Kushiel's Justice (50 page)

If it was to be done, it would have to be done quickly. That much, we all understood. Once the hull was lifted clear of the jagged rock piercing it, only our strength would keep the ship from sliding into the depths, and that wouldn’t last long.

The day we raised the ship, we carried Urist to the distant lookout post with its signal pyre that he might tend its fire. He grimaced at the pain, but didn’t complain. All able hands were needed for the endeavor.

I saw very little of the actual effort. We’d found only one bucket, and Iosef had assigned me to bailing duty, reckoning I had the fastest hands of the lot. Men dove behind the stern, threading rope around it. Others drew the ropes taut, perched on awkward footholds on the rocks. The divers clambered out of the water and took up positions beneath the hull. I perched on the ladder descending into the submerged hold, waist-deep in water. Captain Iosef and a fellow named Ruslan who had experience as a carpenter stood at the ready with all our hard-won supplies.

Iosef gave the order.
“Go!”

The divers strained to lift the hull free of the rocks. The rope-men hauled. The ship creaked and moaned. For a long moment, it didn’t shift.

And then it did.

It came free with a lurch, sliding forward. The bottom scraped along the rocks, the prow nosed skyward. Water poured from the ragged hole in the hull. I was flung free of my perch on the ladder of the hatch. I trod water in the sinking waters of the hold, scooping water and flinging buckets of it over my head. A futile effort, mayhap, but every bucket less was less chance the ship would sink. Outside, I could hear men groaning under the strain of holding the ship in place, while Iosef and Ruslan worked frantically to pack the hole with wool to stem the tide of water and drill holes to peg the planks in place, slathering them with pitch.

The ship shuddered.

“It’s going!” someone shouted.

It went, easing slowly backward into the water. Rocks, scraping. I kept bailing grimly. If it sank, I would swim. And we would be doomed.

It didn’t sink.

With a hold full of water and a leaking patch, it wallowed. It wallowed so low the deck barely cleared the surface of the sea, but it didn’t sink. We didn’t dare try to board and row it ashore for fear the additional weight would submerge it for good, so I stayed in the hatch and kept bailing while everyone else plunged into the water, struggling to get hold of the ropes and begin the long, arduous process of towing it to shore.

It took the better part of a day, but we did it. By the time we got it into the shallows, the sun was hovering low on the horizon and we were too exhausted to attempt to roll the ship over the log ramp we’d built. My arms had gone completely numb. The patch had held, but it leaked like a sieve. The water in the hold was at the same level it had been when I’d begun.

Still, we’d done it.

At Captain Iosef’s orders, I clambered out of the hold and hefted the anchor overboard, my arms shaking at the effort. He wedged it under a rocky outcropping to ensure the ship wasn’t going anywhere. I climbed over the railing and dropped wearily into the shallows, splashing ashore to collapse on dry land. All of us sat in poses of utter exhaustion, contemplating our achievement.

As the day’s last light faded, a lone figure hobbled down the shore, splinted leg swinging in an awkward arc. Urist had spent his day on futile lookout duty fashioning himself a pair of crutches from a couple of sturdy, forked branches he’d pillaged from the pyre. He stared at the ship for a long, wordless moment.

“I’ll be damned,” he said at length. “You did it.”

F
IFTY

I
T TOOK ANOTHER TWO
weeks to get the ship repaired and seaworthy.

I lent a hand with all of the unskilled work; chopping wood, gathering pitch, fishing. I was a fair shot with a bow, but there were others who were better. Whenever we caught a sizable haul of fish, more than we could eat, we built slow-burning fires with green wood and smoked them on makeshift racks.

Captain Iosef was exacting in his repairs. Although the weather was growing cooler by the day, he wouldn’t be rushed. Damaged planks were removed and new ones hewn to replace them. It was a mercy that the inner framework of the ship was intact. Slowly, slowly, it took shape, and I began to believe that we would leave the island.

I tended to my neglected weapons, polishing and whetting them. I began my days by practicing the Cassiline forms for the first time in long weeks.

