Phantasmical Contraptions & Other Errors

by Jessica Augustsson

  Copper smiled and nodded. “Exactly. Mind your manners and do as you’re told.” She looked to Oskar, who had his arms crossed over his chest and was looking both amused and wry. Copper clapped him on one huge shoulder. “Carry on, Oskar.”

  “Copper,” Oskar murmured, nodding once before she turned and walked away. He then looked down at Beata, one thick gray brow raised. “So, little one, do we set you to walk a while on the charger or get your hands dirty, eh?”

  Beata blinked, not having expected to be given a choice. After a moment she stood up tall and lifted her chin. “I’d rather get my hands dirty, sir.”

  Oskar’s grin returned and he chuckled. “Chief is adequate, Bee. Keep the ‘sir’ for the port officials. Come along!” He was already turning as he beckoned her to follow, his much-stained sleeveless shirt tucked into high-waisted trousers with two belts, both loaded with pouches and hooks and loops, all of them full or dangling with tools, keys, and assorted unidentifiable things. He was one of the few members of the crew she’d seen in proper boots, and his were scuffed and stained with hard use; proof enough of why he wore them.

  Beata hurried along behind him, his strides large and sure, while she was almost trotting to keep up. Even so, much of her unhappiness was at least temporarily buried beneath her growing interest in what she would be doing.

  4 – Unfortunate Consequences

  Beata lay on her simple pallet, her thin, scratchy blanket folded at the foot for the moment, and she rubbed the salve Doc Roban had given her on the healing marks at her wrists and ankles. It hurt less each time, and the skin looked less raw and rough after only a couple of days’ application, morning and night. She had been given another, smaller pot to rub on the three rapidly healing wounds in her arm.

  Spaced about two fingers apart, the wounds were small, shaped like the narrow bottom half of an oval, and already scabbed over with a pale milky-pink substance, as if blood had been mixed into cream. It had formed in minutes after Captain Nyx had used a slender tool pulled from the wooden box to make a shallow curved puncture in Beata’s arm. As they’d been promised, it hadn’t hurt; Copper had used a similar pot of salve and spread it thickly on the brown skin of Beata’s forearm. The sharp tip of the tool had been pressure for a moment and then a bizarre sliding in sensation, but never pain. Three times, it had occurred, in a slow, measured procedure.

  Wiping off the excess substance from her fingers onto a clean cloth, Beata switched to the smaller pot, unscrewing the lid after removing the gauzy wrappings around her forearm. The salve in this pot was the palest of green, nearly white, and smelt like the fresh, salty wind from the ocean with an undercurrent of blood. It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t wholly pleasant, either. It tingled in the three wounds before the whole area went numb. Beata very, very tentatively ran her salve-coated fingertip over the small bumps under her healing skin, feeling them shift the tiniest bit at her touch, though the sensation was at a remove, muffled by the salve just as the potential pain had been. It was an unsettling feeling, unnatural, but somehow fascinating, as well.

  When she slept, at some point or another each night, Beata dreamt she was floating; neither on the surface nor at the bottom, but surrounded on all sides by liquid, without any certainty which was up or down. Though she was under the water, she never seemed to need to breathe, and a regular ebb and flow of the tide or the waves rocked her in little rolling swells. It was vaguely comforting, and only seemed strange if she tried to make sense of it.

  Sometimes, near the end of the dreams, she heard a sound, surrounding her in the warm water, like singing in the far, far distance, traveling to her in fainter and fainter waves. She could never quite make out the whole tune, but it was sweet and longing, lingering in the back of her mind during her waking hours, when she wasn’t paying attention. However, as soon as she focused upon the memory, it faded away, elusive as mist in the moonlight.

  Wiping her fingers again, Beata unfolded her blanket and settled herself for sleeping. Tomorrow, she would be spending the morning endlessly walking in one place to charge the bank of batteries, but this time she would be reading a manual on maintenance of the engine. Beata was eager to start, still immensely surprised and happy that Chief Oskar had found she could read and immediately suggested she “read something worthwhile, then.”

