The Corsairs of Aethalia: A Thalassia novel Page 4
She’s oldin, ma’am. Just barely. Three feet of water in the bilges. We caint move that there mast cause she be oldin down the boards she cracked. Boktor’s the onliest place we kin git refitted. We’d better git there fast, ma’am, cause if the pumps fail we’re sunked.”
The captain nodded, and then turned to Hudak. “Make it so, First.”
The First Mate sighed and watched the retreating back of the captain. “Aye, Cap’n.” He said to the air.
The port city of Boktor, on the island of Vaigach, hadn’t changed since Marko left it, almost a full year back. The beggars had different faces but the fences still had the same shifty, untrustworthy eyes. Smells of rotting garbage and dumped chamberpots filled the narrow streets. Buildings were still shoddy shacks and the castle loomed silent and menacing over the harbor, the execution platform sticking out like some hideous wooden tongue. Yasarin the Fence, he discovered, had been found floating in the harbor with his throat cut from ear to ear. Marko found that grimly satisfying.
The rope to the dovecote had long since been stolen, but he knew more than one way up to the roof where he had lived for years. His booted feet crunched on rotted timbers while he half expected to fall through into the Inn below. The dovecote itself had collapsed into a heap of moldering wood, half covered with pigeon droppings. The boy held his breath and dug for a minute before he found the loose floorboard where he had stashed his loot. The map had rotted to a pile of gray goo, but the jewels remained, bright and shiny as he placed them in his pouch. Just over his head, sitting on a forlorn perch, a lone dove sang its sad song. He now had a small fortune. With a sigh, he left the cover to the hole off when he departed. It didn’t matter anymore.
Marko sat on a cold stone bench in a neglected overgrown park, and watched the life of the city swirl around him, as he had been sitting for the past two weeks, waiting for the Dagfred to be repaired. Spiny green weeds caroused where flowers once bloomed. A patrol of purple and gold liveried soldiers stamped by, their faces hard and their bootheels ringing on the dirty cobblestones. The sergeant in charge glanced at him briefly, down a long thin nose, and then dismissed him just as fast. Marko could almost hear the thought;
He stood up.
He hadn’t realized just how sorry and mean the city of Boktor had become until he was half way to the docks. Crumbling wooden tenements leaned drunkenly over the street; missing clapboards making them look scabby and leprous. Sometimes crude pieces of cloth were stretched over windows, but in most cases the windows were just boarded up. None had glass. Thin children of every age sat in doorways or alleys, too weak to cry, too broken to care. The smell of corruption was horrendous.
He put a shaking hand into the deep pocket of his seaman’s pants and pulled out a small red apple. Marko always had something to eat hidden away in a pocket. A young girl of indeterminate age, Marko guessed at eight or nine, sat in a crude doorway, a short ragged dress of some long since faded color coming down to her thin bony knees. Her black hair, looking muddy and snarled was filthy and matted and hung, half covering her dark eyes. They were dark blue he saw at second glance. Marko knelt before her.
“What’s your name, girl?”
She looked up with dead eyes. “Dala, my Lord.”
“Dala.” He laughed. “I’m not a...” He looked down at himself. Tanned, fit, wearing good, if old, clothes. Real shoes. To her he was a Lord. Silently he held out the apple to her. Dark eyes grew huge. “Go ahead and take it, Dala. It’s for you to eat.” Trembling dirty fingers touched the apple, then, in a flash, she had it to her mouth. It took only seconds for the apple to disappear, core and all. She licked her fingers, a smile as trembling as her fingers playing at the corners of her lips.
“Thank you, my Lord.”
Marko bent and kissed her forehead, then turned and continued down the street. He ignored the tears running down his face. The voice in his head said nothing.
Looking like three fingers of rotted, worm-infested wood, the North end docks were falling apart and isolated from the more prosperous parts of the port. They stood out into the harbor a full hundred feet. Sitting next to the North-most dock was a sunken barge, only a stump of the moldering stern post still visible above the sludgy water. Garbage floated past green decaying piers and Marko noticed that the smell here was no better than among the tenements, except that it smelled more of rotting fish than of chamberpots. On shore, a partial wall of an abandoned warehouse reached almost to the water’s edge. Fire had gutted the rest.
A handful of degrees above freezing, the water flayed his skin, and the filth stuck to his naked body like rancid oil. His stomach churned and he tasted sour bile.
Dala was sitting by his pile of clothes when he returned. She had followed him. She looked at his bare goosefleshed body and giggled.
“You’re dirty.”
“You’re right.” He replied, rejecting the half dozen off-color remarks that had flashed through his mind. Marko flung the locket around his neck.