The first time I did so, the Vralians stared in open astonishment. If anyone remembered the bow with which I’d greeted Captain Iosef so long ago in Norstock, I daresay they’d thought it was a mere homage to their hero. I ignored them, concentrating on telling the hours.

“Where did you learn that?” Ravi asked me that night around the campfire.

I smiled. “From the man who taught Micah ben Ximon.”

He laughed. “No, really.”

“It’s true,” I said. “Where did you think
he
learned it?”

“From an angel who appeared to him in a vision,” he said seriously.

“No angel,” I said. “Just a D’Angeline.” I told him about the Cassiline Brotherhood and their training, and the story of how Joscelin had come to befriend the Yeshuite community of La Serenissima, teaching the art to a young Micah ben Ximon and others. How they had helped Joscelin and Phèdre thwart a plot to assassinate the Queen of Terre d’Ange during her visit there.

Ravi stared at me, wide-eyed. “And you know these people?”

I nodded. “I’m their foster-son.”

In all the time we’d been together, working side by side, I’d told him very little about myself. Ravi whistled through his teeth. “I thought you were just . . . I don’t know, an adventurer or a scout sent to explore.”

“Oh yes, of course,” I said, realizing he’d just handed me a vaguely plausible reason for our journey to Vralia. “That too.”

“Do you report to the Queen of Terre d’Ange herself?” He sounded awed.

“I do.” Elua knows, that was true. “And Urist is in the service of the Cruarch of Alba.”

Ravi winced. “They’ll not be impressed by our shipwreck. Will you tell them it doesn’t happen often? It was a very bad storm.”

I glanced over at the dim hulk of the ship, still visible in the fading light of day. “Ravi, if we get off this island and Urist and I return home in one piece, I promise you, I will tell them that the courage and strength of Vralia’s men is without equal.”

His young face beamed. “Well, that’s true.”

I felt guilty at lying to him; to all of them. We’d grown close during our travail in the wordless way that men do working together for a common cause. Still, what could I do? Urist and I were seeking to enter Vralia under false pretenses. If there was a dangerous task to be done here on the island, I would trust Ravi or Captain Iosef or any one of these men with my life. But I didn’t dare tell them we were hunting a man who had entered Vralia as a Yeshuite pilgrim, intending to kill him.

Although it wasn’t
we
anymore.

We hadn’t talked about it yet, Urist and I, but I daresay both of us knew. He was lucky to have kept his leg, lucky it was a clean break, lucky it appeared to be healing. But a broken thigh-bone was a serious injury. It would take months to mend. Urist was able to hobble about on his crutches, but he couldn’t put any weight on the leg, and there was no way he could ride.

I would be hunting Berlik alone.

At least I was hale. If nothing else, I had these weeks of hard labor to thank for it. Thinner than I had been, subsisting on a diet of fish and fowl, but with lean, hard muscle on my bones. The deep gouges Berlik’s claws had rent into my flesh had healed, leaving angry red scars where they’d cut the deepest. Still, they were scars. Oftentimes they ached, and when I overexerted myself, I could feel them burn and tug, but they were scars.

On the thirty-first day of our ordeal, as reckoned by Urist’s tally, Captain Iosef determined the ship was ready to be tested. Her hull was intact, her rigging restored. We rolled her down the ramp of pine logs into the deep water, setting our shoulders and heaving. She floated proudly. A handful of us stood ashore, watching as the others set to at the oars. Watching the sail unfurl.

They didn’t go far, just far enough to test her seaworthiness. I shaded my eyes, watching the sail bob on the choppy waters, sporting its crimson cross. I thought about the pilgrims in Maarten’s Crossing, sporting their muslin caps. Iosef ordered the ship brought back to shore, rolled up the pine ramp. He crawled into the hold, inspecting the seams. Measuring the bilge. He called for moss and more pine tar to caulk the seams. We scoured the forest for moss, gathered pitch in sticky handfuls.

Three days later, Iosef tested the ship again.

“She’s ready,” he said briefly upon returning. “We’ll sail on the morrow.”

