Bone Jack

Sunset took longer than Itzal had ever known. The mountains no longer stood on the western horizon except as a smudge. All the world between him and the sun was miles of rolling hills, stark and shady with the sun so low. And all that stood on the hills was grass and rare trees and rarer farmhouses and occasional herds of cattle, buffalo, and elk.

The entire eastern horizon was vertiginously flat. Itzal hadn’t quite the courage to look at it yet. He sat cross-legged near a cooking fire, a brown cloak and hood over his back and head, and he faced northwesterly. Idly, he dug his fingers into the cool dirt where he sat.

The Riot stood still, chocked and like a ship’s skeleton looming over the campground. They’d stopped the ship at the crest of the last hill before the Razorgrass Sea. Captain Younes had ordered the entire ship’s company out onto the hilltop.

“It’ll be the last time they’ll walk on the earth for a long while,” he’d said.

Itzal still hadn’t quite caught onto why no one could walk among the grasses of the Razorgrass Sea. In his books there’d been a few vague statements about the impenetrable grasses and the species that lived there, but nothing that Itzal quite understood. He supposed he’d understand soon.

Ben had gone off to be chummy with the sailors. They drank and laughed around a different fire than the one where Itzal sat. Ben had invited Itzal to go, but Itzal had declined. True to the prediction of Captain Younes, after they’d seen him the crew had treated Itzal much differently. For one thing, even though he chose many of the same places to rest, Itzal had never been shooed away anymore. Quite the opposite. He got occasional suggestions about better places to sit for this reason or that one. There might be some sight worth seeing on the other side, or there’s a spot on the deck warmed from below because of the cook’s range. And when he did have to move, the sailors would ask politely. Or as politely as they could with a vocabulary more than half made of colorful deprecations.

They’d given him things to do. Rather than treating him like a bother, they asked him to do things that an educated lubber might accomplish. They caught on that he was keen with knots and gave him some rigging to repair. When they discovered after idle conversation that he’d done a bit of work with an awl, they gave him some new pins that needed reshaping.

In the meanwhile, Itzal never wanted for stories to hear. The sailors all had their lives and dreams and girls they knew around the continent. Each and every crewman on the Riot would bubble forth unceasingly with information if given reign to do it. Itzal heard about every one of them, nearly to the point he couldn’t remember it all.

He would never say he disliked it. The journey had been turning lonely and tiresome, and this newfound familiarity with the crew had helped that. Though he rarely got a word in, and when he did people seemed to misunderstand him. He kept getting the feeling that he didn’t know how to talk to these world-wise men. After a while he gave it up and merely listened.

Now that he had a chance to sit quietly with his own thoughts, on his own much-missed dirt, Itzal embraced this opportunity to be alone.

Except for Captain Younes. But his cold presence was as good as an absent person anyhow, so that was all right.

Captain Younes had said he didn’t make a practice of mingling with the men. He had this fire made up for his use, and Tyro’s and his two or three other officers earlier in the evening. Tyro and the others, unlike their skipper, did mingle with the men. Now the only person at this smaller fire with Captain Younes was Itzal.

Captain Younes stood straight, watching the sailors but with his mind somewhere else. To Itzal the Captain’s sharp eyes looked to be peering at some abstracted area, visible in his own mind but as real to him as the cigarette in his hand. The cigarette—long and white—must have been a special one. He smoked it slowly, in small puffs taken rarely. Otherwise it sat in the thin fingers of his hand like a delicate specimen he’d discovered.

Itzal put words to a thought he’d been thinking for a while.

“This seems a lot of trouble for you,” he said, gesturing with a couple fingers in a vague way at the whole situation.

“Are you here?” Captain Younes said. He said it with only tired snideness, which was as close to warm as he seemed to get.

“Ben seems like he’s more trouble than he’s worth, is what I mean,” Itzal said.

