Justice and Utu (18 page)

Donna lapsed into abashed silence. Wiri took Evie's arm, leading her to the table.

Hobson tapped the chart. ‘Miss van Zelle, I am sorry to trouble you, but we really do need your aid. We must track Hayes's ship through the night. We will have little to no visibility, and ordinarily I would never sail at night so close to land. But where they go, we must. Wiri believes they will make for the East Cape, and we must somehow interpose ourselves and prevent that. Miss Kyle believes you have the skills to aid us.'

Evie glanced doubtfully at Donna Kyle, who nodded curtly in encouragement.

‘Once they make landfall there, pursuit will be impossible,' Wiri added.

They think I can do this?
Evie took a deep breath and tried to think how she could do what was asked.
Maybe I can …
An idea began to form, based on what she'd done before when tracking Grieve and Venn on land. ‘Do you know anything about their ship?' she asked, seeking some way to visualize it.

Wiri answered the question. ‘Grieve and Venn are sailing with William “Bully” Hayes. I've met Hayes while serving Puarata. He's American, but he lived in Australia and New Zealand for much of his life. He was a blackbirder — someone who kidnapped people to be pressed into work on plantations — and he was notorious for running up debt
while in port, then skipping off to sea to avoid paying. He's owned more ships than I can keep track of, but the sailors in Kororareka told us he's on the
Rona
, which is a barque. She'll be sleeker than us, but she hasn't our firepower. She's built to run, not to fight.'

‘You mean they can go faster than us?'

‘Ordinarily,' Wiri told her.

‘It's not that simple,' Hobson put in. ‘Air and sea are not constant. Winds blow in surges and lulls. Seas can be smooth or rough. Coastal factors affect both. There are hundreds of variables. Identical ships can travel at vastly different rates in the same seas, through different techniques and reading of the conditions.' Hobson sounded so enthusiastic that Evie was reminded of Pete Montgomery, the TV yachting commentator.

‘But I know nothing about sailing,' Evie protested.

‘My men will sail the ship,' Hobson told her. ‘What we need from you is insight as to the shifting of the winds, and the position of our quarry.'

She swallowed, and tried to think it through. At first it seemed too much, but she broke it down to small steps.
Can I read the wind strength and direction? Can I predict it?
The problem started to take shape in her mind, like some kind of three-dimensional puzzle, always in motion. She would need something to work with … She looked down at the chart — it was a large-scale map of the Bay of Islands and the Bay of Plenty. A pair of tiny wooden sailing ships had been positioned on it. She chose one to be the
Rattlesnake
and placed it instinctively. ‘We are here.' Hobson nodded. She placed the other carved ship northeast of them on the chart.
It had a blackbird painted on the mainsail. ‘This is the
Rona
.' Then she pulled out her playing cards, and dealt nine onto the table without looking at them. She knew already, through years of her Gift, that they were the Two through to the Ten of Clubs. The shape of the Club symbol reminded her of puffs of air. It wasn't much of a connection, but it would do for what she had in mind. They slid across the table, until she waved a hand and they rose into the air.

She heard Hobson swear under his breath, and felt Donna leaning forward hungrily.

‘The Ten represents the strongest available gust, then Nine, Eight, and so on,' she told them, making it up as she went, and feeling the cards conform to her will. She dipped her hand into her rune-stone bag and pulled out
Ansuz
, a rune of Odin the Sky Father, and slipped it inside her eyepatch. The rune seemed to glow inside the darkness of her left orb. She then placed
Raido
, Thor the Thunder God's stone, on the chart, to protect them through the oncoming storm. She placed a compass beside it, and found north.

Now …

She closed her one good eye, and lifted her patch. Her vision changed, the shape of
Ansuz
luminous in the darkness. Then her vision opened up, but it was not normal sight. She could see nothing but the cards and the map, stretching all about her, while the cabin and her companions were gone. The Ten of Clubs was over her left shoulder, but it was spinning, falling … Behind it, ten degrees more northerly, more and more black symbols were writing themselves onto the air. The Ten became the Seven. The Two appeared elsewhere. She began to call out words, but didn't stop to
hear them. Other cards floated about her, changing as she sensed the air movements about the ship. Dimly she could hear Hobson's voice, taking what she said and turning her words into a stream of orders for his runners to give to the helmsman. She barely noticed, her mind questing ahead, whilst before her, a blackbird flew, darting beyond her reach in lazy swoops …

 

There was singing faintly emanating from the crew's quarters, and the sound of a fiddle. Rhythmic handclapping sounded, and Mat heard Damien humming along in the bunk above. ‘What's the time?' he groaned.

