by Rj Barker
Below, the watery swirl of a signature.
“Such things can be forged,” said Meas.
“These were not. You would think your own mother’s writing would be easy for you to recognise.”
Meas rolled the note, tapped it against her chin.
“Where do you fly for?” she said.
“Well, I am sure you would like to know, but I am afraid knowing that, I would say, comes under the remit of you interfering.” It did not escape Joron’s notice that the members of Golzin’s crew were encroaching on them, and more were coming up from below. At the rump of the ship two small gallowbows were being untrussed. Meas glanced at Coughlin, who gave her a small nod, turned his head to Berhof and exchanged a look.
“Out here, in the ocean, Shipwife,” said Meas, “there’s no way to check if you’ve forged that or not. So I think I should check your cargo anyway. I am sure my mother will understand, she has always respected thoroughness.”
Golzin stared at her.
“Out here in the ocean, Shipwife Meas,” she said, “anything can happen, and I am also sure your mother would understand if it did.”
And on one side or another a signal was given, Joron did not see it made. He only heard the result, the drawing of blades, the command to spin the bows and, like a bolt fleeing a gallowbow, he felt the release of tension among the merchanter’s crew.
Saw the dangerous smile on Meas’s face.
Reached for his precious gifted sword.
Shipwife Golzin stepped back and her crew came rushing in. At the same time Meas drew her sword, shouting, “Coughlin!” She dodged the slash of a curnow blade from one of Golzin’s crew and ran the women through with a leisurely thrust. Then she pulled one of the small crossbows from the tethers on her jacket and loosed it at Golzin before retreating to where Berhof and a small group of Coughlin’s men had locked their round shields. The leader of the seaguard had taken three of his men and was running up the deck of the ship in a desperate race to reach the small gallowbows before the crews could lose the cannisters of rocks they were loading. Had they been a fleet crew Joron had no doubt Coughlin and his men would have been cut to ribbons by a hail of sharp stone, but they were not, and the seaguard fell upon the deckchilder like sankrey on their prey.
The violence aboard Maiden’s Bounty was sudden and total. One moment Joron stood and waited, the next he was thrusting and slashing with his shining steel blade. There was little skill to it; Meas had, for months now, been teaching him to use a straightsword like hers, and he had proven more apt then he had dreamed of, but here on deck there was no time for such dainty fighting. It was about brute force and quick reactions, both of which the seaguard had in abundance. A blade from the front, one of the seaguard caught it on his shield and Joron thrust the tip of his sword into an unprotected neck. A woman lifted her curnow to slash at Joron’s flank and Anzir struck out with a club, smashing a leather hat into the skull beneath. The deckchild to landward of him fell, a curnow cutting through her ribcage and Farys, screaming, struck back at the man who had killed her friend. Further down the line Meas stood, and only she seemed not to be taken up by fury, her thrusts and ripostes almost leisurely. A man jabbed at her with a wyrmpike, its great reach making him a real danger, but where Meas went so did Narza. The small woman ducked beneath the wyrmpike and slid her body down the shaft, impaling the wielder on a bone dagger and putting herself amid a knot of the Maiden’s Bounty’s crew where she was a whirlwind of black hair and razored edges.
Oh, the crew of Maiden’s Bounty were a world-worn and hard-looking lot, and Joron had no doubt they would happily have stabbed him in the back as soon as blink, but this sort of fight was not for them. The deckchilder of Golzin’s ship had little stomach for the fight and they broke upon the discipline of Meas’s women and men, backing away, dropping their weapons, muttering, leaving the dead and the maimed to bleed upon the slate. Meas strode forward.
“Your shipwife, where is she?” No answer. Narza darted forward, grabbed the smallest of the deckchilder and dragged her over to Meas with a knife at her throat. “Where is she?” said Meas again. The woman stared. She was missing an eye – not a wound, just another defect of one born in the Hundred Isles. Her good eye was wide, terrified.
