Arabella of Mars (14 page)

She raised one foot, bouncing lightly off the deck as she did so, and began fitting the loop around her foot. “But I have a question,” she said before he could move away.

Faunt glared at her from beneath his profuse gray eyebrows.

“Why don't we just go around that storm?”

“'Cause we'd never get to Mars without it, would we?” he thundered. But at her stricken expression, his voice softened a bit. “Look, ye need a good hard kick to get on yer way. The trick is to catch the right wind with all sails set, then strike 'em all down afore it changes. Else ye'll just blunder about like a lubber, and take a year and a day to get to Mars.”

“That doesn't sound easy.” How would she ever manage to understand all of this?

“Don't be afeared. The cap'n's the best.” Then his expression returned to its usual severity. “But every man jack must do his job. Now shake a leg.”

“Aye, aye.”

*   *   *

Arabella shivered miserably in her hammock while the ship twitched and shuddered in every direction around her. Despite her exhaustion after an endless day of labor—a literally endless day, in which the sun never budged in the sky—and despite the dark and humid warmth of the belowdecks space, she found herself unable to sleep: the motion of the ship, the snores of the airmen close-packed all around, and the strange sensations brought on by lack of gravity were all too distracting.

Though the state of free descent was not completely foreign to her, as she had experienced it once before on the trip from Mars to Earth, it was still disquieting: her head felt stuffy, as though she'd caught a cold, and there was a dizzy sensation of falling at all times. At least she was not afflicted by aerial nausea, as some of the other “new fish” were.

There must have been a time when the gravity had fallen away to the point that it was equal to that of Mars. She must have been shoveling coal at that moment, she supposed, and she was sorry to have missed it, because it would have been a moment of familiarity in between the uncomfortable heaviness of Earth and the different discomforts of shipboard floating.

But at the moment, she felt unimaginably distant from any familiar thing, any comfortable place, any person who cared about her.

How she wished she had managed to send a letter to her mother! Though the two of them had often been at odds, she still felt tenderly toward her, and after Arabella's sudden and unexplained departure—and what story had Beatrice concocted to explain her absence?—Mother must be completely overcome with anxiety. And poor Fanny and Chloë would be entirely bereft.

Another gust, feeling like a hard shove on the end of her bed, made Arabella's hammock thrum like a low harpsichord string between the hooks on either end. They'd begun rounding the Horn some hours ago, and since then the ship had been nudged and jerked by capricious winds from every direction. Winds that had been steadily growing in strength.

The Horn, she had learned, was the airmen's term for the place where the daily-rotating atmosphere of Earth met the yearly-rotating interplanetary atmosphere, the two great masses of air grinding against each other like a pair of millstones. It was a place of constant turbulence, but as Faunt had explained, an experienced crew could make good use of the ever-shifting winds to send the ship rapidly in any desired direction. This pummeling wind was a
good
thing.

Then a sudden massive jolt hammered the ship, accompanied by a loud protesting groan of wood, and Arabella shrieked aloud.

“Shut yer yap!” cried a nearby airman. Arabella clapped both hands across her mouth, but the sensation of being pushed hard from one side and the creak of stressed timbers went on and on. A low whimper escaped from behind her hands.

Dear Lord
, she prayed,
preserve me
.

With another loud and sudden jerk, the ship slewed upward, then was slammed down. Each motion was accompanied by unexplained creaks, groans, and rattles from every direction. The creaks and groans, she told herself, were nothing more worrisome than the sounds of Marlowe Hall as the ancient house shifted in a strong wind;
Diana
had made this passage many times and was surely well built for it. As for the rattles, she supposed that a few beans or nails might have slipped from a cask and were now rattling about the hold.

Then the ship jerked again, and Arabella stifled another scream as a large dark rat scuttled along an overhead beam not two feet from her face, its claws rattling on the
khoresh
-wood. The rat ran nimbly along the beam's lower surface, apparently untroubled by the lack of gravity.

