This Forsaken Earth (37 page)

Rol set an arm about her strong shoulders. “Some memories,” he said.

Chilled through and through by the keen norther, Rol and Esmer helped each other down below again. Those he had brought over the mountains were still in the square, eating, sleeping, staring into the cooking fires with bemused looks on their faces. As he entered the firelit cavern they turned toward him, and he saw the same thing in their eyes. All these people were his now. They looked to him for a direction, and for some kind of protection. He could give them neither of those, he was sure. But that no longer meant he would not try.

Even Miriam looked at him differently. There was a new appraisal in her glance as he joined his friends at one of the fire-pits and was handed a cup of wine by Gallico. Miriam and Esmer measured each other a moment before the dark-haired woman left. “I’ve work to do,” Esmer said. “Unlike some. Later, Cortishane.”

Miriam leaned on her musket and shook her hair out of her face. “You’ve been having adventures, it seems, Cortishane. Fighting wars and making kings.”

Rol drank his wine. Gallico was reclining on one elbow, eyes glimmering in the flame-light. Giffon sat leaning against his huge bulk, head down, and Elias Creed stood to one side like a stripe-bearded scarecrow. There was something in the air among them, some knowledge hovering.

“What’s happened?” Rol asked.

They looked amongst themselves and over their shoulders, like people unwilling to share a secret. Finally, Miriam spoke.

“You arrived in good time. Artimion sent in word this morning. There are ships out to the north, a large convoy. They may be Mercanters, they may not. He’s putting farther out from the coast to take a look. In the meantime, we are to discreetly make all ships in the Ka ready for sea.”

Rol closed his eyes.

“It’ll be a Mercanter convoy,” Gallico said gruffly. “The wind this time of year…” He trailed off, convincing not even himself.

“The wind has changed,” Rol said. “It’s fair for the Reach now. Canker knows where we are. He’s finishing the job.”

“What must we do?” Miriam asked him. Looking into her face, Rol saw fear there for the first time since he had known her. For himself, he felt only a kind of dull hopelessness. It was not over. There would be no end to it.

“We must evacuate the Ka,” he said at last, hating the words as he said them, hating himself as he surveyed the motley, vagabond crowd about the cooking-fires who believed themselves safe at last.

“We don’t have enough ships,” Creed said, tugging at his beard, his cheekbones sharp angles planed by the firelight.

“We’ll get out those we can. The rest must take to the mountains, like last time.”

Giffon groaned wordlessly and Gallico set a hand on the boy’s head.

“Miriam, I leave it to you,” Rol said. “This word will spread soon enough, and when it does there will be panic. You know better than I what has to be done. I make only one stipulation.”

She stared at him.

“The people we took from the slaver, and those who have come over the mountains with me, they shall go into the ships.”

“Indeed! And why should—”

“They’ve suffered enough, Miriam.”

After a moment, she nodded. “Very well. Gallico, if those are men-of-war out there, then how long do we have?”

“I don’t know.” The halftroll flapped one taloned hand. “I haven’t so much as been outside to sniff the wind.” He spoke to Rol. “We must get out to the
Revenant.
”

“We’ll take a cutter,” Rol agreed. “There’s one tied up next to the
Astraros.
But you’re not coming out, Gallico.”

“What? Why not?”

“You must assume command of the
Astraros
from Thef and start taking on passengers as soon as she’s outfitted for sea. As soon as you’ve taken on board as many as you can, bring her out and rendezvous with the
Revenant.
”

“No, Rol,” Gallico said quietly. “I go with the
Revenant.
It may be we’ll have to tangle with these men-of-war, if that’s what they are. You need every able officer you can cram on board. Thef can handle the xebec; all she has to do is show a clean pair of heels, after all.”

“What about Artimion? He commands the
Revenant
now,” Miriam said indignantly.

“She’s my ship,” Rol told her. “And my crew. Artimion must come back to shore and look after the Ka; that’s his command, where he can do the most good. This is not bloody-mindedness, Miriam. There’s no time for that now.”

