Falconer's Quest

by T. Davis Bunn

  Falconer possessed a voice that could reach the highest watch in a storm. Now, however, he spoke so gently his breath did not disturb the candles anchoring the map’s near side. “The ship’s company shall not proceed further than the African coast, madam.”

  She blanched. “What—what do you mean?”

  “I cannot say for certain what will happen. Everything we hope to do depends upon what we discover in Marseilles. For the moment, we feel our tactics are as sound as we can make them. We move forward with stealth and determination. Which means limiting the number of people who will enter into harm’s way. Who will require protection.”

  Amelia Henning was reduced to a trembling form. “You are asking me to trust you with my daughter’s life.”

  “Madam, you have no choice. None of us do.” Reginald Langston spoke as gently as Falconer. “I too have been reduced to the role of observer. These men are fighters. They have traversed such waters before. You and I know nothing of it.”

  “But I have been there.”

  “To take you would risk everything,” Harkness said. “Would you have other lives on your conscience?”

  Reginald went on, “I have fought and I have begged and I have searched my way through almost a year of sleepless worry. Now I must trust in these men, heroes all. Men I am certain God has brought together as an answer to my and my wife’s fervent prayers. I suggest, madam, you do the same.”

  Harkness added, “We carry in our holds the gold the pirates have demanded. We shall insist upon your daughter’s release before handing over the first payment, even before we seek the release of Reginald’s son.”

  The woman studied the candlelight for a time, then asked Falconer, “What of you?”

  “I shall become the shadow.” He waited long enough to be certain she would object no further. Then he asked, “What can you tell us of La Rue’s hideout?”

  “It is no hideout, sir. It is an entire harbor city. The port of Tunis, it is called nowadays. Tunis proper lies some ten miles inland from the African coast. Ali Saleem rules his fiefdom from there. La Rue controls the port from his castle.”

  “Describe it please, if you will.”

  “A fortress from beyond time. It was old when the Romans arrived. The Phoenicians named the town Carthage, and they wrested this very same fortress from a barbarian race whose name no one remembers.”

  The table was so still even the candle flames stopped trembling. The ship creaked and rocked upon steady seas. Inside the cuddy, however, the assembly remained locked upon the woman and her softly spoken words.

  “The castle,” Falconer gently prodded.

  “There are no windows in any chamber I entered. Just arrow slits. It is a man-made cave with walls two paces thick. Rock and iron and doom. The dungeons are endless. My daughter…”

  Falconer raised one finger, offering her something to help refocus upon the matters at hand. “What do you remember of your time in Carthage?”

  “Everything of what I saw.”

  “And please, what did you see?”

  “The slave yards. The castle’s entry chambers. The dungeons.”

  “The port,” Falconer said. “Did you catch even a glimpse?”

  Amelia Henning was silent so long they assumed she was imprisoned by her memories. Then she murmured, “Ports, plural.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I recall seeing two ports. Is that possible?”

  “Not only possible, ma’am.” Harkness spoke in a voice that sounded over loud. “It is a standard harbor of old. One small port within a larger, separated by a second breakwater. This gives greater shelter from storms. From intruders.”

  She shrugged away this information. “Two ports,” she repeated, more certain now. “The slave yards were a stonelined arena west of the ports. The slavers lived in a small tower between the inner and outer harbor.”

  “Slavers, ma’am? Not soldiers?”

  “Soldiers, slavers—I saw no one in uniform. I only know the men who controlled the slave yards went there to sleep and eat.”

  Falconer shared a glance with the officers. A harbor keep holding slavers meant the city was so comfortable and seemingly safe its security might be lax. He asked, “Anything else you might be able to describe for us?”

  She frowned into the candlelight. “There was a market on the port’s other side. Camels, spices, food. And taverns. I saw the merchants there.” She was quiet for a time, then, “I don’t believe I recall anything further.”

  Falconer leaned forward. The map crinkled beneath his elbows. He shifted the candles to one side and waited until Amelia Henning met his gaze. He waited longer still, until he saw the question register in her wounded eyes.

