Inda (48 page)

Ranet smiled tiredly; she had hurried the faster, knowing how welcome her news would be.

Fareas said to Tdor, “Captain Sindan put him on a ship.”

“A ship?” That was Chelis, standing with her back to the door so it could not be accidentally opened.

Tdor rejoiced.
Oh, Inda, you are still in the world.

Fareas turned to Ranet. “It does seem strange that he is put to sea, yet no one knows. My husband was there, he agreed to his being taken away, yet he did not know to where.”
And he cannot know now,
she thought, and saw concurrence in the other’s countenance.

Aloud, Ranet murmured, “No one did, only Captain Sindan.”

Fareas understood. It was the only way the king could circumvent his brother’s seemingly unaccountable behavior, whatever the king thought of the Harskialdna’s reasons. He sent a boy into exile; he started a war.

The Harskialdna saw my Inda’s potential for greatness, and was afraid,
Fareas thought.

Tdor stood silently, blind, deaf to the others in the room.
Inda is still alive.

The world was right again. And she needed it to be right, because in two weeks she would depart for Marth-Davan, for her last visit, and after that she would go to the royal city to begin her two years of training with the Queen’s Guard. For she was now fifteen.

Chapter Seven

SPRING warmed into summer as the
Pim Ryala
and its two consorts sailed down the strait toward the east. One day, when the winds were particularly timid, most of the merchant traffic (and there was plenty of it) lightened sail, to the relief of crews. Strings of signal flags were hauled up, various captains inviting other captains for ship visiting.

High on the mainmast, Inda watched Niz the Delf sling his arm around a brace without pausing once in his speech about the intricacies of square sails.

Niz liked this new mid, who seemed to want to learn his trade, instead of shirk duty like some young sparks he could name. “No. With them topgallants, you sheets home to weather-side first.”

Inda, standing on a boom nearby, nodded respectfully. “That’s better than running the lee sheet almost all the way out before homing the weather sheet, and then the lee sheet?”

“Three moves,” Niz said, raising three gnarled fingers as he bobbed his head, his high bridged, sharp nose poking forward just like a bird pecking seeds. “That’s three, and three takes longer than two. Sure as fire, boy, sure as fire. With them topgallants, which is tricksy sails, you know—”

“Sail hai,” came the call from the mizzen lookout. “Brig. Comin’ up fast on the weather quarter.”

Inda groaned, hoping it was no one the captain knew. But moments later, sure enough, “Pass the word for flags!”

Inda heard the words relayed from aft forward by various voices, in a variety of accents. He sighed. Lesson obviously over. “Thanks, Niz.”

He slid down the backstay. Tau handed him the glass.

Tau studied Inda, who looked so ordinary—brown of skin, hair, and eyes, sturdy, his unruly hair escaping a sloppy sailor’s braid. “Why d’you set that old fart on about sails we’ll never fly?”

“You don’t want to know how Venn ships rig?” Inda asked.

Tau snorted. “No. I won’t ever hire out on anything but merches, and comfortable merches at that. Nothing ever to do with those damn square-sailed Venn. The only thing I think about, and I admit it’s a comforting thought, is those Venn aloft, handling what looks like a hundred lines per sail, in winter ice.” He waved a hand at their familiar triangular sails, which only required four ropes: a halyard to raise it, a tack to control the weather corner, and a sheet on each side to set it right to the wind.

Inda shook his head. He could still hear Gand’s voice from his days as an academy scrub.
Master the details. If you know ’em well enough, you don’t have to think about ’em. And you won’t be riding blind into a bog.

While he thought, Tau watched him, and sure enough, Inda got that sightless look again. Jeje called it listening to voices no one else heard, but then she’d been raised singing sea songs, and Tau was impatient with the hyperbole of poesy. He’d decided that Inda, though he wasn’t yet fourteen, looked back in memory. Bad memory, if his lowered gaze and thinned mouth were any sign—bad memory, yet he was no coward, no liar, no thief; he fought better than most grown men, and he could read not just Sartoran, but the ancient stuff.

“You think I’m a fool.” Tau tried to tease out the truth.

“No.”

Tau loved poking at this mystery. “So I’m right.”

“No.” Inda held one hand out. “If I have to spend the rest of my life on ships, it just makes sense to learn everything about them I can.”

