Chapter 32: Home for the Harvest

We still had almost forty cargo ships and we spread the troops out among them all to give them some space for the trip home. We had a lot of wounded and injured men and they needed the room.

I hated having to leave our dead behind here on the Islands, but we had no way to preserve their bodies so we had to bury them either where they fell or at sea. Their families would get their pay and their share of the loot. If we could find them. A lot of our men had no families. Their share could go to help support Hunter Island’s orphans, all those children who had lost their parents.

Sailing home, we all noticed the difference immediately. Sailing downwind was much easier than tacking across the wind. The waves all seemed to be longer with them headed away from us instead of crashing into our bows, and the ships all rode easily over them. We’d seen it before around Hunter Island, but this time it seemed to mean “You can relax now. You’re done and on your way home.”

We weren’t done, though. As long as we were around the Pirate Isles we could expect to be fighting at any time. I put Filo in command of our ‘scouting force’, all of our brigs except for Shark, Flying Arrow, and Eagle 2, and he pushed ahead of the fleet looking for trouble. We kept Eaglet busy going back and forth between his squadron and the main fleet.

We weren’t even out of the Cut yet when his line caught a ship coming south. We could see the fight on the horizon. The ships joined immediately, so our men must have wanted to talk instead of just sinking whoever it was. By the time we caught up to them, though, the unknown ship was already sailing north again and all we got was Wrong Place, waiting for us to give us the news.

It had been a ship from Big Isle. Actually, it was from one of the smaller islands around it, but they considered them all to be part of “Big Isle”. They were coming to see if Alfred or Vernon or someone would hire them to fight against the King on Central Isle. Was everyone from Big Isle a mercenary? What would they do if they ran into another ship from Big Isle, one which had been hired by the King? Would they fight, or would they stop and have dinner together?

The last ship we’d seen from Big Isle had wanted to fight for the King, because he was going to win and they wanted to be on the winning side. This one wanted to help Alfred because they didn’t want the King to win. I couldn’t help but think that they probably just flipped a coin to decide who to support any time there was a war and then came up with a good excuse for their decision.

This one had wanted to get the news, and maybe do a little pirating if our ships weren’t well defended. They had decided to talk when they saw all the weapons and armor, and when they had been sandwiched between two of our ships they had agreed that surrendering was best for everyone concerned. Filo had simply disarmed them all, taken everything of value from their ship, and told them to go back home before they got hurt.

They probably hadn’t liked being treated like children, but what were they going to do? All the swords, knives, and axes they had lost probably cost Big Isle even more than the ship itself had. Big Isle still had enough trees to build more ships, but that crew could not participate in any more fighting until they came up with some more weapons.

They would also spread the word about how we had dismissed them. Some would get angry and go looking for a fight with us. Others would think about it and decide not to. In the long run, the troublemakers would all get killed and the thoughtful ones would raise children.

When we got to the mouth of David’s Cut we decided to just head straight east until we’d passed Central Isle, since it was pretty much due east of Mountain Isle. We were already on the north side of Mountain Isle, so by heading due east we would stay north of Central Isle, too. Maybe not well clear, but we shouldn’t run into it in the middle of the night.

We reduced sail at night, but that was mostly just to keep the fleet together. With everyone lighting a lantern, anyone who was getting too far ahead or behind would know they needed to do something.

Filo kept his ships out ahead and to both sides, and after a couple of days one of the scouts came up from the south to let us know that Central Isle was well over the horizon and we could probably steer a little more southward.

A day or two after that and we had three ships coming up to us from the south. The one in the middle was Cleaver, one of our brigs, and the other two were strange cogs. When they got close enough, I went out to meet them in Shark. I took Eagle 2 with me, just to make sure we could handle anything that happened.

We rafted together so we could all sing Kumbaya, and several people came across to Shark. One introduced himself as Captain Samuel, a senior captain serving the King and commanding both cogs. They had run across one of our ships, and then been surrounded by the rest of Filo’s squadron while they talked. Apparently there had been some question about the obvious absurdity of any claim that a Hunter Island fleet even existed in the first place. There was no way such a fleet could be cruising around the Pirate Isles even if Filo had a half-dozen ships with him.

