Children of Earth and Sky (13 page)

There is nothing tidy about the Senjani or their place in the world. Right now Marin doesn't want to be reflecting upon that. He wants them gone. He will lose some cargo; he needs to keep the quantity acceptable. And it will be a disgrace to let them take the woman.

She isn't Seressini, which helps, but her family will be wealthy, most likely, which doesn't. He wonders how she ended up married to a doctor. A physician and a Mylasian aristocrat? It doesn't square.

Marin leaves that for now. He is reconciling himself to negotiating a ransom on his deck, a price for the raiders leaving her behind. And then he'll need to hope her family reimburses his own. That will depend on many things, and is hardly a certainty.

But then everything becomes much more uncertain, because why should men be permitted certainty in life, especially at sea?

—

PERO VILLANI WENT
quickly up the ladder to the deck. Later he would wonder why he'd moved so fast. It wasn't as if he could bring anything to a confrontation with pirates.

It had been clear what was happening. Strangers were striding about below deck, shouting, shifting and banging things. His heart was beating fast. You heard tales about piracy at sea. Seressa lived and breathed in fear of Asharite corsairs from the coastline below Esperaña, or these so-called heroes from Senjan across the narrow sea. The corsairs were worse. Men and women were taken into slavery by them. Almost never returned. Lived, died, on galleys or in Asharite lands. The Senjani just wanted ransom and goods.

Or revenge now? Because of those war galleys that had just come back after trying to starve them out. Bad luck, he thought, to be taken so soon after that failed adventure.

Was this to become his own failed adventure now? Ending before it began? He had no one to ransom him, was worth nothing
to the raiders. Would they want paint pots and sketchbooks? Their portraits rendered in charcoal? Or—the thought occurred—would their well-known piety be offended if they learned he was going to Asharias to paint the grand khalif for coins and fame?

Perhaps best not mention that.

Up on deck he stayed by the rearmost hatch, conspicuously unarmed, a threat to no one. Hardly worth noticing, really. He had hurried into a tunic and trousers and pulled on his boots. His clothing, he thought, was much better than it was at home. Would they decide he had money?

Marin Djivo, whom he had come to admire, was speaking with the captain of the pirates when there was a commotion at the other hatch and Pero saw Leonora Miucci manhandled up to the deck by a raider. Her hair was unbound, exposed. She was barefoot, clad in an unbelted night robe.

Pero took an impulsive step forward, then remembered who he was, and where he was. This was not something an artist was going to be able to address. He swore under his breath. He had a sword here. It was below with his servant. He wasn't very good with it.

The man gripping Signora Miucci was skinny, sour-faced, with unkempt hair. Pero was
not
going to think him any kind of hero. It pained him to see this woman even touched by such a man. She twisted to escape. Then the Senjani leader snapped a name and she was released. She spoke, in a voice cold and cutting—and suddenly patrician. And she wasn't Seressini, it seemed.

Wouldn't matter. Pero knew enough to know that. What would raiders care about her birthplace? Her voice would say
money
to the Senjani. He realized that she was at risk of being taken now. He looked an urgent appeal at Marin Djivo. Read a hard anger in the shipowner's face.

There were about forty raiders on the deck, however. Four of their small boats surrounded the
Blessed Ingacia
like wolves around a solitary sheep. They were outnumbered here two to one, and they
were seamen and merchants (and an artist and a doctor), not fighting men. This would need more than anger, Pero thought.

Then the doctor came on deck, and a mild morning turned dark.

—

IT WAS BRAVE BUT
FOOLISH
, and those two together, Danica thought, could get men killed.

The man who burst onto the deck of the
Blessed Ingacia
, behind Kukar and the woman, was holding a thin, bright surgeon's knife.

He said, a voice with some authority, in fact, “You will unhand her now, or you are dead now!”

Kukar Miho had been raiding since he was a boy. His father and grandfather and Miho men for generations had been Senjani fighters.

He turned towards the voice. He did let the woman go. Did so in order to draw his sword and run the physician through with it, in the belly.

