by K. J. Parker
“Of course,” she heard herself say. Anything, to get clear, away and safe.
“Thank you.” He smiled, but she could see he was still watching her, the way wolves watch potential prey in the distance; the thorough, methodical way a predator has of gathering the facts, weighing up the relevant factors and making an informed decision. He’s got the patience of an animal, she thought; patient, clear mind and lightning reflexes. “I know I can rely on you.”
She waited, for as long as she could bear to without screaming; then, as evenly as she could, she said, “Well, I’d better get on with it, then.”
He nodded, but she couldn’t go yet. If she broke eye contact now, he’d know exactly what she’d been thinking. Suddenly she understood what sort of soldier he must have been: a natural, unbeatably fast and unstoppably strong, a man-eater. She wanted to run away, like the little girl in the fairy tale, until she met a woodsman who’d come with his axe and kill the monster. She said: “I’ll talk to them. I’m sure they’ll understand.”
He frowned, his face changing suddenly. “Don’t say anything about the money,” he said. “That’s not something that needs talking about.”
“No, of course.” His eyes moved, just a little, and she realised she’d replied a bit too quickly; not enough to trigger an instinctive reaction, just enough to snag his attention. She could feel herself starting to panic. “I mean, that’s none of their business, is it?”
“No.”
She’d said the wrong thing. He was looking straight at her now, concentrating on her, and her mind had stopped working. She couldn’t think what to say or do, but staying still and quiet wouldn’t be possible for much longer. There was a calm about him that terrified her, like an animal saving its energy just before the quick, massive exertion of the kill.
Then, quite suddenly, he gave a little shrug and looked away. “Menin’s got the right idea,” he said. “There must be loads of things we can eat, quite apart from Muri’s bloody squirrels. But I think the sensible thing would be for us to build a boat - nothing too fancy, just a sloop, something that’ll get us to the mainland and back with a few barrels of flour; little and often, instead of trying to stock up all in one go. I’ve still got a couple of hundred in cash, and there’s bound to be stuff we can trade. I mean, we don’t really need three anvils, or all that mining gear. Come to think of it, I’ve got no idea why I brought it in the first place.”
She laughed, although she was shivering. “That’s a brilliant idea,” she said. “There’s plenty of cloth for a sail, too. How far are we from the mainland, anyway?”
He shrugged. “Two days, possibly three if the wind’s being tiresome. I remember, when I was here after the war, four of us took a boat and went across, it was no big deal.”
“Well, then.” She gave him a big smile. “I’ll be getting back to the house now.” She didn’t wait for a reply; she turned her back, catching her breath as she did so. She was quite proud of herself for not breaking into a run until she was inside the yard gate.
So they built a boat. Muri and Kudei felled the timber: tall, straight thirty-year ash from the top of the lower hills, which Aidi and Kunessin slabbed and planked in the yard, where they’d dug a sawpit. All but one of the long crosscut saws had been hanging up in the grain store when the fire started; the heat had drawn their temper and left them soft and useless, at least until someone could find the time to cook them up again. Aidi volunteered to do it, but Kunessin pointed out that he’d have to get the forge working first, and besides, they didn’t have any charcoal. Aidi said he knew how to burn charcoal. Kunessin replied that he didn’t doubt it, but they couldn’t spare the time. Aidi started to explain that getting all six saws back in service would save them time in the long run; at which point Alces, who was listening to the debate from the chair he was confined to until his burns healed, suggested that if they were going to argue, they might as well saw wood at the same time. There didn’t seem to be an answer to that, so Kunessin climbed down into the pit and they started sawing, still discussing the point at issue at the tops of their voices.
It was a good saw - Kunessin had bought nothing but the best; even so, it took them two hours to cut out one plank, a fact which Aidi took great pleasure in pointing out. Kunessin gave way more or less gracefully, and Aidi practically swaggered as he headed off to the forge. One of the indentured men took his place in the sawpit, and the next plank only took an hour and a half.
