At the same time, it would have helped her to have a husband to cling to in this darkest of moments. The death of her beloved firstborn daughter had unhinged her as badly as could be—worse even than she had ever understood that a person can be unhinged—and the only time she had seen Arran lately was when he returned to their stateroom at odd intervals for a sketchy meal, usually too exhausted from his labors even to talk, let alone for anything else. Sometimes he even spent the night aloft, among the spars, cabelles, and starsails.
Loreanna glanced down at her figure, still clothed in the exaggeratedly lascivious fashions of the capital (although she had long since put away her ornamental fetters). For a woman of her stature, her legs were surprisingly long and well turned (as workingmen were wont to express it), and the fact was that childbearing and maturity had been exceptionally kind to her. Her behind remained small and attractive, her waist remarkably slender; her well-shaped breasts, raised and almost indecently exposed within the constrictive bodice of her Hanoverian dress, were rather fuller than when she and Arran had first met.
At a conscious level, Loreanna knew perfectly well that her husband loved her and found her even more desirable than when he had first made passionate love to her more than fifteen years ago. She also understood, with a crystalline clarity, that he was working himself and his crewbeings to death to save her life.
All that kept her moving presently—or alive, she was inclined to think from moment to moment—were thoughts and images of her surviving children at home and of her husband. And her husband was too busy at the moment even to acknowledge her existence. She knew it was childish of her—and it made her squirm with guilt—but it was how she felt. In the future, did they but prevail against the current circumstances, she would have this out with him and never again be left in unproductive solitude. For the moment, then, she would simply persevere. The very best of wives, Loreanna would let Arran do what he must, without yet another worry to distract him, and endure what she could not correct.
She heard the teakettle whistle forlornly at her from the next room, but did not hurry to answer its plaintive call. It would shut itself off before long, and she had had quite enough tea for lack of anything better to do with herself.
She thought that if she were to begin eating in the same way she had been drinking tea—as she had begun to feel a temptation to do—she would swell up until she looked like one of the Krumm women, or perhaps even her uncle’s fat sisters. And then Arran would have the very best of excuses—her own visible lack of selfrespect—to ignore her, possibly for the remainder of their lives.
Not that he would long lack company. She had seen the way women upon the capital world had given their sidelong glances to her romantic and dangerous husband.
At exactly that moment, there came a knocking upon the stateroom door—the door leading directly out onto the maindeck, a scene of so much purposeful activity that Loreanna, feeling useless herself, could not bear the sight of it. She arose from where she sat upon the window seat and went to answer the knocking.
Through the many-paned transparency, she saw her new half brother Woulf, appearing unusually neat and well scrubbed. Shipboard life with all of its attendant disciplines, Loreanna thought, seemed to be doing the boy a world of good. Not that he looked that much like a boy. He was, in fact, a man full-grown, not tall, but remarkably muscular, almost handsome after a somewhat sinister manner, well-spoken—although inclined not to speak at all, most of the time—and with a surprisingly winning smile, when he chose to display it.
He offered her a broad grin now, through the transparency, and, returning it merely by reflex, she showed him in. “I bid you good morrow, half sister,” he said, doffing a broad-brimmed imaginary hat that she was certain boasted an enormous plume, and bowing in a manner intended to be comical. “Discovering no better employment elsewhere for myself—I have been ordered to remove my inconvenient presence from so many quarters of this vessel I have lost count of them—and not seeing you anywhere about, I thought I would look for you here.”
“Well,” she replied, closing the doors and ushering him inside, “here I am—having in essence been told the same thing, myself. Would you care for a nice cup of tea?” She felt strangely glad—and vaguely guilty—to see him.
“No, no thank you. I had been wondering, instead, whether you would care to take a turn about the ship with me—naysayers to the contrary—in order to observe how the repairs to her are proceeding. Understanding rather more about such Deep-faring technicalities than I do, I had hoped I might persuade you to explain to me some of what is being done. It all looks extremely interesting.”
Loreanna’s heart leapt. She had been cooped up within these chambers for far too long, basically ever since, she realized, they had departed from Skye. And their stay upon Hanover had been little less confining, although Bretta had seen parts of the city—upon the arm of this young man, come to think of it.
“I should be positively delighted, Brother dear,” she replied. “Please wait for just a moment while I find a jacket and perhaps some more appropriate shoes.”
Woulf nodded. Loreanna turned and stepped into a sleeping cabin she had not shared with her husband for days, looking for the short velvet jacket that matched the gown she had chosen this morning—it would be unseemly for the captain’s lady to display her unprotected throat and all but naked breasts to the crew—and something without heels to catch between the spaces of the deckmesh.
Suddenly, a shadow passed through the room. She whirled, believing that someone stood within the doorway, but was mistaken. At the segmented windows, outside, upon the hull of the starship—apparently protected from the rigors of the Deep by a temporary extension of the §-field—Uncle Sedgeley, of all people, dangled upon a line, wielding a container of the plastic coating used to preserve the metalloid mesh of which the vessel was fashioned, and clothed in the attire of a common starsailor. The Executor-General to a great Ceo and his successor swayed to and fro, happy as a lad with a new toy. Having caught her attention and waved at her, he grinned like a marine mammal and swung out of sight again. Blast it—even Uncle Sedgeley had found some useful task to do!
