"This Forsaken Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kearney Paul)

THE SLAVER

“It is said,” Gallico declared, “That no man has yet sailed south of the Tropic of Mas Morgun, which girdles the world eleven degrees south of Khasos.”

“It’s said the gods made the world round to confound the ambitions of men,” Creed retorted. “But then how does one stand on the underside of a spinning sphere?”

“How else is it that we see topsails on the horizon before the ship becomes hull-up?” Gallico asked reasonably. “Because the earth curves under our feet. And it’s the weightiness of the stars that keeps everything on the surface of this globe from floating off into the ether. The stars we steer by are nails driven through the warp and weft of heaven to hold our world in place, hammered in by God to fix us within space and the unwinding clock of the universe.”

“I have heard of the Tropic line,” Rol broke in, speaking for the first time that evening. “I’ve heard a dozen old men up and down the length of the Westerease and the Reach talk of it-usually after their bellies have been filled with beer. Who fixed it in place, Gallico? Not your God, I think. And no man has sailed so far south and come back to boast of it.”

“The Ancients mapped out the world in millennia of exploration long before man was born,” the halftroll said confidently. “They had every grain of sand numbered and gave the leaf of every tree a name. They counted the hairs on each man’s head, and knew when a sparrow fell to earth.”

“They had the wits of God, then,” Rol sneered.

“Yes,” Gallico said quietly, “they did.”

“How do you know all this, Gallico?” Creed asked.

“He makes it up,” Rol scoffed, punching the halftroll’s granite bicep playfully. His eyes were cold, though.

“I used to read,” Gallico admitted. “In the days before I fell in with bad company.”

They fell silent. All about them in the fire-stitched darkness that bad company was cavorting and singing and snarling and laughing, as men will when drunk. The beach was a long gray blade with the bright moon-kindled silver of the sea before it and the darkness of the forest behind. Their campfires seemed an intrusion, a presumption in this tranquil wilderness. Strangely enough, only the black silhouette of theRevenant, at anchor a cable from the shore, seemed at one with the black and silver serenity of the night.

“How many were on that transport, you think?” Elias Creed asked no one in particular.

“A battalion maybe,” Gallico rumbled. “Five hundred men.”

“And on the warship?”

“Heavy crews, these Bionari cruisers. Some two hundred.”

“Seven hundred men. Gods above us.”

“What’s your point, Elias?” Rol asked irritably.

“Just this: we’re not mere privateers anymore. This is not piracy-it is warfare.”

“It’s been a rough week,” Rol consoled him. “Have a drink. As soon as we’ve refitted we’ll strike out east, or north or south. Anywhere that takes us away from this goddamned continent and its wars.”

The others said nothing. They knew his words were empty.

A boat put off from the side of theRevenant, sculled by half a dozen of the harbor watch. The crew ran it up the beach in a flash of spray and trudged through the sand, exchanging banter with the men at the campfires as they came. They stopped before Rol, the firelight making uplit masks of their faces.

“Well, Kier, how goes it?” Rol asked, and handed his carpenter a round-bottomed bottle.

The cadaverous little man took a long swallow and passed it to his neighbor.

“The leak is plugged for now, skipper; a couple of planks started. There’s not much else I can do with it, lessen we haul her down or get her back in dock. The stern will take another mort of work too; your cabin windows are gone, frames and all, and the stern-lanterns too.”

“The rudder?”

“It took a glancing shot, nothing much.”

Rol nodded. “So she’ll float, then?”

“Oh, aye, we’re seaworthy-or near as, damn it. She don’t look so pretty, but by God she can take punishment.”

“I saw nine-pound balls bounce off her sides at a thousand yards, like they was peas,” John Imbro, the gunner, volunteered.

“Powder, John?”

“We took some six barrels out of the Bionese, skipper; enough for a dozen broadsides.”

“We have teeth again,” Gallico said with relish.

“That we do, ’Co. And there’s those nine-pounders we salvaged before we burned her. They’ll come in right handy back at the Ka.”

“Who’d you leave on board, John?” Rol asked.

“Gill Whistram and Harry Dade. They’re upright and sober; I checked myself.”

“Good work. Go and get something to eat. There’s fresh game doing the rounds; though what beast it is, I don’t know.”

