With a contrary wind, she was close-hauled. The yards were pulled in as far as possible against the shrouds, and she was sailing at some sixty degrees to the wind with the propellers halted.
“Captain, sir …” Sandover saluted the stiff-backed, lean man who stood with feet braced against the rocking deck, flanked by the bosun and the cabin boy. Captain Chauvond waved him away impatiently without taking his eyes off the tossing treetops below. There was a ship to be sailed—discomfited stowaways must bide. Chauvond spoke to the bosun from the side of his mouth.
“Wind’s veering now. Prepare to tack.”
Orders were shouted: “Ready about!” Sailors in yellow uniforms rushed to their stations, threw the coiled lines off the pins, and checked that they were clear to pay out. Lee braces were flaked out on deck, free to run.
“Foremast manned and ready!”
The ship was eased off the wind to build up enough speed to help her turn through the wind’s eye. The propellers sprang to life, groaning and rattling as they woke to the full force of the wind. Then, as the wheel was slowly put hard over, the ’tween mast staysails were dropped. The yards on the main- and mizzenmasts spun around as the orders were given, and now came the critical moment. Headsails clattered as they went aback. She was turning, with the jibs, staysails, and sails on the foremast aback to help push the bows around, and the decks a web of ropes. For a long moment she slowed, with the sails flapping backward.
“Mainsail haul!”
Sails on the main- and foremasts were braced around as soon as they began to fill. Then the mizzenmast was braced around, jibs and staysails sheeted home, ’tween mast staysails reset, course steadied, and the spanker eased off. Aeronauts busied themselves recoiling lines and hanging them neatly on their pins. Now the captain directed his attention to the business at hand.
“Stowaway, Cap’n, sir,” Sandover announced unnecessarily, still gripping the lad by the elbow. Captain Chauvond grimaced. He was not an unkind man, but he ran a tight ship, in complete accordance with the rules and regulations of the Sky Moot, and had no time for those who broke them.
“Shall I clap ’im in leg-irons, sir, or give ’im six of the best?”
“In truth, Mr. Sandover, I have half a mind to have you throw him overboard,” the captain said testily. “What say you to that, lad?”
The lad shook his head miserably. The cabin boy scrutinized him with intense curiosity.
“Think ’e ’as a wooden tongue, sir,” said Sandover. The captain turned away, hands clasped behind his back.
“Aye, well, we shall have to put him off at the next port of call, that’s the correct procedure—hand him over to the local authorities. Until then he is to be adequately fed and put to scrubbing the decks and whatever else he can do to work for his ticket. And make sure he keeps his taltry tied on!”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
For the rest of that day and all of the next, the lad was set to polishing the brass binnacle and the fife-rail around the mainmast, scrubbing the mess deck, and scouring pots and pans in the galley, where the cook was preparing a pungent stew. The aeronauts, at first uncertain as to whether he might be some eldritch wight about to curse the ship, were too busy to take much notice of him. More widely traveled than the parochial inhabitants of the Tower, they were accustomed to strange sights and thus more tolerant. The lad pondered bleakly on what might happen to him in Gilvaris Tarv and whether he would be sent back to the House of the Stormriders. Until now his only ambition had been to leave the Tower, as if somehow simply roving out in the wide world would give him the answers he craved. He dreaded being sent back to the Tower even more than he dreaded a beating for stealing illegal passage on the Windship, but if he were allowed to remain in the city, would he not merely end up as a drudge, toiling in sunless chambers for the rest of his life, polishing aumbries, bleeding, broken? Yet at least in a city, through which strangers passed, he might meet someone who could help him find out his name.…
Topside, the ship was a bee’s nest of activity—yellow-jacketed men spliced and coiled ropes, mended and trimmed sails, and ascended and descended the rigging; orders were shouted and bells were rung; canvas strained against rope and every eyelet was a slit pierced by the red needles of the sinking sun as the Windship sliced through the sky with her sails heaped up like storm clouds.
They dropped anchor on the third evening at Saddleback Pass. The sheer and purple walls of the Lofty Mountains loomed up far above the masthead on each side. Below, wooded clefts lay in deep shadow. The next part of the voyage, through the steep, uninhabited ranges, would be difficult and dangerous, but it was the last leg, and the captain expected to reach Gilvaris Tarv on the following afternoon.
