Red Seas Under Red Skies (49 page)

“'Vast heaving,” she cried. “Secure larboard anchor!”

“Cast to the larboard tack,” came Drakasha's amplified voice; “fore and main topsails!”

More running, more whistles, more commotion. Ezri hopped to her feet atop the capstan and bellowed a quick succession of orders: “Hands aloft to loose fore and aft topsails! Brace mainyards round for the larboard tack! Foreyards braced abox!” There was more, but Locke stopped listening as he tried to make sense of what was happening. The
Poison Orchid
had been drifting by a single anchor in a calm sea, with a light breeze out of the northeast, and she'd drifted down so that the wind was dead ahead. What little he understood of Ezri's orders told him that the ship would be slipping a bit aback, then turning east and bringing the wind over her larboard bow.

“Fore and aft watches, at the rails! Top-eyes, wide awake, now!” Ezri leapt down onto the deck. Dark shapes were surging up the ratlines hand-over-hand; blocks and tackles creaked in the growing darkness, and still more crew were coming up through the hatches to join the tumult. “Scrub watch! Scrub watch, get to the undercastle and stay out of the bloody way!
Not
you two.” Ezri grabbed Locke and Jean as they moved with the
Messenger
's men, and she pointed them aft. “Tool locker, under the starboard stairs abaft the mainmast. Get brooms and sweep all this sand back into its bucket. After you unship the capstan bars.”

They did just that, tedious work by wavering alchemical light, frequently interrupted by busy or discourteous crewfolk. Locke worked with a scowl until Ezri stepped up between him and Jean and whispered, “Don't mind this. It'll make things a hell of a lot easier with your old crew.”

Damned if she wasn't right, Locke thought; a little extra humiliation heaped on Ravelle and Valora might be just the thing to stifle the old crew's resentment.

“My compliments,” he whispered.

“I know my business,” she said brusquely. “See everything back to where you found it, then go to the undercastle and stay there.”

Then she was gone, into the work parties overseeing a dozen delicate operations. Locke returned the brooms to the tool locker, then threaded his way forward with Jean just behind. Overhead, canvas snapped and rolled, ropes creaked as strain was added or adjusted, and men and women called softly to one another as they worked with nothing but thin air for dozens of yards beneath them.

The
Poison Orchid
slid slowly onto the larboard tack. She put the last faint halo of the lost sun behind her, as though sailing out of some ghostly golden portal, and gathered way beneath the first stars of evening, which waxed steadily brighter in the inky eastern sky.

Locke was pleasantly surprised to discover that Jabril had held a spot for him and Jean; not one of the more desirable ones near the entrance to the undercastle, but enough spare deck to squeeze up against the larboard bulkead, in relative darkness. Others with more favorable positions seemed not to begrudge them a moment of space as they crawled and stumbled past. One or two men muttered greetings; at worst, a few, like Mazucca and Aspel, maintained an unfriendly silence.

“Looks like you two really have joined the rest of us galley slaves,” said Jabril.

“Galley slaves is what we'd be, if Ravelle hadn't gotten us outta Windward Rock,” said someone Locke didn't recognize. “May be a dumb fuck, but we should show him fellowship for that.”

Thanks for speaking up when we were being thrown off the ship
, Locke thought.

“Aye, I agree about the dumb fuck part,” said Mazucca.

“And we'll
all
mind the fellowship part,” said Jean, using the slow, careful voice he reserved for people he was trying to avoid hitting. “Orrin's not alone, is he?”

“Dark in here,” said Mazucca. “Lots of us, squeezed in together. You think you can move fast enough, Valora? You think you can stay awake long enough for it to matter? Twenty-eight on two—”

“If it was clear deck between you and me,” said Jean, “you'd piss your breeches the moment I cracked my knuckles.”

“Jerome,” said Locke, “easy. We can all—”

There was the sound of a scuffle in the darkness, and a heavy thud. Mazucca gave a strangled squawk.

“Baldy, you stupid bastard,” hissed an unknown voice, “you raise a hand against them and Drakasha will
kill
you, savvy?”

“You'll make it worse for all of us,” said Jabril. “You never heard of Zamira Drakasha? Piss her off and we might lose our chance to be crew. You do that, Mazucca, you find out what twenty-eight on
one
feels like. Fuckin' promise.”

There were murmurs of agreement in the darkness, and a sharp gasp as whoever had been holding Mazucca let go.

“Peace,” he gasped. “I won't…I won't ruin things. Not me.”