“Right now, skipper, all I want is a rock to lay my head on; me and Kier both. There’s a lot more to be done tomorrow.” Rol nodded, and the carpenter, the gunner, and their mates left the firelight and staggered out into the darkness.

Gallico raised his savage head. In the moonlight it seemed sculpted out of stone, a gargoyled physiognomy. “Wind’s backing at last,” he said, his nostrils sniffing wide. “Be due north by morning, you see if it’s not. And then we’ll have a long and weary time of it beating back to Ganesh Ka.”

Ganesh Ka, the Hidden City. For Rol and Elias it had once been a fable, nothing more. A city of pirates, its location unknown to the wider world-a tall tale for mariners all about the Twelve Seas. Now they knew it for what it was: a vast and ancient ruin, in which squatted a host of the outlawed and the dispossessed. Murderers, thieves, escaped slaves, or men who simply found the world too small for them; they congregated there on the strength of a legend.

“Not much of a trip,” Rol said. “All blood and thunder, and damn-all to show for it but a pockmarked ship and half a dozen dead shipmates.”

“Seven hundred less Bionari in the world,” Gallico retorted. “There’s treasure for you.”

“You can’t put a corpse in your pocket, or eat one either.”

“I know some who’ve tried,” and Gallico grinned horribly, making them all laugh.

Rol drank from another bottle; they lay all about the beach like flotsam.

“OspreyandSkua are back in fighting trim this long while. It’s not like the Ka is undefended. What say you, Gallico, to a far-foreign cruise? Why not get this wind on our quarter and make for the Gut, and the Outer Reach? There’s fat Mercanter ships there that would make us rich men in a month. We could try and find that Tropic-line of yours, and cut it with our keel.”

“Skuaand Osprey don’t carry such heavy metal as we,” Elias Creed said quietly. “Rol, you know we’re the only ship the Ka has that can take on men-of-war.”

Cortishane stood up, fist clenched around the neck of his bottle. He strode away from the fire-and as he did, a light began to shine in his eyes, cold as the edge of a sword.

“I know, I know. Where would I be, Elias, without you beside me to play mother hen?”

He made his way through the scattered clumps of mariners who were sprawled on the beach about their fires. Here and there he exchanged a word, a wave, a smile. The men respected their captain, esteemed him even. But he knew there was something in his eyes that prevented them from making that full, human connection.

And why not? Rol wondered. After all, I am not human.

He joined Giffon and his improbable infirmary. The company’s wounded had been made comfortable with what slim facilities the ship possessed. For those in unbearable pain, this meant stupefying amounts of hard liquor. Kier Eiserne had run up a crude table for Giffon’s heftier work, and this now stood in the sand with the raw wood of its top dark as mahogany, stained deep with blood. Giffon sat on it wiping his eyes with a filthy rag. At his side was a smeared bundle of tools more suited to carpentry than surgery.

“Giffon. How do they go?”

Giffon was a young, round-faced man with sandy hair and a snub nose. He seemed to be in his early teens, until one looked into his eyes and saw the memories there.

“Al-Hamn and Boravian will do well, I think. The stumps were clean, and I sewed flesh over the bone. Gran Tomasson died this evening.”

“Damn. He was a good man, as good a gun-captain as I’ve ever seen.”

“Half his ribs were gone. I’m amazed he lasted this long. As it is, all those who are still alive now will remain alive, if they can steer clear of fever.”

Rol gestured to the dark stains of the table. “You were cutting again tonight?”

“I didn’t like the smell of Morten’s leg, so I resectioned it again.”

Rol studied his youthful would-be surgeon closely. Giffon was exhausted. He had been looking after the wounded virtually single-handed for a week. Rol had sent seamen to lift and carry for him, and at times they had needed a half-dozen men to hold down some unfortunate when the pain of the saw was too much. But the bulk of the burden was Giffon’s. There was something indomitable about him. Had he the requisite knowledge, this boy might be a real healer. He had that touch. But he was no more than a butcher’s apprentice who had fled a harsh master and been picked up by slavers on the coast of Borhol. The usual abuse had followed, but somehow Giffon had escaped and made his way to the Ka. No one knew how, and the memories in those eyes stopped folk from asking. Like Elias Creed, he had buried his pain so deep there was no longer any way to go delving for it.

