Curt Benjamin - [Seven Brothers 03] - The Gates of Heaven

by Curt Benjamin

  Hate to strangle the merchandise when you can sell it,Llesho thought, but he dropped his gaze to the sawdust lest the evidence of his fear sway Stipes into doing something foolhardy.

  “What’s done is done,” Stipes agreed, and with a heavy tread, he walked away.

  Do something foolhardy. Get me out of this.Tayy must be thinking the same, with less hope, Llesho thought, and reminded himself that Stipes wouldn’t be far off. He knew the plan and he’d follow the pirates. Kaydu needed to know where they had taken him; not, however, before he found Prince Tayyichiut.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve been fed or watered since morning,” the pirate muttered under her breath. It was clear she was talking to herself and not to Llesho. She took up the belt that Stipes had looped around his neck and tugged on it to get his attention.

  “Come on. No food; food gives strength and strength gives a new slave ideas. But I can find a drop of water to keep you on your pins at least until we reach home. Then you can have something to eat, and all the ideas you want for whatever good they will do you.” She laughed then, and though she had said nothing of ships and the sea, Llesho knew the joke all right. With any luck at all they would turn the punch line back on the pirates. But he kept his expression humble and managed a quiver in his chin.

  “Don’t lay it on too thick; there’s none but me to see it, boy. Keep it for a more gullible audience. You’re saucy enough when it suits you, I reckon.”

  Llesho didn’t say anything, which was what she expected. “Drink, and don’t make trouble. I’ll wring your neck and mourn the loss of six pennies if you give me any trouble.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He took the cup and drank, then let her lead him to the post where she tied him among the handful of young men who sagged dispiritedly around it. They gave him an incurious glance but said nothing. Sliding his back down the pole, Llesho sat in the way of the pearl divers taking their rest in the shade of a palm tree on Pearl Island, letting none of his time in combat show in his posture. The woman had made it clear that the pirates kept a watch for slaves plotting together, and he didn’t want to give them a reason to separate him from Tayy in the boats, in fact, he decided, it would be best to pretend hostility when they met again. What better cure for escape plans than distrust? He refused to consider that they might not be the same pirates, or they might not put him to oar on the same ship.

  “Alph!”

  Called by the pirate’s sharp cry, a man with a wide sashed coat over his pirate pants bustled out of the kiosk at the center of the corral. A hand of women trailed behind him on a lead. The pirate woman gave him a nod of greeting and took the lead. “Keep the boys quiet while I’m gone,” she said, and hauled on the rope to set the women in motion. “It shouldn’t take long to dispose of these, and then we head for home.” None of them were young enough or fresh enough to sell for wives in the luxury market, but they’d go for washerwomen or cooks, perhaps. In spite of their weeping they’d been fortunate to survive their encounter with pirates at all.

  The man with the coat over his pirate garb nodded an acknowledgment. Like his companion, he said nothing to give away their destination or their identity. Anyone might know, however, who thought to look down at the ankles of their yellow-and-scarlet pants.

  Left alone with the slaves destined for the oar, he sat on a stool and bounced the flat of a scimitar against his knee as a warning. When one of their number wandered too close to the end of his tether, their guard snarled threateningly with a yawn in his voice. Even here on land he expected no resistance. At sea, Tayy’s rescue from within the ranks of the slaves themselves would come as a complete surprise. Or so Llesho hoped. But Tayy wasn’t anywhere in the corral, and he hunkered in on himself, saving his energy for the night ahead.

  The pirate woman came back as the market was closing up for the day.

  “About time, Moll,” her companion grumbled. “A man needs some relief from time to time.”

  “Tie a knot in it,” she answered him back. One way or another, she’d rid herself of the women she’d left with, bringing back one man about Bixei’s age but with a darker tan to his skin and a sneakier look around his eyes. “It will have to wait until we reach the docks.”

