I have no idea how long we continued
to row but the time gave me the opportunity to reconsider some of the facts as
I understood them as well as some assumptions that I didn't. I begin with
geography. As far as I could establish from the comments made to me a few
nights ago by Welcome, we were headed for a small group of islands known as the
Xandrian Quarters. Though named, they lay outside the jurisdiction of the
Xandrian City States and were more or less autonomous. At least they would be
if it wasn't for the notorious port of Knublar that sat at the northern tip of
the largest island in this small archipelago. The Xandrians called the island
Britha Yenglesh, the Isle of the Lost. I believe that this was on account of
the high population of corsairs and other privateers who frequented the place,
mostly of course in Knublar itself. By all accounts, in addition to giving the
place a slightly unhealthy feel, the population exerted an unduly significant
influence over the remaining isles, more or less holding the small and
diminishing number of indigenes in a form of servitude that bordered on
slavery.
That the population was declining at
an alarming rate was a well publicised fact. For some obscure reason the
archipelago also seemed to exert an influence on the Xandrian press far out of
proportion to either its size or its economic worth. In a word, the place had
appeal. There was nothing like a brutal death more guaranteed to arrest the
roving eye of a Xandrian merchant and nothing approximating to rapine and
slaughter that didn't help the same merchants sleep better in their beds on the
mainland at night. The principle was a simple one. If they were killing and
stealing over there, they won't be killing and stealing over here. I had only
been reading last week of the recent and rather messy exploits of Baruk
Barahir, the Beast of Britha who it appeared, had single handedly gutted an
entire watch onboard his ship, the Filthy Angleesh. Apparently this was because
someone had stumbled upon him wandering the cargo hold in the early hours in a
state of considerable undress and arousal. No one had lived to tell tale of
what kind of cargo was down there or on the assumption that it was live, how
many legs it had. Personally, I just wanted to know how the press had got hold
of the tale at all if there were no survivors, but it was all fuel to the
popular furnace of imagination.
The tales that I had picked up in my
travels about the Port of Knublar gave a broadly similar picture to the press
reports. There were a lot of pirates. There was a lot of drinking. Women or
boys (it made no difference to most apparently) were brought in from the other
islands and as numbers began to diminish, from further afield. Slavery,
although outlawed on the mainland (that's not to say that it didn't go on in
some form or another) was pretty active in the archipelago with the principal
trade being in sex slaves. Domestics came in a close second and biological
carriers a distant third.
The sex trade was principally for the
Cinque Ports of the archipelago : Knublar and Kes on Britha; Beros and Ferol on
the smaller island of Lahut ; and, Manos which was the name of both port and
island, being one of the smaller of those that were inhabited.
However, there was a fair amount of
additional trade offshore, as it were, as traders came both from the mainland
and from Chineve. Traders also came from Ruardan but these brought slaves in
rather than took them out. Sadly, Ruardan was one of the principal sources of
raw material ( if it can be put that way). The olive skin and the rotund
shape of the women together with their famed skills in cooking and other
household matters (not to mention their natural fecundity), made them the
obvious target. The Ruardean men didn't help matters either. They were natural
artists who excelled in the portrayal of the human form. The net effect of
their prolific and beautiful paintings and sculpture as it was sold around the
world was that they advertised the beauty and appeal of their women in a manner
that was to prove unhealthy.
I feel that I cannot offer comments on
these affairs without making at least one point. That is, how sad and indeed
sick we can become as a species in the pursuit or our primal urge to pass on
our genes: men as well as women. After all, every slave trader has a wife or
partner (admittedly they may not always be female but then again not every
slaver is male). Every user and abuser of a sex slave most likely has partner,
friends and relatives. Let’s face it the same comments apply to domestics
although there isn't usually an exchange of bodily fluids unless the boundaries
between these categories become blurred (which of course they often do). I'm
not going to expand here on biological carriers and surrogacy.
