His sally bowled aside a rat-thin pickpocket and fetched him with a thump against a bench where a bald brute with notched ears and tar-blackened knuckles dealt out a quicksilver stream of cards.
Dakar hiccuped through a contrite smile.
‘ ‘Scuse,’ he slurred on an approximate note of apology. Graceless enough to seem intoxicated, he affected a reeling stagger, stumbled, and hooked an ankle between one rickety leg and its cross-brace. The bench upset. Dingy cards, dice, and silver cascaded in all directions. Only a seaman’s fast reflex let the bald lout regain his feet.
‘You there!’ he screamed in indignation, jostled and poked as enterprising bystanders dropped in a seething crush to snatch and scrabble after coins.
Before the offended gambler could ram through to defend his scattered cache, Dakar raised an ear-splitting shout. ‘Are you Captain Dhirken’s scumbag lackey?’
The surrounding celebrants dropped into electrified silence. Swarthy bodies pressed into a close ring.
Cut off from the happy din at the fringes, red-eyed in a hellish play of lamplight, the bald brute licked broken teeth. ‘What if I am?’ He flexed his fists. Sun-browned, hairy forearms bulged with sliding knots of muscle.
A broad-hipped serving girl burdened with a tray saw trouble brewing and wisely changed course.
‘What quarrel have you got with Dhirken?’ someone screamed from the sidelines.
Dakar backstepped and rolled his eyes. Cramped by hostile shoves from slit-eyed, tattooed sailors, he jabbed his thumbs in his belt. ‘Nothing, nothing.’ On the tail of a disarming smile, he shrugged. ‘Or nearly nothing, surely. I simply heard about a rumour…’
‘What rumour?’ The bald man kicked aside the upset bench to a forlorn flutter of disturbed cards. He sauntered closer. ‘Better speak. Or believe this, I’ll pound your front teeth clean down through your bladder.’
Dakar edged from foot to foot, his round face blanched suet-white. ‘Are you one of Dhirken’s men?’
‘Aye, so I am. The Black Drake’s first mate, in hard fact.’ A curl of a thickened lip, a glower hot enough to sear, and a last brisk step brought the mate within range to strike. ‘State yer piece, you snivelling piggin of fish bait.’
‘Ah,’ Dakar swallowed and contrived to look pathetic. ‘Well, in the square by the harbourmaster’s, somebody mentioned that Dhirken’s crew were slow as tar in a hard frost. A man I know wants to lure the Drake. Well, he shouldn’t, if this is the truth.’
‘You believe that?’ the bald giant shouted.
Quiet had spread like flung poison to the farthest corners of the room. Every ear awaited Dakar’s answer; every eye measured his unease. The hiss of oil lamps blended with the whisper of heavy breathing, against which Dhirken’s mate cracked his knuckles, the pop of each gristled joint distinct as the snap of flung gravel. He spat on both palms and dried them on the tar-stained thighs of his slops.
‘Oh,’ declaimed the Mad Prophet, his bulging eyes fastened on the fists cocked and ready to fight. ‘I only came here to ask. But really, if the Drake’s a slack ship, you’ve shown me no proof to the contrary.’
From behind, a raw-boned sailor chuckled deeply. ‘Matey, here’s facts, if you want to hear straight. Dhirken’s a mincing girlie a man could knock flat with a whistle, and the crew o’ the Drake? They’re a pack o’ lisping sissies that my lame little brother could whip spitless!’
‘You think so?’ An erstwhile card-player scrambled erect, brass earrings flashing. The knuckles of both hands were packed with coin winnings, now cheerfully brandished as cudgels.
In beet-faced, maniacal belligerence, the Drake’s bald mate replied with a battering fast fist.
Adroit enough when it counted, Dakar dropped flat upon the floor. Knuckles whistled just over his frizzled head and smacked with dull impact into the bystander just behind. One whose lame little brother proved agile as a snake, and nastily gifted at knife-play.
Further conniving was unnecessary. This was Ship’s Port’s dockside, where brawling was akin to breathing reflex. The mixed crowd hemming the instigators heaved, roared, and dived joyously into the fight. Patrons caught in the crossfire scuttled like an upset basket of crabs, the timid to leap behind trestles and barricade themselves into shelter. The most hardy broke their beer mugs into jagged edged weapons and pitched howling into the fracas.
