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DIVVYTOWN

‘I ’M JUST NOT sure.’ Brashen stood on the foredeck next to her.

The late evening mist damped his hair to curls and beaded silver on his coat.

‘It all looks different now. It’s not just the fogs, but the water levels, the foliage, the beach lines.

Everything is different from how I remember it.

’ His hands rested on the railing, a hand’s breadth from her own.

Althea was proud that she could resist the temptation to touch him.

‘We could just lie out here.’ She spoke softly, but her voice carried oddly in the fog. ‘Wait for another ship to go in or come out.’

Brashen shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t want to be challenged or boarded.

That may happen to us anyway when we reach Divvytown, but I don’t want to look like I’m blundering about out here.

We’ll go in cocky and knowing, sail up there and drop anchor in Divvytown as if we’re sure of a welcome.

If I seem a bit of a braggart and a fool to them, their guards will drop faster.

’ He grinned at her crookedly in the gathering darkness.

‘It shouldn’t take much effort for me to give them that impression. ’

They were anchored off a coastline of swamp and trees.

The rains of winter had filled the rivers and streams of this region to overflowing.

At high tide, saltwater and river water mingled in the brackish bogs.

In the gathering darkness, trees both living and dead loomed out of the gently drifting mists.

Breaks in the fog occasionally revealed dense walls of trees laced with dangling creepers and curtained with draping moss.

The rainforest came right down to the waterline.

By painstaking observation, Brashen and Althea had spotted several possible openings, any of which might be the narrow mouth of the winding river leading to the sluggish lagoon that fronted Divvytown.

Brashen once more squinted at the tattered scrap of canvas in his hand.

It was his original sketch, a hasty rendering done while he was mate on the Springeve .

‘I think this was meant to indicate a kelp bed exposed at low tide.’ He glanced around at his surroundings again.

‘I just don’t know,’ he confessed quietly.

‘Pick one,’ Althea suggested. ‘The worst we can do is waste time.’

‘The best we can do is waste time,’ Brashen corrected her. ‘The worst is considerably worse. We could get lodged in some silty-bottomed inlet and have the tide strand us there.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But I guess I choose and we take a chance.’

The ship was very quiet. By Brashen’s order, the crew walked softly and conversed only in whispers.

No lights had been hung. Even the ship was trying to mute the small noises of his planked body.

All canvas had been lowered and secured.

Sound carried too well in this fog. He wished to be able to hear if another ship approached in the mist. Amber ghosted up to stand silently beside them.

‘If we’re lucky, some of this fog may burn off in the morning,’ Althea observed hopefully.

‘We’re as like to be shrouded more thickly than ever,’ Brashen returned. ‘But we’ll wait for what light day offers us before we try it. Over there.’ He pointed and Althea followed the line of his arm. ‘I think that’s the opening. We’ll try it at dawn.’

‘You’re not sure?’ Amber whispered in quiet dismay.

‘If Divvytown were easy to find, it would not have survived as a pirate stronghold all these years,’ Brashen pointed out. ‘The whole trick of the place is that unless you know it’s there, you’d never think to look for it.’

‘Perhaps,’ Amber began hesitantly. ‘Perhaps one of the former slaves could help. They came from the Pirate Isles…’

Brashen shook his head. ‘I’ve asked. They’ve all professed complete ignorance of Divvytown, denied they ever pirated.

Ask any of them. They were the sons of runaway slaves who settled in the Pirate Isles to begin new lives.

Chalcedean or Jamaillian slave raiders captured them, and they were tattooed and sold in Jamaillia.

From thence they were brought to Bingtown. ’

‘Is it so hard to believe?’ Amber asked him.

‘Not at all,’ Brashen replied easily. ‘But a boy almost always picks up a generalized knowledge of the town he grows up in. These fellows profess too much ignorance of everything for me to be comfortable with their stories.’

‘They’re good sailors,’ Althea added. ‘I expected trouble when they were shifted onto my watch, but they haven’t been.

They’d prefer to stay to themselves, but I haven’t allowed that, and they haven’t objected.

They turn to with a will, just as they did when they first came aboard to work in secret.

