The Fox (24 page)

His hair wasn’t blond, it was brown, though the top layer, especially around his face, was sun-streaked. Maybe he was more blond when the report was made? Anyway he was definitely short. So . . . was this fellow Inda Elgar? No prince in his experience would be seen publicly in bare feet and plain deckhand clothing. But then what prince turned pirate? More to the point, what boy could lead a successful mutiny against the likes of Walic?

“Whiskey? That’s Raskan,” the lieutenant said, breaking into the captain’s thoughts. “Rumor has it he kept a tub of triple-distilled malt whiskey to bathe in, or to treat his crew when they did well, or for use in questioning. No stories agree on what he did with it, but they all said he had it. And you’d be staggering from the fumes if you were in there long.”

The boy—Elgar?—said, “What was left alive of their crew was in a longboat, if you want to catch them. In return, have you any news of recent movements of the Brotherhood of Blood, specifically one who calls herself Boruin Death-Hand?”

Taz-Enja studied that upturned face. No hint of what was going on behind those mild brown eyes. He said, “Most of the red sails have gone west. Except for the pirate Boruin Death-Hand, whose cruising station is north at The Fangs.”

The mysterious young man—pirate or prince, neither seemed quite to fit—waved a hand in farewell. He turned away to address the child, who made a horrible face at someone aboard his own ship (the captain realized whom when he heard suppressed chuckles behind him). Then the girl gave a self-important little twitch of her shoulders, rubbed her hands, and swung the tiller. The strange young man tightened sail again.

And the entire crew of the
Nofa
watched the long, elegant sail fill as the scout craft picked up speed, crossed the bow of the big raffee, and vanished on the lee.

The black-sided ship slid past, the tops full of pirates in silent, waiting defense teams, the work crew below busy hammering and sawing.

“We will have to report that,” the captain commented.

The lieutenant had not been asked his opinion, so strictly speaking he was not supposed to answer with anything but “Yes, captain.” But the day had begun so unreal he observed, “Will anyone believe us?”

The captain swung around and watched the pirate ship head toward the horizon as an east wind strengthened with the morning light, the sea now a brilliant green-blue, full of choppy waves. He smacked his glass to and said, “They will if we catch those pirates off the
Brass Dancer
. All sail, straight south.” His voice lowering slightly, “Dranon! Did you want to join the pirate?”

His cabin boy appeared, face scarlet. “No, sir.”

“Your notion of discipline seems to match theirs.”

“She was showing off,” Dranon observed to the deck.

“If the worst a pirate ever does is stick her tongue out, the world will be an easier place to live in. You may think about that for the rest of the day at the masthead.”

Sigh. “Yes, sir.”

Nugget gloated about her exchange with the Sarendan navy cabin boy for the rest of the week, to Uslar’s envy and Mutt’s disgust.

As the
Cocodu
sailed northwards, Inda mulled over that devastating blue-yellow explosion. He also considered the nature of rumors.

If Boruin knew as much about them as they knew about her, he had to use what she knew. Or what she thought she knew.

So, what he knew was this:

She had three capital ships, he had one. Her reputation for relentless cruelty gave even some pirates pause. The only people who survived being taken by her were the rich, and she got the maximum ransom by sending with her demands a finger or toe, once an eye, from a duke’s daughter who had been too haughty.

She and her first mate Majarian, a runaway murderer, had picked a crew as strong and vicious as they were. Ganan Marshig, Commander of the Brotherhood of Blood, had selected her to cover the east end of their cruising grounds. The rest of the fleet under Marshig sailed west to plunder Iasca Leror under the watchful eyes of the Venn. When they returned, if she still held control, she would be acknowledged leader of the eastern fleet, young as she was.

Inda stood at the rail watching the sea, or pacing around and around on the captain’s deck, pounding a fist on rail, binnacle, wheel, rail again as he made his way around and around. When at last he stopped pacing, he looked bemusedly around the deck, addressing the air. “Where does one buy casks of whiskey?”

Thog, busy smoothing arrow shafts, said softly, “Chwahirsland is where you will get the best, whether corn, rye, or malt.”

“Then we are going to Chwahirsland first.” Inda started his round again, brow knitted.

“He giving up?” one of the new mates asked Dasta.

