by R J Barker
It was a kindness, really.
“Want?” it said again, quietly. Then it softly opened and closed its beak and climbed down from where it hung on the bars of the cage. “What does gullaime want?”
Meas stepped up to Joron. He waited for the reprimand, but she turned from him to the gullaime.
“I would be interested to know this too, Windtalker.”
“Great shipwife,” spat the birdmage, “asks what gullaime want?” It seemed to shrink down into itself. “But gullaime serve, all know gullaime serve.” And was it bitterness in that otherworldly voice, spoken without lip or true tongue? Could Joron really know what the inflections such a creature gave its voice meant?
“Maybe gullaime do serve, and that is the way of it on most ships.” Meas left a pause, a long one. “But as Joron has reminded me, this is not a normal ship. So maybe things on Tide Child will not be done the normal way.” Something inside Joron glowed a little at the faint praise contained in Meas’s words. “So, Gullaime, what is it you want?”
It squawked quietly and thoughtfully, more to itself than to Meas or any of the watching crew, and as if in reply Black Orris squawked back at it from his perch on Joron’s shoulders:
“Arse!”
Silence.
“String,” said the gullaime, the word slow from its mouth. “Want string.” Then it tipped its head to seaward and thought a little more, before adding, “And dust.” Another pause. “A lot of dust.” A squawk of excitement. “And cloth and needles and dust . . .” Then it was reeling off a list of things, strange and seemingly pointless things, some everyday, some extremely rare, and for the life of him Joron could not work out what the beast could want with any of it. But Meas listened and nodded, and when the creature took a breath, for it showed no sign of stopping, she interrupted.
“String, dust, cloth and needles, these things I can do; some of the other things are harder to find. But trust blows both ways. You must prove yourself to me.”
“How?” It tipped its head on one side. Opened its beak and snapped it shut.
“While we have been speaking, my crew have raised the staystone. All that holds us here is lack of wind.”
“You want wind?”
“Ey,” she said. “I understand you have not visited a windspire for a long time. We will take you ashore to the spire above Bernshulme and allow you to breathe it and—”
“No need!” squawked the gullaime and it raised its featherless wings inside the cage. Heat washed over the ship, and Joron felt like someone had clapped hands over his ears, so quick was the change in air pressure. The black sails of Tide Child cracked and shuddered in the sudden gusts. For a moment Meas was shocked at the power the beast conjured up. Then she was reacting.
“Oarturner!” she shouted. “Oarturner! To the rump of the ship!” They were moving already, Tide Child listing and creaking as the wind brought by the gullaime hit, and the ship began to move smoothly and swiftly forward, without thought to direction. Meas was running for the oar as was Barlay. “Steer us landward. Aim for the harbour entrance,” she shouted. Now the wind was howling around the ship, and Joron knew there was danger, but the look on his shipwife’s face contained nothing but exhilaration as she threw herself against the oar, laughing, bringing Tide Child round to point his beak at the open sea. They flew out of Bernshulme harbour like a thief leaving the scene of a crime, and not one deckchild in the harbour or woman or man of the rock cheered their passage.
Though you would not have known it from the shouts of of joy from those aboard.
It seemed to Joron the ship was somehow lighter. He did not understand why – it carried more crew, more cargo, more weight than ever before – but the black ship skipped across the waves, and not only when the gullaime brought the wind. The birdmage’s magic lasted only until they were out of the harbour, and then the gullaime turned its head to Meas and gave her an emphatic nod, as if to say, Well, there you go. Doubt no more. Then it sat down in its cage amid the straw and filth, and the breeze coming off Bernshulme picked up where the creature left off.
Meas wandered over to the beast.
“When was the last time you were at a windspire to charge the strength within you, Windtalker?”
“Six times the cold eye of night opens and closes,” it said quietly.
“Six months?” She put a hand on the bars. “Six months and you still conjure a wind to bring us out of the harbour? Most of your kind would not last a week.”
