“Say, we can ask him about Thasha’s father!” said Neeps.
Pazel nodded. “And we can ask him what in the Nine Pits he’s doing aboard.”
“There is one further matter,” said Rose, silencing the crowd again. He nodded to someone below, and the tarboy Peytr Bourjon started up the ladder to the quarterdeck. Peytr was a tall, lean whip of a youth. He and Dastu were the ship’s senior tarboys, just one voyage away from making full sailors. Peytr was climbing awkwardly. As he stepped onto the quarterdeck, Pazel saw why: he had a large red object tucked under one arm.
“I’ll be blowed, that’s a gumfruit,” said Neeps.
So it was: a scarlet gumfruit. The lumpy, bright-red fruit was about the size of a pineapple. The flesh was said to be spongy and bitter; they were no one’s favorite, as far as Pazel knew. Pazel had never seen one aboard a ship: they spoiled quickly and attracted flies.
“Gumfruits come from Ibithraéd,” said Neeps. “My grandmother used to buy ’em for Fifthmoon dinner.”
“Peytr’s from Ibithraéd too,” said Pazel thoughtfully.
“Is he? Pitfire, that’s why he hates me! He thinks my granddad pissed on his granddad.”*
Peytr handed the gumfruit to Rose and took a few steps back. Clearly someone had explained what was wanted of him.
“The worst is behind us,” shouted Rose unexpectedly. “Do you know why that is, men? Because we’ve left something heavy, something suffocating, behind us in the Empire. That something is hope. I see your faces! You would laugh at me if you dared. But look at the old men among you. They are not laughing. They know what you will come to know. Hope was never something to cling to. Not for us, lads. Not for you, or for me.”
He lifted the great scarlet fruit above his head. “Look at this gorgeous thing,” he said. “Brighter than the red lanterns on the Lily of Locostri. Brighter than the girls’ painted nails. Who wants a bite? First come, first served! Come on, no tricks—who wants a great, juicy bellyful of red?”
The eight hundred before him stood silent, for everyone knew that gumfruit rind was toxic.
Rose nodded, satisfied. Then he lowered the fruit and squeezed hard with his left hand, digging in with his fingers. With wrenching motions he tore the rind away in inch-thick chunks, letting them fall carelessly about the deck. Ten seconds, and it was done. Now his hands cradled the inner fruit, cream-white and slippery as a newborn.
“Hope is the rind,” he said. “Beautiful, and poisoned. This is life, naked life, and it’s all we’ve ever really had. Do you hear me, lads? You’ve got to strip that rind away.” His eyes were blazing now as they had not done once since Etherhorde. “I couldn’t do you that service until now—Ott would have stabbed me, if Sergeant Throatcutter over there didn’t do it first. But I’m doing it today—I’m handing you the blary respect you deserve.
“Hope is back there in Simja, back in Ormael and Opalt and Etherhorde and Besq. Hope belongs to somebody else. We’re done with it. And that means I don’t have to lie to you anymore. Fact: we do the Emperor’s bidding or he kills us, and kills our kin. Fact: we’re to cross the Ruling Sea with no trial run, and in the time of the Vortex. Fact: what awaits us in Gurishal is worse, if we’re ever lucky enough to get there.”
Moans began escaping from the onlookers, but Rose spoke over them. “Keep looking at this fruit. Look hard. It’s not a choice of this or something better. We don’t even have the choice of tossing it and going hungry—not unless we want our families nailed up for the birds to pick. Now get over here, Mr. Bourjon, and tell me what you think of gumfruit.”
Peytr jumped; he had been gazing at Rose in blank confusion. “The … the truth, Captain?”
“Gods of Death, boy, the truth!”
“I … I like ’em, sir. Always did. Since I was small.”
Rose looked hard at him, then nodded. Very carefully, the captain passed the wet pulpy fruit into the tarboy’s hands. Turning to face the mob again, he raised his sticky fist before his face and sniffed appraisingly.
“Gumfruit kept his people from starving, through nine known famines,” he said, pointing at the tarboy. “He likes it, d’you hear? When it’s what you’ve got, you learn to like it. And that is how you stay alive! Eat it, Peytr! Show us how it’s done on Ibithraéd!”
