by Lian Tanner
‘That’s what I said,’ cried Dolph.
‘No, we’re not going to fight. We’re going to the bridge deck.’
‘What can we do there?’
‘You’ll see,’ said Petrel. She pulled a face. ‘Least I hope you will. Come on. You too, Cap’n.’ And she tucked the silent rats inside her jacket, and hurried towards the far end of the little cabin, where there was a door with a circular handle.
Dolph tried to hobble after her, and yelped again. The silver boy tapped her hand. ‘I am strong,’ he said. ‘I could carry you, if that would help.’
They all stared at him. Dolph laughed uncertainly. ‘The Sleeping Captain, carry me . . .?’
‘Good,’ said Petrel, as if it were already settled. ‘Let’s go.’
The boy was strong, despite his smallness. He lifted Dolph in his arms as if she weighed no more than a loaf of bread.
Petrel picked up the lantern, saying, ‘Stay close. Don’t fall behind.’
Fin grasped the spanner, which was still in his pocket.
Then the four children – one of them silver-faced and carrying the lost knowledge of generations inside his slender body – began to climb upward through the ship, knowing that above their heads a battle was raging, and that all the advantage was with the Devouts, and none at all with the crew of the Oyster.
BROTHER THRAWN
Past the silent engines they ran. Past the digester and the batteries, up the first steep ladders with their iron rungs, up the next ladder until they were on the Commons, and up again. There was no time for caution, no time for ducking around corners to avoid folk. But neither, to Petrel’s growing dismay, was there anyone to avoid. Apart from the babies and the youngest bratlings, who were presumably still huddled amidships with a few adults to care for them, everyone must be trying to fight their way out onto the open decks.
Trying and dying.
Petrel climbed faster, her mind spinning like a whirlpool. Fin’s last-minute confession had shocked her, though it explained so much. The uncomplaining weight of the rats inside her jacket made her want to weep. The emptiness of the passages, the thought of what was happening above, the slim hope that she might be able to do something about it—
Fin’s footsteps echoed hers. Dolph urged them on from the rear. ‘Quick, Petrel! Quick, Fin! Don’t drop me, Cap’n!’
They passed Dufftown and kept climbing. Petrel thought she could hear shouts of fury and screams of pain from above, but it might have been the creaking of the ship or the grinding of the ice. The Commons ladderway seemed to go on forever, as if Brother Thrawn’s malice had slithered down into the ship and changed its structure.
We’ve got to stop him. And with that thought, Petrel led the way up the last short ladder to the bridge deck.
There was no one there. Everyone who could work had been busy setting the lectrics to rights and mending the fire damage. And now they were trying to force their way out onto the fore- and afterdecks, determined to defend their ship.
Crab should’ve been on the bridge, thought Petrel, running along the last passage. He should’ve seen the grappling irons come over the rail. He should’ve stopped the cruel men before they got a foothold.
But it was too late for recriminations. Petrel darted onto the bridge. The sun was a fingertip below the horizon, and the air outside the windows was pearly grey. It should have been beautiful. But below them, on the open decks, terrible things were happening.
Petrel put the lantern down, threw open the hatch that led outside, and ran aft, with the others close behind her. Out into the freezing air. Out into the screams and howls and clash of weapons rising from below.
She could hardly bear to look down. Every hatch on the fore- and afterdecks was open, and the Oyster’s crew were trying to fight their way out. But they were at a terrible disadvantage. Only two men could climb through the hatch at a time, and however well-armed those men were, however fierce, a dozen or more Devouts waited for them, and struck them down as they emerged.
Petrel saw Crab fall, and five Officers, one after the other, behind him. At another hatch, Krill was fighting for his life. The deck in front of him was red with blood, and the cries of the Devouts, floating upward, were so full of savagery and hatred that Petrel shrank back. Her idea for stopping the attackers seemed pitiful now. She wished desperately that the silver boy could throw down lightning, or summon up an ice storm.
But he could not. It was up to her. The Nothing girl.
‘What do you wish me to do?’ asked the captain, putting Dolph down.