Miriam finally nodded.

“I’m going to write out orders for Thef. Miriam, what other ships are in or close by?”

“Jan Timian’s
Skua,
and Marveyus Gan’s
Osprey.
That’s all.”

“I’ll write orders for them, too, then. We must get as many aboard as possible. If this is Canker’s doing, this fleet, then he will have embarked an army with it. I know him. He’ll send regiments ashore and scour every inch of this coast.”

“What’s he doing it for?” Miriam asked. Her face was white as sailcloth.

“He’s looking for me, Miriam. I am half brother to the last legitimate ruler of Bionar; a tenuous connection, but it’s there all the same. He’ll sleep better at night with me dead and Ganesh Ka destroyed.”

“The people must make for the hills at once,” Miriam said, shocked.

The little group stood silent for a while, staring into the fire-pit before them.

“This is the end, then,” Elias Creed said at last. “The Ka is finished. We cannot fight a fleet.”

“This place has been here a long time,” Rol told them. “Even if they bombarded it for a month, they’d barely make a dent in the stone. No, the city itself will endure, but our tenure of it is over. We must look for someplace else to lay our heads.”

“And where will that be?” Miriam asked.

“I will find a place,” Rol said calmly. He scratched the itching palm of his left hand, where Ran’s Mark burned in folds of flesh. He knew now why it had been set there. To lead them to a new beginning.

Twenty

THE BLACK SHIP

THE BREEZE HAD VEERED ROUND TO EAST-SOUTHEAST
and was still freshening, kicking up whitecaps on the waves, a half-fathom swell that set the heavy cutter to pitching like a playful cart-horse. They had hoisted the lugsail, stowed the oars, and were now making a good seven knots or so with the wind on the starboard quarter. Rol sat at the tiller, drenched and grinning, whilst Elias Creed stood by the single mast, clinging to a halliard and peering north. In the bottom of the boat, Giffon was bailing with a wooden pail, his face as green as the translucent swells around them. He was always sick when first he went back to sea after an absence.

Gallico bent to peer at the brass compass between his feet. “Nor’-nor’west by south,” he said. “That’ll do just fine. Gods in heaven, but it’s good to be back in a boat!”

“It’s like coming back from the dead,” Elias Creed said. And then: “Sail ho! I see the
Revenant,
or her twin. She’s under topsails and jib, one point off the larboard bow. Look at that bow wave! Artimion is giving her the wind.”

Cold sea-spray came aboard, lit up by the westering sun into a shower of yellow sparks. Rol wiped his face, feeling the new angles upon it, the scars that had not been there before. His youth was gone now. There was no trace left of the fresh-faced boy who had one night knocked on the door of Psellos’s Tower in Ascari. But he still had no idea what that boy had become.

“Rol,” Creed said, and his voice was quite changed. “Look north.”

Rol gave over the tiller to Gallico and made his way forward, ducking under the drum-taut sail. The horizon was a ragged line of white and dark, waves coursing along it like the teeth of a saw, their heads whipped to white foam by the brisk wind. The
Revenant
was less than a league away now, but more distant, to larboard, there was a line of white nicks on the horizon that were not waves. Rol counted over two dozen of them, though one could not be accurate at this distance and in this sea. The sun was sinking rapidly, and the western horizon was a clear, blushed arc of color, dark as wine, with a dying light brimming over the topmost peaks of the mountains. Rol wiped salt-spray from his face. “Big vessels. I can see their courses on the rise. Ship-rigged too. Those are men-of-war, Elias.”

They had all expected it, but deep down some irrational part of them had hoped it might yet be a merchant convoy.

“Canker has been busy,” Elias said, eyes dark as the shadowed flanks of the mountains in the west.

“Yes. He is a resourceful man.”

They had to wave and halloo like fools before the
Revenant
noticed them and backed topsails to let the cutter clunk alongside. By that time, the ship’s company had recognized them, and were cheering up and down her decks. They were shouting Gallico’s name, and Creed’s, and a few yelled
“The skipper!”
too.