“Ben Mouse represents a sizable financial speculation,” Captain Younes said. “He’s the farthest-flung line in a far-reaching trade network funded by one of the world’s superpowers.”

“Alwatan?” Itzal said. Captain Younes nodded. “They’ve never seemed like much of a trading force in the area.”

“No, they have not,” Captain Younes said. “They’re making some strategic movements. Sir Ben represents their, as yet, farthest reaching concern.”

“Profits. You’re telling me you stand to profit by him,” Itzal said.

“His employers elected him as their agent with a great deal of care,” Captain Younes said, as if that explained it. Itzal didn’t think it did. “Trade routes cannot be easily built. There are certain…hindrances. His employers didn’t have the resources to send a large party this far west. Usually they would. Usually they’d need a large party. In the face of the constraints, they selected Sir Ben to serve alone.”

“I see,” Itzal said. It was a half truth. “I don’t believe you.”

“A balance of trust and honesty seems to dominate our conversation,” said Captain Younes.

“That’s true,” Itzal said. The last fiery slivers of the sun extinguished below the faraway hills. Full night had to wrestle with the dusk for a long time. A coyote howl went into the gloom. Another howl joined its keening. For a few seconds their dirge put shivers into the dark while it won its fight with the daylight.

“Will we be safe here?” Itzal asked. The Khans had raiding parties out all the time anywhere east of the Razorbacks, if Itzal’s reading was to be believed.

“Dear boy, it’s been many miles time since we could guarantee anything like safety,” Captain Younes said. The words seemed to amuse him. “You may rest in sure faith tonight that the Riot has passed this way many times already, and she is still intact. Does that comfort you?”

“And she’s protected you for all those hundreds of times?” Itzal asked.

That seemed to amuse Captain Younes even more. “She’s always protected someone. Unluckily for her former captain, on one of those hundreds of times, I was the danger in the night.”

“Ah,” Itzal said. He decided to be glad, by that, to count Captain Younes, for the moment, as an ally.

Without much pomp, bright as wet dew the next misty morning, the Riot rolled down from the last of the Foothills. Quiet and slow, catching a breath of a cold and lazy morning breeze, the ship dipped toward the Razorgrass Sea. The green-gold grass wavered and whispered, to any imaginative mind as if filled with beckoning ghosts. And Itzal had an abundance of imagination. He stood on the bowsprit, watching the dusty ground underneath the nose of the ship run away like a stream made of grass and dust. Thus far on the voyage, the grasses had grown barely high enough to brush the ship’s belly, when there had even been grasses underneath. They’d mostly kept to tracks, worn to dirt by frequent traffic, and had only occasionally gone through grass at all. Sometimes, when they’d stopped for what they said was the sort of maintenance and checks that wanted doing before the voyage really began, Itzal would go down into the grass too. At its tallest it never reached higher than Itzal’s chest, and the damp stalks would give him less trouble than wading through water of the same height.

The grass below changed. It grew thicker and lusher. Then, in a sudden line, it changed from thin buffalo grass into razor grass. The stalks stabbed up more than twice the tallest grass behind—more than three times. It lashed the hull of the Riot with a constant rattling like a hailstorm of wheat and straw. He could see no break in it—nowhere that the sun could reach the ground. Only thick grass as far as the horizon.

“Oy, squirrel,” someone shouted. “You wanting a closer look at the grasses?”

Itzal wasn’t sure he did, but he thought he ought to have a look. He followed the sailor’s ponytail to the beam leading to the larboard outrigger. Rope railings jostled at about waist height so that people running along it had something to grip. The sailor didn’t even touch the ropes. Itzal had been testing himself to see how far he could get without needing them. So far he’d needed to grasp them about halfway down.

This time especially. The grass stalks seemed to reach up toward him, unnerving him. Without shame, he held onto one of the ropes to get down to the outrigger.

The outriggers looked about like smaller versions of the ship, just narrower and without sails. At the front they rose to what seemed before now like a uselessly high point. Itzal now saw that they rose that high to stay out of the grasses.