Dala held out a six foot long ash staff to him, thick around as her small wrist. She smiled again. “Gang is coming.” She pointed one dirty finger back toward the tenements.
Memories of the back streets of Boktor flooded through him. He was eight years old and he remembered the bigger street toughs teaching him the stave, laughing at his crude efforts. The little boy with the big stick. They didn’t laugh long, however. Marko was quick and agile and soon mastered the staff. Hudak had taken that knowledge and refined it—showing him the finer details. He looked down at his naked, filth covered body and shrugged. No time for cleaning or dressing right now.
He stepped out and assumed a traditional low guard posture with the tip of the staff aimed at the largest boy’s eyes, tail of the staff held low. The six boys approached him to stop and gape. This, they had not expected. Knives appeared in hands and they spread out, underlings on the side and the leader in front. Marko smiled. If they had all charged, he might have felled one or two before he was swar
med under, but now...
The large boy in the lead ducked in, knife held low. The staff buzzed as it spun, then cracked against the big boy’s head. His eyes glazed and he dropped. Marko drove the tail of the staff backward into the stomach of a smaller boy behind him. There was a whoosh of expelled breath and that boy was down, making thin retching sounds. He swung once more and the rest ran. After disarming his opponents he returned to Dala. She looked on appreciatively.
“Good fight.”
Marko set the staff down, chuckling. “They were better at running than fighting.” He stepped into the pool of rainwater and gasped as the icy water made his muscles cramp. He held his breath and dunked his head under, then gasping, clambered out of the pool and began to dress. He was still shivering as he put his shoes back on. Dala watched him intently. “I want to thank you for telling me about the gang and for the staff.”
“You’re pretty good.” She said, simply.
“They were pretty bad.” He lifted the rock his clothes had been folded on and took out his small pouch that he had hidden there. He looked at the young girl, who was not as small as he once thought, opened the pouch and removed one blue stone. He looked at it speculatively, and replaced it back in the pouch, taking out a silver stone instead. “This is for you, Dala. We’ll find you a school that will take you in and teach you. Let’s try the Temple of the Goddess.” The name just seemed to pop into his mind. “The Priestesses there will take you in, I think, especially if you can pay.” He held up the silver jewel. “This can buy you a new life, Dala. Use it wisely.”
The dirty, dark haired girl looked at him seriously, and then looked at the stone he had put in her hand. “Why?”
“Because when I needed help there was someone for me. Maybe I can be the one for you.”
“You,” she seemed to hesitate, her voice fearful. “You don’t want anything?”
Marko frowned, then gasped as understanding came. “No! NO! I just want you to have a chance. That’s all.”
Her dirty hand clenched tightly around the stone, and in one jump she had her arms around his neck. She was weeping wildly. “What is your name?” She hiccupped, unsteadily.
He almost said Marko. Almost. “My name is Jorse.”
The temple of the Goddess Selene sat on a cliff high over the harbor. Maybe the temple had been built there to show the purity of the Priestesses and their closeness to their Goddess. Maybe it was just the smell they sought to escape. Sweat trickled down his face. He had been carrying Dala piggy-back for the last mile, over the rough, sharp stones, and his feet were sore. They took a last corner and stopped, inhaling the sweeping curves and gleaming white walls of the Temple of the Moon standing before them. He set the girl down.
“This is the temple, Dala.” He said gently. “Go to the front door and ask them to take you in and to train you. I’ll wait here until you are safe inside.” She seemed reluctant to release his hand.
“Will I ever see you again?” Her voice was shaky.
“You can never tell, Dala; however, I promise you this, if I ever come back to Boktor, I will come to see you.”
The boy smiled.
Dala looked back several times before she reached the massive temple door. Jorse waved. A tall slim woman in a flowing white robe appeared and bent to the girl. They spoke, Dala pointed back to him and the woman nodded. When the young girl offered the jewel, the woman in white simply reached down and closed Dala’s dirty fingers protectively around it. With a wave the priestess beckoned Jorse forward.
Her eyebrows went up when she noted his age. “Are you the brother of this child?” Her voice was soft and cultured. She seemed to radiate serenity.
Jorse was about to answer honestly, when Dala came up beside him and took his hand in hers. “This is my brother Jorse, who I haven’t seen in years.” Dala lied smoothly.
“And the money?” The priestess’ voice took on a hard edge.
“My pay, Priestess. Nothing more.” He lied. Well, some of it was his pay.
“Are you telling me that you took in this child that you claim is your sister and are paying a small fortune for her upbringing through the kindness of your heart?” Disbelief flickered across her face.
