Red Seas Under Red Skies: The Gentleman Bastard Sequence, Book Two (Gentleman Bastards 2)

On the quarterdeck they were met by a harried-looking woman of middle years, short and broad, with a finger-length halo of white hair above the lines of a face that had obviously contributed many years of scowls to the world. Her wide, predatory eyes were in constant motion, like an owl unable to decide whether it was bored or hungry.

‘You might have caught a less wretched bunch had you looked nearly anywhere,’ she said without preamble.

‘And you might have noticed it hasn’t exactly been a buyer’s market for prizes recently.’ Zamira bore the woman’s manner with the ease of what must have been a very old familiarity.

‘Well, if you want to use frayed hemp to weave a line, don’t blame the ropemaker when it snaps.’

‘I know better than to blame you for anything, Scholar. It leads to weeks of misery for everyone. How many?’

‘Twenty-eight at the forecastle,’ she said. ‘Eight had to be left aboard the prize. Broken bones in every case. Not safe to move them.’

‘Will they last to Port Prodigal?’

‘Assuming their ship does. Assuming they do as I told them, which is a bold—’

‘That’s the best we can do for them, I’m sure. Condition of the twenty-eight?’

‘I’m sure you heard me say “wretched”, which derives from a state of wretchedness, which is in turn caused by their being wretches. I could use a number of other highly technical terms, only some of them completely imaginary—’

‘Treganne, my patience is as long-vanished as your good looks.’

‘Most of them are still suffering from long enclosure. Poor sustenance, little exercise and nervous malaise. They’ve been eating better since leaving Tal Verrar, but they’re exhausted and battered. A handful are in what I’d call decent health. An equal number are not fit for any work at all until I say otherwise. I won’t bend on that ... Captain.’

‘I won’t ask you to. Disease?’

‘Miraculously absent, if you mean fevers and contagions. Also little by way of sexual consequences. They’ve been locked away from women for months, and most of them are Eastern Therin. Very little inclination to lay with one another, you know.’

‘Their loss. If I have further need of you—’

‘I’ll be in my cabin, obviously. And mind your children. They appear to be steering the ship.’

Locke stared at the woman as she stamped away. One of her feet had the hollow, heavy sound of wood, and she walked with the aid of a strange cane made of stacked white cylinders. Ivory? No - the spine of some unfortunate creature, fused together with shining seams of metal.

Drakasha and Delmastro turned toward the ship’s wheel, a doubled affair like the one aboard the Messenger, currently tended by an unusually tall young man who was all sharp, gangling angles. At either side stood Paolo and Cosetta, not actually touching the wheel but mimicking his movements and giggling.

‘Mumchance,’ said Drakasha as she stepped over and pulled Cosetta away from the wheel, ‘where’s Gwillem?’

‘Craplines.’

‘I told him he was on sprat duty,’ said Ezri.

‘I’ll have his fucking eyes,’ said Drakasha.

Mumchance seemed unruffled. ‘Man’s gotta piss, Captain.’

‘Gotta piss,’ mumbled Cosetta.

‘Hush.’ Zamira reached around Mumchance and snatched Paolo back from the wheel as well. ‘Mum, you know full well they’re not to touch the wheel or the rails.’

‘They wasn’t touching the wheel, Captain.’

‘Nor are they to dance at your side, cling to your legs or in any other way assist you in navigating the vessel. Clear?’

‘Savvy.’

‘Paolo,’ said Drakasha, ‘take your sister back to the cabin and wait for me there.’

‘Yes,’ said the boy, his voice as faint as the sound of two pieces of paper sliding together. He took Cosetta’s hand and began to lead her aft.

Drakasha hurried forward once again, past small parties of crewfolk working or eating, all of whom acknowledged her passing with respectful nods and waves. Ezri pushed Locke and Jean along in her wake.

Near the chicken coops, Drakasha crossed paths with a rotund but sprightly Vadran a few years older than herself. The man was wearing a dandified black jacket covered in tarnished brass buckles, and his blond-grey hair was pulled into a billowing ponytail that hung to the seat of his breeches. Drakasha grabbed him by the front of his tunic with her left hand.

