The Bitterbynde Trilogy (17 page)

One brave sailor crept up behind a roaring brigand who had bodily lifted one of his shipmates and was hurling him overboard. As he finished his business with a grand yell, the canny pirate positioned his scimitar along the underside of his left forearm. In a lightning movement he stepped back with his left foot, thrusting the scimitar straight out behind him and twisting his body to the left. The sailor, advancing with upraised weapon, was taken unawares and fell, cut almost in two. With a vengeful cry, one of his fellow aeronauts attacked, lunging with sword outstretched. The still-bellowing pirate retreated out of range. As he had hoped, the aeronaut shifted his weight backward to recover. In that moment of vulnerability, Roarer jumped forward and cut him down.

A bald, one-eared reiver hacked his way through the fray, naming his cuts and thrusts as he gave them: “The Hedger! The Reaper! The Thresher!” His blade clove the air with a rushing, hissing sound; it clove flesh with the succulent smack of an axe through cabbage.

When the shang wind came on them it seemed to increase the ferocity of the fighting, as if it got into the blood of the men. Smoking clouds boiled across the sky. Twilight glinted with strange, rainbow fires like ice, like jewels, like frosted stars. The brig's rigging was a dew-beaded cobweb giving off stabs of diamond light.

“Make her a ghost-ship!” cried a dying aeronaut, his last breath bubbling away in the crucible of his breast. The combatants, their heads bare of taltries in the heat of battle, danced to the rhythm of life and death in a soft radiance that burned their images on the air. Where they had been, a moment ago, their shapes remained—translucent, shimmer-edged, and slowly fading. A sailor swung a knife, and a fan of ghost-knives hung dissolving. A man fell, and his numberless ghosts fell again, many times. Phantoms and men leaped from deck to deck, their cries and the clash of weapons underpinned by a faint chiming of crystal bells.

The clipper, still staggering with the momentum of her dismasting and the counterthrust of the mangonel's firing, lurched sideways into the mountain wall. There, tall, dark pines clung, deep-rooted, glittering, growing straight up out of land that fell almost straight down. A wild-eyed pirate jumped back as his adversary moved forward and lunged with a cruel upward cut that opened his belly; the man fell forward uttering a gurgling cry. Another invader chopped at a sailor, missed—his scimitar sliced through rope. Sandover, who had been pulling hard at the other end of the rope for leverage while fending off blows, shot down the deck and out over the side. He crashed through the branches of a tree that gave way forgivingly and brought him up, scratched but living, against the trunk. The Windship spun away and left him. Foreseeing the ship's doom, many aeronauts slashed through ropes depending from the yards and swung themselves over the side in long arcs to throw themselves on the mercy of the trees and take their chances with whatever beasts and wights roamed the pathless slopes below; but not all were as lucky as Sandover.

When it was over, the pirates took some prisoners and threw the rest of the crew overboard. They plundered the
Tarv
, loading chests of precious things into the longboats to be ferried to the brig. Little of the less valuable cargo they stole—there was too much to take all; it would have weighed down their ship and slowed them. Then they scuttled the white bird of a clipper, driving her into the mountainside and wrecking her on the rocks, raping her of as much of her sildron as they could get. She hung broken there, her lacerated timbers red-stained. The ghost-tableau faded out as the shang storm passed away over the mountains to the north and the sun shone, croceate, in the late afternoon.

When the next unstorm blew, the
Tarv's
ghost-image would fly again, in memoriam.

In the wake of the unstorm the black Windship fled among the peaks. Patrol ships would come looking for the
Tarv
when she missed her rendezvous at the docks of Gilvaris Tarv, and the captain wanted to be far away by then. His ship was fast and maneuverable and had been drastically modified to enable her to change altitudes quickly, gaining or losing height ear-burstingly as the slatted andalum linings shielding the sildron were rolled back and forth inside her double hull.

The merchant sailors taken prisoner had been selected from among the unwounded for their size, strength, or nimbleness. Now they were shackled and manacled with iron, lest rope-chafe damage their appeal to prospective buyers. They were given food and limited room to move. Hale workers fetched worthwhile prices in this illegal trade. One of these captives was the stowaway.

