Fenn Halflin and the Seaborn

by Francesca Armour-Chelu

  At this, Fathom leant close to Fenn’s ear. “Why should we trust him?” he whispered, but Humber had as good a hearing as Halflin.

  “No reason you should,” he said pragmatically before carrying on. “Here’s the deal. In the morning there’ll be a roll call. Get up jack flash; they don’t need an excuse to beat you, so don’t give them one. Don’t leave anything in your hammock; the guards steal what they can.” He looked pointedly at Fenn. “And you should get that ferret out before he gives you something to remember him by.”

  “It’s not a ferret,” Fenn said, unbuttoning his shirt. “And he’d never bite me anyway.” Tikki poked his head out and ran down into his lap. Immediately many little hands grabbed at him, pulling his tail and stroking him.

  Humber motioned for one of the children to bring something else to eat, and the little boy dipped his mug in the soup again and brought it back for Amber first. She took a sip, blowing its warmth back up into her face and closing her eyes as she let the heat seep in. She passed the mug to Comfort.

  Humber nodded at Comfort as she gulped. “Leave that little scrap with the older girl – she’s too small to go down the mines. That means you three boys are going to have to work twice as hard. The more stone you dig the more grub you’ll get. I’ll show you what’s what. There’s a woman here, a cook. I’ll get the girls in with her.”

  “Why are you helping us?” Amber asked, her face screwed up with suspicion. Humber looked at her in surprise.

  “Why wouldn’t I?” Humber asked. “We’re all in the same boat, aren’t we?”

  He clapped his knees and looked around to see how many people appreciated his great wit, but even though hardly anyone had the strength to notice it, he still laughed; a rich joyful sound, deep from the centre of his scraggy body, so far down inside that meanness, cold and hunger couldn’t reach it.

  Fenn started laughing too, not at the joke as much as at Humber’s sheer joy at having made it. As their laughter echoed across the room others turned to look and smile, or scowl, depending on how annoying they found Humber. The laugh finally reached the fireplace, causing one of the women to look up at the sound. She flipped up the rim of a black hat to hear better, and saw Fenn.

  Letting out a loud whoop she hurtled towards him.

  “You’s like a bad penny, chil’!”

  15

  Magpie scooped Fenn into a tight embrace. “I don’t believe it! You got off them Shanties!” Her eyes gleamed with tears of happiness, making them more buttony than ever.

  “You’ve got a friend here already?” Humber said. “And she’s a fine cook too,” he added, throwing her his most charming smile.

  “Tsk!” Magpie tutted, nudging Humber out of her way with her ladle. She didn’t have time for his compliments; she knew he only did it to get an extra ladle of food.

  “How did you end up here?” Fenn asked, as she settled down between Comfort and Amber.

  “Terra Firma patrol jumped the Panimengro again! Course they couldn’t prove Viktor done nuffin’ wrong, but that didn’t stop them confiscatin’ his permit. Took most of the crew ’n’ all! Includin’ him.”

  At this Magpie jerked her thumb over her shoulder towards one of the Sargassons now climbing into his hammock. Fenn remembered him from when he first boarded the Panimengro the night he fled East Marsh; he’d been one of the musicians playing instruments made from rubbish.

  “That big ol’ Caspian got to go free – I bet he greased a palm – but the rest of us…” She pressed her lips together unhappily for a moment. “Like I tol’ yer; my permits wouldn’t fool no one.”

  Fenn felt terrible about Viktor. The Panimengro’s captain might have dumped him on the Shanties, but he had also taken a huge risk helping him get away from East Marsh.

  “Where’s Viktor now?” he asked.

  “He’s still a cap’n, but they Sunkmarked the Panimengro.” Magpie pulled a tragic face. “Got him workin’ a bone-barge now, fishin’ the dead off these Hellhulks here an’ dumpin’ them out at sea. The same job as allus, when yer come to think on it: Viktor’s allus bin carryin’ Seaborn across the oceans, ’cept these ones gonna be fish-food…”

  Magpie huddled in conspiratorially, drawing up her legs and resting her chin on her knees. She clicked her sharp fingers for Humber to listen up. Keeping an eye out, she grabbed Fenn’s collar and jerked him nearer so she could keep her voice low. Her eyes glittered with mischief.

