Bone Jack

Creaking and aching but gaining speed by the second, the Riot moved toward the gap in the Razorbacks. Although the ship had gotten moving, the crew still kept quiet. The noise on the deck grew to talking level, but not above that. No one shouted or called out, and they kept the clattering as infrequent as they could. Itzal admired the care.

Looking the other way, back at the docks, Itzal wondered at the simplicity of the escape. He wasn’t sure whether to trust Ben’s cleverness or whether he ought to feel uneasy.

“Ben says that it’s cat-and-mousing’ll save us,” Itzal said, more or less to himself. Something about Captain Younes made him feel comfortable. Itzal couldn’t place what it was, unless it was the clearness that there was no possible way of flapping the skipper. “I cannot say that I agree with him.”

“Will someone shut him up, please?” Captain Younes said. He stood near Itzal and stared out over the stern rail too. He awaited something. Itzal chose to wait for it too.

It seemed to be taking too long.

“If the fuse is wet—” Tyro started in his unhappy tone.

“Did you set the fuses, Mr. Tyro?” Captain Younes said, cutting of Tyro.

“Aye, sir,” Tyro said.

“Did you set them correctly? Answer me honestly,” said Captain Younes.

“Aye, sir,” Tyro said.

“Then be patient,” said Captain Younes.

With that, they were patient. Without speaking again, they watched the dark outlines of the buildings on the dock, only visible, and only just visible, because of here-and-there flickers of firelight from lamps and torches.

And, for a breath or two, nothing happened.

“Come on,” Captain Younes said. Itzal heard the skipper’s thin-fingered hand gripping the aft rail. It made a tightening ropes creak.

Itzal looked at the faces of the sailors, wondering if they saw something he didn’t.

Then it came. First a burst of orange light rent the night. After it, but almost so soon after as to be called the same moment, a crash like a punch of thunder hit Itzal. Then came the wave of heat.

A warehouse had exploded on shore. The crew of the Riot started a cheer.

“Belay that noise,” Captain Younes shouted. The cheering ceased. “We must hasten our exit, if you please, Mr. Tyro.”

“Aye, sir,” said Tyro. Then he started shouting orders at the sailors about mainstays and jibbooms and what more Itzal did not know. If the deck below had been a mass of roiling movement before, it had looked nothing to the new frenzy. More sails billowed out. Sailors swarmed up and down the rope ladders from the decks to the masts. Any pretense of quiet disappeared, and cries and calls went into the night sky. The animal roiled.

And the effect of it all was, at first, nil. For the first few moments, Itzal felt no change in the speed of the Riot.

Then he did.

And then they were well away.

Prairie ships got invented when the old, now fallen empire had decided not to interrupt their eastern push at the coast. The engineers of that empire, in what some historians have called an instance of fortunate stupidity, decided it would be too difficult to offload the ships of exploration they’d come in across the ocean. They decided they did not see the wisdom in building new carts. They would need an unrealistically large amount of them, after all.

In their questionable wisdom, they had instead decided to build carts around their ships and draw them across the new land that way. It proved only a point of limited difficulty to harness the local buffalo and train enormous teams of them. The load could be lessened for the great beasts at times when the wind was in the right quarter, of course. The carts were, after all, still sailing ships.

Those engineers thought they had hit on a brilliant scheme. They did not know how wide the new continent was, nor what obstacle took up a good part of its center.

That initial design, never meant to be a permanent solution, required frequent refinement. The first refinement it received was outriggers. Ballast worked differently on land than in water, although it proved just as essential, which required new fiddling. They grew faster. Moving at the walking pace of a herd of buffalo proved tedious and, the further east they got to encounter hazards there, downright dangerous. Seeking speed resulted in refinements of wheels and balancing. The eventual design that caught on the most had a single wheel in the middle that bore the most weight and rose up more than twice the height of the deck of the ship. For stability, there would be smaller wheels at some distance in every direction from the central wheel. There would always be one wheel in the nose and at least one in the stern. Then there were the outriggers, which always had at least one wheel each. As a result, the ships could go through all of the movements of a ship on the water, all of the banking and pitching that it would require, with the stability of the central wheel and at least one other all the time, no matter how sharply it maneuvered.

