Ship of Magic

‘Ephron,’ she had said quietly. ‘Ephron, Wintrow is here.’

And in the bed, a shape stirred and coughed and then mumbled what might have been an acknowledgement. He stood there, shackled by his grandmother’s grip on his wrist, and only belatedly offered a ‘Hello, Grandfather. I’ve come home to visit.’

If the old man had heard him at all, he hadn’t bothered with a reply. After a few moments, his grandfather had coughed again and then queried hoarsely, ‘Ship?’

‘No. Not yet,’ his grandmother replied gently.

They had stood there a while longer. Then, when the old man made no more movement and took no further notice of them, his grandmother said, ‘I think he wants to rest now, Wintrow. I’ll send for you later when he’s feeling a bit better.’

That time had not come. Now his father was home, and the news of Ephron Vestrit’s imminent death seemed to be all his mind could grasp. He had glanced at Wintrow over his mother’s shoulder as he embraced her. His eyes widened briefly and he nodded at his eldest son, but then his Mother Keffria began to pour out her torrent of bad news and all their complications. Wintrow stood apart, like a stranger, as first his sister Malta and then his younger brother Selden welcomed their father with a hug. At last there had been a pause in Keffria’s lament, and he stepped forward, to first bow and then grip hands with his father.

‘So. My son the priest,’ his father greeted him, and Wintrow could still not decide if there had been a breath of derision in those words. The next did not surprise him. ‘Your little sister is taller than you are. And why are you wearing a robe like a woman?’

‘Kyle!’ his mother rebuked her husband, but he had turned away from Wintrow without awaiting a reply.

Now, following his aunt’s departure, he trailed into the house behind them. The adults were already discussing the best ways of moving Ephron down to the ship, and what must be taken or brought down later. The children, Malta and Selden, followed, trying vainly to ask a string of questions of their mother and continually being shushed by their grandmother. And Wintrow trailed after all, feeling neither adult nor child, nor truly a part of this emotional carnival. On the journey here, he had realized he did not know what to expect. And ever since he had arrived, that feeling had increased. For the first day, most of his conversations had been with his mother, and had consisted of either her exclamations over how thin he was, or fond remembrances and reminiscing that inevitably began with, ‘I don’t suppose you remember this, but…’ Malta, once so close to him as to seem almost his shadow, now resented him for coming home and claiming any of their mother’s attention. She did not speak to him but about him, making stinging observations when their mother was out of earshot, ostensibly to the servants or Selden. It did not help that at twelve she was taller than he was, and already looking more like a woman than he did a man. No one would have suspected he was the elder. Selden, scarcely more than a baby when he had left, now dismissed him as a visiting relative, one scarcely worth getting to know, as he would doubtless soon be leaving. Wintrow fervently hoped Selden was right. He knew it was not worthy to long for his grandfather to die and simply get it over with so he could return to his monastery and his life, but he also knew that to deny the thought would only be another sort of lie.

They all halted in a cluster outside the dying man’s room. Here they lowered their voices, as if discussing secrets, as if his death must not be mentioned aloud. It made no sense to Wintrow. Surely this was what the old man had been longing for. He forced himself to focus on what was being said.

‘I think it best to say nothing at all about any of it,’ his grandmother was saying to his father. She had hold of the door knob but was not turning it. She almost appeared to be barring him from the room. From his father’s furrowed brow, it was plain that Kyle Haven did not agree with his mother-in-law. But Mother had hold of his arm and was looking up at him beseechingly and nodding like a toy.

‘It would only upset him,’ she interjected.

‘And to no purpose,’ his grandmother went on, as if they shared a mind. ‘It has taken me weeks to talk him around to our way of seeing things. He has agreed, but grudgingly. Any complaints now would but reopen the discussion. And when he is weary and in pain, he can be surprisingly stubborn.’

She paused and both women looked up at his father as if commanding his assent. He did not even nod. At last he conceded, resentfully, ‘I shall not bring it up immediately. Let us get him down to the ship first. That is the most important thing.’

