This Forsaken Earth

by Paul Kearney

  “Tide’s on the ebb,” Elias Creed said.

  “Only just. Let her glide in, Elias.”

  Creed smiled. He knew how his captain savored the majesty of this view.

  There were light fishing smacks and dories dotted about the water of the bay, men and women hauling in skein nets and longlines beaded with the silver flash of herrin and amarack, staples of the city. They stood up in their bobbing cockleshells and cheered the sight of the two ships. The Revenant they knew well—she had become a sort of talisman for the inhabitants of the Ka. But the Astraros was new, exotic, and they pointed at her and shouted indecipherable catcalls to Gallico, who stood grinning and waving from her bows.

  Darkness, startling after the gold and blue splendor of the day outside. At once the quality of sound itself changed, the chop of water and creak of the ships’ working echoing back at them as they passed through the ship-gates into the vast cavern within which housed the docks and wharves of Ganesh Ka. Woodsmoke, ordure, rotten fish, tar—the heavy smells of the land crowding about noses more used to the clean air of the sea. Lightermen came sculling out in their narrow craft and took cables from the bows to tow the ships to dock.

  “Take in all sail,” Rol said. “Gangplank to the waist. Fenders there, ready in the bows.”

  A ragged and malodorous crowd had gathered about the wharves, and now shouts and good-natured catcalls went to and fro between their ranks and the busy sailors on board the Revenant and Astraros. The two ships tied up alongside each other, and the crowds on the docksides went quiet as they saw the wretched, stubble-headed throng of terrified figures that peopled the deck of the slave-ship. Many there had been slaves themselves, and knew what they were looking at. Others gave full vent to their curiosity, and Gallico had three enterprising youngsters thrown overboard into the slimy water of the docks after they had shinned up the mooring-ropes.

  “Dry-dock, skipper—as soon as we’re able. I won’t rest until her poor bottom is seen to.” This was Kier Eiserne, the carpenter, his narrow face earnest with worry.

  “Don’t worry, Kier. She’ll not sink yet. We’ll have her offloaded first. Get some of those ragamuffins on the piers to help you empty the hold.”

  “The guns’ll have to go, too, skipper—every damn thing that’s not nailed down.”

  “I know that,” Rol snapped. And in a softer tone, “Do whatever you have to, but get her seaworthy again with all speed. If you have any deficiencies, see me or Gallico.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  In all probability Kier was overworrying, but that was no bad thing in a ship’s carpenter. Rol patted the quarterdeck rail. Where once it had been all black teak, now sections of it were of lighter wood, the results of repairs after many sea-fights. All about the ship, the Kassic teak that had been the original flesh of the Revenant was patchworked with softer wood—good timber, the best they could find—but still, nothing like as hardy as that used by her original shipwrights. In time, the very stuff a ship was made of changed under the feet of her company, but her essence, the concept for which she had been made, remained the same.

  If only it were that way with men, Rol thought.

  A year before, the Revenant had been a mastless hulk, quietly rotting in a flooded dry-dock here in Ganesh Ka. The carcass of a once-proud ship, she had belonged to the Bionese—a heavy dispatch-runner surprised and taken by a cloud of the Ka’s vessels, surrounded and beaten like a bull brought to its knees by the hounds. Her captain, Rol thought, must have been a fool, to let such a ship be taken by the light privateers of the Ka.

  Now she was reborn. Rol had rescued her, rebuilt her, and made of her a superb fighting ship, a man-of-war to match any the Bionese might send against her. He regarded her dark hull with the jealous love of a father, or a lover. His blood was in her very timbers.

  “Cortishane!” a deep voice shouted from the wharves. Rol lifted his head from contemplation of his ship and found himself looking down on the face of Artimion, his eyes two shivers of blue glass in a shining black face. A scar rippled like a tree-root down his forehead. This was the master of Ganesh Ka, or as close as anyone could come to that.

  “You’re looking well, Artimion. Life ashore agrees with you.”

  The pale eyes grew colder. “Come to my quarters when you have a minute to call your own, you and your officers. We have things to discuss. What’s the xebec?”

