Journey to Fusang
by William Sanders

1

And how was I to know she was the High King's own daughter? Besides, she swore she was fifteen.

(You'd have believed her too—or pretended you did, after one good look. Slim as a willow, white as milk, great cataracts of red hair falling clear down to a truly demented little behind…but I digress.)

After all, it was not as if being offspring of the High King represented any major distinction, not when the great flat-footed fool had seeded half of Ireland with his casual begettings; just as well, too, considering the boggle he usually made of the King business on the rare occasions his attention drifted higher than his navel, but never mind that. Yet the word was that Deirdre was his personal delight, and he was hot to settle accounts with the seducer who had, in a manner of speaking, got him in the grandfatherly way.

Not that the High King's authority ran very large, his office being mainly traditional and ceremonial—we Irish have not paid much attention to any sort of authority, barring to some extent the Church, since the Normans went back to Britain a couple of centuries ago. Still, he had his little private army of kerns and gallowglasses and assorted shillelagh-swinging louts, more than enough to take care of a lone man with no important connections.

Then he posted that damned reward on my head, and life became almost unbearably interesting for Finn of No Fixed Abode…

It was the reward, in fact, that pushed the situation past any chance of a reasonable solution.

There I was, sitting in a rather low-class inn in Cork town, drinking overpriced and understrength poteen and trying to think what I should do next, when a great baying voice from the next table called out, "Why, look here—is this not Wandering Finn the Juggler, on whose head the High King has laid a price of twenty pieces of gold?"

He was standing up and pointing before I even had him in focus: a large and unreasonably ugly party with no hair on his head but a pair of bushy eyebrows, which were drawn together in a scowl that might have represented hostility or merely the effort of trying to conceive of the number twenty without consulting his toes. He had a thick and professional-looking blackthorn stick in the hand he wasn't using to point with; and next to him stood another individual so close to him for ugliness they had to be blood relatives, for the good Lord would not do that to more than one family. The second plug-ugly was in the process of drawing a distressingly long sword.

"Don't touch him," the bald one added to the room at large as they split up and came at me round the table from opposite directions. "We saw him first."

What could I do? I abhor violence, but I abhor it a great deal more keenly when it is directed at myself than otherwise.

I palmed the little knife from my sleeve and put it into the swordsman's throat—good throw that, full length of the table and no time to get set—and ducked under the shillelagh and fed the other one a stool square in the middle of his big overactive gob, catching the blackthorn as he dropped it and finishing him off with a crack to the side of the neck just under the ear; then I was through the crowd, over the tables, and out the back door. Thank the Saints they had a back door, though if they hadn't they would have acquired one at that time.

And that, I thought pretty sourly as I slipped through the alleys and muddy streets in the gathering darkness, had done it well and truly. The business with the High King would have blown over in time, but a killing—probably two killings; I had put a lot into that last blow of the blackthorn—would mean family looking forblood into the next generation. Judging from the looks of those two, I didn't want to meet any of their relations, even socially.

Clearly it was high time I took myself abroad. Ireland was growing a bit crowded.

A brief modest introduction here.

As you will have gathered, I am he who was known as Wandering Finn, or in the elegant form Finn of No Fixed Abode; and at other times and places I have been called other things. Many, many other things.

My father was none other than the great bard Mad Colin, of whom you may have heard. He was the author of the well-known song that goes:

"Toora-lie-oora-lie-oora-lie

Toora-lie-oora-lie-aye

Toora-lie-oora-lie-oora-lie

Toora-lie-oora-lie-aye."

Or some such; I never had much of a gift for tunes.

My own talent ran to other branches of what you might call the performing arts. Perhaps I take after my mother, who told fortunes—palms, Tarot, stars, customer's choice; she'd have had a go at reading a sheep's shoulder-blade if a Mongol had turned up with the silver and a desire to know his fate—or maybe it comes of spending my formative years amongst itinerant players, mountebanks, gypsies, and the like.

I can, for example, juggle anything I can lift. I can do things with knives to make your ballocks shrivel, and I can work conjuring tricks slick enough to baffle a Chinese magician. (This last is no idle brag; I have done it. Once, in a mining town on the Tuolumne—but there, I get ahead of myself.) Thus I have always been able to make a living, anywhere there were enough people for an audience, particularly if I can pick up a well-made girl to be my assistant and flash a bit of skin at the right moments.

