“D’keeper saved your arm, boy! You didn’t let go, the rope would have had it off.” Gavith’s eyes widened, then he looked from the deckchild to Joron and nodded, started to get up but Joron knelt by him.
“Wait,” he said, watching the rapidly shrinking coil of rope. “Wait.” The deckchilder rowed hard. The wind howled and the waves swelled and the rain beat upon them. “Row my girls and boys. Row.” The rope spooling out. “Row hard.” More rope, hissing as it passed. The merchanter looming behind them as it rose up on a wave, and though it lacked the keyshanskull front of their own warship, it was just as threatening, just as hard and unyielding. The spool of rope ran out. “Brace!” shouted Joron, and the crew threw themselves forward over their oars. The flukeboat jerked to a halt and the rope was ripped from the sea in a curtain of water as it came tight, throwing the braced crew of the boat hard against the woman or man or hull in front of them. A great groan coming up from the small vessel as its varisk skeleton was tested. Then Joron was up, despite his chest throbbing from where he had been cast against the side of the hull.
“Row! Row or that great brownbone will be on us. Row for your lives!”
Then the real work, and the real danger, began. It was as if they sought to drag a huge and angry keyshan from its slumber. When they wished to go to landward it pulled to seaward, when they wished to go to seaward it pulled to landward. Communication between the two flukeboats and the bigger ship was impossible with the whipping wind and driving rain. Occasionally he would see the merchanter’s shipwife on the beak of the ship, plainly shouting something, but what they said was heard only by the Northstorm, which stole words and hoarded the secrets of storm-wracked deckchilder.
They fought on, pulling on the oars, muscle set against storm winds, against the sea, against the weight of the ship, and with nothing to fight the tired ache of their arms but their will. With the howling wind and scudding clouds no landmarks could be made out. All Joron had was that sixth sense that a life on the waves had given him – a mixture of a million intangibles: the cut of the waves, the direction of the wind and rain, even the smell and the taste of the water on his tongue. He felt it, felt the way to go, felt Tide Child out in the storm, not as a real thing, not something he could touch. But he knew where he had left the ship, knew the speed of the ship and the strength of the wind and the likelihood and length of drift in the howling gale. But he doubted, even as he screamed through the freezing rain for them to row, shouted directions at Farys on the tiller. Worried the rope would rip their boat in two if he misjudged the pull of the huge ship. Worried he misread Tide Child, that he sent them heading heedlessly out into the ocean.
And then there was relief as he felt a dot of warmth in the storm, a pulsing tiny dot of heat he had come to associate with the gullaime. Sometimes he felt it out there, sometimes not. But it provided him a point of reference. He knew if not for that he would have doubted more, worried more about his mental calculations, his instinct; but with the dot out there he knew he was right.
Little solace.
Rather not have it, rather get it right himself and know he had done it. Rather do that again and again and again until the doubt was worn away like rock by the tides.
But if wishes were wings gullaime would fly. This was his world and he must live in it, could not change it any more than he could rid himself of the slowly growing sores on his shoulders and legs.
Then, as if she could tell the deckchilder were finding the end of their strength, that the ropes were chewing through the soaked varisk of the flukeboats, that tiredness was beginning to mask his ability to react to the movement of the waves, Meas came.
“Ship rising!”
The black ship, Tide Child, Meas Gilbryn on the prow and her grey hair, black with rain, streaming in the wind.
“Throw me the ropes!”
No storm could hold her words, no wind could steal them nor woman or man deny them.
For she was Lucky Meas.
She was the greatest shipwife who ever lived, and she would be a legend.
2
Ill Found the Flotsam
They flew the ship for three days. The gullaime never moved from its favoured place to bring the wind, crouched before the mainspine, and it never looked up or spoke as it concentrated on finding the most favourable currents of the air and bringing them to Tide Child. When Joron passed close to it he thought he could hear its song in his bones.
They towed the merchanter, named Maiden’s Bounty, a full five ship-lengths behind them – for Meas would not trust an unknown shipwife any closer to her precious boneship.
“Too easy for the brownbone to wreck us, Joron.”
Five ship-lengths gave them room enough to cut the bigger ship free if it did anything foolish, or if the gullaime could not calm the storm around them. But the ship did not do anything foolish and the gullaime did calm the storm. They moved in a bubble of relative quiet – not comfort or safety, never that, but the gullaime took the worst of the bite from the waves and the wind. Occasionally, Joron would imagine he felt heat cross the deck of the ship, a great wave of it – but, like all aboard, he was tired from long watches and short sleeps. They were leaden, the women and men aboard Tide Child; muscle memory powered the ship through those grey days and howling nights.
On the night of the fourth day, Menday – though none had time to mend – the winds subsided and the Northstorm’s anger ebbed a little. When Skearith’s Eye rose that morran it rose bright and cold, the light crystal sharp and clear, the sea no longer staccato-rhythmed into jumbled ranges of knife-edged mountains, became rolling hills of oily looking water. The gullaime vanished from the centre of the ship and Meas stood on the rump, her hair once more dyed through with her rank’s reds and blues underneath the two-tailed hat of the shipwife.
“We’ll go over there today, Deckkeeper,” she said, pointing at the rising and falling beak of Maiden’s Bounty. In the light the merchanter looked more damaged, more bedraggled than it had in the teeth of the storm. The hardened varisk that made up the hull had rips in it and he could see keyshan bone, the skeleton – literal and figurative – of the ship below. The spines were gone, just two broken stumps to mark where they had been. On the deck, crazily cracked with the flexing of the ship, the crew milled about. Joron picked out the shipwife, stood on a barely raised rump next to her oarturner. She was a stout woman, with hair cropped short, and she leaned on a crutch, the badge of some old injury. It must be injury, not birth, for few, if any, Berncast made shipwife of even a brownbone merchanter. Only the families of the Bern, the women who birthed healthy children and rose through the Hundred Isles aristocracy, or the Kept, their chosen concubines and warriors, became officers. Joron watched the shipwife of Maiden’s Bounty, thought it curious that she displayed little interest in the ship towing her.
Meas went to the rear rail. “Shipwife of the Maiden’s Bounty!” she shouted. “Ready yourself to receive my wingfluke. We will assess your damage and do what we can to help.”
The sea rose and fell and fell and rose while the other shipwife walked down her web-cracked deck and Joron went to join Meas at the rear of Tide Child.
“I thank you for dragging us away from the island, Shipwife,” was shouted back from Maiden’s Bounty. “But we are well supplied. If you will allow us, we will loose your ropes now and be on our way.”