Brian Ruckley - Corsair

Their blades clashed and Yulan could feel that there was strength yet in Lake’s one good arm. He gave ground, feet searching for the safe spaces between rubble and cracks. Even amid desperation, his mind found the distance to see in himself a half-buried reluctance. There was some small part of him that still did not want to commit to this, to the violence and death. He saw no such reluctance in Lake’s steady gaze. And he knew, as only one who had come alive out of past violence could, that commitment was half the fight.

Yulan set his rear foot to the ground, and both hands to the hilt, and hammered a flurry of slashing blows in at Lake. The Orphanidon found the speed from somewhere to block or turn each, angling his own blade to send Yulan’s glancing away.

Lake gave an abrupt, shuffling dance forward of his feet and launched a kick into Yulan’s midriff. Like a thread through the eye of a needle, he found the one instant in which sword’s movement, balance, weight all conspired to hold Yulan there, unable to avoid the blow. It numbed his stomach and sent him staggering back, almost tripping over the debris that littered the passage.

For a moment he was hunched over, struggling for breath and composure. Lake might have killed him then, had he not been just as spent. The Orphanidon swayed unsteadily. For that one moment, he seemed to lack the strength to hold his sword up and its tip touched the floor.

Enna wailed, half-scream, half-fury. From her hand, pressed against the wall, a thousand cracks suddenly webbed out through the stonework. The greatest of them raced straight ahead, ripping itself along the length of the corridor, spitting out fragments of stone. The whole keep shook. Greater convulsions still wracked the walls and ceiling. From Yulan’s left, a tempest of destruction erupted. That whole wall seemed to tear itself apart and an all-consuming hail of rock splinters and shattered masonry and misting mortar filled his world and senses.

He felt the skin of his face being lacerated. He felt the blast punching that whole side of his body. He felt the dust filling his nose and mouth. Some larger, blunter hunk of debris slammed against the side of his head and he fell.

In darkness he lay. Lost. Hearing collapse and thunder as if from very far away. Feeling the flagstones beneath his cheek shivering. Body and mind were empty.

Then: Get up, his own voice whispered within him. Get up.

He blinked. Blood in his eyes. Pain in his temple.

Get up .

He coughed as he levered himself up onto one knee. His vision was blurred, as if water coursed down over the whole world. His ears rang, the ringing laid over the sound of the castle quaking and tumbling. Some huge block of the ceiling crashed down beside him, and he barely noticed it.

Dimly, he saw Lake slumped against the wall to one side of the passageway. He was trying to push himself upright, using his sword like the walking stick of a fallen old man. Further on, Enna was there. Taking one short step after another. And beyond her … what? Yulan blinked again. There was something there, behind Enna. Some shape. Some movement.

The lion came, impossibly, out of the darkness, out of the veiling mists of grit and mortar and took hold of Enna. Feeble, emaciated, the lion came and shook her. She made no sound, and nor did it. Quietly, it simply took her shoulder in its mouth and shook her like a doll.

Yulan stared, barely understanding what he saw. Experiencing it as if it were a waking dream. Lake turned to look and cried out.

‘No!’ the Orphanidon roared, and as if the sound summoned up strength he heaved himself to his feet and lumbered towards the beast and the child.

Lake’s sword came up, and in the same moment the roof came down. Finally broken, all its decades or centuries of resilience defeated, the castle began to fold in on itself. A rain of stone in deep, deafening surrender. It engulfed everything in front of Yulan, snatching away his view of Enna, Lake, lion in an instant. It fell around him, beating at his back.

He turned and stumbled away. As fast as he could, on feet he could hardly feel any more, on a floor that rocked and pitched like the deck of a boat. At the corner, he saw Hamdan ahead, in the midst of climbing over the great back of the corpse-bear.

‘Get out!’ Yulan tried to shout, surprised at how faint and weak his voice sounded. ‘It’s all coming down!’

And it did, in their wake as they struggled and strove to reach the balcony. All the Sorentines’ handiwork fell in on itself. Yulan could not breathe, could not hear. Saw only dimly. Until he was at the door to the balcony and there was sky before him.

Hamdan was there for a moment, and then gone, throwing himself out into the air. Yulan took one hobbling stride, another, and planted his hand on the balustrade and vaulted clumsily over.

‘I can’t swim!’ he cried pointlessly as he fell, because there was nothing else in his head but that one very simple thought.

Being dragged from the water was at once an immense relief and distinctly painful. Corena leaned down and snagged Yulan’s collar with a boathook and heaved him in close to the side of the boat. It was rough. Less so, though, than the flailing around he had been doing after the sea rushed up from very far below and hit him. It had felt much like being hit with a door.

‘Is anyone coming after us?’ Corena asked him as he lay sprawled on the deck, as wet as he had ever been.

‘No,’ he gasped. And that was all he could say.

Hunched on the last rock, as far from the shattered remnants of the castle as it could get without wetting its feet, was the black ape. As they drifted slowly past, it watched them with all the solemnity of an old and wise man. Yulan read no entreaty, no hostility, no accusation in its gaze. Yet the sombre gravity of it struck him. The sheer indifferent acceptance in the creature’s eyes that it had somehow survived and come out unscathed from the mayhem of the Corsair King’s fall. The madness did not seem to have touched the ape, which simply sat on a rock and observed the passing of a boat.

‘Can we get in any closer?’ Yulan asked Corena on impulse.

She eyed him as if he had lost whatever sense he might once have had.

‘I’m curious,’ was the only explanation he could offer.

He and Corena and Hamdan stood along one side of the boat, holding it in against the rocks with poles. The sea wanted to bear it off and carry it out into the landless expanse. It took a good deal of effort, a good deal of leaning the poles hard into crannies, to hold the boat steady even for a short time.

‘Hurry up,’ Yulan grunted.

The ape looked at them. It looked at the poles and at the boat as it gently rose and fell. With languorous care it unfolded its arms, set its weight on its knuckles and picked its way over the weed-cloaked rocks.

It climbed up into the back of the boat, as far as it could be from the vessel’s human occupants, and settled itself there in the stern. It spent a little time picking at something caught beneath one of its fingernails. And then shuffled round, almost as if it wanted to watch the island receding into the distance, or the pale wake that trailed behind them.

The children lay down to sleep beneath canvases Corena had found stowed beneath benches. To Yulan’s amazement they did sleep, quickly and deeply.

Corena did not, of course. She stood tall at the tiller in the dwindling light with the sky turning orange and purple behind her. The ape had not liked that, her intrusion upon a space it thought it had claimed for its own. But Corena was master of a new ship, better than the scow she had left in the cove, and she was not minded to have her captaincy questioned by an animal she had not invited aboard. She scowled at the ape until it yielded, and curled itself in to a corner.