‘Dunno. Nearly midnight. The guys who ain't actually sailing this tub are partying up.' Damien poked his head over the side of the bunk, head upside-down and hair flopping everywhere. ‘Let's go check it out.'

‘No way!'

‘Nah, c'mon. We gotta fight alongside these guys, so best we make sure they like us, yeah?'

Put like that it made sense, but the sudden curious silence when they climbed through the doorway into the crew's mess was intimidating. Eyes swivelled, smiles froze, words faltered. The fiddle screeched to a jagged halt.

‘Hey!' Damien struck a rock-star pose. ‘Anyone here know “In the Navy”?'

Mat winced, and began to wonder if they'd re-emerge with all their teeth.

The fiddler cocked his head at them. ‘Do you prefer dressing up as the Indian Chief or the Moustache Guy, pansy-
boy?' he asked in a hard voice.

Damien guffawed.
‘Touché
, mate! You got me!' He walked into the middle of the mess as if he owned it. ‘So, is this the bit where you beat the crap out of us, or shall we all just party?'

Mat saw them weighing it up. Seriously.

‘Nah, it's the bit where we make you sing,' the fiddler replied eventually.

‘Then we beat the crap out of you,' someone added, to much hilarity from the crew.

‘Yeah, if you're any good, you get out alive,' someone else suggested.

‘No problem,' Damien announced. He went up to the fiddler and had a low conversation with him, lots of nodding and questioning looks, and a couple of experimental chords.

Mat waited while eyeing the crewmen about him warily, noting the profusion of scars, tattoos and bulging muscles. One of them measured him up, then thrust a mug at him. ‘Rum, lad?'

He took a sip, and winced. More laughter. ‘Get it down ya, lad!' the man smirked. ‘It'll put hairs on yer chest!'

‘Did someone say rum?' Damien asked, weaving his way over, snatching the mug and downing it. He pulled Mat into the middle of the room. ‘Mat, the fiddler is new here, too; they just took him on at Paihia. He's a Kiwi, and he knows some modern stuff. So just do what I do, man!'

Mat looked about at the sea of sceptical expressions and almost bolted. But the fiddler struck up a few notes, and Mat realized he knew the tune.
I know that! I even know the words …

So he and Damien belted out ‘Whaling', and ‘Loyal', and
even ‘Six Months in a Leaky Boat', which had the crew in hysterics. After that it was as if they'd known these men all their lives. They sang along to choruses of the older songs, and got tipsy lessons on dancing the hornpipe. It was three in the morning before the marine sergeant, a brusque and severe-looking man called Thomas Carver, came to quieten them all down.

Mat and Damien returned to their bunkroom humming and feeling a lot better about everything. Mat's abiding memory was of Damien dancing about the mess like a dervish while the crew cheered him on with thumping feet and clapping hands. He drifted off to sleep with the image etched on his brain.

 

Mat woke again, only an hour later. He remembered the singing and dancing … and what it had felt like kissing Evie. He felt a smile crease his lips. But the warm glow was replaced by worry, as he remembered belatedly that she had gone to see the captain on some errand. He stood and stretched, as much as one could in these tiny rat-hole cabins, then went looking for her. He had to step aside as a runner, a little cabin boy, darted around him with a blinding body-swerve, shouting ‘Three points to port!' at the top of his voice. Mat stared after him, then staggered on as the ship lurched and timbers protested. He grabbed the door frame and pulled himself into the captain's cabin as another runner sprinted out.

Evie was standing, eyes closed, her hands moving as if doing tai chi or feeling her way along a passage in the dark. Although the whole ship was being tossed alarmingly, she
was rock-solid to the floor. All about her in the air, playing cards were spinning on slow, spiralling trajectories, constantly in motion. From her mouth issued a stream of words: ‘Four ascending at ninety-two degrees … the Ten's going to sixty-three …' and so on. It was all gibberish to him, but Hobson was lapping it up, translating the information into a stream of commands, and, at each one, the next in the row of young lads zoomed off to relay the order to the helmsman.

