by Scott Lynch
She released Locke, and seemed to note the somber expressions of the Messenger’s crew with approval. She pointed at Ezri.
“My first mate, Ezri Delmastro. We call her ‘lieutenant’ and so do you. She says it, I back it. Never presume otherwise.
“You’ve met our ship’s physiker. Scholar Treganne tells me you could be worse and you could be better. There’ll be rest for those that need it. I can’t use you if you’re in no condition to work.”
“Are we being invited to join your crew, Captain Draksaha?” asked Jabril.
“You’re being offered a chance,” said Ezri. “That’s all. After this, you’re not prisoners, but you’re not free men. You’re what we call the scrub watch. You sleep here, in what we call the undercastle. Worst place on the ship, more or less. If there’s a filthy shit job to be had, you’ll do it. If we’re short blankets or clothes, you’ll go without. You’re last for meals and drinks.”
“Every member of my crew can give you an order,” said Drakasha, picking up as Ezri finished. Locke had a notion that they’d honed this routine together over time. “And every one of them will expect to be obeyed. We’ve no formal defaults; cop wise or slack off and someone will just beat the hell out of you. Raise enough fuss that I have to notice and I’ll throw you over the side. Think I’m kidding? Ask someone who’s been here a while.”
“How long do we have to be on the scrub watch?” asked one of the younger men near the back of the crowd.
“Until you prove yourselves,” said Drakasha. “We raise anchor in a few minutes and sail for Port Prodigal. Anyone who wants to leave when we get there, be gone. You won’t be sold; this isn’t a slaving ship. But you’ll get no pay save drink and rations. You’ll walk away with empty pockets, and in Prodigal, slavery might be kinder. At least someone would give a shit that you lived or died.
“If we cross paths with another sail on the way down,” she continued, “I’ll give thought to taking her. And if we fly a red flag, that’s your chance. You’ll go in first; you’ll board the prize before any of us. If there’s fire or bows or razor nets or gods-know-what, you’ll taste it first and bleed first. If you survive, grand. You’re crew. If you refuse, we dump you in Port Prodigal. I only keep a scrub watch on hand as long as I have to.”
She nodded to Ezri.
“As of now,” said Delmastro, “you can have the forecastle and the weather deck far back as the mainmast. Don’t go below or touch a tool without instructions. Touch a weapon, or try to take one from one of the crew, and I guarantee you’ll die on the instant. We’re touchy about that.
“You want to get cozy with a member of the crew, or they offer to get cozy with you, do what you will as long as you’re off duty and you stay off the bloody weather deck. Out here, what’s given is given. You try to take something by force, you’d better pray you die in the attempt, because we’re touchy about that, too.”
Zamira took over again and pointed at Locke and Jean. “Ravelle and Valora will be rejoining you.” A few of the men grumbled, and Zamira rested her hands on her saber hilts. “Mind your fucking manners. You put them over the side and vowed to let Iono be their judge. I showed up about an hour later. That settles that; anyone who thinks they know better than the Lord of the Grasping Waters can jump over the rail and take it up with Him in person.”
“They’re scrub watch like the rest of you,” said Ezri.
Still, the men didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic, and Zamira cleared her throat. “This is an equal-shares ship.”
That got their attention.
“Ship’s quartermaster goes by the name of Gwillem. He counts the take. Thirty percent goes to the ship so we don’t slink about with rotting canvas and cordage. Rest gets split evenly, one share per beating heart.
“You don’t touch a centira from what we already took out of your old ship. No apologies there. But if you get your chance on the way to Port Prodigal, and you’re crew when we sell the Messenger off to the Shipbreaker, you’ll get a share of that, and that’ll set you up nicely. If you’re crew.”
Locke had to admire her for that; it was a sensible policy, and she’d brought it into the lecture at a moment calculated to deflect dissension and worry. Now the Red Messenger wouldn’t just be an unhappy memory vanishing over the horizon in the hands of a prize crew; it might be a waiting pile of silver.
