Paul Kearney: The Mark of Ran

Rol closed his eyes, and felt her move under him. Felt the long creak and groan and fall and rise of her. It was like taking a strange woman into one’s bed, a new body to explore.

“By God, she has a heart,” Gallico said.

He opened his eyes at once. “Yes, she’s remarkably stiff. They knew what they were doing, those shipwrights who cursed over the teak in her ribs. Log-line there, what’s she making?”

The beardless youth who was being soaked in the forechains held on to the knotted log-line and shouted back aft. “Seven knots and one fathom!”

Gallico thumped the quarterdeck rail in sheer satisfaction.

“We’d best take in sail,” Rol said with studied casualness, “or we may well overtake master Artimion.” And then they both laughed like simpletons.

Rol sent lookouts to the mastheads; on a day like this they could survey a twenty-mile horizon. He looked back over the starboard quarter at Ganesh Ka, and saw a strange formation of mighty stone, the towers mere geological curiosities, the gap in the cliffs almost invisible. He realized in that moment that Ganesh Ka had always been a place of refuge, even back in the far distant days of its building. The Ancients had windows and fireplaces, they needed stairs and roadways, but their motives and concerns were utterly lost, completely alien. How old was Ganesh Ka? Ten thousand years? Twenty? No one knew. There was something maddening in that, not because of the Ancient blood that ran in his own veins, but simply because the loss of this knowledge, which he felt to be important, seemed almost criminal. What a world, he thought, what an awesomely crass world that can have such monuments erected in it, and not wonder about the minds that made them.

He faced forward again, the ship rising and falling under his feet. There was something in the sea, some ageless rhythm, which all men hearkened to even if none understood. He did not know if Ran’s Mark had put the sea yearning in his heart or if it had always been there, but he knew that here, now, at this moment, he was as happy as he had ever been in his life.

He looked skyward, and in his mind the bright ocean became a flat gaming board upon which pieces moved in obedience to the vagaries of the wind. There was the ragged Ganesh coast; deep-bitten and rock-strewn, death for vessels that did not know it well. There was Artimion and his ships, swooping down upon ten other vessels, the Bionese regiment and its protectors. Rol breathed in slow, remembering what Psellos had told him.

Most men think in one straight line. They see their own actions as a single thread unraveling, and the impingement of others upon their life as nothing more than stray knots in the thread. They look at things through one set of eyes: their own. It is a gift you must learn, to look at your own situation from the viewpoint of another. It is not hard, nor is it complicated. But it is necessary, if you are to survive.

For a moment Rol thought of Rowen, now a rebel queen vying for the possession of a kingdom. His sister. Why would she want him brought to her, now, seven years after she had walked away? He did not believe it was for love. Whatever she was now, it was not the woman she might have been had they remained together. He knew somehow that she was an enemy. That knowledge broke the boy Rol’s heart, but the man Psellos had trained nodded thoughtfully and filed it away for future use.

Then the training went to work on the task in hand. Assemble the information, and ask yourself how it all got there. Why is this happening? Crude questions, and pyramids of factors in the answers.

The Bionari are beating up the coast, into the wind, which means they have come from the south. What is in the south? They have a garrison in Golgos, and-and that’s it.

Rol opened his eyes.

The embarked regiment is the Golgos garrison, and it has taken ship because it has received intelligence about the region in which this elusive pirate city can be found. From where would it receive such intelligence?

And he knew. The knowledge leaped up in his brain even as his heart sank under the weight of it.

His erstwhile shipmates must have been picked up by the Imperials. For the first time, the Bionari knew in which region the Hidden City lay. And now they were sailing up the coast looking for it.

Artimion was right, he thought. I am bad luck. I have brought this on their heads. And his joy in the bright blue day and the ship leaping under his feet was diminished.

“Sail ho!” the lookout on the foremast cried.

His mind emptied. He was instantly alert. “Where?”

“Broad on the larboard beam, skipper. Topsails up. I believe she might be ship-rigged.”

Rol was running aft in a moment. He clambered up the weather shrouds of the mainmast, heaved himself into the maintop, and then started up the topgallantmast. He got close to the truck, hooked an arm in the hounds, and peered east.

Yes, she was three-masted, though not ship-rigged. A barque, square-rigged on fore and main, fore-and-aft sails on the mizzen. More than that he could not make out.

He roared down at the quarterdeck. “Helmsman there! Bring her three points to larboard. Course due east!”

The Revenant turned smoothly under him, his lofty perch leaning and then straightening, dipping and rising. The strange ship could be a Mercanter, minding her own business, but somehow he did not think so. And in any case, she had the weather-gage of Artimion’s little fleet. Rol would have to intercept her if she was not to come upon the other ships of the Ka from the rear.

Ran, let her not be a man-of-war, he prayed silently. Not now.

It was a glorious day about him, a fine day to be at sea. After the confines of Ganesh Ka’s somber stone, the outside world seemed vast beyond measure.

This turning earth, as limitless as a madman’s imagination.

He could see five leagues in every direction, and if he looked east, this entire world was naught but a bubble of blue space. Turquoise sea, the breeze caressing it into a wrinkled swell that caught the sunlight in a vast shimmer. And a sky so dark above his head it might almost be purple, shading down to the far horizon and meeting the ocean, merging with it at the edge of sight. A blue world, empty of everything but air and water. And that nick on the edge of the horizon, the strange ship that might be harmless, or might spell his doom.

Heart rushing in his throat, he looked down. Far below him there pitched a tiny, crowded wooden world. The deck was covered with men, cordage, and the crouching shapes of cannon tied up close to the bulwark, like bronze beasts kept prudently in check. The men below paused, and he could see scores of faces tilted upward at him, and then out at the horizon.

He could not take the risk. Rol closed his eyes for a second, and bellowed, “Beat to quarters!”

A moment of stillness, and then the dry rattling of a drum started up, and the crowd of men on deck exploded into a circus of activity. The ship’s wake began to curve in a graceful arc behind her as she answered her rudder, and changed course to converge with the approaching vessel. Her bow dipped and plunged with a hissing roar and scattered packets of spindrift along the fo’c’sle. Below him, the rigging creaked and groaned, the timbers stretching and straining as though his ship were stirring into wrathful life, a woken titan.

The Revenant was running now with the wind on her larboard quarter, with her mizzen brailed up, the topsails full and drawing tight. His crew were hauling in the mainsail and forecourse-when there was action ahead, it was best not to have canvas billowing too near the muzzles of the guns.

Rol grasped a backstay and slid back down on deck, Ran’s Mark keeping his palm from burning. At once the close-packed activity surrounded him, and his world grew small and busy.