Halcyon The Complete Trilogy (73 page)

Syfax laid a heavy hand on the kid’s shoulder. “Hey, look, we all have our sob stories, kid. But today is today. We need to get home to tell the generals about that warship, and we can’t afford any screw-ups. We’re not talking about murdering anyone, just stealing a boat.”

“Go to hell. I’m no thief.” And he turned and stomped away.

Syfax lunged to grab his arm but Nicola caught the major’s sleeve and said, “No, let him go. An officer who can’t follow orders is a liability. Let him go and talk to whoever will listen to him. He’ll be arrested by sundown if the search for us has reached this town. And if it has, the soldiers will be so pleased with themselves that they’ll drink and celebrate, and possibly spend the evening beating the boy. No one will be watching the harbor. No one will see us rowing away.”

Damn it, kid, I thought you were supposed to be smart.
The major exhaled and nodded. “All right. We’ll find someplace warm to sit and wait for dark.”

Nicola made a short detour to a stable where she sold her horse for half of what it was worth. Then they wandered into the center of town and though Syfax was looking for a tavern where he could rest his feet, he didn’t object when Nicola steered him into a large, empty church with an altar blazing with hundreds of candles. A scant handful of worshippers sat in the pews, most with their heads resting on the pews in front of them with their eyes closed. The rare cough or shuffle of feet echoed over and over through the high rafters. Syfax sat in a back corner where he could see the doors, and Nicola sat beside him, her hip just touching his. He grimaced.

Two hours later, the waning light through the windows faded altogether and Syfax decided it was time to move. He nudged the Italian lady awake, lifting her head roughly from his shoulder. Outside he found a sky painted deepest black and drenched with shining stars from one horizon to the other. There were no streetlights here, no haze of smoke and ash looming over the city, nothing at all conspiring to hide the stars from view. Syfax breathed the cold salty air, wondering if Port Chellah had ever been so clean and clear.

They went down to the water and walked along the gravel strands and wooden docks, scanning the small boats for simple rigging, loose lines, and especially shadowed moorings. But there was always a shaft of light from a cottage or a passing man or a tricky looking knot, and so they walked on and on.

“Here. This one.” Syfax jerked his chin at a fifteen-foot dinghy. He recognized the knot. He recognized the oars. And there was no one about to see or hear him shove it down the gravel slope to the water.

“Surely something larger. A yacht. A single mast.” Nicola pointed out across the harbor. “Maybe one of those.”

“Hey lady, we didn’t exactly cover sailing in soldier school. I know how to row and that’s it. All I know about sails is they need a hundred ropes and knots, and then the long arm swings around and hits you in the back of the head. No thanks. This here will do.” He knelt and whipped the single anchor line free of the ancient chunk of masonry in the sand serving as a mooring. Then he grabbed the raw and splintered wood of the dinghy’s bow and he pushed.

The tiny boat scraped and groaned down the gravel slope. Syfax winced at the noise and glanced about the deserted beach. Then he shoved again. The hull growled and rattled, and a few pebbles tumbled free to clatter down the short slope and splash into the softly rolling waves. He shoved a third time and the dinghy screeched into the water, and the first incoming wave shoved the boat right back into the beach where it banged and crunched on the stones and sand.

“Hey!”

Syfax whirled to see a stocky, older man just a few yards away, silhouetted in the open doorway of a cottage just above the high water line.

“Hey, you! Stop!” The man waved.

“Aw, crap.” Syfax grabbed Nicola and lifted her into the boat, dropping her into the bottom on top of stiff coiled ropes and rotting tarps. Then he grabbed the rough gunwale and shoved the boat back into the sea, back against the rising tide, driving out until he was hip-deep in the freezing water. Syfax leapt up into the dinghy, dragging his soaked legs up into the howling sea breeze. He rolled to his knees and stomped off-balance to the seat in the center of the boat, wrestled the oars into the oarlocks, and began sweeping them about in awkward circles as he tried to propel the little boat out into the harbor.

“Help! Boat-thief! Help!” The stocky man was no longer in the open doorway and Syfax couldn’t bother to look for him in the dark.