Zamira turned and headed aft, leaving Delmastro to finish the show. As murmurs of conversation began to rise, the petite lieutenant yelled, “Shut up! That’s the business, then. There’ll be food in a while and a half-ration of beer to settle you down some. Tomorrow I’ll start sorting those of you with particular skills and introducing you to some work.
“There’s one last thing the captain didn’t mention.” Ezri paused for several seconds and made sure that everyone was listening attentively. “The younger Drakashas. Captain has a boy and a girl. Mostly they’re in her cabin, but sometimes they’ve got the run of the ship. What they are to you is sacred. I mean this, more than I mean anything else I’ve said tonight. Say so much as an unkind word to them and I’ll nail your cock to the foremast and leave you there to die of thirst. The crew thinks of them as family. If you have to break your neck to keep them safe, then it’s in your best interest to break your bloody neck.”
Delmastro seemed to take everyone’s silence as a sign that they were duly impressed, and she nodded. A moment later, Drakasha’s voice sounded from the quarterdeck, magnified by a speaking trumpet: “Up anchor!”
Delmastro lifted a whistle that hung around her neck on a leather cord and blew it three times. “At the waist,” she hollered in an impossibly loud voice, “ship capstan bars! Stand by to raise anchor! Scrub watch to the waist, as able!”
At her urging, most of the Messenger’s former crew rose and began shuffling toward the Orchid ’s waist. A large work party was already gathering there, between the foremast and the chicken coops, fitting long capstan bars in their places by lantern light. A woman was scattering sand on the deck from a bucket. Locke and Jean fell in with Jabril, who smiled wryly.
“Evening, Ravelle. You look a bit…demoted.”
“I’m happy enough,” said Locke. “But honestly, Jabril, I leave the Messenger in your hands for what, an hour? And look what happens.”
“It’s a bloody improvement,” said someone behind Locke.
“Oh, I agree,” said Locke, deciding that the next few days might be infinitely more pleasant for everyone if Ravelle were to swallow anything resembling pride over his brief career as a captain. “I agree with all my gods-damned heart.”
Ezri shoved her way through the gathering crowd and vaulted atop the capstan barrel; it was wide enough that she could sit cross-legged upon it, which she did. She blew her whistle twice more and yelled, “Rigged below?”
“Rigged below,” rose an answering cry from one of the hatches.
“Take your places,” said Ezri. Locke squeezed in next to Jean and leaned against one of the long wooden bars; this capstan was wider than the one aboard the Messenger, and an extra twenty or so sailors could easily crowd in to work it. Every place was filled in seconds.
“Right,” said Ezri, “heave! Slow to start! Heave! Slow to start! Feet and shoulders! Faster, now—make the little bitch spin round and round! You know you want to!”
Locke heaved at his bar, feeling the grit shift and crunch beneath him, poking uncomfortably at the sensitive spots between his toes and the balls of his bare feet. But nobody else seemed to be complaining, so he bit his lip and bore it. Ezri was indeed spinning round and round; clank by clank, the anchor cable was coming in. A party formed at the larboard bow to secure it. After several minutes of shoving, Ezri brought the capstan party to a halt with one short blast on her whistle.
“’Vast heaving,” she cried. “Secure larboard anchor!”
“Cast to the larboard tack,” came Drakasha’s amplified voice; “fore and main topsails!”
More running, more whistles, more commoti
on. Ezri hopped to her feet atop the capstan and bellowed a quick succession of orders: “Hands aloft to loose fore and aft topsails! Brace mainyards round for the larboard tack! Foreyards braced abox!” There was more, but Locke stopped listening as he tried to make sense of what was happening. The Poison Orchid had been drifting by a single anchor in a calm sea, with a light breeze out of the northeast, and she’d drifted down so that the wind was dead ahead. What little he understood of Ezri’s orders told him that the ship would be slipping a bit aback, then turning east and bringing the wind over her larboard bow.
