Set the Stars Alight

by Amanda Dykes

  A pair of grimy hands circled around Elias, pulling him off Frederick. A sturdy force pulled Frederick back likewise until the boys stood facing each other, each shackled by a man, shoulders heaving. Killian Blackaby grinned from his place binding Elias.

  “Some entrance.” Blackaby laughed, and the man behind Frederick tensed. Something about the man’s silence, along with his iron grip, sank sickness into Frederick as he realized what he’d just done. All these boys—and men—had just been witness to his very first act upon the great Avalon.

  “Yes,” the man behind Frederick said, easing his grip around Frederick’s elbows as his breathing slowed. He hung his head.

  His sole hope now was that Admiral Forsythe had not also seen this disgrace.

  “I do not permit such . . . spectacles . . . on my ship,” the man behind him said. Frederick let his head fall lower and, as he did, saw Elias from the corner of his eye. He stood taller. Face ruddy, eyes wide. He gulped. And for the first time, Frederick felt . . . like Elias. It was a brotherhood he did not wish to acknowledge. He, too, gulped. Turned. And lifted his gaze to meet that of the man whose portrait hung on his schoolroom wall. Admiral Cuthbert Forsythe.

  sixteen

  “Y-yes, sir.” He stammered, loathing himself for it. “My apologies.”

  A few stifled snickers slipped through the crowd, which had otherwise become thick with silence.

  That silence grew until Killian fairly burst forth from himself, apparently one of the rare breed who could not abide the absence of words. “Killian Blackaby,” he said, his greeting almost as explosive as his stride, pumping the admiral’s hand with no regard for the decorum that should preside over such a meeting. “Purveyor of Ballads. At your humble service. Humbly at your service. At your service in any humble way you choose, Admiral.” God bless the man. He was succeeding not only in making a spectacle of his own self but, Frederick sheepishly hoped, also in erasing the spectacle of his own making.

  Forsythe, bedecked in gold buttons, medals, and fringes upon his navy suit, was what Reskell would have described as “Gravitas, embodied.” The very soul of dignity. He surveyed Killian from head to toe, then Frederick, Elias, and finally, the leader of the press gang, who was much more reticent than he’d been the night before.

  Forsythe’s expression seemed to question the haphazard lot of sea urchins the press gang had brought him. He looked Frederick over. “How old are you, young man?”

  “Twelve, sir.”

  “Far too young.”

  Frederick knew twelve was not the youngest the waves knew, and he was nearly thirteen. And yet . . . was there a note of compassion in the admiral’s voice? Frederick could but hope.

  Admiral Forsythe turned to the press gang leader. “This is what you bring when I request seaworthy men?”

  The leader, whom the others had called Smith, wavered for the first time. “The county stock was limited, Admiral. Other press gangs gone before us an’ such.” He ventured a half laugh that flopped like a cold squid upon humorless decks.

  Admiral Forsythe spoke not a word more. Only turned to climb the steps to the quarterdeck. In his silence, he communicated more than all the volumes in the Royal Naval Academy in Portsmouth could have. “The sailors aboard the Avalon will not resort to violence amongst themselves,” he said. “Show them the sty.” And with hands clasped behind his back, he disappeared behind a mast.

  “You heard the man!” the press gang leader barked. “No room for your rows here. To the meat grinder, and then down to the hull with ye. You’re in for it tonight. Slap you in the stocks or worse after a scene like that, like as not.”

  Or worse. The admiral had called it the sty. Frederick had read of ship discipline. Of running the gauntlet, of leg irons, floggings, being left to blister in the sun where all could see a man’s shame. Which of these, he wondered, did the admiral mean? His stomach betrayed him, but it was empty, and for that he was thankful.

  The “meat grinder,” Frederick learned, was the maze belowdecks where new seamen were catalogued and assessed like livestock. Eye colour, hair colour, temperament—Frederick catalogued as about as lively as a clam, and Elias as suspected unruly—and whether or not they were seaworthy.

  They apparently were, for they were ushered farther into the belly of the whale, where the sound of fiddles and rowdy voices faded and they heard the lower grunts of swine.

