Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [147]
Cauvin grunted. Had he been alone, the history of Sanctuary would have been the farthest thought from his mind. His body ached, but his head ached worse, maybe from the stench his boots released each time he took a stride or maybe from the sorcery that had made him literate. But most likely Cauvin’s head ached from a froggin’ stubborn refusal to think about Soldt when the duelist—the assassin—was everywhere in his mind. Froggin’ forget the Torch and Soldt, Cauvin wanted to be alone.
But Cauvin wasn’t alone and he couldn’t be for hours, so he took refuge in whatever distraction Bec could provide. Fortunately, his little brother was a master of distraction.
Since leaving the red-walled ruins, they’d watched an Ilsigi galley make its way into Sanctuary harbor. The galley dwarfed everything else on the water. Its mast was taller than any wharf-side building, and its immense sail, furled now, had been like a cloud branded with the pointed crown of the Ilsigi king, Sepheris. Centipede oars arranged in two ranks that ran the length of the ship had brought the galley into the Wideway wharf. He’d heard that the lower rank of an Ilsigi galley was manned by condemned criminals—four to each froggin’ oar, chained to their benches until they died or drowned.
Maybe the tale was true, maybe not. Cauvin’s path had never taken him into a galley’s hold and neither had the path of anyone he knew. What he did know was that the galley had rowed and sailed its way to Sanctuary from Inception Island, whose dark hilltops could be seen hovering, as if by sorcery, above the ocean on the hottest days of summer.
Once, the island had belonged to Sanctuary, then the Hand came to power and lost it to the Ilsigi Kingdom. Of all the things Sanctuary had lost to the Bloody Hand of Dyareela, Inception Island was among the least valuable. The island itself was barren—not fit for farming or living. The water, Cauvin had heard, was brackish. If men wanted to live there, they drank the rain, or sent galleys to Sanctuary, across the strait, for barrels of water as well as food.
That kept the population down.
Then, a few years back, the Ilsigis had crowned themselves a new king, a froggin’ ambitious king who’d plunked a full-blown garrison on the island. Since then, two or three times a month—more often if the rains were sparse—a big Ilsigi galley hove into Sanctuary’s harbor. Its officers paid whatever the Sanctuary merchants charged to resupply their garrison—and why not? They were spending Sepheris’s money, not their own. They and the crews spent their own money almost as freely in the taverns and markets.
Thieves waxed their fingers when the galley breached the horizon. Merchants laid out their best and brightest wares; whores did much the same. Few complained that everything cost more when the galley sat in the harbor.
Well—Mina minded, but Mina had the tightest fist on Pyrtanis Street. Padpols flowed through her hands like glue. And, on balance, the stoneyard benefitted from the Inception trade. Wary of storms that could roil the strait without warning, the galleys set sail with island rock ballasted in their cargo holds. They threw a goodly portion of that ballast overboard as they laded up for the return voyage. Grabar paid a padpol for every barrow of island rock the low-tide gleaners pulled out of the mud.
“You want to hear a story about Scavengers Island?” the boy asked, pulling Cauvin’s thoughts back from the piles of Inception rock he’d be sorting a few days from now.
“Is it about Honald the scavenger chicken?” Cauvin teased.
“No-o-o-o … pirates! It’s a story about pirates!”
“Our chickens and their rooster have turned pirate?”
“No! It’s not a made-up story, it’s lived-through. Grandfather lived through it—”
Cauvin lost the rest of Bec’s explanation. A sheep-shite like himself might not have expected to see a galley this particular day or any other, but the Enders clearly had. They’d sent a string of carts onto the spur road between Land’s End and the East Ridge