Chapter 266

The two ships beached side by side high on the back of a root, a forest of smaller roots rising round them like trees. The Marka on her side, the chalk cofferdam gone to dust in the night, the long split along her keel open to the sky. Root foxes watching from the roots, red, with patches of bark in their fur.

sitting cross-legged on the shelf beside the split keel with the broken bark of her hull spread out round him in a thousand pieces, sorting them into numbered piles. His hands shaking, badly. A pencil rolling away across the bark.

looming over him with a mug, glaring at the piles.

slinking up beside the piles, sniffing a shard. And on a root above it, Flisa, sitting with her knees up and a fox curled in her lap, watching the shipwright work. The vixen Kvist.

Every gold glint in the roots round the shelf flaring. The foxes gone in a flash of red.

Up the root from below, out of the root forest, swarming over the arches: the Barkstrippers. Fifty of them, in leather aprons and iron-shod boots, carrying iron draw-knives, long iron hooks, mallets, coils of chain, and big brass-hooped nail-guns loaded with fat iron spikes. Pale strips of stolen bark bundled on their backs.

BARKSTRIPPER · K-II MARKED · bark-harvesters

a heavy man with a grey beard and iron rings in his ears, stopping at the edge of the shelf and staring at the beached Marka with naked delight.

unrolling a scroll with a cracked red seal: CERTIFIED HARVEST · BARK-YARDS OF THE ORDER.

Vigolas dropping off the Marka's rail onto the shelf, landing between the strippers and the piles, cracking his neck. Krydog dropping beside him off the Upp Igen. Both crews spilling down behind them.

not even looking up from his piles, shaking hands still sorting.

Svala pointing, the crimson mark on her arm blazing, and flying: one straight line through the strippers' hauling-winch, cut clean in two. "Through!" She perches on a root, panting. "…Don't ask me to turn round."

Rougeina Swapping a charging stripper with a bale of stolen bark: the bale rolls off the shelf, the stripper finds himself on the far side of it, very confused.

Roffe, a big man with a big ladle, bonking a stripper flat. "Not in my kitchen." "…You haven't GOT a kitchen here!" "I've got a LADLE."

Perne on the Upp Igen's masthead, Fjärran at her eye, shooting the nail-guns out of their hands one after another.

A stripper with an iron hook swinging at Jeppson's bowed head. And Levla, stepping in, one ringed hand out, a price tag appearing in the air over the shipwright, swinging on its string.

bouncing off the air an inch from Jeppson's head like it hit a wall, the stripper staggering back, his arms numb.

Flisa everywhere among the strippers: out of a hook-pole, out of a mallet, out of a nail-gun stock, a bite, a Swell (a splinter in a palm grows a thorn through the hand; a stripper screams), gone. Strippers falling back.

watching her, calm, a nail-gun in each hand.

Flisa coming up out of a root between three strippers, and the strippers firing: iron spikes slamming into the root all around her in a ring, THUNK-THUNK-THUNK-THUNK, fat iron nails driven deep into the wood on every side.

trying to sink back into the root, and nothing happening. The wood under her feet dead. Every gold glint inside the ring of iron going out, one after another, like lamps.

walking up to the ring with a pair of long iron tongs.

backed against the dead wood, small, jagged, her iron-nail necklace rattling, her splinter-teeth bared, a fox's growl in her throat.

a little way off, Bror in his hands, his eyes gold, seeing her threads. And stopping still.

Flisa, in his gold sight: thousands of threads pouring out of her in every direction, down into the roots, out across the Splinterlands, away over the sea, each one running to a splinter she's left somewhere in the world. A storm of threads. And not one, not a single one, running to a person.

Vigolas hitting the Foreman's tongs out of his hand with one lightning-wrapped backhand, then dropping to his knees in front of the ring and grabbing the iron nails with his bare hands, and pulling. The first nail comes out of the root with a shriek. His palms tear.

pulling the second, the third, blood on the iron, grinning through it.

staring at him through the gap in the ring, at the bleeding hands, at the man who folded her up like a napkin.

The ring broken, the gold glints in the root lighting again round her, and Flisa gone, into the wood, without a word. And the strippers falling back off the shelf under both crews, dragging their wounded, their winch cut, their nail-guns shot to bits.

at the edge of the shelf, retreating last, looking back at the beached Marka with something like pity.

wrapping his torn palms in a rag, watching them go.

The bark-shelf under the star. Both crews asleep in heaps round two fires. The split Marka. And Jeppson, alone among his nine hundred and forty heaps, by a lantern, hands still now, fitting the first shard of bark back into the keel, by hand, tapping it home with a mallet so softly it barely sounds.

Krydog sitting down on the bark beside him with two steaming mugs, holding one out.

(Above them, in a root, two knot-hole eyes that never close, watching both.)