It stood then, raising itself from sitting without needing to steady itself with elbow or beak. Standing, it was of a similar height to Meas.
‘Hurts,” said the gullaime and stroked its chest with a wingclaw, “but I am not most. Not most.”
Meas stood back.
“We shall find you land and windspire the first chance we get,” she said. “And the other things you ask for, I shall have Deckkeeper Twiner find them.” The creature’s head shot round, unerringly finding Joron even though it was blind. Then Meas opened the door of the cage and stood to one side. It scuttled out, across the slate on all fours and down the stairs to the underdeck, watched by all.
The sight made Joron shudder, but the rest of the crew seemed inured to the gullaime; to them it was just a part of the furniture, as much a fixture of the ship as the turning oar, spines or spars. But to him it was something dark, unnatural. As a child he had dreamed he heard the storms talking to him, and his father had told him to put such thoughts aside, that nothing good could come of them and that if he spoke of them he was likely to find himself floating blue above a ship as a corpselight.
And then what would I do, Joron? Left all alone without my boy? But how could he not be reminded of such things when a creature that could control the winds with just its thoughts walked the same slate as he did?
They flew across the sea and Skearith’s Eye closed on them. The lights of the town were slowly absorbed by the night, going from many to a few to a single fuzzy glow that Joron supposed, at least to some of the crew, must be sad to see vanish, though he was not one of them. Then Skearith’s cold bones lit the sky, a myriad glowing messages for the courser and the shipwife who huddled below, charting Tide Child’s course. How had he found himself here? Officer on a ship of the dead, a ship of betrayal on his way to meet Gaunt Islanders.
How could that even be?
Traitors among his own kind he could almost understand – to meet more Hundred Islanders bent on stopping war, well, that would make some sense. But Gaunt Islanders? They were little more than animals, given to eating their own children if none from the Hundred Isles were available. Masters of the underhand, reavers and murderers. But Meas had not even blinked at the idea of working with them.
How could that be?
Was that what condemned her?
And how would the crew react?
Would Meas try to hide from these rough women and men that they worked with the enemy? The people they most hated and feared would fly ships alongside them and they would have to trust them. How could they? No matter how lucky Meas may be, they surely would not follow her in this.
But without Gaunt Islanders ready to stop fighting, how could there be this peace she talked of?
Joron took a deep breath.
It was not his problem; it was hers. And maybe, if in the meantime he could learn as much as possible from her, when the time came and her treachery was unmasked, he would be able to steer the ship. He would have Mevans and some of her old crew on his side, he was sure. They seemed to like him. Then there was Anzir. She would support him. He only need prove himself and . . .
He cut those thoughts off. Why plan? He walked the slate deck of a black ship. What point in planning? There was only living. Doing and moving and being.
With that in mind he set himself to the first of his tasks, one he had decided upon himself. He would remember the names of those who served under him.
Some were easy: the bonemaster, Coxward, was a hard man to forget. As was Meas’s
hatkeep and purseholder, Mevans. And Solemn Muffaz – a Maiden-cursed man was not hard to recall – he would not forget the deckmother, there to keep discipline aboard and dole out what punishments were needed. Farys, the burn-scarred girl, was now bowsell of the underdeck, and he realised that there was a little bit of pride in him at this, for he had chosen her. They had a seakeep, Fogle, but Meas had warned him the woman was likely to fall into drink and asked him to watch for those who showed some skill with the ship, should the need arise for a new one.
She had chosen her underdeck officers from all over the ship, not just from her own people, knowing that to mix her own with those already here and those brought from the hulks was more likely to bond the crew like dovetail joints in bone, the crews slotting into one another and becoming one. The two wingwrights, he could not remember their names, one from the old crew, one from Meas’s. What were they called? He would find out. Gavith – there was a name he knew. The heartbroken cabin boy had somehow found himself a friend in Solemn Muffaz, a man who had murdered his own wife. The same misery from different mirrors, he suspected.
