Chapter
6
The next day Lorcan was still very fractious, and Celie hardly dared to let him out of her sight. The others, too, were keeping their griffins close, in case they joined Lorcan in his mutiny. Instead of letting them fly out from the garden, they made them sit at their feet on the lawn, while the humans spoke nervously of what do to.
“The only thing to be doing is to be viewing the ship!” Orlath cried from the gate to the garden. “We are having such building as will make the finest of tours now!”
They all stood up, but were clearly not as enthusiastic as Orlath had hoped.
“But all is being grim,” Orlath said, looking baffled. “All is being strange! But no! It cannot be such a thing! It is a time of shipbuilding! Of ship viewing! Of joy!”
“Of joy,” Lilah echoed, sounding as though she didn’t know the meaning of the word.
But once they were at the shipyard, the sight of their ship drove thoughts of Lulath’s potentially dangerous mission from their minds. The ship truly was magnificent: rising high and proud on the shore of the harbor, distinctive from the other ships being built because of the variety of wood being used. The Grathian wood shone a light golden brown, while the Sleynth was a dark peat color, and the Arkish and Hathelocke parts gleamed reddish in the sun.
“A thing of the greatest beauty,” Orlath said, throwing his arms wide.
The Glower family stood there and took it in, every inch of it. Celie was about to say something, to ask if it was supposed to look that way, when Pogue jogged over to them.
“I know, I know it’s hideous,” Pogue said. “I mean, I don’t have much to compare it to, but from what the other men are saying, it’s a monster cobbled together from old parts, and shouldn’t even float.” He grinned.
“What?” Lilah looked from Orlath to Pogue, her mouth open. “A monster? But what should we do? How do we fix it?”
“I like it,” Rolf said as they all went closer to the ship. “It has . . . character.”
“Of naturalness it will be sailing on the ocean with grace,” Orlath said. “I am not knowing any other way of building such a ship!” He shook his head and laughed. “But it is sure that this is being the only ship of its like to sail.”
“It’s perfect,” Celie said at last, making up her mind.
And it was.
Care had been taken to preserve symmetry. There were just as many Sleynth planks as Grathian making up the hull, so that the ship had a striped appearance rather than one of patchwork, which Celie had privately feared. As they climbed the plank to the deck of the ship, they saw the brass instruments that had been taken from one of the towers in the Castle being mounted on swiveling stands. There was a stack of what Pogue told them were called belaying pins off to one side, waiting to be put along the sides of the ship for the sail ropes to be tied to. The pins were Hathelocke made, old, and of richly polished red wood, but the rails they would be set into were golden Grathian wood.
“It’s perfect,” Celie said again.
“I don’t know,” Lilah said, biting her lower lip. She pushed her heavy curls back from her face, a nervous gesture that almost—but not quite—dislodged her tiara. “What if they’re right?”
“But, Lilah,” Celie protested, “it’s exactly what we wanted! It’s a ship made of all the parts of all our lands!”
She windmilled her arms, trying to embrace the ship the way the Grathians always seemed to embrace anything that pleased them. But really, she was trying to cover up something: she felt it, too. The ship wasn’t what it was supposed to be.
“I just don’t know,” Lilah said slowly.
“It’s not alive,” Rolf said bluntly. “It’s not like the Castle.” He rocked back on his heels, his thumbs in his belt.
“I was wondering about that,” Pogue said. “I can’t feel it myself, you know. But I wanted to ask one of you what you felt.”
“But what is being happening?” Orlath said. “For it was a certainty that the very sticks of the wood in the shipyard are having the best effects on my our Glower family.” He frowned around. “What is being done that it is gone to sleep now?”
“How do we wake the ship up?” Pogue said.
He and Orlath turned and looked at Celie. So did Lilah. And Rolf.
Celie just looked back.
“I’m not a wizard,” she said finally. “And I’m not the Builder of the Castle.”
“Yes, but—” Rolf began, but Celie cut him off.
“Don’t you dare say the Castle loves me best,” she told him. “This isn’t the Castle! And you’re the heir; the Castle loves you, too.”
She didn’t want to sound childish, but she was getting just a trifle annoyed with everyone turning to her all the time for answers. It made her feel stupid when she didn’t have any. And how could she possibly have one in this case? She knew just as much about the building of the Castle as they did, and she’d never even been on a ship before. She had no wisdom to offer.
“Why don’t we show you around?” Pogue said. He waved a hand and started toward the upper deck without waiting to see if they would follow. “The wheel is from the Builder’s original ship, as you know,” he began.
And so they took a tour of the new ship. There were still things that weren’t in place. The doors weren’t hung, for instance, but they had been stood in the rooms that they belonged to. The mast wasn’t in place, but was waiting on the hard-packed earth of the shipyard, beside the figurehead, which Pogue told them would be the next-to-last part of the ship added, the sails being the last.
Celie stood in the bow and stared down at the shipyard, trying to figure out what it was. What had made the Castle the Castle? What would make the ship the Ship?
Her eyes lit on the figurehead.
“Pogue,” Celie called out.
“I’m one step ahead of you,” Rolf crowed. “For once.”
He leaped up onto the rail and balanced there. He clapped his hands to get the attention of the workers. When they were all looking at him, he cupped his hands to his mouth to make the announcement.
“I know it’s not this way done in Grath,” he said, in his best Grathian. “But we are be needing the head figure on the ship. Right now.”
“Rolf, you’re a genius,” Lilah said.
“I thought of it, too,” Celie muttered.
Pogue nudged her. “Let him have his moment,” he whispered.
Celie made a face, but couldn’t hold it. She wasn’t really angry. The most important thing was that they get the figurehead in place.
That they get the figurehead in place, and that they turn out to be right: this would bring the ship to life.
Because that was the thing, what they’d all been hoping for since Celie had first found the figurehead in an unused room behind the nursery. No one had dared to say it, but they’d all been wishing it to be true, that the ship would become a live thing, like the Castle. It had been so reassuring to sit by the figurehead and watch the building of the ship this past week, but now that feeling of comfort was gone, and Celie was worried.
Of course, it would take some work to get the figurehead properly in place, but they all wanted to watch. It fitted under the jutting prow, and couldn’t really be seen from on deck, so they filed down the plank to the ground again to wait. Stools were brought, and refreshments, and their griffins flew down to join them. It was almost like a picnic, except no one was talking and all eyes were on the gilded wooden griffin being carefully fitted to the bow of the ship.