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  A Tale of the Free: Corsair

  Brian Ruckley

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  I

  ‘Let me show you my animals,’ the Corsair King said to Yulan. ‘Been the greatest labour of my life, they have. You should see them.’

  Yulan did not want to see Kottren Malak’s animals. He would not have been interested at the best of times, and with his body still feeling rinsed out this was not the best of times. The stench of the creatures filled this crumbling stronghold and made him feel ill all over again. Getting closer to the source of the stink was the last thing he wanted to do. Even so, he followed as the Corsair King limped along the passageway.

  ‘Folks called me a fool to start bringing animals to this island,’ Kottren muttered. As he walked, he was working stubby fingers up the side of his chin, scratching them over the wiry hair of his beard. ‘But the idea crept up on me, crawled into my head like a spider.’

  He scrabbled his fingers at his ear, and stopped and turned to grin at Yulan, his hand frozen there as if trying to get inside.

  ‘That ever happen to you, Free-boy? You ever get an idea that just came from somewhere, crept in and made a nest in your skull, all uninvited?’

  ‘Not really,’ Yulan said without inflection.

  He was nineteen years old, big and strong. It had been some time since anyone called him a boy, and he had no idea whether Kottren was mocking him or just letting his tongue run as it would. He was beginning to suspect that the self-proclaimed Corsair King was mad. It was a rather dispiriting thought. When someone’s head was rot-riddled, trying to reason with them was not easy. Nor was trying to bargain with them, predict them or threaten them.

  Kottren moved on again, leading the way towards the menagerie.

  ‘Maybe you’re too young,’ he said without looking round. ‘Might be you’ve not got the bedding in your head yet for an idea to make a nest from.’

  Yulan could hear, somewhere up ahead, snuffles and shiftings. Grunts and snarls. The smell of dung and straw and fur and musk was getting stronger. He braced himself – or more to the point, his stomach – for the encounter. But his testing was delayed a little longer, for the Corsair King once more stopped, and he turned about in the narrow corridor so suddenly that Yulan almost walked into him.

  Kottren glared out from narrowed eyes.

  ‘You sure you’re here to parley?’

  Yulan nodded.

  Kottren wrinkled his nose. ‘Never liked parley. It’s not a game for men, y’ask me. And I never did hear of the Free being paid to parley for peasants.’

  The hope had been that this contract might be fulfilled without bloodshed. Yulan suspected that the day was loosening its arms, flexing its muscles, preparing to smack him in the face with disappointment. Of course, no disappointment would outweigh the relief of having solid ground beneath his feet. The day could knock him about all it liked and he would still be thanking it for giving him that wonderful respite.

  ‘There’s always room in the world for new things, don’t you think?’ he said.

  Kottren did not seem inclined to reflect on such notions. He flicked the underside of his chin three times with his middle finger, absently but surprisingly hard, and looked over Yulan’s shoulder.

  ‘D’you see that beast behind you?’

  Yulan looked round. There was no animal there, only the closest of Kottren’s mangy warriors. Older than the rest, with lines and loose skin and hair turning white with age. He wore, just as the rest did, a strange medley of clothes. Ill-fitting, mismatched. The paltry booty of their raids against people still poorer than they were themselves.

  ‘Calls himself Lake, but that’s not his name,’ Kottren said.

  Yulan had not closely marked this man before, though he had probably been with them all along, in among the ragtag band of brigands which followed Kottren around. It was an oversight that Yulan now regretted. For all his years, the man had an air of competent concentration that the rest of Kottren’s pack most decidedly lacked.

  ‘Not his name?’ Yulan murmured.

  ‘No,’ said Kottren. ‘Don’t know his true name. Foreign. He used to be an Orphanidon, y’see.’

  Yulan chose not to react. Not outwardly, at least. From somewhere up ahead, amid all the other bestial sounds, he thought he could hear teeth scraping on bone.

  Lake stared flatly back into Yulan’s eyes. It seemed absurd that a petty pirate like Kottren could acquire the services of a former Imperial Orphanidon, but was it possible? Perhaps. The decadently strange Empire of Orphans was very distant, and was no friend to the Hommetic Kingdom upon whose fringes this island lay; any journey that had brought an Orphanidon here would have been extraordinary. But it could have happened. As descriptions of the day went, disappointing might yet prove too feeble.

  ‘Thought y’might want to know,’ Kottren continued. Not quite amiable, but not aggressive either. ‘Just … well, you’re the Free, y’say. Everyone knows it’s trouble when the Free stick a finger in a stew, don’t they?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be,’ Yulan said, turning away from Lake with studied calm. ‘Depends how people deal with us.’

  ‘If they let you be the bully or not, y’mean.’ Kottren was smiling, in a manner of speaking. ‘Either way, can’t do any harm for folks to know I’ve got an Orphanidon at my back, right? If I want to, I can piss all over trouble.’

