Chapter 265
The Marka listing hard to port, black water pouring over her lee rail, the Upp Igen racing in beside her, both ships lit by the fixed star and by the gold glints of the root forest on the horizon.
Krydog with a fistful of Jeppson's collar, and Jeppson clutching his dented brass chalk box to his chest like a baby.
Krydog throwing his shipwright across the gap between the two ships: a wiry man in a leather apron sailing through the night, goggles flapping, and landing in a roll on the Marka's tilting deck, the chalk box held high and not one stick broken.
JEPPSON · K-III TESTED · Scalelist #12,804 · Shipwright
getting up, pushing his goggles down, already walking for the hatch as if pacing a measurement.
Black water up to Kompis's waist and rising, lanterns swinging, Öde's seed-sacks floating. Jeppson wading in, right eye shut, sighting down the keel.
a fine violet grid of measuring lines glowing across the iris (BLUEPRINT waking), following the split from stem to stern.
splashing up beside him.
kneeling on a dry rib above the flood line, drawing: one long single stroke, perfect, then another, a cofferdam in full size, every measurement written in tiny exact numbers along the lines. Violet light glowing in the chalk.
A gold glint in the wood. And out of it, a small splinter-hand, which smears a long stretch of his chalk line with one wipe, and goes back in.
staring at the smudge for one long beat. Then drawing the line again. Perfect. And the hand coming out again, and smearing it again.
chest-deep in water, eyes gold, seeing every glint in the rib light up just before she comes out.
swimming across the hold, scrambling up onto the dry rib, and lying down right across the corner of Jeppson's drawing, where the next glint is lighting. Chin on his paws. Looking at the glint.
drawing fast now around the edge of the dog, the water at his chest, chalk dust on his eyebrows. And the hull groaning, twisting under him as the Marka rolls, the rib he's drawing on bending.
the last one, the long one along the bottom of the dam. And because the rib is twisting, the line on it is a hair off true. Hardly anything. A breath.
wading to them through the black water, already making her face very still.
Jeppson's (chalk-white), Krydog's (bandaged, he's just dropped down the hatch), and Isa standing between them, chin up, perfectly still. Eyes open. No breath.
The Marka's hold, stopped. A whole wall of the black Deep caught in mid-pour through the split keel, hanging in the air like glass. Lanterns frozen mid-swing. Öde's seed-sacks hanging in the water, every bubble in it a frozen pearl. Drekk on the ladder, mid-shout. A gold glint in a rib caught half-lit.
And in the middle of the stopped sea, three people who can still move: a girl who can't, perfectly still, with two men's hands on her shoulders, and one of them, a wiry man in goggles, drawing one-handed on a rib, his other hand never leaving her.
ISA (no balloon; her face is the balloon: very still, and starting, very slightly, to go pale round the lips)
redrawing the bottom line one-handed in the held moment, and it's still a hair off, because the rib's still twisted, because one-handed is one-handed. He rubs it out. Starts again. Still off.
Still. Not breathing. Her lips going blue. Her eyes, which can't blink, filling with water that can't fall.
looking from Isa's blue lips to the shipwright on his knees, rubbing out a line for the fourth time.
on the chalk-line reel. Shaking, already, a little. And then, for the first time in his life, snapping a line he knows is off.
The cofferdam rising out of the drawing like a pop-up book, pale as bone, violet ticks along every edge, slamming down across the split keel just as Isa breathes, and the held sea falls in one black crash against the chalk wall.
gasping, sagging in Krydog's arms, colour coming back into her face. Water pouring off the dam, and the dam holding, a hair off true and not caring.
on his knees in the water, staring at the line he snapped off true. At the dam, holding anyway.
in the rib under Mingus, and Flisa's voice coming out of it, thoughtful.
The Marka limping on with her chalk dam, low in the water, the Upp Igen beside her, into the shadow of the first great root, an arch of cork-oak rising out of the sea higher than a mountain, black against the star.
All around the two ships, the sea bulging: gold glints lighting in the roots under the water, splinters swelling, and new roots bursting up out of the Deep on every side, thick as towers, arching over the ships, closing over them like the fingers of a hand.
The hand of roots closing round both ships, and lifting: the Marka and the Upp Igen raised dripping out of the Deep in a cradle of wood, carried up through the root forest, and set down, gently, side by side, on a broad bark-shelf high on the back of a root.
on the tilted deck of a beached ship, looking at the roots holding them.
climbing down onto the bark-shelf, laying his palm flat on the Marka's split keel. His hand shaking a little already: tomorrow's price arriving early.
Far off across the roots, a sound: iron on wood. tonk… tonk… tonk. And in the Marka, in every plank, every gold glint flaring at once, and Flisa's face in the root twisting, and from every splinter in the ship, a thin dry scream.