I can only assume that, at some time
over my musings on the strange world of the archipelago, I must have nodded
off. I say this because when I woke up, or more precisely when I was woken up,
the boat was moored. It wasn't particularly stationary as it bobbed up and down
with a singularly vigorous motion which a few days ago would have had me
reaching for the gunwales. I must have seemed a bit confused as I could see a
number of young men looking at me. They showed pretty much the same look that I
usually offered myself whenever I had the misfortune to meet a mirror and the
reflection of an old man resembling my father that I invariably saw looking out
at me from it.
I tried to nod back at them but I was
more or less ignored. Instead they seemed to busy themselves about with a pile
of rags and other detritus that was gathered in the middle of the boat and was
now visible to me given that the numerous casks and bundles had been removed
from the centre of the vessel. I could detect a very unpleasant smell that
occasionally wafted in my direction. It was unfortunately not indescribable. All
those possible fluids and solids that can be extracted from humanity all seemed
to coalesce in a veritable cocktail of filth and putrescence. I could feel my
stomach rebelling. It was then that I realised why these young men looked so
unpleasant. Theirs was the task of removing the stench from the boat.
I had no idea when or where everyone
else had gone but it was pretty obvious why they had done so. I suppressed a
slight unhappiness that I had been left behind but decided to listen to my
stomach and move myself on before I found myself contributing to the problem as
it were.
I climbed the rope ladder up to the
quayside with some difficultly. Firstly it seemed pretty impossible to get onto
the ladder as it had been placed fairly high up and I had to pull much of my
body weight up with my arms. That was bad enough but the boat and the water was
a little lively thanks to the prevailing wind and so I frequently found myself
hanging, albeit briefly, in mid air before dropping back onto the deck below.
With the aid of one particular movement from the sea however, I managed to
secure a foothold on the rope ladder and started the uncomfortable climb up.
It's not just the age that I have reached nor the painful knees, nor the
slightly overweight bearing that causes problems. It is the fundamental premise
that ladders made of rope are not intended to be an easy climb, especially if
you have been at sea for more than a couple of days. There was movement in that
ladder that wasn't physically possible, I am sure of it.
Dry land also seemed to have more
movement than I recalled at my last meeting with it. For a while I stumbled
along the quayside like a drunk, tripping over ropes and lurching unexpectedly
into lobster post and casks without expectation or warning. On a couple of
occasions I had expected to be in the water but somehow managed to get back
from the edge of the treacherous drop. On one occasion I sent three barrels
tumbling over the side, much to the annoyance of one of the fishermen below who
just escaped injury. Fortunately the owners of the casks were not around
because no one made any fuss about the loss of the merchandise: whatever that
might have been.
Despite a somewhat angry exchange with
the fishermen (which I think it is fair to say that I lost) the quayside seemed
relatively empty. Sure there were a few boats bobbing about, mostly small
vessels for coastal traffic, but there was not the bustling crowd that I had
expected. That was probably because we had not actually moored up in one of the
busier ports and in fact had slipped, relatively unnoticed, into one of the
smaller fishing ports on Britha Yenglesh. It was also relatively deserted
because it was heading towards one of the hotter parts of the day and most
sensible folk were in doors or at least in the shade and preparing to sleep off
the worst of the heat.
It was undoubtedly hot and in the
short walk from boat to the shaded area alongside a small hut that was leaning
dangerously at the landward end of the jetty, I managed to work up quite a sweat.
The salty liquid ran and dripped from under the sweat band of my hat making my
eye's sting. I could feel my shirt starting to stick to my back and where it
wasn't there was the slightly unpleasant feel of droplets of moisture running
down the inside between my shirt and my skin.