As if hearing Joron think his name, Gavith appeared, eager as a chick for food, at his side.
“Mea—” he began and then stopped, frowning at himself. “I mean the shipwife wants you, D’keeper.”
“Very well.” He turned. “Barlay, the rump is yours until D’older Kiveth comes up. Keep us on this course.”
“Ey, D’keeper.” Joron listened for some hint of resentment but it did not come. Barlay only stared forward, her big hands wrapped around the steering oar as if his order came with years of experience. He made his way into the underdeck with a step that was a little bit lighter.
In the underdeck of Tide Child Joron ducked beneath the overbones and wove between the swinging hammocks of the crew. Many were occupied, bodies groaning and snuffling in sleep, the underdeck thick with the warm scent of too many humans crammed into a confined space. Wanelights glowed along the sides of the hull, but he stepped gingerly, avoiding those chests or packs that had yet to be stowed correctly. Meas had allowed her tired crew a little leeway, though made clear that from the moment they woke tomorrow they would work like skeer looking for carrion to deliver the type of ship she expected – an efficient fighting ship.
He knocked gently on the door of the great cabin and put his head around the door. In the gloom its floor and walls shone, almost magical in their paleness. The faces of Meas and the quiet courser Aelerin were like planets orbiting her desk, eclipsing one another, becoming one then two then one again.
“Come,” said Meas gently, and he let himself in. Meas’s desk was once more comfortable in its place in the floor – Joron noticed Bonemaster Coxward had done nothing to fill the indentations the desk had worn – and it was covered in charts, unrolled and held in place with all manner of things. Here a knife driven into the top of the desk, there a heavy shell of the type he knew contained a creature which shot poisonous spines. A stone, seemingly nothing odd about it but too heavy to have found its way accidentally aboard the ship. A model boneship held down another corner. The charts had been laid out so the whole of the Scattered Archipelago lay under the dim light of glowing bird skulls.
“You look struck, Joron,” said Meas. “Have you never seen a chart before? It is a sight, is it not?”
“Ey, it is a sight,” he said. And it was. He had never thought of his world as square. Like all who knew navigation, he knew the world was curved and they lived on half of the sphere, hemmed in by fearsome storms. What, if anything, was beyond them was unknown to woman or man – most believed the Hag’s lands of the dead. But drawn on charts the world was flat, made somehow less by the pens of those who sought to control it on paper.
Running diagonally across the centre of the square was Skearith’s Spine, a line of huge mountains of solid granite rising like blades from the water, far too steep to climb in most places. His father had told him they had been connected once, a solid wall between the civilised people of the Hundred Isles and the animals in human form of the Gaunt Islands, but time and sea changed all things. Now the spine was a shattered chain with great gaps between its peaks through which the ships of the Gaunt Islands came to raid, and the ships of the Hundred Isles passed to revenge.
On the landward side of the charts, taking up what Joron thought of as the top half, the better half, the Hundred Isles were scattered over the sea. He picked out the crescent of Shipshulme, roughly in the centre on the line where the seasons were most clement. He was seized by an urge to count the islands. Were there really a hundred of them? Or were there more? Or less? Some he knew, could name just by sight. Others, names written beside serrated coastlines in a delicate hand, sounded mysterious and strange, and he knew there were as many colours and shapes of people and different cultures in the Hundred Isles as there were beasts that killed in the sea. All bound together by the need to defend themselves from the Gaunt Islanders, whose lands occupied the other half of the map – the cold, uncivilised half.
Were there really fewer islands over there? Or was it only that the women and men who made the charts knew so much less about the Gaunt Islands? They were bigger than all but Shipshulme, that was definitely true, and he wondered if that was why the Gaunt Islanders were more singular in their culture, less colourful and fewer. Perhaps that was why their dark culture of raiding and murder seemed universal among them. They were a people who took the easy ways: take rather than give, using mortar rather than learning the patient art of stone laying.
