What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.
-- Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, chapter 5.
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When the war was over and I was discharged, I thought I'd go home. But home wasn't there anymore. The houses and barns were still standing, mostly, though a lot of the roofs were leaking after going a year or two without repair; and the mill was still there, its wheel turning and turning and making the grindstone grind away at nothing. But the people -- oh, the people. At first I couldn't find any trace of them. There was no one I recognized, nobody at all but a few war orphans from some other village who were squatting in the mayor's house; they ran away when I tried to talk to them. But there were many more laurel trees than I remembered along the streets and in the front gardens. And when I walked into my parents' house, I found a laurel growing in the kitchen, its roots dug in through the floorboards into the foundation and most of its leaves yellowed for want of sunlight, except those of one branch which stuck out the window. There was another in my sister's bedroom, in a similar plight, though more of its branches had reached out the window. I found one or more laurels growing in several other houses I entered, as well. Some were dead, their roots and branches withered, unable to reach a window to get sunlight or to penetrate the floorboards to find soil. Those in smaller houses with dirt floors were generally better off than those in the rich people's houses with sturdier wooden floors. I spent a few days tearing the roofs off some houses where the trees were languishing but maybe not dead yet, and tearing up floorboards to let their roots get at the soil more easily.
The orphans gradually got used to me and came up a little closer each day to watch me work. Finally a couple of the bolder ones talked with me. They knew nothing of what had happened to my family or why; they'd found the village like this when they'd wandered into the area after their families were killed and their home village burned by soldiers. They were so scrawny and filthy I couldn't tell if they were boys or girls. I thought about staying there and sowing a crop in the fields that had lain fallow for a year or more, but I couldn't stand to stay close to those trees for too long. Sometimes I imagined I saw faces on them. And I was afraid that whatever had made them like that might affect me, too, if I stayed there.
So I set out to find somewhere less haunted. A few weeks later I was in Sikramar. It had been less damaged by the war than most cities; its walls and most of the houses were still standing, and the burned-up areas were being rebuilt faster than I would have thought possible. I swear that in the days I spent wandering around looking for work, I saw houses go from burned-out husks to completely rebuilt in five or six days. Probably there was magic involved; I knew even less about magic then than I do now, but I knew Sikramar was rich in magic.
Finally, I hired onto a merchant ship, the West Wind, as a mercenary. The end of the war meant that a lot of discharged navy men had turned pirate, and the captain of this ship wanted more men who could handle themselves in a fight. I was no sailor, but I'd been on shipboard before, four or five troop transports at one stage or another of the war, and I'd fought off boarders once; it didn't take me long to get my sea legs back.
The captain hired a wizard at the same time he hired me, some other mercenaries, and several new sailors. The wizard's name was Kasrigan, and I felt a vague kinship with him at first; he had a haunted look in his eyes, like he'd done things he wasn't proud of and seen things he couldn't forget. I knew what that was like. But he didn't mix with the sailors or mercenaries, and I never got to know him. He spent most of his time in his cabin -- he was one of only three people, the captain and the first mate being the others, who rated a cabin -- and most of the rest standing at the rail looking out to sea, never answering when anybody spoke to him, unless it was the captain. Sometimes he would toss a bucket into the sea, haul it up, make mystic gestures over it, and pour some of its contents into glass bottles before dumping the rest into the sea again. He was supposed to protect us from bad weather, and he might have done a good job of that for all I know, though the fine weather we experienced might just as easily have been pure luck. But he was supposed to warn us of pirate attacks and help fight them off, too, and at that he was a disgraceful failure.
It was after we'd stopped at Bapram and headed out to sea that we discovered he was getting drunk on the seawater he'd been turning into brandy. The captain was angry, and talked about discharging him at the next port, or at least the next time we put into Sikramar, if he couldn't find another wizard for hire in Fasrimar or Tamu.
I happened to be walking the deck late one morning near the wizard's cabin when the captain barged in and tried to wake him. He got nothing but incoherent mumbles for a while -- he left the door open, and I happened to linger there looking out to sea -- and then the wizard said:
"Go 'way. I don't need to be awake 'n sober all the time. Two or three hours a day's all I need to renew the protective spells."
"That might work for weather," the captain said, "but if we meet with pirates, I don't want to rely on your passive protective spells, I want you alert and casting offensive spells against them. Send them to the bottom of the sea, or better, kill all the pirates and leave their ship for us to take what's useful from it."
"Sure, I c'n do that. Just give me another couple of hours to sleep this off."
The captain grew angry then, and I won't repeat what he said, for I'm not a foul-mouthed man, though I was a soldier for so long. I walked further along toward the bow and looked out. The nearest land was much too far to see.
There were four other mercenaries on board, besides the sailors, some of whom could handle a sword well enough. Between the five of us we'd fought for three of the four factions in the war; I didn't hold it against them, as they probably had no more choice about it than I did. We were under the command of Sumar, who'd been a sergeant in the Datrafi army until they were defeated, and then spent the last couple of years of the war in a prison camp. He had us, and whichever of the sailors weren't busy with nautical duties nor asleep, doing sword drills a couple of times a day, morning and early evening; the rest of the day we were free to do as we pleased, though at least two of us had to be awake and on deck at any given time. Archery drills required more coordination with the officers and sailors, to be sure that no one would be on deck downrange of the men shooting, or coming in and out of the cabins in the stern. We were supposed to put our arrows in the center of a target hung between the doors of the captain's and wizard's cabins, but most of the misses hit the wall or doors; we lost only two arrows in the sea during the three archery drills in our first eight days at sea.
