Slaves of Socorro

by John Flanagan

  They paused as they crested the ridge, Lydia and Thorn content to let Gilan lead the way. Before them stretched a panorama of rocks, dusty, uneven ground and low-lying scrub, spreading out in all directions. The sun beat down on them and the rocks shimmered with the heat they had stored for the past eight hours. After the deep shade of the bay, the heat here was oppressive. Gilan shaded his eyes and peered around on all sides. There was no sign of anyone – enemy or otherwise. Although to the south, where Socorro lay, a thin haze of smoke was evident, rising on the hot air, then being stirred by the breeze. Gilan gestured to the northern headland, on the opposite side of the bay.

  ‘Let’s make our way round there and take a look,’ he said. The others nodded assent and they set off, their boots raising small puffs of dust from the parched ground as they moved around the ridge to explore the far side of the inlet.

  On the beach, Hal contented himself that the camp was being put together with the usual dispatch. Then he set off for the trees beyond the beach, calling to Ingvar as he went.

  ‘Ingvar! Come with me, please!’

  The big boy had completed the heavy lifting that went with setting up the sleeping tent. He picked his way over to where Hal was waiting, then fell in step with him as they walked towards the trees.

  ‘What are we looking for, Hal?’

  Hal looked sidelong at his friend. ‘We?’ he asked, smiling gently to make sure Ingvar took no offence.

  The huge boy acknowledged the joke. ‘All right. What are you looking for?’

  ‘We need a couple of new spars,’ Hal told him. ‘I want to disguise the ship and rig her with a square sail.’

  Ingvar thrust out his bottom lip. ‘That should do it, all right. I take it I’m along to carry these spars of yours back to camp. I am the beast of burden for this crew, after all.’

  ‘And invaluable you are in that role,’ Hal said.

  Ingvar gave a soft snort of derision. Then, joking aside, he said, ‘Will green timber be all right for spars? Won’t you want seasoned wood?’

  ‘I’d prefer it, of course,’ said Hal, his eyes scanning the trees around them. ‘But new timber should be all right. I only need it for a few days and we’re not going to be hitting any heavy weather. That one,’ he added, pointing to a straight sapling some ten centimetres in diameter and five metres tall.

  They made their way to the sapling and Hal shook it experimentally, then hit the trunk with the back end of the axe, listening to hear how the wood rang. Ingvar watched with some interest.

  ‘Why do you do that?’

  Hal shrugged. ‘I’m not really sure. It’s something Anders always does. But I think if there are flaws in the wood, it won’t ring true. It’ll sound sort of . . . rattly.’

  ‘Have you ever heard it do that?’ Ingvar asked. He had great respect for Hal’s technical ability.

  ‘Once or twice,’ Hal said.

  ‘And how did it sound?’

  Hal paused, not sure how to explain it. Finally, he settled for: ‘Sort of rattly.’

  Ingvar raised his eyebrows. ‘I suppose it’s my fault for asking,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to cut it down for you?’

  Hal shook his head, his eyes intent on the tree. There was something about preparing wood for a ship. He knew Ingvar would cut down the sapling in half the time he’d take, but he liked to do it by himself. It made him feel totally in tune with the process, totally involved.

  He made his first cut into the sapling and the entire trunk quivered under the impact. Then he cut again, placing the axe blade exactly, so that it deepened the first cut. Then he came at it from the opposite angle, with an overhand cut, and a large wedge of wood flew free from the tree. He made four more cuts, the axe biting deeply into the wood, and the small tree lurched and staggered. He leaned against it, signalling to Ingvar to join him.

  ‘Shove it,’ he said and the huge boy added his strength to Hal’s so that the sapling quickly keeled over with a rending, cracking noise. It lay parallel to the ground, joined to the stump by a few remaining strands and fibres of wood. Hal measured the distance and placed one more cut into the point where the tree joined the stump. The tree fell free, thudding softly onto the grass.

  Hal straddled the tree and moved quickly along its length, deftly trimming the side branches and foliage until the sapling was reduced to a bare pole, five metres long.

