A Ship Worth Keeping

They hauled the Kestrel up Covenant's slip on the top of the evening flood, and Nera Pell stood at the slip head and watched every foot of it.

The ship had come in from Fallow Creek in the afternoon under her stick of a jury mast, with Isobel at the helm and the old Darn shipwrights lining the moles to see her. Now she lay in the cradle at the foot of the big slip, with the hauling tackles hooked on and sixty yard hands at the capstans. The slip had held Covenant's hull for half a year. It would hold the Kestrel for five days. Nera had greased the ways herself.

"Heave," she called. "Together. Heave."

The capstan bars went round. The cradle came up out of the water with the ship in it, slow and steady, the black water pouring off her keel. At last she sat high on the ways under the lamps, with her copper patch at the stern showing green. Nera walked round her once with a lantern. The old knee had held. The stern seam she had patched in Southwick had held. Everything else was what the Skerrow had left: the stump of the mainmast, the rail stove in along the starboard side, a crossbow carriage smashed to kindling, and scorch marks and bolt holes everywhere.

"She looks worse than I do," said Orris from his chair at the slip head. He had been carried there on a hand barrow, with his splinted leg up on a keg, and he had refused to be carried anywhere else until the ship was up.

"She'll look better by the first of the month," Nera said. "You won't."

"Cruel girl," Orris said. "Hand me my axe."

She handed it to him.

Covenant had not gone far. Its tugs had walked it north-west all morning in the dark, and early in the afternoon the flood had turned against them. No string of towboats could drag an engine ship against a spring flood. They had anchored it four miles west of Darn, and there it stayed. Darn lay inside its five miles by a mile, and the edge of its dark lay a mile beyond the eastern mole. And every dead man in Darn's water was still its servant.

So the Kestrel lay on the slip in the black, with lanterns all round her and fire buckets in a line along the slip head, filled from the harbor. Agathe Moll's women stood by the buckets. Twenty of Dunning's marines and forty yard hands lay down to sleep in their clothes in the mould loft, with their weapons beside them. Nera sat up instead on a baulk of timber by the foot of the slip, with her adze across her knees, and listened to the water.

At midnight Dunning came round the buckets and sat down on the baulk beside her.

"If one of ours goes in the harbor tonight," he said, "does he get up again?"

"Not from four miles," Nera said. "But the ones already up are still the engine's." She nodded at the black water beyond the slip foot. "Those out there are up already."

"So we keep ours out of the water," said Dunning, "and break theirs."

They came in the small hours, on the last of the falling tide, and they came without a light.

Nera heard the oars before she saw anything: muffled, many, out in the harbor beyond the moles. Then the lamps along the slip head showed her the first boat, a long black pinnace with its oars going slow, and a second behind it, and more behind that. Nobody in them shouted. The slip lay at the inner end of the harbor, and the stream ran out of the inner harbor straight past its foot. Covenant lay four miles west at its anchor, and these were its escorts' boats, come to take the ship back.

"Rouse them!" Nera shouted. "Dunning! The loft!"

The boats came in under the slip foot. Men went over their sides into the shallows with axes, living men, and ran for the hauling falls where the great tackles came down from the capstans to the cradle. Nera saw what they meant to do before the first axe fell. Cut the falls and knock the shores, and the cradle would run back down the greased ways into the harbor with the ship in it, and the dead would be waiting in the water.

And at the foot of the slip, where the ways ran down into the black harbor, the dead began to climb out of the water.

Nera saw the first of them come up the ways. It came on hands and knees, up out of the water onto the greased timber, slipping and coming on, its white face lifted toward the lamps. Behind it came another, and another, a dozen or more, crawling up the slip out of the black water with the harbor pouring off them. They were coming for the cradle. For the shores that held the ship upright on the ways.

"Shores!" Nera shouted. "They're going for the shores! Knock one of those out and she'll fall on her side!"

She went down the slip at them with the adze.

The greased ways were treacherous underfoot. She went down them sideways, with her feet on the cross-cleats, and met the first dead man as he reached the foot of the cradle. He was reaching for the nearest shore, a great raking prop of oak that held the Kestrel's side. She hit him at the knee. The joint broke, and he slid sideways off the ways and down toward the water. The next caught her ankle. She struck down at the elbow and felt it break, and kicked herself free, and nearly fell.

Then Dunning was beside her with his staff, and Joss, and the marines from the loft, and the yard hands with mauls and timber dogs. They fought down the slip in a line, on the greased ways, slipping and catching each other. The dead came up the ways at them in the lamplight, silent, endlessly patient, and the line broke their legs and their arms and their necks and rolled them back down into the harbor. One got hold of a shore and pulled at it, and the whole great oak prop shifted in its footing with a groan. Nera felt the cradle move under her feet. Above her the Kestrel's hull leaned an inch toward the water.