It was so unfair!
She smiled ruefully at the thought, realizing that she sounded just like Bretta.
“Ready?” Loreanna jumped, nearly startled out of her wits. The young urban barbarian who happened to be her mother’s son loitered just outside her bedroom door, leaning casually against the frame upon one jauntily upraised elbow, looking round at her private things as if he owned the place and all within.
It occurred then to Loreanna that, despite any blood relationship the two of them shared, they bore not even the slightest resemblance to one another. At twenty-nine, she knew exactly how she looked, brown-haired, freckled across her nose and cheeks, pretty (she was aware) and . . . well, nothing if not absolutely wholesome.
By all means handsome enough in his own sinister way, at the same time, somehow, Woulf seemed to be darkness personified, with that distinctly olive cast to his skin that sometimes caused people to think he had not bathed, and Deep-black hair that hung in languorous shiny curls all about his well-shaped head.
Woulf’s eyes were so dark that the irises could not be distinguished from the pupils. At all times they looked impossibly, almost inhumanly large. And the manner in which her half brother chose to attire himself, all in a light-absorptive black, served only to emphasize the apparent darkness of his being. It seemed so much more than merely superficial. Perhaps it was some sort of protective coloring or threat-display, needful for survival in the environment in which he had been born and come to manhood. Whatever it was, that light-devouring quality appeared to reach down, through his bones, into his very marrow.
Into his very soul.
“Er . . . yes,” Loreanna answered a question she had almost forgotten for a moment, uneasy, all of a sudden, to have someone looking—looking into what? Looking into a personal and intimate portion of her p
rivate sleeping quarters. Greatly accustomed as she had become, from time to time, to living the cramped shipboard life, she had never resented it quite this way before. It occurred to her to wonder why the feeling pulsed so strongly within her. “I was just coming.”
“So to speak,” he added for her.
She flushed furiously—and was furious with herself for flushing—at Woulf’s adolescent and overly suggestive play upon words. “So to speak,” she answered, attempting to do it in a light, bantering tone. She pushed past him into the sitting room and immediately toward the door to the maindeck. “Shall we?”
“Indeed,” he replied, maintaining the wry expression he had started with. Without warning, he reached up in a casual, and presumably brotherly manner to tuck a stray curl of her hair where it belonged. Loreanna reflexively shied backward at this unwonted familiarity, and what she saw then, upon his face—for no reason that she felt competent to fathom—was a look of triumph. “We shall.”
From that day forward—and despite any misgivings she might have felt initially—Loreanna and Woulf went strolling about the ship every morning. Together they took the opportunity to inspect the Osprey, to see what the battle had done to her, and to learn what was being done to repair it. They saw the great spiral crack running about the mast from the maindeck to the maintier crotch and, they were told, right down to the almost obliterated liftdeck. Already, highly skilled workers had begun to refabricate the mast, which proved to be an extremely complicated process, and a dangerous one, at that.
It began with very powerful, foul-smelling, poisonous solvents—Phoebus forbade any spark or open flame aboard the starship while this procedure was being carried out—used to clean and strip the polymerized coating off the metalloid mesh a handspan either side of the crack. Next, powerful retractors were set into the fabric of the mast, spanning the damage, and cranked tightly to draw the broken mesh ends together, narrowing the crack. Artisans adept at welding metalloid materials then joined the ends of each and every individual element of the mesh, an energy-intensive undertaking that drew massive amounts of power from the starsails, set up to soak up particles from the surrounding Deep.
Phoebus had ordered the full suite of starsails set, and in such a manner that, in terms of imparting any motion to the Osprey they worked at cross-purposes to one another, leaving the vessel motionless. Even the ship’s nine great stunsails—ordinarily used, in the special circumstances that allowed it, to increase the ship’s speed—had been unfurled upon their retractable booms to gather and transform the energy they provided purely as a secondary function.
At that point, the captain had been compelled, after all, to tether the Osprey to a nearby asteroid, so that her suite of sails could be adjusted to provide her with a degree of traction, in order to brace the mast as straight and tall as might be, before whatever flaws or crooks it had acquired were made a permanent part of its fabric by the welders. That part of the mending done, the affected area was covered once again—first the wirelike elements of the mesh, then the open spaces between the elements—with a protective polymer.
Similar techniques were employed to rebuild the shattered liftdeck. The Osprey, like any other well-run vessel, carried spares—various materials and fixtures—to be installed or adapted following virtually any disaster which did not destroy the starship altogether. The recent battle had nearly accomplished that. Osprey was like a water-borne conveyance suddenly bereft of her transom. Yet she, her officers, and her crewbeings had survived, where others had not, and now the Osprey would be reconstructed, if not altogether reborn.
