Paul Kearney - The Mark of Ran

There was a quiver at Rol’s hip, and he set his hand upon his sword-pommel. Fleam slept uneasily. Perhaps she sensed more violence to come.

There was a life in the sword; Rol knew that now. It was avid, savage, and it had a voice that he half understood. What sorcery had created the blade he could not guess, but it had long passed from this world of men.

“They say the Goliad was once paradise on earth,” Creed said quietly, staring up at the mountains but seeing different things. “A garden of the ancient world shaped by the hands of the Creator Himself. And in it He set the fathers of the first men, while the angels watched over them in their sleep.” Creed’s eyes snapped darkly to Rol’s face. “They say some with the blood of angels still walk the earth.”

“I was not sure if you’d noticed.”

“It’s in the eyes. They are not truly human.”

“Gallico and I, we are the same, under the skin. Does that bother you?”

Creed shrugged, smiling. “We all have our burdens to bear. Myself, I think I shall feel the shackles on my wrists for the rest of my life-and the lash of the overseer’s whip.”

A cry, a tattered chorus of laughter from below. Rol and Creed ran and jumped down the side of the gully to find their shipmates gathered close about the kneeling Gallico. The halftroll was still shoveling earth out of a fair-sized hole, but his hands were glistening black now with mud and there was a tiny bell of sound at his knees, a trickle.

“Water, by all the gods,” Elias breathed. “Gallico, I salute your nose.”

“The hell with my nose. Get down here and help me dig.”

Another quarter of an hour and they had a pool of water shining in the gully bottom and were taking turns to cup it in their hands and gulp it greedily down their dry throats. It was muddy and full of grit, but tasted sweet and cold. They filled their flaccid waterskins and drank pint after pint. One or two of the men threw it up directly, and then went back to drinking again. It sat like liquid ice in their stomachs but was welcome for all that. Finally Rol called a halt.

“Back to the beach. We have to fill the water casks. The rest of the crew are as thirsty as we, and it’ll be dawn soon.”

The way back seemed shorter with the good water seeping through their parched bodies. Gallico raised his head and sniffed the air again.

“The onshore breeze has dropped. It’s backing round now, northeast or nor’-nor’east.”

“A fair wind for Ordos,” Mihal, one of the younger sailors, said.

They were still a mile from the coast when they caught sight of a strange glow on the horizon, a saffron glare like that of a tiny setting sun. They studied it in puzzlement as they walked.

“Perhaps the men at the boat lit a fire to keep themselves warm,” Elias said.

“What are they burning, sand?” Gallico retorted. His face had clenched shut again.

It was Mihal who said it.

“It’s the ship. The Cormorant is burning.”

Such a stupid thing to say. Ships sailed, they went aground, they capsized, they sank. Ships did not burn. Men burned ships.

Rol began to run.

“Do not do it!” Gallico shouted, loud as a trumpet blast in the night.

Rol ran. The land dipped under his feet and he sped through a hollow filled with black stunted trees. Their sharp leaves furrowed his brow for him but he did not slacken his pace. He ran as fast as the burgeoning fury in him could catch light. He found the cliff path and scrambled and half fell down it, a cloud of stones and gravel tumbling with him, racing past his feet. His boots hit soft sand and he ran on. He ran past the bodies of the men he had left on the beach, the stove-in timbers of the ship’s boat. He hit water with a white flare of spray, and began swimming as though water were a necessary irritation, another medium of transport. He swam as he had run, without thinking, his mind one big white space.

Prothero.

The Cormorant was ablaze from truck to waterline, and crucified to her sides were Prothero and the shipmates Rol had left behind to look after her. A dozen men twitching in the flames as their muscles and sinews contracted into cinders, their skin already blackened, hair alight. The pitch on the end of Prothero’s stump blazed like a torch, so that it seemed he was bleeding fire. His eyes were already withered and the heat had shrunk his face to the size of a child’s.

Rol swam to the ship’s side and trod water, staring up at the conflagration. The Cormorant groaned and creaked in her final agony and flaming pieces came tumbling off her jury-rigged yards like little comets, hissing into the sea all about him. There was a sharp bang on board, and the brig shuddered, timbers fountaining up into the air like fireworks as one of the small powder-charges for the swivels caught light. The ship began to list and the fire hissed venomously at the waterline, fighting the cool dark of the sea.

Rol dragged his gaze away from Prothero’s shriveled face and swam around the Cormorant ’s stern. The glass in the stern windows was exploding with high-pitched cracks and the flames rushed out hungrily to lick round the taffrail. His fury cooled, sank cold into ash. He peered out at the horizon where the lightening sky spoke of morning, but could see nothing. He was too low in the water, weighed down by his sword and the master’s wheel-lock at his waist.

He floated there by the dying ship that had been his home, ignoring the pleas and cries of the shore party as they found their own way down onto the beach. Finally, as the sunrise paled the roaring flames, he turned in the water and began swimming for the shore again, tired to the depths of his bones.

Seventeen

“We saw them. From the sea cliffs they were hull-down on the horizon,” Elias Creed said, his face pale beneath the red peel of his sunburn. “Two Bionese cruisers, sailing sou’-sou’west. They must have sent boats in through the reef during the night.”

“We were a Mercanter ship,” young Mihal protested. “What were they thinking?”

“No pennant-it went in the storm,” Rol told him in an even voice. “They mistook us for the privateer’s consort, and sent in the marines without asking too many questions. They crucify pirates, and pirates is what they thought we were.” He looked at Creed and Gallico as he spoke, and then looked away again, ashamed of the meanness of his thinking.

“I do not blame you if you are bitter,” Gallico said. “The Adder brought this upon you, and for that I am heartily sorry.”

“Sorry!” Jude Mochran said, red-eyed. “My brother was on that ship. He made it through the storm when many another didn’t-and then they killed him like a common murderer!” Mochran was a small man, but he bunched his fists as though he meant to take on Gallico there and then.

“Enough,” Rol said sharply. “We’ve two shipmates to bury, and we must salvage what we can from the cutter.”

“We’re on the shore of a desert hundreds of miles away from anywhere,” Bartolomew Geygan, a young sailor from Corso, said, quiet but cold. “What in the world is the use?”

“You can sit here and cry into the Reach if you want,” Rol snapped, “but I intend to live through this. Now get on your feet, all of you.”

“You can’t command us,” Mochran said, “your commission went down with the ship. You’re nothing to us now.”

“Then go your own way, Jude,” Rol said calmly. “I won’t stop you.” He knelt in the sand and began to dig with his hands. At once, Gallico and Elias joined him, and after a few moments the other four Cormorants did so also. The tears ran down Mochran’s face as he hurled the sand aside, but he said no more.

Two years, Rol had been with the Cormorant, and many of those who had gone down nailed to her burning hull had been shipmates all that time. Prothero he had sailed with for three times as long. For some reason, as he knelt in the hot sand with the rising sun beating fierce and unpitying upon his back, he felt that his past had somehow caught up with him again. There was something to his life that would not let go of him, as unyielding and ineradicable as the mark on the palm of his hand. It had slept, these seven years, but now was waking again. So he dug deep in the sand, making a grave for things other than the two corpses. There were tasks to fulfill now, and the white fury of his rage would help him accomplish them.