“Tell me where she is or I will have Narza take your other eye,” said Meas, and Joron suspected it was not the threat in her voice that frightened the woman – it was the offhand, matter-of-fact way Meas put it, as if blinding her enemies was something she did each and every day.
“Her cabin,” stuttered the woman, glancing toward the rump of the boat where a ramshackle building of varisk and gion stalks was lashed in place. A small chimney on top was bleeding smoke to be quickly whipped away by the wind.
“Hag’s breath,” spat Meas, “she burns her charts.”
Then they were running for the cabin. Finding the door locked against them Meas kicked it until it burst open, and there they found Golzin, leaning against one of the varisk uprights, a small brazier smouldering before her. All it contained was ash.
“You may have burned your charts, Shipwife, but I will find out what you were doing here and I will take the knowledge from your body if I must.”
Golzin shook her head, a slow and painful motion.
“I think not,” she said, coughed, spat on the deck. An attempt had been made to whitewash the floor of the room, to make it look like a real shipwife’s cabin, but the white was scuffed and scratched, though enough remained to show Golzin spat blood. “You’re a good shot with that crossbow,” she said. Coughed again, more blood. “But, unlike you, I am loyal to the Hundred Isles.” She was struggling to get the words out, each one coming slower than the last. Golzin fell to her knees, looked up at Meas. “Loyal,” she said, and fell forward to show the crossbow bolt in her back that had taken her life.
Meas shook her head. “I cannot fault loyalty, however mistaken,” she said. “Hag embrace you, Shipwife Golzin.”
She turned from the corpse. “Now, Joron, let us see what Golzin has in her hold. Let us see what was worth dying for.”
Tide Child’s crew were outside the cabin, menacing those left of the Maiden’s Bounty’s. Joron did a quick count of his crew to find how many had been lost, found three deckchilder from Meas’s ship of the dead who had now had their sentence completed. Their corpses lay cooling on the deck.
“Coughlin,” Meas said, “find some black material and make armbands. These women and men do not know it yet but they have volunteered to join us. Their shipwife is dead, and as of now so are they.” As she walked past the crew of the Maiden’s Bounty, she stared at them. “And the dead belong to me,” she said.
Joron followed his shipwife across the deck and to the main hatch of the merchanter. A hefty lock was in place on the hatch and the smell, ever-present on deck, was noticeably stronger here.
“Mother’s mercy,” said Joron. “Do you think she died to protect a shipment of rotten food?”
“No,” said Meas quietly. “I think I know what she ships, and why she did not want me to have her charts.” She turned to Narza. “Find me something for the lock. I have no wish to break my good sword.” The smaller woman nodded and walked away.
“What do you imagine it is?” said Joron.
“I’ll not sully Golzin’s name without knowing,” said Meas, “but if I am right I will take back my wish for her to rest with the Hag.”
Narza returned with a gallowbow bolt and placed it within the hasp of the lock, pushing her weight onto it and using it as a lever to break the metal with an audible crack. “Lift the hatch, Joron,” said Meas, “but before you do, we should get torches, and something to cover our faces with.”
“Why cover our faces?”
“You will find out.”
3
What Lies Beneath
It was dark in the underdeck of the merchanter, not even lit by the weak glow of wanelights. He found that lack of the small glowing bird skulls disquieting. But he di
d not think about it for long, because the smell hit him with its full force. It was a thing with a presence, a hard wall of stink that he had to fight not to reel away from. Instead he pushed the borrowed cloth harder against his mouth and nose, fought the vomit rising from his gut, pinched his nose shut and tried to breathe through his mouth – though that was almost worse. This was a stench so pervasive he was sure he could taste it, and it felt like he imagined it would to drink bilge water, that concoction of rotten bone water, sewage and refuse that collected at the bottom of every ship. He coughed, held up his guttering torch, illuminating the overbones of the deck above and the walls close around them. They were stood in a small room with three doors leading from it.
“They have shut off the hold,” said Joron. “Would that not make it hard to load cargo?”
“It depends on what the cargo is,” said Meas. She reached for the door to landward of them – like the whole boat it was ill-kept and stiff and took all she had to open it.
