This Forsaken Earth Read online

  A huge shadow fell over the Revenant, a choking fog that was the powder-smoke of the man-of-war’s broadside, drifting on the wind like a curse. Rol could taste it acrid on his tongue. His eyes smarted.

  Kier Eiserne, the ship’s carpenter, hauled himself up the companionway and sketched a greeting in the air with one fist, his words drowned out by the thunder of the Revenant’s return broadside, largely impotent—the ebbing tide was working against Gallico and his two dozen straining at the spring. They were coming round, but slowly. The tide rushing out of the bay was pushing the ship clockwise, with the spring-anchor at her stern the pivot upon which she turned.

  The powder-cloud passed over, and they were in brilliant sunshine again.

  “…below the waterline, but we’ve plugs in place,” Kier was saying. “I need men for the pumps.” His wedge-shaped face twitched with worry for the ship’s bowels.

  “What’s she making?” Rol demanded.

  “Three foot in the well and gaining maybe a foot a glass. It’s not the shot-holes—she must have been pierced when she touched the rocks.”

  “Can you get at the leak?”

  “I need more men, to shift the water-casks. It’s somewhere under the main hold.”

  “Damn the water-casks. Pump them out, or break them up if you have to, but get that leak, Kier. I’ll give you more men when I can.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Creed appeared at Rol’s side. “That son of a bitch is changing course. He’s going to come round east of the Assassins. He’s coming out.”

  Rol considered. There was a momentary lull in the tremendous hammering of broadsides as both crews concentrated on the maneuvering of their vessels. He lifted his head—how blue the sky was—and felt the wind. It was still veering. Northeast, and soon to be east-nor’east. Once it came round the tail-end of the Assassins, the enemy ship would have it on the stern—and she would be upwind of the pinioned Revenant. She would have the weather-gage. Rol swore quietly.

  “Slip that blasted cable, Elias, but buoy the anchor. We may come back for it.”

  “Aye, sir.” Obviously relieved, Elias ran aft and began shouting at Gallico and the men hauling there.

  The rope was cut. They would need a power of ship’s stores to make up for today’s profligacy—if they made it through today. The end of the cable had been attached to a longline and buoyed with a pair of pigs’ bladders, which now bobbed astern in some derision. The Revenant took the wind at once. It was on the larboard quarter. “Gallico!” Rol called. “Mizzen-course and jibs. Elias, reload and run out the guns but hold your fire. Morcam, pass the word for the gunner.”

  Once again the beauty of the day struck him. The white spangle of the sunlight on the sea, the honey-colored stone of the Oronthir coast, now full astern. The sand-martins carving gleeful arcs out of the air.

  Beneath Rol’s feet, the Revenant came round at last, her fragile stern hidden from the enemy guns. Now, let’s see your nine-pounders break these scantlings, Rol thought with a jet of hatred.

  The gunner, John Imbro. A burly native of far-off Vryheyd, he had a full yellow beard and a pink-bald scalp. When drunk he would declare himself born with a head upside down. His face shone with sweat as if greased, except for the matt-black smudges in the sockets of his eyes.

  “John, how are we for shot and powder?”

  “Enough for another four broadsides, sir—”

  “What? Ran’s arse—”

  “The leak below got into the powder store and has soaked all but two barrels of best white long-grain. It’ll be a week’s work ashore to dry out the rest.”

  “There’s nothing else? What about the fine stuff?”

  “Oh, it’s still snug and dry—but it’ll only be of use in swivels and sidearms. Cram it into a twelve-pounder and you may as well fart at yonder bastards.”

  “Do what you can, John.”

  The gunner stumped away unhappily.

  Rol studied the enemy man-of-war. Some eight hundred yards away, it was now off the larboard quarter, upwind and running out its guns. They were slow to reload—the Revenant’s earlier broadsides must have thinned out the crew. Rol turned to the quartermasters at the wheel. “South-southeast, as sharp as you can.”

  The wheel spun, creaking, and the ship’s beakhead made the turn to larboard as another broadside thundered out of the enemy vessel. One second, two, and then the nine-pound balls were whistling about their ears, chopping blocks out of the rigging, ripping through the courses. A loud clang as one clipped the bow anchor and whipped across the fo’c’sle. Someone screamed forward, a hoot more of outrage than of pain.

