Mountains have shielded it, and the impenetrable forests on their slopes. Ganesh is no place for armies. It is there, believe me.”
Rol nodded. It was not his place to convince Creed of the absurdity of his beliefs. The convict had the face of a man who has not yet lost hope, despite having nothing to hope for.
Paul Kearney
The Mark of Ran
Fifteen