  Instead of putting the new man into the corral, she hauled on the ropes and thongs that bound her earlier purchases, tying them together in a line that her whining cohort shoved into order. Llesho found himself toward the middle, tied by the neck and one ankle far too close to a much taller man in front and with another tied up close behind him.

  “Left!” Alph the pirate called the cadence and Llesho tried to raise his foot at the same time as the man in front, put it down to the same rhythm. He was the only one among them who had gladiator training, however, and had learned to match the rhythm of an opponent. Their line was soon tangled again, since most of the slaves didn’t know what a “left” was.

  “This one,” Llesho gasped out, tapping the left instep of the man who’d been to his rear a moment before. Then he’d lifted his right foot and knocked Llesho and himself down with it. All along the line nooses had yanked tight around the slaves’ necks, and they all pulled at their bonds as they struggled to breath.

  “Fools!” The pirate, Moll, ranged up and down their sorry line, clipping at this one and that one with a shortprod meant as a reminder and not punishment. They had to be fit to work at the end of the day.

  This time, when Alph called out the cadence, “Left!” they all managed to lift the same foot, if not at the same time. The line was learning to work together. Llesho recognized the method if not this exact version of it.

  Still, panic threatened to rob him of the breath he needed to walk. He couldn’t, couldn’t, do the Long March again. Better to lie down and die where he stood. He considered doing just that, falling to the pavement and letting Moll mourn the loss of six small coins while she strangled him.

  But ahead he heard the sound of the sea lapping against the stone of the wharf and the gentle slap of wavelets against the wooden prows of boats. Once or twice he caught a glimpse of Stipes matching their pace in the shadows. The pirates had no reason to suspect a plot, however, and paid no attention to what might be following. Alph called them to a halt and lined them up along the stone edge of the wharf. Looking down onto the dark water gen tled to a soothing lap against the piers and jetties, Llesho wondered if they were supposed to swim out to the pirate vessels, but Alph shifted his coat and his trousers and let a bright yellow stream arch out into the water below.

  “Don’t take all day about it,” he ordered the men and boys who stared from the pirate to the waiting sea.

  In his long travels, Llesho had learned never to waste an opportunity to eat, sleep, or relieve himself on the march, and Alph didn’t have to make the suggestion twice. Before long there were six streams arching into the night. And soon, they were done watering the sea and had settled their clothes again.

  Moll had faded into the shadows while all of this was going on. As they prepared to march again, she reappeared, more impatient than ever with her prod and her cursing. “Come on, you lubbers! What do you think this is, a picnic? We sail on the falling tide if we ever reach the ship!” In fact they had only to walk a hundred more paces to reach their destination, a ship far larger than he’d thought any pirate ship to be. And this one had a gangplank resting on the shore with a name,Guiding Star, on an arch above the landing.

  “Property for my master on the Islands,” Moll called out to the customs official standing under the arch. Not a pirate ship, then. He doubted they’d grown so bold, even in Edris. The pirate in disguise handed over a sheaf of papers and drew the new slaves forward, one by one, to have the thum bmark on chest or arm or shoulder checked against the one that filled the official circle in the documents. All legal, and Llesho wanted to kill somebody for it, to tear the market down and put it to the flame. The customs official, knowing nothing of these thoughts of blood and murder, held the papers up to Llesho’s breast and measured t
he prints one against the other.

  “All watertight and seaworthy,” the official handed back the papers and turned to his next customer as Moll led her property up the gangplank. They’d meet the raiders of the sea somewhere between Edris and the Islands.

  Stipes had vanished, going back to find the cadre and report, he hoped. In the meantime it was down, down, into a hold with water ankle deep on the floor and the light from a single lamp to find their way. Moll stopped halfway down the ladder, leaving Alph to slosh through the bilge to a long beam set low to brace the hull of the ship. Into the beam were set metal shackles and the same hung from the rafters over their heads. The pirate grabbed a loose chain draped over the Y of an upright supporting the deck over their heads and used it to fasten the slaves to each other by a metal leg ring. Only the last of their line, the one closest to the hatch, did he shackle to the beam.

