Aboard a pirate ship in the Gulf of Aden, Shahar survives by disguising herself as a man - a violent and religious man, who her crewmates leave well alone. Repaying their debt to the Imam of Oman, the pirates are bringing home a precious cargo; but it is a cargo which puts Shahar at risk of losing it all...
As a pirate terrorising the Red Sea, Shahar has long survived by disguising herself as a fearsome and solitary man. But on a return trip to Oman, carrying the Iman's precious cargo, Shahar's identity is not the only thing she's in danger of losing...
CW: explores themes of both a sexual and racial nature
Stories from the Hearth is an experimental storytelling experience ft. truly original fiction and thoughtfully produced soundscapes. The aim of this podcast is to rekindle its listeners' love for the ancient art of storytelling (and story-listening), and to bring some small escapism to the frantic energies of the modern world. Stories from the Hearth is the brainchild of queer punk poet, environmentalist, and anarchist Cal Bannerman. Vive l'art!
Episode #2 out Sunday 31st January 2021 (31.01.21)
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Welcome to Stories From The Hearth, the podcast for tall tales and fantastical fiction, short stories the likes of which you might once have heard a wandering bard tell, to a group of villagers, gathered around the fire. Explore the history of storytelling in bonus series The Wandering Bard, or escape your surroundings with a brand-new story, written and performed by me, Calum Bannerman, on the last Sunday of every month. Historical, romantic, science fiction, or fantasy; these are tales to transport you, doorways into another world…
Hi, and welcome to the first ever episode of Stories from the Hearth. My name’s Cal, and this podcast is an experimental, artistic space, like a painter’s studio where I am free to try new things, to create, and to conjure up worlds for you to escape into. Worlds which might excite you, relax you, challenge you, or even help you grow. Worlds which might simply entertain you. I’m from a small rural community in the lowlands of Scotland, in the British Isles, where storytelling was an important part of growing up and forming my identity. These days, I live in Glasgow, the same city I moved to to study History and English about ten years back. I fell in love with the place for its art, its people, its grunginess, and the prevailing DIY and punk ethics of its subcultures – and so I stuck around. For a while I ran a spoken word open mic, and toured the poetry circuit myself; I travelled around the world, worked in bookshops and in publishing, and then, when the pandemic hit, I decided to break out and do something on my own. Today, I’m a freelance writer, editor, voice actor and storyteller. I’m privileged to be able to do what I do, and I work hard to make sure it brings value not just to my life, but hopefully to the lives of those around me. This podcast, Stories from the Hearth, is all about sharing my art, in the hope that it will offer some slow-cooked, thoughtful, and nourishing artistic enrichment to others, in a world which unfortunately puts monetary gain before quality of life every time. The story you are about to hear is the first in a long line of stand-alone works of fiction, each episode backed by an immersive soundscape to help you lose yourself in the tale. If this one isn’t for you – perhaps it’s just not your genre – then take a look at what else Stories from the Hearth has to offer. No two stories are the same. Oh, and one last thing: I recently came to understand myself as queer, both in terms of sexuality and gender. Growing up in a small town, I’d locked my queerness – my true self – away. Now, I wear it with pride, and am committed to making Stories from the Hearth a safe and inclusive space for all. You’ll find that my stories embrace life in all its wondrous forms. If that clashes with your worldview, well why not give the podcast a try anyway? You might be surprised by what you find.
Now, come and gather round the fire, for I’ve got a story to tell. This is Episode One: The Imam and His Pirates.
Coffee charged her bones like powder down the barrel of a ten-pound blunderbuss. Her third of the morning. It was easy to see why the Imam of Oman had extended her crew the offer of a royal pardon, on the condition that he should receive for his birthday the delivery of one-hundred brimming barrels of these little green beans.
One-hundred barrels. They’d taken a tenth of that in heads, just to bend the ear of the local chieftain. Ten more to get him to trade. Shahar herself had taken a round of buckshot on a sightseeing tour of the chieftain’s cousin’s son’s digestive tract, and watched curiously as a black-brown gloop fell from him to colour the sand. She remembered thinking that their blood looked darker, richer even, than the sickly red she’d watched squirt from the lopped-off wrists of thieves, in memories of a childhood marketplace. Their skin, too, was darker. Like roasted coffee beans, Ali Omar had said. They spent so much time harvesting and roasting the beans, the heat of the braziers has roasted their skin, too, he said. A curious people.