  Her time working in maintenance—which was apparently under the aegis of engineering in the command structure, and which pleased her mainly because of her papa—had been very interesting, though quite demanding. It seemed half the reason she’d been assigned to maintenance was because she was the shortest out of the six captives; many parts of the engines and other devices and machinery aboard The Kraken required regular maintenance, part of which was quite often lubrication, but often there was precious little space to reach the areas requiring the grease or oil. Thus, Beata’s willingness to get her hands dirty had resulted in her being trained as a part-time “grease monkey.” In other words, a small and agile person who clambered around like a monkey upon the machinery on an airship—or a seagoing ship—to grease it. The term was a bit silly, but Beata didn’t mind.

  During their evening meal, after everyone had been sent off all over the ship to learn their tasks, they had spoken a bit of their experiences. No one had really hated their work, though they all agreed to a general feeling that they were far more fatigued than seemed natural. Especially Kailin, who looked paler where she wasn’t still flushed, and who said tallying up shipments and inventories had been fairly easy for her, but she was so tired she felt ill. Dark shadows had formed under her eyes and she held her arm—the one where the larvae had been placed—close to her body and stiffly, as if it pained her.

  The two males shared their assignments, in between wolfing down another hearty stew and gulping down watered-down ale. Azri had been assigned to work under Bosun Huus, who was in charge of keeping track of and caring for the equipment used by and for the crew of The Kraken, which primarily meant issued weapons and tools, and related items like sheaths and baldrics, tool belts and boxes, as well as ladders, stools, and the like. Bosun Huus was also in charge of tracking all the regular crew’s work and performance, and Azri said the man was frighteningly sharp.

  “Nothing escapes him!” Azri shook his head in a sort of wondering intimidation. “Everyone speaks to him with respect and, though I heard muttering and grumbling, no one said anything specific.”

  “He can get them disciplined,” Temmin said around a mouthful of stew, chewing quickly and swallowing before going on. “I’ve read stories where sailors got lashes with a whip when they didn’t do as they ought to.”

  “I don’t think they’d do that here on The Kraken, do you?” Saramay asked her brother with a troubled expression.

  “That’s usually what they do with slaves, too,” Azri put in casually, his chin out a bit, his dark green eyes avoiding everyone’s gaze. “You’d all best make sure you jump when they tell you what to do.”

  “Would they whip us?” Dara asked, sounding as if she didn’t want to believe, but was halfway there anyway. “Copper, Tagur... Everyone’s been so much kinder than I thought they would be.”

  “They own us,” Azri said sullenly, stabbing his spoon into his bowl as if the last of his stew was trying to escape. “They can do anything they like to us.” He glanced over at Kailin with an angry frown, but Beata felt that he was angry for the pale young woman, not at her. “You little ones don’t know—”

  “Stop,” Beata said suddenly, though more pleading than ordering. “It doesn’t...” She hesitated at the fire in Azri’s eyes, the angry red blooming in his cheeks, but then made herself go on. “It doesn’t help to make us more afraid, Azri. We...we’re all afraid, but it’s only going to make it harder if you go on about the horrible things. I know I missed a lot of it, but I’m grateful for that.” Swallowing, she tried not to let her voice thicken with the tears that seemed so close sometimes. “I think they’re trying to be kind, or at least not unkind.” />
  “Because we’re carrying their little monsters,” Kailin said softly, keeping her left arm close still, still poking around in her bowl more than actually eating. “If they abuse us, they could damage their precious little bugs.” Her ice-blue eyes were swimming in tears that didn’t quite fall.

  “I don’t think that’s it,” Dara said, shaking her head, brown curls bouncing freely over her shoulders. “Every other person I’ve seen so far has the scars from hosting when they were younger. I think there’s more stolen people in this crew than we know.”

  Azri shrugged unhappily, scowling down at his food. “Believe what you like, but watch yourselves. You didn’t witness what I did back at the flesh market... or on the ship that stole me from my people.” His chin was still jutted out, but Beata noticed a slight tremble in it before Azri clenched his jaw and took a deep, slightly uneven breath. “I never realized how evil people could be,” he muttered before scraping out the last few bites of his food without further comment.