By the way the youth ate he might have spent days in preparatory fasting. He anchored his fingers deep in the fruit and tunneled with his mouth, biting, tearing, swallowing, now and then pausing to sop his chin with his shirtsleeve. It was amazing how quickly he diminished the fruit.
“Eat it! Eat it!” The chant began somewhere among the tarboys and was quickly taken up by all the crew. Peytr rose to the occasion, gobbling even faster, barely seeming to breathe.
“The koyfruits we grow on Sollochstol are tastier,” said Neeps.
“Oh shut up,” said Pazel.
In less than five minutes a pulp-smeared Peytr had completed his mission, and nearly every voice on the Chathrand was roaring approval. He gave them a woozy grin. Rose held out his hand for the gumfruit pit, then raised the other for silence once again.
The thumb-sized pit was the same bright scarlet as the rind. Rose held it aloft. His face showed neither mirth nor anger, but his eyes blazed still.
“That’s hope, too, lads,” he said, extending his hand toward them. “Hope when the bitter meal’s finally over, hope at the end of everything. The kind of hope you plant in fair soil and pour sweet water on, year after year. Let an island man tell you: gumfruit trees are kindly things—good shade, sweet spring blossoms. We just might have that kind of hope to look forward to, if we’re as strong and smart as I think we are, which is stronger and smarter than any crew in the history of this grandest of ships. But if you weaken yourselves by dreaming about that hope—never, never.”
He closed his fist around the seed. “We’re off to the Nelluroq, on a voyage of ruin and death,” he said quietly. “Some of us will perish. All of us certainly may. But so long as you count yourself among the living, guard this thought: no one can give you this little red seed but me. Some will lie and claim otherwise, but you know who tells you the truth. Dismissed.”
Six sharp notes from the bell: it was eleven o’clock in the morning. Down on the berth deck, Pazel and Neeps were lending the other boys a hand caulking seams—driving tar-coated bits of old rope, called oakum, into tiny crevices between planks, then painting on hot resin to seal the crack against moisture and decay. The crevices were so tight one needed a mallet and chisel to force the oakum into place. But without such tender care the planks would soon leak; Pazel could touch his tongue to an old seam and taste the salt of the ocean, fighting to get in. The work was never completed: hammer in the oakum, slap on the hot resin, chalk off the plank, trade with your mate when your arm grew tired or the resin-fumes made you too dizzy to aim. Up and down ladders. Up and down the endless curve of the hull. Four times a year for six hundred years, and counting.
“That crafty, cunning, sneaky old beast,” said Pazel, hammering. “He’s got the crew back in his pocket, doesn’t he?”
“He’s a good liar,” Neeps conceded, slapping hot resin over the seam Pazel had just filled.
“He’s a monster,” said Pazel. “He kept an ixchel man locked in his desk, and only brought him out to check his food for poison. He probably made Swellows kill Reyast, too, come to think of it.”
“Poor Reyast,” said Neeps, remembering the gentle tarboy with the stutter. “He would have stood with us for sure. He did stand with us, for a little while. But let me tell you something about lies, Pazel. The best kind, the kind hardest to see through, are the ones that mix a little truth into the recipe. Take Captain Rose, now: he says he’s the only one who can give us hope. Well, that’s nothing but a dog-dainty. But it is true that he’s the only one aboard who’s commanded a boat on the Ruling Sea. No, he didn’t cross her, but he flirted with her and lived to tell the tale.”
“So what?” said Pazel. “I’ll bet a lot of ships have m
ade little darts into the Nelluroq in good weather. How do we know Rose did more than that?”
“The Emperor must think so,” said Neeps, “otherwise he’d have put someone else in charge. Your arm tired yet?”
“No.”
Pazel liked striking the chisel: he could pretend it was Jervik’s skull. And the scent of resin made him think of pine trees in the Chereste Highlands, on summer days long ago. Beside him the wall sizzled like bacon with each stroke of Neeps’ brush.
Pazel shot Neeps a cautious smile. “You did like her, eh?”
Neeps blinked at him. “Who, Marila?” he said, flushing. “Don’t be a clod, mate, I barely spoke to her. I just think she might have come in handy, that’s all. She sure did on the Haunted Coast.”
“She seemed blary smart,” Pazel ventured.
Neeps shrugged. “She was just a village girl. She probably had even less schooling than I did.”
