Amos said, ‘Lucky shot. Shark hide’s tough. That’s like punching an arrowhead through armor.’
Without boasting, Calis unstrung his bow. ‘Luck had nothing to do with it.’
The men in the longboat got the survivor into the boat and began rowing back to the ship. Amos called, ‘Ready a sling!’
By the time the boat reached the side of the Raptor, a sling and two ropes were ready. A couple of the crew climbed halfway down to aid the injured man as he was hauled up on deck.
By the time he was aboard, Anthony had reached him. He examined the man’s color, rolled back an eyelid, and put his ear on the man’s chest. Nodding once, the healer said, ‘Get him below.’
Amos motioned for two men to pick up the man and take him to the crew’s quarters, and turned toward the helm. ‘Get her back on course, Mr Rhodes!’
‘Aye, Captain,’ came the answer.
Amos scratched his beard. ‘If one of them is still alive …’
Nicholas said, ‘Then we’re not too far behind!’
Amos nodded. ‘Two days at most.’ He calculated quickly, then said, ‘Unless I miss my guess, we’ll catch sight of them by sundown tomorrow.’ There was a gleeful look in his eye, and Nicholas didn’t need to ask what was on his mind. When Amos overtook the men behind the sack of Crydee, there’d be murder to pay.
Nicholas, Marcus and the others waited on deck as the sun sank in the west. Amos had gone below with Nakor and Anthony, to see to the man they had fished from the sea. They had been down for most of the day and still no word was forthcoming.
At last Amos appeared on deck and motioned for Nicholas and his cousin. They left the others, who were gathered on the foredeck, and joined Amos on the main deck. ‘He’s still alive, but barely,’ said the Admiral. ‘Who is he?’ asked Marcus.
‘He says his name is Hawkins and he was apprentice to a wheelwright in Carse.’
‘Then he was from the black ship!‘’ said Nicholas.
Amos nodded. ‘He also said that he had been in the water two days before we’d found him. They throw those who are dead and those too ill to recover overboard at sunrise, along with the garbage. He clung to a bit of a broken crate that was tossed, which is how he survived. He has a hacking cough, and Anthony figures that’s why he was tossed overboard. It’s a miracle he’s still alive.’
Nicholas said, ‘What about the girls?’
‘Rumors. They were taken away from the other prisoners the first night the ship put out, so he knows they were on board then, but he hasn’t seen them since. He says that someone claims a sailor mentioned they’re kept in better quarters because of their rank, but he doesn’t know.’
Marcus said, ‘Will we overtake them before they reach their home port, Admiral?’
Amos nodded. ‘Unless we’re closer to land than I think, we will.’ As the sun sank beneath the horizon, he said, ‘The color of the water’s different here, it’s deep.’ Glancing upward, he added, ‘But I have no idea where we really are; the stars are in places I’ve never seen before. Some old familiar ones have fallen below the northern horizon over the last month, and there are ones new to me visible in the southern sky. I judge we’ve still got a way to go before we reach our friend’s port, if I remember that map.’
‘That makes it a long journey,’ observed Marcus.
‘Nearly four months from Krondor to the northern shore of that landmass on the map, I’m guessing. We’ve been more than two months from Freeport, and I think we’re still two weeks from landfall,’ said Amos. He shook his head. ‘Assuming Anthony is right about their course.’ Glancing at the deck as if he could see the sick man from Carse through the planks, he said, ‘And our near-dead friend down there shows that Anthony knows at least that much magic’
‘Will we have trouble getting back?’ asked Nicholas.
Amos shook his head. ‘I can retrace our course, allowing for the winds. Every night I record my best guess as to heading and speed, and I’ve been doing this long enough that my best guess is fairly reliable. The stars may have changed, but I’ve marked the new ones, and where the more familiar ones rise each night. It may take a bit of work, but we’ll hit somewhere between Keshian Elarial and Crydee when we get back.’
He returned to the quarterdeck and left the cousins alone with their thoughts.
Anthony came on deck, looking drawn and exhausted. Nakor came out behind him. Nicholas asked, ‘How is he?’