  “Here ye be,” Smith said. “Accommodations for the night.”

  Frederick nearly tripped in the dimness over something warm and large and full of deep-snouted grunting. “That’s . . . that’s a pig.”

  “Aye, so it is.”

  “Right brilliant of you to say so, too,” Elias piped up, crossing his arms in his maddening fashion.

  “I just thought . . . Well, I thought the admiral meant something else when he said sty.”

  “You’ll find Cuthbert Forsythe to be a man who says what he means.”

  As Smith turned to go, Elias strode over to the beast, who lay in contented reverie in his own filth. “Escaped the sheepfold to land in a pigsty. Just my luck.” He gave a mirthless laugh. “What’s his name?”

  “Name,” the man said, as if it were the most preposterous notion he’d ever heard. “Salt. And it’s a ‘she.’”

  “As in, ‘a sailor worth his salt’?” Frederick bent to scratch the animal on his head. He looked at him with a fond affection in his pitiful animal eyes.

  “As in, ‘salted pork.’” The sailor filled the cavernous sty with laughter and departed, shouting after them to clean up the place but good, lest they end up with lashings for their row, rather than this kinder punishment.

  What a world it is, Frederick thought later, when they finally lay down after six bells of the dogwatch. If he were at Edgecliffe, he’d have been waiting on the rising of the midnight star, but here he was three decks below the night sky, hundreds of men sleeping or working in the columns of space above him while he cleaned and fed his own future dinner rather than tracking stars.

  Bone-tired when all was said and done, Frederick struggled to climb into his hammock—his own future coffin, should he meet his end at sea—swaying barely above the fresh straw and the muck hidden beneath it. It was in this fashion, morose as it was, that he recorded that night in his log.

  In the days and weeks that followed, he stayed awake as long as he could in the minutes just before sleep to record a line or a page—whatever he could muster to keep himself sane.

  September the eighth, 1805

  Dined with Salt.

  Fiddles above, fighting off strong headwinds.

  Smith keeps us in the hold, going on three weeks now. He says Elias and I are of the same country stock, from East Sussex, and therefore we are as good as family and may as well stay here.

  Does family make one wish to poke one’s own eyes out?

  September the twenty-first, 1805

  Mal de Mer. Seasick. Wouldn’t wish this upon Salt. Or even Elias. (Debatable.)

  October the first, 1805

  If I had the seasickness badly, Elias has it ten times over, and the sea is making the most of it, tossing us with a vengeance. Water seeps into the hold and the stink from Salt is worse than ever, but she looks apologetic, poor old girl. She does not know her fate. What sort of life is it, to spend every waking and sleeping moment in a dark hole, awaiting the day you die?

  Then again . . . perhaps we are not so different from Salt.

  Gave my crust to Elias. Even wretches need strength.

  Every night without fail, he goes up to deck and points himself homeward and just . . . watches. I know what he’s thinking of.

  Or rather . . . who he’s thinking of.

  I think of her, too. I think of how to get him home to her. It seems the right thing to do. For I have taken, again, something good from her.

  October the fifteenth, 1805

  The admiral had us into his quarters to dine. It seems he’s had a letter from his old shipmate, Barnard Hanfor
d, letting him know his son had been among those pressed into service.

  Barnard Hanford—Father—did not likewise send a letter to that son.

  Since they came up together from the days of powder monkeys and beyond, the admiral felt he owed it to me—and my bunkmate, apparently—to give us a proper reception. “I have strict admonitions from your father to treat you as any other powder monkey,” he said when he issued the invitation. “But he did not strictly forbid me giving you a decent meal. I know what you eat down in the hold.”

  And so we scrubbed the stink of the manger from our clothes as best we could and dined on mutton and butter and biscuits, with chandelier overhead and views to the ocean beyond. He keeps a grey mourning dove in a cage, and I asked after it. Most captains and admirals keep some exotic pet from their adventures—a monkey, a parrot—but this creature was so quiet and unassuming, it did not seem the sort to play mascot to a grand ship like the Avalon.

