Two other sailors appeared, drawn by the noise.
‘What the fuck?’ someone started shouting. Knifeman was reeling around, clutching his face. Tobias kicked him between the legs, whereupon he collapsed in a heap. Weak as piss, these boys. Weak as bloody piss.
‘Tried to fucking knife me,’ he explained to no one and everyone. ‘Yartek and this guy.’
The crew looked down at their fallen comrade, rolling around on the floor clutching his manhood, blood running out of his nose.
‘Didn’t do it very well,’ the shorter one said.
‘No.’ Tobias tried to look heroically shocked and wounded. ‘They didn’t.’
‘Excitement over then,’ the short sailor said. ‘Back to bed, lads. Including you, Leg. Try not to get too much blood on the deck.’
Gods, this lot made Skie look overemotional. Tobias lay awake in his cubbyhole fingering his sword and listening to the sounds of the ship moving around him.
A strange piping sound woke him from a fitful dream about shadowy creatures with toothless, bulbous mouths. Morning roll-call, he realized after a moment. The night crew giving way to the day. Crawled groggily out of his bunk, strapped his sword back onto his belt then scrambled out onto the deck. It was early morning, grey and cold, rot-coloured clouds massing ominously on the horizon before them. That feel in the air of held calm before a storm. Pressure, like he’d last felt staring into Marith’s ruined burned-out eyes. Mercenaries were almost as good weather readers as sailors, for similar although perhaps slightly less urgent reasons. Tobias shivered. He’d rather have had his throat cut quietly than drown.
Thinking of which, there was Yartek, eyeing him nervously, a bruise on his cheek. I don’t even remember hitting him, Tobias thought. Oh, no, wait, I think he whacked his head on something running away. He waved cheerfully. Yartek looked hastily away and then back at him with a humiliated face.
‘Leg’ was about, too, his nose a glorious mass of black, blue and crimson looking rather like embroidery on a woman’s dress. He and Yartek seemed to be avoiding each other. Tobias sauntered over to him.
‘Make a habit of trying to kill your passengers, do you?’
‘Piss off and fuck yourself.’ The comic sound of the voice through the broken nose was most pleasing.
‘Try it again, I’ll kill you.’ Tobias touched the hilt of his sword.
Leg jerked his head at the clouds. ‘To be honest, if she’s as bad as she looks, in a few hours’ time you’ll be wishing I’d managed it.’
Tobias looked at the clouds again, and at the sheer bare cliffs of the Immish coastline looming away on their left. We’ve been at sea less than a full day. Overnight, basically. And we’re possibly about to die within sight of land. Like a pitched battle against impossible and overwhelming odds, only without the ever-appealing option of desertion. Curse Marith-damned-Altrersyr for the thousand-and-first time.
The storm hit sometime after midday. Not that it was possible to judge midday, the sky being so dark by then that it might as well have been twilight. Sesere-whateveritis, thought Tobias. Night comes. We survive. It had always struck him as a particularly low-aspiration credo, as beliefs went.
The waves were getting bigger and bigger. The wind was rising, cracking in the sails, hurting the eyes. No rain, but you could see it moving in, a dark curtain in front of them, the sound of it beating on the sea loud as a living thing. Sailors scrambled around the deck and rigging, shouting. Tobias and the two other passengers watched them from the pitiful lack of shelter provided by the bunk huts on the deck. The only other place to go was down below into the hold, which would be worse, an utter surrender of control to the elements. I could have been killed by a dragon, Tobias thought. I will not die already underwater in a coffin stinking of rotted whale fat.
‘Get out of the bloody way!’ Yartek screamed at them, running past with a coil of rope. He seemed to be instrumental in doing something to the sail, so Tobias felt some relief he hadn’t had it in him to draw his sword last night.
‘One day out,’ the woman beside him, Raeta, he thought her name was, muttered. ‘Captain should just have turned back at first light.’
‘Can’t just turn back,’ the third and richest-looking passenger said darkly. ‘If merchant ships turned back every time the weather got up, nothing would ever sail.’
Acceptable added cost of trade goods. Until it was your fucking ship.
The rain hit, then, sudden and painful, a great roar of noise as it struck the deck and the canvas of the sail. The sea seemed to boil under the force of it.