The lad took his meal with the aeronauts but was unable to stomach the stew, making do with hard bread and water and small, sweet apples. They sent him to the cargo hold to sleep and closed the hatch lest he escape and walk among them like a night-fright, disturbing their dreams.
During his watch, Ared Sandover could see far away a tiny glow shining through the darkness—a Lightship that was moored, eternally, at Cold Crow Peak.
Through the night, a sound reverberated through the mountains from some indiscernible point—now near, now far—the weeping of a heartbroken woman.
From time to time, an anguished keening gathered into a long, rising wail before breaking again into wrenching sobs. Indescribable sorrow communicated itself in those wordless cries. None of the crew slept. The skin crawled on their backs. They stayed silent in their discomfiture, tense as stretched shrouds; a strange, cold heaviness weighed them down, slowing every movement, even breathing. For it was the cry of a weeper, a harbinger of doom to mortal men. Three times it echoed forth, and then in the night fell an almost unnatural silence.
Someone, soon, would die.
First light was cool and blue, like the sea. High-level cirrus wisped in curls softer than swan’s down. It was the hour to call all hands to man the capstan and raise the iron anchor from its bed somewhere in the mold of the forest floor 150 feet below. White fog lay low in the deep vales, and cloud wreathed the mountains’ heads. Bringing up the massive chain was a lengthy task; the shantyman’s tune echoed among the hills as the great iron flukes rose in time to the tramp of the men marching around the foredeck pushing the capstan bars before them.
A light wind was breathing down their necks, and conditions were fair for climbing the rigging as the men went aloft to cast off the gaskets that lashed the sails to the yards. Soon ropes were flaked out neatly on deck, and buntlines and clewlines were ready to be eased out. The hands aloft by the mast at the upper staysails stood on the cranlines. Looking up at the yards, Sandover could see the loops of folded cloth, sails not yet set, as all around the decks aeronauts checked the layout. Orders were awaited. Not much canvas would be unfurled today—the Tarv must cruise slowly in this precipitous region.
Whistle blasts signaled commands along the length of the ship. Propellers spun into action, and the ship began to make headway. Gradually, as more sail area was displayed, speed increased.
The sun was not yet visible behind the peaks, and great swaths of lavender shadow fell from steaming crags into blind depths. Skillful navigation was crucial here. Uneven ground exerted unequal pressures on the sildron in the hull, which caused pitching and yawing. The steeply rising landforms forced the air currents to break up into strong turbulence; a run through this part of the country was always bumpy.
The Windship floated between giant castles of escarpments like a fragile moth, lit once or twice by stray shafts of light spearing between the eastern tors. Toward the middle of the morning, the lad’s skin prickled. Fine, pale hairs on his arms stood on end, and excitement drilled through him like a silver auger. He shivered with expectancy—an unstorm was approaching.
The day-star climbed beyond the Lofty Mountains at last, and it seemed that the ship was making fair headway, when a minor solar eclipse occurred. Startled, the crew looked up to
see, silhouetted against the morning sky, a brig, her two-masted rig laden with sails, floating across the fiery path of the sun.
The Tarv’s bell clanged fiercely.
“Sail ahoy! Black sail! Black brig fifty degrees high to starboard! All hands on deck!”
“Plague and madness! Where did that evil hulk spring from?” bellowed the first mate, letting fly a stream of curses. Confusion ensued, escalated. Men raced to load the mangonels and arm themselves. A black sail meant a pirate vessel—here in the mountains they could not outrun her; nor could they outmaneuver her. The black brig was smaller, leaner, built for speed. Their only chance was to fight.
But the brig, long and sharp as a knife, had the ally of surprise. Preceded by her iron-shod ram, she had glided silently from behind a high rocky wall where she had lain in ambush, and now, from her position overhead, a deadly hail of arrows and stones came clattering onto the merchant’s decks. Two or three men fell, wounded.
“Captain, sir, I suggest flaming arrows,” the bosun panted.
“And would you have burning debris rain upon us? Order the mangonels to prepare to fire.”
