Everyone worked on the ship. The Pinega had been rated for ninety crewmen when she was launched and that had been for trained, veteran sailors. The hundred-odd living people on board the ship had their hands full since most of them had never left dry land before. Seasickness, the occasional midnight snack for the liches (everyone knew it was happening, nobody breathed a word) and the ship's particular problems took their toll and on an average day only perhaps two-thirds of the women and men living on the main deck could be accurately described as able-bodied. So everyone worked.
They kept the most gruesome and repellent task for Ayaan. She got to carry the hand bucket.
'There are two hundred and six bones in human body,' a doctor told her, kneeling next to a patient who didn't so much as flinch as he began to carve. 'Twenty-seven of them are in each hand. That's a quarter of the bones in body. There are more muscles, more, more''
'Here,' she told him, and lifted away the inert piece of meat from the patient's arm. The patient of course was already dead and it had no liquid blood to mop up, just a dry brownish powder that blew off the stern deck in a playful ocean breeze.
'Is more complex than any organ in body, except perhaps brain. Is evolution's greatest miracle. But to them' to them is almost useless. They lack fine motor control. These hands might as well be lumps of' of meat.' His eyes, what she could see of them behind his scratched glasses, went very vacant for a moment. Then he leaned forward with a metal rasp and started to sharpen the exposed lengths of ulna and radius. 'You're going to do it, aren't you?' he asked, in a whisper.
'Yes,' she said. She didn't whisper. They had powers she lacked, senses she didn't have. If they were going to overhear her there was nothing she could do.
'Find me when you are ready,' he told her.
She gathered the excised meat from the neat piles the other doctors had made on the open-deck surgery (no need for sterile conditions with these patients). She watched the eyes of the dead men and women who lay stretched out on the deck, looked for the hunger in them. She had to give the Tsarevich some credit'he kept his charges under tight control.