“Lord,” said a voice behind him, and Mangku whirled, suddenly flooded with a kind of guilt, as if he were a Temple novice again who had been caught in some illicit action.
It was Arif, a cringing little man, ugly as a bag of toads, that Mangku had plucked from the crew to be his servant, to cook his meals, clean his cabin and wash his clothes, although he had nothing in the way of magical skill or ability—he was not even a very good cook. He was, however, as pure-blooded an Ebu as one could find these days.
“It’s the men—they want to speak with you,” Arif said. He seemed to be even more frightened than usual.
“What? All of them?” Mangku had meant it as a mild jest but humor was not very prominent among his talents.
“Yes, lord,” his servant said. “They sent me to summon you.”
“Summon me? I am not a person to be summoned. What do they want?”
Arif could not meet his eye. “They are all on deck, lord.”
“Well, then, we had better go and see what this nonsense is all about.”
* * *
• • •
In the bright sunlight on the deck of the Sea Serpent, more than a hundred of the crew had gathered in a murmuring crowd. Mangku clambered out of the hatchway and made his way up to the quarterdeck so that he could look out over the mass of raggedy men below him. He felt a sense of trepidation, almost of bewilderment and fear, when he looked out at the sea of faces. Although he made very sure that it could not be detected. Demons he could command, servants did his bidding or they were dismissed, but this crew was different. They were used to the freedom of the Brotherhood of the Sea, the pirates’ code of equality, in which every man, however stupid or ill informed, had his say and could dispute with the captain. These men knew the power at his disposal, they knew that he could destroy any one of them with a flash of green fire, but still they persisted in their stubborn individualism.
Mangku was by nature a man who operated alone. He had had almost no friends at the Temple, although he had some companions whom he tolerated, and since then he had wandered the Earth either alone or with a single servant. He had never needed to learn the art of leadership. He had no idea how to make men follow him. All he had was the fear he could inspire in them. He leaned on his long staff and tried to lock eyes with some of the men in the front rank, one after the other. But they all shied away from his angry glare.
“I am told that you wished to summon me. Summon me!” said Mangku. “Well, I am here. What is it that you require of me?”
Nobody spoke. The murmuring began again. He looked over his men—apart from a few up in the rigging as lookouts, and two men on the tiller, they seemed to be all here. It was a depleted company and one that bore the cruel marks of battle. Bandaged men, bloody faces, some with arms in slings—they looked haggard, too. Deeply tired.
“Well? What do you want?” Mangku left the question hanging in the air. No one answered it. “If you have nothing to say, I will ask you to return to your duties.”
Mangku turned his back on the men and began to walk to the taffrail, feigning an interest in the long wake that stretched out behind the bow of the Sea Serpent.
“Your Holiness,” said a voice, and Mangku turned on his heel.
“Ah, someone has found the courage to speak!”
A tall, broad-shouldered ebony-black man had pushed through the ranks of his comrades. His face was scarred with the tribal marks of his Ziran Atari clan. A long, vicious-looking chopper hung from a loop of his leather belt.
“Yes, Kanto—what do you wish to say to me?”
The tall man straightened his shoulders and looked directly at the sorcerer.
“We think, begging your pardon, Your Holiness, that is me and my fellows, we think, ah, that with all possible respect . . .”
“Yes, what is it? What do you think?”
“We think there has been too . . . too much fighting for too little reward.” The tall man said this all in a rush, as if he could not wait to get it all out.
There was a mumble of assent from the ranks behind him.
“Is that so? Interesting. How can you say there has been too little reward? We have in the hold beneath our feet two of the greatest treasures in the whole of the Laut Besar, perhaps the whole world. I would say that was a magnificent reward for our efforts so far.”
The Atari warrior seemed to take heart that he had not yet been blasted with green fire.
“An old sword and a big colored rock,” scoffed the man. “Can’t eat them; can’t drink them; can’t fuck them, begging Your Holiness’s pardon. We got no big bags of shiny silver ringgu; no fat fingers of pure gold. No pretty little slave girls to play with . . .”
Mangku sighed. “You have sufficient meat and drink aboard, there is obat, too—and if it’s silver you want, I can promise that at this journey’s end . . .”
