by R J Barker
Today it barely moved. Weed waved lazily around the beak of Tide Child, and fish, skin scintillating with light, darted in and out of the safety of the plants, vanishing into the depths in a sparkling cloud as noisy women and men ran ropes through the hipbones of the prow and back to the flukeboats – one old, one newly acquired.
Joron knew towing the ship out of the bay should be a simple operation, and yet it was not. Voices were raised; no one quite knew what was expected of them, and when Joron intervened he was met with sneers by those who listened and the deaf ears of those who did not. And though there was plenty of noise and industry at the beak of Tide Child, the job remained undone, and the disapproval of Meas at the rump of the ship began to loom over him like stormclouds at the rim of the world. But eventually, as the eye beat on his back and when it felt like the storm must break over him, the job was suddenly over, messily, untidily and in the least fleet-like way possible, the flukeboats were attached to Tide Child, and the women and men of the crew were scurrying back to them along the ropes like insects returning to a nest. He wondered at the casual bravery they showed. Few of Tide Child’s crew, including him, could swim, and to fall into the sea? He heard his father’s voice – In’t water is only death, boy. Knew it for true. If it wasn’t the choking death of drowning then it was to be met with tooth or stinger or tentacle from the denizens of the water, creatures that brooked no trespass in their medium, for they hated anything of the land as much as they seemed to hate each other. Nothing as fierce as the seas, son.
Around him, as women and men worked, he tried to find his voice, to give orders, but it felt like drowning. I am out of my depth. For a moment he considered taking the short walk, not far to go, only three, maybe four steps, and the vicious sea would swallow him up; his sentence would be served and the Sea Hag sated.
That feeling did not last long.
He did not, had never, have it in him to take his own life.
He was Hundred Isles born and bred, and they did not raise you to give up in the Hundred Isles, for life was hard on the rock and sand. They bred you to see the world through a veil of anger and vengeance, and it was this stubborn sullen anger that had kept the war with the Gaunt Islanders going for so many generations – so many ships lost, souls lost, territory lost and regained, the causes of the war and number of years it had raged long lost to anything but night tales for children: They take our healthy men, they murder for joy, they eat our childer, especially those like you, that will not sleep. Behind him he heard Meas’s voice: “Row! Row or I’ll take a finger from each of you!” The voice of the Bern, the casual threat of cruelty. No, he would not take the sea walk. The anger in him had a target, though he did not know if he would ever get the chance to loose at it.
“Row!” he shouted, adding his voice to hers. “Row hard or the Sea Hag’ll have you.” But the women and men in the flukeboats were not rowing, not yet, though he let himself believe they hurried a little in settling themselves down on the benches, in taking the strain and readying themselves.
He hoped they would not show him up; knew they would.
The oars, when they moved, did not move in unison, some barely even scratched the water, and he saw a man – What was his name? He did not know. – fall backwards when his oar did not meet the expected resistance. Barlay slapped the man with a meaty hand, moving among the small crew, shouting at them in a way he felt only jealousy for. She knew each and every one. Of course she did; they were chosen from her clique, loyal to her.
Meas appeared by his side, roaring at the other boat. “Look, fools! Look at them! Are you stonebound?” She pointed over the rail. “Will you let Barlay’s crew out row ye?” A man in the smaller boat – one-eyed, a hand missing two fingers – stood and started to shout at those in his boat, forcing them into rhythm with harsh barks. “Who is he?” asked Meas.
“I do not know,” Joron said.
“You should.” She walked away. “You two,” she said to two women crouched on the deck, “I’ll have no slatelayers on my ship. Raise the staystone. We’ll have our ship in the true sea soon enough but not with the stone a-laying. So raise the staystone stone and sing me a song!”
Women and men rushed to the central windlass, a huge wheel made from a slice of vertebra. At first it did not move and it was as if Tide Child fought them. As if he had become comfortable here, away from the threat of war. Joron wondered if he had left the ship here too long, if weed and floorcakers had cemented the giant round stone to the seabed.
As women and men strained a song started.
Bring the babe a-world.
Push, hey a-push hey!
Bring it out in blood.
Push, hey a-push hey!
Bring the babe a-world.
Push, hey a-push hey!
Be Bern girl and be good.
Push, hey a-push hey!
And as more and more of the crew put their weight and voice to it the windlass began to move. Joron felt the song in his throat, remembered the old joy of a tune but could not sing, not as an officer, and not since he had lost his father. The bone creaked against the slate of the deck. Joron felt the ship list slightly to landward as the weight of the staystone moved from the sea floor to the ship. Bone complained, moaned, shuddered, and then he felt it, felt the same thing as everyone aboard, and he knew it because the air filled with excitement. In some almost imperceptible way it felt as if the ship beneath his feet woke from a deathlike slumber, as though he came alive.
“Stone comes up!” came the cry from the rump of the ship. Deckchilder guided the great stone into place against the side of the hull and bound it there. Then feet beat the deck as women and men ran for the great central spines, climbing the ropes and ladders, moving across the spars to put themselves among the ship’s wings, ready for the wind. Ready for flight across the sea.
