by Robin Hobb
From the moment Sa’Adar had thrown the lantern at Gantry, it had been out of Wintrow’s hands. He had not started this carnage; this slaughter was not his doing. He could not even recall making a decision, only that he had followed Sa’Adar and helped him unshackle slaves. It was the right thing to do. More right than trying to warn his father and crewmates? Don’t ask that question, don’t let that question exist. These deaths were not his fault. Over and over again, Wintrow told himself that. Not his fault. What could one boy do to stop this torrent of hatred once it had broken loose? He was just a leaf caught up in a storm wind.
He wondered if Gantry had felt the same way.
He and Sa’Adar had been freeing the map-faces, deep in the bottom-most hold of the Vivacia, when they heard the yells from above. In their haste to join in the fray, the map-faces had literally trampled over him. Sa’Adar had led them with the lantern. Wintrow had been left behind in the pitch black, frightened and disoriented. Now he groped his way through the filthy holds, clambering over the bodies of slaves either too weakened or scared to join in the rebellion. Others milled in the confusion, calling to one another, demanding to know what was happening. He pushed his way through them and groped his way around them, and still he could not find the companionway up to the hatch. He knew every inch of this ship, he told himself. But suddenly the Vivacia had become a black maze of death and stench and frightened people. On the deck above him he heard running feet, and cries of both anger and fear. Screams of death, too.
Then another scream burst out, one that rang within the hold and wakened echoing cries of terrors in the churning slaves. ‘Vivacia,’ he gasped to himself, and then, ‘Vivacia!’ he called out to her, praying she could hear him, and know he was coming to her. His groping hands suddenly met the ladder and he flung himself up it.
As he emerged onto the deck into a driving rain he stumbled over the first body of a crewman. Mild was trapped in a half-closed hatch. In the dimness he could not tell how he had been killed, only that he was dead. He knelt by him, hearing the sounds of fighting elsewhere in the ship, but capable of comprehending fully only this death. Mild’s chest was still warm. The sluicing rain and flying spray had already chilled his hands and face, but his body gave up its warmth more slowly.
Others were dying now, slaves and crewmen. Vivacia lived it all, he suddenly recalled. She felt it all, and alone.
Wintrow was on his feet and stumbling towards her before he knew what he was doing. In the waist, some of the crewmen had been sleeping in crude canvas shelters. The wind and rain there had been preferable to the thick stink of belowdecks. Now the tent was collapsed, and wind and rain tore at it while men tore at each other. Manacle chains were suddenly weapons. Wintrow dodged through the blood-crazed fighters, shouting, ‘No! No! You have to stop this, the ship won’t take it! You have to stop!’ No one heeded him. There were men down on the deck, some squirming and some still. He jumped over them. He could do nothing for them. The only person he could possibly aid was the ship, who now screamed his name into the night. Wintrow tripped over what might have been a body. He scrabbled back to his feet, evaded a man who clutched at him, and groped his way forward through the rain and the dark of night until his hands found the ladder to the foredeck.
‘Vivacia!’ he called, his voice a thin and pitiful thing in the rising storm. But still she heard him.
‘Wintrow! Wintrow!’ she cried mindlessly, shrieking his name as a nightmare-plagued child calls for her mother. He clambered up on the foredeck, only to be driven back as the Vivacia ploughed wildly through the sea. For a moment all he could do was grasp the rung of the ladder and fight for air. In the next space between waves, he was up and dashing foolishly forwards. His hands grasped the forward rail. He could not feel her, could see her only as a shadow before him.
‘Vivacia!’ he cried to her.
For an instant she did not answer. He gripped the railing hard and reached for her with all his might. Like warm hands clasping on a cold night, her awareness joined gratefully with his. Then her horror and shock flowed into his mind as well.
‘They’ve killed Comfrey! There’s no one on the wheel!’