“Fore and aft watches, at the rails! Top-eyes, wide awake, now!” Ezri leapt down onto the deck. Dark shapes were surging up the ratlines hand-over-hand; blocks and tackles creaked in the growing darkness, and still more crew were coming up through the hatches to join the tumult. “Scrub watch! Scrub watch, get to the undercastle and stay out of the bloody way! Not you two.” Ezri grabbed Locke and Jean as they moved with the Messenger’s men, and she pointed them aft. “Tool locker, under the starboard stairs abaft the mainmast. Get brooms and sweep all this sand back into its bucket. After you unship the capstan bars.”
They did just that, tedious work by wavering alchemical light, frequently interrupted by busy or discourteous crewfolk. Locke worked with a scowl until Ezri stepped up between him and Jean and whispered, “Don’t mind this. It’ll make things a hell of a lot easier with your old crew.”
Damned if she wasn’t right, Locke thought; a little extra humiliation heaped on Ravelle and Valora might be just the thing to stifle the old crew’s resentment.
“My compliments,” he whispered.
“I know my business,” she said brusquely. “See everything back to where you found it, then go to the undercastle and stay there.”
Then she was gone, into the work parties overseeing a dozen delicate operations. Locke returned the brooms to the tool locker, then threaded his way forward with Jean just behind. Overhead, canvas snapped and rolled, ropes creaked as strain was added or adjusted, and men and women called softly to one another as they worked with nothing but thin air for dozens of yards beneath them.
The Poison Orchid slid slowly onto the larboard tack. She put the last faint halo of the lost sun behind her, as though sailing out of some ghostly golden portal, and gathered way beneath the first stars of evening, which waxed steadily brighter in the inky eastern sky.
Locke was pleasantly surprised to discover that Jabril had held a spot for him and Jean; not one of the more desirable ones near the entrance to the undercastle, but enough spare deck to squeeze up against the larboard bulkead, in relative darkness. Others with more favorable positions seemed not to begrudge them a moment of space as they crawled and stumbled past. One or two men muttered greetings; at worst, a few, like Mazucca and Aspel, maintained an unfriendly silence.
“Looks like you two really have joined the rest of us galley slaves,” said Jabril.
“Galley slaves is what we’d be, if Ravelle hadn’t gotten us outta Windward Rock,” said someone Locke didn’t recognize. “May be a dumb fuck, but we should show him fellowship for that.”
Thanks for speaking up when we were being thrown off the ship, Locke thought.
“Aye, I agree about the dumb fuck part,” said Mazucca.
“And we’ll all mind the fellowship part,” said Jean, using the slow, careful voice he reserved for people he was trying to avoid hitting. “Orrin’s not alone, is he?”
“Dark in here,” said Mazucca. “Lots of us, squeezed in together. You think you can move fast enough, Valora? You think you can stay awake long enough for it to matter? Twenty-eight on two—”
“If it was clear deck between you and me,” said Jean, “you’d piss your breeches the moment I cracked my knuckles.”
“Jerome,” said Locke, “easy. We can all—”
There was the sound of a scuffle in the darkness, and a heavy thud. Mazucca gave a strangled squawk.
“Baldy, you stupid bastard,” hissed an unknown voice, “you raise a hand against them and Drakasha will kill you, savvy?”
“You’ll make it worse for all of us,” said Jabril. “You never heard of Zamira Drakasha? Piss her off and we might lose our chance to be crew. You do that, Mazucca, you find out what twenty-eight on one feels like. Fuckin’ promise.”
There were murmurs of agreement in the darkness, and a sharp gasp as whoever had been holding Mazucca let go.
“Peace,” he gasped. “I won’t…I won’t ruin things. Not me.”
The night was warm, and the heat of thirty men in close confinement rapidly grew stifling despite the small ventilation grating in the middle of the forecastle deck. As Locke’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, he became able to pick out the shadowed shapes of the men around him more clearly. They lay or sat flank to flank like livestock. The ship reverberated with activity around them. Feet pounded the forecastle deck; crewfolk moved about and laughed and shouted on the deck below. There was a slapping hiss of waves parting before the bow, and the constant sound of toil and shouted orders from aft.
