Two pirates, one with a half-pike and the other swinging a hatchet, rushed Jaume. Wielding his longsword two-handed, he knocked the thrusting pike past him on his left. Grabbing its haft with one hand, he hacked into the other corsair’s bare armpit. Then he swung the Mirror back to half-sever the neck of the one now struggling unwisely to tug his half-pike back.
At his side, Pere laughed as he knocked in a pirate’s teeth with his dagger’s steel handguard, then loosed the man’s intestines with a slice of his sword.
‘You’re right, my love,’ he called to Jaume, voice as wild as his eyes. ‘It is a good day to be alive!’
And then all was hewing of bare limbs and bodies and faces, and sheets of spraying blood. The stench of gore and shit rose over Jaume, familiar and unloved.
From the corner of his eye he saw a female pirate a couple of meters behind their opponents’ front rank heft a half-pike like a throwing spear. He opened his mouth to cry warning.
She cast.
Luc had just shed an arming sword cut with his shield, opening himself just enough to thrust his enemy through the gullet. The clumsily thrown half-pike sailed over the sagging corsair’s shoulder to punch through Luc’s own throat, just above his cuirass. Luc dropped to his knees, blood gushing near-black in the fast-fading light.
Rising above the clang of steel on steel, and the hoarse shouts and screams, a voice boomed down from the cog: ‘I told you idiots to take the prettyboys alive! The Fae eat your eyes!’
Glancing up, Jaume saw a giant head wreathed in blond beard glaring over the rail of the cog’s high sterncastle. The captain, he thought.
Less experienced than his brother Companions, Dieter knelt over Luc. Though Jaume marked that he kept the presence of mind to hold his own shield up, helping a fallen comrade in the middle of melee was always a mistake. Can’t you see that Luc’s beyond help?
Without glancing his way Pere side-kicked the young knight aside. As Dieter fell on his ass Pere wheeled to slash the pirate whose cutlass-stroke had just narrowly missed the young Companion across the back of the neck. He fell across Luc’s corpse.
Dieter’s own training, first as a knight and then as a Companion, kicked in. He sliced another attacker’s legs out from under her. Then he was on his feet again, shield up and fighting.
At Jaume’s word, the three Companions took a step back so as not to trip over their Brother’s body. In front of them, the corsairs surrounded the shrinking Sea Dragon phalanx. Though there were many more sparsely clad bodies sprawled in the rowing-wells than blue-and-green armoured ones, the pirates attacked with such mad fury some literally vaulted up their comrades’ backs to try to hurl themselves past the Marine shields.
‘What are their masters promising them to keep them coming like this?’ asked Dieter, taking an axe-cut on his upraised shield.
‘We’re not winning this one,’ Speranza said matter-of-factly. Jaume glanced back to see that she had lost her own shield and pike. She stood, shortsword in hand, ignoring the blood that streamed from her cheek. ‘My apologies, gentlemen. I’ve failed.’
‘Not yet,’ Pere cried. ‘Are you up for a plan, Jaume, my love? It’s a mad one.’
‘The only kind that’ll answer now,’ Jaume said.
Pere nodded toward the stingers. Though pegged to the deck and abandoned, they still served as minor obstacles to the pirates attacking the Companions. Oil casks and buckets of tar-soaked rags still stood beside them.
Jaume smiled. ‘Right. Captain, if you could please keep them off our backs for a few moments?’
He saw Speranza’s eyes narrow on either side of her helmet’s nasal, but she nodded. The Companions were renowned for their daring deeds—and a decently high rate of success. As Jaume and Pere stepped back, she and the tillerman took their places alongside Dieter.
Pere was already skinning off his trousers next to the tiller. Jaume grinned and did the same.
* * *
Jaume climbed up the grappling-line behind the smaller, more agile Pere. Pirates descended towards them, feet-first and oblivious, not expecting traffic the other way. The first one yelped in surprise as Pere grabbed his ankle from below and yanked. Yell turned to shriek as the pirate plummeted past Jaume toward La Canal. A second quickly followed.
