Not all the deckchilder ran; some were lost in fighting and killing, unable to hear anything but the roar of blood in their ears, and the raiders hacked them apart. Some tripped on loose tangles of rigging, slipped on blood or were simply not quick enough and were caught by the furious mob of woman and men rushing up the deck. Blood spilled over the slate and into the sea, and the longthresh churned furiously in the water below. Joron ran, feeling guilty that he was thankful some had fought and fallen or been slow, that their deaths bought him time to escape.
On the rump of the deck stood Meas; by her stood Barlay. A hasty barricade of broken spars and wingcloth had been built, and Joron realised that, while he had been thinking about keeping raiders off the rail and staying alive, Meas had sent Barlay to make this barrier. The big woman was holding a spar up so crew could run underneath. Joron ducked through, wingcloth rasping against his back, and as soon as the last of the crew were through Barlay dropped the spar. Scattered across the rump of the ship were bows. Joron was shamed by them. They were in poor condition, and he had had not even known they were aboard.
“If you know how to shoot a bow,” shouted Meas, “get up the rumpspine” – she motioned behind her – “and take down their archers first.” She pointed at the raiders climbing the for’ard spine, and then her own crew were climbing, bows held in their teeth and arrows in their hands. Meas pushed a fishskin beaker of water into Joron’s hand. Another thing he had not even thought about: an open water barrel stood at the bottom of the paint-spattered rumpspine.
“Drink now. You’ll be thirsty though you may not feel it.”
He drank, suddenly aware how much his body needed water, and he gulped the whole beaker down, like it was the best anhir he had ever tasted.
“Pass it on,” said Meas.
Joron dipped it into the barrel and pushed the full beaker into Old Briaret’s hand, but the old woman passed it over to Farys and ran to get her own water as the raiders finished off those who had not made the barricade in time and massed for their assault.
“They come!” shouted Meas.
It was grim work under the heat of Skearith’s Eye. Curnows were slashing weapons, the weighted ends helping them bite through flesh. They required little skill but made the muscles in Joron’s arm burn. Around him deckchilder died; in front of him raiders lost their lives, and he had no sense of who was winning. He only knew the burn in his arms, the ache in his lungs as he fought against panic to breathe, the desperate need to survive.
Meas fought with barely disguised fury. Barlay’s strength took life after life, and further away fought Cwell, her movements precise and lethal. Some remembrance of fleet discipline lurked in Meas’s line, and it held against the onslaught. She stood in the centre, not that tall, but fearless. Her straightsword a silver line, rising and falling, trailing streamers of blood as it did. Her voice a clarion call. When Joron’s arms burned, his lungs rasped and he started to feel the pain of the many cuts and bruises on his body. When he began to feel like he could go on no longer, she shouted, “One more push!” and from somewhere he found more energy. Not much, but enough – enough to kill, enough to roar at his enemy.
And, at the moment he thought he could give no more, something changed. The raiders were leaving, streaming over the side as if the Sea Hag herself had come for them. He turned to Old Briaret, but the woman lay on the deck, her bleeding head in Farys’s lap, eyes vacant and a terrible wound in her skull.
“Took it in the first attack, D’keeper,” Farys said quietly. “Looked after me, she did. Her and Hilan. Who will do that now, ey? Who will watch for poor Farys now?”
And Joron knew the answer he should give but did not have the energy to speak, so he only watched as a scarred girl cried over the still body of a criminal.
There was little sense of triumph once the raiders had been beaten back. Joron did not know what he had expected – some congratulation from the people of Corfynhulme, maybe? Even help from them would have been something. It was rare that those upon the sea did not to help one another when it was needed. But, though the women and men of Corfynhulme came out in a small flotilla, they did not come to Tide Child’s assistance. Instead they took the raiders’ boats and rowed them back to shore. Joron watched them painting the raiders’ boats in their own colours, a happy riot of greens and yellows.
The atmosphere aboard the black ship was sullen.
To Joron’s thinking, and to most of the crew’s, they had a won a victory here.
Not to Meas.
She walked the slate like a most terrible insult had been offered to her person, shouting at anyone who got in her way, demanding an already tired crew work even harder to get the ship back into some sort of shape.
Already teams were cutting away rigging and broken spars, and for the first time Joron got to examine the spines of the ship. He had thought them bone and was surprised they were not, not totally. The main rises, the thick round bottom parts, were arakeesian bone, but the higher uprights and the cross spines were made of gion stalks, dried and bound in bunches then tightly tied to give them extra strength, the whole lot painted black to match the ship. The centre part of the mainspine of the ship was similar, but of Gion trunks, also dried, bound and fitted with collars of bone, and it amazed him that he had never known these simple things about the ship, that he had never taken the time to look.
“Will you gawp all day, Twiner,” said Meas, “or will you deliver me the Hag’s cost for this debacle?”
“Shipwife?”
“How many died, Deckkeeper? How many crew have I got left to try and get this wreck floating again?” There was a barely hidden fury in her.
“I tried to—”
“No!” She threw the word at him, and Joron felt the eyes of the entire crew turn on him, a heat, in its own way more intense than that of Skearith’s Eye. “You let us run aground. No stonethrowers at the front to warn us, none of the safeguards a ship should have. And you knew about that reef?” She was talking quietly, but still Joron was sure all aboard could hear her. “If the deckkeeper knows a thing, it is their job to make sure the shipwife also knows. This mess is on you, Twiner, and if you were not already among the dead I would see you there for it.” She turned and walked away. “Bring me someone who can swim.” She hacked out the words. “I need to know how fast the keel is in the seabed.”
A deckchild grinned at Joron’s discomfort, and Meas snapped as she passed, “You! Why do you sit there like a fool? Get together a crew for the flukeboat and ready it for towing. There’ll be some hard muscle needed to get this hulk moving.” From there she vanished belowdeck, no doubt to sit in her cabin while others worked, he thought.
Joron went off to carry out her orders, only to find the bodies of the fallen had already been lined up on the deck; the dead raiders had simply been thrown over the side.
He counted twenty-two corpses in cured varisk leaves with rocks sewn in to carry them down to the Hag. Farys sat at the end of the line carefully wrapping a body. Joron felt like he should say something but had no words, so he walked away, up towards the rump of the ship, where he thought he could be alone, out of sight of the crew. But the rump had been the place of their stand and he found no peace: deckchilder were busy clearing away the barricade that had saved them. Barlay stood among them, lending her strength.