Petrel glanced at the horizon. ‘Stand next to the rail. Closer! Closer! Quick, now! Stand right here, and look down at the afterdeck.’
Fin and Dolph stared at her, puzzled, but did not speak. The boy captain took a step forward and stood, looking down at the carnage . . .
And at that moment, as Petrel had calculated, the first rays of the sun rose above the horizon and struck his silver face. He shone as bright as a comet, and the light bent down to the deck and dazzled one of the attackers.
Just one.
The man looked up – and stopped in his tracks. His quivering hand rose to point at the boy captain. His mouth gaped and no sound came from it.
The man next to him looked up. And the man next to him. And the man— It was like a sickness, thought Petrel. A winter sickness that started with a single person and spread through the crew so quickly that one moment everyone was healthy and the next they were all coughing and sneezing.
The men below her were dumbstruck. Horrified. Afraid.
Can you not kill the Devouts with a glance? Can you not boil the blood in their veins?
As the invaders stared up at the silver boy, waiting for his terrible weapons to strike them, the men and women of the Oyster poured out of the hatches to defend their ship.
But then they looked up too. And they were dumbstruck. Petrel could see Albie, his cunning face blank with shock. And Krill and all his folk, staring up at the captain, their weapons limp in their hands.
Within seconds, the afterdeck went from a scene of death and destruction to total silence. Even the wind fiddles were still. Even the useless straining turbines.
It won’t last, thought Petrel. They’ll be fighting again as soon as they get their wits back, which means more blood. And Albie and Krill still don’t know what’s going on. I’ve gotta tell ’em.
Her breath was a cloud in the morning air. She could feel the doubt gathering inside her. What if no one listened? What if they looked straight past her, ignored her, treated her as nothing?
‘No,’ she told herself firmly. ‘I’m not nothing. Never was. Never will be again.’ And she stepped straight past the doubt, stepped forward until she was standing beside the silver boy.
‘This is the captain,’ she shouted to the folk watching from below, and her words fell like an axe upon them. ‘He’s the Sleeping Captain, only now he’s awake!’
She saw the sudden understanding in Albie’s face, and in Krill’s.
‘And those folk—’ Petrel pointed at the Devouts ‘—they’ve come to kill him!’
Her words woke the invaders from their stillness. They had thought the demon was safely dead, but now here he was, directly above them. Alive. Awake.
Most of them turned tail and ran. With their hands shielding their heads and their axes forgotten, they raced for the ship’s rail and began to slide frantically down the ropes.
Behind them, the Oyster’s crew roared with fury. Albie raised his pipe wrench and bellowed, ‘After ’em, shipmates! Don’t let ’em escape!’
But the boy captain, up on the bridge deck, bellowed louder. ‘Let them go, Albie.’
The Chief Engineer stopped in his tracks. As far as Petrel knew, he had never taken an order in his life, not from anyone. But this was the Sleeping Captain – though he was no longer asleep. And what was more, he knew Albie’s name.
Petrel looked at the silver boy, startled. How did he know that?
‘
Let them all go,’ cried the boy. ‘Krill, let them go.’
He knows Krill, too.
The captain’s orders made no difference to the Devouts. In their panic, they crowded each other and pushed and shoved, so that some of them fell off the ropes onto the ice, and their companions left them there without a backward glance.
‘Good riddance,’ shouted Skua, who had joined his da.
But not all the Devouts had run away. Petrel saw movement out of the corner of her eye, and spun around. A small group of men had climbed onto the aft crane, and now they stood there, glaring up at the boy captain with such loathing that Petrel could almost feel it.
Even before Fin spoke, she knew that the man at the front of the group was their leader. His thin face was set in disapproving lines, as if everything about the world disappointed him. He was as cold as midwinter – but at the same time there was a feverish air about him that Petrel could sense even from this distance. An air of hatred, and the determination to shape the world to his will, no matter what the cost.
‘Brother Thrawn.’ Fin’s whisper sounded as if it had been cut out of him with a knife.
‘Do you fear that man?’ asked the boy captain in a quiet voice.