“We’ve lost fifty good men, Your Holiness.” Kanto was fidgeting on his feet, his hands twisting against themselves in front of his belly, but seemed determined to say his piece. “Fifty-two men out of the two hundred and ten we set out with is now dead. Meat and drink is no use to them. Neither is obat. And half of us still alive is cruelly wounded, some so badly they’ll likely not live. You promised us plunder when we signed on in Singarasam and apart from that shitty old sword and the Eye of Sukatan, we’ve seen little enough of that.”
Mangku looked at the Ziran Atari warrior, dominating him with his cracked gray eyes. The man broke his gaze and looked down at his feet.
“What we have achieved, through your courageous actions in battle, is so much greater than a few sacks of ringgu, a few chests of gaudy jewels—can you not understand that? We are about to change the world—and it is all for your benefit. Must I explain all this again?”
No one answered the sorcerer. He gave another great sigh.
“If we gather the Seven Keys, we will be more powerful than any force in the Laut Besar. Can you not get that through your thick skulls? With the Seven Keys in our possession our kind will rule the Earth. The Usurpers—the Wukarta, the overseers, the merchants, the slave-masters, all the bosses—will be swept away and the Ebu—our people—will be left as the sole inheritors of all the wealth that they have gathered. For too long your people, our people, have been enslaved, despised, worked like cattle to enrich the New People, the Usurpers. No longer. It will all be ours. All of it. Everything. Gold, jewels, slave girls—anything you desire will be yours. The whole world will be yours for the taking!”
If Mangku had been expecting cheers at his speech, he was to be disappointed.
“That’s all well and good, Your Holiness. For the future. But in the meantime, we would like to do a little plundering, a bit of good old-fashioned pirating, get some of that silver in our pockets, get a few of those slave girls in our bunks—right now, sir, on account, if you like, or as an advance of us inheriting the whole world. That’s what we was all thinking, sir.”
Rage boiled inside Mangku’s brain. He was within a hair of pointing his long staff at the big black imbecile, cutting his own flesh and blasting him to bloody shreds. But he managed somehow to control himself. They are but sheep and I am their shepherd, he thought. Besides, if he started killing his own crew, his own people, where would it end? And they were his own people—each man picked individually because of his Ebu heritage, not a full-blooded descendant of the New People among them. And they would be the inheritors of the world, if only he could make them understand their true role.
“Very well, if it is plunder that you seek, I shall indulge you this one time. The next appropriate ship to cross our path shall be your prey. We shall attack it and the spoils will be shared out equally to all. And if we see no ship I shall select a small port or coastal town for your attentions in the next few days or weeks. Will that satisfy you?”
Mangku did not wait for an answer. “Now if there is nothin
g else, I shall be in my cabin. And I would be obliged if you would all now quietly return to your duties.”
CHAPTER 26
Jun thought that he would not sleep. The pitiful whimpering of the Yawanese girl from the far side of the dormitory disturbed him, filling him at first with a scalding guilt, then a quite unreasonable anger at her weakness. Also there was the lurking fear that Kromo would come over to pester him in some revolting fashion during the dark hours. However, after such a brutal day of unaccustomed labor, his physical exhaustion proved to be too great and, although he tried to keep one eye on the other still forms in the dormitory, the next thing he knew after his head touched the greasy boards of the bed-shelf was the gray light of dawn flooding into the dormitory, and he was sitting up stiffly, every muscle and joint aching, and scrubbing his face with his torn and blistered hands.
He fervently wished, not for the first time in recent days, that he was back in the Watergarden and his cheerful servants were busy preparing a hot soapy bath for him and a hearty breakfast of fried eggs with pickled vegetables, fried rice, just-caught fish and a big scalding pot of Han tea.
What he actually received, after the doors of the dormitory were unlocked and they were allowed to hurry along to the dining room, was a bowl of lukewarm watery rice porridge, several days old, reheated and burned, and smelling strongly of rotting fish. He swilled it down anyway: he was learning. In the Hole, you eat when you can. And quickly.