Two yard hands threw themselves on the dead man. Dunning's pike-butt stilled it. Bram Coulter, the cooper's man from the pumping house night, drove a fresh wedge in under the shore with three blows of a maul, and the hull steadied.

From the slip head, Orris roared.

A dead man had come up over the slip head itself, out of the dark at the end of the bucket line, and Agathe Moll's women were scattering. Orris could not stand, so he fought sitting. He swung his boarding axe from the chair, one-handed, low and hard, and took the dead man's knee from under it, and it fell across his splinted leg. He hit it again on the back of the neck.

"Salt and blazes," Orris said. "Get it off me. Somebody get it off my leg."

The falls were the worst of it.

The cradle was held on the ways by two great hauling tackles, one each side, made fast to the capstans at the slip head. While the dead came up the ways for the shores, the living men from the boats had gone for the tackles. By the time the marines reached the starboard one, its fall was cut half through and three of the axemen were lying in the shallows below it. Then the fall parted. Nera heard it go, a crack like a spar. The whole cradle lurched a foot down the ways with the ship in it, and hung there on the port tackle alone, groaning, with the greased timber under it slick as ice.

"Joss!" she shouted. "The port fall! If that goes she's in the harbor!"

Joss was already moving. He had a coil of the slip's heavy line over his shoulder, and he ran up the ways with it, not down, past her, to the iron warping bollards at the slip head. He took two turns of the line round the nearest bollard and ran the end back down the ways, shouting at the yard hands by the capstan for a block, the big one, the one from the sheers. They brought it at a run. He hooked it to the cradle where the parted tackle had been, rove the line through it, and ran the end back up to the capstan.

Nera saw what he was making before it was made. Bollard, block, capstan: a purchase, with the bollard taking the weight that the parted tackle had let go. Twenty yard hands threw themselves on the capstan bars. The line came taut and sang. The cradle stopped sliding, and the port tackle stopped groaning, and the Kestrel stood on the ways with two lines holding her where there had been one.

The living men from the boats saw it hold, and went back down the ways to their pinnaces faster than they had come, and the marines let them go. Dunning's line had broken the last of the dead at the shores, and Bram Coulter was driving wedges under every prop in turn. Out beyond the moles the oars went away into the dark.

Nera sat down on the ways with her hands raw and looked at Joss. He was shaking.

"Where did you learn that?"

"Ropewalk. Hauling out the long strands, when the walk's too short. You take it round a post and back." He swallowed. "I didn't know if the bollard would hold."

"It held," Nera said.

Rusk was standing at the slip head with a lantern when they came up. He looked at the line round the bollard, and the block on the cradle hook, and then at Joss.

"I saw it from the loft," he said. "Who rigged that?"

"Joss," Nera said.

Rusk studied the boy.

"Come and see me in the morning," he said. "We'll talk about the tow deck."

The sun came up on Darn at twenty-five past six on the twenty-eighth of October.

Vaust had held Covenant at anchor to cover his raid. When the boats were back with it, at three in the morning, the tugs took it on west, and by five it was more than five miles from Darn. Nera knew it only afterward, from the clock. At the time she knew nothing about it at all. Darn was still black. The lamps burned on the slip. The dead lay where they had fallen on the ways and in the shallows below, and they did not move again. She saw them lying there when she went down to the slip foot with a lantern at four o'clock, and thought nothing of it, because broken dead men did not move. The unbroken ones out in the harbor had gone slack at the same hour, out of Covenant's reach, and sunk.

At six she was asleep on a pile of sailcloth in the mould loft. Joss woke her by shaking her shoulder.

"Nera," he said. "Nera. Come and look."

She came out of the mould loft onto the slip head, with her eyes full of sleep. Everyone in the yard seemed to be there. The yard hands, the marines, Agathe Moll's women, the wardwrights' families, the surrendered garrison under guard on the wharf below. Old Gideon Dray stood at the slip head in his nightshirt and a coat, with his white hair blowing. They were all looking east.

The sky in the east was gray.

It was the gray of dawn, the faint, cold, true gray that had come over Darn only twice in a month. It lay along the line of the sea beyond the moles, low down, and it grew while she watched. The black above it went to deep blue. The lamps on the slip began to look small. She could see the moles. She could see the harbor water, dull and wrinkled, and the masts of the boats in it. She could see the dead lying on the ways with their faces to the sky.

Then the sun came up out of the sea.

It came up red and huge and blinding, straight into their faces, and lay a road of fire across the water right to the foot of the slip. The light ran up the slip and over the Kestrel's scorched sides and up her stick of a mast, and across the faces of every man and woman in the yard. It was warm. Nera felt it on her eyelids.

