Corsair

by Brian Ruckley

  They were indeed. Scallop shells, by the look of them. Thirty or more were plated over Kottren’s shoulders and breast like a child’s notion of armour. On his head rested a wreath of gull feathers and dried seaweed. It trembled as Kottren limped closer.

  ‘He looks like something washed up on a beach,’ Hamdan murmured. ‘If that’s supposed to be royal regalia …’

  Yulan already had another matter on his mind.

  ‘The Orphanidon’s not here,’ he said quietly.

  ‘No? That good or bad?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  It was unexpected, and that troubled him. He had assumed Lake would be at his master’s side. The warrior’s absence made little obvious sense.

  ‘I don’t know whether to be proud or pained,’ the Corsair King was calling as he came out from beneath the assaults of the gulls. ‘I get the famous Free set on me and all I merit is a fishwife and you two sand-eaters.’

  ‘I’ll pain the bastard myself if he carries on like that,’ Hamdan muttered under his breath, dropping his head to conceal his lips from view.

  ‘Best to take the pride,’ Yulan said loudly. ‘All the Free stand behind us, even if you can’t see them yet. And this lady is no fishwife. She is here as contract-holder and to witness for her people how matters are settled between the Free and the Corsair King.’

  He heard Corena crossing her arms, and could imagine with what fierce loathing she was watching Kottren’s approach. He hardly begrudged her that loathing. She was entitled to it.

  Kottren’s shells scraped and clicked against one another as he drew himself up, a good twenty or so paces from Yulan and the others. He flicked both arms out sideways and those of his escort who lacked the look of fighters fell back a short way; those with weapons fell into line on either side of their king. The wind tugged at Kottren’s ragged crown and he lifted a hand to set it a little more firmly on his head. It would be laughable, if laughing were not so inadvisable.

  ‘She’s a fine day for the mighty t’be making parley,’ the Corsair King said with jab of his bearded chin towards the wide and cloudless sky.

  ‘As you say,’ Yulan nodded. ‘And what is it you’re to tell to us?’

  ‘What to tell, what to tell,’ Kottren echoed distractedly. He was watching gulls circling way up in the azure air.

  Hamdan glanced at Yulan, one eyebrow sharply arched.

  ‘Mad for sure,’ the archer silently mouthed.

  Yulan allowed himself the slightest and most subtle of shrugs.

  ‘I spent years under the heels of folks that thought they were my betters,’ the Corsair King told the sky. ‘Took me all that time to reckon out what a man’s real duty was. Y’know what I reckoned?’

  ‘No,’ said Yulan. He was not certain he managed to keep all of his impatience out of his voice.

  ‘Do what you want,’ Kottren smiled, turning his gaze at last down towards earthly matters. ‘Don’t go looking for a mercy no one’s going to give you. Don’t hope for a kindness that’s not in the world. Fight your way up, and break any bastard as tries to push you down.’

  The Corsair King looked beyond Yulan.

  ‘What’s a contract-holder, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Our Captain and the elders of her village put their marks to a parchment,’ Yulan explained without any enthusiasm. ‘She carries it as proof that what we do is right in the law. Whatever we do, within the bounds of the contract.’

  He tried to put a touch of threat into those last words, but it washed over Kottren unnoticed as far as he could tell. The Corsair King took a few paces closer and beckoned Corena with a crooked finger.

  ‘Let’s see it, then. Let’s see this contract between peasants and the Free that’s supposed to make my bowels tremble.’

  ‘There’s no need …’ Yulan began, but Corena was already moving smoothly past him.

  ‘Let the man see it if he wants,’ she said.

  She carried the parchment case at the small of her back, strapped around her waist. Her hand moved round towards it as she walked. Kottren was holding out his hand. He was smiling with the sort of sour laziness Yulan had come to expect of the King’s amusement.

  Off-kilter, Yulan’s mind whispered to him. It caught the shifting mood before he was consciously aware of it. It set his legs in motion, even as he was seeing that Corena’s hand behind her back clasped not the contract but something else, nestled in there beneath the leather case. He reached for her with one hand, for the hilt of his sword with the other, and already knew there was nothing he could do.

