A time of ashes, p.16
A Time of Ashes, page 16
part #1 of Fate and the Wheel Series
On the morning of the fourth day, the duty lookout called down the speaking-cord from his basket on its skinny mast ten mytors above the deck that he had sighted a huge foilfish almost dead ahead. Jinny had pulled hard at the wheel as the crew scrambled to trim the sails for their new heading.
The nimble ship had jinked. As the fish slid past a good two kelemytors away, the spray whipped up by its threshing tentacles rose off the sea like steam.
‘Are you never afraid of those things?’ Murrin had asked Sheehan.
She hadn’t answered.
On the fifth day, their run of luck ended. The wind disappeared and the sky cleared completely, leaving Fat Chance bobbing in glassy water, as low and undignified and stuck as any displacement vessel. Leaning over the balustrade, Murrin could see the great fin plunging into the depths like a scimitar, its counterweight invisible.
The heat on deck became sweltering, the air below ripening by the hour. By midday, the crew had stripped to loin-cloths or trews with the legs cut off as they listlessly attended to chores such as whittling sail-needles, patching sails, inspecting and greasing blocks, windlass gears or the huge steel gimbals which allowed the masts to rotate, and servicing the two osmosis pumps upon which everyone’s supply of fresh water, and hence survival, depended.
Wel produced an ancient greliand from his cabin. For a while, simple, sweet tunes washed over the deck as he worked its bellows, caressing keys on the instrument’s end-plates with spidery fingers. Then a tune most of the crew knew as a song kicked off a set of sea-shanties, rendered in glorious polyphony and with surprising sensitivity as the men worked. Fraim, the gruff, snaggle-toothed cook, joined in on a seven-stringed lutian he kept lashed to the ceiling of his galley. Chet and Murrin looked on, spellbound.
The two countesses had dived over the side as the wind failed, attracting a surreptitious crowd. Murrin could swear their transformation had been visible in the second or two it took them to hit the water. They headed immediately down, disappearing in deepening shades of blue, presumably off hunting the small pelagic fish they preferred to the salt biscuits and sloppy stews available on board.
On previous occasions the sisters had provided fresh fish for the crew – a gesture that was either thoughtful or calculated. Either way, it had done their standing aboard Fat Chance no harm at all. Curiously, while aboard, both seemed to enjoy fresh water from the osmosis pumps: a quirk of the Shi’iin that Murrin had not expected.
Chet had watched from the rail as the pair disappeared. Freed from his earlier coyness, he now spent much of his time chatting with the countesses, particularly Sheehan. Murrin had heard him grilling her about life as a noble, and how status was signified in a society without clothing or possessions. As the day turned into evening and they still had not returned, Murrin found the apprentice looking anxiously over the side.
‘They’ll be back.’
He hoped the hand he placed on the boy’s shoulder did not seem overly paternal.
‘You have to remember – they’re much more at home down there than they are on the ship.’
Though Chet nodded, his expression did not change.
ON THE SIXTH DAY, the wind rose again. With it rose the sea, which the captain began describing, with growing frequency, as ‘ugly’.
Murrin knew what he meant, but to him the glassy water looming all around the ship was fearsomely beautiful.
To begin with, Fat Chance made light of the conditions. The ship’s bow sliced into the waves until the blunt vee of the foil was sufficiently submerged to lift the hull, by which time the wave crests had already passed, exposing the foils once more, reducing lift and allowing her to fall. The effect was to damp out the worst of a sea which would have thrown a less extravagantly designed vessel around like a cork.
As the seas grew more confused, however, phosphorescing mountains of water began dashing themselves against the side of the fin, hurling deluges over the deck and making the entire ship boom like an enormous drum. Murrin and Chet found themselves bedbound. Even some of the crew were being loudly and violently sick. The creaking from the fin grew to a distressing, high-pitched moan. The sails had already been reduced to two tiny triangular storm jibs, and still the ship was making too much headway for the captain’s liking.
At length, he sent Ol’ Jinny to raise Murrin from his berth. The bosun brought him staggering to the mess, where Jarosh sat him before the map.
