The right bait for a trap is always essential, whether it's cheese or lambs. If you want to trap a mouse, you use cheese; for the wolf, it's lambs. If the Lord won't forgive me for no longer baiting even the right trap with my own lambs, I guess that will have to be a matter He can take up with me.
The admiral, of course, has his own bait. And if that includes me, well, it's no worse than I deserve, and perhaps better.—Cully
The night was too bright, although only a crescent of moon showed.
If Sir Guy had been a superstitious man, the crescent would have bothered him, as it reminded him far too readily of the Star and Crescent that waved above every city, town, village, and probably latrine of the Dar Al Islam, but superstition was one of the sins he was able to avoid.
Still, the further west on the Izmiri coast you went, the closer you got to Antalya, and Koosh, for that matter. Not the safest of waters in any case. The Empire still claimed sovereignty over all of what had been Turkish provinces, but that, as the saying went, when the emperor or his so-called pope spoke, it shook the ground in Constantinople, shook the knees in Cernivici, and shook the belly with laughter in Izmir.
Although maybe the laughter shouldn't have come quite so easily.
Even in its present, shrunken state, the Empire could have easily reconquered its way down to the Mediterranean, at least through Turkey. The Empire was not what it once had been, but it was nothing for a small former province to trifle with.
Still, such a move would have brought the Empire into conflict with both Crown and Dar, and while the so-called Emperor and his so-called pope were certainly fools, they likely weren't that foolish. Much better to leave it as a buffer zone, and eventually let the Crown and Dar fight it out, and hope to pick off the winner. That was the sort of cowardly thing you could expect from the Imperials.
"Do you think you're ready?" the admiral asked—and he asked Cully, not Sir Guy. At least he had addressed Cully, and not Kechiroski.
Cully shrugged. "As ready as I'll ever be," he said. "As soon as those clouds pass across the Moon."
And he shrugged again. If a man of as mild a temperament as Guy of Orkney could be irritated over a gesture, Cully's shrugging would have irritated him mightily. Even more than the admiral treating Sir Cully as though he was the senior Order Knight aboard, when Sir Cully carried merely two mundane swords—when he carried them at all—while Sir Guy was a knight of the White Sword, carrying Albert. Proper decorum would have required the admiral to be consulting with Sir Guy, who was, after all, in both law and fact, the senior of the two.
But, no; DuPuy was unfailingly polite to Sir Guy, but when it came time to ask a question or advice on a decision, it was to Sir Cully that he went, and that should have been utterly maddening.
But, naturally, it wasn't anything of the kind. Sir Guy was capable of sin, of course, but not that one; he was of a mild temperament. Still, without moving his thumbs from where they were stuck in his sash, he touched his little finger to Albert's steel, and was rewarded, as always, by the sense of peace that washed over him, as he imagined that a cold glass of wine would, although he was abstemious in that, too, and allowed himself no stimulants, save for his occasional . . . lapses.
He first tried not to think of those, then forced himself to. That was, after all, part of the nature of penitence: to remember the sins that had been washed away, to help him avoid their repetition.
Yes, Guy, it is. All is forgiven the penitent, but nothing is forgotten.
He let his finger fall away; a miserable sinner like himself didn't deserve the reassurance that came from the intimate contact with the saint who had voluntarily had his soul imprisoned in the whitest of White Swords during the Age, and had, as far as Guy knew—and no man living could know better; Sir Gustav had finally died the year before—not had the slightest regret in the centuries since of delaying his entry into Heaven to better serve both God and king.
Purity of the soul was hard enough to attempt to maintain, and sinner that he was, the attempt was all that was possible. Purity of the body was but a small step in aid of that.
Sir Guy failed, all too often. He still recalled the drunken night of debauchery in Pironesia, and it would have been tempting to blame Cully. After all, Cully had insisted that Sir Guy share a glass of retsina in the tavern, quoting St. Paul to St. Timothy: "Have a little wine for the sake of your digestion."
But, no. That one glass of wine had turned into many, and not one of the many had been forced down Sir Guy's throat, after all, and while he could not remember most of the rest of the evening, he did remember his shame upon waking up in the crib with the slattern.
At least, in Pironesia, there was an Anglian to hear his confession, and not just Cully. Cully would probably have, once again, insisted on too light a penance, rather than the self-flagellation that the Anglian had acceded to, to accompany the dozen rosaries.
Cully seemed to think of drunkenness as, at worst, the mildest of sins, and Sir Guy didn't want to know what he really thought of fornication in his priestly capacity, although to be fair, if Cully had been sneaking off to visit the whores, he had done so with great discretion; Sir Guy had been watching him for just that sort of lapse.
