Paul Kearney: The Mark of Ran

“Why not?” Rol asked. “Surely this is no time to allow personal animosity to sway judgment.”

“My judgment is sound,” Artimion flashed. “Your ship has not even undergone sea trials. You are short in your complement, and your men have not yet worked together under your command-you would be more of a liability than an asset. This is not your fight, Cortishane. Stay out of it.”

“Is that your last word?”

“If you wish to be of use, take on as many of the common folk as you can and get them out of here until the thing is done. Otherwise, you’re just wasting my time. Go waste your own elsewhere.”

He turned and walked over the gangplank, closely followed by Miriam and half a dozen of her musketeers. Rol watched him go white-faced, but he put an arm out to stop Gallico following. “It’s no use.”

“I never thought Artimion small-minded until today.”

“He may be right. We’re not ready to take on Bionese men-of-war in open battle. Not yet.”

“We have a ship and a crew to sail her.”

“Oh, we’ll sail her, all right. Never fear.”

The little flotilla of vessels left the Ka towed by lighters from the wharves and cheered from the dockside by almost the entire population. Rol’s crew stood watching from the decks of the Revenant, sullen and low-spirited. Gallico was clenching and unclenching his mighty fists as though eager to wrap them round a throat. Elias came running along the packed dockside and pelted up the gangplank as though pursued.

“Well?” Rol asked, still watching the yards of the departing ships, stark silhouettes against the bright sunshine beyond the sea gates.

“I spoke to one of Artimion’s master’s mates. The enemy are sou’-sou’east of here, nine leagues. The wind’s from the west-nor’west, a fresh breeze. They’re beating up into it, tack on tack.”

“So that’s why he’s so confident,” Gallico said. “He has the weather-gage. He’ll swoop down on them at the time and place of his choosing.”

Rol stood considering. “We’re putting to sea, all the same. We’ll make some offing from the coast and take a wide course down their starboard flank, make sure everything is going to plan.”

“And maybe get in a few licks of our own?” Gallico asked, eyes dancing.

“If we can. We’ll play it by ear. Elias, go you to the far docks and hunt us up another lighter-we’ll need a tow to get out of the bay same as Artimion. But we’ll leave it until he’s made it beyond the cliffs. No sense in antagonizing him. He has enough on his mind.”

Ganesh Ka was not yet in a panic, but it was a close-run thing. Its population had divided into those who sought safety on the boats now being cleared at the wharves, and those who were fleeing pell-mell for the hills. Experienced mariners were numbering folk off to each and every fishing smack, cutter, launch, lighter, and hoy that stood at the docks. It was an ordered process, but in the queuing lines there was the growing stink of desperation. Rol did not doubt that it would turn ugly before long.

A gaggle of men and women turned up on the dock alongside the Revenant and hailed the ship in shrill voices. The gangplank had been taken up preparatory to casting off but now these unfortunates were wailing in a body at the busy ship’s company.

“Take us aboard of you, sirs!”

“I worked three weeks on this here ship!”

“For pity’s sake, you have room enough in the hold; let us aboard.”

“Lower the gangplank,” Rol said to Creed, his hand on his sword hilt. “Gallico, how many could we get below the waterline?”

“We pack ’em in tight among the cable-tiers and the water casks, I’d say fifty maybe.”

“Count the first fifty on board and then raise the plank.”

Those on the docks cried out their thanks and came aboard in single file, their arms full of their meager possessions. Men, women, and bewildered children, some sobbing bitterly as they boarded. Creed led them below bearing a ship’s lantern and stowed them in the depths of the hold, where they lay weeping and gabbling in the near-darkness. When the gangplank was raised on the last of the fifty the remainder of the crowd stood staring hopelessly at the ship for a while, and then shouldered their burdens and left quietly. Rol felt a kind of shame as he watched them go.

“No lights to be allowed below,” he snapped as Creed came back on deck bearing his lantern. “We may have loose powder coming and going later on. Gallico, how long can we fight?”

The halftroll scratched his chin. “We’ve enough for eighteen or twenty full broadsides, fighting only one side of the ship. Both broadsides are loaded, though, and we’ve plenty of match, no fear about that.”

“If we haven’t won with twenty broadsides we’re beat anyway,” Rol said. “Sidearms?”

“A brace of pistols in your cabin, courtesy of the magazine. For everyone else it’s cutlasses, pikes, and axes, and don’t they hope we won’t need ’em.”

The lighter was alongside, its twelve-man crew resting on their oars. They had their seabags piled about the thwarts; clearly, once they had towed the Revenant out of the bay they meant to keep going.

“Cast off fore and aft!” Rol shouted. His heart was thumping madly. “Bear a hand with the towline forward. Helmsman, stand by at the wheel.”

His orders were well-nigh superfluous, for every one of the crew was an experienced seaman, and they had anticipated him. Beneath their feet, the ship began to move. Achingly slow at first, she built up a momentum through the water as the lighter crew strained at their oars. They edged away from the docks, toward the blazing brightness of the sea gates and the wide blue disc of the bay beyond.

The sunlight made them all blink like owls as they passed out of the shelter of the stone. Rol had almost forgotten that it was early summer, and the day was not yet old. He let fall topsails as a shimmer of a breeze passed over the enclosed bay, wrinkling the water, and the lightermen made better speed with the help of the sails. They steered directly for the gap in the encircling cliffs.

“We’re on the tail of the ebb,” Creed said, shading his eyes with his hand. “Lucky for us. Another hour and they’d have been hauling against the tide.”

The Revenant passed through the gap, the shadow of the cliffs cutting out the brilliant sunshine for a few minutes. But then she was through, and at once her motion changed, grew livelier. There was a stiff west-nor’west breeze blowing from the land and she had it on the port beam. The topsails bellied out taut and the creak of the rigging picked up a note.

The lighter crew cast off the towrope and stroke oar rose in his seat and waved his cap at them as they pulled away from the smaller craft. He shouted something but it was lost on the wind. Rol breathed deep. He could see Artimion’s ships fine on the starboard bow, some three or four leagues away already. He would keep his distance.

“Jib and courses-but reef the mizzen, lads,” he called out to his crew, and the men started up the shrouds, their sullenness evaporated. They were grinning and laughing as they climbed out on the yards, and the huge creamy masses of canvas fell like clouds, to be braced round and sheeted home with a minimum of fuss. Rol met Gallico’s eye, and nodded.

“Well, they’re seamen, all right.” He turned to the quartermaster at the wheel. “East-southeast.”

“Aye aye, sir. East-southeast it is.” The quartermaster was smiling like a man whose wife has given birth.

“Now let’s see what she can do,” Rol said to Gallico. “Get a log-line to the forechains.”

The Revenant was chopping through the swells, rolling and pitching as the offshore breeze met the eastward-rolling waves of the Inner Reach. She rose nobly, her heavy construction a bonus. Rol stood on her quarterdeck and grasped a backstay as was his wont, feeling the living movement of her beneath his feet, gauging the pressures working on her hull and masts. The spray raised by her bows came as far aft as the waist and in the white wake of her passage a miniature rainbow bloomed. Out here in the sunshine her hull timbers seemed even darker than in the gloom of the ship-cavern, such was the contrast with the blue sea, the unclouded sky. She was truly a black ship. His ship, the first he had ever truly taken to heart, having sweated and agonized over her resurrection like a midwife at a breech birth.