As Hiero moved away, he missed the pain in Brother Aldo’s eyes, which followed him until the cabin door closed.
The following day and for several more, the weather held fair. The travelers, even Gorm, grew accustomed to the wave motion and enjoyed roaming the little ship. Klootz fretted, but Hiero spent a lot of time grooming him and keeping him soothed. Also, the old Brother seemed able to calm him at will, and Hiero actually felt a bit of jealousy at the morse’s fondness for Aldo.
The bear became a prime favorite with the polyglot crew, who considered him merely a very clever, trained beast and fed him sweet things such as tree-sap candy and honeycakes until his furry sides bulged.
Luchare and Hiero had a marvelous time. The small cabin at last gave them some privacy and they made love constantly, with the fire and passion of superb health and no complexes. Hiero was worried at first, since the Metz Republic had a universally known drug used to prevent childbirth and he had none with him. But a quiet word to Brother Aldo about his fears produced some of it, or a workable substitute. In fact, the old Elevener had quite an extensive pharmacopeia stowed away in a small sea chest, and Hiero and he discussed various medicines by the hour.
Captain Gimp also proved an entertaining companion. Despite his funny face and bow legs, the little freshwater mariner ran a taut ship. Foam Girl was as clean as her captain was soiled, and her strange mixture of a crew, though noisy and ragged, were also well disciplined. Most of them carried long sheath knives, and stores of boarding pikes and swords were racked in lockers around the cabin. A portable arrow engine, a device like a huge bow firing across a grooved table, could be mounted on the little poop abaft the wheel. It shot six long arrows at once and looked to the priest-warrior like a useful weapon.
“Never know what you’ll need, not in these waters,” Gimp said, while discussing his ship’s armament. “There’s giant fish—and sometimes we go after ’em with harpoons—and great beasts and pirates out for loot. There’s slavers as’ll turn pirate in a trice if given a chance. And then there’s the Unclean. Been more of them about in the last few years. And some of their boats go by magic.
No sails, nothing. You can’t outfight or outrun them, not if what I hear is true.” Reflecting on the lightning gun and his stay on the Dead Isle, Hiero silently agreed.
Life abounded in the sun-flecked waters of the Inland Sea. Schools of fish leaped from the surface, driven by larger predators surging up from the deeps. Once, as the Foam Girl passed a small, rocky islet, a half-dozen sleek, giant, flippered forms, great, toothed jaws snapping at the end of long necks, roared at them from the shingle on which they lay basking. Gimp’s name for them was Ot’r, and he kept a wary eye on them until the island was out of sight.
“They have good fur and meat too,” he said, “but it takes a whole proper flotilla and trained harpooners to go hunting that gentry.”
It was the fifth morning, a gray one, windy and full of scudding cloud, since leaving the northern coast. Hiero lay sleeping, his tousled head pillowed on Luchare’s dark, gleaming breast, when a sailor’s horny hand beating at the cabin door aroused them both.
Hurrying on deck, they found Brother Aldo and the little captain standing near the wheel, staring back beyond the wake. The reason was obvious. A great, dark, three-masted ship, all her square, brown sails set, was coming up behind them with the calm inevitability of Fate. Even Hiero, no trained mariner, could see that the newcomer was eating up the distance between the two vessels. Her decks were black with men, and an ominous twinkle showed among them. She bore a huge black banner at the main truck, and gaudy red and white animals, monsters, and human skulls were painted on her sails.
Hiero looked at the nearest streamers on the mizzen ratline. These showed the wind to be dead astern and growing stronger. The day was an overcast one, with a promise of coming rain, but visibility was at least a good mile. They were seemingly trapped.
Next, he stared at Aldo, their minds meshing as he did so, but on a “closed circuit,” limited to the two of them alone.
Unclean?
No, I think not, was the answer, at least not directly. But a pirate, evil, yes, and cruel. And I think also, searching this part of the Inland Sea, perhaps on orders. The Unclean net is wide. When their own ship did not come back, they must have sent out new instructions, some to those they totally rule, others to those whom they merely influence and lead as yet. Their pawns rather than their servants, it appears to me. Try your own mind. Some of them seem not unprotected, which makes me even more suspicious.
Hiero closed his eyes, gripped the taffrail, and concentrated. Captain Gimp peered through a battered telescope, mumbling oaths through his quid. On the deck below, the first mate, a saturnine, black-skinned man with one eye, served out weapons in silence to the little ship’s crew. The team of three men who manned the arrow engine were setting up their contrivance only a yard away.
Brother Aldo was right, Hiero realized at once. The crew of the strange ship, a large one, were indeed evil through and through. But it was the human evil of wicked men, the scum which has always infested unguarded seas since the first pirate robbed the first trader, five thousand years before the corning of Christ.
Yet their leaders’ minds were guarded! All the Metz could get was an individual aura radiating from each one, an aura of power and evil. But the thoughts themselves were warded, even against attacks on the new band he had taught himself to use on Manoon. The Unclean truly learned quickly! For only they could have provided the devices and training which made his mental weapons useless. But not quite useless, he reflected. Only four of the minds on the ship were shielded from him, and the crew’s were totally open.
He felt for the steersman of the pirate, for such he now knew it to be without any question. The man’s name, he learned, was Horg, and his life had been evil, his mind a reeking cesspool. Turn the wheel, Horg, my boy; edge off now, that’s it, away a few points, now quick! Yaw; the ship’s in great danger! Hurry!
An exclamation from Captain Gimp made him open his eyes. Astern of them, the square-rigger had come up into the wind, her sails all flapping, the ship in irons. Hiero shut his eyes and simultaneously felt Horg’s mind die, as the life went out of the man. The enemy wasted no time, though they had lost a quarter of a mile.
But as the big ship came around and back on course, a groan went up from the Foam Girl’s idle sailors, who had been watching in fascination. A torrent of oaths from the square little skipper drove them back to their work and cleared the poop again, save for the helmsman, the arrow engine crew, Aldo, Luchare, and Hiero.
Once again, the priest probed for the helmsman. But whoever was the master of the great ship was a quick thinker. One of the four shielded minds now steered the ship. Undaunted, Hiero found a nearby sailor. His name was Gimmer, and his mind, if possible, was more repellent than that of the dead Horg.
The helmsman is your deadly enemy. He hates you. He is taking you into danger. He will kill you. You must kill him first! Quickly! Now! Coldly and ruthlessly, Hiero drove the craven will to the assault. Ordinarily a sensitive and kindly man, he had no compunction about slaying creatures such as these sealice. Wasting false sentiment over the truly wicked was no part of an Abbey warrior-priest’s training. The world was harsh enough on decent folk without coddling vermin.