Blood and Steel (The Cor Chronicles Volume I) Read online

“Boy, you are too sickly to serve aboard my ship,” the captain had said like every captain before him. A light breeze blew in from the bay across the docks where ships of all sizes loaded and unloaded passengers, crew and cargo. It smelled oddly of salt.

  He was an interesting character, from the continent of Tigol across the Southern Sea, which in and of itself was not odd as many merchant captains hailed from that land. But most of them were smaller in stature than Westerners, standing no more than five and a half feet tall with wiry, athletic builds and stylized, pointed mustaches that sprung from either end of the upper lip. This man was a Shet, from the great desert in the center of that continent rather than the coastal trading cities.

  Like most of his ethnicity, Captain Naran stood tall and wide, extremely well muscled in core and limb. The epicanthic folds of his eyes were far less developed than the other Tigoleans, causing them to appear more closed from the sun than his fellows, and from exposure to the sun, his skin appeared more dusky brown than a shade of yellow. He spoke Western well, though heavily accented, and it took Cor a few moments to decipher his words.

  “Sir, I am well. I can work,” Cor answered him.

  “You look as if you just crawled from the grave. At the least, my men would view a cabin boy of your pallor as bad luck, and I think you would not survive the first voyage.”

  “I survived working with my father on the farm sir. I’ll be fine,” Cor replied.

  “Why aren’t you on your farm now boy?” Naran asked.

  Cor paused before answering; he had lied to every other ship captain and met with no success in finding one who would take him. It was time for honesty.

  “I ran away sir. I stole a horse from the barn and rode to the city. It took a few days. I sold the horse when I got here.”

  “Why run from home? Did your parents ill treat you?”

  “No sir,” Cor answered, and he left it at that.

  The captain pondered this for a moment before asking, “And why do you look as if you are walking dead?”

  “I do not know sir. My parents said it happened a few days after I was born.”

  “You are not ill?” he asked.

  “I cough sometimes,” Cor answered truthfully and with a shrug. “Sometimes, I cough bad, but I’m used to it.”

  “How old are you boy?”

  “Thirteen this year sir.”

  “Very well,” Captain Naran said, apparently satisfied. “You seem to be well mannered and able, which is all I can ask from a cabin boy. The wages were posted, and if you are in fact not too sick to live through our voyage south, I will keep you on. Report to the Crewmaster by dawn tomorrow. What is your name boy?”

  “Cor Pelson.”

  “Westerners,” Captain Naran sighed as he wrote the boy’s name upon a scroll full of names. “You name your children as if anyone cares whose son you are.”

  And as such, Cor began his sailing career. With nowhere else to be, he reported aboard ship immediately and was assigned quarters, little more than a small closet, that immediately adjoined Captain Naran’s and the main deck. It had just enough room for him to curl up into a ball with a straw pillow and wool blanket, with two makeshift shelves for a few belongings. He learned to be careful not to hit his head on them when he stood.

  Tigoleans dominated the crew, and most of these from the northern coasts, though there were also a few other Shet. Mixed in were a few Westerners, making about a third of the crew. They had the typical dark hair, a mix of browns and black, and white skin of their race, though heavily tanned. And what Captain Naran had said seemed at least partially true; some of the sailors eyed Cor with fear and distrust, though the more grizzled veterans carried on about their duties without pause. Cor supposed once you had seen one oddity, you grew numb to others.

  Cor was a Westerner of course, with nearly jet black hair and gray eyes, not overly uncommon. Twelve years of age (and well on his way to thirteen) when he first joined Naran’s crew, he was about five and a half feet tall and apparently in good physical health except for one notable fact. His skin held the ashen pallor of the grave, solid pale gray across every inch of him without one hint of blemish or variation. Once he had been pink as any newborn, and at the tender age of three days began a horrific coughing fit flecked with blood. The village priest said he saw a great sickness in Cor, and that the babe likely would not survive his first few weeks, much less his first winter. His color changed during that first attack; Cor unnerved nearly everyone who saw him.

  Cor’s cough attacks came occasionally, but not once during his first voyage, which took nearly a month. In fact in his first week something completely unexpected, to Cor at least, attacked him instead - he could not keep anything at all on his stomach for the first three days. A farmer’s son, Cor had never set foot on a boat of any kind and seasickness was not something he knew about or anticipated. He spent the entire first day voiding his stomach of any and all contents and the following two days dry heaving every time he attempted to stand or move about. By the fourth day aboard ship, he could move about without collapsing and found he could actually begin eating again, though he was in no hurry to do so. The Crewmaster gave him leave of his duties for those first few days, not out of any kind of sympathy but because seasickness was largely unavoidable.

  Cor’s duties seemed light compared to the others aboard ship; he largely attended to the captain’s needs and kept the officer’s cabins clean. He took his meals with the captain, and at night all of the officers supped together, an event in which he learned to enjoy greatly. The crewmen on the other hand had a hard job it seemed, constantly scrubbing the deck, scraping the hull or attending sails or any number of odd looking rope contraptions. Cor Pelson was a farmer’s son, and he’d never seen a sailing vessel or even how one operated. Watching it up close dispelled any romanticism he may have had.

  While at the docks, Cor noticed a huge difference between the fat ships of the West and these slimmer Tigolean vessels. Western ships were wide and heavy oaken things that sat low in the water and required massive, magnificent sails to push them around. The shipwrights of the southern continent built long narrow ships that scarcely seemed to touch the water with one large fan shaped sail dead center that could be rotated to better catch the wind. Similar but much smaller sails could also be found at bow and stern. They opened like an exotic paper fan, and when they caught the wind the ship would spring forth like a crossbow bolt. While Tigolean ships could not carry the quantity of cargo of their Western counterparts, they more than made up for it in speed and the timeliness of their deliveries. This also made them the ship of choice for smugglers, refugees and criminals.

  Over the two month stint across the Narrow Sea to a port in northeast Tigol, it became extremely clear that Captain Naran was none of these things. He loved life and the feel of the wind in his hair, the misty spray of the sea upon his face and the sun on his body. He’d left the Shetlands when he was younger than Cor and found the sea, and he discovered nothing in the world to be more dangerous and free. As master of his own vessel, he commanded his own fate and forced the treacherous waters of the Narrow Sea to take him where he willed. These things Cor learned merely by watching and listening to the large Shet; Captain Naran talked to him often about his life, offering stories and wisdom without any real expectation of an answer.

  Cor simply listened.