1
Brought Up on a Hard Wind
Waves as monuments: huge and uncaring, crowned in furious white. Freezing salt water ripped across the decks of Tide Child, grasping careless feet, numbing hands. Wind; all noise and anger, rigging singing the high-pitched song of rope on the edge of panic; the lone topwings bellied out, on the edge of cracking. Ice on the ropes and the decks and the faces of the crew, making every movement treacherous. The bone hull of the ship groaned in complaint at the treatment of the waves. Women and men, wrapped in stinker coats, pulling and pushing ropes and windlasses, tying knots with cold and nerveless fingers. Tired after days of this, weeks of this, a lifetime of this. But no rest, because one moment of inattention was all that was needed and then the ship would be gone. Turned over, bone keel sticking up into the air while the crew tumbled down through the grasping water into the waiting hands of the Hag.
This was the Hagsbreath, the Northstorm’s fury.
In the midst, one figure stood unmoving and uncomplaining – but watching, always watching. She stood at the rump of her ship and it was as if the storm could not touch her. The ship bucked and rocked as towering waves pulled him seaward to landward, landward to seaward, but she did not move.
Lucky Meas, the witch of Keelhulme Sounding, the greatest shipwife who ever lived.
“Ship rising!”
The call from the topboys – amazing that a human voice could cut through the noise and fury of the storm – and in that moment Meas went from stone-still to action. Passing her deckkeeper, Joron Twiner, shouting: “The rump is yours, Joron!” And she was gone, up the mainspine as if the wind did not threaten to rip her from it, as if the stressed rigging may not snap and cut her in two.
Far below, Joron dragged himself across the deck. A word here, a nod there, and in return a strong hand helped him across the constantly shifting slates. All the time his eyes scanning the horizon – grey water and black skies.
“Steer four points to the for’ard shadow, Deckkeeper.” Her voice calling from above; his own voice hoarse as he relayed the order to Barlay at the steering oar behind him. The battering of the sea, constant, fighting Tide Child as he began to turn. Orders given, stolen from his mouth by freezing wind, ice in the corners of his eyes making the shape of the descending Meas waver in his vision.
“Deckkeeper!” That voice, able to cut through any storm. “There’s a ship in trouble out there, trader of some sort, near to foundering on the rocks of a small island.” One hand on her ornate two-tailed hat, holding it in position, just as Joron was doing with his one-tailed version. “We’ll need the gullaime on deck. Bird needs to make us some slack water or we’ll be on the rocks ourselves.”
“Ey, Shipwife. We shall attempt a rescue then?”
“Or die trying, for that is our lot.” She smiled the words at him as she shouted them through horizontal, icy rain: because Tide Child was a ship of the dead, and all those aboard were condemned to fly the seas of the Scattered Archipelago until they found themselves in the Hag’s embrace. “Ready the flukeboats and crews.” Water poured from the braided edges of her hat, from her nose, gathered on her lips, droplets chased across her weathered face by the wind. “We’ll throw grapples on board and tow them away from the rocks.” The ship lurched, hit by a rogue wave. A groan ran through Tide Child’s bones. Meas turned from Joron to Barlay on the oar. “Keep him steady, Barlay!” Then she screamed into the wind: “Solemn Muffaz!” The deckmother, a giant of man, appeared from the fug of driving rain. “Help Barlay on the oar, I’ll not want us drifting onto the rocks.” She turned back to Joron. “Take Dinyl, he can command the oared flukeboat. You take the wingfluke.”
“Ey, Shipwife,” he shouted, rainwater filling his mouth. The coldness of it nothing to the cold he felt at Dinyl’s name. Once he and the deckholder had been friends – more than friends – but no longer, and what lay between them now was as cold as the Hagsbreath. He crossed the deck, guyrope to guyrope, and passed the gullaime; the bird-like windtalker was wrapped around the mainspine, its robes and feathers plastered to its spiky frame, and though the creature was anything but human, if anything on this ship embodied the misery they all felt in the constant wind and cold it was their gullaime, pressed against the spine.
“Do not like, Joron Twiner,” it screeched. Then snapped its beak shut to stop more freezing water getting in its mouth. There was something of the land to the gullaime, something of southern islands, places of heat and sand that made its being here in the wet and ice and cold all the more alien.
“It will pass, Gullaime,” he shouted. “Help Meas keep us off the rocks.”
“Not like, Joron Twiner.” A screech into the wind. “Not like!” Then Joron was past.
“Farys! Farys! Get me a crew for the wingfluke.”
The girl – no, a woman now – appearing from the rain, her scarred face almost invisible under the stinker coat’s hood. “Ey D’keeper,” said Farys. “Won’t be much fun on the sea in this.”
“I cannot disagree, but go out we must. Have Dinyl ready the flukeboat.”
“I’ll tell the d’older, ey,” and she vanished into the rain. Water swept the deck once more. The ship rose and fell and rose and fell. He was cold and damp but had been that so long that he could not imagine being any other way – though it was not really that long, six weeks only. Six weeks combing the most northerly parts of the Hundred Isles for a ship Meas was sure did not exist. A Gaunt Islands four-ribber that Kept Indyl Karrad, spymaster of Thirteenbern Gilbryn, swore was up here waiting to raid. But this had been their lives ever since Tide Child had been refitted, mission after mission supplied by Indyl Karrad, make-work rather than real work. It was becoming clearer to Joron and Meas that, whatever his reasons, Karrad did not want them in Bernshulme. Joron believed it was simply punishment for not killing the arakeesian sea dragon as they had been ordered, which Karrad had seen as the quickest way to the end of war. Meas, ever one to look on the gloomiest side, was sure she saw darker purposes in these missions. She had also dreamed of peace – an end to the war with the Gaunt Islands that had raged for as long as all could remember – but in the end had spared the keyshan, let it go to whatever waited it beyond the storms. Now she worried that their shared goal of peace was to be put aside, that Karrad had placed his ambition on another course.
Yet Meas had not abandoned her dream of a sea where warships no longer roamed. In the time since they had let the keyshan go she had introduced Joron to Safeharbour, and he had been stunned by what Meas and Karrad had wrought. For eight years they had been putting their energies into a freetown, built of the rejects, the lost, the unwanted and unwelcome. A place Meas barely ever set foot on herself, wary of the inevitable spies, but a place of succour and safety for those that desired to escape the grind of the Hundred, or Gaunt Islands, and a place that continued to grow. It was not a great or beautiful place – the roads were more mud than stone, its people rough, life hard and its Grand Bothy not that grand – but Joron had walked its streets, and marvelled that this place could exist. He knew Meas felt a quiet pride for it, and he shared it with her, as did all the shipwives of the black fleet that had come into being around Meas. It felt like something solid, something real that made their struggles worthwhile.