by Scott Jäeger
“I don’t know that name. Is she a cargo vessel?”
“Aye. Grain, flour, barley, dry goods. You might think such humble wares safe from pirates, but on this coast they’ll attack anything without an armed escort. The crew are a tough lot. Most will have their stripes.”
“What stripes? Is that a form of rank?”
“You must be a long way from home,” he said with a leathery grin. “If you see a mariner whose shirt is painted with crimson vertical stripes, it means he has defeated at least one pirate. That’s defeated as in dead, not knocked down in a tavern brawl. Serves as a warning to freebooters.”
“I don't want him to get the stripes,” Isobel said, taking my chin in her hand. “They always come with scars and I like his face the way it is.”
“I don’t know that Harrog will take someone so green as you on the Asphodel,” Solomon went on, “but if he does, here’s a bit of advice: don’t ever speak of your cargo or route to anyone not in the crew. There are spies about the wharf. There is one group in particular I wouldn't mind swallowed by the sea entire.”
Isobel frowned as her father’s expression grew severe.
“Go on,” I said. I had thought him about to launch into some sailor’s yarn, but he spoke in deadly earnest.
“They arrived here spring before last. We had all heard stories of the traders of Dylath-Leen, with the hushed speech and soft hands full of oddly shaped rubies, but they had never been seen so far south. At first folks avoided them. There is something decidedly unwholesome about them, and the appetite for rubies in these parts is small. But this season they came with a variety of more common goods, and some unusual items as well.”
“Imagine it,” Isobel said lightly, “foreign merchants bringing us foreign goods.”
“At first they could not earn a single coin,” Solomon said, biting down on his pipe stem, “but they stayed on, offering simpering smiles and sweet tea to any who would stop. People are curious by nature, and their prejudice couldn’t hold out against the lure of trade. Their silk is good, their grain is sound, and soon enough coin began to flow into their coffers. They sell cheap, so naturally the other merchants despise them and would like to see them driven out, but as they violate no laws–”
Solomon shrugged to show that this was the end of the story .
“And what goods do they take in trade in for their return voyages?” I asked.
“As far as I know, nothing but gold.”
“And crew,” Isobel added. “They seem always to be recruiting, and they must pay well for they have no trouble finding oarsmen for their galleys.”
Solomon made to speak, but instead drank deeply.
The mood had soured with the topic of conversation, and I took leave of my new friends, eager to find the ship Solomon had mentioned.
* * *
The Asphodel’s quartermaster was supervising her loading, occasionally encouraging the men with a broad range of obscenities, but as I approached he tracked my steps with pale, appraising eyes. He was slender, with an equally long and thin nose, and had lived long enough to see his hair climb to the top of his scalp to make its last stand. His tunic bore the crimson stripes of which Solomon had spoken.
When I had come close enough to address him, he pivoted on the ball of one foot and seized my wrist as if to pull me off balance.
“Here, friend,” he said, indicating the thick line the khukuri had left beneath my chin, “that looks like a near thing.”
“I owed a man some money, but don’t worry. He has been paid in full.” This earned me an easy laugh. “My name is Isaac Sloan. Solomon the shipwright recommended me to the Asphodel.”
“I’m Erik. Are you here to sign up for a short life of grueling labour and no reward, or so little as to make no difference?”
“That is exactly why I’m here.”
“Then welcome aboard.”
* * *
I was already hard and tireless from my work on the wharf, but aboard ship I learned to be agile and quick as well. I became a regular crewman on the Asphodel, as at home among the waves as any fish or tern, and joined her many times on her regular route, a round of the nearby coast and islands lasting between four and six weeks. It wasn’t until my third such tour that anything of note occurred. We had earlier that day left behind the stone terraces of Baharna, the farthest point on our circuit, and I was drowsing between shifts.
The peal of the lookout’s bell cut cleanly through my slumber, punctuated with the repeated call: “Pirates astern!”
