Master of Whitestorm (2 page)

“Oars in! Quartermaster, hard aport!”

Nallga’
s
captain pounded up the companionway, still naked from his berth. His hand clutched a bleeding shoulder, and his face was purpled with outrage above his broad chest.

“Send the mate on deck!” he bellowed to the nearest seaman. While the galley rounded to windward, he turned on the quartermaster and shouted over the crack of wind-whipped canvas. “What in Zhaird’s blackest pit provoked that nullard’s act of stupidity?”

The quartermaster had no answer.
Nallga
rocked gently, her bow pointed to windward. A stricken groan from the benches recalled the captain to his responsibilities. He issued rapid orders. Hands ran aloft to subdue the mainsail and assess damage. Escorted by the heavily armed bulk of the ship’s marshal, the healer made rounds of the slave benches to tend the injured. His task took the better part of the night.

The mate spent an unpleasant interval in the captain’s cabin. He insisted he had been asleep in his hammock at the time the shout disrupted
Nallga’
s
course, but repeated denials only made him look silly.

“Thou hast made a fool of thyself.” The captain gestured crossly. “No crew respects an officer whose behavior lacks logic. Thou art relieved of duty for the next watch. Perhaps rest will restore thy reason. Zhaird’s hells, it had better. This vessel cannot afford another of thy mistakes.”

* * *

Nallga
resumed headway at daybreak. Crewmen labored over her sail with rigging knives and needles, and the oar banks stood gapped where injuries laid up several rowers. Seven looms had snapped off at the rowlock; replacements were fitted from a store of spares, and the broken ends stacked behind the lower deck companionway, their lead-spliced handles saved for salvage. Slowly the galley regained her trim, while fore and aft, her crewmen whispered that the mate had lost his honor. Perhaps, they said, he had been cursed with madness, and their thoughts strayed often from their work.

Haldeth bent to the rhythm of the oar and furtively studied the emotionless man by his side. Last night’s call for reverse stroke had roused him from deep sleep. With reflexes ingrained through years of obedience, he had run the loom half out before his benchmate stopped it with his fists.

“Wait.” Korendir fumbled his end of the oar and seemingly by chance the blade splashed short of its full sweep. In the following second, the reverse stroke of the lower deck tangled with the entrenched beat of the upper, with disastrous results. The mate had issued no order, Haldeth perceived at once. The voice and words had been delivered with diabolical skill by the one man who would least be suspected: the Darjir named by the Mhurgai never spoke, far less rendered pitched imitations of his masters. Now, Haldeth watched the same oar rise, dripping from the sea. He concluded his thought grimly. If a man sought to undermine the mate’s authority, no method could be better. Except Korendir’s wayward performance had left two slaves dead from punctured lungs; six others gained multiple broken ribs, and their moans of pain could be heard as the day wore on.

“The dead no longer suffer,” Korendir whispered in reply to Haldeth’s silence. “And shattered bones are a small price to pay for freedom.”

His words held a ringing arrogance which allowed no grace for reply. Haldeth did not try. Either Korendir was a madman with a taste for cruelty, or he knew explicitly what he was doing; his implied intent was to release every slave on
Nallga’
s
benches. Haldeth splashed the oar into the swell with bitter anger. More likely his benchmate would earn them all the cold taste of the knife.

*
* *

Nallga
entered the tiny harbor of Kahille Island late that afternoon. Mhurgai ships often anchored there, for springs flowed like silver down the islet’s mountain slopes. Most southern archipelagoes relied on rain cisterns for fresh water; controlled by a water-broker, the price came dear. But Kahillans were too unsophisticated to levy a fee, and free water made their harbor a popular port.

Nallga
moored inside the barrier reef, and instantly became the target of a flotilla of native vendors in dugouts. Reduced swell offset their nuisance; casks made awkward handling, and the captain wished the loading accomplished as smoothly as possible. The Kahillans did not concern him. A culture without knowledge of metal could traffic no weapons with the slaves, and any guard spared for security left one less man for work.

On the lower deck, Haldeth lounged at ease, grateful for the respite. An unfamiliar deckhand stood watch. Seated on the gangway enjoying a basket of fruit, the man was tolerant of contact between the slaves and the Kahillan merchants. One bold wretch had managed to wheedle himself a bunch of grapes, but the officer was too busy eating to intervene.

