Corsair

III

Getting to the killing was starting to feel inevitable to Yulan as he followed the Corsair King into the huge hall where he kept his menagerie. He would have preferred to avoid deaths, but he did not fear the prospect. He had killed more than a few men – some even before he joined the Free – and he was starting to suspect that Kottren Malak’s demise would be at least as great a service to the world as any of them had been.

In the villages along the mainland shore, as he rode with Merkent and the rest to meet with the fisherfolk, Yulan had seen a dozen kinds of utter misery. The graves of children killed by Kottren’s raiders in among the burned-out husks of shacks. The widows of fishermen, their husbands slaughtered or enslaved at sea, begging by the side of the track. They had been thinned by hunger, made desperate and shameless by poverty. Empty moorings where boats seized by the Corsair King had once lain.

The fishing villages and their inhabitants were dying. It was all Kottren Malak’s doing, and as far as Yulan could tell it weighed less than a feather in the man’s conscience or memory.

‘People called me a fool for starting to collect these beasts,’ Kottren told Yulan, just as he had done before.

I’m sure they did, Yulan thought.

‘You’ll see now, though,’ Kottren continued. ‘I’d wager there’s none has more. Not even your King in … where do they reign these days? Armadell?’

Yulan quickly said, more out of instinct than anything else, ‘The Free answer to no throne. We owe allegiance to none but ourselves.’

‘Lucky boys and girls,’ Kottren grunted. ‘The kings and the School have stamped out every other free company. You folk have faced them down though, eh? Got to, if you want to stand straight and tall. Got to follow your fancies. Can’t have others telling you which way to sail.’

The decrepit castle had been impossible to miss while a couple of the pirate’s raiding boats were escorting Corena’s scow in to the island. The whole long, thin isle was tipped up at an angle, rising to a rocky headland atop which someone – the Sorentines, who ruled long before the Hommetics, Yulan guessed – had decided to build a stronghold. Now it was well on the way to being a ruin. There was a pervasive dampness to the place, and flutters of wind leaked in to tug at the flames of the torches Kottren’s men carried.

Even so, the menagerie hall retained a little of its remembered grandeur. It was big and high; once, it must have a place of feasting and councils. Now it held far more squalor than glory. The dressings that hung on the walls were not the tapestries that might grace a real king’s abode, but the faded cloths and bedsheets of Kottren’s impoverished victims. Hooks held not gem-encrusted swords or shields or glaives, but copper cooking pots and hammered pewter salvers. Trophies of a sort, bespeaking not power and might but pettier attributes.

‘You’re amazed,’ Kottren suggested, to which Yulan could think of no sensible reply.

Cages were spaced evenly around the edges of the hall, some twenty of them in all. Each held a single animal. The few oil lamps on the walls bathed the whole chamber in a yellowish light that barely dented the gloom. Partly because of that, partly because most of them appeared to be sickly, wasted and caked in excrement or dirt, it was hard for Yulan to identify most of the creatures.

But he recognised an emaciated wolf, staring at him with dead eyes. There was also a huge lizard of the sort that scavenged carcasses across much of the Kingdom. He thought a strange, hunched shape huddled at the back of its prison might be an ape, one of the almost but not quite human monsters he had heard rumoured.

Only one of the captive animals held his attention for more than a moment. A lion. The kind of big male, bearded and maned, that his own people both hunted and respected. The desert lions were feared for the threat they posed to the precious Massatan horses, but no other creature was so admired.

Yulan could see the lion’s ribs through its hide. Its jowls hung slack. He could not be absolutely sure, but it looked as though the longest of the animal’s teeth had been knocked out. Certainly there were welts and scars across its flanks and back that suggested its captivity was ungentle.

It struck Yulan that any man so proud of holding all these creatures in such sordid imprisonment betrayed a terrible smallness of imagination and understanding.

‘They’ve come from all across the world to grace my court,’ the Corsair King was murmuring.

Yulan ignored him. His eyes followed the surprising keepers of this menagerie: children. There were perhaps a dozen of them, all young, all clothed in drab rags. All shuffling barefoot between the cages, sweeping away straw and dung that had spilled out onto the floor, pushing food through the bars. Some were hunched over. Some looked to be so thin they might collapse at any moment. Their dirt and rags and illness made it hard to tell how old they were.

Kottren, having evidently noted Yulan’s gaze, said simply, ‘My children.’

‘Your children,’ Yulan echoed.

He had seen a similar kind of suffering among Corena’s people. Had even known it once or twice himself when young, under the crushing weight of near-famine. The anger he felt stirring in his breast might be dangerous, for him as well as others, so he hid it away.

‘Every one sprung from my loins,’ Kottren muttered. ‘I care for them best as I can, now their mothers’re gone.’

Yulan wondered at the fate of the mothers, but did not enquire. He doubted there was anything to be gained from further exploration of the fetid swamp that was Kottren.

‘D’you want to feed them?’ Kottren was asking. ‘Perhaps the lion?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘You’ll let me feed you, at least,’ Kottren said, beckoning one of the nearest children.

She came – Yulan thought it was a she – on unsteady legs. Yulan noted that most of the other children stopped where they were, scattered about the hall, to watch. There was something in the way they held themselves, their expressions … anxiety, perhaps? Trepidation? He felt a tension tightening the musty air. It did not quite fit Kottren’s casual gesture and the calmness with which the girl responded. So much here felt subtly – or not so subtly – off-kilter, as if the Corsair King’s imbalances had seeped into everyone and everything.

‘I should be getting back to the boat,’ Yulan said, just a little more curtly than he intended.

The girl stood before him, gazing up at him. Her eyes were red-veined and had some sort of encrustation at their corners. There were sores on her face. Her fingers were crooked, over-aged. She looked to Yulan like misery given form. He found himself wanting to give her a smile, to offer some small comfort.

‘She can fetch whatever y’want from the kitchens,’ Kottren said.

‘No, thank you,’ said Yulan. He found it difficult to shift his eyes away from that girl, but he did. ‘I’m awaited. What message shall I take with me?’

‘Message? Oh, the tithe notion?’

‘One-tenth of everything the fishing boats land, delivered up to you each month for as long as you live, in payment for peace.’

It was an offer riddled with trips and traps, only to be made if the Corsair King proved – as he had so far – resistant to intimidation. None but an idiot would seriously entertain it for long. Yet Kottren stood there, grasping and tugging at the fringes of his russet beard. For all the world, it looked as though he was giving the matter serious thought.

‘I’ll sleep on it,’ Kottren mused, almost to himself. ‘Sometimes answers come, y’know? Creeping into a sleeping head like … spiders, I suppose.’

He smirked unappealingly at Yulan.

‘Lake here’ll walk you back to your boat. I’ll bring you my answer down there in the morning. Early. I always rise early. Keeps the years from weighing too heavy, y’know?’