This Forsaken Earth (14 page)

Rol did not allow the crew to rest even then. They had a moment’s respite to stand and chew cold chunks of salt-beef and biscuit, and then were set to changing the yards on the foremast. Aveh had worked all night, and now the two spars were resting across the beam of the xebec. A series of lines to the capstan lifted first the foreyard, and then the foretopyard up in the air, to be eased through the rigging as though they were made of eggshell and then laid close to the foremast. Lifts were then attached to the mid-point, the parrel fastened about the mast itself, and all that paraphernalia of cable, the stirrups, the lifts and braces, were rigged on one by one. When that was done, more sails had to be bundled aloft and bent on the new square-rigged yards—all this in a brisk easterly that was already churning the Westerease into a hillscape of white horses and a wicked fathom-high swell. Only when all this had been accomplished did Rol allow one of the two watches to go below; two dozen shattered men who would not even change out of their dripping clothes before climbing into their hammocks.

The starboard watch, resigned to another four hours of keeping the deck, found themselves nooks and corners out of the wind and huddled together, nodding and dozing and talking in a desultory fashion while Rol, Creed, and Gallico stayed by the wheel, studying the motion of the ship, feeling the lift and fall of her on the choppy swells, sensing the forces at work on her hull and through her masts.

“She will do very well,” Gallico said with a smile. Under a scudding sky, with the spindrift flying aft and the
Astraros
heaving under them like a willing lover, the fog-bound apprehension of the night before seemed far in the past.

A hand in the fo’c’sle threw the log into the sea foaming past and let the line run off the spool in his other fist. His mate shouted, “Nip!” as the sand in his tiny hourglass ran out, and they hauled the line back in, counting the knots in the rope.

“Six knots one fathom sir!” they shouted aft.

Rol bent over the binnacle and wrote in the running log. “If this keeps up, we’ll run under the southern edge of Windhaw Island in three days.”

The wind held true; it would seem that Ran had left his bed and was running up and down the seas of the world again. They passed Windhaw in the forenoon watch, giving themselves a clear five leagues of sea-room, and the grim island remained a shape on the horizon, ragged and forbidding, half hidden by distant showers.

“They say that on Windhaw, Gibniu himself has a smithy, and that is why smoke issues from the mountains there,” Elias Creed said.

“Four-thousand-foot cliffs all the way around, over fifty leagues of them,” Gallico said. “No man has ever set foot on it; not even seabirds will nest there.”

Rol was looking in the other direction, southeast, to where the coast of Bionar was a long shadow on the horizon. Fifteen leagues to Urbonetto, greatest city of the world, a place he had never seen. He frowned and turned away.

“We hold this course through tonight, then put her about at the start of the forenoon watch—if the wind holds. The Wintethur Peninsula lies ahead. I want some comfortable leeway, especially with this easterly on our tail. Once we’re past the peninsula, we’ll head due south, keep it on the beam, and see how these lateens really earn their money.”

The lookout was kept on his toes all day, for the
Astraros
was now in some of the busiest sea-lanes of the world. They passed by a Mercanter convoy of fifty sail, with three mercenary brigs of Maprian as escort. One of the brigs edged closer to inspect the xebec, and see if a little piracy might be in order; but she sheered off as soon as Rol had the nine-pounders run out. It was a bluff, of course, but it worked.

“Greedy bastards,” Gallico said, not without a kind of approval. “They get paid a king’s ransom to escort Mercanters up and down the Westerease, and still they’re on the lookout for an easy prize.”

“The Mercanters know about this?” Creed asked.

“Of course. But they turn a blind eye as long as their convoy makes it to port in one piece. Look at that for a sight to gladden a privateer’s heart. Fifty fat merchantmen with barely a long gun between them but for those brigs. Had we the
Revenant,
we’d be in there like a goddamn wolf among sheep.”