‘I think we should get under cover,’ the rich man said. The ship juddered violently. Huge waves, their surface pitted from the raindrops, churning up the ship; the sky now dark as coal fires, dull lights flickering across the clouds. Lightning and storm spirits shrieking and riding the winds. Green-white fingers traced through the rigging, whipping and probing at rope and canvas and men’s hands. Frantic blowing of a whistle. A man screamed and fell. Blood on his mouth like fine long claws. The snap of a rope, more screams as the released tension caused it to rebound and strike like a snake. More men falling. Men rushing across the deck, calling out orders, the whistle blowing.
‘We should go below,’ said the woman Raeta. ‘Shelter in the hold.’
I’m not going down there, thought Tobias. I’m not dying in the bloody dark in a bloody box. I’m not breathing in whale rot and bilge water as my last breath of air before my lungs give out.
‘Below,’ Raeta said, pulling his hand. ‘Come on, you fool.’ He could almost see the figures in the air, circling and dancing, tearing with teeth and nails. Beautiful, they were said to be.
‘Get out of the fucking way!’ a sailor shouted at them. Possibly Yartek. The deck tipped suddenly, sending Tobias staggering. Salt water hit him in the face hard as a punch, tasting like blood, like a shock going through him. Raeta lurched into his arms, their heads bashing together. He grabbed at her as the ship tilted again in the other direction, riding up on a wave, spinning in the wind. The sail screamed as they ripped around. Another rope broke, lashing across the deck. Green-white hands snapping it like a whip. A wave crashed onto the deck and suddenly Tobias was half-floating in hissing foam. Gods it was so fucking cold. Things like long, long fingers pulled at his legs, tangled him, wrapped themselves in knots around him, sank into his skin through his clothes.
‘Just get below!’ Tobias found himself crashing through the hatch into the hold. Raeta fell on top of him. They slithered down the ladder and ended up in a soaked heap on the floor. It was very dark, water running in rivulets around them. Rats running around them too.
‘Close the hatch!’ someone yelled. Tobias, half-stunned, dragged himself back up the ladder. Another surge of water hit him in the face as he struggled and finally pulled it shut. He fell down again gasping. Never felt so bloody useless. Like some knock-kneed recruit dropping his sword and bearing his neck for a kill stroke when he bent to pick it up.
‘Thank you,’ he grunted at Raeta. In the dark she was nothing more than a shape. He remembered yellow hair around a clear face.
‘We’ll probably still drown,’ she said brightly.
‘No.’ Soaking wet and humiliated, he felt more confident. Couldn’t hear the wind screaming, see the things in the sky. Just a storm. Just weather. Ships sailed through wind and rain all the time. ‘Blow out soon enough.’
The ship tipped and jerked. Thrashing on the water. It reminded Tobias of a body shuddering as it died. He crawled a little way and found a large barrel to lean against. The woman crawled next to him.
‘You think?’ She was speaking Immish, but her accent and her dress were from the Whites. So might be able to tell him something useful about Morr Town and Seneth. Unusual, a woman travelling alone. And as a passenger on a merchant ship. Interested him as a result, despite himself.
‘Going to Morr Town?’ he asked her.
‘Just sit in the dark and chat until we die, shall we?’ Raeta lau
ghed. ‘I’m going to Turn, on Fealene Isle. But fewer boats go there.’
An awkward pause, the ship lurching. Crash of water dripping in through the cracks in the deck.
‘This is the worst place to encounter a storm,’ Raeta said. ‘Our bad luck. Even half a day further on, we could have put in at Lanth or Immerlas. Polle Island, even. But here … If we’re driven onto the cliffs, we’ll be smashed apart.’
‘Know the journey well, then?’
‘Done it once or twice. Been through storms once or twice.’
‘Had the crew try to slit your throat once or twice?’
‘Hah. No.’ Tobias could hear her grin in the dark. ‘I’m the captain’s sister.’
That was … interesting. ‘Know if they’re going to try to slit mine again, then?’
‘If we survive this, good chance of it.’ She sucked in a breath, knocked against Tobias as the ship rolled. ‘You did maybe help me a bit when we were slipping all over the place up there. And gave Leg a good walloping. Tell you what, you give me one of those nice big gold coins you’ve got there, I’ll tell my brother to leave you alone.’
