The Mad Ship

A curious thing happened then. In Wintrow’s urgent welcome of his self-awareness and Kennit’s sensing of the boy, they mingled. Memories churned and tumbled free of their owners. A boy wept silent tears the night before he was sent from his family to a monastery. A boy yammered in terror as he watched his father beaten unconscious while a man held him and laughed. A boy struggled and yelped in pain as a seven-pointed star was needled into his hip. A boy meditated, and saw shapes of dragons in the clouds and images of serpents in swirling water. A boy struggled with his tormentor, who throttled him into compliance. A boy sat long and still, transported by a book. A boy choked and gasped, resisting the tattooing of his face. A boy spent hours practising the careful formation of letters. A boy held his hand to the deck and refused to cry out as his infected finger was cut from his hand. A boy grinned and sweated with joy as a tattoo was seared from his hip.

The ship had been right. There were many conjunctions, many places where they matched. The congruency could not be denied. They overlapped, they were one another, and then they separated again.

Kennit knew himself again. Wintrow cowered at the harshness that had been Kennit’s early years. In the next instant, a wave of pity and compassion overwhelmed Kennit. It came from the boy. Wintrow reached out to him. Ignorantly, he sought to fix the parts that Kennit had deliberately broken away from himself. This was you. You should keep it, Wintrow kept insisting. You cannot simply discard parts of yourself because they are painful. Acknowledge them and go on.

The boy had no concept of what he was suggesting. That whimpering, crippled thing could never be a part of Kennit the Pirate. Kennit defended himself from it in the same fashion he always had. With anger and contempt he rebuffed Wintrow, severing that brief connection of empathy. In the moment before they parted, he became aware of the boy’s sudden hurt at his act. For the first time in many years, he felt remorse burn him. Before he could truly consider it, he heard as from a great distance, a woman’s voice calling his name.

‘Kennit. Oh, my Kennit. Please, please, please, don’t be gone. Kennit!’

Unavoidable pain defined the confines of his body. There was a weight on his chest and his leg ended in a sensation of wrongness. He drew in a deep breath through a throat that was raw with spirits and bile. As if pulling up an anchor by himself, he hauled his eyelids open. Light scorched his brain.

The whore clutched his left hand, weeping over it. Her wet face and dishevelled hair, her shrill cries…it was really too distressing to tolerate. He tried to jerk his hand free of her grip, but he was too weak. ‘Etta. Do stop that. Please.’ His words came out in a hoarse croak.

‘Oh, Kennit!’ she cried out in sudden joy. ‘You aren’t dead. Oh, my love.’

‘Water,’ he said to her, as much to be rid of her as for the sake of his thirst. She sprang to the task, hastening to the carafe on the sideboard across the room. He swallowed in a dry throat, then pushed vaguely at the weight on his chest. Hairy. Rough hair under his hand, and a sweaty face. He managed to lift his head a tiny bit and look down at his chest. It was Wintrow. From a chair next to the bed, the boy was collapsed forward onto Kennit. The boy’s eyes were shut, his face a dreadful pasty colour, but tears streaked his cheeks. Wintrow wept for him. A sudden rush of feeling confused Kennit. The boy’s head was on his chest, making breathing even more difficult. He wanted to push him away, but the warmth of his hair and skin under his hand awoke a foreign longing as well. It was as if he himself were embodied afresh in this lad. He could protect this boy as he had not been protected himself. He had the power to stave off the destructive forces that had once torn his own life apart.

After all, they were not that different. The ship had said so. To protect him would be like saving himself.

It was a curious feeling, that power. It offered to sate a deep hunger that had lived nameless inside him since he had been a boy himself. Before he could wonder further at it, Wintrow’s eyes opened. The boy’s gaze was dark and unguarded. He looked full into Kennit’s face with an expression of bottomless woe that changed suddenly to wonder. The boy’s hand rose to touch Kennit’s cheek. ‘You’re alive,’ he said in whispery awe. His voice wandered as if that of a fever victim but joy began to kindle in his eyes. ‘You were all in pieces. Just like a stained-glass window, all in pieces. So many parts to a man. I was amazed. You still came back.’ His eyes sagged shut on a sigh. ‘Thank you. Thank you. I didn’t want to die.’

The boy blinked his eyes and suddenly seemed more himself. He lifted his head from Kennit’s chest and looked around groggily. ‘I must have fainted,’ he said to himself in a thin voice. ‘I went so deep in the trance…that’s never happened to me before, but Berandol warned me…I suppose I’m lucky that I found my way back at all.’ He leaned back abruptly into the chair he was perched on. ‘I suppose we’re both lucky,’ he said woozily.

