The Mark of Ran (33 page)

“He said he’d find you a ship.”

“My grandfather once promised me a pony. I believed him, but I was a child then.”

Creed threw his hands up. “So what do we do?”

“
We?
Elias, we have come to your journey’s end. I don’t claim any loyalty from you or anyone else.”

“You have it nonetheless.”

“And if I don’t want it?”

Creed’s reply was cut short by a clatter in the passageway, and then ducking in through the doorway and throwing aside the flap came Gallico.

“By God, you hide yourself well, Cortishane. Are you allergic to company?” The halftroll had a large seabag of weathered canvas in his arms. He dumped it on the floor and flexed his scarred arms.

“What’s this?”

“Shipmates must stick together. I’m moving house, taking the rooms opposite Elias.”

Rol stood up. “What is this, a conspiracy? Damn it all, Gallico, if I wanted neighbors I’d have taken a cubbyhole alongside that carnival downstairs. And since when have we been shipmates?”

“I speak metaphorically. I, like you, am without a ship for the moment, and I pick my captains carefully.” He lowered his voice. “Artimion is a good man, but he has many concerns above the heads of the likes of us. I would feel better if Elias and I messed below—that way anyone coming to see you must first get past us.”

Rol held the halftroll’s gaze steadily. “Very well, then. It seems I am to be burdened with the pair of you. We’ll get settled in later.” He bent and began pulling on his boots once more. “Gallico, take us to this much-lauded harbor of yours. I want to see what floats there.”

“Precious little at the moment.”

“Nonetheless. Somehow or other, I intend to find us a ship.”

The stone of the sea cliffs had been hollowed out into nothing less than a warren, though one constructed on a vast scale. A series of ramps led down a gentle incline into the gutrock, the roadway as smooth as a dinner table. They passed a stream of people coming and going, some pushing handcarts laden with timber, others rolling empty casks downhill with a rattling thunder that jabbed at the temples. Rol saw a gang of sweating, cursing men easing a light culverin on its carriage down the slope, and Gallico stepped in to give them a hand as it threatened to slip free of its tackle.

The tunnels opened out into an incredible space, a cavern so large it had its own air currents. Light came in from a series of sea gates, enormous arches cut out of the stone on the far side, each tall enough to admit a fully rigged ship. Long moles of stone extended out into the waters within the place, and tied up at these were half a dozen vessels of various rigs. These moles and the wharves they ran out from were piled high with all manner of cargoes, and crammed with men and women loading and off-loading, provisioning, hauling on dockside cranes, heaving sacks and barrels and generally creating a picture of chaotic industry.

Behind the wharves there were dry docks with spring-loaded doors of stone that seemingly still worked. Around these were clustered scores of shantylike huts of wood and hide warmed by a series of high bonfires. There was a heavy smell of smoke, and Rol saw women manhandling long poles upon which fillets of ablaroni hung brown and brittle. Others were stretching deerskins on wooden frames and scraping them clean and yet more were sewing nets and gutting fish. A layer of rubbish covered the perfect stonework of the place. Fish bones, scraps of rope and wood, discarded lengths of rawhide. The whole place was nothing less than a manufactory for the convenience of ships.

“What’s moored at the moment, Gallico?” Rol asked. “With your head up there you can see better than I.”

“A few fishing smacks, off-loading. Artimion’s
Prosper,
a brigantine, and then the
Albatross
and the
Swallow,
two big schooner-rigged pinnaces.”

“Are there many more at sea?”

“I know that Jan Timian’s
Osprey
is still out, and Marveyus Gan’s
Skua.
A few more I can’t recall.”

“You burn the ships you capture, do you not?”

“Mostly, though if they’re handy craft we’ll board a prize crew and bring them in. The average merchantman is too slow for our liking, and draws too great a draft to make it up to the wharves. We never moor vessels outside the ship-cavern; it’s too risky.”

“So much for the chances of a ship going begging. Let’s walk about, now we’re here. I’ve never seen so many so busy at one time.”