  Another concern, cosying up against that regarding Kottren’s possible madness. Could it be that he was ignorant too? Yulan had not been riding with the Free for long, but he had already come to expect a certain … well, caution if nothing else, at the mere naming of the last of the independent companies. In the decades of its storied existence, the Free had broken entire armies, humbled mighty lords. Unmade and made real kings, not just broken-minded bandits who pretended to the title.

  The Free might not be all it had been in its glorious past, but still it wielded martial and magical power beyond the dreams of most. And one thing the Free still knew how to do when necessary was make trouble, far more of it than one aged Orphanidon could quench with his stream. Perhaps Kottren did not know or understand that.

  Which was all the more troubling given that Kottren and his grey-haired killer did not actually have to contend with the full might of the Free today. Just Yulan and one other. There was a touch of the bluff to this whole venture, and Yulan did not much like his chances of bluffing an ignorant madman.

  It was, if nothing else, going to be interesting, he supposed. And what had the wandering that eventually brought him to the Free been, if not a search for the interesting?

  ‘Let’s go and feed the animals then,’ Kottren said.

  ‘Let’s,’ agreed Yulan, smiling thinly.

  II

  ‘What will you do when you get there?’ Corena had asked Yulan.

  That’s what he thought she’d said, anyway. It had not been easy to hear above the breaking of waves about her boat’s prow, the groaning of the rope and wood that held the wind-full sail. And the sound of his own heaving and retching. Here was a depth of bodily misery
he had never before explored. A simple admixture of wind, wave and boat and lo: all the world was asway and he was undone. Unmanned.

  It should not have concerned him that Corena saw him like this, yet it did. Or it had until he became so ill he began to wonder if he was dying and lesser worries were forgotten. She was attractive in her weather-scoured way, and could only be five or six years older than him. Young to be captaining her own fishing scow, he would have thought.

  Whatever her age, having her standing there watching him empty his already empty stomach into the brine was not how he had imagined things turning out. He had anticipated a rather more splendid journey: one that would prove his worth and firm his standing in the Free. All that had been proved so far was that the ocean loathed him almost as much as he loathed it. Not quite, but almost.

  ‘No call for boats where I grew up,’ he muttered by way of apologetic explanation as he leaned back from the gunwale. ‘I know sand and horses better than water.’

  ‘The sea’s mother to a thousand hurts. Sickening you’s about the gentlest of them.’

  In Yulan’s head-spun state, he couldn’t untangle the sympathy from the unsympathy in that. There was certainly no sympathy on offer from the rest of the boat’s crew. They were a taciturn and hard-faced little group, and they had not bothered to conceal their amusement at the effect the sea had upon their passengers.

  ‘What’ll you do when we get there?’ Corena asked again.

  Yulan wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. He could dimly hear Hamdan vomiting over the side a little way back in the small boat. There might have been some comfort buried in the fact that he was not the only brave warrior of the Free to be crippled by a bit of a swell, but he felt far too sick to go digging after it.

  ‘If we survive the voyage, you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘You’ll live,’ she said, and her sharpness cut through even the fog of Yulan’s bottomless misery.

  Hard as it was to remember in this foul-tasting moment, his own suffering might not be the most important thing in the world. Corena’s village, and two others just as poor, had rendered themselves all but destitute to buy the aid of the Free, and what had their desperation bought them? Two men of the desert who collapsed into puking and snivelling infirmity as soon as they were put aboard a boat. She was probably thinking they had spent their every hope to buy warhorses and landed themselves a pair of ailing mules instead.

  ‘When we get there,’ he said carefully, ‘we’ll do whatever is required to fulfil our contract with you. Merkent gave you his word and the Free does not break its Captain’s pledges.’

  ‘Two men don’t seem much to set against the Corsair King,’ Corena said.

  Yulan was reaching for something confident to say when his stomach clenched again. In an instant he was back over the boat’s edge, retching into the glittering, foaming waters.

  ‘Sorry,’ he tried to say, but there was no real room for the word in his throat or mouth.

  Only two, he might have said, but two of the Free are worth twenty who aren’t.

  The liege of the fishing villages was Munn of Festard, a petty lordling whose entire renown was as a dullard and drunkard; among the dullest and drunkest of all the Hommetic Kingdom’s nobility, which in that company was no small achievement. Receiving none of the protection Lord Munn owed them, Corena’s people had turned to the Free.

  Barrels of salted whitefish, some whale ivory, jars of fish oil, a scattering of jewellery that had been passed down through generations. Half the total remaining wealth of the villages, perhaps. Morsels, by the standards of the Free; only enough to buy the service of Yulan and Hamdan.

  She might doubt it now, but if Yulan could have spoken he would have promised her: Two is enough. We are enough. You will see.

  His involuntary silence left her un-reassured and she moved away, crossing the pitching deck with an ease Yulan found deeply enviable. He slithered and stumbled his own way back to Hamdan’s side, eyes tight shut, never leaving hold of the gunwale.

  ‘I feel like I’m dying,’ he muttered to his fellow warrior.

  ‘I know.’ Hamdan sounded as enfeebled as Yulan felt. ‘First time I sailed was even worse, believe it or not. Swore I’d never ride the sea again.’