Behind the door a scene that Joron felt sure not even the Hag would visit on those she punished. The stink thickened the air around them. It took a moment for Joron to make sense of what he was seeing in the flickering light of his torch, and when he did his stomach threatened to rebel again.
“Mother’s mercy,” he whispered.
The cargo deck ran the length of the Maiden’s Bounty and was separated into three levels of shelves, each about the length of Joron’s forearm and hand above the one below. This strange deck was filled with a low moaning, and now he heard it Joron knew it had been present on this ship since the moment he had stepped aboard. He had presumed it to be the ship, the old bones, the tortured varisk, but it was not. It was the cargo.
People. Women and men stacked on the shelves with barely any room to move or breathe. The head of one by the feet of those next to them and on throughout the hold, nose to tail the length of the ship. Joron brought his torch nearer to the body closest to him – a corpse, one that had clearly been dead for a long time, weeks maybe. The feet next to its head moved weakly and that horrified him more. Imagine, being here in that confined space in the pitch black for weeks on end next to a corpse. Did they know that body rotting beside them? Was it once a friend, a lover even?
“Hold fast!” shouted Meas into the moaning deck. “Those who put you aboard are no longer in charge, I am. We will have you freed as soon as we can, so hold fast.” Did her voice shake? There was little response from the people on the shelves and Meas pushed Joron back, opened the seaward door and said the same to those there.
“What is this, Meas, slavers?”
“I do not know, Joron. I suspected it at first because of the smell. That was why I doubted the papers, my mother would never allow it.” She stared in once more before closing the door. “But even slavers treat their foul cargo better than this.” She turned and opened the last door, the central one, into the smallest of the three holds and in there found something different. No shelves, just a wide space and in the centre, cowering back from the torchlight, were gullaime. All masked, as was right and proper, but smaller than the gullaime aboard Tide Child, Joron was sure of it. When they moved he heard the clink of chains and saw metal gleam in the weak light. Meas repeated her words to the crowd of windtalkers, told them they were safe and then shut the door of this hold as well. The sight of them seemed to bother her even more than the humans. “Go over to Tide Child, Joron, bring our gullaime to speak to its people. I doubt they will trust me nor any other human after being kept aboard this ship.” She took off her hat, ran her hand through her hair before putting the hat firmly back on her head. “No wonder Golzin burned their charts, something truly wicked is happening on this boat.”
“I shall arrange to have the deckchilder questioned,” said Joron. Meas nodded.
“Have Solemn Muffaz do it, though I doubt he shall learn much. Did any of the ship’s officers survive the fight?”
“I do not know.”
“Well,” said Meas, and she started up the ladder, “it would be best for them if they have not. I will not look kindly upon them.”
When they were back on deck and Joron could take in great lungfuls of the cleaner air, Meas gave out orders. “Coughlin, belay those armbands. Instead, bind this ship’s crew and put them in the flukeboat. Joron and Berhof will take them over to Tide Child and they will not join my crew just yet. Then find axes, food and water. There are women, men and gullaime cruelly chained in the holds below. Start with freeing the women and men, and treat them kindly. You will see why when you get there. Pick those of your seaguard with the strongest stomachs.” A pause. “You will find many dead in the hold. You are to lay them out before you throw them overboard. They may have loved ones among those on the ship who wish to say goodbye. Joron will bring back our gullaime.” She turned to him. “And bring the hagshand, Garriya, to see to those this ship carries.” Meas took a step toward Joron, standing close to him so she could whisper. “Make sure Garriya brings all her medicines, Joron, especially those that will kindly let a woman or man leave this world.”
“But—”
“You saw it down there, Joron, smelled it. The stink of death and rot. The slightest wound in those conditions will fester, the slightest crack in a mind will be broken wide open. I would wish such imprisonment on no one and will prolong the suffering of none.”
“What will we do with them, Meas?” he said. “There must be hundreds of them and we are in these waters to find a raider.”
