Blue Sea Burning (7 page)

“So would Warty.”

“Aye . . . That he would.”

Quint's eyes crinkled with sorrow, but he didn't shrink from Healy's withering stare.

Finally, the captain spoke. “Come look at my ship.”

“THAT'S A BIG BITE,
that is.”

We were down in the gloomy main hold of the
Grift,
wedged into the aisle between the port hull and the massive pile of water barrels that filled most of the space. Quint was standing on a barrel, examining the ragged mix of hammered planks, grain sacks, oakum, and pitch plugging the two-foot-wide hole that had nearly sunk us on the voyage in.

It had been stabilized, but not truly fixed, and seawater was still bubbling through in spots and trickling down the hull.

Quint whistled appreciatively. “Wot was it? Shell gun?”

Healy nodded. “From a shore battery. How many hours to fix her?”

Quint squinted, thinking for a moment.

“If we can careen her—”

“There's no time. We need to set sail at the tide.”

“Can ye wait a day?”

“It's been risk enough staying in port this long. Best guess is Jones and
Homaya
are on a regular sweep between here and the coast. If we're not out by tonight, like as not they'll catch us either docked or in the dead miles.”

Quint shook his head. “I can repatch. Shore it up a bit. But if ye want a true fix, I gotta get her out o' the water.”

“We can dry-dock her in Edgartown. I just need you to get us there.”

Quint snorted in disbelief. “Due respect, Cap—how ye gonna make port in Edgartown without gettin' strung up fer piracy?”

Edgartown was the colonial capital—the biggest Rovian outpost in the New Lands. I'd never been, but I figured there were plenty of soldiers garrisoned there. And piracy was punishable by death.

“Leave that to me,” said Healy. “I just need a patch that'll make the trip.”

“At wot speed?”

“Fourteen, if the wind's right.”

“Wouldn't risk more'n eight. And no promises if ye see combat. 'Specially against the likes of the
Red Throat.
” That was Ripper's ship. “Wot's
Homaya
sailin'?”

“Two Cartager men-of-war. And there's five ships in all—
Frenzy
and
Blood Lust
have joined them.”

That last part was news to me.
Frenzy
and
Blood Lust
were pirate raiders that, until now, I hadn't realized were allied with the Ripper. Healy must have learned that since he'd been on Deadweather.

Quint's eyes widened. “All five of 'em? Against just us?”

“That's right.”

His mouth fell open. “How in the name o'—”

“No time for the story,” said Healy. “How soon to get us repatched?”

“With the right material?” Quint gave the damage another look. “Five hours.”

“I need you to do it in two.”

Quint was looking a lot less thrilled about going to sea than he had been when we left the plantation.

“And there's the issue of your legs,” Healy added.

“Wot legs?” asked Quint.

“That's the issue. How will you get around if we see combat?”

“Reckoned these three'd be my mates,” Quint told him, nodding at us. “Haul me where I need to go, plug shot if it comes to that.”

Healy turned to look at me with concern. I shrugged.

“If your crew will have us . . . we need to get to Edgartown,” I told him.

“There's no guaranteeing we'll make it.”

“I understand.”

“Not sure you do,” he said. “Ever been in a sea battle?”

“I was on the
Earthly Pleasure.
”

“That'll be a picnic compared to this.”

“I been in battles,” Guts offered. “Powder monkey.”

“Under whose command?” Healy asked him.

Guts's face twitched hard. “The Ripper,” he said, staring at his feet.

Healy didn't comment. Instead, he looked at Kira.

“I have fought on land,” she told him. “And I am not afraid to die.”

“I'd rather you were,” he told her.

Then he looked back at me. “Where's your brother?”

“Up at the plantation.”

“To stay?”

“Yes.”

Healy stroked his jaw as he stared at all three of us in turn. “Carpenter's mates?”

“Yes, sir.”

He grimaced. Then he leaned in toward me and spoke in a quiet voice.

