The Mark of Ran

by Paul Kearney

  They plodded on doggedly all that day, their throats parched into uselessness. Creed staggered like a drunk man, walking at length with his eyes screwed shut against the awful glare, one hand on Gallico’s forearm. They did not halt or rest and seemed to have agreed by some form of osmosis that they would walk till they dropped.

  And Creed did drop. It felt like flying, like being whirled around in the heat of an oven. He dimly felt his face hit the earth and knew there was grit in his teeth, but was completely detached from the beginnings of his own death. When he opened his eyes he could see nothing but whiteness. A voice said Drink, and he felt himself raised up. His lips touched hot flesh, but it was wet and dripping also and he sucked on it without conscious volition. The liquid he ingested was not water, but it allowed his tongue to move against his teeth again. There was something else in that coppery fluid. It seeped into him like a draft of good brandy, but was cool as a fountain on a summer afternoon. The white blindness receded and the stabbing pains in his head faded away. He saw Cortishane leaning over him. He was being cradled like a baby. Cortishane’s forearm was dripping blood, and Creed knew now what the taste was. His gorge rose feebly but he had not even the strength to retch.

  “What in God’s name—”

  “Don’t speak. Gallico will carry you for a while. It’s not long now, Elias.”

  He was lifted up onto the halftroll’s lacerated shoulder and had not the will to protest. It was like perching upon a moving tower. He could see more clearly than before—he felt as though Cortishane’s blood had chilled the bubbling heat of his arteries and veins, allowing his mind to cool, to work again.

  Their shadows, attenuated and fantastic-looking, streamed out to their right as the sun began descending toward the mountains. The capering haze before them thinned out with the wearing on of the day, and Creed, nodding stupidly, saw something that had not been there before. A different color inserted between the broiling white of the Flats and the deepening sky above them. He stared at it for long minutes while bobbing up and down on the halftroll’s shoulder.

  “Land ho,” he rasped at last, pointing with one corded arm. “Two leagues maybe. Dear God, I see—I see trees.”

  “I wish you joy of the sight, my friend,” Gallico rumbled with something approaching humor. “Where there are trees there is water. We will make it yet.”

  They stumbled off the Gorthor Flats as it came on to dusk. The white dry-packed earth ended in frozen breakers of stone and piled dirt, and the land rose beyond it with a browner hue, green in places. There were patches of sharp-toothed grass, stunted acacia and live oak, juniper bushes. They staggered uphill like creatures unable to halt in their tracks, this new country dipping and rising under their feet. Stone began to thrust up through the scanty earth, crumbling in avenues and tumbled hillocks. They found flowering things at the base of the rocks, and then heard the liquid rill of running water, sweeter than any music. A bright ribbon of water gliding and flashing between banks of gray stone. They fell to their knees before it, and drank on all fours like beasts.

  Nineteen

  THE HIDDEN CITY

  THE HIGHLANDS OF GANESH WERE GOOD TO THEM. UNTOUCHED, unpopulated, they fairly teemed with game, animals so unafraid it seemed almost a shame to kill them. With the master’s unwieldy pistol Rol wounded two plump young bucks badly enough for Gallico to be able to run them down and break their necks. These were gralloched and skinned, and their livers eaten warm and raw by the famished castaways as the halftroll jointed the remainder. Then the trio lay and slept the night through with their feet turned to the warmth of a high bonfire, too exhausted to care who might mark the man-made blaze in the darkness of that vast wilderness. The nights were not so cold here as on the Flats, but still chilly enough to warrant the gathering of grass and heather for bedding and the sheer luxury of a good wood fire to keep the frost from their bodies. They were high up, and when dawn came they could look out on a great panoramic view of the Inner Reach, as grand as kings.

  “I see ships,” Creed said, looking into the bright fire of the eastern dawn.

  “Where away?” Rol asked.

  “East-southeast. Three—no, four, ship-rigged and in convoy.”

  “Men-of-war,” Gallico said somberly. “Probably part of the flotilla that pursued the Adder. The Bionari are taking an almighty interest in this coast all of a sudden. I wonder if it’s anything to do with their civil war.”