Arabella squeezed her eyes tight and prayed harder, feeling like a die in a cup being shaken by God in some enormous game of backgammon.

Suddenly the hatch was thrown open, letting in a gust of wind and throwing harsh and shifting light directly into her face. Her eyes blinked open and then squeezed shut against the glare. “Rise and shine, lads!” came the cry, which was greeted by groans from the men. Had it really been four hours? She hadn't slept a wink.

*   *   *

Breakfast was a quick, cold bite of hard ship's biscuit, but Arabella was glad of it—any thing hot or more substantial would have been dangerous in the constantly shifting ship.

She came out on deck to find the ship embedded in bright, thrashing cloud. All around the tempest roiled, white and gray and black with not a trace of blue, here and there shot with occasional bursts of lightning. The sound of thunder was lost in the constant rush of wind and groan of the ship's embattled structure.

“Ashby!” came a shout from the quarterdeck. It took Arabella a moment to register the name as her own, and when she finally did she saw it was Kerrigan who had called. He was waving pointedly at her and looking very cross in the harsh and shifting light.

Arabella checked that her safety line was well attached at both ends before working her way hand by hand along the rail to the aft end of the waist. All around her, more experienced airmen leapt from deck to mast to yard with hardly a care; many of them did not even wear safety lines like hers. Some day, she vowed, she'd be as brave as they.

“Yes, sir?” she called from the foot of the ladder when she reached it.

“The captain requests you bring him his tea!”

Tea? In this weather? But “Aye, aye, sir,” was what she said.

She made her way down to the galley, where two of the other waisters were working the bellows that kept the stove alight. For some reason, the lack of weight made the fire go out. “The captain wants his tea,” she told the cook, expecting a snide remark or possibly even a thrashing, but without a word of complaint the cook set to work, squeezing water from a huge skin—apparently made from a whole cowhide—into a stout iron kettle, which he twisted firmly into a fitting atop the stove to keep it from floating away. In minutes the kettle was boiling, the rumbling sound incongruously homely against the rush of wind and moan of timbers.

“Watch out, boys,” the cook said to Arabella and the other two waisters. “This's hot.” He twisted off the kettle's lid, then used a pair of wooden paddles to shepherd a seething, roiling glob of boiling water out of the kettle and into a plain white china teapot.

Arabella gaped in astonishment at the floating blob of water. For the cook to manage this dangerous, unpredictable fluid in a state of free descent, in the middle of a turbulent storm, was an amazing performance, and Arabella's respect for the one-legged old man suddenly grew tenfold.

The lid of the teapot also fastened with a twist, and the spout was plugged with a cork. “Get this up to the old man straight away,” the cook said, thrusting the pot at Arabella. “He don't like it if'n it's too strong.”

She drew in a sharp breath at the pot's heat, and juggled it from hand to hand. Were the cook's palms made of leather?

As she came up on deck with the teapot, Arabella held it to her chest with one arm—bunching up her shirt to keep the pot from burning her arm and side—so as to keep the other hand free. And she was most glad of that free hand as the wind assailed her, threatening to whip her away immediately; she clung to the guide ropes and shuffled along, not letting either foot leave the deck, for fear of being swept overboard.

Though there was no rain as such, the rapidly moving air was filled with stinging tiny drops of water, which half-blinded her eyes and made the footing treacherous. At least it was fresh, not salt.

At last she reached the quarterdeck, requested and received permission to ascend, and approached the captain with her steaming burden. But just as the captain was turning to face her, she felt a jerk on her ankle and fell forward.

The teapot flew from her hands, bounced once upon the deck, and sailed away into the roiling heavens. In moments it was lost to sight.

Furious and ashamed, Arabella looked behind herself to see what had tripped her. The young officer who'd led the crew that rowed her and the captain across from the dock to
Diana
—Binion, that was his name—stood nonchalantly by the rail, with his foot several inches from where her safety line snaked across the deck. But the line, she noted, extended dead straight from her to Binion, then curved away from his position, as though it had a moment ago been drawn taut by some force in his vicinity.