Kunessin was graceful enough not to make an issue out of the snags Aidi encountered once he’d got the forge going (charcoal wasn’t a problem after all, once they discovered six full sacks of the stuff hidden among the heaps of rubbish at the back of the garrison’s original storehouse). They had just enough whale oil to temper the saw blades in, once they’d emptied all the lamps in the main house; what they didn’t have was a shallow container eight feet long to put it in. Eventually Aidi solved the problem by cutting one end off two drinking troughs and forge-welding them together, an extremely skilful piece of metalworking for which he got very little credit. The first saw he retempered snapped like a carrot as soon as they tried to use it.
In the end, they salvaged three of the five fire-softened saws, and dug three more sawpits. Even then, the most they could manage to produce was twelve planks a day (Kunessin soon had both hands wrapped in rags to cushion his blisters); the smallest number they could get away with was two hundred and sixty. At that rate—Kunessin interrupted to say that he could do mental arithmetic as well as the next man, but what alternative had they got?
Kudei solved the problem. He cut a dozen oak wedges, and taught himself how to split the tree trunks lengthways to make rough but acceptable planks. A third of what he turned out were too bowed and warped to be any use except for cutting into short lengths, and even the good ones needed to be trimmed and fettled with adzes and drawknives. But with the sawpits working day and night as well, they brought their daily output up to twenty-one planks, which was generally reckoned to be enough to give them a fighting chance.
On the fifth planking day, Alces joined in. His hands and face were still heavily bandaged, but he declared that if he had to sit still and quiet for one more day he’d become a danger to himself and others. He was too weak to saw or swing a hammer, but he padded his hands with raw wool to the point where he could use a drawknife. They rigged up trestles to lay the planks on so he could work sitting down.
After thirteen days of frantic effort, they had their stack of planks (at which point, one of the indentured men pointed out that the floorboards from the main house were only a few inches shorter than the planks they’d just cut, and most of them were seasoned pine rather than green ash; the comment was received in stony silence and never referred to again), and it was time to face up to the fact that none of them actually knew how to build a ship. True, they’d all been in one, and all five of them had helped pass the time on the voyage out by studying how it was put together. That, Kunessin maintained, ought to be enough. Aidi then asked where they should start: should they lay the keel first and then fit the ribs to it, or should they begin with the ribs and shape the keel to fit? It was a very good question, good enough to push Kunessin to the verge of losing his temper. Aidi himself expressed no opinion, and the situation wasn’t helped when Muri said that he’d heard of both methods being used, though he couldn’t recall any details. At least that goaded Kunessin into making a decision: keel first, then ribs.
Kudei had found them a suitable tree: ridiculously tall and thin, with only a very slight taper. Aidi (Dorun reckoned he was still upset about breaking the first saw) then asked how Kunessin proposed bending it to shape, and was rather taken aback when Kunessin smiled and said he knew exactly how it was done. That proved to be something of an exaggeration. What he’d actually seen, once, was a bowyer bending a bow stave over a kettle, though he insisted the principle was the same.
They had a fifty-gallon iron cauldron. Nobody knew why Kunessin had bought it - Alces’ th
eory was that he’d misheard the merchant who sold it to him, while Chaere took the view that he’d bought it for the sake of completeness, since he’d already stocked up with every other item of useless junk available for immediate delivery in Faralia. Now they lugged it out into the yard, lit an enormous fire under it, filled it with water and waited a very long time for it to come to the boil. Eventually it did; whereupon the five of them lifted the keel on to their shoulders and held the relevant place over the steaming cauldron for half an hour, which was the length of time the bowyer had given his slender wand of elm. Then they scurried it across the yard to the place where a massive forked-trunked beech grew, stuck the front end of the keel in the fork, and hauled sideways. They were all completely stunned, Kunessin included, when it worked first time. The wood bent smoothly and easily, and once it had cooled down, the carefully judged contour of the bend stayed there. They carried it back to the cauldron in thoughtful silence and repeated the procedure for the other end.