“Ah, so next cruise you plan to sign onto a Venn ship?”

Inda looked away, then back at Tau, whose teasing was never cruel. “I just know that what you want and what you get can be two vastly different things,” Inda said.

Tau thought,
I always get what I want. Except when I lose my temper
. But that wasn’t the sort of thing to say aloud, and so it was just as well that Inda shifted the subject. “Who’s the brig? Anyone we know?”

“A Captain Dirbin, out of Mardgar. She’s also a captain-owner, so even though she’s just a single little two-master brig you’re to fly the blue below the white.”

Inda had to translate that long washing-line of messages after the green check flag (meaning messages coming), and presently he hailed the deck mate. “News but no mail; pirates seen; Venn two days west; dinner?”

Inda waited while the deck mate relayed the messages down to the captain’s cabin, then sent up his counter-invitation.

“Dirbin. Miserly. She’ll come here,” Kodl predicted. “But she’ll know the gossip from home waters, if you can understand her.” Kodl stumped toward the hatch. “Better change.”

Inda soon reported that yes, Captain Dirbin would bow to Captain Beagar’s kind invitation and come over.

A captain’s dinner meant that Inda’s ease-watch had just been curtailed. He was the lowest ranking of the mids, which meant he couldn’t get out of standing behind a chair to serve. But he’d hear any news from home!

He dashed below to clean up and put on his single good shirt. He soon stood with Kodl, Dasta, and Yan, also dressed in their best shore-going shirts, belted with weave, long wide-legged deck trousers, and bare feet clean. Inda’s thick hair had been yanked back and neatly braided by Dasta; in turn Inda smoothed Dasta’s lank wood-colored hair back and tightly wove the four-strand sailor’s tail.

Kodl gave them a quick inspection and just had time to nod in approval as a short, heavy woman with an apple-red, cheerful face heaved herself aboard, her green coat brushed and buttons polished, followed by her equally finely dressed second mate, her first being on watch, a well-scrubbed mid sporting, to Dasta’s disgust, striped deck trousers under his beautifully bleached loose white shirt, and then her barge crew, who were taken below by off-watch sailors for their own feast, entertainment, and gossip.

“Hullo, Beagar,” Dirbin caroled in a voice made loud and unmusical by years of masthead pitch, as she flung her hand up in the age-old gesture toward her forehead and outward that once had been the doffing of a hat toward the captain.

Beagar saluted her back, equally hatless; no captains wore hats anymore. They hadn’t been worn for generations, unless the weather was bad and they had to be on deck. But tradition on the sea was strong.

Captain Beagar led the way down to the cabin. Inda took his place behind Kodl’s chair, ready to take the bottle from Dasta, who was stationed behind the captain.

First the wine. Inda poured with care, still not used to these broad-bottomed wooden mugs, sensible as they were.

Having managed to pour without a spill, he silently handed off the bottle to the mid in the striped trousers.

“Fair voyage,” Captain Beagar said, hoisting his glass.

“Fair voyage to you,” Captain Dirbin responded, and drank. The mates drank, as was proper, in silence.

Dirbin drained hers off, smacked her lips, and said in Iascan, with a strange, gargling accent, “I haff so much news for you out of the west.”

Yes,
Inda thought.
News behind us, out of the west.

Beagar nodded, and Dasta gestured to the cook’s mates hovering just outside the cabin door. As the platters of grilled chicken and potatoes were brought in, Beagar said, “I heard some at the Nob last month. The Marlovans are taking the coast. Some say they’ll push as far as Idayago.”

Dirbin thumped her fist on the table. “Damned horse turds. What expect you? Pooh! Pah! They don’t innerfere with harbor business, leastwise, and that is a boatload better than the Venn. Strange, these Marlovans! Hear you about their fighting, but! They can’t put up no fleet.”

“Not with their warships sunk soon’s they launch ’em,” Beagar said with the indifference of the uninvolved.

“These horseboys attract pirates.” Dirbin shook her head. “Not just pirates, but the soul-cursed pirates. Strange. Hah! But your news is month old. You know what’s said since about Ramis of the
Knife
in the west?”

