Empire Of Blood

Chapter 15

The bearded man set a course to the southeast. Heading due south would have taken them away from the battle and the islands of the Strait of Nongai faster, but it would also have taken them straight away from land, out into the Silver Sea. Kukon was afloat for the moment. Before they could safely take her on a long voyage, she would need repairs of a sort they could not give her in the open sea. They would also need fresh water, firewood, and jury masts.

Then there was the matter of sorting out those who had been slave rowers and those who had been free sailors and soldiers. For the moment there were neither slaves nor freemen aboard Kukon, only men fleeing for their lives. If this happy situation didn't last, there would be trouble of a sort best prevented before it got started. Blade, Dzhai, and the bearded man all-agreed on that.

No ship from either side followed Kukon as she limped away from the battle. Perhaps no one noticed her; perhaps no one cared enough to follow. Or perhaps there was no one left alive to either notice or care.

Blade suspected it was the last situation. The rest of the battle had probably been fought as savagely as Kukon's part. If so, there would be neither pirate galleys nor Imperial galleys left afloat-nothing except wreckage and a lot of well-fed sharks.

The sun set a couple of hours later. Kukon crept on through the darkness, a weary drummer beating out a very slow cruising stroke to the half of the rowers who remained on their benches. The other half had not been released from duty; they had simply collapsed on the deck from sheer exhaustion and fallen asleep where they landed.

Blade wouldn't have minded joining them. His head throbbed, his throat and mouth felt as if he'd been eating porridge made out of gunpowder and sand, his eyeballs felt swollen to three times their normal size. He had no serious wounds, but he was bruised, scratched, and generally battered and sore from head to foot. Dzhai and the bearded man were hardly in better shape, but none of the three could afford to sleep as yet.

At dawn they swung north again, toward the coast. The leak was growing slowly, so that Kukon was noticeably more sluggish. They had to get her beached within another day at the most. If they had to fight, they were probably finished. There was one serviceable cannon and a dozen muskets left aboard. There was practically no dry powder. There were plenty of spears and swords, but there was hardly a man aboard Kukon who could lift a finger by now, let alone a weapon.

The bearded man, who now admitted to the name of Luun, put it accurately.

«T'ree old wimmin-tey catch us, den hit us on t' head w' brooms.» He made a thumbs-down gesture and spat into the water alongside.

Toward sunset they finally crept into a wooded cove. Kukon's bow crunched gently onto the sand and gravel of the beach, and a sigh went up from more than two hundred exhausted men at once. They were not out of danger by any means, but for the moment they no longer had to worry about their ship sinking under them and leaving them to thrash about until the sharks came.

Blade and his two co-captains didn't try to get any work out of the men that night. The men wouldn't budge. All of them, slave and free both, wanted to drink fresh water, breathe air that smelled of growing things, sleep on pine needles instead of hard planks.

After seeing the wounded carried ashore and a small guard posted, the three leaders retired to what was left of the after cabins. They had to decide which of them should be the new captain. All knew that a ship could have only one.

Inevitably, the choice fell on Blade. He was a nobleman and the only one who had commanded a warship in the past-although he didn't tell them when or where. He also knew gunnery, tactics, and swordsmanship enough to be the best leader in any fight. Last, he was by far the strongest of the three. That could be important with Kukon's assorted and perhaps unruly crew. Her new captain might have to back up his authority with his own fists and sword.

The next morning the new captain of Kukon addressed his crew. Blade stood on the galley's ram. The tide was out, and twenty feet of the ship's bow rested on land. Luun and Dzhai stood on the damp sand at the water's edge, one on either side of the ram. Both held drawn swords. All the rest of the men who could stand stood in a rough half-circle facing Blade and their ship.

«Men of Kukon,» he began. «You have fought in a great battle and won a victory. Three galleys of the pirates of Nongai will never sail again because of your victory.» Everyone cheered loudly. Blade held up his hand for silence.

«You and your ship have come away from this victory and come safely to land. There are repairs to be made and then another voyage to make.