“It’s hard, for those of us who live and die in ships,” Rol said gently. “The blade, the shot, the surgeon’s saw-”

“And the deep dark of the sea,” Giffon said. “I know. We can put ships back together that are all but sunk, but when a man has a leg splintered, all we can do is take it off, and hope.”

Rol offered the boy his bottle. “Get drunk, Giffon. That’s an order.”

Giffon’s face twisted into a smile. “Can’t stand the taste of the stuff, skipper. I’d sell someone’s soul for a pint of cold buttermilk, though.”

“There’s wild goats in the hills. Grab ahold of one for long enough and we’ll get Gallico to tug on its teats for you.”

Giffon laughed, a short bark, no more. “I’ll sleep, I think. Skipper?”

“Yes?”

“Are we going back in now? Back to the Ka, I mean. There’s men here who ought to rest in beds ashore.”

Rol sighed. “Yes, Giffon. We’re going home.”

The word was still echoing in his head as he left the lights of the beach behind him and struck out into the woods, the taste of the evening’s rotgut sour in his mouth. The ground rose under the canopy of the trees, bare bones of stone thrusting up through the thin soil. Wild olive, juniper, pine, and cypress, and here and there a poplar, straight as a sentinel. As soon as the firelight had been left behind the night brightened in his sight, becoming clear as day. Part of it was the moonlight; part of it was the nature of the blood that beat through his heart.

He made his sure-footed way up one bald outcrop, and straightening there he found the vast, eldritch expanse of the Inner Reach spread out below him, theRevenant as tiny as a child’s forgotten toy, the campfires mere golden buttons. If he looked east, there was nothing but open sea for two hundred and fifty leagues. Behind him, the bulk of the Goloron Mountains loomed up in long blunted ridges of shadow to claw at the stars.

And what stars. They swirled in sky-spanning horsetails and banners and speckled sweeps of sprinkled silver, here and there the brighter glimmer of something larger. The Mariner. Gabriel’s Fist. Quintillian, the star his grandfather had once told him pointed to their home.

The only real home Rol had ever known was now a burnt-out shell on Dennifrey. His grandfather had died there with a crossbow bolt in his guts, murdered by a mob as his wife had been before him. Because of what ran in his blood.

You are not human, he had told his grandson. Almost his last words. Well, thank you, Grandfather. For raising me in ignorance, for telling me nothing of my heritage or history, until it was too late. You old bastard, long-winded in telling everything but the truth. And now here I am nursemaiding a city full of derelicts, doing the decent thing, keeping the wolf from the door. But what if I am the wolf?

The stars glittered down, everything below them a matter of cold irrelevance. Ganesh Ka had started to become home for him. He did not like that, but had no say in the process. You cannot choose the things you care for, he thought. If only you could.

He closed his eyes, a panoply of memories parading again before that tireless inner eye. And as always the last of them was the white, set face of a beautiful woman, her hair as dark as the wing of a raven. Rowen, the woman he had loved as a boy. His sister, now fighting to make herself a queen. The scalloped scar on the palm of his left hand tingled and he scratched it absently.

They stayed five more days in the sheltered cove, working on the ship, sending out foraging and watering parties, burying the latest of their dead. Elias took a work-party into the forests and came back with a pair of mature trees trimmed down to the trunk. They floated them out to theRevenant and hauled them aboard with tackles to the yardarms, then stowed them with infinite pains on the booms among the ship’s boats. Kier Eiserne was particularly glad to have them aboard; the carpenter had always worried about their lack of spare topmasts.

They hunted game with ship’s pistols, fished over the side, and caught birds inland with nets and quicklime-anything to vary the monotonous shipboard diet of biscuit and salted goat. After the first few days, Rol kept them at watch on watch, so that most of them had four hours of work followed by four hours of rest, around the clock. This was shipboard routine and they were used to it. The only exceptions were the so-called “idlers,” men like the carpenter, the cooper, the blacksmith, the sailmaker, and their mates. These men were only expected to work daylight hours, but still put in sixteen-hour days. A thing as complex as a ship-of-war needed the continual attention of a whole host of specialists, even when she was riding at anchor.

