The Plague of Swords

by Miles Cameron

  The door of the main cabin opened like a vision of heaven. Inside was light—a beautiful golden candle light. She suspected Michael might be in there. She threw up over the side again, cursing her lot, and finally felt better.

  The emperor was holding her hair out of her eyes.

  “Don’t you dare laugh at me!” Kaitlin spat.

  Gabriel laughed. “I think we’re going to have some court ceremonial lessons,” he said. An arm of spume off the nearest wave was blown over them, soaking her again.

  He put her wet hands on the lifeline that ran down the waist of the big ship. “Go to the cabin,” he said.

  “I’m soaked!” she yelled. “I’ll go below.”

  There was another wild shriek from the stern.

  “I have to go,” he said. “The cabin will be better for you. And there’s wine. And Blanche is bored.” He gave her a gentle push and ran aft, slipped on the deck, fell, and a wave came over the bulwark. It was not a big wave, and it only dragged him to the scuppers and pulled him against the side of the ship, but he hung on, rose, and ran the rest of the way to the door into the high stern castle.

  She followed him as far as the steps, and then entered the door from which he’d come.

  There were half the officers of the company, and their partners—Sauce and Count Zac, Bad Tom, her husband, and Giorgos Comnenos and his wife and Sukey. Sukey looked grey instead of her usual magnificent pale brown, and so did Tom. No one was well dressed.

  Kaitlin got the door closed before the wind put out every candle.

  Blanche rose from the coach, the long settee built into the stern of the ship under the great stern windows. On this ship, however, the stern windows overlooked a small platform, like a balcony, and a long, long heavy pole, as big as the mainmast, that pointed straight astern.

  Kaitlin had no interest in looking at the vast majesty of the sea coming up astern, roller on roller to the grey horizon that seemed, today, far too close. But she was grateful for Blanche’s warmth when the golden-haired woman wrapped her arms around Kaitlin. She led her into the alcove by the coach and stripped her shift over her head and replaced it with a dry wool gown. Kaitlin tried to resist the sisterly impulse to subside into Blanche’s arms. The wool was luxurious.

  “I’m so seasick,” she confided. “Or I’m pregnant again.”

  Blanche embraced her.

  Kaitlin worried about her son. I can be away for an hour, she thought, eager for adult conversation. She had a nurse, who seemed afraid of everything and yet completely resistant to the sea.

  Her husband came and replaced Blanche’s arms with his own. He put a cup of hot wine in her hands and she drank a little.

  Sauce looked up from her cards. “Tom’s been liking the chicken soup,” she said kindly.

  Bad Tom did not look like the monster of the battlefield he sometimes could be. Instead, he looked as if he’d just begun to recover from jaundice, and his eyes had red rims.

  “I think I still have a touch of the cough,” he muttered.

  Sukey made a sound not unlike a kitten’s pitiful mew.

  “I’m in good company,” Kaitlin allowed. “Let me try the soup.”

  * * *

  Blanche watched him recover from the cough. He was very difficult to live with. He never stopped talking and he was far too intent and often distant. He would make love to her in the lightning-shot ecstasy of the stern cabin in a storm and almost immediately rise and begin writing, which made her feel small and possibly used. He would go to see his monster the moment the thing screamed, leaving her or anyone else. He came to bed at all hours, having spent time with the helmsman or fencing on deck by mage light with Michael or playing piquet.

  But what she really missed was how much the queen needed her and how important she was to the queen’s life. But the queen had sent her—had blessed her. Had offered her lands and a title, in fact, to go and represent her.

  “Do not let him forget he is Alban, and one of us,” she said.

  Blanche was used to a life of work, and hard work: work at which she excelled. She had little interest in being a mistress, and she was quickly bored, although the lovemaking was, she admitted to her own surprise, very exciting. She had always assumed it was something women put up with to get children. Her mother had told her so in just so many words, dwelling on shame and dirt.

  Her mother had never made love during a lightning storm at sea by a window of a hundred panes of glass and rollers taller than the stern of the ship.

