“But if you sink in the harbour—”
“That would be expensive for you also.” The keeper looked alarmed, but also lost in the face of Meas’s self-assurance. “What I suggest is that you have a land cradle made ready for us.” She pointed past his boat at the distant shore, past the ships at their staystones to where the huge ship cranes could just be made out through the mist. “I see an empty cradle. I think we can make it if I keep the pumps running.” The harbour keeper turned from her and had a swift whispered conversation with two ostentatious dandily and scantily dressed Kept who accompanied him. Then he turned back.
“Very well. We will send out pilot boats to bring you in. Your crew will not leave the ship. We will have soldiers meet you and, when we are ready, will have your crew moved to a hulk outside the harbour until you leave. If you try to deviate from the path the pilot boats take you on then the gallowbows will sink you no matter the loss. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly,” she said. “And I would expect nothing less.” She turned away from the man as if he had never been, and as she walked past Joron he heard her whisper to herself. “Jumped-up purseholder – never even seen the storms.”
Tide Child’s crew were standing around like lost children. Meas snapped, “Get ropes, ready the ship for towing and double the speed on those pumps. I’ve been embarrassed enough; I won’t have this ship sink in the harbour under me.” Then there was at least a pretence of order aboard the ship. Women and men ran around, stowing spars and shot, getting ropes tied on to the ship’s beak ready for the pilot boats. When the boats arrived there was no communication with Tide Child; the ropes from the black ship were attached in silence. Meas had already changed the teams on the pumps and told those going off duty to get some rest. Then she called for Joron to join her on the rump of the ship.
“Twiner, we pass through the harbour now, you and I. We will stand here, and we will say nothing. We will look at no one and we will feel no shame at the colour and state of our ship. Do you understand?”
“I—”
“You need only say, ‘Yes, Shipwife.’”
He swallowed, nodded.
“Yes, Shipwife.”
“Good.”
And they stood, feeling the strange motion of the ship moving, seemingly of his own volition as the pilot boats towed him through the harbour. All about them rose the boneships of the Hundred Isles fleet, white and whole and shining. Each one named and loved by his crew, polished until he shone in the dipping light of Skearith’s Eye, corpselights dancing merrily above them to show that, unlike Tide Child, these ships lived. As a young man Joron had enjoyed sitting with his father, watching the ships come in – enjoyed the drama of it and the joy. The way a ship would come back, flying flags of victory or, even better, towing a prize and with his crew looking forward to the coin they knew it would bring. And his favourite moment had been when the crews of the ships in the harbour would line the rails and spars of their own ships and cheer the new arrival into the harbour.
But there was to be no cheering in for Tide Child.
The women and men of the Hundred Isles lined the rails and spars of their ships, right enough, and above them glowing corpselights gently spun around the spars, but as Tide Child drew near they turned away. Turned their back on the black ship. Joron knew it was no honour to be on the crew of a ship of the dead, but he had never seen this before, never even heard of such a mass rejection of a fleet ship. But gradually, as each crew turned away from them, he realised it was not his shame they refused to look upon, nor the sorry state of the ship – it was Meas they repudiated.
She showed no emotion, not even when they passed the ship that had been hers, the five-ribber Arakeesian Dread, and the crew that had once served her turned away. Still she stared forward, as if Tide Child was the only ship in the harbour and the only thing that interested her. But as they rounded Arakeesian Dread he saw the first crack in her armour.
Another five-ribber, newer, much smaller, had been hidden behind the Dread. Joron did not know this ship, had not heard of him before. Across his beak was the name Hag’s Hunter, and above him floated seven corpselights, one shy of a ship’s full complement and all the blue of firstlight – to show the ship undamaged. Blood still stained the ship from sacrifices, lines of bright red down pristine white sides. He was not a truly new ship – could not be, must have been taken from the Gaunt Islanders. But it was not the ship that made Meas clench her hands, fight back a look of such sudden and complete fury that Joron took a step away from her. It was the woman on the rail, the shipwife of Hag’s Hunter. Only she, among the thousands of women and men on the many ships in the harbour, did not turn away. Instead she watched Tide Child as he was gently towed past. Like Meas she wore the two-tailed hat, but where Meas looked fit to kill, she watched with something akin to amusement and never took her eyes from Tide Child’s shipwife.
So, thought Joron, who are you, ey? And what do you hold over Lucky Meas? But there was no clue from Meas. She did not look again at the shipwife of Hag’s Hunter and she did not look at Joron, only stared ahead at the town of Bernshulme as it began to appear from the mist.
To take his mind from the rows of backs on each ship Joron concentrated on Bernshulme too. It was a town of curves. A single curving path wound up the steep side of the mountain and along the path were the spiral bothies, the houses of the Bern and the buildings of Bernshulme’s government and fleet. Small ones at the bottom and around the old harbour, little more than the height of a tall woman standing on another’s shoulders, each the shape of half an eggshell, and growing larger and larger as they climbed the hill until it reached the Spiral Bothies. These were enormous beehives of flat stones placed carefully and artfully so that each stone locked together and held up the building no matter what the storms might throw at them.
As the ship approached the cranes, Joron began to pick out colours around the bases of the bothies, where women and men had thrown bright paint for luck or blessings. At the very top of Bernshulme, about a third of the way up the hill, was the greatest bothy of them all, the Grand Bothy, the palace of Thirteenbern Gilbryn, its stone alternating between dark and light so twin spirals ran right the way up it, ten, eleven, maybe twelve times the height of a tall man. And this was not a simple beehive shape; it was more like the upturned hull of a ship, the top floors a latticework of stone and plates of cured and bleached clear gion. Joron had heard it also went back into the mountain, hiding multiple floors and rooms within the rock, though a fisher boy would never gain entry to such a place.
On the lower floors judgements were handed out and ceremonies took place; higher were the small rooms where the women of the isles went to bear their children. Any woman strong enough to live through childbirth and who had children unmarred by the Hag’s curse lost their first child to the ships, though they would join the Bern and rise in power for it.
Joron’s mother had died birthing him in those rooms, and his father had taken his tiny bloodied body from the bothy. Miserable at the loss of his wife, but glad his son would live. Weak stock for weak stock, the hagpriests would say of those found wanting, and they would not take him for the boneships, his soul to inhabit the living structure and glow above it as a corpselight.