“I was not privy to what Karrad and my shipwife discussed.”
“Your shipwife?” The eyebrow raised in amusement caused the glittering turquoise paint around his eye to flake away. “Well then, I suppose you are Kept, in your own way. You’ve been given Meas’s favour at least, eh? Though I reckon you spend your seed in vain there. If she were to be Bern she would be by now. Hag knows she’s tried hard enough. Still, better to seed a field in hope than hate, eh?” He leaned closer, grinning. “Though sometimes it adds a little spice if it is both.”
“I am sure the Thirteenbern would love to hear you say that,” said Joron. Tassar’s broad, blocky face hardened, and Joron wondered if the Kept would draw on him, but instead he flicked the curnow into the air so the blade landed in his hand. Then he stared hard at Joron, grasping the blade tight enough to make the muscles in his arm ripple and for the blade to draw blood from his hand. Then he offered Joron the hilt.
“Do not joke about such things.” He took a step closer. “Do not think to repeat any of my words to the Thirteenbern.” He stepped even closer. Joron took one step back on the ramp and had a moment of vertigo, realising how close he was to the edge, how far he had to fall. “Be very careful how you tread. Many people have slipped and fallen on their way down the spiral bothy, Deckkeeper Twiner. It is often a fatal fall.”
“Meas would be upset if I fell.”
The yawning void behind him.
“You are presuming Meas will ever leave the room above,” he whispered. “I am afraid that sometimes a mother’s love is not all it should be.”
“She will leave.”
“And how do you know that, Deckkeeper?” He did not know. But not knowing did not make him any less sure. When he did not immediately reply a smile spread across Tassar’s face.
“She will leave because she is Lucky Meas, Seaguard,” said Joron, and the smile swiftly vanished.
“My title is Kept, Twiner, and I am Kept of the Thirteenbern. You should remember that. And if after what Meas did, you still believe she will come back? Maybe you are simple.” Joron must have betrayed something, made some tiny movement of his face that Tassar, schooled in the ways of deceit and politicking among the Bern and the Kept, picked up. “Oh . . .” He drawled out the soft exclamation. “You do not know, do you? Of course, stuck away on that black ship, you do not hear the news. Do not know what sort of creature you serve. And she is unlikely to tell one as lowly as you. Well, I do not think I shall tell you either; I shall leave you to wonder.”
Before Joron could say anything else Meas appeared on the ramp. She had something of a air of a fighting bird that had, if not lost its contest, definitely not come off best from it. Though maybe it had done enough to keep its pride and stay out of the pot, for now.
“Come, Twiner.”
Tassar gave Joron a smile and nodded his head at Meas as she passed.
“Go then, Joron,” he said, “and remember, my offer to teach you the sword remains open.”
Joron ignored him. He caught up with Meas who, as they walked away whispered to him,
“Tell me that Tassar did not bait you into a duel.”
“He did not, though if I am honest I more thought he was trying to get me into his bed.”
Meas laughed – a real laugh, a bright sound.
“Oh, I did not think on how little you knew of their ways. No ship’s rules for the Kept, Twiner. Their lives depend on the strength of their seed, and they strut and preen like cock birds to gain the favour of the Bern. To be accused of loving men is a mortal insult among them. But you did not know that, and all his work to goad you into insulting him was for naught.”
“I know no one who cares of such things.”
“That is because you are fleet, ey?”
“But I am not fleet,” he said, confused, and he could not keep the sadness out of his voice. “I have never been fleet. I am just a simple fisher boy.”
“The Thirteenbern mocked you,” said Meas, coming to a halt, and when she spoke she was fierce, but that fierceness was not aimed at him. “Do not let that affect you. Do not worry about not being fleet, for I will teach you all you need to know. My mother’s words were loosed to hurt me, not you. And if Tassar mocked you it was for the same reason. This does not mean you cannot be angry – be angry, be angry by all means. But believe me in this, Joron. The greatest revenge is not that taken with a blade, it is that done by taking your enemy’s taunts and throwing them back in their face.” She stared at him, her tongue moving in her mouth. “You will be fleet by the time I am finished with you, Joron Twiner. I promise you that.”
“Or dead,” he said.
“There is that. But I would not dwell on it, for there is far less opportunity for revenge in death.”
There were few things sadder in the Scattered Archipelago than the prison hulks, ships so badly damaged they were no longer salvageable, not even to become a black ship to carry a crew to glorious death or a brownbone hauling cargo in short hops from island to island. Instead they lay sluggish on the surface of the greasy water outside the harbour and rotted. Skeleton crews of seaguard garrisoned them. No one wanted the duty, so it fell to the worst of them to guard those who, through crime or poor luck, had been judged unworthy of the land and locked below. They barely lived on whatever slop was served up and were forced to prey upon one another to survive, begging the Sea Hag that their sentences be served out before the hulk’s bones finally gave way and the old ships went to the bottom. For if you were imprisoned on a hulk when it sank, surely your death was the Hag’s wish?
No wonder the hulkbound flocked to the call when the black ships recruited.
It was to the largest of the hulks that Joron rowed Meas. They were neither white nor black, but the awful brown of rotting bone. And as every bit of keyshan bone that could be salvaged became more and more precious, the hulks became as much gion and varisk as they were old bone. And the gion and varisk were kept up no better.
They stank.
Joron had believed Tide Child, sad and neglected in Keyshanblood Bay, was the worst thing he had ever smelled, but that was only because he had never been near a hulk before. First the stink of rotting bone, wet and organic. Then the stink of human filth. The hulks were little more than open sewers, and in the high heat the reek was almost unbearable. Joron found himself retching as he pulled on the oars; Meas, as ever, seemed unaffected. And behind the louder scents that insulted Joron’s nose there was another – more subtle, almost undefinable but in its own way far worse – misery. The stink of women and men who were at their last, the desperate and the lost.
Meas dipped her hand into her pouch and brought out a posy of bright flowers, holding it to her nose to ward off the stink as Joron, choking on the malodour, rowed them further into the miasma. At the side of the hulk a seaguard let down a rope ladder, done with no ceremony or care. Meas ignored the insult; she seemed to have skin thicker than a keyshan. The shipwife grabbed the ladder, shimmying up in a couple of easy leaps while Joron tied the boat on to the side of the hulk and then struggled his way up the rungs as they swayed left and right with his weight.
When he crested the rail of the hulk, the once-ornate bone splintering in his grip, leaving brown smears and shards sticking into his his palm, he was met by a long line of prisoners waiting for Meas to cast her eye over them. Around them stood seaguard, and if women and men as different from those who guarded the spiral bothies could have been found, Joron could not imagine a better collection than those gathered here. Where they bothered to wear more than the birdskin leather hat of the seaguard, their uniforms were dirty, and their faces were pinched and mean.