The five days passed, and the efforts of eighty men began to put theRevenant to rights again. The heaviest work was the restowing of the stores in the hold which had been boated ashore to let the carpenter come at the leak. As it was, she would need to be careened or dry-docked to give Kier Eiserne complete peace of mind, but she was ready to face the sea nonetheless. They had been helped by the fact that the ship was not deep in stores; they were only eighty leagues from Ganesh Ka, their cruise cut short by the encounter with the Bionese troopship and her escort. Now it was time to steer north again.

Rol sat in the great cabin, staring landward through the new timber of the stern window-frames. No glass, of course, but Kier had done a beautiful job of replacing the blasted wood. The sun was coming up, and the yellow dawn-light sent the ship’s shadow pouring onto the beach. The watch had been up on deck this last glass or so, making ready to weigh anchor. He could hear the quiet dawn-murmurs of the ship’s company through the deck-head, and yawned, muscles in the sides of his face cracking. Under him, theRevenant was pitching and rolling with a cacophony of creaks and groans, like a horse eager for the off. The wind must have picked up.

A soft knock on the cabin door, and without further ado Gallico twisted his huge form through the doorway. Rol grinned at him crouching there.

“Gods in heaven, Gallico, what in the world ever made you think you’d be comfortable on board a ship?”

The halftroll raised his paws helplessly. “Can I help it if all shipwrights are midgets?”

“How’s the wind?”

“Blowing in our teeth like a cheap tart.”

“Where from?”

“Due north, where else?”

Rol swore. “We need sea-room, then. No point in beating up the coast against it-if it veers it’ll have us on the rocks. What say you to getting it on the larboard beam, making east? There’s the southerly Trades that come up out of Cavaillon this time of year, off the mountains.”

Gallico studied his captain closely. “There is that, I suppose. But they don’t take hold until halfway out in the Reach. That’s a hundred and fifty leagues of blue-water sailing, if it’s an inch.” He paused. “You have no wish to go back to the Ka anytime soon, have you, Rol?”

“I’m thinking of the ship, and her crew.”

“Is it Artimion? He’s not the man he once was.”

Rol stood up. He, too, had to stoop under the deck-beams, and did so without conscious volition. “No, it’s not Artimion. He and I have made our peace. It’s Ganesh Ka itself, Gallico.”

“What about it?”

“Just a feeling, a notion, nothing more.”

“Spit it out before we grow old.”

“Gallico, I have this feeling that Ganesh Ka is unlucky. I think it was unlucky for whoever built it all those centuries or millennia ago, and I think it is for us also.”

Gallico’s eyes blazed. “It has sheltered some of us well enough these thirty years and more.”

More softly, Rol said, “It has sheltered me, too, Gallico. Nevertheless, something in me believes it is doomed, and everyone who remains within it.”

The halftroll’s anger faded, but there was still a hot glare about his eyes. “These Bionari cruisers and troopships?”

“They have something to do with it, yes. We’ve been sending them to the bottom one after another for going on six months now, and still they keep coming. Sooner or later, one will get through. Either that, or our luck will run out, and one of them will sendus to the bottom.”

The halftroll considered this. “That’s as may be, but they’ve always had traffic up and down this coast-to supply their bases south of here. Golgos has a big garrison.”

“Had. We sank most of it in the Reach last spring.”

“You think that’s where they came from?”

“Where else? And now they’re not going to stop sending troops south until they find out what happened to it.”

“They’re fighting a civil war. They’ll give it up in the end-there are bigger fish in their pot.”

“Perhaps. In the meantime, this one ship and crew cannot hold off the entire navy of a great power single-handed.”

Gallico opened his mouth, but what he said was not what had been in his eyes. “Shall we weigh anchor, then?”

“Yes. And set a course due east. Get us out in blue water, Gallico.”

“You’re the captain,” the halftroll said, and his huge frame disappeared through the doorway with startling swiftness.

Rol stared after him. I’m become like Grandfather, he thought. I can mix truth and lies and make them sound the same.