The ships eventually outstripped the speed of buffalo. They outstripped the speed of horses. They became the premier technology for traversing the predominant terrain in the new continent, and adopted by all people there.

Supposedly, the best ships, and the Riot looked to Itzal untrained eye like a good one, had been so well balanced that they could be pushed by a few men. Itzal wanted to see that someday. He didn’t believe it.

He sat on one of the railings on the stern of the ship. The mountains, sharp in the western sky, sank slowly away. In every direction green-gold grasses rustled in a wind that felt to Itzal too thin to push such a large object as the three masted Riot. Tyro had explained, in his way that failed to explain, that you couldn’t often tell with wind. That had left Itzal with a vague sense that a lot of sailoring must be an exercise in faith.

Morning had well and truly broken. Though the sun in the east hadn’t risen far over the horizon, and the wind still had the chilliness of a sleeping world. Even though the sky over the mountains westerly still hung on gloomy purple, the light in the Foothills set everything visible in bright outline. The world fairly glinted.

After they’d passed the ridges of the Razorbacks, Tyro had said he could show Itzal and Ben to a place they could sleep out the night. Itzal had not felt sleepy, and he’d stayed on deck to watch the goings on and the breaking of dawn. It was his first sunrise so far away from home. He had mixed feelings about the sight of it.

Captain Younes had left. Tyro stayed. Then Tyro left the ship in command of another sailor, who’d left a little before dawn when the skipper came back. Captain Younes watched the sunrise too. Then for the last half an hour they’d been on deck without a word shared.

“I thought it’d be less…” Itzal said. The Riot had breached another hill with what felt like a creaking effort. Itzal paused for the sensation of his belly rising that would come when the Riot started down the hill in a rush. He’d grown to enjoy the feeling. “…bumpy.” He said.

“We have not yet reached the Sea,” Captain Younes said. It took Itzal unawares to hear him speak. Itzal hadn’t expected the skipper to say anything.

“And will the sight of the sea explain why these prairies have so many stories of impassibility? It doesn’t look so impassible from here. We’re going along on a dirt track now.”

Captain Younes, resting a hand on the rail and looking out at the foothills, took a deep breath before speaking again. He took his time about things, this Captain Younes. That was Itzal’s impression. He seemed a much different person than the whiplash-in-human-shape of the night before.

“We ride the Common Track, worn to earth by a hundred ships, and a hundred ships more, passing this easy countryside. When you see the graveyard, and the hulks stripped to bare ribbing, you will ask less questions. When the buffalo grass and the sage brush are swallowed by the razor grass, you will ask less questions.”

“I…” Itzal said, feeling disinclined to interrupt the dramatic moment. Captain Younes looked so poetical, with his leather coat flapping around his stable legs and his steel-cold eyes looking at the horizon like it might give up its secrets to interrogation. Anything that sprang to mind to say seemed like the right kind of thing to make the wrong kind of impression. “I may,” Itzal said. “Ask less questions, that is.”

He didn’t think he would be asking less questions, but it addressed the matter fairly, so he left it at that.

“Would you do me a courtesy, Captain?” Itzal asked.

“Since you’ve developed some gentle manners, I think I must,” Captain Younes said.

“Thank you, sir,” Itzal said. Now he had permission, though, he wasn’t sure how to ask what he wanted to know. “Won’t…” he started, closed his mouth, and restarted. “Did you hide your evidence well? In Garnison, I mean. I mean to say, it can’t do much to keep trade relations smooth in the territory if traders blow up ports both willy and nilly.”

“Believe me, young man, when I tell you that trade relations in the territory have not been smooth—to use your crude word—for many long years.”

“I suppose I have more to learn about trade relations in the territory,” Itzal said.

“I prefer this habit of obvious facts to your habit of impeding my crew.”

“It just seemed like an over-exciting way to cover an escape,” Itzal said. “I suppose I’m trying to say that.”

That got a smile from Captain Younes. The smile made Itzal uncomfortable, like he’d just heard about a murder. “The weight of an…inconvenient promise has lifted from my shoulders. The moment deserved a celebration.”

Captain Younes’ tone gave Itzal a cold shiver. Itzal said something else he didn’t expect Captain Younes to grace with a reply.

“You remind me of Ben,” Itzal said, preparing to say how since he didn’t think Captain Younes would say anything. Captain Younes interrupted.

