Corsair (13 page)

“Take this pouch,” Gareth said, picking up the leather purse beside Kelch’s body, “and put it in the captain’s cabin.

“We won’t load the main guns until dark,” he went on. “But single up to the main sheet, and have the topmen standing by. We might have to leave in a hurry.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Gareth turned to get back aboard as the four sailors grabbed Kelch’s arms and legs and lugged him up the gangway.

He saw three Linyati warships gliding toward him, close inboard. But their guns weren’t manned. The ships moved past the
Steadfast
in that eerie silence. None of the Linyati along the rails said anything, showed anything in their expressions.

The three ships put on sail, tacked toward the harbor mouth and the open sea.

• • •

Not a half-glass later, a dozen men came down the docks toward the
Steadfast.
All but one wore armor. They carried muskets and had swords at their waist. The unarmed man was a thin, tubercular-looking sort carrying a scroll.

The dozen stopped a stone’s cast away.

“Ahoy the ship.”

Gareth was on the quarterdeck. He walked to the landward side.

“We hear you.”

“It is the decision of the rulers of Herti that, because of a matter of blood, you are required to leave this city at dawn.

“We pride our neutrality, and do not wish to become involved in any private dispute.

“This order is in congruence with international custom, and if disobeyed will be met with the appropriate responses … including violence.”

He stumbled a little on the last word, then turned, and the formation moved away, a bit faster than it had come.

“And the godsdamned Linyati are outside the harbor, waiting for us,” Nomios said.

Gareth nodded.

“We might as well get ready to put on the chains we wuz ready to put other people into,” the bosun gloomed.

“No,” Gareth said, wondering at his certainty. “No, that’ll not happen. None of us will be anyone’s slave, not now, not ever.

“Ready the ship for sailing.”

Labala,” Gareth said. “You told me once you could bring up a harbor full of mist. Were you yarning, or were you telling the truth?”

“I don’t lie,” Labala said. “I sometimes just can’t keep my memory straight as to tales.”

“Good,” Gareth said. “Get whatever you need ready. I’d like a spell when it falls dark.”

He turned to the crew, who were assembled in the waist. For some reason, he was utterly unafraid, and felt very calm, as if he’d been born to live in this kind of emergency.

“Four men,” he said. “No. Three and you, Thom Tehidy. Get five bags of gunpowder, and ten bottles of brandy. Not the good stuff, the raw kind, with the most alcohol.

“At full dark, I want you four to go ashore, just as Labala’s mist hopefully rolls in, and burn that fish plant at the end of the wharves. That’ll give the locals something to keep them occupied.

“As soon as our bonfire fiends leave the ship, everyone not on watch get into the armor that’s stored up forward. We’ve already got muskets loaded and ready.

“Rig boarding nets and load the main guns, but we won’t run them out until we cast off. The wheels make too much noise on the deck.

“Bosun, plot a compass course that we can use blind to get us out of the harbor.

“Now, set to.”

A smile came to Gareth as the crew bustled about its business. Following orders.
His
orders.

Tehidy came to him.

“It’ll be a bit of a burden with the four of us and the extra brandy and gunpowder.”

“No,” Gareth said. “I’ll be the fifth man.”

• • •

Gareth looked at the Linyati lantern on the mizzen mast as it grew dark.

No greenish glare came.

Now, he wondered, was the lantern keyed to Luynes, and had it gone out when he was killed? Or did the Linyati wizards, and there must be some aboard the Slavers’ ships still in the harbor, cancel the spell? That might mean they have some kind of contact with the lamp, then. Contact enough, maybe, to use it like a lodestone to locate the
Steadfast
?

He unhooked the lantern, carried it down to the deck, and slipped up the gangway. He left the lantern next to a bollard, came back aboard.

If they’re “watching” that, he thought, maybe they’ll think we’re still at the dock when we’re not.

Torches flared along the waterfront, with no human lighter to be seen, and a wind from the land made them flicker. Then, as it got darker, they dimmed slowly. Gareth realized they weren’t fading. Rather a dank mist, drifting slowly, unobtrusively in from the water, was masking them.

Either Labala’s lucky … or we’ve got ourselves a real wizard, Gareth thought.