“I'm not your father, boy . . . but if I were, I'd never let you on this ship.”

The way he looked at me put a lump in my throat.

“I want to go with you,” I said.

His face tightened in another grimace. He stared up at the ceiling planks for a moment, like he was looking to them for permission. Or maybe it was forgiveness.

Finally, he exhaled sharply through his nose.

“Fine.” He turned to Quint. “Tell the purser what you need. And hurry.”

He was two steps up the companionway when the waver in Quint's voice turned him back around.

“Beggin' pardon, Cap—”

“Yes?”

“We hadn't talked about pay—”

“Get the job done, you'll see a crew share. Fifty thousand gold.”

Quint looked confused. “Ye mean, we split fifty—”

“That's the share. You're splitting ten million.”

Quint's eyeballs bulged. “I can live with that.”

“Let's hope we all do.”

Mates

AFTER CHECKING THE
GRIFT
'S STORES
against the list of supplies Quint gave him, the purser sent Guts, Kira, and me off with a handful of silver coin to buy extra lumber and nails from Port Scratch's only store. On the way, I stopped to say good-bye to Mung, who'd been waiting with the carriage in case we needed to go back up the hill.

“Please watch out for my brother,” I begged him. “Try to keep him out of trouble.”

Mung gave me a solemn nod, then gurgled a request of his own. I was pretty sure I understood it.

“I'll do the same for Quint. I promise.”

Mung smiled, and I knew I'd guessed right. Then he gave me a hug that nearly squeezed the breath out of me. I had to hurry off after that, not just because I didn't want the crew to think I was slacking, but because I could feel myself starting to get emotional. The list of things I liked about the ugly fruit plantation was a pretty short one, but Mung was at the top of it.

By the time we got back to the
Grift
with armloads of cut lumber and a bucket of nails, Quint already had a team of pirates hard at work in a makeshift staging area on the lower deck, sawing wood for the new patch. We'd barely had time to set down the wood when a lanky pirate appeared with a tape measure that he spread against each of our upper backs.

“Wot ye doin'?” Guts asked him.

“Harnesses.”

He sped away before we could ask him what he meant, but a stocky, square-headed Gualo had popped up in his place, and he answered our question before we even asked it.

“He makes harnesses from sailcloth. For your backs. So you can carry carpenter. I am Ismail. I train you. Come.”

Ismail led us down to the hold and gave us a quick tour. It was divided into a cavernous main compartment that held hundreds of water barrels, stacked sideways nearly to the ceiling, and a handful of smaller compartments fore and aft that housed the bread room, sail room, carpenter's room, shot locker, and magazine.

The whole deck reeked of bilgewater and was gloomy even on a sunny afternoon. Just a trickle of sunlight managed to filter down through the ceiling grates in the upper decks, and although a couple of oil lamps hung on hooks, neither of them were lit.

“Lantern only at night,” Ismail told us. “And
never
near magazine,” he added, pointing to the little room that contained the gunpowder kegs. “Unless you want to go
boom.
Kiss the sky.”

In the main compartment, two feet of empty space stood between the stacked water barrels and the hull on either side; fore and aft, there were narrow walkways of the same width separating the compartment walls from the hull.

As Ismail explained our duties, the reason for that empty space around the hull became clear.

“First job of carpenter and mates,” he began, “is plug any hole below waterline. With load we got now, waterline about here”—he reached up on tiptoe, extending his arm to mark a space just below the ceiling—“so no worry about holes on other two decks. Only down here.

“When cannonball come through hull, you plug hole. Take you twenty seconds, no problem. Take you forty seconds, you got problem. Take you one minute, whole ship got problem.”

He held up a canvas sack and pulled out a squat wooden cylinder about ten inches across, wrapped in canvas. “Each of you get sack with plugs. This smallest plug. For eighteen-pound cannonball. Ripper ship mostly fire this. Short-Ear man-of-war . . .” He held up a slightly larger plug. “Fire twenty-four pound. And if we got bad luck . . .” He showed us a plug the size of my head. “Maybe thirty-six. Too many of these, make big problem.