“Yes.” Jorse glowered. “I can’t help all of them, but by the damn gods I’ll help this one.”
The pose seemed to crack, and a smile flickered across the smooth features of the Priestess. “Good. I was just checking. You may have your money back.” She reached down for Dala’s dirty hand.
“Keep it in safety for her. When she gets older she can become a seamstress, or a healer, and open her own shop. At least she has a choice, and a chance.”
She nodded. “It will be as you say.” The Priestess smelled of lilacs, and her eyes were violet. “You are a strange man, Jorse, not at all what I took for a sailor.”
Jorse felt the other presence push him aside. “I sail because it takes me where I must go, to do what I must do. Nothing more.” The Priestess stared and Jorse found himself back in control once more. “Goodbye, Dala.” He said softly. The dirty young girl ran into his arms.
“I love you.” She squeezed him fiercely, then turned and darted into the temple.
~~~
The sea miles slipped by under a favorable icy wind, and the salt tang in the air was strong. Jorse did his duties, but his mind was elsewhere. Dark sad eyes haunted his dreams, sleeping and waking, and his feelings were confused.
“Marko.” Hudak’s voice called from the main deck. “Marko! Damn your eyes, wake up!” The bellow cut through Jorse’s gloomy thoughts. His name was another thing he would have to take care of sooner or later, but he didn’t know where to start. “It’s your turn at the wheel, boy, so get to it.”
Jorse knuckled a brief salute to the First Officer and headed for the stern. “Aye, Mister Hudak.”
“You young rascal.” The big man grinned as Jorse passed. “Bet you be dreamin of some cute young thing you left in port.”
Jorse tripped on a flaked coil of line and turned, his green eyes wild. “What did you say?” For some reason his heart was pounding. Hudak just laughed, his great belly shaking. “You think yer the first sailer to meet a sweet doxy in port an moon over her when yer far gone? I’ve done it, boy, as has every man jack on this here ship. It’s a part o growin up, I think.”
“But... but. It’s not like that at all! I didn’t... we didn’t...”
Hudak laughed all the harder. “I was right, eh? What was er name, boy, this sweet young thing you didn’t do nothing with.” The First Officer dropped one eyelid in a slow wink. Jorse’s face flushed and his ears were hot.
“I... we...” Jorse gave up trying to explain. “Her name is Dala.”
“Leave the boy alone, Mister Hudak.” The captain didn’t raise her voice from the deck behind the First Officer. Jorse saw the big man flinch. “Get to your post, Marko. It’s your watch, I believe. Keep her bow heading due west. We should pick up the islands just north of Xicocu in three months. We will fill our water tanks there, stretch our legs for a day or two and then finish the second half of our journey to Little Wassau. Things are a bit strange in the Wassau islands, and we will see wonders, I have no doubt.”
Jorse knuckled his forehead, returned a crisp, “Yes, ma’am, “ and took the wheel.
The ocean, simply called the Great Ocean because of its huge size, s
lipped by, a dark and mysterious teal green, bottomless, some said. Storms appeared, black smudges sometimes flecked with lightning, far off on the horizon, but mostly the fair following wind sped them along their way. The young crewman marveled as schools of foot long silver fish would suddenly burst into the air, shedding water like sheets of fine crystal in the morning light, and glide alongside the fast moving ship before plunging back into the ocean. Some mornings the cook would collect the fish that had landed on the deck overnight, and fry them for breakfast and the smell of the frying fish and pungent spices filled the Dagfred. Overhead the rings of the world glowed in the first light of the day and looked down on the works of man with supreme disinterest.
Three days later, as he was taking a reef in on the mizzen top gallant sail, the lookout, high on the mainmast, called to the deck below.
“Sail ho! Astern on our starboard quarter.” Jorse finished tying down the sail and then turned, leg wrapped around a rough halyard. There! Maybe ten miles off, ducking in and out of a bank of heavy clouds like it didn’t want to be seen. The sails. It was something about the sails that drew his attention. Something the captain had told him. It came to him in a rush. Those were the three huge lanteen sails of a Corsair. The Corsairs of Aethalia!
The Dagfred turned slightly, and the captain had the hands put on every stitch of canvas the ship could carry; the royals and even the stun sails were hoisted. The ship surged. Jorse knew the Xicocu islands weren’t too far ahead, if only their lead was enough.
It wasn’t. Jorse, in his inexperience, had thought the Dagfred a fast ship. Compared to the trader, the attacking Corsair moved like a thoroughbred. It was a ship built to run down prey and take them. As soon as the Dagfred set more sail the approaching Raider turned, set more sail itself, and seemed to leap ahead.