Most of my education was received from what you might call the less respectable fringe of society—though the monks who had me for several winters did manage to teach me how to read and write and to get along in Latin; I always was quick to pick up languages. I could pick a pocket before I could count past ten, and locks fairly wet themselves in their eagerness to yield to my caresses. I had also a certain facility with games of chance and skill, especially dice, and I was expert in such diversions as the pea beneath the nutshell and the Saracen game of the three cards.

Perhaps I should also explain that I have always been fond of animals, and tried to show them all the Christian kindness I could. Many a savage watchdog, made vicious through ill-treatment, can be soothed and settled with remarkable ease if you know how; thus they do not injure themselves lunging against inhumane collars or charging about in the dark, or give themselves sore throats from barking in the night air. Then, too, I hate to see a fine horse neglected, and so I have from time to time felt it my duty to take such an animal out for some much-needed exercise, and afterward to try and find it a more worthy and appreciate owner. Even so lowly a creature as the common chicken, perhaps suffering from the chill on a winter's night in some drafty barn—well, I'll not apologize for having a soft heart. As they taught us at St. Dismas, we must care for God's creatures.

At the time I am telling you about, when I began to feel that Ireland offered inadequate opportunities for a man of my talents, I was a youngish fellow in the prime of life, having turned twenty-nine only about eleven months before. I was, and remain, of average if not rather shortish build, wiry rather than heavily-muscled; and, though foreigners think of Irishmen as generally fair and red-haired, my family on both sides always ran to the dark sort, so that I have at various times been mistaken for a gypsy or even a Moor. There is a belief that we black Irish are an older folk, a race from the days before the big pale Celts came shambling ashore; I do not know about that.

If it is of any conceivable interest, I was no more than mediumly well hung. Ah well, as Gypsy Davy, my stepfather and knife-throwing teacher, used to say, the equipment does not matter if the technique is there.

I believe that is all anyone should need to know about me, for now.

There had been the Devil's own storm the night before and on into the morning, so I could count on finding at least a few ships in the harbor; with any luck at all, I would even have some choice as to destinations. Not that I was in any situation to be picky—rather than stay and face that lot of hellhounds on my trail, I was prepared to climb aboard just about any rotten old tub bound for other shores, and kiss its deck and the captain's arse as well. Still, all else being equal, there were places I had no desire to visit.

(Britain, for one. I'd been there, thank you kindly, more than once, too; we played any number of fairs and festivals and the like there when I was a lad, and I made the tour several summers on my own in later years. Even picked up a bit of silver entertaining various minor-grade nobles in their dank old castles, though it was just barely worth enduring the smell. The Anglo-Normans have no sense of humor at all, the Welsh always want to sing along, and the Scots, listen, don't get me started on the Scots.)

Scrambling down through the brush towards the dark strand, I considered that it might be better not to go mucking about the waterfront if I could avoid it. It was entirely possible that some of the people looking for Finn the Fugitive just might have the wit to look for me there; even they would see the logical connection between ships and a hunted man…and even if they didn't find me by the dockside before I could talk someone into taking me aboard, surely they would eventually think to start interrogating officers and crew: "Short dark fellow, clean-shaven, big nose, probably asking about outbound ships—" A bare mention of shares in the reward and I'd be up for it; I've never in my life met a sea captain who wasn't a treacherous bastard at bottom. Nor very many sailors who could keep their mouths shut; there's something about the seafaring life that makes men garrulous as old women. Ask any waterfront barkeep.

Anyway, I'd already had a look along the local waterfront—to give undeserved dignity to a collection of primitive wooden piers and a few ramshackle storehouses; Cork is not your great international port, you know—earlier in the day, when I still had at least the illusion of options. As I recalled, the selection hadn't been very promising: local coasters, mostly, and a couple of wallowing old freighters from Britain, dirty as pisspots and about as seaworthy.

