Chapter 290
The pilgrims asleep along the branch in blankets, jars in their arms. Fires glowing in the cracks. Kvar sitting apart on a black ridge, his jar beside him, not asleep, not talking. And Aska on her stump, cooling, grey, counting nothing for once.
walking up to her with something long wrapped in sailcloth. Standing there. Not sitting.
unwrapped: the charred spar. A ship's yard burned black, and nailed to it, half burned away, a scrap of black sailcloth with a painted sigil: a white gull with a fish in its beak.
very quiet.
opening her coal eyes, looking at him.
holding out her cracked hand for the spar.
on the charred spar, her cracks blazing. The ember-knot at her sternum flaring white-orange.
The spar rising out of her hands, and growing: wood out of ash, a mast out of the yard, a hull spreading out of the black like ink in water, down off the edge of the branch onto the dark Current below.
On the starlit Current below the Burn, whole again, for one minute: a merchant ship, broad and plain, sails set, a white gull with a fish painted on her black mainsail, lanterns lit on her rails. And lining her rails, looking up at the branch, thirty-one men: sailors, a cook in an apron, a boy of fourteen with a bucket, an old mate with a pipe, and on the quarterdeck her captain, a broad grey-bearded man with his arms folded.
On the black edge of the branch above them, small, a pirate in a long coat, and a woman of charcoal beside him, counting.
AND IN THE CORNER, Aska's number: 1.
looking up at the branch. At the man in the coat. Recognising him slowly. His face hardening.
at the edge, his mouth opening, the word already coming.
closing round his wrist. Burning. He stops.
a long breath. Looking down at the ship. At the faces. All of them. And something in his own face changing: not guilt. Greed. The old hungry look, turned on the men.
his voice carrying down off the branch, steady, loud, a captain calling a roll.
his folded arms loosening. Staring up.
Aska's count climbing in the corners, 19… 27… 34…: face after face on the Gråtrut's rail lifting as their names come down to them out of the dark, one after another, a man who drowned every one of them calling them like crew:
fourteen, staring up.
his eyes wet, his voice not shaking.
on the quarterdeck, unfolding his arms. A long look up at the man who burned his ship.
counting, 51… 52…, her cracks widening, her face grey with the effort of thirty-one men at once. Not letting go of Vigolas's wrist.
at the very edge of the branch, lifting two fingers to his brow in a salute: the two-finger salute his own drowned crew gave him once, in the Arena.
every man on it lifting two fingers back. The cook. The twins. Old Simon. Tobbe, with his bucket. The captain last, slowly, gravely.
60. The ship burning from the waterline up, gently, gold, all of her at once, the men on her rail still saluting as they go, and settling back into a long black charred spar floating on the Current below the branch.
letting go of his wrist, sagging back onto her stump, a whole new web of cracks across her shoulders, breathing smoke.
a black handprint burned into it where she held him. He looks at it. Doesn't touch it.
Vigolas and Aska sitting side by side with their legs over the drop, the Current far below, the charred spar floating on it. Mingus lying on her footprints behind them.
looking at her hands. At the cracks. The ghost of a smile.
Behind them, down the branch, the pilgrims' line, the blankets, the jars. And Roffe, standing in the middle of it all with his big arms folded, looking down the line. At the thin faces. At a child eating ash off her own fingers in her sleep. At an old man with a cracked lip sucking on a pebble.
his face going very still, very dark, the way it only does about one thing in the world.
untying his apron, retying it, tighter. Rolling up his sleeves over a hundred pot-handle burns.
the pilgrims asleep along it, hundreds, and one huge man in an apron standing at the top of it with his fists on his hips, looking down at them like a general looking at a battlefield.