‘Gwillem, what part of “watch the children for a few minutes” did Ezri fail to make clear?’

‘I left them with Mum, Captain—’

‘They were your problem, not his.’

‘Well, you trust him to steer the ship, why not trust him to—’

‘I do trust him with my loves, Gwillem. I just have a peculiar attachment to having orders followed.’

‘Captain,’ said Gwillem in a low voice, ‘I had to drop some brown on the blue, eh? I could’ve brought them to the craplines, but I doubt you would have approved of the education they’d have received—’

‘Hold it in, for Iono’s sake. I only took a few minutes. Now go and pack your things.’

‘My things?’

‘Take the last boat over to the Messenger and join the prize crew.’

‘Prize crew? Captain, you know I’m not much good—’

‘I want that ship eyeballed and inventoried, bowsprit to taffrail. Account for everything. When I haggle with the Shipbreaker over it, I want to know exactly how far the bastard is trying to cheat me.’

‘But—’

‘I’ll expect your written tally when we rendezvous in Port Prodigal. We both know there was hardly any loot to sling over and count today. Get over there and earn your share.’

‘Your will, Captain.’

‘My quartermaster,’ Zamira said when Gwillem had trudged away, swearing. ‘Not bad, really. Just prefers to let work sort of elude him whenever possible.’

At the bow of the ship was the forecastle deck, raised perhaps four and a half feet above the weather deck, with broad stairs on either side. In between those stairs a wide, uncovered opening led to a dark area that was half-compartment and half-crawlspace beneath the forecastle. It was seven or eight yards long by Locke’s estimate.

The forecastle deck and stairs were crowded with most of the Red Messenger’s men, under the casual guard of half a dozen of Zamira’s armed crewfolk. Jabril, sitting next to Aspel at the front of the crowd, looked deeply amused to see Locke and Jean again. The men behind him began to mutter.

‘Shut up,’ said Ezri, taking a position between Zamira and the newcomers. Locke, not quite knowing what to do, stood off to one side with Jean and waited for instructions. Drakasha cleared her throat.

‘Some of us haven’t met. I’m Zamira Drakasha, captain of the Poison Orchid. Lend an ear. Jabril told me that you took ship in Tal Verrar thinking you were to be pirates. Anyone having second thoughts?’

Most of the Messenger’s men shook their heads or quietly muttered denials.

‘Good. I am what your friend Ravelle pretended to be,’ Drakasha said, reaching over and putting one of her arms around Locke’s shoulders. She smiled theatrically, and several of the Messenger’s less-battered men chuckled. ‘I have no lords or masters. I fly the red flag when I’m hungry and a false flag when I’m not. I have one port of call, Port Prodigal in the Ghostwinds. Nowhere else will have me. Nowhere else is safe. You live on this deck, you share that peril. I know some of you don’t understand. Think of the world. Think of everywhere in the world that isn’t this ship, save one rotten little speck of misery in the blackest arsehole of nowhere. That’s what you’re renouncing. Everything. Everyone. Everywhere.’

She released Locke, noting the sombre expressions of the Messenger’s crew with approval. She pointed at Ezri. ‘My first mate, Ezri Delmastro. We call her “lieutenant” and so do you. She says it, I back it. Never presume otherwise.

‘You’ve met our ship’s physiker. Scholar Treganne tells me you could be worse and you could be better. There’ll be rest for those that need it. I can’t use you if you’re in no condition to work.’

‘Are we being invited to join your crew, Captain Draksaha?’ asked Jabril.

‘You’re being offered a chance,’ said Ezri. ‘That’s all. After this, you’re not prisoners, but you’re not free men. You’re what we call the scrub watch. You sleep here, in what we call the undercastle. Worst place on the ship, more or less. If there’s a filthy shit job to be had, you’ll do it. If we’re short blankets or clothes, you’ll go without. You’re last for meals and drinks.’

‘Every member of my crew can give you an order,’ said Drakasha, picking up as Ezri finished. Locke had a notion that they’d honed this routine together over time. ‘And every one of them will expect to be obeyed. We’ve no formal defaults; cop wise or slack off and someone will just beat the hell out of you. Raise enough fuss that I have to notice and I’ll throw you over the side. Think I’m kidding? Ask someone who’s been here awhile.’