“All right,” Gareth said to Thom and the three others. “Let’s go.”

They slid over the gangway, keeping low, and crept along the wharf, rats avoiding the light. Ramps led up toward land, and they followed them.

Gareth, wishing he had some of a soldier’s skills, kept peering into the shadows, knowing Herti
must
have sentries posted.

But he saw no one. Maybe these people kept themselves truly disinvolved, and were true neutrals. Or cowards.

Tehidy pressed prickly lips to Gareth’s ear.

“We can navigate from here by the smell.”

Thom was right Holding to the shadows, they found the plant, moved along its ramshackle walls, found a sliding door. There weren’t any lights visible through cracks in the planking.

Gareth put his shoulder to the door, but it didn’t move. Thom pushed him aside, used his strength.

The door came open, with a hinge-rusty
screek
Gareth thought was as loud, and alerting, as a trumpet blast. They froze, waited. But no one responded.

They went inside the long shed a few feet, no further, for fear of stumbling over something with sharp edges. Gareth drew his knife, cursed that it had no point, as every ship’s officer he’d known had ordered, thought suddenly and irrelevantly that now he could carry any damned kind of blade he wanted, sawed at the burlap and let powder pool about. He tore off the wire seal and pulled the cork from a bottle of brandy, dabbled some here, there.

Thom was holding out a hooded slowmatch. He saw the shadows of the four, waiting in the doorway, giving him the honor.

The honor, he thought, of maybe going up in a great ball of flame. He uncovered the slow match and held it to the burlap, saw flames flicker, saw other emptied bags in the growing firelight, touched the match to them.

“Come on,” Thom hissed, and they trotted away from the fish plant, flames growing behind them. The flame flashed as gunpowder caught here, then a bigger flare as the wood, soaked in long years of oily fish, took fire.

They ran, then, up the gangplank onto the
Steadfast.
A sailor who’d held a boarding net wide for a passage let it fall.

“Man the guns and send the watch aloft,” Gareth ordered. He went on up the ladder to the quarterdeck.

“Very well, mister,” Gareth told Nomios. “Put us to sea.”

“Yes, sir,” Nomios said. “For’rd! Let go the main sheet.”

There was a splash as a rope dropped into the water.

“Hard aport your rudder,” he said in a low voice to the helmsmen, and the current drifted the
Steadfast
a foot or so away from the dock.

“Set the fores’l and mains’l,” and the barefoot men above sidled out on footropes. Yards clattered, and canvas rattled as it unfurled. Sails caught the wind and pulled the prow of the
Steadfast
away from the dock, toward the sea.

“Helmsman,” Nomios said. “Th’ course is south by south-southeast. Hold firm, and you’ll be in the center of the channel.”

“Aye.”

“Labala,” Gareth called down to the main deck.

“What, Gareth?”

“Can you sense the Linyati out there?”

“No,” Labala said. “Tried. Didn’t work. Sorry.”

“Anyone in the waist with good eyes, up to the foredeck,”

Gareth ordered. “Give quiet warning if you hear or see anything. Anything!”

Gareth closed his eyes, listened, forced his mind away from the
Steadfast
, into the foggy dark. The wind was coming from due north.

“’Nomios,” he said in a low tone, “correct the steering a point south or so. The wind might blow us a bit wide of the channel on this course.”

“Aye, sir. I was just about to do that.”

Gareth went down the ladder to the maindeck, called the four gun captains to him, Knoll standing in for Gareth.

“We’ll be cutting through the fog sooner or later into clear air,” he said. “When we do, if you spot the Linyati, aim your guns, but wait, for the sake of the gods, until I give the command. Maybe we’ll be able to slide past them without being seen.”

The men nodded, went back to their cannon. Knoll N’b’ry lingered for a minute.

“What’re you grinning about?”

“Just about how much you sound like a real captain.”

Gareth tried to keep from laughing. “To your gun, sir.”

Gareth went back to the quarterdeck, went back to listening. The
Steadfast
was mostly silent, except for the creak of her hull, a quiet splash as a wave broke against the prow now and again, the rustle of the sails.

Labala came up the ladder.

“Gareth,” he said, voice low, “I think my damned mist is staying with us!”