Between one breath and the next, the Kittiwake’s overcrowded taproom erupted into bedlam with the wholesale abandon of a fiend storm. Whores snatched up skirts and petticoats and pulled out concealed bludgeons, or thin-bladed, pearl-handled daggers. Plates sailed and crashed against the walls; bodies flew airborne and hammered into chairs, and anything not tied down got snatched and brandished as bludgeons. Drawn by the bellows of their mate, Black Drake’s insulted sail-hands rallied into a knot bent on bloodshed and murder. Fisticuffs and grunts and raucous bouts of shouting dismembered civilized conversation, while Dakar scrabbled to safety on hands and knees, an overweening smile on his face.
Let Arithon try now to hire Captain Dhirken, he would justly get his liver diced for crab snacks.
By the streetside window, spattered with meat shreds and stew broth, the stoic mermaid figurehead looked on with paintless eyes as the Kittiwake’s landlord rammed shoulder-down to confront someone seated at the table. While shrill questions erupted into argument, Arithon watched, cat-still and poised, his face a mask of straight-lipped irony.
Even from his vantage on the floorboards, that expression moved Dakar to a pin stab of dread. The surge of the fight now behind him, he regained his feet, ducked a flying bottle, and side-stepped a wrack of splintered chairs. Somebody had drawn a cutlass; above the belling clang of parries, and a woman’s spitfire obscenities, he cocked his ear to track the altercation.
The landlord demanded payment for his damages, the sum he named exorbitant enough to redecorate a high-class brothel.
‘Come now,’ Arithon said, his singer’s tone liltingly amused. ‘You’re no stranger to the habits of sailors. This tavern’s weathered a hundred such frolics. Any man with eyes can see every trestle in the place is still seeping green sap from the mill Wright’s.’
Behind the landlord’s planted stance, a pigtailed top-man nipped into the rafters with his rigging knife. He screamed epithets at somebody else down below. Invective floated upward in reply. The chandelier swayed, cut loose from its mooring, and whooshed down. The spectacular crash as it struck the top of the bar made an end to further insults. Bottles toppled, fell; sloshed spirits sprayed through the wicks of rolling candles. Nobody stirred to run for water; the Kittiwake’s floors were fired brick. As the puddles spat into curls of blue flame, the fighting near at hand jammed on its course like a hiccup. Pugilists and bystanders dodged and fell flat in a sliding crush to escape, while leaping tongues of fire blistered and ticked at ankles and buttocks and casualties.
Intent on the brawl’s fresh developments as a tax collector calculating tithes, the landlord wrung his hands in chin-thrusting refusal to be placated. ‘The Drake’s crew are trouble. Always have been. On your word of surety, I let them in here. Well, now I’ve lived to be sorry. Any pack of scoundrels with a captain who’s a -’
‘Don’t say it,’ snapped a silken alto voice.
The landlord squeaked, blinked, and ceased speaking, his widened eyes turned downward to track the naked cutlass that indented the belly of his waistcoat.
‘Don’t,’ repeated the woman with the glossy, black braid, her consonants frigidly emphatic. She uncoiled to her feet, neatly compact, every inch of her primed for a stop-thrust. ‘Presume again to say how my men should be handled, and I’ll spit your guts just for joy. The Kittiwake’s damages will be squared to my satisfaction; but only after my crew gets done with mending the slight to their competence.’
Dakar stiffened in his tracks. Slack-jawed, he looked askance at Arithon. ‘Captain Dhirken?’ he mouthed, shaken silly by the concept that she had been female all along.
The cor
ners of Arithon’s lips twitched. ‘No other. You should have noticed. Whores don’t generally dress in sea boots.’
Dakar fumbled behind his back, hooked a fallen stool, set it upright and sat down. ‘A woman,’ he mouthed again. Then, plaintive and much louder, ‘Ah, fiends! What stakes in Sithaer’s chaos are you playing for?’
But the Shadow Master’s focus had already shifted beyond him to survey the taproom, and a turmoil whose direction was far from random. The raw-boned man and most of his fellow dicers were heaped prone and passed out cold, while shoulder to shoulder like brothers, the Drake’s crew were acting in ferocious concert to level those combatants left standing.
Recovered from his terror of the cutlass, the landlord had begun to natter on again.
Dakar was past listening. Incensed by his victim’s nerveless patience; well aware the saucy captain would seize due revenge for every separate provocation, he indulged his vicious urge to crack the s’Ffalenn equilibrium. ‘Why so hot a bother, miss? Your crew seems to like their recreation.’