Korendir leaned across the shaft of his oar with his head cradled on folded arms. To an inboard eye, he appeared asleep. Haldeth knew he was not. A Kahillan dugout drifted close to the galley’s side, all but moored beneath his oarport. The occupants sat with upturned faces watching a humorous mime as Korendir pretended to hunt lice in his beard. By periodic stretching, Haldeth caught the gist of the performance. The sham puzzled him until he noticed the Kahillan men were clean-shaven. For a people without knives or steel, the fact was a telling oddity.

Evidently Korendir intended to exploit the implications if he could. A final, furious round of scratching raised applause from his audience. The men in the dugout pushed off. Chattering and laughing as if they shared a fine joke, they unshipped paddles and executed a graceful stroke. As the canoe slipped out of sight beneath
Nallga’
s
counter, Korendir shut his eyes and drowsed in earnest. Presently, Haldeth did likewise.

* * *

“Baja!”
cried a smiling native in accented imitation of the Mhurgai call to rise.

Haldeth opened his eyes in time to see Korendir lift his head and peer cautiously through the oarport. Balanced precariously on tip-toe in the stern of his dugout, a KahilIan man stood with his paddle extended above his head. Lashed to the end was a small wooden box. Korendir squeezed both shoulders through the oarport to reach it. Untying the knots on the waving blade took him an imprudent amount of time.

Haldeth cast a nervous glance at the watch and observed that the sight of a slave straining through an open oarport did not pass unnoticed. The officer spat grapeskins onto the deck and shouted a guttural warning.

Korendir ignored him. With an irritable frown, the deckhand rose and unslung his whip.

Haldeth kicked his benchmate’s ankle, imploring prudence. But with the final knot nearly undone, Korendir refused to relinquish his prize. The string fell loose, just as the deckhand strode the length of the gangway and uncoiled his lash. Korendir started to unwedge his shoulders from the oarport, but the deckhand moved first. Seven supple feet of braid struck, splitting through muscled flesh.

Korendir recoiled and skinned his collarbone on the oarport. Silent and sullen, he straightened. Gripping his oar with both hands, he lifted gray eyes and glared at the deckhand. The insolence earned him the whip-butt across the face in a blow that left him reeling.

“Mind thy manners,” snapped the officer. But the slave’s cold gaze left him strangely unsettled. He blotted sweat from his lip and sauntered back to his seat.

The instant the officer’s back was turned, Haldeth caught his friend’s shoulder and whispered. “Was that necessary?”

Korendir shifted his hand, surreptitiously exposing the corner of a small wooden box. Kahillan shaving tools were bound to be inside, and if his brief act of defiance had distracted the deckhand from noticing, Korendir considered the price worthwhile. One bruised eyelid dipped into a wink as he tucked his prize under his loincloth. Curled once more over his oarshaft, he ignored the flies which lit upon his opened back with impressive single-mindedness, and presently fell asleep.

* * *

In the dark, still hours after midnight, Korendir examined his contraband. Haldeth craned his neck to see over his companion’s shoulder as the box fell open. The contents were immediately disappointing. By the wan light through the oarport, Haldeth discovered that Kahillans removed their beards with slivers of sharpened shell, each imbedded in a layer of pitch to preserve their fragile edges. A slot to one side contained a well-used whetstone.

“Neth,” said Haldeth. Disgust blunted his habitual caution. “Those things are worthless.”

Korendir lifted his head. “They’re precisely what I expected,” he said mildly.

But Haldeth remained too irritable to demand any explanation. Angered that he had permitted himself any hope at all, he hunched at the far end of the oar shaft and sleeplessly waited for dawn.

* * *

The dishonored mate resumed duty the following day.

His jaw was clenched, and his strut more pronounced as he relieved the officer on the gangway. Interpreting the signs as fishermen read weather, Haldeth knew the man’s temper would be short. No slave needed Korendir’s crusted back to remind how readily the Mhurgai whip might fall. All orders on the lower deck were obeyed as though the rowers sat balanced on eggshells.

Nallga
cleared the barrier reef just after sunrise. Driven by both banks of oars, she thrust through the swells under a stiff breeze, her forward slaves drenched in spray.

