Barlay put down the shot she held with one hand, shot he would have struggled to hold with two, and came to him. “Twiner,” she said. “Why is she here?”
“I need a group to—”
“I said, why is she here, Twiner?” Barlay’s voice was full of threat, like the moment a spear sinks into a longthresh and all know the flukes of its tail are now certain to breach the water in murderous fury, but not who will die in the beast’s wrath, or on its teeth.
He opened his mouth to answer her. At the same moment she took a step back and bowed her head as if in respect. For him?
No. Of course not.
He turned, knowing what he would see, must see, her: Meas, standing at the hatch.
“Barlay,” she said, snaking out from the underdeck, “I am glad to see such enthusiasm from you.” Barlay nodded as if that was exactly what she had been feeling, and Meas approached, pulling on one of the fishskin tethers that held her crossbows to her coat. “Pick seven you trust and take our flukeboat to the fishing village.” She held out a piece of parchment. “Commandeer another boat, one big enough to take some strain, small enough to stow on deck if we need to, and with a wing if there is such a one.”
“They won’t like it, Shipwife,” said Barlay, still looking at the deck.
“That is why I send a woman the size of you,” said Meas, nodding at the parchment. “This letter promises that Bernshulme will give them the price of what we take, and as it is now the growing time they should have no trouble replacing their boat.” Joron wondered if she knew she lied, that even the simplest flukeboat took at least a month to make, and a month off the water was likely to leave a fisher family starving. He wondered if she cared. “Well,” said Meas, “get on then.” She turned, and a deckchild scurrying past stopped in his tracks, unable to meet her eye. “You,” she said, “get a catapult and start knocking the skeers off the wings of the ship. Kill a few and the rest will think twice before coming back.” The man nodded and scurried off once more. “Joron, return to my cabin,” she said. Her voice promised nothing good.
His heart fell to rest in his stomach, spreading a tide of sea-cold blood through his system as the skeers took off in a cloud of noise, protesting the great and mortal insult done to one of their number by a stone launched from a spinning cord.
From the light to the dark he followed her. The smell of the underdeck would not let him forget he lived among the dead, but in the bright cabin with the chart floor the light was better, even if the atmosphere was not. Meas ignored him, dragging her desk back into its rut and sitting behind it. On the desk was the onetail hat of the deckkeeper. Black material, folded up around a rounded crown, at the rear the material falling in a plaited rope to dangle down the wearer’s back.
“You do not ask for volunteers,” she said. “You are an officer of the fleet. You tell the deckchilder what to do and if they do not do it they are punished.” He opened his mouth but she gave him no leave to talk. “And I doubt not that you think you have no authority over them for you do not, not really, and never have had, and that is your fault and no other’s. But that time has passed, for now you hold my authority. So speak with it, Joron Twiner, and if I must crack a few heads for them to understand that you being weak does not mean that I am weak then I will do it. Do you understand?”
He nodded.
“Why?” That single syllable again, leaking from his mouth like water seeps into the bilges. Weak, she was right to recognise him as that.
“Because you know numbers,” she said.
“As do others.” These words snapped out, his confusion forgotten in annoyance, emotions warring inside him. Who was she to treat him this way? Who was he to let himself be treated so? That almost-smile crossed her face again. She stood, came around the desk and stood in front of him. Smaller than he was, but more comfortable in her skin than he would ever be, a fierce predator before prey.
“That crew chose you as shipwife, Joron Twiner, not just because they believe you weak – and that is a hard course you have set that you must, in time, find your own route through – but because you have no loyalty to any other and you gave no clique an advantage. I have seen such decisions before.” Her tone was almost jovial, and he relaxed, if only a little. Then, as if remembering herself, who she was, what she was, where she was, the storm came upon her and she picked up the deckkeeper’s hat from the desk and took a step closer to him. “They do not respect you, but no one owns you and you owe no one. They have played you like a fish on a line, Joron Twiner, but I have made you deckkeeper so you owe me now, you hear?” She lifted the hat, showed it to him and then placed it on his head. “You owe me, not them. I chose to let you live, and you owe me. You belong to Lucky Meas, and you’ll learn to work a ship and those aboard or they’ll scrag you one night and your sentence is then earned and carried out, Sea Hag have you. But I own you now, you hear?” He nodded. “I own you. Speak it.”
He did not want to but saw no way out.
“You own me.”
She stared into his face, examining the lines and ridges, staring into his eyes as if searching for something.
“I hoped there was a little fight in you, but maybe not. Now check these numbers on the floor. The courser seemed to know their way, but I would have the numbers checked again.” And she turned away, sitting at the desk and taking a small book from her pocket, leafing through it and staring at each page as if it held all the world’s secrets. And maybe it did.
Joron wondered what they were.
With the numbers checked he returned to the deck as Barlay brought in the boats. The new one she had crewed with her people, and they rowed it hard, wing hanging loosely from the spine, towing their own boat behind.
“Get up front,” he shouted, then pointed to the two deck-childer nearest to him and spoke with Meas’s voice. “You and you, up to the beak, tie on the boats and then put together enough childer to pull the oars of them both.” They sneered at him and skulked away, but did as he asked and for a moment he felt almost like he was a real officer on a real ship. Past those he ordered, Cwell stood on the deck, looking at him. A pyramid of wingshot had collapsed and spilled across the deck, the nearest shot by his feet, and it was all he could do not to kneel and start to stack it again, stack it correctly as his father had taught him to do. But he could not do that, because that was not an officer’s job. When he glanced around there was no one near enough to call on to do it except Cwell, who stared so balefully at him. He turned away, starting to stoop as Lucky Meas appeared on deck, striding towards the rump and barely sparing him a glance, caught as he was between kneeling and standing. Though he had no doubt she noticed, no doubt at all.
The beak of a ship was always reaching for the future. The curling spines of bone along the rail and above the ribs of the ship pointed forward. Below the rail the skull of the long-dead arakeesian, eyeholes filled with green sea glass and boneglue, stared sightlessly forward. Below the eyes the beak, clad in metal, built to ram its way into other ships and through the waves, to cut a curling path of spray and foam, pointed out the ship’s course.
Today it barely moved. Weed waved lazily around the beak of Tide Child, and fish, skin scintillating with light, darted in and out of the safety of the plants, vanishing into the depths in a sparkling cloud as noisy women and men ran ropes through the hipbones of the prow and back to the flukeboats – one old, one newly acquired.