They made slow progress through the crowds, for everyone knew Gallico and made it their business to wish him good day. The halftroll showed Rol and Creed the magazine, where the store of powder and shot was kept. Rol studied with interest a set of a dozen twelve-pounder sakers beautifully forged in long-barreled bronze, taken from the hold of a Bionese munitions ship. The magazine was guarded by a pair of Miriam’s musket-armed compatriots, the closest Ganesh Ka came to regular soldiers. They greeted Gallico brightly but reserved cold stares for Rol and Creed.

“Unfriendly fellows,” Rol said as they left.

“Miriam likes to pick the sober ones for her militia, and there’s a waiting list to get in.”

“Where did the muskets come from?”

“Same place as the sakers. Bionar has armed us nicely these last few years, though the city is low on good powder. We tried making our own, but it was poor-grained, unstable stuff. There are ancient lead mines in the hills, though, so we smelt our own shot.”

They wandered their obstructed way toward the rear of the cavern and the dry docks. In one of these a mastless hulk floated in scum-thick water and rats skipped about her decks. Intrigued, Rol boarded her over a narrow gangplank for a closer look.

“What is this?”

“An old Bionese dispatch-ship. She was badly mauled in the taking, some five years ago now—though not so badly as she mauled three of our vessels—and she’s rotted here ever since. We cannibalize her for the wood; she’s built of Kassic teak, black timber that’s hard as iron and as difficult to work; but it lasts forever.”

Rol ran his hands up and down the hulk’s side, feeling the heavy grain under his palms. The scar on his hand tingled oddly, and he felt a momentary thrill, but his face did not change. “What do you think she would gauge?”

“She’s bigger than most privateer craft. Three hundred tons, I’d say.”

“Let’s look below.”

“Rol, she’s been gutted time and time again. What’s left is probably rotten and worm-bored.”

“Indulge me, Gallico.”

The companion ladders were long gone so they dropped through the gaping main-hatch and made their way aft, Creed groping in the darkness behind them and cursing under his breath. “We’re not all cat-sighted wonders.”

“There’s light ahead,” Rol told him. “They made a clean sweep of the orlop anyway; that’s the stern windows.”

They came up against the stern locker and looked over the heavy mantels of the windows. Turning back, Rol saw the noble sweep of the ship’s shape loom out before him in the dark. All the interior compartments had long been stripped away and he could clearly see the graceful lines of her construction, and the massiveness of her ribs.

“How was she rigged?”

“Eh? Oh, ship-rigged, I think. A lateen on the mizzen. Blast you, rat.” The halftroll kicked out at an overfriendly rodent.

Rol nodded, eyes shining. “Gentlemen, we have found our ship.”

“You’re jesting,” Gallico said in disbelief.

“Have you seen her scantlings, or looked at her knees? You couldn’t push a knife blade into them, they’re so solid. She’s been stripped, yes, but what remains is sound—I’d bet a king’s ransom on it. Let’s check out the hold.”

They trooped to the orlop hatch and peered into the blackness below. There was water there, rats swimming through it.

“See? She’s got a fathom in her if it’s an inch,” Gallico said.

“We’ll rig pumps and get it out.” Rol stamped his boot on the deck timbers. “I’ll bet you anything you like it’s nothing more than her normal workings—there’s no real leak in her, or her decks would have been awash long ago. A dispatch-runner, you say? But she’s built like a man-of-war.”

“She’s old, sixty or seventy years at least. They built heavier vessels in those days, and the Kassic teak forests are long gone.”

“Those sakers in the magazine—anyone have a claim on them?”

“They’re too heavy for any vessel of the Ka. Artimion was thinking of rigging them up on the clifftop as a shore battery, but it would be a hell of a job getting them up there.”

“This ship could bear them,” Rol said, smiling. “Damn it, Gallico, this is the one.”

The halftroll rubbed his chin. “The work involved would be fantastic.”

“Have you more pressing employment?”

“What about a crew?” Creed asked. “A vessel like this, with twelve of those guns, would need … say sevenscore men, if she’s to be run man-of-war fashion.”

“Less than that,” Rol said. “We’d only man one broadside at a time. No, I’d undertake to sail her with a company of a hundred, if they were the right seamen.”

“A hundred men,” Gallico said thoughtfully. “Well, there are mariners aplenty here in the Ka, but you will need gunners, carpenters, blacksmiths—a shipwright if there are any major defects in her hull.”