  Prepared for a quick escape. Llesho figured they’d never reach the Islands where theGuiding Star was heading, and Alph would only have one lock to deal with when they made their hasty exit. If the ship were breached in the hold, they’d all still drown, as they would if they hit the water so burdened with each other and the heavy chain. Most ships didn’t sink, of course. The knowledge would have comforted him, except that he didn’t think the pirates planned to off-load their cargo on land.

  Then Alph was done with them and headed up the ladder after Moll. In his hand, he carried the lantern. Too soon, he had cleared the hatch, taking with him the last of the light. Above, hinges shrieked in rusted pain and the hatch slammed down with a crash of timbers meeting timbers. They were well below the waterline and so had no windows or vents for air or light. Llesho found himself in a dark more complete than he had ever known.

  Not silence, though. They did not speak to each other, each as ill disposed to conversation as the next. But the soft sound of one man’s prayer mingled with the sibilant curses of another and the moans and sobs of yet another. Llesho tucked his legs up tight under his chin and clasped his arms around his shins.I will count the days of the season before I weep, he bargained with himself. When he had counted his way around the seventy-seven days of summer, he made a new deal for the days of spring, and so on into winter.

  Halfway to midwinter’s day the boat lurched at its mooring and Llesho heard the shouted chant of sailors dragging in the lines. So they were on their way. Somewhere out in the night Tayy was pulling an oar under a sky thick with stars that offered him no hope but Llesho, who lay chained at the bottom of hell. For about the hundredth time since Alph had dumped them in the dark, he wondered what had possessed him to come up with such a stupid plan.

  In spite of his terror, however, the exhaustion of the day and his almost-forgotten familiarity with the motion of the boat on the sea worked against him. He’d barely made it round to summer again when he lost his place in his count. Soon, to the rise and fall of the waves at his back, he fell asleep, only to wake again to the harsh thud of a boat ramming them amidship.

  Another. Another. Llesho roused up to the shouts and sobs of his fellow slaves crying out in terror of being holed. The boats that had come alongside seemed to be nudging them along but were making no attempt to damage them, at least not yet. Pirates, Llesho figured, and unlikely to sink them while their own cargo rested in the bottom of the ship. Still, he huddled with the others in fear for his life and waited for a sign that they were rescued—from drowning, if not from the pirates—or left to die.

  Confirmation of his guess came quickly. Above them, the hatch slid open with a heave. Sticking his head into the abyss, a stranger with a thick dark beard and his hair held up in a brightly colored turban held out a lamp to light the way. More pirates, their wide red-and-yellow pants billowing to the narrow cuffs at their ankles, started down the ladder. In the lead, Alph carried a scimitar between his teeth. One hand guided him down the ladder and in the other he carried a key.

  By the dim light of the lantern, Llesho noticed that the newest of the slaves, the one Moll had brought back from her sale of the women, braced himself in a way Llesho recognized. He was going to attack the pirate and try to take the scimitar, which might have worked if Alph were alone, but would get them killed now.

  Under cover of scrambling out of the way, he fell against the man and grabbed his arm with a muttered warning in Shannish, “If he drops that key, we will lie here until we die.” Then he tried again, in the few words of Harnish he could string together. While pleading for Radimus’ freedom he had learned the word for “shackles” and “release” but he couldn’t be sure that he’d strung them together in a way that made sense. The man might not speak either language, but there was still Thebin to try. Llesho sucked in a breath. Before he could get out the words, however, he felt the tension leave the slave’s body.

  A slight nod, and the man gave him a thoughtful look, taking in more than Llesho wanted him to know. How another soldier in the mix affected his plan would take some thought. For the moment, the man had settled into a waiting mode. With any luck, Alph would never know how close they had all come to disaster.

