This Forsaken Earth (6 page)

“Elias,” Rol said. “Keep them busy, will you?” The ex-convict nodded. Under his deep tan, the blood had left his face.

Eventually the two cutters put off for the xebec, filled to the gunwales with heavily armed men and all manner of stores. The slaver was low in the water, and the Revenants clambered over her sides with the agility of wharf-rats. Rol fought the urge to gag at the miasma of filth that shrouded the ship, and snapped at the petrified crew, “Where’s the master?”

He came forward clutching his ship’s papers and setting knuckle to forehead like a peasant greeting his lord. “Here, Captain. Grom Mindorin, master of the
Astraros.
”

“What’s your cargo?”

“Three hundred and seventy-odd head, bound out of Astraro for Omer. Captain, we are a Mercanter ship.”

“What of it?”

“I thought perhaps—”

“You thought wrong. Show me your hold. I wish to see the cargo.”

They went below. The sun was climbing up a cloudless sky, and despite the lateness of the year the heat of it beat down on the decks. Rol felt sweat trickling down the small of his back. All the hatches had bolt-fastened gratings that let in almost no light or air. Mindorin, bobbing his head apologetically, led Rol first to the stern-cabin, where he lit a lantern, then he made his way forward along a gloomy companionway. The stench grew worse, if that was possible, though the wailing had given way to a low murmuring, punctuated by the odd sharp cry, like that of a rabbit taken by a stoat.

They went through a reinforced bulkhead—every door in the ship had bolts to it—and at once the flame in the lantern burned blue and guttered low. Mindorin raised it up, his face streaming with sweat. The close, fetid air was hard to breathe, the smell almost a physical presence, pressing about their faces.

“Gods of the world,” Rol croaked.

The compartment ran almost the full length of the ship, some twenty-five yards. It had been divided up horizontally by a stout wooden platform, so that there were two decks in front of Rol, each less than a yard high. A thick carpet of bodies lay on both of these, chained by the ankles, feet to feet. Hundreds of people, turning feebly, twitching, moaning, sobbing, or lying inert. All caked in their own filth, bloodied by the chains that bound them. All in darkness. The lantern was of little use, but Rol’s preternatural vision spared him none of the details. There were men, women, and children here, mixed indiscriminately, all of them naked and plastered in their own excreta, dull eyes sunken in their heads, skulls shaven down to the skin. Corpses lying amid them with maggots working busily about every orifice. Lice in clusters the size of marbles, and here and there a venturesome rat crawling over the dead and the living unmolested.

A wondering fury blazed up in Rol’s heart. He understood Gallico better now. But he stood there for a long moment, mastering the rage, beating it down. When he turned to Mindorin again, his voice was quiet, even.

“You will unlock these chains, and get these people on deck.”

The slaver’s master shrank from the light of those eyes. “Aye, sir, at once. I’ll get the keys. One minute, and I’ll have them—”

“Get your crew down here, every last one of them. You will bring these people water and food. You will wash them.”

“Anything, Captain, anything.” Mindorin scuttled away, falling over backward in his haste.

Rol bent low and hunkered his way through the dense-packed morass of humanity, sometimes reduced by the lack of headroom to crawling on his hands and knees. Tar from the hot deckhead fell on his shoulders and his boots slipped and shifted in liquid filth. Here was a young woman, dead, staring. Between her legs the corpse of a baby, which had issued out of her long before full term. A clenched, gray, globular thing gnawed by rats and running with maggots. But Rol could still make out the tiny fingers closed in fists.

