Mad Ship Read Online Free PDF Page A

voice in the darkness and hands with a cool damp rag. Others saw him as a sham, as the captain’s son playing at mercy but doing little to free them until they had taken matters into their own hands. One and all, they avoided him. He could not fault them. He avoided them as well, choosing to spend most of his time on the foredeck near Vivacia. The pirate crew members came there only when the operation of the ship demanded it. Otherwise, they avoided it as superstitiously as the slaves did. The living, speaking figurehead frightened them. If their shunning of her bothered Vivacia, she gave no sign of it. For Wintrow’s part, he was glad there was still one place aboard ship where he could be relatively alone. He leaned his head back against her railing and tried to find a thought that wasn’t painful.
    At home, it would almost be spring. The buds would be swelling in the monastery orchards. He wondered how Berandol was doing with his own studies, if his tutor ever missed him. He wondered with deep regret what he would be studying now if he were there. He looked down at his hands. Once they had transcribed manuscripts and shaped stained-glass windows. They had been a boy’s hands, agile but still tender. Callus coated his palms now, and a finger was missing from one hand. They were the rough hands of a sailor. His finger would never wear a priest’s ring.
    Here it was a different kind of spring. The canvas snapped in the brisk chill wind. Migrating flocks of birds passed overhead with their haunting cries. The islands to either side of the channel had become even more lush, green and alive with shorebirds arguing about nesting space.
    Something tugged at him.
    “Your father calls for you,” Vivacia said quietly.
    Of course. He had sensed it through her. Their journey through the storm had affirmed and strengthened the bond of mind and spirit between the ship and himself. He did not resent it as he once had and he sensed that Vivacia did not cherish it as dearly as she once had. Perhaps in this, at least, their feelings were meeting in the middle. Since the storm, she had been kind to him, but no more than that. Like a preoccupied parent with a demanding child, he thought to himself.
    “In some ways, we have exchanged roles since our journey began,” she observed aloud.
    He nodded, having neither spirit nor energy to deny the truth. Then he straightened his shoulders, ran a hand through his hair and set his jaw more firmly. He would not let his father see how uncertain he felt.
    He kept his head up as he threaded his way across the deck, avoiding the knots of slaves and the working crewmen. No one met his eyes, no one challenged him. Foolish, he told himself, to believe they all watched his passage. They had won. Why should they care about the actions of one surviving crew member? At least he had come through it physically unscathed.
    Vivacia
bore the scars of the slave uprising. There were still bloodstains on the decks. The marks had not and would not yield to the sanding-stones the men used. The ship still smelled like a slaver, despite the near-continuous scrubbing Brig had ordered. The storm had taken a toll on her canvas as well; the hasty patching that the pirates had done showed plainly on her sails. In the aftercastle, doors had been forced when the slaves had hunted down the ship’s officers. The gleaming woodwork was splintered and awry. She was not the tidy little vessel he had embarked upon from Bingtown. It suddenly shamed him to see his family ship this way, as if he had seen his sister whoring in a tavern. His heart went out to her and he wondered what it would have been like to have come aboard the ship of his own free will, as a boy perhaps, to serve under his grandfather’s authority.
    Then he set all such thoughts aside. He came to a battered door guarded by two sullen map-faces. He stepped past the former slaves as if he did not see them and knocked on Gantry’s cabin door. At least, it had been