“Every time you go to hole, take sack with you. Find right size plug, pound in hole with this.” He pulled a wooden mallet from the sack.

“Sound easy, yeah? Not so easy. Water come fast. Now—second job of carpenter. Fix masts and yards when they break. Deadeyes, too. This complicated. Take time to teach you. Battle come soon, someone else do job. Just know this—someone on deck yell for carpenter, whoever got him on your back get to deck fast. Anybody got question?”

Nobody did.

“Okay. Now we train.”

Within seconds, Ismail had us sprinting every which way at top speed, carrying mallets and bags of shot plugs as we reacted to the shot sizes and locations he called out.

“Starboard magazine, low, twenty-four!”

“Bread room, top by ceiling, eighteen!”

“Three holes port side, amidships! Thirty-six all!”

It was tough work. But it was easy compared to what came next.

“Everybody think they good? Know they job? Yeah?”

We nodded, wiping sweat from our faces.

Ismail smiled and pulled three bandannas from his pocket.

“Okay. Now we work blindfolded.”

It made sense, given how little light reached the hold. But it was disastrous. I banged my limbs every few feet, had a forehead-to-forehead collision with Kira that sent us both sprawling, and I'd never heard Guts curse so much. Which was saying a lot.

Once the new patch had been sealed over the breach and the
Grift
got under way, Quint joined us. The sailmaker had finished the harnesses, and Ismail had us take turns sprinting up and down the companionways with Quint on our backs. Whoever didn't carry Quint was given a sack of cannonballs that weighed as much as he did.

Then Ismail made Quint practice jumping in and out of our harnesses so many times that when we finally stopped for our dinner ration, Quint looked as tired as we were.

We ate under the moonlight on the weather deck, grateful for the breeze that dried the sweat from our shirts. The
Grift
had taken the long way around Sunrise Island, and even in the dark I could see the craggy outline of Mount Majestic rising to the east, along with a cluster of twinkling lights just above the horizon that must have been Blisstown.

I wondered if Millicent was somewhere out there.

And then, for the first time in days, that Cyril fellow popped into my head.

The older boy. The one who'd grown up with Millicent on Sunrise.

The one she'd told me was tall, handsome, and rich, and had just gotten himself kicked out of some fancy boarding school in the Fish Islands for doing something terribly impressive.

The one Millicent had claimed she was going to marry.

Is she with him right now? Under one of those twinkling lights?

A little shard of fury went shooting through my brain, and for a moment I considered jumping overboard and swimming to shore.

But I was too tired to chew, let alone swim miles of ocean in the dark.

After dinner, Ismail had us string our hammocks on the lower deck, and at first we were thrilled to get into them. But it turned out he wasn't sending us to sleep. He just wanted to see how fast we could jump out, unstring the hammocks, and stow them.

We must not have been fast enough for him, because when we were finished, he had us do it all over again.

Twenty times.

Then we did it blindfolded, twenty more times.

By the time Ismail finally let us bed down, I'd grown to hate him. I slept that night like a dead man.

The next morning brought more of the same, along with lessons in repairing deadeyes and climbing ratlines to fix broken spars in the rigging. Whenever he let us pause to rest, Ismail quizzed us on the various commands that governed the ship in combat, and there were so many of them that pretty soon my head hurt as much as my arms and legs did.

But as brutal as the training was, every time I looked around whatever deck we happened to be on, I saw men working every bit as hard as we were. The sailors who handled the rigging were a blur of constant movement, and the gun crews drilled nonstop. If there was a single pirate on the ship who wasn't pulling his weight, I never saw him.

I gradually realized that this was why Healy's men had always seemed so much more capable than other crews—because they worked at it, night and day, until every movement their job required had been practiced so many times that the memory of it was burned deep into their muscles.

