Son of the Sea, Daughter of the Sun by Marc Graham

Author:Marc Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amphorae Publishing Group, LLC
Published: 2019-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

39

THE STORM RAGED through the rest of the grey day. With darkness came the calm and a damp, fitful night. Iudila’s men slept in shifts, one of them keeping watch at all times.

The night passed without incident. In the new dawn the villagers took the pirates back to their clearing. The woman and the boy Iudila had saved led him by the hand, while the others danced and sang, picking at the pirates’ clothing and whiskers as they went.

“How can you stand to have them touch you?” Thanos demanded of Iudila after shooing away one of the children. “They butchered more than half our men.”

Iudila’s stomach tightened but he kept his voice even.

“You should be grateful I called you back. Otherwise, you might be with them now. If they’d listened to me, none of it would have happened.”

“The men meant no harm.”

“Armed strangers arrive on your shore, shouting like devils, then chase after your women and children. You wouldn’t feel the need to defend yourself?”

Thanos made no reply.

“Every one of their deaths is a knife in my gut,” Iudila said, “but they brought it on themselves. Doing harm to these people won’t bring them back. Anyway, I thought you’d be glad.”

“Glad?”

“Your share of the treasure has more than doubled.”

Iudila ignored the Greek’s curses and tried to sing along with the villagers as they entered the clearing.

The storm had reduced the place to nothing more than a muddy swamp. The villagers seemed to care little as they set about collecting fallen trees and branches, cleaning up as best they could.

“Can you take us back to the beach?” Iudila asked the woman.

He used hand signs to try to get his point across. She eventually caught his meaning and called to one of the other women. The pair of them gestured for Iudila and his men to follow.

It was past midday when they reached the sheltered beach. Dirty runnels cut their way to the shore, scarring the land as the flood waters returned to the sea by whatever path they could. The front line of trees had been flattened by the wind, making passage from the jungle to the beach almost impossible. Iudila and his men squeezed, scraped and crawled their way through the debris, only to find a beach littered with death.

Shellfish, squid, and seaweed baked under the sun and filled the air with the stench of decay. The only sign of Mari-Nadris was the anchor, nearly buried in sand and closer to the tree line than it had been when they’d left the ship. Dingha tugged on the rope and raised it from its bed of sand as he followed it to the trees. When he reached the end of the line, he found it attached to its cleat, still fastened to its scrap of deck.

“Good knot,” Iudila said.

He led his men into the trees, but it was no use. Mari-Nadris was dead, her body broken and strewn across the jungle floor, among the branches and—in one case—driven through the heart of a tree trunk.

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