Today, Shahar hunched over her breakfast, in the galley of His Imamate’s proudly procured ship, The Moonlit Voyager. Muhammad had ridden to heaven on the back of a man-faced donkey-horse. The prow of Shahar’s ship was carved with the head of a beautiful boy, innocent to their plunders, and when they sailed beneath the boundless skies of a clear evening, she supposed it did feel as if they were bearing heavenward. Indeed, Shahar meant moonlit; an omen of good portend, even if she said so herself. Shame that she could never reveal that to her crewmates.
The crew of The Moonlit Voyager knew Shahar as Yazeed. Yazeed al Mufakir (Yazeed the Thinker) – a light barb, but not unwarranted. Quiet, solitary, heavily bearded, Yazeed was known to the crew in snippets of rumour and vivid splashes of deed. Intimately violent, when necessary, he spoke with a voice high and lilting as summer wine. The first (and last) of The Moonlit’s pirates to mimic Yazeed’s effeminate tone had exited the ship keel-side. A most devout follower of Allah, Shahar, as Yazeed, kept mostly to themselves, often lost to contemplation and religious ablutions, for which they insisted on using fresh water, rather than the salty stuff, and to which they were left alone.
On this particular morning, ten days out from the port city of Berbera (ten days clean of its stench: incense, cattle dung, sweaty men, dried fruit), Shahar found herself rather unusually surrounded by her crewmates. Under the fiery influence of the steaming black-stuff, it had fast become routine for her to wake earlier than normal, sink a few cups, and set to work on deck before most of the crew had even begun untangling themselves from their hammocks. But this morning, the galley was abuzz.
The din of chatter cut through her thoughts.
‘Aye, she promised she’d wait! Don’t believe me? Coming from a man who dips his sword less often than a stranded camel finds water. You’re a fool, Omar.’
‘I’ve more sense than you, you empty-headed oaf. More sense than to hope a village daughter I once convinced to spread her legs hasn’t been married off to some other fool, already. Probably had a marriage deal on the table when you ploughed her, come to think of it. Least I’ve the decency to have a wife back home.’
‘A wife I’m sure would love to know how much you’ve been drooling over the Ethiopian pink we’ve got in cargo.’
‘Crude bastards, the pair of you. What is it? Combined age of thirty, between you? Omar, we’ve all seen you eyeing them, may Allah shield His eyes. May He cover His ears, we’ve heard you thinking of them in your bunk. If you want a go, you’ve got today and that’s it. But be gentle. When we dock in Muscat tomorrow, they’re to be presented as offering to the Imam’s son-in-law. Word is he likes black cunt the best. You scratch the merchandise, you pay for it, and best believe there’ll be no royal pardon this time.
As for you, Nasri, stay away from the locals. Please. It’s a matter of time before one of your conquests sinks this whole wretched barnacle. Trust me, the world of women will not mourn the loss of your warty tadger.’
A high-pitched influenza of laughter travelled the galley; even Shahar scoffed dryly, glad to see Nasri taken down a peg or two. The jokester, an older man, with a scar the length of Shahar’s cutlass running from forehead to breastbone, turned to her. He paused with a handful of mutabbaq an inch from his mouth.
‘What say you, Yazeed?’ Shahar, caught chewing through a fatoot of fried bread (stale, passable in the clarified butter) and egg (also stale, a deal less passable), did not look up from her plate. At length, she washed down the fatoot with the last swill of coffee from her cup. She took her time, not relishing the newly wrought quiet of the packed galley. She knew that a reply from her, from Yazeed, was a novelty. She also knew that most of the crew were still drunk from the night before – Tej, Ethiopian honey wine not explicitly forbade by the Qur’an, and thus apparently sin-free. A drunken crew was a demanding crew, and they did not wish to hear her silence.
‘I say,’ began Shahar, making it up as she went along, ‘that far from mourning the loss, women of the world may now rejoice, knowing that they need never suck the dust from that calloused stump ever again.’