Seizing my sword, I stumbled up the ladder to the deck. It was a clear day and we were tacking into the wind, the Island of Oriab looming dim and green on our starboard side. Every man of the Asphodel’s crew was on deck and armed, mostly with a short-bladed sword or club. My weapon was a cutlass with a worn wooden grip. I had been careful to keep the blade sharp, but had not yet put it to use.
"Hard-to-starboard!"
Our pursuer was a shabby but nimble cutter, much too swift for our brig to outmaneuver. As the enemy closed, I saw they were emaciated, and their eyes shot red with pirate’s courage. They came up on our port side, forcing us to either reef our sails and be boarded, or risk running aground, no choice at all as the latter course would leave us like a tortoise turned on its back.
In the following instant the hulls clashed and groaned, and with the momentum of the collision they bounded like fleas to our deck. I should have been brained during the first sally had Second Mate Jome not shouldered me to the deck as a pirate’s club, studded with bits of glass, swished overhead to glance off the mast. In the pitiless fight which ensued, my shipmates fought with unwavering focus, chopping and swinging as they hopped about the labyrinth of rope coils and hatches. On the relatively clear surface of the forward deck, I made my stand against a young man with a freshly sunburned face.
He employed a cutlass similar to my own, but so caked with rust his first blow snowed orange flakes. With a surge of adrenaline, I pushed off the rail and we fell into a rhythm of stroke and counterstroke to the music of jarring weapons and feet stomping on bare wood, with for a chorus someone down but not dead, screaming over and over. Anyone in Massachusetts hearing the words Isaac Sloan and adventurer in the same sentence would have fallen to his knees with laughter, yet here I was, trading blows with a teenaged boy whose only aspiration was to cut my throat.
Neither of us could find an advantage until the blunt spine of Jome’s sabre accidentally clipped my opponent’s head on the backswing, spinning him half around. The slash I had aimed at his arm bit deep into the thigh instead, all but severing his leg, and he fell to the deck. The limb pulsed a vivid red stream and he slumped in place, senseless from shock. I watched the life fade from his face, so stunned by what I had done a strong wind could have knocked me down. He was dead when the voice roused me to raise my cutlass from where it rested point down on the deck.
Captain Harrog, looking as if he had bathed in blood, was balancing on the back of a still struggling foe. Like a butcher attacking a gristly bit of beef, he finished his man with a wet-sounding chop and, teeth bared, called, “Pirates, to me! Come meet your master!”
My comrades’ cheer admitted no doubt or fatigue, and our remaining enemies sought frantically for succour. They had left a lone man to pilot their craft and without a crew to pace the Asphodel she had drifted far out of reach. The survivors chose the sea over surrender, swimming towards Oriab, where they would likely be cut into chum on the hidden reef. Harrog had us circle around to claim the abandoned ship, and an hour later it provided a pyre for our dead.
The embers of the cutter were no brighter than the stars when the captain growled, “Isaac Sloan.”
No special words marked the occasion, but a pot of red paint and the worn nub of a brush were produced, and my tunic was adorned with the stripes of a fighting mariner. I did feel different once it was over, for now I understood the significance of its warning.
* * *
When the lookout
announced our approach to Zij three weeks later, sunlight limned every mast and rooftop, conspiring to turn the wharves and shanties new and strange. I felt a protective affection for my new home, just as one loves life more when on the knife’s edge of losing it.
Dusk had melted into night when I joined Solomon on the rooftop, where he sat on a broken-backed chair abusing a jug of wine. When in port I would eat with Isobel and her father three or four times a week, often talking deep into the night. Isobel was away this time, accompanying a cousin on a trip to a silk merchant up the coast.
"You've been blooded,” he said, inviting me to sit while he fetched another cup. His hand shook as he poured, and I helped steady the jug. “I knew it wouldn't be long."
I ran my hand absently over my breast. I had thought, rightly, that it would be easier to show the painted tunic than to be first to speak on it.
“He was about sixteen years of age,” I said, “just a boy.” I remembered when his face had gone slack forever: the snarl had vanished and beneath the grime and marks I saw the innocent he should have been. An adventurer I might be, but I had doubts about my future as a ruthless killer.
