“Up! Up! I’ll have no slate-layers on this ship now. Twiner may have afeared himself of you but I know no such thing. Last woman or man lying on the deck” – a boot against a body – “will feel the bite of the cord.” A shout, something indeterminate. “I care nothing that your skins were burned as you slept drunkenly under Skearith’s Eye, you deserve those blisters. I’ll give you worse if you do not obey.”
Joron came over the rail to find the crew – his crew – standing around, bewildered, as if they had been caught in the curse of the Southstorm, the sudden squalls that come out of nowhere and wreck ships on the unseen rocks and reefs of the Lairo Islands. And he shared that feeling. She was like a storm, a fury, like the Mother had come among them to wreak her havoc and demand her justice. Meas strode to the rump of the ship, the slightly raised area at the rear where traditionally only the officers and the oarturner would stand. As she moved between poorly coiled mounds and tangles of rope and past the huge slack gallowbows – jumping a badly stacked pile of wingshot – she kicked out at those she passed.
“Up, up!” Always shouting. “Off my deck! Off the rump unless you think yourself up to facing me!” A kick, a punch, a whirlwind of noise and fury and bright colours amid the drab, hungover, eyeburned crew of Tide Child, who now stood, slack and bleak as their fates, watching this woman who wore the two-tailed hat.
He wondered if any one of them gave a thought to him. If they wondered where he was or even if he lived.
He thought it unlikely, and as he watched, standing by the rail between two great gallowbows, a little blood from a stinging cut on his foot stained the water at his feet. A slowly branching pattern of dark red against the grey slate of the deck.
They had no interest in him, the crew. They had sometimes regarded him with interest when he’d returned to have the purseholder dole out the meagre amount of coin due to him as shipwife. Heads had sometimes turned, cold eyes had sometimes followed him as he went below to the shipwife’s great cabin.
In the great cabin was his chest, holding what meagre possessions he had – even more meagre than when he had come aboard as what money he got was never enough to buy what he needed from the fisher village. Each time he left Tide Child he had been worried about that chest, though he could not take it with him as that would be to finally abdicate all authority, to say he had run from the black ship. But when he returned he was almost frightened to approach it, in case he saw the hasp broken, as that would mean that his authority was gone -- what authority? In the claustrophobic heat of long nights in his decrepit bothy he had dreamed of that moment: the shattered lock, the quick knife to the kidneys and the blood upon the white boneboard in the great cabin. The light finally fading as Tide Child claimed its due, passing his weary soul into the hands of the Sea Hag, who waited for all.
But the moment had never come, and each time he had seen that lock still in one piece he had felt sure, somehow, deep inside, that his small authority was intact. Only now, watching the reddened backs of what had been his crew, did he realise how wrong and foolish he had been. Sea chests were sacred to the deckchilder, and to meddle with one was one of many small superstitions, like throwing paint in a dock or on the spinebase, that was never to be broken.
They paid him no mind as he stood and gently bled, but they could not take their eyes from her as she paced back and forth like a caged firash. There was that unmistakable fury to her, something internal, a roaring fire that was not seen, only sensed – sensed through the strict movements of her legs, of her arms, the glare of her eye as she surveyed the state of the deck, kicking at loose bottles and old rope. Her mouth moving as she paced. Rehearsing the words she would cast at the crew? The feathers in her grey and blue and red hair glinting like lightning in a far-off storm.
As she paced he realised that, apart from the few he considered an obvious threat, he had lied to himself about this crew. He did not know them. He did not recognise them from their eyeburned backs. They were not his and never had been. When he looked at them, at the myriad different-coloured skins and shapes of the Hundred Isles, he had no clue what names those skins clothed. Even those whose faces he saw as they emerged, blinking and confused from belowdeck, he could not name as they squinted and wondered about the sudden and tempestuous change in the winds that had blown into their lives. He did not know them at all. Where she invited their gaze upon the stage of the rump, he had avoided it. Where he had quailed and hunched and scurried past disinterested eyes, she demanded they look upon her – and they did. They could do nothing else.
He could do nothing else.
Joron started to count them, gave up and guessed the entire crew must be present. He saw the courser slinking around at the edge of the group in their grubby, patched and holed robe – damn him he should at least know their name. He had known it, what was it? Alerry, Alerrit? Aelerin. That was it, Aelerin. But the courser was one of the othered, and made him uncomfortable; they were neither woman nor man and he regarded them with the same sort of superstitious dread that came upon him when he thought about the gullaime, the windtalker, stranded far out on the bell buoy.
“You stink,” said Meas quietly. “You hear that? You stink and it shames you. From the lowest fisher in a flukeboat to the crew of the mighty Arakeesian Dread, the sailors of the Hundred Isles are clean. We’re no raiders. No Gaunt Islanders to wallow in our own filth and fly ships that can be smelled before they breach the horizon. We have pride.” Her eyes pricked at the crowd, making feet shuffle, heads bow. “And yet, you stink.”
“Who are you to tell us this?” The speaker was hidden in the crowd, but at least that was a voice he knew. Old Briaret. The woman was as taut as rope and had been condemned in youth. Hardly knowing any other life than Tide Child, so she knew little of the world outside it. Only to her could the identity of the woman on the rump be a mystery.
“They call me Lucky Meas.”
“Not that lucky then,” said Briaret, “if you’re sent here to join the dead.”
Meas seemed to grow, to straighten, as if what should be shame was a mark of pride.
“I am Meas Gilbryn. I broke the Gaunt Islands fleet at Keelhulme Sounding. I took the four-ribber Bern’s Woe with only a handful of flukeboats. I am firstborn of Thirteenbern Gilbryn, who leads us all.”
He heard the whisper at that, like the hiss of wave on shingle – “Firstborn cursed born, firstborn cursed born . . .” – and so did she.
“I hold no curse for I am chosen of the sea and it washed me ashore as a babe when raiders wrecked around me. I hear the whispers of all storms, North, South, East and West, and I am favoured by the goddess of the young, the goddess of the people and the dark goddess of the depths. Maiden, Mother and Hag listen when I talk.” She stopped then, royal, regal, ruler of the ship, and she dared any to say otherwise. When she spoke next she sent her words into a stillness as profound and full as any becalming. “You will find, and I believe, that the Hag sends me where I am needed.” She looked around the ship – at the filth, at the resentful faces and lastly at him, at Joron Twiner. “And Hag knows I am needed here. Sorely needed.”
There was a moment then when Joron waited for the challenge. He felt like someone should turn the glass at the rump so the sand could pour and time could be seen to pass, but none did and no challenge came. He picked out the ones most likely: Barlay, a woman as huge as any and flanked by two of her cronies; Cwell leaning on a rail, looking alone as always, and as thin, lithe and dangerous as any longthresh, but she had her followers too; then there was Kanvey, surrounded by his boys, standing on the other side, and it was him that Joron feared most, for he was a predatory man and more than once he had found Kanvey’s eye travelling up the curve of his calf, and the man’s open lust scared him. But for now they were stilled, shocked by the onslaught of Lucky Meas’s contempt.