  Corena brought a thin, short blade out and around. She stepped forward and took hold of the Corsair King’s hair so suddenly that he had no reaction save the widening of his eyes and the opening of his mouth. She punched the knife once, twice, thrice into the side of his neck. The spray of blood was instant. Kottren’s arms had started to come up to fend her off, but his legs folded as if some puppeteer had carelessly cut his strings.

  ‘Is there a plan I don’t know about?’ Hamdan asked into the fragment of silence as everyone stared in startled disbelief at Kottren’s slumping form.

  Then all was movement, and the only thing that mattered was who moved fastest. Yulan, already reaching for Corena, was fastest.

  His left hand closed on her shoulder and he dragged her violently backwards, away from her choking victim. His right hand brought out his sword as he stepped over Kottren’s twitching legs.

  This was the kind of moment in which he had always found a calm others could not. He saw clearly and with precision. His anticipation reached a beat ahead of his steady heart. A glimpse told him all he needed to know about the men before him.

  Several would not fight. Others might, unless they were quickly discouraged. The key to their discouragement lay in the few who sprang forwards at once, swords and clubs and axes raised.

  He dodged past the first, because they would not expect him to put an enemy at his back. His sword came down on the shoulder of the next. It bit in. The blade did not come free at first, so he kicked the man hard in the chest with the sole of his boot to force flesh and sword apart.

  Behind him he heard what he had hoped – no, trusted – he would: the tethered sounds of bowstring thrumming, shaft flying, arrowhead smacking home. Hamdan was the only reason it was safe to put an enemy at his back.

  Three pirates still remained to his front. Beyond them, a few of their fellows were already fleeing. More stood in uncertainty, or edged cautiously towards the struggle. Every moment mattered, so he danced between those moments and shaped them as best he could.

  He caught a descending axe on the blade of his sword and turned it aside and down. The movement brought him in close enough to hit the axe’s wielder hard in the throat with stiff fingers. The man staggered, clutching at his neck, and Yulan spun away and onward even as Hamdan skimmed an arrow into the axeman’s chest.

  Yulan shouted, screaming invented rage at his opponents. It worked as it was meant to. Eyes widened a touch, feet hesitated. Yulan fell on them. He ducked under the clumsy swing of a stave. Broke a man’s wrist, cutting it open to the bone. Swept the legs out from under him and half-slit his belly even before he hit the ground.

  Yulan’s foot slipped on blood and slime. It took him less than a heartbeat to steady himself, long enough for a knife to stab into his upper arm. There was only the distant whisper of pain – as if someone else, somewhere else was feeling it – as the blade wrenched out. He spun and brought his sword about in a rising arc, fast and hard as it would go. It took the man who had stabbed him in the side of the face. Unhinged his jaw, broke his teeth. And with that, there was no one left to kill.

  Yulan stood among the dead and dying. His arms hung loose at his side, the bloodied point of his sword almost touching the ground. He bowed his head for a moment or two, breathing hard. The gulls were screaming. The wind was tumbling Kottren’s fallen crown over the rocks, spinning it like a toy wheel.

  Hamdan moved up at his side. He loosed an
arrow after the fleeing figures, a dozen or more of them running for the distant castle through a churning cloud of angry gulls. He set another to the string before the first was even homed, sent it too flashing away.

  ‘Cursed birds get in the way,’ the archer grunted in irritation.

  ‘Let them go,’ Yulan muttered.

  ‘Only because of the birds. Once the killing starts, never think it’s done before you know it’s done. That’s my advice.’

  Yulan turned about as he sheathed his sword. He stepped over a corpse and knelt at the side of the Corsair King. Kottren’s blood had slicked out from his punctured neck, spreading a thick and darkening sheen over the bare rock. Yulan carefully turned Kottren’s head so that he could look into his eyes. The light and life in them were fading. Flickering away.

  ‘What did you do?’ the Corsair King murmured. ‘It’s not … never …’

  And he was gone. Yulan took his hand away. The knife that had killed Kottren lay on the rocks, its victim’s blood sticky around it. It was such a small blade. A simple knife for gutting fish.