“No,” Dasta said. “He’s thinking. You’ll see him back among us again when he’s got a plan. Now get that deck swept.”

The fellow, about Dasta’s age, on the sea all his life, applied himself vigorously to his sweeping, keeping to himself his annoyance at having to dodge around Inda’s ceaseless barefooted march.

Chapter Fifteen

THE encounters they had along the way were short and sharp, twice driving away cruising pirates, once a Khanerenth warship determined to board them, and last, some fast-moving coastal galleys, fisher folk who turned pirate when it suited them. They fought haphazardly, relying on surprise. Since they were close to shore, Inda had his crew sink their ships, sending them rowing and swimming back to land. Jeje circled round them in the fast
Vixen,
Nugget and Mutt gleefully sending fire arrows into the rowboats’ sides.

The new crew discovered that Fox considered these encounters mere practice, so those who’d gotten in the way of weapons when fighting off attempted boardings wrapped their wounds and kept their mouths shut. Fox required them on deck for drill as if nothing had happened.

As they angled in toward the rocky, dangerous coast of Chwahirsland, they captured two vessels off another fleet of pirate galleys: a big, ugly old caravel and a fine little sloop.

This pirate galley fleet had been lying in wait for a convoy of Chwahir merchant craft outside the mouth of a narrow harbor. It made sense to take the sloop darting about between the galleys. It did not make sense to board and carry the round-hulled, top-heavy ancient transport caravel that the pirates had been using to store loot.

But no one said anything, at least to Inda, who walked back and forth along the companionway, his feet smacking slap, slap, slap on the wet deck as a brief shower passed overhead.

The ship was squared away to Barend’s satisfaction and Fox was overseeing boarder-repel practice when Inda stopped his latest circle of the deck, looked around, and said, “Where’s the bosun? Carpenter?”

By the time those two emerged on deck, everyone was listening.

Inda said to the bosun, “Is the treasure transferred aboard us?”

“Stowed where it will stiffen us best,” replied the bosun, who was scarcely older than Inda.

Inda waved a hand, then turned to the carpenter. “Build me a cut boom on that tub.”

“Cut boom?” The carpenter who had replaced Dun and Wumma was an older man, experienced with wood, but not imaginative. He stared aghast at the clumsy ship rolling leeward, his carpenter’s mates still cleaning up and repairing after the fight. Then he rubbed his jaw, ambivalent about arguing with the commander.

Everyone stared in varying measures of disgust and distrust at the old trader caravel.

“What?” Barend laughed. He had no difficulty arguing with Inda. “You try booming a pirate’s shrouds with that old bucket and it’ll fall to splinters. We’d have to reinforce it right down to the keel, and where’s the use in that, even if we had a convenient port in which to do it?”

“I want a big, strong-looking cut boom, metal inset all the way to its point, and I want it off the foremast, with enough preventer stays to make it swing easily, and look wicked seen through a glass,” Inda said. “I also want the whiskey casks we’re going to buy stored on deck as well as below.” And, as they looked at him as if he’d boiled his brains, he opened his hands. “It’s a ruse.”

A ruse! Inda had a plan at last. Word spread through the ship, and all free hands got to it, stripping the bulkheads in the moldy hold to get enough wood to make a foremast cut boom that would overreach even that on the
Cocodu.

As they sailed on fragrant winds from the islands behind them, Inda spent long watches in the caravel, which shouldered clumsily through the sea, masts corkscrewing. The rapping and sawing of the carpentry crew went unnoticed as he experimented with whiskey in small wooden mugs, Thog and Uslar and Mutt helping him.

A full mug did not set fire. A half-filled one did, and they had the singed eyebrows to prove it. Something about fire and fumes combined produced those blue explosions of flame. He did not need to know why; he only had to know what would work.

The false cut boom was finished by the time they rounded the juts of the Jessachwa Mountains. Now they were heading for the strait—and though the Brotherhood might be down to one fleet this far east, this area was also controlled by the Venn. No one knew how many of them had gone west and how many remained to patrol the strait.

Two weeks they sailed, tacking steadily, for the winds had shifted into the west. That brought the weather that was best for covert sailing: cold rain and fog mixing with the warm current going northward.