  “There’s always been evil in the world,” Beata said, shaking her head on a sigh. “But there’s always been good, too. We were all in the hands of evil people, it seems, but I don’t think that’s the case here. Maybe they’re not wholly good,” she allowed, tilting her head, “but I don’t think they’re evil.”

  Azri shrugged, but continued silent. Several of the others nodded thoughtfully, Dara murmuring a quiet, “Yes.” Kailin just shook her head and took a small sip of her watery ale.

  None of them were particularly happy as they cleaned their dishes and took themselves off to their little cabins to sleep, but Beata still felt it could have been so much harder to go to bed with even worse things than they’d already experienced, or heard about, lurking about in their minds. She watched Kailin move down the companionway ahead of her as they left the galley and noticed her movements were slow, her feet barely leaving the floor with her steps. Something was wrong, but Beata didn’t know if she ought to speak to Kailin or someone else; the girl had already been asked repeatedly if she was unwell, if she needed anything, and she’d insisted she was just tired, that she didn’t need a thing.

  The next day, and the next, as well, Kailin’s listless behavior didn’t improve, and she just continued to look more wan and sickly each day. That evening, she ate no more than three bites of her food and only finished half a cup of water before sluggishly cleaning up after herself and slipping off to bed. No one stopped her, but Azri asked—as some one of them had almost every day—if she was going to be all right, and Saramay asked if Kailin wouldn’t like to see Doc Roban in case he could give her something to make her feel better. Kailin had just shaken her head and continued out.

  They’d all shared worried looks after she’d gone and Saramay said quietly, “I’m talking to the doctor tomorrow; something’s wrong with her and she’s never going to do it.” No one argued and most of them had nodded or murmured an agreement. Beata had been having the same thought, herself, and was relieved that Saramay was taking the decision upon herself.

  Beata wondered if Kailin was having a reaction to the larvae, but figured they’d find out one way or another if Doc Roban got involved. She tried to push the matter aside again once she had stretched out on her humble bed, idly thinking she was glad it wasn’t winter, but also relieved they’d missed coming into this situation in the summer. It would have been horribly stuffy in their windowless cabins—still more cells than anything else, in Beata’s opinion—and the tiny grilled openings in the doors were barely adequate for ventilation as it was. Of course, she realized why they had these quarters on the ship, and that some of what Azri had been saying wasn’t too far from the truth, but maybe things would improve once they proved themselves useful. She hoped so.

  It couldn’t have been long after Beata dozed off that she heard the distant sound of someone retching so hard they were almost shouting, and then hoarsely gulping for breath before heaving violently again. She heard Saramay’s voice—she was pretty sure it was Saramay—in a worried tone, then Temmin’s, and footfalls thumping past Beata’s door. She got up, throwing her still-damp tunic on hurriedly before opening her door.

  Saramay was just disappearing around the corner to the right of Beata’s door and, to the left, she saw Temmin standing in the companionway outside what she was sure was Kailin’s cabin, wringing his hands together as he wavered from foot to foot nervously.

  “Temmin, what’s wrong?” she called down to him.

  His brown eyes were wide with fear and he looked into Kailin’s cabin before slowly moving toward Beata, whispering, “Kailin’s sick. Terribly sick!”

  She ran toward Kailin’s cabin.

  “Dara and Azri are with her,” he said as she approached. Beata could smell the sickness, vomit and something else—the poor girl, how embarrassing, she thought randomly—and heard Kailin’s voice, hoarse and breathless, though Beata couldn’t understand what she was saying.

  At the doorway, she saw Dara holding Kailin as she knelt near the corner of the tiny cabin, holding her hair back and steadying the bucket she’d obviously been being sick into. Beata had another reason to wish they had windows, because the smell was terrible. “Can I do anything?” she asked.

  Azri turned, having been using what looked like an article of clothing—possibly Kailin’s tunic—to try and corral the mess on the floor away from Kailin’s bed. “Saramay’s fetching the doctor, and there’s not much room in here...” He gestured with a nose-wrinkled grimace at the floor. “At least, not much that hasn’t been vomited on. Can you and Tem find a bucket of wash water and some rags?”

  “Right away,” Temmin said from behind Beata’s shoulder. Beata nodded, grabbing for Temmin’s arm and, after stopping at the nearest supply closet for cleaning rags, a mop, and a bucket, they ran in the direction of the galley. It was better to do something than to stand there fretting and doing nothing.