‘You don’t think if you let me live I might start telling people all over Morr Town what it is you get up to on this ship of an evening?’
Tobias heard her grin again, wider. Somehow saw her mouth with gleaming smiling teeth. ‘And who’s going to believe you? My brother sells cheap, buys expensive. Makes a bit extra in creative ways. Good for everyone. You know all that anyway. Wouldn’t bother trying to tell. And it’s nothing to do with me, either. I’m just hitching a lift to visit our old mother back home on Fealene.’
‘How about you tell your brother to have our fellow passenger knifed instead, I tell him to rest easy tonight and then forget I ever met him, then we all enjoy the rest of the voyage in peace?’
‘I’ll think about it.’ Raeta stretched in the dark. ‘You’ve got the smell of money about you, Tobias. Look of hate about you, too. Blood on your hands. What you going to Seneth for, then, with no baggage but a sword and a bag of gold round your neck?’
‘Witch woman, now, are you?’
‘Ha.’ She snorted through her nose like a horse. ‘I can smell blood and gold on a man. See it in his face. Your future’s a nasty thing, Tobias. Don’t need to be a witch to see that.’
‘My past’s been a nasty thing. My present’s not looking particularly great right now either. And blood and gold smells a hell of a lot better than whale shit and salt.’
‘Indeed and so.’ She kissed his cheek. Not sexual: like a mother kissing a clever child. Her lips were hot and dry on Tobias’s skin. He shivered. ‘I will tell my brother to let you live, I think.’
They lapsed into silence, the storm rising to such a pitch their voices would have been lost had they tried to talk. The ship creaked and shifted, rose and fell. Thank all the gods the cargo seemed securely tied down. Occasional sounds like something scraping against the hull. Hours, it seemed, there in the dark. No longer any idea whether it was day or night, how much time had passed. We could be dead and drowned and in an afterlife, Tobias thought. Ghosts or something, floating on a ghost sea.
You’re going as mad as the boy, he thought then. What the fuck are you thinking? There isn’t a bloody afterlife. Not for Amrath, not for Marith and certainly not for you. We’re just lumps of meat. We just die. And we’re not dead.
He really needed a piss and a crap, in fact. That proved he was still alive in itself: in no religion or folk-tale, anywhere, ever, did the dead need a crap. His legs were feeling nasty and cramped too. If he crawled to the other side of the hold behind some more barrels, would Raeta somehow not notice? Between the roar of the storm and the stink of whale, probably not …
‘Gods, that smells disgusting!’ Raeta shouted a very short while later. ‘Amrath and Eltheia, man, couldn’t you just wait?’
‘No.’ Tobias made his way back to her, face blazing with humiliation. ‘I bloody couldn’t.’
‘You’ll have to clean it up as soon as the weather drops.’
‘What do you think I am?’ A soldier never soiled a camp. Knew too well the consequences of uncleanliness.
‘A man who shits on the floor?’ Raeta said sweetly.
The ship lurched again, with an ominous creak of rope as the cargo shifted. We’ll be buggered if the barrels start moving, Tobias thought. Crushed to death by whale excretion and my own shit. Poetic, like. Another shower of water streamed down through the closed hatchway. We seem to be losing, Tobias thought. Tapping on the hull, scratching like hard, long fingernails. Things in the air. Things in the water. And those black cliffs somewhere off the port bow, running straight down into the sea sharp as knapped flint.
He was hungry, too. Thirsty. Scared. Bored. It was strange, not being part of it. Sitting down there with no idea what was going on or whether things were swinging their way whilst others fought the great fight. So many years of being in charge, sending out orders, knowing how things were falling, seeing it all in his mind. This powerlessness was so … dull. Didn’t feel like himself. Didn’t feel like any of this was really happening. Maybe that’s what fucks the high lords so badly, he thought. They just sit there, not really a part of anything. So powerful they’re kind of powerless, ’cause they don’t actually do any of it. Nothing’s real. They’re not real. Everything’s shadows to them, themselves included. Don’t really exist like we do, in the solid world of shit and piss and blood that means you’re alive. No action on the world.
