Page 28

BINGTOWN

S EVENTEEN DAYS. Althea looked out the tiny porthole of her stateroom, and watched Bingtown draw nearer. The bared masts of caravels and carracks forested the docks that lined the placid bay. Smaller vessels plied busily between anchored ships and the shore. Home.

She had spent seventeen days within this chamber, leaving only when it was necessary, and then during the watches when Kyle was asleep.

The first few days had been spent in seething fury and occasional tears as she railed against the injustice.

Childishly, she had vowed to endure the restriction he had put upon her simply so she could complain of it to her father at journey’s end.

‘Look what you made me do!’ she said to herself, and smiled minutely.

It was the old shout from when she was small and she would quarrel with Keffria.

The half-deliberate breaking of a dish or vase, the dumping of a bucket of water, the tearing of a dress: Look what you made me do!

Keffria had screeched it at an annoying small sister as often as Althea had shrieked it up at an older oppressor.

That was only how her withdrawal had begun.

She had by turns sulked or raged, thinking of all she would say if Kyle dared come to her door, either to be sure she was obeying him or to say he had repented his command.

While waiting for that, she read all her books and scrolls again, and even laid out the silk and considered making a start at dressmaking herself.

But her sewing skills were more suited to canvas than silk, and the fabric was too fine to take a chance on botching the job.

Instead she mended all her shipboard clothes.

But even that task ran out, and she had found she hated the empty, idle time that stretched before her.

One evening, irritated at the confines of her too-small bunk, she had flung her bedding to the floor and sprawled on it as she read yet again Deldom’s Journal of a Trader. She fell asleep there. And dreamed.

Often as a girl, she would catnap on the decks of the Vivacia, or spend an evening stretched out on the deck of her father’s quarters reading his books.

Dozing off always brought her vivid dreams and semi-waking fancies.

As she had grown, her father chided her for such behaviour, and saw that she had chores enough that she would have no time for napping on deck.

In recalling her old dreams, she put them down to a child’s vivid imaginings.

But that night, on the deck of her own stateroom, the colour and detail of her childhood dreams came back to her.

The dream was too vivid to dismiss as the product of her own mind.

She dreamt of her great-grandmother, a woman she had never known, but in her dream she knew Talley as well as she knew herself.

Talley Vestrit strode the decks, shouting orders at the sailors who floundered through a tangle of canvas, lines and splintered wood in the midst of the great storm.

In an instant, sudden as remembering, Althea knew what had happened.

A great sea had taken off the mast and the mate, and Captain Vestrit herself had joined her crew to bring order and sanity back with her confident bellows.

She was nothing like her portrait; here was no woman sitting docilely in a chair, attired primly in black wool and white lace, a stern-faced husband standing at her shoulder.

Althea had always known that her great-grandmother had commissioned the building of the Vivacia.

In that dream, however, she was not just the woman who had gone to the money-lenders and the ship-builders; she was suddenly a woman who had loved the sea and ships and had boldly determined the course of her family’s descendants with her decision to possess a liveship.

Oh, to have lived in such a time, when a woman could wield such authority.

The dream was brief and stark, like the image etched in one’s vision by a lightning flash, yet when Althea woke with her cheek and palms pressed to the wooden deck, she had no doubt of her vision.

There had been too many details too swiftly impressed upon her.

In the dream the Vivacia had carried a fore-and-aft rig, or what remained of one after the storm’s fury.

Althea had never seen her so fitted. She instantly grasped the advantages of such a rigging, and for the interval of the dream, shared her great-grandmother’s belief in it.

It was dizzying to awaken and find herself Althea, so completely immersed in Talley had she been.

Hours later, she was still able to shut her eyes and recall the night of the storm, Talley’s true memory shuffled in with hers like a foreign card in a deck.

It had come to her from the Vivacia; there could be no other way.

That night, she had deliberately composed herself to sleep on the deck of her stateroom.

The oiled and polished planks were not comfortable, yet she put no blanket or cushion between herself and them.

The Vivacia rewarded her trust. Althea had spent an afternoon with her grandfather as he carefully negotiated one of the narrower channels in the Perfume Isles.

She saw over his shoulder the sightings he took of the jutting rocks, witnessed him putting out a boat and men to pull them the more swiftly through a place passable only at a certain tide.

It was his secret, and it had led to the Vestrit monopoly on a certain tree sap that dried into richly fragrant droplets.

No one had been up that channel to trade with the villages there since her grandfather’s death.

Like any captain, he took to his death more than he could ever pass on to his descendants.

He had made no chart. But the lost knowledge was not lost, but stored in the Vivacia, and would awaken with her when she quickened.

Even now, Althea was certain that she could take the ship up that channel, so completely had its secrets been passed on to her.

Night after night, Althea sprawled upon the wooden deck and dreamed with her ship.

Even by day, she lay there, her cheek pressed firmly to the plank, musing on her future.

She became attuned to the Vivacia, from the shuddering of her wooden body as she strained through a sudden change in course, to the peaceful sounds the wood made when the wind drove her on a steady and true course.

The shouts of the sailors, the light thunder of their feet on her decks were only slightly more significant than the cries of the gulls who sometimes alighted on her.

At such times it seemed to Althea that she became the ship, aware of the small men who clambered up her masts only as a great whale might be aware of the barnacles that clung upon it.

There was so much more to the ship than the folk that worked her.

Althea had no human words to express the fine differences she now sensed in wind and current.

There was pleasure in working with a good steersman, and annoyance in the one who was always making minute and unnecessary adjustments, but it was a surface thing compared to what went on between the ship and the water.

This concept that the life of a ship might be larger than what went on between her and her captain was a major revelation to Althea.

In the space of a handful of nights, her whole concept of what a ship was underwent a sea-change.

Instead of an enforced confinement to her quarters, the days she spent closeted in her room became an all-involving experience.

She recalled well a day when she had opened her door to find it blazing morning rather than the soft evening she had expected.

The cook had been so bold as to take her by the shoulder and shake her when she had drifted off into a daydream in the galley on one of her visits for food.

Later she had been annoyed by an incessant tapping at her door.

When she opened it, she had found not Kyle, but Brashen standing outside it.

He looked uncomfortable at questioning her but still demanded to know if all was well with her.

‘Certainly. I’m fine,’ she replied and tried to shut the door on him. He stiff-armed it ajar.

‘You don’t look fine. The cook told me you looked like you’d lost half a stone of weight and I’m inclined to agree. Althea, I don’t know what went on with Captain Kyle, but the health of the crew is still part of my duty.’

She looked at his knit brow and dark, troubled eyes and saw only an interruption. ‘I’m not part of the crew,’ she heard herself saying. ‘That is what happened between Captain Kyle and myself. And the health of a mere passenger is not your concern. Leave me be.’ She pushed at the door.

‘The health of Ephron Vestrit’s daughter is my concern, then.

I dare to call him friend as well as captain.

Althea. Look at yourself. You’ve not brushed your hair in days, I’d say.

And several of the men have said that when they have seen you on deck, you drift like a ghost with eyes as empty as the space between the stars.

’ He actually looked worried. Well he might.

The slightest things could set off a crew that had endured too long under too strict a captain.

A bewitched woman wandering about the decks might precipitate them into anything.

Still, there was nothing she could do about it.