Brian Ruckley - Corsair

Yulan trotted after Corena, who was struggling to launch the rowboat from where they had wedged it in an angle between rocks. He watched Hamdan’s arrow arch out as he ran. The shaft seemed almost slow as it vaulted from island to boat and smacked into the gunwale, no more than a hand’s span from Lake’s midriff. The Orphanidon looked calmly towards them and then sank down out of sight.

‘Bastard wind, bastard waves,’ Yulan heard Hamdan growling behind him as he caught up with Corena and took hold of her arm.

‘You’ll just get yourself killed,’ he said as he pulled gently at her.

She shook him off, and glared at him with such ferocity he could almost believe she would strike him.

‘That’s my boat they’re going for,’ she snapped.

‘And you can’t stop them. Look: your crew already knows it.’

The handful of men aboard Corena’s scow were hurriedly – in panic, more or less – hauling up the anchor, unfurling the sails. The old, tired fishing boat was turning slowly as the wind got to grips with it, but already Lake’s vessel was coming in a wide sweep around the tip of the island. However hard and fast the fishermen worked, however skilled their handling, neither labour nor talent would be enough.

‘Faster, faster,’ Corena was muttering, her body all but trembling with impotence.

‘What do you think?’ asked Hamdan as he came to stand beside them, staring out just as they did at the gradually unfolding hunt over the glittering waves.

‘I think we’d best get to the castle,’ Yulan said. ‘Make sure there’s none there still inclined to fight us. Steal ourselves one of Kottren’s own ships. Maybe save those children from something even worse than what they’ve already lived.’

‘Sounds simple enough,’ Hamdan said wryly. ‘Apart from that Orphanidon out there.’

‘The man he was guarding’s dead, so by rights we shouldn’t be of much interest to him any more.’

‘He seems more interested than not at the moment,’ Hamdan sighed.

Lake looked to have a dozen or more of Kottren’s followers with him. Some of them were gathering around the front and near flank of their boat, hefting grappling hooks and poles, as they remorselessly closed on the lumbering scow. Others stood with shields ready to catch arrows now that they had learned Hamdan’s range.

‘Your arm all right?’ Hamdan asked.

Yulan absently pressed a hand to his upper arm. The pain was mounting now, a hot, sharp ache. Nothing too troubling, though.

‘It’s not my sword-arm, so it’ll do. We can patch it up later.’

The vessels were lurching into a clumsy embrace. Ropes and hooks dragged them closer, bound them together. Some of Corena’s crew were leaping into the water even as Lake’s men scrambled from the deck of the hunter to that of the hunted. Corena hung her head.

‘To the castle,’ Yulan said. ‘We might not have much time now.’

Corena did not look back as they walked away, climbing the same path Kottren had so recently descended. That surprised Yulan. The screams of a thousand agitated gulls put a more immediate thought into his head.

He trotted back and prised one of the long staffs from a dead hand, then rejoined Hamdan and Corena. He held it high above their heads just in time for the wheeling birds to start attacking it.

A grey outcrop of rock a few dozen strides from the castle’s landward entrance gave the three of them shelter. They sat with their backs to it while Hamdan roughly bound Yulan’s arm with a makeshift bandage. The rock was patterned with a hundred white streaks of dried gull-waste.

Every so often, Hamdan would pause in his ministrations to stretch up and check the castle for signs of activity. The gatehouse must once have been quite imposing. Now it was a toothless maw, crumbling and empty of gate or door. Just a dark gullet into the dark body of the stronghold.

Staring out in the other direction, Yulan watched Lake’s boat laboriously zig-zagging its way up the side of the island with Corena’s scow. Both were in the hands of the late Corsair King’s men now. Both had an unforgiving task in hand, working their way against the wind back towards the berthings beyond the castle.

‘We were not told Kottren had taken your husband from you,’ Yulan said as matter-of-factly as he could.

Corena, watching the boats just as he did, said nothing at first and then, ‘Why should you have been?’

‘Because we might have asked for another to bring us here, that’s why,’ grunted Hamdan, pulling the knot of the bandage tight a little less gently than Yulan would have liked.

‘And there’d have been none,’ Corena said. There was more than a hint of anger in her voice. ‘No one else would come out here. You know what Kottren Malak did to those he caught on the sea? Cut their sinews and tendons, then bound them in their own nets. And threw them overboard. That’s what he did to my husband.’

‘So it’s his boat you captain now,’ Yulan said.

‘It was.’

Tears were welling at the corners of her eyes; not falling, but gathering there. They did not reveal themselves in her voice. Yulan could see them. Hamdan did not.

‘We would have done what we said we would do, one way or the other,’ Hamdan muttered as he lifted his head once more to survey the castle. ‘Not sure you’ve made it any easier for us, or for your people.’

‘And I’d do the same again, a thousand times. You’d have done what? Bargained with him? Threatened him? Tricked him into overreaching himself? He never meant you anything but harm, always meant to seize my boat. You play games, because it’s all coins and caution for you. It’s not your love he’s drowned, not your homes he’s burned. I’ve ended it, in the name of my husband, and I care not one fingernail for anything else.’

Yulan held up a placatory hand in the face of her mounting passion.

‘So be it,’ he said gently. ‘So be it. But if there’s more killing needed now, will you let us do it?’

Corena glowered at him. She blinked those unshed tears away.

‘Maybe,’ she said, and Yulan knew that was all he was going to get from her.

‘I’m seeing nothing,’ Hamdan said. ‘Everyone hiding away, you think?’

Yulan shuffled round to get a better view of the castle. It squatted there on the high end of the island in mute, grey immobility. Not a single figure could be seen in the gateway, atop the walls, atop the keep beyond.

‘Only one way to find out,’ Yulan murmured. He glanced back over his shoulder towards the boats butting their way through waves and wind. ‘Best to do it before the odds set themselves properly against us.’

Yulan went first, running in a low stoop for the nearest corner of the gatehouse. He pressed himself against the stonework to one side of the gateway. Hamdan watched from the half-shelter of the rock, arrow notched to bowstring. The archer’s eyes darted between Yulan and the crenellated walls above.

Yulan waited, gathering himself and his memories of what lay within into one clear and purposeful unity. He remembered a doorway on each side of the gatehouse, about halfway in, stairways to the towers and walls. Height was what they needed. Hamdan nodded, and Yulan spun into the castle.

He ran straight for the opening on the right-hand side of the passageway. He could see the empty courtyard beyond the inner gateway but he ignored it. Such places could be made into killing grounds by even the most inept of defenders.

He bounded as fast as the darkness would allow up the spiralling stair. The wound in his arm did not enjoy it, but speed was everything now. Every passing moment was another in which Kottren’s followers might find some courage from somewhere, and another bringing Lake closer – the only one of them who probably had courage to spare. If he chose to apply it to a dead man’s cause.