by Lian Tanner
And everything went dark.
THE MAW
When Petrel woke up, she was sure she was dead. She was pleased that she had missed the painful part, where she had been crunched between the Maw’s great teeth, but she was annoyed too. She didn’t want to be dead. She wanted to be back on the Oyster, helping to drive that army of cruel, shouting men away from her home. She wanted to wake the Sleeping Captain. She wanted to ask Mister Smoke why he had betrayed her.
But there was no chance of any of that now. She wondered if there were ships in the afterlife, and fried toothies. And friends.
There were certainly no fried toothies in this part of it. All she could smell was salt water, with maybe a bit of oil mixed in.
Beside her, something stirred. ‘Fin?’ she whispered. ‘That you?’
‘Where are we?’ mumbled Fin.
‘Dead, I reckon.’
‘What was that – that monster?’
‘The Maw. It chewed us up and—’ Petrel broke off. She was thinking a little more clearly now, and she didn’t feel chewed up. She didn’t feel dead either. She felt more or less the same as she always had, except for a few more bruises.
But if she wasn’t dead, where was she? And where was Mister Smoke? And Dolph?
That last question was answered almost immediately. Petrel heard a groan from somewhere behind her, and twisted around. ‘Dolph?’ she whispered.
Another groan. Then, ‘Blizzards! My ankle!’
Petrel crawled towards Dolph’s voice. She had to feel her way past hundreds of rats, all of them sprawled on their stomachs in attitudes of exhaustion. They were certainly not dead. They squeaked at her as she passed, annoyed at being disturbed.
‘Dolph, where are you?’ whispered Petrel. Her hand bumped against something that was not a rat.
‘Ow!’ said Dolph. ‘Watch where you’re going.’
‘Is that your ankle?’
‘It was,’ snarled Dolph, ‘before you clomped all over it.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Where are we? Where’s that stupid rat of yours brought us to?’
‘Don’t know. Wish there was some light.’ Petrel held her hand up to her eyes, but the darkness was so absolute that her fingers were invisible.
‘Hey, Fin,’ she said. ‘You cold?’
‘Not as cold as death,’ said Fin, from just behind her.
‘Me neither. Maybe the Maw spat us out again. Didn’t like the taste.’
‘Then we’d be back on the ice,’ hissed Dolph, ‘or twenty fathoms under water, and too dead to make stupid comments. It can’t have swallowed us after all.’
‘But it did, Dolph.You know it did. You saw it.’
Fin cleared his throat uncertainly. ‘Could it be that we are – in the monster’s belly? I cannot think of any other possibility.’
Dolph gasped. Petrel stared in Fin’s direction, and an awful chill ran down her spine.
He’s right. That’s where we are. Inside the Maw!
The darkness seemed to crowd around her. ‘D’you think it knows we’re here?’ she whispered, and immediately regretted the words. They made it more real, somehow. They gave the darkness an intelligence, an inward-turned eye.
A hunger.
Now even Dolph’s voice wobbled. ‘P’raps it’s – keeping us for later.’
‘Like – like putting a toothy on ice,’ agreed Petrel. ‘For the next day.’
She fumbled for Fin’s hand and was not surprised when she felt Dolph squeeze her other hand. She squeezed back, and the three of them huddled together, united in terror.
When something roared beneath them, they all flinched. ‘What is that?’ hissed Fin.
The roaring grew louder, and the darkness began to tremble. ‘It’s swimming, I think,’ whispered Dolph. ‘Taking us deeper.’
Petrel could feel the movement now, a powerful, rhythmical surge that jammed the three bratlings against each other, then pushed them apart. She braced herself against it, and wondered what the monster would do when it finally decided to eat them.
Will it spit us forward and crunch us between its teeth? Or will it just swallow, and we’ll get squished up in its guts?
One would be just as painful as the other. She was glad her mam and da had been killed before they were thrown to the Maw. She wished desperately that it was the crew of the other ship stuck down here, and that she and Fin and Dolph were back on the Oyster. But at the same time she felt a sense of inevitability.
‘Always knew the Maw’d get me,’ she whispered. And so she had. But she had never imagined, not for a moment, that it would be Mister Smoke who betrayed her. That hurt more than anything.