  “My son has told us that your daughter Catherine is known by all who love her as Kitty. Is that correct?”

  Her nod, though scarcely a tremble, was enough to dislodge a tear.

  “We must have something that will help us to recognize her. No matter what she might be wearing.”

  The unspoken rose into the shadows and clustered about them, looming reminders of the woman’s greatest fears. She required a long moment to reply. “She has a birthmark.”

  “Where?”

  “On her left shoulder. The size of your thumbprint. It is purple and shaped like a ripe plum with the stem pointed downward.”

  Falconer leaned back. Harkness met his eye and nodded approval. Falconer felt the woman’s sorrow like a stone set upon his own heart. “Madam, I shall do everything in my power to bring your daughter home.”

  “I suggest we close upon a moment of prayer,” Harkness said. “Mr. Langston, will you do us the honor?”

  Chapter 12

  After Amelia Henning said her good-nights, the others remained in the cuddy until well after midnight. As tired as he was, when Falconer finally lay in his bunk he found he could not sleep. His restless impatience brought back memories of other sleepless nights, other dangers he had met with ferocity and an utter absence of faith. He tried to pray, mainly to reassure himself that he was a different man now, but the silent words seemed to fall like pebbles to the creaking floor. Falconer quietly left his bunk, made sure Matt was asleep, slipped into his clothes, and walked up on deck.

  The night officer saluted him and spoke of the wind. When Falconer did not respond, the young man saluted again and moved off. Crewmen were trained by life on board to respect their shipmates’ need for privacy. Falconer took an oilskin cloak from the pile by the wheel. He flung it over his shoulders, stepped to the windward railing, and let the night wrap him in its veil.

  The wind blew from the north. The deck and railing were damp from a passing squall. The wind tasted of rain yet to come. There were no stars. Falconer could smell land up ahead. Cities always had a peculiar scent sailors could detect after spending weeks at sea. Land-starved sailors hungered for what lay beyond the horizon, yet a city’s smells always seemed too big for the air. Falconer breathed in deeply, searching the wind and the coming rain for any hint of danger.

  Instead, he heard a woman’s voice say, “Would you mind if I joined you, Mr. Falconer?”

  The truth was, he could not say. So he merely bowed briefly and replied, “Shall I find you an oilskin, ma’am?”

  “Thank you, but I have my own cloak.” Amelia Henning stepped to the railing beside him. “Will it rain again?”

  “Soon, I think. Would you not be more comfortable in your cabin?”

  In reply, she pulled the cloak more tightly about her. “Your son has spoken about you in a manner that has left me deeply moved, John Falconer,” she finally said to the wind.

  “Most call me Falconer, ma’am. You are welcome to do the same.”

  She did not respond to the invitation. “Matt adores you, and he counts you as the reason he has survived the loss of his mother. I feel that I have come to trust you also by what he has said. With your permission, I no doubt shall speak far too frankly for a stranger.”

  “Shipboard life
inspires a remarkable level of confidence, ma’am.”

  “That first day in the captain’s cabin, you said something that at the time I could not address,” Amelia Henning continued slowly. “You said you and I were bound by something other than our loss. At the time, what I most remarked was how you spoke to my heart. But I wish to know now what it was you meant.”

  “I think you already know, ma’am.”

  “Still, I ask that you tell me.”

  He smelled the chill, clean spice of rain. Falconer addressed his words to the approaching squall. “We have both been struck by the world’s casual brutality.”

  She shuddered, and yet did not draw away.

  “We have not merely lost our most precious possession. We have had it stripped away in a manner that has deepened the wound. We have been rendered utterly helpless. Our strengths and convictions have been made to seem as empty as…as old smoke.”

  He waited for the question. The one he knew lay behind her approach in the middle of this dark night. As he waited, he sensed that likely here was the reason sleep wouldn’t come.

  She asked, her voice low, “Do you rage at God?”