  A shadow fell across him and the body. He looked up at Corena. Her hands were balled into fists; from the right, the Corsair King’s blood still dripped. She was staring at the dead man with a cold, fixed expression. Then she spat onto Kottren’s cheek.

  ‘Why?’ asked Yulan, rising to his feet.

  ‘Because I got close enough,’ the fisherwoman said levelly. ‘It needed doing. And because he killed my husband.’

  Which raised more questions than it answered, since Yulan had heard nothing about a dead husband before. He was not allowed the time for answers, though.

  ‘Not done,’ Hamdan called. ‘Told you.’

  Yulan and Corena looked to the archer, then followed the line of his pointing arm out over the island and onto the sea. A boat was there, sleek and low in the water, racing on full sails across the wind. It cut through the waves with a fierce determination Corena’s scow could never have matched.

  Yulan squinted at the figures near the prow, veiled in spray as the boat sped down the flank of the island. One of them was Lake, he thought, and his heart sank. Corena was already running for the tiny rowboat that had carried them ashore. Even Yulan, with his near-endless ignorance of the sea and the vessels that rode it, could tell it was futile. Kottren’s Orphanidon was making for the fishing scow, rocking at anchor a hundred paces offshore, and he would reach it before anything could be done.

  ‘Can you hit anyone on that boat from here?’ Yulan quietly asked Hamdan.

  The archer was tugging an arrow free from one of the bodies. He straightened and wiped the barbed point clean on his sleeve, gazing out at the pirates with one eye half closed against the sun.

  ‘Maybe. Wouldn’t want to stake my life on it.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have to; only his. The Orphanidon’s standing up at the prow, I think.’

  ‘Oh, well in that case I’ll have a try. You might want to call back our captain-assassin, though. She goes out there, good chance she’s not coming back and I’m not sure how we get home then.’

  Yulan trotted after Corena, who was struggling to launch the rowboat from where they had wedged it in an angle between rocks. He watched Hamdan’s arrow arch out as he ran. The shaft seemed almost slow as it vaulted from island to boat and smacked into the gunwale, no more than a hand’s span from Lake’s midriff. The Orphanidon looked calmly towards them and then sank down out of sight.

  ‘Bastard wind, bastard waves,’ Yulan heard Hamdan growling behind him as he caught up with Corena and took hold of her arm.

  ‘You’ll just get yourself killed,’ he said as he pulled gently at her.

  She shook him off, and glared at him with such ferocity he could almost believe she would strike him.

  ‘That’s my boat they’re going for,’ she snapped.

  ‘And you can’t stop them. Look: your crew already knows it.’

  The handful of men aboard Corena’s scow were hurriedly – in panic, more or less – hauling up the anchor, unfurling the sails. The old, tired fishing boat was turning slowly as the wind got to grips with it, but already Lake’s vessel was coming in a wide sweep around the tip of the island. However hard and fast the fishermen worked, however skilled their handling, neither labour nor talent would be enough.

  ‘Faster, faster,’ Corena was muttering, her body all but trembling with impotence.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Hamdan as he came to stand beside them, staring out just as they did at the gradually unfolding hunt over the glittering waves.

  ‘I think we’d best get to the castle,’ Yulan said. ‘Make sure there’s none there still inclined to fight us. Steal ourselves one of Kottren’s own ships. Maybe save those children from something even worse than what they’ve already lived.’

  ‘Sounds simple enough,’ Hamdan said wryly. ‘Apart from that Orphanidon out there.’

  ‘The man he was guarding’s dead, so by rights we shouldn’t be of much interest to him any more.’

  ‘He seems more interested than not at the moment,’ Hamdan sighed.

  Lake looked to have a dozen or more of Kottren’s followers with him. Some of them were gathering around the front and near flank of their boat, hefting grappling hooks and poles, as they remorselessly closed on the lumbering scow. Others stood with shields ready to catch arrows now that they had learned Hamdan’s range.

  ‘Your arm all right?’ Hamdan asked.

  Yulan absently pressed a hand to his upper arm. The pain was mounting now, a hot, sharp ache. Nothing too troubling, though.

  ‘It’s not my sword-arm, so it’ll do. We can patch it up later.’