Ruslan the carpenter had built a crude barrel. We tramped back and forth to the spring-fed pond, filling waterskins and our bucket, dumping their contents into the barrel. We packed the ship with our stores of smoked fish. As it transpired, the hardest part was getting Urist aboard the ship. In the end, we hoisted him in a cradle of rope, his splinted leg sticking out at a stiff angle. He cursed and swore as we wrestled him over the railing. I found an out-of-the-way place on the aft deck and tried to make him comfortable.

“You know I’m finished,” Urist said to me, his jaw clenched. “I can’t go on.”

“I know,” I said quietly.

His eyes glinted. “You’ll not give up?”

“No.” I sat cross-legged beside him. Captain Iosef gave an order. Men shoved; the ship lurched over the pine logs. Floated. Men shouted, scrambling to board the rope ladders. Set to at the oars, the ship turning. She presented her stern to the island. The sail was unfurled. It caught the wind, snapping. I watched the barren, inhospitable shore dwindle behind us and thought about Dorelei. Her dimpled smile, her lilting laugh. The son we might have raised together if she had lived. All those things Berlik had cut short, no matter how much it grieved him.

The way she had taught me to be a better person.

I’d spent a good portion of my life looking for those answers. I’d looked to heroes like Joscelin and Phèdre. I’d looked to wise men like Master Piero, the philosopher. In the end, I’d learned more about simple, common decency from my wife than anyone else. Dorelei had loved me. She had
known
me. She had shaken me from my youthful self-absorption. She had extorted promises to ensure my happiness. I owed her justice.

“No,” I repeated to Urist. “I won’t give up.”

He grunted. “Good. Didn’t think so.”

By noon on the second day, we caught sight of the mainland, all of us cheering wildly. We were back on course. What a small distance it was, truly; little more than a day’s sail, less if we’d had a stronger wind at our back. And yet it had been enough to render us utterly isolated.

On the following day, we put ashore at a small port-town called Yelek, situated on a jutting peninsula. I can only imagine the picture we made. Our ship was sound, but we looked like . . . well, as Urist had said, we looked like savages. All of us were burned brown by sun and wind, filthy and salt-crusted, our clothing frayed and tattered. There simply hadn’t been enough fresh water on the island to bathe.

Yelek didn’t have a bath-house, but it had a marketplace and a public well. While Captain Iosef explained our plight to the harbor-master, we stripped to the waist and dowsed one another with buckets of fresh water, shivering in the bright, chilly air. Women from the town eyed us and giggled, talking behind their hands.

“They’re all looking at you,” Ravi noted.

I dumped a bucket of water over my head, shaking it off like a dog. “And you.”

“Oh, I think not.” He smiled ruefully. “Between your face and . . .” Ravi cocked his head, glancing at my scarred torso. “What did happen to you, anyway?”

“Now you ask?” I said wryly.

He shrugged. “It seemed impolite.”

I handed the bucket to the man beside me. “I was attacked by a bear.”

“Some bear,” Ravi murmured.

I gazed toward the north. “Yes,” I said. “He was.”

Those of us with money to spend bought warmer clothing in Yelek; ill-fitting woolen stuff sold by the vendors there. Urist and I were in good shape, the bulk of our monies having been tied in a pouch around his waist. The vendors looked askance at our D’Angeline coinage, but they weighed and accepted it, giving us change in Vralian currency. Copper coins, bearing the flared cross on one side and a sword on the other.

I bought a coarse woolen coat for Ravi, who had no money to spend, and for several of the other men in the same circumstances, embarrassed by their thanks. The weather was turning cold and the wind at sea cut to the bone; obtaining warmer gear was the main reason we’d put in at Yelek. I was glad I could help. I’d lost time in my quest for vengeance. Iosef and his men had lost a portion of their livelihood, the profits from this journey on which they had depended.

Which was more important?

I couldn’t say.

Marginally cleaner and markedly warmer, we set sail from Yelek. Back to sea, back to following the coastline.

All the way to Vralgrad.