Figurehead and boy plunged into cold saltwater. The wizardwood deck slid under his grasping fingers. In the dark he shared her knowledge and despair even as he fought for his own survival. He felt the widespread death throughout her, and knew, too, the lack of control she felt as the storm winds drove her forward into the towering waves. Her crew had been driven from their duties. Barricaded in the sterncastle were some who fought for their lives. Others were dying slowly on the decks they had manned. As lives winked out, it was as if Vivacia were losing pieces of herself. Never before had he sensed how immense was the water and how small the boat that preserved his life. As the storm waves ran off her decks, he managed to stand. ‘What should I do?’ he demanded of her.
‘Get to the wheel!’ she cried to him through the wind. ‘Get control of the rudder.’ She raised her voice in a sudden roar. ‘Tell them to stop killing each other, or they’ll all die. All of them, I swear it!’
He turned back toward the waist of the ship, and drawing as deep a breath as he was able, shouted at the men who struggled there. ‘You heard her. She’ll kill us all if you don’t stop the fighting now! Stop the fighting. Man her sails, those of you who know how, or not a one of us will survive this night! And let me through to the helm!’
They plunged again into a wave. The wall of water hit him from behind, and he was suddenly flying free with it, no deck, no rigging, nothing, only the water that offered a yielding resistance to his scrabbling hands. He might already be overboard and not even know it. He opened his mouth to scream and sucked in saltwater instead. In the next instant the water slammed him against the port railing. He caught at it and held, despite the water’s best efforts to carry him over the side. Right next to him a slave was not so lucky. He struck the railing, teetered and then went over the side.
The water ran off through the scuppers. On the deck, men thrashed like landed fish, choking and spitting seawater. The moment he could, Wintrow was back on his feet and struggling aft. Like an insect in a puddle, he thought, struggling mindlessly only because live things always tried to stay alive. Most of the others who remained on the deck were clearly not sailors by the way they flung themselves at railings and ropes and grasped tight. They seemed just as shocked by the next dousing wave. A manacle key must have been found, for some were entirely free of chains, while others still wore their fetters as familiarly as their shirts. More faces peered up fearfully from the open hatches, shouting advice and questions to the groups on deck. As each mammoth wave passed, they ducked back to avoid the dousing, but seemed to take no care for how much water flooded down into the ship. Bodies of both slaves and crew washed back and forth in the waist with the wallowing of the ship. He stared at them incredulously. Had they fought for their freedom only to die by drowning? Had they killed all the crew for nothing?
He suddenly heard Sa’Adar’s voice raised. ‘There he is, there’s our lad. Boy, Wintrow, come here! They’ve barricaded themselves in there. Any way to smoke the rats out?’ He mastered a band of triumphant map-faces outside the door to the officers’ quarters in the sterncastle. Despite the storm and the tossing ship, they were still intent on their killing.
‘This storm will take us down if I don’t get to the wheel!’ he shouted at them. He drew his voice from deep within him and tried to sound commanding, like a man. ‘Stop the killing, or the sea will finish it for all of us! Let the crew come out and man the ship as best they can, I beg you! We’re taking on water with every wave!’ He caught at the side of the aftcastle ladder as another wave hit. In horror he watched it pour down the open hatches like beer filling a mug. ‘Shut those hatches down tight!’ he bellowed at them. ‘And put some men on the pumps, or everyone sick or hiding below is going to drown even before the rest of us!’ He looked aloft. ‘We need to take in those sails, give the wind less to push on!�
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‘I’m not going up there,’ one slave declared loudly. ‘I didn’t get out of chains just to kill myself another way!’
‘Then you’ll die when we all go under!’ Wintrow shouted back at him. His voice broke on the words, going up into a boy’s shrill timbre. Some of the slaves were making a faint-hearted attempt to shut the hatches, but no one was willing to let loose their secure holds to do so.
‘Rocks!’ screamed Vivacia. ‘Rocks! Wintrow, the helm, the helm!’
‘Let the crew out. Promise them their lives if they’ll save yours!’ he roared at Sa’Adar. Then he scrabbled swiftly up the ladder.
