Salt, Sand,and Blood

Excerpt: Interlude

By MarQuese Liddle

It was not long after that the red Tsaazaari sun set fast over the horizon where our and the heathen men made motley companions around the fire. We told tales, listened together to the crackle of carapaces, scorpions sizzling on spits to be spread on hard bread with lime juice and curdled milk. A feast for kings in a castle of sand against the cold desert winds. We ate in silence, hollow cheeks and conspiring eyes staring across the fire until the Messah broke the peace.

“You never finished telling us about your village,” he said. There wasn’t much else to tell, but he was curious. “What made you leave? How did you end up in the Tsaazaar?” It was a story he wanted, and the moon overhead shewn pale against the black like an eye of God. I settled closer to the flames, urged them listen closely.

“In Umlomo Village, Hell was born from the sea. It came on black sails on the eastern tide in the evening in the guise of Gautaman slavers from which we knew of no salvation, only to run and hide and to weary our eyes watching the horizon. But all that watching left us blind; so on the night of my twentieth solstice, in the midst our ancestral worship, with the whole village night-blind in torchlight and gathered on the beach, I saw the ships birth themselves from the ocean blackness, and I smashed the conch that was to be their warning.

“My kin scattered like flies as slavers poured onto the beach. Those scarred and squinting faces—they stole the able souls and put the young and the old to the sword, yet somehow I passed to the coast unseen. There an abandoned boat was waiting for me. I dragged it into the ocean and paddled through the dark. God knows what the slavers must have thought when they heard me shouting.

“By morning I was lashed to the oars with the other chattel under the authority of our boarish taskmaster, Slave Driver Yin. Quickly, we learned to fear those fat, yellow cheeks and thin black eyes and his wisps of moustache that whipped when he grunted his native tongue right before flogging us. God bless that man for putting up with our weakness. He was given an impossible task, keeping the oars in time, and I lost count of how many leathers he wore out on our hides.

“Yet we were ungrateful, pained and tired, and laggard worst of all. It could not have more than a month that we were moored to the oars when the man in front of me dared to stop. He could not go on, he cried. I watched Yin flog him until bones showed where there was skin just before. The whole time, the man pleaded for mercy, but never once did he reach for his oar. He died in front of me, and just I kept rowing, wondering why—why didn’t he save himself?

“The next morning, I had my answer; and from then on I toiled hard from wake till slumber. My hands turned to blisters and my muscles so sore I truly thought they might rupture, but never again did I suffer the whip. I learned those wisps of mustache were nothing to fear, nor those beady slits that eyed my labor. Even the grunts became familiar.

“‘Kyoken,’ Yin would chuckle as he passed me by, and every few days he would drop a piece of fruit or fish in my lap. That made the others bitter, of course, but their abuse held nothing to the sweet taste of food after months of gruel, and they would be sold or dead soon enough. The ship would anchor, and the crew would come down with chains and take the liveliest away; then we’d sail again, and after a while the hull was filled, and the cycle repeated—Only Yin and I always remained.

“Then one day we anchored, and the crew came down and Yin with them and another man I had not seen before. His beard and eyebrows were a sliver-gray, the trim of his clothes gold, his hat and coat layers of orange and red, and he wore shiny new boots of burgundy leather with bright brass buckles. Their raised heels clacked on the floor as he and Yin approached me and unclasped my fetters. Even the stranger’s fingers were covered in colored jewels. Only his eyes were dark—hard as stone—he stared into my very bones and smiled.

“That day I saw the sun for the first time in months as it set over the mountains of Gautama. I cried, and the crew laughed and led me ashore where a feast had been prepared in a tavern on the docks. I didn’t know what a damn of it was, but I cried again when they sat me at table and gave me a knife. That night, we ate and drank until we were sick as dogs.

“When morning came, Yin brought me back to the oars, yet when I tried to take my place, I felt the flog on my back for the first time in ages. ‘Kyoken!’ the taskmaster grunted. I turned in shock to see him shaking his head. His eyes were crescents and his jowls grinning. He handed me the leather and left for the upper deck. I had become Slave Driver Kyoken, the mad dog. The flog was my badge of office. The oars, my domain. The slaves, my charge.