In the elevator down to the cavern, he saw Kromo leering at him from the far side of the cage. He stared straight back at him, considering the advice Tenga had given him. There must have been something new, perhaps harder, more dangerous in Jun’s eyes, for Kromo suddenly dropped his gaze and looked away.
The two musket-armed Manchu herded them along the dark tunnel to the ore-face, as they had the day before, and set them to their labor with cries of, “Work! You work.” As Jun bent and began to pick up the first chunks of ore he felt all his muscles protesting but, as the cuts from yesterday’s whips were still fresh he did not dare to pause or reduce his pace. Tenga and Ketut formed their usual partnership and swiftly began lobbing lumps of ore in the wagon with a minimum of effort.
Jun looked covertly at Kromo, who was wielding the hammer again today with his dwarfish friend, and energetically smashing the larger boulders of ore into smaller, more manageable chunks. The yellow man looked big and strong and full of life, the muscles of his shoulders swelling and writhing with each stroke of the heavy hammer. Could he actually kill this fellow? Jun wondered as he worked. Was he capable of the act—not just capable morally, but in terms of physical strength? Could he defeat him? No, was the short answer. While he might have been incessantly nagged by War-Master Hardan to do his exercises, he had never used any of the skills he had learned against a real, live opponent. An opponent who would fight back. A big, ugly, brutal opponent well versed in the violence of the Hole. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill Kromo. It was just not possible. Or was it? What would Hardan have done in this situation? What would he advise his pupil to do?
He noticed as he bent and heaved up and dumped the ore in the wagon that the pretty Yawanese girl was struggling—her face was white and tear-streaked and her movements had a shaking, random unsteadiness as if she was fevered or on the very edge of collapse. Then, quite suddenly, she stopped work and fell to the floor, curled into a tight little ball and began to sob, her thin frame shuddering with every wet, tortured breath. The Manchu guards were on her like weasels on a shrew, the whips thudding down on her near-naked body but, to Jun’s surprise, she refused to get up, lying there and allowing the blows to cut into her flesh again and again. She wanted to die, Jun realized with a leap of intuition, after being defiled by so many men the evening before, and perhaps during the night, too; after being denied food, sleep and human comfort, and with nothing but more degradation staring her in the face, forever, she wanted this existence to be over as quickly as possible.
He slid a glance across at Kromo, who was leaning on his long hammer a few feet away and watching the savage whipping with a sly grin on his ugly yellow face—this was what that muscle-clad brute had in store for him if he did not submit to his kisses, his caresses, his disgusting desires. He would become a piece of meat just like that poor Yawanese girl: broken, bloody, begging for a swift end to it all.
No. No. A thousand times no.
Jun made his decision.
The Manchus stopped beating the girl. Both of them panting, the sweat dripping down their flat, alien faces. One said something to the other, a joke of some sort, in their own language. The other one laughed. The joker blew his whistle indicating that it was water-break time—although the work gang had only been laboring for an hour or so—and the second Manchu slung a trio of leather waterskins toward the slaves, who had all as usual immediately collapsed on the floor. Jun picked up the nearest skin and drank deeply of the warm, musty-tasting water it contained.
The two Manchus, their muskets on their shoulders, picked up the Yawanese girl, each one taking an arm. Jun could see that she was still alive; indeed she struggled feebly when they hauled her to her feet. Then, half dragging her between them, they disappeared off into the darkness heading back toward the elevators. They did not go far. From out of the darkness, Jun heard the girl give a frightened scream, which was followed by a lustful chuckle, and the sound of a slap.
Here was his chance. It was now or never. Jun picked up the skin of water with his left hand. His right hand closed around a piece of ore the size of a mango. Keeping his right hand hidden, no feat in the dim light, he scrambled over toward Kromo, holding out the waterskin and carefully keeping his face blank. Just as the brute reached out his hand to take the water, Jun dropped it and, as Kromo cursed him and bent to pick it up, Jun leaped forward and smashed the rock in his right hand as hard as he could onto the side of his enemy’s face. It was a fine blow, well dealt; the piece of ore shattered into fragments in Jun’s fingers, and Kromo was knocked down onto his knees. It was a good hard strike, one that would have felled a normal man. If Jun had received it, he’d have been smashed into oblivion. And it clearly hurt Kromo badly—but it did not finish him.
