Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb
He doubted the man heard him. Sorcor had already left his side and was shouting orders to deckhands on his way back to the helm.
“Let me take you back to the cabin,” the ever-present whore said from behind his shoulder. He had just been about to tell her to do that. Now, of course, he could not. He'd have to wait until she believed it was his own idea, or until he could think of a good reason why he had to go there. Damn her! His good leg was beginning to tire, and the bad one just dangled there, a hot heavy weight of pain.
“Retrieve my stick,” he ordered her. It pleased him to see her chase it across the wave-washed deck. At the same time, he noted that she definitely had her sea-legs now. There was nothing clumsy about her. Had she been a man, he'd have said she had the makings of a good sailor.
In that abrupt change so characteristic of these waters, the rain squall hit them. Torrents sheeted down over the ship, while the wind's direction seemed to switch almost constantly. He could hear Sorcor's bellowed commands to the deck crew. What had looked to be a simple little blow was now building up to something else entirely. There was always a current in Hawser Channel, and in some tides it could be difficult, but now the storm wind conspired with that current to send them racing. The liveship fled ahead of them. He watched her, expecting her to take in sail. Sorcor had their hands reefing canvas. Storm and current were driving them along swiftly enough without giving the treacherous winds anything extra to push on. Not far ahead was Crooked Island. To the east of the island was the better passage. The liveship would certainly take it. To the west of the island was how they would have to go. They'd use both storm and current to race ahead of the liveship and cut her off. It would be tricky, and no mistake there. He wasn't sure they'd make it. Well, he doubted he had long to live anyway. He might as well die on his own deck if he couldn't do it on the deck of a liveship.
Sorcor had taken the wheel himself; Kennit could tell it by the way the Marietta seemed suddenly to relish each challenging wave. He squinted his eyes against the downpour and tried to find their quarry again. For the space of three waves he could not see her. Then he spotted the liveship at the same time as he heard her distant scream.
She was taking the storm badly, her untended sails pushing her awkwardly against each wave. As Kennit watched in horror, she slid down the trough of a wave, disappeared, and then a moment later wallowed into view again. His straining eyes could pick out figures of men dashing about her dimly lit decks, lots of men, but no one seemed to be doing anything to save her. He gave a groan of despair. To get this close to capturing a liveship, only to see her go down right before his eyes because of her own crew's incompetency-it was too bitter to bear.
“Sorcor!” he bellowed through the storm's blast. He wouldn't be able to wait until they could cut her off. As she was going now, she'd end up on the rocks. “Sorcor! Catch her up and ready a boarding party of good seamen. ” The rain and wind snatched the words from his mouth. He tried to work his way aft, holding to the rail and hopping along on his good leg. Each jarring motion felt as if he'd plunged his stump into boiling oil. Suddenly he was shaking with cold as well. The waves were running taller. As each wave broke, he saw the salt water rushing towards him and could do nothing save clutch tighter to the rail. Eventually one swept his tired leg out from under him. For an interminable moment he clung desperately as the water washed over his body and out the scuppers again. Then Etta had him, carelessly seizing hold of him with no mind for his injured leg at all. She wrapped one of his arms around her shoulders and hoisted him up, gripping him around the chest.
Page 310
“Let me take you inside!” she begged him.
“No! Help me get back to the wheel. I'll take the helm; I want Sorcor to lead the boarding party himself. ”
“You can't board another ship in this weather!”
“Just take me aft. ”
“Kennit, you should not even be out on the deck tonight. I can feel your fever burning you up. Please!”
His rage was instantaneous. “Do you completely discount me as a man? My liveship is out there, her capture is imminent, and you wish me to go lie down in my cabin like an invalid? Damn you, woman! Either help me to the helm, or get out of my way. ”
She helped him, a nightmarish trip across a deck that pitched with the fury of the storm. She hauled him up the short ladder as if he were a sack of potatoes. There was anger in her strength, and when his stump knocked against a rung, near stunning him with pain, she offered no apology. At the top she hauled on his arm as if it were a sheet, until she had it draped across her shoulders. Then she stood up under his weight and dragged him to the wheel. An incredulous Sorcor shook water from his eyes and stared at his captain.
“I'll take the helm. Our liveship's in trouble. Prepare a boarding party, as many sailors as raiders. We'll need to overtake her swiftly, before she gets too far into Hawser Channel. ”
Far ahead of them, they caught yet another glimpse of the liveship as the seas lifted her high. She sailed like a derelict now, wind and waves pushing her where they pleased. A trick of the wind brought her despairing shriek to their ears as she dived down into a trough of water.
She was headed to the west of Crooked Island.
Sorcor shook his head. He had to shout over the storm. “There's no catching up with her the way she's sailing. And even if we had the crew to spare, we couldn't board her in this storm. Give her up, sir! There'll be another one along. Let that one go to her fate. ”
“I am her fate!” Kennit roared back at him. A vast anger rose in him. All the world and everyone in it opposed him in his quest. “I'll take the wheel. I know that channel, I took us through there before. You work with the crew to put on a bit of sail so we can catch her up. Help me but overtake her and try to run her onto the shoals. And if nothing is to be done then, I'll give her up!”