‘How long do we have to be on the scrub watch?’ asked one of the younger men near the back of the crowd.

‘Until you prove yourselves,’ said Drakasha. ‘We raise anchor in a few minutes and sail for Port Prodigal. Anyone who wants to leave when we get there, be gone. You won’t be sold; this isn’t a slaving ship. But you’ll get no pay save drink and rations. You’ll walk away with empty pockets, and in Prodigal, slavery might be kinder. At least someone would give a shit that you lived or died.

‘If we cross paths with another sail on the way down,’ she continued, ‘I’ll give thought to taking her. And if we fly a red flag, that’s your chance. You’ll go in first; you’ll board the prize before any of us. If there’s fire or bows or razor-nets or gods-know-what, you’ll taste it first and bleed first. If you survive, grand. You’re crew. If you refuse, we dump you in Port Prodigal. I only keep a scrub watch on hand as long as I have to.’ She nodded to Ezri.

‘As of now,’ said Delmastro, ‘you can have the forecastle and the weather deck as far back as the mainmast. Don’t go below or touch a tool without instructions. Touch a weapon, or try to take one from one of the crew, and I guarantee you’ll die on the instant. We’re touchy about that.

‘You want to get cosy with a member of the crew, or they offer to get cosy with you, do what you will as long as you’re off-duty and you stay off the bloody weather deck. Out here, what’s given is given. You try to take something by force, you’d better pray you die in the attempt, because we’re touchy about that, too.’

Zamira took over again and pointed at Locke and Jean. ‘Ravelle and Valora will be rejoining you.’ A few of the men grumbled, and Zamira rested her hands on her sabre hilts. ‘Mind your fucking manners. You put them over the side and vowed to let Iono be their judge. I showed up about an hour later. That settles that; anyone who thinks they know better than the Lord of the Grasping Waters can jump over the rail and take it up with Him in person.’

‘They’re scrub watch like the rest of you,’ said Ezri.

Still the men didn’t look particularly enthusiastic, and Zamira cleared her throat. ‘This is an equal-shares ship.’

That got their attention.

‘Ship’s quartermaster goes by the name of Gwillem. He counts the take. Thirty per cent goes to the ship so we don’t slink about with rotting canvas and cordage. Rest gets split evenly, one share per beating heart.

‘You don’t touch a centira from what we already took out of your old ship. No apologies there. But if you get your chance on the way to Port Prodigal, and you’re crew when we sell the Messenger off to the Shipbreaker, you’ll get a share of that, and that’ll set you up nicely. If you’re crew.’

Locke had to admire her for that; it was a sensible policy, and she’d brought it into the lecture at a moment calculated to deflect dissension and worry. Now the Red Messenger wouldn’t just be an unhappy memory vanishing over the horizon in the hands of a prize crew; it might be a waiting pile of silver.

Zamira turned and headed aft, leaving Delmastro to finish the show. As murmurs of conversation began to rise, the petite lieutenant yelled, ‘Shut up! That’s the business, then. There’ll be food in a while and a half-ration of beer to settle you down some. Tomorrow I’ll start sorting those of you with particular skills and introducing you to some work.

‘There’s one last thing the captain didn’t mention.’ Ezri paused for several seconds and made sure that everyone was listening attentively. ‘The younger Drakashas. Captain has a boy and a girl. Mostly they’re in her cabin, but sometimes they’ve got the run of the ship. What they are to you is sacred. I mean this, more than I mean anything else I’ve said tonight. Say so much as an unkind word to them and I’ll nail your cock to the foremast and leave you there to die of thirst. The crew thinks of them as family. If you have to break your neck to keep them safe, then it’s in your best interest to break your bloody neck.’

Delmastro appeared to take everyone’s silence as a sign that they were duly impressed, and she nodded. A moment later, Drakasha’s voice sounded from the quarterdeck, magnified by a speaking trumpet: ‘Up anchor!’

Delmastro lifted a whistle that hung around her neck on a leather cord and blew it three times. ‘At the waist,’ she hollered in an impossibly loud voice, ‘ship capstan bars! Stand by to raise anchor! Scrub watch to the waist, as able!’

