The Starfollowers of Coramonde (27 page)

Many crafts
were ratcheted up the ways, or hove down in bustling shipyards for swarming
repair crews and caulkers. Cargo ships took Mariner treasure, to procure
supplies wherever they could. More came in each day with stores for the fleet,
and against blockade. Fresh water was rationed, to build a reserve for the Hub
and fill ships’ casks.

Gil stayed
out of people’s way, impatient to leave but fascinated by life among the
seafarers and the incessant buzz of their preparations. But Bey was somewhere
across the water, scheming, contriving, and that seldom left the American’s
mind, even when he was wondering how Dunstan was or, as happened with
surprising frequency, when he thought of Swan.

Even
Wavewatcher and Skewerskean were busy; the Prince of the Waves filled their time
with tasks, saying it was high time two such capable Mariners shouldered more
responsibility.

Less than two
weeks after the advent of the Trailingsword, the Children of the Wind-Roads
sailed out again. It took hours just to maneuver into formation, with
Osprey
in the lead and the larger vessels around her. Tubby cargo bottoms were at the
center, with lean brigs and barkentines flanking.

Gil, aboard
Osprey,
was billeted with his friends in the same little storeroom they’d used on the
way out. Landlorn had yielded, for now, to the partners’ pleas that they be
allowed to ply their old trade as topmast hands. Serene was also in the ship’s
company, having absolutely refused another separation from her husband.

The fifth day
out, a storm came up. In alarm, the American watched whitecaps come up and
swells grow, and nausea hit him for the first time. As the ocean rose in sudden
temper, ships’ bows began slamming into the troughs with greater and greater
force.
Osprey
and many of her sisters could have run before the wind
with a good deal of sail, but it was vital that the fleet not be scattered.
Landlorn ordered most canvas taken in, as the following seas exploded tons of
water around the barque. The flagship did well enough, her fore topmast
staysail set and the main lower topsail taken up goosewing-fashion, presenting
a fan shape to the squalls, the remainder heavily lashed to prevent its chafing
fully open. The Prince commanded his captains to keep careful distance but rig
lanterns, and not become too dispersed. Each craft coped as her captain judged
best, most of them goose-winging like
Osprey,
or rigging a
three-cornered cross jack.

Gil, clinging
to the lifelines, watched Landlorn clinging to a rail up on the quarterdeck, the
Prince’s cloak snapping around him like a whip as he surveyed his fleet. Salt
spume, gust-driven, pumiced the skin like a sandblaster, numbing it in seconds.
He noticed Gil, and called, “Be not so despairing. This is only a middling
blow; we will ride it out.”

Gil, jaws
clenched on the sour taste of vomit, nodded gratefully. Landlorn, mistaking
that for stoicism, smiled with approval, and motioned for the American to get
himself below.

By four the
next morning, when the middle watch was over, the wind had died enough for
eight bells to be heard clearly. At daylight the storm was blowing itself out.
The ships picked their way through sluggish seas, back to a loose formation,
tallying losses.

Several
vessels were no longer with them, three lost and as many more unaccounted for.
Other lives had been taken by the weather as well. A great deal of sail had to
be replaced, and water pumped from bilges. Masts had snapped here and there,
and there was too much minor damage to calculate. That evening at sundown, Landlorn
recited the brief Service for the Lost, though all hands aboard
Osprey
had survived. He told the crew—as captains throughout the fleet were doing—that
their brothers were rejoined to the eternal flow of the tides, as all men would
one day be. The sea, in Mariner creed, shall not yield up its dead.

Debris was
cleared, and shipboard routine resumed. As were-gild for the men it had killed,
the ocean granted them a fair, easy ride in the next days with a fresh,
following wind. They accepted it thankfully, making the Strait of the Dancing
Spar in good time.

Gil was
sitting with his back against a hatch cover, enjoying the day and idly trying
to calculate how much horsepower
Osprey
was cajoling from the wind, when
Wavewatcher and Skewerskean went by, on their way aloft.

They stopped,
and Gil asked what it was like to haul canvas ten stories up. They asked what a
story was.