‘Steer a further three to port!' Hobson snapped, not looking away from Evie. Another lad darted away.

Mat looked at Wiri, then at his watch. It was after four in the morning. ‘She's been at it all night,' Wiri whispered. ‘She's incredible.'

There was a kind of dim glow about Evie's left eye, and her hair was crackling with so much energy that it was standing on end, giving her a halo that lent her an angelic aspect. Sacred and precious. ‘She is,' he agreed.

Donna Kyle sat on a stool, staring at the girl with an unreadable expression in her eyes.

 

‘What the hell?' A silky voice made harsh by surprise intruded on the trance-like state Evie had entered. A face flashed across her inner vision, a lugubrious visage framed by long silver hair, with big shining eyes.

She flinched, and the cards wavered about her.

‘Ah, you must be Everalda, the seer,' the man said. He was looking down at her as if she were a fish in a glass he was holding. Another man appeared, a plump, smiling face, complacent with success. She knew him — Sebastian Venn.
She felt her control waver. Two of her cards fell to the floor.

‘Yeah, that's her,' Venn drawled. ‘What's she doing?'

‘Trying to follow us,' the first man said in a piqued voice.
Asher Grieve, surely.
She felt her control waver, the cards beginning to dip to the floor. Grieve smiled contemptuously. ‘Desist, girl, lest I rip your remaining eye out.'

She refused to be cowed. Reaching inside her pocket, she pulled out a tarot card, precisely the one she wished for. The World: completeness, assurance, a symbol of her mastery of this place.
I'm the Seer, not they
. ‘This is my place,' she told the two men. ‘Get out!'

There was no struggle, even though she was braced for one. They were simply gone. The fallen cards flew back into place, and she felt the winds outside on her skin again.

I did it! I made them go.
She recalled Donna telling Mat that blocking another's scrying was easy, but it still felt good. There was no time for further self-congratulation, though. ‘The Ten is now behind me, Captain. The Nine is three points left of it, but they're both drifting north.'

‘Take her ten points to starboard!' Hobson shouted to the nearest runner, relief palpable in his voice. He must have sensed her inner struggle. ‘They're making their run southward. Let's sail up under them!'

She let herself smile, as the blackbird at the edge of her sight darted to the right. She almost felt she could reach out and pluck its feathers.

 

Mat was in the bow with a pale Damien as first light smeared the eastern horizon. They'd been sailing all night. Ten hours
at roughly twenty knots. He calculated they must have sailed more than three hundred kilometres, in an arc about the east coast of the North Island, rounding Coromandel in the night and ploughing south across the Bay of Plenty. The night felt like a dream, dominated by his memories of Evie, reading the winds tirelessly as the minutes crawled by. He'd left her an hour ago, too awake to sleep, needing fresh air. Damien had found him ten minutes ago. The lanky teen was splashing cold water over his face, pallid and looking sick, but on his feet. Hotu of the Nga Puhi was beside them, having slept on deck as he'd refused to sleep in the claustrophobic spaces below-decks. Waves were breaking below, sending cascades of spray about them. They were in the lee of the bowsprit — a matronly woman painted gold, one breast bared, one arm pointing forward. She looked so life-like that Mat half-expected her to move.

There was a stir behind them as one of the runner-boys crawled to the top of the stairs and called: ‘Hard south! Hard south!' The boy lay there, spent, but he rallied enough to add: ‘Eyes landward, Cap'n says.'

The cry was taken up, as sunlight burst over the ocean. To their right, the northern Bay of Plenty coastline brooded, coming awake to a golden dawn, shredded clouds torn by a strong northerly. They were only five or six miles from land. An island lay just aft, Motiti Island, off Papamoa Beach. Mat remembered that Ngatoro had once lived there.

Damien touched Mat's shoulder: Hobson was emerging from below, his face lined and haggard, as if haunted by his older self. Evie was with him, clutching his arm as if it were a lifeline. Wiri and Donna emerged behind. They all crowded
into the afterdeck, where the helmsman was blinking in the sunlight.