The Complete Liveship Traders Trilogy: Ship of Magic, The Mad Ship, Ship of Destiny. Robin Hobb
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do that if a stranger comes aboard?’
The incredulous look on the watch-man’s face grew. ‘How could she not know? What Captain Vestrit and his father and his grandmother knew of shipboard life, she knows.’ He looked aside and shook his head slightly as he added, ‘I thought all Vestrits would know that about a liveship.’
‘Thank you,’ Wintrow said, ignoring the last bit of the man’s comment. ‘I’ll be seeking Torg now. Carry on.’
He stooped and swept up the discarded blanket. He walked carefully as he left the dim circle of light, letting his eyes adjust to the deepening darkness. He found the door to Althea’s cabin standing ajar, light spilling out onto the deck. Those of her boxes that had not already been carted off were stacked unceremoniously to one side. The mate was engaged in judiciously arranging his own possessions.
Wintrow rapped loudly on the opened door, and tried not to take pleasure in the way Torg started almost guiltily.
‘What?’ the man demanded, rounding on him.
‘My father said to see you to get a blanket,’ Wintrow stated quietly.
‘Looks to me like you’ve got one,’ Torg observed. He could not quite hide the glint of his amusement. ‘Or does the priest-boy think it’s not good enough for him?’
Wintrow let the offending blanket drop to the deck. ‘This won’t do,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s filthy. I’ve no objection to worn, or patched, but no man should willingly endure filth.’
Torg scarcely gave it a glance. ‘If it’s filthy, then wash it.’ He made a show of returning to his stowing of his goods.
Wintrow refused to be cowed. ‘I should not need to point out that there is no time for the blanket to dry,’ he observed blandly. ‘I am simply asking you to do as my father commanded. I’ve come aboard for the night, and I need a blanket.’
‘I’ve done as your father commanded, and you have one.’ The cruel amusement in Torg’s voice was less veiled now. Wintrow found himself responding to that rather than to the man’s words.
‘Why does it amuse you to be discourteous?’ he asked Torg, his curiosity genuine. ‘How could it be more trouble to you to provide me with a clean blanket than to give me a filthy rag and force me to beg for what I need?’
The honesty of the question caught the mate off-guard. He stared at Wintrow, speechless. Like many casually cruel men, he had never truly considered why he behaved as he did. It was sufficient for him that he could. Quite likely, he had been a bully from his childhood days, and would be until he was disposed of in a canvas shroud. For the first time, Wintrow took physical stock of the man. All his fate was writ large upon him. He had small round eyes, blue as a white pig’s. The skin underneath the roundness of his chin had already began to sag into a pouch. The kerchief knotted about his neck was anciently soiled, and the collar of his blue-and-white striped shirt showed an interior band of brown. It was not the dirt and sweat of honest toil, but the grime of slothfulness. The man did not care to keep himself tidy. It already showed in the way his possessions were strewn about the cabin. In a fortnight, it would be a reeking sty of unwashed garments and scattered food scraps. In that instant, Wintrow decided to give up the argument. He’d sleep in his clothes on the deck and be uncomfortable, but he would survive it. He judged there was no point to further bickering with this man; he’d never grasp just how distasteful Wintrow found the soiled blanket, nor how insulting. Wintrow rebuked himself for not looking more closely at the man before; it might have saved them both a lot of useless chafing.
‘Never mind,’ he said casually and abruptly. He turned away. He blinked his eyes a few times to let them adjust and then began to pick his way forward. He heard the mate come to the door of the cabin to stare after him.
‘Puppy will probably complain to his daddy, I don’t doubt,’ Torg called mockingly after him. ‘But I think he’ll find his father expects a man to be tougher than to snivel over a few spots on a blanket.’
Perhaps, Wintrow conceded, that was true. He wouldn’t bother complaining to his father to find out. Pointless to complain about one night’s discomfort. His silence seemed to bother Torg.
‘You think you’ll get me in trouble with your whining, don’t you? Well, you won’t! I know your father better than that.’
Wintrow didn’t even bother to reply to the man’s threatening taunt. At the moment of deciding not to argue further, he had given up all emotional investment in the situation. He had withdrawn his anma into himself as he had been taught to do, divesting it of his anger and offence as he did so. It was not that these emotions were unworthy or inappropriate; it was simply that they were wasted upon the man. He swept his mind clean of reactions to the filthy blanket. By the time he reached the foredeck, he had regained not just calmness, but wholeness.
He leaned against the rail and looked out across the water. There were other ships anchored out in the harbour. Lights shone yellow from these vessels. He examined them. His own ignorance surprised him. The ships were foreign objects to him, the son of many generations of Traders and sailors. Most of them were trading vessels, interspersed with a few fishing or slaughter-ships. The Traders were transom-sterned for the most part, with after-castles that sometimes reached almost to the mainmasts. Two or three masts reached toward the rising moon from each vessel.
Along the shore, the night market was in full blossom of sound and light. Now that the heat of the day was past, open cook-fires flared in the night as the drippings of meat sizzled into them. An errant breeze brought the scent of the spiced meat and even the baking bread in the outdoor ovens. Sound, too, ventured boldly over the water in isolated snippets, a high laugh, a burst of song, a shriek. The moving waters caught the lights of the market and the ships and made of them rippling streamers of reflection. ‘Yet there is a peace to all of it,’ Wintrow said aloud.
‘Because it is all as it should be,’ Vivacia rejoined. Her voice was a woman’s timbre. It had the same velvety darkness as the night, with the same tinge of smoke. Warm pleasure welled up in Wintrow at the sound of it, and pure gladness. It took him a moment to wonder at his reaction.
‘What are you?’ he asked her in quiet awe. ‘When I am away from you, I think I should fear you, or at least suspect you. Yet now I am aboard, and when I hear your voice, it is like… like I imagine being in love would be.’
‘Truly?’ Vivacia demanded, and did not hide the thrill of pleasure in her own voice. ‘Then your feelings are like to my own. I have been awakening for so long… for years, for all the life of your father and his father, ever since your great-grandmother gave herself into my keeping. Then today, when finally I could stir, could open my eyes to the world again, could taste and smell and hear you all with my own senses, then I knew trepidation. Who are you, I wonder, you creatures of flesh and blood and bone, born in your own bodies and doomed to perish when that flesh fails? And when I wonder those things, I fear, for you are so foreign to me, I cannot know what you will do to me. Yet when one of you is near, I feel you are woven of the same strand as I, that we are but extensions of a segmented life, and that together we complete one another. I feel a joy in your presence, because I feel my own life wax greater when we are close to one another.’
Wintrow leaned on the rail, as motionlessly silent as if he were listening to a blessed poet. She was not looking at him; she did not need to look at him to see him. Like him, she gazed out across the harbour to the festive lights of the night market. Even our eyes behold the same sight, he thought, and his smile widened. There had been a few occasions when words had so reached into him and settled their truth in him like roots in rich earth. Some of the very best teachers in the monastery could wake this awe in him, when they spoke in simple words a truth that had swum unvoiced inside him. When her words had faded into the warmth of the summer night, he replied.
‘So may a harp string, struck strongly, awaken its twin, or a pure high note of a voice set crystal to shimmering as you have wakened truth in me.’ He laughed aloud, surprising himself, for it felt as if a bird, long caged in his chest, had taken sudden flight. ‘What you say is so simple, only that we complement one another.