Comfrey had indeed died at the wheel, struck from behind. Whoever had killed him had left him as he fell, half-tangled in the spokes. Only the weight of his fallen body had kept the rudder from slapping back and forth with every sea. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ Wintrow babbled apologetically as he pulled the lanky body free of its last post. He stepped up to the wheel and seized it, stopping its random turning with a wrench. He drew the deepest breath his lungs would hold. ‘TELL ME WHAT TO DO!’ he bellowed, and prayed his voice would carry the length of the ship through the storm.
‘HARD PORT!’ Vivacia’s cry came back to him. Her voice came not only through the wind but seemed to vibrate into him through his hands. The spokes of the ship’s wheel, he realized, were of wizardwood. He set his hands to it more fully. Not sure whether he sinned or not, he reached not for Sa but for oneness with the ship. He abandoned his fear of losing himself in her.
‘Steady,’ he whispered to her, and felt an almost frantic leaping of connection. With it came her fear, but also her courage. He shared her awareness of the storm and the current. Her wizardwood body became his greater self.
The wheel had been built with the assumption that a grown and well-muscled man would hold it. He had watched the ship steered, and taken a turn or two in milder weather, but never in a blow like this, and never without a man at his shoulder instructing him and catching at the wheel if it looked like it would overpower him. Wintrow put the full weight of his slight body to turning it. He felt every point he gained as a small victory but wondered if the ship could answer the rudder in time. It seemed to him that they hit the next wave more squarely, cutting through it rather than being nudged aside by it. He squinted through the driving rain, but could see nothing but blackness. They could have been out in the middle of the Wild Sea with emptiness all around them. It suddenly struck him as ridiculous; he and the ship were alone in their struggle to save them all. Everyone else on board was too intent on killing one another.
‘You have to help me,’ he said quietly, forming aloud the words he knew she would sense. ‘You have to be your own lookout, for both waves and rocks. Reach for me with what you know.’
In the waist he could hear men shouting to one another. Some of the voices were muffled and he guessed that the slaves negotiated with the captive crew. From the fury in the voices, he doubted if they would agree in time to save the ship. Forget about them, he counselled himself. ‘It’s you and me, my lady,’ he said quietly to her. ‘You and me alone. Let’s try to stay alive.’ He gripped the wheel tight in his hands.
He did not know if he felt her answer him or if his own determination lent him new strength. He stood, blinded by both water and darkness, and defied them both. He did not hear Vivacia call out to him again but he seemed to catch a feel for the ship. The sails overhead worked against him, but he could do nothing about them. A different sort of rain suddenly began to fall, just as insistent but lighter somehow. Yet even as the storm abated and the first greying of dawn tinged the sky, the wheel seemed to grow stiffer and heavier under his hands. ‘The current has us!’ Vivacia’s low cry carried back to him. ‘There are rocks ahead! I know this channel from long ago! We should not have come this way. I cannot stay clear of them by myself!’
He heard the clank of chain and then the fall of a heavy body to the deck. He spared a glance for a group of men making their way towards him. Several manacled and fettered men were shoved along in their midst. As they reached Wintrow, someone gave the front man a harder push. He went to his knees on the wet deck. Sa’Adar’s voice boomed out. ‘He says he’ll steer and steer true if we let him live.’ In a quieter voice he added, ‘He says we cannot get past those rocks without him. He alone knows this channel.’