They heard her cry out again, a long drawn-out scream of despair, haunting in its eeriness. The sound hung long in the air. “Oh,” Etta exclaimed suddenly with a shudder as it finally died away. “Someone save her. ” The words were almost a prayer. She glanced from one man to the other. Rain had slicked her hair flat to her skull. The water ran like tears in streams down her face. “I'm strong enough to hold the wheel,” she proclaimed. “If Kennit stands behind me and guides my hands, we can keep the Marietta on course. ”
“Done,” Sorcor replied so promptly that Kennit instantly realized that had been the man's true objection all along. He didn't think Kennit could stand on one leg and still handle the ship's wheel.
Grudgingly he admitted Sorcor was probably right. “Exactly,” he said, as if it had been his intent all along. Sorcor made room for them. It was an awkward transfer, but Etta eventually had her hands on the wheel. Kennit stood behind her. He set one hand on the wheel to aid her, and clasped her with his other arm to keep his balance. He could feel the tension in her, but was also aware of her pent excitement. For a moment, it was as if in clasping Etta he embraced the ship herself.
“Tell me what to do!” she called over her shoulder.
“Just hold it steady,” he told her. “I'll tell you when you need to do anything else. ” His eyes followed the silvery liveship as she fled before the wind.
He clasped her close to him, and his weight against her back was not a burden, but a shelter from the wind and rain. His right arm wrapped her, his hand gripping her left shoulder. Still, she was frightened. Why had she ever said she would do this? Etta gripped the spokes of the ship's wheel tightly, so tightly her knuckles began to ache. She set her arms stiff to oppose any movement the ship might suddenly make. All around her there was only darkness and driving rain and rushing wind and water. Up ahead she could suddenly see flashes of silver-white water as waves dashed against barnacled rocks. She could not tell what she was doing; she could steer the ship directly into a rock and never know until they struck. She could kill them all, every man aboard.
&n
Page 311
It was his lover's voice he spoke with, small and breathless, warm with encouragement. She had never felt closer to him than now, sharing his love of the ship that he guided through the storm. Never had she felt stronger, as she clasped the wooden spokes of the wheel and held the Marietta's nose into the waves. Aloft, she could hear Sorcor calling to his deckhands. They were reefing in some sails in a pattern she still found incomprehensible, but which she suddenly found herself resolved to understand. For she could understand it. And she could do it. That was what Kennit's arm around her, his weight against her back, and his soft voice in her ear were telling her. She squinted her eyes against the driving rain. Suddenly the cold and the wet were simply a part of this, not pleasant, no, but not something to fear or avoid for their own sakes. They, like the wind, were a part of her life now. A life that was carrying her forward as swiftly as the current carried the ship, shaping her every day into a new person. A person she could respect.
“Why cannot it always be like this?” she asked him at one point.
He feigned surprise and asked in a louder voice, “What? You prefer the storm that sweeps us toward the Damned Rocks to easy sailing on peaceful waters?”
She laughed aloud, embraced by him and the storm and this new life he had plunged her into. “Kennit, you are the storm,” she told him. In a quieter voice she added to herself, “And I prefer me as I am when I race before your winds. ”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - DAY OF RECKONING
THERE WERE, WINTROW KNEW, SOME RELIGIONS THAT TAUGHT OF PLACES WHERE DEMONS REIGNED AND HAD the power to torture men endlessly. The ship, caught in the press of wind and rain, populated with two-legged creatures that shrieked and struggled with one another, seemed such a netherworld. The scriptures of Sa contained no belief in such a place. Men created their own torments, Wintrow believed, not the benevolent Parent of All, who only viewed such things with grief. This night on this ship, he had come to grasp in its fullness the truth of Sa's teaching. For here they were, one and all humans, each one a creature of Sa. Yet it was not the howling wind or the stabbing rain that raced through the ship shedding blood and tearing life free of bodies. No. Only the humans aboard the ship did that, and only to one another. This was not Sa's doing. There was nothing of Sa in this perdition.
From the moment Sa'Adar had thrown the lantern at Gantry, it had been out of Wintrow's hands. He had not started this carnage; this slaughter was not his doing. He could not even recall making a decision, only that he had followed Sa'Adar and helped him unshackle slaves. It was the right thing to do. More right than trying to warn his father and crew-mates? Don't ask that question, don't let that question exist. These deaths were not his fault. Over and over, Wintrow told himself that. Not his fault. What could one boy do to stop this torrent of hatred once it had broken loose? He was just a leaf caught up in a storm wind.
He wondered if Gantry had felt the same way.