  “Hold your fire!” Rol bellowed at the gun-crews in the waist. Four broadsides. What to do with them?

  “We could make a run for it. No shame in that—it’s been a bloody morning.” This was Gallico, at Rol’s side once more.

  “No; that’s to leave the job half done. And who’s to say we mauled him badly enough to stop him following? No—we must fight it out, Gallico.”

  “We’ll board, then.”

  Rol caught his first mate’s eye, though he had to crane his neck to do so. He smiled bleakly. “That’s the way of it. Best get the arms chests into the waist. All the pistols we have. And one more crew to help with the swivels.” He paused. “What about our people?”

  “Six dead, or will be before the day is out,” the halftroll said tersely. “Another thirteen taken below.”

  “We must get ourselves a surgeon, one of these days.”

  “Aye. Giffon can take off a leg quick enough, but he’s all thumbs when it comes to the fine work.”

  The two ships were on parallel courses now, their bows pointed toward the open sea. The wind had veered round to east-nor’east and was still freshening, as it did this time of year, pushed out to the ocean by warm masses of clouds forming inland. Rol estimated they were making a good six knots, though he was not going to check for sure; the ship’s company was busy enough. Under Gallico, Creed, and Fell Amertaz, the bosun, they worked to splice and knot the loose-flying rigging, scatter the deck with more sand, replace the match-coils that had burned out, and bring up the last of the powder-cartridges from the powder-room, where Imbro and his mates were scooping and weighing the deadly stuff into the cloth bags which would be thrust down the gaping maws of the guns.

  Four broadsides.

  “He’s packing on more sail, skipper,” Morcam said from the wheel. Rol looked back over the shattered taffrail. Sure enough, their enemy was unfurling topsails, topgallants, even weather studding-sails. They would prove awkward if he had to fire his windward broadside.

  “He’s a bloody-minded bastard, I’ll give him that.”

  “They’re getting rid of their dead,” said one of the swivel-gunners. The men on the quarterdeck went silent, watching. Rol counted twenty-six splashes in the pink wake of the enemy. “Morcam,” he said. “Jig your steering. Put a few nicks in her wake, like we’re having trouble with the rudder.”

  Morcam grinned. “Aye, sir.”

  “Gallico!”

  “What now, damn it?”

  “Make like a winged duck. Spill a little wind. Lose us a few knots. Elias, get the boarders out of sight in the waist. Four broadsides when I give the word, and then we board her in the smoke.” Elias nodded.

  They ran on, less swiftly now. The topmen were loosening the braces, letting the yards jink and swing in the wind. The sails cracked and boomed as the air behind them spilled round their slack leeches and clews.

  Rol felt Fleam stir at his hip; she knew what was coming. He set his palm on the pommel of the scimitar and felt the trembling eagerness that ran right through the blade. As always, something of that bloodlust communicated itself to him, a momentary, dizzying mote of pleasure.

  “She’s coming up hand over fist, skipper,” Morcam said. “Seems she has the same idea as us.”

  “Bionese,” Gallico said, and spat over the bulwark.

  The enemy had cleared away his ch
asers and now they were firing deliberately, first the larboard, then the starboard. He had altered course two, three points, and was barely two cables away. Rol could see the crowd of Bionese marines packed together on his fo’c’sle, armor winking in the sun. Bionari men-of-war carried large contingents of marines when they were not going far foreign; they trusted their soldiers more than their sailors.

  “Morcam, when I give the word, hard a larboard. Gallico, at the same time, back topsails. Elias, wait for my command.” The air seemed to crackle in the confines of the ship, a tenseness that showed in the whites of men’s eyes. Rol breathed in deeply, watching his enemy, taking in the wind, the swell, the swaying statues arrayed about the remaining guns, the sweat glimmering in the pleats of their backbones. He saw fragments of timber and wreckage drift by the side of the Revenant and realized they had retraced their steps all the way out to the scene of the first battle of the morning. A troop-transport, shot to pieces even as its passengers came sculling in the ship’s boats for the Revenant in a desperate attempt to take her hand-to-hand. A few bodies still littered the swells of the Inner Reach, though most had sunk like stones. What kind of vainglorious fool would wear steel armor aboard ship?

