Corsair (18 page)

“Anyone disagreeing is welcome to call for a vote on the matter.”

Gareth knew he had the majority, and anyone calling for a vote to sell the Kashi men as slaves would, most likely, be cut from the Articles and told to leave the Company.

“Now, as to the cargoes we’ve taken,” he went on, after waiting to see if anyone else said anything. “The first option is that each man can draw his share of raw goods, take it ashore to dispose of as he wishes, on whatever terms he can make.

“The second option is for it to remain with me, for either disposition here for items we either need to continue our voyaging or ones I think will be more valuable back in Saros, or for shipment and sale when we return to Saros.

“The items gotten rid of here will be either traded for or sold for silver or gold. I can safely say that the prices I think I’ll get here will be far lower than in Ticao.

“Any of the ship’s Company who want their share in gold after I trade or sell can take it here, or, again, leave some or all with the Company.”

“Long’s I get enough for proper food, a crawlin’ drunk, and a couple of women at m’ head an’ feet, I’ll let th’ rest stay with you,” a sailor said, and, amid laughter, there were shouts of agreement from some, headshakes from others.

“I’ll take all I can here,” a grizzled seaman said. “For what’re the odds of us living to see home again, anyway? Most likely we’ll bleach our bones at forty fathoms before we see cold green seas again.”

There was an uneasy murmur of agreement from too many of the sailors to that.

• • •

The first order of business for Gareth’s pirates was getting under the weather, and the residents of Freebooter’s Island, as well as the other corsairs harboring there, seemed quite happy to join in.

The island was a celebration of anarchy. Here someone had put up a building from the island stone, laboriously cut and fitted into shape. Next to it four driftwood logs had been hammered into the sand, given a palm roof and indifferent siding from scavenged lumber. There was a central marketplace, but not much in the way of roads radiating from it.

There weren’t many houses — the pirates weren’t ashore long enough to build them nor, Gareth suspected, confident enough of their life span to justify the work.

Businesses were trading shacks, taverns, crude inns, brothels, and craft shops, these last run by Kashi natives who’d been rescued from the Linyati and chosen not to return to their homelands.

But Gareth’s observations were made in a scattered fashion, as a feast, vaguely in honor of the newcomers’ successes against the Linyati, swirled.

Hogs were butchered, dressed, and set on great spits over charcoal to slowly cook, basted with sauces. Chickens were chased down, killed, cleaned, and put into pots with fresh vegetables and fiery peppers. There were salads of strange fruits and bamboo hearts, drenched in spicy dressings.

For drink there was a dozen varieties of liquors, some made on the islands, more the local tipples from northern ports, a few even captured from the Linyati. The favorite among the last was known as Axkiller, not only for its immediate effects but for the way its drinker felt the next day.

About the only thing missing was salt beef and fish, for obvious reasons.

“We wish we could have fresh beef,” said a ship’s cook, now volunteering to turn one of the roasting pigs, “but th’ island won’t carry ‘em yet. If we had some folks willing to work on land, we c’d clear an’ plant one of the other islands, and bring in beeves to graze.”

Gareth took a heavy-laden wooden plate and a concoction of various tropical fruits, found an empty brandy keg to sit on, and watched the party as the day turned into dusk:

Here a swarthy, muscled dwarf was juggling half a dozen bottles, pausing now and again to drink from one of them;

Three women were dancing, hand in hand, around a supine, snoring sailor;

Labala was singing in some unknown tongue, half a dozen brown-skinned natives playing instruments like Gareth had never seen, in keys Gareth had never heard;

Thom Tehidy and Knoll N’b’ry were arguing intensely about the correct way to lay nets for sea-trout, using bottles in the sand for their boats and twigs for nets;

Froln, seemingly quite sober, disappeared into a hut with a woman in each arm, gold coins clenched in his teeth;

Bosun Nomios and Dafflemere sat on the sand, playing some sort of board game, but the pieces were small glasses of brandy, and the winner or loser, Gareth couldn’t tell which, was required to upend the glass. After a while, Nomios very sedately pitched onto the board and began snoring. Dafflemere got up, tried to dance a victory jig around him, collapsed on the ground and stayed there.

