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DEFIANCE AND ALLIANCE

H ER FIRST SLAVE DEATH happened in the early afternoon.

The loading had gone slowly and poorly. A wind from the east had churned up a nasty chop in the water while the building clouds on the horizon promised yet another winter storm by morning.

The coffles of slaves were being ferried out to where Vivacia was anchored, and the slaves were being prodded up the rope ladder hung over her side.

Some of the slaves were in poor condition; others were afraid of the ladder, or simply awkward getting from the rocking boat to the ladder on the side of the rocking ship.

But the man who died, died because he wanted to.

He was halfway up the ladder, climbing awkwardly because his legs were still fettered together.

He suddenly laughed out loud. ‘Guess I’ll take the short road instead of the long one,’ he sang out.

He stepped away from the ladder and let go.

He dropped like an arrow into the sea, the weight of chain on his ankles pulling him straight down.

He could not have saved himself even if he had changed his mind.

In the dark waters far below her hull, a knot of serpents suddenly uncoiled.

She sensed their lashing struggle for a share of the meat.

The salt of a man’s blood flavoured the seawater briefly as it washed against her hull.

Her horror was all the deeper that the men on her decks suspected nothing.

‘There are serpents below!’ she called back to them, but they ignored her just as they ignored the pleas of the slaves.

After that, an angry Torg had the slaves roped together.

This made it even more awkward for them to climb aboard, but he seemed to take some vengeful delight in reminding them that any man who jumped would have to answer to the rest of his coffle.

No one else tried it, and Torg congratulated himself on his slyness.

Inside her holds, it was even worse. The slaves breathed out misery, until a miasma of unhappiness filled her from within.

They were packed like fish in a barrel, and fastened to one another as well, so that they could not even shift without the co-operation of their chain-mates.

The holds were dark with their fear; they pissed it out with their urine, wept it out with their tears until Vivacia felt saturated with human wretchedness.

In the chain locker, vibrating in harmony with her and adding his own special note to the woe, was Wintrow.

Wintrow who had abandoned her was once again aboard her.

He sprawled in the dark on the deck, ankles and wrists still weighted with chains, face pocked and stained with her image.

He did not weep or moan, nor did he sleep.

He simply stared into the blackness and felt.

He shared her awareness of the slaves and their misery.

Like the beating of a heart she did not have, Wintrow thrummed with the slaves’ despair.

He knew the entire gauntlet of their despondency, from the half-wit who could not comprehend the change in his life to the ageing sculptor whose early works still decorated the Satrap’s personal quarters.

In the lowest and darkest of her holds, scarcely above the bilge, was a layer of those least valuable.

Map-faces, little more than human ballast they were, and the survivors would be sold for whatever they might bring in Chalced.

In a safe, dry hold that had oftimes held bales of silk or casks of wine, artisans huddled.

To these were given the comfort of a layer of straw and enough chain to stand upright, if they took turns at it.

Kyle had not secured as many of these as he had hoped for.

The bulk of his cargo in the main hold were simple labourers and tradesmen, journeymen fallen on hard times, smiths and vineyard-dressers and lacemakers, plunged into debt by illness or addiction or poor judgement, and now paying the forfeit of their debts with their own flesh.

And in the forecastle were men with a different sort of pain.

Some of the crew had had reservations about the captain’s plan from the beginning.

Others had given it no thought, had assisted in installing the chains and eye-bolts as if they were just another kind of netting to restrain cargo.

But in the past two days, it had all become real.

Slaves were coming aboard, men and women and some half-grown children.

All were tattooed. Some wore their fetters with experience and others still stared and struggled against the chains that bound them.

None had travelled in the cargo hold of a ship before; slaves that left Jamaillia went to Chalced.

None ever came back. And each man in the crew was learning, some painfully, not to look at eyes or faces and not to heed voices that pleaded or cursed or ranted.

Cargo. Stock. Bleating sheep shoved into pens until the pens would hold no more.

Each man was coming to terms with it in his own way, was inventing other ways of seeing tattooed humans, other words to associate with them.

Comfrey’s joshing manner had vanished on the first day of loading.

Mild, in his effort to find the relief of levity somewhere, made jokes that were not funny, that were sand in the wounds of an abraded conscience.

Gantry held his peace and did his work, but knew that once this trip was up, he would not sail on a slaver again.

Only Torg seemed to find contentment and satisfaction.

In the depths of his greasy little soul, he was now living the cherished fantasy of his youth.

He walked down the lines of his lashed-down cargo, savouring the confinement that finally made him feel free.

He had already marked for himself those in need of his attentions, those who would benefit from his extra ‘discipline’.

Torg, Vivacia reflected, was a piece of carrion that, overturned, now showed its working maggots to the daylight.

She and Wintrow echoed one another’s misery.

And working inside her despair was the deep conviction that this never could have happened to her if her family had only been true to her.

If one of her true blood had captained this ship, that captain would have had to share what she was feeling.

She knew Ephron Vestrit would never have exposed her to this.

Althea would have been incapable of it. But Kyle Haven heeded her not.

If he had any misgivings, he had not shared them with anyone.

The only emotion Wintrow recognized from his father was a cold, burning anger that bordered on a hatred for his own flesh and blood.

Vivacia suspected that Kyle saw them as a double-pronged problem: the ship that would not heed his wishes because of a boy that would not be what his father commanded him to be.

She feared that Kyle was determined to break one or the other of them. And both, if he could.

She had kept her silence. Kyle had not brought Wintrow forward last night when he had hauled him on board.

He had thrown Wintrow into his old confinement and then came forward himself to brag of his son’s capture.

In a voice pitched to carry to every man working on deck, he recounted to her how he had found his son a slave, and bought him for the ship.

Once they were underway, he’d have the boy brought to her, and she might command him as she pleased — for his father, by Sa’s damned eyes, was through with him.

His monologue lengthened, measured against her silent outward stare.

Kyle’s voice rose until his fury had him practically spitting.

A shift of the breeze brought her the whisky of his breath.

So. That was a new vice for Kyle Haven, coming aboard her drunk.

She would not reply to him. He saw her and Wintrow as but parts of a machine, a block-and-tackle that, once joined a certain way, must then work a certain way.

Had they been a fiddle and bow, she reflected, he would have smashed them together over and over again, demanding that they make music.

‘I’ve bought you the damned worthless boy!

’ he finished his rant at her. ‘That was what you wanted, that’s what you’ve got.

He’s marked as yours, he’s yours for every day left in his miserable, useless life.

’ He spun and started to stride away, then turned back suddenly to growl at her back, ‘And you’d damned well better be content with him.

For it’s the last time I’ll try to please you. ’

It was only in that instant that she finally heard the jealousy in his voice.

Once he had coveted her, a beautiful, expensive ship, the rarest kind of a ship.

A man with a ship such as her became a member of that elite brotherhood of those who captained liveships and traded in the exotic goods of the Rain Wild River and became the envy of any man who captained anything else.

He had known her value, he had desired her and courted her.

When he eliminated Althea, he thought he had vanquished every rival for her.

But in the end, his attentions had not been enough for her.

She had turned from him to a worthless twig of a boy who did not grasp her value.

Like a spurned lover, Kyle’s dream of truly possessing her was crumbling.

The shards of it held only the bitter dregs of hatred.

Well, it was mutual, she told herself coldly.

More difficult to name was the emotion she now felt toward Wintrow. Perhaps, she thought, it was not so different from what Kyle felt for her.