Farlander (17 page)

Red wine had been produced from a locked cabinet fixed to the floor, and Ash and Dalas and the captain were now well into their second bottle, while Nico still sipped from his first glass. He suspected the pair of them were already a little drunk.

‘It’s good to see you on your feet at last,’ Captain Trench observed quietly, as he used his handkerchief as a napkin to dab at his pale lips, and favoured Nico with a glance from his blind white eye, as though he could see more clearly with it. Even in the soft sunset hues that filled the cabin, his skin had a pallied complexion, like the slick greyness of rain.

Ash grunted at the remark, and Nico glanced towards the old man, but the farlander refused to return his gaze.

‘A tricky business, adjusting to big sky,’ Trench continued in his soft, clipped accent suggestive of a wealthy education. ‘Worse than being at sea, most will inform you. Well, it’s no shame on you, the reaction. Believe me, I am hardly any better myself when I make it back to land. It takes me – what – a full day in bed with a galloping whore before I feel steady again.’ And he flashed Nico a good-natured smile, with a cock of an eyebrow, before looking quickly away again as though shy at having said too much.

Nico forced a smile in return, for it was hard not to like this man. Indeed, this evening he was gaining a sense that it was important to Trench to be liked by those sharing his company; which was surprising, remembering him earlier that day, as he screamed at one of his crew for fouling the rigging, his words flying incoherently with so much spittle that Nico had wondered if he wasn’t in some way unhinged. Dalas had eventually stepped in to pull Trench into his cabin, out of sight of the crew, though not out of earshot.

Now, at dinner, the captain seemed calm. His smiles came easily and his sound red-rimmed eye held something of an apology in it: clearly whatever demons plagued him, they were restrained just now by this softer nature, which also seemed his truer nature, so that Nico felt reassured in his presence, despite his earlier loss of control.

From across the table, Dalas observed Nico coolly while he shovelled food into his mouth with a fork. The big Corician lifted his free hand and made a gesture in sign language, almost too fast to follow: a balled fist tilting from side to side, a waving motion, a flat chop, a palm soaring.

‘Pay no heed to him,’ advised Trench, dismissing the other man with a wave.

But Nico continued to stare at the Corician’s hand, which now rested on the tablecloth, the forefinger rubbing restlessly against the end of its thumb. ‘Why?’ he inquired. ‘What did he say?’

Trench raised his bunched handkerchief to his mouth, and murmured from behind it. ‘He says, my young friend, that he doubts you have ever even sailed before, let alone flown.’

The Corician had stopped eating, his right cheek stuffed with food, as he awaited Nico’s response.

‘He would be right, then,’ Nico admitted.

‘Yes, but you may not have noticed
how
he said it. That gesture just now, with a loose wrist, it meant he intended it to be insulting.’ Trench shook his head at Dalas reproachfully, and Dalas frowned back. ‘Dalas was born on a ship. All his life, he has lived on one type of deck or another. He is often this dismissive with people who have never been to sea. He reckons, somehow, that their priorities are all wrong.’

Nico offered an awkward smile to them both. ‘Once, when I was ten, and swimming in the sea, I found a log and used it for a boat.’

Trench withdrew the handkerchief from his mouth by a fraction.

‘A log, you say?’

‘A big one.’

Trench choked back a laugh, which in turn became a cough that he stifled with his handkerchief. Even Dalas’s expression softened, enough at least to swallow his food.

‘You are hardly drinking,’ the captain observed, as he caught his breath. ‘Berl, fill him up, if you please.’

Berl, standing by the table in attendance, dutifully stepped forward. He added more wine to Nico’s glass, though it hardly needed topping up.

Nico studied the glass before him.

‘I see you haven’t acquired a true thirst for it yet,’ Trench observed over the rim of his own goblet. ‘You will, believe me. In lives such as ours it happens all too easily. Look at your master, there. When last he was aboard this ship, I had to keep all the stores under lock and key, his thirst was so limitless.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Ash, and downed the rest of his wine before holding out the empty glass for a refill.

Nico sat back in his chair, hoping to let their conversation drift by him. He picked up the glass, if only to have something to do with his hands. Everywhere around him, wood creaked to its own disjointed rhythms. It reminded him of the forested foothills back home, of standing alone deep amongst the pines as they swayed and groaned in the midday breeze. He tried another sip of the wine. Its aftertaste was a sweet one, not like the cheap, bitter stuff his mother sometimes drank. He could take to this, he thought, if ever he had the money to afford it.

An image of his father came to mind. His father raging drunk, breath hissing through his nostrils, tongue trying to push its way out through the obstruction of his lower lip. Nico found himself setting down the glass once more.

Trench leaned back in his chair, tilting it on to its two rear legs. His sigh only deepened the impression of weariness that hung about him.

‘I have taken you from your land-leave,’ Ash said by way of an apology.

‘And the rest of the crew, too,’ Trench muttered, then straightened his chair again, smiling with thin lips as his hooded eye surveyed the table without focus. ‘They are somewhat displeased with their captain just now, and I can hardly blame them. We only just made it back from our last run. You saw the poor condition we were in, and that was after a full week of repairs. Now, they have to run the blockade again, with hardly more than a week on land for respite. It’s hard on them – hard on us all.’ And he dabbed his face again with his handkerchief.

Ash wiped his lips of wine. ‘It is a short journey this time, at least.’

‘Yes,’ admitted the captain. ‘Though with little profit in it, save for some cloth we might shift in return for grain, which will keep my investors happy at least. And of course in wiping my debt to you. I take it we are even?’