‘My leg is wrong,’ Kennit told him. With the boy’s head off his chest, it was easier to take breath and speak. He was now free to focus entirely on the strange sensation of his truncated body.

‘It’s numb. I treated it with kwazi fruit rind, to take the pain away for a while. You should sleep while you can. The pain will be back. We don’t have enough rind to keep it away forever.’

‘You’re in my way,’ Etta said tartly.

Wintrow gave a guilty start. She stood beside him, holding a cup of water. The boy was not truly in her way; she could have simply brought it to the other side of the bed. Wintrow took her true meaning, however. ‘Beg pardon,’ he said hastily, and rose. He staggered two steps towards the door and then collapsed to the deck as bonelessly as a dropped rag. He lay where he had swooned.

Etta gave an exclamation of annoyance. ‘I’ll call a crew man to take him away,’ she said. The sight of the unconscious boy on the deck distressed the pirate until she offered him the dripping cup.

Her long-fingered hand was cool on the back of his neck as she held up his head. His thirst was suddenly all consuming. It was ship’s water, neither cold nor fresh, tasting of the barrel it had been stored in. It was nectar. He drank it down. ‘More,’ he croaked when she took the cup away.

‘Right away,’ she promised him.

His eyes followed her as she returned to the water ewer. He noted in passing the limp boy on the floor. A moment ago, there had been something about him, something urgent he wished Etta to do. It had been important, but now he could not recall it. Instead, he was starting to float, rising off the bed. The experience was both unnerving and pleasant. The cup of water came back. He drank it all. ‘I can fly,’ he observed to the woman. ‘Now that the pain is gone, I can fly. The pain was anchoring me down.’

She smiled at him fondly. ‘You’re light-headed. And perhaps a bit drunk still.’

He nodded. He could not keep the foolish smile from his lips. A rush of gratitude suffused him. He had lived with the pain for so long and now it was gone. It was wonderful. His gratitude swelled to engulf his whole world.

The boy had done it.

He looked at Wintrow still sprawled on the floor. ‘He’s such a good boy,’ he said affectionately. ‘We care so much about him, the ship and I.’ He was getting very sleepy but he managed to bring his eyes back to the woman’s face. Her hand was touching his cheek. He reached up slowly and managed to capture it. ‘You’ll take care of him for me, won’t you?’ His eyes moved across her face, from her mouth to her eyes. It was hard to make his eyes see her whole face at once. It was too much work to refocus them. ‘I can count on you for that, can’t I?’

‘Is that what you want?’ she asked him reluctantly.

‘More than anything,’ he declared passionately. ‘Be kind to him.’

‘If that is what you want, I will,’ she said, almost unwillingly.

‘Good. Good.’ He squeezed her fingers gently. ‘I knew you would if I asked you. Now I can sleep.’ He closed his eyes.

When Wintrow opened his eyes, there was a cushion under his head and a blanket thrown over him. He was on the deck of the captain’s stateroom. He tried to find his place in time. He had a fragmented dream of a stained-glass window. A frightened boy had been hiding behind it. The window had broken. Somehow, Wintrow had reassembled the window. The boy had been grateful. No. No, in the dream, he had been the boy…no, he had pieced the man back together, while Berandol and Vivacia advised him from behind a curtain of water. There had been a serpent and a dragon, too. A seven-pointed star that hurt horribly. Then he had wakened, and Etta had been annoyed with him and then…

It was no good. He could not make it come together. The long day was broken into pieces that he could not reconcile. Some parts, he knew, were from his dreams. Others seemed relentlessly real. Had he actually cut off a man’s leg earlier this afternoon? That seemed the most unlikely recollection of all. He closed his eyes and groped towards Vivacia. He was aware of her, as he always was whenever he reached towards her. A wordless communion was constant between them. He could feel that much of her, but she seemed distracted. Not disinterested in him so much as intrigued with something else. Perhaps she was as disoriented as he was. Well. It was not going to do any good to lie here.

He rolled his head and looked up at Kennit’s bunk. The pirate’s chest rose and fell reassuringly under his bedding. His colour was terrible, but he was alive. At least that much of Wintrow’s dream had been true.