Sitting, or rather lounging, in the
shade of the hut were a couple of men in strange looking trousers or
pantaloons. They were baggy in the main but gathered together tight against the
ankles. One was wearing a dirty off white colour whilst the other wore an
orange and dark blue combination that made the garments look even wider than
they were. Both wore linen shirts that looked remarkably white against their
other garments and the bronzed, dirty cooking pot tones of their skin. As I
walked towards them they stopped their conversation and looked up at me. Both
adopted a sloppy grin of more or less the same look and at more or less the
same time. I could see unbridled contempt in the two pairs of dark eyes and
knew that I was in for some kind of trouble. The one on the right, facing me,
looked slightly older. There were streaks of grey in his tied and greased hair
and the wrinkles of his face and the crows feet around his eyes were more
pronounced than the other man. He spat, the red saliva landing just ahead of
the next placement of my right foot. The younger man spoke.
It was a brief sentence full of
harshness and sarcasm but I didn't actually understand a word he said. In fact
I couldn't even start to place the language. From the look of them I had
assumed that they were outlanders from the archipelago or perhaps further
afield. Syrenacians possibly, or Berkhuts. They didn't look Xandrian and though
of a similar skin tone, they looked nothing like the Ruardean. I decided to go
for Xandrian and replied by way of an apology and a question. They listened to
me and then, the same sloppy grins stuck to their faces, they turned to each
other and started a conversation of some length in no language that I had ever
heard before.
For a while I let the conversation run
on, partly with a view to trying to understand them and partly because it
seemed rude to interrupt. However, after a few sentences, expressions and hand
gestures had been exchanged it began to seem increasingly unlikely that I was
going to be brought into the conversation and in fact the longer it went on,
the less likely that it seemed that I was either party to, or the subject of,
the exchange.
I had got to that point when you start
to think about walking away and yet are unsure as to whether that might be seen
as rude. I could feel the weight shifting from one leg to the other as if
balancing out in my mind the option to take and was just about to cross over
and make the move away when one of them spoke.
I was so focused on my own inner
thoughts at this point that I didn't actually notice who had spoken but I
looked automatically at the one who had spoken last. He grinned at me and as I
looked at him, the grin got bigger. I noticed that he had lost one of his front
teeth. Then he winked at me and said in poorly expressed Xandrian,
"Papers."
It was a statement, not a question. It
seemed almost to roll off from the earlier animated discussion that they had
been having. I just looked blankly at him.
"Excuse me?" I queried.
"Papers..." he repeated
seeming to grin even wider.
"What papers?" I asked, now
zoning in a bit and trying to make sense of all this.
"Your papers." He replied,
this time sounding a little less jovial and providing some considerable
emphasis to the first of these two words. The look in his eyes had shifted from
contempt to something a bit more sinister.
Now I was a little concerned. I had
assumed that these two were no more than fishermen curious about a stranger
wandering along a quayside. However, a quick look at the almost derelict hut
told me at once that they were probably customs officers or some other form of
petty local official. Of course, I didn't have any 'papers'. After all why
would I ? I was an itinerant not a trader. I was a little concerned to state
the obvious but set against various other possibilities I decided to go for the
simple truth.
"I don't have any papers." I
said.
I tried not to sound nervous and
managed not to swallow any syllables. I was however very much aware of how dry
my mouth was. I left sufficient humility in the tone however not to antagonise
them, I hoped. Metaphorically, I stood back and waited.
Both of them grinned ear to ear now.
For them it was sheer pleasure.
"No papers: 'ees a fine."
the younger one said. He then followed up quickly to prevent any possible
confusion about the interpretation of the word ‘fine’.
"Three marques!"
Three marques! It took all the self
control that I had and a good deal that I didn't think that I had already not
to make a fool of myself. As man and boy wrestled with each other in my head, I
chose to play the ignorant foreigner trick. I held up both my hands palms up
and grimaced. I lifted my arms higher. The impression was meant to be one that
said something along the lines of 'sorry, don't speak the language. Don't
understand you.'
I don't think it worked all that well
because the two of them rose as on to their feet. All smiles were gone now and
I could see curved daggers tucked into their belts. These were currently
sheathed in ornate scabbards but as they had stood up I had seen the hands
brush back the fabric to reveal the handles. That was enough for me but I
wasn't really sure how best to move on from this one. I was damned if I was
going to fork out three marques to these pirates but then again, I wasn't over
excited about being filleted and left to flap about in the sun just for some
miserable coin.