And yet . . .
And yet they worshipped the same goddesses, saw Skearith’s Eye in the same sky and had not been struck down by the Women of the Sea for their ways, vile though they were. Maybe those who said the Hag only wanted bodies and cared not where they came from were right.
The Gaunt Islands’ capital, Sparehaven, was roughly on the same line as Bernshulme, so had similarly clement weather and calm seasons. Even the placing of their capital was stolen from the Hundred Isles, for all knew they had once kept their capital up near the Northstorm, the better to test their women and men against the fierceness of the winds and seas.
“Are you listening to me, Joron?” He was back in the room, the spinning map of his mind fading.
“I? No, Shipwife. My apologies.” Once he would have lied. But not now. “I have never seen the entire world laid out so.”
“Well,” said Meas, “I can still remember the spell it cast on me, so I can forgive you this once. Never again though, Deckkeeper, right?”
“Yes, Shipwife.”
“Good. Aelerin, you may leave now. Thank you for your help and get what sleep you can.”
“Thank you, Shipwife.” The courser spoke in little more than a whisper.
Meas watched them leave.
“How much have you told them?” asked Joron.
“Very little,” Meas said quietly, “only the route we must take, and they go away to think on it. We head south now to rendezvous with the Gaunt Islander ships at Skeerpass here.” She pointed at the map. “According to Indyl Karrad, the arakeesian should be heading up Flensechannel. Now, that’s only ten hunths across. With three ships we can cover that. One of us should sight the arakeesian.”
“If it exists,” said Joron.
“I have known Kept Indyl Karrad be many things, Deckkeeper, not all of them pleasant, but he is rarely wrong. And as he ages and loses his looks and his strength, it becomes more important that he provides good intelligence if he is to keep his position. The Bern do not tend to suffer the Kept past their prime. The lucky vanish to some island to enjoy what money they have hidden away, the foolish die in duels they are too old to fight, and the clever find other ways to make themselves useful.”
“Or become a favourite.”
“That may be the riskiest course to take of them all. Bern are often fickle and cruel.”
“You do not count yourself among them.”
“There are no stretch marks on my belly, Joron. My body
may be unmarred by Skearith’s curses but I have no children to my name. What honour I have I earned on the slate of a boneship, not on a Bern’s chair.”
“But your mother—”
“—put me on this ship,” she said, and that conversation was over, the subject clearly never to be raised again.
“If I may ask a question, Shipwife?” said Joron. “It has been bothering me.” She looked hard at him, and he was sure she was weighing up the possibility of him sweeping back, tidewashed, to the subject of her mother like flotsam on a beach. Then deciding he would not. That he was either too sensible or cowardly.
“Ask.”
“The black ships we go to meet . . .” He said it so quietly even he could barely hear his voice. Meas had to lean in close. She smelled of clean clothes and honest sweat. “They are Gaunt Islanders. How can we trust them?”
“Because we must, Deckkeeper, and do not believe all you have been told of the Gaunt Islanders. Remember you only hear of them from the mouths of those that want you killing them.”
“Their raids are not rumours.” This came out more harshly than he had expected. She paused before replying.
“No, they are not, but neither are ours on them. My advice is to judge them on who they are when you meet them, rather than on what you have heard from those to whom they are only stories.”
“The stories are what worry me. I work to your order, and if there is good reason for this, well, then I will believe what you say, but the crew—”
“—will never meet them, Joron. Never. Mevans and Solemn Muffaz will row us over to the Gaunt Island ships – they can be trusted. When aboard the Gaunt Islanders’ ships we will be treated as though we are of their islands. If the Gaunt Islander shipwives come aboard Tide Child, we will treat them as though they are from the Hundred Isles. The accents and language are not too dissimilar, our clothing barely any different. That is the great advantage of a ship of the dead, Deckkeeper: anyone may become his shipwife. The fact that no one will have heard of those who command will not be suspicious.”
