The Bone Ships Read online

  Joron opened his mouth to tell her she was wrong about him and his ship, but he did not, because she was not.

  “Get up, Joron Twiner,” she said. “You’ll not die today on this hot and long-blooded shingle. You’ll live to spend your blood in service to the Hundred Isles along with every other on that ship. Now come, we have work to do.” She turned, sheathing her sword, as sure he would do as she asked as she was Skearith’s Eye would rise in the morning and set at night.

  The shingle moved beneath him as he rose, and something stirred within him. Anger at this woman who had taken his command from him. Who had called him weak and treated him with such contempt. She was just like every other who was lucky enough to be born whole of body and of the strong. Sure of their place, blessed by the Sea Hag, the Maiden and the Mother and ready to trample any other before them to get what they wanted. The criminal crew of Tide Child, he understood them at least. They were rough, fierce and had lived with no choice but to watch out for themselves. But her and her kind? They trampled others for joy.

  She had taken his hat of command from him, and though he had never wanted it before, it had suddenly come to mean something. Her theft had awoken something in him.

  He intended to get it back.

  The tide it ran for miles,

  Left ship and crew a-dry.

  Don’t sacrifice the babe,

  The sea put out the cry.

  But the hagpriests didn’t listen,

  Said, “The babe must surely die.”

  Anon., “The Song of Lucky Meas”

  From the hill above Keyshanblood Bay Joron could see his ship – her ship – Tide Child. The ship lay held by the staystone and, as befitting a ship of the dead, his bones had been painted black and no corpselights danced above him. His wings, which had been clumsily furled atop the wingspines jutting from the grey slate of the decks, were also black. Every inch of the ship should have been black, but the ship’s crew and his shipwife – and he – had been slack in their care and it looked as if a gentle rain of ash had fallen over the ship, dotting him with specks of white where the bone showed through. His prow was the slanted and the smooth hipbones of a small arakeesian, a long-dead sea dragon, angled to cut through the water. At the waterline the beak of the keyshan skull poked out from the hipbones, and curving back from it were the ribs, four long bones that ran the length of the ship and helped him slide through the water. Above the ribs were the bones of the ship that made his sides, and these were sharp and serrated, a riot of odd angles and spiked bone meant to repel borders, the shearing edges and prongs making him hard to climb.

  Tide Child’s colour showed he was a last-chance ship, the crew condemned to death. The only chance anyone had for a return to life was through some heroic act, something so undeniably great that the acclaim of the people would see their crimes expunged and their life restored to them. Such hope made desperate deckchilder, and desperate deckchilder were fierce. Though if any forgiveness had ever been offered to the dead it had not been in Joron’s lifetime, nor in his father’s lifetime before him.

  He should have been a terror, cutting his way through the seas of the Scattered Archipelago, but instead of roaring through the grey seas Tide Child sat at the staystone, weed waving lazily around him from where it had grown on the slip bones of his underside, the water about the black ship greasy with human filth: sewage, rotting food and the other hundreds of bits of flotsam a ship constantly generated. Across the spars of the wingspines sat skeers, lean white birds no more than dots from this distance, but he knew their red eyes and razored bills, always hungry.

  “Mark of a lax ship,” whispered Meas from beside him.

  “What?”

  “The skeers. If a deckchild falls asleep they’ll have out an eye or a tongue – seen it more than once. Should have someone with a sling out there. Mind you, you don’t have to see the birds to know that ship’s not loved as it should be; you can smell it.”

  He sniffed at the air. Even up here on the hill he could smell his ship, like a fish dock at the slack of Skearith’s Eye when the heat burned down from above and there was no shadow, no shelter, no release.

  “Tide Child,” he said.

  “A weak name,” she replied and strode off, vanishing into the foliage which grew strong and thick away from the old flensing yard. Her dark body disappeared among the riot of bright purple gion leaves, thick spreading fans providing respite from the slowly climbing eye of Skearith. Twined around them was bright pink varisk, vines as thick and strong as a woman’s thighs, leaves almost as big as the gion, fighting it for the light.

