The Mark of Ran

by Paul Kearney

  “Rol. Rol, come back.”

  Cortishane blinked stupidly. Fleam slipped from his grasp to the deck. His eyes rolled back in his head.

  “Gallico, we must be quick. This ship is sinking under us,” Elias Creed said, and the halftroll scooped Rol’s body up into his blood-smeared arms.

  Twenty-two

  THE BITERS BIT

  A PATCHWORK OF IMAGES, BARELY FIT TO BE CALLED memory. At some point he knew he was being carried, and he heard the urgent chorus of many axes working frantically on timber. Men and women were screaming in pain but they were at one remove. He knew that he was being stared at, and whispered about, and he heard Gallico’s voice raised in anger.

  He was in his cot, and it was swaying with the pitch of his ship. Beside him Elias Creed sat methodically reloading his pistols. The Revenant was moving through the water about them with the graceless lunge of a crippled bird.

  Rol drifted away again, and this time the Revenant was left far behind. There was a woman with him; they existed together in some indefinable space. She was beautiful and dark and rounded and her white flesh melted against his. She had eyes the color of Fleam’s gray-green steel, and her eyeteeth were long fangs of gleaming silver. She moved against him with a delicious building friction, her skin satin-soft. He wanted her more than anything else in the world, and set his mouth against hers, crushed her dark lips against the white fangs. When he drew breath their mouths peeled apart as if glued, and he saw that there was blood all over her lips and teeth and he could taste it in his own mouth.

  “It’s all right, Orr-Diseyn,” she said. “Prince of Orr, Lord of Demons. You come into your own, day by day, and I will be here always to watch over you.”

  “Rowen?” Rol asked softly.

  The woman’s face changed; it grew hard, and he could see the bones beneath her flesh, the skull within its beautiful shell of meat. For a second she was no longer what she seemed, and Rol had a glimpse of some shambling angular beast. Then she was gone completely.

  He stood on a high mountain; he could feel the rareness of the air as it sidled unwillingly in and out of his lungs. But it was hot and bright all the same, and he looked down onto a green country below, a riotous forest of trees and plants he did not know. Beneath their canopy there was a hidden world.

  The violent jade-green of the forest was bisected by the wandering course of a mighty river, brown and slow. His eyes followed the meander of its sinuous turns and twists, and far out on the edge of the world he thought he saw a glimmer of what might have been the sea, great Tethis. This, he knew, was the land of Orr.

  A thing stood beside him. It was manlike in many respects, but not a man in the remotest sense of the word. It stood shrouded in a dark cloak with a tall helm of iron on its head, and within the helm two green lights blinked.

  “You have been sailing in ancient waters,” it said. “The first men launched their canoes upon the waves of the Inner Reach, and it was by sea that they spread to the far corners of the world, not over the mountains. For what remains of the One God is in the sea, and thus men listen to Tethis and are moved and know not why. The sea was here at the Beginning and shall be here at the End, when all things shall return to it.”

  The iron helm turned and the lights within it burned brighter. “Now, feast your eyes on the jungle-brightness of Orr. One day you will find sanctuary here. You are the son of my blood, but not the child of my heart. For her it is too late, but for you there may yet be a chance.”

  Rol shrank from the chill of his companion’s regard. It was like staring into an abyss without end.

  “There is no need to be afraid of me. Be more afraid of what is festering in your own marrow. Orr-Diseyn, do you not feel it working within you?” The thing gestured at the wide jungle-hid land below. “Do you not know what you will find here?

  “No. Of course you do not. You are yet young, a stripling. Ten thousand leagues of the sea have yet to go beneath your keel.” He paused. “Your vessel was well named. She will carry you far, your Revenant.”

  “Sail ho!” a voice shouted.

  Rol opened his eyes, sucking in air with a hoarse gasp.

  “Welcome back,” Creed said, smiling. “I don’t know where you went, but you were gone deep.”

  Memory flooding back, no longer a tattered patchwork thing, but a full-blooded torrent. “The ship, Elias—”

  “She floats. It would seem—”

  Rol leaped out of the hanging cot and ran along the companionway. He came out onto the sunlit quarterdeck, and found himself looking forward at a strange, disjointed mess of a vessel: scarred decks, broken wood, and a makeshift series of sails sheeted from the foremast to an ugly lumpen stump of bowsprit. All about the ship’s guns a great crowd of people gathered, cowering at his approach.