  “I’d ask you what you’ve bin up to, chil’, ’cept I already know,” she whispered, poking him hard in the ribs and wrinkling her nose with indignation. “You think I don’t know who you are? Jus’ cos I don’t read too good, don’t you go assumifyin’ I add two an’ two an’ make five! When them Terras came aboard, they’s so interested in you I did some guessin’ an’ some askin’ an’ some workin’ out myself! Them funny eyes, them way you knew nowt ‘bout the world ’cept what you got outta books!”

  Magpie leant back on her seat, casting her eye over Fenn’s, and sucked her teeth.

  “An’ now look at you! If a Cajun cat can look at a king? An’ got yourself an entourage I see!” She glared at Fenn with a mixture of infuriation and admiration. “An’ they say you’ve been stirrin’ up a whole soup of trouble! There ain’t a Seaborn worth the name that don’t know Fenn Demari’s alive an’ kickin now, thanks very much to you – an’ your shenanigans!”

  “So it’s true?” Humber gasped, peering at Fenn with wonder. “We all heard the rumours, but we thought you were with the Marsh Sargassons. People are sayin’ Moray handed you over.”

  “Moray would sooner die. He was the one who—” Fenn began indignantly, but before he had a chance to finish, a siren wailed.

  “Curfew,” Humber said. “Lazlo’ll be coming.” He jerked his head towards the hammocks. “Get some kip. Look smart. We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

  Meanwhile, Magpie fished deep in her coat and pulled out a tiny black pod of vanilla, fuzzy with pocket fluff. She ripped it into minuscule pieces and handed them out to each of the children. Humber looked on hopefully, but she ignored him.

  “It’s my last bit. Enjoy it!” she said as she wrapped her arms around Amber and Comfort, giving them a motherly squeeze. She shot Fenn a beady look as he fed a scrap of his own bread to Tikki, still curled up in his shirt, and tutted.

  “I got the sum of you when I saw you say goodbye to your granddaddy. You allus think you gotta take everythin’ under your wing – but your wing ain’t big enough for everyone. You gotta share. You gotta trust others to help.”

  The last lights were put out as the guards and Trusties made their final tours of the kitchens. People hurriedly made their way to their beds. Lazlo never needed an excuse to give a prisoner a beating. Humber quickly led them to an alcove, where a few empty rice sacks had been strung between the huge iron straps of the ship.

  Fenn passed him his share of the vanilla pod. “Never liked the taste much,” he said.

  “Me neither,” Humber replied, passing it back. “I’ll wake you before Lazlo gets a chance to,” he mumbled, climbing into his hammock. “That way you get a day gettin’ used to the place before he gets you down the mine.”

  By sneaking the children away from the first roll call, Humber bought the boys a whole day’s grace and they avoided being called for mine duty. The girls were able to stay with Magpie and the other cooks, lost in the muddle of bodies that always huddled around the stoves. But Humber couldn’t hold the Trusties off for ever and when Lazlo found out what Humber had done, he docked his rations and put him on double shifts. Just as the sea was greedy for land, the Wall was hungry for stone – and the mine never seemed to stop spewing out limestone and flint.

  “Ready?” Humber asked, as he hitched the leather straps from the cart over Fathom and Fenn’s shoulders. Gulper was too short to be paired with anyone and was relegated to scuttling alongside, helping where he could. The boys had been put on the hardest shift as well, as punishment for their day’s reprieve. With dozen
s of other Seaborn boys and men they rode down into the mines on the heavy oak carts. But after loading them up with the heavy limestone, the real work began in hauling them back up to the surface. Each truck was hitched to eight people to drag, but even so it was a back-breaking job, dangerous and dirty.

  Humber had made sure the boys were in his team and today they were only a few hundred yards away from the strip of rock the Terras wanted mined – a seam of limestone – but it still took an hour to reach it. The tracks twisted and turned so often the cart kept derailing, and the team of workers had to lift it back on each time. When they arrived in the middle of a high cave hollowed out of the rock, they were already pouring with sweat.

  The air was hot and damp in the cavern and hundreds of stalactites had formed on the rock face overhead in an arch of needles. They stopped to scoop a handful of water from one of the stone troughs around the walls, but a Trusty was soon over them, pushing them to get back to work.