“Not easy to
tell,” Wavewatcher decided. “Why not come up and see? Sight of the Isle of Keys
cannot be far off.” Before Gil could say he’d give that a miss, the red-beard
was calling for permission to take a new hand up the ratlines.

Landlorn came
to the quarterdeck rail. “Go; encounter the sky,” the Prince of the Waves told
the American, curious what this fey landsman would make of the experience.

Gil put one
foot on the rail, thought better of it and sat down to take off his boots. He
returned to the side. It was easy enough getting around the deadeyes and
lanyards, onto the ratlines. Then he looked up the shrouds, their gathering at
the top only adding to the feeling of height, and had his doubts.
Osprey’s
pitch and roll didn’t help.

He started.
The mere mechanics went okay, just demanded care that his foot was firmly on
the ratline before he hoisted himself for the next step. Wind played its song
in the rigging, and he found it appealing. There were spiderweb vibrations
along the hard, coarse shrouds. Skewerskean raced past him, and when he chanced
a look backwards, Wavewatcher grinned up at him. He steeled himself, going on.

He would have
liked to look around at the play of air against sailcloth and study intricacies
of the ship’s rigging and running, but narrowed his concentration to ratlines
and shrouds, one step at a time. He could hear the rush of foam from the keel.

When he got
to the base of the tiny platform that was the main top, Skewerskean was
standing on it, smirking, fists on hips. Gil knew he was supposed to do it
properly, pulling himself up the futtock shrouds and angling his body out, up
onto the top, but played it safe instead, snaking up through the lubber hole.
He sat there, one hand white on the ratlines, the other arm around the topmast.
Wavewatcher joined them, making things, in Gil’s silent opinion, way too
crowded.

“Well, come
on,” said Skewerskean.

“What ‘come
on’? Where?”

“Why,
aloft.
You don’t think you are there yet, do you?”

“I know that,
goddammit! There’s a whole bunch more of this flagpole I’m hanging onto, isn’t
there? But what makes you think I’m going up it?”

“Wanted a
view, did you not?” hurled Wavewatcher. “Fie, the mess-boy climbs this high to
call us down to lunch,”

The idea had
its appeal; if the main top was this exhilarating, what would the crosstree be
like? He got, but cautiously, to his feet.

The main
topmast shrouds, descending from the little topmast crosstrees, stretched
almost vertically past courses of sail realized in stately arcs, were much less
roomy than the first leg of the climb. Again, Skewerskean preceded him as
Wavewatcher brought up the rear. Under his breath, Gil cursed the other
Mariners watching from the yards, now and then calling out a jibe or
encouragement.

The wind up
here blew his hair around in constant fluttering. He gritted his teeth, made
the dubious safety of the topmast crosstree. Wavewatcher stayed in the shrouds
below, and Skewerskean hung casually to one side, a hand in the shrouds. Gil
reswallowed lunch and turned his head upward. The topgallant mast waited above,
shrouds bunched, ratlines far too insubstantial. Then, for the first time, he
took a good look around. The rigging, spars and sails were a middle kingdom in
themselves, with logic and beauty of their own. Below, the hull was plainly too
small to need or support these regal mansions of billowing sailcloth and
creaking hemp. Here, the winds themselves were divided into components, seduced
to service. To the north, he could see the southernmost coast of Veganá, and to
the south the hazy shoreline of the domains of Salamá.

He pulled
himself to his feet, got one ratline without thinking. He never really decided
to go the rest of the way up the topgallant mast; begun, the climb had its own
destination. The two Mariners stayed behind, leaving him to his mood. Past
memory and thought, he pursued sheer sensation.

He went
painstakingly, because the ship’s movements were exaggerated by the mast’s
height. Here, where the halyards closed in, the mast’s body was slimmer. With
exacting care, he pulled himself up onto the topgallant crosstree. Above him,
the mast truck stood only a few feet higher, flying Landlorn’s sea-horse
emblem. He was level with the mainroyal yard, close to the sky as he’d ever
been. Here was a terrible solitude, uninhabited but for sea birds hovering over
the cryptic fluxes of the Wind-Roads.

