You’re going as mad as the boy, he thought then. What the fuck are you thinking? There isn’t a bloody afterlife. Not for Amrath, not for Marith and certainly not for you. We’re just lumps of meat. We just die. And we’re not dead.
He really needed a piss and a crap, in fact. That proved he was still alive in itself: in no religion or folk-tale, anywhere, ever, did the dead need a crap. His legs were feeling nasty and cramped too. If he crawled to the other side of the hold behind some more barrels, would Raeta somehow not notice? Between the roar of the storm and the stink of whale, probably not …
‘Gods, that smells disgusting!’ Raeta shouted a very short while later. ‘Amrath and Eltheia, man, couldn’t you just wait?’
‘No.’ Tobias made his way back to her, face blazing with humiliation. ‘I bloody couldn’t.’
‘You’ll have to clean it up as soon as the weather drops.’
‘What do you think I am?’ A soldier never soiled a camp. Knew too well the consequences of uncleanliness.
‘A man who shits on the floor?’ Raeta said sweetly.
The ship lurched again, with an ominous creak of rope as the cargo shifted. We’ll be buggered if the barrels start moving, Tobias thought. Crushed to death by whale excretion and my own shit. Poetic, like. Another shower of water streamed down through the closed hatchway. We seem to be losing, Tobias thought. Tapping on the hull, scratching like hard, long fingernails. Things in the air. Things in the water. And those black cliffs somewhere off the port bow, running straight down into the sea sharp as knapped flint.
He was hungry, too. Thirsty. Scared. Bored. It was strange, not being part of it. Sitting down there with no idea what was going on or whether things were swinging their way whilst others fought the great fight. So many years of being in charge, sending out orders, knowing how things were falling, seeing it all in his mind. This powerlessness was so … dull. Didn’t feel like himself. Didn’t feel like any of this was really happening. Maybe that’s what fucks the high lords so badly, he thought. They just sit there, not really a part of anything. So powerful they’re kind of powerless, ’cause they don’t actually do any of it. Nothing’s real. They’re not real. Everything’s shadows to them, themselves included. Don’t really exist like we do, in the solid world of shit and piss and blood that means you’re alive. No action on the world.
‘Got anything to drink?’ he asked Raeta.
‘Should be water in some of the barrels,’ she said. ‘No idea which, without light, so you’d have to chance it and hope it isn’t whale oil …’
Oh, they thought they did things. Thought they changed the world, trampled on it, built great works and tore them down. Thought they pissed on the common folk and then made them smile in gratitude. But they were ghosts, in the end. Didn’t do anything with their own hands, not so as they could say ‘that was me’. Just words, they were. Like gods indeed, in that respect: all their power depended on someone else to do all the heavy lifting. If someone some day said ‘no’, they’d be buggered. Just be left to shout louder and end up either begging or sticking them with a knife.
‘Got anything to eat?’ he asked Raeta.
‘Should be hard tack and salt meat in some of the barrels,’ she said.
The motion of the ship began to calm, the roar of wind and rain and waves to lessen. Don’t tell me we’ve actually survived? Tobias thought. Bloody hell, surprises never cease.
Of course, that means I’ve now got to scrape my own shit off the hold floor …
‘Think we can probably risk going above,’ Raeta said. They crawled up the ladder and gingerly opened the hatch. The deck above reminded Tobias of a fortress following an unsuccessful assault. Bloody chaos, literally and figuratively, but with an air of exhausted, crazed relief. Half the rigging seemed to be in pieces, but the sail had held. Sailors were already scaling the mast with great coils of rope over their arms. The bunk huts were smashed up, and they were missing the rowing boat thing. Still raining, but far less furiously. Just rain, from a sky that was just grey. Just wind, blowing his lungs clear of the stench of the hold. Waves foam-capped, no longer monsters, sending up spray as they struck the prow.
Being alive is bloody wonderful, Tobias thought. Gods and demons and fuck, the world’s a beautiful place.
Three of the crew were drowned, ripped overboard from the mast. Another two were injured. Really not such a bad butcher’s bill. Nothing damaged so bad they couldn’t continue. Not a very bad storm, it seemed, all noise and bluster and comparatively little force.
‘Yeah,’ Tobias said, ‘met plenty of blokes like that.’ Green-white fingers tearing and tapping. Hands like ropes pulling at his legs in the swirl of the water. Imagination and paranoia, a trick of light and currents …
He sat eating with Raeta, cross-legged on the deck. Golden evening light illuminated the flecks of grey in her hair. Not that he was interested, but he couldn’t help noticing. Shitting in front of someone whilst contemplating the shared prospect of cold slow death made a bond like that. Probably worse things to see as the last image of your existence than long yellow hair floating in the water you were drowning in. And a hell of a lot better to look at now than the food, which was hard tack already suggestively wormy and dried beef. Another deep truth known to all soldiers and sailors: food does not taste any better for being garnished with relief at still being alive and in possession of all four limbs. Arguably, it actually tasted kind of worse. I survived hell and high water, for this?
‘Should be better weather for a while now,’ said Raeta.
‘And what makes you say that?’
‘Optimism,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Also the fact that there are plenty of places to put in to harbour and wait it out now we’re past the Sker coast. With your luck, we won’t meet another storm till we need to go into open water for the last run into the Whites.’
‘With my luck?’
‘Actually, you know, you’re bloody lucky, Tobias. In that you survive everything. It’s just those around you that don’t.’
Thalia’s blue eyes, guilty and ashamed. Marith’s white dead face, broken with surrender, knowing he’d just taken every last chance of hope away. Yeah.
And Rate and Alxine and Skie and Geth and Emit and …
‘Stop it,’ he said savagely.
‘Stop what?’ she said with a smile and a shrug.
So the journey went on. Almost enjoyable, at times, when the autumn sunshine was warm on the deck and the sea sparkled and the land to their left was low and dark and filled with safe harbours. A few clear nights when the stars were bright. A group of dolphins appeared one evening, dancing and leaping, seemingly trying to race the boat. The third passenger disappeared the night after the storm, and Raeta had a nice new cloak, thick wool with a double weave. She appeared quite happy to spend time with Tobias, explaining some of the detail about ships and sailing, equally interested in the carefully selected stories he told of life as a hired sword.