The pirate's crew were thieves and cutthroats recruited from the dregs of cities, or simple country lads who had been seduced to piracy by tavern talk and could not now go back, or disillusioned soldiers; men who looked for rich rewards preying upon the Merchant Lines or who sailed in the sky for their own reasons. One of these stood now before the prisoners, his feet braced apart on the planks, his brawny left arm roughly bandaged where he had sustained a wound from a poniard. The lad squinted up at the head outlined against the sails. Tangled red hair like stiff wire had been randomly knotted with thin braids; in the thickets of it, a gold disk winked from his left ear. Blue eyes squinted over a ginger mustache that, although bushy, was clipped short. A copper torc clasped his bull-neck, from which also hung a tilhal of amber with two coupling flies trapped inside. A stained taltry hung from his shoulders. His barrel chest was swathed in a torn shirt that had once been white, overtopped with a rabbit-skin jerkin, and he wore olive-green breeches belted with gold-worked, purple leather with a wicked-looking skian scabbarded at his side. His feet, ginger-tufted and sporting dirty nails like goats' horns, were bare and tattooed with scorpions. The nameless youth had a good view of these feet because he was lying in front of them. To his left lay Captain Chauvond and the cabin boy. To his right reclined half a dozen merchant aeronauts, also bound with ropes.

“Deformed!” proclaimed the red pirate. “Twisted, ugly, and deformed!” He leaned closer to the youth and said confidentially, breathing garlic, “Hogger has one eye, Kneecap's got a wooden leg, Black Tom is missing three fingers, Fenris be earless, and Gums ain't got a tooth in his head. A man has to be ruined to sail on the
Windwitch
. Fires of Tapthar! You'll fit in well here,
mo reigh
, you'll fit like an egg in its shell!”

He laughed, revealing gaps in his dentition that seemed to go through to the back of his head.

“Me, I'm physically perfect. See that?” He flexed bulging sinews in his right arm, which was tattooed with ravening birds, their toothed beaks gaping, looking faintly ridiculous.

“I wouldn't like to meet
me
in battle,
mo reigh
. It's the brain—the brain that's twisted. I'm mad, see?” His jutting eyebrows shot up and down rapidly. “Sianadh the Bear, unconquerable in battle!”

He roared, a wide grin splitting his weather-lined face. The cabin boy whimpered.

“What is the matter,
tien eun
? See, I unbind you and your
reigh
friend.” Squatting, he did so. “You two lads are to join us! You shall be buccaneers on the upper drafts. Every now and then, such as today, we lose a few hearty hands. Captain Winch needs to replace 'em with young 'uns nimble in the rigging. Don't look so sad! 'Tis better than being sold as slaves in Namarre like these
shera sethge
shipmates of yours here. And you, Captain, are to be ransomed to your Cresny-Beaulais Line.”

Captain Chauvond groaned, licking blood from his lips.

“Now, don't bleed all over the clean deck. You lads, see that keg over there? Go and fetch water for yourselves and your shipmates. Make yourselves useful or Winch will notice you and you'll taste the lash. We sink anchor at dusk, then we eat and suffer. 'Tis a shame we left your cook in a tree—ours is a sadist and poisoner—'twould have been kinder to our aching bellies to have swapped one for t'other. Look lively there!”

The two youths hurried to obey.

The brig was a lean, streamlined ship, but run on more slovenly lines than the merchant clipper. The crew, less disciplined, were more careless and prone to unprovoked outbursts of violence. Captain Winch, however, ruled with a steely hand.

Having risen, the wind was blowing hard.

“Aloft and stow the top-gallants!” Winch's stridor, with all the power of a gale behind it, burst over the decks like a hailstorm. “You new lads, get aloft before I kick yers aloft.”

The cabin boy looked frightened and opened his mouth to protest, then thought better of it. He and the deformed youth followed some of the hands up the thrumming ratlines on the weather side of the rigging, not having the least idea of how they would do the job demanded of them. Although the ship moved in relative harmony with the wind, its speed and direction deviated somewhat. The wind beat the lads down against the shrouds and banged at them. Climbing over the overhanging futtock shrouds was not for the fainthearted; their feet and legs disappeared from sight, and all their arm power was needed for the last heave onto the tiny platform. Once over that hurdle, the climb to the second platform with its smaller overhang was easier. The black top-gallant sails leaped and slatted among the clouds. Ropes and rigging tautened on all sides. Far below, perhaps a hundred feet down, they could see the men working on the decks. The massive yards slanted perilously over the wild tors and scarps, crevasses and clefts that stretched in every direction like crushed lime velvet tossed over a table setting. Trees raced by below, each leaf sharply delineated in every shade of green and gold.