The Lady’s Mirror rode in its scabbard across Jaume’s armoured back. His friend carried his sword the same way, and his parrying dagger gripped in his teeth like a hero from a romance. It was a practice more showy than sound. But that was Pere to the life: in battle the brooding, beautiful man was replaced by a mad laughing boy, deadly as a storm of blades and Fae-may-care about his personal safety.
The third pirate glanced down. His eyes widened comically in his tattooed face as Pere lunged up and ball-punched him through his foul linen diaper. The man clutched himself and tumbled into the red froth below.
The stinging reek of pine oil and tar emanating from Jaume’s trousers, their legs tied around his waist and drawstring cinched tight to form a makeshift bag, was thick enough not only to blot out the battle-stench but to make Jaume’s head swim as he ascended toward the cog’s rail. He hoped the contents would not leak out onto his bare legs.
A lithe woman with short red hair turned on swung her cutlass at Pere. He let his body drop to hang from the line. The sword cut air. Pere whipped his right leg up to crack her in the face with his shin. She fell.
Jaume paused briefly while Pere hooked the same leg over the line and drew himself back on top of it. Drawing his sword, he seized the railing and flung himself over it. An eyeblink later a longsword thunked into the railing where he’d vanished.
The pirate pulled out his sword and turned inboard to deal with Pere. Jaume grabbed the back of his dirty slashed-velvet blouse and jerked him overboard. He joined Pere on deck.
Pirates still crowded the cog’s main deck. Most were transfixed by the combat aboard the Melisandre, where a seethe of bare flesh covered the Sea Dragon phalanx like soldier-ants swarming a Compsognathus. But a score or more faced the Companions on the after part of the main deck, before the sterncastle.
Pere pulled his sword out of a pirate’s thick neck. ‘Can your Princess punch a pirate in the balls?’ he called to Jaume, as the black-bearded man crumpled.
‘She hasn’t been called to yet, but I’m sure she could,’ Jaume said, and ducked under a furious sword-slash. ‘She’s your friend too, you know…’
Pere wasn’t listening. He had danced in among their foes, sword whirling, dagger deflecting and thrusting. Blood drenched his face and armour. Jaume knew the two stood no chance of taking the cog, of course. Even naked and overmatched in skill and steel shells, the pirates could still mob them as they were the Marines aboard the Melisandre. But Jaume knew capturing the ship wasn’t Pere’s mad scheme.
Jaume shifted his left hand to grip the Lady’s Mirror a third of the way up its meter-long blade. A longsword was ground less than shaving-sharp to allow such half-swording. Jaume pitched into yelling pirates with the tip, blocked and thrust with the flat, and smashed with the pommel as he and Pere carved a bloody path toward the aft-most mast.
A hatch lay open beside it. Pere reached it, sheathed his weapons, and untied his trousers from around his middle. Resuming a two-hand grip on his hilt, Jaume stood off corsairs with sweeping swings as Pere gashed the improvised bag with his dagger and took out a cask of lamp-oil. Prying out the cork with his dagger he poured the pungent pine oil over the trousers. They were stuffed with tarred rags that, like the oil, had been used to make firebolts for the war-galley’s stingers. From a ceramic tube carried on a cord around his neck, he produced a smoking punk. He blew the punk’s tip to an orange ember and touched it to the oil-drenched trousers.
They flared alight. He tossed them into the darkness of the hatch, and threw the cask in after.
‘Done,’ he said, turning toward Jaume and the corsairs and drawing his weapons. ‘Your go, my love.’
As Pere hel
d the pirates off, Jaume untied his pants-legs one-handed, slashing with the Mirror at such opponents as managed to get close. He cut the drawstring with his sword to let his own oil cask fall out onto the deck. He picked it up, drew the cork with his teeth, and sloshed half its contents onto the mast itself and the lower part of the sail, taking care not to splash himself. The rest he poured on the rag-filled trousers, sparing the ends of the legs. Using those for a handle, he lit the cloth from the pool of fire Pere had left on deck.