  “This city of yours had best be well hid,” Rol told him.

  They walked northward along the coast for thirteen days and in all that time they saw no further sign of man or his works. On their right the Inner Reach swept white-tipped to the horizon and on their left the hills rolled in rumpled, rocky succession to the heights of the Myconians, draped with dark forests of pine and poplar, fragrant with wild thyme. Rol buried the master’s pistol, having run out of bullets for it, and Gallico fashioned a sling out of deerhide that knocked down rabbits and birds for their nightly meals. They raided birds’ nests, nibbled wild sorrel and bracken shoots, and drank from every stream they came across, finally satiating their inordinate thirst. Their wounds healed and the constant walking and short commons pared down the flesh of their bodies until they became tireless creatures of muscle-wrapped bone, at home in the high woods and mist-shrouded crags of this quiet world.

  They came upon Ganesh Ka at evening, rounding the bluff of one outflung arm of the mountains that towered above the spear-straight poplars at its foot. There was a gap in this tall buttress of granite, as square and sheer as though cut with a knife, and once through it the land descended steeply to the sea over a mile below. The last sunlight was disappearing behind the Myconians, and below them, purple and blue with evening shadow, was the perfect circle of a deep bay surrounded on all sides by honey-pale cliffs about which thousands of seabirds circled and wailed. Its only outlet to the open sea was a narrow gap in the circle to the east, scarcely half a cable wide.

  But on the landward side the cliffs were less steep, and seemed to have been broken off short. They had been hewn back and shaped in a way that made it hard to guess whether their fashioning was the work of man or a freak of nature. Tunnels or caves riddled them at sea level, but there were no signs of life in those black-shadowed holes.

  Slender blade-shaped towers of darker rock were perched on the crest of the cliffs like stone-sculpted poplars, at once part of and distinct from the landscape about them. The tallest of these reared up twenty or thirty fathoms from base to sharp tip and they were built in orderless clusters that had nonetheless a pleasing kind of half-glimpsed symmetry about them. Looking closer, Rol saw that about the base of these towers was a talus of deeper shadow, coigns of light and dark—streets and roadways. If they had an overall pattern, then the knots and copses of trees that grew amongst them obscured it. Overall the place had an eerie, forbidding quality, like a monument erected to forgotten gods. Though there were no lights in the towers, no movement in the tree-clogged streets, Rol could smell woodsmoke, carried past them by the onshore breeze.

  “Ganesh Ka,” Gallico said with satisfaction and a weary kind of relief.

  “It looks deserted.” Rol frowned. If truth be told, it did not look like a city at all, more a geological formation, an immense abstraction thrown up on a whim by the Creator.

  “Come full dark, you would see it come to life with lights, but only on the landward side. The cliffs are tunneled deep, and could house many thousands with ease. Most choose to live in the towers.”

  “How many live here?” Creed asked. As he spoke, he saw the flicker of lamps being lit far up in the spines of the towers, tiny yellow gleams dwarfed by the massiveness of the stone. It was an unsettling sight, like seeing movement in the skin of a megalith. The windows must be so deep-set as to be almost invisible.

  “Some thousands,” Gallico said. “It varies, depending on how many ships are at sea. The tunnels at the base of the cliffs lead to a vaulted underground harbor with wharves of solid ston
e. Fifty men-of-war could tie up there with ease. The whole city is built inside the circuit of a half-drowned crater, formed in some past catastrophe of the ancient world.”

  The moon was rising, well on the way to becoming full. Out at sea a band of translucent pink cloud was smeared across the eastern skyline and the light was climbing red up the pinnacles of Ganesh Ka’s towers whilst below the sea grew dark with the onset of night. More lights were kindled in those tall spires of rock, and as the day dwindled the lights stood out alone in the gathering dark, a spangled tracery soaring up out of the sea.

  “It’s beautiful,” Creed breathed. He looked like an exile within sight of home, his face transfigured. “I have dreamed of this day.” His voice choked and he bent his head. Gallico laid one great paw lightly upon his shoulder.

  “The work of the Ancients, yet again,” Rol said, oblivious. “I am to wander from one Weren relic to another, it seems.” He turned to his companions, cold eyes unreachable. “Well, let us go down.”