Absolute and deafening uproar. The old pirate who’d asked the question slammed his fist to the table, scattering mincemeat and pancake shrapnel to the four winds. Omar wept, to see the look on his friend’s face. Men the room over grabbed each other by the shoulders, to keep from falling from their benches, bellies shuddering with uncontrolled laughter. Nasri trained his eyes on the man he knew as Yazeed, two burning gemstones of purple, smouldering in the night.
‘He hasn’t even…’ tried Nasri, struggling to be heard above the taunts and mimicry. ‘How can you… Yazeed doesn’t even look at women… He’s a fag! Yazeed’s a fag!’ But to Shahar’s eternal thanks, no one heeded the man’s vitriol, and his attempts to divert attention were met only with reprimand. Some old deckhand – the kind of sailor for whom The Moonlit Voyager was one among an endless naval fleet, roaming the oceans of his memory – grabbed Nasri in a headlock, and scoured the scalp of the man with his knuckles. More laughter.
Amidst the tumult, Shahar slipped quietly from the belly of the boat. Climbing the rolling stairs up out of the dankness, she emerged on deck, squinting against the sheer light of day.
At sea you were the centre of the world; in no other setting was that possible. But afloat the big blue-green, with nothing but whitecaps and the occasional crowd of bobbing birds between you and the edges of the earth, you existed in the very middle of everything.
Rounding the cape of Oman the previous evening, The Moonlit’s omnipotence had cracked. From over the horizon had lurched first shallow beaches, followed close behind by the beige minaret and twisting towers of Al Hadd fortress. Sand-coloured for a sand-people. Gentle on the eyes, yet camouflaged from sight, if not for the baby-blue of sky serving as a backdrop. This morning, random scatterings of cloud beat a hasty retreat afore the vanguard of the sun, and now the entire portside view was of coastline – hard and real and tangible: an anxious reminder to Shahar that soon they would dock, and she would be out of time.
At the stern stood the captain, Abd al-Yasu ibn Salmān ibn Muhammad al-Suriun. A long-winded name for a rather laconic man. The wind was strong, and in it Abd al-Yasu’s kaftan caught like a sail. Sheer white (though Shahar knew from closer inspection of the delicate umber woven through), it sang a pirate song in the golden light of mid-morn: of buried treasure, clean sea air, and the brittle cold of open ocean. A handsome man, and the only sailor aboard who Shahar harboured any respect for. Stern, and decisive, she’d watched him first-hand, in his negotiations with the Ethiopian chief. A gravely bloody man, too, who had crushed the skull of the chief’s personal guard, as an example of what would happen to all the people of that place, were his crew not gifted the treasure they’d came for. That being coffee, and a score of village women to take as slaves. An ugly job, but Shahar appreciated its necessity. All of their necks were on the line this time, and the Omani Imam had his hand aloft, ready and happy to conduct their executions with a flick of his mightily ordained and much-bejewelled wrist.
Below the captain, in the soft shadow of the mainsail, were chained the women.
Shahar grimaced. She knew that for them there had been no possible escape from this fate. She knew so because she’d helped sealed it, with cutlass, and musket, blunderbuss, and indifference. She could not help but feel some contempt for the poor sods. Blind little girls, she thought, shackled like cattle bound for market. She wondered if at any point, from the day of their conception, until now – until the whips, the chains, the torture – any of them had thought of running. Of leaving town, jumping ship. She supposed at least most of them were probably now dreaming of the latter. But to stay in such a place – a village full of men who would exchange you for their lives at the first taste of fear – to Shahar that was shameful.
She held many feelings, regarding the women, cowering in their huddled mass of hair, and breasts, and eyes, low and sad. A complicated well of emotion, doubtless some of which stemmed from Shahar’s own failings, as a woman, but which, deep, deep down, was undeniably undercut by something akin to love. Kindred affiliation was perhaps closer to Shahar’s own notion of the feeling. A gutting, angry vacuum in the pit of her stomach. A throbbing sense of duty; one which Shahar had spent ten days contemplating. One more day and she would be out of time, and no matter what she decided – whether her disguise, and the life she’d built around her was, or was not, more important than the lives of these women – it would be too late to act.