  But Blanche was determined to fit in, and to work. She suspected she’d perish of boredom, otherwise. Luckily, fate sent her a sodden and very seasick Kaitlin, and she spent two days caring for Kaitlin and for Galahad, her son, named for an old tale and the handsome servitor of the queen’s too. If she had a daughter, she was going to call her Tamsin for the Faery Queen. Kaitlin had said so just that morning.

  The first thing she found in Kaitlin’s space belowdecks was that the other women didn’t have fine hanging beds as she had in the stern cabin. Kaitlin had a hammock, hung in a range of hammocks with the other women of the company, and noblewomen and seamstresses occupied the same lines. Two men-at-arms stood guard at all times at the head of the range, and the archers of the household were in the next range: all men and women that Blanche knew. It was intimate to a degree Blanche had never seen; there was no hint of privacy, and the smell—the “fug” as the sailors called it—was like nothing she’d ever endured.

  Little Galahad was not helping. He was loud in his protests against the sea, and his wet nurse was a slattern, more interested, already, in finding herself an archer—or two, or five.

  The morning after the sodden Kaitlin had flung herself into the great cabin, Blanche went to visit her and found her work. The baby was crying because he was dirty, and Kaitlin was beside herself because the baby was dirty, and the slatternly nurse was indignant because she was being blamed for it.

  It was surprisingly like life in the palace.

  Laundry wasn’t easy at sea. Blanche had noted that the food was dull, and sometimes bad, but she hadn’t fully understood how afraid everyone was of fire until she went to the galley herself, carrying a naked baby on her shoulder. The cooks were all men, all survivors of bad wounds; Pierre had a peg leg, and Antoine had just one arm.

  Oak Pew was there, still pale from the cough. Blanche had never encountered her sober before and was shocked when the older woman took the baby and made cooing noises.

  “The wet wind makes me ill,” she said, “but I love the sea. Oh, what a cute baby. What a fine little man you are,” she said, running her rough hand over the baby’s smooth thighs.

  Blanche almost said something foolish, like But you’re lovely, sober! but she restrained herself. Instead, she found that Oak Pew, being a regular in the galley, could be her intermediary to the rather scary men who were the cooks.

  “I need hot water. I need a lot of hot water, to wash clothes. At the least, I need to wash all the baby’s things.” She shrugged. “I’m at my wits’ end.”

  Oak Pew spoke to the cooks in Gallish. They answered with shrugs.

  “Antoine says he only has so many pots, and...”

  Blanche laughed. “And he’s not anxious to have baby shit in them,” Blanche said. “I heard him. My mother spoke Gallish at home.”

  “They do laundry,” Oak Pew said. “They do it in seawater and it’s full of salt—bad for a woman and terrible for a baby. But they must have washbasins or wooden tubs.” She rattled off a long string of rapid Gallish, which Blanche could just about follow.

  Antoine nodded and Pierre led them out of the galley and down a short, very narrow passage, to a storeroom. There were washtubs of wood, all knocked down and stored with their hoops, like barrels.

  Blanche sighed. “It’s like the palace,” she said. “You have to make the tool before you can do the job.” Nonetheless, she left Galahad with Oak Pew, a daring decision in the eyes of many, and ran, barefoot, aft, to the small deck
above the great cabin, from which the master mariner commanded the ship. Most of the ship’s officers and trained men gathered there, and Gabriel stood with the master mariner, a Morean seaman of few words and vast experience.

  She’d seen them all do the routine whereby they paused on the steps to the quarterdeck and crossed themselves to the crucifix, hung on the new aft cabin, built high on the castle, that the pranksters called the “eighth deck” because it was half the size of the quarterdeck.

  Gabriel smiled when he saw her. Master Alexei bowed politely.

  “Despoina,” he said. “Welcome to my deck.”

  She curtsied. “Master,” she said, “I’ve come to beg a boon.”

  He nodded, his eyes already flicking around his ship. It was interesting to watch him—every few seconds, he looked at the mainsail and the mast tops and then looked forward. “Yes?” he asked.

  “I wonder if I might borrow your carpenter, and have a few of your washtubs knocked together,” she asked.