Inda waited, not breathing, and started when a hard elbow struck Inda’s ribs. “I’ll have that bottle any day now,” whispered the little mid in the striped trousers.

Inda looked down, saw the bottle sitting there, and passed it as Dirbin finished her wine with a practiced flourish. “There’s this new pirate, Ramis.”

Beagar sighed. “I’ve heard the name, but that’s got to be just fog. Such rumors always seem to be crossing just ahead, or just behind, never with any fact you tie an anchor to.”

“Oh, so Ramis of the
Knife
is just a rumor, is he?” She gargled that “r” in “Ramis” like a hunting cat on the prowl.

Beagar motioned to Dasta to serve the last of the potatoes. Dasta waggled his hand to the cook’s mate. Inda saw the mate helping himself to a drink right out of one of the bottles just being brought in. “Pirate independent, or Brotherhood of Blood?”

“Oh, he’s an independent, they say. But as tough as the Brotherhood. Tougher, some say. You know how the Brotherhood, they wear a gold hoop in their ear after their first ship kill. But on
Knife,
it means Brotherhood kills. Not mere traders.”

Ship kill.
It was a Brotherhood of Blood tradition, Inda had learned from other shiprats—some terrified, some impressed. It didn’t mean capture, forcing the crews either to take to the longboats or switch allegiance, it meant taking a capital ship, looting it, and setting it afire, killing everyone aboard, just because they could. Subsequent kills were signaled by adding diamonds to the golden hoops.

“He’s after the Brotherhood?” Beagar looked surprised.

“So they said, so they said. He fired three Brotherhood ships. Midst of an attack. Took ’em one at a time.” Dirbin waved her finger back and forth three times, making a spitting sound. “Three. Makes the independents, with their rules and safe harbors and setting prisoners free inna boat, look like silk-weavers from Colend. As for Ramis’ ship,
Knife
is a captured Venn warship, and diddied up to be even faster.”

Beagar whistled. “Took it off the
Venn
? Huh. So how does it steer? Did he keep the whipstaff, or put in a wheel?”

The visiting mid smothered a laugh at the looks on the captains’ faces. As the two captains embarked on a highly technical discussion of what this Ramis had done to the Venn ship, the new mid whispered behind his hand to Inda, “Pirates! We never get within sniff of them.”

“Us either,” Inda whispered back.

The boy sighed. “You stay close to shore, like these merch captains always do, and with a lot of other ships, and pirates are just a story.” As he spoke he glanced at the captains, who were both leaning forward, illustrating what they meant by moving knives and spoons about on the table. With practiced ease that Inda admired, the mid’s fingers nipped the last piece of chicken.

Dirbin finally said, “I had the sved off of half a dozen people, all stone sober. This Ramis is hunting ’em for Norsunder, he is. Taking ’em straight out of the world. Through a tunnel black as night he snaps up with his fingers. I tell you I heard it, with these ears.” She flicked both her ears, and then glanced at the apple tarts the mates had just brought in; the heel of the ship sent the tray sliding past her as she hoisted her cup. Unseen by either captain, her mid made good use of the movement to snag three tarts.

“Well, that one I’ll believe when I see it,” Beagar stated with comfortable ease. Norsunder, in his worldview, was as distant as the time of his grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfathers, when there were barbaric customs such as leaving condemned criminals out for the Norsundrians to find and harvest, saving the effort of a beheading. “Souleater” was the worst insult possible, but no one saw Norsundrians actually
doing
it any more.

“Suit yourself, suit yourself. You know I never argue, not in the face of this here Alygran wine. Now, this battle. It reminds me of the time . . .”

The visiting mid, seeing that the captains were safely embarked on their battle talk, slid out toward the galley. Dasta poked Inda, holding up two fingers: fetch more bottles.

Inda eased out of the stuffy cabin, glad at least to get a breath. The summer evening was still, warm, and he could hear singing forward; he longed to find someone who could tell him what was going on at home.

No, that wasn’t home anymore. His home was here.

He turned away, poked his head into the galley in time to see the mates passing a bottle from hand to hand, each swigging out of it. The new mid took it, glugged down at least six swallows, and then turned without a stagger as the cook expertly topped the bottle with an inferior wine.

Inda silently held his hand out. The two bottles were put into it, and he eased his way back into the cabin.