  “A slaver. The Astraros, out of Astraro for Omer.”

  “Any other meetings?”

  “The Bionari, as usual.”

  “Did you fight, or cut and run?” Artimion was looking the Revenant up and down for recent repairs, shot-damage. His question inferred no manner of moral judgment; it was a professional inquiry, but Rol bristled all the same.

  “We exchanged a few broadsides, Artimion.”

  “You must tell me about it.” The black man coughed suddenly, a hacking churn of liquid. He spat on the quay and then wiped his mouth with a rag, grimacing. “My quarters, as soon as you can, Cortishane.” For a moment he seemed about to say more, then he strode away with the rolling walk of one used to shipboard, though he himself had not put to sea in many months. He was a long time recovering from the wounds he had received in the spring.

  “I’ll take over here, Rol,” said Elias. He smiled. “Artimion is never one for the courtesies.”

  “Artimion can kiss my arse. As soon as the wounded are ashore, talk to Kier about what he needs done. He wants her stripped and hauled down in dry-dock to check out her hull.”

  “He’s overzealous.”

  “No harm in it, not now anyway.”

  “What about them?” Elias pointed to the troops of unsteady, shaven-headed figures now being helped across the Astraros’s gangplanks.

  “What about them? They’re here, they’re free, the rest is up to themselves.”

  “We should perhaps hunt up some food for them, and clothes.”

  “Not my problem, Elias. As soon as they hit dry land, they’re Artimion’s. Our job is to get the Revenant seaworthy again as soon as possible.”

  Elias frowned. “There is something to be said, Rol, for a little compassion.”

  “I’ve already shown them a little, Elias. Now someone else can show them a lot. Talk to Kier—and don’t let the crew ashore until he’s got what he wants. They’re no good to him drunk.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  A man-of-war was a crowded machine. Those who saw some form of romance in a life at sea usually knew little of its realities. Men ate together in messes of eight, slept together in swaying rows of hammocks, each touching their neighbors’. They defecated together from the heads in the bow of their ship, and they fought and died together surrounded by the close wooden walls of their little floating world. There were no secrets on board ship; eventually every man’s proclivities, secret or otherwise, became common knowledge. A man could not play a part and remain a member of that company; the realities of his soul became known to all over time.

  Thus it was that Gallico and Creed were viewed by their shipmates with an uncomplicated mix of respect and affection, and Rol Cortishane was viewed with something more akin to awe. His men had seen what happened to him in the extremity of battle, and they knew there was something in him that was not remotely human. They accepted this; they did respect him, they feared him, and knew him to be a master-mariner, a canny tactician, and a hard but fair taskmaster. But they could not love him. Rol knew this, and the man he had become shrugged it off. But the boy who had once dreamed of the fellowship of a ship’s company could not help but be wounded by it.

  He had his friends, of course. Gallico and Creed were as close to him as brothers, despite their disagreements. They all owed one another their lives many times over, and that was a bond unbreakable. Oddly enough, young Giffon, too, was closer to his captain than to anyone else on board. Perhaps he sensed the bruised boy that Rol had been not so very long ago. Perhaps damaged souls drew together.

  Back now in Ganesh Ka, the
close, enforced companionship, the cheek-by-jowl living of a ship’s company was diluted by space and the addition of hundreds, thousands of other people. Wives, children, parents even—all re-established their ties on men come from the sea, whose only family had been one another, who had committed the bodies of their brothers to the depths of the ocean, whose blood had soaked into the very fabric of their ship. They became embroiled in the intricacies of land-living again, and their lives became that much less simple.

  Standing on the ancient stone of the wharves, Rol felt the long roll of breakers still moving under his feet. Men called out greetings; women smiled, some lewdly; children plucked at his clothing. It took a moment’s mental effort to collect his thoughts. The ship-cavern, vast though it was, seemed close, the gutrock of millennia bearing down on him. He pinched the bridge of his nose and picked his way through the tatterdemalion crowds until he stood by the towering bulk of Gallico, who was supervising the procession of unsteady slaves which filed endlessly off the Astraros.