That was where the iron discipline came from, too. A man who worked such long hours didn't have time for grumbling. Or mutiny. Or fear.

If I'd had the time to stop and think about it, I would have been grateful for that. My head and my hands were so preoccupied with practicing what I'd do in a battle that I didn't have time to worry about whether there was going to be one. There were five ships out there, bristling with cannon, scouring the Blue Sea for us, and if I'd had nothing to do but sit around and wonder when their masts might poke up over the horizon, I would've paralyzed myself with fear.

But I was too busy to be scared. And when I did have a moment to myself, I was too tired to spend it on anything but sleep.

There was something else about working that hard, and for such long hours, with other people—it bound you to them. Ismail taught Guts, Kira, and me to work with Quint as a team—to plug holes, relay supplies, and cover the narrow carpenter's walks in pairs; to share the load of carrying Quint from place to place; and to keep a map in our heads of where the others were, so we could rush to help them, or call on them for the same, at any time.

It's hard to explain the feeling I got from that. Guts and I had been tight for a while, and Kira as well—we'd seen hard times together, and watched each other's backs. And I'd known Quint as long as I could remember. Next to Mung, he'd treated me better than anybody on the plantation.

But those days on the
Grift
bound us even more tightly, to one another and to the rest of the crew. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was part of something: a small but necessary piece of a whole that was much bigger, and more important, than just myself alone. And it felt good. Not happy good, or exciting good, or even warm-piece-of-jelly-bread good . . . but a deep, strong, lasting good.

Not that I understood a bit of that while it was happening. It was only much later, after things had settled down and I'd had a chance to puzzle it all out. All I remember feeling at the time was a strange sense of stability, of having my feet planted firmly somewhere even though I was in the belly of a boat crashing through the sea.

And I do recall wondering, on the night of the third day, why I'd stopped hating Ismail for working us so hard. But I chalked that up to the fact that he'd given us the rest of the evening off after dinner.

Quint arm-vaulted off to sleep, but Guts, Kira, and I spent a few minutes stretched out on the deck, peering through the rigging at the stars overhead.

“Been thinkin',” Guts said. “Gonna get crew shares out o' this?”

“Why would we?” I asked.

“Quint's gettin' one.”

“Quint patched the hull,” I said. “And anyway, I think crew shares are only for whoever makes it through the battle.”

“And we won't?”

“We're less than a day out of Edgartown. I think we'll be off the ship
before
there's a battle.”

“Don't say that!” snapped Kira.

“Why not?”

“You taunt Ka when you make a prophecy. He will prove you a fool.”

“Sorry,” I said. I didn't understand Kira's religion, let alone believe in it. But just the same, I didn't want to get on the wrong side of her god. “Can I take it back? Say a prayer or something?”

“It is too late for that,” she said. She stood up, stretching out her neck. “I am going to sleep so I don't have to smell your burnt flesh when Ka strikes you down.”

We followed her down two flights to the wide-open midsection of the lower deck, strung our hammocks in the dark, and crawled into them to sleep.

As I lay there, gently swaying with the roll of the ship alongside a hundred cocooned pirates, I thought about Kira's superstition.

It seemed a little silly. Healy's best guess had been that Ripper Jones and
Li Homaya
were patrolling the coastal lane between Deadweather and the mainland. If that was true, they were days away from us now.

And by tomorrow night, we'd be in Edgartown. The thought of seeing it for the first time was exciting. Not only that, but there were regular ships, as many as one a day, between Edgartown and Blisstown.

Depending on how things worked out with Kira's old tutor, I might have time to double back to Sunrise and find Millicent.

Maybe she'd come with us to track down the Okalu.

And we'd be together again.

Me and Millicent . . .

Millicent . . .

I drifted off with a smile on my lips.

It was the last calm breath I'd draw for two days.