Elmo and I stood at the tip of the headland, watching the afternoon sun play around the edges of a storm far out to sea. It had danced in and swamped our encampment with its cool deluge, then had rolled off across the water again. It was beautiful, though not especially colorful.
Elmo had not had much to say recently. “Something eating you, Elmo?” The storm moved in front of the light, giving the sea the look of rusted iron. I wondered if the cool had reached Beryl.
“Reckon you can guess, Croaker.”
“Reckon I can.” The Paper Tower. The Fork Barracks. Our ignoble treatment of our commission. “What do you think it will be like, north of the sea?”
“Think the black witch will come, eh?”
“He’ll come, Elmo. He’s just having trouble getting his puppets to jig to his tune.” As who did not, trying to tame that insane city?
“Uhm.” And, “Look there.”
A pod of whales plunged past rocks lying off the headland. I tried to appear unimpressed, and failed. The beasts were magnificent, dancing in the iron sea.
We sat down with our backs toward the lighthouse. It seemed we looked at a world never defiled by Man. Sometimes I suspect it would be better for our absence. “Ship out there,” Elmo said.
I didn’t see it till its sail caught the fire of the afternoon sun, becoming an orange triangle edged with gold, rocking and bobbing with the rise and fall of the sea. “Coaster. Maybe a twenty tonner.”
“That big?”
“For a coaster. Deep water ships sometimes run eighty tons.”
Time pranced along, fickle and faggoty. We watched ship and whales. I began to daydream. For the hundredth time I tried to imagine the new land, building upon traders’ tales heard secondhand. We would likely cross to Opal. Opal was a reflection of Beryl, they said, though a younger city...
“That fool is going to pile onto the rocks.”
I woke up. The coaster was perilously near said danger. She shifted course a point and eluded disaster by a hundred yards, resumed her original course.
“That put some excitement into our day,” I observed.
“One of these first days you’re going to say something without getting sarcastic and I’ll curl up and die, Croaker.”
“Keeps me sane, friend.”
“That’s debatable, Croaker. Debatable.”
I went back to staring tomorrow in the face. Better than looking backward. But tomorrow refused to shed its mask.
“She’s coming around,” Elmo said.
“What? Oh.” The coaster wallowed in the swell, barely making way, while her bows swung toward the strand below our camp.
“Want to tell the Captain?”
“I expect he knows. The men in the lighthouse.”
“Yeah.”
“Keep an eye out in case anything else turns up.”
The storm was sliding to the west now, obscuring that horizon and blanketing the sea with its shadow. The cold grey sea. Suddenly, I was terrified of the crossing.
That coaster brought news from smuggler friends of Tom-Tom and One-Eye. One-Eye became even more dour and surly after he received them, and he had reached all time lows already. He even eschewed squabbling with Goblin, which he made a second career. Tom-Tom’s death had hit him hard, and would not turn loose. He would not tell us what his friends had to say.
The Captain was little better. His temper was an abomination. I think he both longed for and dreaded the new land. The commission meant potential rebirth for the Company, with our sins left behind, yet he had an intimation of the service we were entering. He suspected the Syndic had been right about the northern empire.
The day following the smuggler’s visit brought cool northern breezes. Fog nuzzled the skirts of the headland early in the evening. Shortly after nightfall, coming out of that fog, a boat grounded on the beach. The legate had come.
We gathered our things and began taking leave of camp followers who had trickled out from the city. Our animals and equipment would be their reward for faith and friendship. I spent a sad, gentle hour with a woman to whom I meant more than I suspected. We shed no tears and told one another no lies. I left her with memories and most of my pathetic fortune- She left me with a lump in my throat and a sense of loss not wholly fathomable.
“Come on. Croaker,” I muttered as I clambered down to the beach. “You’ve been through this before. You’ll forget her before you get to Opal.”
A half dozen boats were drawn up on the strand. As each filled northern sailors shoved it into the surf. Oarsmen drove it into the waves, and in seconds it vanished into the fog. Empty boats came bobbing in. Every other boat carried equipment and possessions.
A sailor who spoke the language of Beryl told me there was plenty of room aboard the black ship. The legate had left his troops in Beryl as guards for the new puppet Syndic, who was another Red distantly related to the man we had served.
“Hope they have less trouble than we did,” I said, and went away to brood.
The legate was trading his men for us. I suspected we were going to be used, that we were headed into something grimmer than we could imagine.
Several times during the wait I heard a distant howl. At first I thought it the song of the Pillar. But the air was not moving. When it came again I lost all doubt. My skin crawled.
The quartermaster, the Captain, the Lieutenant, Silent, Goblin, One-Eye, and I waited till the last boat. “I’m not going,” One-Eye announced as a boatswain beckoned us to board.
“Gel in,” the Captain told him. His voice was gentle.
That is when he is dangerous.
“I’m resigning. Going to head south. Been gone long enough, they should’ve forgotten me.”
The Captain jabbed a finger at the Lieutenant, Silent, Goblin, and me, jerked his thumb at the boat. One-Eye bellowed. “I’ll turn the lot of you into ostriches...” Silent’s hand sealed his mouth. We ran him to the boat. He wriggled like a snake in a firepit.
“You stay with the family,” the Captain said softly.
“On three,” Goblin squealed merrily, then quick-counted. The little black man arced into the boat, twisting in flight. He bobbed over the gunwale cursing, spraying us with saliva. We laughed to see him showing some spirit. Goblin led the charge that nailed him to a thwart.
Sailors pushed us off. The moment the oars bit water One-Eye subsided. He had the look of a man headed for the gallows.
The galley took form, a looming, indeterminate shape slightly darker than the surrounding darkness. I heard the fog-hollowed voices of seamen, timbers creaking, tackle working, long before I was sure of my eyes. Our boat nosed in to the fool of an accommodation ladder. The howl came again.
One-Eye tried to dive overboard. We restrained him. The Captain applied a bootheel to his butt. “You had your chance to talk us out of this. You wouldn’t. Live with it.”
One-Eye slouched as he followed the Lieutenant up the ladder, a man without hope. A man who had left a brother dead and now was being forced to approach that brother’s killer, upon which he was powerless to take revenge.
We found the Company on the maindeck, snuggled amongst mounds of gear. The sergeants threaded the mess toward us.
The legate appeared. I stared. This was the first I had seen him afoot, standing. He was short. For a moment I wondered if he were male at all. His voices were often otherwise.
He surveyed us with an intensity that suggested he was reading our souls. One of his officers asked the Captain to fall the men in the best he could on the crowded deck. The ship’s crew were taking up the center flats decking over the open well that ran from the bow almost to the stern, and from deck level down to the lower oar bank. Below, there was muttering, clanking, rattling, as the oarsmen wakened.
The legate reviewed us. He paused before each soldier, pinned a reproduction of the device on his sail over each heart. It was slow going. We were under way before he finished.