As least Cully was sober at the moment, and while DuPuy had quaffed at least three glasses of wine over dinner, he seemed to be steady-legged on the slowly rolling deck.
He didn't look like much of an admiral. He affected utilities aboard ship, rather than wearing a proper uniform, as though he was a dockside junior lieutenant running a crew of seamen stevedores. Worse—his utilities held not so much as a tab or braid of rank; it was an insult to call them a uniform.
The captain hadn't made a word of complaint about that, although Sir Guy had tried to draw him out, with no success whatsoever.
Well, at least the affectation didn't extend to DuPuy's aide, Lieutenant Emmons, though, who seemed to always be in a fresh uniform, no matter what the hour, although he really looked too young to be an officer in HM Navy. More of a midshipman, really.
Although not at the moment. He still looked like a midshipman, at least in the face, but he was dressed as the seamen in the skiff below were, save that he, at least, had the decency to be wearing a shirt.
DuPuy gave the lieutenant a nod, and Emmons hopped over the side and quickly made his way down the rope ladder to the launch below. Normally, of course, the launch would be propelled by its sails, but the mast had been shipped, and the crew waited by the oars. Even had the wind been onshore, rather than mostly offshore, it would still have been more discreet.
They were, once again, waiting for Cully to decide.
Sir Cully of Cully's Woode, indeed.
Not that he looked like much of a knight. If it weren't that Stavros Andropolonikos—more formally, Sir Stavros Kechiroski, KHMG, OC—didn't have the natural Turkish/Hellenic swarthiness, they could have been brothers. They were built much the same, and dressed more or less identically as Kechiroski came up on deck, adjusting his trousers. With a woman aboard, the seamen had given up just pissing over the lee side whenever it took their fancy, and Kechiroski was a seaman by trade, if not his present trade.
He still looked like one, though. Not like a knight, either.
That didn't bother Sir Guy about the Hellene; granted, Kechiroski had knelt before the king to arise as a knight of His Majesty's Guard, but title aside, he had been and really was nothing more than a common Pironesian sailor, known as "Stavros Andropolonikos," because after he had been impressed into and successfully completed his term in HM Navy as common sailor, he had mostly worked his newly learned craft out of the southern Pironesian ports, where Andropolonikonians, or whatever they called them, were largely unknown.
Why Cully had asked Kechiroski to come along on the mission was less obvious than why Kechiroski had accepted. He could have been living back in Andropolonikos on the pension that came with the OC, but he clearly thought of himself as a knight, as though a tap on the shoulder had changed his status in the view of anybody who mattered.
But they both looked about the same.
Like Kechiroski, Cully was dressed like a Hellenic or Turkish peasant, in a stained and clumsily mended blousy shirt over short pantaloons secured at the waist by nothing more than a length of thin rope.
And he didn't look much like a knight from the neck up, either. He had allowed his thinning gray hair to grow into a sailor's queue, bound back tightly behind his head, and his beard was unshaven on the cheeks, in the local style. Of his two swords, he had only packed one in his seabag, and had insisted that Sir Guy permit the ship's carpenter to whittle plain sheaths and grips for both of Sir Guy's swords, and the armorer to—while wearing heavy leather gloves, to avoid the chance of touching a finger to Albert's metal—affix a plain wooden hilt to Albert as well as to his other sword, the fine saber that had been presented to Sir Guy by the abbot general himself.
Well, Sir Guy would report that, along with the rest of Cully's very unknightly behavior, to the abbot, when they returned to Alton. Which wouldn't be soon enough to suit him, for a fact. Pity that the workings of codebooks was a slight that Sir Guy had never quite been able to master; it would be best to have primed the abbot with an advance report.
He wasn't happy about his own appearance, either. At Cully's urging—insistence, really—Sir Guy had stopped shaving when they had set sail from Portsmouth, and Sir Guy had, shortly before their arrival off the coast, adopted a similar disguise himself, although he had, of course, seen to the proper laundering of his clothing. There was no need to appear, even in disguise, with tears in one's clothing that could be mended, and every reason not to smell like the garlic that Cully popped, clove by clove, as though they were sweetmeats, until he not only looked but smelled like a garlic-eating Turk.
But Cully had taken on this . . . preposterous garb from the day that they had sailed from Portsmouth, and even insisted that Sir Guy dress in mufti when they made port along the way, although Sir Guy wasted no minutes in resuming the proper clothing of a knight of the Order of Crown, Shield, and Dragon the moment that he was back aboard, of course.