‘Exactly,’ Grandmother Vestrit agreed, and finally opened the door. They entered. But when Malta and Selden tried to follow, she stepped briskly to block them. ‘You children run and have Nana pack a change of clothes for you. Malta, you dash down to Cook and tell her that she’ll need to pack a food hamper for us to take, and then make arrangements for meals to be sent down to us.’ His grandmother was silent when she looked at Wintrow, as if momentarily puzzled as to what to do with him. Then she nodded at him briskly. ‘Wintrow, you’ll need a change of clothes as well. We’ll be living aboard the ship now until… Oh, dear.’

Colour suddenly fled from her face. Bleak realization flooded it. Wintrow had seen that look before. Many a time had he gone out with the healers when they were summoned, and many a time there was little or nothing their herbs and tonics and touches could do for the dying. At those times, it was what he could do for the grieving survivors that mattered most. Her hands rose like talons to clutch at the neck of her gown and her mouth contorted as if with pain. He felt a welling of genuine sympathy for the woman. ‘Oh, Grandmother,’ he sighed and reached towards her. But as he stepped forward to embrace her and with a touch draw off some of her grief, she stepped back. She patted at him with hands that all but pushed him away. ‘No, no, I’m fine, dear. Don’t let Grandma upset you. You just go get your things so you’re ready to go when we are.’

Then she shut the door in his face. For a time he stood staring at it in disbelief. When he did step back from it, he found Malta and Selden regarding him. ‘So,’ he said dully. Then, in a desperation he did not quite understand himself, he reached after some feeling of kinship with his siblings. He met their gazes openly. ‘Our grandfather is dying,’ he said solemnly.

‘He’s been doing it all summer,’ Malta replied disdainfully. She shook her head over Wintrow’s witlessness, then dismissed him by turning away. ‘Come, Selden. I’ll ask Nana to pack your things.’ Without a glance, she led the boy off and left Wintrow standing there.

Briefly, he tried to tell himself he should not feel hurt. His parents had not meant to diminish him by their exclusion of him and his sister was under the stress of grief. Then he recognized the lie and turned to embrace what he felt and thus understand it. His mother and grandmother were preoccupied. His father and his sister had both deliberately attempted to wound him, and he had let them succeed. But these things that had happened, and these feelings he now experienced were not faults to be conquered. He could not deny the feelings, nor should he try to change them. ‘Accept and grow,’ he reminded himself, and felt the pain ease. Wintrow went to pack a change of clothes.

Brashen stared down at Althea in disbelief. This was the last thing he needed today, he thought inanely, and then hung onto the anger in that thought to keep the panic from his mind. He pushed the door shut and then knelt on the floor by Althea. He had entered her cabin when she had completely refused to answer his raps and then his loud knocking on her door. When he had angrily thrust the unlocked door open and strode in, he expected her to hiss and spit at him. Instead he found her sprawled on the floor of her cabin, looking for all the world like one of the fainting heroines in a penny-theatre play. Except instead of falling gracefully with her hands to cushion her face, Althea lay with her hands almost clutching at the deck, as if she strove to dig her fingers into it.

She was breathing. He hesitated, then shook her shoulder gently. ‘Mistress,’ he began gently, then, in annoyance, ‘Althea. Wake up!’

She moaned softly but did not stir. He glared at her. He should yell for the ship’s doctor, except he shared her feelings about having anyone make a fuss. He knew she would rather not be seen like this. At least, that had been true of the old Althea. This fainting and sprawling on the deck was as unlike her as her moping in the cabin had been on the long voyage home. Nor did he like her pallor and the bony look to her face. He glanced about the stripped cabin, then scooped her up and deposited her on the bare mattress on the bunk. ‘Althea?’ he demanded again, and this time her eyelids twitched, then opened.

‘When the wind fills your sails, you can cut the water like a hot knife through butter,’ she told him with a gentle smile. Her eyes were distant, transfigured, as they looked into his. He almost smiled back at her, drawn into the sudden intimacy of her soft words. Then he caught himself.

‘Did you faint?’ he asked her bluntly.

Abruptly her eyes snapped into wariness. ‘I… no, not exactly. I just couldn’t stand… ’ She let her words trail off as she pushed herself up from the bed. She staggered a step, but even as he reached for her arm she steadied herself against a bulkhead. She gazed at the wall as if it presented some perfect view. ‘Have you readied a place for him?’ she asked huskily.

He nodded. She nodded in unison with him, and he made bold to say, ‘Althea. I grieve with you. He was very important to me.’