Here, two men had strangled each other with their chains and were locked in a last embrace. Here a child, a girl not more than five years old, with the flesh on her ankles eaten down to the bone by the shackles. Rol could feel the eyes of hundreds on him as he made his noisome way down the compartment. People called to him hoarsely in languages he did not understand. Some struggled to their bloody and yellow-scabbed elbows, then fell back again. Just as he thought he could bear it no more his gaze was caught by that of a young boy, ten years old maybe. His limbs were stick-thin and lice-tracks were raw and red all over his narrow chest. The boy was smiling emptily. Beside him was an older man, the oldest Rol had seen here. For some reason he had been allowed to retain a full, gray beard. His eyes were dark, and lively with intelligence. They regarded Rol with grave appraisal, as though weighing up the defects and deliberations of his soul. Rol tried to speak to him, but his throat had closed.

Back up on deck, he breathed in the clear, clean air deeply. He could feel the vermin of the slave-hold crawling over his skin, and began plucking at his clothes. “Quirion!”

“Aye, sir.” The burly master-at-arms had a naked cutlass in his hand, and the point of it twitched as though it ached to be in use.

“The crew of this ship will unchain all the slaves and get them on deck. The slaves will be watered, fed, and hosed down. Then that crew will go below and clean out the slave-deck with swabs. On their hands and knees, Quirion.”

“Hands and knees, sir.”

Naked now, Rol sprang to the ship’s rail. “Get rid of those rags,” he said, and then dived overboard.

The cold plunge of the water, the clean salt bite of the sea. He dived deep, deep as he had ever gone, trying to leave behind the filth that coated his skin, the filth he felt to be within.

Three

HOMECOMING

11th Jurius, Year 32, Bar Asfal. Wind southerly, the Cavaillic Trades. Course WNW under all plain sail. With Dead Reckoning we are two leagues north of the latitude of Golgos, three leagues west of the Omer longline. Overtook a slaver at the end of the middle watch, a flush-decked xebec of some two hundred tons, the
Astraros.
On board were twenty-six crew, three hundred and thirty-two slaves, and two score corpses. I made the crew of the slaver clean out the hold of their ship, then had them bound each to a corpse and threw them overboard. The slaves remain on the xebec, which Gallico now commands with a prize crew of thirty men. I have not seen before a more pitiful collection of people. Before I drowned him, the
Astraros
’s master told me that many of them had already made a voyage before this—they are natives of every coast about the Inner Reach, some kidnapped from fishing villages, others taken in war. Gallico insists that all must be brought back to the Ka, and for once I agree with him.

For all her dirty trade, the
Astraros
is a fine ship, and I think her hull will bear the nine-pounders we took from the Bionese man-of-war earlier this month. She would be a useful consort for the
Revenant,
keeping so close to the wind, though I think I may change her yards to square-rigged on the foremast.

A knock on the cabin door, and Elias Creed put his head around it. “Ganesh Ka is in sight.”

“Thanks, Elias. I’ll be up on deck presently. Where does the
Astraros
stand?”

“Fine on the starboard bow, some half a league ahead. She’s a flyer, all right. Gallico has reefed every sail she has, and still has the legs of us.” Creed sounded almost resentful, as if the
Revenant
’s honor had been slighted.

“I’ll wager she stinks of shit, all the same,” Rol said, with a weak grin.

Ganesh Ka. From the sea it appeared to be nothing more than some huge geological anomaly, a freak of soaring stone. Cliffs between two and three hundred feet high ran sheer and mustard-pale for over a league along the shore, the sea smashing in white breakers about their foot. But above them there reared up black, unearthly towers of volcanic stone—basalt and granite in poplar-shaped buttresses and barbicans, as variegated as the trees in a wood, and yet existing in some half-guessed symmetry. With the eyes half closed and the light behind them, they might almost become the castles of some rock-hewing titan, in places as rough as nature and the wind could make them, in others as perfectly smoothed as a sculptor’s dream. A man might marvel at the sight, without ever guessing that it had been built by artifice, and the imaginations of minds long dead.

There was an opening in the sea-cliffs, invisible from more than a few cables away. They ran the ships in through the hundred-yard gap with four men to each wheel, all sails furled but for a few scraps of canvas to give the vessels steerage-way. Above their heads the seabirds—skuas and gulls and blue-eyed gannets in their thousands—wheeled and soared and dived, heedless of any human. This late in the year they had been joined by skeins of long-necked, raucous geese, black and white and gray, immigrants from the far, frozen north. No one ever hunted these geese; they were seen as part of the Ka’s luck.