  “How are they?” he asked his first mate.

  The halftroll grimaced. “We lost twelve more over the last three days, but Giffon reckons the rest will pull through. Most look worse than they are; it was the second-voyagers who had it worst. Some of them had come from as far afield as Mysol, and had been in that filth for many weeks.”

  Strange, how the slaves seemed to have lost all definition of age or sex; they might have been some strange other species, dead-eyed and hollow-faced. One of them had a beard: an older man whose face retained some humanity. In his arms he carried a young boy; Rol remembered them from his descent into the slaver’s hold. The boy’s smile was singularly sweet, but there was no knowledge in his eyes. Moved by he knew not what, Rol stopped them.

  “Where are you from?” he asked the man.

  “We were taken off the coast near Golgos,” the man answered. His voice was deep; he would be a fine singer. His brawny forearms were those of a man whose life had been earned with sweat, corded with muscle that age and circumstances had not yet withered away. He was not tall, but there was a solid presence about him, a sense of calm. The boy’s slim arms encircled his neck.

  “Your son?”

  “Yes, Captain. My only child.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I am called Aveh.”

  “Well, Aveh, you’re welcome here.” Something in the man’s steady gaze made Rol uncomfortable. “I hope you find some peace here,” he fumbled.

  The man nodded. “Thank you, Captain.” Then he continued on his way, the boy smiling over his shoulder as empty-headed as a butterfly.

  Miriam had arrived on the docks with a company of her musketeers, the only standing soldiery the Ka possessed. Her men were making lists, issuing orders, asking questions. Behind them, a horde of folk were setting up trestle tables and lading them with food, plates, jugs, and others were coming up to the slaves with oddments of clothing, blankets, homemade sandals.

  “It takes poverty to make one truly generous,” Gallico said, watching them. “It seems to me sometimes that only the poor are truly human.”

  “Make me rich, and I’ll test that theory for you,” Rol said, and Gallico chuckled.

  Miriam stalked up to the pair, musket slung at her back. She was a tall, thin woman whose hair was a bright halo of red-gold and whose skin was white as ivory. “Well, gentlemen, you have been busy, it seems.” A gap between her front teeth gave her speech a small, pleasing lisp. Her eyes smiled up at Gallico, then rested on Rol with cold dislike.

  “Three-hundred-odd to be found a place to lay their heads, Miriam,” Gallico said. “They’re in poor shape, most of them, and some speak languages I’ve not heard in many a year.”

  “We’ll open up another tower,” Miriam said. “If you brought back ten thousand, we could still find them room. No, it’s food I’m worried about. We need more in the way of sea-fishing craft, and more land cleared up in the woods; most of the fields we have are close to farmed out.”

  Rol’s attention drifted. He heard the same things rehashed every time he came back from a voyage. These were not his problems. His problems were to do with timber, iron, gunpowder, sailcloth; the mechanics of men’s mastery of the sea.

  “I bore you, Cortishane?” Miriam asked.

  “You have your problems, Miriam, I have mine,” Rol said.

  “I apologize for bringing the inconveniences of the little people to your attention.”

  “Apology accepted,” Rol snapped. “Now, if you will allow me, I must speak to my first mate.”

  Miriam glared at him, then turned to Gallico. “There’ll be a feast tonight, in the square, if you and the Revenants want to come along, Gallico. It’s not every day the Ka gains itself a new ship. And Albatross came in two days ago loaded to the rails with the plunder of two fat Mercanters.”

  “Ben Oban got lucky at last, did he? We’ll be there, Miriam.”

  Rol watched her go, the boyish hips with the musket slung in the crease of her buttocks, the hair bright as a flammifer.

  “If she saw you looking at her like that, you might get yourself shot,” Gallico told him.

  “Men have died for stranger things. Listen, Gallico, I want the Astraros refitted as a man-of-war. She’ll bear at least eight of the nine-pounders we took out of the Bionese. I reckon we’ll square-rig her on the foremast too. What do you think?”

  “I think it’s a fine idea. The only problem is crew. We’ve mariners by the score here in the Ka, but we’re short on artisans, carpenters, and the like. And who’s to captain her?”