Down in the outrigger, several feet lower than the deck of the Riot, the skittering, sliding sound of the razor grass took up most of the air. From here, the tips of the stalks might have been touched as they went past. Itzal found himself reaching out to do that. The sailor grabbed him to stop him.

“You don’t want to be doing that, little master,” the sailor said. “Your hand’ll come back all cut up, if it comes back at all.”

“That bad, is it?” Itzal asked.

“And crawling with all manner of the worst sort of night fever,” the sailor said.

“Anyone ever tried to clear a path through it?” Itzal asked. “I mean, anyone since the old empire tried to build their road.”

“You never heard what stopped them building the Old Highway?”

“I know that they found the Razorgrass Sea impassible,” Itzal said. “I always supposed that meant too expensive.”

“Well, if’n by ‘expensive’ you mean it wouldn’t take at no price, then expensive’s the word for it,” the sailor said. “As I heard it, they encountered what you’ll probably see sooner than you like, and that’s what stopped them in the main way. I shan’t ruin the story for you any more than that, though. I’m a one for ruining stories, and all.”

“Are you?” Itzal said.

“And more’s the worse for it, squirrel,” the sailor said. He was one who always wore a straw hat. Itzal had liked hearing about his son, Nero, who lived in Rotstock. He couldn’t remember the sailor’s name. “You wait till Teknik says it. Few can spin a yarn like Old Woodchips, and that’s something worth remembering.”

“I think I shall remember it,” Itzal said. He stared at the grasses skittering past like so many tiny whips. A spray splattered up from the passing of the ship’s hull. Itzal knew it was dew, knocked off the stalks onto his cheeks. It confused his senses, though, and he went into a reverie, watching the grass and feeling the water.

A vague awareness of increased speed grew in him. The misty morning warmed to a sunny one. The thin breeze puffed into a stronger one.

It would be a fine day for swift sailing. The wind favored the Riot and they would make good progress.

Comfort made Itzal suspicious. Always had. It seemed to forbode of much less pleasant things.

The weather continued fair and business about the Riot settled into what Itzal understood to be the usual bill of fare on less eventful voyages. The Riot’s crew went about their daily routine of maintenance and cleaning and making and breaking sail with all the mixed boredom and alertness of men who’d long past grown bored of it, but who knew with every waking breath that a lapse in attention would invite various disasters. Any sail sighted, for instance, far on the horizon caused an enormous commotion, the result of which was a change in course away from the sail. In addition, once when Itzal found himself peering at the shining world from the fighting top, the man on watch there assured him that they had to keep an eye out for whales.

“Notlike you’ve seen in books, mind,” the sailor said. “Not the sort in them peculiar wet oceans, far and away west. I’m talking our sort.”

“I know about prairie whales,” Itzal said. And he did, in passing, know about the hulking creatures that moved about among the razor grasses. They would attack a ship. Legends reckoned them malicious, and claimed the whales would hunt down ships. Itzal presumed they were like any animal: dangerous when startled or goaded. He didn’t want to say so.

The sailor in the fighting top with him looked so disappointed that Itzal apparently had an expertise in prairie whales that Itzal made haste to assure him that he knew nothing about them, really. (Only about their biology, mating and eating habits, and their relationship to mammoth in the north and elephants in the south—answer: distant.) That seemed to perk the man up. He went into a long set of stories about his dealing with the whales. They spent the afternoon cheerily after that. Itzal quite liked hearing about those vague contacts of the sailors and their claims to have been through the guts of whales or to have been unable to escape the whales whatever they did. The sailor had Itzal quite engaged.

And above all else, the sailors kept a keen eye on maintaining discipline to evade the ever present terror that they called skipper. Captain Younes, to them, was the worst force of nature to be reckoned with, and they much preferred triple checking their work to inviting his displeasure.

