Brotherband 4: Slaves of Socorro (32 page)

He experimented desperately, trying to find a position to ease the knots in his thigh. But, as always happens with a cramp, there was no way he could move his leg without exacerbating the problem. He kneaded his fingers into the tightened muscle, trying to loosen it. For a moment, it eased, then constricted again, worse than before.

‘Aaaaaah!’ he cried.

Gilan knelt by him, unable to help, watching anxiously.

Hal clenched his fist and pounded it repeatedly into the offending, tight-knotted muscle. I’ll have the mother of all bruises there tomorrow, he thought. But the action loosened the taut muscle a little. He put a hand up to Gilan.

‘Help me up,’ he gasped. Gilan drew him to his feet. Or rather, to his foot, as he stood on his left leg, unwilling to put weight on his right. He bent over, breathing heavily.

Gilan looked at him apologetically. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘I really thought the prayer call wasn’t until midday. And I thought it would be for one of the other gods – not Kaif. The prayers to them are a lot shorter. They have less to do, after all.’

Hal glared at him, busily kneading his thigh muscle and wincing with the pain that caused.

‘In future, try to get your times and your gods right,’ he said.

Gilan looked suitably chastened. He gestured to Hal’s leg. ‘Can you put weight on it?’

Hal tried, then shook his head as he felt the movement of his leg about to trigger another savage cramp.

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Give me a minute.’

Gilan nodded sympathetically. ‘Take your time,’ he said. ‘Remember, you’ve got to make it back down those stairs.’

Hal glared at him through pain-wracked eyes.

‘Thank you so much for reminding me of that,’ he said.

T
here was a fresh, steady breeze blowing out of the north-west the following morning. The crew rowed
Heron
out of the narrow inlet where they’d been anchored, then hoisted the new mast.

Ulf and Wulf wrinkled their noses in distaste as they sheeted the square sail home. By now, they were used to the smooth, powerful curve of their usual rig, reminiscent of a bird’s wing. The square sail, like all sails of its kind, tended to surge and flap in the breeze. It wasn’t possible to sheet it home as firmly as their triangular sail. It billowed and relaxed alternately, causing the ship to move forward in a series of surging, lurching swoops.

‘How does she handle?’ Stig asked, standing beside Hal and watching his friend’s lips move in a silent curse at yet another lurch.

‘Like a log,’ Hal said bitterly. He’d forgotten how clumsy a square sail could be.

The square sail notwithstanding, they made good time down the coast. In under two hours, they were off the entrance to Socorro harbour. The pungent smell of smoke that Lydia had commented on two days previously mixed with dust and spices and a slight taint of decaying matter to overlay the fresh sea air.

‘Furl the sail,’ Hal ordered. ‘We’ll row in.’

He wasn’t about to negotiate the harbour entrance under sail. It was a narrow channel with shoals and mudflats on either side, and a sharp, almost ninety-degree turn to starboard halfway along its length, to prevent raiders dashing into the harbour and seizing any of the ships moored there.

‘Leave the yardarm up,’ he called, seeing that the crew were preparing to lower it and stow the sail properly.

‘Just furl the sail on the yard and leave it in place,’ he said. ‘I want us to continue to look like a square-rigger, even if we’re rowing.’

The normal six rowers took their places on the benches and began to stroke smoothly, sending the slim ship speeding across the long, lazy swell towards the harbour entrance. There was none of their previous surging, stop-and-go movement now. The oar strokes were steady and powerful and the hull was graceful and well shaped, cutting through the water easily.

The fort on the southern headland, which had appeared squat and stocky when viewed from the hill above the town, took on a different aspect from sea level. It towered over them as they entered the harbour mouth, dominating the narrow entry channel. Its walls were formed from massive sandstone blocks that glowed with the colour of honey in the sun. A yellow flag, emblazoned with a red lightning shape, flapped lazily from its battlements. Hal could see helmeted heads lining the ramparts, and could make out the pale ovals of faces turned towards them. No ship would enter this harbour without undergoing a thorough inspection, he thought.