  He said he observed it, on shore in Canada. It was wounded, or so he’d thought. It seemed to have a broken wing, limping away as if to escape him. He later watched from some distance, and the dove tucked her wing in just fine, returning to her nest of young ones. She had been attempting to distract him, a threat to those in her care.

  The next day, he had returned to find her wounded in earnest, her nest empty. Some creature had gotten to her, and the mourning dove, bereft of her fledglings, was earning her namesake.

  I asked why he kept her. He said, “Any creature willing to sacrifice herself for one weaker is a creature with truer heart than many a man I’ve met. I kept her to let her heal. I keep her to protect her. And I keep her to remind us.”

  I thought of his fighting tactics. The way he infamously puts the Avalon in harm’s way when smaller ships in the fleet are in danger. And I counted myself lucky to have been pressed into service on a ship with such a man.

  Nights in the hold with a smelly pig and a smelly would-be comrade did not a pleasant slumber make. Frederick had realized early on that the answer to maintaining sanity was the same as his methods at home. So tonight, like so many nights before, he wound through the labyrinth of the ship, up and up, until the night sky burst upon him with fresh air that blew the cobwebs and stench-laden clouds right out of him. The dogwatch was on—those latest hours when the sky was darkest, the ship seemed small, and the sky seemed big. He did not know the crew taking the watch this night. Even after months aboard in tight quarters, there were new faces at every turn. Five hundred, he’d heard, all in different shifts and roles, making the ship run like clockwork.

  Though he knew his fellow sailors hardly at all, if he looked higher—above the rigging, above the billowed, taut sails, above the crow’s nest—he spotted his only true friends, scattered across the dark sky like diamonds.

  Orion. Ursa Major. And faintly—way up north—Draco. Warriors of the heavens, whose reaching expanse made this never-ending war seem small. Made him smaller still, and glad for it.

  Like flames drawing a winged creature, they summoned him. He was thankful, suddenly, for the swabbing of the decks and mucking of the stalls, and how they’d toughened his skin enough—left it with screaming red marks and thick blisters—so that he might now ascend the heavens, as it were.

  He’d fallen at first. Picked himself up. Slipped. Caught himself. A wrestle with the ropes, which for a long while he’d lost. But he’d thought of a girl with freckles splashed across her face, how she’d take on the world, and that had fueled him. If a girl could man a cutter on her own, he could climb rigging. He’d kept at it, again and again. He’d gathered stares from the sailors on watch, but no one stopped him. And when nightly he stole above deck to practice, until the ropes no longer tangled and ensnared, their stares of amusement had turned to nods of respect.

  Tonight, the higher he went, the more the ship’s rocking amplified, flinging him about like a plaything. His hands and feet flew over the rigging like a spider over his web, until at last he reached the crow’s nest, naught but a man-sized barrel with its top cut off, lashed to the mast pole.

  Betimes it was occupied by a sailor on watch or a sailor relegated to a place of assured seasickness to school his unruly behavior. But tonight it was empty, and it became his sanctuary. He imagined himself standing on Edgecliffe’s rooftop again, far above strife and war, guarded by chimneys. Only here, he was hidden among masts.

  Here he could look up and out and see an entire universe of black that would turn to blue come daylight—sky above, sea below, blue all ’round. In the light of the starry night he could only vaguely see the other ships of the fleet trailing behind, waves circling. How could he feel confined, with such a view? In the smallest segment of the ship, he found boundless freedom.

  He narrowed his eyes until they focused on the warriors of the sky—Hercules, Poseidon; and the brothers, Castor and Pollux, for whom he still harbored envy. But his mind was then drawn higher, to the One who created these stars that men assigned stories and names to. Here, he prayed.

  In the midst of those prayers he finally fell asleep . . . and awoke to dawn’s light and a sound so sickening it could not be real.

  The splintering force of cannonball on wood, embedded with frantic voices.

  Just above him, something round sung through the air in a streak, its dark mass punching through a white sail and leaving a perfectly round, perfectly horrifying window to the blue sky above.