Unlike Yelek, Vralgrad didn’t lie on the coast of the Eastern Sea, but leagues inland, straddling the Volkov River. It was a wide, slow, strong river. We beat a course upstream with sail and oars, passing many other small ships like ours. Ravi told me that there were a series of large rivers crossing Vralia, linked by smaller tributaries, that went as far as Ephesium. They had long been used as trade routes, although toward the east they were vulnerable to raiding Tatars, which was why Tadeuz Vral was looking to increase trade in the west.

That was a thought that made me uneasy. The Mahrkagir had courted the aid of several Tatar tribes. He’d promised me as a prize to the Kereyit Tatar warlord Jagun, who had a fondness for young boys. Jagun hadn’t gotten his prize in the end, but he’d had a chance to toy with me. I bore the mark of his brand on my left buttock, a shiny, puckered scar. I still remembered the charred odor of my own flesh searing.

I put such thoughts aside as we sailed into Vralgrad. Although small and compact, it was an impressive city, far more so than I would have reckoned. The notion of a vast kingdom might be a new one, but the Vralings had ruled this particular region for a long time. According to Ravi, the city itself was over two hundred years old. It was encircled by a sturdy stone wall, and beneath the river there were heavy chains that could be lifted and stretched taut to keep enemy ships from entering.

The architecture was a curious mixture. The oldest buildings were square and squat, stone fortresses suitable for defense, but there was a good deal of newer timber-built construction. Here and there, one could see another style altogether, with high arches and pointed domes I guessed were due to an Ephesian influence.

We found a berth at the bustling quay. The wharf was filled with Vralians, mostly men, standing around in animated conversation; so animated, in fact, that our arrival elicited little interest. I glanced at Captain Iosef, frowning beneath his overgrown mustache.

“Not a lot of work being done here,” Urist observed. “What’s happening?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

It wasn’t long before we found out. The harbor-master ordered us not to leave the ship, but he was willing to share the news. In the small hours of the night, there had been an attack on the tower where Fedor Vral, the younger brother of Tadeuz, had been imprisoned for the better part of a year. Half a dozen guards had been slain. The attackers had succeeded in freeing Fedor and fled, taking the rebel prince with them.

No one, it seemed, was permitted to disembark. There was a handful of guards working their way down the wharf, interrogating new arrivals. They were an imposing lot, clad in heavy coats of white brocade worked with the flared cross in crimson, with wide sword-belts and tall black boots. We waited patiently until a pair of them boarded the ship. They took one look at Urist and me and began questioning Captain Iosef.

From Iosef’s replies, I gathered that Ravi had passed on the story I’d told him; that we were scouts sent by the Cruarch of Alba and the Queen of Terre d’Ange. I heard Micah ben Ximon’s name mentioned several times.

The guards responded by berating Captain Iosef for his carelessness in allowing such potentially valuable persons to be shipwrecked, a charge he denied with angry vehemence. I made an effort to intervene.

“Not his fault,” I said in crude Rus. I made a motion with one hand to indicate waves pitching. “Good man. Bad storm, very bad.”

The guards conferred, and one of them departed at a quick trot. The tallest offered me a crisp bow. “On behalf of Grand Prince Tadeuz Vral, I apologize,” he said slowly and carefully. “We will escort you to the palace to meet with ben Ximon.” He said something else I didn’t quite understand.

“He’s sent for a carriage for Urist,” Ravi said helpfully.

I returned the guard’s bow.
“Spasiba,”
I said. “Thank you.”

It all happened very quickly. The carriage came in short order, the driver clad in crimson livery. Urist maneuvered cautiously down the loading plank on his crutches. The guards surrounded us respectfully, the tall one holding the carriage door open. We said awkward good-byes to our shipmates, shaking hands all around.

“Come find me if you have a chance,” Ravi said hopefully. “I’ll be seeking cheap lodgings near the wharf until I ship out again. You can buy me a drink and tell me what Micah ben Ximon is like.”

“I’ll try,” I said, knowing it wasn’t likely.

It felt strange to leave them. We’d been working together and sharing close quarters for so many days, sleeping cheek by jowl beneath our shelter. I helped Urist into the carriage, then went round to get in the other side. The tall guard bowed again, opening that door for me. I thanked him as he closed it and gave an order to the driver.