‘Please, mister. Water. Please.’ A voice like the sandstone canyons of home, old of experience, harsh as desert, wheezed along the deck, barely reaching the ears of Shahar before collapsing. It stirred the pirate woman from distant thoughts of a distant place.
Soon, more of the slaves took up their companion’s call; their cries desperate, anxious, excited by a deck free of their tormentors, empty, except for the one they called ts’īmi sēti. Shahar grit her teeth. She caught sight of Captain Abd al-Yasu turning from his spyglass, the crease of his brow etched alarmingly.
‘Shut them up, Yazeed!’ he shouted, gesticulating his frustration in an awkward wave of the hand. ‘Damn women. See, now I’ve lost my focus!’ The captain stormed from his post at the wheel to a bench built into the stern-railings. Shahar knew that by the bench, the Syrian kept a hookah pipe and a pouch of flavoured tobacco – an otherworldly indulgence, and one which, before embarkation on this particular vessel, she had held no prior knowledge of. A distinctly Persian practice, practiced by a Syrian Christian, captaining a crew of Arab Muslims pulled together from every corner of the Muhammadan world. How odd.
‘Please, miss. Water. Please m–’
Had she heard that right? Had that woman just called her-? Eyes bulging, Shahar felt fear tug at the exposed skin of her ankles. Damp, clammy, slimy fear. The women held their hands to her, cupped, as if she might like the prophet Yasu conjure water to moisten their cracked and weary life lines. Their eyes were sallow, yellow almost, and their cheeks gaunt. The Imam of Oman had commanded they bring him a herd of beauties. This lot, after ten days of malnourishment, abuse, and unforgiving sun, were more akin to a corpus of beasts.
Shahar stepped among them, keeping her eyes trained on the one about to call her miss again; concentrating hard on the rage that word induced, trying even harder to ignore the sorrow she felt. She ran the back of her hand with swift and unmitigated punishment across the woman’s temple. The slave yelped and crumpled.
Almost instantly, the punished woman was secreted away beneath a canopy of caring hands and sacrificed bodies. The women moaned a low, collective moan, but all question of water stopped. From where she stood Shahar could just see the captain’s eyes, peering from the stern. He caught hers and nodded, then shut his and reclined, as if exhausted from playing his part in the silencing of the slaves.
Shahar watched him for a while, until she was certain of his dozing. Secretly, quietly, she filled her skin from a water-barrel lashed to the starboard. Turning, she put a finger to her lips.
Thrice she refilled the skin. Thrice she passed it amongst the dessicated skeletons. Thrice her heart leapt, believing she could hear her crewmates finishing their breakfasts, making for the deck. And thrice she breathed a dizzying sigh of relief, not to be caught in the act of mutiny.
One of the women, a tall, muscled being with breasts the weight of coconuts, ritual scarring decorating her shoulders like poxy wings, could speak Arabic. Most of them could speak it to some degree. They knew the words for ‘water’, ‘child’, ‘please’, ‘no’, and ‘hurt’. But this one, shackled triply as testament to her strength – by the ankles, wrists, and from her neck to the former – could speakArabic. Shahar squatted, and grabbed the woman by the iron collar. She mashed her face into a venomous visage, but her words came gentle as the dawn.
‘I need you to ready your women.’
The Ethiopian stared glass-eyed at Shahar, disrobing her, de-bearding her in her mind. Her friends prodded soft fingers at her shoulders, asked in whispers for a translation. The woman batted them away, and slowly the pain of her past ten days etched itself into the lines of her face. Shahar averted her gaze, ashamed of what she saw there.
‘And why should we trust you, ts’īmi sēti? Uh?’ Her accent was thick as Portuguese molasses, and deep, a timbre moulded in the depths of time.
‘You want to try trusting anyone else round here? Any of my crewmates?’ That soon quieted her. ‘Look. I have… a plan.’
‘You sound confident.’
Shahar smirked. ‘Do you want help, or not?’ Reluctantly, the Ethiopian nodded. She turned her head, observing the emaciated frames of her sisters, cousins, her mother – the oldest of the group, but ample-arsed enough for the pirates of The Moonlit to have overlooked her age.