Harg, I think, resents losing some of his authority over the others; on my watch, they are all just sailors, on an equal footing with the rest. But they are good sailors…

a bit too good for this to be their first voyage. ’

Amber sighed. ‘I confess, when I first proposed bringing them aboard and allowing them to trade their labour for a chance to return to their homes, I never considered that they might have conflicting loyalties. Now, it seems obvious.’

‘Blinded by the opportunity to do a good turn for someone,’ Althea smiled and gave Amber a friendly nudge. Amber gave her a knowing smile in return. Althea knew a moment’s uneasiness.

‘Do I dare ask if Lavoy could assist us here?’ Amber continued softly.

Althea shook her head when Brashen didn’t reply. ‘Brashen’s charts are all we have to go by. With the shift in seasons, and the constant changes in the isles themselves, it becomes tricky.’

‘Sometimes I wonder if I even have the correct bit of swamp,’ Brashen added sourly. ‘This could be the wrong river entirely.’

‘It’s the right bit of swamp.’ Paragon’s deep voice was very soft, almost a thrumming rather than speaking. ‘It’s even the right river mouth. As I could have told you hours ago, if anyone had seen fit to ask me.’

The three humans kept absolutely still as if by moving or speaking they would break some spell. A deep suspicion Althea had always harboured simmered in her mind.

‘You’re right, Althea.’ The ship answered her unspoken words.

‘I’ve been here before. I’ve been in and out of Divvytown enough times that I could sail up there in the blackest night, at any tide.

’ His deep laugh vibrated all the foredeck.

‘As I’d lost my eyes before I ever went up the river, what I see or don’t see makes little difference. ’

Amber dared to speak aloud. ‘How can you know where we are? You always said you feared to sail the open waters blind. Why are you so fearless now?’

He chuckled indulgently. ‘There is a great difference between the wide open sea and the mouth of a river. There are many senses besides sight. Cannot you smell the stink of Divvytown? Their woodfires, their outhouses, the charnel pit where they burn their dead? What the air does not carry to me, the river does. The sour taste of Divvytown flows with the river. With every fibre in my planking, I taste the water from the lagoon, thick and green. I’ve never forgotten it.

It is as slimy now as it was when Igrot ruled there. ’

‘You could take us there, even in the blackest night?’ Brashen spoke carefully.

‘I said that. Yes.’

Althea waited. To trust Paragon or to fear him. To place all their lives in his care, or to wait for dawn and grope their way up the fog-bound river…She sensed a test in the ship’s words. She was suddenly glad that Brashen was the captain. This was a decision she would not want to make.

It was so dark now she could scarcely see Brashen’s profile. She saw his shoulders lift as he took a breath. ‘Would you take us there, Paragon?’

‘I would.’

They worked in the dark, without lanterns, putting up his canvas and raising his anchor.

It pleased him to think of them scurrying in the blackness, as blind as he was.

They worked his windlass voicelessly, the only sound that of the turning gears and the rattling chain.

He opened his senses to the night. ‘Starboard. Just a bit,’ he said softly, as they raised his canvas and the wind nudged him, and heard the command relayed in whispers the length of his deck.

Brashen was on the wheel. It was good to have his steady hands there; even better to be the one deciding how he would go and feeling the sailors jump to his orders.

Let them discover how it felt to have to place your life in the hands of one you feared.

For they all feared him, even Lavoy. Lavoy made fine words about friendships that transcended time or kind, but in his gut, the mate feared the ship more profoundly than any other man aboard.

And well they should, Paragon thought with satisfaction.

If they knew his true nature, they would piss themselves with terror.

They would fling themselves shrieking into the deeps, and count it a merciful end.

Paragon lifted his arms out high and spread wide his fingers.

It was a pitiful comparison, this damp wind flowing past his hands as his sails pushed him towards the mouth of the river, but it was enough to sustain his soul.

He had no eyes, he had no wings, but his soul was still a dragon’s soul.

‘This is beautiful,’ Amber said to him.

He startled. As long as she had been aboard, there were still times when she was transparent to him.

She was the only one whose fear of him he could not feel.

Sometimes he shared her emotions, but never her thoughts, and when he did catch a tinge of her feelings, he suspected it was because she allowed it.

As a result, her words confused him more often than the others did.

She was the only one who could possibly lie to him. Was she lying now?