‘The lady’ refers to the ship itself. That’s right: sailors are sufficiently stupid and superstitious to confuse a large, loosely held together heap of planks and canvas sheeting with a ‘lady’. I let the comment pass and turned my attention back to Chalmers. ‘You were saying, about my stupidity—?’
She pointed to the left – the port – side of the barge. ‘See that big puddle of water out there?’ When I nodded, she said, ‘That would be the Great Bay of Pertine.’ She turned to the right. ‘And that large patch of—’ She motioned to the sailor, who was still standing there, a wooden barrel on his shoulder, apparently awaiting an apology on behalf of ships everywhere. ‘What do you call that non-watery thing over there again?’
The man looked confused. ‘What? You mean the land?’
‘The land,’ Chalmers repeated to me. ‘That would be the Western Cliffs of Luth. So given that we have water on one side and land on the other, how exactly could we be going the wrong way?’
‘You know,’ Brasti said to Kest, ‘I’m starting to believe she is a Greatcoat. She might be too young for the job, and absolute rubbish with a weapon, but she instinctively shows just the right amount of deference due to the First Cantor.’
I stared up at the cliffs a few hundred feet away – I couldn’t even begin to think in terms of knots or nautical miles or whatever the hells they used instead of normal distances – and felt profoundly uncomfortable. I’d been to Luth dozens of times – it borders my own Duchy of Pertine – but this didn’t look anything like it to me.
‘It’s a different view of the world, isn’t it?’ Kest asked as I clung onto the side.
‘I feel like a foreigner. I thought I’d walked or ridden across every inch of the country, and yet . . .’
‘Thirteen per cent,’ Kest said. ‘I worked it out once, in the map room at Aramor. In my life I’ve seen thirteen per cent of the villages, towns, cities and hamlets of Tristia.’
I stared at him. ‘You’re joking.’
‘That was a few years ago, of course, but since the King died we’ve spent most of our time in places we’d already been before, so I doubt it’s much higher than fourteen per cent now. Maybe fifteen, at a pinch.’
Tristia is a small country, or so I’ve always been told. I’ve seen maps of the known world, of course, and I can even name half a dozen other countries, but I’ve never been to those places – I’ve never left the land of my birth. To find out I knew barely a sixth of my homeland was troubling.
‘We’ll be entering Sanverio Gorge soon,’ Chalmers said, pointing at the high cliff. It looked like a giant had riven the coastline with an axe, leaving an impossibly narrow passage into the land itself.
‘How will we fit?’ I asked.
The sailor behind us put down his cask and joined us. ‘We’re still a ways off. It looks narrow here, but it’s actually a good half a cable across.’
‘Half a what?’ I muttered.
‘About three hundred feet,’ Kest translated.
‘Won’t it be too shallow?’
‘Nah,’ the sailor said, ‘most of the river’s twelve fathoms.’
‘Seventy-two feet,’ Kest said before I had to ask what in all the hells a fathom was.
As the barge sailed slowly towards the gorge it did eventually become clear we weren’t going to be crushed, which allowed me to relax just enough to feel seasick again. But the sense of being lost remained. I looked up at the Luth side of the gorge, trying to re-establish some sense of location. ‘The nearest town’s Elean, isn’t it?’ I’d actually been there once.
‘That’s miles away,’ the sailor replied cuttingly. ‘You’ve got a dozen villages between here and there.’
‘Vois Calan is the closest, I think,’ Chalmers said, peering at the cliffs looming over us.
The sailor nodded appreciatively. ‘Exactly right. Well spotted, little girl.’
‘I’m eighteen, and I’m a Greatcoat.’
He laughed. ‘Well then, well spotted, Trattari.’
‘Use that name again and I’ll—’
Chalmers and I both stopped, realising we’d both spoken at once.
The sailor threw up his hands and walked away as she and I shared a brief nod of acknowledgment.
Maybe Brasti was right. Maybe Chalmers was a Greatcoat.
‘Anything interesting about this Vois Calan?’ Brasti asked. He’d hopped up on the rail and was hanging on to a piece of rope tied to something called a ‘mizen’. ‘I mean, other than the fact that they have a chair at the top of a cliff?’
The rest of us shielded our eyes from the sun overhead and followed his gaze. I couldn’t see any chair, but I did make out what looked like a small crowd assembling near the edge.
‘Look at the path,’ Chalmers said.
It took me a moment to make out the steep path carved into the rock; it was almost hidden in the shadows and scrub. There were two people slowly making their way from the shore, dragging what looked suspiciously like an unconscious or dead body behind them.
‘Well, that isn’t polite,’ Brasti said.
‘What are they doing with him?’ I asked, wishing my eyesight was even half as good as his.
‘Looks like he’s being taken for trial.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Well, first of all, I think the chair is a magistrate’s throne, and second . . .’ He pointed a little further along, away from the crowd. At first it looked like a row of little trees along the edge, but they were far too straight – and trees don’t usually have ropes dangling from their tops.
‘One usually doesn’t hang quite so many people at once without a trial,’ Brasti finished.
I grabbed a passing deckhand. ‘Tell the captain he needs to stop—’
‘—weigh anchor,’ Brasti said helpfully.
‘—now.’
The sailor stared back at me.
‘You mean “drop” anchor,’ Kest said. ‘“Weigh” anchor is the other one.’
‘I don’t give a shit.’ I motioned for the deckhand to move. ‘Just tell the captain to make the damned ship stop and give me something that floats so I can get to the shore.’
Kest glanced up at the late afternoon sun. ‘We’ll have to move fast. Village trials in Luth take place at sunset.’
‘Why’s that?’ Chalmers asked. ‘There’s nothing in the legal codes about—’
‘So they don’t lose time working the fields.’ Brasti was already packing up his quiver. ‘And so it’s over before supper. Nobody likes to watch an execution on a full stomach.’
My mind had already turned to the problem of the time it would take to get up the cliff path. I’ve always had a dislike for hanging – apart from anything else, it tends to make appealing the verdict difficult. But more than that, I was sick and tired of seeing the law twisted into a means of bringing more death and destruction into the world. I needed to have words with this so-called ‘magistrate’.
On a more positive note, I wasn’t feeling seasick any more.
*
‘You see, this is why we ought to take up piracy full time,’ Brasti said, pulling himself up the slippery path. ‘We could spend our days relaxing on our lovely barge, enjoying the fresh salty air, drinking, carousing with other pirates, and hardly ever have to slog our way up a cliff only to face a mob who will doubtless be trying to send us right back down, only much faster.’
‘We’re not being pirates,’ I panted, wiping my sleeve across my forehead. The sun was dropping fast.