Itzal had an easier time of it. The generally fair treatment by the Riot crew continued. He could help them as much as they wanted, but they seemed more capable than he would be of managing the ship. He had no interest in getting in anyone’s way. When they asked him, he’d lend a hand. For the most part he’d find somewhere to sit and watch the expanses roll past.

Without paying too close attention, the voyage looked fairly monotonous. Itzal, though, attended minutely. He had never been able to see the real places that corresponded to his map, and he found himself enjoying the experience.

He knew the latitude where they travelled. From the angle of the sun he could tell that the Riot had kept on a northeasterly course, and more east than north. If they had gone directly east, they would have sailed off the edge of the world.

Not literally, but nearly. The Razorgrass Sea had a reputation for being a sea of grass uninterrupted in its flatness. That wasn’t entirely true. It was mostly uninterrupted, but all manner of geographic features existed that made it hazardous to make a course in any straight line across it. There were rare bogs, most of them known as difficult hazards. And there were many hillocks of many sizes and shapes rising like islands from the grass. No serious botanist had ever come to study why it was that the razor grass wouldn’t grow on the hills; the people who lived and farmed them worried less about why it happened and concerned themselves more with profiting by it.

The largest interruptions in the Razorgrass Sea were a few ravines so wide and deep they ought to have been called canyons. One of the largest of them cut a line to the east, and the Riot veered north to get around it. On this line, the ship would pass several landmarks. Itzal had seen drawings of several of them and descriptions of the rest. He looked forward to seeing them.

Lo, after a longer time than he expected, he saw the first: a boulder, rising a hundred feet higher than the top of the Riot, all hanging with creepers on its north side and baked dry on the south. It looked like it’d been thrown here by a giant from the mountains. It was called Evan’s Toe, among the Kelts, after the first person who’d reported it. Flags and banners hung from near the top, from the ground looking like pins that had caught things to flap in the wind. People would moor up at the base of the boulder and climb to the top, simply to say they had.

Distances felt both longer and shorter than Itzal expected. He knew the distances involved. They’d gone some hundred fifty miles at least, and it’d taken the better part of two days to do it. He had known that, and he had known the ship’s speed. Some sailor or other would periodically cast a knotted rope over the rail and measure out with it how fast the Riot went. Knowing the speed of the ship and the distance to Evan’s Toe, he made an estimation about how long it would take to get from the edge of the Razorgrass Sea to the boulder. And his estimation turned out to be just about spot on.

Something funny happened to his perception of time passing, though, while he stared out at the grasses skidding away past the ship. The wait seemed to grow interminable, and every time the ship’s bell struck the half hour he felt surprised that only a half hour had passed. Then, when the cry came out from the fighting top that Evan’s Toe had come in sight, it surprised Itzal to hear it had appeared so soon. He’d been growing convinced that his estimation of the distance had been wrong and that the time kept by the ship’s bell corresponded less to the usually agreed upon measure of time and more to the whimsy of whomever stood nearest to the bell’s pull rope.

When they passed Evan’s Toe after about 2:15 on the afternoon of the second day, when Itzal supposed they would, he chose to try very hard to trust what he knew, rather than what he thought, for the next one.

The which idea sent him into a reverie in which he mused on the difference between knowledge and thought.

That kept him busy for a while. He never concluded anything useful, except perhaps the power of the objective versus the subjective. As a result of his reverie, Itzal had fallen behind doing his estimation of the next leg before the next landmark. They wouldn’t be passing the next thing till the next morning. He looked forward to seeing it. It was something called Ovs Sum. At some ancient point in time, a civilization had inhabited the territory. Not much was left of them but their pyramids and obelisks and temples, rising from the razor grass, decayed and broken and left to the buzzards and the snakes and the rats. No one had yet discovered how the ancient civilization had managed to build so successfully among the razor grass. Or at least no one had duplicated it.

