flags. Plus, for a merchant, once the painful business of ‘taxes’ is concluded, there are few places in the world that offer as wide a range of goods and services as the corsair ports. They trade in flesh there too, the bought-and-sold type as well as the hired type. Slaves run mainly west to east and a trickle north to south. The Broken Empire never had a big demand for slaves. We have peasants. Much the same thing, and they think they’re free so they never run off.
Coming into port it felt good to at last see the world I knew best, the headlands thick with pine and beech and oak in place of the scattered palm trees of northern Liba. And seasons too! The forest stood rust-speckled with the first crisp touch of autumn, though on a blazing day like this it felt hard to imagine the summer in terminal decline. In place of Liba’s flat roofs the houses on the slopes above the harbour boasted terracotta tiles, sloped in a tacit admission that rain actually happens.
‘Two days! Two days!’ Malturk’s first mate, a barrel of a man named Bartoli, who seemed incapable of wearing a shirt. ‘Two days!’ A booming baritone.
‘How many?’
‘Two d—’
‘I got it, thank you.’ I wiggled a finger into my half-deafened ear and proceeded down the gangplank.
The quays of Port French are like none I’ve seen. It’s as though the contents of every brothel, opium den, gambling hall, and blood-pit have been vomited up onto the sun-soaked harbour, pushing out among the quays so that the dockhands have to weave their path among this bright and varied crowd just to tie off a hawser.
I immediately found myself swamped by maidens in all shades from jet through dusky to sun-burned, along with men trying to steer me to establishments where any vice might be indulged so long as it parts you from your coin. The most direct of all, and perhaps the most honest, were the small boys dodging in and out among the adults’ legs and attempting to lift my purse before I’d gone ten paces.
‘Two days!’ Bartoli, on the rail, watching his crew and passengers disperse. The Santa Maria would sail with or without us once its business had concluded and the code flags were hung.
After Hell, the desert, and then the sea, Port French seemed as close to heaven as makes no difference. I wandered through the crowd in a state of bliss, paying no specific attention to any of the people trying to lure me this way or that, no matter how persistent. At one point I paused to boot a particularly annoying little cutpurse into the sea, and then at last I was off the quay and climbing into the maze of streets leading up to the ridge where all the finest buildings seemed to cluster.
Nothing paralyses a man so well as choice. Offered such a banquet after so long in the wilderness the decision stumped me. I settled at a table outside a tavern on a steep and cobbled street halfway to the ridge. I ordered wine and it came in an amphora cradled in a raffia jacket to keep it whole. I sat watching the world go by, sipping from my clay cup.
They call them the Corsair Isles and it’s true that pirating defines them, but there are millions of hot dry acres in the interior where the sea can’t even be spotted from a hill, and in those valleys they grow damned fine grapes. However cheap its container, the wine was good.
My travel-stained robes and Sahar tan made me more of an Arab than a man of Red March, only the sun-bleached gold in my hair told the lie. Certainly nobody would mistake me for a prince, which has its advantages in a town packed with robbers, thieves, pirates and pimps. Anonymous in my desert attire I took a moment to relax. Hell, I took several moments, then two hours, then three more, and enjoyed the passing hustle and bustle of close-packed living while the sun slipped across the sky.
I considered my return to Vermillion, my fortunes, my future, but most of all I considered Yusuf Malendra and his calculations. Not just Yusuf though, not just the Mathema where a hundred mathmagicians scratched away at their algebras, but all of those who saw or told or lied about the future. The völvas of the north, the magicians of Afrique, the Silent Sister with her blind eye, the Lady Blue amid her mirrors looking for reflections of tomorrow. Spiders, all of them, laying their webs. And what did that make men like me and Jorg Ancrath? Flies, bound tight and ready to have our vital juices sucked away to feed their appetite for knowing?
Jorg had it worse than me of course. That boy prince with his thorn scars. He’d escaped that tangle of briars but did he know that he hung in a larger one now, its hooks long enough to eviscerate a man? Did he know my grandmother whispered his name to the Silent Sister? That so many conspired to either make or break him? Emperor or fool – which he would be remembered as I couldn’t say, but he was one of those in the making, no doubt about it. Perhaps both. I remembered his eyes, that first night I saw him in Crath City. As if even then he looked past the world and saw all this coming his way. And didn’t give a damn.
I knocked back my cup and tried to pour another. The amphora dribbled and ran dry. ‘I’m well out of that business.’ I had covered the Ancrath boy with a blanket and left him on that roof in Hamada. I should have done him the kindness of pushing him off. Still, I had escaped, and that, as always, was the important thing. A prophecy has to get up very early in the morning indeed if it wants to snare old Jalan!
‘Rollas?’ Looking up from my close inspection of the amphora’s interior, in search of hidden wine, I saw a man turn from the main street into a side alley. Something about the square cut of his shoulders below the blunt and bristly back of his head, put me in mind of my friend Barras Jon’s man, Rollas. I stood, swaying somewhat, steadying myself with a hand to the shoulder of a man seated by the next table. ‘Your pardon.’ The words slurred over numb lips. ‘Just getting my land legs.’ And I stumbled out across the street. It hadn’t just reminded me of Barras’s man. It had been him. I’d followed the back of that head home to the palace after enough drunken Vermillion nights to know it anywhere. It was habit more than anything that made me set off after it this time.
I walked carefully, not wanting to step in anything unpleasant, and had to negotiate passage around an ill-smelling beggar even more drunk than myself. I emerged from the alley into another street leading from the docks to the heights, sure that I must have lost my quarry, but found myself just in time to see him enter a whorehouse. You can always tell the places: better presented than the drinking holes, more conspicuous than gambling dens, and if business is slow then girls will be leaning out of the upstairs windows. Besides, this one had ‘Hore House’ painted in big red letters on a sign running the length of the eaves.
I crossed over and let the street-hook snare me.
‘A fine-looking man like you shouldn’t be alone on a nice afternoon like this now.’ The hook, a striking, dark-haired woman in her forties took my arm, steering me toward the brothel door.
‘And you’d like to keep me company would you?’ I leered politely.
She smiled, professional enough not to wince at my wine-sour breath. ‘Well, I’m a little old for a young man like you, but there are some beautiful girls inside just dying to meet you. Samantha has the b—’
‘Do you know the man who went in just before me?’ I held back against the tug of her arm, just shy of the doorway and the door-guard hulking in the shadows of its porch.
She released me and looked up, smile erased. ‘We’re a very discreet establishment. We don’t tell tales.’
I held up a Liban bar between finger and thumb and let the rectangular coin catch the afternoon light. I’d borrowed ten bars from Omar the night before I left, each made of a touch more gold than an Empire ducat.
‘I haven’t seen him before. I would remember. Handsome fellow.’