He and Sa'Adar had been freeing the map-faces, deep in the bottom-most hold of the Vivacia, when they heard the yells from above. In their haste to join in the fray, the map-faces had literally trampled over him. Sa'Adar had led them with the lantern. Wintrow had been left behind in the pitch black, frightened and disoriented. Now he groped his way through the filthy holds, clambering over the bodies of slaves either too weakened or scared to join in the rebellion. Others milled in the confusion, calling to one another, demanding to know what was happening. He pushed his way through them and groped his way around them, and still he could not find the companionway up to the hatch. He knew every inch of this ship, he told himself. But suddenly the Vivacia had become a black maze of death and stench and frightened people. On the deck above him he heard running feet, and cries of both anger and fear. Screams of death, too.
Then another scream burst out, one that rang within the hold and wakened echoing cries of terrors in the churning slaves. “Vivacia,” he gasped to himself, and then, “Vivacia!” he called out to her, praying she could hear him, and know he was coming to her. His groping hands suddenly met the ladder and he flung himself up it.
As he emerged onto the deck into a driving rain he stumbled over the first body of a crewman. Mild was trapped in a half-closed hatch. In the dimness he could not tell how he had been killed, only that he was dead. He knelt by him, hearing the sounds of fighting elsewhere in the ship, but capable of comprehending fully only this death. Mild's chest was still warm. The sluicing rain and flying spray had already chilled his hands and face, but his body gave up its warmth more slowly.
Others were dying now, slaves and crewmen. Vivacia lived it all, he suddenly recalled. She felt it all, and alone.
Page 312
Wintrow was on his feet and stumbling towards her before he knew what he was doing. In the waist, some of the crewmen had been sleeping in crude canvas shelters. The wind and rain there had been preferable to the thick stink of the lower decks. Now the tent was collapsed, and wind and rain tore at it while men tore at each other. Manacle chains were suddenly weapons. Wintrow dodged through the blood-crazed fighters, shouting, “No! No! You have to stop this, the ship won't take it! You have to stop!” No one heeded him. There were men down on the deck, some squirming and some still. He jumped over them. He could do nothing for them. The only person he could possibly aid was the ship, who now screamed his name into the night. Wintrow tripped over what might have been a body. He scrabbled back to his feet, evaded a man who clutched at him, and groped his way forward through the rain and the dark of night until his hands found the ladder to the foredeck.
“Vivacia!” he called, his voice a thin and pitiful thing in the rising storm. But still she heard him.
“Wintrow! Wintrow!” she cried mindlessly, shrieking his name as a nightmare-plagued child calls for her mother. He clambered up on the foredeck, only to be driven back as the Vivacia plowed wildly through a sea. For a moment all he could do was grasp the rung of the ladder and fight for air. In the next space between waves, he was up and dashing foolishly forward. His hands grasped the forward rail. He could not feel her, could see her only as a shadow before him. “Vivacia!” he cried to her.
For an instant she did not answer. He gripped the railing hard and reached for her with all his might. Like warm hands clasping on a cold night, her awareness joined gratefully with his. Then her horror and shock flowed into his mind as well.
“They've killed Comfrey! There's no one on the wheel!”
Figurehead and boy plunged into cold salt water. The wizardwood deck slid under his grasping fingers. In the dark he shared her knowledge and despair even as he fought for his own survival. He felt the widespread death throughout her, and knew, too, the lack of control she felt as the storm winds drove her forward into the towering waves. Her crew had been driven from their duties. Barricaded in the stern-castle were some who fought for their lives. Others were dying slowly on the decks they had manned. As lives winked out, it was as if Vivacia were losing pieces of herself. Never before had he sensed how immense was the water and how small the boat that preserved his life. As the storm waves ran off her decks, he managed to stand. “What should I do?” he demanded of her.
“Get to the wheel!” she cried to him through the wind. “Get control of the rudder. ” She raised her voice in a sudden roar. “Tell them to stop killing each other, or they'll all die. All of them, I swear it!”
He turned back tow
They plunged again into a wave. The wall of water hit him from behind, and he was suddenly flying free with it, no deck, no rigging, nothing, only the water that offered a yielding resistance to his scrabbling hands. He might already be overboard and not even know it. He opened his mouth to scream and sucked in salt water instead. In the next instant the water slammed him against the port railing. He caught at it and held, despite the water's best efforts to carry him over the side. Right next to him a slave was not so lucky. He struck the railing, teetered and then went over the side.
The water ran off through the scuppers. On the deck, men thrashed like landed fish, choking and spitting seawater. The moment he could, Wintrow was back on his feet and struggling aft. Like an insect, he thought, in a puddle, struggling mindlessly only because live things always tried to stay alive. Most of the others who remained on the deck were clearly not sailors by the way they flung themselves at railings and ropes and grasped tight. They seemed just as shocked by the next dousing wave. A manacle key must have been found, for some were entirely free of chains, while others still wore their fetters as familiarly as their shirts. More faces peered up fearfully from the open hatches, shouting advice and questions to the groups on deck. As each mammoth wave passed, they ducked back to avoid the dousing, but seemed to take no care for how much water flooded down into the ship. Bodies of both slaves and crew washed back and forth in the waist with the wallowing of the ship. He stared at them incredulously. Had they fought for their freedom only to die by drowning? Had they killed all the crew for nothing?