  ‘Should do for the mast extension,’ he said, satisfied with the result. ‘Let’s find a new yardarm.’

  They left the trimmed sapling lying and trudged a few more metres into the trees, Hal’s eyes upwards, checking each new trunk for straightness and strength. Eventually, he found one that suited his requirements. He felled it with a few deft strokes of the axe before trimming off the leaves and branches. There was a slight kink in the trunk, about two-thirds of the way along. He shrugged. It wasn’t perfect, but it would serve. He cut off the length he wanted, abandoning the upper third, where the wood tapered, and gestured at it to Ingvar.

  ‘Bring it along,’ he said. ‘We’ll start fitting it tomorrow.’

  Ingvar heaved the ungainly piece of wood over his shoulder and they walked back towards the camp, collecting the heavier tree trunk as they went. The extra weight didn’t bother Ingvar at all. He balanced the two long spars easily, as if they were featherweights.

  On the way back, they intercepted Thorn, Gilan and Lydia, descending from the northern headland. Hal looked a question at them and Thorn shook his head.

  ‘Nobody about,’ he said. ‘We’re all alone.’

  But he was wrong. From a hide under a jumble of rocks halfway up the slope at the end of the U-shaped ridge, hostile eyes were watching them, counting their numbers and assessing their ability to defend themselves.

  The following morning, Gilan and Lydia climbed to the southern ridge and set out for Socorro. They left Hal frowning thoughtfully over the best way to re-rig the Heron with a square sail, while the rest of the crew waited patiently for the tasks they knew he would assign them.

  The ground was flat and stony, baked by the sun during the day and frozen at night by the chill desert air. In the distance, to the east, Gilan and Lydia could see a range of massive mountains rearing up from the dry, stony plain, running roughly parallel to the coast. Frequently, their way south was blocked by dry gullies, steep sided and several metres deep. They would have to hunt for an easy way down, where the bank had collapsed, and then find a similar way back up again on the far side. Fortunately, such paths usually corresponded with each other. Obviously, previous travellers had forged a way here. But sometimes, having slipped and slithered down, they had to walk for several hundred metres before they found a place to clamber up again. Lydia voiced her displeasure the third time this happened.

  ‘Who put these darn things here anyway?’ she said, kicking at the dry dust in the bed of one of the gullies.

  ‘They’re water courses,’ Gilan told her.

  Lydia studied the rocky, dusty ground around her and sniffed. ‘Doesn’t look very wet to me.’

  ‘When it rains here, which it doesn’t do very often, it comes in an absolute downpour,’ the Ranger told her. ‘The water collects in those mountains you can see, then comes flooding across the plain in torrents. These gullies – the locals call them wadis – are the result. The water finds the path of least resistance and carves its way through, washing everything before it. Over the years, a huge channel forms. If you happened to be in one of these during a flash flood, you’d have no chance of surviving. The water would come through here faster than a horse could gallop, and it would fill the channel up to the banks.’

  Lydia glanced around, imagining a wall of surging brown water suddenly erupting round the bend in the channel. At this point, the banks were at least three metres higher than her head and there would be no escape.

  ‘How often does that happen?’ she said.

  Gilan shrugged. ‘Not often. But when it does, there’s absolutely no warning. It could be teeming with rai
n in the mountains right now, with a head of water building up, ready to burst down onto the flatlands and carry everything before it.’

  ‘That’s comforting to know,’ Lydia said. From their current position, in the bottom of the gully, she couldn’t see the mountains in the distance. She had no idea whether or not it was raining over them. She looked along the southern bank. Unfortunately, this was one of the spots where a way out didn’t correspond directly with a way in.

  ‘Let’s get a move on,’ she said, and lengthened her stride.

  Gilan smiled and kept pace with her. He noticed that she seemed to relax when they eventually climbed out of the dried water course, some several hundred metres further downstream.

  ‘You seem to know a lot about Socorro,’ she said, when they were back at ground level once more. In the near distance, she could see the dark haze of dust and smoke that hung over the slaver city. And she could smell the pungent smoke of hundreds of cooking fires. Gilan nodded acknowledgement of her statement.