  What ensued was chaos.

  “She’s gaining on us!” a voice called from the quarterdeck below. Frederick turned his head. A sail flapped aside to reveal the blue, red, and white of French colours on an approaching frigate.

  He scrambled to the rigging, all limbs tripping to obey. But when he looked below, he saw the admiral commanding on deck. Men were climbing over one another to obey, to save their own lives.

  Frederick did not know what to do. If he descended into the mayhem, what could he do but make it worse? But if he stayed hidden amongst the sails, he was naught but a coward. A deserter, on his own ship.

  “Beat to quarters! Beat to quarters!” And there was the command. The decision made for him. Cannons would be fired. And cannons must be loaded.

  Something inside took over, urging his feet to action before his thoughts had time to match. The rigging flying by as he descended, he landed in a sea of missional confusion—every man on fire with purpose, and every purpose urgent.

  Frederick spotted Elias, making a mad dash for the gun deck below. Sprinting to join him, Frederick leapt over sacks, dodged ropes, ducked around bodies intent on reaching their posts. Just as he reached Elias, he saw the officer of the watch opening wide his mouth, fire in his eyes, shouting for them to take cover. All of this in surreal motion, drawn out as if the urgency of the moment had muted the chaos, stretched time, and all he could hear was his pulse.

  He threw himself over Elias. Knocking the boy to the ground as he’d wished to dozens of times before. Only now it was to save him.

  Frederick collided with Elias—and Frederick’s head collided with a crate, exploding into pain, but registering nothing but the destruction of the cannonball just feet away.

  Elias squirmed to his feet. And as Frederick made to do the same, his head protested, the world spinning fast, red pooling where he’d collided.

  One look at him and Elias braced his shoulders, guided him downstairs, tossed an empty sack at him, and pointed at Frederick’s head, hollering something.

  Frederick’s thoughts were ringed in clouded black. What was wrong with him? He looked at his hand holding the sack, then back at Elias. Gripping the bag, not understanding, Frederick tried to shake clear of the fog. He stooped to grab at a bucket, slipped—and only then did he understand. ’Twas his own blood there, slicking the floor.

  Quick motion yanked the empty sack, and Frederick lifted his head to see Elias had grabbed the sack and was tearing it seam from seam. He wrapped the rough fabric tightly about Frederick’s head and thrust a bucket at him.

&
nbsp; What followed was men becoming machine. Rolling cannons. Loading. Firing, to an upward eruption of black smoke. Yellow lanterns swung eerily above as the Avalon rocked and shook with shots fired, shots landed, men falling, cannons rolling. And firing. And rolling. And firing. Sick, odd silences, broken again by flashes of fire in the fray beyond. Shouts to “Hold steady, men!” made him stand tall, ignore the pounding in his head. Splintering blows until at last . . .

  Silence.

  The Avalon groaned an ancient, wounded groan. Guttural and waterlogged, like her men.

  But though they be cut, and though they be worn . . . they were victorious.

  It was not until later, far into the night, as Salt sang them to sleep with her lullaby of porcine snores, that Frederick looked over at Elias, and something changed. They were no longer boys. Nor nemeses. Nor even begrudging friends by default of being kept in a literal pigsty.

  They were comrades.

  “What.” Elias’s face was grim, staring at the dark ceiling. “What are you staring at?”

  “Nothing,” Frederick said.

  “You’re staring at me.”

  “Precisely.”

  Elias held silence a moment, then snorted at Frederick’s dig.

  Frederick looked at the ceiling, and spoke what he needed to. “Thank you,” he said simply.

  “For what?” Elias said.

  Frederick shook his head, frustration climbing into his voice. “You helped.”

  “I saved you, more like.”

  Now Frederick sat up. “I saved you first.”

  Elias leaned up on an elbow. “You must’ve really knocked your skull hard if you think that. You’d have bled out if I hadn’t tied you up like a mummy. With my hand crushed from someone tossing me to the ground, by the way.” He held up his swollen hand, pressing his fist to his heart and pounding it for effect.