Due east they steered, the wind on the larboard bow and the yards braced round as sharp as they could haul them, a quilt of staysails keeping the courses company, and all bellied taut and drawing with creaks and groans as the wind continued to freshen into a blue-water blow. They made better than forty leagues a day for three days, and then the wind began to fail them. It backed round, became whimsical and inconstant, and both watches grew weary trying to guess its next move. Four more days of wallowing and twitching and cursing Ran under their breath for his capriciousness, and then the storm-god or his spouse grew tired of toying with them, and let go their bag of winds.

The true southerlies off Cavaillon began, no more than a zephyr at first, then growing in brashness until the air was washing through the rigging with a hiss of glee. They altered course to west-nor’west, took the wind on the quarter, and spread courses, topsails, topgallants, every stitch of canvas they could rig on the yards. They were four hundred long sea-miles from Ganesh Ka, but at this constant ten knots they would run it off in two days.

Or would have, if Ran had not decided otherwise. The splendid southerlies slackened a day later to a steady breeze, no more. Their speed came down, and soon they were cruising along sedately with the beakhead barely pitching. They resigned themselves to it, as mariners must if they are not to go mad, and the convalescing wounded, at least, were glad of the ship’s easier pace. There was less banging of stumps or twisting of broken limbs, or bumping of burnt flesh.

Thirteen days and nights had passed since the battle with the Bionari. Though Kier Eiserne made a formal and lugubrious report to his captain every morning concerning the fragile state of theRevenant ’s hull, the days of sailing were uneventful. They were well found in stores, fresh and preserved, and all of the more obvious damage to the ship had been repaired, even down to the replacing of starboard number three’s gun carriage. Giffon was able to come on deck and sun his pallid, moon-shaped face more often as his charges healed, and Rol made a point of inviting him to dinner in the great cabin more than once.

TheRevenant ’s captain never dined alone. Gallico and Elias Creed were permanent fixtures-Gallico seated on a specially strengthened stool-and often the gunner or the bosun or the carpenter would be invited also. The youngest of the topmen would serve the food, one standing behind each diner, and they were compensated for their servitude by drinking glass for glass with the guests and joining in the conversation whenever the whim took them. Though the ship’s company was in many ways a rigid hierarchy, it was not an oppressive one, and when dinner was over the diners would repair to the quarterdeck and join in the tale-telling and song-singing which usually sprang up in the waist with the last dogwatch.

A clear night sky, with skeins of cloud drifting ghostlike before the magnificent sweep of the stars. The moon was a wide-bladed sickle halfway back to the full, and the ship was coursing along at no more than four knots, the sails drawing without strain to the yards. Rol stood at the break of the quarterdeck and listened along with most of the crew as the bosun, Fell Amertaz, a man as hard and fearsome as any pirate in a landsman’s imagination, sang a ballad of his native Augsmark, the tears trickling unashamedly into his iron-gray beard. The ship’s company listened respectfully, for Amertaz, though given to sentimentality, was a hard-handed bastard to cross.

“It must be a fine thing,” Elias Creed said quietly, “to be able to call one place home, one land your own, even if you never go back to it.”

“Your father was an Islander, wasn’t he, Elias? From Andelys?”

“So he was. But my mother was a ship’s slave and I was born on board theBarracuda. ”

Rol smiled wryly. “Once I was told that I, too, had been born aboard a ship.”

“Then we are brothers in that, Rol-men with no country to call our own.”

Rol gestured to the ranks of privateers listening intently to Amertaz’s song. “You imagine any of them think of themselves as citizens of here or there? We belong to the sea, Elias. As for our home, we stand upon it.”

“Some of them think of Ganesh Ka as home.”

“Ah, yes.” Rol stared up at the towering intricacies of the mainmast as it loomed above them. All those tons of timber and canvas and cordage, balanced and designed to take the wind and with it move the little world that sustained them across this vast inimical wilderness that men named the sea.

“Sometimes it doesn’t profit a man too much to know where his home lies. It’s just one more thing that can be taken away from him,” Rol said with some bitterness.

“A man must fight for something, or somewhere or someone, or else he is no more than an animal,” Creed said quietly.

“We are worse than animals,” Rol answered him. “We will fight for nothing, simply for the joy of fighting; and if our conscience pricks us afterward, some will give that joy a name, and call it patriotism. That’s where it leads you, Elias, that possession of a home to call your own.”

