Joron knew towing the ship out of the bay should be a simple operation, and yet it was not. Voices were raised; no one quite knew what was expected of them, and when Joron intervened he was met with sneers by those who listened and the deaf ears of those who did not. And though there was plenty of noise and industry at the beak of Tide Child, the job remained undone, and the disapproval of Meas at the rump of the ship began to loom over him like stormclouds at the rim of the world. But eventually, as the eye beat on his back and when it felt like the storm must break over him, the job was suddenly over, messily, untidily and in the least fleet-like way possible, the flukeboats were attached to Tide Child, and the women and men of the crew were scurrying back to them along the ropes like insects returning to a nest. He wondered at the casual bravery they showed. Few of Tide Child’s crew, including him, could swim, and to fall into the sea? He heard his father’s voice – In’t water is only death, boy. Knew it for true. If it wasn’t the choking death of drowning then it was to be met with tooth or stinger or tentacle from the denizens of the water, creatures that brooked no trespass in their medium, for they hated anything of the land as much as they seemed to hate each other. Nothing as fierce as the seas, son.
Around him, as women and men worked, he tried to find his voice, to give orders, but it felt like drowning. I am out of my depth. For a moment he considered taking the short walk, not far to go, only three, maybe four steps, and the vicious sea would swallow him up; his sentence would be served and the Sea Hag sated.
That feeling did not last long.
He did not, had never, have it in him to take his own life.
He was Hundred Isles born and bred, and they did not raise you to give up in the Hundred Isles, for life was hard on the rock and sand. They bred you to see the world through a veil of anger and vengeance, and it was this stubborn sullen anger that had kept the war with the Gaunt Islanders going for so many generations – so many ships lost, souls lost, territory lost and regained, the causes of the war and number of years it had raged long lost to anything but night tales for children: They take our healthy men, they murder for joy, they eat our childer, especially those like you, that will not sleep. Behind him he heard Meas’s voice: “Row! Row or I’ll take a finger from each of you!” The voice of the Bern, the casual threat of cruelty. No, he would not take the sea walk. The anger in him had a target, though he did not know if he would ever get the chance to loose at it.
“Row!” he shouted, adding his voice to hers. “Row hard or the Sea Hag’ll have you.” But the women and men in the flukeboats were not rowing, not yet, though he let himself believe they hurried a little in settling themselves down on the benches, in taking the strain and readying themselves.
He hoped they would not show him up; knew they would.
The oars, when they moved, did not move in unison, some barely even scratched the water, and he saw a man – What was his name? He did not know. – fall backwards when his oar did not meet the expected resistance. Barlay slapped the man with a meaty hand, moving among the small crew, shouting at them in a way he felt only jealousy for. She knew each and every one. Of course she did; they were chosen from her clique, loyal to her.
Meas appeared by his side, roaring at the other boat. “Look, fools! Look at them! Are you stonebound?” She pointed over the rail. “Will you let Barlay’s crew out row ye?” A man in the smaller boat – one-eyed, a hand missing two fingers – stood and started to shout at those in his boat, forcing them into rhythm with harsh barks. “Who is he?” asked Meas.
“I do not know,” Joron said.
“You should.” She walked away. “You two,” she said to two women crouched on the deck, “I’ll have no slatelayers on my ship. Raise the staystone. We’ll have our ship in the true sea soon enough but not with the stone a-laying. So raise the staystone stone and sing me a song!”
Women and men rushed to the central windlass, a huge wheel made from a slice of vertebra. At first it did not move and it was as if Tide Child fought them. As if he had become comfortable here, away from the threat of war. Joron wondered if he had left the ship here too long, if weed and floorcakers had cemented the giant round stone to the seabed.
As women and men strained a song started.
Bring the babe a-world.
Push, hey a-push hey!
Bring it out in blood.
Push, hey a-push hey!
Bring the babe a-world.
Push, hey a-push hey!
Be Bern girl and be good.
Push, hey a-push hey!
And as more and more of the crew put their weight and voice to it the windlass began to move. Joron felt the song in his throat, remembered the old joy of a tune but could not sing, not as an officer, and not since he had lost his father. The bone creaked against the slate of the deck. Joron felt the ship list slightly to landward as the weight of the staystone moved from the sea floor to the ship. Bone complained, moaned, shuddered, and then he felt it, felt the same thing as everyone aboard, and he knew it because the air filled with excitement. In some almost imperceptible way it felt as if the ship beneath his feet woke from a deathlike slumber, as though he came alive.
“Stone comes up!” came the cry from the rump of the ship. Deckchilder guided the great stone into place against the side of the hull and bound it there. Then feet beat the deck as women and men ran for the great central spines, climbing the ropes and ladders, moving across the spars to put themselves among the ship’s wings, ready for the wind. Ready for flight across the sea.
At the beak the rowers rowed hard, but though the ship quivered he did not move, not yet. It was as if the rowers fought against a great current and their muscles and sweat challenged the heavy dead bones of Tide Child. Then, with a sigh of water along his sides, the ship moved, gave in to the pull of the oars, and a shout went up. Even Joron, sullen, resentful Joron, felt some degree of satisfaction in this small victory of intelligence and muscle over inert matter and cruel water. At the rump Meas took the great oar that would steer Tide Child, and from the beak Joron shouted direction to the rowers as they pulled the great ship towards the bellcage that tolled mournfully at the entrance to the bay.
The cage was a set of twisted metal arches built around a floating platform to protect the bell within, and on it he could see the silhouette of Tide Child’s final crew member, the gullaime windtalker. A shudder passed through him. There was nothing anyone in their right mind wanted to do with a gullaime, but in turn there was so much they needed. The creature could, to a degree, control the thing most important to any deckchild – the wind.
It sat atop the bell cage, stick-like body hunched over so its alien form was hidden beneath the ragged robes falling about the cage. The clothes, despite their length, were far too thin to muffle the sound of clapper against bell as the buoy rocked on the waves where the currents of the sea met the still waters of the bay. The gullaime crouched, unmoving, unreal in its lack of movement, but that same lack of movement pulled the eye towards it, made it impossible to ignore. The cage moved but the windtalker did not so much as rock, making it seem to hover above its perch. The closer Tide Child came to the creature, the more of it he could make out: the filth of its once-white robes, the bright colours of the leaf mask that covered the pits where its eyes had once been, the sharp and predatory curve of its beak. Underneath the robes was an inhuman body, three-toed feet with sharp claws, puckered pink skin tented against brittle bones and punctuated by the white quills of broken feathers. He did not know why the gullaime lost their feathers, only that they did, and he guessed it was due to the filth they chose to live in. The source of all lice and biting creatures on any ship was the windtalker, as any deckchild knew.