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DAY OF RECKONING

T HERE WERE , W INTROW KNEW , some religions that taught of places where demons reigned and had the power to torture men endlessly.

The ship, caught in the press of wind and rain, populated with two-legged creatures that shrieked and struggled with one another, seemed such a nether world.

The scriptures of Sa contained no belief in such a place.

Men created their own torments, Wintrow believed, not the benevolent Parent of All, who only viewed such things with grief.

This night on this ship, he had come to grasp in its fullness the truth of Sa’s teaching.

For here they were, one and all humans, each one a creature of Sa.

Yet it was not the stabbing rain or the buffeting winds that raced through the ship shedding blood and tearing life free of bodies.

No. Only the humans aboard the ship did that, and only to one another.

This was not Sa’s doing. There was nothing of Sa in this perdition.

From the moment Sa’Adar had thrown the lantern at Gantry, it had been out of Wintrow’s hands.

He had not started this carnage; this slaughter was not his doing.

He could not even recall making a decision, only that he had followed Sa’Adar and helped him unshackle slaves.

It was the right thing to do. More right than trying to warn his father and crew-mates?

Don’t ask that question, don’t let that question exist. These deaths were not his fault.

Over and over again, Wintrow told himself that.

Not his fault. What could one boy do to stop this torrent of hatred once it had broken loose?

He was just a leaf caught up in a storm wind.

He wondered if Gantry had felt the same way.

He and Sa’Adar had been freeing the map-faces, deep in the bottom-most hold of the Vivacia, when they heard the yells from above.

In their haste to join in the fray, the map-faces had literally trampled over him.

Sa’Adar had led them with the lantern. Wintrow had been left behind in the pitch black, frightened and disoriented.

Now he groped his way through the filthy holds, clambering over the bodies of slaves either too weakened or scared to join in the rebellion.

Others milled in the confusion, calling to one another, demanding to know what was happening.

He pushed his way through them and groped his way around them, and still he could not find the companionway up to the hatch.

He knew every inch of this ship, he told himself.

But suddenly the Vivacia had become a black maze of death and stench and frightened people.

On the deck above him he heard running feet, and cries of both anger and fear. Screams of death, too.

Then another scream burst out, one that rang within the hold and wakened echoing cries of terrors in the churning slaves.

‘Vivacia,’ he gasped to himself, and then, ‘Vivacia!’ he called out to her, praying she could hear him, and know he was coming to her.

His groping hands suddenly met the ladder and he flung himself up it.

As he emerged onto the deck into a driving rain he stumbled over the first body of a crewman.

Mild was trapped in a half-closed hatch.

In the dimness he could not tell how he had been killed, only that he was dead.

He knelt by him, hearing the sounds of fighting elsewhere in the ship, but capable of comprehending fully only this death.

Mild’s chest was still warm. The sluicing rain and flying spray had already chilled his hands and face, but his body gave up its warmth more slowly.

Others were dying now, slaves and crewmen. Vivacia lived it all, he suddenly recalled. She felt it all, and alone.

Wintrow was on his feet and stumbling towards her before he knew what he was doing.

In the waist, some of the crewmen had been sleeping in crude canvas shelters.

The wind and rain there had been preferable to the thick stink of belowdecks.

Now the tent was collapsed, and wind and rain tore at it while men tore at each other.

Manacle chains were suddenly weapons. Wintrow dodged through the blood-crazed fighters, shouting, ‘No! No! You have to stop this, the ship won’t take it!

You have to stop!’ No one heeded him. There were men down on the deck, some squirming and some still.

He jumped over them. He could do nothing for them.

The only person he could possibly aid was the ship, who now screamed his name into the night.

Wintrow tripped over what might have been a body.

He scrabbled back to his feet, evaded a man who clutched at him, and groped his way forward through the rain and the dark of night until his hands found the ladder to the foredeck.

‘Vivacia!’ he called, his voice a thin and pitiful thing in the rising storm. But still she heard him.

‘Wintrow! Wintrow!’ she cried mindlessly, shrieking his name as a nightmare-plagued child calls for her mother.

He clambered up on the foredeck, only to be driven back as the Vivacia ploughed wildly through the sea.

For a moment all he could do was grasp the rung of the ladder and fight for air.

In the next space between waves, he was up and dashing foolishly forwards.

His hands grasped the forward rail. He could not feel her, could see her only as a shadow before him.

‘Vivacia!’ he cried to her.

For an instant she did not answer. He gripped the railing hard and reached for her with all his might. Like warm hands clasping on a cold night, her awareness joined gratefully with his. Then her horror and shock flowed into his mind as well.

‘They’ve killed Comfrey! There’s no one on the wheel!’

Figurehead and boy plunged into cold saltwater.

The wizardwood deck slid under his grasping fingers.

In the dark he shared her knowledge and despair even as he fought for his own survival.

He felt the widespread death throughout her, and knew, too, the lack of control she felt as the storm winds drove her forward into the towering waves.

Her crew had been driven from their duties.

Barricaded in the sterncastle were some who fought for their lives.

Others were dying slowly on the decks they had manned.

As lives winked out, it was as if Vivacia were losing pieces of herself.

Never before had he sensed how immense was the water and how small the boat that preserved his life.

As the storm waves ran off her decks, he managed to stand. ‘What should I do?’ he demanded of her.

‘Get to the wheel!’ she cried to him through the wind. ‘Get control of the rudder.’ She raised her voice in a sudden roar. ‘Tell them to stop killing each other, or they’ll all die. All of them, I swear it!’

He turned back toward the waist of the ship, and drawing as deep a breath as he was able, shouted at the men who struggled there.

‘You heard her. She’ll kill us all if you don’t stop the fighting now!

Stop the fighting. Man her sails, those of you who know how, or not a one of us will survive this night! And let me through to the helm!’

They plunged again into a wave. The wall of water hit him from behind, and he was suddenly flying free with it, no deck, no rigging, nothing, only the water that offered a yielding resistance to his scrabbling hands.

He might already be overboard and not even know it.

He opened his mouth to scream and sucked in saltwater instead.

In the next instant the water slammed him against the port railing.

He caught at it and held, despite the water’s best efforts to carry him over the side.

Right next to him a slave was not so lucky.

He struck the railing, teetered and then went over the side.

The water ran off through the scuppers. On the deck, men thrashed like landed fish, choking and spitting seawater.

The moment he could, Wintrow was back on his feet and struggling aft.

Like an insect in a puddle, he thought, struggling mindlessly only because live things always tried to stay alive.

Most of the others who remained on the deck were clearly not sailors by the way they flung themselves at railings and ropes and grasped tight.

They seemed just as shocked by the next dousing wave.

A manacle key must have been found, for some were entirely free of chains, while others still wore their fetters as familiarly as their shirts.

More faces peered up fearfully from the open hatches, shouting advice and questions to the groups on deck.

As each mammoth wave passed, they ducked back to avoid the dousing, but seemed to take no care for how much water flooded down into the ship.

Bodies of both slaves and crew washed back and forth in the waist with the wallowing of the ship.

He stared at them incredulously. Had they fought for their freedom only to die by drowning?

Had they killed all the crew for nothing?

He suddenly heard Sa’Adar’s voice raised.

‘There he is, there’s our lad. Boy, Wintrow, come here!

They’ve barricaded themselves in there. Any way to smoke the rats out?

’ He mastered a band of triumphant map-faces outside the door to the officers’ quarters in the sterncastle.

Despite the storm and the tossing ship, they were still intent on their killing.