  He nodded, glanced around his ship, and smiled at her, possibly amused. “Leonardo!” he called. “Attend this lady.”

  Leonardo, it proved, was entirely competent. Blanche suspected, from what she’d overheard, that Gabriel had ransacked the imperial navy and hired Albans and Galles to fill out his crews, but everyone she met seemed thorough and professional, and Leonardo was clearly glad to have something to do. He built her three washtubs in a time that would have been considered miraculous in the palace in Harndon and then filled them with seawater to make sure they were tight. They weren’t, but he kept filling them.

  “That’s why we use soft wood,” he said. “It swells. Everything warps at sea. Best to just let nature do the work. Give her half a glass.”

  She went below and negotiated, for a little of Gabriel’s money, that the cooks would give her six fills of her tubs in hot, fresh water. The rain had filled every barrel on the ship. She hadn’t even considered the rarity of fresh water.

  She collected all the baby’s clothes—and all of Kaitlin’s underclothes, her own, and Sukey’s and Blanche’s and Sauce’s. Sukey smiled and assigned her four young women, and they contributed their own clothes, and before the water was hot, she had all the shifts of all the women and girls aboard. This led to a certain hilarity belowdecks, as thirty-five women went about clad only in kirtles, to the delight of most of the archers and men-at-arms.

  Of course they began to ask for their own clothes to be washed—seven days at sea, and men were wearing braes for the fourth time, some of them.

  Sukey just shook her head. “This one’s on me, Blanche. I run the laundry, and why I thought that the saints would do the clothes at sea...perhaps I thought we’d all run naked.”

  “The cooks can’t boil any more water,” Blanche said, “without affecting food.”

  There was an archer standing behind Sukey with his arms full of white smalls. Sukey took them and added them to the pile with a smile, and the young archer vanished.

  “We aren’t doing men’s clothes,” Blanche began, and then she got it. “Who’s she?” she asked.

  Sukey nodded. “Someone who shouldn’t be here,” she said. “But I’ll hazard she’s got the solution.” Sukey left Blanche standing by her tubs with her new girls: four strong young women, all new to the company and all inured to work. She gave them her new-girl lecture from the palace about cleanliness, and when the first hot water came, she led them in washing her own hands, arms, and face with soap. Then she filled three tubs.

  “I’ll do the baby things,” she said. “They’re foul, and they will take some skill.” She’d scraped the worst off over the side into the clean, fresh sea, and now she gave them a first wash, turning her water foul but the cloth whiter.

  Work enveloped her, as it did. She did the dirtiest work, and her girls immediately liked her.

  She’d done this all before. The first woman to teach her to wash laundry had told her, Shit washes away. It was her life principle.

  Her girls were like girls. They liked to talk, none of them particularly liked to get their hands in dirty water, and all four managed to get water everywhere.

  But the work got done.

  She was unaware that Gabriel was there until he came forward. “Sukey told me,” he said.

  “You aren’t angry?” she asked.

  He made a face. “It is you who could be angry. I should learn to do this,” he began.

  “And then you’d try to compete with me to do it better,” she said, hands on hips.

  “What do you need?” he asked, pushing hair out of her eyes.

  “More hot water?” she asked. “As you are emperor and everything.”

  “And emperor on a ship is only the second or third in command,” he said. “But hot water I can do, and so can Morgon.”

  She never thought about using the hermetical.

  He boiled her baby diapers in their second clean water, right in the tubs.

  “You could find employment in any laundry,” she said. “Lord, the time saving.”

  Sukey, close at hand, laughed. “Sweet Christ, if women ran the world, think of the magic items we’d build. Self-heating laundry tubs.”

  One of the girls, Kady, laughed, showing her strong teeth. “Magical stoves!” she said.

  They all laughed. The smallest one giggled. “A charm against making a baby?”

  Kady blushed. “That would be—” She couldn’t stifle a laugh.

  Morgon Mortirmir was just coming up the main ladder. He looked at young Kady. “Why would you want such a charm?” he asked.

  Kady blushed again.

  Sukey shrugged. “Because guessing your cycle is dull,” she said. “And it doesn’t always work.” She’d spent enough time with the young magister to know how literal his mind was.

