Scott Lynch - Red Seas Under Red Skies

"I know my business," she said brusquely. "See everything back to where you found it, then go to the undercastle and stay there."

Then she was gone, into the work parties overseeing a dozen delicate operations. Locke returned the brooms to the tool locker, then threaded his way forward with Jean just behind. Overhead, canvas snapped and rolled, ropes creaked as strain was added or adjusted and men and women called softly to one another as they worked with nothing but thin air for dozens of yards beneath them.

The Poison Orchid slid slowly onto the larboard tack. She put the last faint halo of the lost sun behind her, as though sailing out of some ghostly golden portal, and gathered way beneath the first stars of evening, which waxed steadily brighter in the inky eastern sky.

Locke was pleasantly surprised to discover that Jabril had held a spot for him and Jean; not one of the more desirable ones near the entrance to the undercastle, but enough spare deck to squeeze up against the larboard bulkhead, in relative darkness. Others with more favourable positions appeared not to begrudge them a moment of space as they crawled and stumbled past. One or two men muttered greetings; at worst, a few, like Mazucca and Aspel, maintained an unfriendly silence.

"Looks like you two really have joined the rest of us galley slaves," said Jabril.

"Galley slaves is what we" d be if Ravelle hadn't gotten us out" a the Windward Rock," said someone Locke didn't recognize. "May be a dumb fuck, but we should show him fellowship for that."

Thanks for speaking up when we were being thrown off the ship, Locke thought. "Aye, I agree about the dumb fuck part," said Mazucca. "And we'll all mind the fellowship part," said Jean, using the slow, careful voice he reserved for people he was trying to avoid hitting. "Orrin's not alone, is he?"

"Dark in here," said Mazucca, "lots of us, squeezed in together. You think you can move fast enough, Valora? You think you can stay awake long enough for it to matter? Twenty-eight on two—"

"If it was clear deck between you and me," said Jean, "you" d piss your breeches the moment I cracked my knuckles." "Jerome," said Locke, "Easy. We can all—"

There was the sound of a scuffle in the darkness, and then a heavy thud. Mazucca gave a strangled squawk.

"Baldy, you stupid bastard," hissed an unknown voice, "you raise a hand against them and Drakasha will kill you, savvy?"

"You'll make it worse for all of us," said Jabril. "You never heard of Zamira Drakasha? Piss her off and we might all lose our chance to be crew. You do that, Mazucca, you find out what twenty-eight on one feels like. Fuckin" promise."

There were murmurs of assent in the darkness and a sharp gasp as whoever had been holding Mazucca let go. "Peace," he gasped. T won't… I won't ruin things. Not me."

The night was warm, and the heat of thirty men in close confinement rapidly grew stifling despite the small ventilation grating in the middle of the forecastle deck. As Locke's eyes adjusted to the darkness, he became able to pick out the shadowed shapes of the men around him more clearly. They lay or sat flank to flank like livestock. The ship reverberated with activity around them. Feet pounded the forecastle deck, crewfolk moved about and laughed and shouted on the deck below. There was a slapping hiss of waves parting before the bow, and the constant sound of toil and shouted orders from aft.

In time, there was a cursory meal of lukewarm salted pork and half a leather jack of skunkish swill vaguely descended from ale. The food and drink were passed awkwardly through the crowd; knees and elbows met stomachs and foreheads continually until everyone was dealt with. Then came the equally punishing task of passing jacks and tin bowls back, and then of men crawling over one another to use the craplines. Locke finally settled for good into his sliver of deckspace against Jean's back, and had a sudden thought. "Jabril, did anyone find out what day it is?"

"Twelfth of Festal," said Jabril. T asked Lieutenant Delmastro when I was brought aboard." "Twelve days," muttered Jean. "That bloody storm lasted a while."

"Yeah," Locke sighed. Twelve days gone. Not two weeks since thed'r set out, with every man here deferring to him and Jean as heroes. Twelve days for the antidote to wane in strength. Gods, the Archon… how the hell was he going to explain what had happened to the ship? Some nautical technicality? "Squiggle-fucked the rightwise cock-swabber with a starboard jib," he whispered to himself, "when I should" ve used a larboard jib." "What?" muttered Jean and Jabril simultaneously. "Nothing."

Soon enough the old instincts of a Catchfire orphan asserted themselves. Locke made a pillow of the crook of his left arm and closed his eyes. In moments the noise and heat and bustle of the men around him, and the thousand noises of the unfamiliar ship, were nothing more than a vague background to his light but steady sleep.

By the seventeenth of Festal, Jean had come to dread the sight and smell of the ship's vinegar as much as he'd come to appreciate his glimpses of her lieutenant.

His morning task, on most days, was to fill one bucket with the foul red stuff and another with seawater, and set to swabbing the deck and bulkheads along the full length of the main deck, at least where he could reach. Fore and aft were long compartments called crew berths, and one would be in use at any given time, crammed with four or five dozen people in and out of hammocks, their snores mingling like the growls of caged beasts. That berth Jean would carefully avoid, instead swabbing out ship's stores (what the crew called the "delicates room" for its rack of glass bottles under netting), the main-deck hold and armoury and the empty crew berth — though even when empty each berth contained a mess of barrels, crates and nettings that had to be laboriously shifted.

Once the reek of watered vinegar was fully mingled with the usual below-decks stench of old food, bad liquor and all things unwashed, Jean would usually move throughout the lowest two decks, the orlop and the bilge, swinging a large yellow alchemical light before him to help dissipate the miasmas that caused disease. Drakasha was a great one for the health of her crew; most of the sailors pierced their ears with copper to ward off cataracts and drank pinches of white sand in their ale to strengthen their bellies against rupture. The lower decks were lighted at least twice a day, much to the amusement of the ship's cats. Unfortunately, this meant climbing, crawling, scrambling and shoving past all manner of obstacles, including busy crewfolk. Jean was always careful to be polite and make his obedience by nodding as he passed.

This crew was always in motion; this ship was always alive. The more Jean saw and learned on the Poison Orchid, the more convinced he became that the maintenance schedule he'd set as first mate of the Red Messenger had been hopelessly naive. No doubt Caldris would have spoken up eventually, had he lived long enough to notice.

There appeared to be no such thing, in Captain Drakasha's opinion, as a state of adequate repair for a ship at sea. What was checked or inspected one watch was checked again the next, and the next, day after day. What was braced was then rebraced, what could be mended was remended. The pump and capstan mechanisms were greased daily with fat scraped from the cooking pots; the masts were "slushed" top to bottom with the same brown gunk, for protection against the weather. Sailors wandered in constant, attentive parties, inspecting plank seams or wrapping canvas around rigging where the ropes chafed against one another.

The Orchids were divided into two watches, Red and Blue. They would work in six-hour shifts, one watch minding the ship while the other rested. The Red Watch, for example, had duty from noon till the sixth hour of the evening, and would come back on duty from midnight till the sixth hour of the morning. Crew on the off-watch could do as they pleased, unless the call of "all hands" summoned them to the deck for some strenuous or dangerous undertaking.