They must step resolutely from the ratlines to the thin foot-rope festooned beneath the spar, which shuddered as the draperies of flogging canvas cracked the wind like whips. The foot-rope sagged under the first man's weight so he sank almost below the yard, but it lifted as more men stepped on it and, finally, the two lads. There were now about four sailors on either side of the yard. The sail hit the lads in the face and knocked off their taltries. The brig rocked in its passage along a rocky crevasse, the masts swinging in long, graceful arcs. They were clinging to an erratically swiveling pole a dozen stories above the deck. The cabin boy's face was pale, and his teeth clenched. The nameless lad did not look down again. Panic ebbed and was replaced, gradually, by exultation. Up here, he felt like a King. Had he possessed a voice, he would have shouted.

The sail had already been partly gathered in from the deck, the clewlines drawn to raise its corners and the buntlines pulling in the bulk of it up to the spar. The men leaned over the yard, seeming to hang on with their own belly-muscles so as to leave two hands free. They reached far down to grasp a ruck of wind-shaken canvas. It beat back at them and blew from their hands. The wind pinned them flat against the yard, tearing at their clothes.

“Heave, you laggards!” an angry voice brayed.

The lads copied the men. After pulling the sail up, they jammed a pile of it under their bellies, then grasped some more. When all the sail had been bunched up, they flattened it along the crosstree, then rolled and lashed it. Then they must descend, climb the foremast, and do it all again. There was no tuition for new crewmen on this vessel; it was “learn or die.” Most of the buccaneers had learned that way and were prepared to give as much quarter as they themselves had received: namely, none.

At sunset, the
Windwitch
anchored in a deep and narrow ravine. Lurid light speared between almond-shaped clouds standing in the lee waves of the land formations, reddening a mountain peak shaped like three old men standing in a row. When the Windship was snugged down for the night, sails furled and lines coiled, the crew partook of their meal on the mess deck, so aptly named, slopping it into their mouths, wiping their greasy hands on their hair or clothing or any other surface that tended in any way toward absorbency.

The two lads drooped, almost too exhausted to eat. After a few bites they huddled together where some of the wounded pirates lay at the side. There they dozed, oblivious of the gibes halfheartedly hurled their way. Adversity had created a kind of comradeship, despite the fact that neither knew the other's name and never a word had passed between them.

Hawking, swaggering, elated by their recent victory, the hale crew-members argued about the division of the spoils.

“Let's have it now, I say. We've worked hard for it. Let's see the color of the gold in them chests.”

Cheers and the banging of pewter tankards greeted this oratory.

“If we divvy it up now,” said a horse-faced rascal, “where should we stow it on this bucket? In our hammocks? In our ship-bags? To have them made lighter by some sneak-thief such as Spargo as soon as we turn our backs and go aloft?”

Spargo, who had just then buried his nose in a jar to take a deep draft, thumped the jar down, spluttering. Rum splashed out of it. Also, carelessly, he had
thwacked
it right in the middle of his dish. Grayish gravy flew up, splashing his face and nearby diners, who snarled aggrievedly.

“Did I hear you aright, Nails?”

Nails leaned closer to him, lips curled back to show the remains of his teeth. Spargo did not flinch.

“Blow me down,” Nails invited, thrusting forward a stubbled jaw like a fist.

Spargo's eyes slid from side to side in his frozen face. Most of the crew had stopped eating and were watching.

He pushed Nails's shoulder.

Laughing, Nails playfully shoved him back, harder. Spargo's face turned purple. He thrust against Nails with all his strength; Nails barely kept his balance, then returned to land a blow squarely on Spargo's jaw. They rolled together across dinner plates loaded with boiled cabbage, charred mutton, and flour dumplings in gravy, to the chagrin of their shipmates, who instantly joined the melee in revenge for the ruining of their dinners, no matter whether the fault had been the brawlers' or the cook's. The lads from the
Tarv
prudently removed themselves as far as possible from this storm of flailing fists, cabbage, and pewter.