“Flukeboats are ready, D’keeper.” This from loyal Anzir, shadow to Joron. “Dinyl is already in the water and rowing. Here is your sword.”
“Well, the d’older is efficient, he knows his work.” He buckled the sword to his belt, a straightsword of great workmanship, given to him by Meas and his most prized possession. Sooner see himself go to the depths than lose that sword. Sooner run into the Hag’s arms than let his shipwife down.
Tide Child bucked and reared on giant waves, the space between the big boneship and the smaller flukeboat opened and closed like a hungry mouth. Anzir’s strong arms helped him across and hands reached for him because, despite his rank and his familiarity with the sea, he had never quite got the hang of crossing from ship to boat – the spines and spikes of Tide Child’s sides engendered a certain timidity in him. But despite this strange inability Joron had become well-liked by his women and men, and they helped, as to go into the water in weather like this was death. A kind death maybe, where the cold would take you before the creatures of the sea found you, but death nonetheless.
“Row, my girls and boys,” he said, once safe and sat, “let’s see if we can catch the d’older. No, better than that.” He raised his voice into the storm as the boat was raised up on a wave, “Let us see if we can outpace him.”
“That’ll annoy Cwell at his helm,” shouted Farys, “and who does not enjoy annoying Cwell, ey?” Laughter at this, smiles beneath hoods, grins as aching muscles pulled on heavy oars and the movement of those muscles chased away some of the ever-present cold. Joron stood in the beak of the ship, the sea so much fiercer and more dangerous in this small boat: picking them up, throwing them about. Two of the crew were forced from their oars to bail water from the hull as the waves threatened to swamp them. The flukeboat, usually so responsive, was unwieldy, weighed down by the coiled rope they carried in the rump. There were, he knew, deckkeepers who would have managed every oar sweep and movement of the tiller in weather like this, but not Joron; he knew those with him and he trusted them to keep the little boat afloat and headed in the right direction. He stood, staring into the ever-changing landscape of whirling water, looking for the stricken ship. In his mind was the deckkeeper’s voice, his father’s voice in many ways: If it is this hard to row now, how will it be when we are paying out rope behind us, trying to tow some unwieldy brownbone merchant? How much more likely we will be cast over, our sentence of death finally carried out?
And behind that voice was another, the one he had heard more often and more clearly with every day. The one he never spoke of. The song of the windspires, the song he somehow shared with the gullaime. Once he had loved to sing, and then for so long hated it, the memory of singing for his lost father too raw. But his voice had returned, and there were those among the crew who believed he had sung a keyshan into saving them from certain doom. Then, for a short while, he had loved to sing again. Though he felt his melodies subtly distorted and changed by the alien melodies of the windspires which recharged their gullaime’s ability to control the wind, and which he now had some link to. A constant awareness, as if something vast and, for now, placid moved through the matter of his mind, and though he felt great joy when he sung, it scared him also.
There!
Glimpsed through the weather, a shape he knew well, the torn wings of a ship rising from a deck, wingcloth flapping and cracking in the high winds.
“Two points on the for’ard shadow to landward!” The boat moving to his call as Farys leaned into the tiller. The shape in the mist becoming clearer, no sign of the other flukeboat, no doubt lost in the troughs of the waves. Then he saw it, rising above him on a wave, women and men pulling hard as they drove the rowfluke up the sheer water. Hag’s tits, it was dangerous, the merchanter was big and if they judged this badly it would smash the delicate flukeboats to flinders.
“Gavith!”
The boy came forward, keeping low so as not to tip the boat.
“Ey, D’keeper,”
“How far can you throw a grapple and keep it on the target, Gavith?” The rowfluke vanished over the crest, no doubt racing down the other side of the wave while his boat now fought its way up the side of a wave which was steeper than any hill. Vertigo span in his chest, stealing breath already thin with cold.
“I can throw it twenty-five spans, I reckon, D’keeper.” The boy screamed the words through vertical rain, sheets of water running off him, glazing his skin. Joron nodded, water falling from the hood of his coat. Reckoned in the usual overstatement any deckchild gave their skills when they were young. They would have to be far nearer than he liked; the flukeboat was what, ten spans long? Even side-on they would be nearer than anyone with a mind would choose in a sea such as this. Two good waves and they would be smashed into the side of the merchanter.
“Be ready then.” He took the grapple, a thin rope tied to the end of a thicker towing rope, and pushed it into the boy’s hands. “The sooner we are rowing away from that great lug the better.”
They crested the great wave and Joron was looking down on the merchanter. Its women and men – not many, maybe twenty – ran hither and thither over the slate of a deck crusted with ice. It had two large spines but both were broken and dragging in the water, the crew trying desperately to cut them free with axes. Behind it was a small, shallow island, one of a thousand that showed up as little more than smudge on the charts, but it had rocks enough to break a ship and with sight of the island the song within Joron became a little louder. Then the flukeboat tipped and he was screaming at the crew to row against their speed as the boat careened down the wave toward the blocky merchanter, but no matter how hard they rowed the boat continued to gather speed.
“Farys!” Water breaking over them. Wind grabbing at them as he scrambled for the rear of their boat over women and men grunting and fighting the oars. “Steer for the beak!” Screaming it through wet air. Picking up speed. The wind changing, coming from the front. The merchanter growing bigger, bigger. “Get ready, Gavith!” Skearith’s Eye, if they smashed into it they were done.
The wind screamed.
The grapple whirled.
Speed picked up.
“Row hard my girls and boys! Slow us or we’ll be food for longthresh!” He didn’t need to shout, his little crew knew the danger, strained at the oars while the cold sea tried to smash them against the bigger ship. The grapple spun in Gavith’s hands then flew through the air. “Turn, Farys! Turn!” he yelled, and the flukeboat was rushing on, the side of the merchanter growing in his vision as it raised up on a wave.
Not enough time.
Too fast.
Sure to die.
But the rising wave slowed their boat, just a little, and they flashed past the beak of the merchanter; a brutal, blunt and stubby prow. Gavith watched the rope fly. Joron saw the boy’s face light up, knew it for a hit.
“I got him! I got him!” He held up the looped cord of the grapple in victory.
Joron dove forward, fist lashing out to knock the boy flat as they sped past the merchanter and the cord the boy had been holding was stretched taut as the thick rope tied to it was pulled from its coil. The boy’s face a picture, looking hurt, insulted by his deckkeeper’s attack until one of the deckchilder, pulling hard on an oar, shouted at him.