‘Of course,’ the words through grinding teeth. Was that pride? Shahar lost control of her Yazeedi cool for a moment, surprised by this resilience, in the face of assistance. She was reminded of herself.
‘Tonight, we will reach Muscat. The captain will have us drop anchor in the bay, so that we can make our grand entrance tomorrow, by first light. Tonight, the crew will be celebrating safe passage, below deck. That’s when we make our move. It’s our only chance.’
The woman’s eyes flickered. Something Shahar couldn’t catch.
‘You really mean this, don’t you?’
Shahar nodded, gravely as she could.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘Ife,’ replied the woman.
Through the porthole at the end of her table, Shahar watched a new moon shed tentative light on the waves. Surely the most perfect of sights, she thought. It reminded her of the first time she’d seen the sea: six years old, hand-in-hand with her father, Chelem, on a trip to the beachfront at Aden. ‘This water touches many far-off lands, Shahi. When you stand here, with your toes like this…’ She remembered the exhilaration of that sensation. A freshness which touched every microscopic inch of her. ‘…you stand feet to feet with someone else, a million miles away. A stranger, with whom you will always share that moment.’
Her father had been a philosophic man, a thinking man. A drunken, and violent man.
Her thoughts were shattered rudely by the clang of a metal bowl, dropped in front of her. Goat stew, eleventh night running. Better yet, goat stew with the added crunch of occasional maggots. Delightful. Shahar pushed the contents around her dish with the back of her spoon. She had no stomach for eating; the organ twisted up like a prince’s turban, squirting the odd dollop of sickly acid into the cup of her throat.
Tonight, her crewmates were rowdier than ever. As the ship rolled against the tide of the bay, the galley swam with fumbled singsong and barked jokes of varying vulgarity. Slops of dinner flew through the air as missiles, sometimes landing wide of their mark, sometimes catching the quartermaster, cabin boy, a deckhand, or the boatswain square in the fizzog. Fights broke out from small scuffles, quickly ended by a sharp word from Captain Abd al-Yasu, who entertained the Navigator and a handful of his favourite musicians at his own, private table. Thusly, music filled the room. Creaking zithers, ouds, the tables as drums. One old salty devil struck up an improvised tune about the Imam and his promise.
Oh! Raiders are we
Who sail the ocean,
Turning its waters red!
Oh! Raiders are we
Who capture beauties
And ship them to his bed!
The Imam wants us brewin’ ‘is coffee
Or else he’ll strike us dead?
But I been sailin’ fifty years
An’ if there’s one thing that I’ve said
Is that before the Imam gets his beauties
I best be gettin’ some head!
Shahar watched, through the flailing limbs of raucous mirth – all snorts and spittle – as an amused grin formed on the captain’s face. She thought of him, the hand of help he’d extended her, whisking young Yazeed from the danger of some Godforsaken port town. She thought of the betrayal she was planning, and her heart thundered in her chest.
‘Men!’ Abd al-Yasu ibn Salmān ibn Muhammad al-Suriun stood up from his chair. With a single gesture, he brought the manic energies of the room to a lull. ‘Tomorrow morn we dock in Muscat. It has been a long and shitty voyage, since last we were here, and I thank you for your service.’ A round of cheers. ‘Tomorrow we impart upon his bountiful eminence the prizes of our recent conquest.’ A chorus of boos. ‘I know! I know. The bastard. But we made our mess, and tomorrow we clean it up, once and for all.’ The men of the galley muttered accord among themselves. ‘But here…’ All listening. ‘Here I’m thinking… we can’t touch the women, of course…’
‘What if they touch us!?’ someone from the back hollered, to the delight of his friends.
‘Very good. Ibrahim, but you had your chance. It’s not my fault you’re pussy-shy.’ Deftly, the captain had the crew back on his side, and distracted once more from their collective lust. ‘No, no touching tonight. We have to do right, by the Imam, if we would keep our heads. But here… wouldn’t you boys like to see some dancing?’
It took a moment for the question to register in the drunken brains of her crewmates, but once they’d got the captain’s meaning, the room erupted like a geyser, full of lewd gestures and lewder remarks.
