[Florin & Lorenzo 01] - The Burning Shore Read online

  He almost made it on the first attempt. Almost. But just as his fingertips brushed against the mahogany inlay that surrounded the trapdoor, the Destrier reared her head, heroically breaching the crest of a wave and sending Lorenzo slipping helplessly back down the deck.

  He scratched at the wood with his nails as he shot back down the sudden slope of the deck, back towards his cabin. With a bang he hit the wall only three feet to the left of where he’d started out.

  But before he had time to despair the Destrier charged, storming the cavern that had followed the wave, and Lorenzo was sent spinning back towards the hatch.

  He hit it with a thump, his hands and teeth gripping the wood as he hugged himself into it, fastening onto the carpentry as tightly as one of the barnacles that slated the Destrier’s hull.

  She reared up again, climbing the next wave, and in the second of relative calm that followed Lorenzo reached over and grabbed at the solid wooden handles that opened the hatch. He turned at them expectantly, already anticipating the sweet respite that awaited him below decks.

  The handles remained solid. Stubborn.

  Unmoving.

  Baring his teeth in desperation, Lorenzo twisted and pulled harder, but nothing gave. The Destrier’s charge was broken as she dropped into a sudden chasm with a bone-jarring thud, and Lorenzo, half stunned, tried again.

  “Gods damn it!” he swore at the sudden rush of water that smacked into him, pulling playfully at his legs.

  Then he tried to turn the handles the other way.

  Still nothing.

  Lorenzo howled with frustration and, refusing to relinquish his precious handholds, banged the hatch with his head.

  Suddenly the handles were turning of their own accord. The hatch winked open, and he felt hands pulling him roughly inside. He was dragged down a short ladder as the trapdoor was once more secured into place above him.

  At first Lorenzo could think of nothing but the relative silence and calm of this welcome underworld. Even the stench of refuse and bilge-water seemed sweet to him after the terrible, scouring freshness of the world above. And the dozen or so men who stood hunched over him, their faces distorted into gargoyle masks by the flickering light of their lantern, looked like angels.

  Then their leader pushed his way through them, bent almost double beneath the low ceiling, and looked down with a terrible satisfaction.

  “Well, well. Look who it is,” said Jacques, as he knelt down to study his lads’ catch. “The captain’s monkey.”

  “That boot didn’t do much for your looks,” Lorenzo told him, and spat a mouthful of blood and salt water into the bilges at Jacques’ feet.

  “No matter,” the mercenary agreed smugly. “The girls always love a winner.”

  “So I see,” Lorenzo looked around pointedly.

  Jacques laughed and slapped his catch on the shoulder.

  “You’re a real diplomat, little man,” he cackled. “But you can get stuffed. I’m not making the same mistake twice. Your fop of a master turned out to be a real killer, gods alone know what a runt like you would turn out to be.”

  “What I am,” Lorenzo shrugged, grabbing at the ladder as the Destrier leapt upon another peak, “is in a hurry. The fevers got a hold of Fl… of the captain. Seems the surgeon’s better at drinking the spirit than using it on his patients.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” Jacques frowned. “He wasn’t a bad fellow. For an officer.”

  “Isn’t such a bad fellow,” Lorenzo muttered. “But anyway, if you’ll just show me where the water’s kept I’d better get back to him.”

  “Surely,” Jacques nodded. “You’ll have to ask the sergeant first, though. Turns out he isn’t just a pretty face either.”

  “Sergeant? You mean one of the Kislevites?”

  “No. Orbrant, of course. Kislevites!” he spat. “Those rotten bastards wouldn’t piss on their own grandmothers to put them out. That captain they hide behind won’t even let us leave our sick in the upper decks. That’s why we’re all stuck down here.”

  “You have a sickness down here too?”

  “Fever, dysentery, sea weakness. Just the usual,” the mercenary shrugged.

  “Maybe when the boss is better he can change that. But look, can we be quick? I don’t like to leave him for too long.”

  “Of course,” Jacques agreed and headed off into the darkness.