The oars bit into the inky sea and drove forward inch by inch. The boat rolled as the waves and wind whipped and battered it back toward the beach.

We’re moving. Just stroke. Gotta be a machine. Gotta work like an engine. Stroke. Again. Again.

Syfax ground his teeth as he hauled on the oars. His rough palms were already burning where tiny splinters sliced open his skin and his back was already aching from the unfamiliar motion.

Harder. Harder.

The beach was still only a dozen yards away when the first rifle shot echoed across the water. A babble of Espani shouts soon followed, and a smattering of rifle shots followed that. Syfax peered up at the beach and saw the dark figures running down toward the water.

Four, eight, twelve.

Damn it.

“Halt, thief!”

The next shot was a proper volley, six rifles crackling in unison. Two bullets struck the water just to their right, sending up tiny jets of brine. A third bullet struck the stern of the dinghy.

Nicola lay flat in the bottom of the boat, twisted and contorted at the major’s feet. “Can we escape?”

Syfax took one last quick glance at the black waves shoving him back to shore where a line of men were leveling their weapons at him. “Nope.” He let go the oars and raised his hands over his head. “Stand down!”

No more shots were fired and in a very few moments the tide deposited the dinghy back on the beach. Syfax stood up, hands raised, and let the sneering boys in uniform pull him out onto the sand at gunpoint. He looked back at Nicola. “Don’t say anything.”

“Don’t be stupid, I’m well versed in Espani law. I can have us out of this little predicament in an hour.”

“I said shut up.” Syfax looked into the face of the oldest soldier there on the beach. The grim man peered back with an all-too-familiar sleepy-eyed look. There were no nervous eyes, no shaking hands, no shuffling feet here tonight. “Just shut up.”

Chapter 21. Shifrah

She stood in the shadows across the street and watched the soldiers lead the Mazigh major and his homely friend into the constable’s little jail. When the uniforms were all gone, Shifrah stepped out from the alley and walked slowly past the jail. It was a small building but built of massive gray stones, and she knew the country’s construction habits well enough to guess that the cell would be caged with heavy wrought iron bars bolted deep into the stones.

So much for you, big man
. Shifrah paused.
But where is your sickly little friend?

She continued past the jail and down the lane, through a dark little graveyard behind a dark little church, and onto another street that looked to have a few more lights than the others. But she found only three guttering torches outside a tavern. She ducked inside, found only a few old fishermen nodding in their cups, and resumed her walk down toward the water.

Maybe the kid ran away when the major got arrested
.

But as she strolled along the top of the pebbled beach, she saw no men still at work on their boats, and the boats themselves were little more than rotting relics passed down from fathers and grandfathers who probably knew as little of shipwrighting as she did. There were a thousand places to hide in the dark, but no real shelter, nowhere worth staying for more than a few minutes.

She stood in the cold wind, smelling the salt and tasting the faint oils of the dead fish. Seeing and hearing nothing, she turned to walk back up into town when she heard the unsteady shuffling of boots on the steep slope of the beach. And there in the darkness was the sickly boy, only he wasn’t so sickly now. He walked tall with an angry stride, as though stomping either toward or away from some argument. She couldn’t quite see his face, but she recognized the line of his small nose and the unhappy lines around his mouth.

“Good evening,” she called.

He stopped and looked up at her, squinting in the dark. The starlight fell on his angry face. “You again. What do you want?”

“I came to find you, of course. Well, your friend the major, anyway,” she said. “Have you seen him lately?”

He glanced up the beach. “Not in a few hours. I was just going to find him now.”

“I think I can help you with that.” She turned and started walking back the way she had come. “I saw him and that horse-faced Italian woman less than hour ago.”

“Where?”

“Being led into a jail.”

He shook his head and started walking again parallel to her along the water’s edge. “Don’t be stupid. It would take a dozen soldiers to take down the major.”

“Only half a dozen from what I saw.”

He stopped short. “You’re serious?”

“Always.”

“Show me.”

It only took a few minutes to lead the young man back past the tavern, through the graveyard, and around to the back of the jail. He strode as all angry young men do, hunching forward, fists clenched, brow furrowed. “Do you have a name?” he asked.