The big man came up from his knees into a fighting crouch, glaring at Jun, a trickle of blood running from his left ear but saying nothing. He leaped forward, quick as a leopard, and swung, his right fist flashing out toward Jun’s face with all the power of his muscle-slabbed shoulder behind it.
Without thought, Jun’s left arm came up and round in a crisp block, forearm thwacked against forearm, and the massive punch slipped safely past his left ear. Again without any conscious thought, Jun’s right fist shot out like a piston, the two knuckles leading, and crunched into Kromo’s mouth, mashing his lips against his teeth. Jun hit him again, this time with his left fist, a more considered blow, with full follow-through, that cracked into his cheekbone and knocked his head right back.
Kromo stepped back, his senses blurred, his face bloodied. He was surprised. Shocked, even. He had taken three hard, punishing blows to the head in a few short moments and he felt dizzy and dazed. Jun was, in fact, no less surprised than Kromo by his own actions. He had never thought that all those tedious combat lessons with Hardan would actually bear fruit. But it seemed those thousands of hours of punching, kicking, blocking, learning the routines, grappling with the War-Master and tumbling on the rice-straw mats, all that sweat and pain, all those afternoons of sheer bloody boredom had actually served a purpose. He could almost hear Hardan’s clipped voice ordering him briskly to deliver that kick-punch-kick combination that he favored most.
Jun obeyed.
He stepped in, raised his knee, and his right foot shot out and smacked deep into Kromo’s belly; as his opponent grunted and came bending forward, gasping for breath, Jun’s left fist chopped down into the right side of his jaw, knocking him around. Then Jun spun to his left, whirling all the way around, gaining momen
tum; his left leg lashed out, the flat of his sole catching Kromo under the jaw and hurling him up and back, right off his feet, to land with a crunch on the pile of ore.
He sensed danger, spun to his right, and saw the dwarf, with his hammer raised, begin to run at him, snarling. But a long black arm swooped out and seized the little man by the shoulder as he passed, hauling him round. In an instant, Tenga had her thick arms wrapped around the dwarf’s neck. She gave one brutal twist, there was a horrible snapping sound, and the dwarf, released, tumbled lifeless to the floor.
“Finish him,” growled Tenga, jerking her chin at the big shambling creature struggling to rise from the ore pile. “Do it quick, before the bannermen come back.”
Jun advanced on Kromo. The big man rose and swung a fist clumsily at the slim youth—who blocked him easily, dipped and sank a punch deep under his ribs. Kromo sat down hard. Jun snap-kicked him full in the face, crushing his nose, knocking him back onto the ore slope once more. Kromo got up again—by the Gods, thought Jun, the man is harder than teak—and made a stumbling run at Jun, aiming to ram his head into his belly. Jun dodged, and drove an elbow hard down onto Kromo’s spine as he passed. The big man plowed into the earth. Jun leaped on him, landing with one knee and his full weight on his midspine, punching all the air from his lungs. He straddled Kromo’s broad back, seized the man’s greasy hair with his left hand, pulled his head back and punched hard with two knuckles of his right hand at the point where his skull met his backbone. He felt the crack of spine under his fist. It was a killing blow, or so the War-Master had assured him. But Kromo was still groaning. The man seemed indestructible. He flipped his body over, stood upright and looked down at his adversary. The mad eyes were rolling in his head. Blood was running from his crushed nose and slack mouth. Jun felt the red rage flood through his whole body—all the indignities, all the pain, the whippings, the forced labor, the foul food and the constant fear of violence and death. All that fury came out in the one hard stamp that he delivered to Kromo’s open neck. His heel crunched through cartilage, thumped painfully against the bone. Kromo’s eyes rolled in his head; his face grew dark with blood, a bloody froth seeping from his lips. His body was still but the head was moving, jerking slightly side to side. Jun picked up a large piece of ore, twice the size of the one he had first used, and sharply pointed at the end. He tipped Kromo’s head to one side, exposing the right ear and temple. He raised his arms in the air, the piece of ore gripped between his palms, like a man holding up a trophy in a gesture of victory, then he smashed the rock down onto his enemy’s skull with all his strength.
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