Gareth sat alone, yet quite content, wanting, as far as he could tell, nothing, needing nothing. No, he thought. Not quite. Cosyra would be nice here. That’d be someone who could honestly tell him what Axkiller tasted like.

A brown-skinned boy lounged nearby against a palm tree, a brightly colored flower behind one ear. He was curly haired, handsome. He smiled tentatively at Gareth, who smiled back politely, then shook his head. The boy shrugged, found another’s attention, and went up a winding path with him a few moments later.

A quite small, very well built woman, not much more than a girl, sat beside him.

“You are the captain of these?” she asked.

“At the moment,” Gareth said.

“A man like yourself, as young as you are, must have much
karaba,
“ she said. The various languages Gareth had learned swept through his mind. There.
Karaba.
Courage. Manliness.

“Uh … thank you.”

“I am Irina,” she said.

“And I’m Gareth.”

“You are by yourself.”

Gareth nodded.

“I saw you turn away that boy. Am I better?”

“Uh … well, yes, I mean, I’m more attracted to you than men,” Gareth stumbled.

Irina preened.

“Then I would be proud to be the consort of a captain … for an hour, or as long as you linger here.”

“You, uh, honor me deeply,” Gareth said. “And I’m enchanted.” He wondered why he was sounding like such a bumpkin.

“But …” Irina said through her teeth.

“There’s someone in Saros that, well …”

“What of that?” Irina said. “I’m not offering to company you for eternity, or to bear your brats, now.”

“But — ”

“Is this woman some sort of witch, that she could sniff out what we do when, or if, you return?”

“No, but — ”

Irina gave him a look as good as a broadside, hissed something untranslatable by the language spells Gareth had learned, and stalked away.

Now what the blazes am I supposed to do about something like that? Gareth wondered. I always thought someone who’s given an honest answer about something like this would be, well, maybe not respectful, but at least understanding. And now I’ve made another enemy.

That woman was behaving like . . . like a man!

Suddenly he found everything enormously funny, burst out laughing, and decided it was time for him to go back to the
Steadfast.
He had to decide how to go about trading. And not think about how very pretty Irina was.

• • •

The
Steadfast
was beached on soft sand, and sailors had attached block and tackle between masts and large palms and careened her. Her hull was green, filthy, and already the stink of the dying barnacles drifted everywhere.

“They didn’t tell us about this in the romances,” Knoll N’b’ry said, then shouted, “All right, men. Off your soft asses and set to.”

Crewmen lounging in the shade groaned, got up, picked up scrapers and lit torches, and went back to cleaning the hull. But they worked hard and fast. No man wanted to think about his fate if a Linyati squadron warped into the lagoon, with a ship incapable of fight or escape.

The Linyati slaver, which Gareth had decided to name the
Freedom
— a little irked that he’d already used
Revenge,
considering the ship’s purpose and how he intended to use it in the future — was being warped toward the beach as the title rushed out of the lagoon.

Standing in the shallows was Dafflemere, chanting a spell, wearing only a cut-off pair of breeches. Beside him was Labala, earnestly mimicking the sorcerer’s gestures, aping his speech.

There were no more than a dozen men on the ropes, pulling at the ship; steadily, under the influence of the spell, it came closer to shore as if pulled by invisible shipyard winches.

There was a loud scratching as it grounded. Experienced islanders ran close with balks of lumber, braced the ship to keep her from falling on her side.

Dafflemere stopped his spell.

“Now, m’friend,” he told Labala. “As I taught you, go in and brace your ship.”

Labala nodded, picked up a rock, ran close to one length of timber. He touched the rock to sand, chanted:

Dafflemere waded ashore.

“A promising sort,” he said. “All he lacks is the ability to cipher.”

“Which I’m teaching him,” Gareth said. “In my copious spare time.”

“I’d be willing to take on that chore.”

“For how much? You certainly set a price for the services of your shipyard.” Gareth politely refrained from commenting on what he thought of a shipyard made up of a long stretch of sloping beach, fifty half-naked men, and a largish pile of lumber, with nary a dry dock or victualing dock.

