The Red Wolf Conspiracy (16 page)

His voice was proud but not ill-humored, and Pazel found himself smiling.

“They think I'm just tanned, you know. About half the time.”

“And then you open your mouth.”

Pazel laughed, nodding. Ormali was a singsong language—and despite all his efforts its rolling cadences emerged in every tongue he spoke.

As they neared the top of the gangway the noises of the ship grew louder. Surging ahead of the boys, Mr. Fiffengurt seized a buntline and pulled himself up on the rail, giving an expansive wave.

“Aboard! Aboard! Step lively, now!”

Like goats crossing a stream, the boys leaped onto the deck. Pazel would never forget what he saw in those first moments.
A city
, he thought.
It's a city afloat!

They were boarding amidships. Here the vessel was so wide that the
Eniel
could have sat athwart her without touching the rails. Fore and aft she seemed a broad wooden avenue, crowded with barrels, boxes, timbers, heaps of sailcloth, spools of cordage and chain. Swarming through these obstacles were hundreds upon hundreds of people—sailors, stevedores, customs officers, tearful sweethearts, efficient wives, a man selling little scraps of sandrat fur (“Nobody drowns with sandrat fur!”), monks leaving their holy thumbprints in ash on the foreheads of believers, two bald men fighting over a chicken, a tattoo artist etching a boar on a burly chest. The tarboys stood frozen, awed. They were the only stationary beings aboard.

A second headcount, and Fiffengurt led them aft, past the mainmast, the longboat, the tonnage hatch yawning like a mineshaft. Clerks and midshipmen shoved by without a glance. High on the yards the sailors looked distant indeed, and Pazel was not surprised to see Mr. Uskins inspecting their work with the aid of a telescope.

At length they reached the stern port ladderway, and Fiffengurt led them into the belly of the ship. One floor down was the main deck, every bit as crowded as the topdeck above, but quite a bit hotter and smellier. Next came the upper gun deck, where the ship's cattle were temporarily stockaded, wearing looks of bewilderment Pazel found deeply justified. Farther forward the boys caught a glimpse of the cannon themselves. They were ferocious guns, tree-trunk thick and scarred by countless years of fire and salt. “Grandfather-guns,” said Fiffengurt. “Terrible weapons, to be sure. But the bow carronades throw shot like prize pumpkins. Eighty-pounders. Down we go.”

On the lower gun deck a sharp smell of frying onions told them the galley was near. Through the open bulkhead Pazel glimpsed it: a steamy compartment full of pots and saucepans and hanging ladles, where a squadron of cooks busied themselves around a cast-iron stove in which one might have roasted a buffalo. “Mr. Teggatz!” shouted Fiffengurt, barely pausing. “Thirty-six for breakfast, plus the old boys! Now, if you please!”

One more descent, and they stood in darkness. Fiffengurt strode away from them, as sure and quick as he'd been on the daylit topdeck, and Pazel wondered if he had committed the whole ship's plan to memory. A minute later they heard him striking at a flint, and then a lamp sputtered to life.

“Berth deck,” said Fiffengurt. “You'll sleep right here, lads, and eat at the rear of the main mess, past the deckhands. You'll have light from the hatches in good weather, and the windscoops freshen the air a bit, once we're under way. Never mind the smell; you won't notice it in a day or two. No windows in your compartment, but if you don't act like hooligans the sailors may leave the doors open on their own berth, and you'll have a bit more light. Come on, in with you.”

By the dim glow of walrus oil they explored their new home: a musty wooden cavern, its far corners lost in the gloom. Massive stanchions braced the ceiling, which was low enough for the largest boys to touch. Every beam and bulkhead wall, and even the long dining tables, were carved from the same gigantic, immeasurably ancient kind of tree. The air was heavy; it smelled like a barn sealed tight against a storm.

Fiffengurt rapped on a bulkhead. “Cloudcore oak. Strong as any wood in Alifros, but lighter by half. The gun and berth decks are almost solid cloudcore. We don't know half the secrets of the
Chathrand
, lads, but here's one we grasp well enough. Not that it does us much good: there are no more cloudcore oaks. The last fifty trees grow on Mount Etheg in a secret place. They harvest one tree a century, for essential repairs to this gray lady.”

Footsteps rang on the stairs behind them. “Ah, Teggatz! Very timely!” said Fiffengurt. “My lads, be good to this man or he'll poison you: he's our head cook.”