He drew a deep breath, and got his arms under him. He pushed up carefully from the deck, fighting his way through a wall of vertigo. Never had a working trance so weakened him. He still was not quite sure what he had done, or if he had truly done anything at all. In his work trances at the monastery, he had learned how to engage completely with his art. Immersed in it, the various tasks of creation became a whole act. It seemed he had somehow applied that to healing Kennit, but he did not understand how. He could not remember composing himself for a work trance.

Once on his feet, he moved carefully towards the bed. Was this how it felt to be drunk, he wondered? Unsteady and dizzy, seeing colours as too bright, edges of objects sharply defined? It could not be. This was not pleasant. No one would willingly seek out these sensations. He halted at the edge of the bed. He dreaded checking the bandages on Kennit’s leg, but he knew he should. He might still be bleeding. If he was, Wintrow had no idea what he would do. Despair, he decided. He reached gingerly for the edge of the blanket.

‘Don’t wake him, please.’

Etta’s voice was so gentle he almost did not recognize it. He turned his whole body towards her. She was seated in a chair in the corner of the room. There were hollows under her eyes that he had not noticed before. Dark blue fabric overlay her lap while she plied a busy needle. She looked up at him, bit off a thread, turned her work, and began a new seam.

‘I have to see if he’s still bleeding.’ His words sounded thick and misshapen to his ears.

‘He doesn’t seem to be. However, if you disturb the bandages to check the wound, you might start blood flowing. Best to leave well enough alone.’

‘Has he awakened at all?’ His mind was starting to clear itself.

‘Briefly. Right after you…brought him back. I gave him water, lots of it. Then he dozed off again. He’s slept ever since.’

Wintrow rubbed at his eyes. ‘How long has that been?’

‘Nearly all night,’ she told him placidly. ‘It will be dawn soon.’

He could not fathom her kindly manner towards him. It was not that she looked at him warmly or smiled. Rather something was gone from her voice, an edge of jealousy or distrust that had always been there before now. Wintrow was glad that she didn’t seem to hate him any more, but he wasn’t quite sure how to deal with it. ‘Well,’ he said inanely. ‘I suppose I should go back to sleep for a while then.’

‘Sleep where you were,’ she suggested. ‘It’s clean and warm in here. You’re close to Kennit in case he needs you.’

‘Thank you,’ he said awkwardly. He was not sure that he wanted to sleep on the deck here. His bed would be the deck no matter where he went on the ship, but the thought of having a stranger watching him while he slept was unnerving. What happened next was even stranger. She shook out the work on her lap, holding it up between them, her eyes going from him to her needlework and back again. It was a pair of trousers, and she was obviously eyeing him to see if they would fit. He felt like he should say something, but he did not know what. She folded it back into her lap without comment. She threaded her needle again and resumed her work.

He returned to his blanket on the floor, rather like a dog returning to its designated spot. He sat, but could not bring himself to lie down. Instead, he shawled the blanket over his shoulders. He looked at Etta until she returned his gaze. ‘How did you become a pirate?’ he abruptly asked her. He hadn’t realized he was going to speak until the words popped out.

She took a breath, then spoke thoughtfully. There was no trace of regret in her voice. ‘I worked as a whore in a house in Divvytown. Kennit took a liking to me. One day I helped him kill some men who attacked him there. Afterwards, he took me out of the whorehouse and brought me here. At first, I was not sure why he had brought me to his ship, or what he expected of me. However, after a time, his thought became clear to me. I could be much more than a whore, if I chose to. He was giving me the chance.’

He stared at her. Her words had shocked him. Not her admission that she had killed men for Kennit; he had expected that of this pirate. She had called herself a whore. That was a man’s word, a shame-word flung at a woman. But she did not seem ashamed. She wielded the word like a sword, slicing away all his preconceptions of who she was. She had earned her living by her sex, and she did not seem to regret it. It roused a strange shivering of interest in him. She suddenly seemed a more powerful creature than she had just moments ago. ‘What were you before you were a whore?’ Unaccustomed to speaking the word, he put too much emphasis on it. He had not meant it to sound that way, he had not meant to ask that question at all. Had Vivacia nudged him to it?

She frowned at him, thinking he rebuked her. Her eyes were straight and flat as she said, ‘I was a whore’s daughter.’ A note of challenge crept into her voice as she asked in turn, ‘And what were you, before your father made you a slave on his ship?’

‘I was a priest of Sa. At least, I was in training to be one.’

She lifted one eyebrow. ‘Really? I’d rather be a whore.’