by Geoff Rodkey
Ismail led us down to the hold and gave us a quick tour. It was divided into a cavernous main compartment that held hundreds of water barrels, stacked sideways nearly to the ceiling, and a handful of smaller compartments fore and aft that housed the bread room, sail room, carpenter’s room, shot locker, and magazine.
The whole deck reeked of bilgewater and was gloomy even on a sunny afternoon. Just a trickle of sunlight managed to filter down through the ceiling grates in the upper decks, and although a couple of oil lamps hung on hooks, neither of them were lit.
“Lantern only at night,” Ismail told us. “And never near magazine,” he added, pointing to the little room that contained the gunpowder kegs. “Unless you want to go boom. Kiss the sky.”
In the main compartment, two feet of empty space stood between the stacked water barrels and the hull on either side; fore and aft, there were narrow walkways of the same width separating the compartment walls from the hull.
As Ismail explained our duties, the reason for that empty space around the hull became clear.
“First job of carpenter and mates,” he began, “is plug any hole below waterline. With load we got now, waterline about here”—he reached up on tiptoe, extending his arm to mark a space just below the ceiling—“so no worry about holes on other two decks. Only down here.
“When cannonball come through hull, you plug hole. Take you twenty seconds, no problem. Take you forty seconds, you got problem. Take you one minute, whole ship got problem.”
He held up a canvas sack and pulled out a squat wooden cylinder about ten inches across, wrapped in canvas. “Each of you get sack with plugs. This smallest plug. For eighteen-pound cannonball. Ripper ship mostly fire this. Short-Ear man-of-war . . .” He held up a slightly larger plug. “Fire twenty-four pound. And if we got bad luck . . .” He showed us a plug the size of my head. “Maybe thirty-six. Too many of these, make big problem.
“Every time you go to hole, take sack with you. Find right size plug, pound in hole with this.” He pulled a wooden mallet from the sack.
“Sound easy, yeah? Not so easy. Water come fast. Now—second job of carpenter. Fix masts and yards when they break. Deadeyes, too. This complicated. Take time to teach you. Battle come soon, someone else do job. Just know this—someone on deck yell for carpenter, whoever got him on your back get to deck fast. Anybody got question?”
Nobody did.
“Okay. Now we train.”
Within seconds, Ismail had us sprinting every which way at top speed, carrying mallets and bags of shot plugs as we reacted to the shot sizes and locations he called out.
“Starboard magazine, low, twenty-four!”
“Bread room, top by ceiling, eighteen!”
“Three holes port side, amidships! Thirty-six all!”
It was tough work. But it was easy compared to what came next.
“Everybody think they good? Know they job? Yeah?”
We nodded, wiping sweat from our faces.
Ismail smiled and pulled three bandannas from his pocket.
“Okay. Now we work blindfolded.”
It made sense, given how little light reached the hold. But it was disastrous. I banged my limbs every few feet, had a forehead-to-forehead collision with Kira that sent us both sprawling, and I’d never heard Guts curse so much. Which was saying a lot.
Once the new patch had been sealed over the breach and the Grift got under way, Quint joined us. The sailmaker had finished the harnesses, and Ismail had us take turns sprinting up and down the companionways with Quint on our backs. Whoever didn’t carry Quint was given a sack of cannonballs that weighed as much as he did.
Then Ismail made Quint practice jumping in and out of our harnesses so many times that when we finally stopped for our dinner ration, Quint looked as tired as we were.
We ate under the moonlight on the weather deck, grateful for the breeze that dried the sweat from our shirts. The Grift had taken the long way around Sunrise Island, and even in the dark I could see the craggy outline of Mount Majestic rising to the east, along with a cluster of twinkling lights just above the horizon that must have been Blisstown.
I wondered if Millicent was somewhere out there.
And then, for the first time in days, that Cyril fellow popped into my head.
The older boy. The one who’d grown up with Millicent on Sunrise.
The one she’d told me was tall, handsome, and rich, and had just gotten himself kicked out of some fancy boarding school in the Fish Islands for doing something terribly impressive.
The one Millicent had claimed she was going to marry.
Is she with him right now? Under one of those twinkling lights?
A little shard of fury went shooting through my brain, and for a moment I considered jumping overboard and swimming to shore.
But I was too tired to chew, let alone swim miles of ocean in the dark.
After dinner, Ismail had us string our hammocks on the lower deck, and at first we were thrilled to get into them. But it turned out he wasn’t sending us to sleep. He just wanted to see how fast we could jump out, unstring the hammocks, and stow them.
We must not have been fast enough for him, because when we were finished, he had us do it all over again.
Twenty times.
Then we did it blindfolded, twenty more times.
By the time Ismail finally let us bed down, I’d grown to hate him. I slept that night like a dead man.
The next morning brought more of the same, along with lessons in repairing deadeyes and climbing ratlines to fix broken spars in the rigging. Whenever he let us pause to rest, Ismail quizzed us on the various commands that governed the ship in combat, and there were so many of them that pretty soon my head hurt as much as my arms and legs did.