Rol hauled himself up his ship’s side, aided by the manropes they sent down for him. When he stood on the
Revenant
’s deck his head was swimming slightly, and his biceps burned. He was a long way from hale; the mark the mountains had set upon him would take time to erase. John Imbro, Fell Amertaz, little rat-faced Kier the carpenter, and two dozen others; they left their posts and came crowding around as Gallico, Creed, and Giffon climbed up from the cutter in turn, leaving the pitching craft made fast fore and aft to the
Revenant
’s side. As they came aboard, the grinning seamen slapped and manhandled them as if to make sure they were real. Rol looked aft, and saw Artimion standing at the quarterdeck rail. If he was surprised at this visitation, he concealed it, and he stood as impassive as a ship’s captain should, looking down on the little pantomime below. Rol made his way through the cloud of laughing mariners and climbed the steep steps aft. He had to pause at their top, breathing hard. He offered Artimion his hand, and after a brief moment the black man shook it, then bent his head to peer at the mutilated limb he held.

“You’ve been through the wars,” he said.

“That I have.”

“Come below. We can talk there.”

The familiar cabin, one of the most beautiful spaces Rol had ever inhabited. Artimion had changed very little. He took the captain’s chair, his back to the stern windows so that his face was hid by shadow, and Rol had the light of the sunset in his eyes.

“You want your ship back,” Artimion said.

“Yes, I do.”

“Fine; it’s yours. It was only a loan, after all.” Artimion’s face was impossible to read.

“The sea air has done you good,” Rol told him. “I can’t hear your lungs wheezing anymore.”

Artimion inclined his head. “You, on the other hand, look more dead than alive. Perhaps you could tell me what you’ve been up to, and if it is connected with the doom of Ganesh Ka, which is beating up into the wind as we speak.”

He was coldly angry, Rol realized. He blames me.

“The rebel Queen, Rowen, is dead, her armies broken and destroyed. I killed Bar Asfal with my own hands, which, as it happens, was the final thing your old friend Canker needed to hatch out his plans. He is now King of Bionar, and it is he who has sent out this fleet to destroy us.” Looking at Artimion’s face, Rol added, “Yes, it came as quite a surprise to us too.”

“How did you get back to the Ka?”

“Over the Myconians.”

“How long—”

“Canker has had a little under two months. Ample time to collect up a fleet and send it south.”

Artimion leaned back in his chair and stared at the deck-head above. “We must abandon the Ka,” he said, his voice a choked whisper.

“Miriam has it in hand. Now tell me of this fleet. What do you know?”

Artimion collected himself with a visible effort. “They fly the saffron and black of Bionar in the main, but some of them have Mercanter pennants also.”

“Merchantmen, in a fighting fleet?”

The black man leaned forward. “No. They are all warships. It would seem the Mercanters have got themselves a navy, and are in league with our old friend Canker.”

Rol digested this. His turn to be shocked. “We must stop trying to outdo each other with our surprises,” he said to Artimion. The black man smiled.

“You know what it means, Cortishane?” He rose, and from the gimballed jug slung from one bulkhead he poured them clay cups of wine. Rol sipped without replying.

“It means we’re finished, all the inhabitants of the Ka. If the Mercanters have outfitted warships against us then there is truly no place left to run, for there is not a kingdom in the world that would defy them to harbor us. Ganesh Ka was the last sanctuary.” Artimion tossed back his wine. “We are floating dead men.”

Rol watched him. Canker’s treachery had hit him hard. “It would seem there is less honor among thieves than we thought,” he said.

“I never thought Canker to be some paragon of honesty, but I misread the scale of his ambition.”

“So did I,” Rol admitted. “So did everyone.”

“With a new regime in Bionar as our ally, we would have been secure, Rol. I did what I thought was best for us all.”

Rol nodded. “I know you did. I know that now.”