“A man may fight for many things,” Creed countered. “What he thinks is right or wrong-”

“And who are we to judge what is right and what is wrong, Elias Creed, convict, pirate? Killer of men. Right and wrong is a matter of opinion-or of fashion.”

“Are you trying to tell me-” Creed began with some heat.

“Do you smell that?” It was Gallico. He had joined them at the quarterdeck rail with that odd graceful speed it was so remarkable to see. He had lifted his head and was sniffing the wind.

“What is it?” Rol asked at once. They had learned long ago to trust Gallico’s nose.

“I smell shit.”

“We’ve been talking it this last glass and more.” Creed grinned.

“No. It’s coming down the wind. Human shit.”

The smile slipped off Creed’s face. “A slaver?”

“Must be. The stink can drift for miles with a good breeze.”

Rol went to the taffrail and stared over the ship’s wake, slightly phosphorescent under the sickle moon. Nothing on the horizon, not so much as a gull. The starlit night was vast and empty. Yet Gallico was seldom wrong.

Then Rol caught it himself. A land smell, heavy and alien to the cool freshness of the sea-breeze. “They’re astern of us. Masthead there! Look aft. What do you see?”

The lookout was perched comfortably in the foretop. At Rol’s hail, he started, and quickly swarmed up the shrouds to the cap of the foretopmast. “Nothing, sir!”

“He’ll see damn-all from there, looking aft,” Gallico muttered.

Rol turned to the quartermasters at the wheel, one of whom was old Morcam, a foul-smoking pipe clenched between his carious teeth.

“Starboard two points.”

The wheel was spun without question or comment. The ship turned right through some twenty degrees. Watching the yards Rol saw the courses slacken and bulge and crack as the mizzen ate into their wind. He stepped forward. In the waist, Amertaz had stopped singing, and the ship’s company was staring aloft, wondering. Then all eyes came to rest on their captain.

“Take in the mizzen-course,” Rol said. He glanced aloft again, his mind working with the variables. “Take in topgallants. Douse all lights. Lookouts to all three mastheads. Imbro, fill cartridge for two broadsides. Quirion, arms chests to the waist.” Then, slightly louder, “All hands. All hands on deck.”

The crowds of men who a moment before had been sitting listening, smoking, exchanging banter, broke up at once. The decks rumbled with the smothered thunder of their bare feet, and the mizzen topmen came scampering aft. Within a few seconds the ratlines were black with climbing figures, deck-lanterns had been blown out, and the gunner, the master-at-arms, and their mates had disappeared below. It never failed to give Rol pleasure to watch this-his crew going about their business with the purposeful efficiency of true professionals.

As soon as the mizzen lookout was up in the topgallant shrouds, Rol hailed him. “Generro, what do you see astern?”

Generro was a lithe, dark-haired young man with the eyes of a peregrine, the arms of a moderate ape, and an absurdly pretty face. “Vessel on the horizon, skipper, dead astern! She comes and goes, nowhere near hull-up yet.”

“Odds are she won’t have seen our lights. Damn that fool moon. Gallico, what do you know of slavers?”

The halftroll bared his fangs a little farther. “They’re swift sailers; they have to be to get their cargoes to port alive-or half-alive, at any rate. I’d say this fellow is bound out of Cavaillon, one of the great markets there such as Astraro. And on this course he’ll be making for ancient Omer, biggest auction-port of live flesh you’ll find north of the Gut.”

“Omer of the black walls. Yes, I know it.”

“They’re fore-and-aft-rigged for the most part, slavers, flush-decked and narrow in the beam. Everything for speed.”

“They’d outrun us, then.”

“Given anything like a fair wind, yes. But it’s a southerly we’ve got here, a stern wind-not good for his lateens, if that’s truly what he has shipped.”

“How many would they carry?”

“Slaves? A vessel much the same size as us would reckon on cramming in some five hundred.”

Rol whistled softly. “Five hundred! How do they carry stores for so many mouths?”

“They don’t,” Gallico said glumly. “A certain amount of wastage is acceptable.”

“What kind of price do slaves bring on the block these days? We could be looking at a fortune here.”