But as brutal as the training was, every time I looked around whatever deck we happened to be on, I saw men working every bit as hard as we were. The sailors who handled the rigging were a blur of constant movement, and the gun crews drilled nonstop. If there was a single pirate on the ship who wasn’t pulling his weight, I never saw him.
I gradually realized that this was why Healy’s men had always seemed so much more capable than other crews—because they worked at it, night and day, until every movement their job required had been practiced so many times that the memory of it was burned deep into their muscles.
That was where the iron discipline came from, too. A man who worked such long hours didn’t have time for grumbling. Or mutiny. Or fear.
If I’d had the time to stop and think about it, I would have been grateful for that. My head and my hands were so preoccupied with practicing what I’d do in a battle that I didn’t have time to worry about whether there was going to be one. There were five ships out there, bristling with cannon, scouring the Blue Sea for us, and if I’d had nothing to do but sit around and wonder when their masts might poke up over the horizon, I would’ve paralyzed myself with fear.
But I was too busy to be scared. And when I did have a moment to myself, I was too tired to spend it on anything but sleep.
There was something else about working that hard, and for such long hours, with other people—it bound you to them. Ismail taught Guts, Kira, and me to work with Quint as a team—to plug holes, relay supplies, and cover the narrow carpenter’s walks in pairs; to share the load of carrying Quint from place to place; and to keep a map in our heads of where the others were, so we could rush to help them, or call on them for the same, at any time.
It’s hard to explain the feeling I got from that. Guts and I had been tight for a while, and Kira as well—we’d seen hard times together, and watched each other’s backs. And I’d known Quint as long as I could remember. Next to Mung, he’d treated me better than anybody on the plantation.
But those days on the Grift bound us even more tightly, to one another and to the rest of the crew. F
or the first time in my life, I felt like I was part of something: a small but necessary piece of a whole that was much bigger, and more important, than just myself alone. And it felt good. Not happy good, or exciting good, or even warm-piece-of-jelly-bread good . . . but a deep, strong, lasting good.
Not that I understood a bit of that while it was happening. It was only much later, after things had settled down and I’d had a chance to puzzle it all out. All I remember feeling at the time was a strange sense of stability, of having my feet planted firmly somewhere even though I was in the belly of a boat crashing through the sea.
And I do recall wondering, on the night of the third day, why I’d stopped hating Ismail for working us so hard. But I chalked that up to the fact that he’d given us the rest of the evening off after dinner.
Quint arm-vaulted off to sleep, but Guts, Kira, and I spent a few minutes stretched out on the deck, peering through the rigging at the stars overhead.
“Been thinkin’,” Guts said. “Gonna get crew shares out o’ this?”
“Why would we?” I asked.
“Quint’s gettin’ one.”
“Quint patched the hull,” I said. “And anyway, I think crew shares are only for whoever makes it through the battle.”
“And we won’t?”
“We’re less than a day out of Edgartown. I think we’ll be off the ship before there’s a battle.”
“Don’t say that!” snapped Kira.
“Why not?”
“You taunt Ka when you make a prophecy. He will prove you a fool.”
“Sorry,” I said. I didn’t understand Kira’s religion, let alone believe in it. But just the same, I didn’t want to get on the wrong side of her god. “Can I take it back? Say a prayer or something?”
“It is too late for that,” she said. She stood up, stretching out her neck. “I am going to sleep so I don’t have to smell your burnt flesh when Ka strikes you down.”
We followed her down two flights to the wide-open midsection of the lower deck, strung our hammocks in the dark, and crawled into them to sleep.
As I lay there, gently swaying with the roll of the ship alongside a hundred cocooned pirates, I thought about Kira’s superstition.
It seemed a little silly. Healy’s best guess had been that Ripper Jones and Li Homaya were patrolling the coastal lane between Deadweather and the mainland. If that was true, they were days away from us now.
And by tomorrow night, we’d be in Edgartown. The thought of seeing it for the first time was exciting. Not only that, but there were regular ships, as many as one a day, between Edgartown and Blisstown.
Depending on how things worked out with Kira’s old tutor, I might have time to double back to Sunrise and find Millicent.
Maybe she’d come with us to track down the Okalu.
And we’d be together again.
Me and Millicent . . .
Millicent . . .
I drifted off with a smile on my lips.
It was the last calm breath I’d draw for two days.
CHAPTER 10
Incoming
“STATIONS!!”
The voice cut through my sleep like an ax. My heart was pounding before I even opened my eyes.
There was no light. I was swinging in the air.
And the ship was breaking to pieces.
No. The shudder and rumble was feet—hundreds of them, all hitting the decks at once, above and around me.
Get out of the hammock.
It was swaying so crazily I couldn’t settle it. I lifted my legs free and rolled out.
Only one leg wasn’t quite free. My foot snagged, but the rest of me kept going. I landed ugly on the deck, breaking the fall with my right hand. When I put weight on it to push myself up, a burst of pain shot from my hand all the way to my shoulder.
Something’s hurt.