The night was warm, and the heat of thirty men in close confinement rapidly grew stifling despite the small ventilation grating in the middle of the forecastle deck. As Locke's eyes adjusted to the darkness, he became able to pick out the shadowed shapes of the men around him more clearly. They lay or sat flank to flank like livestock. The ship reverberated with activity around them. Feet pounded the forecastle deck; crewfolk moved about and laughed and shouted on the deck below. There was a slapping hiss of waves parting before the bow, and the constant sound of toil and shouted orders from aft.

In time, there was a cursory meal of lukewarm salted pork and half a leather jack of skunkish swill vaguely descended from ale. The food and drink were passed awkwardly through the crowd; knees and elbows met stomachs and foreheads on a continual basis until everyone was dealt with. Then came the equally punishing task of passing jacks and tin bowls back, and then of men crawling over one another to use the craplines. Locke finally settled for good into his sliver of deck space against Jean's back, and had a sudden thought.

“Jabril, did anyone find out what day it is?”

“Twelfth of Festal,” said Jabril. “I asked Lieutenant Delmastro when I was brought aboard.”

“Twelve days,” muttered Jean.

“Yeah,” Locke sighed. Twelve days gone. Not two weeks since they'd set out, with every man here deferring to him and Jean as heroes. Twelve days for the antidote to wane in strength. Gods, the archon…how the hell was he going to explain what had happened to the ship? Some nautical technicality?

“Squiggle-fucked the rightwise cock-swabber with a starboard jib,” he whispered to himself, “when I should've used a larboard jib.”

“What?” muttered Jean and Jabril simultaneously.

“Nothing.”

Soon enough the old instincts of a Catchfire orphan asserted themselves. Locke made a pillow of the crook of his left arm and closed his eyes. In moments the noise and heat and bustle of the men around him, and the thousand noises of the unfamiliar ship, were nothing more than a vague background to his light but steady sleep.

CHAPTER TEN

ALL SOULS IN PERIL

1

BY THE SEVENTEENTH OF FESTAL,
Jean had come to dread the sight and smell of the ship's vinegar as much as he'd come to appreciate his glimpses of her lieutenant.

His morning task, on most days, was to fill one bucket with the foul red stuff and another with seawater, and set to swabbing the deck and bulkheads along the full length of the main deck, at least where he could reach. Fore and aft were long compartments called crew berths, and one would be in use at any given time, crammed with four or five dozen people in and out of hammocks, their snores mingling like the growls of caged beasts. That berth Jean would carefully avoid, instead swabbing out ship's stores (what the crew called the “delicates room,” for its rack of glass bottles under netting), the main-deck hold and armory, and the empty crew berth—though even when empty each berth contained a mess of barrels, crates, and nettings that had to be laboriously shifted.

Once the reek of watered vinegar was fully mingled with the usual belowdecks stench of old food, bad liquor, and all things unwashed, Jean would usually move throughout the lowest two decks, the orlop and the bilge, swinging a large yellow alchemical light before him to help dissipate the miasmas that caused disease. Drakasha was a great one for the health of her crew; most of the sailors pierced their ears with copper to ward off cataracts and drank pinches of white sand in their ale to strengthen their bellies against rupture. The lower decks were lighted at least twice a day, much to the amusement of the ship's cats. Unfortunately, this meant climbing, crawling, scrambling, and shoving past all manner of obstacles, including busy crewfolk. Jean was always careful to be polite and make his obeisance by nodding as he passed.

This crew was always in motion; this ship was always alive. The more Jean saw and learned on the
Poison Orchid
, the more convinced he became that the maintenance schedule he'd set as first mate of the
Red Messenger
had been hopelessly naïve. No doubt Caldris would have spoken up eventually, had he lived long enough to notice.

There seemed to be no such thing, in Captain Drakasha's opinion, as a state of adequate repair for a ship at sea. What was checked or inspected one watch was checked again the next, and the next, day after day. What was braced was then rebraced, what could be mended was remended. The pump and capstan mechanisms were greased daily with fat scraped from the cooking pots; the masts were “slushed” top to bottom with the same brown gunk, for protection against the weather. Sailors wandered in constant, attentive parties, inspecting plank seams or wrapping canvas around rigging where the ropes chafed against one another.

The Orchids were divided into two watches, Red and Blue. They would work in six-hour shifts, one watch minding the ship while the other rested. The Red watch, for example, had duty from noon till the sixth hour of the evening, and would come back on duty from midnight till the sixth hour of the morning. Crew on the off watch could do as they pleased, unless the call of “all hands” summoned them to the deck for some strenuous or dangerous undertaking.

The scrub watch didn't fit into this scheme; the former men of the
Red Messenger
were worked from dawn to dusk, and took their meals after they were dismissed, rather than around noon with the actual crew.