‘Petrel.’ It was Fin, murmuring in her ear. ‘What will happen when the men from the Severity—’ ‘That the other ship?’
‘Yes. What will happen when they attack the Oyster?’
‘They won’t win,’ said Petrel quickly. ‘They can’t win.’
‘Will the – the Sleeping Captain wake up?’ asked Fin.
‘Sleeping Captain doesn’t exist,’ said Dolph.
‘Don’t you be so sure of that, Dolph,’ said Petrel. ‘I know where he is – least I think I do. I was going to wake him and tell him about Fin’s ship . . .’
Petrel’s voice trailed off, as she thought of the army of men tramping towards the Oyster. In her imagination, every one of those men was twice as big as Krill and three times as vicious as Albie. What if no one told the Sleeping Captain about them? What if he stayed asleep when he should be defending the ship?
What if everyone on the Oyster died as a result?
She ground her teeth. ‘I don’t want ’em to die,’ she said aloud. ‘I want to get out of the Maw’s belly, and back to the ship to wake the Sleeping Captain. And he’ll strike all those men dead, and – and – and you and me’ll take the Severity, Fin, and go and find your mam.’
It was absurd, and Petrel knew it. But it made her feel better.
‘We should stand up,’ she said.
‘Why?’ asked Dolph.
‘So we can dodge when the Maw tries to chew us.’
Dolph snorted. But she stood up all the same, balancing on her good leg, and Fin stood too, and the three of them put their backs together and waited. The Maw surged and twisted around them, taking them who-knows-where.
Petrel had no idea how much time passed. The intense darkness magnified every heartbeat, every movement. It might have been half a watch – or only a few grains of the hourglass – before she heard a dragging sound.
The three stiffened, and pressed against each other. It was impossible to tell which direction the dragging came from, or what it was. But it was coming closer – they could hear it quite clearly.
And then it stopped, and was replaced by a rough voice. ‘You there, shipmate?’
‘Mister Smoke?’ said Petrel, amazed.
‘That’s me, shipmate.You all right?’
In a flash, Petrel’s astonishment gave way to anger. ‘What’s it to you if I am, Mister Smoke? I trusted you, and you gave us to the Maw.You tried to kill us.’
‘So are you dead, shipmate? You don’t sound dead to me.’
‘Not yet, no thanks to you.’
‘Hang on,’ said the rat. ‘There’s something missin’ from this conversation.’
There was a scraping sound and an oil lantern flickered to life. As the yellow light spread, Petrel stared around in stunned disbelief.
She was standing on a porous deck, with black rats flopped on every side of her. Metal arches glinted above her head, disappearing into darkness where the light did not penetrate. The arches supported something that looked a bit like the hull of the Oyster, except here it was made of overlapping plates that moved rhythmically against each other.
Petrel looked at Fin, and he gazed back at her, dumbfounded. ‘We are inside a machine,’ he whispered.
Petrel nodded slowly. That was undeniable. But what—
The truth struck her, and she glared at Mister S
moke, at the gleam in his eye. ‘It’s a ship!’ she said accusingly. ‘The Maw is an underwater ship!’
Mister Smoke looked mysterious and pleased at the same time. ‘Knew you’d work it out, shipmate. Back-up, that’s what the Maw is.You gotta have back-up. Ain’t I told you that over and over again?’
Petrel’s anger flared higher. All that fear. All that terror, for nothing. ‘You should’ve told us,’ she said. ‘You should’ve—’ ‘Where’s this thing taking us?’ interrupted Dolph.
The rat’s eyes shone with mystery. Petrel scowled at him. ‘You stop all these secrets, Mister Smoke. They scare me half to death, and I want to know the truth. Where are we going?’
‘Back to the Oyster,’ said Mister Smoke. ‘Where else?’
Fin caught his breath. ‘Back to the Oyster?’
‘How’ll we get past those men?’ asked Dolph. ‘They’ll be right around the ship by now.’
The rat said nothing. Petrel sighed. ‘More secrets, Mister Smoke?’