  The vessels were lurching into a clumsy embrace. Ropes and hooks dragged them closer, bound them together. Some of Corena’s crew were leaping into the water even as Lake’s men scrambled from the deck of the hunter to that of the hunted. Corena hung her head.

  ‘To the castle,’ Yulan said. ‘We might not have much time now.’

  Corena did not look back as they walked away, climbing the same path Kottren had so recently descended. That surprised Yulan. The screams of a thousand agitated gulls put a more immediate thought into his head.

  He trotted back and prised one of the long staffs from a dead hand, then rejoined Hamdan and Corena. He held it high above their heads just in time for the wheeling birds to start attacking it.

  VII

  A grey outcrop of rock a few dozen strides from the castle’s landward entrance gave the three of them shelter. They sat with their backs to it while Hamdan roughly bound Yulan’s arm with a makeshift bandage. The rock was patterned with a hundred white streaks of dried gull-waste.

  Every so often, Hamdan would pause in his ministrations to stretch up and check the castle for signs of activity. The gatehouse must once have been quite imposing. Now it was a toothless maw, crumbling and empty of gate or door. Just a dark gullet into the dark body of the stronghold.

  Staring out in the other direction, Yulan watched Lake’s boat laboriously zig-zagging its way up the side of the island with Corena’s scow. Both were in the hands of the late Corsair King’s men now. Both had an unforgiving task in hand, working their way against the wind back towards the berthings beyond the castle.

  ‘We were not told Kottren had taken your husband from you,’ Yulan said as matter-of-factly as he could.

  Corena, watching the boats just as he did, said nothing at first and then, ‘Why should you have been?’

  ‘Because we might have asked for another to bring us here, that’s why,’ grunted Hamdan, pulling the knot of the bandage tight a little less gently than Yulan would have liked.

  ‘And there’d have been none,’ Corena said. There was more than a hint of anger in her voice. ‘No one else would come out here. You know what Kottren Malak did to those he caught on the sea? Cut their sinews and tendons, then bound them in their own nets. And threw them overboard. That’s what he did to my husband.’

  ‘So it’s his b
oat you captain now,’ Yulan said.

  ‘It was.’

  Tears were welling at the corners of her eyes; not falling, but gathering there. They did not reveal themselves in her voice. Yulan could see them. Hamdan did not.

  ‘We would have done what we said we would do, one way or the other,’ Hamdan muttered as he lifted his head once more to survey the castle. ‘Not sure you’ve made it any easier for us, or for your people.’

  ‘And I’d do the same again, a thousand times. You’d have done what? Bargained with him? Threatened him? Tricked him into overreaching himself? He never meant you anything but harm, always meant to seize my boat. You play games, because it’s all coins and caution for you. It’s not your love he’s drowned, not your homes he’s burned. I’ve ended it, in the name of my husband, and I care not one fingernail for anything else.’

  Yulan held up a placatory hand in the face of her mounting passion.

  ‘So be it,’ he said gently. ‘So be it. But if there’s more killing needed now, will you let us do it?’

  Corena glowered at him. She blinked those unshed tears away.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, and Yulan knew that was all he was going to get from her.

  ‘I’m seeing nothing,’ Hamdan said. ‘Everyone hiding away, you think?’

  Yulan shuffled round to get a better view of the castle. It squatted there on the high end of the island in mute, grey immobility. Not a single figure could be seen in the gateway, atop the walls, atop the keep beyond.

  ‘Only one way to find out,’ Yulan murmured. He glanced back over his shoulder towards the boats butting their way through waves and wind. ‘Best to do it before the odds set themselves properly against us.’

  Yulan went first, running in a low stoop for the nearest corner of the gatehouse. He pressed himself against the stonework to one side of the gateway. Hamdan watched from the half-shelter of the rock, arrow notched to bowstring. The archer’s eyes darted between Yulan and the crenellated walls above.

  Yulan waited, gathering himself and his memories of what lay within into one clear and purposeful unity. He remembered a doorway on each side of the gatehouse, about halfway in, stairways to the towers and walls. Height was what they needed. Hamdan nodded, and Yulan spun into the castle.