  “Get tooled up,” Humber instructed, as they pulled the straps off their shoulders. “We’ll prep this tunnel here. Wet your rags,” he said, dipping his scarf in the trough. “The less dust in your pipes, the better you’ll dodge sickness. Too late for some, mind.” He laughed as he spat at the ground and a red stain the shape of a bursting star splodged the dust. He tied the scarf over his nose.

  Leaning against the walls were iron wedges, picks and mallets. Fenn and others loaded them into rush baskets and heaved them onto their backs while Humber took a lantern from a cavity in the wall.

  “Follow me,” he said and led them up a short, roughly hewn slope that forked into two small caves. “If you hear a sudden ruck, it’s a rockfall. Get near those.” He pointed to five thick oak stanchions running up the centre of the tunnels. “They keep the roof up,” he said, setting down his tools as he looked along the rock. “Won’t take long; there are some natural fractures here already.” He smiled encouragingly at them.

  On one side of the wall a line had already been chiselled out, showing where the next blocks of limestone were to be cut.

  “First things first,” he said. “We need to mark the blocks out.”

  He hammered a guide line into the rock and tied a thin piece of rope to it, then gave the rope to Fenn, pointing to a spot further down the wall.

  “Get it level with this, then we chisel. When it’s deep enough, we lay the powder. The rock pops out.”

  Fenn pulled the rope taut and tied it to the second loop. Humber rubbed the underside of the rope with a chunk of chalk, then he held the rope out like a guitar string and let it twang back against the rock face. A white line was left and Humber tossed the chalk over to Fathom.

  “Two more lines. There, and there.” He pointed out where he meant. Then turned to Gulper. “You look strong,” he said unconvincingly. “Up to a bit of graft?”

  Gulper nodded doubtfully. He was used to catching rats, not working with stone. He looked at the tools in his hands and felt their weight. Humber wrapped a rag around Gulper’s left hand, which would hold the wedge in place.

  “Work towards me, see?” he said, pointing to where the two lines would meet up. Humber then crouched down by the incisions already chopped in the rock and began to tap the iron wedge into the crevice, deepening the crack with each metallic beat. “After this we make the holes for the dynamite.”

  Fenn watched how Humber let the mallet bounce off the iron wedge so he’d get two or three strikes for the price of one, and copied him. It was relentless and exhausting; after an hour, the rag only stopped his skin getting broken – it didn’t numb the pain of constantly striking himself.

  Humber was the leader of their unit and it was his job to make sure everyone worked as hard as they could for the whole unit to earn their rations for the night. So he urged them on, and kept their spirits up, alternating between whistling, singing rude songs about Chilstone and laughing at his own jokes, which made him cough more. Now and then he’d cock his ear to the stone as if listening for an answer to a question only he knew, then he’d tell more bad jokes and tall stories – tales of shark attacks, his capture and his exploits in the Arctic when he’d been a trawler man. When he finished entertaining them with nonsense, he passed on tips about surviving in the Hellhulk, about the geology of the quarry, about the weaknesses of the Wall.

  “Too rigid,” he explained. “Another Rising will knock it clean off its foundations.” Every now and then he’d disappear, but no one ever seemed to see where, and when he returned he was always caked with stone dust, his knuckles bleeding.

  Finally the Terras sounded a siren and the workers stopped for a few minutes to take a drink. Humber had other ideas. While Fathom and Gulper huddled down, sharing a single ration of rice bread, he gave Fenn a sly nod and slipped away to a small side entrance. Here they turned into a narrow, gloomy corridor that shelved down into darkness. Humber grabbed Fenn’s hand as he pulled him past more of the wooden stanchions that propped up the low, jagged ceiling. When they were out of earshot, Humber glanced around, quickly lowering his voice and jerking his head towards the end of the cave. He lifted the candle so Fenn could see better.

  “You’ve got sharp eyes. Notice anything here?”

  “What?” Fenn asked. He couldn’t see a thing other than a chunk of limestone sticking out like the prow of a boat, casting deep shadow to one side.

  “Terras never check down here cos of these,” Humber whispered, giving one of the wooden stanchions a soft kick. A shower of stone dust powdered from the roof. “If they ever did they might find a surprise. Well?” he asked.

