Brian Ruckley - Corsair

He tried to put a touch of threat into those last words, but it washed over Kottren unnoticed as far as he could tell. The Corsair King took a few paces closer and beckoned Corena with a crooked finger.

‘Let’s see it, then. Let’s see this contract between peasants and the Free that’s supposed to make my bowels tremble.’

‘There’s no need …’ Yulan began, but Corena was already moving smoothly past him.

‘Let the man see it if he wants,’ she said.

She carried the parchment case at the small of her back, strapped around her waist. Her hand moved round towards it as she walked. Kottren was holding out his hand. He was smiling with the sort of sour laziness Yulan had come to expect of the King’s amusement.

Off-kilter, Yulan’s mind whispered to him. It caught the shifting mood before he was consciously aware of it. It set his legs in motion, even as he was seeing that Corena’s hand behind her back clasped not the contract but something else, nestled in there beneath the leather case. He reached for her with one hand, for the hilt of his sword with the other, and already knew there was nothing he could do.

Corena brought a thin, short blade out and around. She stepped forward and took hold of the Corsair King’s hair so suddenly that he had no reaction save the widening of his eyes and the opening of his mouth. She punched the knife once, twice, thrice into the side of his neck. The spray of blood was instant. Kottren’s arms had started to come up to fend her off, but his legs folded as if some puppeteer had carelessly cut his strings.

‘Is there a plan I don’t know about?’ Hamdan asked into the fragment of silence as everyone stared in startled disbelief at Kottren’s slumping form.

Then all was movement, and the only thing that mattered was who moved fastest. Yulan, already reaching for Corena, was fastest.

His left hand closed on her shoulder and he dragged her violently backwards, away from her choking victim. His right hand brought out his sword as he stepped over Kottren’s twitching legs.

This was the kind of moment in which he had always found a calm others could not. He saw clearly and with precision. His anticipation reached a beat ahead of his steady heart. A glimpse told him all he needed to know about the men before him.

Several would not fight. Others might, unless they were quickly discouraged. The key to their discouragement lay in the few who sprang forwards at once, swords and clubs and axes raised.

He dodged past the first, because they would not expect him to put an enemy at his back. His sword came down on the shoulder of the next. It bit in. The blade did not come free at first, so he kicked the man hard in the chest with the sole of his boot to force flesh and sword apart.

Behind him he heard what he had hoped – no, trusted – he would: the tethered sounds of bowstring thrumming, shaft flying, arrowhead smacking home. Hamdan was the only reason it was safe to put an enemy at his back.

Three pirates still remained to his front. Beyond them, a few of their fellows were already fleeing. More stood in uncertainty, or edged cautiously towards the struggle. Every moment mattered, so he danced between those moments and shaped them as best he could.

He caught a descending axe on the blade of his sword and turned it aside and down. The movement brought him in close enough to hit the axe’s wielder hard in the throat with stiff fingers. The man staggered, clutching at his neck, and Yulan spun away and onward even as Hamdan skimmed an arrow into the axeman’s chest.

Yulan shouted, screaming invented rage at his opponents. It worked as it was meant to. Eyes widened a touch, feet hesitated. Yulan fell on them. He ducked under the clumsy swing of a stave. Broke a man’s wrist, cutting it open to the bone. Swept the legs out from under him and half-slit his belly even before he hit the ground.

Yulan’s foot slipped on blood and slime. It took him less than a heartbeat to steady himself, long enough for a knife to stab into his upper arm. There was only the distant whisper of pain – as if someone else, somewhere else was feeling it – as the blade wrenched out. He spun and brought his sword about in a rising arc, fast and hard as it would go. It took the man who had stabbed him in the side of the face. Unhinged his jaw, broke his teeth. And with that, there was no one left to kill.

Yulan stood among the dead and dying. His arms hung loose at his side, the bloodied point of his sword almost touching the ground. He bowed his head for a moment or two, breathing hard. The gulls were screaming. The wind was tumbling Kottren’s fallen crown over the rocks, spinning it like a toy wheel.

Hamdan moved up at his side. He loosed an arrow after the fleeing figures, a dozen or more of them running for the distant castle through a churning cloud of angry gulls. He set another to the string before the first was even homed, sent it too flashing away.

‘Cursed birds get in the way,’ the archer grunted in irritation.

‘Let them go,’ Yulan muttered.

‘Only because of the birds. Once the killing starts, never think it’s done before you know it’s done. That’s my advice.’

Yulan turned about as he sheathed his sword. He stepped over a corpse and knelt at the side of the Corsair King. Kottren’s blood had slicked out from his punctured neck, spreading a thick and darkening sheen over the bare rock. Yulan carefully turned Kottren’s head so that he could look into his eyes. The light and life in them were fading. Flickering away.

‘What did you do?’ the Corsair King murmured. ‘It’s not … never …’

And he was gone. Yulan took his hand away. The knife that had killed Kottren lay on the rocks, its victim’s blood sticky around it. It was such a small blade. A simple knife for gutting fish.

A shadow fell across him and the body. He looked up at Corena. Her hands were balled into fists; from the right, the Corsair King’s blood still dripped. She was staring at the dead man with a cold, fixed expression. Then she spat onto Kottren’s cheek.

‘Why?’ asked Yulan, rising to his feet.

‘Because I got close enough,’ the fisherwoman said levelly. ‘It needed doing. And because he killed my husband.’

Which raised more questions than it answered, since Yulan had heard nothing about a dead husband before. He was not allowed the time for answers, though.

‘Not done,’ Hamdan called. ‘Told you.’

Yulan and Corena looked to the archer, then followed the line of his pointing arm out over the island and onto the sea. A boat was there, sleek and low in the water, racing on full sails across the wind. It cut through the waves with a fierce determination Corena’s scow could never have matched.

Yulan squinted at the figures near the prow, veiled in spray as the boat sped down the flank of the island. One of them was Lake, he thought, and his heart sank. Corena was already running for the tiny rowboat that had carried them ashore. Even Yulan, with his near-endless ignorance of the sea and the vessels that rode it, could tell it was futile. Kottren’s Orphanidon was making for the fishing scow, rocking at anchor a hundred paces offshore, and he would reach it before anything could be done.

‘Can you hit anyone on that boat from here?’ Yulan quietly asked Hamdan.

The archer was tugging an arrow free from one of the bodies. He straightened and wiped the barbed point clean on his sleeve, gazing out at the pirates with one eye half closed against the sun.

‘Maybe. Wouldn’t want to stake my life on it.’

‘You wouldn’t have to; only his. The Orphanidon’s standing up at the prow, I think.’

‘Oh, well in that case I’ll have a try. You might want to call back our captain-assassin, though. She goes out there, good chance she’s not coming back and I’m not sure how we get home then.’