And the garlic? The garlic that Cully ate incessantly, just because the Turks did? The garlic that made Cully's breath smell like a pigsty?
Horrible.
Not that smelling like a peasant was Cully's only failure as a knight. A knight was supposed to have a certain dignity, and moderation was part of that.
Cully, on the other hand, despite his age, would keep up, mug for mug, with the most sodden drunks at the captain's table, of which there was more than an ample nightly supply. HM Navy had strict regulations against being too drunk for duty, and in Guy's opinion, even aboard the supposedly taut Lord Fauncher, they were enforced in far too loose a fashion, at least among the officers who dined at the captain's table, although presumably the ones who had the deck saved their tippling for after they were relieved.
Being treated as the junior of a drunk knight who was, in fact, junior to him wasn't the only thing that Guy found distasteful, at least within the confines of his mind. Nor was the fact that he had been assigned as Cully's companion, for reasons that were surely good enough, as they had come from the abbot general himself, as unpleasant as the mission was.
All of it was, well, wrong, and the blame went through Cully straight to Admiral DuPuy. Given the admiral's assignment from His Majesty to manage the search for the source of the new live swords—and, more importantly, to extinguish that source—Admiral Sir Simon Tremaine DuPuy should have been in his offices in Portsmouth, where every report would quickly reach his desk, and ships and men could be properly dispatched in good order.
And, if not that—if he believed, as he apparently did, that the source was somewhere not too far north of the Med, and that rapidity of response would be in order—he certainly had the authority to set up his offices either at Gibraltar or Malta, or anywhere else he pleased. Napoli was wonderful this time of year—and almost every time of every year; that would have been a reasonable choice.
But he had done none of those. He had had a ship seconded to his service, with a full complement of clerks aboard, sending and receiving endless coded messages whenever they made port, or flagged down a ship of the line.
The Lord Fauncher. Bah.
If he had decided, as was apparently his prerogative, Guy supposed, to have a "floating office," he could have and should have seconded a ship of at least the second rank, rather than the Lord Fauncher, at best a ship of the Third.
Some people just didn't understand the matter of station, and DuPuy was worse than many, although not as bad as Cully. Somehow or other—despite his rank—the admiral seemed to be functioning as officer of the deck on more than one occasion, although not at the moment, when the master and commander, Lieutenant Winters, had the quarterdeck himself . . . although why the master and commander would need to take the deck with the ship lying at anchor was another thing that puzzled Sir Guy, as there was no good explanation.
It wasn't the only thing that was wrong here.
Sir Guy repressed a shiver, although he couldn't have said why he had to. Nights along the coast were balmy and clear, and the offshore wind brought distant hints of cook fires to his nose, and nothing more threatening.
Still, the nearest of HM ships of the line were off Rodhos, easily forty miles and ten hours away, under the best of circumstances, with a favorable wind. The Lord Fauncher would set no speed records, save perhaps for the speed it would sink to the bottom if a Dar ram managed to close with it.
Yes, the combination of the flinger crews and the Marine company could likely fend off any single-ship attack that the Lord Fauncher itself couldn't flee from, but it was itself too big a prize to settle for "likely," what with the admiral himself aboard.
And then there was the girl. Yes, of course, a wizard was obviously needed for this, but why couldn't it have been a proper man, preferably a nobleman, rather than a blousy young Injan thing who shamelessly flirted like a Northhampton trollop, with both officers and crew?
She was pretty enough, perhaps, in a dark sort of way, and that was probably why Cully had picked her, although seamen were notoriously unchoosy, and perhaps she did rather more than flirt, although—
No. That was an unworthy thought. And yet another thing to confess, and if were capable of being irritated, he would have been more than slightly irritated that the only priest available aboard the ship to hear his confession was Cully, who had initially acceded with ill grace just this side of rudeness, at best.
Sir Guy lived in fear of few things, but one of those was of missing the specifics of a sin in his confessions. To give the old knight credit, Sir Cully finally had finally come around to agreeing to hear Sir Guy's daily confessions with what passed for good grace, and although he had initially resisted, he had eventually assigned almost suitable penances, rather than a token rosary or two that he clearly preferred.
And, of course, if Cully had so much as taken confession a single time since they had left Malta, much less Portsmouth, Sir Guy was utterly unaware of it, and doubted that he had, although Sir Guy had made the offer on more than one or two occasions even recently, although he had given up making the offer daily within a week after they had left.
Cully was eying the sky, as though he could read something more from it than how quickly the clouds were moving toward the half moon.