«When Kukon sets forth on that voyage, she will not be as she was before the battle. Then she was a galley of the Imperial fleet of Saram. She is one no longer, and she will never be one again?» More cheering, much louder than before, practically all of it coming from the rowers. They were half hysterical with joy. Most of those who had been free stood silently.

«We sail for the Five Kingdoms and whatever fate awaits us there. All of us shall work to make Kukon fit for the voyage, but no man shall sail to the Five Kingdoms who does not wish to go. No man aboard her shall be chained by the ankle, or have a whip lashed across his back, or a sword pointed at his throat.

«There are those among you who were slaves at our ship's oars. There are also those who were freemen, soldiers, sailors, gunners. It does not matter to me what you were before the battle. When we sail for the Five Kingdoms, all of you will be the men of Kukon, no more and no less.

«There may be some among you who do not wish to sail for the Five Kingdoms. So be it. You will not suffer in any way for this choice. It is yours to make. Come to me, say that you have chosen, and I will inscribe your name on a list. All on that list will be set ashore where there is food, water and people who may send messages. All of them will have the chance to return to the service of His Sublime Magnificence Kul-Nam of Saram.»

Blade rolled out the name of the Emperor as sarcastically as he could. He drew a good deal of laughter, and he was interested to see that not all of it was from the rowers. Apparently some of the freemen felt as Blade did and were happy to be able to show it, now that they were for the moment beyond the Emperor's reach.

Blade again waved the men to silence and continued. Now both his face and voice were grim. «If you do not return to Saram, do not think to continue serving the Emperor by trying to betray your shipmates. The first sailor or soldier who speaks a word or raises a hand against us will not only be ending his own life. He will put all those who were his comrades in danger. We sail as the men of Kukon, with no place aboard for traitors or cowards.» He touched the hilt of his sword to give extra force to his words.

Blade did not care to end his speech with a threat, but he didn't feel he had any choice. There were too many men aboard of the sort likely to respect nothing but force, or at least the threat of it. The men of Kukon, were not yet a band of brothers, and there was no sense in thinking otherwise.

Most of the freemen were glad to stay beyond the Emperor's reach if Blade was willing to have them and lead them. Very few came to ask him for help in returning to Saram. Most of them were older men, with families or property at home. None of them had much hope of saving their own lives by returning home. The Emperor's wrath would fall on anyone who had been at all involved in the disaster to Sukar's squadron. But they all hoped to keep their homes from being razed into rabble, their wives sold to brothels, their children sold as farm slaves, and the old or infirm among their families killed outright.

Blade felt sorry for these unfortunate men and determined to find some way of avenging them. Fortunately, there were less than thirty of them. The attitude of the rest was summed up fairly well by the words of one young gunner.

«Captain Prince Blade, I haven't anything to keep me in Saram, thank the gods. I can live better on crusts of bread out of Kul-Nam's reach than on beef and fine wine in Saram. The Five Kingdoms for me.»

When everyone finished making up his mind, Blade found he had more than a hundred and eighty able-bodied men. That would not be enough to take Kukon into battle. It would be more than enough to take her across to the Five Kingdoms.

Then everyone went to work. Trees were cut down, trimmed, then wedged and tied into place as new masts. Water barrels were refilled, fish and birds caught and salted down, and edible nuts and roots picked or dug and stowed away. The gunpowder was dried out in the sun. The smashed decks, gangways, and cabins were patched up as well as possible. In the smelly darkness of the hold, twenty men worked night and day with timber, nails, pegs, and a barrel of tar, patching up the hole torn by the pirate galley's ram.

All of this took ten days-disagreeable and nerve-wracking days for Blade. He was the captain of a ship as helpless as a beached whale. Every day spent here meant one more day when either pirates or Imperial galleys might enter the cove and finish the work done in the battle.

Thanks to Blade's driving leadership and the hard work of everyone under him, Kukon's work was finished first. On the eleventh day he took her out to sea for a brief trial cruise. On the morning of the twelfth day, Kukon's men saluted their shipmates who lay buried on the shore of the cove, then weighed anchor and set sail for the Five Kingdoms.