This Forsaken Earth Page 29

  “You know the tower you’re looking for?” Rol asked Creed.

  “It’s not far off the square. Nearly all the slaves were billeted there.”

  “Go to it, Elias, and don’t let them bring too much baggage. If anyone disputes your passage, shoot them.”

  Creed raised the pistol-barrel to his temple in mock salute. He looked profoundly unhappy.

  “And Elias, if you see Esmer, bring her with you. Get her on a boat.”

  “I’ll try, Rol.” Face set, Creed stalked off briskly enough, accompanied by Gil Whistram and Harry Dade—good, sound men.

  The square was full of quarreling and arguing people. The cooking-fires were burning low, and that added to the hellish unreality of the scene. The refugees who had followed him out of Myconn had drawn themselves up in a corner like a ragged band of fearful children. Strangers here, they did not know what to make of this rancorous uproar; perhaps it was a normal occurrence. Rol saw relief in their eyes as he strode up to them.

  “On your feet,” he said brusquely. “There’s no time to talk. You have to come with me. We’re putting to sea.”

  Incomprehension, panic. Rol turned to Quirion. “Get them up, and herd them down to the quays. Keep them together.” The master-at-arms looked both startled and dubious. Rol grasped his arm. “Do it, Quirion. Don’t fuck around.”

  They herded the emaciated, ragged band together like wolves hounding sheep. There was no time for gentleness or explanation; that would have garnered too much attention from the others in the square. Blows were exchanged, people knocked to their knees. Rol saw blood glisten scarlet in the firelight. “What are you doing to us?” someone wailed.

  “Get on your feet,” he snapped, and hauled a rail-thin woman off the floor. “Follow my shipmates. Trust me.”

  Trust me. The ghost of Michal Psellos must be laughing now.

  Someone at his elbow. So tense was he that he raised Fleam. Aveh, the carpenter. “Shouldn’t you be on the Astraros?” he asked the man irritably.

  “I was off at the northern stores with a working-party. Miriam is handing out food and weapons. Captain, Bionese marines have been sighted up the coast, two or three full regiments. A shepherd-boy brought the news only an hour ago. Miriam sent me to find you.”

  “Gods in heaven,” Rol said. “How far?”

  “Five, six leagues. They’re marching in the dark, in unfamiliar country, but they’ll be here before morning.” Aveh looked at the brutal work in hand and asked, “Do you need some help?”

  Rol lifted a crying teenage girl off the ground; even to his weakened muscles she felt light as a bundle of rags. He handed her to Aveh and she buried her face in the carpenter’s shoulder. “Yes. Help me. We must get these people down to the docks.”

  Quirion, Rol’s hardened master-at-arms, had been a privateer most of his life, and before that a sell-sword for Augsmark, Auxierre, half the kingdoms in the Mamertine League. Now he held a skull-faced, sexless child to his breast with one arm and in the other he brandished a ship’s pistol. His eyes were full of incredulous rage. “What happened to these people?”

  “Never mind,” Rol snapped. “Keep them moving.”

  They made their tortuous way back down to the ship-cavern—a stop-start, infuriating, exhausting half-mile odyssey. Their progress was punctuated by bursts of violence, brandished pistols, Quirion kicking his way forward to the front of the line. Rol’s strength began to fail him, and his knees buckled. Aveh’s fingers fastened on his bicep and raised him up again. The carpenter was immensely strong, but he could not bear all of Rol’s weight on his one free arm. The press of bodies grew intense. Someone took Rol’s other arm and kept him from falling. It was Esmer, narrow-eyed and fierce as a cat. “Keep your damn feet on the floor!” she shouted at him, braids flying.

  The wharves were packed again. Artimion had disappeared, and all order had vanished. The bigger ships of the Ka, the Skua, the Osprey—both flush-decked brigs—and the Astraros, had slipped their moorings and were being towed out to the open water of the harbor by their ship’s boats. Their decks were crammed with people and around them the water was stubbled with the bobbing heads of dozens more, desperate to climb aboard. The Revenant’s heavy cutter was still there, and all the other boats of the ship; light cutter, launch, and captain’s skiff. Their crews were clubbing people from the gunwales with their oars. Elias Creed stood on the lip of the quay with a naked cutlass, eyes blazing, blood trickling from a gash at the side of his mouth.

  Rol struggled to his side through the mob. “Load the boats!” he yelled. There were bodies at his feet, but he did not look down. “Get as many as you can aboard without swamping them.”

  The ex-convict nodded. “Rol, I only found a couple of dozen. The rest—” He gestured helplessly at the faces of the crowd.

  “I know, Elias. We did our best. Get them aboard now.”

  They filed the Bionese refugees aboard the boats through a gauntlet of the ship’s company, hardened mariners not afraid to use their weapons. Some had wives in the Ka, children lost somewhere beyond that howling mob, but they stood to their posts and held back the desperate throng at sword- and pistol-point. People spat in their faces, threw stones, cursed them, and vowed revenge.

  Rol was the last to leave the quay. He clambered aboard the heavy cutter and pushed her off from the stone with his boot. Someone tried to leap past him and Fleam flicked up without his will to slash the unfortunate open from crotch to breastbone. The corpse splashed into the water. A cry went up. A stone swooped past his head. In his fist, Fleam quivered in pleasure, and he sheathed the scimitar with revulsion.

  The cutter was low in the water, the crew barely able to ship their oars for the mass of people cowering within. The sailors used them like giant paddles instead, and slowly drew away from the wharves. Musket-shots, echoing off the cavern walls. People wailed and shouted and fell tumbling from the wharves and fought one another in the water. Some threw torches at the departing boats.