  There had been a wall once, more a demarcation than a defense, but this had crumbled and was now little more than a rockery for dense thickets of lavender and juniper and a few stunted olive trees. They clambered over it without difficulty and found themselves in the skeleton of a town. Roofless walls delineated narrow guttered streets. Doorways opening into nothingness, windows of blackness. Rol was at once reminded of the cavern below the foundations of Psellos’s Tower where his former life had come to ruin. The same perfect masonry, utterly devoid of any life or sign of use.

  A dog barked somewhere and shattered the silence of the shadowed streets. Rol could smell rotting food, ordure, burning wood with the tang of resin in it. The trio tramped down the street like ghosts surrounded by a world they could not see, only hear and smell.

  And halted as a band of shadows became solid before their eyes, materializing out of the side streets with no sound to mark their appearance except the click of metal and scuff of leather on stone.

  “Who goes?”

  Gallico grinned, his green eyes gleaming. “Who in merry hell do you think, Miriam?”

  “A face like that could only have been made the once; God does not repeat His mistakes.” The speaker stepped forward. She was a tall, lean woman with a long face above which sprouted an untidy thatch of bright-colored hair. She smiled, revealing a wide gap between her front teeth. It gave her speech a lisping quality, though her voice was melodic as a harper’s. In her hands she held a long-barreled musket, a weapon Rol had seen only once or twice before in his voyaging. Her clothes were of worn buckskin, as were those of her companions. They all edged forward now behind her, and there was the gleam of more musket-barrels.

  “Hold hard there a second,” Miriam said, raising one white bony hand. “You we know, Gallico, but who are these followers of yours? Been collecting vagabonds on your travels? What about old Woodrin, and the rest of the Adders?”

  Gallico’s face closed. “All dead. These two are my friends. I will vouch for them with my life. One is Mathuw Creed’s son, the other a mariner from Dennifrey. They saved me when the Adder was wrecked, but the Bionari torched their ship, and we walked across the Gorthor Flats to get here.”

  A murmur of talk behind Miriam. Her eyes widened. “So? The Bionari are a busy crowd of late. Gallico’s word is enough for me. Come, and be welcome to Ganesh Ka.”

  Miriam left the rest of her band at the wall and led them downhill into the ruined city proper. All about him now, Rol could hear the voices of a multitude, but apart from Miriam and her fellows he could see no sign of the inhabitants. Looking up, he saw that the towers above were riddled with lights, but only on the landward side. To the east they presented a face of blank stone. The streets themselves were an empty maze; the more so since the buildings that enclosed them were open to the sky. This was later construction, not the consummate masonry of the towers, and was choked with tumbled stone and broken blocks.

  He caught the woman Miriam staring at him as he lowered his eyes from the towers. She held his gaze coolly for a second, then looked away.

  “We’ll go to the square. There’s a good gathering there tonight, because Artimion’s Prosper has just come in, looking as if Ran has been using her for a toothpick, I might add. You are not the only ones to have had a run-in with the Imperials lately. We’ve the Albatross and the Swallow on the wharves, too, come a-running with their sheets flying, tails between their legs and twelve-pound cannonballs rolling in their scuppers. They won’t be fit for sea again this side of midsummer.”

  “This coast must be getting crowded,” Gallico said.

  “Aye. We’ll have the faint-hearts and grandmothers up on their hind legs tonight, you mark my words. Something is up in the palaces of the world, and they’d like to take it out on us for want of an easier enemy.”

  “How long have you been in this place?” Rol asked Miriam.

  “Since my master’s ship was taken by Artimion and the Seasnake. Ten years ago if it’s a day. God bless that old brig, she’s on the bottom now.”

  “I mean everyone—how long has Ganesh Ka been a haven for pirates?”

  Miriam stopped in her tracks and looked Rol up and down. “This cold-eyed friend of yourn is free with his insults, Gallico.” The musket-barrel came up. Her own eyes were hazel, hot and bright.

  “He’s still learning, Miriam,” the halftroll said, pushing down the weapon’s muzzle gently. To Rol he said: “We do not like the term pirates here in the Ka. We’re privateers, if you must call us anything.”