  The pirate had waited until they sorted out their apparent clumsy tangle before approaching, which he did with a grunt of distaste. On the open sea they had taken on more water—not enough to endanger the ship but too wet for most stored goods. Llesho figured that’s why they put the human cargo down here. Human flesh took longer to rot than flour or salted fish. The shackles by which the lead slaver had tied them all to the keel beam was now underwater and Alph reached for it with his nose pinched and a snarl around the scimitar in his teeth. Finally, the key turned in the lock and the leg ring fell open.

  Quick as that, he moved the scimitar to his hand, waving it at the ladder. “This way, or die with the ship,” he said, and waded away.

  Though free of the ship’s beam, the slaves remained bound to each other. Llesho curbed his panic, knowing if they rushed the hatch they would tangle and maybe die down here. With all the self-control he could summon, therefore, he waited for the sorting out that set the last man into the hold first in the line that followed Alph up the ladder. It seemed like forever, but in moments they were out of the bottommost hold. Through another hatch they found themselves on the lower deck, a long gallery that had once been a gun deck. The guns were gone. Between the cradles, passengers with their belongings in sacks and bundles had marked out spaces in family groups. Now they huddled together, clutching at each other in terror.

  “Pirates!” went the whisper through theGuiding Star, and already the red trousers were moving through the clustered knots of cowering passengers, roaring curses and waving their scimitars. They were on their way out of port and had no need of market slaves, but sorted out the men who might be useful at the oar.

  As they went, they opened bundles and scattered property in a careless search for valuables, though they were finding little worth their effort on this deck. A little girl began to cry. Horrified, Llesho watched helplessly as a pirate snatched her from her parents by one leg and tossed her out a gun port. Chained as he was, he could do nothing to stop the rampage.

  Alph ignored the looting but gathered the new captives as he went and led them all up the next ladder, where open sky and chaos greeted them. Under the white glow of Great Moon Lun, the crew of the ship had closed in hand-to-hand combat with the overwhelming forces of the pirates. A dozen or more small galleys surrounded the larger but less agileGuiding Star. The merchant sailors did not give quarter easily but fought across a deck washed red with the blood of pirates and seamen alike. Metal clashed against metal to the cries of the wounded and the gurgles of the dying.

  Smoke that began as a trickling irritation at the back of Llesho’s nose soon billowed over the deck in dense black clouds. He’d fought fire before and knew the devastation the flames could wreak in just a short time. If he were going to die, he preferred the sea to the flames. Better not to die at all, though, and Alph kept them moving in spite of the panic of the slaves and the carnage aroun
d them. Llesho crouched low under the smoke and followed as quickly as the boy in front of him could move.

  Then the dead weight of a murdered seaman crashed into them. A single pass of a scimitar had severed his head from his neck, which bled out the last beating of his heart in great squirting gouts over the chained slaves. The boy ahead of Llesho stopped with a horrible scream, his bloody hands raised as if to cover his eyes until he noticed what they were covered in. Then he froze, pale as Great Moon-Lun herself.

  “Come on!” Alph had continued moving and Llesho gave the panicked boy a shove before they were all strangled by the chains that linked them neck to neck. “Stay down and stay moving or you’ll wind up like that sailor!”

  He didn’t know if the words sank in, but his hand on the boy’s arm seemed to calm him enough to follow where he was led. Llesho got him moving, realized the new man had done the same behind him. Keeping low and skirting the worst of the fighting, they scurried across the slippery deck. A thick rope with knots tied at regular intervals served as a ladder down to the pirate boats. With one leg over the side, Llesho scanned the deck littered with dead.

  When he’d been imagining his plan, the pirates had taken them down to the docks and piled them into their own boats and rowed them out to sea. But the city was full of guards and customs officials who would seize the small boats and put them all in prison if they came openly to port. As with most of the plans that had brought him across half the known world, this had been almost a good one. The trickster always struck between the details, however. As if thinking of the old proverb could call up what it spoke of, a familiar voice called out of the gray mist.