“Then we’ll find them. Today. Gallico, you know every ragamuffin about this place. You are going to be our recruiting sergeant. I want artisans first, carpenters as you say, but plenty of willing backs for the donkey work too. Anyone who works on her will be eligible to be picked as crew.”

“You’re liable to annoy the other captains, if you go poaching experienced men off the wharves.”

“Too bad.”

They came at first out of curiosity, and because it was Gallico. Many of the more experienced sailors took one look at the hulk and turned away again, shaking their heads and laughing, but enough were unemployed and bored and sufficiently intrigued to remain, and form work parties under Rol’s direction. He poached supplies and equipment from the wharves—few men would argue with Gallico when he breezed in with a dozen others at his back and demanded pitch, oakum, leather-hosed pumps, coils of cable, sailcloth, adzes and saws and hammers and ten-inch spikes. A cornucopia of naval stores built up on the dock about the hulk and within three days there were thirty people working on her—but they were common sailors and curious landsmen, no more. Many were handy with a saw or a handspike, but Rol needed specialists, and a forge.

They drained the dry dock first, so it lived up to its name, and had an unpleasant time propping up the hulk’s sides so she would not tip over in the evil-smelling ooze the departing water revealed. Her rudder was gone, and she settled on her keel with a rending groan that had Rol’s heart in his mouth as he waited for her to hog, or, worse, break her back entirely. But the Kassic teak held firm and a series of custom-hewn baulks wedged her tightly in the dock on all sides so that she stood upright as a model ship yet to be inserted in its bottle.

It took them eleven hours, watch on watch, to pump out the hold, and in the bilge they found the skeleton of a tall man with his armor rusting about his bones. This rattled many of the more superstitious of the workers, until Rol had the thing set up on a stake at the dockside, the empty sockets of its skull staring at them as they worked around the hull. The skeleton became a mascot of sorts, and created a sort of grim camaraderie among those who labored there.

The hull timbers were remarkably sound. Whatever was in the water of the docks, it discouraged
teredo,
the wood-boring worm that was the death of ships. Creed raided the wood stores of the city for deck planking and fittings and at the same time had experienced men out in the hills looking for the largest and straightest tree trunks they could find, for no mast in the stores was big enough to fit the butts of the hulk.

Miriam visited the dockside on the fourth day with two of her militiamen beside her. She looked over the swarm of men and women working on the hulk with a raised eyebrow, and asked where she might find Cortishane.

Rol was belowdecks aft, drawing rusted spikes from the transom timbers whilst about him Creed and several others were levering the salt-rotted rudder gudgeons loose. The hulk was iron-sick, for not enough copper had been used in her construction and parts of her hung together more through luck and stubbornness than anything else. He edged out of the tight space about the transom, wiping his rust-orange hands and frowning, to find Miriam squatting on her heels behind him, her musket slung shining on her back.

“Artimion wants a word.”

“I’m busy.”

She blinked. “You’ve been appropriating a lot of things that are not yours, Cortishane. The least you might do is answer to the man for your actions.”

“I thought we held everything in common in this place,” Rol told her with a feral grin. She backed a foot, then steadied. “You have a monster’s eyes.”

“Yes. It broke my mother’s heart. Where is he?”

“On the dock.” And as Creed rose to join Rol she said: “Cortishane alone.”

“It’s all right, Elias,” Rol said, and he followed Miriam up on deck, straightening with a groan and knuckling the base of his spine.

Artimion nodded curtly in welcome. “You have found a project, it seems.”

“It’s coming along. I’m still short of a few things, though. People mostly.”

“What exactly are you hoping to achieve, Cortishane?”

“I’m bringing a ship back to life. A good ship, better than any you have tied up at the wharves.”

Artimion’s eyes flashed coldly. “You take a lot upon yourself. Less than a week in the city and you are setting yourself up as some kind of captain.”

“I thought that was the general idea.”

“How long have you had at sea?”

“Long enough.” Rol met Artimion glare for glare.

“And you have commanded a man-of-war, have you?”

“I’ve smelt powder, if that’s what you mean. And I’ve fired great guns before.”

“That’s hardly the same.”

“It’ll have to do.”

Artimion looked about at the gaggle of workers on the dockside who were listening, some covertly, some openly. “Walk with me,” he said.