They passed skeins of sail on every horizon, but saw no men-of-war. Arbion and Phidon had been Bionar’s two great naval bases, but one was now held by the rebels and the other had only lately fallen back into Bar Asfal’s hands. When Canker came back up on deck he studied the passing ships as intently as the Astraroes did.

“We must have burned thirty men-of-war alongside the docks when we took Arbion,” he said. “Some of it was accidental, what with the quantities of pitch and tar and timber on the wharves, but some was deliberate. A damned waste. The loyalists sank two big ships in the harbor-entrance to try and block it off, but it wasn’t enough. There’s still a channel open, right in the middle.”

“What about the wall-guns?” Gallico asked. “Are they still in place?”

“Some. Many were spiked, many more toppled into the sea as the enemy retreated to their own ships. The harbor walls of Arbion used to mount two hundred cannon, but I doubt there’s a dozen left now fit to fire.”

“Is Rowen trying to take over Bionar, or destroy it?” Rol asked with a sneer.

“A certain amount of destruction is inevitable in war. Things happen that one might not sanction or approve of, but they cannot be helped. That is the nature of war itself.”

“You speak like a politician, Canker.”

“I am a politician, Rol.”

Flurries of sleet came flocking in from the northeast, off the Seven Isles. The ship’s company dug out what warm gear they possessed, but there were not enough oilskins to go around, and they were swapped about between the watches. The easterly remained with them, veering or backing now and again, but always coming back to due east. They rounded the Wintethur Peninsula eleven days after leaving Ganesh Ka, and it was as if they entered a different world. There was snow in the air now, fat flakes which accumulated on the deck and froze to the rigging. The swell eased as the peninsula took the brunt of the wind and the
Astraros
took what was left of it on the larboard beam as she turned south toward the wide bay of Arbion itself. On either side of her, the coasts stretched away black with pine forests, but the snow was already piling up on them. The sky was as blank as a dead man’s eyes.

That night they dropped anchor in fifty fathoms. They had been unable to take a reading all day, and Rol’s charts of the approach to the city were inadequate. The wind was dropping, and the snow continued to fall in an eerie silence. They could see the mast-lanterns of merchantmen out to sea, but the bay itself was empty of ships. They gathered in the stern-cabin—Rol, Creed, Gallico, and Canker—and sipped rough ship’s wine without taking their seats.

“We take the red cutter in, the four of us,” Rol said. “I’m not chancing the ship, what with Canker’s wrecks scuttled in the channel and the fact that none of us but Gaudo have ever piloted in these waters before. Thef can navigate well enough; he’ll take the
Astraros
back out to sea and cruise this latitude for a few weeks in case”—here Rol’s mouth smiled—“in case we decide that Bionar is not for us. We leave tonight, with the turn of the tide. Any questions?”

“How far from the harbor are we?” Canker asked.

“About three leagues. We’ll step a mast in the cutter—it shouldn’t take us more than a couple of hours to get ashore.” Canker nodded. He seemed remote, as if the proximity of land was already throwing some other mantle across his personality.

“To Bionar,” he said, raising his glass. The others drank, but did not echo his toast.

The snow feathered their faces invisibly in the darkness. The cutter bumped and dented the side of the xebec, a sullen weight with umbilicals of ice-stiff cable. Rol took his place at the tiller, wrapped in a threadbare sea-cloak but shuddering with cold nonetheless. Only Gallico seemed unaffected by the bitterness of the night. Thef Gaudo hung from the main-chains, his lower body soaked with the chop and slap of water between the two vessels.

“Three weeks, Rol. No farther west than the Swynderbys, no farther east than Windhaw.”

“And keep her out of trouble, Thef. Remember she has fine legs, but no teeth worth speaking of.”

“Aye, sir.” Rol saw the bosun’s own teeth flash white in the gloom. He was cock-a-hoop at the prospect of his own command.

“And after three weeks with no word, I take her home. Good luck, Rol, Gallico, Elias. Good-bye.”

