This Forsaken Earth

by Paul Kearney

  “Aveh,” Rol said softly. “How long before we can start getting them up on the mast?”

  The old man raised his head. “The mainyard will be ready by the middle watch. The topyard will take until the morning. It’s more slender, so there’s more to take off.”

  “You’ve worked on ships before. You’re no landsman.”

  They had lit a candle-lantern so the carpenter could see where his hands were going. Its flame was tall and thin as a willow-leaf around which the mist drifted in gauzy tendrils. But the light did not reach Aveh’s face. “I have been to sea before, yes.”

  Almost, Rol asked him where, but the question died in his throat. As quiet and equable as the carpenter seemed, he gave the air of a man not to be trifled with. Rol ruffled his son’s curly hair instead, straightened, and went forward to the prow of the xebec, from where two cables stretched out into gray nothingness. He could hear the plash of oars out there, but nothing else. The mist pressed close now, and somewhere beyond it the sun had set behind the continent of Bion. The world had become a dark, shrouded place within which the only reality was the vessel under their feet.

  Canker came forward, wrapped in a cloak that was already beaded with moisture. As he spoke, his breath clouded about his face to merge with the mist.

  “Damn, it’s getting cold again. I had forgotten.”

  “Winter draws upon us,” Rol told him. “North of Omer’s latitude, and you begin to feel it, especially at night.”

  “You should see the Myconians this time of year—I suppose you will. A kingdom of snow, glaciers longer than rivers. Black nights where the frost crackles in a man’s very lungs.”

  They stood in silence. The Inner Reach hissed past the cutwater below them; and all around, the Astraros creaked with a million minute shiftings of wood on wood. In his mind, Rol pictured a line traveling up the chart in his cabin at three sea-miles in every hour, a worm inching its blind way past the coast of Bionar and passing from the blue waters of the Reach to the wider, colder waters of the Westerease Sea. Windhaw Island lay nor’-nor’west of them, and southwest of that, the great Free City of Urbonetto with its thousand-ship harbor and miles of warehouses and great sea-walls. But it seemed like it must all be a dream. There was nothing but the black water below them, this house of mist that loomed all around, Aveh’s candle-lantern the sole point of brightness and warmth in all that sodden darkness.

  The bosun joined them, wiping moisture out of his black eyebrows. “Ran sleeps,” he said. “Ussa has taken him to her bed.”

  “You know these waters, Thef?” Rol asked.

  “Corso’s almost due north of here, less than two hundred leagues. I know the sea-lanes between it and Urbonetto like they was written on the back of my hand.”

  For a second, something flashed through Rol’s mind, an insight. He stared at his own scarred palm with the strange lines tracing their way across it. But his train of thought was broken as the bosun said, “Time to change crews.”

  The cutters came alongside again, the exhausted rowers hauling themselves up the side of the xebec. Elias Creed handed Rol the hand-compass, a cold weight of brass. The ex-convict was shivering. “A cold seat at the tiller,” he said to Rol. “Best take a boat-cloak.”

  “Gallico, you have the con,” Rol said to the halftroll. “Thef, you steer the blue cutter and I’ll take the red. Come, lads. No one goes below, but you can lie down on deck. Gallico, get the cook to rouse out a few bottles.” The halftroll nodded. In the dim light he looked like a thing made of stone. Rol paused, and then said, “Break out boarding-weapons, but no pistols, mind. I want every man armed, and that includes the men in the boats.”

  To Rol’s surprise, Canker followed him down into the cutter. He sat beside him in the stern, muffled to the eyes. There was the inevitable clunking and swearing and fumbling of men in a small boat at night. The cutter rowed six oars a side, and it took a while to sort them out.

  “Pull,” Rol said quietly. Stroke oar pushed the boat away from the side of the Astraros, and the others let fall and leaned back as one. The cutter surged forward, trailing the heavy cable behind it.

  Three strokes of the oars, and the mist swallowed them. The cable lifted out of the water and the men’s oars dug deeper, creaking at the padded tholepins. Rol leaned on the tiller, the course clear in his mind. He called the stroke for a time, until the men were in the rhythm of it, and then there was only the plash and groan of the oars, the panting of the scullers.