  The cutter was paddled out of the ship-cavern, into the harbor with its mighty encircling arms of stone. Rol looked up to see the stars overhead, a sliver of moon. The tide was still just on the ebb, and it took their keel, slid them quietly along with the plash of the oars. The water around them was thick with small-craft of all sizes and rigs, and ahead the yards of the three ships stood stark against the paler stone. The noise died away. No one spoke in the boat.

  Twenty-one

  THE MARK OF RAN

  A RAT-TAG FLOTILLA, THEY ANCHORED TOGETHER around the Revenant and transferred their wretched cargoes to the larger vessels. Rol came aboard to find Gallico standing on the starboard gangway, his face a desolation.

  “Is this all?” he asked. “You must go back for more.”

  The Revenants rigged tackles to the yardarms and began hauling the weaker occupants of the boats aboard like sacks of grain. “There’s no going back,” Rol said. “We barely made it away afloat.”

  “I’ll go back. Let me take the cutters in again, Rol. We have space for more.”

  “No. Gallico, that place is not Ganesh Ka anymore. It belongs to a maddened mob. You take the boats back in and they’ll sink them under you.”

  “Now, listen—”

  “That’s an order, Gallico. As soon as the boats are back on the booms we weigh anchor. It’s over.”

  Gallico glared at him with something like hatred in his shining eyes.

  “Where’s Miriam, Artimion?”

  “I don’t know. The Bionese have landed up the coast. They’re on the march as we speak, whole regiments. We have to get away.”

  Gallico’s great fist came up and grasped the front of Rol’s tunic. Gaunt though he was, the strength in the halftroll’s arm was startling.

  “He’s right, Gallico.” This was Elias Creed, climbing aboard with his mouth still bloody. “We can do no more. We’ve saved all we can.”

  Gallico released Rol. “The wind has backed to east-nor’east,” he said formally. “The
tide will be on the flood in two turns of the glass.”

  “Then we must put out to sea as soon as we can, and claw off this coast.”

  “What course shall I set?” Gallico asked.

  “Due south, reefed courses and jib.”

  “You’re the captain,” Gallico snapped. And he walked away.

  “Let him go,” Elias said, as Rol tried to follow. “It’s not you. He knows. He just has to get over it.”

  The small boats surrounding them were already sculling down the coast in an ungainly gaggle, their oars striking up white water from the darkened surface of the sea. The Astraros, the Skua, and the Osprey were making sail. Rol hailed the nearest: Thef Gaudo on the xebec.

  “Due south, Thef—pass it on to the brigs!”

  “Due south, aye aye—glad you made it, skipper.”

  “Elias, throw lines to the smaller boats. We’ll tow them if they can’t keep up.”

  Aveh and Esmer had joined them at the gangway, looking landward. “I see lights,” the carpenter said.

  They were springing up all over the shoreline, disembodied in the dark, some larger than others.

  “They’re burning the place,” Esmer said, astonished. “Is it the Bionese? Have they arrived already?”

  They watched, transfixed, as the fires spread. Not in one single wave, but in dozens of discrete glows, licking out of the stone windows that peppered the seaward sides of the towers and the cliffs. It looked almost as though the Hidden City were finally coming to life, lighting up for some unknown celebration, unafraid of watching eyes at last.

  “We’re burning it,” Rol answered him. “We’re doing it to ourselves, room by room.”

  The looming towers were outlines above a saffron blaze now, a bloom of fire. As they watched, there was an incredible mushrooming ball of flame that rose up hundreds of feet, and a second later the air shook with the deep thunder of the explosion. They all ducked instinctively. The ship’s company, the refugees on board, all paused to stare, aghast.

  “That was the powder-arsenal,” Rol said.

  “Artimion has lost control,” said Creed.

  Between them, Aveh the carpenter looked at the vast fireball now rising up to blot out the stars, and merely nodded to himself, as though it confirmed some knowledge he already possessed. Then he hid his eyes with one hand and bowed his head until it rested on the good wood of the ship’s side.

  Rol and Creed went to the quarterdeck. Gallico was fixed there like a standing stone, and the tears on his face gleamed bright in the light from his eyes.

  “There was no going back,” Rol said quietly, looking up at the halftroll, this monster he loved as a brother.

  “I know,” Gallico said.

  Rol raised his voice. “Weigh anchor. Morcam, course due south. Lookouts to fore and main. Elias, get those people below.”

  The crew of the Revenant went about their business, and in the white-tipped sea around them the other ships and boats and desperate souls of their little fleet watched the Black Ship unfurl her sails and take wing for the south. On her quarterdeck a tall, gaunt man stood among his friends, and stared at the palm of his hand.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PAUL KEARNEY was born and grew up in Northern Ireland. He studied English at Oxford University and lived for several years in both Denmark and the United States. He now lives by the sea in County Down with his wife and two dogs. His other books include the acclaimed Monarchies of God sequence.

  ALSO BY PAUL KEARNEY

  The Mark of Ran

  The Way to Babylon

  A Different Kingdom

  Riding the Unicorn

  Hawkwood’s Voyage

  The Heretic Kings

  The Iron Wars

  The Second Empire

  Ships from the West

  THIS FORSAKEN EARTH

  A Bantam Spectra Book / December 2006

  Originally published 2006 by Bantam Press,

  a division of Transworld Publishers (UK)

  Published by Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2006 by Paul Kearney

  Map by Neil Gower

  * * *

  Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kearney, Paul.

  This forsaken earth / Paul Kearney.

  p. cm.

  eISBN-13: 978-0-553-90315-7

  eISBN-10: 0-553-90315-2

  I. Title.

  PR6061.E2156 T48 2006 2006047733

  823/.914 22

  www.bantamdell.com

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