They cast off the bow and stern lines and Gallico shoved off from the side of the
Astraros.
The mast was already stepped, and their scrap of lugsail took what was left of the wind and pulled the cutter with it. Rol let the wind take her until the
Astraros
had become a darker shadow on the face of the iron-dark sea, then brought her round to larboard. There were no stars, but slack water had come and gone and now the tide was on the flood, carrying them in toward the land. It was hard to tell, but Rol thought they might be making a good five knots, borne on the back of that great mass of moving water.

“Looks like we’ll not have to row, after all,” he told Canker. The Thief-King did not answer, but stared intently southward to where the coastlines on either side of them came together. As they converged, there was a glow, a thickening of lights almost dead ahead, some miles off yet. Arbion.

The snow continued to fall soundlessly. Rol could feel it on his eyebrows. The interior of the cutter brightened as it began to lie on the thwarts, but it kept down the swell and spindrift so that they remained fairly dry.

There was an exclamation in the bow of the cutter. Elias Creed gave a shout of surprise.

“What is it?”

“We have a stowaway, hid under the tarp. For the love of the gods, boy, what in hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m coming with you.” The voice was Giffon’s, and he sounded remarkably composed.

“Gallico, take the tiller.” Rol clambered forward and leaned on Creed’s shoulder. Giffon’s moon-face looked up at him, stubborn and set. He had his bag with him, and it clinked as the boat pitched.

“Giffon—”

“You might need sewn back up, if you start fighting in Bionar’s wars. And they say a battlefield is the best place for a surgeon to learn his trade too. I will go where I please. I choose to come with you.”

“We may not choose to have you,” Rol said quietly.

It was as though some light in the boy’s face went out. He ducked his head. “That’s for you to decide. Throw me overboard, if you like; I’ll swim to shore.”

“You’ll freeze first,” Creed said grimly. The frost had turned his beard entirely white; he looked like some hoary prophet. “We’ll have to get him back to the ship.”

“I won’t go,” Giffon said, entirely calm.

“Gallico?” Rol called aft.

“We’d be all night beating back up against this wind. We’re stuck with the little bugger.”

“All right.” Rol was glad of the darkness; he hoped it would hide his grin from the boy. For some reason, Giffon’s presence heartened him. Something indefinable and absurd to do with his luck, perhaps. “One of these days, you’ll have to stop this stowing-away lark,” he said, as sternly as he could.

“I’ll be no burden. The day I am no longer of use is the day you can wave me good-bye.”

“I’d sooner kick you in the arse, you little idiot,” Creed said, but his tone was softer than his words. Rol went aft again and took a seat on the snow-covered thwart beside Canker. Gallico was as good a helmsman as himself, and could likewise see in the dark.

They sailed on. The lights of the city grew close, separating out into ten thousand separate shards of fire. Candles at windows, street-lanterns, braziers, watchfires, bonfires. So many nurtured points of flame, and a story behind every one. But between many of them were wide stretches of empty darkness which even Rol’s eyes could not penetrate.

“We’re in the channel,” Gallico said.

Two great flammifers of iron blazed high on towers either side of the cutter, and out from them the immense hulk of the harbor wall extended into the night, a faint flash of surf all about its foot. The sense of open water about them faded, and the current picked up as the tide surged through the sea gates. The walls passed, shadowed and flamelit and tossing back the echoes of the water chopping in their lee. They slid past the masts of a great ship, poking black and forlorn above the sea. The wind had dropped, but the tide still had them on its back, and it brought them into the docks at a slow walking pace, a silent craft full of snow, five bundled shapes within, silent as stone.

Arbion’s waterfront stretched almost two miles, a city within a city of wharves and jetties and warehouses. Even at this time of night it should have been crowded with vessels, busy with longshoremen and lighter-crews and dockworkers, but as they broke out the oars to scull the last few yards to the quays, there was barely a sound. A tang of burning hung in the air, and the charred hulks of ships lay beached like broken whales in the shallower water, a veritable graveyard.