The original liftdeck of Arran’s vessel-of-prey would have been a trifle too small to accommodate the larger lubberlift of the starship they had lately plundered and destroyed. As facilities to house the replacement were rebuilt, the Osprey took on a broader-beamed, narrow-waisted, somewhat “voluptuous” aspect (as Phoebus put it with a leer) that Arran said he found displeasing. Crewbeings trimmed and then extended the battle-destroyed sheaves of metalloid mesh that made up the liftdeck, just as they had healed the fracture in the mast.
Siemme by siemme, measure by measure, the smashed stern took shape again. Amenities would be sparser than before. For example, there was no method by which the complicated machinery of the waste-disposal system—which had been altogether lost through the breached hull—could be replaced. From now on, all garbage and other refuse would be dragged up to the quarterdeck—by none other than Leupould, Demondion-Echeverria and Sedgeley, who had been surprisingly helpful in other ways, as well—and put over the taffrail into the §-field, as it was done in earlier days of starsailing. No matter, the Osprey would make do, and, wherever necessary, do without, until she returned again to her homeport.
Slowly, a feeling of hope began to suffuse the vessel’s officers and crew.
Careful to stay clear of the bustling workers and their often dangerous tools and materials, Woulf walked the Osprey’s less well occupied decks with Loreanna and spoke with her about nothing in particular for hours upon end. In the increasingly burdensome absence of her husband, she had at first found the daily attentions of this handsome young fellow somewhat consoling, and rather flattering. And after all, she made excuses to herself, who could possibly be safer, with regard to one’s reputation and self-respect, than a lady’s younger half brother?
Step by step, however, day by day, Woulf grew more familiar in his manner with her. That business with her hair had only been a beginning to it. She was acutely aware of feeling increasingly uncomfortable with Woulf’s boldness, but at the same time, she seemed strangely unable to do or say anything about it.
Exactly, she realized, as if the whole situation were occurring in a bad dream.
CHAPTER XXXIV:
THE LADDERWELL
She laughed.
For the first time in what seemed a very, very long while, Loreanna Islay laughed.
Woulf’s jocular observation was certainly not the most outrageously witty remark that she had ever heard. He was most likely content to leave that sort of endeavor to their uncle. Their uncle! She realized it again: she had a brother! If someone had happened to ask her an hour later exactly what her half brother had said, she could probably have not remembered. All she knew was that she was in the company of someone she liked—at least she thought she did; he still made her nervous at times—and who liked her, and that she had someone to drink another cup of tea with, in an endless series of cups of tea.
They had just returned from another of their several explorations of the Osprey in the past few days, this time down to the boatdeck to inspect the vessel’s steam launches. By an odd combination of circumstances, Loreanna had never ridden in one—most shiphandlers, her husband included, regarding them as prohibitively costly to operate without sound reason, and risky, as well—always having employed the lubberlift to travel from planet to ship and back again.
Somehow, somewhere, Woulf had apparently learned to pilot such auxiliary vessels as these, and, having reached the boatdeck by a little-used outboard ladderwell connecting the captain’s quarters (and nobody else’s) to the spaces below, they had sat together for some time, side by side upon the oddly tilted acceleration couches, as he explained the launch’s control systems to her. Loreanna had found the whole lesson utterly fascinating—very different from sailing a starship—and she longed now for some practical experience in the Deep.
They had just returned to the staterooms she shared—theoretically, she thought with a moment’s wash of resentment—with her husband, and having left Woulf in the sitting room in order to change out of the rough-and-ready clothes her daughter had left behind, into apparel that was less modest in its way, although considerably more formal, she was now preparing another cup of tea.
She leaned over awkwardly to pour tea in his cup, strangely concerned—she could not fathom why; he was her brother after all—not to display her breasts to him too frankly. Her back was to the doors and mullioned windows looking out upon the maind
eck. Woulf sat facing those windows, politely (she thought) gazing past her to watch the crew at work healing their vessel’s many wounds.
Of a sudden, he raised his eyebrows. “Beg pardon, Sister, but if I am to be expected to drink that, I shall be compelled to make, er, adjustments, if I may?”
She smiled back at him. “By all means do, Brother. You know the way by now.” She poured tea for herself and sat, enjoying it after having been upon her feet most of the day and especially after their long climb up the outboard ladderway.
Woulf nodded, arose, and went quickly through the door into the sleeping accommodations, which was necessary to reach the sanitary facilities which for some reason lost in the mist of antiquity were referred to aboard ship as “the conrad.” Almost in the same instant, the outer door banged aside, and a grim-looking Arran stalked in from the maindeck. “A word with you, my dear, if I may?”
Perplexed at her husband’s apparent anger, she blinked up at Arran. “Of course, my darling—with regard to what, if I may inquire?” She gestured to him, inviting him to sit beside her upon the settee, intending to offer him a cup of tea. However, equally without words, he curtly refused and remained standing.
“Some of the crew have told me that, despite my clearly expressed wishes to the contrary, they saw you below this morning, upon the boatdeck, with that Woulf.”
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 36