“Shifrah. And you?”

“Kenan.” He studied the heavy stones of the jail walls, grimed with filthy ice and pitted by countless years of salt winds. “You’re sure they’re in there?”

“I saw them go in. I assume they’ve not gone out for supper.”

“Right.” Kenan’s gaze wandered up the wall to the roof and the stars beyond. “Well, then I guess it’s up to me to get them out of there.”

Shifrah smirked. “And how exactly do you plan to do that?”

“The old-fashioned way. Wait here.” He strode off into the night with his arms crossed over his chest and his frown as deep as ever.

She waited in the shadows, huddled under her furs, staring at the stone wall and wondering if it was time to disappear again, to wander off into the darkness and find some young sailor willing to share his bunk until they reached some distant, warmer shore.
Numidia, perhaps. Or even Aegyptus. It might be time to visit my broker again and check my accounts.

Kenan’s loud footsteps preceded him up the alleyway from the graveyard, as did the flickering light of the torch in his hand. She recognized the iron basket holding the coals as one of the torches from the tavern near the beach.

“If you’re planning to burn the jail down, you may be disappointed. I don’t know if stone walls burn in Marrakesh, but here in España I can almost assure you they won’t.” She smiled.

He only cast her a tired look stained with contempt as he passed by. He walked right up to the jail and held the torch high over his head against the first ironwood rafter of the roof. Patiently he stood there, waiting for the frozen wood to burn.

“This is stupid. There are other ways to get him out of there,” she said. “Lies. Bribes. Distractions.”

“I don’t recall asking for your help. You can leave now.”

“Oh no, I want to watch you burn down a stone jail covered in ice.”

Just then a soft crackle sounded overhead and she saw the tongues of fire licking greedily at the rafter. Kenan took two steps to his left and began heating the next one. And so one by one he slowly proceeded along the back of the jail setting dark orange flames wriggling and writhing around the rafters.

It took nearly half an hour, but eventually the roof was well and truly burning. Kenan nodded. “All right, let’s go.” He strode toward the corner of the jail and Shifrah followed him, right into the arms of a startled old man peering up at the roof.

“Fire?” The old man squinted.

Kenan held his torch up between the man’s face and the roof above. “No. Just my torch. Sorry about that. Here, let me help you, sir.”

“Ah, yes. Thank you.”

Kenan and Shifrah each took the old man by the elbow and escorted him back out into the street in front of the jail where they left him and strolled calmly away. Kenan tossed the still-burning torch into an alley as they passed, and at the top of the street they turned to look down on their handiwork. The entire back of the jail’s roof was burning steadily and smoking mightily, but the fire burned quietly under the whistling sea wind.

Minutes passed. Then they heard the first shout, and then some more. Men yelling. Church bells ringing. Buckets clanging. Water sloshing.

The constables jogged out to consult with the bucket-bearers, and then the lawmen dashed back inside only to emerge again a minute later with the major and the Italian in chains.

“All right,” Shifrah said. “You got them out. But what now? We’ll have half the city down here in the few minutes to put out that fire before it starts spreading from roof to roof. Don’t you think it will be a little difficult to get to him with four hundred people watching?”

Kenan shook his head as he picked at his lip. “No. It’ll be easier. Much easier. And besides. There’ll only be two hundred at most.”

“I’ll bet you one of my shiny Espani reales it will be more.”

Kenan didn’t smile. He didn’t even look at her. He only watched the fire and crowd growing in the street. “Two reales.”

Ten minutes later the fire had spread across the entire roof and leapt to the adjoining building, but the buckets were flying from hand to hand and freezing sea water was flying through the air, splashing and hissing on the roofs. With a creak and a groan, the entire roof of the jail buckled and broke and collapsed within the walls.

“Now.” Kenan started walking down the street, straight into the crowd. It was no tangle of panicking bodies. The men stood in loose lines, passing buckets and sloshing water. Several shovels and axes lay in the street where they’d been deposited by the rallying townsmen, just in case there would be wreckage to clear away later. Kenan stepped over the tools without looking down at them.