‘Got anything to drink?’ he asked Raeta.
‘Should be water in some of the barrels,’ she said. ‘No idea which, without light, so you’d have to chance it and hope it isn’t whale oil …’
Oh, they thought they did things. Thought they changed the world, trampled on it, built great works and tore them down. Thought they pissed on the common folk and then made them smile in gratitude. But they were ghosts, in the end. Didn’t do anything with their own hands, not so as they could say ‘that was me’. Just words, they were. Like gods indeed, in that respect: all their power depended on someone else to do all the heavy lifting. If someone some day said ‘no’, they’d be buggered. Just be left to shout louder and end up either begging or sticking them with a knife.
‘Got anything to eat?’ he asked Raeta.
‘Should be hard tack and salt meat in some of the barrels,’ she said.
The motion of the ship began to calm, the roar of wind and rain and waves to lessen. Don’t tell me we’ve actually survived? Tobias thought. Bloody hell, surprises never cease.
Of course, that means I’ve now got to scrape my own shit off the hold floor …
‘Think we can probably risk going above,’ Raeta said. They crawled up the ladder and gingerly opened the hatch. The deck above reminded Tobias of a fortress following an unsuccessful assault. Bloody chaos, literally and figuratively, but with an air of exhausted, crazed relief. Half the rigging seemed to be in pieces, but the sail had held. Sailors were already scaling the mast with great coils of rope over their arms. The bunk huts were smashed up, and they were missing the rowing boat thing. Still raining, but far less furiously. Just rain, from a sky that was just grey. Just wind, blowing his lungs clear of the stench of the hold. Waves foam-capped, no longer monsters, sending up spray as they struck the prow.
Being alive is bloody wonderful, Tobias thought. Gods and demons and fuck, the world’s a beautiful place.
Three of the crew were drowned, ripped overboard from the mast. Another two were injured. Really not such a bad butcher’s bill. Nothing damaged so bad they couldn’t continue. Not a very bad storm, it seemed, all noise and bluster and comparatively little force.
‘Yeah,’ Tobias said, ‘met plenty of blokes like that.’ Green-white fingers tearing and tapping. Hands like ropes pulling at his legs in the swirl of the water. Imagination and paranoia, a trick of light and currents …
He sat eating with Raeta, cross-legged on the deck. Golden evening light illuminated th
e flecks of grey in her hair. Not that he was interested, but he couldn’t help noticing. Shitting in front of someone whilst contemplating the shared prospect of cold slow death made a bond like that. Probably worse things to see as the last image of your existence than long yellow hair floating in the water you were drowning in. And a hell of a lot better to look at now than the food, which was hard tack already suggestively wormy and dried beef. Another deep truth known to all soldiers and sailors: food does not taste any better for being garnished with relief at still being alive and in possession of all four limbs. Arguably, it actually tasted kind of worse. I survived hell and high water, for this?
‘Should be better weather for a while now,’ said Raeta.
‘And what makes you say that?’
‘Optimism,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Also the fact that there are plenty of places to put in to harbour and wait it out now we’re past the Sker coast. With your luck, we won’t meet another storm till we need to go into open water for the last run into the Whites.’
‘With my luck?’
‘Actually, you know, you’re bloody lucky, Tobias. In that you survive everything. It’s just those around you that don’t.’
Thalia’s blue eyes, guilty and ashamed. Marith’s white dead face, broken with surrender, knowing he’d just taken every last chance of hope away. Yeah.
And Rate and Alxine and Skie and Geth and Emit and …
‘Stop it,’ he said savagely.
‘Stop what?’ she said with a smile and a shrug.
So the journey went on. Almost enjoyable, at times, when the autumn sunshine was warm on the deck and the sea sparkled and the land to their left was low and dark and filled with safe harbours. A few clear nights when the stars were bright. A group of dolphins appeared one evening, dancing and leaping, seemingly trying to race the boat. The third passenger disappeared the night after the storm, and Raeta had a nice new cloak, thick wool with a double weave. She appeared quite happy to spend time with Tobias, explaining some of the detail about ships and sailing, equally interested in the carefully selected stories he told of life as a hired sword.
The Court of Broken Knives Page 36