After that, there was no stopping them. They bent the ship’s sixteen ribs in exactly the same way, using a curve scratched in the dirt as a template, and they were most put out, practically offended, when the fifteenth rib cracked as they hauled on it (on subsequent inspection it proved to have an unexpected twist in the grain, for which they refused to hold themselves responsible). Aidi wanted to go further and steam curves into the hull planks as well, but Kunessin said that wasn’t necessary; they could be bent and nailed on, and the stress would keep them from warping as the green timber dried out. That sounded suspiciously as though he’d just made it up on the spot, but by that point they were sick to death of holding bits of wood over the cauldron, and nobody was minded to argue.
The rest, as Muri cheerfully told them, was just carpentry, which any fool could do. That analysis didn’t hold up for very long. The three carpenters among the enlisted men quickly contrived to splinter two of the ribs as they tried to mortice them to the keel. When accused of carelessness, they objected that they were carpenters, not shipwrights, and only a fool would try and make highly stressed load-bearing components out of green timber. So Muri fitted the ribs himself; as he pointed out, he wasn’t a time-served carpenter and didn’t realise what he was doing wasn’t possible, so he did it anyway. The carpenters watched him in grim silence; then, when he’d finished, they promised him faithfully that the whole thing would be firewood within forty-eight hours, and refused to implicate themselves any further. The ribs held, and so did the keel, but the carpenters maintained that it was a blasphemy and an abomination, and confined their involvement to planing the deck planks to a fine, entirely unnecessary finish while Muri and the others set about nailing up the hull.
While the ship was being built, nobody said anything about food, which was probably just as well. Nobody commented when bread was replaced with crushed-barley porridge made out of cattle feed, briefly supplemented with extravagant servings of pork. When the last of the pigs had been eaten, that was the end of the meat ration. Kunessin flatly refused to slaughter any of his pedigree Robur shorthorns, Muri was too busy cutting mortices to go deer-hunting, and all but three of the chickens had been killed by a fox on the night of the fire. When the porridge ran out, they ate the horses’ oats; when the oats were finished, they broke into the two barrels of condemned beans that Kunessin had got cheap and intended to use for pig food; finally the seedcorn. The next night, after the assembled company had dined on walnuts, wild mushrooms and cranberries, someone went out while everybody else was asleep, took Muri’s extra-heavy bow from the small barn, and shot a cow.
“It’d be a shame to waste it,” Chaere said next morning. They’d been paraded at the scene of the crime, and nobody had said a word so far.
But Kunessin refused. He was clearly furious; quiet, nervous, as though bracing himself to do something he’d prefer to avoid. He told Muri and Aidi to drag the corpse to the latrine pit and throw it in.
Aidi looked at him. “Can I have a quiet word with you?” he asked.
Kunessin shook his head. “Are you going to do as I said?”
Aidi frowned. “We can post a guard on the cattle pen if you like,” he said. “If we all take turns it won’t be so bad. But - come on, Teuche, the bloody thing’s dead and we’re starving.”
“Fine,” Kunessin said. “Muri, get a rope.”
Muri helped him rope up the carcass and drag it across the yard, while the rest of them watched in total silence. They had to use levers to get it into the pit; it fell with a loud splash and a sheet of nauseating spray, which hit Muri full in the face and drenched Kunessin’s jacket.
Muri spent the rest of the day in the woods, and came home with a gutted roebuck on each shoulder. He was plainly exhausted, though he denied it, and spent the evening huddled by the fire, wrapped in a blanket. Precious little shipbuilding had been done that day, since the principal shipwright hadn’t been there.
“I’ll go tomorrow,” Alces said. “I’m sick to death of sitting around all day.”
“You’re in no fit state,” Kunessin snapped back at him. “We can’t afford to waste time and manpower searching the woods for you if you flake out.”
“Fine,” Alces replied angrily. “Just leave me, I’ll find my own way home.” Melted-side grin. “I’ll just follow the river.”
(Later, Chaere asked Dorun if she had any idea why that particular remark had killed the conversation for the rest of the evening. Dorun replied that she hadn’t a clue, but clearly Alces had deliberately hit a raw nerve.)
