Paul Kearney: This Forsaken Earth

Rol leaned against the bulwark and knotted an arm in the larboard mainmast shrouds. The tarred rope seemed to fit his hand somehow, and under his feet the minute movement of the ship upon the water brought peace to his mind.

Footsteps on the planking. He opened his eyes in time to find himself falling over, but was caught by a strong pair of arms before his face hit the deck. The arms set him down gently on his back and he found himself looking up at a bearded face that seemed oddly familiar.

“I know you.”

“Yes, you do. Stay here. I’ll be back.” The man left him, cushioning his head upon a coil of rope. Rol lay there, content to stare up at the rigging lines of theAstraros, and the roof of the cavern above with the writhing bright snakes of water-shadow playing upon it.

The man returned, and set a hand under Rol’s head, raising it. “Drink this.”

A leather nozzle was against his lips. Rol put his lips about it as though it were a teat, and wine was squirted into his mouth, cold and warming at the same time. He swallowed it down: acrid, resinous wine from the shores of the Inner Reach. It was rough laborer’s drink, the kind ten thousand small-holders made for themselves up and down the southern seas, and it seemed to Rol in that moment that he had never tasted better.

The wineskin was taken away. Rol was propped up and a flat barley-bannock was placed in his hands. “Eat.”

He broke the bread, and took a chunk in his mouth. As he swallowed, he remembered the face that was smiling at him.

“You’re Aveh, the carpenter.”

“Welcome home, Captain. You look like you have traveled a hard road.”

Rol ate more bannock. It seemed to be swelling in his meager stomach. He coughed, and Aveh set the wineskin to his mouth again, poured in another stream of the brown liquid. Rol swallowed it down, and felt the warmth of the humble stuff course through his innards.

“The mountains. We came over them. Thef got theAstraros home, then. I’m glad.”

“Yes. We put in almost seven weeks ago. They’ve all gone to the square to see you. I was left alone here, as harbor watch.”

“Alone? You have your son. Where is he?”

Aveh’s face clouded. “My son is dead, Captain.”

Something sank in Rol’s heart. “How?”

“A Bionari cruiser chased us past Windhaw, firing its chasers as it pursued. It could not catch us, but a lucky shot came aboard.”

“I’m sorry, Aveh.”

“These things happen. It’s the way of this world.”

“This world is a filthy sty.”

The carpenter had a strange look in his eyes-not sorrow, not anger. It was a kind of judicial detachment. “Perhaps it is,” he said.

Aveh helped Rol below, and he tumbled into the hanging cot of the xebec’s stern-cabin, dead to the world, his travel-stained clothes still wrapped about his bony limbs and Fleam cradled in his arms. For a while there was nothing, only a darkness without dreams. Black sleep, and within it the slow repair of his blood-starved muscles and overworked bones.

Rol slept the clock around, and when he woke, he washed himself in a bowl of fresh water brought into the cabin by Aveh. The old carpenter would have left him to his ablutions, but Rol asked him to stay while he washed and changed into some of his own clothes, left in the cabin since he had turned the ship over to Thef Gaudo, off Arbion. It seemed a long time ago, but it was only a matter of months. Now, back on board the xebec, it seemed that his sojourn in Bionar must be only some form of unquiet dream, less real than the memory of capturing this ship, of sailing theRevenant, of climbing through the slave-hold that once had festered here below his very feet, and seeing Aveh’s simpleminded son smiling at him through the filth and manacles, the degradation wrought upon him by men simply trying to turn a profit.

The world was indeed a sty, and mankind a herd of pigs rooting through it. Rol sat on the edge of the swinging cot with the water still dripping from his face and stared at the stump on his right hand where his invisible finger still ached and wriggled. This was not the triumphant homecoming he had imagined.

“We haveOsprey andSkua docked at the moment, after barren runs to the east of the Reach,” Aveh said. “Artimion cruises two or three weeks at a time, then puts in for a few days to give the crew a run ashore. He’s chased off a couple of Bionari sloops, but has seen nothing big since you left. A longboat has just put in from theRevenant. I think Artimion has sent some news. The ship is in peak condition; I’ve worked upon her myself. It’s fine timber, that black teak that makes her hull. I doubt I’ve seen better.”

Rol’s clothes hung on him like sacks. He could make thumb and forefinger meet about his forearm, and had made a fresh hole in his belt with Fleam’s keen point to stop his breeches from sliding down his hips.

“What time of day is it?”

“Past noon.”

“And what’s everybody doing?”

The carpenter smiled. “They’re trying to struggle along, Captain, same as usual.”

“Aveh, if I had not taken this ship, your son might still be alive. A slave, but alive.”

“You cannot know that; no man alive can. You did the right thing at the time. That’s all anyone can do.”

Some kind of foreboding was upon Rol. It was as oppressive as anything he had ever known.

“Is it enough, you think, just trying to do the right thing?”

“It’s more than enough.”

“I was brought up to think of ordinary men as cattle, not worthy of consideration. Their lives and deaths were without meaning or significance. How can it be otherwise, in a world where death ends everything? Why do the right thing, if the wrong thing is easier, and in the end no one is made to pay for their misdeeds?”

“I think some men-good men-will always do the right thing, Captain; or at least they will wish they had. Consideration of life or death does not come into it, not in the day-to-day business of their lives.”

“I am not a good man, Aveh,” Rol choked, remembering. Rowen’s face on the battlefield at Myconn. Rafa’s body with the stones piling up upon it. Those men and boys he had had blown from the guns of theRevenant -out of anger, and because it was simply in his power. In his travels he had met with death many times, but now the collective weight of all those killings seemed to hang leaden about his heart.

“Then try to be better,” the carpenter said. He laid a hand on Rol’s shoulder for a moment, and then got up and left.

Rol wiped his face, nodding.

The febrile tumult of the day before seemed to have cooled. Men and women greeted Rol as though he had never been away. They told him it was good to have him back, and by their eyes they meant it. There was not the same joyous welcome that they gave to Gallico, or even to Elias Creed; it was a subdued reception, something else. Rol realized with a flash of insight that they looked upon him with hope. They did not love him, but he reassured them somehow. He had no idea how this could have happened, but accepted it without question.

He made his slow, painful way through the subterranean passages of the Ka, up into the light aboveground, until there was blue sky above him and the soaring towers of the city reared up against it, serene and eternal. A cool air was blowing, and as he sniffed at it, looking out to sea, part of him registered that it had backed round. The easterlies had faded, and in their place there came a cold north wind off the Winterpack at the top of the world. A fair breeze to clear Windhaw. He felt the chill of it steal into his bones.

People walked by him in knots and ribbons. Farmers on their way to the lower fields, woodsmen out to tend the charcoal-kilns. Grubby children following their mothers with halloos and cries. He nodded at them, accepting their stares and their greetings, some murmured, some shouted. For the first time in his life he felt he fitted someplace. He had earned his right to be here.