This Forsaken Earth (13 page)

Three masts, limp topsails just nicking the horizon. The vessel was perhaps five leagues away, it was hard to tell. There was a haze thickening about the brim of the sky, and the light was going. No top-lanterns, which meant she was not a merchantman. A man-of-war, then, and in these waters almost certainly Bionese.

In the
Revenant,
with the crew he had formed and had come to trust and esteem, Rol would have felt keen anticipation, a kind of joy at the sight. In this ship, with this crew, his only thought was how to avoid any encounter. As he hung there above the placid sea, he cursed Artimion and Miriam and Canker with all the venom in his heart.

All about him, the yards were filling with men as the ship’s company unfurled every sail they had. The canvas fell dead from the spars, however, with not so much as a zephyr to stir the reef-points.

“Keep an eye on her for as long as you can, Phelim,” Rol told the lookout.

“Aye, sir.” That would not be long. The thickening haze had turned to mist, and even as he watched, Rol saw the distant ship’s topsails disappear into it. He looked up, and saw that the first stars were already out. There would be something of a moon tonight, but the mist would hide it.

“Could be worse,” he told Gallico and Creed back on deck. “We’ll tow her northwest, try and get her into a wind. I want both cutters in the water. We’ll change crews every four glasses.”

The Astraroes were not veterans, but most of them knew the sea in some way or other, and all of them had passed time in small boats. The two cutters were hoisted over the side with a minimum of fuss, and both Creed and Gallico picked their crews in little more than a murmur. Rol saw Giffon standing by the ship’s rail, hoping to get picked, and called him aft.

“No rowing for you, lad. We need those hands of yours to be as dainty as a milkmaid’s.”

“I’ll do my share,” Giffon said stubbornly. Rol laid a hand on his arm.

“It may be you’ll be sewing up a few of us tonight, or in the morning, Giffon. That’s your share, and we all value you for it. Any fool can pull on an oar.”

The boy hung his head. “If you want to do me a service,” Rol told him, “get up to the foretopmast, and bring down the carpenter’s son in one piece, and deliver him to his father.”

Giffon looked up, and smiled. “He seems happy there.”

“And I’ll be happy when he’s down on deck. Be careful, Giffon.” The boy nodded. How old was he—sixteen, seventeen? What turns had his life taken to give him those eyes? He had come aboard the
Astraros
without a word, lugging a goatskin bag almost as large as himself, and had set up a little sickbay in the forepeak without order or invitation. But it had warmed Rol’s heart to see him, like having some of the
Revenant
’s luck on board.

The cutter-crews sculled their craft past the bows and took on cables from the fo’c’sle. The
Astraros
had a good bosun in Thef Gaudo, a small, seal-dark man from Corso, but there was no gunner on board, and some of the topmen had never handled anything bigger than a large fishing ketch. Still, the operation proceeded with not much more than the usual profanity. Everyone was talking in undertones now, and the men in the boats had muffled their oars with wads of sheepskin. The mist was thickening; it felt cold on Rol’s face, like a wet linen handkerchief laid across his forehead. Already, the
Astraros
’s upper yards had disappeared into blank vapor, and her bowsprit was a mere shadowed guess from the quarterdeck. One of the men at the wheel, attentive to the thinning sand in the hourglass, stepped forward and struck four bells, the end of the first dogwatch; the sixth hour after noon to a landsman.

“Belay that,” Rol told him. “Wrap up the clapper.”

“Aye, sir.”

The
Astraros
began to move as the men in the cutters took the strain. Luckily, she was a light ship with a narrow floor, easier to pull than the three-hundred-ton, bluff-bowed
Revenant.
Almost her only point of superiority over the Black Ship, Rol thought sourly. But it was good to hear the water whispering past her sides again. Nothing more unsettling than to be aboard a ship of sail in a flat calm. It felt almost like a form of death.

The bosun came aft. “What do you think, sir, three knots?”

“About that. Keep them quiet, Thef. Every sound will carry tonight, and we don’t know if yonder bastard saw us before the mist came down. See that the crews switch every two hours.”