Dhirken whirled on him, her face a slim, tanned oval scattered across nose and cheeks with freckles like fine sienna ink. ‘You!’ Her cutlass whistled and changed target. ‘Haven’t I enough problems on me without your baiting my mate for sheer fun? Take your meddlesome self elsewhere before I slit your gizzard to oil the Black Drake’s brightwork.’
‘Lady,’ Arithon said, softly laughing. ‘Desist, please. That one’s on our side.’
Caught at a loss, too dignified to gape, Captain Dhirken spiked an exasperated glance toward the pair of them. She shrugged, finally, helpless to stay angry before Arithon’s infectious bent of humour.
‘Sithaer’s damned, a conspiracy?’ She loosened strong fingers and sheathed her blade with a hiss of whetted steel. ‘If you wanted my attention, you have it. But by Dharkaron’s hairy bollocks, your business had stinking well better make me rich!’
Arithon gestured toward the table, pulled out a bench, and settled to a quiet round of bargaining. Outfaced and excluded from the conversation, the landlord stalked off to tally every coinweight of his losses. Dakar stood in flat-footed amazement, forgotten as a useless piece of furniture. Disgruntled, sullen, stinging from every scrape collected through his hands and knees scuttle across the bricks, he dragged up his stool and parked his elbows on the trestle to rethink the failure of his strategy.
A tavernmaid ventured out to bring whisky. No mugs being available, she left an opened crock, which Arithon and Dhirken passed between them, the latter with her sea boots propped crossed in front of her. She braced her back against the opened window sash, and through placid, half-lidded eyes, gauged the ongoing progress of the fight.
Over a volley of fresh shouting and a soprano spray of breaking glass, she said, ‘If my mate winds up crippled or killed, I’ll press-gang you both as common seamen.’ She swallowed, passed the crock, and waited while Arithon drank in turn.
Dakar could not choke down his sarcasm. ‘Last I saw, your precious first mate was tearing the face off some ugly brute who went at him with a butcher’s cleaver. At best, your worries are misplaced.’
Captain Dhirken took back the jug. Her hands were large-knuckled, callused; no stranger at all to a whisky crock. She downed her draughts straight, and softened into a dreamy, full-lipped smile that somehow fell short of reassurance. ‘Well, that’s my mate’s style, sure enough. Got his ears notched by a bully when he was ten. Steel’s made him jumpy ever since. Almost killed my cook, in one of his sick bouts of nerves. Remember that. He slit a man’s belly while sleepwalking, once.’
Unfazed by the grotesque, Dakar scavenged a plate of roast chicken lying abandoned on a windowsill. Beyond the split trestles, over the snapped struts of downed benches, he could see the remaining roisterers were part of Drake’s infamous crew, or else hapless onlookers fallen by chance onto the winning side. The Kittiwake was settling. A drudge with a broom and a basket sallied out to sweep up splinters and smashed crockery. Here and there in the corners, survivors gathered, to exchange boasts and nurse cuts and compare bruises.
The landlord rounded up his barmaids, shrewd enough to judge that good custom would be lost if beer and spirits were not available.
Then, too crafty to indulge herself in drunkenness, Dhirken banged down the crock and pushed loose sleeves back to her elbows. Over an end of gnawed bone, Dakar sighed in disappointment: whether the captain’s wrists were delicate or mannish, no connoisseur’s eye could tell. She wore leather bracers studded with brass and laced on with wrapped silver wire.
‘You set the stage,’ she said in tart opening. ‘My men performed. Meet their damage fee and I’ll hear out your offer. But first you must let me clear them out of here.’
Arithon gave a nod and tipped a clanging spill of coins across the trestle.
‘That’s too much,’ snapped the lady captain. Brass studs scraped the table as she leaned toward him. ‘Since I don’t like bribes, what’s the show for?’
‘Rum, to celebrate the Black Drake’s triumph at the Kittiwake.’ Possessed of a bard’s charm when it suited him, Arithon grinned. ‘Piggin, firkin, or by the whole barrel, whichever vessel gives your heart pleasure.’
Dhirken regarded the glimmering wealth with jaundiced disdain. ‘Not for my pleasure, matey. That of my men, more likely, and for them, it’s me who speaks. Let it be a piggin apiece, since it’s my intent to have them wakeful to sail on the ebb tide at midnight.’
‘As you wish.’ Arithon masked his disappointment, that the bulk of his sweetening offer remained on the table. The captain shoved off to collar her rollicking crewmen and awarded him not one glance back.