He pulled the blade out, twisting, as you were taught. Blood followed. The gutted man's mouth gaped. He fell. The knife clattered on the deck.

It was too fast, too unexpected. They had been moving towards ransom talk, Danica was certain of it. That was what Senjan
did
with people like this woman. Ransoms negotiated and paid immediately, on the ship. Easier for everyone, no letters, no intermediaries, no time-consuming back-and-forth. They would take the coins and some of the Dubravae cargo, and go home. A successful first raid of the spring. Money for the town to buy food. Goods to resell up the coast . . .

Not now.

Oh, Jad! That limp-cock fool!
she heard her grandfather snarl.

She saw the ship's owner, the tall man, stride forward, reaching for his sword. The other woman was screaming. Danica looked at Hrant Bunic, her leader. His face had gone dark with fury.

“
Kukar!
” he roared.

The merchant was halfway across the deck—sword leaving its sheath—towards Kukar, who had spied on Danica once outside Senjan's walls, thinking he was unseen, who was a crude, thoughtless,
stupid
man.

She loosed her arrow. Targeted him. Kukar Miho. Her raid companion. It struck him in the chest, an easy, short flight. Killed him instantly. An arrow to the heart will do that.

—

HE WAS NOT HER HU
SBAND.
He was dead. Her life was over, with his.

Leonora knelt beside Jacopo Miucci whom she had met only days before, and who had been so unexpectedly decent and kind. She was amazed at how desperately she was weeping on the deck of a ship in bright sunlight.

There was blood soaking her night robe, she realized. The man who had killed the doctor lay beside her, on his back. He had seized her from their small room below, gripped her in an ugly, insinuating manner, his hand on her an intolerable insult. There was an arrow in the raider's chest. His mouth was open.

She couldn't stop crying. Jacopo Miucci, in death, looked startled, affronted. He had come rushing up to save her with a surgeon's knife—against raiders with swords.

It had happened at such speed, Leonora thought. A certain life was yours, it was unfolding, and then it wasn't and would never be again. How did men and women deal with that much fragility? Your existence under Jad could be knit tightly (if not perfectly), you could be sailing a springtime sea, and then . . .

Her grief was unfeigned, but they would not understand it. They would think her a woman wildly mourning the husband lying before her. It was that, yes, but in a way no one here could know.

Dubrava would send her back.

Of course they would. Why would she
want
to stay, in their
minds? And in Seressa? What good was she to the council now? What worth did she have? Would they want to arrange a false marriage to a second doctor? Do it all again? They
couldn't
do that—she'd been on a Dubravae ship!

Perhaps they'd propose she become a state-employed courtesan, an elegant whore bedding merchants and ambassadors, wheedling what she could from them in candlelit pillow talk after offering subtle pleasures, or violent ones. And unless she agreed? Back behind the walls of the Daughters of Jad on the mainland, where her father had wanted her locked away. Leonora could almost hear the iron gate closing, the loneliness of the bell.

She wouldn't be a prostitute, she hadn't been born for that. It was not a path. But nor would she ever go back behind those high and holy walls. (They weren't guarding holiness. They were not!) Which left little in the way of choice, Leonora thought. Left nothing, really.

They were at sea. The waters would be deep here, cold this early in the year. Final. Silent. There were worse ways to die. The man she'd loved had been tortured by her brothers, castrated, his body left unburied in wilderness. And this other man, who'd seemed to care for her, astonishingly, was dead on the deck among strangers, his life ripped apart, ended by a sword.

You lay down to sleep at night, woke to noises in the morning . . .

A footfall. The Senjani woman who had killed her own companion walked up. She bent over the raider, gripped the arrow in his chest and twisted it out. Through tears, Leonora looked up at her. The other woman was tall, young, expressionless. Her fair hair was also down along her back.

“I'm sorry,” the woman said in a brusque voice. “He shouldn't have done that. It was a mistake.”

“A
mistake
?” Leonora managed. She wiped at her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “That is the word?”

“One of them,” the other woman said.

Leonora became aware of a hunting dog pushing his head against her shoulder.