‘Yes. No. I— I don’t know,’ answered Fin.
‘Don’t look at him,’ whispered Petrel. ‘He wants you to look at him, I know he does.’
It was true. The eyes of Brother Thrawn’s companions were fixed on the boy captain. But Brother Thrawn was watching Fin. And Fin was watching Brother Thrawn.
By this time, Albie had spotted the men on the crane too. He began to urge the crew after them – but then he stopped and shouted, ‘What about them, Cap’n? Shall we get ’em down?’
The silver boy looked at Petrel, who shook her head. ‘Wait,’ said the boy, holding up one hand.
Albie waited.
Brother Thrawn took five precise steps forward. ‘Initiate,’ he said, and his voice was like a shard of ice on the morning air.
Petrel felt Fin tremble. She thought of what it must have been like for a small boy to be at the mercy of such a man, and she stepped closer to her friend, so he would know she was there.
‘Initiate,’ said Brother Thrawn again. ‘I am pleased to see you.’
He didn’t sound pleased. He sounded furious, in a secretive sort of way, and Petrel wasn’t at all surprised when Fin didn’t answer. She wondered if he could answer, or if all the breath had gone out of him, the way it had gone out of her when she saw the Maw rearing up through the ice.
The sun was rising higher now, and everyone else was blinking. Brother Thrawn did not blink. ‘Now you must act,’ he said to Fin. ‘This is what I trained you for. This is your moment. The fate of the world lies in your hands. Now you must act. Now—’ There was something horribly hypnotic about that flat, cold voice. Petrel found herself nodding, as if Brother Thrawn was talking to her. She blinked.
‘Fin,’ she hissed. ‘Don’t listen.’
She didn’t think Fin heard her. All his attention was fixed on the awful figure of Brother Thrawn.
‘Raise your weapon, Initiate,’ said the Brother.
It was only then that Petrel realised Fin was still carrying the spanner, his fingers clenching and unclenching around it.
The boy captain touched her arm. ‘Should we do something?’
Petrel looked at Fin. He had retreated behind the old blankness, and only his hand showed his distress. ‘Wait,’ she whispered to the captain, though she was not at all sure it was the right thing to do. ‘Just wait.’
‘Listen to me, Initiate,’ said Brother Thrawn. ‘Raise your weapon.’
Slowly Fin raised the spanner. It seemed to weigh a ton, and sweat sprang from his forehead, as if one part of him was fighting with another part.
‘Do you see the demon beside you?’ Brother Thrawn’s voice was no louder, but it seemed to envelop the whole ship. ‘Do you see the vile creature?’
Fin nodded.
‘No,’ whispered Petrel, but she did not move.
‘You must crush it,’ cried Brother Thrawn. Some of the flatness had gone from his voice, and in its place was a thinly concealed triumph. ‘Crush it, and join the Inner Circle. Crush it and save the world. Crush it, boy, and win yourself a name!’
As the spanner rose, the sun seemed to pause in its journey. Down on the afterdeck every face was a mask of dismay. Petrel held her breath.
Fin’s mouth opened and shut. His chest heaved. He lifted the spanner high above his head, so that the parts of it that were not rusty shone almost as bright as the boy captain.
Then he shouted at the top of his voice. ‘I have a name! It is Fin!’ And he threw the spanner at the terrible figure of Brother Thrawn.
The spanner spun through the morning air, turning over and over, like a seal in the water. It spun like something joyous, thrown by a small bratling. It spun like life itself, homing in on the man who had denied that life.
Brother Thrawn did not duck or try to avoid his fate. Perhaps he was courageous, in his own cold way. Or perhaps he simply did not believe that one of his Initiates would turn against him.
The spanner hit him on the forehead. With a cry, he dropped to his knees. He tried to stand – once, twice – then sprawled face down and did not move again.
NORTH
The men around Brother Thrawn stood stunned, looking from Fin to their leader and back again. But then understanding gripped them and they set up a wailing so loud that it hurt Petrel’s ears. They lifted Brother Thrawn’s body as carefully as an egg and lowered it from the crane, shuffling past the Oyster’s crew members as if they were not there.
