I had plenty of time to think while the little captain favoured me with a sour stare and chewed his lip. I could have picked a ship at random. Any small vessel actively loading would be departing for ports up the coast from Barlona or down the coast. I’d bought a couple of ales for a sailor earlier in the day. He’d gone through his share from his previous trip and was delaying a new signing until the last possible moment. In return for my keeping him from sobriety for a few more hours he’d run off a list of the best bets for a trip south. The Sea-goat’s name had taken my fancy. Who wants to sail on the Maria, or the God’s Grace, when there’s a Sea-goat to be ridden?
“Two silver and you haul rope when told,” he said.
“One silver and I get fed with the crew,” I said and started walking toward the gangplank. I could ride the Maria just as well. In fact it sounded better each time I said it.
“Done,” he said.
And so I sailed on the Sea-goat with Captain Nellis.
Before the Sea-goat hoisted sail I took a last walk around the seafront and stopped in at the Port Commander’s office long enough to place a bribe of sufficient weight to considerably lighten my gold supply. Ideally the Brothers would be steered onto a ship that would take them north up the coast and abandon them in a minor port. Makin would be too busy vomiting to notice which side of the boat the land lay off. Failing that, they need only arrest Makin and hold him a week or two—long enough for my trail to grow cold and to remind him that in the end when your king tells you to do something, you do it.
I like the sea. Even with a gentle swell, with the coast in plain view just ten miles to starboard, it sets me in mind of mountains in motion. I like the nautical phrases. Splice this, belay that. If Lundist proves right and we are all reborn, I’ll go once more round life’s wheel as a pirate. Everything about the ocean puts me in a good mood. The smell and the taste of it. The cry of seagulls. God jammed some kind of magic down their throats. No wonder the crows want to murder them and the ravens are unkind.
Captain Nellis didn’t like me being on the quarterdeck, or so he said, but I spent my time there, legs dangling through the rail with him behind me, dwarfed by the wheel. He could have roped it off for all the steering he did, but he seemed to like to hold it while he shouted at his men. To my eye he steered them as little as he did the ship. His curses and instructions rolled off the crew and they went about their tasks oblivious.
“I’ll buy me a ship one day,” I said.
“Surely,” Captain Nellis spat something thick and unpleasant onto the deck. Without men like him and Row, decks probably wouldn’t need swabbing at all.
“A big one, mind. Not a barge like this. Something that cuts the waves rather than wallows about in them.”
“A young sell-sword like yourself shouldn’t set his sights so low,” Nellis growled. “Buy a whole fleet.”
“A valid point, Captain. Very valid. If my kingdom ever gets a coastline I will buy a fleet. I’ll be sure to name one of them the Spitting Nellis.”
And so for the rest of that day, and most of the next, the Sea-goat wallowed its way sedately around the shore, stopping once in a small port to unload a huge copper pot and to fill the space with red-finned fish called…red-fin. I slept a night in a hammock, below decks, rolling in the gentle arms of coastal waters and dreaming of absolutely nothing. I can only recommend hammocks if you’re at sea. On dry land there seems no point to them. And sleep above deck if you have the chance. The Sea-goat had an appropriately animal smell to it in the stale heat of its hold.
My grandfather’s castle is called Morrow. It overlooks the sea, standing as close to a high cliff as a brave child might, but not so close as a foolhardy one. It has an elegance to it, being tall and slender in its towers, and sensibly tiled on its many roofs, having fought fiercer and more prolonged battles with ocean storms than with any army trekking to it overland.
The port of Arrapa lies just two miles north of Castle Morrow and I disembarked there, taking some pleasure in unsettling Captain Nellis with enthusiastic thanks for his services. I left the crew unloading red-fin and taking on crates of saddles destined for Wennith Town. Why the fishermen of Arrapa couldn’t catch their own red-fin I never did find out.
A well-maintained cart track winds up from the port to Castle Morrow. I walked, enjoying the sunshine, and turned down the offer of a ride in a charcoal man’s cart.
“It gets steep,” he said.
“Steep’s fine,” I said. And he flicked his mule