Accustomed to the shudder of planking against heavy waves, Haldeth rowed, preoccupied by thought. Korendir’s exchange with the Kahillan natives had been outright recklessness. Certain the mate would discover the contraband, Haldeth worried. Sharpened shells were no match for Mhurgai steel. Korendir was crazy to believe in them.

Scarcely an hour beyond the barrier reef, Haldeth noticed cold water wetting his feet. He glanced downward, immediately suspicious of a leak.
Nallga
was clinker built, her strakes lashed through eyes on the ribs with tarred cord; one of the lines had given way, and seawater welled between the floorboards with each roll of the hull.

Haldeth swore. Korendir surely had been at work with his shells; the line showed no trace of chafing previously. And with the mate’s competency questioned by the entire crew, now was the worst time to discover hull failure. Yet Haldeth had no choice. Refusal to report a leak carried worse penalty than the whip. Reluctantly he raised his voice.

“Zhaird’s hells,” snapped the mate. “How did that happen?” Surly and impatient, he rang the brass bell to summon the ship’s marshal since no Mhurga seaman ever walked among slaves without an armed escort to cover his back.

The mate strode down the gangway to Haldeth’s bench. Even where he stood he saw the water sluicing through the floorboards. The cause was certainly minor, and in his present vicious mood, the protocol which demanded he wait for assistance rankled. The moment the marshal’s weaponed bulk loomed above the companionway, the mate barked orders to hold stroke. Then he stepped down between the slave benches.

Haldeth relinquished his oar and moved clear. Left to tend the loom alone, Korendir stared through the oarport as if unaware that an officer had arrived to inspect the leak.

The mate muttered an insult and added a curt gesture for Darjir to move his feet. Korendir complied without haste. He fixed intent gray eyes upon the mate and appeared not to notice the foam-laced swell which rose beneath the poised blade of his oar. The sucking smack of impact tore the shaft free of his grip. The high end of the loom rose in a neat arc and struck the mate in the side of the head.

Haldeth cried out in alarm as pounds of leaded beech thumped into skull. The officer toppled like a felled tree. His weapons clattered over the wood of slave bench, rib, and floorboard. Korendir controlled the shaft with a onehanded motion and swiftly bent over the fallen body of the mate.

Haldeth trembled uncontrollably. A man four years at the oar could never have misjudged the swell; Korendir’s act surely was deliberate. The marshal had witnessed its entirety, and his muscled, gut-round figure now pounded the length of the gangway. Both huge fists contained knives.

Fear closed Haldeth’s throat and sealed the breath within his lungs. Only divine intervention would spare him from hamstringing, and as he knew the Mhurgai, he would be lucky to escape that lightly. He remembered the mate’s knife too late; the marshal’s lumbering charge had already carried him aft. Haldeth found himself throttled by a hairy wrist, while ten inches of bare steel pricked his exposed neck.

“Get back!” commanded the marshal. He spoke past Haldeth.

Instantly obedient, Korendir straightened. He withdrew his hands, which surprisingly held no weapon, but instead had supported the mate’s shoulder to hold him clear of the bilge. Salt water welled beneath the floorboards, lifting plumes of blood from the man’s split scalp. His tasseled braid was already sodden scarlet and his body lay ominously still.

Korendir shrugged, artfully emphasizing empty hands.

The marshal snorted in disgust, but his death grip on Haldeth relaxed slightly.

“Zhaird’s own fool, thou art, to have made such a move,” he muttered at the unconscious mate. Then he fixed unfriendly eyes on Korendir. “Ship that oar, slave, and make certain it causes no further mischief.”

The marshal raised his voice and summoned
Nallga’
s
healer. The man arrived, accompanied by a brace of deckhands who removed the mate from the bilge under the vigilant eyes of the marshal. After a brief examination, the healer stood up and pronounced the mate dead. He accompanied his prognosis with a clipped gesture toward Haldeth and Korendir.

“Those slaves should both suffer punishment.”

The marshal crossed his arms over his belted chest and spat on the deck. “I think not,” he said. “Why ruin two fine strong backs? The mate’s own carelessness earned his death. I saw. No hand held the oar which struck Alhar down. Any fool who thinks himself clever enough to walk alone on a slave deck well deserves a split skull.”