Below, on the seaside of the ship, the captain's launch was already waiting, along with its navy crew, although turning the ship so that it would be out of sight of land was, Sir Guy thought, just another one of Cully's overly cautious precautions; the Lord Fauncher stood at anchor easily a mile from shore, with all lights doused abovedecks. Somebody sitting on the shore with a fine Arabian spyglass might—might—have been able to spot the ship, but only if they had the glass pointed in the right direction.
A massive puff of dark cloud was moments away from the moon.
Cully nodded. "It's time, I think."
"Two weeks?" the admiral asked, sounding hopeful. It wasn't the first time that he had brought up the subject of how long they'd be ashore.
"Unlikely. More like a month. If we have any luck. Could easily be more." He turned to the girl—to the girl!—first. "Are you ready, Sarila?" he asked in Turkish, his accent thick enough to spread on toast.
"Of course, Master Erdem."
Like Kechiroski, and unlike Cully and Sir Guy, her skin hadn't needed to be darkened with hours in the sun, or supplemented by the smelly oils that Sir Guy had had to apply to himself; with an Injan mother brought back by a soldier in the Mumbai Guard, nature had already done that for her. She didn't look Turkish, of course, but the slave trade had brought some injans to the area as slaves, mostly captured off of British merchantmen, and mixed breeding was hardly unusual for second- or third-generation slaves, for the obvious reasons.
"Ercam?" He turned to Kechiroski. "Nisalsiniz?"
Kechiroski grinned. "Hayir," he said. "Kirimizi sarap istiyorum."
Sir Guy sniffed. Kechiroski wasn't well because he hadn't had enough wine?
Cully turned to Sir Guy. "And you, oh, Onan?"
Sir Guy forced himself not to wince at the name. It was a decent Turkish name, after all, although he was certain that was not the reason that Cully had picked it for him.
"Nisalsiniz?" Cully asked.
"Well, of course I'm ready, and—"
Cully silenced him with a raised finger. "The proper answer is incoherent mumbling. You're a mute, remember? Not a deaf-mute, mind you; just a mute."
Cully had found endless faults with Sir Guy's Turkish accent, and after repeatedly trying to get him to modify it, had announced that passing him off as a mute slave was the only alternative. The only reason Sir Guy had gone along with that indignity—as well as the indignity of the name that Cully had assigned him, and all the others—was that his initial protest to the admiral had been met with stony indifference, and followed up with one of Cully's powders slipped into his morning tea, and that followed the next morning by a thoroughly unknightly—albeit private—lecture on how Cully was going to obey orders to the extent that he could, but that he was perfectly capable of leaving Sir Guy behind, dead or unconscious, if he became a burden.
He was along, Cully had explained, because he was the least useful knight of a live sword that the Order had ever known, and while the abbot had not come out and admitted that openly, Cully said, interspersing his comments with common words that were as unknightly as unknightly could be, that was why Sir Guy had been foisted on Cully.
Had Sir Guy been a man of temper, he would have whipped out Albert and had at him. Even if Cully was still the swordsman that legend had it—something that Guy doubted—he could not have stood up to a live sword.
But that would have been murder. And, besides, the abbot general had warned Sir Guy that Cully would try to provoke him, as a way of getting rid of him.
That was not to be. He would just be patient, and bear up under the many indignities, until he could return to his proper life and proper station—preferably with His Own, although he had never been given that honor.
"Time to go," Cully decided.
He took his own bag and carefully dropped it over the side to the waiting arms of the seamen below, and then was quickly over the side himself, moving quickly and easily, despite his years.
The girl was next, and Sir Guy looked away by instinct—her shift had started to ride up, and no doubt both Cully and the sailors would be amusing them by looking up her full, native skirt, a sight that Sir Guy would not have been surprised was familiar to at least one of them.
And then it was his turn. He slipped the sword into his own bag, and lowered it on a line to Cully, then retrieved the line and dropped it on the deck for one of the sailors to handle.
But he was, after all, a knight of the Order, and even in his present disguise, the proprieties should be observed. He bowed toward the quarterdeck, where Lieutenant Winters properly returned his bow, and then to the admiral.
"Just get going," DuPuy said. "And come back alive, dammit."
Cully would, no doubt, have made some insolent comment, but swallowing his offense at the profanity, Sir Guy just turned and climbed down the ladder.
Beaching the launch wasn't possible, as Sir Guy had expected; the shore was just too rocky, and he wasn't all sure that Winters had read the charts aright, anyway.