  ‘We’ve been taking a particular interest in the place since the slave market reopened,’ he said. ‘We may have to do something about it one of these days. That’s one reason I decided to tag along with you lot. It was a chance to get some first-hand intelligence on the place.’

  She sniffed the air and wrinkled her nose. ‘Does your intelligence go as far as telling us what the blazes they’re burning in their fires?’ she asked. Whatever it was that she smelled, it wasn’t woodsmoke.

  ‘Dried camel and goat dung, probably,’ Gilan replied. ‘They say you haven’t eaten until you’ve eaten a haunch of camel meat roasted over goat dung.’

  ‘And you might never eat again after it,’ Lydia replied.

  The ground began to rise again as they came closer to the city. At first, they could see only the taller buildings. Then they crested the rising ground and the sprawl of the city itself came into view, where the houses and other buildings clustered around the roughly oval shape of the main harbour. The buildings were predominantly white, with occasional highlights of bright primary colours – blues and reds – and the sun glared off them. The roofs were flat, and built with a wall around the edges, as was common in this part of the world. In the cool evening air, residents would often eat, relax and sleep on the roof of their house, where they could enjoy the night breeze after the stifling heat of the day. Among the sprawl of one- and two-storey buildings, set at regular intervals, half a dozen tall, elegant spires rose into the sky, their peaks pointed and tiled, each adorned with an ornate balustrade forming a narrow balcony around the entire tower, just below the top.

  A high wall ran round the city, extending in a rough circle as far as the two headlands on either side of the narrow harbour mouth. There was a squat castle on the southern headland, obviously designed to defend the entrance.

  The quays and jetties bristled with the masts of hundreds of ships moored alongside while the brilliant blue of the ocean sparkled offshore.

  ‘Looks like everybody’s here for the slave market,’ Gilan commented. They paused and scanned the harbour, looking for some sign of Nightwolf. But the ships were too numerous and too tightly packed for them to be able to discern her.

  ‘Hal or Stig could probably pick her out in a few seconds,’ Lydia said.

  ‘Let’s hope Tursgud doesn’t share that ability,’ Gilan said, but she shook her head.

  ‘Hal will make sure of that. They all say he’s a genius when it comes to rigging and designing a sail plan.’

  Gilan looked curiously at her. There was an obvious affection in her voice when she spoke of the Heron’s skipper.

  ‘How did you come to team up with them?’ he asked, adding, ‘You’re not Skandian, are you?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. I’m from a city called Limmat on the Stormwhite’s east coast. We were invaded by pirates about a year ago, and Hal and his crew turned up in time to help us kick them out. They saved my life, actually. I’d got away in a small boat but had run out of water. They found me drifting in the Stormwhite and took me aboard.’

  She trudged on, her eyes down as she thought of those days when she first met the Herons.

  ‘I stayed with them when they went after the pirate who had led the raid on the town. I liked being around Hal and Stig and Ingvar and the boys.’

  ‘And Thorn?’ Gilan asked, teasing her.

  She shook her head in exasperation. ‘Oh, him! He’ll be the end of me one of these days. He’s constantly on my back, never lets up.’ She paused, then an admiring look came into her eyes. ‘But you should see him in battle. He’s unstoppable. Gorlog knows what he would have been like with both his hands. He’s the battle leader for the crew when we go into action. Stig is his lieutenant. He’s pretty fearsome as well.’

  ‘So why did you stay with them after they left Limmat?’ he asked.

  She hesitated, not sure how to explain the feeling of constriction that had gripped her in her home town.

  ‘My grandfather had died in the fighting and I had no other family. I guess I just felt that I fitted in with the Herons. People in Limmat used to think I was a bit weird because I didn’t like to primp and dress up and parade like the other girls. I enjoyed hunting and tracking.’

  Gilan smiled. ‘We have a royal princess who shares your point of view.’

  Lydia thought it wise not to mention the fact that, incensed by the lack of gratitude the people of Limmat had shown to the Herons, she had seen fit to ‘liberate’ a small sack of emeralds from the town’s secret mine and present it to them.

