Corsair

II

‘What will you do when you get there?’ Corena had asked Yulan.

That’s what he thought she’d said, anyway. It had not been easy to hear above the breaking of waves about her boat’s prow, the groaning of the rope and wood that held the wind-full sail. And the sound of his own heaving and retching. Here was a depth of bodily misery he had never before explored. A simple admixture of wind, wave and boat and lo: all the world was asway and he was undone. Unmanned.

It should not have concerned him that Corena saw him like this, yet it did. Or it had until he became so ill he began to wonder if he was dying and lesser worries were forgotten. She was attractive in her weather-scoured way, and could only be five or six years older than him. Young to be captaining her own fishing scow, he would have thought.

Whatever her age, having her standing there watching him empty his already empty stomach into the brine was not how he had imagined things turning out. He had anticipated a rather more splendid journey: one that would prove his worth and firm his standing in the Free. All that had been proved so far was that the ocean loathed him almost as much as he loathed it. Not quite, but almost.

‘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.’