Alces left for the woods early next day, before Kunessin was awake. Muri volunteered to go and find him, but Aidi said no, let him get on with it; they’d all been in worse shape than that in their time and gone on to fight and win major battles. That was an exaggeration, but Muri nodded and carried on sawing a tenon into a brace. Earlier he’d said he reckoned they’d have the first planks on the hull by mid-afternoon, though nobody reacted to his claim one way or the other.
Alces came back just as the light was starting to fade, dragging an enormous wild pig on a sled of lashed-together branches. They didn’t waste time weighing it, but Kudei reckoned it had to be at least four and a half hundredweight. Alces slumped in a corner without even taking off his mud-caked boots, and they had to wake him up for his dinner.
“We got three planks on,” Muri told him cheerfully, handing him his plate. “If we really tear into it tomorrow, we’ll have it done in a couple of days.”
Dinner next evening was a thin, watery stew of store apples fried in pork fat, a chewy fungus Menin had found growing on the trunks of rotten trees, and three rabbits caught in wires set by one of the indentured men. Only Chaere commented on the taste; they’d got two thirds of the hull planked in, the mast was ready and Clea and Enyo had finished hemming the sail.
(‘It’s ridiculous,” Chaere told them, as they sat sewing in the doorway of the middle barn. “You’re wasting your time, and that’s all there is to it. That stupid boat’s never going to sail anywhere. At the rate they’re going, the real ship’ll be here before they’re finished.”
Clea scowled at her; Enyo smiled and said, “Well, it helps pass the time. And I enjoy sewing.”
Chaere could see blood and torn skin on the tips of her fingers. The sailcloth was too thick to be sewn with an ordinary needle (but ordinary needles were all they had), so it had to be forced through, using the already completed hem. Sometimes, the base of the needle punched through the hem and deep into Enyo’s finger.
“Just as well,” Chaere said. “Personally, I left Faralia so I wouldn’t have to spend my life doing stupid, useless needlework.”)
The next morning, Kunessin got up very early, walking carefully across the floor so as not to wake anybody else. He went to the middle barn and got a poleaxe, then crossed the yard to the cattle pen. The heifers were already crowding up to the rail, waiting for their ration of hay. He hesitated, choosing, then stepped up to the biggest heifer and smashed her forehead with the hammer of the
axe. She dropped to her knees, then rolled over. The other heifers bucked and twisted away, as he climbed through the rails, opening his long-bladed pocketknife. He knelt down, lifted the heifer’s head on to his knee, and stabbed the knife into the neck vein, dodging sideways to avoid the jet of blood. By the time the others came out to start work, he’d got the carcass hoisted up on the frame they’d used for the pigs. The steam rising from the opened belly looked like smoke.
They all worked well all day, lighting lamps and torches when the light began to fade so they could finish planking the deck. At one point, it looked as though they were going to run out of nails, until one of the indentured men found two full kegs in the lean-to store. Nobody seemed inclined to talk very much while they ate their evening meal (apart from Chaere, who complained that the beef was tough, though that was only to be expected if you left the animal too long before slaughtering it). There wasn’t very much of it; the women had used up the last of the salt curing as much as they could.
After the meal was over and the trestle tables had been cleared away, Kunessin got up and walked over to the far end of the room, where the indentured men sat. They were huddled in a circle, studying what looked like a small handful of fine gravel heaped up on somebody’s shirt. Kunessin stood over them till they had to look up.
“You two,” he said (and there was no mistaking who he meant). “Outside.”
The two men - he only knew their family names, Aechmaloten and Andrapoda - followed him into the yard. There was just enough moonlight to see by.
“Where the hell did you two get to all day?” Kunessin asked.
The shorter of the two, Aechmaloten, hesitated a long time before answering. “We went down the river,” he said quietly. “Major Proiapsen wanted two sacks of fine gravel, for making cement, for the forge.”
Kunessin could hear something in his voice, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was. He said quietly, “That shouldn’t have taken you all day.”