‘He’s not dead yet,’ she snapped. She smeared her hands over her face and pushed her hair back. Then, as if she thought that restored her bedraggled appearance, she stalked past him, out the cabin door. After a moment he followed her. Typical Althea. She had no concept that any other person beside herself truly existed. She had dismissed his pain at what was happening as if he had offered the words out of idle courtesy. He wondered if she had ever stopped to think at all what her father’s death meant to him or to any of the crew. Captain Vestrit was as openhanded and fair a man as skippered a ship out of Bingtown. He wondered if Althea had any idea how rare it was for a captain to actually care about the well-being of his crew. No. Of course she couldn’t. She’d never shipped aboard a boat where the rations were weevily bread and sticky salt pork almost turned poison. She’d never seen a man near beaten to death by the mate’s fists simply because he hadn’t moved fast enough to a command. True enough that Captain Vestrit never tolerated slackness in any man, but he’d simply be rid of him at the next port of call; he’d never resorted to brutality. And he knew his men. They weren’t whoever happened to be standing about on the docks when he needed a crew, they were men he had trained and tried and knew to their cores.

These men had known their captain, too, and had believed in him. Brashen knew of some who had turned down higher positions on other vessels simply to remain with Vestrit. Some of the sailors, by Bingtown standards, were too old to work a deck, but Ephron had kept them on for the experience of their years, and chose carefully the young, strong sailors he put alongside to learn from them. He had entrusted his ship to them, and they had entrusted their future to him. Now that the Vivacia was about to become hers, he hoped to Sa she’d have the morals and the sense to keep them on and do right by them. A lot of the older hands had no home save the Vivacia.

Brashen was one of them.

6 THE QUICKENING OF THE VIVACIA

THEY BROUGHT HIM ABOARD on a litter. That was what made Brashen’s heart clench and sudden tears burn his eyes. In the moment that he beheld the limp form beneath the linen sheet, he grasped the full truth. His captain was coming back aboard to die. His secret hope that Ephron Vestrit was not truly that badly off, that somehow the sea air and the deck of his own ship would miraculously revive him was only a silly child’s dream.

He stood back respectfully as Kyle supervised the men who carried his father-in-law up the gangplank. They set his litter under the canopy Brashen had improvised from canvas. Althea, as pale as if she were carved of ivory, stood there to receive him. The family trailed after him like lost sheep, to take up places around Ephron Vestrit’s litter as if they were guests and he were a laden table. His wife and elder daughter looked both panicky and devastated. The children, including an older boy, looked mostly confused. Kyle stood back from them all, a look of disapproval on his face as if he were studying a poorly-repaired sail or a badly-loaded cargo. After a few minutes, Althea seemed to break loose of her stupor. She left quietly, returning with a pitcher of water and a cup. She knelt on the deck beside her father and offered him a drink.

In the first hint of motion that Brashen had seen from him, Ephron turned his head and managed to sip some water. Then, with a vague motion of one skeletal hand, he reminded them that he must be lifted from the pallet and placed on the deck of his ship. Brashen found himself starting forward to that gesture, as he had so often sprung to obey his captain. He was briefly aware of Kyle’s scowl before he crouched by Captain Vestrit’s pallet.

‘If I may, sir,’ he said softly, and waited for the half nod of both recognition and permission that he was given. Althea was suddenly beside him, slipping her arms under her father’s bony legs as Brashen himself took the bulk of the old man’s weight. Not that there was much weight to him, or even that he was all that old, Brashen reminded himself as he eased the emaciated body down to the bare planks of the deck. Instead of frowning at the hardness of the deck, the captain sighed as if some great pain had suddenly eased. His eyes flicked open and found Althea. A trace of their old spark was there as he quietly commanded her, ‘Althea. The figurehead peg.’

Her eyes widened for an instant in a sort of horror. Then she squared her shoulders and rose to obey him. Pinched white lines formed around her mouth as she left her father’s side. Instinctively Brashen began to withdraw. Captain Vestrit would not have asked for the figurehead’s peg if he had not felt death was very near. This was a time for him to be alone with his family. But as Brashen drew back, he felt his wrist suddenly seized in a surprisingly tight grip. The captain’s long fingers dug into the flesh of his arm, and drew him back, closer. The smell of death was strong on him, but Brashen did not flinch as he lowered his head to catch his words.