  Resentment was his companion through the forest, not just because she made him struggle through the foliage, rather than taking the longer, clearer path kept by the villagers. It was also for the ship, for his command. In the six months since he had been condemned the ship had filled his life; thoughts of riding it to glory or escaping it completely had trapped him in a current of indecision. The ship may not have been much, but it had been his, and when she insulted it she insulted him. Hag’s curse on you, Lucky Meas. He had no doubt she would turn out to be anything but lucky for him, for the ship or for those aboard, though in truth he cared far less about them, keyshans take them. He stumbled after her, mouth dry, body aching for the gourd at his hip, shaking for it, but the one time he paused to unlimber it and take a drink she had stopped and turned.

  “We’ll find water in the gion forest,” she said, “or we’ll tap a varisk stalk. My officers aren’t soaks.”

  Her officers? What did she mean by that? And he added another item to a growing list of resentments in his head.

  The huge gion and varisk plants were at their height now; any paths there may have been through this part of the forest had been quickly overgrown by bright creepers, and their sickly colours made his head ache even more. The plants fell easily to his curnow and a creeping sense of claustrophobia grew within him, a feeling of being trapped that joined the crew of his discomforts as he felt the path behind them close up, overtaken by the relentless growth of vines and stalk and leaf. The forest birds raised a cacophony at the clack of blade on stalk, some calling warnings, some singing out threats, and his knuckles whitened on the hilt of his swinging blade. This was the time of year when most were lost to firash, the giant birds darting out in ambush, opening guts with their claws and dragging their dying prey away to eat alive. He wondered if Lucky Meas would fall to one. But no, somewhere inside he knew Lucky Meas was not destined to die in a forest at the claws of a great bird.

  Joron was so lost in his thoughts he barely heard Meas when next she spoke.

  “Is your crew on board?”

  He stumbled over a thick root pulsing with blue sap.

  “All except the windtalker.”

  She stopped, turned and stared at him. “Black ships do not have windtalkers.”

  “Ours does, but the crew won’t have it aboard when the ship is still – say it’s bad luck.”

  She looked at him as if wanting more, but he could not think why – surely everyone knew this? Just the thought of the gullaime made his flesh creep over and above the shaking and nausea wracking him for want of drink.

  “Where is it then?”

  “Where?”

  “I’ll not ask again. Are you so cracked in the head by drink that you cannot answer a simple question?”

  He could not meet her eye.

  “On the bell buoy off the bay entrance. We cast it there.”

  “And the last time it touched land? The last time it was brought to a windspire?”

  “I . . .” His head refused to clear; the world swam before him in a thousand bright colours that twisted like his aching guts.

  “Northstorm’s whispered curses, man, have the drink you long for and pray to the Sea Hag it brings you sense if not sobriety. I’ll ask the windtalker myself when it comes on board.” And she turned away, stalking through the bright forest. He brought the flask to his mouth, taking a gulp of the thick soupy
alcohol. Something hidden by the gion and varisk around him screamed out its last moment as nature played out the endless game of prey and predator.

  The nearer they came to the beach the stronger the smell of the ship became. He had never noticed it on his return before, never thought about it, but today it was nauseating. It was not the smell of death that drifted across the bay from the black ship, but the stink of life – carefree, chaotic and unconcerned. They had found this quiet bay where orders were unlikely to reach them a month ago and tied up the ship. The fisher village in the bay wanted nothing to do with the crew so Joron had felt it safe to leave. The very few among Tide Child’s crew who could swim were not enough to be a threat to the hard women and men there. His tumbledown bothy was far enough away that the deformed land hid the ship from him, and he wondered what it said about him that he had chosen somewhere where he could not even see his command?

  Nothing good.