Looking across the water now, though, I could make out the dim shapes of a few larger craft anchored out in deep water; on their way elsewhere, no doubt, just ducked in to wait out the storm and maybe take on fresh water, and waiting now for the morning tide or whatever sailors wait for. There's my answer, I said to myself, but how to get out there? Swimming, in my view, is a thing you do only to keep from drowning, and I could never even do that for more than a few minutes at a stretch.

But a little poking along the shore turned up a perfectly good curragh—little flimsy cockleshell of a boat, if you don't know, wicker framework covered with hide, like what the Pawnees call a "bull boat." This one was smaller than most of the breed, no doubt the property of some solitary fisherman; it had been covered with some bits of brush in an ineffective effort to hide it from thieves, bad cess to the mistrustful bastard. Not much of a boat, but it would serve my present modest needs.

I knew nothing about boats, except that they were things you stepped into after paying some forelock-tugging half-wit an exorbitant fee to ferry you across something too deep or wide to wade; but I have seen experienced sailors go blue in the face trying to manage a curragh for the first time. It is so light it sits on top of the water rather than in it—as sailors say, it draws little water—and so it will go sideways almost as readily as straight ahead. And I didn't know how to row, and the business of facing in one direction whilst trying to go in the other must surely require a pact with Satanic powers. I finally turned round and paddled clumsily with one oar, on first one side and then the other, and began to make some sort of progress.

In the last few minutes, as the bulk of the ship rose up before me against the stars—odd how huge all ships look from the waterline—I wondered whether I'd gone to all this trouble for nothing. I had no real idea how much the going fare might be to wherever this particular vessel might be bound, except that it would probably be doubled as soon as the captain figured out that a man who comes aboard in such a manner and at such an hour is unlikely to be a normal traveler off on a holiday. This, he would surely say to himself, is clearly a fellow in no position to drive hard bargains; let us skin him…Of course, these as-yet-unidentified sailormen might also simply confiscate all I had on me, crack me on the head with a belaying pin or some such nautical implement, and drop me over the side. Who would ever know?

They wouldn't be getting much if they did; and if they didn't, it was going to take some powerful persuasion on my part, because I wasn't packing all that much portable wealth about me. Most of my possessions were, as far as I knew, still back at that damned inn—including all my juggling and conjuring paraphernalia, to say nothing of certain tools for readjusting stuck doors and windows and the like—and I had only the clothes I stood in, and a modest amount of silver, and a few bits of personal jewelry. Even my good knife had been left in that overweight spalpeen's gullet. Not, on the whole, a great deal of capital on which to begin a new life abroad; and I wasn't even abroad yet. Just have to play whatever cards you get at a time like that and hope to stay in the game until you can get your own hands on the deck.

The curragh bumped against the ship's side and began rubbing up and down against the rough planking of the hull as the little waves rose and fell. (It struck me briefly that I'd been lucky in one respect: any real sea running and I'd never have pulled it off.) Somewhere above me in the darkness, a voice called out something sharp in a language I didn't recognize. A moment later there was the arse-puckering click of a musket being cocked. Looking up, I could see the unmistakable glow of a slow-match.

I waved my arms frantically, nearly overturning my ridiculous boat, and babbled something incoherent to the effect that I was essentially friendly. There was a long pause and then a different voice spoke, in what sounded like the same tongue.

I hadn't thought of this angle, and I should have. I called back, loud as I could and leaving plenty of time between words: "Does…anyone…here…understand…Irish?"

I heard a quick muttering of several voices—by now there seemed to be quite a few people hanging over the rail; there was the match-glow of another musket, too—and then someone called down, "Speaky English?"

Ah. This was more like it. Speak it? I could write original poetry in it—and had, as a youthful seducer, though that's neither here nor there. I shouted, "I can. May I come aboard?" and after some more mutterings they tossed down a rope ladder, and I scuttled gratefully up the side and over the rail. Halfway up I realized I hadn't secured the curragh, which would now be bobbing gaily off across the harbor. Better make this one good, then.