  A second lot of vainglorious fools was almost upon them.

  “Hard a larboard,” he said to Morcam. A nod was enough for Gallico. The deck tilted inboard under their feet as the ship came round. They could hear the rudder groan and the tiller-ropes creak as they fought the pressure of the water beneath them. The enemy warship’s beakhead was now pointed directly at their side. Gallico’s topmen backed topsails and the wind took the ship back so dramatically that many of the crew were staggered. The yards complained and flexed, but nothing gave.

  “Gun-crews—fire!” Rol shouted.

  The five remaining sakers of the broadside bellowed out in one terrific roar, the knees of the ship groaning at the tons of iron blasted backward, only to be brought up short by the deep twang of the breeching.

  “Reload, reload, reload,” Rol was repeating childishly. He peered through the powder-smoke and saw the enemy ship bearing down on them like an appalled giant. She had begun to yaw, but then had fallen off. Her fo’c’sle was a slaughterhouse, scarlet remnants of her marines hanging from the very yards and smeared all over the forecourse.

  The Revenants got in one more broadside at pistol-shot. Rol saw the Bionese ship’s foremast stagger, then it came down over her chasers. One of her knightheads had been blasted clean away. She had slowed, but was still coming on.

  “Gallico, weather gangway!” Rol shouted, drawing Fleam for the second time that day and leaping down from the quarterdeck into the mad fury of the gun-crews in the waist.

  “Give her two more, lads—then join Gallico and me on the gangway. Point them low, into the hull. Rake the bastards!”

  A hoarse cheer—or rather, a collective growl—went up. Rol clapped Elias Creed on the shoulder, missed, and ended up slapping his face. Laughing, he ran up to the gangway, where he found his first mate and a dozen others who were firing pistols at the enemy bows, then ducking down to reload them with an absurdly childish air of mischief.

  “Hold on now,” Gallico said.

  The Bionese ship struck amidship, and the Revenant shuddered at the impact. But it was not a wicked blow, more like a man whose shoulder has been jostled in the street. They were a taller, weightier ship than the enemy, and the Revenant’s tumblehome created a gap between the shot-splintered bows of the Bionese and her own bulwarks.

  Two more broadsides, the swivels barking their two-pound loads of grapeshot and shrapnel—anything their gunners could find to cram into them. The snapping rattle of pistols fired gleefully at anything that moved. The enemy maintop-mast came down, and then the mizzen—they must have been almost shot through earlier in the fight.

  The sakers stopped firing. Their crews boiled up out of the waist onto the gangway, yelling, eyes red as cherries, faces smoke-black. Some seventy Revenants paused on the larboard gangway of their ship and stared down at the enemy man-ofwar, treading on one another’s toes and wincing at the jab of neighbors’ cutlasses.

  “Revenants! Follow me!” Rol shrieked, holding Fleam as upright as a banner. With a roar, the crowd of men scrambled over the side of their ship and down to the bows of the pitching enemy vessel. Gallico made fast a grapnel in the gammoning of her broken bowsprit. Men panted and shouted and gouged bloody slivers out of their hands as they climbed over the wrecked headrails, through gaping holes with fringes of sharp wood that tore the shirts from their backs. They swarmed over the fo’c’sle of the Bionese vessel like a plague, wide, bloodshot eyes starting out of their heads.

  Nothing moved in all that tangled mass of wreckage and shredded cordage and shattered spars. All along the decks, flesh, wood, and iron had been beaten into one unholy, pulped mess from which trickled streams of blood that brightened the brown stains venting from the scuppers. The enemy vessel was a dead thing, which even the wind could no longer stir to life. The Revenants stared around themselves in heavy wonder, as if uncertain as to who could have brought such a thing to pass. A silence fell, broken only by the weary creak and groan of seaborne wood, the death rattle of a tall fighting ship. There was a moment almost of reverence.

  “This,” Rol said, “is victory.”

  Two

  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 the Revenant, 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 y
our 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 the Revenant, 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.”