Jingling his ring of keys from an outthrust finger, the captain addressed his frothing, crashing mass of horny apes. ‘Who will fetch them for me?’
Shahar’s heart was now solidly lodged in her throat. Saliva swilled the contours of her mouth, and she felt as if she might throw up. She had seen gore that could have curdled milk, she had dealt gore even more gruesome, and yet nothing had left her feeling so empty, so vacuous and ill as this.
The room about her bucked and swelled, spilling its male contents like lumpy porridge over the tables, toward the captain. Men clambered, climbed, kicked and wrestled their way toward the keys in the Syrian’s hand, and the roar of protest became deafening.
It was now or never.
Shahar, sat toward the rear of the galley, stood atop her solitary table, put her hands on her hips, and yelled with all her might.
‘CAPTAIN!’
The room hushed. Despite their fervour, everyone paused in their pursuit, and all eyes turned on her. The captain, bemused, tilted his head, waiting.
‘Captain. Let me do it.’ Abd al-Yasu chuckled. The crew joined in. ‘Captain,’ she continued, raising her voice to be heard, ‘let me do it. If you can look a single man in this room in the eye, and tell me you trust him not to scratch your merchandise, well, then fine. If not, then let me do it. I have no interest in those women.’ A look of confusion. Or was it… was it suspicion? Shahar’s heart was the prayer call of a mu’adhdhin, from atop his minaret. Loud, plosive, celestial.
She watched the captain scan the room, and balled her hand into a fist. At last, with a shuddering, silent sigh, Shahar exhaled the breath she’d been holding, as, with a sudden grin, the captain turned to her and nodded.
‘A fair point, my friend. Watertight.’ Then, to the groans of the crowd, ‘What?! You think I don’t know what you would do with them, all alone up there?’ He scoffed. ‘Be quick about it, Yazeed!’ And with that, he tossed Shahar his keys.
With a grumble, the rest of the men got back to their drinking. Before long, their energies were jubilant again, forgetting the breasts they’d imagined groping, the sex they’d imagined stealing; turning their minds instead to the erotic hips they were surely about to see, turning and twisting below the navels of a dozen exotic women.
As Shahar climbed the stairs out of the galley, only two pairs of eyes followed her. The apple greens of her captain, and the bruised purples of one Nasri al-Mansi.
Moonlight fell dully on The Moonlit Voyager’s whaleboat. A dinghy of ten oars, with space enough for twelve. That made them one person too many. Not bad, all things considered.
Shahar worked fast to lower it to the water, navigating the pulley with one hand, pushing the thing away from the hull with an oar held in the other. The night was cool, but sweat beaded her forehead like a river, building against a dam. She had no free hand to wipe it clear, and periodically had to blink the salty wet from her eyes.
She had been gone from the crew too long already, and still the women were fussing with their shackles. She’d given the one called Ife the captain’s keys, indicating which corresponded to which locks. Yet still she could see their task was incomplete.
‘What’s the hold up?’ she hissed, wild-eyed, finding less than half of the slaves fully freed.
‘My sisters are sick. Tired. We are moving as fast as we can.’
‘Shit. Well, hurry.’
The cacophony below deck was, up here, the muted rumblings of earthquake, against a satin night, still and full of stars. Shahar prayed to them, now. Prayed to Allah, and Yasu, and all the prophets of Muhammad. Across the bay, the lights of Muscat twinkled. Shahar grit her teeth.
Eventually, the chains fell. A dozen naked women from some goatfuck village in the Ethiopian interior, stretching bruised and aching limbs, rubbing the life back into their extremities, aboard a vessel moored in the Gulf of Oman. The fear in their eyes told the rest.
Shahar could not wait another second.
With hushed and violent instruction, she shepherded the terrified flock to the starboard side, and motioned for them to begin climbing. Ife acted as first mate, cooing encouragement among the saved, helping lift the weakest over the railing, and holding their hands as far down as she could, as they descended the net toward the whaleboat below. The rope was old, the muscles gripping it exhausted and nervous. One woman missed her footing, and fell the final six feet into the dinghy, a thud and splash of ocean cutting the night like a cannon ball.