‘You owed me nothing to begin with.’

‘You hear that?’ snapped Trench suddenly to the kerido, who aborted its reaching towards the scraps on his plate with a scaly claw, and instead looked up. ‘He mocks his hold over me, even now.’ Absently, the captain picked up a half-eaten sweetroot, and the creature opened its beak as he offered the morsel towards it.

‘Just promise me one thing,’ Trench said to Ash, and then he paused as Nico shifted back from the table in alarm. Trench looked down at the creature perched between them. From its open beak it was brandishing its tongue at him, a long and stiff and hollow thing like a child’s rattle, making a noise clearly intended to sound threatening. Trench tossed the morsel into the creature’s mouth to shut it up, then continued.

‘When next some old saltdog comes at my back in a taverna,’ he said to Ash, ‘do me the kindness of letting him have me. Friendship is one thing, but I’d rather a pierced liver than ever be in your debt again.’

Ash inclined his head in consent.

Nico watched the creature as it ate, both its claws holding the root as it tore off strips with quick jerks of its beak. He found himself holding his cutlery before him as though in defence.

A brilliant glow had permeated the cabin. The sun was now setting, throwing the last of its light through the stained-glass windows at the back of the room, printing diamonds of colour against the beams of wood not far above their heads, against the plank walls, the long desk with charts splayed out across its surface and kept flat with rounded stones. Nico peered over at the charts. He was close enough to discern a few oblique details: landmasses lost in symbols, notations, curving sweeps of arrows. Maps of the air, they seemed, as much as of the land surface.

That thought caused his eye to range beyond the desk. Through the lower portion of the rear windows was visible a sea made to look flat and featureless by height.

‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ he ventured, dragging his gaze from the watery abyss, ‘how long will the crossing take us?’

For a moment a shadow passed over the captain’s features. Captain Trench sat forward and, with his goblet, gestured to Nico. Wine slopped out of the glass, and Berl frowned as red stains blotted the clean linen. ‘It depends,’ he said, in a voice more sober than before. ‘Some time tonight we approach the imperial sea blockade. Maybe the wind will hold true. Maybe they don’t have anything in the air here.’

‘In the air?’ Nico blurted. ‘You mean, Mannian skyships?’

‘There is always the chance, this far out.’

Again Nico glanced at Ash, but the old man was feigning interest in the bottom of his glass.

Trench registered his discomfort. ‘It’s unlikely, mind,’ he said. ‘Mostly their birds-o’-war are over in the east, preying on the Zanzahar run. That’s where the main action is to be found, not here. Believe me, I know. Zanzahar’s all we have left for foreign trade, so most long-traders are committed to it, the
Falcon
included. When the sea-fleets can’t get through, or they take heavy losses, the longtraders pick up the slack. We’ve been flying the Zanzahar run close to four years now.’ He paused to upend his goblet, draining it of the last drop. ‘You have heard the stories, I’m sure.’

Indeed, Nico had heard the stories. How the Mannian skyships waited in packs like wolves along the route, ready to pounce on any longtraders that passed by. How every year the number of longtraders grew smaller and smaller. Trench hardly needed to explain as much, for it could be heard in the grim tone of his voice, a tone that had even caused the kerido to stop momentarily in its nibbling, to stare up at him.

Nico stared too. Trench no longer seemed to be present there in his chair; he was lost instead in the spots of wine on the tablecloth. For a moment, as the sun cast its final rays about him, Trench looked up, startled, as though returning from a great distance, and slowly inclined his head towards the dying light. In silhouette his nose was prominently hooked, a hint of some old Alhazii ancestry in his blood perhaps – though here, in this cabin, he was merely a ghost of the Alhazii desert, more a sick-looking Khosian, holding together his command with a sometimes trembling left hand and a slightly sturdier right, which seemed always to clutch a white, sweat-stained handkerchief of lace-bordered cotton within its fist.

Nico stabbed a potato from his plate and stuffed it into his mouth. It was cold, and his stomach was feeling queasy again, but he ate anyway. He did not like this talk. At least in Bar-Khos, the city walls still stood as a symbol of protection and life carried on. Here there was nothing but sky and, by the sounds of it, an absolute reliance on wind and good luck. It did not sound promising at all.

And, after this, what? Cheem, that notorious island of reavers and Beggar Kings where, according to Ash, they would travel into the mountainous interior to find the hidden R
shun order, and where he would train to become an assassin. The more he thought of all that was to come, the more uneasy Nico became. It had all seemed easier when he had lived in Bar-Khos, simply struggling each day to survive. At least he’d had Boon by his side.

A shout, coming from outside.

Trench and Dalas looked to one another. The shout came again. The kerido clutched the remains of the sweetroot in its beak and clambered on to the captain’s shoulder. Dalas rose and, even with his back bent, the Corician’s scalp brushed against the roof beams. He stomped out.

‘A little earlier than I was expecting,’ Trench murmured, dabbing his lips one last time. His chair scraped back as he pushed himself to his feet. ‘Excuse me, please.’

He took his goblet with him, Berl and the wine bottle trailing behind.

In the sudden silence, Nico and Ash were alone.

‘A ship,’ Ash explained at his side.

‘Mannians?’ Nico asked. His voice was subdued.

‘Let us go and see.’

*

In the cool twilight, Nico could not make out anything at first. He stood close to Ash and peered in the direction that everyone else, including the kerido, was looking. He could see nothing but dull water beneath a faltering sky.

Then he spotted it. To the east on the surface of the sea – a white sail.