A note of bitterness had crept into Neeps’ voice. Pazel stared at the wall to hide his unease. You could be both smart and unschooled, of course, and he wanted to say so. But how would that sound coming from someone who’d gone to city schools, and been tutored by Ignus Chadfallow?
No, he couldn’t say anything of the kind. And before he could find another way to break the silence it was broken for him by a pair of tarboys approaching from portside. Swift and Saroo were nicknamed “the Jockeys,” for the brothers claimed to be great riders. They were nimble, quiet boys with sharp glances. Rumor held that their father had been a horse thief in Uturphe, and was shot dead in the saddle on a stolen mare.
“Give us them tools,” said Swift. “We’re to relieve you, Uskins’ orders. You’re wanted topside, double quick.”
“Wanted by Uskins?” said Pazel with a groan.
“Not exactly,” said Saroo.
Neeps lathered boiling resin on a final seam. “Who wants us, then?”
Saroo leaned close. “It’s Oggosk,” he said. “Lady Oggosk. She wants to see you in her cabin. Uskins was just passing the word.”
Pazel and Neeps traded startled glances. “Oggosk?” said Pazel. “What can she want with us?”
The Jockeys shrugged, in a way that made it clear they would rather not know. “Just don’t keep her waiting,” Swift advised. “One dirty look from that witch could kill a buffalo.”
Pazel and Neeps handed over their tools. But even as they turned to leave cries broke out in the next compartment.
“You give that blary thing back to me, Coxilrane!”
“Can’t, sir, can’t!”
“Blast you to Bodendel! It’s mine!”
All down the passage boys were turning from their work. The voices drew nearer. Suddenly Firecracker Frix galloped into the compartment in a kind of terror, his long beard flapping and a notebook of some sort tucked under his arm. Behind him came Fiffengurt, barefoot and red with fury, shaking his fists above his head.
“Thief, thief!” he roared. “I’ll tear out your damned beard by the roots!”
Frix apparently believed him: he was running for his life. But as he drew even with Pazel he took a bad step. Groping for balance, his palm slapped the last spot on the wall Neeps had painted with resin. There was an audible sizzle. Frix screamed; the notebook flew from his hands, slid across the deck—and stopped at the feet of Mr. Uskins, who had just entered the passage from the opposite side.
“What’s all this, Second Mate?” he snapped.
“My h-hand—”
Uskins scooped up the book and examined it suspiciously.
“Now, Uskins, don’t involve yourself,” shouted Fiffengurt, closing the distance.
Uskins put his back to the quartermaster. “Mr. Frix?” he demanded.
“It’s his p-private journal, sir,” said Frix, still shuddering on the deck. “Captain Rose knew about it, somehow. He sent me to take it from his quarters—it wasn’t my idea, Mr. Fiffengurt! See here, he gave me the master key and all! Whoopsy!”
Frix dropped the key and scrambled after it. Fiffengurt kicked his prominently displayed backside, then reached out to Uskins for the book. Uskins ignored the gesture. He had opened the journal and was flipping through the sheets of neat blue handwriting.
“There must be two hundred pages,” he said. “You’ve kept yourself busy, Quartermaster.”
“It’s none of your business,” said Fiffengurt. “Hand it over.”
“I doubt I have ever missed her more,” Uskins read aloud with mock reverence. “All the beauties of this world are dust without my Annabel.”
“Devil!”
Fiffengurt lunged for the journal, but Uskins kept his body between the quartermaster and his notebook. He was very nearly laughing. “Carry on, Frix,” he said. “I’ll see that this reaches the captain.”
“But it’s my blary property!” shouted Fiffengurt.
Uskins looked at him with naked malice. “I am glad to hear you say so. First, because you will be held to account for whatever libel or mutinous matter I find in these pages.”
“You find?” said Neeps.
“And second,” Uskins continued, “because to keep such a journal is a crime in itself.” He backed in a circle, holding off the quartermaster with one hand and waving the open book above his head with the other. “Except for letters home, an officer’s every written word is the property of the Chathrand Trading Family. Imperial law, Fiffengurt. We’ll see how Captain Rose decides to punish—Ach!”