He noticed the angular forms of several catapults on the battlements – clumsy throwing machines that could hurl large boulders over a long distance. He guessed that their range was at least equal to the distance between the two promontories.

No ship could leave harbour, either, he realised, without risking a rain of jagged rocks plunging down on it from those catapults. In a few days, they might be facing such a threat.

Thorn, standing by him, seemed to share the same idea. ‘They’re not terribly accurate,’ he said, nodding towards the crane-like arms of the catapults. ‘But if they let go in a salvo, things could be interesting.’

Hal shrugged. He was confident in
Heron
’s agility and speed of manoeuvre. Avoiding the clumsy machines, slow to shoot and inaccurate, would be relatively simple.

‘It’d take a lucky shot to hit us,’ he said.

Thorn looked at him, head tilted to one side, for some seconds. ‘Sometimes people get lucky,’ he replied.

‘Nothing we can do about that,’ Hal told him.

Thorn nodded fatalistically. ‘True enough.’

They had slid past the fort now and the channel took a sharp turn to the right. Hal steered through the bend and the harbour opened up beyond it.

To the south there was a forest of masts, all bobbing and rocking on the remnants of the swell that forced its way through the narrow channel. He was relieved to see that the northern arm of the harbour was still relatively unoccupied.

Lydia was in the bow, keeping a lookout. She turned now and called to him, pointing to starboard.

‘There’s the harbour master’s wharf.’

He followed the line of her pointing arm and saw the universal sign for the harbour master’s wharf – the symbol of the local currency – indicating that this was where visiting ships paid harbour and mooring fees. And bribes, he added cynically. In this case, it was an ornate letter
D
, signifying dirum, with two slanting bars through it.

He steered the
Heron
towards it. There were two men on the wharf, relaxing in the shade of a canvas awning. They rose lethargically and moved to the wharf’s edge as
Heron
came alongside. Thorn, who had moved to the bow, tossed them a mooring rope.

Once the ship was secure, and wicker fenders had been hung over the side to protect the hull from the rough timbers, Hal and Thorn stepped up onto the wharf.

Gilan raised an eyebrow in question. Did they want him along?

Hal shook his head curtly. As a young skirl, he was used to harbour officials trying to browbeat him and take advantage of his apparent lack of experience. Thorn’s weathered face and grey beard more than compensated, and they were accustomed to letting officials assume he was the captain of the ship. Adding the Ranger’s presence might be overkill. And it might make the harbour master wonder whether they had something to hide.

The boards of the wharf vibrated under their boots as they strode in step to the small wooden shack at the base of the wharf. The line handlers, their work done, returned to their relaxed positions in the shade.

They pushed open the door of the harbour master’s shack and went in. For a few moments, they were virtually unsighted, until their eyes, used to the bright glare of the sun outside, became accustomed to the shady interior.

The shack was divided into two rooms, with the larger one serving as an antechamber to what Hal assumed was the harbour master’s office. The door to that section was closed, and inscribed with Arridan script that he couldn’t read.

The larger room was furnished with wooden cabinets along one wall, a rather threadbare carpet in the middle of the floor and a large table with one wooden chair behind it, where a clerk was seated. The surface of the table was chaotic. Sheaves of paper and rolled scrolls were scattered across it. Some were overflowing from file trays. Others simply littered the table top. A small work area had been cleared in the mess, in front of the seated clerk.

The clerk was dressed in the local fashion, in the same sort of flowing robe that they wore, and with a
kheffiyeh
on his head. His headdress was arranged in a different style from theirs, so that the sides were folded upright, away from his face, and gathered on top of his head. It seemed a more practical style for someone who was working indoors, hunched over papers.

