‘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.