‘Secrets within secrets, shipmate, and all of ’em kept for three ’undred years. But it looks like they’re about to be dragged into the light.’ And he limped away.
For as long as she could remember, Petrel had been able to judge how fast the Oyster was going, and its direction, even when she was curled up in one of her nests, deep inside the ship. But now, in this strange vessel, she was lost. It swam, in that odd rhythmical way, and she balanced herself against the movement and tried to understand.
We’re inside the Maw.
She had a thousand questions, and a thousand more that she hadn’t thought of yet. She wished she knew how far they were from the Oyster, and how long it would take to get there. It was a terrible thing to be sitting helplessly while death and disaster marched on her ship.
She kicked the nearest arch. ‘Those men could be climbing the hull by now.’
‘Someone’ll see ’em from the bridge,’ said Dolph, who was sitting down again, nursing her ankle.
‘Who? Crab? He’s probably too busy tidying up. He’ll have the whole crew standing in a neat row, just in time for ’em to be slaughtered.’
‘If Mam was still alive—’
‘But she’s not, is she. She got herself killed, just when we needed her.’
‘It wasn’t her fault,’ snapped Dolph. ‘Crab betrayed her—’ ‘She shouldn’t’ve trusted him,’ said Petrel, with a sizeable snap in her own voice. ‘I didn’t trust him.’
‘You don’t trust anyone.’
‘I’ve got good reason for that,’ said Petrel, and she
glared at Dolph until the older girl reddened and looked away.
The deck rumbled and swayed beneath their feet. ‘Go faster,’ whispered Petrel.
Despite the evidence, she couldn’t quite bring herself to think of the Maw as a ship. It was the monster that had followed the Oyster for centuries, the monster that everyone feared. The monster that had chased Petrel through her dreams, year in, year out.
Now she wanted to skitch it onto the army of men. ‘Go as fast as you can,’ she whispered to the metal arches. ‘Crash up through the ice and swallow ’em. Chew ’em to bits—’ She broke off, thinking of all the corpses that had been thrown over the side of the ship, year after year, century after century. Petrel had thought – everyone had thought – that the Maw ate them.
But it wasn’t alive. It couldn’t have eaten them. So what had it done with them?
She remembered how nothing on the Oyster was wasted. Everything was used for either food, clothing or fuel. Maybe the Maw was the same. Maybe there was a digester back there in the darkness, and an engine, just like the ones on the Oyster, and Mister Smoke overseeing their workings, the way he seemed to oversee everything else.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the old rat’s voice from somewhere aft. ‘Hang on, shipmates!’
Petrel grabbed one of the metal struts just in time. She heard a muffled clang and the deck beneath her jolted violently. Dolph yelped. The black rats woke from their exhausted sleep with a great squeaking and protesting, and the shadows from the lantern cavorted like ice devils.
And then everything was still.
‘Reckon we’re there,’ said Petrel. ‘Reckon we’re right up against the hull.’
‘Impossible,’ said Fin. ‘The ship is icebound.’
Petrel’s breath quickened. ‘Reckon we’re under the ice.’
‘Then how can we get on board?’
‘Don’t know.’
Mister Smoke shouted again, ‘Time to move, shipmates.’
‘Don’t you go without me,’ said Dolph, and she struggled to her feet, clinging to one of the metal struts.
Petrel picked up the lantern and put her shoulder under Dolph’s arm. ‘Fin, you go on her other side. You can hop, can’t you?’ That was to Dolph.
The older girl nodded. ‘Can’t dance though.’
Which was, Petrel realised in astonishment, a joke.
Petrel and Fin made their way slowly aft, with Dolph between them. She leaned heavily on their shoulders and winced with every step, but made no complaint. Their feet rang on the metal deck.
Mister Smoke was waiting by a hatch in the wall. It had no clamp, but otherwise it looked more or less like the hatches in the Oyster. Petrel heard scratching sounds, and the rasp of metal against metal.
‘Must be a double hatch,’ she whispered. ‘The Maw and the Oyster must be screwed up tight against each other so we can get through with no water coming in.’
‘Where will we come out?’ asked Fin. ‘Somewhere near the – Sleeping Captain?’