Inda brooded over his charts whenever he was not on deck. Barend drove the sail crews to better speed. And Fox drilled them all until they fell into their hammocks, muscles trembling with fatigue. Drilled them all, including Inda. There were no complaints, not when everyone could see Fox and Inda on the forecastle sparring an entire watch, every day, in all weather.

They saw no one but Chwahir fishers until one morning, the rising sun lit a jagged line of mountains in the south: the western border of Chwahirsland, east of the Fangs.

“Send Jeje’s signal,” Inda said, coming up on deck.

Mutt and Uslar embarked on a friendly scuffle. Mutt shot off the whirtler, and the boys laughed at the sound as it arced down to cross the
Vixen
’s bow. They now knew why Inda liked signal arrows instead of flags whenever practical. Barend had told them stories about the plains warriors of the west, and Mutt and his friends had begun using horse jargon (or what they imagined to be horse jargon) , even though the closest they’d ever been to the animals was dodging them in mainland ports.

Jeje brought the
Vixen
smartly up, the brothers spilling wind as Nugget tossed up the hook. But Inda tossed it back, and boomed down a heavy bundle wrapped in greenish canvas. Then he leaped down onto the
Vixen
’s deck.

“What are you doing?” Dasta called from the foremast.

Inda shouted back, “Scouting. Wake up Fox, tell him he’s in command. Put up Walic’s red sails and cruise as showy as possible north and south. Circle the Fangs. Poke past every island harbor. No mainland.”

Barend appeared at the rail below Dasta, his hair messy from his snooze-watch. “You mean, we’re luring ’em out, is that it?” He paused, taken by a huge yawn.

The deck watch saw Inda grin. “Throw down a war banner.”

Barend rubbed his eyes. “We don’t know where they are.”

“Someone will. Let gossip do our work for us.”

Barend whistled. “Won’t she come after us with a fleet?”

“That’s what I’m going to find out,” Inda called back.

The
Vixen
skimmed out into the blue morning waters, chasing the last of the night sky into the west.

When the horizon had sunk
Cocodu
’s hull behind them, Inda said to Jeje, “We’ll put into the Danai Mainport at night.”

Jeje looked at him in surprise. “You think she’s there?”

“I think she’s looking for us,” Inda said. “What I want to find out is what we can expect by way of aid on her side.”

Jeje puffed her cheeks out. “You mean the Venn?”

“Did you listen to the reports off those Chwahir fishers? About the Venn, I mean.”

Jeje waved a hand. “Complaints. Ships they stopped, searched, levied a toll on. We already knew all that.”

“But they also said the Venn don’t loot, they don’t kill— except those they have declared war against—and they don’t interfere with anyone who pays up.”

“So what’s that got to do with Boruin?” Jeje scowled.

Inda perched on the taffrail, scruffy in his fighting shirt, which was the old, stained, sun-bleached, mended, and washed one he’d taken out of Walic’s wardrobe last summer, the sleeves loose enough to hide his wrist sheaths, the laces long gone, revealing his scarred chest. His long vest was worn and creased. He was barefoot, as were they all, his deck trousers worn and bag-kneed, curls escaping from his three-day-old sailor’s queue. “Don’t you see?” Inda gestured. “If the Venn obey their own rules, how much do they really trust those who don’t have any?”

“Using the Brotherhood to do their dirty work doesn’t make ’em any cleaner,” Jeje said, watching sail and sky.

“What’s that?” Nugget popped up from below and pointed at the grubby canvas roll on the deck. She bent, both hands on thighs. “Looks disgusting!” she exclaimed.

“It is disgusting,” Inda called back. To Jeje: “Take us away from land. We’ll pull in at night.” Inda yawned.

“And until then? I take it you want a snooze-watch?”

“No.” Inda snorted a laugh. “There’s going to be no gossip about us, only what we gather about others. So here’s your new sail. We’re going to take a nasty little fishing smack in.” He jumped off the taffrail and bent to snap open the length of canvas. They stared, appalled, at the patched, filthy sail wrapped around a small chest. “How much paint you got below?”

Nugget gave a gasp of delight. “A ruse! We get our very own ruse!” She looked pleading. “Do I get to rip up my clothes?”