He made some quick calculations to estimate when the ship would pass it, doing what he could to correct for time lost to musing. Then went for a meal and to bed.

Next morning was cloudy and especially gusty. The Riot’s course shuddered more than usual, and the sailors kept busy with adjustments that kept them on course. They said it might sprinkle later.

“Around ten, I should warrant,” one of the sailors said. He was an older sailor with a tattoo of a seabird across the side of his neck. Itzal had come to trust Seabird’s instincts about weather. He had some old scars and old bone-breaks that seemed particularly delicate to changes in air pressure. Whenever Seabird complained of particular aches, they’d always proved to correspond to particular weather. Better than any barometer that Itzal had studied.

True to Seabird’s aching elbow, a sprinkling just heavy enough to be called “rain” and not merely a drizzle pattered on the deck starting just before the ten o’clock bell. It so happened to correspond to Itzal’s estimation for when they’d pass the Ovs Sum ruins. Putting up his hood, he went on deck and peered off the starboard side into the rain. It wasn’t such a thick rain that he still couldn’t see a mile or two. After that the world faded to grey.

Cold wind gusted in his face. For a while he watched the flat prairies without moving. The ten o’clock bell rang. Itzal started estimating the time passing. He recited poetry in his head. The poem bothered him—some epic about a king who’d died of both old age and in battle at the same time. It being one of the few he could remember and knew how long it took to recite, he used it to estimate time.

About the ninety-sixth stanza, he started waiting for the bell for half-past ten. It rang, when he expected it too.

And the grey world, annoyingly, continued empty of ancient ruins pushing out of the prairie and into the sky.

He might have misjudged the exact time, he knew, so he waited for a while longer, staring out over the prairies.

The eleven o’clock bell rang. Still no ancient ruins. At that point, Itzal looked around for a crewman of the Riot. A sailor stood near coiling cables.

“Hello, Mr. Braun,” Itzal said to the sailor. It was one of the few who he remembered, because Mr. Braun’s name described him. Mr. Braun stood taller than most and broader than most. The top of his head was shiny bald, but the rest of his hair grew thick and black. He wore it in a long ponytail.

“Hello, squirrel,” said Mr. Braun, glancing at Itzal then back at his work.

“I wondered if you could tell me something,” Itzal said.

“Never put your hand in a cougar’s mouth,” Mr. Braun said. He grinned, holding up his right fist. Thick scars covered his hand and arm. “You can have that for free.”

“Most useful advice, sir,” Itzal said.

“None more useful,” Mr. Braun said, going back to his ropes.

“The kind of words you can live by, I mean,” Itzal said.

“They’ll keep you a few days more this side of the sod, aye,” Mr. Braun said.

“I have no disagreement with them.”

“None whatever?”

“Indeed no, sir.”

“Indeed no, sir, he says.”

“I feel myself already growing into a wiser man.”

“Wise as the sages,” Mr. Braun said.

“Wise, as you say, as the long-bearded sages,” Itzal said.

“That’s the main point, then,” Mr. Braun said. He finished with his cables and went to a mug he had nearby. It had coffee in it, Itzal could smell. Mr. Braun glugged something from a little bottle in his pocket into the coffee before taking a drink of the mug.

“I wonder, though, if you could tell me something else,” Itzal said. “Something more specific, having to do with our course.”

“Our course is our business,” Mr. Braun said. “The skipper plays his numbers close. Only way of getting your own on the prairies.” Mr. Braun toasted the horizon.

“Of course,” Itzal said. “That makes utter sense.”

“To a lubber, it rarely does,” Mr. Braun said. He considered Itzal for a moment or two. Itzal wished he knew how to accomplish the natural cunning of the Riot crew. They had a way of looking at him that confused him completely. He didn’t know what measures they used to measure him up, and it put him on edge. Back home, he’d always known the standard, and he’d always known how to tidy himself or—as was more often the case—grow more slovenly to effect expectations. This new world flooded with rules that he felt far from prepared to understand.