“Tico, gentle,” the woman said. She added, “He won't hurt you. I think he feels your sorrow.”

“The dog does? I see. What about the beasts who just killed my husband?”

“Said I was sorry. Kukar Miho doesn't represent Senjan.”

“No? Just the ones among you who raid and kill?”

“Not those either,” the woman said. “I'll leave you.”

She turned and walked away towards where Marin Djivo was now speaking intensely with the Senjani leader. There was a different mood on the deck. Men had died.

“My lady, do you wish to go below?”

Leonora looked up again. It was the artist, Villani, his face so pale it was startling. “I will help you back down, signora.”

“Am I even permitted? Aren't they planning to take me for ransom?”

“I, ah . . . I believe it is being negotiated. To be paid by Dubrava now, or by the Djivos.”

“They are
bargaining
for me while my husband lies dead?”

It was beyond belief. Except that if the pirates
did
take her, there would be no ransom paid by her family. Seressa might offer something, out of shame, to preserve appearances. She had been presented to the world as a Seressini doctor's wife. It wouldn't help them to risk having that exposed.

“I believe they are. Negotiating. Yes,” Pero Villani said awkwardly. “Let me take you down?”

It would be quieter there. She could be alone. She looked away, at the sea in sunlight.

“No,” said Leonora Valeri, addressing herself as much as the man beside her. “No. That is not what happens now.”

She stood up, ignoring the quick hand he extended to help. She wiped at her tears again. Blood had soaked her robe from the knees down. It was chilly in the spring air, but that didn't matter, not now. She took a breath and, head high, walked across the deck towards the railing and the rising sun, away from the men, a tight cluster of them, who were presuming to define her worth in silver and gold in the morning's light.

—

HE HAD BEEN READY
to kill the ugly Senjani bastard who'd gutted the doctor. He'd been striding that way, knowing it might doom the ship, all his mariners, turn this morning into something other than it had been meant to be, make it an encounter defined by death.

Raids had a rhythm, a protocol (like trading). There was a
process
. Insurance and shared understanding guided them. Violence would normally be avoided. If there were no Asharite or Kindath goods or merchants on board when Senjan's raiders came you could limit the damage in terms of what they seized.

Even so, even knowing this, sometimes a man might deem himself to be less than he wanted to be if he didn't act, consequences be cursed to darkness. This, Marin Djivo had thought, seeing the doctor die, was such a moment for him.

He had been moving, drawing his sword. They might—many or all of them—have been sent to the afterworld, to darkness or light as Jad decreed, if an arrow had not killed the raider before he got there.

In the taut silence that follows, he looks at the woman who'd loosed that arrow. The one who had offered to fight him with knives. Her gaze meets his. She nocks another arrow without looking at the bow.

Marin lets his sword slide back into its sheath.

And seeing that, she nods, as if he is being granted approval.
By a female Senjani! Marin Djivo has enough wryness, and he does apply it to himself, to imagine that later he might find this moment amusing. Maybe.

Just now, nothing is. He breaks that exchange of gazes and crosses to the Senjani raid leader. This needs to be dealt with swiftly, properly. No one else should lose their life on his ship.

The leader seems to agree. The process resumes. They will take twenty bales of the fabric below, the Senjani says briskly. Marin knows the raiders cannot even carry that much. He offers ten, lets anger infuse his voice. In negotiating you use what you have—and his fury is real. He sees that the Senjani are unhappy, there is tension among them. One of them—a woman—has killed another. That will make for a pleasant journey home, Marin thinks. They'll also be aware that killing a Seressini physician contracted to Dubrava might rally two republics that dislike each other against Senjan.

It is never good when your enemies are allied.

Murdering Jacopo Miucci might even weaken the emperor's support for Senjan. Small things can affect larger ones.

Marin has a thought. He looks back at the woman with the bow. She isn't far away, standing with feet spread for an archer's balance, arrow to string, hair unbound.

Marin Djivo is a man who makes connections, draws conclusions. It is possible, it is even
likely
, he thinks, that this woman is the same one who . . .