Dafflemere looked hurt.

“I’ll be happy to do that without fee, Captain. For it’s always good for a man to have knowledge, is it not?”

Gareth looked at Dafflemere closely, saw no sign of intrigue or mockery.

“My apologies, sir,” he said, “for I’ve become used to everything on these islands being for sale.”

“Ah,” Dafflemere said cagily, “you fail to understand my subtlety. I’ll instruct your wizard, and both you and he will owe me, for I sense that both of you are unfortunately cursed with a sense of morality.

“Sometime in the future I shall need a favor, and you won’t be able to begrudge me.”

Gareth managed a grin.

• • •

“The most I will give you,” the man with an eyepatch said, “is two, no three of my heavy falconets for your silks. I expect to go out soon, and will need every gun I have.”

“Which is why you’ve got the falconets stowed amidships, handy for use,” Gareth said.

The pirate glowered, played with his eyepatch, poured himself another glass of brandy.

“Let me leave it like this,” Gareth said. “Six bales of silks for each gun.”

“No. I cannot stand to be dealt with in such a trifling manner,” the pirate said. He got up and stalked away from the open-air stand Gareth sat in. But he walked more and more slowly away, waiting for the call back.

“Captain,” Gareth said.

The man turned around quickly.

“You didn’t finish your brandy, sir.”

The man looked angrily at Gareth, then came back and drained his glass. A sheepish smile came.

“You are a hard bargainer, sir. Especially for someone as young as you are.”

Gareth shrugged.

“In another life, at another time, were you a merchant?”

“I was apprenticed to one,” Gareth said. “And I was a ship’s purser.”

“Ayee,” the pirate wailed. “No wonder I am bested! Take your damned guns!”

Gareth scribbled an instruction on a bit of paper for the ship’s prize crew to release the silk.

He considered his accounts, thought he was doing fairly well, not really knowing the worth of anything out here in the unknown.

Another man, this one an island merchant, came up.

“I understand you have spices for sale.”

“Not many,” Gareth said honestly. “Most are to be shipped home.”

“But let us talk about what remains,” the man said. “For I have gold to bargain with.”

• • •

Life on Freebooter’s Island was somewhat of a dream for Gareth, when he remembered the cold winds of Saros, the brief summers, and the gray seas heaving around his homeland.

The only clothes needed were a pair of breeches for decency, and food, crispy-fried spiced fish and wonderfully sweet fruits, was gotten by tossing a copper to one of the island natives cooking over a brazier on the beach.

No one cared if you got drunk, as long as you didn’t bother anyone else that much. Women were friendly.

The seas were clear, blue, warm, with multicolored fish wriggling through tendrilled seaweed.

Gareth thought of building a house on one of the islets, far enough away from the other pirates, close enough to row over when he wanted company other than Cosyra, who, of course, would be his partner in the idyllic days and soft nights.

Then he caught himself, realizing that half of the charm and the attraction of Freebooter’s Island was it was very temporary. Sooner or later, he and the Company would be sailing back out, looking for prey.

If he was forced to live here, doing nothing, for the rest of his life, he’d go mad from boredom within a month.

As, he suspected, would Cosyra.

Gods, but he missed her!

• • •

“We’re doing fairly well,” Gareth told his crew. “We’re getting better prices than I’d anticipated and a lot of it in gold or silver. Plus we’ve signed thirty new men to the Articles.

“As for repairs, the
Steadfast
comes off tomorrow, the
Goodhope
and
Revenge
go on the beach after that.

“The
Freedom
’s stern should be rebuilt within the fortnight, and we can begin thinking about who volunteers to go to Kashi and return the slaves, as we agreed, and then which of our ships should be loaded and start for home, and who’ll sail them as prize crews.”

“Home, sir?” Nomios said.

“Sorry,” Gareth said. “I’ve been busy … and tired. Here’s what I think: We’ll sell one ship here — I’ve got a possible buyer — and three others will be packed solid with our treasures and sail for Lyrawise, in Juterbog.”