  “How long can we keep this up?” Canker asked through a fold of his cloak.

  “We hope to tow her into a wind; a calm like this is unusual this time of year. It won’t be long.”

  There was an hourglass and a slot-lantern at Rol’s feet. He set the compass between them and every so often lifted the metal slide in the lantern to check the time and their course. He might have the night-sight of a cat, but it heartened him, all the same, to let slip that little wand of yellow light. One glass slid by, then two. The mist was thickening, if anything, and it sat like a dream of salt on their lips, trickled down their chilled faces.

  “What happens when we reach Arbion?” Rol asked in a low voice. Canker started as if he had been half asleep, though his eyes were bright and clear.

  “That depends on where the front lines are. We should still hold the line of the Embrun River. If Myconn has fallen, then Rowen will withdraw across it toward the north. Gallitras should hold out. Its governor, Moerus, is a good soldier, a man of his word. In any case, when we leave the ship we’ll set off south. It should be easy traveling; once you get down from the mountains, Bionar is a pleasant enough kind of country, well tilled and watered, good roads, inns. Civilization!” And Canker’s eyes smiled above his mask of oilskin. There was a lie in the smile.

  “You’ve grown used to the finer things in life since I first saw you in a derelict warehouse in Ascari,” Rol said.

  The Thief-King shrugged. “I always had the finer things in life; I just chose not to flaunt them. Snigger if you will, Rol, but it so happens that I am a man of some station in Bionar now, chamberlain and chancellor to Queen Rowen herself, no less.”

  “And how do the Bionari feel about an Islander thief lording it over them?”

  “They have learned to like it.” And Canker’s voice was as cold as the mist and the night that pressed in around them.

  Rol bent again and let slip that shard of light from the lantern at his feet. The hourglass was out. He turned it, and the sand within began its journey once more. He was about to speak but something out in the darkness, a rumble of sound, stopped him.

  “Easy oars.” The boat-crew lifted the blades out of the water and leaned on the looms, breathing heavily and staring at him, twelve white faces.

  “Do you hear that?”

  Canker cocked his head, pulling his cloak from his face. “It sounds like thunder.”

  Again it came, more sustained now. A rolling growl of deep noise passing over the sea from the east.

  “Those are broadsides,” Rol said. His heart seemed to fill his chest as it beat and beat. He twisted at the tiller and looked over his right shoulder. “Silence fore and aft.” The crew’s muttering ceased.

  Again. It was like some bad-tempered god turning in his sleep. Rol wiped the mist from his eyes irritably, and caught a glimpse of something far out in the fog: a light, a diffuse glow. “Can you see that, Canker?”

  “Yes, yes, I see it. Looks like a bonfire or something.”

  “It’s a ship on fire.”

  The men in the boat watched, straining on the thwarts. The light flared up briefly, and seconds later there came the dull roar of an explosion, louder than anything that had gone before. The light sank in darkness, and silence fell about them again.

  “What happened?” Canker asked.

  “The powder-magazine must have blown.” Rol snapped out of his reverie. “Come lads, get her going. Another glass and we change round.”

  The men dipped their blades, and be
gan sculling again. About them, the black, mist-bound night kept its secrets.

  Seven

  THE NECESSITIES OF WAR

  THE WIND RETURNED WITH THE DAWN, AS THOUGH IT had been frightened of the dark. It came from due east, and shredded the mist in a matter of minutes, but bore on its wings a squall of rain which drenched the Astraros and her crew, numbing them to the bone. Nevertheless, the exhausted ship’s company were at once sent aloft to take in sail, and reefed the lateens on main and mizzen while Gallico took the wheel and pointed the beakhead northwest, to make the channel between Windhaw Island and Urbonetto.

