Paul Kearney - This Forsaken Earth

“What’s your cargo?”

“Three hundred and seventy-odd head, bound out of Astraro for Omer. Captain, we are a Mercanter ship.”

“What of it?”

“I thought perhaps-”

“You thought wrong. Show me your hold. I wish to see the cargo.”

They went below. The sun was climbing up a cloudless sky, and despite the lateness of the year the heat of it beat down on the decks. Rol felt sweat trickling down the small of his back. All the hatches had bolt-fastened gratings that let in almost no light or air. Mindorin, bobbing his head apologetically, led Rol first to the stern-cabin, where he lit a lantern, then he made his way forward along a gloomy companionway. The stench grew worse, if that was possible, though the wailing had given way to a low murmuring, punctuated by the odd sharp cry, like that of a rabbit taken by a stoat.

They went through a reinforced bulkhead-every door in the ship had bolts to it-and at once the flame in the lantern burned blue and guttered low. Mindorin raised it up, his face streaming with sweat. The close, fetid air was hard to breathe, the smell almost a physical presence, pressing about their faces.

“Gods of the world,” Rol croaked.

The compartment ran almost the full length of the ship, some twenty-five yards. It had been divided up horizontally by a stout wooden platform, so that there were two decks in front of Rol, each less than a yard high. A thick carpet of bodies lay on both of these, chained by the ankles, feet to feet. Hundreds of people, turning feebly, twitching, moaning, sobbing, or lying inert. All caked in their own filth, bloodied by the chains that bound them. All in darkness. The lantern was of little use, but Rol’s preternatural vision spared him none of the details. There were men, women, and children here, mixed indiscriminately, all of them naked and plastered in their own excreta, dull eyes sunken in their heads, skulls shaven down to the skin. Corpses lying amid them with maggots working busily about every orifice. Lice in clusters the size of marbles, and here and there a venturesome rat crawling over the dead and the living unmolested.

A wondering fury blazed up in Rol’s heart. He understood Gallico better now. But he stood there for a long moment, mastering the rage, beating it down. When he turned to Mindorin again, his voice was quiet, even.

“You will unlock these chains, and get these people on deck.”

The slaver’s master shrank from the light of those eyes. “Aye, sir, at once. I’ll get the keys. One minute, and I’ll have them-”

“Get your crew down here, every last one of them. You will bring these people water and food. You will wash them.”

“Anything, Captain, anything.” Mindorin scuttled away, falling over backward in his haste.

Rol bent low and hunkered his way through the dense-packed morass of humanity, sometimes reduced by the lack of headroom to crawling on his hands and knees. Tar from the hot deckhead fell on his shoulders and his boots slipped and shifted in liquid filth. Here was a young woman, dead, staring. Between her legs the corpse of a baby, which had issued out of her long before full term. A clenched, gray, globular thing gnawed by rats and running with maggots. But Rol could still make out the tiny fingers closed in fists.

Here, two men had strangled each other with their chains and were locked in a last embrace. Here a child, a girl not more than five years old, with the flesh on her ankles eaten down to the bone by the shackles. Rol could feel the eyes of hundreds on him as he made his noisome way down the compartment. People called to him hoarsely in languages he did not understand. Some struggled to their bloody and yellow-scabbed elbows, then fell back again. Just as he thought he could bear it no more his gaze was caught by that of a young boy, ten years old maybe. His limbs were stick-thin and lice-tracks were raw and red all over his narrow chest. The boy was smiling emptily. Beside him was an older man, the oldest Rol had seen here. For some reason he had been allowed to retain a full, gray beard. His eyes were dark, and lively with intelligence. They regarded Rol with grave appraisal, as though weighing up the defects and deliberations of his soul. Rol tried to speak to him, but his throat had closed.

Back up on deck, he breathed in the clear, clean air deeply. He could feel the vermin of the slave-hold crawling over his skin, and began plucking at his clothes. “Quirion!”

“Aye, sir.” The burly master-at-arms had a naked cutlass in his hand, and the point of it twitched as though it ached to be in use.

“The crew of this ship will unchain all the slaves and get them on deck. The slaves will be watered, fed, and hosed down. Then that crew will go below and clean out the slave-deck with swabs. On their hands and knees, Quirion.”

“Hands and knees, sir.”

Naked now, Rol sprang to the ship’s rail. “Get rid of those rags,” he said, and then dived overboard.

The cold plunge of the water, the clean salt bite of the sea. He dived deep, deep as he had ever gone, trying to leave behind the filth that coated his skin, the filth he felt to be within.

Three

11th Jurius, Year 32, Bar Asfal. Wind southerly, the Cavaillic Trades. Course WNW under all plain sail. With Dead Reckoning we are two leagues north of the latitude of Golgos, three leagues west of the Omer longline. Overtook a slaver at the end of the middle watch, a flush-decked xebec of some two hundred tons, theAstraros. On board were twenty-six crew, three hundred and thirty-two slaves, and two score corpses. I made the crew of the slaver clean out the hold of their ship, then had them bound each to a corpse and threw them overboard. The slaves remain on the xebec, which Gallico now commands with a prize crew of thirty men. I have not seen before a more pitiful collection of people. Before I drowned him, the Astraros’s master told me that many of them had already made a voyage before this-they are natives of every coast about the Inner Reach, some kidnapped from fishing villages, others taken in war. Gallico insists that all must be brought back to the Ka, and for once I agree with him.

For all her dirty trade, theAstrarosis a fine ship, and I think her hull will bear the nine-pounders we took from the Bionese man-of-war earlier this month. She would be a useful consort for the Revenant, keeping so close to the wind, though I think I may change her yards to square-rigged on the foremast.

A knock on the cabin door, and Elias Creed put his head around it. “Ganesh Ka is in sight.”

“Thanks, Elias. I’ll be up on deck presently. Where does theAstraros stand?”

“Fine on the starboard bow, some half a league ahead. She’s a flyer, all right. Gallico has reefed every sail she has, and still has the legs of us.” Creed sounded almost resentful, as if theRevenant ’s honor had been slighted.

“I’ll wager she stinks of shit, all the same,” Rol said, with a weak grin.

Ganesh Ka. From the sea it appeared to be nothing more than some huge geological anomaly, a freak of soaring stone. Cliffs between two and three hundred feet high ran sheer and mustard-pale for over a league along the shore, the sea smashing in white breakers about their foot. But above them there reared up black, unearthly towers of volcanic stone-basalt and granite in poplar-shaped buttresses and barbicans, as variegated as the trees in a wood, and yet existing in some half-guessed symmetry. With the eyes half closed and the light behind them, they might almost become the castles of some rock-hewing titan, in places as rough as nature and the wind could make them, in others as perfectly smoothed as a sculptor’s dream. A man might marvel at the sight, without ever guessing that it had been built by artifice, and the imaginations of minds long dead.