The claim seemed a lot more reasonable when he was standing on a ship that was at the same time both bigger than any of theirs and faster than any of theirs, watching forty or so ships pass us by. Samuel seemed to be a reasonable man who was willing to discuss our differences, so I offered him some ale and we talked for a bit on Shark’s quarterdeck while all the transports sailed on by.

I didn’t want to threaten him or scare him. He seemed like a good guy. We were just two good friends having a pint and talking about our problems.

The bottom line from our point of view was that we were tired and we were all going home for now, but that we would be back come next summer to discuss things with his king. That discussion would probably take place among the burning ruins of his home and involve a sword or an axe. The good captain could tell the king and his advisors whatever he wanted to, but we understood that saying anything that would get him killed may not be wise.

The bottom line from his point of view was that it didn’t matter whether our demands were reasonable or even possible. The King of all the Pirate Isles was not going to accept any limit to his authority, and regardless of what his advisors wanted he would not listen to demands that he stop doing anything.

We weren’t interested in exchanging envoys with the King and passing messages back and forth for several years while he continued to do whatever he wanted. We also weren’t going to demand tribute or anything like that from the King, but absent some kind of solid evidence that he had changed his ways we expected to be talking to a new King sometime next summer. Whoever it was could agree to our demands the way Michael and Andrew had, or we would simply destroy Central Isle the same way we had destroyed North and East Isles.

We weren’t going to waste a lot of time talking about it, either. His king had all winter to think about it. If he was going to be agreeable, that would be wonderful. Another Pirate Isle that wasn’t going to cause trouble for us anymore. If he wasn’t, well, that would be why we were going to bring the fleet back with us. We’d gotten an immense amount of loot from this raid, and our men would be looking forward to finding out how much loot they could get from the King of all the Pirate Isles.

I did suggest that he send someone, or have his king send someone if that was the way it worked, to go talk with Michael, who was at least the new Mayor of Safety Bay and might be Prince of South Island by now as well as Andrew Black, who was the new Lord of North Harbor. He should also talk to anyone he could get to talk to him from Mountainside City and North Isle and East Isle.

Again, the good captain may want to be a bit slow to pass this on to his king, in case he was the sort of person who liked to kill the messenger, but if the pirate raids didn’t stop the King of all the Pirate Isles was going to get to experience a pirate raid first-hand.

In any event, if he wanted to fight for his king when we came back then he could, but I was going to recommend that he went home and spent some time with his wife and children before coming out to fight us. He wouldn’t be able to do that, afterwards.

I gave him a refill while we were talking, but he refused a second refill. He said that if he had any more they would claim he was drunk and no one would listen to him. I wished him and his men good luck, and hopefully he would be able to avoid the fighting next summer.

That was the last bit of excitement and drama we had in the Pirate Isles before we went home.

The council spent a lot of time talking about the men. We needed to get them all home as quickly as we could, but we also needed to pay them everything they were owed. The loot would be almost impossible to share out fairly, but we could start with giving them all their basic pay. We’d been gone for almost three months, excuse me, more than eighty days and it would be over ninety by the time anyone got home. Even the rawest recruit was an experienced veteran by now and we’d promised them two Pinches per day. Even without the loot, every man with us was due more than forty Quads.

No one argued against paying them all their basic pay in whatever form they wanted, plus one-quarter of their share of the loot and last a token that said we still owed them the other three-quarters of a share and would pay it once we’d figured out how much that really was.

I frankly had no idea how to total the loot. All we could do was estimate it. We had each ship-captain do an inventory as best he could of everything brought aboard his ship for the trip home, and estimate the total value. Then we made fun of Aldo as he tried to use his limited math to add all the ship’s totals together.

Some ships sent estimates in the hundreds of Conchs. Other ships claimed treasure worth tens of thousands of Conchs. We had little enough to do on the way home, so we put together a couple of survey teams. Each one had a senior soldier, a shopkeeper, and at least one of our trader-captains. The teams went to each ship in turn and validated their estimate on their loot’s value. Any time they felt that a soldier or sailor was claiming an inflated value for the stuff he’d brought on board, they simply told him that the item was his, at that value. End of problem.

Of course, that led to people lowering the claimed value of their stuff. If the survey team felt that something was grossly under-valued, they offered to buy it for that value plus some small extra. If the holder objected, the value got raised up to where it should be.

I stayed completely out of it. I was familiar with what everyday objects cost on Chaos, but I had no business appraising valuables and unusual objects.