Lucius stood at the prow of Lupin’s ship the next morning, girded in armor. He puffed his chest full of air, tasting the morning dew upon the wind, and said, “Smells like smoke.”
Lupin had just strolled up beside him, not a drop of iron on his person. The merchant wore nothing but silk and linen, his only accessory a piece of brass fashioned to look like two fish chasing one another’s tails. Unfortunately for him, no prayer to the goddess Saphira would be answered in those waters. “It does? All I smell is brimstone and salt. If that smells like smoke to you, you have a peculiar history with fire.”
“Perhaps I do,” Lucius said, but his mind was on the future. Little Doe Island had already been spotted by the navigator. It was a measly thing, barely able to stand above the waves. Rather than a mountain peak, it looked more like an upthrust bit of stone from a caldera below. The captain had given the deep end a queer look and skirted the ship the other way, to the eastern shore.
Lupin twisted his mustache, freshly waxed. “Could you imagine how much tobacco could be grown here? If good, hardworking farmers came south? There’s a fortune to be made.”
“You don’t need to replace the locals for that,” Lucius said.
The merchant scoffed. “Then why haven’t they seized upon it by now? What do they grow anyway?”
“The ones with hunger for gold? They’ve got a different crop.”
“Kuku?”
“Yes, and that’s what I’m going to burn.”
The farm could be seen from shore, the whole of the island could be seen, given the slant. It bathed the crops in sunlight all through the morning and only waned in the evening. One decrepit well sat at the top, dug deep through the hill to drag water up and irrigate down to the shore. Given the volcanic soil, anything would have flourished. Cereal crops, tubers, tobacco, great trees or fruiting flowers. From the sandy shore, it looked like a carpet of colossal ferns danced in the misty wind.
There was a collection of mud and timber huts at the front, near the water and easily accessible from the docks. They weren’t completely abandoned, judging by a trail of cooking smoke no larger than a pipe smoker’s. As the ship drew closer, it had to navigate around hook laden fish nets. It smashed against some submerged timber as it drew to the deteriorating dock, the noise much like a trumpeter’s blast.
The noise made all manner of heads pop up. They emerged from windows, around stone fences, and from the midst of the field. Each stood transfixed for a moment too long. They might have been prepared, or at least understood if a fully armed detachment of soldiers emerged, but they only saw Lucius at first. One lone Vassish that leapt off the prow of a merchant sloop. The ship had other soldiers, a few requisitioned from the mine and two from the guard regiment that Sera had been training, but Lucius took point.
“March out here and surrender,” he bellowed, drawing out his infantry blade. A few of the faces vanished, darting to the shadows of the island and perhaps into unknown caves and estuaries. Their flight meant the abandonment of their crop, which was all the same to Lucius.
Not all fled, one swaggered out with a thumb in a rotten loincloth that barely covered his genitals. The farmer licked his teeth, what fangs he had left, and said something in the native dialect.
Lucius half turned and shouted, “Isalin!”
The old man of [Tongues] shouted back, “He asked who you are.”
“Lucius von Solhart, lord of the misty isles.”
“Mudder, lord of Little Doe Island,” the farmer said, mirroring Lucius’ tone of authority. He grinned and laughed.
Lucius didn’t banter words with him, he didn’t assert authority. Any claim of providence, of divine right, would have been on deaf ears even if the local could understand him. The reality was that Lucius stood upon ground Vassermark only ruled on paper. Throughout all of history, the one true way to know if you ruled a land was to extract taxation from them, be it gold or levied soldiers. That tithe of submission was the proof of governance, rather than protectorship. No tax collector had ever bothered Little Doe Island.
As such, Lucius did not set foot upon that plantation as the rightful lord, but as a conqueror.
He slashed the man’s cheek open, cut it to the bone and opened his mouth halfway across his face. The violence began then, like he had slit open the bottom of a coin purse. Before the other men had even dismounted the ship, a calamitous shouting gripped the island. Weapons of base and cruel design appeared in the hands of men. Bows with barbed heads. Axes made from the teeth of sharks. One even fought with a whipped laced with frog poison.
Lucius waded through these offenses, letting them break off across his steel armor. The arrows were made of mere bone. They cracked upon his armor. The shafts of wood were soft and splintered on impact. Wherever his blade met their ax, it cleaved through the twine and sinew securing the teeth. Their only advantage was in numbers. They eventually tried to surround him, three to one, with fish spears pointed at him like he was some feral hog to be captured. He attacked their weapons and made an opening, leaping from their trap and upon them.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
He spared what men he could, for questioning, but the entire conquest of the island took less time than it would have to walk to the cliff summit. With the sun not yet at noon, he had laid five men to their ends and defeated three more.