For all their grumbling, Jean didn't get the sense that the Orchids genuinely resented their new shipmates. In fact, he suspected that the ex-Messengers were taking up most of the less interesting chores, leaving the Orchids that much more time to sleep, or mend personal effects, or gamble, or fuck without a hint of shame in their hammocks or under their blankets. The lack of privacy aboard ship was still a major astonishment to Jean; he was neither a prude nor a virgin, but his idea of
the right place
had always involved stone walls and a firmly locked door.

A lock would mean little on a ship like this, where most any noise was a shared noise. There were a pair of men on the Blue watch who could be heard from the taffrail if they were doing it in the forward berth, and a woman on the Red watch who screamed the damnedest things in Vadran, usually just as Jean was drifting off to sleep on the deck above her. He and Locke had puzzled over her grammar and concluded that she didn't actually speak Vadran. Sometimes, her performances were followed by applause.

That aside, the crew seemed to take pride in their discipline. Jean witnessed no fights, few serious arguments, and no out-of-place drunkenness. Beer or wine was had in a respectable fashion at every meal, and by some complicated scheme that Jean had yet to work out, each member of the crew was allowed, about once a week, to go on what was called the Merry Watch, a sort of watch-within-a-watch. The Merry Watch would set up on the main deck, and be allowed a bit of freedom at the ship's waist (especially for throwing up). They could drink more or less as they saw fit, and were excused even from all-hands calls until they'd recovered.

“It's not…exactly what I expected,” said Jean as Ezri stood at the larboard rail one morning, pretending not to watch him touch up the gray paint on the bottom of the ship's smallest boat. She did that, every now and again. Was he imagining things? Was it his quoting Lucarno? He'd avoided quoting anything else at her, even when the opportunity had presented itself. Better to be a mystery, in his book, than to make a cheap refrain of something that had caught her attention.

Thirteen gods, he thought with a start, am I angling myself for a pass at her? Is she—

“Pardon?” she said.

Jean smiled. Somehow he'd guessed she wouldn't mind his speaking without invitation. “Your ship. It's not exactly what I expected. From what I read.”

“From what you
read
?” She laughed, crossed her arms, and regarded him almost slyly. “What'd you read?”

“Let me think.” He dipped his brush in the gray alchemical slop and tried to look busy. “
Seven Years between the Gale and the Lash
.”

“Benedictus Montcalm,” she said. “Read that one. Mostly bullshit. I think he traded drinks for stories off real sailors until he had his fill.”

“How about
True and Accurate History of the Wanton Red Flag
?”

“Suzette vela Ducasi! I know her!”

“Know her?”

“Know
of
her. Crazy old bitch wound up in Port Prodigal. Scribes for coppers, drinks every coin she gets. Barely speaks decent Therin anymore. Just haunts the gutter and curses her old publishers.”

“Those are all the books I can remember,” said Jean. “Not much of a taste for histories, I'm afraid. So, how'd you manage to read everything you have?”

“Ahhh,” she said, tossing her hair backward with a flick of her neck. She wasn't scrawny, thought Jean—no angles on Ezri, just healthy curves and muscle. Had to be healthy, to knock him down as she had, even by surprise. “Out here, the past is a currency, Jerome. Sometimes it's the only one we have.”

“Mysterious.”

“Sensible.”

“You already know a bit about me.”

“And fair's fair, is it? Thing is, I'm a ship's officer and you're a dangerous unknown.”

“That sounds promising.”

“I thought so too.” She smiled. “More to the point, I'm a ship's officer and you're scrub watch. You're not even real yet.” She framed him with her hands and squinted. “You're just a sort of hazy
something
on the horizon.”

“Well,” he said, and, aware that he sounded like a nitwit even as he repeated himself, “ah, well.”

“But you were curious.”

“I was?”

“About the ship.”

“Oh. Yeah, I was. I just wondered…now that I've seen a fair bit of it—”

“Where's the singing, where's the dancing on the yardarms, where's the ale casks fore and aft, where's the drinking and puking sunrise to sunset?”

“More or less. Not exactly a navy, you know.”

“Drakasha
is
former navy. Syrune. She doesn't talk about it much, but she doesn't try to hide her accent anymore. She did, once.”

Syrune, thought Jean, an island empire even more easterly than Jerem and Jeresh; proud and insular dark-skinned folk who took their ships seriously. If Drakasha was one of them, she'd come from a tradition of sea-officers that some said was as old as the Therin Throne.

“Syrune,” he said. “That explains some things. I thought the past was a currency?”

“She'd've let you have that bit for free,” said Ezri. “Trust me, if history's a coin, she's sitting on a gods-damned fortune.”

“So she, uh, bends the ship to her old habits?”

