The Mad Ship. Робин Хобб

the feeling that Kennit and Sorcor have sailed together for a long time. Such men have ways of doing things, ways they pass on to their crews. Besides, Kennit is still alive. Before long, he may feel well enough to guide us to Bull Creek himself.’ Wintrow spoke reassuringly, attempting to comfort the ship.

      ‘Perhaps,’ Vivacia conceded grudgingly. ‘But I would feel better if we were underway already. He has survived the night, that is true. Nevertheless, he is far from strong, or cured. Yesterday, he died when he stopped struggling to live. Today, he struggles to cling to life. I do not like how his dreams twitch and dance. I would feel better if he were in the hands of a real healer.’

      Her words stung, just a bit. Wintrow knew he was not a trained healer, but she might have spoken some word of admiration at how well he had done so far. He glanced down at the deck where he had performed his crude surgery. Kennit’s flowing blood had followed the contours of his supine body. The dark stain was an eerie outline of his injured leg and hip. It was not far from Wintrow’s own bloody handprint. That mark had never been erased from the deck. Would Kennit’s shadow stay as well? Uneasily, Wintrow scuffed at it with his bare foot.

      It was like sweeping his fingers across a stringed instrument, save that the chord he awoke was not sound. Kennit’s life suddenly sang with his own. Wintrow reeled with the force of the connection, then sat down hard on the deck. A moment later, he tried to describe it to himself. It had not been Kennit’s memories, nor his thoughts or dreams. Instead, it had been an intense awareness of the pirate. The closest comparison he could summon was the way a perfume or scent could suddenly call up detailed memories, but a hundred times stronger. His sense of Kennit had almost driven him out of himself.

      ‘Now you glimpse how it is for me,’ the ship said quietly. A moment later she added, ‘I did not think it could affect you that way.’

      ‘What was that?’

      ‘The power of blood. Blood remembers. Blood recalls not days and nights and events. Blood recalls identity.’

      Wintrow was silent, trying to grasp the full import of what she was saying. He reached out a hand towards Kennit’s spilled shadow on the deck. Then he pulled back his fingers. No amount of curiosity could draw him to experience that again. The potency of it had dizzied his soul and nearly displaced him from himself.

      ‘And that is what you felt,’ the ship added to his thought. ‘You, who have blood of your own. At least you possess your own body, your own set of memories and your own identity. You can set Kennit aside and say, “He is not I.” I have none of that. I am no more than wood impregnated with the memories of your family. The identity you call Vivacia is one I have cobbled together for myself. When Kennit’s blood soaked into me, I was powerless to refuse it. Just like the night of the slave uprising, when man after man entered me, and I was powerless to deny any of them.

      ‘The night all that blood was spilled…Imagine being drenched in identities, not once or twice, but dozens of times. They collapsed on my decks and died, but as their blood soaked into me, they made me the reservoir of who they had been. Slave or crewmember, it made no difference. They came to me. All that they were, they added to me. Sometimes, Wintrow, it is too much. I walk the spiral pathways of their blood, and I know who they were in detail. I cannot free myself from those ghosts. The only more powerful influences are those of you who possess me doubly: with your blood soaked into my planks and your minds linked to mine.’

      ‘I do not know what to say,’ Wintrow replied lamely.

      ‘Do you think I do not already know that?’ Vivacia replied bitterly.

      A long silence fell between them. To Wintrow, it was as if the very planks of the deck emanated cold towards him. He crept away quietly, his new clothes bundled under his arm, but he took the knowledge with him that there was nowhere he could go that would free her from his presence. Accept life as it came. That was what Etta had said to him but a short time ago. Then, it had seemed brilliant. He tried to imagine accepting that their eternal fate was to be bound together. He shook his head to himself.

      ‘If this be your will, O Sa, I know not how to endure it gladly,’ he said quietly. It was pain to feel Vivacia echo the same thought.

      It was hours later and the sun was high when the Marietta found them. She had a long scorched area along her starboard railing. Deckhands were already at work repairing it. An even plainer sign of both her encounter and her triumph was the string of severed heads that dangled from her bowsprit. The cry of the lookout had brought Wintrow out on deck. Now he stared in sick fascination as the ship drew nearer. He had seen carnage the night the slaves had risen and taken over the Vivacia. These trophies went beyond carnage into a planned savagery that he could not completely grasp.

      The men and women that lined the railings alongside him lifted up a cheer at the bloody prizes. To them, the heads represented not only the Satrap who had condoned their slavery but Chalced, the most avaricious market for enslaved humanity. As the Marietta drew closer, Wintrow could see other signs of their battle with the patrol galley. Several of the pirates wore crude bandages. That didn’t stop them from grinning and waving to their compatriots aboard Vivacia.

      There was a tug at Wintrow’s sleeve. ‘The woman says you’re to come and wait on the Captain,’ Dedge told him dourly. Wintrow looked at him carefully, fixing the man’s face and his name in his memory. He tried to look past the lineage of his slavery and see the man beneath the sprawling tattoos. His eyes were sea-grey, his hair no more than a fringe above his ears. Despite his years, muscle showed through his rags. Etta had already marked him as her own; he wore a sash of silk about his waist. ‘The woman’ he had called her, like a title, as if she were the only woman aboard the ship. Wintrow supposed that in a sense, she was. ‘I’ll come right away,’ he responded to the man.

      The Marietta was dropping anchor. Soon a gig would be lowered to bring Sorcor aboard to report to Kennit. Wintrow had no idea why Kennit had summoned him, but perhaps Kennit would allow him to be in the room when Sorcor reported. Earlier today, when he had checked on his father, Kyle had insisted Wintrow must gather as much knowledge of the pirates as he could. Wintrow tried to push the memory of that painful hour away.

      Confinement and pain had made Kyle more of a tyrant than ever, and he seemed to believe Wintrow was his only remaining subject. In truth, the boy felt almost no loyalty to him at all, save for a residue of duty. His father’s insistence that he must constantly spy and plot for a way to regain control of the ship struck him as laughable. But he had not laughed; he had merely let the man rant while he saw to his injuries and coaxed him to eat the dry bread and old water that were the only rations afforded him. It was easier to let his words flow past. Wintrow had nodded to them, but said little in reply. To try to explain their real situation aboard the Vivacia would only have angered Kyle. Wintrow had let him keep his far-fetched dream that they would somehow regain control of the ship. It seemed the easiest thing to do. Soon enough, they would reach Bull Creek, and then they both must confront what had befallen them. Wintrow would not battle his father to make him recognize reality; reality would do that itself.

      He tapped at the door, then entered at Etta’s soft response. Kennit was awake on the bunk. He turned his head to greet him with, ‘She won’t help me sit up.’

      ‘She is right. You should not sit up, not yet,’ Wintrow replied. ‘You should lie still and rest completely. How do you feel?’ He set his hand to the pirate’s forehead.

      Kennit rolled his head away from the touch. ‘Wretched. Oh, do not ask me what I feel. I am alive; what can it matter what I feel? Sorcor is coming, fresh from triumph, and here I lie, mauled and stinking like a corpse. I will not be seen like this. Help me to sit up, at least.’

      ‘You must not,’ Wintrow warned him. ‘Your blood is quiescent just now. Lie still and let it remain so. To sit up will change the reservoirs of your organs, and may spill blood that then must find its way out through your wound. This I learned well at the monastery.’

      ‘This I learned well on the deck: a pirate captain who can no longer actively lead his crew is soon fish bait. I will be sitting up when Sorcor arrives here.’

      ‘Even