  Lorenzo ducked his head and followed him, splashing through the wash of filthy water that rushed throughout the Destrier’s lower deck. It was dark here; the men were presumably rationing their lantern oil. It was dripping wet. Mould grew in slick patches on the ceilings and walls of this dingy world, and most of the men who swung like rotten fruit from hammocks that had been strung up between the Destrier’s ribs were coughing or feverish. One of them was crying out in the soft tones of a child, wailing in his delirium as one of his comrades lent over him, mopping the dampness from his brow.

  “Is the upper deck much better than this?” he asked, although he was really speaking only to himself. Jacques, who was holding tightly to a crossbeam as the Destrier rolled queasily, answered him.

  “It’s drier,” he said. “And that’s the thing when you’ve got a fever. There are less vermin too.”

  To demonstrate, he waved the lantern at a bundle of black-furred shapes that were swimming past them. The rats fled before the light, although without much urgency.

  Jacques led off again and Lorenzo realised how similar this place was to the visions of hell his village priest had tried to terrify him with as a child. The darkness, the filth, the misery and the vermin.

  And if this had been hell, the figure that they now approached would presumably have been the presiding daemon.

  Orbrant was kneeling with his back to them, the smoothly shaved cannon ball of his head bent in prayer. He seemed not to notice the foetid bilge-water that surged around his calves and thighs, or the creaking of the ship’s timbers.

  He somehow sensed Lorenzo and Jacques approaching however, and rose smoothly to his feet, legs slightly bowed to allow for the rolling of the ship.

  “Visitor for you, sarge.”

  “Thanks, Jacques. What is it Lorenzo?”

  “It’s Captain d’Artaud,” Lorenzo said. “He’s got the fever.”

  “Yes,” Orbrant nodded. “I’d heard. Is it bad?”

  “Bad enough.”

  “He’ll need water.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, let’s get moving. Jacques, bring a couple of lads and a coil of rope to the hatch. Lorenzo, come with me to the casks.”

  “Yes, sergeant,” Lorenzo said, realising too late that he’d failed to inject even a trace of mockery into his use of the title.

  Florin’s fever broke on the same day as the storm, and just as suddenly. One night he was shaking with the icy chill of his burning blood, teeth chattering as he mumbled to friends long gone and imagined. But the next morning, as effortlessly and naturally as the rising sun, he opened his eyes, yawned, and said, “How about something to eat?”

  Lorenzo, who’d been dozing while the storm drew its breath, looked up blearily. Then a wide grin split his grizzled face.

  “Yes, how about something to eat?” he said and, eager to be gone before the storm reasserted itself, he stripped off his jerkin and padded over to the cabin door.

  “Won’t be long,” he said, picking up the billycan Orbrant had given him to keep the rations dry. Then, bracing himself, he opened the cabin door and snatched for the safety rope that the sergeant had had rigged up.

  He’d already twisted a loop of it around his wrist by the time he realised something was wrong. It took him perhaps half a dozen heartbeats to realise what it was.

  The storm had gone.

  There was no wild assault of wind and spray to greet him, no pitching deck, no grey half-light or flickering octane.

  Instead the Destrier rode easily across calm blue waters, the tortured remains of her rigging sharply defined agains
t a clear sky. The ship’s crew were already aloft, busily repairing the damage, and above them there was nothing but lazy cumulus clouds. Lorenzo sighed with pure animal pleasure as felt the warm sun against his skin—the first time he’d felt it for perhaps a month.

  Around him other men, smiling the same disbelieving smile, sat or strolled around the deck. After the purgatory of the storm they looked as alike as brothers: their skin pale, their clothes mildewed, their faces gaunt but open with the joy of being alive.

  Lorenzo unhitched his hand from the safety line and strolled across the deck to the galley, where the cook was ladling out the contents of a great iron pot to all comers. The smoke from the cooking fire, the first in weeks, lifted in a high and unbroken line into the clear sky.

  Filling his cook tin Lorenzo hastened back to Florin to tell him the good news, tripping over fallen rigging as he made his way back to the cabin. Once there he kicked open the door with a bang and handed Florin the steaming tin.

  “The storm’s broken,” he said smugly, as though he’d somehow personally arranged the improved weather.