He jabbed a lunging pirate in the cheek and flung the burning trousers at the sail. Flames shot up the blood-red canvas and ran orange and blue down the mast.
‘Fire!’ he yelled at the pirates amidships. ‘Fire aboard! Fire! Fire!’
The Sea Dragons had taught him well: there was no more dreaded call onboard a ship at sea. The pirates lost all interest in fighting, aboard the dromon or their own ship. They began to screech at one another to fetch buckets and man pumps.
‘Jaume!’ yelled Pere.
He wheeled clockwise, swinging up the Mirror. Too late. A smashing impact to his sallet blasted yellow sparks behind Jaume’s eyes and dropped him to his knees.
His stomach sloshing with nausea and his eyes blurred, Jaume saw a naked, blond-bearded corsair looming over him, well over two meters tall. If Pere hadn’t warned Jaume his boarding axe would have struck Jaume squarely, caving in helmet and skull beneath. Now the pirate raised the axe above his head to finish the job.
Through the fog in his head Jaume realized it was the man who had bellowed at the boarding-party to take the Companions alive—probably the pirate captain. Jaume willed his hand to raise the Mirror. It would not.
The giant screamed in a surprisingly shrill voice as Pere ran past him behind, slashing both his hamstrings with a single draw-cut of his sword. He toppled backwards.
Pere tossed his parrying dagger in the air, caught it by the hilt point-down, and plunged it into the pirate’s glaring blue left eye.
As Pere put a boot on the corsair’s dead face to pull his weapon free, Jaume saw that his left arm was sleeved in blood from a cut just below the shoulder.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked, picking himself up.
‘Still fighting,’ Pere said. ‘But we’ve got to go.’
Running to fight the blazes that engulfed the sail and shot up from the open hold, the corsairs ignored the Companions. The pair ran to the rail and the rope by which they’d boarded. And saw that the corsairs on board the Melisandre, demoralized by their sudden brutal turn of fortune, had broken and were fleeing up the lines.
Pere put away his sword and dagger, and caught Jaume’s eye.
‘So she’s your choice, then? Melodía.’
Jaume shook his head. ‘It’s not that way. We still—‘
Pere grabbed his face in both hands and stopped his words with a quick, fierce kiss. Then he was over the side and sliding down the line. Jaume sheathed the Lady’s Mirror and followed.
A few meters from the galley’s rail, Pere’s blood-slick hands lost their grip on the rope, and he plunged into the sea. Jaume stopped and swung round. Letting himself dangle toward his lover by his right hand, he reached out with his left.
‘Take my hand!’ he shouted.
Treading reddened water, Pere raised his face. Once more his dark eyes met Jaume’s.
‘I love you always,’ Pere said.
A vast shadow swelled beneath him, clutched him in monstrous yellow teeth, and bore him down forever.[GdM]
Victor Milan has been a professional writer of science fiction, fantasy, and other adventure tales his whole adult life—as in, forty years now and counting. He’s also done time as a cowboy, semi-pro actor, computer support tech, and Albuquerque’s most popular all-night progressive rock DJ. Victor lives on Jupiter with his cats and dog. He serves as MC for Life for Archon’s unequalled Masquerade, as well as, apparently, for the fine home-grown con Bubonicon.
He’s published over 100 novels, including the Prometheus Award-winning The Cybernetic Samurai, its sequel Cybernetic Shogun, CLD: Collective Landing Detachment, and numerous short stories, including the novella The Seeker: A Poison in the Blood, in S. M. Stirling’s 2015 anthology The Change: Tales of Downfall and Rebirth. Victor is a founding member of the popular Wild Cards shared-world project, and frequent contributor.
The Dinosaur Lords, came out from Tor in hardcover on July 28th, 2015, and will be released in mass market paperback May 31, 2016. The second volume of the epic fantasy cycle, The Dinosaur Knights, is due out in hardcover July 5th, 2016.
Victor thanks all his friends and fans, whose love and support have literally kept him alive.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9945214-3-9
Copyright 2016 Grimdark Magazine
Grimdark Magazine Issue #7 ePub Page 9