  Fenn stared and listened. All he could hear were the bangs and clatters reverberating up from the main cavern as the other units started work, but at that moment he felt a cold draught needle down the passage. The candle flame fluttered and ducked.

  “You think we’ve been twiddlin’ our thumbs while we waited for you to save us?” Humber smiled. “There’s a tunnel.”

  “Under the Wall?” Fenn asked.

  “No, out to sea,” Humber answered sarcastically. “Terras nibbed a clever old fella a coupler months back. Knew the marsh and lie of the land. I worked this patch with him an’ he told me a secret…” He motioned to Fenn to get nearer and Fenn leant in to hear. “He said this mine’s not all flint. Said there’d be a seam of chalk right here! Sure enough, we found it. Soft as butter, an’ almost as easy to scoop out! He started pickin’ at it but a coupler weeks ago there was a rockfall an’ his leg got well gammed up. Can’t lift a pick no more; works at the sick-house now. I took up where he left off.”

  “Can I see?” Fenn asked excitedly. He’d never imagined it would be possible to get to the other side of the Wall.

  “Nothin’ to see. We stuffed it up with chippings an’ rip-rap. Just in case a Terra came snoopin’. But it only needs one kick to knock it down.”

  “Does anyone else know?”

  “A few. Ones I trust. Before Magpie said who you were, I already knew you were a good ’un. The way you looked out for those other kids. The way they looked to you. But there aren’t many like you. The Terras got a tidy little scam here: extra rations for people who give them information. Extra rations for spies. And wanna know what information they want? Not who’s causin’ trouble but who’s doin’ good; who’s helped someone out, who shared their rations, who did a double shift so someone could be with their family for a bit. The Terras use the Trusties to set Seaborn against Seaborn.”

  Fenn shook his head despondently. After thinking Moray was wrong about the Hellhulk prisoners fighting, it turned out he was right.

  “Don’t get that upside down neither.” Humber said. “An evil place like this might make people do evil things, but people who snitch aren’t all bad – they’re just starvin’. There aren’t many who hold out. That’s why I couldn’t tell everyone.”

  Humber’s eyes shone, lamp-like in the gloom. He gripped Fenn’s arm tightly.

  “The Trusties will soon work out this unit hasn’t been cuttin’ as m
uch stone as before, so we have to move quick. Now’s the perfect time. Two weeks ago, a hundred Terras were on night shift, last week it was fifty … and tonight? Just a handful. That stupid fool Chilstone – he’s got ’em all out on the marsh, chasin’ his ghosts, lookin’ for you!” he smiled mischievously. “When they don’t have enough guards, they lock down the Brimstone. No guards on it at all. That’s after rations have been doled out. That’s when we act. But first we have to spread the word about you. A few Seaborn stormin’ the mine? They’ll be cut back by the Terras fast as you say snap! But once they all know the Demari boy’s alive and kicking, then every Seaborn will fight until their last breath to get out!”

  Before Fenn could answer, a sharp whistle echoed down the passageway.

  “Back to work,” Humber whispered. “Can’t afford to have Terras pokin’ around down here.”

  16

  It was pitch-dark as they tramped back across the bridge towards the Brimstone after the shift, and the wind swept glugs of freezing seawater up over the wooden boards, drenching their feet. Fenn’s head was full of plans to escape, but Gulper and Fathom talked about nothing but food. All they’d had to eat and drink all day was half a cup of water each, and a mouldy slice of rice bread.

  “Do we get full rations? We got a full load in the dram,” Gulper asked hopefully, holding his coat tight against the sleeting wind.

  Humber shook his head, gesturing to the single crate of food being loaded onto the Brimstone ahead of the workers. “Not today,” he said with a sigh, as the drawbridge ground shut behind them.

  No Terras followed them inside the Brimstone tonight, instead escorting the workers only as far as the drawbridge. Once that closed, Fenn heard the huge bolts being dragged into their slots and realised Humber was right: the Brimstone was on Lockdown.

  As news of the dismal rations got out, people from every deck of the ship swarmed into the main hall to make sure they got a share. Instantly, fights and arguments clanged in ugly shouts across the hall and people jostled to get close to the only crate. When the Brimstone was on Lockdown it was a free for all. Their wrangles were eventually interrupted by a loud hollering as Magpie and a stout woman came stomping down the ladders, banging their iron ladles on the railings as they came.