He got his
breath and pulled himself erect, adapting to the mast’s sway. He burned with
fierce, abstract pride in
Osprey,
then threw his head back, whooping, to
a sky as much around as above him. Thronging ships of the fleet spread behind,
like sheep on a meadow. He called down to his friends. They waved back, asking
if he’d care to climb a little higher, and goose an angel or two.

Sounds caught
his ear, coming from nowhere he could see. He heard a dry creak like a turning
wheel, the crackle of flame. He craned his neck, uncertain whether or not the
glare of the sun suggested a fiery mandala. Too bright; his gaze was forced
down to the ocean. Before he could lift it again, something caught his
attention. “What’s that, another ship?”

The Mariners
were instantly attentive. Following his pointing finger they saw, just at the
periphery of sight, a disturbance in the sea to the far west. With no sail, no
oar, and the immense displacement of water from its way, something came toward
them.

Lookouts were
giving the alarm. Wavewatcher turned to Skewerskean, saying, “Speedily, tell
the Prince just what we see!” The little chanteyman turned, sprang lightly
through the air and seized the mainroyal backstay with hands and feet, swooping
to the deck in a controlled fall.

Gil began the
long descent to the deck. When he dropped at last to lean on the rail, men were
scurrying in all directions to bos’n’s whistles piping battle stations, the
timbers drumming to running feet. The entire fleet took up the stridence. A
crewman, dashing by, dumped a cork life jacket into his arms. Weapons racks
emptied as arms were issued out. He was gathering up his boots, life jacket
under one arm, when Skewerskean found him.

“I must go
back aloft,” the chanteyman panted. “What’s coming off?”

“No one is
sure, but it may be all our worst suspicions come real; I think it is the
Acre-Fin.”

“The—that
thingie you were talking about? Here? Why?” Fright was an ache down his spine.

“It can mean
us no good. The fleet will fight if it must, or disperse and evade. This tells
us how the Inner Hub fell, but too late.” He hopped to the rail. “The Prince
ordered that you stand abaft by the boat station; there is little safety on the
sea today.” The shrouds vibrated to his climb.

Gil made his
way aft as frantic seafarers dodged around him in either direction. He reached
a boat station near the companionway. Swells were up, and a strong wind from
the west. No move had been made to put boats over the side, but that could be
done in moments. A coxswain, a man Gil knew only vaguely, was waiting by his
station. To the American he said, “You are to stay here in all events, where
you have been accounted, to avoid confusion.”

Archers were
in the rigging, and spearmen. Gil could see the catapult arm aboard
Osprey’s
sister ship,
Stormy Petrel,
being cranked down for loading. The coxswain
climbed to the rail while Gil pulled his boots on and fastened his life jacket,
painfully aware what an indifferent swimmer he was. The wind had lifted to a
squall. Clouds raced in with the gusts, bringing light rain.

“I see a wake
beyond our last ships.” the coxswain said. “It sends forth a wall of water.
Wait; I see it no more.”

“Will it let
us alone?”

A shrug. “Who
may say? Yet, it—there! It broke surface, a very mountain of froth.” He was
yelling now, with the rising wind. “It’s dived now, I think.” The air flapped
his shirt and tangled his rain-soaked hair.

Gil hiked
himself up for a partial view. All around the fleet, fish of every kind raced
blindly eastward, leaping through the spray, shivering in silver and
polychrome.

Could it be
another sending of Bey’s? He willed himself calm; he clung to his only
substance, determination to reach Yardiff Bey.

He was
brought up short by recollection that Dunstan’s sword and Dirge were stowed in
his quarters. He tugged the coxswain’s trouser leg and cupped his hand to his
mouth. “I’ll be right back, understand?” He made his way to a ladderwell, as
the Mariner called him to come back over the hundred other shouts and orders
going back and forth.

Gil had to go
down two decks and farther amidships. The gloom was usually alleviated by small
gymbal-mounted lanterns, but these had been extinguished when battle stations
had sounded. He groped along, trying doors along the port side as
Osprey
raced with the sea. Deciding he’d gone too far forward, he retraced his steps
and discovered that some jerk had padlocked the room, probably one of the
Mariners who shared it.

Bracing
against the opposite frame, he began kicking. The two swords, one a trust and
the other a clue, were too important to abandon. He stamped madly, ranting at
the door.