By now someone had brought up a big lantern, and I could see the welcoming committee. It was not the sort of sight you would voluntarily choose to look at, close on and at that hour of the night. A more villainous set offaces I would not care to imagine, and I've seen some lovelies in my day…and beyond the basic unsightliness God had inflicted on them at birth, most appeared to have been extensively remodeled by various impacts and collisions. There were enough scars, broken noses, and ripped ears to illustrate a medical book, and so many missing parts—teeth, fingers, a couple of eyes and no fancy business about patches to cover empty sockets, either—that you'd wonder whether they had the makings of even one whole man amongst them. All of them were clutching weapons, mostly edged and altogether too long and sharp-looking for my taste.

There was something else, I saw now: they were all of them black. Not black as a black African is black, you understand, but black as we Irish use the term—dark, swarthy, and more so than mere sun and wind would account for; and they all had big beaky noses, and twisted rags wrapped round their heads. Moors, by God! I should have known. The ship was too big and well-built to belong to anyone else in that part of the world.

The most horrible-looking brigand of the lot, a great fat toad of a man in a big turban and a kind of striped robe, was looking me up and down with great interest and fingering an ugly curved sword. Now he said in a harsh croak, "I am captain this ship. What you want?"

Keeping my words and sentences short, I told him I was looking for a passage abroad. I was about to add a query as to his fee when he laughed noisily and said something to the others in that language that sounded like a man with a bad cold trying to breathe.

They all burst into a storm of cackles, with a distinctly mocking note, and several of them pointed at me and made derisive-sounding remarks. To me the captain said, "You want go but you no ask where, huh? You no care where you go? Maybe you want bad get out of Ire-land, maybe peoples after you. I think you bad man." He guffawed noisily. His breath would have crumbled a castle wall. "How much money you got?"

We haggled and lied for the next good piece of an hour at least, and he blustered and bullied and I evaded and poormouthed, and the crew watched with great interest—one skinny sod with a missing hand seemed to be interpreting for them—and eventually we struck a figure which I swore would leave me a ruined and penniless vagabond on the Earth and he swore was so ridiculous he would surely go to Paradise since Allah was known to bless the hopelessly mad. Or words to that effect; some of his exclamations were in Arabic, which I'd never even heard spoken before.

Actually I was a trifle surprised at the final price, which seemed fairly reasonable when you considered that he could have soaked me for everything I had and I'd have had no choice but to pay up. I wound up with at least a handful of coins in my little bag—enough, anyway, to stake me to a few games and wagers once I got ashore again, and that was all I asked to set myself up just about anywhere in the world. It was also agreed that I would lend a hand about the ship during the voyage, within the limits of my nonexistent nautical skills.

I asked, then, where we were bound, and he laughed again, whacked me on the shoulder with one fat hand, and said, "You in luck, Irish man. We go Tangier."

Tangier? Even I'd heard of Tangier: the great Moroccan port where the Mediterranean and the Atlantic came together and the big ships sailed for the New World. Everything passed through Tangier, from Persian slaves to Mexican gold, and it was said that you might stand on a corner and stop twenty people at random and get your replies in twenty different languages. It sounded like the kind of town where a man of my talents and propensities could go far—and besides, there'd be no more of these damned bone-freezing northern winters and endless dripping mists. Even before this trouble with the High King came up, I'd been thinking for some time about moving to warmer parts.

I said, "Well, where shall I sleep?"

He gestured in a general way about the deck. "Any place you find, nobody there first." Something seemed to strike him as funny and he gave me a rotten-toothed grin. "Sleep in hold if you want."

"On the cargo?" I asked innocently, and got another of his ear-bending laughs. He spoke quickly to the others and they all exploded into howls and hoots, slapping their bare legs and pointing at me, the ones who had enough fingers. I wondered what I'd said that was so hilarious.

Gesturing for me to follow, the captain waddled over to the lip of a large open hatchway and grunted a command. The sailor with the lantern scuttled forward and held it high.

"Sleep on cargo, no good," my host chortled. "Cargo maybe not like. Look."

From the darkness of the hold, round white objects caught the light and then resolved themselves into pale human faces that stared blankly up at me. A powerful rancid smell drifted up and attacked my nostrils.

"Good cargo," the captain said cheerfully, "but hold no place to sleep."

Well, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I thought disgustedly, and hasn't this been a day with all the bark on it? First I get myself outlawed and have to flee my native land; and now, with a whole harbor full of shipping to choose from, I manage to take passage on a slaver.