  “Storm?” Florin slurped the contents down hungrily. “What storm?”

  Lorenzo was still chuckling when Orbrant, as unmoved by the storm’s passing as he had been by its fury, knocked on the cabin door to make his first official report.

  It was another day before Florin could stand up without dizziness, and three more before he could walk around the deck. The violence of the fever had left him gaunt, his shirt hanging like an empty sail from his bones, but at least his wound had healed into a healthy jagged scar. The pink slash ran down beside his spine, and the surgeon’s only advice was to shield the raw flesh from the sun.

  He would have done so anyway. There was no doubt now that they had travelled far, far to the south of Bordeleaux. Even beneath the brisk sea breeze the tropical skies burned with a scorching blue light, the midday sun beating down on men grown sluggish with the heat.

  Not that that stopped the Destrier’s crew. Day by day they struggled to repair the damage done by the storm. Ignoring the sweat that poured off them they raced to get their ship back into shape, so that the days were filled with the sound of hammering and sawing, and the cries of foremen as they manhandled timber across the vessel.

  The Destrier’s sister ships, the Hippogriff and the Beaujelois, seemed in even worse shape. They limped along behind her, their splendid white sails now as bedraggled as a street urchin’s rags. The Beaujelois had even lost her foremast. The splintered stump made her seem as unbalanced as an elephant with only one tusk. Long boats of materials and craftsmen plied back and forth between the three ships, swapping canvas and expertise under Captain-Owner Gorth’s foul-mouthed direction.

  The mercenaries, meanwhile, had been confined to quarters, their clumsy limbs stowed out of the crew’s way whilst they worked. So, while the sailors toiled above in the healthy sea air, Florin’s men remained rotting in the dank fever-pit of the hold. He’d visited them on the second day, where he’d been impressed by their ragged salute as much as by the squalor in which they lived. Judging by the coughing and the babbling of the delirious, he could tell that the men needed a change of quarters.

  Eventually, of course, they’d be allowed up onto the deck to sleep under the warm southern stars or through canvas-shaded days, but only when the skipper had finished repairing the storm damage. And when that would happen, nobody appeared to know.

  In fact, it often seemed to Florin that things were getting worse. Even now, as he made his way over to the stern deck, a great, splintered beam was being lowered down onto the main deck, trailing a mess of twisted tackle behind it.

  He skirted the mess, Lorenzo close behind him, and greeted the two men he found there.

  “Good-day to you, skipper,” he said, bounding up the steps and offering his hand. “Just wanted to thank you for getting us all through that storm.”

  The sailor nodded his thanks, and grasped Florin’s hand.

  “Don’t mention it, cappo,” he said, eyes smiling within the weathered creases of his face. “If I’d have lost his ship old man Gorth would have followed me down into the deeps to give me a beating for it.”

  Florin laughed. Old man Gorth, although safely ensconced on his flagship, was legend amongst passengers and crew both. Rumour had it that he’d built this fleet up from nothing but the fishing skiff his uncle had left him and Florin, although he’d never seen the man, was inclined to believe it.

  “According to what I’ve heard, the old man probably would have. And you, captain,” he continued, turning to the other man. “We were never introduced. I’m Captain Florin d’Artaud.”

  Again he held out his hand and the Kislevite, after regarding it for one suspicious moment, reached out and shook.

  “Graznikov,” the man muttered, and squeezed as hard as he could. Florin squeezed back. Only when the two men’s knuckles start to shine white did Florin force himself to pull his hand away.

  The small victory was enough to paint a wide smile across the pink expanse of Graznikov’s flabby face. His small blue eyes gleamed as he drew a bottle of clear liquid out from the folds of his cloak.

  “You southerners, very soft,” he smirked, uncorking the bottle and taking a long pull. After a moment’s hesitation he offered the bottle to the skipper, who declined, and then Florin.

  “Cheers,” he said, raising the glass before taking a swig.

  The alcohol burned its way down Florin’s throat like molten lead. There was no taste to it, unless you counted the hint of burnt grease. It didn’t even have a smell.

