Robert Redick - The Rats and the Ruling sea

Eighteen days like this. It was winter in Arqual, here it was sweltering and cloudless. The men were going mad for rum, but Fiffengurt knew enough to post the Turachs about the liquor compartments with orders to kill: spirits, of course, only make one pass more water than one has swallowed. Men sucked lemons, drank up the vinegar and syrups. The crawlies began to fight among themselves. Was it their messiah, I wondered, who had ordered them to spring this trap, which had now caught them as well?

He came to see me, at last, and begged my advice. 'Your men are choosing death, Captain [suddenly I was Captain again] — drinking their fill and crawling into their hammocks, as if someone else were about to appear and sail the ship for them. Won't you tell your man to give them rum?'

'Is that what you were counting on?' I said. He did not understand the effects of alcohol, and paled when I told him that it increased thirst. 'What are they to drink, then?' he shrilled, as if I were being unreasonable.

I had him bring me Teggatz, and told the cook how he might fashion a boiler-condenser, to distil fresh water from salt. 'Use bilgewater; it will have less salt than the sea itself. Meanwhile, boil the rum in an open cauldron; the alchohol will go up in fumes.' Teggatz assembled the device, and stoked the galley stove until the whole deck felt the heat. But the machine and the flat rum together only yielded another forty gallons a day, and the men tending the stove had to drink a quarter of that just to keep from passing out in the heat.

Perhaps those forty gallons made the difference, however. For a morning came when, parched and gritty-eyed, I woke to find the little lordling's girl (Myett, she is called) standing before me with a white pill in her hand. 'Eat it, Captain, and go to the quarterdeck. Our lord wishes you to see something.'

I gulped the pill (before Ott or Haddismal chose to wrestle me for it) and staggered to my feet. Outside on the deck, I felt no pain in my lungs at all. She ran ahead of me, and I walked stiff and angry towards the bow, taking in the damage to my ship. At last I pulled myself up the quarterdeck ladder. The lordling was there, on a man's shoulder, having my own telescope held up for him. It was aimed — like six or eight others in various hands — at something two points off the port bow. Thasha Isiq saw me before the little tyrant did, and brought me Admiral Isiq's instrument to gaze through. I raised and focused it, guessing already what I would see.

'Congratulations, Captain,' she said. ' You brought us across, alive.'

I lowered the scope; was she mocking me? The choices I'd made, the alliances I'd condoned! The ship still reeked of fire, the boards beneath our feet were black. My men were lifting carcasses of rats and wondering if they dared drink from their veins.

Then I saw the ghosts clustered behind her, scores of them, the complete repertoire of former captains, six centuries strong. They were toasting me with brandy. They were shouting the name of Nilus Rose.

Only the girl and I were aware of them, of course. But as they cheered, Pathkendle came up beside her and offered me his hand. You crafty little bastard, I thought, but I shook it all the same. If they were recruiting me for something it was handsomely done.

Now I shall send this, Father, and hope that you are not ashamed to call me son.

I am, and ever shall be, your obedient

Nilus

P.S. The antidote was temporary. Within the hour, as the crawlies intended, I was back in the forecastle house. Oggosk declared that she could receive letters from you so long as we remain trapped here. We fell to arguing; and by a slip of the tongue she revealed how she has been opening and reading your letters before passing them on to me. I confess I was quite angry. I took her unlit pipe (yes, the same one; she will masticate no other) and crushed it beneath my heel.

Pray do not trouble yourself to write, therefore, until you hear that I have resumed my command. Of course I shall still write to you. But will you really see these letters? Is she truly sending them, as she feeds them page by page into the fire-pot? There is no proof one way or the other. I must trust the hag, as I have been doing (not always profitably) these many years.

Finally, I implore you not to tell Mother of my conflict with her elder sister, who is savage without her pipe. Whether she took my side or Oggosk's, the headache would be intolerable. Some things are best kept among men.

16 Ilbrin 941

215th day from Etherhorde

'Captain Fiffengurt,' said Mr Thyne, 'aren't you going to name it? You have that right, after all.'

'Don't call me captain,' growled Fiffengurt. 'The ixchel can't promote me, no matter what Taliktrum says.'

'The Trading Company, however, has named many a captain. And your qualifications-'

'Hang it all, man! It's not Company approval I'd go looking for, if I wanted to hold onto this job.'

Thyne sighed, gazing south over the carronades. 'Such a beautiful place. It just feels wrong to keep calling it the island.'

It was by general acclamation (and only because it was expected to save their lives) the most beautiful island in all the world. Not that they could see much of it: Bolutu warned of sandbars, so with five or six miles to go they had tacked westward, and were keeping a safe distance.

Even through the stronger telescopes, however, there was little to be seen. A meandering, sand-coloured smudge. No rocks, no human (or dlomic) structures. Low trees or bushes on dune-tops, possibly. That was all. The island was so flat and low to the horizon that the first men to see it confessed they had thought it a mirage.

But it was no mirage. And it was no tiny island, either, at least in length: the wall of dunes vanished west as far as any eye could discern. Bolutu had given them one name already: the Northern Sandwall, a two-thousand-mile-long barrier of offshore banks, entirely without rock or coral, torn and shaped and sifted by the Nelluroq. 'Within lies the great Gulf of Masal,' he said, 'almost a sea unto itself.'

'Gods of mercy!' Fiffengurt had exploded. 'You can't be saying we have another voyage to make, before we reach solid land?'

'I have no way to know that, from here,' said Bolutu. 'The coast is quite irregular. In places the Sandwall comes to within five miles of the mainland; in others it stands three hundred miles offshore. But it is solid enough, and quite broad in places. There are fishing villages, small forests, naval stations — and yes, fresh water. In other places the Sandwall is so thin one can throw a rock from the north beach into the Gulf of Masal.'

In such spots, he explained, the Nelluroq frequently punched inlets straight through the Sandwall. Entering the Gulf by one of these, a ship could make a safe landing on the Sandwall in any number of places, by following the channel-markers set by fishermen. 'Provided, of course, that we are in Bali Adro territory. That is likely, for most of the Gulf is claimed by our Empire. But I cannot know for certain without a landmark.'

'Are those inlets deep enough for a ship like the Chathrand?' Taliktrum had demanded, from his perch on Big Skip's shoulder.

'It depends, sir,' was Bolutu's reply.

'Depends, depends,' grumbled Fiffengurt. 'Everything blary depends.'

They had plenty of sea beneath them now: twenty fathoms, when the lead was cast. Fiffengurt called for topsails, on the masts that could take the strain. Time was against them: the men's spirits had lifted at the sight of land, but they were still half mad with thirst. And there would be no landing of any kind this side of the Sandwall. When the wind was right they could hear the breakers: a smashing, bellowing surf that would crush any vessel caught in its grip. They had no choice but to sail on.