‘Is he dead?’ whispered Petrel.
‘I do not know,’ said Fin. ‘I do not care.’
It took the Devouts several minutes to find a way of lowering Brother Thrawn to the ice. Someone – Petrel thought it was Skua again – shouted, ‘Just drop him. He won’t feel it,’ and laughed. But everyone else stood silent and threatening, until the Devouts were gone, and their mournful cries fading in the distance.
Only then did they look up. And now their faces were as bright as the morning.
‘Cap’n!’ cried Krill.
‘Cap’n!’ shouted a dozen other voices, and then two dozen, and then a hundred. And before Petrel knew it, she and Fin and Dolph and the silver boy were wrapped in a great rolling swell of sound that rose and fell with joy.
‘Cap’n, Cap’n, Cap’n!’
It seemed to go on forever. And when it began to die away at last, Skua climbed onto the aft crane and picked up the spanner that had clobbered Brother Thrawn. ‘Fin!’ he shouted, waving the spanner above his head.
The sound rose again, as everyone forgave Fin for being a stranger, and bellowed his name at the tops of their voices. ‘Fin! Fin! Fin!’
Dolph waved from the bridge deck. ‘Dolph! Dolph!’ cried the crew.
No one shouted for Petrel. They had heard her when it counted, but now they looked past her, as if the habit of ignoring her was too great to be broken.
She wasn’t surprised.
Not really.
She told herself that it didn’t matter.
Not really.
She was about to turn away when a single voice said, ‘Petrel.’
It wasn’t the cry of acclamation that the others had been. It was quieter. More thoughtful. More of a suggestion than anything else.
‘Squid,’ whispered Petrel.
No one else said anything, not immediately. The folk near Squid looked at her, puzzled.
‘Petrel,’ said Squid again, a little more definite this time.
Near the rail, Krill crossed his beefy arms, peered up at the bridge deck and boomed, ‘Yes, Petrel.’
‘Who?’ said a woman nearby.
‘Where?’ said a man.
And within seconds the whole deck was whispering back and forth, back and forth. ‘Who’s Petrel? What are they talking about? Did Krill get a bang on the head, do you think? There’s no on
e else up there except the Nothing girl.’
Petrel couldn’t bear it. A great heat billowed up inside her, a great noise that would not be silenced. Before she could lose her nerve, she strode back to the rail and said the words that she had said to herself earlier. Only now they rang out across the afterdeck, too loud to ignore.
‘I’m not nothing. Never was, never will be. I’m Petrel. Quill’s daughter. Seal’s daughter too!’
And she stood there in the morning sunlight, not hiding, not ducking away. Just stood there, so that they had to see her.
For a long moment there was dead silence, broken only by the creaking of the ship and the distant cry of gulls.
Then someone said, ‘So that’s her name.’
And someone else said, ‘I didn’t know she had a name.’
‘I always thought she was a half-wit.’
‘Me too.’
‘But she can’t be, can she. She’s the one who shouted, earlier. Told us what was happening. Showed us the Sleeping Captain.’
‘Quill’s daughter, heh? Sounds just like her mam . . .’
The murmuring stopped abruptly. Feet shuffled. Eyes fell, as folk remembered things from twelve years ago. Things they had done. And not done.
It was then that Squid said, for the third time, ‘Petrel.’
A quiver swept through the gathered crowd, like wind on water. Gradually, folk began to whisper again, but this time their voices were so quiet that Petrel couldn’t catch what they were saying. Not at first, anyway.
But then she heard her name.
‘Petrel,’ said a woman.
‘Petrel,’ said the man next to her.
And suddenly the whole afterdeck was filled with voices, all of them shouting, ‘Petrel! Petrel!’, and folk craning their necks to see her as she stood beside the captain, and beaming up at her and stamping their feet.
‘Petrel!’ they cried, ‘Petrel! Petrel! Petrel!’ as if they were trying to make up for the last twelve years.
The girl they shouted for could hardly believe what was happening. She looked at Fin, who smiled at her.