Robin Hobb - The Mad Ship

Come back. Please. It was the boy’s voice, pleading. Kennit. Please choose to live.

The name was a magic. It bound and defined him. The boy sensed that. Kennit. He repeated the name coaxingly. Kennit, please. Kennit. Live. At each touch of the word, he became more solid. Memories coagulated around the name, scabbing over the old wound of his life and sealing him into it.

Please, he begged. He groped for his tormentor’s name. Wintrow. Please let me go. Wintrow. He sought to bind the boy as he had been bound, by the use of his name. Instead of bending Wintrow to his will, it only locked him into an awareness of the boy.

Kennit, the boy acknowledged him eagerly. Kennit. Help me. Come back to yourself, become yourself again. Enter your life again.

A curious thing happened then. In Wintrow’s urgent welcome of his self-awareness and Kennit’s sensing of the boy, they mingled. Memories churned and tumbled free of their owners. A boy wept silent tears the night before he was sent from his family to a monastery. A boy yammered in terror as he watched his father beaten unconscious while a man held him and laughed. A boy struggled and yelped in pain as a seven-pointed star was needled into his hip. A boy meditated, and saw shapes of dragons in the clouds and images of serpents in swirling water. A boy struggled with his tormentor, who throttled him into compliance. A boy sat long and still, transported by a book. A boy choked and gasped, resisting the tattooing of his face. A boy spent hours practising the careful formation of letters. A boy held his hand to the deck and refused to cry out as his infected finger was cut from his hand. A boy grinned and sweated with joy as a tattoo was seared from his hip.

The ship had been right. There were many conjunctions, many places where they matched. The congruency could not be denied. They overlapped, they were one another, and then they separated again.

Kennit knew himself again. Wintrow cowered at the harshness that had been Kennit’s early years. In the next instant, a wave of pity and compassion overwhelmed Kennit. It came from the boy. Wintrow reached out to him. Ignorantly, he sought to fix the parts that Kennit had deliberately broken away from himself. This was you. You should keep it, Wintrow kept insisting. You cannot simply discard parts of yourself because they are painful. Acknowledge them and go on.

The boy had no concept of what he was suggesting. That whimpering, crippled thing could never be a part of Kennit the Pirate. Kennit defended himself from it in the same fashion he always had. With anger and contempt he rebuffed Wintrow, severing that brief connection of empathy. In the moment before they parted, he became aware of the boy’s sudden hurt at his act. For the first time in many years, he felt remorse burn him. Before he could truly consider it, he heard as from a great distance, a woman’s voice calling his name.

‘Kennit. Oh, my Kennit. Please, please, please, don’t be gone. Kennit!’

Unavoidable pain defined the confines of his body. There was a weight on his chest and his leg ended in a sensation of wrongness. He drew in a deep breath through a throat that was raw with spirits and bile. As if pulling up an anchor by himself, he hauled his eyelids open. Light scorched his brain.

The whore clutched his left hand, weeping over it. Her wet face and dishevelled hair, her shrill cries…it was really too distressing to tolerate. He tried to jerk his hand free of her grip, but he was too weak. ‘Etta. Do stop that. Please.’ His words came out in a hoarse croak.

‘Oh, Kennit!’ she cried out in sudden joy. ‘You aren’t dead. Oh, my love.’

‘Water,’ he said to her, as much to be rid of her as for the sake of his thirst. She sprang to the task, hastening to the carafe on the sideboard across the room. He swallowed in a dry throat, then pushed vaguely at the weight on his chest. Hairy. Rough hair under his hand, and a sweaty face. He managed to lift his head a tiny bit and look down at his chest. It was Wintrow. From a chair next to the bed, the boy was collapsed forward onto Kennit. The boy’s eyes were shut, his face a dreadful pasty colour, but tears streaked his cheeks. Wintrow wept for him. A sudden rush of feeling confused Kennit. The boy’s head was on his chest, making breathing even more difficult. He wanted to push him away, but the warmth of his hair and skin under his hand awoke a foreign longing as well. It was as if he himself were embodied afresh in this lad. He could protect this boy as he had not been protected himself. He had the power to stave off the destructive forces that had once torn his own life apart.

After all, they were not that different. The ship had said so. To protect him would be like saving himself.

It was a curious feeling, that power. It offered to sate a deep hunger that had lived nameless inside him since he had been a boy himself. Before he could wonder further at it, Wintrow’s eyes opened. The boy’s gaze was dark and unguarded. He looked full into Kennit’s face with an expression of bottomless woe that changed suddenly to wonder. The boy’s hand rose to touch Kennit’s cheek. ‘You’re alive,’ he said in whispery awe. His voice wandered as if that of a fever victim but joy began to kindle in his eyes. ‘You were all in pieces. Just like a stained-glass window, all in pieces. So many parts to a man. I was amazed. You still came back.’ His eyes sagged shut on a sigh. ‘Thank you. Thank you. I didn’t want to die.’

The boy blinked his eyes and suddenly seemed more himself. He lifted his head from Kennit’s chest and looked around groggily. ‘I must have fainted,’ he said to himself in a thin voice. ‘I went so deep in the trance…that’s never happened to me before, but Berandol warned me…I suppose I’m lucky that I found my way back at all.’ He leaned back abruptly into the chair he was perched on. ‘I suppose we’re both lucky,’ he said woozily.

‘My leg is wrong,’ Kennit told him. With the boy’s head off his chest, it was easier to take breath and speak. He was now free to focus entirely on the strange sensation of his truncated body.

‘It’s numb. I treated it with kwazi fruit rind, to take the pain away for a while. You should sleep while you can. The pain will be back. We don’t have enough rind to keep it away forever.’

‘You’re in my way,’ Etta said tartly.

Wintrow gave a guilty start. She stood beside him, holding a cup of water. The boy was not truly in her way; she could have simply brought it to the other side of the bed. Wintrow took her true meaning, however. ‘Beg pardon,’ he said hastily, and rose. He staggered two steps towards the door and then collapsed to the deck as bonelessly as a dropped rag. He lay where he had swooned.

Etta gave an exclamation of annoyance. ‘I’ll call a crew man to take him away,’ she said. The sight of the unconscious boy on the deck distressed the pirate until she offered him the dripping cup.

Her long-fingered hand was cool on the back of his neck as she held up his head. His thirst was suddenly all consuming. It was ship’s water, neither cold nor fresh, tasting of the barrel it had been stored in. It was nectar. He drank it down. ‘More,’ he croaked when she took the cup away.

‘Right away,’ she promised him.

His eyes followed her as she returned to the water ewer. He noted in passing the limp boy on the floor. A moment ago, there had been something about him, something urgent he wished Etta to do. It had been important, but now he could not recall it. Instead, he was starting to float, rising off the bed. The experience was both unnerving and pleasant. The cup of water came back. He drank it all. ‘I can fly,’ he observed to the woman. ‘Now that the pain is gone, I can fly. The pain was anchoring me down.’