We had a bit of luck when the pirates found us, for it was morning, and all of us soldiers were on deck. When the lookout called out the warning, we left off sparring with practice swords and got out our real swords, then ran to the stern and looked out. Only Timusram, the sharpest-eyed of us, could see the pirate ship at first, but it soon approached close enough for even me to see it. Sumar sent Umiru, one of the sailors who had been drilling with us, to wake up the wizard and tell him about the attack, and the captain put the others to work raising additional sail to try to outrun the pirates.
The timing of the attack was all the luck we had that day. The pirate ship was faster than us, and had more and, I must confess, better fighting men on board. We killed or disabled a handful of them with arrows in the last moments before they came alongside. They tried several times to grapple us before they got their hooks to stay -- I think that may have been the result of Kasrigan's passive protective spells. If so, they didn't help for long; on the fourth or fifth try, they grappled our hull and swarmed over the side, and it was hand-to-hand from then on.
Some of us, though good enough fighters on land, had only gotten our sea legs within the last few days. The pirates were in their element, and too many for us. I saw Timusram cut down from behind by one pirate after holding his own against two in front. Fira was wounded and disarmed, but not killed, as it turned out -- despite his injured leg he managed to trip up a couple of the pirates coming at me before he passed out from loss of blood. Sumar and I fought with our backs to the wall of the poop deck for some time before he was killed with a thrust to the eye. I fought alone for a little while after that, vaguely aware of Midrun and some of the sailors fighting the pirates here and there on the deck or in the rigging -- fighting, and mostly losing -- until I took a sharp blow to my sword arm and my sword suddenly dropped from my nerveless fingers.
"Do you surrender?" one of the men surrounding me asked. I glanced at the bodies on the deck around me and nodded, gripping the wound on my right arm with my left hand to stanch the bleeding.
One of the pirates tied my wrists together with a piece torn from my shirt, in such a way that the cuff doubled as a bandage for the worst of my wounds; then he stood guard over me and a few other wounded men while the last few skirmishes came to an end, the last of the sailors and officers surrendering or being disabled or killed. Most of the fighting was already over by the time I was disarmed. I saw the captain and first mate both stretched out dead in pools of blood; they weren't far from me, and I wondered how I had failed to see them die. I realized then that I hadn't seen any sign of the wizard.
That mystery was soon resolved when two of the pirates emerged from the wizard's cabin, pulling him roughly along, his hands tied behind his back and his eyes bleary and bloodshot. I cursed him, knowing that if he hadn't been drunk last night, his magic might have tipped the balance for us against the pirates this morning.
"Listen!" cried one of the pirates -- their captain, as it turned out. He was a tall man with a grey beard covering half his face, the other half disfigured with burn scars. Though most of his hair was gone and what was left was grey, he looked strong and healthy; he still had most of his teeth, unlike most sailors of his age.
"Many of you fought well," he said to us prisoners. "And I always like to be generous to an honorable enemy. Those of you who fought hard and didn't surrender till you were too bad hurt to fight, I'll give you a choice. Those who hid or surrendered just because they were outnumbered must suffer the fate I mete out."
The other pirates gave a cheer at that, and my gut clenched. Would he consider me to have been too badly hurt to fight any longer, when I surrendered? And what kind of choice was he offering? I soon found out:
"You," he said, and he pointed out several of us, me included, "plus a few of your unconscious comrades, if they live through the next hours, are welcome to join my crew. You'll have the same rights and duties as any new sailor who signs on in port -- one share of all our loot, with a chance to earn more shares as you prove yourself. If you don't wish to join us, you may choose: die an honorable death, jumping overboard under your own power, or be sold into slavery with your dishonorable comrades who surrendered.
"You don't have to choose instantly. Think on it for an hour, while my physicker attends to my wounded men and then, if it's not too late for them, to your own."
"I c'n help," Kasrigan said. "You might want to make an exception for me."
"Oh? And why shouldn't I sell you as a slave along with the others? My men tell me you didn't put up much of a fight -- slept through the whole battle, and struggled feebly with them when they pulled you out of your bunk."
"I'm a wizard," he said. "If I'd been awake when you approached, you'd all be dead. I know I'm not much use, drunkard as I am, but I'm more use to you on shipboard than in a slave market. Untie my wrists and I can heal some of your wounded men."
"You aren't much of a wizard, if two of my men could subdue you so easily."
"I was sleepy and hung over -- by the time I woke up enough to think of casting a spell, they had my wrists tied. I'm not quite helpless, though, now that I've woken up enough to talk." And he said something in another language that made my head hurt to listen to; the tunic and trousers of one of the men who'd hauled him out of his cabin unraveled then, all in a moment, leaving him naked in his boots with a tangle of threads dangling around his ankles and wrists. He cried out and stepped away from the wizard, drawing his sword and pointing it at him -- his belt, like his boots, was still intact.
"Just a harmless trick," the wizard said, "to prove I'm what I say I am. I need my hands free to heal your wounded men, though."
"I'll do that when I can be sure you won't turn against us," the pirate captain said. "Swear by the source of your power that you will join us, sharing in the risks and rewards of our profession, and never act against your fellow pirates except in a declared and formal duel."
"I so swear," Kasrigan said, and repeated that oath pretty much word for word. The pirate captain nodded, and the other man standing by the wizard, the one who hadn't lost his clothes, untied the wizard's wrists.
"Now," the wizard said, standing up and rubbing his wrists to get blood circulating in them, "who seems to be most badly hurt?"
