Authors: Scott Lynch
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.
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.