  The flukeboat lay where he had left it, askew on the pale pink beach. The sand looked attractive, relaxing, but each grain was a lie as it was a beach of trussick shells. Most were smashed but in among them were plenty of whole ones that would shatter under a foot and cut the sole open, so as they walked over the beach he had to pick his way carefully forward while Meas, booted Lucky Meas, strode confidently on.

  The flukeboat resembled a cocoon. Built from gion leaves which had been dried and treated until they became soft and pliable like birdleather, then wrapped around a skeleton of fire-hardened varisk stalks and the whole thing baked in the sun until it was bone hard. Flukeboats were brown to start with, until their owners painted them in lurid colours: symbols of the Sea Hag, Maiden or Mother, eyes of the storms or the whispers of the four winds. This flukeboat was little more than a rowboat, big enough for ten but light enough for one to row if they must. Flukeboats ranged as large as to hold twenty and sometimes thirty and more crew, with large gion leaves, dried and treated to act as wings, catching the wind above and powering the boats through the sea.

  Vessels for the foolishly brave, most said, as they were brittle, not like the hard-hulled boneships. A flukeboat could be wrecked by one good gallowbow shot. But Joron knew they had advantages too, those brittle boats; he had grown up helping his father on one, just the two of them against the sea in a boat bright blue and named the Sighing East, for the storm that loved a deckchild. It had been fast, able to outrun almost anything, even the crisk and the vareen, and when those great beasts of the sea raised their heads looking for prey they had never caught the Sighing East. The little boat had run with the wind, salt spray stiffening Joron’s hair as he stood in the prow, laughing at the danger, sure in the knowledge his father would steer them safe. He always steered them safe, always found the fish, always protected his singing boy. Until the last day, and then he could not. Sometimes it was hard to believe that had been Joron’s life, that just months ago he had been that scarless, careless, laughing boy in the prow of a flukeboat.

  How had it come to this?

  How had he ended here?

  Nineteen years on the sea and condemned to die. The world pulsed, the blue sky darkening at the edges.

  He knew these thoughts as offspring of the drink, the melancholy it brought he had only ever been able to drink through, running toward oblivion to escape himself. But he could not drink now. Not in front of her. He would keep going even if just to spite her. If she put him to cleaning filth from the bilges he would do it, biding his time, waiting for his moment.

  Meas reached the flukeboat, pulling it upright so the thin keel cut into the sand and she could slide it into the lapping water. No happy colours for this boat; it was unnamed, painted black and given only the one eye on its beak to guide it through the sea. She went to the front, one foot in the hull, one raised on the beak, looking every inch the shipwife. She did not look back, did not speak, did not need to. He knew what was required.

  He was crew now.

  She stood where he should have, though never had; no member of Tide Child’s crew would ever have rowed him anywhere, would have laughed if he had asked. By the time he had picked his way across the sharp beach the boat had drifted out into the still bay and he had to wade out to it, the salt water stinging a hundred tiny cuts on the bottoms of his feet. He pulled himself, dripping, into the boat, feeling the wetness as humiliation while the growing heat burned the moisture from his clothes. He picked up the two oars and set them in their notches.

  “Foolish to leave the boat here,” she said.

  “Who would steal a boat fit only for the dead?”

  “The dead,” she said and pointed at Tide Child, far ahead of them and thick in the water. The ship was not dipping or moving with the motion of the sea, it looked as steady and immovable as a rock, a rock to wreck a soul upon.

  “I brought it to the shore so they could not have it.” He said the words, though he wanted to shout at her. Could she really not know the crew would use the boat to run if he left it with them?

  “Well, unless they are an uncommon lot, I reckon at least a few of ’em can swim?” She did not look round to see if he acknowledged what she said, did not need to as they both knew she was right. The only reason the boat was still there was probably because the crew of Tide Child were so drunk they had not thought it through any more than he had. Again the damp clothes against his skin felt like shame. “And it may have passed your notice” – she pointed at Tide Child – “but they already have a ship.” He stared at her, feeling like the fool he was. “Row then,” she said, impatient, not looking back. “I would see what poor sort of crew a poor man like you is shipwife to.”