  Rol did not allow the crew to rest even then. They had a moment’s respite to stand and chew cold chunks of salt-beef and biscuit, and then were set to changing the yards on the foremast. Aveh had worked all night, and now the two spars were resting across the beam of the xebec. A series of lines to the capstan lifted first the foreyard, and then the foretopyard up in the air, to be eased through the rigging as though they were made of eggshell and then laid close to the foremast. Lifts were then attached to the mid-point, the parrel fastened about the mast itself, and all that paraphernalia of cable, the stirrups, the lifts and braces, were rigged on one by one. When that was done, more sails had to be bundled aloft and bent on the new square-rigged yards—all this in a brisk easterly that was already churning the Westerease into a hillscape of white horses and a wicked fathom-high swell. Only when all this had been accomplished did Rol allow one of the two watches to go below; two dozen shattered men who would not even change out of their dripping clothes before climbing into their hammocks.

  The starboard watch, resigned to another four hours of keeping the deck, found themselves nooks and corners out of the wind and huddled together, nodding and dozing and talking in a desultory fashion while Rol, Creed, and Gallico stayed by the wheel, studying the motion of the ship, feeling the lift and fall of her on the choppy swells, sensing the forces at work on her hull and through her masts.

  “She will do very well,” Gallico said with a smile. Under a scudding sky, with the spindrift flying aft and the Astraros heaving under them like a willing lover, the fog-bound apprehension of the night before seemed far in the past.

  A hand in the fo’c’sle threw the log into the sea foaming past and let the line run off the spool in his other fist. His mate shouted, “Nip!” as the sand in his tiny hourglass ran out, and they hauled the line back in, counting the knots in the rope.

  “Six knots one fathom sir!” they shouted aft.

  Rol bent over the binnacle and wrote in the running log. “If this keeps up, we’ll run under the southern edge of Windhaw Island in three days.”

  The wind held true; it would seem that Ran had left his bed and was running up and down the seas of the world again. They passed Windhaw in the forenoon watch, giving themselves a clear five leagues of sea-room, and the grim island remained a shape on the horizon, ragged and forbidding, half hidden by distant showers.

  “They say that on Windhaw, Gibniu himself has a smithy, and that is why smoke issues from the mountains there,” Elias Creed said.

  “Four-thousand-foot cliffs all the way around, over fifty leagues of them,” Gallico said. “No man has ever set foot on it; not even seabirds will nest there.”

  Rol was looking in the other direction, southeast, to where the coast of Bionar was a long shadow on the horizon. Fifteen leagues to Urbonetto, greatest city of the world, a place he had never seen. He frowned and turned away.

  “We hold this course through tonight, then put her about at the start of the forenoon watch—if the wind holds. The Wintethur Peninsula lies ahead. I want some comfortable leeway, especially with this easterly on our tail. Once we’re past the peninsula, we’ll head due south, keep it on the beam, and see how these lateens really earn their money.”

  The lookout was kept on his toes all day, for the Astraros was now in some of the busiest sea-lanes of the world. They passed by a Mercanter convoy of fifty sail, with three mercenary brigs of Maprian as escort. One of the brigs edged closer to inspect the xebec, and see if a little piracy might be in order; but she sheered off as soon as Rol had the nine-pounders run out. It was a bluff, of course, but it worked.

  “Greedy bastards,” Gallico said, not without a kind of approval. “They get paid a king’s ransom to escort Mercanters up and down the Westerease, and still they’re on the lookout for an easy prize.”

  “The Mercanters know about this?” Creed asked.

  “Of course. But they turn a blind eye as long as their convoy makes it to port in one piece. Look at that for a sight to gladden a privateer’s heart. Fifty fat merchantmen with barely a long gun between them but for those brigs. Had we the Revenant, we’d be in there like a goddamn wolf among sheep.”

  They passed skeins of sail on every horizon, but saw no men-of-war. Arbion and Phidon had been Bionar’s two great naval bases, but one was now held by the rebels and the other had only lately fallen back into Bar Asfal’s hands. When Canker came back up on deck he studied the passing ships as intently as the Astraroes did.