  Falconer listened to the hiss of rain striking an unseen ocean. “The Scriptures tell us of Elijah, a man of God who so despaired over his own brutal world that he fled to the desert. God found him there, huddled upon a rock, like a man who had gone in search of his tomb. And what did the man do when God spoke?”

  Amelia Henning’s whisper was almost lost to the wash of rain. “He covered his head.”

  “He pulled his cloak over his face like a shroud,” Falconer agreed. “A man so disgusted with life he wanted nothing but the grave. God’s presence meant nothing to him. Yet God was there still. Urging him back into life. Into the life that God wished to bestow upon him.” He turned his head slightly to look into her face.

  Her only response was to release the hood of her cloak, lift her head, and allow the rain to join the tears.

  Falconer raised his own face. The rain had a chilling effect, washing away the world beyond the horizon and all the responsibilities he must face with the dawn. Instead, the image that had driven him up on deck flashed before his closed eyes, more clearly even than when he had first awakened. It had come and departed so swiftly it could hardly be called a dream at all. More a fleeting memory that slipped through his sleep like a dagger between his ribs.

  “Just before yesterday’s dawn, I dreamed of our church back in Salem,” Falconer said to the night and the squall.

  “It was on the day of Ada’s funeral.”

  “Ada was your wife?”

  “Of eighteen months. I had long thought I was fated never to know either love or family. Both had been granted me, the miracle so complete some mornings I could not find room about my full heart to breathe. Joy was mine. And completeness. I thought eternity was captured by the sight of her face in the dawn light. I thought we would be together for all time. Yet now, when I look back…”

  Amelia Henning picked up the thought in a broken voice, one awash in months of tears. “Now the days are mere seconds. The perfect life is a myth. And nothing lies ahead but darkness and rain.”

  “No, ma’am. I am sorry. But in that you are mistaken.” Falconer gripped the woman’s shoulder through her shawl. The lady seemed as insubstantial as the unseen dawn. He turned her toward the east. “You do not see it. But in less than one hour, the sun will rise. Though the rain falls. Though we endure a storm not of our choosing. Even though we might not be able to see it this time, the sun shall come again.”

  He dropped his arm and turned back to the north and the city beyond the horizon. The city and the duties and the life ahead. He said, as much to himself as to the lady, “At the time I was so broken by loss that I could not mourn. Yesterday I dreamed of that loss and felt anew the pain. Yet there was a difference. The pain is gradually moving into my past. I sensed that its passage made way for a new future. I have duties. I have friends who need me. I have a son who relies upon my strength and my love.”

  Falconer stopped. He was not given to such talk. He had a warrior’s ability to look outward and see almost nothing within. Or rather, it had been so until every breath and every thought became colored by his inner wound.

  He looked at the woman beside him. There was not so much a rising dawn as a lessening of the surrounding dark. She had lowered her head so that her rain-swept hair hid her face. Falconer said, “I stand here beside you, ma’am, as a man who has walked the same rocky path as you. I tell you this with all the strength remaining in my heart. I cannot say what we will find in the Tunisian port. I cannot speak for your daughter. But this I know. God is. And before you expect, perhaps before you are ready, He will speak to you. He will call you into the future He has prepared for you.”

  At dawn’s light, the city of Marseilles appeared a haven for ancient mystery. Their ship passed the Frioul Islands and the fortress of Château d’If before dawn. This timing freed Falconer from explaining to Matt how the medieval prison’s infamy was tavern talk from the Spice Islands to Brazil. The two forts which guarded either side of the harbor entrance had been old fifteen centuries ago. Before sailing to the African wars, Roman soldiers had garrisoned there and offered sacrifices to Saturn at the hillside temple where a church now stood.

  Falconer entered the harbor standing in the ship’s bowsprit, there to shelter Matt, though the lad needed neither his strength nor his balance. Matt’s gaze was everywhere, his questions constant, for the port held a realm of forbidden mysteries. Falconer was weary from his night of meager sleep. But the boy’s eager questions were a boon stronger than many nights of quiet rest.