‘Not good,’ said Anthony. With bitterness he said, ‘The slavers knew their trade. Even if he recovers, he’s never going to be a hearty man, certainly not someone who can be sold on the slave block.’
Nicholas said, ‘When will we know if he’s going to make it?’
Anthony exchanged glances with Nakor, then said, ‘If he lives through the night, he stands a fair chance.’
Nakor shrugged. ‘It’s up to him, I think.’
Nicholas said, ‘I don’t understand.’
Nakor grinned. ‘I know. When you do, your foot won’t hurt any more.’
The short man took Anthony by the elbow and led him away to the other side of the ship where they could be alone. Nicholas glanced at Harry, who shrugged and said, ‘Let’s practice.’ Pulling out his saber, he said, ‘If we’re going to overtake that ship soon, I want to be as sharp as this blade.’
Nicholas nodded and they marked off a portion of the main deck and began exchanging blows.
Nakor looked at the young men at practice a moment, then said, ‘You did well, magician.’
Anthony ran his hand over his face, clearly fatigued by his efforts. ‘Thank you. But I’m not sure what you were doing in there.’
Nakor shrugged. ‘Some tricks. Sometimes it is not the body that needs healing. If you practice, you can see other things inside the person. I was talking to his spirit.’
Anthony frowned. ‘Now you sound like a priest talking.’
Nakor shook his head vigorously. ‘No, they mean soul.’ The little man looked at a loss for words for a moment, then said, ‘Close your eyes.’
Anthony did so.
‘Now, where is the sun?’
Anthony pointed over toward the bow of the ship.
‘Ah,’ said Nakor in a tone of disgust. ‘I mean, where do you feel it?’
‘On my face.’
‘This is hopeless,’ Nakor said, his disgust even more apparent. ‘Magicians. They mess your minds up at Stardock, fill your brain with nonsense.’
Anthony was usually amused by the strange man, but now he was too tired. ‘What nonsense?’
Nakor screwed up his face as if in concentration and said, ‘If you’re a blind man, can you tell where the sun is?’
‘I don’t know,’ answered Anthony.
The ship shuddered as Amos ordered a slight course change because of a wind shift, and Nakor said, ‘A blind man can feel the warmth of the sun on his face and “look” at it.’
Anthony said, ‘All right. I’ll accept that.’
‘Very generous of you,’ snapped Nakor. ‘Close your eyes again.’ Anthony did so. ‘Can you feel the sun?’
Anthony turned to face the bow of the ship and said, ‘Yes. There’s more warmth there.’
‘Good, now we’re getting somewhere.’ With a grin, Nakor asked. ‘How can you feel the sun?’
Anthony said, ‘Well …’ He looked surprised. ‘I don’t know. You just can.’
‘But it’s up there.’ Nakor pointed to where the sun hung in the late afternoon sky.
‘It gives heat,’ responded Anthony.,
‘Ah,’ said Nakor with a grin. ‘Can you feel the air?’
Anthony said, ‘No … I mean, I can feel the wind.’
‘You can’t see the air, but you can feel it?’
‘Sometimes.’
Nakor grinned. ‘If there are things you know are there that you can’t see, then might there not also be things you don’t know are there that you can’t see?’
Anthony looked befuddled. ‘I suppose.’
<
br /> Nakor leaned against the rail, and adjusted the rucksack he always had with him. Opening the bag, he took out an orange. ‘Want one?’
Anthony found he did, and asked, ‘How do you do that?’
‘What?’
‘Always have oranges in there. We’ve been at sea nearly four months since leaving Crydee and you’ve never bought any that I’m aware of.’
Nakor grinned. ‘It’s a –’
‘I know, a trick, but how do you do it?’
Nakor said, ‘You’d call it magic’
Anthony shook his head. ‘But you don’t.’
‘There is no magic,’ Nakor insisted. ‘Look, it’s as I said: there are things you can’t see but are there.’ He made an arch in the air with his hand. ‘You do this, you feel the air.’ Then he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. ‘But you do this, you can’t feel it.’
Looking out over the ocean, he said, ‘The universe is made up of very strange stuff, Anthony. I don’t know what this stuff is, but it’s like heat from the sun and wind. Sometimes you can feel it, and even move it.’