Rol walked forward. Fifteen paces, and he was on the fo’c’sle, where Aveh was busy trimming down the new foreyards with a few hands to help with the rough work. His son sat cross-legged beside him, watching the white curls of wood come shaving off the new spar with avid fascination. It was indeed a soothing thing to watch. The carpenter worked with a deft economy that was a pleasure to see, and his hands ran up and down the timber as though feeling out the best places to lay the edge of a tool.

“Aveh,” Rol said softly. “How long before we can start getting them up on the mast?”

The old man raised his head. “The mainyard will be ready by the middle watch. The topyard will take until the morning. It’s more slender, so there’s more to take off.”

“You’ve worked on ships before. You’re no landsman.”

They had lit a candle-lantern so the carpenter could see where his hands were going. Its flame was tall and thin as a willow-leaf around which the mist drifted in gauzy tendrils. But the light did not reach Aveh’s face. “I have been to sea before, yes.”

Almost, Rol asked him where, but the question died in his throat. As quiet and equable as the carpenter seemed, he gave the air of a man not to be trifled with. Rol ruffled his son’s curly hair instead, straightened, and went forward to the prow of the xebec, from where two cables stretched out into gray nothingness. He could hear the plash of oars out there, but nothing else. The mist pressed close now, and somewhere beyond it the sun had set behind the continent of Bion. The world had become a dark, shrouded place within which the only reality was the vessel under their feet.

Canker came forward, wrapped in a cloak that was already beaded with moisture. As he spoke, his breath clouded about his face to merge with the mist.

“Damn, it’s getting cold again. I had forgotten.”

“Winter draws upon us,” Rol told him. “North of Omer’s latitude, and you begin to feel it, especially at night.”

“You should see the Myconians this time of year—I suppose you will. A kingdom of snow, glaciers longer than rivers. Black nights where the frost crackles in a man’s very lungs.”

They stood in silence. The Inner Reach hissed past the cutwater below them; and all around, the
Astraros
creaked with a million minute shiftings of wood on wood. In his mind, Rol pictured a line traveling up the chart in his cabin at three sea-miles in every hour, a worm inching its blind way past the coast of Bionar and passing from the blue waters of the Reach to the wider, colder waters of the Westerease Sea. Windhaw Island lay nor’-nor’west of them, and southwest of that, the great Free City of Urbonetto with its thousand-ship harbor and miles of warehouses and great sea-walls. But it seemed like it must all be a dream. There was nothing but the black water below them, this house of mist that loomed all around, Aveh’s candle-lantern the sole point of brightness and warmth in all that sodden darkness.

The bosun joined them, wiping moisture out of his black eyebrows. “Ran sleeps,” he said. “Ussa has taken him to her bed.”

“You know these waters, Thef?” Rol asked.

“Corso’s almost due north of here, less than two hundred leagues. I know the sea-lanes between it and Urbonetto like they was written on the back of my hand.”

For a second, something flashed through Rol’s mind, an insight. He stared at his own scarred palm with the strange lines tracing their way across it. But his train of thought was broken as the bosun said, “Time to change crews.”

The cutters came alongside again, the exhausted rowers hauling themselves up the side of the xebec. Elias Creed handed Rol the hand-compass, a cold weight of brass. The ex-convict was shivering. “A cold seat at the tiller,” he said to Rol. “Best take a boat-cloak.”

“Gallico, you have the con,” Rol said to the halftroll. “Thef, you steer the blue cutter and I’ll take the red. Come, lads. No one goes below, but you can lie down on deck. Gallico, get the cook to rouse out a few bottles.” The halftroll nodded. In the dim light he looked like a thing made of stone. Rol paused, and then said, “Break out boarding-weapons, but no pistols, mind. I want every man armed, and that includes the men in the boats.”

To Rol’s surprise, Canker followed him down into the cutter. He sat beside him in the stern, muffled to the eyes. There was the inevitable clunking and swearing and fumbling of men in a small boat at night. The cutter rowed six oars a side, and it took a while to sort them out.