The bosun’s shouts were drowned in the broadside that exploded from the black ship’s own mangonels, expertly aimed. She was so close that her shotmen could not miss, and with a splintering roar the mainmast crashed down onto the deck, bringing the foremast with it. Sailors who had been clinging aloft were hurled overboard. Their cries tapered off into deep mountain gullies, lost in the booming echoes of destruction. The stern wing on the starboard side was smashed off and tumbled down to vanish in the abyss while bits of sildron from the propeller floated away. With one blast, the City of Gilvaris Tarv had been disabled.
Her decks erupted into scenes of chaos, rolling and bucketing as the ship wallowed. Broken spars and yards rolled, sliding within a tangle of ropes. Orders were shouted in a desperate attempt to salvage the situation, but Ared Sandover, hanging on to the railing to stop himself from sliding, could see the brig swinging close alongside and knew they were doomed. The long arm of one of the Tarv’s mangonels, released from torsion, was flung up against its transom to hurl forth its heavy missile. The ship recoiled, slewing around like a dying thing, and the ball went wide of its target, slamming into the mountain wall, where it blasted a hole.
The nameless youth stood, unheeded, by the bridge, feeling the unstorm coming closer. There was no fear, only numbness; he felt detached from the scene, as though watching a play. Besides, there seemed nothing he could do; he had no training in bowmanship or working catapults or sailing. He gripped a tangle of ropes and watched the rugged horizon seesawing. In the next instant he regretted his lack of voice more than ever he had before; oh, to be able to scream a warning! Now his heart burst into pounding life at what he saw. Iron grappling hooks erupted over the railing, cast up from below, and thudded into wood. He flung himself down the canting slope to where able aeronaut Sandover struggled for balance.
“What? Leave hold of me!” They scuffled briefly, then the man turned his head and saw, too, the row of heads appearing up over the poop rail; the dark shapes of men swarming over, leaping down to the deck, knives glittering. More and still more came up the ropes from the longboats that had slid silently in under the hull while all attention had been diverted to the brig.
With shrill cries and bull-bellows the reivers thronged over the clipper, wielding their long, curved blades with expertise. The fighting was fierce; the merchant sailors had been trained to defend themselves and their ship, but there had been few pirate attacks on record in recent years, and they were ill prepared. Standing side on with feet braced apart and knees bent, duelists fought desperately up and down decks that soon ran slippery with blood.
A battle-hardened, scar-faced pirate advanced within a sword and arm’s length of his adversary. Grinning, the cutthroat swung his scimitar from right to left in front of his chest. The aeronaut extended, trying desperately to deceive, knowing he was outmatched. Scar-face repeated his playful action several times, advancing and retreating. All at once their weapons engaged, Scar-face’s scimitar deflecting the other and coming in over the top to scoop up the blade and fling it aside. A ring of metal on metal, a rainbow in the air. With a thud, the aeronaut’s severed hand hit the deck, followed a moment later by his torso.
Another pirate, a stringy fellow with no teeth who had been attacking, parrying, and riposting in a rapid rhythm, suddenly rapped sharply on the boards with his forward foot. His adversary, distracted from the scimitar, let down his guard. It was only for a fraction of an instant, but that was all the time necessary for the point of Toothless’s cutlass to slash the aeronaut’s forearm, slicing through the sinews. The sword fell from the impotent hand, and with a swift forward thrust Toothless skewered him to the heart.
One brave sailor crept up behind a roaring brigand who had bodily lifted one of his shipmates and was hurling him overboard. As he finished his business with a grand yell, the canny pirate positioned his scimitar along the underside of his left forearm. In a lightning movement he stepped back with his left foot, thrusting the scimitar straight out behind him and twisting his body to the left. The sailor, advancing with upraised weapon, was taken unawares and fell, cut almost in two. With a vengeful cry, one of his fellow aeronauts attacked, lunging with sword outstretched. The still-bellowing pirate retreated out of range. As he had hoped, the aeronaut shifted his weight backward to recover. In that moment of vulnerability, Roarer jumped forward and cut him down.
A bald, one-eared reiver hacked his way through the fray, naming his cuts and thrusts as he gave them: “The Hedger! The Reaper! The Thresher!” His blade clove the air with a rushing, hissing sound; it clove flesh with the succulent smack of an axe through cabbage.
When the shang wind came on them it seemed to increase the ferocity of the fighting, as if it got into the blood of the men. Smoking clouds boiled across the sky. Twilight glinted with strange, rainbow fires like ice, like jewels, like frosted stars. The brig’s rigging was a dew-beaded cobweb giving off stabs of diamond light.