It's really odd how on some occasions
time seems to travel so slowly and yet on other occasions minutes seem like
seconds. This was one of those seconds-seem-like-hours moments as I watched my
antagonists. They walked over to me with all the confidence and self assurance
that power imposes upon the inadequate. These were the pettiest of petty
officials and whilst they were otherwise disguised by the seeming casualness of
their uniform, I became increasingly confident that I could deal with them. I
straightened up so that I was able to look them in the eyes.
For a moment I saw contempt but then a
shadow seemed to fall over them and I saw a growing sense of disquiet. The
disquiet gave way to concern and the concern gave over to what looked like
fear. Fear moved quickly into something beyond. For my part I started out
quite pleased with myself as I watched their changing disposition. Then the old
man in my head spoke up and I began to realise that this was unlikely to be the
result of anything I had done or said. With a little anxiety on my part, I
followed the line of sight of their eyes as it went past me and along the jetty
to where I could now see a short thick set creature hauling himself over the
top of a rope ladder.
It was Malice and as he jumped onto
his feet he called down to the depths below. In two simple but powerful
gestures he caught one after the other, a large axe and a broad-bladed stabbing
sword. The former he flung casually over his shoulder where it sat glinting
wickedly in the bright midday sun. The stabbing sword he tucked into a plain
leather scabbard that was stuck into his belt. With an expression that looked
like murder even at a distance, he walked the length of the jetty to where I
was standing. My heart was racing with fear. The other side of me I could
almost hear two other hearts racing. He looked as though he was going to walk
right past me but he came to a sharp halt beside the two officials. The redness
of his hair and the weathered look of his skin made the bronzed faces of the
men look almost pale in comparison. On reflection though, their faces weren’t
just pale: if it were possible they looked almost white. After a moments
silence, he spoke in clear and precise Xandrian.
"Do we have a problem?" he
asked to no one in particular. In fact he hadn't even looked at them and
appeared to be watching a point somewhere on the horizon ahead of him.
The two officials were nodding
vigorously but seemed to have lost the power of speech. He hadn't looked at
them until now and I guess, because he hadn't had a reply that he had
recognised he decided to reinforce his argument. The axe struck the wooden
jetty with a dull thud, burying itself a little way into the oak timbers. It
was a compelling argument. At the other end of it I could see muscle and sinew
rippling and glistening as the berserker tensed and relaxed his muscles for
what seemed to be the fun of it. One of the officials, the younger one, made a
soft sighing sound and slipped quietly and unconsciously to the deck. The other
one, with an expression of poorly controlled terror just stood rigid with his
mouth half open. If Malice had shouted or moved quickly, I am sure that the
creature would have wet himself. I am not entirely sure that I wouldn't also
have disgraced myself for that matter.
"I will assume that silence is an
affirmation that all is in order," he growled. Then he added "but for
the avoidance of doubt perhaps you would tell me what you were planning for my
friend here." He nodded at me but strangely that didn't make me feel any
more comfortable.
"Not the missing papers one
was it?"
These last words were hissed
almost and I could feel the hairs standing on my back.
The official still standing was
nodding vigorously in the negative and seemed to be trying to say something
about a mistake but for reasons I wholly understood, seemed to be unable to
form the words.
Malice took one look at him and spat.
"Not worth the effort. Get out of
my sight and take the detritus on the floor with you." He paused long
enough for the man to start to lift his fallen comrade and then added in a tone
that should have made the man lose all bladder control.
"I won't see you again. You
understand me don't you?"
As he said this he removed the blades
from the oak flooring as if he were lifting something of no weight.
Then he turned to me.
"You might be an old ladybody but
you're one that I have been paid to look after. Follow me and don't pick any
more fights with the locals. Blood is expensive and it makes getting a room for
the night that little bit harder. If you get my drift."