“Pull,” Rol said quietly. Stroke oar pushed the boat away from the side of the
Astraros,
and the others let fall and leaned back as one. The cutter surged forward, trailing the heavy cable behind it.

Three strokes of the oars, and the mist swallowed them. The cable lifted out of the water and the men’s oars dug deeper, creaking at the padded tholepins. Rol leaned on the tiller, the course clear in his mind. He called the stroke for a time, until the men were in the rhythm of it, and then there was only the plash and groan of the oars, the panting of the scullers.

“How long can we keep this up?” Canker asked through a fold of his cloak.

“We hope to tow her into a wind; a calm like this is unusual this time of year. It won’t be long.”

There was an hourglass and a slot-lantern at Rol’s feet. He set the compass between them and every so often lifted the metal slide in the lantern to check the time and their course. He might have the night-sight of a cat, but it heartened him, all the same, to let slip that little wand of yellow light. One glass slid by, then two. The mist was thickening, if anything, and it sat like a dream of salt on their lips, trickled down their chilled faces.

“What happens when we reach Arbion?” Rol asked in a low voice. Canker started as if he had been half asleep, though his eyes were bright and clear.

“That depends on where the front lines are. We should still hold the line of the Embrun River. If Myconn has fallen, then Rowen will withdraw across it toward the north. Gallitras should hold out. Its governor, Moerus, is a good soldier, a man of his word. In any case, when we leave the ship we’ll set off south. It should be easy traveling; once you get down from the mountains, Bionar is a pleasant enough kind of country, well tilled and watered, good roads, inns. Civilization!” And Canker’s eyes smiled above his mask of oilskin. There was a lie in the smile.

“You’ve grown used to the finer things in life since I first saw you in a derelict warehouse in Ascari,” Rol said.

The Thief-King shrugged. “I always had the finer things in life; I just chose not to flaunt them. Snigger if you will, Rol, but it so happens that I am a man of some station in Bionar now, chamberlain and chancellor to Queen Rowen herself, no less.”

“And how do the Bionari feel about an Islander thief lording it over them?”

“They have learned to like it.” And Canker’s voice was as cold as the mist and the night that pressed in around them.

Rol bent again and let slip that shard of light from the lantern at his feet. The hourglass was out. He turned it, and the sand within began its journey once more. He was about to speak but something out in the darkness, a rumble of sound, stopped him.

“Easy oars.” The boat-crew lifted the blades out of the water and leaned on the looms, breathing heavily and staring at him, twelve white faces.

“Do you hear that?”

Canker cocked his head, pulling his cloak from his face. “It sounds like thunder.”

Again it came, more sustained now. A rolling growl of deep noise passing over the sea from the east.

“Those are broadsides,” Rol said. His heart seemed to fill his chest as it beat and beat. He twisted at the tiller and looked over his right shoulder. “Silence fore and aft.” The crew’s muttering ceased.

Again. It was like some bad-tempered god turning in his sleep. Rol wiped the mist from his eyes irritably, and caught a glimpse of something far out in the fog: a light, a diffuse glow. “Can you see that, Canker?”

“Yes, yes, I see it. Looks like a bonfire or something.”

“It’s a ship on fire.”

The men in the boat watched, straining on the thwarts. The light flared up briefly, and seconds later there came the dull roar of an explosion, louder than anything that had gone before. The light sank in darkness, and silence fell about them again.

“What happened?” Canker asked.

“The powder-magazine must have blown.” Rol snapped out of his reverie. “Come lads, get her going. Another glass and we change round.”

The men dipped their blades, and began sculling again. About them, the black, mist-bound night kept its secrets.

Seven

THE NECESSITIES OF WAR

THE WIND RETURNED WITH THE DAWN, AS THOUGH IT
had been frightened of the dark. It came from due east, and shredded the mist in a matter of minutes, but bore on its wings a squall of rain which drenched the
Astraros
and her crew, numbing them to the bone. Nevertheless, the exhausted ship’s company were at once sent aloft to take in sail, and reefed the lateens on main and mizzen while Gallico took the wheel and pointed the beakhead northwest, to make the channel between Windhaw Island and Urbonetto.