Mr. Braun finished measuring Itzal. “You ain’t a lubber of common measure though,” Mr. Braun said. “Are you?”

“Not common, no,” Itzal said. Bone Jacks constituted a small enough population that the statement could be honest without being prideful. They’d always told him he was prone to pride; he did make an effort to avoid it when he could. “I don’t care to know our heading anyway,” he said.

“I wouldn’t tell it you if you did,” Mr. Braun assured him.

“The best of crewmen, you,” Itzal said. “You’re a boon to your ship, crew, and captain.”

“Every man-jack here be that,” Mr. Braun said.

“I’d like to know something else, about a sight I’d heard stuck out of the grasses in the area,” Itzal said. He looked back out at the railing. “I’ve heard of an old ruin. Ought to be somewhere over there.”

“Old Ratskeep?” Mr. Braun said. He went to the railing.

“I…suppose,” Itzal said. “I’m talking of something called Ovs Sum.”

“Aye, that’s what the locals calls it,” Mr. Braun said. “We calls it Old Ratskeep. There’s sport to be had there of a summer, for them with the fortune to see it—call the fortune good or bad. You can make a bit of money if you’re any good at fighting rat breeding.”

“That’s barbaric,” Itzal said. He had no tone of disgust or accusation. He’d gotten used to simply stating it around the sailors.

“Aye, and profitable to them with a good eye for it. I never made a penny there, but you ask Mr. Teknik. His uncle breeds the gruesomest rats, if the stories are anything.”

“Are they anything?”

“Old Woodchips talks big,” Mr. Braun said.

“That he seems to,” Itzal said. “When will we be passing Old Ratskeep?”

“Just Ratskeep,” Mr. Braun said.

“You called it Old Ratskeep.”

“That’s just a way of starting a sentence, lad,” Mr. Braun said. “Some’ing like saying, ‘like,’ as you young boys sometimes do, and all.”

“Ah,” Itzal said. He thought about that for a moment. “Then…is it just ‘Woodchips,’ not ‘Old Woodchips’?”

“No, he’s Old Woodchips,” Mr. Braun said, as if it should be obvious. “Of course he is.”

“Why of course?” Itzal asked.

“Well he were just ‘Woodchips.’ ”

“What changed?”

“Well he’s got a son, or nephew, what’s a ships carpenter too. Now the son, or nephew—never met the lad meself, you understand—he’s ‘Woodchips,’ and our carpenter’s got ‘Old Woodchips,’ which is the more venerable title.”

“Ah,” Itzal said. “But of course.”

“Folk respect a man with titles,” Mr. Braun said.

“I have always respected men with titles more than men without them,” Itzal agreed.

Mr. Braun toasted Itzal and took another drink of his coffee.

“We won’t be,” Mr. Braun said. For a moment, Itzal thought he could use the phrase “apropos of nothing,” which pleased him. He liked that phrase and got to use it less than he thought seemed fair. Then Itzal remembered.

“Oh, we won’t pass the…Ratskeep. Ovs Sum ruins,” Itzal said.

“No. Afraid not,” Mr. Braun said. “Not on this heading. It’s way and away off that way,” Mr. Braun gestured broadly to the southeast. “We’d have passed it by now if we was going to. We’ve been on this course for long enough.”

“Ah-hah,” Itzal said. The Riot had veered further north. Itzal amended the course on the map in his head. The line the Riot now followed flew across a long, empty land, till it fell like a dart making a lazy bullseye on one of those places that had always represented a mixed fascination to Itzal. It’d been a place he’d studied, unable to keep away from it, all the while thanking the luck of his birth and upbringing that he’d never need to go there.

He fell into another brood about the mistakes that had contrived him onto this course, and in that way failed to notice the rain, and its passing, and the coming of the sun, and the beginning inches of the sun scratching its lazy hours in the bright forenoon.