Dakar worked a shred of gristle out from behind a rear molar. ‘Are you possessed, or simply in love?’
‘It’s too early to tell, don’t you think?’ Too cold-nerved to be baited, Arithon stretched. ‘I wanted the boldest captain to ply Eltair Bay. Dhirken fits that requirement. She handles the men well.’
A true observation, Dakar allowed, while across the littered taproom, her crew of ruffians gathered mollified around her, blotting cuts and split lips and jostling in back-slapping high spirits. The last few still engrossed in combat broke off at the first direct order from their captain. Whatever she said in her lecture did not carry; but return phrases struck through with ‘insulted’ and ‘provoked’ carried over the rising stew of voices as the tavern’s battered patrons resumed their rowdy entertainments.
His last wing now stripped of its cartilage, Dakar crooked a finger at a bar wench and ordered another plate of food. ‘Anyway, how did she come by her ship?’
‘Brig,’ Arithon corrected. ‘The story goes that Black Drake was her father’s. He died of fever while at sea. The first mate tried to seize command. That version holds that she cut out his heart with a cutlass and named herself master, and nobody else cared to argue.’
Dakar blotted grease on his sleeve. ‘And the other version?’
Arithon hitched his shoulders into a tight little shrug. ‘That she was the original captain’s lover and cut out his heart with a cutlass, and nobody else -’
‘I believe the second tale,’ Dakar cut in, his gaze torn between searching out his coming meal, and the female captain in her fitted scarlet breeches and loose, seaman’s tunic that spilled in uninformative folds over what he could see of her chest. In sullen and contrary conclusion, he added unthinkingly aloud, ‘Probably binds her dugs flat, if in fact she has any.’
‘You think you’ll pinch her to find out? Don’t whine to me when she gelds you.’ Arithon tipped back the rum jug, lit to merciless merriness. ‘Since I plan to buy up her services, you’re just going to have to get along.’
‘Fatal starvation on the dockside might be preferable,’ Dakar flared back. When the barmaid arrived with a plate of thick bread, batter-fried vegetables, and a bowl of fish stew, he chose in scowling forethought to amend his three days of starvation. Enough silver lay strewn on the tabletop; Arithon could well afford to pay. br />
Except for bruised and battered faces, and the occasional set of bloodied knuckles, the fight might as well not have happened. The least pummelled patrons in the Kittiwake righted trestles and resumed their disrupted pleasures; the wounded consoled themselves with doxies or strong drink, and the noise level swelled, as newcomers stepped over the prone and the unconscious to vie for their chance at the whores.
Black Drake’s crew were not among them. Their highhearted cheers as Captain Dhirken announced a rum ration could not obviate her final warning. ‘Keep yourselves in hand! I’ll hear no excuses for layabouts. Black Drake sails with the tide. My business here won’t take long. I want my gig smart and waiting, and any man who’s swilled too much to handle himself in the rigging gets pitched on the shoals for the sharks.’
Dismissed back to shipboard, the men dispersed in grumbling, happy knots and steered through the crush toward the doorway. Dhirken returned to the table, the lift of her hip as she sat less a flaunt of her sex than practical allowance for the hang of her brute-sized sabre.
Immersed in his meal, Dakar let discussion flow across him as captain and Shadow Master settled to haggle over terms. Arithon’s list of requirements caused the woman to narrow dark eyes.
‘Say again?’ She leaned on crossed arms, the fingers hooked into her coarse linen sleeves tensed to a sudden, stark white. ‘You want the Drake, for time unspecified, to sail to a destination, also unspecified, with added contract, that your judgement overrules mine in unfamiliar waters? Lunacy. What about cargo? My holds are filled. Or are your very bodies the contraband?’
Only Dakar caught the fleeting, bitter irony that prefaced Arithon’s smile. ‘I only have cargo for pick-up, and it’s held in another harbour. Outbound, I don’t care what you carry. The return run’s all that concerns me.’
Dhirken blinked. ‘Lunacy,’ she repeated. ‘You’ve wasted my time and gained an unkindly debt, through your friend’s stupid meddling with my crew.’
Her phrasing raised a sudden, queasy thrill that flattened Dakar’s appetite. He ceased chewing, a half-gnawed fin dangled in one hand and grease glistening in his beard. For the Shadow Master across from him did nothing, ever, without thought; he had embraced a hostile try at insurrection without a ripple of annoyance. Yet whatever tangled wiles coiled behind his mild calm, his expression stayed guileless and shuttered.