‘Fucking hell,’ cursed Shahar. She could have sworn she heard the noise from the galley hush for a second.
At long last, though, only she and Ife remained aboard The Moonlit. The Omani coast beckoned. Hit it, and they could skirt southeast, back to the fortress town of Al Hadd. Round the cape, and it was a straight coastal hug down to Yemen, and the town of Aden where all those years ago she had first tasted the salt of sea air. She had no idea how long that would take. She had not thought that far. As Ife and she lowered a water barrel, and a barrel of moulding bread down into the whaleboat, she told her of the plan.
The woman took Shahar by the hand.
‘I don’t know who you are, ts’īmi sēti. But…’ She tried, but it seemed she could not find the words. Her eyes caught Shahar’s, and in them was another world. ‘Thank you.’
Shahar nodded, blinking away a hot dampness springing at the corners of her eyes.
‘Go!’ she urged. ‘I’ll follow.’ Ife began to climb.
But before Shahar could hoist a leg over the railings, she was stopped short, a hand on her shoulder. Its grip was like a blacksmith’s tongs.
‘You fucking traitor. I knew it.’
Nasri al-Mansi spun her round to face him. He wore a grin, maniacal in the moonlight, his eyes two marbles of polished zeal.
‘Fucking traitor.’
Shahar went for her cutlass, but the man was already armed, and swiped at her sword-arm with his own. The blade whistled and stopped, a thick and meaty sound cushioning its trajectory. She looked down. Found her wrist hanging by a thread, glistening ivory and saffron, vivid, elegant, excruciating. Shahar stomached a scream.
Adrenaline kicked in, like a heartbeat skipped, and time slowed to a single falling droplet of shiny red. She watched Nasri’s face widen with some terrible glee as he observed the damage wrought; watched him yank back the cutlass and whoop like a triumphant baboon; watched him shake with the anticipation of his next attack. Before he could make a move, though, Shahar took her good hand and slammed it into his jaw. Teeth crashed together, and blood spurted from the section of Nasri’s tongue caught between them. His elated cry morphed like a cat’s meow into an agonised wail.
‘Fag!’ he yelled. ‘Bitch!’ he screamed. ‘TRAITOR!’
Blood from his mouth spattered Shahara’s cheeks like warpaint. She hit him again, in the groin this time. Nasri buckled, but only for a second, and as she brought her elbow down upon the back of his head, she jerked suddenly to a stop.
A long, low laugh moved from whispered to audible to thundering shriek, Nasri’s eyes flashing with vengeance.
Shahar’s arms dropped limp, and her chin sagged to her chest. As her vision twisted whirlpool-like toward blackness, she saw in the timid moonlight two things. A blade, silver and silent, plunged up to the handle in her gut, turning slowly scarlet as her lifeblood ebbed from her. And below, already detaching itself from The Moonlit, already beginning its passage to the shores of Oman, and to freedom, she saw a boatful of slaves, silently grieving. Mourning lost time, lost innocence. Lamenting the alienness of their surrounds, and a home too far gone to return to. And there was Ife, sending a message on the night breeze, like Muhammad, raised to heaven on the winds of the world and the wings of a steed, pausing for a beat by the ears of Shahar, to whisper.
‘Thank you, stranger.’
As darkness came, Shahar listened to the ocean, and thought of home.
Thank you for listening to this month’s Story From The Hearth. Thanks also for bearing with the poorer audio quality of these early episodes. I was younger and a podcasting noob, what more can I say? If you liked what you heard, please do subscribe, and share this podcast with friends, family, and anyone you know who could use just a half-hour’s respite from the chaotic energies of the everyday. You can also now rate podcasts on Spotify, so if you’re listening to it there, why not drop us some stars. If you wish to support the podcast, please head to my Patreon by hitting the link in the description. Similarly, you can check out the podcast’s Instagram, Twitter, and website via the links below. Story episodes are released on the last Sunday of every month. Additional episodes in The Wandering Bard historical mini-series will pop up from time to time. Until next we meet around the fire, I’ve been Calum Bannerman, and you’ve been listening to Stories From The Hearth.