I stood up. The rumbling of feet had stopped, replaced by the eerie frip-frip of a hundred hammocks being whisked into storage all around me.
I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. I was groping for the front tie of my hammock, the pain in my arm creating green starbursts in my eyes, when a pirate thundered past in the dark and nearly bowled me over.
The rumble of feet rose again as the crew streamed past me, headed for the companionway and the gun deck upstairs.
Faster. Stow the hammock.
My shaking fingers found the tie, and as I started working at the knot, the pain settled around my wrist, stabbing daggers through it.
The pounding of feet was drowned out by the heavy rumble of cannon carriages moving into place over my head.
I couldn’t get the knot undone.
Calm down. You practiced this.
I gulped air, trying to slow my thudding heart.
It’s just a drill. Don’t get—
I never heard the first round hit. The next thing I knew, I was on my back, skittering across the deck with things and people raining down on me. Then there was light coming from somewhere and voices were crying out and my nose was full of something smoky and bitter as thunder erupted in the distance.
That’s not thunder.
A second round struck the ship like the hand of an angry god.
I was thrown again, battered against the hull. As I lifted my head, I heard the thunder again, and the first thing I saw was Quint’s face, dazed and blinking in the blue moonlight filtering through an open portal behind him.
Only nobody had opened a portal.
That hole in the hull wasn’t supposed to be there.
Quint’s dazed look turned wild and urgent as he whipped his head around to me. “GET US BELOW!”
But I haven’t untied my hammock.
He vaulted toward me, and I got on one knee like I’d been trained to do. I was wearing the harness—Ismail had made us sleep in them—and Quint swung into it like I was a saddled horse.
I lurched to my feet and started for the companionway down to the hold. Men dodged past me in both directions. I tripped over someone—alive or dead, I wasn’t sure—and nearly fell.
I saw Kira a few feet ahead in the smoky gloom, moving in the same direction as me.
“Guts?!” I called out.
“Behind ye!”
Another round of cannon fire slammed into the ship, sending us all sprawling. Quint landed on my head, tangling us both up in the harness.
The force of the impact had blown us forward, almost to the companionway leading down to the hold. As Quint struggled to untangle the harness, a new sound reached my ears.
Rushing water.
Quint heard it, too. “MAN THE PUMP!” he screamed at the ceiling.
The Grift’s cannon fired overhead, with a deafening roar that rattled the ship from end to end.
Quint kept yelling, “MAN THE PUMP!” but my ears were ringing so loud it sounded like he was underwater.
He tapped me twice on the shoulder. Ready. As I got up to take the final few steps to the companionway, an answering cry came down from the gun deck:
“PUMP’S ENGAGED!”
Kira was crouched beside the companionway, trying to light an oil lantern. It was pitch black down in the hold. Even through the ringing in my ears, I could still hear the water.
It sounded like a river down there.
“GO!” yelled Quint, but I was already on the steps.
The water in the hold was ankle deep and roiling. I was blind in the darkness, but the canvas sacks of plugs and mallets were right near where they were supposed to be, floating to the left of the stairs. I picked up a sack, handed it back to Quint, and listened for the direction the water was coming from.
Everywhere. It was coming from everywhere.
I moved forward, hands groping in front of me, until I reached the hull. I could feel a current moving past my ankles, and
I walked against it, stutter-stepping through the water, until I found the closest breach.
It was at waist level, the seawater rushing in so fast that it slapped away my hand when I first crossed it. My injured wrist shrieked in protest.
“Wot’s the size?” yelled Quint.
I tried to probe it with my hands. In the dark, it was like a living, angry thing. “I don’t—”
“Kneel on it!”
I knelt down in the water, pressing my body against the hull so Quint could get his hand out to feel the gushing stream.
“Thirty-six!”
The size of the largest Cartager cannon. Ismail’s words came back to me.
Too many of these make big problem.
I straightened up. Quint held the sack open, and I plunged my hand into it, searching for the right plug.
No . . . no . . .
I could feel the water rising up my legs.
Got it.
I lifted a large plug from the sack, tucked it under my right arm—the wrist was throbbing now—and reached back in to grab the mallet.
“Mallet on the left!”
Quint took the mallet from me with his free hand. I gripped the plug with both hands, then stepped forward and knelt down in the water as I shoved the plug into the roaring stream.
It pushed back with such force that the plug smacked me in the face, almost knocking me over.
I tried again, putting my weight behind it. The water batted me away a second time.
The pain in my wrist was excruciating. My body was trembling, my clothes soaked and heavy with seawater. Roaring water filled the darkness all around me.
This was nothing like the training.
Get it done or we sink.
I held up the plug in front of my face and shoved it forward with all my strength. My arms shook as the water struggled to find a way around the plug.
I got it.
Almost. A knifelike stream of water was drilling into my face. I moved my head down and away from it.
Then the spray must have hit Quint, because I heard him curse.
The water kept fighting me. My wrist shrieked in agony. Gritting my teeth against the pain, I kept the plug over the hole as I leaned to my left so Quint could drive it home with the mallet.