"Sixteen?” Solomon was saying. “I don’t know how they reckon it in your homeland, but here that makes him two years a man. Were there any others?"
“The second was in Nagoordi, older but no more able. I caught him trying to filch from our goods on the dock. He had the chance to run but– I was worried my hand would betray me, but the opposite was true. I did not hesitate.”
"Good. Mercy is a luxury a sailor can ill afford, especially under Harrog.” Solomon fumbled with his pipe as if to light it, then put it away again. He was glassy-eyed, far into his drink so early in the evening.
“Captain Harrog fights without mercy,” I said.
“He’s a hard man, you’re not wrong there. On this coast, and without coin for guards, he must be.”
I closed my eyes and allowed the wine to dull my nagging New England morality.
“How goes it with you?” I asked. “You look like you’re sitting on nails. Missing Isobel, I suppose.”
“I cannot deny there is something weighing on my mind. I have a last job to do for the Guild, a dirty task, but it will be the last.” We sat without speaking awhile.
"I remember now what I wished to speak to you about,” he groaned in mock irritation. “Isobel never stops praising you when you’re at sea. It’s embarrassing.”
I smiled, but did not answer. In New England, the threat of marriage hung over a man like the sword of Damocles. There, I would have had to ask for Isobel’s hand or sever our ties altogether, but in Zij each day followed the last without urgency, and I believed they would continue that way without end. How wrong I was.
Late that night, dizzied with Solomon’s wine, I got turned around in the maze of back lanes abutting the port. I had stopped by a smoking taper to get my bearings, when I recognized a sign scratched into the surface of a shop door. The symbol there had been worn by time and weather almost to obscurity, but it was undeniably similar to that printed in the frontispiece of Solomon’s atlas: two seven-pointed polygons above a zigzag line like an asymmetrical letter M. The more ornate version here plainly represented mountain peaks beneath two stars.
I rapped on the panel and a tall man in dingy robes answered. He was bald as an egg and had bound an embroidered rectangular patch across his eyes, a custom indicating blindness.
He sniffed disdainfully at me, then made a show of turning his head left and right, as if scanning the road for spies. Without warning, he seized my left wrist and ran his fingers up the loose sleeve of my shirt to touch the scar on my forearm. With a grunt I inferred to indicate satisfaction, he turned back inside and I followed.
The dirt-floored room was divided by a high counter, behind which sat a hutch of many small drawers, another Chinese medicine cabinet. From back of the partition, the blind man produced two clay cups and poured us a draught from an unmarked bottle. Thinking it rum, I drank it off in one go, but my throat and stomach burned with undiluted grain alcohol. As I struggled to temper my expression –stupidly, given my host’s sightlessness– he opened one of the cabinet’s compartments to retrieve an object wrapped in a torn shirt.
“Is this what you sell?” I said.
“It’s not for sale, dumb cluck. It’s yours.”
I unwrapped an ornate leather sheath, and found the patterns worked into its surface, in some places like a foreign alphabet and in others like an abstract design, eerily familiar. From it I withdrew a long knife with a handle of inlaid pearl. The workmanship was heavy and solid, and it felt made for my grip.
Examining the sheath once more, I pulled back my sleeve and the ground under my feet shifted like a ship’s deck in a chop. The concentric ridges and grooves of the scar on my forearm were distinctly similar in style to the sheath’s weird patterns, too close of a likeness to lay to chance. I returned the blade to the sheath and fastened it to my belt, glad that my reaction was invisible to the shopkeeper.
“Listen,” I said, “did a man named Eamon Sloan leave this here?”
“He went by a different name in Zij, but yes, I knew your uncle. That knife was part of his legacy to you, and this the rest.” He produced a square of material about two hands across and so fine it was translucent, like onionskin but stronger. It was marked with a series of disconnected strokes and curves. I held it to the light, then turned it upside-down and on one side, but could make no sense of it.