Anthony was now intrigued. ‘Go on.’
Nakor said, ‘When I was a boy, I could do tricks. I knew how to do things that amused the people in my village. I was to have been a farmer like my father and brothers, but one summer a traveling magician came through our village, selling curatives and spells. He wasn’t a very good magician, but I was fascinated by the tricks he could do. The night he came, I left my father’s house and went to him and showed him some of my tricks, and he asked if I wished to be his apprentice. So I followed him, and never again saw my family.
‘For years I stayed with him, until I discovered that my tricks were better than his and I could do more, so I set off to find my own fate.’ Sticking his thumb into the orange, he pulled away a section of peel. He bit into the orange and paused as he chewed. Then he said, ‘Years later, I had discarded all pretense of magic, for I learned I could do things without the chanting and the powders in the fire, without the marks in the dirt, or the other trappings. I just did them.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know.’ He grinned. ‘See, I think Pug is a very smart man, not because he’s so powerful, but because he knows how much he doesn’t know yet. He understands that he’s passed beyond his training.’ Nakor fixed one squinting eye on Anthony. ‘I think you also could move past your training should you but come to understand one thing.’
‘What?’
‘There is no magic. There is only this stuff that makes up the universe, and magic is what less enlightened people call it when they manipulate this stuff.’
‘You keep calling it ‘stuff’. Do you have a name for this magical element?’
‘No.’ Nakor laughed. ‘I have always thought of it as stuff, and it’s not magical.’ He held his thumb and forefinger as close together without touching as he could, while he took another bite out of the orange in his other hand. Talking around the mouthful of fruit, he said, ‘I imagine this tiny space. Now imagine it half again as small. Then halve it again, and then again. Can you imagine it that small?’
‘I don’t think so,’ admitted Anthony.
‘It’s a wise man who knows his limits,’ said Nakor, his grin widening. ‘But even so, imagine this space, and imagine you are in it, and imagine that it’s huge, the size of the biggest room, and make your fingers so.’ He held out his hand again. ‘Then begin once more, and do it all again. In that last space, it would be so very small, there is where you would find stuff.’
‘That is small,’ admitted Anthony.
‘If one could but look, that is where you would see it.’
‘How did you discover this stuff?’
‘As a small boy I just could do things, my tricks. I was a mischievous child, and I would spill a bucket of water, or put a sleeping cat on the roof of a hut. My father, who was an important man in our village, sent to the city of Shing Lai for a priest of the order of Dav-lu, whom you in the Kingdom call Banath, for he is known in the province where I grew up as the Prankster, and my father was certain we were being troubled by an impish spirit or demon. I set a hot brand to the priest’s backside and was found out. The priest told my father to beat me, which he did, and then I was admonished to behave, which I did most of the time.’
Taking another bite of orange, he said, ‘Anyway, all my life I have found that I could do things, what I call tricks, because I knew how to manipulate this stuff.’
Anthony shook his head. ‘Can you teach others?’
‘It is what I was trying to tell people at Stardock when I was there: anyone can learn.’
Anthony shook his head. ‘I think I would fail should you try to teach me.’
‘I’m already teaching you.’ Nakor laughed. ‘It is that stuff that I was talking to in the sick man below. There is energy in everything, this stuff I can manipulate.’ Opening his sack, he said, ‘Reach in and get another orange.’
Anthony reached into the bag and said, ‘There’s nothing there!’
Nakor said, ‘It’s a trick. Close your eyes.’ Anthony complied. ‘Can you feel a seam at the bottom, at the side away from me?’
‘No.’
‘Try harder. It is very faint, very difficult to feel. Try concentrating on the tip of your longest finger, just hooking the nail under the fabric. Can you feel it there?’
Anthony concentrated, then said, ‘I think I feel something.’
‘Gently pull back that fabric, moving it toward me.’
Anthony said, ‘I think I’m losing it … I have it.’
‘Once you’ve moved that fabric out of the way, reach below and you’ll feel an orange.’
Anthony reached and felt the fruit. He pulled it out and opened his eyes. ‘So it is a trick.’
Nakor took the rucksack off his shoulder and handed it to Anthony. ‘Look inside.’