“Make her a ghost-ship!” cried a dying aeronaut, his last breath bubbling away in the crucible of his breast. The combatants, their heads bare of taltries in the heat of battle, danced to the rhythm of life and death in a soft radiance that burned their images on the air. Where they had been, a moment ago, their shapes remained—translucent, shimmer-edged, and slowly fading. A sailor swung a knife, and a fan of ghost-knives hung dissolving. A man fell, and his numberless ghosts fell again, many times. Phantoms and men leaped from deck to deck, their cries and the clash of weapons underpinned by a faint chiming of crystal bells.
The clipper, still staggering with the momentum of her dismasting and the counterthrust of the mangonel’s firing, lurched sideways into the mountain wall. There, tall, dark pines clung, deep-rooted, glittering, growing straight up out of land that fell almost straight down. A wild-eyed pirate jumped back as his adversary moved forward and lunged with a cruel upward cut that opened his belly; the man fell forward uttering a gurgling cry. Another invader chopped at a sailor, missed—his scimitar sliced through rope. Sandover, who had been pulling hard at the other end of the rope for leverage while fending off blows, shot down the deck and out over the side. He crashed through the branches of a tree that gave way forgivingly and brought him up, scratched but living, against the trunk. The Windship spun away and left him. Foreseeing the ship’s doom, many aeronauts slashed through ropes depending from the yards and swung themselves over the side in long arcs to throw themselves on the mercy of the trees and take their chances with whatever beasts and wights roamed the pathless slopes below; but not all were as lucky as Sandover.
When it was over, the pirates took some prisoners and threw the rest of the crew overboard. They plundered the Tarv, loading chests of precious things into the longboats to be ferried to the brig. Little of the less valuable cargo they stole—there was too much to take all; it would have weighed down their ship and slowed them
. Then they scuttled the white bird of a clipper, driving her into the mountainside and wrecking her on the rocks, raping her of as much of her sildron as they could get. She hung broken there, her lacerated timbers red-stained. The ghost-tableau faded out as the shang storm passed away over the mountains to the north and the sun shone, croceate, in the late afternoon.
When the next unstorm blew, the Tarv’s ghost-image would fly again, in memoriam.
In the wake of the unstorm the black Windship fled among the peaks. Patrol ships would come looking for the Tarv when she missed her rendezvous at the docks of Gilvaris Tarv, and the captain wanted to be far away by then. His ship was fast and maneuverable and had been drastically modified to enable her to change altitudes quickly, gaining or losing height ear-burstingly as the slatted andalum linings shielding the sildron were rolled back and forth inside her double hull.
The merchant sailors taken prisoner had been selected from among the unwounded for their size, strength, or nimbleness. Now they were shackled and manacled with iron, lest rope-chafe damage their appeal to prospective buyers. They were given food and limited room to move. Hale workers fetched worthwhile prices in this illegal trade. One of these captives was the stowaway.
The pirate’s crew were thieves and cutthroats recruited from the dregs of cities, or simple country lads who had been seduced to piracy by tavern talk and could not now go back, or disillusioned soldiers; men who looked for rich rewards preying upon the Merchant Lines or who sailed in the sky for their own reasons. One of these stood now before the prisoners, his feet braced apart on the planks, his brawny left arm roughly bandaged where he had sustained a wound from a poniard. The lad squinted up at the head outlined against the sails. Tangled red hair like stiff wire had been randomly knotted with thin braids; in the thickets of it, a gold disk winked from his left ear. Blue eyes squinted over a ginger mustache that, although bushy, was clipped short. A copper torc clasped his bull-neck, from which also hung a tilhal of amber with two coupling flies trapped inside. A stained taltry hung from his shoulders. His barrel chest was swathed in a torn shirt that had once been white, overtopped with a rabbit-skin jerkin, and he wore olive-green breeches belted with gold-worked, purple leather with a wicked-looking skian scabbarded at his side. His feet, ginger-tufted and sporting dirty nails like goats’ horns, were bare and tattooed with scorpions. The nameless youth had a good view of these feet because he was lying in front of them. To his left lay Captain Chauvond and the cabin boy. To his right reclined half a dozen merchant aeronauts, also bound with ropes.
The Bitterbynde Trilogy Page 12
