‘I know what I said last night, but it’s a whole tower of guesswork balanced on an awful lot of ifs. But if we lose people, and we can’t put the maps together, then, welclass="underline" those left alive will have every right to be seriously pissed with us.’
‘And their captain.’
Dalip checked the deck for Simeon’s position. He was wrapped around the prow again, telescope to his eye.
‘This ship’s whole purpose is to keep the decent people away from the bad ones. Now, that contract is broken. Simeon is taking the ship, and everyone on it, into the unknown. I can’t predict how this is going to turn out, and for all his fine words, neither can he.’ He pulled a face. ‘I just wonder if a better captain would have made a different decision.’
‘He made the decision I want,’ said Mama.
‘We’re all going to have to live with it, come what may.’ Behind them, the island was diminishing, and their destination was still over the horizon. ‘Seriously, how does he navigate? He’s not taken a bearing since we left the bay. He’s not got a clock or a compass. He’s just pointing us in what he hopes is the right direction and leaving the rest to chance.’
‘Well, however he’s doing it, no one looks scared.’
The steersman at the rudder certainly seemed content with the course laid in by his captain. The sail ahead of him was bowed and full of wind, and the ropes strained to transmit all that raw power to the rest of the boat. The rest of the crew who weren’t tending the wooden blocks and pulleys were delving in their sea-chests for swords and knives and whetstones.
The atmosphere on deck was more akin to a carnival than a sombre troopship. Practice fights spontaneously broke out, some of which made Dalip genuinely fear for the safety of the participants. If they arrived at the White City bandaged and furious with each other, or worse, so incapacitated that their already depleted numbers reduced further, then their plans would come to nothing.
And Simeon seemed content to ignore the high spirits and the threat, so fixed was he on the far distant horizon. He might have looked back once to acknowledge something was going on, but returned to his telescope almost immediately.
‘Where’s Elena?’ asked Dalip.
‘She wasn’t with me last night,’ said Mama, ‘I thought she might be…’
‘What?’
‘With you.’ She raised her hands. ‘What you youngsters get up to is none of my business.’
Dalip blinked, distracted for a moment from the swordplay going on around them. ‘She’s—’ At least five, nearly ten years older than him, not a Sikh, and recently bereaved. ‘She wasn’t with me.’
Last night he’d eaten and listened to the stories told around the fire, but when the grog started making its way around the circle, he’d excused himself and hidden away from the forced, loud jollity that resulted. He’d slept alone, which wasn’t necessarily what others had done, judging from some of the sounds that had crossed the moonlit air.
Mama was right: it wasn’t her business, and it was certainly none of his. But he hadn’t had a chance to work out his feelings about Elena before any chance was closed down.
She was there, near the bow, with a group of sailors. She was holding what looked like a cavalry-pattern sabre, and the man behind her◦– tall, lithe, tanned◦– was guiding her movements, stepping her forward, moving her backwards, turning and feinting for her. Compared with the chaos on the rest of the deck, it seemed an island of calm and choreographed purposefulness, and strangely intimate for such a public place.
She was safe, he told himself: that was what was important.
Mama followed the direction of his gaze and narrowed her eyes. ‘Looks like she doesn’t need us any more.’
‘That’s not really fair,’ he said. ‘We’re part of the crew now. She can spend time with whoever she wants.’
‘Be that as it may,’ said Mama, ‘I hope that girl knows what she’s doing.’
‘Probably no more than we do.’ Dalip put any feelings he might have had back in their box, and shut the lid. They’d escaped fire and dungeon with each other, that was all. He couldn’t read anything more into their time together.
And while he wasn’t watching, someone got cut. A man reeled backwards, almost tripping over Mama’s feet, his sword arm staining red on the biceps. His opponent, a short, bald greybeard lunged again with rapier, only to see his blow miss its mark as he was dragged back by an arm around his neck.
Mama reared away, barging into Dalip, who lost his balance. The hurt man roared and raised his hatchet, intent on plunging it into something. He didn’t seem to care what: he started forward, and Dalip, sprawled on the deck, could only watch.
The steersman caught the man’s arm, right where the rapier’s thin blade had punched through, and squeezed hard. The hatchet bounced away, and the fight was suddenly over. Simeon stood between them, arms outstretched, staring first at one man, then the other, until they both decided that carrying on wasn’t in their best interests.
As to whose fault it was, there was no way of telling. The captain seemed content not to cross-examine any of the witnesses. Blame wasn’t apportioned, and guilt or innocence stayed unestablished and, gradually, the deck quietened down again.
There’d been a couple of other mishaps, which were treated with salt water and rough stitches, and the blood scrubbed off the deck with rags. Everyone else treated the incident as one of those things, like spilling a drink or dropping a plate at a party: a strange, cavalier attitude to Dalip.
He understood how it was easy to be reckless with your own well-being because he’d been a teenage boy and that was what it was like◦– climbing things, falling from things, taking things, doing things◦– but mock fights with real knives? These people were adults, and their sudden wildness scared him. There could easily have been a death, accidental for sure, but he suddenly had no doubt that the body would have been pitched over the side, and the perpetrator given extra duties for the duration◦– and then it would have been forgotten. And these were supposed to be the sensible ones, the good people, who’d escaped from the clutches of the geomancers and decided to live free.
The ship readied to come about. Ropes were loosened, and the sail flapped and billowed, snapping in the wind until the rudder forced a change in direction. The sailcloth filled again, and the ropes tightened. For all their disregard, they were a decent crew. Or perhaps because of it. How long could you stay at sea, dodging beasts, without craving the danger that came between bouts of extreme boredom? Raiding the land was as exciting as it got: hunting animals, picking fruit and nuts, gathering firewood, drawing water.
Dalip realised he hadn’t understood a single thing about the ship or its fools. They weren’t cowards, running away from danger. They were like vermin, ruthlessly exploiting the one gap they could find in a screwed-up ecosystem. If that meant they had learnt to run sometimes, then it also meant they had learnt to swarm ashore and strip a coast clean.
Opportunistic: that was the word. And with the maps, Simeon sensed the biggest, juiciest opportunity of all. No wonder the crew had chewed the idea over, then swallowed it wholesale. This was something they excelled in.
Perhaps they could pull this off after all.
‘Whose is this sea-chest?’ he asked Mama.
‘No one’s come for it.’ She looked around and settled her sights on the steersman. ‘What do we do about this?’
‘Fight over it if you want,’ he said, not taking his eyes off Simeon at the far end of the ship. ‘Or share what’s inside.’
‘So what happened to the previous owner?’
The steersman did his best to shrug while holding the tiller. ‘He got left behind. That could mean anything: dead, taken, deserted.’