In time, there was a cursory meal of lukewarm salted pork and half a leather jack of skunkish swill vaguely descended from ale. The food and drink were passed awkwardly through the crowd; knees and elbows met stomachs and foreheads on a continual basis until everyone was dealt with. Then came the equally punishing task of passing jacks and tin bowls back, and then of men crawling over one another to use the craplines. Locke finally settled for good into his sliver of deck space against Jean’s back, and had a sudden thought.
“Jabril, did anyone find out what day it is?”
“Twelfth of Festal,” said Jabril. “I asked Lieutenant Delmastro when I was brought aboard.”
“Twelve days,” muttered Jean.
“Yeah,” Locke sighed. Twelve days gone. Not two weeks since they’d set out, with every man here deferring to him and Jean as heroes. Twelve days for the antidote to wane in strength. Gods, the archon…how the hell was he going to explain what had happened to the ship? Some nautical technicality?
“Squiggle-fucked the rightwise cock-swabber with a starboard jib,” he whispered to himself, “when I should’ve used a larboard jib.”
“What?” muttered Jean and Jabril simultaneously.
“Nothing.”
Soon enough the old instincts of a Catchfire orphan asserted themselves. Locke made a pillow of the crook of his left arm and closed his eyes. In moments the noise and heat and bustle of the men around him, and the thousand noises of the unfamiliar ship, were nothing more than a vague background to his light but steady sleep.
CHAPTER TEN
ALL SOULS IN PERIL
1
BY THE SEVENTEENTH OF FESTAL, Jean had come to dread the sight and smell of the ship’s vinegar as much as he’d come to appreciate his glimpses of her lieutenant.
His morning task, on most days, was to fill one bucket with the foul red stuff and another with seawater, and set to swabbing the deck and bulkheads along the full length of the main deck, at least where he could reach. Fore and aft were long compartments called crew berths, and one would be in use at any given time, crammed with four or five dozen people in and out of hammocks, their snores mingling like the growls of caged beasts. That berth Jean would carefully avoid, instead swabbing out ship’s stores (what the crew called the “delicates room,” for its rack of glass bottles under netting), the main-deck hold and armory, and the empty crew berth—though even when empty each berth contained a mess of barrels, crates, and nettings that had to be laboriously shifted.
Once the reek of watered vinegar was fully mingled with the usual belowdecks stench of old food, bad liquor, and all things unwashed, Jean would usually move throughout the lowest two decks, the orlop and the bilge, swinging a large yellow alchemical light before him to help dissipate the miasmas that caused disease. Drakasha was a great one for the health of her crew; most of the sailors pierced their ears with copper to ward off cataracts and drank pinches of white sand in
their ale to strengthen their bellies against rupture. The lower decks were lighted at least twice a day, much to the amusement of the ship’s cats. Unfortunately, this meant climbing, crawling, scrambling, and shoving past all manner of obstacles, including busy crewfolk. Jean was always careful to be polite and make his obeisance by nodding as he passed.
This crew was always in motion; this ship was always alive. The more Jean saw and learned on the Poison Orchid, the more convinced he became that the maintenance schedule he’d set as first mate of the Red Messenger had been hopelessly naïve. No doubt Caldris would have spoken up eventually, had he lived long enough to notice.
There seemed to be no such thing, in Captain Drakasha’s opinion, as a state of adequate repair for a ship at sea. What was checked or inspected one watch was checked again the next, and the next, day after day. What was braced was then rebraced, what could be mended was remended. The pump and capstan mechanisms were greased daily with fat scraped from the cooking pots; the masts were “slushed” top to bottom with the same brown gunk, for protection against the weather. Sailors wandered in constant, attentive parties, inspecting plank seams or wrapping canvas around rigging where the ropes chafed against one another.
The Orchids were divided into two watches, Red and Blue. They would work in six-hour shifts, one watch minding the ship while the other rested. The Red watch, for example, had duty from noon till the sixth hour of the evening, and would come back on duty from midnight till the sixth hour of the morning. Crew on the off watch could do as they pleased, unless the call of “all hands” summoned them to the deck for some strenuous or dangerous undertaking.