Pazel had crept around behind him and grabbed the journal. Uskins was caught off-guard and stumbled over the resin can, which oozed bubbling across the deck. But he kept his grip on the book. Furious, he slammed Pazel against the wall with his shoulder, even as Neeps and Fiffengurt grabbed at the book themselves.
“The lamp! The lamp!” cried the other boys.
Fiffengurt looked up: Uskins must have struck the oil lamp with a wild swing of the notebook. The peg on which it hung had cracked, and looked set to break at any moment. Walrus-oil lamps were sturdy but not indestructible, and fire in a passage awash with flammable resin was too grim a thought to contemplate. Fiffengurt let go of his journal and grabbed the lamp with both hands.
Uskins gave a vicious, whole-bodied tug. Pazel and Neeps held fast—and the journal ripped at the spine. Man and boys fell apart, each side gripping half the ruined book.
The first mate looked at what he held. With an approving snicker he jumped to his feet and ran off along the corridor, leaving sticky resin bootprints.
“That pig got almost everything,” said Neeps, riffling the mangled pages. “This is the empty half of the book.”
“Are you hurt, lads?”
They assured him they weren’t. Fiffengurt inspected them to be sure, moving slowly, as if in a daze. At last he turned to his beloved journal. Out of two hundred pages he was left with three.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Fiffengurt,” said Pazel.
The quartermaster stared at the crumpled sheets, as if expecting them to multiply. Slowly his jaw tightened, his teeth clenched and his hands began to shake. The tarboys shuffled backward.
Fiffengurt turned on his heel and bellowed:
“Uskins! Son of a leprous limp-teated dog-spurned side-alley whore!”
The Lady Oggosk, Eighteenth Duchess of Tiroshi, had for reasons never well explained made her quarters in a little room inside the forecastle house, between the smithy and the chicken coops.
The cabin had been hers for a quarter century, since her first voyage with Captain Rose. When Rose was stripped of his captaincy in 929, Oggosk departed as well, but her last deed was to mark her cabin door with a strange symbol in chalk. According to tarboy legend, anyone who set foot in Oggosk’s cabin from that day forward broke out in chills, boils, warts or mortifyingly confessional song, depending on who was telling the story. There was no proof of these claims. What was certain was that her little cabin had stood untouched for twelve years, until she and Rose returned in triumph to the Chathrand.
The door was painted rob
in’s-egg blue: a strange choice for a woman nearly everyone on the ship was afraid of. Pazel had had time to reflect on this curiosity for some minutes now. Oggosk was making them wait.
“We don’t have to be here,” said Neeps. “We’re not in the service; we don’t have to hop when Uskins says so.”
“Don’t be a fool, mate,” said Pazel. “We may not be tarboys, but we’re sure as Pitfire not Rose’s guests. We’d be better off if they gave us more work to do. If Rose ever gets it into his head that we’re useless, why, he’ll toss us down to steerage with the rest of those poor louts, and only let us out to use the heads.”
Neeps grunted. “I’m blary starved. When we’re done here we have to make Teggatz slip us something to eat. It’s our meal shift right now, you know.”
Pazel smiled. “Your stomach’s growling like a street dog.”
“I want to be strong for our fighting-lesson, that’s all,” said Neeps.
“There’s one thing we have to do before we eat,” said Pazel, his mood darkening. “Track down Greysan Fulbreech.” He glanced about nervously, then whispered: “You know that the minute we’re past Talturi, Thasha’s coming out of hiding.”
“So?”
“Neeps, if Fulbreech has anything—well, shocking—to say about her father, I want us to know first, so we can break it to her gently.”
“Right you are,” said Neeps. Then the ship’s bell began to ring, and he stamped his foot. “That’s eight bells, by damn! What in the Nine Pits can that old crone be—”
The latch clicked. The blue door swung wide, and a pungent odor met their nostrils: incense, ginger, old sweat, dead flowers. “Come in, monkeys,” said Lady Oggosk from the shadows.
They entered, warily lifting aside an old batik curtain, and saw the duchess seated on a black-cushioned chair against the far wall with her enormous cat Sniraga pacing before her, its red tail twitching like a snake. The light was dim: no lamp burned, but a six-inch-square bit of glass planking was set into the ceiling, allowing a little pale, diffuse sunlight to enter from the deck above. “Close the door behind you,” said Oggosk, “and sit down.”
The Ruling Sea Page 19