  “We must have burned thirty men-of-war alongside the docks when we took Arbion,” he said. “Some of it was accidental, what with the quantities of pitch and tar and timber on the wharves, but some was deliberate. A damned waste. The loyalists sank two big ships in the harbor-entrance to try and block it off, but it wasn’t enough. There’s still a channel open, right in the middle.”

  “What about the wall-guns?” Gallico asked. “Are they still in place?”

  “Some. Many were spiked, many more toppled into the sea as the enemy retreated to their own ships. The harbor walls of Arbion used to mount two hundred cannon, but I doubt there’s a dozen left now fit to fire.”

  “Is Rowen trying to take over Bionar, or destroy it?” Rol asked with a sneer.

  “A certain amount of destruction is inevitable in war. Things happen that one might not sanction or approve of, but they cannot be helped. That is the nature of war itself.”

  “You speak like a politician, Canker.”

  “I am a politician, Rol.”

  Flurries of sleet came flocking in from the northeast, off the Seven Isles. The ship’s company dug out what warm gear they possessed, but there were not enough oilskins to go around, and they were swapped about between the watches. The easterly remained with them, veering or backing now and again, but always coming back to due east. They rounded the Wintethur Peninsula eleven days after leaving Ganesh Ka, and it was as if they entered a different world. There was snow in the air now, fat flakes which accumulated on the deck and froze to the rigging. The swell eased as the peninsula took the brunt of the wind and the Astraros took what was left of it on the larboard beam as she turned south toward the wide bay of Arbion itself. On either side of her, the coasts stretched away black with pine forests, but the snow was already piling up on them. The sky was as blank as a dead man’s eyes.

  That night they dropped anchor in fifty fathoms. They had been unable to take a reading all day, and Rol’s charts of the approach to the city were inadequate. The wind was dropping, and the snow continued to fall in an eerie silence. They could see the mast-lanterns of merchantmen out to sea, but the bay itself was empty of ships. They gathered in the stern-cabin—Rol, Creed, Gallico, and Canker—and sipped rough ship’s wine without taking their seats.

  “We take the red cutter in, the four of us,” Rol said. “I’m not chancing the ship, what with Canker’s wrecks scuttled in the channel and the fact that none of us but Gaudo have ever piloted in these waters before. Thef can navigate well enough; he’ll take the Astraros back out to sea and cruise this latitude for a few weeks in case”—here Rol’s mouth smiled—“in case we decide that Bionar is not for us. We leave tonight, with the turn of the tide. Any questions?”

  “How far from the harbor are we?” Canker asked.

  “About three leagues. We’ll step a mast in the cutter—it shouldn’t take us more than a couple of hours to get ashore.” Canker
nodded. He seemed remote, as if the proximity of land was already throwing some other mantle across his personality.

  “To Bionar,” he said, raising his glass. The others drank, but did not echo his toast.

  The snow feathered their faces invisibly in the darkness. The cutter bumped and dented the side of the xebec, a sullen weight with umbilicals of ice-stiff cable. Rol took his place at the tiller, wrapped in a threadbare sea-cloak but shuddering with cold nonetheless. Only Gallico seemed unaffected by the bitterness of the night. Thef Gaudo hung from the main-chains, his lower body soaked with the chop and slap of water between the two vessels.

  “Three weeks, Rol. No farther west than the Swynderbys, no farther east than Windhaw.”

  “And keep her out of trouble, Thef. Remember she has fine legs, but no teeth worth speaking of.”

  “Aye, sir.” Rol saw the bosun’s own teeth flash white in the gloom. He was cock-a-hoop at the prospect of his own command.

  “And after three weeks with no word, I take her home. Good luck, Rol, Gallico, Elias. Good-bye.”

  They cast off the bow and stern lines and Gallico shoved off from the side of the Astraros. The mast was already stepped, and their scrap of lugsail took what was left of the wind and pulled the cutter with it. Rol let the wind take her until the Astraros had become a darker shadow on the face of the iron-dark sea, then brought her round to larboard. There were no stars, but slack water had come and gone and now the tide was on the flood, carrying them in toward the land. It was hard to tell, but Rol thought they might be making a good five knots, borne on the back of that great mass of moving water.