Teggatz was portly, with round red cheeks. His eyes were small and recessed nearly to the point of invisibility. He laughed, rubbing his hands together nervously. The boys waited, the laugh went on, the hands moved faster and faster. At last Teggatz spoke, in a gleeful, soft explosion:

“Shepherd's pie!”

“Shepherd's pie, is it?” said Fiffengurt. “Fancy that! Bring it on, then!”

“Fancy!” giggled Teggatz, and waved up the stairs. More footsteps, and then a second group of boys appeared, bearing plates and platters and cups. They numbered about fifteen: the senior tarboys, kept on from previous voyages. Most greeted the new boys with frank, friendly looks, but a handful gazed at them with something like hostility, as if they were sizing up the competition. Fiffengurt introduced them all by name as they set their burdens on the tables.

“These are your elder brothers,” he told the new boys. “Some of them have been four years with
Chathrand
. Of course, we've all got a new captain, and new rules to learn. But until you know the ship as well as they do, see that you heed 'em. Peytr and Dastu here are your chiefs because they're the oldest—turning full sailors in a year's time, if they stay out of trouble.”

Pazel studied the two older tarboys. Peytr had narrow shoulders and a pointed chin. He smiled, but there was a wariness to his look, as if he were guarding himself against some unpleasant surprise. Dastu was broad and strong, with a look of serenity to his clean-shaven face.

Fiffengurt left them as they sat down to eat. The shepherd's pie was delicious and hot, and when they finished, Peytr and Dastu led them on a tour of the
Chathrand
. This was a hasty business: the ship was set to launch at dusk and work was rising to a frenzy. Lieutenants stormed fore and aft, sweating, shouting orders nonstop. Cargo cranes rose and fell. Brigades of sailors rolled casks along the decks. The boys were shoved, stepped on, laughed at, cursed. No matter where they stood they were in someone's way.

Still, Pazel was in love. There are few things more beautiful than a full-rigged ship, and the
Chathrand
was a marvel to shame all others. Every inch of her seemed the work of mages. There were the famous glass planks: six mighty, translucent windows, built directly into the floor of the topdeck, flooding the main deck below with daylight. The main deck itself had two glass planks, and one survived in the floor of the upper gun deck. Over all of these men dragged crate and cannon without a second thought: in six hundred years they had never cracked, nor even sprung a leak. A few had been lost to great violence—cannon fire, falling masts—and had to be replaced with wood, for no record told the name of that wondrous crystal, nor how it had been made or mined.

The speaking-tubes were another marvel: slim copper pipes wrapped in leather, snaking between decks and compartments from stem to stern. They were not much good in foul weather, and useless in a fight, when the cannon deafened everyone. But on calm days the captain could address the officer at the helm without rising from his desk, or call for tea without leaving the quarterdeck.

Stranger sights abounded on the lower decks. Peytr showed them a gunport near the bows where a white, curved object the length of Pazel's forearm lay embedded in the wood. The boys gasped when they realized they were looking at a tooth. “Fang of a sea-serpent,” Dastu told them. “Killed four hundred years ago by the gunners at this very window. They sealed a crack in the hull with it, as you can see: good luck, that, or so they hoped.”

“And that's not the scariest thing on this ship,” said Peytr.

“No, brother, it ain't,” said Dastu quickly. “But some things we'll not discuss today.”

Of course, not naming such “things” left the tarboys more curious than ever, and soon the rumors began. Curses; creatures in the hold; weird rites among the sailors; tarboys pickled in barrels of brine: by evening Pazel had heard them all. “There's a beam in the afterhold,” a freckled boy named Durbee whispered to him, “with the names of all them what's been killed aboard since the day she launched. And even though each name's the size of a grain of rice the list stretches thirteen yards.”

“Then there's the vanishing compartments,” said the one called Swift. “If you ever see a door or a hatch where none should be—don't open it! Horrible things in those chambers—and one of 'em never lets you leave again if the door shuts behind you.”

“And s-s-s-somewhere,” put in Reyast, a kind-faced new boy whose lips quivered with his perpetual stutter, “there's a t-t-talking floorboard. It g-g-groans in the voice of a c-c-c-captain who went m-ma-maaa—”

“Nonsense, Reyast!” said Dastu, overhearing. “Rose is the only captain you should be thinking about. Fear him, if you must fear somebody, and stay out of his path. Now come along, all of you! Get those hammocks up!”

