Nothing good.
The flukeboat lay where he had left it, askew on the pale pink beach. The sand looked attractive, relaxing, but each grain was a lie as it was a beach of trussick shells. Most were smashed but in among them were plenty of whole ones that would shatter under a foot and cut the sole open, so as they walked over the beach he had to pick his way carefully forward while Meas, booted Lucky Meas, strode confidently on.
The flukeboat resembled a cocoon. Built from gion leaves which had been dried and treated until they became soft and pliable like birdleather, then wrapped around a skeleton of fire-hardened varisk stalks and the whole thing baked in the sun until it was bone hard. Flukeboats were brown to start with, until their owners painted them in lurid colours: symbols of the Sea Hag, Maiden or Mother, eyes of the storms or the whispers of the four winds. This flukeboat was little more than a rowboat, big enough for ten but light enough for one to row if they must. Flukeboats ranged as large as to hold twenty and sometimes thirty and more crew, with large gion leaves, dried and treated to act as wings, catching the wind above and powering the boats through the sea.
Vessels for the foolishly brave, most said, as they were brittle, not like the hard-hulled boneships. A flukeboat could be wrecked by one good gallowbow shot. But Joron knew they had advantages too, those brittle boats; he had grown up helping his father on one, just the two of them against the sea in a boat bright blue and named the Sighing East, for the storm that loved a deckchild. It had been fast, able to outrun almost anything, even the crisk and the vareen, and when those great beasts of the sea raised their heads looking for prey they had never caught the Sighing East. The little boat had run with the wind, salt spray stiffening Joron’s hair as he stood in the prow, laughing at the danger, sure in the knowledge his father would steer them safe. He always steered them safe, always found the fish, always protected his singing boy. Until the last day, and then he could not. Sometimes it was hard to believe that had been Joron’s life, that just months ago he had been that scarless, careless, laughing boy in the prow of a flukeboat.
How had it come to this?
How had he ended here?
Nineteen years on the sea and condemned to die. The world pulsed, the blue sky darkening at the edges.
He knew these thoughts as offspring of the drink, the melancholy it brought he had only ever been able to drink through, running toward oblivion to escape himself. But he could not drink now. Not in front of her. He would keep going even if just to spite her. If she put him to cleaning filth from the bilges he would do it, biding his time, waiting for his moment.
Meas reached the flukeboat, pulling it upright so the thin keel cut into the sand and she could slide it into the lapping water. No happy colours for this boat; it was unnamed, painted black and given only the one eye on its beak to guide it through the sea. She went to the front, one foot in the hull, one raised on the beak, looking every inch the shipwife. She did not look back, did not speak, did not need to. He knew what was required.
He was crew now.
She stood where he should have, though never had; no member of Tide Child’s crew would ever have rowed him anywhere, would have laughed if he had asked. By the time he had picked his way across the sharp beach the boat had drifted out into the still bay and he had to wade out to it, the salt water stinging a hundred tiny cuts on the bottoms of his feet. He pulled himself, dripping, into the boat, feeling the wetness as humiliation while the growing heat burned the moisture from his clothes. He picked up the two oars and set them in their notches.
“Foolish to leave the boat here,” she said.
“Who would steal a boat fit only for the dead?”
“The dead,” she said and pointed at Tide Child, far ahead of them and thick in the water. The ship was not dipping or moving with the motion of the sea, it looked as steady and immovable as a rock, a rock to wreck a soul upon.
“I brought it to the shore so they could not have it.” He said the words, though he wanted to shout at her. Could she really not know the crew would use the boat to run if he left it with them?
“Well, unless they are an uncommon lot, I reckon at least a few of ’em can swim?” She did not look round to see if he acknowledged what she said, did not need to as they both knew she was right. The only reason the boat was still there was probably because the crew of Tide Child were so drunk they had not thought it through any more than he had. Again the damp clothes against his skin felt like shame. “And it may have passed your notice” – she pointed at Tide Child – “but they already have a ship.” He stared at her, feeling like the fool he was. “Row then,” she said, impatient, not looking back. “I would see what poor sort of crew a poor man like you is shipwife to.”
Warm, damp clothes against his skin.
Black water, they called it, that greasy area where the detritus of a ship held the water that little tighter to it, a disturbance that caused a circular calm about the vessel. And this water was black in more than name. The reflected hull of Tide Child made rowing into the black water to approach an abyssal hole, like the places where the floor of the sea fell away beneath a ship and a deckchild heard the Sea Hag’s call to join her in the depths. One moment Joron rowed through limpid green sea where the pink sand gently shoaled away beneath them, and then they were in the cold shadow of the ship, rowing through darkness towards darkness: life into death.
There were rules in the Hundred Isles navy for a shipwife’s approach: calls to be made, horns to be blown, clothes to be worn and salutes to be offered. Lucky Meas – perched on the beak of the flukeboat – received none of this; not even the careless courtesy of a ladder thrown over the ship’s side greeted her. And though she said nothing, Joron could feel the affront radiating from every taut muscle of her body. When the fluke-boat was within a span of Tide Child she leaped from the beak of the boat, the sudden change in weight as she jumped pushing it down into the black water, buoyancy pushing it back up in a fountain of white foam that tried, and failed, to follow Meas Gilbryn up the side of the ship. Where the water fell back, disturbing the bits of food and rotting rubbish, sending them bobbing away from the smooth black ribs of the hull, Meas seemed to defy gravity. She needed no ladder; the ship became her steps, each spike and sharp edge, each piece of the vessel that made him nervous – he knew they existed to take life, to ruin flesh, to end women and men, to grind them against the hull – she swung between them, booted feet finding purchase between the blades of the ship, hands knowing instinctively where to grasp without being cut. All this despite never having seen Tide Child before, never climbing his sheer sides, never inspecting the hull for rot or learning the curves and undulations of him. It did not matter to her. Joron’s father had talked of those who were “born to the sea” and he had never really understood. Not until he saw her.
In a moment she was over the rail and on the deck. Joron heard the thud of boots on the slate as he tied the flukeboat on. Then he heard the thud of a boot meeting a body. He climbed the ship quickly, but so much more carefully than she had. He heard the sound of voices, surprised voices, angry voices, and something in him trembled at it. He knew this crew, this seventy-two that rode Tide Child. Some had been there for years, some only for months, and there was not a one he would turn his back on without worrying they would draw a curnow on him, but she was fearless, her shrike-voice barking out.