‘Go with her, son. She’ll need your help. Stand by her through this.’ His voice was a hoarse whisper.

Brashen nodded that he understood and Captain Vestrit released him. But as Brashen rocked back onto his heels to stand, the dying man spoke again. ‘You’ve been a good sailor, Brashen.’ He now spoke clearly and surprisingly loudly, as if he desired not just his family, but everyone to hear his words. He dragged in a breath. ‘I’ve no complaint against you nor your work.’ Another breath. ‘Could I but live to sail again, you’d be my choice for first mate.’ His voice failed on the last words, coming out as a wheeze. His eyes left Brashen’s face suddenly, to turn unerringly to where Kyle stood and glowered. He struggled, then drew in a whistling breath. ‘But I shan’t sail again. The Vivacia will never again be mine.’ His lips were going blue. He found no more air, struggle as he might. His hand knotted in a fist, made a sudden, violent gesture that would have been meaningless to any other. But Brashen leaped to his feet and dashed forward to find Althea and hurry her back to him.

The secret of the figurehead peg was not widely known. Ephron had entrusted it to Brashen shortly after he had made him first mate. Concealed in the tumbling locks of the figurehead’s hair was a catch that would release a long smooth peg of the silky grey wood that comprised her. It was not a necessity, but it was believed that if the dying person grasped this peg as his life departed, more of his wisdom and essence would be imparted to the ship. Ephron had shown it to Brashen and illustrated how it worked, so that if some ship’s disaster felled him, Brashen might bring him the peg in his last moments. It was a duty Brashen had fervently hoped never to perform.

He found Althea dangling all but upside-down from the bowsprit as she tried to tug the peg loose from its setting. Without a word he followed her out, grasped her around the hips and lowered her to where she might reach it more easily. ‘Thanks,’ she grunted as she pulled it free. He lifted her effortlessly and set her back on her feet on the deck. She raced back to her father, the precious peg clutched tightly in her fist. Brashen was right behind her.

They were not a moment too soon. Ephron Vestrit’s death was not to be a pleasant one. Instead of closing his eyes and going in peace, he fought it as he had fought everything in life that opposed him. Althea offered him the peg and he gripped it as if it would save him. ‘Drowning,’ he strangled out. ‘Drowning on a dry deck.’

For a time the strange tableau held. Althea and her father gripped either end of the peg. Tears ran freely down her ravaged face. Her hair, gone wild about her face, clung to her damp cheeks. Her eyes were wide open, focused and caring as she stared down into the depths of her father’s mirroring black eyes. She knew there was nothing she could do for him, but she did not flinch away.

Ephron’s free hand scrabbled against the deck as if trying to find a grip on the smoothly sanded planks. He managed to draw in another choking, gurgling breath. A bloody froth was beginning to form at the corners of his mouth. Other family members clustered around them. The older sister clung tightly to her mother, wordless in grief, but the mother spoke in a low voice into her hair as she embraced her. The girl child wept, caught in a sort of terror, and clutched at her confused smaller brother. The older grandson stood back and apart from his family, face pale and set as one who endures pain. Kyle stood, arms crossed on his chest, at the dying man’s feet. Brashen had no idea what thoughts passed behind that still countenance. A second circle had also formed, at a respectful distance outside the canopy. The still-faced crew had gathered, hats in hands, to witness their captain’s passing.

‘Althea!’ the captain’s wife called out suddenly to her daughter. At the same time she thrust her older daughter forward, toward their father. ‘You must,’ she said in an odd, low voice. ‘You know you must.’ There was an odd purposefulness to her voice, as if she forced herself to some very unpleasant duty. The look on the older daughter’s face — Keffria, that was her name — seemed to combine shame with defiance. Keffria dropped to her knees suddenly beside her sister. She reached out a pale, trembling hand. Brashen thought she would touch her father. Instead she resolutely grasped the peg between Althea’s hand and her father’s. Even as Keffria made her unmistakable claim to the ship by grasping the peg above Althea’s hand, her mother affirmed it for her.

‘Althea. Let go of the peg. The ship is your sister’s, by right of her birth order. And by your father’s will.’ The mother’s voice shook as she said the words, but she said them clearly.