At the beak the rowers rowed hard, but though the ship quivered he did not move, not yet. It was as if the rowers fought against a great current and their muscles and sweat challenged the heavy dead bones of Tide Child. Then, with a sigh of water along his sides, the ship moved, gave in to the pull of the oars, and a shout went up. Even Joron, sullen, resentful Joron, felt some degree of satisfaction in this small victory of intelligence and muscle over inert matter and cruel water. At the rump Meas took the great oar that would steer Tide Child, and from the beak Joron shouted direction to the rowers as they pulled the great ship towards the bellcage that tolled mournfully at the entrance to the bay.
The cage was a set of twisted metal arches built around a floating platform to protect the bell within, and on it he could see the silhouette of Tide Child’s final crew member, the gullaime windtalker. A shudder passed through him. There was nothing anyone in their right mind wanted to do with a gullaime, but in turn there was so much they needed. The creature could, to a degree, control the thing most important to any deckchild – the wind.
It sat atop the bell cage, stick-like body hunched over so its alien form was hidden beneath the ragged robes falling about the cage. The clothes, despite their length, were far too thin to muffle the sound of clapper against bell as the buoy rocked on the waves where the currents of the sea met the still waters of the bay. The gullaime crouched, unmoving, unreal in its lack of movement, but that same lack of movement pulled the eye towards it, made it impossible to ignore. The cage moved but the windtalker did not so much as rock, making it seem to hover above its perch. The closer Tide Child came to the creature, the more of it he could make out: the filth of its once-white robes, the bright colours of the leaf mask that covered the pits where its eyes had once been, the sharp and predatory curve of its beak. Underneath the robes was an inhuman body, three-toed feet with sharp claws, puckered pink skin tented against brittle bones and punctuated by the white quills of broken feathers. He did not know why the gullaime lost their feathers, only that they did, and he guessed it was due to the filth they chose to live in. The source of all lice and biting creatures on any ship was the windtalke
r, as any deckchild knew.
The creature’s head moved, a short and sharp movement almost too quick to follow. One moment the head was almost hidden, hunched up in the hollow between its shoulders, the next it was focused on the ship, on Joron, as if by thinking of it he had called its attention upon him. Each oar stroke brought them closer, and its unseeing gaze never wavered. The eyes painted on its mask, meant to represent Skearith the Stormbird, god of all creation, never left him, and he felt them as an accusation: You put me here. You left me on this thing. You gave no comfort.
It was true, though he told himself he did it to protect the creature, that if he had not removed it from the ship the crew would have tormented it.
No, he had removed the creature from the ship for the same reason he did so many things, because he was scared. The crew mostly took the gullaime for granted, ignoring it completely as if it did not exist. But Joron was not Fleet and had only seem them from afar, in the pens of the lamyard or being led to their ships. A ship the size of Tide Child would usually have more than one of the windmages, and he thanked the Sea Hag for the small mercy that it did not. The thought of them talking to each other in their high-pitched, whistling language, of having to hear that eerie and strangely beautiful chorus of communication made his skin itch.
Tide Child slowed, not at his order, simply because those rowing knew where they headed. The great ship came to a halt within an arm’s reach of the bell cage. The gullaime inverted its head, twisting it round all the way on its flexible neck, keeping its painted eyes on him all the time. Then, upside down, it opened its filthy yellow beak and screeched at him, showing the serrated teeth and tongue within that marked it as a predator. Its annoyance made known, the creature leaped from the bell cage – from still to movement without warning – and crashed into the side of the ship. The robes around it spread; the claws on the elbows of the naked wings beneath gripped bone, the beak doing the same, and the powerful hind legs found purchase on spine and blade. From there it clambered up the side of the ship, moving strangely, inhumanely, before finding the hatch that led into its underdeck quarters and slithering through into the pit it called a home.
“What do they call it?”
“What?” He turned to find Meas at his elbow again. She moved through the ship as if it were part of her already, as if Tide Child conspired to keep her movements secret from him.
“The windtalker, what do they call it? Crews always name them even if the creatures will not name themselves.”
“It has no name, Shipwife. They did not name it. They do not like it.”
“Never met a crew that did like them, Skearith’s beasts frighten any sensible woman or man, but to control it you must have named it.”
“I have never controlled it.” The words made him feel like a fool, and from her expression she thought the same.
“Never, why?”
“It will not come, will not help. Will not even speak to me, Shipwife.”
She nodded as if a question had been answered.
“I thought it unusual a black ship had a windtalker, but if it will not help maybe that explains it. Anyway, it will speak to me.” She leaned over the rail to shout for’ard at the fluke-boats. “Barlay, row us out of the bay, and call me when we have enough wind to let loose the wings.”
“Will, Shipwife,” she called back.
Meas turned to Joron.”You, come with me. We will explain to our gullaime its duties.”
“It will not talk to you. It will not . . .” He was filled with a strange panic at the thought of going near the windtalker. The beast was unnatural. Important, yes. Needed, yes. But that did nothing to make him comfortable with it. “It will talk to no one,” he said.
She turned away, and he felt himself drawn in her wake, as if she were north and he a compass needle. “It will talk to me, Deckkeeper Twiner, it will talk to me.”