“But things changed under the mad dog’s law. I had watched too many strong and defiant men bled to ribbons because of reliance on the flog. It was a waste, and besides, the leather was a precious gift I’d earned with my blood. They did not deserve it. No—my method was song and spirit. The chattel and I shared a common enough tongue that it did not take long before the oars plunged to the rhythm of songs promising freedom and bliss. Our speeds measured half again what they were under Yin.

“Months more passed. It had been at least a year since the raid on Umlomo, and we were plundering the western coasts once more. Everyone I’d ever known had been killed or sold by then, and their ghosts visited me one night a storm had tossed us off course. They were vague and angry shades, their remains lost to the sea or buried in foreign lands. ‘Your soul will be forgotten,’ they sang, ‘a story never told. The traitor’s bones are forever cold in sands beneath the ocean.’

“I awoke shivering despite the warm wash dripping from the hatch. For a moment I feared I’d overslept, but the slaves were still snoring, and there were too few boots battering the upper deck. Then I recognized it—the iron scent—a second baptism. I climbed from my hammock and up the rungs and pressed my ear against the hatch to hear, but I felt instead. A body lay atop the trap, heavy and bleeding through the wood and into my hair till the knots were damp and I was certain the stamping had moved safely away.

“It was a raid. We had drifted too far north into Messaii territory where our kind fell prey to Pareo’s privateers. I wish I’d known that back then—it was the first time I’d seen men with skin that pale, and I pissed myself believing they were wraiths come back for vengeance. A scream from the captain’s cabin cured me shortly after I arrived on deck. One raider was already dead, the other four howling at the head at Yin’s feet. His fat cheeks were grinning, his moustaches quivering in delight as the moon reflected bright on the length of his great sabre. And he wasn’t alone. There was the Vagabond—a sharp jawed man, all angles and long, unkept hair; the ornery Gold Jacket—aptly named; and the captain himself, missing his hat, his mane and beard a blaze of silver, standing naked save for his boots and greatcoat. I would have laughed if it wasn’t so amazing.

“The remaining Messaii died waving their little sabres like toys against the Gautamans’ greater steel. Two of them skewered, another hacked to pieces, and the last cleaved in half for turning his back on taskmaster Yin. ‘Kyoken,’ smiled the former slave driver, then he tossed me one of the dead men’s swords. I’d need it. More privateers were boarding, but so too were our men emerging from the hull.

“The fight went through the night until the light of dawn showed us head to foot in a ruddy brown. By then, all I wanted was to lie in my hammock, yet the day’s work had just begun. There was the deck that needed cleaning, and torn sails to mend, and a whole ship to loot and scuttle. Needless to say, the slaves didn’t get much oaring done. It was night again when we were finally finished, and I on my way to sleep when Yin called me to the cabin.

“Captain Fenghuang was seated upright on his feather mattress, dressed just the opposite as the previous night in a white linen shirt, bright orange trousers, and his gold trimmed hat half-hiding the stains in his hair. He had a sword in his lap and a look in his eye that terrified as he gestured for me to take a seat on the stool set across from him. I sat, and he said some words I couldn’t understand. Then he handed me this sword.”

I lifted my sabre to the fire so that the heathens could see the red lacquer scabbard, gilded disc guard and long braided hilt.

“From that day forward, I was a freed man—a member of the crew truly. I still drove the slaves, yet now my suppers were spent in the mess with the other men: Yin and the Vagabond, Gold Jacket, even the captain on occasion after a particularly successful raid. And there were many. During my few years on the sea, we seized two ships, more than doubled our crew, and halved the natives on the coasts of my homeland. But all good thing must come to an end. Slaves became harder and harder to find as Tsaazaari pirates followed our success, and at the same time, a flux of Messaii flooded the market.

“It was the end of summer when we docked in Gautama’s capital harbor for the final time with three empty vessels and a spent war chest. Captain Feng and his closest men met that evening, and we agreed over rum that our life together had reached its end. One ship went to Gold Jacket, as did several of the crew, though the other two were sold and the profit split among us. Most of us, anyway. The Vagabond refused his share, as did I, for fear of what gold might do to our souls. But there, we parted ways—he to the bamboo forests of the west and I to the northern mountain border. We never saw each other again.”