“We’re both cleverer than you?” Captain Younes said.

Itzal stared at the skipper for as long as the moment of wrong-footing lasted. “No,” he said after gathering his threads again. “Neither of you will tell me whole truths.”

“Ah…” Captain Younes said in a slow, sly way. “Perhaps you have more sense than your air betrays. And it does.”

“It betrays me,” Itzal said.

“Yes. Yes it does.”

Itzal tried to avoid the company of Captain Younes after that. He couldn’t quite put a finger on why he did. Whenever in the presence of the skipper, Itzal found himself fairly comfortable. He felt like he could speak freely and as if his thoughts stayed rather well organized, or better than usual, around Captain Younes. Still, he stayed distant from Captain Younes when he could.

Not that he could be too far distant. The Riot was a fairly large ship, but no ship had much spare space.

A frigate, he was told. It had two levels below the open deck, all whirring with the constant sound of the spinning wheel amidships. For the first few days, Itzal could find no nook to hole up in that seemed out of the way. Sailors kept shooing him somewhere else. He sat in a corner near the bacony smell of the cook’s chamber, but soon discovered that was where some buckets had a prior claim. He relocated to the top of a coil of rope that seemed to have been left to its own devices on deck. Within moments, he discovered that particular coil of rope was due to be repaired. A troop of men with pitch and hemp took the rope away and inspected it by the inch. He thought he’d found a spot where he could stay against the mast near the middle of the ship just aft of the boards around the spinning middle wheel. It turned out that a different coil of rope had been otherwise engaged but now needed to be set down there instead of him.

“Why doesn’t young master take a climb into the rigging?” a sun-beaten sailor suggested. “It’s rare that we have a need for the fighting top, save when fighting starts.”

There was something not entirely kind in the man’s tone. The source of the unkindness Itzal could not easily imagine. In spite of it, Itzal thought the suggestion a good one. He was going to say so, but someone shouted and interrupted him.

“Belay that there, Mr. Watts,” shouted Tyro. He made his way across the deck towards Itzal and the sun-beaten sailor. That really wasn’t a useful way to describe any of the Riot’s crew—sun-beaten. It described them all. He had to come up with a better description for this sailor. He had black muttonchops, sticking in straggly bunches from either side of a thin face. The effect was rather impressive.

Itzal abandoned the observation before he grew too invested, having realized that Tyro had shouted the sailor’s name: Watts.

Watts, smiling in the same mode as the not entirely friendly tone of his suggestion, saluted to oncoming Tyro. “Aye, sir,” Watts said. He went back to his business.

“What has he belayed…belain?” Itzal said. “One of them. What’d he stop?”

“They wanted to see you fall,” Tyro said, frowning unhappily. “Not much entertains them more than lubbers getting into rough spots. They’ve been at you for days.”

“Has it all been intentional, then?” Itzal asked. It made his heart sink.

“It’s a sad thing but a true thing,” Tyro said. As if he felt he needed to explain a bit better, he added. “You put across so lubberly, it hardly warrants their effort.”

“Do I?” Itzal said. It made him feel worse.

“Something in the way you haven’t even tried to act like you know sailing.”

“Oh,” Itzal said.

“Most lubbers’ll pretend they know something.”

“Really?” Itzal said.

“Like they want to put across like they’re making an effort. Like they want to put across like they hope we stop ribbing them.”

“That had never occurred to me,” Itzal said. “I thought you all looked so much like you knew what you were about…I didn’t want to get in the way.”

“I can respect that and all,” Tyro said. “The lads are not, as you might say, so broad-minded.”

“I get your point,” Itzal said, paying attention to a few rude gestures direct at him. They happened in the periphery of his vision and the sailors thought he couldn’t see. Tyro didn’t seem to see them. “Is it, at least, a bit more out of the way in the fighting top?”

“Well, that much be true, yes,” Tyro said.

“Mr. Tyro,” Itzal said, responding to a sudden thought.

“What you want, little squirrel?” Tyro said.

“Where do you come from? You’ve got such an interesting accent. But I can’t place it.”

Tyro’s white-toothed grin flashed in the sun. “Tyro comes from everywhere,” he said.