“You’re joking, I know.” Gallico looked positively dangerous.

Rol smiled without humor. “Of course. Now, how’s about we figure a way to steal the weather-gage from this fellow?”

It was a dreamlike night, the sea hardly chopping up under the steady southerly, the ship gliding along like a ghost, orders issued by the ship’s officers not in their usual bark, but in ridiculously low tones. Sound carried over the surface of the sea at night; a man’s sneeze might be heard a mile away downwind. Rol took theRevenant ever more steadily out to the west, and unfurled almost everything from the topmasts down; the topgallants were too high to risk their prey catching a glimpse of them over the horizon. The lookouts reported the progress of the slaver in hoarse, furtive shouts. She came on northward, expecting nothing, and being a private ship and not a man-ofwar, she had taken in a few reefs of sail for the night so as to reduce speed a little in the dark hours. Her crew had no inkling that out in the wastes of the sea close by there loomed a three-hundred-ton predator waiting for the moment to strike.

Rol moved in just before dawn, packing on every sail theRevenant possessed. They had the southerly on the starboard quarter by then, and were coming up on the slaver’s larboard quarter. The sun rose up almost full in their faces, springing up out of the molten bosom of the ocean, and at the same moment the sleepy lookout on the slaver finally saw them, and the xebec-for such it was-came to startled life. Men hammered up her rigging like ants and began letting out the reefs in the big lateens. The slaver picked up speed at once, but the balance had already tipped against her. Rol had the guns run out and the crew of number-one starboard fired a twelve-pound ball across her bows that lashed her fo’c’sle with spray, so close did it skip to her hull. Men were running about the xebec’s decks, shouting and pointing at the black ship that was powering down on them with the sun rising upon her yards and her guns run out like the grin of so many teeth. TheRevenant ran in under the slaver’s stern, stealing her wind, and there Rol backed topsails and lay-to with his broadside naked and leering at the xebec’s vulnerable stern. The big lateens fell slack, and banged against the yards impotently. Rol clambered forward into the bowsprit and yelled across two hundred yards of sea, “Heave to, or I sink you!”

The Cavaillic ensign at the slaver’s mizzen jerked, then came down in submission, though the Mercanter pennant remained snapping and twisting at her mainmast. Her crew ceased their frenzied running about and stood silent on her deck like men condemned. And about the two ships, predator and prey, a terrible stench arose, and from the hull of the wallowing xebec there came the wailing of hundreds of voices, a host of people in torment.

The Revenant possessed two eighteen-foot cutters, which sculled eight oars apiece. Getting these off the waist booms and into the sea by tackles from the yardarms took some time, however, and Rol went below to the great cabin while the ship’s company manhandled the heavy sea-boats overboard. He came back on deck with his cross-staff and took a reading off the swift-rising sun, grunting with satisfaction at the result. “Gallico,” he called. “Sidearms and swords to the cutter-crews. And Giffon is to come across also with whatever he thinks he might need. And get some water-casks out of the hold-whatever you think necessary.” The heavy stench had enveloped both ships now, swamping even the powder-smell of the burning match in the tubs, and the wailing aboard the slaver would bring out a cold sweat on the most hardened of men. The Revenants were no faint-hearts, but even they looked uneasy.

“Elias,” Rol said. “Keep them busy, will you?” The ex-convict nodded. Under his deep tan, the blood had left his face.

Eventually the two cutters put off for the xebec, filled to the gunwales with heavily armed men and all manner of stores. The slaver was low in the water, and the Revenants clambered over her sides with the agility of wharf-rats. Rol fought the urge to gag at the miasma of filth that shrouded the ship, and snapped at the petrified crew, “Where’s the master?”

He came forward clutching his ship’s papers and setting knuckle to forehead like a peasant greeting his lord. “Here, Captain. Grom Mindorin, master of theAstraros. ”

“What’s your cargo?”

“Three hundred and seventy-odd head, bound out of Astraro for Omer. Captain, we are a Mercanter ship.”

“What of it?”

“I thought perhaps-”

“You thought wrong. Show me your hold. I wish to see the cargo.”