“More like we let ourselves be bent.” Ezri gestured to him to keep painting, and he returned to work. “Brass Sea captains are special. They have status, on the water and off. There's a council of them in Prodigal. But each ship…the brethren sort of go their own way. Some captains get elected. Some only rule when it's time to take arms. With Drakasha…she rules because we know she's our best chance. At anything. They don't fuck around in Syrune.”

“So you keep naval watches, and drink like nervous husbands, and mind your manners?”

“You don't approve?”

“Gods' blood, I damn well approve. It's just tidier than I imagined, is all.”

“You wouldn't call anything we do
naval
if you'd ever served on a real ship of war. Most of our crew have, and this is a slacker's paradise by comparison. We keep our habits because most of us have been aboard other pirate ships, too. Seen the leaks that gain a little bit every day. Seen the mechanisms rusting. Seen the rigging fraying. What good's slacking all the time if the ship comes apart beneath you while you sleep?”

“So you're a prudent bunch.”

“Yeah. Look, the sea either makes you prudent, or it kills you. Drakasha's officers take an oath. We're sworn that this ship goes down in battle, or by the will of the gods. Not for want of work, or canvas, or cord. That's a holy vow.” She stretched. “And not for want of paint, either. Give the whole thing another coat, and look sharp about it.”

Officers. Jean reviewed the
Orchid
's officers as he worked, to keep his mind off Ezri. There was Drakasha, obviously. She kept no watch but appeared when and as she saw fit. She seemed to be on deck at least half the day, and materialized like magic when anything interesting happened. Beneath her, Ezri…dammit, no thoughts concerning Ezri. Not now.

Mumchance, the sailing master, and his little crew of trusted wheel-hands. Drakasha might allow ordinary crewfolk to hold the helm in steady weather, but for any operation of skill, it was Mum and his bunch or nobody. Roughly equal with Mum were the quartermaster—currently assigned to the
Red Messenger
—and the physiker, Treganne, who would likely never admit to being equal with anyone who didn't have a temple with their name on it. Drakasha had the great cabin, naturally, and the four highest officers were allowed little closet rooms in the companionway, canvas-walled things like his old cabin.

Then there was a carpenter, a sailmaker, a cook, and a boatswain. The only privilege of being a petty officer seemed to be the right to boss a few other crewfolk about from time to time. There was also a pair of…under-lieutenants, Jean supposed. Ezri called them her watch chiefs, and they were Ezri when Ezri wasn't around. Utgar had the Red watch and a woman called Nasreen led the Blue, but Jean had yet to meet her, since she'd been entrusted with the
Messenger
's prize crew.

It seemed that all the menial, back-and-forth mucking about was giving Jean—and the rest of the scrub watch—the chance to learn the ship's hierarchy, along with its layout. He supposed that was by design.

The weather had been consistent since their capture. Steady light breezes from the northeast, clouds that came and went like a tavern dancer's favor, endless low waves that made the sea gleam like a million-faceted sapphire. The sun was a pounding heat by day, and enclosure stifled them at night, but Jean was conditioned to this work by now. He was as brown as Paolo and Cosetta. Locke, too, seemed to be making the best of it—tanned and bearded and genuinely wiry, for once, rather than merely slender. His size and an unwise boast about his agility had gotten him assigned to mast-slushing duty, foremast and main, each and every morning.

Their food still came late after each long day, and though charmless it was more than ample. They had a full liquor ration now, too. As much as Jean hated to admit it, even to himself, he didn't mind this turn of events so very much. He could work and sleep in confidence that the people ruling the ship knew their business; he and Locke no longer had to run everything on improvisation and prayer. If not for the damned log, with its relentless record of day after day passing them by, day after day of the antidote waning, it would have been a good time. A good and timeless interval, with Lieutenant Delmastro to puzzle over.

But neither he nor Locke could stop counting the days.

2

ON THE
eighteenth of Festal, Bald Mazucca snapped.

He'd given no warning; though he'd been sullen in the undercastle each night, he was one among many tired and short-tempered men, and he'd made no further threats toward anyone, crew or scrub watch.

It was dusk, two or three hours into the Blue watch's duty, and lanterns were going up across the ship. Jean was sitting next to Locke by the chicken coops, unraveling old rope into its component yarns. Locke was shredding these into a pile of rough brown fibers. Tarred, this stuff would become oakum, and be used for everything from caulking seams to stuffing pillows. It was a miserably tedious job, but the sun was almost gone and the end of duty for the day was nearly at hand.

There was a clatter from somewhere near the undercastle, followed by swearing and laughter. Bald Mazucca stomped into sight, carrying a mop and a bucket, with a crewman Jean didn't recognize at his heels. The crewman said something else that Jean didn't catch, and then it happened—Mazucca whirled and flung the heavy bucket at him, catching him right in the face. The crewman fell on his backside, stunned.