  There was no one in the galley or the mess, though the big iron kettle on the hob was still warm, so it was likely it hadn’t been long since Tagur had gone to bed. Beata sent Temmin to fill the bucket while she found a jug in one of the cabinets, filling it from the fresh water spigot over the wash trough. Shoving the cork in firmly, she went to check on Temmin’s progress.

  When they got back to Kailin’s cabin, Kailin was gone. Azri and Dara were just beginning to return to cleaning up, while Saramay immediately went from her spot in the corner of Kailin’s cabin to grab onto her brother, nearly making him drop the bucket of water.

  “Did the doctor take her?” Beata asked as Temmin put an arm around his sister and let her cry into his shoulder.

  “Just now,” Dara replied, nodding, wincing at the smell as she used Kailin’s blanket to hold all the soiled items, pulling the ends together and carrying it quickly out. “He said for us to clean up and go to bed. That we’ve done what we can.”

  “Do you think it—” Beata started to ask, but Azri cut her off in a hard voice.

  “It’s the bugs. The larvae,” he growled, waving his own arm with its little bumps beneath healing cuts. “I knew she was sick!”

  Dara took a few deep breaths after leaving the bundle in the companionway for the moment and taking the mop from Beata. “Her arm was... it was like the things were rotting in-inside her,” she said shakily, looking as if even saying it made her feel ill. Although, Beata thought sympathetically, she already had plenty of reason for that just from dealing with the mess in the cabin. “She must not’ve been a virgin.”

  “She was most likely taken by the slavers,” Azri said, coming to the doorway to take some of the rags and the bucket. “All those bruises, like she’d been held down.” His expression was hard and angry, his voice harsh with it. “I don’t know whether she was pretending it didn’t happen or...” he shrugged, shaking his head, “maybe she was unconscious?”

  “If they beat her, she may have been,” Beata said, feeling sick inside, both for Kailin and for knowing there were people in the world who would do such
things to helpless girls—to anyone, for that matter. “Maybe she didn’t know.”

  Sighing loudly, Dara said in a flat tone, “She’d know... They couldn’t have been gentle, but she might have been unable to deal with it. Sometimes, when people experience something truly horrible, it’s like their minds hide it away to protect themselves. They just...don’t remember, and explain away the evidence of it, or just ignore it.”

  “Poor Kailin,” Beata whispered, stricken by the thought of such a thing. Niggling doubt rose up in her, making her suddenly afraid of her own long sleep, and she put her hand over her forearm to feel the tiny little bumps under her own skin and the loosely wrapped gauzy bandages.

  “You’d know by now,” Temmin said, looking at her hand upon her arm. “Any sign of infection or anything?” Beata shook her head and he nodded once. “You’re fine, then.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if Doc Roban takes another look at all of us tomorrow,” Saramay said, sniffling a bit and wiping her eyes. “Just to make sure.”

  When she woke to the sounds of activity in the companionway, Beata had tears drying on her face and damp patches in the hair at her temples. She was certain, though she couldn’t have explained how, that Kailin was dead.

  Later, when they gathered in the mess to have their morning meal, the captain came in to speak to the five young captives and the two dozen or so other crewmembers breaking their fast, as well.

  Captain Nyx stood tall with her hands clasped behind her back, looking around at them with a somber expression and a subdued voice. “Kailin passed just before dawn. It seems she had a reaction to the larvae and didn’t tell anyone she was ill. It may be I should not have let her host them until she was more healed from being taken by the slavers. It may be that she did not realize her innocence had been stolen from her. We don’t know. Even so, I take responsibility for her passing and if any of you have questions, come see me and I shall try to answer. We shall give her a crewmember’s services when we consign her to the clouds. Any who wish to be present, please gather on the quarter deck at noon.” She looked to Beata and the four others at their table and bowed her head. “You young folk are to be commended for the kindness you showed her when she took ill, and for undertaking the cleaning of her cabin in hopes she would return. Doctor Roban wants you each to report to him at the ship’s clinic before beginning your assigned tasks for today. Carry on.”