Lupin disembarked from the ship in time to see him rip a crude arrow from his arm. The barb kept him from pulling it free, so he had to snap it off and push it through. “You know,” the merchant said, skirting the draining blood of the ax fighter. “This isn’t my first time seeing violence, but you make my other scrapes look like child's play.”
“Thank you. Pirates?”
“Aillesterran, yes.”
“Not a very pleasant group, are they? I had my own run in with them before I came down here.”
The merchant scoffed. “I’m surprised it wasn’t after. They like to lurk the horizon. They’re like… scavengers. You know, there are wild dogs in the wastelands. They cackle like men, and–”
Lucius only half listened. He didn’t need any explanation of pirate behavior. With one ear open to nod along to the civilian’s story, he kicked open the doors on the farm huts. The mud shacks could hardly be called barns, but locks were an alien concept, as were most amenities. Curiously, he found a number of luxury goods. Tea sets gilded and painted. A golden pipe sculpted like a dragon’s mouth. Other such things, some of which he pocketed for himself, which had clearly been handed over as payment for the kuku bud–pawning at what must have been robbery rates.
Then he found what he had been hoping for. Amid barrels and sacks, there was one cinched tight and unlabelled. It took a good amount of guess work, but he eventually found the right one, and revealed fifty pounds of the illicit crop.
“What’s that?” Lupin asked.
“Their last harvest.”
The merchant peered out at the field, at the dark nuts sprinkled between the leaves. “But they look ready to harvest again.”
“It’s a fertile crop.”
“Remarkably so,” Lupin said, stroking his mustache. “How much do you think that bag is worth?”
Lucius slung it over his shoulder and said, “A long vacation in the mines.”
“If it weren’t illegal. Smugglers value.”
Lucius cocked his head at him. “Are you asking me the price of subverting my own edict?”
The merchant paled and backed, stumbling excuses over one another. He hadn’t said a single sentence of consequence by the time Lucius deposited the bag at the rotting dock and returned to the field with a torch. He started to walk the line, touching the flame to plant after plant. “Get back to the ship,” he called, ordering his men away from the intoxicating smoke. He himself kept a bit of wet cloth across his face and his breaths shallow.
As the flames consumed the field, the wounded farmers began to wail like animals. They threw themselves to the ground and wept. Lucius strode past them and said, “Gag them if you need to.”
“That’s all?” Lupin asked, clambering back up the gang plank of his ship.
Lucius dropped the sack of loot beside the ship’s mast and said, “That’s all. Now we’ve got informants and something they want. We’ll turn up another lead soon enough.”
Lupin was left to pace the ship, fussing with his coat and muttering to himself. The captain in his employ kept his mouth shut and ordered the shoving off of the ship. Lucius directed him back to Aliston, and he made some scowls at the sun. The quickest way back took them through a number of sea channels he didn’t know personally. He complained about tides and split currents, of surprise reefs they might find, and began to argue with the navigator. The two of them fell into an argument in the guttural trade tongue of sailors that bastardized half a dozen languages in the most simplistic of grammar.
Nothing they said changed the amount of time it would take to return to proper port, and that left plenty of time for Lupin to make his pitch. “My lord, if I may,” he began. “I understand that you don’t wish such a rug to be sold in Vassermark, but if people are in such demand for this, then there may be other uses.”
Lucius had been looking for a distraction from Sammy’s work stitching the prisoners up, and enthused the man. “And what would that be, Lupin?”
“What if I sold it elsewhere? Up and down the Giordanan coast perhaps. I could even bring it all the way to aillesterra. I don’t have the connections to get it to the central kingdoms, and I understand that would hardly be acceptable, what with their near vassalage. But, is this not the kind of product that could be used to extract wealth from the enemies of the kingdom?”
Lucius made the mistake of considering the idea. He frowned and looked to the sky, because he was considering how much about the demon to explain to Lupin.
The merchant took it as encouragement. “If it enfeebles their workers, isn’t that all the better? Imagine the twin fountains of gold and war, can’t you picture it now?”
“I can, yes, because it would look like exactly what has done to us… you almost make a good argument that this might be the work of Aillesterra right now. Don’t you think they’d already be wise to the kuku bud? If you were caught bringing this to their port, I imagine they’d flay you in the street.”
“Smuggling exists in all cities, Lucius.”
“I’m sure it does, but–”
“Ship!” the navigator bellowed. Every head on the deck spun to face him as he swung his hand over the railing. All expected to see some measly fishing vessel. A trumped up rowboat to drag nets across reefs. At the most, perhaps a small smuggling vessel fit to shuttle in the night. What they saw instead was twin masted and cruising across waves. It cut through the channels, careening at them while a green flag billowed at the peak of the mast. Lucius didn’t need to see the insignia to recognize it.
“Well then, they found us,” he said, striding to the prow as the crew scrambled to their stations, for pirates had set their sights upon Lupin’s craft.