  ‘You knew it would do this to you and you came anyway?’ Yulan asked in something close to disbelief.

  ‘I’ve been the only Massatan in the Free for a long time, son,’ Hamdan said. ‘You don’t think when another finally turns up, I might be inclined to watch his back? Especially when he’s a young lion who’s got more learning still to do than he knows?’

  Yulan looked briefly into Hamdan’s face. It carried quite a few more years than his own, but even so there was something of the mirror to it. The same pale brown skin soaked in the memory of the sun. The same straight black hair. Two men of the southern sands, far from home.

  A glimpse of the rolling horizon at the edge of his vision quickly made Yulan clamp his eyes shut again.

  ‘Corena wants to know what we’re going to do when we get there,’ he said.

  ‘Assuming we get there alive, you mean?’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ Yulan grunted. He had a powerful urge to lie down.

  ‘Merkent gave you the lead,’ – Hamdan was talking quickly, perhaps trying to outpace an interruption by his own stomach – ‘so he must have thought you could work the thing out. I don’t imagine it’ll be complicated, though. We talk first, and if that doesn’t work we figure out how many people need to die and get to the killing.’

  III

  Getting to the killing was starting to feel inevitable to Yulan as he followed the Corsair King into the huge hall where he kept his menagerie. He would have preferred to avoid deaths, but he did not fear the prospect. He had killed more than a few men – some even before he joined the Free – and he was starting to suspect that Kottren Malak’s demise would be at least as great a service to the world as any of them had been.

  In the villages along the mainland shore, as he rode with Merkent and the rest to meet with the fisherfolk, Yulan had seen a dozen kinds of utter misery. The graves of children killed by Kottren’s raiders in among the burned-out husks of shacks. The widows of fishermen, their husbands slaughtered or enslaved at sea, begging by the side of the track. They had been thinned by hunger, made desperate and shameless by poverty. Empty moorings where boats seized by the Corsair King had once lain.

  The fishing villages and their inhabitants were dying. It was all Kottren Malak’s doing, and as far as Yulan could tell it weighed less than a feather in the man’s conscience or memory.

  ‘People called me a fool for starting to collect these beasts,’ Kottren told Yulan, just as he had done before.

  I’m sure they did, Yulan thought.

  ‘You’ll see now, though,’ Kottren continued. ‘I’d wager there’s none has more. Not even your King in … where do they reign these days? Armadell?’

  Yulan quickly said, more out of instinct than anything else, ‘The Free answer to no throne. We owe allegiance to none but ourselves.’

  ‘Lucky boys and girls,’ Kottren grunted. ‘The kings and the School have stamped out every other free company. You folk have faced them down though, eh? Got to, if you want to stand straight and tall. Got to follow your fancies. Can’t have others telling you which way to sail.’

  The decrepit castle had been impossible to miss while a couple of the pirate’s raiding boats were escorting Corena’s scow in to the island. The whole long, thin isle was tipped up at an angle, rising to a rocky headland atop which someone – the Sorentines, who ruled long before the Hommetics, Yulan guessed – had decided to build a stronghold. Now it was well on the way to being a ruin. There was a pervasive dampness to the place, and flutters of wind leaked in to tug at the flames of the torches Kottren’s men carried.

  Even so, the menagerie hall retained a little of its remembered grandeur. It was big and high; once, it must have a place of feasting and councils. Now
it held far more squalor than glory. The dressings that hung on the walls were not the tapestries that might grace a real king’s abode, but the faded cloths and bedsheets of Kottren’s impoverished victims. Hooks held not gem-encrusted swords or shields or glaives, but copper cooking pots and hammered pewter salvers. Trophies of a sort, bespeaking not power and might but pettier attributes.

  ‘You’re amazed,’ Kottren suggested, to which Yulan could think of no sensible reply.

  Cages were spaced evenly around the edges of the hall, some twenty of them in all. Each held a single animal. The few oil lamps on the walls bathed the whole chamber in a yellowish light that barely dented the gloom. Partly because of that, partly because most of them appeared to be sickly, wasted and caked in excrement or dirt, it was hard for Yulan to identify most of the creatures.

  But he recognised an emaciated wolf, staring at him with dead eyes. There was also a huge lizard of the sort that scavenged carcasses across much of the Kingdom. He thought a strange, hunched shape huddled at the back of its prison might be an ape, one of the almost but not quite human monsters he had heard rumoured.

  Only one of the captive animals held his attention for more than a moment. A lion. The kind of big male, bearded and maned, that his own people both hunted and respected. The desert lions were feared for the threat they posed to the precious Massatan horses, but no other creature was so admired.

  Yulan could see the lion’s ribs through its hide. Its jowls hung slack. He could not be absolutely sure, but it looked as though the longest of the animal’s teeth had been knocked out. Certainly there were welts and scars across its flanks and back that suggested its captivity was ungentle.

  It struck Yulan that any man so proud of holding all these creatures in such sordid imprisonment betrayed a terrible smallness of imagination and understanding.

  ‘They’ve come from all across the world to grace my court,’ the Corsair King was murmuring.