What he was sure was going to be the worst of getting their gear ashore turned out to be the easiest—the tinker's cart, as it turned out, really did float when empty, and it was matter of only a few minutes of soaking-wet sailors grunting and pushing to get it up on shore, followed by a stream of the rest of their gear, more or less kept out of the water by the sailors, at least most of the time. Unsurprisingly, it took two seamen to haul the anvil ashore, even as light as it was—for an anvil.
Sir Guy kept his voice low as he ordered the sailors where to put the gear. At least, with the warm western wind, his peasant garb had quickly dried.
Cully, by that time, had vanished, of course, just when there was work to be done. He had been first over the side of the launch, and had slipped off into the night, and only returned when all of the gear had been brought ashore, and that in the two bags that had leaked had been carefully spread out along the rocks to dry, at least for a while, and the last of the sailors had swum back to the launch, leaving only Lieutenant Emmons along with Sir Guy, the Hellene. The girl had started carrying the gear, or at least what she could manage of it, up the slope to the land above.
"I'd advise you to be careful, Sir Guy," the lieutenant said, his voice not quite a whisper, "but I know you're sensible enough to do that anyway." He grinned.
"And were I not," Sir Guy said, "I doubt that a lecture from a lieutenant in His Majesty's service would make me think otherwise, I'd expect."
"Yessir."
The moon had long reappeared from behind the clouds, but it was low enough in the sky that the rocky prominence above cast a shadow that covered not only where their gear lay, but spread far enough beyond the shore to cover the launch, as well, where the crew had stepped the masts, and rigged the sails, but not raised them.
Sir Guy looked out to see where the Lord Fauncher should have been visible, but it was gone.
Emmons, following his look, grinned again, the reproach forgotten. "We'll catch up with the ship, sure enough, and no worries on that."
Sir Guy furrowed his brow.
"Some men in a launch that looks enough like a small skiff making their way out to sea are smugglers, even if they're seen. Fair amount of opium traded locally—comes down out of the north, and makes its way to the New World," he said. "Black gold comes back as, well, gold. A launch heading out to something that looks like a Guild ship, well, that'd be fine; the Guild are known to be smugglers, and have as little respect for English law as they do for shariah.
"But a launch going out to a what's obviously a ship built along English lines," Emmons went on, "well, that could be something else entirely, and rumors travel fast. About the only way to cover for that would be to impersonate a bunch of Seeproosh pirates, as they've captured one or two of our merchantmen recently—and that would mean that we'd have to raid a village, kill everybody who resisted, and make off with the women, children, and a few men, letting none escape. But then what would we do with them?"
"Of course, the admiral would never countenance such a thing."
"Yessir," he said, giving Sir Guy a dubious look.
Still, all in all, the lieutenant had a point.
If nobody along this admittedly lightly inhabited bit of shoreline had already seen the ship, or seen the boat coming in from it, there would be no problem. But their maps—to the extent that the maps were any good—showed that there was a major trading road along the ridge line a few miles to the north.
If they were in the right spot, it would still be there. It was an old Roman road, and whatever could be said about how the Romans had descended into the perversion and heresy of what was left of the Empire, it would still be here, unless the locals had carted away each and every stone.
Which was unlikely. One thing that Izmir was in no shortage of was stone.
Kechiroski was making his way to shore, a final leather bag held high over his head to keep it dry. As he emerged from the water, the way his leggings clung to him made it clear that he wasn't wearing any undergarments whatsoever; Sir Guy averted his eyes.
Kechiroski staggered up above the waterline and dropped it with the rest of their gear. "That should do it, I think, Lieutenant," he said. His English was very good; Sir Guy had to give him that.
"Time for you to be off, Emmons," Cully said—from right behind Sir Guy, startling him. Sir Guy hadn't heard him at all, although how he had made his way down the slope without being seen or heard was another one of his woodsman things, Sir Guy supposed.
"Good luck and fair winds, Sir Cully."
Cully briefly clasped hands with the boy, and then beckoned to Kechiroski. "The cart's going to be the worst of it. Let's get it up the hill. Sir Guy, if you don't feel like grabbing what bags you can manage, I'd appreciate it if you'd at least dry off what's here."
It was more than an hour later, soaked with sweat, that Cully gestured Kechiroski toward the handles of the cart, and they set off across the barren ground, looking for the road.
They found it at first light, and headed east, walking as quickly as possible.
Sir Guy took his turn at the arms of the cart. Yes, it was undignified, but Cully just shrugged at his initial mild protest, and offered him a drink of water.
He knew better than that.
He drank from his own water skin.