  This ship. My ship. This, here, is my world. I want no other.

  “Gallico!”

  I want nothing more.

  “Here, skipper.” The halftroll raised a hand.

  Rol stood swaying, empty-eyed. It seemed to him that the world was not what it had been. As though some other place floated serenely behind the sun and he was now aware of it.

  He knuckled his eyes. “What sail? Where away?”

  “On the port beam, a small boat and some kind of jury-rig.” In a lower voice Gallico said, “Are you well?”

  “Quite well,” Rol snapped, suddenly aware of the entire crew staring at him, their work forgotten. There were filthy-faced children on deck chewing ship’s biscuit, and a throng of the passengers who had importuned him for a passage back in Ganesh Ka.

  “Gallico,” Rol said again, fainter this time. He mustered his feet under him and made it to the lee scuppers before throwing up. His vomit was blood-red. He leaned on the ship’s rail.

  “Tell me, Gallico.” And in a stronger voice: “Damage report.”

  “We’ve fished the mizzen and jury-rigged the foremast. There’s what’s left of the foretopmast serving as a sprit, though it’s too damn heavy and is pressing down the bow. We lost twenty-three men killed or wounded. The barque sank half a watch after we got ourselves cut free of her. We have no powder left, and we’re making water fast, but the pumps are keeping pace with it. The orlop is ankle-deep, so I brought the passengers up on deck. I set course back for Ganesh Ka, west-nor’west, the wind on the starboard bow.” He stopped, and seemed to grope for words. “Rol, we just sank a Bionese man-of-war.”

  “So I understand.”

  “You don’t understand. No single privateer has ever bested a man-of-war in even fight—never. And with a new ship and untried crew.”

  Rol managed a smile. “You look like a bloodied cat who’s kept hold of the cream.”

  “They mauled us, yes, but by God—” He thumped the quarterdeck rail in a gesture that Rol was coming to see as a habit. “Wait until Artimion hears about this. It was like something out of a goddamned song.”

  “Deck there!” a lookout cried. “There’s people on the launch to larboard, waving and such. I believe they’re friendly.”

  “Heave-to,” Rol said. He straightened and wiped his mouth. Many of the crew were still staring at him, but what he had first mistaken for fear now looked more like awe. He shook his buzzing head. “Heave-to, I say, and set down a cutter.”

  “They’re all in splinters,” Gallico told him.

  Rol sighed. “Gallico, close with the bloody boat and get them on board, will you?”

  The halftroll grinned. “Aye aye, sir.”

  It was Miriam in the launch, along with a dozen others who were slack-jawed with exhaustion, having pulled into the wind for some twenty-five miles. Artimion lay in the boat, his bloody head resting in her lap.

  “The fleet is gone,” she said, having gulped cloudy water out of a scuttle-butt. There was a black bar of gunpowder darkening her face from the corner of her mouth down her chin. Her eyes were red-rimmed as cherries.

  “Jan Timian ran for it, but the others piled in yardarm to yardarm. The brig
s were sunk, and the transports scattered. I think a couple went aground in the surf. But they beat us up something terrible. Albatross and Swallow were dismasted and had to put about before the wind. They’re running south, trying to get new masts up or something. Prosper sank under us. We got the launch over the side and Artimion into it. I do not know if he will live. Where Skua is I do not know. There was too much smoke, too much confusion. But we beat them. The Ka is safe.”

  In the hesitant outbreak of cheering that followed she seemed to look about herself for the first time. “Are you listening to me?” And then: “What happened to you?” Her voice was near breaking.

  “We also had some trouble, Miriam,” Gallico said gently, and bending he lifted Artimion’s body from the deck and into his massive arms.

  “Does he live yet?” Miriam asked. A harshness throbbed behind her words. She looked close to breaking down.

  Gallico closed his huge paw about Artimion’s throat. “There is life beating here. We must get him below.”

  He and Miriam disappeared down the companionway. The rest of Miriam’s companions were sitting all about the waist, heads bowed. The Revenants had fallen silent. Even the passengers did not speak.