They went below. The sun was climbing up a cloudless sky, and despite the lateness of the year the heat of it beat down on the decks. Rol felt sweat trickling down the small of his back. All the hatches had bolt-fastened gratings that let in almost no light or air. Mindorin, bobbing his head apologetically, led Rol first to the stern-cabin, where he lit a lantern, then he made his way forward along a gloomy companionway. The stench grew worse, if that was possible, though the wailing had given way to a low murmuring, punctuated by the odd sharp cry, like that of a rabbit taken by a stoat.

They went through a reinforced bulkhead-every door in the ship had bolts to it-and at once the flame in the lantern burned blue and guttered low. Mindorin raised it up, his face streaming with sweat. The close, fetid air was hard to breathe, the smell almost a physical presence, pressing about their faces.

“Gods of the world,” Rol croaked.

The compartment ran almost the full length of the ship, some twenty-five yards. It had been divided up horizontally by a stout wooden platform, so that there were two decks in front of Rol, each less than a yard high. A thick carpet of bodies lay on both of these, chained by the ankles, feet to feet. Hundreds of people, turning feebly, twitching, moaning, sobbing, or lying inert. All caked in their own filth, bloodied by the chains that bound them. All in darkness. The lantern was of little use, but Rol’s preternatural vision spared him none of the details. There were men, women, and children here, mixed indiscriminately, all of them naked and plastered in their own excreta, dull eyes sunken in their heads, skulls shaven down to the skin. Corpses lying amid them with maggots working busily about every orifice. Lice in clusters the size of marbles, and here and there a venturesome rat crawling over the dead and the living unmolested.

A wondering fury blazed up in Rol’s heart. He understood Gallico better now. But he stood there for a long moment, mastering the rage, beating it down. When he turned to Mindorin again, his voice was quiet, even.

“You will unlock these chains, and get these people on deck.”

The slaver’s master shrank from the light of those eyes. “Aye, sir, at once. I’ll get the keys. One minute, and I’ll have them-”

“Get your crew down here, every last one of them. You will bring these people water and food. You will wash them.”

“Anything, Captain, anything.” Mindorin scuttled away, falling over backward in his haste.

Rol bent low and hunkered his way through the dense-packed morass of humanity, sometimes reduced by the lack of headroom to crawling on his hands and knees. Tar from the hot deckhead fell on his shoulders and his boots slipped and shifted in liquid filth. Here was a young woman, dead, staring. Between her legs the corpse of a baby, which had issued out of her long before full term. A clenched, gray, globular thing gnawed by rats and running with maggots. But Rol could still make out the tiny fingers closed in fists.

Here, two men had strangled each other with their chains and were locked in a last embrace. Here a child, a girl not more than five years old, with the flesh on her ankles eaten down to the bone by the shackles. Rol could feel the eyes of hundreds on him as he made his noisome way down the compartment. People called to him hoarsely in languages he did not understand. Some struggled to their bloody and yellow-scabbed elbows, then fell back again. Just as he thought he could bear it no more his gaze was caught by that of a young boy, ten years old maybe. His limbs were stick-thin and lice-tracks were raw and red all over his narrow chest. The boy was smiling emptily. Beside him was an older man, the oldest Rol had seen here. For some reason he had been allowed to retain a full, gray beard. His eyes were dark, and lively with intelligence. They regarded Rol with grave appraisal, as though weighing up the defects and deliberations of his soul. Rol tried to speak to him, but his throat had closed.

Back up on deck, he breathed in the clear, clean air deeply. He could feel the vermin of the slave-hold crawling over his skin, and began plucking at his clothes. “Quirion!”

“Aye, sir.” The burly master-at-arms had a naked cutlass in his hand, and the point of it twitched as though it ached to be in use.

“The crew of this ship will unchain all the slaves and get them on deck. The slaves will be watered, fed, and hosed down. Then that crew will go below and clean out the slave-deck with swabs. On their hands and knees, Quirion.”

“Hands and knees, sir.”

Naked now, Rol sprang to the ship’s rail. “Get rid of those rags,” he said, and then dived overboard.

The cold plunge of the water, the clean salt bite of the sea. He dived deep, deep as he had ever gone, trying to leave behind the filth that coated his skin, the filth he felt to be within.

Three