His voice was odd again, and his jaw set. When Petrel tried to see his eyes, he turned away from her. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Mister Smoke?’
But the rat was watching the hatch, and waiting.
More rasping sounds. Petrel shifted from foot to foot, thinking about the men they had seen raging across the ice. The dreadful fervour of them. The hatred in their cries and the axes in their hands.
If they thought they could just climb onto the Oyster and take over, she told herself, they were wrong. The Oyster was a ship of fighters. From birth to death, the crew fought the sea and the ice and the long winter nights. They fought rust and decaying machinery.They fought storms so terrible that stories were told about them for years afterwards.
And they fought each other.
‘Those men are gunna get a fright when they come up against Albie,’ she said, and Dolph nodded.
Neither of the girls mentioned the fire and its aftermath. But they were both thinking about it. About the lack of lookouts. About the rattle of pipe messages and the hammering, and how those sounds would drown out the clang of grapnels hitting the rails.
The crew of the Oyster might be fighters, but if they were taken completely by surprise . . .
‘Mister Smoke, what are we waiting for?’ said Petrel. ‘Can’t we hurry?’
To her relief, there was a final rasp and the hatch creaked open . . . and there on the other side of it, her eyes reflecting the lantern light, was Missus Slink, pedalling lopsidedly at a tiny treadmill, which was geared to cogs and wheels and levers, all of them sliding over each other to unseal the hatch.
‘Missus Slink,’ said Petrel, and for just a second or two everything seemed almost normal.
But then Mister Smoke was urging the three of them through the hatch, muttering, ‘No time for greetings. In you go, in you go, mind the step, watch that lantern.’
The black rats surged after them, making Fin grimace with disgust.
‘Don’t worry about them,’ said Petrel. ‘There’s worse things coming than a few rats.’
‘Yes,’ said Fin, in that same strained voice. ‘I know.’
Missus Slink was treadling the other way now, and the hatch was closing. Mister Smoke scrambled up beside her. ‘How’s things above the waterline, Slink?’
‘Not good. Those grapnels are taking hold, and no one up on deck to stop them. There’ll be feet climbing the h
ull any minute, axes a-waving and skulls a-breaking. The past is catching up with us, Smoke.’
‘We have to warn the crew,’ said Dolph. ‘That’s the first thing to do. Second thing is to kill Crab.’
‘We tried to warn ’em before, and they wouldn’t listen,’ said Petrel.
‘They’ll listen to me,’ said Dolph.
‘Who will? Albie? I doubt if you’d get near him; he’ll be so busy. You could try Crab, I spose, before you kill him.’
‘Krill then. And Squid.’
‘They’ll be busy too, trying to set things to rights. By the time you get through to ’em it’ll be too late.’
Dolph shook her head, knowing Petrel was right, and not liking it one bit.
‘What we’ve gotta do,’ said Petrel firmly, ‘is wake the Sleeping Captain. That’s what I’ve been saying all along. Isn’t it, Fin?’
Fin’s lips moved, but he made no sound.
‘There’s no such thing as the Sleeping Captain,’ said Dolph.
‘There is. That’s why we’re here.’
Behind them, the hatch clanged shut and the two rats slid down from the treadmill. ‘Come on, come on,’ said Mister Smoke, clambering up onto a narrow metal walkway. ‘Mind your feet; don’t waste time. You still got that knife of yours, shipmate?’
‘Aye,’ said Petrel.
For all the rats’ urging, they could not hurry. Fin and Petrel had to edge sideways along the walkway, with Dolph hopping between them. Petrel could hear the ice grumbling against the hull and the rattle of pipes in the distance. She felt as if her heart was swelling in her chest, out of sheer excitement.
We’re going to wake the Sleeping Captain!
But then she thought she heard the distant clang of a grappling iron, and the sound of feet climbing the side of the ship. She winced, and held the lantern higher so they could see where they were going.
This space had never been a hold or a storage area. The hull pressed in on one side and the bulkhead on the other, leaving no room for anything much except the walkway. It was a bit like one of the tunnels, only bigger, which was a relief. Petrel didn’t feel like crawling, not with the cruel men so close and her heart drumming so violently within her.