  Warm, damp clothes against his skin.

  Black water, they called it, that greasy area where the detritus of a ship held the water that little tighter to it, a disturbance that caused a circular calm about the vessel. And this water was black in more than name. The reflected hull of Tide Child made rowing into the black water to approach an abyssal hole, like the places where the floor of the sea fell away beneath a ship and a deckchild heard the Sea Hag’s call to join her in the depths. One moment Joron rowed through limpid green sea where the pink sand gently shoaled away beneath them, and then they were in the cold shadow of the ship, rowing through darkness towards darkness: life into death.

  There were rules in the Hundred Isles navy for a shipwife’s approach: calls to be made, horns to be blown, clothes to be worn and salutes to be offered. Lucky Meas – perched on the beak of the flukeboat – received none of this; not even the careless courtesy of a ladder thrown over the ship’s side greeted her. And though she said nothing, Joron could feel the affront radiating from every taut muscle of her body. When the fluke-boat was within a span of Tide Child she leaped from the beak of the boat, the sudden change in weight as she jumped pushing it down into the black water, buoyancy pushing it back up in a fountain of white foam that tried, and failed, to follow Meas Gilbryn up the side of the ship. Where the water fell back, disturbing the bits of food and rotting rubbish, sending them bobbing away from the smooth black ribs of the hull, Meas seemed to defy gravity. She needed no ladder; the ship became her steps, each spike and sharp edge, each piece of the vessel that made him nervous – he knew they existed to take life, to ruin flesh, to end women and men, to grind them against the hull – she swung between them, booted feet finding purchase between the blades of the ship, hands knowing instinctively where to grasp without being cut. All this despite never having seen Tide Child before, never climbing his sheer sides, never inspecting the hull for rot or learning the curves and undulations of him. It did not matter to her. Joron’s father had talked of those who were “born to the sea” and he had never really understood. Not until he saw her.

  In a moment she was over the rail and on the deck. Joron heard the thud of boots on the slate as he tied the flukeboat on. Then he heard the thud of a boot meeting a body. He climbed the ship quickly, but so much more carefully than she had. He heard the sound of voices, surprised voices, angry voices, a
nd something in him trembled at it. He knew this crew, this seventy-two that rode Tide Child. Some had been there for years, some only for months, and there was not a one he would turn his back on without worrying they would draw a curnow on him, but she was fearless, her shrike-voice barking out.

  “Up! Up! I’ll have no slate-layers on this ship now. Twiner may have afeared himself of you but I know no such thing. Last woman or man lying on the deck” – a boot against a body – “will feel the bite of the cord.” A shout, something indeterminate. “I care nothing that your skins were burned as you slept drunkenly under Skearith’s Eye, you deserve those blisters. I’ll give you worse if you do not obey.”

  Joron came over the rail to find the crew – his crew – standing around, bewildered, as if they had been caught in the curse of the Southstorm, the sudden squalls that come out of nowhere and wreck ships on the unseen rocks and reefs of the Lairo Islands. And he shared that feeling. She was like a storm, a fury, like the Mother had come among them to wreak her havoc and demand her justice. Meas strode to the rump of the ship, the slightly raised area at the rear where traditionally only the officers and the oarturner would stand. As she moved between poorly coiled mounds and tangles of rope and past the huge slack gallowbows – jumping a badly stacked pile of wingshot – she kicked out at those she passed.

  “Up, up!” Always shouting. “Off my deck! Off the rump unless you think yourself up to facing me!” A kick, a punch, a whirlwind of noise and fury and bright colours amid the drab, hungover, eyeburned crew of Tide Child, who now stood, slack and bleak as their fates, watching this woman who wore the two-tailed hat.