Compelled, he followed her into the underdeck.
The great cabin sat directly beneath the rump of the ship, four times as big as any other. To the seaward sat the deck-keeper’s cabin, still to become his, and next to that the courser’s cabin. On the landward was the deckholder’s cabin, though the ship had no one to fill the position of third in command, and then the nest of the windtalker. It was a place that seldom saw visitors, for most deckchilder were just as superstitious and scared of the gullaime as Joron. The beasts were governed by many rules, as were the interactions of those who must deal with them: never remove the mask, never pronounce it free and never kill a gullaime on pain of your own death – unless the ship itself is about to founder. The gullaime were creatures of the Mother, born of the last egg of Skearith the Stormbird, who created all things, and this made them precious, made them creatures who must be protected. The fact that the gullaime controlled the winds, well that was rarely talked of; instead all things to do with the gullaime were done in the name of their safety and in the name of Skearith and the Mother.
“Gullaime,” said Meas, pushing the door open before she finished the word, “I enter in the name of your safety and in honour of the Mother and Skearith the Stormbird, who—” The crash of shattering glass sent Meas staggering back.
After the glass came the screeching voice of the gullaime.
“Out! Out! Not your place! Not your place!” The door slammed shut, and Meas stood, shocked, almost as if she was unable to understand that anything may defy a shipwife on her ship. Behind the door something heavy moved, then something else clumped and glumped across the deck. Then, after much squawking and crashing and smashing, there was quiet.
“This is not how gullaime act,” Meas shouted through the door. Her hands held at her side clenching as if kneading some unseen oar handle.
“This one does,” said Joron.
“And you let it?” She put a hand on the handle of the door. “It is here to serve the will of the Mother and Skearith, and that is done through the shipwife.” She pushed against the door, it refused to move. Something else smashed against it. Around them, crew gathered at the noise.
“Away go! Away go!” screamed from inside.
“It will not come out,” said Joron. “It has never come out.”
The look Meas gave him would have withered a vine. She turned to the nearest deckchild.
“Bring axes,” she said. “We will break the door down if we have to.” The woman stood unmoving, staring at Meas. “Bring axes or feel the cord!” she shouted, and the woman ran to obey, vanishing down the underdeck towards the armoury.
“They will not break the door down,” Joron said, and saw the words she was about to say, maybe not for you, forming in her mind before she realised it was not the case. Of course they would not break the door down. Deckchilder were the most superstitious of all women and men; they would not intrude upon the gullaime’s nest. As Meas thought, her mouth moving slightly, the woman returned with an axe. The deck-child made no move towards the cabin door, only holding out the axe towards Meas while the shipwife weighed up the damage this could do to her. What was worse? To let the windtalker defy her or to go against the geas and smash down the door of its nest? The shipwife took the axe, hefted it, getting a feel for it, and then stopped, considered the bone of the door and dropped the axe on the black-painted floor.
“Let the creature have its space. We will have to hope the storms bless us with good winds, and when we return to Bernshulme we will maybe find ourselves a gullaime better able to understand what the Mother and the Stormbird wish of it. This one will go to wherever those of its kind without use are sent.” She raised her voice, “You hear, beast?” She banged on the door. “You hear that?” She turned away, striding towards the ladder that led up to the slate and the rump of the ship, where she could stand and fume.
But Joron found himself silently thanking the windtalker, for it had shown him Meas Gilbryn was not unassailable after all, shown him that she could be beaten. And he tucked away this fact like a child tucks a hopeful feather against their heart when their parents
go to sea.
He was a ship of blood
And fifty beakwyrms chased him.
His crew were not withstood
And fifty beakwyrms chased him.
The Sea Hag well rewarded
And fifty beakwyrms chased him,
Lost women and men aboard.
Aboard ho! Aboard!
Bows to shore and sea.
Riches ho! Aboard!
Bows to shore and sea.
Aboard ho! Aboard!
Bows to shore and sea.
And all the beakwyrms chasing.
Traditional winding song
As they left the bay the Eaststorm gifted them a whisper, and the crew of Tide Child jumped into action. Women and men scaled the rope ladders of the ship’s spines and let loose the wings; others stowed and made secure the oars and sails of the flukeboats, and stacked and tied them safely in the centre of the deck. Water laughed along the sides of the ship and curled away from its smooth bones in a white line of froth and bubbles to slowly fade behind them. It should have amazed Joron that this crew of the broken and the bad could pull together efficiently enough to fly the ship across the sea, but it did not. He had seen them do this before, seen them when he first took command, if that had ever been the word for his place among them.
These were the people of the Scattered Archipelago. Hundred Islander or Gaunt Islander, all in these waters flew their ships across the sea; it was a part of them as much as breathing or walking or fighting.
And yet . . .
And yet did he sense something more? Was there a difference here? Did Barlay at the steering oar hold herself a little taller than usual? Did Kanvey watch the men he gathered around himself with a little more pride and a little less lust than was usual? Did Cwell watch the crew around her with more suspicion and resentment than was usual? Were the eyes she turned to him crueller than they had been before Meas came aboard?