“That’s what I thought,” Itzal said. He looked at the loose tangle that was the ropes and rigging and ladders slung all over the ship. “Do they really think I’d fall?”

“Or have a touch of fright and freeze up,” Tyro said. “Either would cheer ’em for days either way.”

“Well…I might have some trouble,” Itzal said. “I’m not used to this shuddering movement. If it would be out of the way…”

“It would be out the way,” Tyro agreed. “You’d get less razzing up there. Out the line of fire, as it were.”

Nodding, Itzal looked up into the rigging. It attracted him. So many places to leap from and swing from. If no one had been nearby, he would have done some climbing around, for the sheer pleasure of it.

“Blue Jay,” Ben called from nearby. Itzal glanced over at him. He carried a bundle wrapped in grey felt. Itzal glanced back at Tyro. Tyro waved Itzal away, seeming to be amused. Itzal walked toward Ben.

“Was I right?” Ben asked when Itzal got closer. Ben had set down his felt bundle and started unrolling it. It had a selection of weapons—his handiwork, from the looks of it.

“At some point in your long history, I am sure,” Itzal said. “Could you see your way to narrowing the parameters of your question?”

“About your weapon of choice,” Ben said. “When you walked into my shop.”

Itzal opened his mouth to say that his weapon of choice was his rapier wit. He decided that would attract ridicule. Some sailors still watched Itzal. He wished they had something else to do, but they didn’t seem to.

Instead, Itzal said, “I never had enough interest to specialize.”

Wrinkling his eyebrows while he did it, Ben looked at Itzal. Itzal would have allowed himself to use words like “shrewd” and “assessed” to describe the look, if he hadn’t just decided not to attempt to be witty. Calm and controlled. That was the thing called for at the moment.

“You look like one of these lads who’s all ready to tell me the difference between a halberd and a mattock and which to use in close quarters, or some rot like that.”

Itzal opened his mouth, ready to say that your experience mattered more than close quarters, and you ought to use a halberd every time, if you were skilled enough. He decided against that particular tidbit. Trying not to be witty. That was the goal.

“I never favored fighting,” Itzal said.

Ben grunted. It almost came across as a laugh. “Too civilized for it, are you?”

Itzal shrugged. “I found other things more engaging.”

Ben grunted again. Leaving that amiss, he held the handle of a short sword out to Itzal.

“For what?” Itzal asked.

“If we’re travelling together, I need to know you can handle yourself.”

“I can,” Itzal said.

“Many’s the dead lad who said that,” Ben said.

Sensing that Ben might test Itzal’s custom not to roll his eyes as much as Lilywhite had, Itzal took the weapon.

Ben gave voice to his approval, breaking up the monotony a bit by grunting this time. With a sword of the same kind as the one Itzal held, Ben walked a distance away.

The deck of the ship had few direct lines of sight on it. Near the portside rail, where Ben had brought Itzal, had a bit of a long view, uninterrupted by things to tie things down and other things that let people in and out of the lower decks, and other paraphernalia of sailing that Itzal couldn’t identify. It seemed there would be times when the crew had to run freely along just inside the rails. The sailors always kept a path along there without any clutter.

They kept busy, and people kept walking between Ben and Itzal.

Itzal looked at the sword in his hand. With a flick and a twist, he balanced it on his wrist so it lay out flat as the horizon. Although he understood the physics, it always struck him as an odd sight to see the blade of a well-balanced sword sticking out several times longer than the handle. He couldn’t quite reconcile how it appeared not to be balanced when it felt balanced.

He put more faith in the feeling than the sight. The texture. It still struck him as peculiar.

The sword, so perfectly balanced as it was, made smooth wavers with the wavering of the moving ship. Itzal looked past the glinting surface of it. He focused on Ben.

Ben looked, as ever, ready for nothing. He looked it, though, in the same way that an eons-old rock isn’t ready for a storm. The rock will still be there when the storm is gone.

“You aren’t playing a game here,” Itzal said, half asking. “Not just setting me up to see what I’ll do.”

“I am doing exactly that,” Ben said. “It’s the most serious game. What you do could save lives.”

“Is this one of the moments where I learn about the real world and how classroom schooling doesn’t prepare me for everything?”

“You’re tracking the right thought,” Ben said. He had a glint in his eye, a glint to do harm. Itzal did not like the look of it.