“Ashby,” the captain said, and she snapped her attention back to him.

“Sir?”

“I requested you bring my tea to me,” he remarked mildly, “not fling it over the side.” But his face was very serious.

Arabella took a breath to explain herself, but the captain interrupted her before she could speak.

“On this ship, Ashby, we do not lay blame or make excuses. Each man must perform his duty. Upon occasion, circumstances intervene; in such a situation, we are judged by our ability to do what is required
despite
any obstacles. Do you understand, Ashby?”

Arabella swallowed her excuse and her pride. “Yes, sir.”

“I am still waiting for my tea, Ashby.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” She turned, with as much dignity as she could muster in a state of free descent buffeted by winds from every direction, and hurried back to the galley.

As she passed Binion, he gave her a nasty, knowing smirk. “Captain's boy, eh?” he muttered, so low that no one else could have heard it. “Captain's
bum
-boy, more like it. It's clear you're no airman.”

She glared hard at him, but though he was her junior by several years, he did outrank her and she dared not raise her voice to him.

He met her gaze with a nasty, knowing smirk. “Don't get above your station, bum-boy,” he whispered. “You'll be smacked down, and don't think you won't. And don't go running to the captain neither.”

She glanced quickly at the captain, who stood in conference with the other senior officers just as though they were not all floating in a near-weightless state. The captain's eyes met hers, and he flicked one finger in a clear gesture:
Go
.

She went.

And she'd show that snotty little Binion that she was too good to rise to his bait.

*   *   *

Days passed. As
Diana
drew further round the Horn, the constant buffeting of the winds grew stronger and even more capricious. The captain kept the topmen busy watch after watch, constantly raising and striking and adjusting the sails to catch the favorable winds and coast through the unfavorable ones.

When the wind was in
Diana
's favor and all sails were set, life was calm; the ship seemed to simply drift along, the sails billowing gently and a mild breeze blowing across the deck from astern. But this seeming tranquility belied the ship's actual velocity, for she was embedded in a mass of moving air whose speed might exceed eight thousand knots.

But when the wind blew contrary, the captain struck all sails and
Diana
flew with bare poles, doing her best to glide through with the speed and heading she'd built up during the last favorable wind. Winds might come whipping in from any side, above, or below, and could shift dramatically at any moment. Even seasoned hands wore safety lines, and the men of the watch on duty scrubbed the deck or polished the brass with one eye on the weather. For at any moment a favorable breeze might pick up and the captain call all men aloft to set sail, or equally likely a new and even more inimical wind might suddenly begin to blow from another quarter, tumbling men set too firmly against the old wind over the side.

*   *   *

And then came the times when no wind blew at all.

These times were rare at the Horn. But when they did occur,
Diana
must needs move quickly and nimbly, lest she find herself becalmed in an atmospheric eddy, losing all the momentum she hoped to build up at the Horn for the long swing to Mars. Without that momentum, the voyage to Mars might take not just two months, but over a year.… a year for which the ship's stores of food and water would be sadly inadequate.

Arabella was filling and winding the lamps in the captain's cabin—a fascinating small clockwork mechanism advanced the wick and provided a draught to keep the flame alive—when the bosun's pipe sounded, followed by a chorus of voices: “Idlers and waisters to the pedals!” Sighing, she carefully capped and stowed the oil canister before reporting to her duty station.

As she arrived at her station belowdecks, pulling herself through the air hand over hand along the guideline, the other waisters had already cleared away most of the cargo from the ship's central line and opened the panels in the floor, exposing fifty or sixty wooden seats. Each “seat” was a hard, narrow, massively uncomfortable saddle, really nothing more than a board whose hard edges had been softened by years of pedaling thighs, and as Arabella raised her seat and locked it into place with a peg her legs and bottom began to ache preemptively. She could not imagine how men, whose natural equipment occupied the same space between their legs as the wooden seat, could possibly pedal without doing themselves serious injury, but somehow they managed.