‘A lot of islands,’ Murrin observed, clutching the table with one hand and his mouth with the other. He had worked once at a sanatorium during an epidemic of gastroenteritis. The smell permeating the ship was bringing back memories.
The captain nodded. ‘Aye, and no sighting for position. In open waters I might have sailed round this – but we’re in a relatively tight channel of clear sea here, and storms in this area are not exactly predictable. I’m not about to risk playing hide and seek with this one among the islands to either side. I’ve allowed as much as I can for drift in this sea, but if we go any further I can’t guarantee we’ll not meet something solid.’
Jarosh chewed at something beneath his moustache for a moment, and then said: ‘There are shoals hereabouts which, trust me, are not on your precious map. I’m stowing all sails and putting out a sea-anchor, though I’ll need to leave the masts up in case we have to manoeuvre in a hurry. We’ll ride it out hove-to, bow to the wind.’
‘Fair enough,’ Murrin managed.
‘Could be a long haul. May be a day or two.’
‘Do whatever you think fit, Captain.’
‘Sorry for your schedule, that’s all.’
THE SEA ANCHOR was a weighted umbrella of immensely thick waxed canvas, battened by the stems of eight small trees. Hibernating in the for’ard sail store, it was designed to be lashed to a docking hawser and dragged behind the drifting ship, leaving Fat Chance at the mercy of sea-currents, rather than the wind.
That was the theory.
It took thirteen of the crew to toss the anchor over the gunwale near the bow. Shortly after it sank from sight, the massive hawser snapped tight with a thud, ejecting a cloud of spray and swinging the bow towards oncoming waves boiling high above the two harassed men in the lookout basket.
They bobbed like a fishing float after that – in a sea from which, with the damping of her foils gone, even the bladeship couldn’t protect its occupants. The stabilising effect of the huge fin at least meant there was little yawing: just a savage, endless cycle of up and down.
The winds gibbered and howled until slowly, through sheer attrition, rigging began to disintegrate. Wedged into his narrow bunk by a sack of clothes, Murrin found sleep impossible. Work was equally so: not that it mattered, but he had not even managed to update his log. Always at the back of his mind was the idea that the next sound he heard, above the clatter of ropes and blocks on the deck and the groaning of the hull, would be the rending of seawood as the ship blew blindly into an island.
The dank air stank of sweat, bile, and the fear not just of the crew, but the animals clamouring, pissing and shitting in the nearby hold. Water trickled through hatches which could not be kept closed and a thousand flaws in the sealing of the hull and deck, until everything seemed damp or saturated. The windmills driving the four bilge pumps had long ago been dismantled to protect them. Each pump now had to be worked around the clock by crews of four to prevent the fin filling up.
How ironic, Murrin thought. The Shi’iin were weathering the storm in depths Murrin could only imagine were blissfully calm compared to this. At least two of the expedition were likely to survive.
He took some comfort from their promise to watch for land, using senses which saw much further than human eyes. How the sisters planned to make it back aboard the ship to warn them, he had not asked.
ON THE SECOND DAY of the storm, with no sign of conditions relenting, the half-retracted port mainmast finally broke.
Two stays snapped in quick succession. Before replacements could be fastened, the mast’s overloaded base section sheared away two-thirds towards its tip, sending half a dozen snapped lines, attached to pulley-blocks the size of a man’s head, whipping across the deck with enough force to splinter wood.
Fortunately, the screams of rending timber had sent the crew, to a man, diving to the deck. Otherwise half of them would have been cut in two. The entire retracted topmast and the attached third of the mainmast began flailing on their remaining stays, destroying further rigging and knotting it dangerously around the retracted, but far weaker, submast. With each wave, the severed mainmast began pounding the hull like a battering ram.
Below decks, the noise was deafening. Water began gushing through cracks in the seawood.