  ‘Speaking of tracking,’ Gilan said, his eyes on the ground ahead of them, ‘what do you make of that?’

  She looked in the direction he was pointing and took a few paces forward, going down on one knee and feeling the marks in the sparse, coarse sand that covered the rock ground.

  ‘A party of maybe fifteen or twenty people went through here,’ she said, studying the faint footprints. ‘Probably a hunting or raiding party.’

  He raised his eyebrows. He’d come to much the same conclusion. ‘What makes you say that?’ he asked.

  She took a few steps along the line of the tracks, which ran at right angles to the path they were following. Once again, she knelt and touched the sand. It was an instinctive gesture, as if she could feel the people who had made those tracks.

  ‘They’re all men,’ she said finally. ‘No women’s footprints here. No children, either. When you see a party of twenty men, it’s safe to assume they’re either hunting or up to no good.’

  He nodded. ‘You’re right. They’re heading east, towards the mountains. At least they are for the moment. Could be an Asaroki raiding party.’

  ‘Asaroki?’ she asked.

  ‘Bandits. Brigands. There are tribes of them in this desert. Usually they live in the hills and come down to raid. This bunch were possibly hoping to intercept travellers heading for the slave market. Looks like they’re on their way back to the mountains.’ He shrugged. ‘Still, they don’t pose any danger for us. Let’s keep going.’

  They trudged on. To avoid unwanted attention, Gilan had left his Ranger cloak back at the ship, along with his bow. Similarly, Lydia had been persuaded to leave her atlatl behind. With its metre-long darts slung in a back quiver, it was a conspicuous weapon – particularly if carried by a girl.

  The path they were following began to slope down now, and they could see numbers of people making their way into the city through a large double gate, guarded by watch towers on the wall either side. Armed guards were at the gate, checking on those who went through. Occasionally, they would stop a traveller and take him or her aside for questioning. Most of the time, the travellers were allowed to continue. But on two occasions, they saw someone led away to the guard tower.

  They made their way down to the gate, having to wait behind a large party of traders leading half a dozen camels and four small donkeys, all laden with goods to sell in the market. Four guards examined the load, jerking the wrappings off the bundle
s to peer suspiciously at the contents. One of the camels objected to the violent action and reared its head, baring its teeth and roaring. The guard closest to it struck it smartly across the nose with the butt of his spear. The camel objected further and there were a few minutes of confusion before the traders, after paying a substantial bribe, were allowed to continue into the city.

  The guard who had hit the camel looked around and saw them. He frowned, assessing them. That was a standard reaction, Gilan thought. These men would be constantly seeking to see how much they could fleece from travellers entering the city.

  The guard saw a slim, nondescript man accompanied by an equally unremarkable girl, who kept her gaze down, not making eye contact. He nodded to himself. That was only proper, he thought.

  ‘What do you two want?’ he challenged roughly.

  Gilan sized up the man quickly. He was dressed in a knee-length leather tunic, oversewn with mail rings. He wore a combination turban and spiked conical helmet with a strip of hammered brass projecting down to protect his nose. He was armed with a heavy thrusting spear and a short sword slung on his belt. His shins were covered with brass greaves and he wore stout leather sandals on his feet.

  Gilan could see that he was a bully and a petty thief, accustomed to using his position of power to extract bribes from those he could intimidate. There were two ways to deal with such a man: one was to allow oneself to be cowed, to be submissive and plead for consideration. The other was to adopt the same tone of power and arrogance, and let him know that he was not facing an easy victim.

  Since this was a market town, dependent on outsiders entering the city to buy or sell, Gilan knew the man would have no real power to exclude legitimate travellers. The Bey, the official who ruled Socorro, would earn taxes from all transactions carried out in his city. If his guards began excluding traders, his income would suffer. And nothing annoyed an Arridi official more than a drop in income.

  Since Gilan felt in no mood to be cowed this morning, he adopted the second approach.

  ‘I’m a trader,’ he said, matching his tone with that of the guard. ‘Who are you?’