Anthony thoroughly examined the heavy felted wool bag, and at last said, ‘I can’t see the false bottom.’ Wadding up the fabric, he said, ‘And I can’t feel any false compartment.’
‘There is none,’ said Nakor with a laugh. ‘You moved aside a layer of stuff and found a small passage through to another place.’
‘Where?’
‘A warehouse in Ashunta where I once labored awhile. It belongs to a fruit merchant, and when you reach through, your hand is right above a big container the merchant keeps filled with oranges.’
Anthony laughed. ‘That’s how you do it. It’s a rift!’
Nakor shrugged. ‘I think. I don’t know. It doesn’t act like a rift, from what little I know of them. It’s more like a crack in the stuff.’
‘But why a fruit merchant? Why not a treasury?’
‘Because that’s what I was thinking of when I first tried the trick and I haven’t been able to move it since.’
‘You lack discipline,’ observed Anthony.
‘Perhaps, but your spellcasting is nothing more than getting your mind oriented so you can manipulate stuff. You just didn’t know that’s what you were doing. I think Pug found out. He’s not bound by your Greater Path and Lesser Path and this path and that path nonsense. He knows that you just reach out and take a hold on the stuff and move it around.’
Anthony laughed again. ‘Doesn’t the merchant miss those oranges?’
‘It’s a very big bin, and I only take a few each day. And the merchant only has workers in there once or twice a week. My one difficulty is when I hide things on top of his bin, so that the bag appears empty if searched. Once I put some gold coins in the bin. There was a very happy worker at that fruit warehouse the next day, I think.’
Anthony was about to speak when a shout came down from the lookout upon the main mast: ‘Ship ahoy!’
Amos called up from the quarterdeck, ‘Where away?’
‘Dead ahead, Captain.’
Amos hurried to the bow, where he found the others already peering ahead. ‘There!’ said Calis, pointing.
Nicholas squinted agai
nst the setting sun, and there upon the horizon was a tiny speck of black. ‘Is that them?’ he asked.
Amos said, ‘Unless friend Anthony is deluding us with his magic, it is.’
‘When will we overtake them?’ asked Harry.
Amos rubbed his chin. ‘Hard to guess. Let’s see how much distance we make up tonight, and I’ll have a better guess.’ Turning to the stern, he called out, ‘I’ll have an extra watch aloft and another in the bow tonight, Mr Rhodes. Keep a weather eye out for lights.’
‘Aye, Captain,’ came the answer.
‘Now we wait,’ said Amos to those nearby.
• CHAPTER TWELVE •
Disaster
THE LOOKOUT POINTED.
‘Ship ahoy!’
‘Where away?’ demanded Amos.
‘Dead ahead, Captain!’
Amos stood in the bow with the others as the sun rose grudgingly behind them. A heavy mist obscured the western horizon, but a few minutes after the lookout identified the black ship, Calis said, ‘I see it.’
Amos spoke low. ‘You’ve got younger eyes than I, elf.’
Calis said nothing, but he ventured a slight smile at being called an elf. Then he pointed. ‘There!’
In the blue-grey morning a single dot could be seen, a black speck that was recognized as a ship and sails only by those who had spent years on the sea. ‘Damn,’ swore Amos. ‘We’re not gaining that much.’
‘How long?’ asked Marcus.
Amos turned away, moving toward the ladder to the main deck. ‘At this rate, we’ll need a week to overhaul her.’ He glanced above. ‘Three points starboard, Mr Rhodes!’ he shouted, as much out of frustration as a need to be heard. ‘Trim the sails! I want her as tight into the wind as you can get her on that line!’
‘Aye, Captain,’ came the response, and without being told, sailors leaped up and climbed the ratlines into the rigging to trim the sails aloft, while those on deck hauled on sheets to move large booms and yards.
Nicholas overtook Amos on the main deck. ‘I thought we were faster, Amos.’
‘We are,’ he answered, climbing the ladder to the quarterdeck. ‘But we’re a different kind of ship. She’s going to run fastest almost full to the wind. We’re faster off that line, running a tighter reach, but on the same line as she is, well, we’re faster, but not by much.’
Prince of the Blood, the King's Buccaneer Page 69