Four crew volunteered to cut the mess free. Hanging on to storm-lines in the lee of the main hatch’s binnacle, Murrin and Chet watched, hearts in their mouths, as the volunteers crawled, ant-like, along the mainmast’s stump, high above the raging sea, with nothing to secure them but the grip of their own hands and legs. Wedges of blinding spray, and occasionally entire waves, engulfed them.
When conditions allowed, they hacked at the rigging with axes and machetes until finally windlasses could be used to winch the broken mast sideways to the deck. One man caught his hand between a rope and the rail, his fingers pulped instantly. Still disorientated and numb with seasickness, Murrin tended his injuries as best he could.
Then, on the third day, with a speed which seemed miraculous after two days of fury, the wind withered and died, leaving in its wake a flat and lurid light. To the east, close enough to make out trees on its skyline, was an island.
‘A good ship,’ observed the captain, patting the stump of the snapped mast with an air of satisfaction.
Murrin studied the island weakly. Its shore was entirely ringed by black columnar cliffs. ‘Hells’ teeth,’ he muttered. There were similar islands in all directions. Turning at a scrabbling sound, he saw two familiar shapes slip over the for’ard gunwale. They must have climbed aboard using the hawser attached to the sea-anchor.
‘We would have warned you,’ Seeli told him, flashing a chastened grin. ‘If you got close.’ Murrin smoothed a still-shaky hand through sweat-matted hair he hadn’t bothered to tie up.
‘“If?”’
The countess gave a careless shrug. ‘Still here, aren’t you?’
WITH ONE WING BROKEN, they limped into a precipitous bay in the lee of the island. After the bosun had one of the crew drop eight hundred mytors of weighted depth gauge and it still hadn’t touched bottom, the sea anchor was deployed again. The lookout reported movement in the trees at the top of the cliffs. No one was eager to investigate. All anyone wanted was to be done with repairs and on their way to a known port.
Murrin had surveyed the ruined rigging with dismay. Soon, however, he began to appreciate that he had underestimated not only the ability of the crew to make running repairs, but the degree to which repairs were accepted as an inevitable part of ocean-going life.
Watching as the men cleared away knotted lines and stays, cutting out intact blocks and re-greasing them for further use, his respect grew. Broken timbers were trimmed back or hammered out of dowels or joints, ready to receive replacements. Two of the crew took the opportunity to release some of the ship’s cleaner-fish. Immune to the shellfish-derived toxins in the hull’s antifouling, the hand-sized wrasse could be seen below the waterline, nibbling at algae and animal life stubborn enough to have gained a toehold.
Once the deck was cleared, a fresh base-section for the mainmast was hauled from inside the fin via the cargo hatch. As it was skilfully manhandled into position using lines and halyards, the broken stump was unpegged from its universal joint, while the shorter portion was split and shaped into replacements for balustrade and decking timbers smashed during the storm.
With retractable parts of the mast secured to the new base by their sliding collars, and the whole assembly pegged in place, the crew began spinning a web of new rigging. They were for all the world like co-operative spiders, dangling over the sea on hoists, knotting and splicing, nailing, trimming and carving. Among them Murrin was astonished to see Tilna, the seaman who’d lost his fingers the previous day.
With the most urgent tasks completed, the longer piece of the broken mast was trimmed and sanded down to form a new spare submast, which was lowered into the fin.
The entire operation had taken a morning.
‘Let’s be leaving this place,’ growled the captain, scowling up at the clifftops from near the helm. ‘Good work, lads. Cook! Break out a keg of wine – the good stuff! – and be ready to share it out in the mess. Where are the fish handlers? Mai, Prōla – are those cleaners back in their tank?’
A couple of nods. ‘We lost two, Cap’n,’ said Mai, the taller, lighter-skinned of the two. ‘Might be a training problem, but I think I saw a trident-fish under the hull.’
‘Replacements?’
‘Give it ten days. We’ve six juveniles in the training tank already answering the bell.’
‘What about that useless cat? Storm can’t have been fun for her.’
The two handlers looked at each other. ‘No sightings,’ said Prōla. ‘But Paleg and Mistang thought they heard her yowling.’