At her urging, most of the Messenger’s former crew rose and began shuffling toward the Orchid’s waist. A large work party was already gathering there, between the foremast and the chicken coops, fitting long capstan bars in their places by lantern light. A woman was scattering sand on the deck from a bucket. Locke and Jean fell in with Jabril, who smiled wryly.

‘Evening, Ravelle. You look a bit ... demoted.’

‘I’m happy enough,’ said Locke. ‘But honestly, Jabril, I leave the Messenger in your hands for what, an hour? And look what happens.’

‘It’s a bloody improvement,’ said someone behind Locke.

‘Oh, I agree,’ said Locke, deciding that the next few days might be infinitely more pleasant for everyone if Ravelle were to swallow anything resembling pride over his brief career as a captain. ‘I agree with all my gods-damned heart.’

Ezri shoved her way through the gathering crowd and vaulted atop the capstan barrel; it was wide enough that she could sit cross-legged upon it, which she did. She blew her whistle twice more and yelled, ‘Rigged below?’

‘Rigged below,’ rose an answering cry from one of the hatches.

‘Take your places,’ said Ezri. Locke squeezed in next to Jean and leaned against one of the long wooden bars; this capstan was wider than the one aboard the Messenger, and an extra twenty or so sailors could easily crowd in to work it. Every place was filled in seconds.

‘Right,’ said Ezri, ‘heave! Slow to start! Heave! Slow to start! Feet and shoulders! Faster, now - make the little bitch spin round and round! You know you want to!’

Locke heaved at his bar, feeling the grit shift and crunch beneath him, poking uncomfortably at the sensitive spots between his toes and the balls of his bare feet. But nobody else was complaining, so he bit his lip and bore it. Ezri was indeed spinning round and round; clank by clank, the anchor cable was coming in. A party formed at the larboard bow to secure it. After several minutes of shoving, Ezri brought the capstan party to a halt with one short blast on her whistle.

‘’Vast heaving,’ she cried, ‘secure larboard anchor!’

‘Cast to the larboard tack,’ came Drakasha’s amplified voice, ‘fore and main topsails!’

More running, more whistles, more commotion. Ezri hopped to her feet atop the capstan and bellowed a quick succession of orders: ‘Hands aloft to loose fore and aft topsails! Brace mainyards round for the larboard tack! Foreyards braced abox!’ There was more, but Locke stopped listening as he tried to make sense of what was happening. The Poison Orchid had been drifting by a single anchor in a calm sea, with a light breeze out of the north-east, and she’d drifted down so that the wind was dead ahead. What little he understood of Ezri’s orders told him that the ship would be slipping a bit aback, then turning east and bringing the wind over her larboard bow.

‘Fore and aft watches, at the rails! Top-eyes, wide awake, now!’ Ezri leapt down onto the deck. Dark shapes were surging up the ratlines hand-over-hand; blocks and tackles creaked in the growing darkness and still more crew were coming up through the hatches to join the tumult. ‘Scrub watch! Scrub watch, get to the undercastle and stay out of the bloody way! Not you two.’ Ezri grabbed Locke and Jean as they moved with the Messenger’s men and pointed them aft. ‘Tool locker, under the starboard stairs abaft the mainmast. Get brooms and sweep all this sand back into its bucket. After you unship the capstan bars.’

They did just that, tedious work by wavering alchemical light, frequently interrupted by busy or discourteous crewfolk. Locke worked with a scowl until Ezri stepped up between him and Jean and whispered: ‘Don’t mind this. It’ll make things a hell of a lot easier with your old crew.’

Damned if she wasn’t right, Locke thought; a little extra humiliation heaped on Ravelle and Valora might be just the thing to stifle the old crew’s resentment.

‘My compliments,’ he whispered.

‘I know my business,’ she said brusquely. ‘See everything back to where you found it, then go to the undercastle and stay there.’

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 bulkhead, in relative darkness. Others with more favourable positions appeared 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 out’a the 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 then 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 all 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 assent 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 continually 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 deckspace 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. ‘That bloody storm lasted a while.’

‘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.