Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 475 of 619

The wall was manned, but Ajax knew empty stone could not stay a bluff. Fourteen men could walk the rim and fool a passing sail. They could not hold if a merchant crew landed and pushed. He gathered his leaders at the gate as the sun climbed. The town needed more than the look of a garrison. It needed men, and it needed a name. JD Valentino spoke first. He had come north on the hull with them, Marco's brother, the second reader Ajax had sworn to hold the bar at Black Oak. Now he stood on foreign stone with his half-buttoned green shirt open at the chest, the gold bracelet bright on his wrist. "I can find you warriors," he said. "There's a tavern by the harbor. Drovers, sailors off broken crews. Men with no lord." He did not soften it. "Marco reads them better. I read them well enough." Ajax weighed it. He was short on swords and long on wall. "Go," he said. "Buy the drinks. Read every man before you offer coin. Bring me only clean ones." JD nodded once and went, boots loud on the wharf steps. Marcus Tidewater watched him go, then turned to Ajax. The captain had sailed them here without one wrong turn, and he read the harbor like a page. "You want the town held true," Marcus said, "you need Bran. Stone's sound but the inner rows are cracked. A mason repairs it and the wall becomes real, not just tall." He said it flat and stopped. "Then sail back for him," Ajax said. "Take a light crew. Bring Bran and his tools. Tell Grayson to hold Black Oak." Marcus did not argue. "Two runs, there and back. I'll leave at the tide." He walked to the hull to ready it. By dusk JD returned with six men behind him. Rough-handed, watchful, no chains on any of them yet. "These six read clean," JD said. "No debts they hid. No captain waiting to hear from them. One carries a grudge, but not at us." Ajax looked each man in the eye and named the terms: wages, a bed, a share, and a wall to defend. All six agreed. Aldric had come up from the yard with his ledger. He stood at Ajax's shoulder and looked out at the repaired stretch, the new swords, the harbor going dark. "You mean to keep this place," the scholar said. It was not a question. "Then it can't stay a town with no name. Men swear to a name. Merchants trade with a name." Ajax looked at the wall his crew now truly held. Twenty men where there had been fourteen. Bran coming to make the stone whole. "Aldric's right," he said. "When Bran raises it new, it's ours. It gets a name." The island was no longer a bluff. It was a foothold, and it needed only a mason and a word to make it a second home for the brotherhood.