‘Sometimes I wonder if that cat is my crew’s idea of a prank,’ Jarosh muttered. ‘Very well. Men! Ship anchor, unfurl the mains, and let’s be out of here.’
The wind was from the south now, so once out of the bay they tacked south east. The overcast morning had contributed to everyone’s sense of gloom but, by early afternoon, sunlight began leaking through the murk, dappling the ocean with shadows from scraps of young cloudforest. They were making good time close-hauled, the bladeship heeled over at what for her was a steep angle. As the promised wine began circulating, and cooking smells from the galley permeated the air, spirits began to lift.
Wary of the maze of vertically-sided reefs and hidden seamounts, the captain stationed three pairs of the ship’s sharpest eyes in the lookout basket. As afternoon wore on, pinnacle-islands topped with luxuriant vegetation slipped past on either side. Through his spyglass, Murrin could see ladders of rattan-lashed bamboo winding up their sheer flanks from the sea for hundreds of mytors. He could only guess at their purpose. There seemed no safe way to harbour boats at the base.
‘Who lives here?’ he asked the captain.
The captain shrugged.
As evening came on, a shout went up from one of the lookouts. As Murrin and several others dashed up on to the deck, the lookout was pointing directly below. Leaning over the side, Murrin could see streamlined shapes darting between the foils and the ship’s fin.
‘We should talk to them,’ said Seeli, scratching herself in an uncharacteristic display of unease.
The captain frowned, but barked an order – and Wel, the duty helmsman, swung the wheel, bringing them about. Air spilled from the sails. With its drive gone, the ship slumped into the sea, pushing out a big bow wave as it swayed to a halt. The manoeuvre was violent enough to force Murrin to grab the balustrade.
Canvas hung, flapping, like spent wings.
‘Don’t go far,’ Seeli told them. ‘We don’t know how long this will take.’
Unmistakably tense, the two Shi’iin disrobed. They slipped over the side without preamble, dropping like spears towards the depths. Wel rubbed two weeks of beard growth.
‘And these two, they’re gentry?’
Murrin and the captain looked at him. Murrin nodded. The first mate seemed thoughtful.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I realise they’re ruled by women and everything, and their men seem a tad limp-wristed. But I think I’m very glad we aren’t at war with the Shi’iin.’
THE SISTERS WERE GONE all night, and much of the next morning. When they finally reappeared, it was with a shout, requesting that a lifting platform be lowered.
Since their departure, Fat Chance had crept along with reefed sails, as though the captain could not endure time spent without physical progress, no matter how small. Taking the helm, he turned his ship into the wind once more. When the crew turned the capstan to bring the small, rattan platform back up to the deck, Sheehan and Seeli were not alone.
‘This is Laali and Heevaan,’ Seeli said, introducing the two older Shi’iin accompanying them to Murrin and Jarosh. An inquisitive crowd had gathered.
The couple looked dignified, but apprehensive. Like Seeli and Sheehan, they were quite naked, their skins a darker, greyer shade, their facial and body shapes subtly but notably different. Heevaan, Murrin saw with interest, was male, his hairless bluish genitals shrivelled with age.
‘It took us quite a while to seek them out.’ Sheehan was saying. ‘They are queen and king of the territory stretching from Keshien Mellìané in the north to the Farinade group of islands, south-east of here.’
Murrin greeted them with a rapid triple bob of his head, which was the formal greeting amongst the Shi’iin of the Kesh Shargor pod. It seemed to be universal, because the queen’s dark eyes lit up. She smiled, clasping his hands in hers.
‘We have heard much of your quest,’ she told him. ‘We have predicted the coming disaster. For a long time, in fact.’
Her speech was fluent and musical, yet her accent was so consonant-light and oddly emphasised that Murrin had to repeat each word in his head to be sure he had understood. Her expression became regretful.
‘I fear what information we possess may be of little use. Strange tales abound these days, yet I am aware of none pointing to what you seek. Not in my realm. Nor have I heard of such things in those of my neighbours. We have our myths, of course, but typically these concern matters of family. I doubt they would be of relevance.’