  Morgon shrugged. “It’s not that complex a matter,” he said. “Let me see what I can do.”

  He also boiled some water for Blanche, three tubs at a time.

  She nodded to Sukey. “If Ser Morgon will repeat this trick another time or two, I can start on the men’s clothes,” she said.

  Sukey pulled her aside. “You don’t have to do this,” she said.

  Blanche grinned. “You work. Kaitlin works. I wish to work. I am very good at this.”

  Sukey hugged her. “It cracks my hands. I hate laundry.”

  “Lanolin,” Blanche said.

  “Is His Nibs going to let you do laundry?” Sukey asked. “The empress of laundry?”

  * * *

  The stream of imperial messenger birds was incessant. Gabriel had at least one a day and sometimes two, with Alcaeus and his mother sitting in Liviapolis; Kronmir’s messages from Venike, and now, almost daily messages from Du Corse. The Galle was at sea, with his own company and several hundred borrowed Alban men-at-arms and archers. Gabriel was sharing information on the Necromancer.

  Michael sat in the after cabin, writing.

  “It’s like old times,” Gabriel said, coming in with a messenger on his fist.

  Anne Woodstock put her head in the door. “Master Giannis says the Mary Magdalene and the Joseph of Arimethea are in sight.”

  Gabriel smiled. “Thanks, Anne,” he said. When she’d closed the door, he took the message off the bird—Forty-One, a small bird. He read it and handed it to Michael to copy fair.

  Michael copied it and looked up. “So nothing is attacking the Galles,” he said.

  “Another of my clever plans bites the dust,” Gabriel admitted. “I was sure the Eeeague would attack them and we’d slip by.” He frowned. “And that means we may be attacked. This is all so high-risk.” He shook his head. “We’re so close we could rendezvous. They must be just over the horizon—the birds are going back and forth in two hours.”

  “You said you were ready to fight,” Michael said.

  Gabriel raised an eyebrow, and Michael nodded. “This is like old times. You mean, it’s always better to slip by than to fight,” he said. “I’ll be ready to be captain, any day
.”

  Gabriel nodded. “Good,” he said. He paused. “You know that if I go down, it’s you.”

  Michael shrugged.

  Gabriel scratched under his beard. “Birth matters. Sauce can command; Tom can too. But...only you and Gavin have the birth.” His eyes met Michael’s squarely. “And Giorgos Comnenos. He’s for emperor.”

  Michael swallowed. “Don’t die,” he said. “I don’t need to see how thoroughly you’ve planned my future.”

  Gabriel nodded, eyes on the next message. “I’ve done my best,” he said.

  Next morning was clear. The weather mages kept a breeze in the great sails. Otherwise, they’d have been becalmed. But they were not moving much.

  Master Janos had a great sail lowered over the side for swimming, and the men went first, bathing in the clear water. Most could not swim, but the sail kept them safe, and the lookouts were watching for sharks. There were big sharks in these waters. The master mariner assured them they were just a day or perhaps two from the Elbow and the coast of Iberia. Indeed, the lookouts spotted a few sharks, but none came close enough to provide sport for the duty crossbows.

  The Mary Magdalene was so close that they could see people’s faces craning over the side, and Michael waved to Master Julius and wished that the man were aboard the flagship and available to do all the clerking. The Joseph of Arimethea was a ghostly presence, pale and almost white, on the horizon to the north, and making a long board to close them.

  About noon, when Michael emerged from the water, salty but clean of ink, the lookout hailed the deck that he’d seen ships.

  Gabriel was still in the water. But he came up the side naked, water dripping off his beard.

  Master Giannis called into the tops, “Where away?” in Morean Archaic. The lookout, also Morean, answered in the same language.

  Gabriel turned to Michael, naked, and Sauce, not quite naked in a man’s shirt. She had been lounging on the deck, creating havoc among the sailors.

  “Arm,” he said.

  Naked, he ran up the steps to the quarterdeck, even as Anne, very damp, and Toby, just as naked, converged on the day cabin.

  Gabriel paused, just above them. “Flying armour,” he said. “Master Giorgos?”