The wall of cliffs opened out before them into a great circular bay, a sight that never failed to take the breath out of Rol’s throat no matter how often he saw it. Before him the sea-cliffs on the landward side had been tunneled and crannied into a subterranean counterpart of the looming towers of stone above, and three tall ship-gates yawned black and cavernous in the sun-warmed rock of their faces, each massive enough to admit a fully rigged man-of-war.

“Tide’s on the ebb,” Elias Creed said.

“Only just. Let her glide in, Elias.”

Creed smiled. He knew how his captain savored the majesty of this view.

There were light fishing smacks and dories dotted about the water of the bay, men and women hauling in skein nets and longlines beaded with the silver flash of herrin and amarack, staples of the city. They stood up in their bobbing cockleshells and cheered the sight of the two ships. The
Revenant
they knew well—she had become a sort of talisman for the inhabitants of the Ka. But the
Astraros
was new, exotic, and they pointed at her and shouted indecipherable catcalls to Gallico, who stood grinning and waving from her bows.

Darkness, startling after the gold and blue splendor of the day outside. At once the quality of sound itself changed, the chop of water and creak of the ships’ working echoing back at them as they passed through the ship-gates into the vast cavern within which housed the docks and wharves of Ganesh Ka. Woodsmoke, ordure, rotten fish, tar—the heavy smells of the land crowding about noses more used to the clean air of the sea. Lightermen came sculling out in their narrow craft and took cables from the bows to tow the ships to dock.

“Take in all sail,” Rol said. “Gangplank to the waist. Fenders there, ready in the bows.”

A ragged and malodorous crowd had gathered about the wharves, and now shouts and good-natured catcalls went to and fro between their ranks and the busy sailors on board the
Revenant
and
Astraros.
The two ships tied up alongside each other, and the crowds on the docksides went quiet as they saw the wretched, stubble-headed throng of terrified figures that peopled the deck of the slave-ship. Many there had been slaves themselves, and knew what they were looking at. Others gave full vent to their curiosity, and Gallico had three enterprising youngsters thrown overboard into the slimy water of the docks after they had shinned up the mooring-ropes.

“Dry-dock, skipper—as soon as we’re able. I won’t rest until her poor bottom is seen to.” This was Kier Eiserne, the carpenter, his narrow face earnest with worry.

“Don’t worry, Kier. She’ll not sink yet. We’ll have her offloaded first. Get some of those ragamuffins on the piers to help you empty the hold.”

“The guns’ll have to go, too, skipper—every damn thing that’s not nailed down.”

“I know that,” Rol snapped. And in a softer tone, “Do whatever you have to, but get her seaworthy again with all speed. If you have any deficiencies, see me or Gallico.”

“Aye, sir.”

In all probability Kier was overworrying, but that was no bad thing in a ship’s carpenter. Rol patted the quarterdeck rail. Where once it had been all black teak, now sections of it were of lighter wood, the results of repairs after many sea-fights. All about the ship, the Kassic teak that had been the original flesh of the
Revenant
was patchworked with softer wood—good timber, the best they could find—but still, nothing like as hardy as that used by her original shipwrights. In time, the very stuff a ship was made of changed under the feet of her company, but her essence, the concept for which she had been made, remained the same.

If only it were that way with men, Rol thought.

A year before, the
Revenant
had been a mastless hulk, quietly rotting in a flooded dry-dock here in Ganesh Ka. The carcass of a once-proud ship, she had belonged to the Bionese—a heavy dispatch-runner surprised and taken by a cloud of the Ka’s vessels, surrounded and beaten like a bull brought to its knees by the hounds. Her captain, Rol thought, must have been a fool, to let such a ship be taken by the light privateers of the Ka.