  “There, Father John—did you see that? A beast with humps!”

  “It is called a camel.”

  “Is that a French beast?”

  “The animal comes from the deserts of Africa. The humps are used for storing nourishment. It is said they can go for weeks without drinking.”

  The lad mouthed several words, each of them laden with their own mysterious treasures. Camel. Desert. Africa. “Have you seen deserts, Father John?”

  “Beyond the borders of some ports, yes. They are yellow or red or some color in between, and vast as waterless seas. And extremely hot.” And he was destined to visit such a land. Incongruously the thought chilled even this dank and sweltering sunrise.

  Matt’s youthful vigor was back in earnest, along with a hunger to know everything and do even more. His gaze tracked along the approaching quayside to the ancient forts. He named them correctly. “Fort Saint Jean is there to the north and Fort Saint Nicholas to the south, and beside it the church of Saint Victor. Captain Harkness says the emperor’s troops are garrisoned there, whenever they go off to war and when they return.”

  “Indeed.” Falconer had been present when the captain had told the middies what little he knew of the French port. He hadn’t told them that Marseilles was France’s central port dealing with their African settlements.

  “Yes, Father John. The captain said there has been either a temple or church on yonder hilltop for more than two thousand years. That seems ever such a long time.”

  They passed a pair of African sailing hulks with yellowed lateen sails. Young boys in filthy djellabas lifted net sacks of fish and shouted a price Falconer could not understand. Within the harbor walls the darkish water smelled of old refuse. The quayside lanes were a jumble of people and noise. Every manner of dress and speech was present in the harbor market. Another vessel tied to the quayside disembarked a steady stream of live beasts, either in wheeled cages or lashed upside down to stout poles. The animals shrilled their protest and their fear. The din grated on Falconer’s teeth.

  The sky was empty of the night’s rain. Already a yellow veil of dust and smoke clung to the city’s rooftops. The smells, thick and pungent, were of woodsmoke and fish and ancient spices. Falconer searched the approaching dockside and silently fretted about the perils ahead.

  The steersma
n knew his craft and drew the ship alongside the stone quay with scarcely a bump. Captain Harkness bellowed, “Make fast stern and aft! Lieutenant Rogers!”

  The second lieutenant was a pale young man, twentyseven years of age but looked scarcely eighteen. He probably still did not shave more than once a month. Yet Harkness had often professed to Falconer the young man’s potential. “Aye, sir!” came his shout.

  “The ship is yours!”

  “Aye, Captain!”

  “Gentlemen!” Harkness bellowed with a strength amplified by what was yet to come. “To your stations, if you please!”

  “I must go now,” Falconer said to the lad.

  “All right, Father John.”

  “You will do as we discussed?”

  “I will stay on board, help the middies with their duties, and not go ashore until you return.” Matt recited this without taking his eyes from the shoreline. He took a deep breath. His obvious pleasure was too great to do more than sigh the words. “Is this not the most beautiful and mysterious place you have ever laid eyes upon, Father John?”

  Chapter 13

  Falconer stepped up on the quarterdeck just as Reginald Langston emerged from his cabin. The company owner was dressed in such fine garb the captain commented admiringly, “You seem ready to go riding with the King of England, your honor.”

  “Ready to do my bit, for a change.” Reginald nodded and tugged upon his dove-gray overcoat. “When do we depart?”

  “Swift as we can. Soap! Ah. There you are. Good man.” The steward, smiling still, was holding up the captain’s finest jacket. Harkness shrugged off his salt-stained sea coat and donned the one with glittering braid and polished gold buttons.

  “Shall I touch up the skipper’s boots?” Soap asked.

  “No time for that. We’ll be moving too quickly for them to remark on my shoes, eh, Master Langston?”

  Reginald agreed. His hearty coloring did not permit him to become wan. Yet his features were so pinched the skin about his mouth and eyes had gone pale. He asked Falconer once more, “Are you sure our meager number will prove sufficient?”