  “Excellent,” Florin deadpanned, passing the bottle back. Although his expression gave nothing away he couldn’t stop the red flush that burned his cheeks, nor the tears that blurred his vision.

  Graznikov sniggered sadistically and took another swig. Then he passed it back, his greed overcome by the pleasure of seeing another man suffer.

  “Drink, drink,” he told Florin encouragingly.

  “You’re very kind,” Florin agreed and took another gulp of the vile liquid. Surprisingly, this mouthful was as nasty as the first.

  “Thank you very much, Captain Graznikov,” he handed the bottle back. “Acshually, I mean actually, I’m glad we met. I wanted to talk to you about the men.”

  “Talk later,” Graznikov decided, lifting back the tall fur hat that seemed to serve his company as uniform and scratching his head. “First drink.” His eyes disappeared between rolls of fat as he smiled evilly.

  “After you.”

  “Chyars, you say, hey?” Graznikov waved the bottle towards Florin before taking another pull. “I take three fingers, you see? Now you take three fingers.”

  “Three fingers,” Florin nodded, wrapped four fingers around the bottle, and drank.

  “Now talk,” Graznikov said, retrieving the bottle and carefully driving the cork back home.

  “It’s about… about the men,” Florin paused. He was waiting for the nausea to pass before continuing. “I’d like to move all the sick onto the upper deck, where your lads are. It’ll be a lot healthier for ’em.”

  Graznikov looked at him blankly, and Florin wondered if he’d understood. But before he repeated himself the Kislevite answered.

  “Why?” he asked, incomprehension furrowing his brow.

  “Why? Well, they’ll recover quicker if they’re dry. Isn’t that right, skipper?”

  The sailor, who’d been watching his carpenters getting to work on the boom, nodded absent-mindedly.

  “That’s right. That’s how we always treat our lot. The fevered need to be kept dry and warm.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Graznikov waved away the explanation impatiently. “But why I move my men? They are happy. If they are happy, I am happy.”

  “Yes, I understand,” Florin agreed. “But all we want to do is to bring up our sick from the hold.”

  “Not possible. Old man Gorth, he gave the upper deck to me. The skipper knows this. Not possible I move
them.”

  “Even for gold?”

  “How much?” Graznikov asked, the future once more full of possibilities.

  “Twenty gold crowns.”

  “No. Not enough. I move my men, I have too much trouble.”

  “Well, then, perhaps a wager. After all we’re both gentlemen, not merchants. My twenty crowns against your upper deck.”

  Graznikov sucked at his teeth thoughtfully.

  “What wager? I no fight you. I see what you do already!” Graznikov smiled approvingly, as if at some fond memory.

  “What wager do you choose?” Florin asked, warily.

  “I show you. Drobnic!” He turned and bellowed across the deck to his sergeant. “Bring my dragons!”

  “Dragons?”

  “You see, you see,” The Kislevite said smugly. “Now we have another drink, no? Finish bottle.”

  “If it doesn’t finish me first,” Florin replied weakly. Graznikov howled with laughter and punched his arm.

  “No! Is good for you!”

  By the time Graznikov’s man returned the bottle was empty. The Kislevite, legs as steady as ever, went to the prow of the foredeck and wedged the glass against the rail. Then, content with his handiwork, he paced back to the opposite rail and opened the box his sergeant proffered.

  “My dragons,” he smiled as he reached inside and drew both of them out. “Here. Look.”

  So saying he thrust one into Florin’s hand and started the delicate operation of loading the other. He was slow and careful about this task, perhaps because of the danger inherent in black powder or perhaps because the gun was so beautiful.

  And they were beautiful. The finely wrought barrels, thick bored steel as long as a man’s forearm, ended in muzzles that snarled open in the likeness of a dragon’s mouth. Behind them the length of the metal was inlaid with a silver damasque of intertwined beasts and birds, and the thick club of the gun’s body and grip shone with the dull inner glow of well-polished walnut.

  Wielding a ramrod with a flourish Graznikov firmly pushed down a scrap of wadding to hold down the charge in the first, then swapped it with the one Florin was holding and repeated the process.