“It’s just a mess of lines,” I said, “unless it’s some kind of code?”
“Do you see a cross in one corner?”
“Yes, there is a black cross in the corner, over three horizontal bars.”
“Then it’s a palimpsest, of course.” He chuckled. “A blind man could see that. The three bars indicate that three layers complete the diagram. Match the cross with its sisters on the other fragments and you will have some kind of map, or message or something.”
I rolled the palimpsest up carefully, wondering again where the breadcrumbs of my uncle's life might lead.
“What can you tell me about my uncle, about his life here?”
“Not that much to tell,” he said, replacing the bottle and cups behind the counter. “He was a sailor, but I guess you knew that.”
“Eamon served under Captain Bromm. Did you know him?”
“Bromm? Yes. I've heard folks call him a legend,” he muttered to himself, “but he was as real as you and me. He had a scar here.” He drew his finger up from the left edge of his lips to his ear. “They called him Smiley.”
“He's dead then?”
“I cannot say for certain, but no one’s seen him in many years now. My guess is that Captain Bromm sleeps at the bottom of the Southern Sea.”
After asking for directions to my rented room, I thanked him for the parcel and said my goodnight.
With my foot on the threshold however, I asked one more question: “Where would I find the two mountain peaks engraved on your front door?”
“Mountains?” he said. “I know of no mountains.”
Though his voice gave nothing away, and I did not press him further, he had no idea how to present a poker face.
The Yellow-Eyed Merchants
The next morning, while searching for something to fill my stomach, I drifted into the market quarter given over to the merchants of Dylath-Leen, and it struck me that Solomon had not once mentioned them the night before. The traders’ supposed schemes were his favourite topic of conversation, and he never missed the chance to gnaw them over, especially without Isobel present to rein him in.
Unlike the vendors in Zij, and every other town I had visited while serving on the Asphodel, they did not harry me with their goods as I passed, only smiled with mouths unusually wide. They dressed in a style similar to that of a Bedouin nomad, in loose robes, curl-toed shoes, and turbans. The head wrap was lumpy and disheveled however, as if it hid your grandmother's collection of porcelain figurines. W
hen they spoke, it was in a quiet, sibilant lisp.
A particular species of beggar, addicted to some exotic drug, clustered about their stalls like flies. Their appeals were energetic enough, but earned them few coins. Alongside these mendicants, a general discomfort attended the yellow-eyed merchants wherever they lingered. Later, I would realize a low buzzing enveloped the area. When I tried to mentally separate the sound from the regular racket of the market, it disappeared entirely, but my irritation did not.
While I ostensibly inspected a cart of citrus fruit, a young spice merchant got into an altercation with one of the turbaned ones about the stink of the rail-thin vagrants. While the younger man hollered and gesticulated, the interloper maintained the composure and equanimity of a stone wall, saying nothing. I wondered if his slightly insolent expression was a smile, or simply the way his detestable face was put together.
“I hope you have no truck with these scoundrels.” My arm was seized by a man I vaguely recognized, a blacksmith. Although his forge was elsewhere, he kept a stall of wares across the way from the yellow-eyed ones, and seemed to spend as much time scowling at them as trading.
“I do not trade with the merchants from the north,” I said, “if you’re referring to them.”
“I am.” He relaxed the vice which trapped my arm. “I take nothing from their galleys, not wool or spices or rubies either, and they get nothing of mine. I can see you’re keeping tabs as well. Gorice, blacksmith.”
“Isaac Sloan, sailor,” I said, clasping his hand in the Southern Sea fashion.
“Come talk to me a moment, if you will.” Gorice escorted me into the shade behind his kiosk, where he cleared a pile of tools from a shallow bench. After barking out a series of orders to his apprentice, he lowered himself onto the too small seat.
“The truth is I already knew about you, Sloan. Erik of the Asphodel told me to look out for you, and old Solomon has mentioned your name as well. The three of us have formed a sort of informal cadre to study those cretinous northerners polluting the air of our market. After I tell you what we’re about, you’re welcome to join us.”