They had only just been assigned their hammocks—patched and moth-eaten, the sailors' rejects—and were scrambling to claim hanging-spots on the berth deck. The older boys showed them how to sling the hammocks from the great ceiling posts called stanchions, and how to climb the post-pegs of a lower hammock up to one's own without knocking them free and sending one's neighbor crashing down. The hammocks were hung three deep: Pazel found himself on a middle level, with Neeps above him and Reyast below.

“Footlockers to starboard,” Peytr had told them, toeing a heavy box. “Lashed tight against the bulkhead except in port and between shifts. Three boys to a box. There's fresh shirts and breeches for you, but don't you touch 'em till you've been scrubbed proper—deverminated, as we say, made pretty for the home port. Like as not Mr. Fiffengurt will burn your old rags in the furnace.”

At lunchtime, the new boys had to wait on the hundred sailors of the Third Watch, who gobbled their food and grog with enormous pleasure and shouted for more as the boys rushed up and down the stairs from the galley in a nonstop panic. Howling with laughter, the sailors teased them, saying that Captain Rose would make them run with a cannonball under each arm if they didn't step lively.

“And don't let yer fleas get into me sub-stunnance!”

“He he he! And some Ulluprid rum while you're at it, duckies!”

“Or better yet one o' them Ulluprid girlies. Can ye cook that up?”

As their own midday meal (beef hash with carrots and yams, this time) was ending, Fiffengurt appeared with a tattered sealskin logbook and a blue quill. He cleared a space on the table and addressed each new boy in turn. Birthplace? Previous ship, if any? Illnesses? Schooling? Skills? Everything they told him went into his logbook.

Pazel dreaded his turn. All day long he'd heard whispers behind his back—guesses and speculations about his skin and accent. When he named Ormael as his birthplace there were winks and muffled laughter.

Fiffengurt looked up from his book, and for the first time since their arrival looked genuinely angry. The laughter ceased. Then Fiffengurt asked for his previous ships. By the time Pazel had listed all six, the boys' faces were still and thoughtful.

“How did you learn Arquali so well?” said Fiffengurt, writing smoothly.

“I worked hard at school, sir,” Pazel answered with perfect truth. His fine Arquali had nothing to do with his mother's spell.

When the interviews were done, Fiffengurt told the boys about their duties. Pazel was glad that for all the
Chathrand's
size, the tasks that kept her sailing were like those of any ship, and he knew them well. Tarboys did not set sails, or weigh anchor, or stand watch, but they helped the sailors in all these tasks, and did a thousand more besides. If they were not mending sailcloth they might be washing uniforms, sanding anchor-chain, filing down old floor nails or hammering new ones. Then there were the running errands: coal to the galley, meals to the men, water for officers, snuff for the first-class lounge. The galley itself needed twenty boys at a shift. Each deck got a daily scrub. Every rope wore a protective skin of tar.

“How much rigging do we carry, boys?” Fiffengurt asked. “Can ye guess?”

“Leagues and leagues!”

“A mile's worth! Two miles!”

Fiffengurt laughed. “Thirty-nine miles,” he said. “And there won't be a fray or a weakness in any bit 'o them, lads. Not while Nilus Rose is captain.”

During the whole of that day his Gift barely made itself felt: all the boys spoke Arquali, even if a few, like Pazel himself, had a different mother tongue. Still the purring went on in the back of his head, and now and then a sailor cursed or muttered about new tarboys underfoot, and Pazel knew his Gift was translating.

Then at dusk an incident occurred that brought back his old fear of madness. The boys were on the topdeck, center aft, listening to First Mate Uskins' loud and rather sinister lecture on what he called the Five Zones. The point of his harangue seemed to be that the higher your rank, the more parts of the ship you could visit without orders or express permission. The captain was the only “Five-Zone man” aboard: he could of course go anywhere; but no one,
not even the first mate
(Uskins leaned forward and struck his own chest), might enter the captain's quarters uninvited. Think of it, boys! And he, Uskins, was a Four-Zone man!

His dramatic speech ground on toward the inevitable final comment on their own status as lowest of the low (a remark Uskins seemed to look forward to). As he boomed and huffed, Pazel realized one of the boys was whispering on his left. It was an odd whisper, not at all mindful of Uskins. Someone, thought Pazel, is making a big mistake.