Althea looked up in disbelief, her eyes tracing up the arm from the hand that gripped the peg to her sister’s face. ‘Keffria?’ she asked in confusion. ‘You can’t mean it!’

Uncertainty spread over the older woman’s face. She glanced up at the mother. ‘She does!’ Ronica Vestrit declared, almost savagely. ‘It’s how it has to be, Althea. It’s how it must be, for all our sakes.’

‘Papa?’ Althea asked brokenly.

Her father’s dark eyes had never left her face. His mouth opened, moved, and he spoke a last phrase, ‘… let go…’

Brashen had once worked on a ship where the mate was a bit too free with his marlinspike. Mostly he used it to bludgeon fellows from behind, sailors he felt were not paying sufficient attention to their tasks. More than once, Brashen had been unwilling witness to the look on a man’s face as the tool connected with the back of his skull. He knew the look a man wore at that moment when pain registered as unconsciousness. That was how Althea looked at the uttering of her father’s words. Her grip on the peg laxed, her hand fell away from it to clutch instead at her father’s thin arm. That she held to, as a sailor clings to wreckage in a storm-tossed sea. She did not look again at her mother or her sister. She only gripped her father’s arm as he gaped and gasped like a fish out of water.

‘Papa,’ she whispered again. His back arched, his chest swelling high with his effort to find air. He rolled his head, turning his face to find hers before he suddenly collapsed back to the deck. The long struggle was over. The light of life and struggle suddenly left his eyes. His body settled bonelessly against the deck as if he were melting into the wood. His hand fell from the peg. As her sister Keffria stood, Althea collapsed forward. She put her head on her father’s chest and wailed shamelessly and hopelessly.

She did not see what Brashen did. Keffria stood and surrendered the peg to her waiting husband. In disbelief, Brashen watched Kyle accept it. He walked away from them all, carrying the precious peg as if he truly had a right to it. For an instant, Brashen nearly followed him. Then he decided it was something he’d just as soon not witness. Peg or no, the ship would quicken. Brashen thought he already felt a difference about her; the use of a peg would only hasten the process. But the promise he had given his captain now had a different shade of meaning for him.

‘Go with her, son. She’ll need your help. Stand by her through this.’ Captain Vestrit had not been speaking about the peg, or his death. Brashen’s heart sank as he tried to decide exactly what he had promised to do.

When Althea felt hands grip her shoulders, she tugged away from them. She didn’t care who it was. In the space of a few moments, she had lost her father and the Vivacia. It would have been simpler to lose her life. She still could not grasp either fact. It was not fair, she thought inanely. Only one unthinkable thing should happen at a time. If the events had only happened one at a time, she could have thought of a way to deal with them. But whenever she tried to think of her father’s death, at the moment of realizing it, the loss of the ship would suddenly loom up in her mind. Yet she could not think about that, not here by her father’s dead body. For then she would have to wonder how this father she had worshipped could have betrayed her so completely. As devastating as her pain was, she feared even to consider her anger. If she let her anger take her over, it might completely consume her, leaving nothing but blowing ash.

The hands came back, settling on her bowed shoulders and grasping them firmly. ‘Go away, Brashen,’ she said with no strength. But she no longer had the will to shrug his grip away. The warmth and steadiness of his hands on her shoulders were too much like her father’s steady clasp. Sometimes her father would come up on deck while she was on wheel watch. He could move as silently as a ghost when he wanted to; his whole crew knew that, and knew, too, that one could never know when he would silently appear, never interfering in a man’s work but checking the task with a knowing eye and giving a silent nod of approval. She would be standing at the wheel, both hands on it and holding a steady course, and she wouldn’t even know he was there until she felt the firm, approving grip of his hands on her shoulders. Then he might drift off, or he might stand beside her and have a pipe while he watched the night and the water and his daughter steering his ship through both.

Somehow that memory gave her strength. The sharp edges of her grief settled into a dull, throbbing lump of pain. She straightened up, squaring her shoulders. She didn’t understand anything; not how he could have died and left her, and certainly not how he could have taken her ship from her and given it to her sister. ‘But, you know, there were a lot of times when he barked orders, and I couldn’t fathom the sense of them. But if I simply jumped up and obeyed, it always came right. It always came right.’