  “You are.”

  The halftroll shook his head. “I’m right happy with where I am.”

  “Your own command, Gallico. Think on it.”

  “Maybe I’m not the commanding sort. It’s easier taking orders than giving them, I’ve always found. No, Rol, you must find someone else.”

  “We’ll see. Think on it, at any rate. You’ll oversee the work on her, though?”

  “Of course.”

  The population of Ganesh Ka was a mixture culled from every coast and sea-lane in the world. All they held in common was the fact that the Hidden City had become their sanctuary, and all who came to it, whether destitute or deranged, were to be made welcome. Apart from Miriam’s musketeers, the only officialdom that the Ka possessed was the quartermasters, who looked after the city stores, whether maritime- or land-based. In subterranean caverns hewn out of the bedrock by the unimaginable labor of the Ancients, there was laid up a great mass of supplies. Timber, pig-iron, sailcloth, rope, pitch, and all the paraphernalia that attended the maintenance of ships. But barreled up also were hundreds of casks of salt beef and pork, smoked and dried fish, pickled vegetables, tuns of wine. Enough to feed—frugally—the thousands the Ka contained for several months.

  There were no work-rotas, but everyone pitched in as and when they were needed, and if they did not, their fellows soon persuaded them. Some were inshore fishermen, others farmed the tiny plots that had been hewn out of Ganesh’s illimitable forests up in the foothills of the Myconians. Yet more were herders of half-wild goat herds in the high slopes of those mountains, and these goats provided meat, milk, cheese, and hides for the city.

  And yet to call this accumulation of effort, this conglomeration of people, a city was, Rol thought, misleading. Ganesh Ka might be a vast architectural marvel, but to the folk who lived there, it constituted little more than an enormous campsite, with limited organization and a system that worked because it was oiled with a vast amount of goodwill. That, and the knowledge that for these people there was nothing else. The rest of the world was closed to this host of the dispossessed. Rol thought that if the goodwill and desperation that glued the city together ever frayed, then Ganesh Ka would descend into anarchy. But perhaps that was true of every society, every place where men came together in some common resolve.

  Artimion had a superlative view of the wide caldera that formed Ganesh Ka’s harbor. By the time Rol made it to the
black man’s apartments, the sun was sliding down behind the Myconians in the west, and the fishing boats were all docked. The only vessel out in the bay now was the sixty-foot guard galley that patroled the entrance to the harbor, bristling with experienced oarsmen and musketeers. The mustard and honey hues of the sea-cliffs seemed almost luminous in the last light of the sun, and as the shadow fell the air turned colder—a reminder that even this far south, winter had taken hold of the world. The Ka was only some two hundred leagues north of Mas Llurin, the Great Line that men of science said marked the widest mark about the girdle of the earth. Though there was deep snow in the higher passes of the Myconians, here by the sea the warm air lingered most of the year. It grew dark sooner, and the mornings had a bite to them, but winter by the shores of the Inner Reach was as nothing compared to the gray storms and white gales of the Seven Isles, or Northern Bionar.

  In the city, no lights were lit facing the sea, for fear of giving their location away to cruising men-of-war, but Artimion’s chambers were sufficiently far down the cliffs to be hidden from the sight of anything on the Reach. So he had a fragrant fire of pine and olive logs burning in his hearth, and olive-oil lamps flickering in the air from the huge, glassless windows. Gallico, Elias, and Miriam were already perched on wall-benches with cups in their hands as Rol flicked aside the goatskin flap that served as a door.

  Artimion stood with his back to them, and he did not move as he said, “You took your time.”

  “It was mine to take,” Rol said.

  The master of Ganesh Ka turned at that, and smiled. With the dying light from the window behind him all that could be seen in that ebony face were the glint of white teeth and two glass-gleams for eyes.

  “Of course it is,” Artimion said.

  Rol had been looking in on Giffon and the wounded one last time, but there was no reason Artimion should know that. He was very tired, so tired he did not quite make sense of all the shape and silhouette in the room, the competing radiances of sunset and firelight.