“Is that possible?”

“I dunno,” Labala said. “I’m making this up as I go along. Maybe it thinks I’m its daddy?”

Gareth nodded. Maybe, just maybe, this would make things easier, and they wouldn’t have to —

— He heard a shouted command to starboard, and the clatter of lines through blocks.

A moment later, he could see dim light.

Enough of creeping along, he thought. I’m tired of always running.

“Nomios,” he said, “steer for that light.”

“But — ”

“Do as I order!”

“Yessir!”

The bosun gave quiet orders, and the helmsman spun the wheel.

The light grew brighter. Gareth went to the railing and leaned over.

“What’re you loaded with?”

“Grapeshot,” came back.

“Good. Aim at the light, and fire when I order. Reload with solid shot, and aim below the light, into the hull, for your second shot.”

He went back to the wheel.

The light was very close. The
Steadfast
was closing on a Linyati — at least Gareth hoped it was a Linyati — from the stern, on the Slaver’s port side.

“
Ready
…” Gareth shouted, and the ship was close enough for him to see startled figures on the ship’s deck turn toward him …

“Fire!” The two starboard cannon bellowed, and men on the Linyati ship screamed and fell. There was confusion on their deck as the
Steadfast
sailed past, not twenty yards away.

“Bring her about, Nomios! We’ll have another taste of that!”

“Aye, sir,” and the
Steadfast
came about.

“Bring her down close alongside!”

“Aye, aye.”

“Port cannon,” Gareth ordered. “You can’t miss! Ready …”

And the Linyati ship was close aboard. Sailors aboard her jumped back from the railings, afraid the
Steadfast
was intending to ram.

“Fire!”
And the two guns crashed. Gunsmoke swirled as the grapeshot scattered across the Slaver’s maindeck, and Gareth heard men shriek.

“Load solid shot, and fast,” Gareth said, and again brought the
Steadfast
about.

“Ready …
Fire
…” And this time the port guns slammed their tiny broadside into the Linyati’s stern.

“Up her port side,” Gareth called.

Just as they closed on the Slaver, one of its sternchasers blasted, and the round whirred past, scant feet overhead, and thudded into the
Steadfast
’s sterncastle. Fire sparkled along the
Steadfast
’s starboard railing, and Gareth saw men — his men — unordered, firing muskets at the sternchaser’s crew, and two Linyati went down. His starboard guns fired, aiming low as ordered, and they were even with the Linyati ship just as Gareth saw a small robinet on the quarterdeck fire.

The round came close enough so he felt the rush of wind, then the splatter of something warm on his face, his arm. He glanced up at clear skies, no rain, then saw the helmsman stumble back from the wheel.

He was missing his head, and Gareth knew what the rain had been, tried to keep from throwing up as he took the wheel, steering the
Steadfast
past the Linyati as the Slaver lost headway and fell away to port.

Then the fog was gone, and the sea ahead was clear. Gareth ordered full sail, and a new course:

Due south.

• • •

Two days later, the
Steadfast
lay in the lagoon off a tiny tropic island. The horizon to the north was empty, and there’d been no signs of pursuit after Herti.

The thirty-seven sailors were gathered in the waist. They’d buried Kelch and the helmsman the morning after the battle with the Linyati ship.

Gareth, before he’d told everyone to gather and decide what to do next, had sent a boat ashore to gather limes and a barrel of absolutely fresh water from a creek that purled into the ocean. He ordered the cook to make a cool punch from the fruit, some sugar, and brandy, served a moderate amount to each man.

Knoll N’b’ry had come to him as the others were lined up around the barrel.

“I’m starting to think you’re a dangerous man, Gareth Radnor.”

“Oh?”

“I think it’s most interesting that you take the time to make sure we’re all refreshed — with a fruit no one but a nobleman might ever see in Saros — before we discuss the future. A hint of the good things to come.

“Just as I think it’s interesting you set the course south after Herti, instead of north, toward home.”

“I just figured,” Gareth said with an honest smile, “that would be the least likely direction for the Linyati to think we were headed.”

“But of course.” Knoll sipped from his pewter mug. “I was just thinking about some things you used to talk about when we were boys.

“Do you want it to be my idea, or yours?”