  “My mistake.” He held Miriam’s gaze and some momentary tussle of wills was set aside. She smiled.

  “Whatever you think of us, friend, you are one of us now, like it or not.”

  They resumed their way downhill. “Twenty-five years or so,” Miriam said, “that’s how long we pirates have rattled around in this old mausoleum. The irony is, I’ve heard tell it was a Bionari, an Imperial, who set it up, come here fleeing his betters.”

  A tunnel-mouth opened in the ground before them, stone steps leading down and firelight somewhere at the bottom of the darkness. Miriam extended a hand and leaned on her musket. “Do come in.”

  Rol counted sixty steps. At their foot the tunnel-mouth opened out into a wide cavern or carved vault at least fifty fathoms wide and thirty feet from roof to ceiling. Fires burned on raised hearths in the middle of the space within, and all about them hundreds of people came and went. The air was thick and warm, stinking of close-packed humanity and woodsmoke and roasting meat. Rol’s eyes smarted and the fug seemed almost unbreathable after the cold, clear air of the Ganesh highlands.

  “The square,” Miriam announced grandly. “Or so we call it. The gods know what the Ancients used it for; they seemed to like rock over their heads, at any rate. Eat and drink as you please—the Prosper took a Mercanter wine barque before she was mauled by the Imperials and there’s fifty tuns of the stuff floating around—the best Auxierran you could wish for. I’ll tell Artimion you’re here.”

  She stalked off, a willowy, russet-haired shape with the swagger of a longshoreman about her.

  “A city?” Rol said. “It’s a squatters’ camp. Who’s in charge?”

  “The ship captains,” Gallico told him without meeting his eyes. “Without them we’d be down to flint axes and bows. Do not judge us too harshly, Rol—these are humble folk for the most part, many of them freed slaves or convicts like Elias here. We’re not setting ourselves up as one of the powers of the world.” His eyes gleamed dangerously.

  Rol set a hand on Gallico’s massively thewed forearm. “I know. I am sorry.” Perhaps more of Psellos’s training remained in him than he had thought. Or perhaps he had expected something different. This was no legendary city—it was a bolt-hole of refugees.

  They joined the crowd about one of the fires and were given venison and roast hare to eat and a plump skin of wine. Gallico was slapped and hailed and hooted at and the numbers around the three castaways grew as news of their presence spre
ad. Soon there were three- or fourscore packed tight around them, squatting on their haunches and gnawing meat from greasy bones, tossing back beakers of dark wine and laughing and talking all at once. Gallico made no mention of their ordeals yet somehow managed to make a tale of his adventures since last leaving the city—a tapestry, a bright story without shadows. It was a romance of half-truths and imagination, but it was what these people needed, Rol realized. Their lives were cut too near the bone to allow otherwise. Watching them, he was reminded of nothing so much as the kitchens of Psellos’s Tower, and the scrum of kitchen scullions competing for scraps after one of the Master’s grand dinners. These people were of all ages except for the very old and the very young. They were dressed in cobbled-together rags and half-cured animal skins for the most part, though some sported incongruously fine attire edged with lace, or stitched with pearls, no doubt part of some ship’s stolen cargo.

  A girl wormed her way through the malodorous press and sat herself by Rol’s elbow. No more than ten or eleven, she had disturbingly mature eyes. He levered her hand gently out of his crotch and looked appealingly at Gallico.

  “Now, Jenra, none of that. Give him a kiss and have done.”

  She tugged down Rol’s face and planted a kiss on his lips, then smiled a beautiful vacant smile and curled up beside him, asleep in minutes.

  Gallico’s bestial face was ill suited for compassion, but his eyes burned. He patted the sleeping girl’s golden head as though it were that of a dog. “Jenra spent some time as a plaything of Bionese infantry. She was sold onto a Mercanter slaver, and liberated by Artimion. He crucified the captain of the ship that carried her, and fed the crew to the sharks. I think he was merciful.”

  The girl whimpered in her sleep and an older woman with a ravaged face lifted her and took her away, crooning softly.