The man’s robe was grey rather than white, with several unidentifiable stains on it, most of them down the front, where food had spilled. His person showed the same lamentable lack of cleanliness. His skin was oily and his cheeks were fat – as was the rest of him. He filled the flowing grey robe quite substantially. He didn’t rise as they entered but, glancing beneath the table, Hal could see that his feet dangled several centimetres above floor level.

‘Yes?’ he said. His tone was neutral, neither friendly nor dismissive. He looked at them with dark eyes, his gaze switching from one to the other. Then he took a sip from the glass of tea on his table. He grimaced and turned to a side door, bellowing angrily.

‘Ullur!’

‘Yes,
effendi
!’ came the instant reply. The door opened to admit one of the line handlers from the wharf outside.

The clerk gestured to his tea. ‘This is cold. Get me a fresh one!’

‘At once,
effendi
!’ Ullur replied. His words were submissive but his tone wasn’t. He obviously had little respect for the other man’s authority. As he reached for the tea glass, the clerk aimed a swipe at his head with the back of his hand. Ullur obviously was expecting such a move and swayed backwards, avoiding the blow. Then he seized the glass and scuttled out of the room.

The clerk, now obviously in a much worse mood than before, turned to them again, frowning.

‘Yes?’ he repeated. His tone was sharper this time.

‘We want a mooring for ten days,’ Hal told him.

The man’s eyes, which had been trained on Thorn, switched to the younger man, a slightly surprised expression showing in them. Hal unhitched his money purse from his belt and began to loosen the drawstring that closed it. They would actually be out of here in less than a week if all went well, but it didn’t hurt to confuse the issue.

‘It’s ten dirum a day,’ the man told him, pulling a ledger towards him and dipping his quill in an inkwell.

‘I was told five,’ Hal said.

The eyes flicked from the ledger up to his face. ‘You were told incorrectly,’ the man said.

Hal shrugged slightly and began to re-tie the fastenings of his purse.

‘But there is a weekly rate,’ the man said. ‘Eight dirum a day.’

‘We’re staying more than a week,’ Hal pointed out. ‘Six would be fair.’

The clerk’s face showed what might almost have been taken for mild respect. ‘I’m not in the fair business. Seven.’

‘Seven it is,’ Hal agreed and reopened the purse, extracting a fifty and a twenty and placing them before the man. The man’s hand swept out like a pudgy cobra and the money disappeared into a drawer in front of him. He took up the pen once more, head bent over the ledger. Bureaucracy thrived on paper forms and reports and records, Hal thought.

‘Ship’s name?’

‘Ariadne,’
Hal told him. Ariadne was a goddess of the Hellenese, a race from the north-east corner of the Constant Sea. In consultation with Gilan, he had decided that the Herons’ fair complexions would be suited to that race, and this way, there was no likelihood that Tursgud would be alerted to the arrival of a shipful of his countrymen.

The pen scratched as the man wrote laboriously, flecks of ink spattering from its frayed point onto the ledger page. ‘Hellenese, are you?’

He didn’t seem too interested one way or the other, so Hal declined to answer.

The man finished writing and closed the ledger with a slam, pushing it to one side. That’ll have smeared the ink, Hal thought. The clerk slid open a drawer in the table and produced a larger sheet, scanning it swiftly. Viewing it upside down, Hal could see it was a chart of the harbour, with berths and moorings marked and numbered. He glanced at Thorn, who had another purse ready in the side pocket of his vest. It contained a hundred dirum, in case they needed to bribe the man to assign them their preferred position for a mooring. But Thorn relaxed as he saw the man jab a stubby finger at the north-west arm of the harbour.

‘Mooring forty-three, north-west,’ he said, shoving the map towards them and turning it so they could study it more easily. ‘Numbers are on the jetties,’ he added.

Hal nodded. That was standard practice. He slid a further ten dirum across the table. ‘For your kind assistance,’ he said. That was standard practice too.

The man grunted. This time, the money wasn’t swept into a drawer, but disappeared inside his grey robe.