“We shall stay here long enough to see how many of those in the hold can be saved, then put a crew on this ship and send it to Safeharbour. The rest of us will continue in our hunt for the raider, though I doubt we will find anything. ’Tis all smoke and mirrors to keep me away from Bernshulme and embarrassing my mother.”
4
The Unwanted
On Tide Child Dinyl waited with Cwell, who now shadowed his every move, two pairs of resentful eyes meeting his. Behind them stood Sprackin, who had once been purseholder until Meas removed him. Now he made himself a thorn in Joron’s side. The man had been deckchilder long enough to know just how close he could walk to the line of insubordination before attracting the wrath of Solemn Muffaz.
“The shipwife would have you take those aboard my wingfluke and put the black armband on them,” said Joron, “but hold them apart from our crew and keep them bound, for now. I am to return to the merchanter with the gullaime and Garriya; there are many sick aboard the ship.”
“And why do you need the gullaime also?” said Dinyl. They had been shipfriends, lovers, once, but that close friendship had been cut away by Joron, along with Dinyl’s hand – and now, just like the hand, nothing of it remained. Dinyl, Cwell and Sprackin had formed a friendship through their dislike of him that cut Joron every time he saw them together, which on a ship the size of Tide Child was often.
“Because the shipwife asks for it, Deckholder,” said Joron, and he was aware he held his body as stiffly as his language. A cold formality had replaced the heat of the emotions they had once shared. Behind Dinyl, Cwell smirked, she had never liked Joron, and liked him less the more he grew into his rank. She in turn, with her vicious nature, frightened him. Though he could never admit that. He felt sure that both Cwell and Dinyl judged his every move. Sprackin simply sneered and watched for any opportunity to trouble him.
“It is our duty to give the shipwife what she wants, ey?” smiled Sprackin, but there was nothing pleasant there. Dinyl ignored him and stepped forward.
“Cwell, do your duty, bring up the hagshand and the windtalker,” he said, cold and formal. “Then take these women and men and stow them in the brig until they are ready for duty.”
Joron turned away. He did not fail to notice how often the word “duty” fell from Dinyl’s mouth, and from those around him. It was his sense of duty that had cost him his hand, and Joron’s sense of duty that had caused him to take it. In their own way both men had been right to act as they had, and as such Meas had kept Din
yl in his place on the rump of the ship even though he had threatened her life. But each day they stood together Joron felt this was a mistake, and he suspected Meas did too – though she would never admit it. “A shipwife only ever moves forward,” she had said. “I’ll not look to the errors in my wake, Twiner, not once I have set my horizons straight by ’em.”
Joron did not stay long on board, the atmosphere was too chilly on deck. He left Dinyl to sort out the new crew and rowed back to Maiden’s Bounty with the gullaime and Garriya. The old woman sat huddled up in the bottom of the boat between the rowers. She was brought on as one of the stonebound, the lowest rank on a boneship, as she knew nothing of the sea, however she had shown herself to be a skilled healer. This was a rare thing for a ship to have, and almost unheard of on a ship of the dead such as Tide Child. Now she held the rank of hagshand. Like Dinyl she also made Joron uncomfortable, though in very different ways. When they first met, the woman had named him “Caller.” And then, months later when all seemed lost and death had become inevitable, he had sung and an arakeesian had come as if called to that song. The last, vast and mysterious sea dragon had saved them from complete destruction, and although Joron was sure it was not his doing, he could not help wondering if he lied to himself. Because he had heard its songs and felt its presence in ways no one else seemed to.
Except the gullaime.
The windtalker had got over its terror of the Northstorm and reverted to its usual mood of being interferingly curious. At the moment it was fascinated by the rowers. The deckchilder, as they rowed, took in the gullaime’s curiosity with good grace. Where most crews were frightened of the windtalkers, the crew of Tide Child had accepted theirs and looked upon it with the same fondness they reserved for Black Orris, the foul-mouthed corpsebird that nested in Tide Child’s rigging.
“What for these?” It pointed at the oarlocks.
“To rest the oar in,” said Farys from her place at the rump of the boat. “So it is easier for the deckchilder to row.”