  “It’s a lot to take in, I suppose,” Creed said.

  “Get them back to work, Elias,” Rol said sharply. “The ship will not fix herself.” He looked up and down the crowded decks, and his heart lurched at the devastation there. His beautiful ship. Well, she would be rebuilt. But first he must get her back to Ganesh Ka.

  She will carry you far, your Revenant.

  Gallico and Miriam were bending over Artimion’s body in the light of the stern-cabin windows. They had laid him in Rol’s cot and were peeling off layer upon layer of filthy bandages.

  “How is he?” Rol asked.

  “Shot through the lung,” Miriam snapped. “Plus a splinter scalped the side of his head.”

  Artimion’s dark face had taken on a livid hue, and white bone gleamed at his temple. Rol touched his own head, remembering the blow there, but his flesh was unmarked. The wound in his thigh had disappeared also.

  “Gallico?”

  “I’ve stopped up the hole—there was air coming out of it—and I’ll sew his scalp back down. The rest is up to him.”

  “The Blood is in him,” Miriam said. “He’ll not go easy.”

  Artimion opened his eyes, and Miriam stifled a cry. The black man stared at them one by one, his gaze resting last on Rol’s face.

  “I thought so. Miriam, are we—”

  “The day is won.” She took his hand and clenched her white fingers about it. “The Bionari are sunk or scattered.”

  The eyes closed again. The tense, glistening face relaxed somewhat, though it tightened again in pain as the breath left his wounded lung. “Oh, thank the gods.” Then Artimion smiled. He met Gallico’s bright eyes once more. “I thought you would get into the middle of things somehow.”

  “Of course.”

  Artimion stared at the deck-head. He looked puzzled. “This is not the Prosper. What ship is this?”

  “The Revenant,” Rol said quietly. “My ship.”

  “Cortishane. So you took her out after all.”

  “I took her out. She came in useful, as it happens.”

  “She sank a man-of-war,” Gallico said quietly. But Artimion’s eyes had already closed.

  The three of them left him sleeping and came on deck again, glad of the clean air and spray after the powder-reek, the charnel-house atmosphere below.

  “He will live,” Miriam said fervently. “He must. Without him, Ganesh Ka is finished.”

  “The Bionari will not stop looking,” Rol said quietly. “They have an idea now of where we are.”

  Miriam regarded him coldly. “We?”

  Gallico was running a paw up and down the quarterdeck rail. “We’ve put our blood into this ship. She’s truly ours now.”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” Rol said. He was very tired.

  “The refitting will take three or four weeks at least.”

  “So I figure.”

  “We are the only ship the Ka can count on now, Rol. All the rest are sunk or fled.”

  “We’re not so far from sunk ourselves, brother,” But Rol’s attempt at jocularity fell flat.

  Gallico looked square at him. “We must go home now. We must gather up our people.”

  Rol did not look at the halftroll, but surveyed the multitude that populated the ruined deck of his ship. Men, women, children, squatting amid the gore and the wreckage. Miriam, glaring at him with a fine-boned face full of mistrust and doubt. Elias Creed, the sun catching the white in his beard. So many faces, and all of them looking his way.

  “I suppose we must,” he said.

  About the Author

  PAUL KEARNEY was born and grew up in Northern Ireland. He studied English at Oxford University and has lived for several years in both Denmark and the United States. He now lives by the sea in County Down with his wife and two dogs. His other books include the acclaimed Monarchies of God sequence.

  ALSO BY PAUL KEARNEY

  The Way to Babylon

  A Different Kingdom

  Riding the Unicorn

  Hawkwood’s Voyage

  The Heretic Kings

  The Iron Wars

  The Second Empire

  Ships from the West

  THE MARK OF RAN

  A Bantam Spectra Book / December 2005

  Originally published 2004 by Bantam Press, a division of Transworld Publishers (UK)

  Published by Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2004 by Paul Kearney

  Decorative map © Neil Gower

  Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kearney, Paul.

  The Mark of Ran / Paul Kearney.

  p. cm.—(The sea beggars ; bk. 1)

  eISBN: 0-553-90216-4

  I. Title. II. Fantasy fiction.

  PR6061.E2156 M37 2005

  823'.914—dc22

  2005047238

  www.bantamdell.com

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