As the man struggled to his feet, Wintrow finally recognized Torg. He could make out little of his features in the dark. His shirt was torn away from his back; the pale rags of it fluttered in the wind. ‘You,’ Torg said. The low laugh he gave was disbelieving. ‘You did this to us? You?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t believe it. You had the treachery, but not the guts. You stand there and hold the wheel like the ship is yours, but I don’t believe you took her.’ Despite his chains and the snarling map-faces surrounding him, he spat to one side. ‘You didn’t have the balls to take her when she was offered to you on a silver platter.’ The furious words poured from him like a pent-up flood. ‘Oh, yes, I knew all about your father’s deal with you. I heard what he said that day. Your father was going to give you the mate’s position on her when you turned fifteen. Never mind that I worked like a dog for him for the past seven years. Never mind old Torg. Give the captaincy to Gantry and the mate’s position to a pink-cheeked boy. And you’d lord it over me.’ He laughed. ‘Well, Gantry’s dead, they tell us. And your father’s not much better off.’ He crossed his arms on his chest. ‘You see that island off our starboard side? That’s Crooked Island. You should have taken the ship on the other side of it. There’s rocks and current ahead. So if you want a man at the helm of this tub, maybe you’d better talk nice to Torg. Maybe you’d better offer him something a bit more than his own life to get your sorry arses out of this stew.’ He smiled a toadish smile, confident suddenly that they needed him, that he could turn the whole situation to his profit. ‘Maybe you’d better talk nice and fast, for the rocks are just ahead.’ The men behind him, new hands taken on in Jamaillia, cast fearful glances ahead through the darkness.
‘What should we do?’ Sa’Adar asked him. ‘Can we trust him?’
The situation was laughable, it was so horrifying. They were asking him. They were putting the whole ship’s survival in his hands. He glanced up at the lightening sky. Aloft were two slaves, struggling vainly to take in sail. Sa have mercy on them all. He tightened his grip on the wheel and looked at Torg’s smug face. Was Torg capable of putting the ship on the rocks for the sake of vengeance? Could any man take revenge that far, to throw his own life away with it? The tattoo on Wintrow’s face itched. ‘No,’ Wintrow said at last. ‘I don’t trust him. And I’d kill him before I gave him the helm of my ship.’
A map-face shrugged callously. ‘The useless die.’
‘Wait,’ Wintrow cried, but it was too late. In a movement as smooth as a longshoreman pitching bales, the map-face hefted the bulky sailor over his head, and then flung him over the stern with a force that sent the map-face to his knees as well. Torg was gone, as swiftly and simply as that. He hadn’t even had time to scream. On his single word not to trust the man, Torg had died. The other sailors had fallen to their knees, crying out and begging him to spare them.
A terrible disgust welled up in him. It was not for the begging men. ‘Get those chains off them and send them aloft,’ he barked at Sa’Adar. ‘Reef the sails as best you can, and cry back to me if you see rocks.’ It was a stupid order, a useless order. Three men could not sail a ship this size. As Sa’Adar was unlocking their fetters, he heard himself ask, ‘Where’s my father? Is he alive?’
They looked at him blankly, one and all. None of them knew, he realized. He supposed his father had forbidden the crew to speak of him among themselves. ‘Where’s Captain Haven?’ he demanded.
‘He’s down below with his head and ribs broken up,’ one of the deckhands volunteered.
Wintrow weighed it up and decided in favour of his ship. He pointed at Sa’Adar. ‘I need the ship’s captai
n up here. And gently. He’s no good to us if he’s unconscious.’ And the useless die, he thought to himself as the priest dispatched men to fetch the captain. An overseer’s threat to a slave became a credo to live by. To save the crew, he’d have to show the freed slaves their usefulness. ‘Unchain those two,’ he ordered. ‘Get every live sailor who can move aloft.’
A map-face shrugged. ‘There’s only these two now.’
Only two left alive. And his father. Sa forgive him. He looked at the man who had thrown Torg overboard. ‘You. You threw a sailor overboard, one we might have used. You take his place now. Get aloft, to the lookout’s post. Cry down to me what you see.’ He glared around at the others standing around them. It suddenly infuriated him that they would stand about idly. ‘The rest of you make sure the hatches are down tight now. Get on the pumps, too. I can feel she’s too heavy in the water. Sa only knows how much water we took on.’ His voice was quieter but just as hard as he added, ‘Clear the deck of bodies. And get those collapsed tents tidied away.’
The first man’s eyes went from Wintrow up to the tiny platform at the top of the main mast. ‘Up there? I can’t go up there.’