Somewhere behind her a child said, "Oh," as if it hurt.

Nera had meant to have the jury mast out by seven and the mainmast stepping crew at the timber store by eight. She was sitting on a baulk of timber at the slip head beside Gideon Dray, with no notion of the time. Dray had his eyes shut and his face turned up into the sun. His cheeks were wet. Down on the wharf, a garrison prisoner was weeping openly, and so was the marine guarding him.

Annet Sorn came and stood at the slip head with her daughter. Lise had both hands up to her face, looking at the sun through her fingers. Sorn never once looked at the sun. She was looking out to the west, where there was nothing now but clear sky over the sea.

"It'll be at the Kittle by noon," she said. "Through it on the evening tide, and west of the Bar with the others."

"I know," Nera said.

"Good." Sorn's hand was on her daughter's hair. "Count them. Seven. All of them where we'll have to go and find them."

No one worked for an hour. Then Nera stood up and dusted off her hands and went to get the jury mast out of the Kestrel.

The refit took five days, and Nera did almost none of it with her own hands, after the first morning.

On the first morning she was halfway up the Kestrel's mainmast stump with a maul, knocking out the wedges round the broken spar, because nobody else would get them out clean. She had been up there an hour when the crack came from the starboard side, a long splitting sound she knew in her bones, and Coulter's voice swearing under it.

She came down the stump faster than she had gone up. Coulter's crew had the steaming box going at the stove-in rail, and the first new strake lay on the deck beside it in two pieces. They had steamed it the hour she had told them, and bent it round the quarter, and it had split along the grain at the turn.

"It wanted longer in the box," Coulter said. "Twice what you said. I thought so. I sent the lad up to ask you, and you told him to wait."

She had. She remembered the boy's face at the foot of the stump. That strake had been the best of the seasoned elm in the store, eighteen feet of it, and it would take the rest of the day to find and cut another. Gil Hatcher was standing at the forward hatch with his two new pumps and no orders. The rigging crew sat on the wharf with the new rope, waiting for the mast that could not go in until the stump was out. Four crews, and one of them had wasted the best plank in Darn because the master was up a mast knocking out wedges.

"Pell." Gideon Dray had come along the deck with his stick. He looked at the split plank, and at her. "How many crews have you got standing about down here waiting for you?"

"Four," Nera said.

"Then let Coulter's lad knock out the wedges. He'll do it worse than you, and you'll have four crews working instead of none. That's what a master is. I told you that when you were sixteen." He went off along the deck. "You never listened then either."

After that she walked the ship all day, from crew to crew, with a slate and a rule, and let other people's hands do the work. She hated every hour of it, and the ship came together.

The mainmast came out of the timber store on the second day. It was the Halsey pine she had told Rusk about under the wharf, eighty feet long and straight as a rule. They raised it with the sheers and lowered it through the deck into its step, and it went home with a soft, heavy thud that she felt through her boot soles. Nera stood at the foot of it with her hand on the timber. Ivo Kerrow had died at the door of the store to keep it from burning. She stood there long enough that Dunning came and stood beside her.

The rigging went up after it: new shrouds and stays all through, set up hard and tarred down. Joss ran the rigging crew. The men under him were twice his age, and they did what he told them because he knew more about rope than any of them.

Gil Hatcher built her two new pumps from the pumping house's spares. Coulter's crew put her rail back and replaced her rotten upper timbers on the starboard quarter. Nera made them cut every rotten piece out to sound wood, even where it meant taking out double what they had hoped. And in the waist, on each side of the mainmast, Dray's best smith fitted two new towing bitts. They were great posts of oak bound with iron and bolted right through to the keelson. Between them hung the towing bridle, a double span of heavy cable with an iron ring where the spans met. Nera had drawn the bitts herself from the Darn drawings of Covenant's tugs.

"What's she going to tow?" Joss asked her, when the first bitt went in.

"Whatever needs towing," Nera said. "Ask the Captain."

Rusk did ask Joss to come and see him, on the morning of the twenty-eighth, and Nera heard some of it, because she was in the hold under them measuring for the bitts.

"A tackle under load," Rusk said overhead, "is a weapon. Any purchase that's holding weight. If it parts, or somebody cuts it, the load goes somewhere, and the block goes somewhere, and the line goes somewhere, fast. Men die on tow decks because they don't know where."

"Yes, Captain," Joss said.

"You knew last night," Rusk said. "You put the load on the bollard. You knew where the weight would go before you put it there. That's rare. When she's done, the tow deck is yours. The bitts, the bridle, the tackles, the hawsers. You'll have six men. You'll answer to me."

There was a pause. Then Joss, in a strangled voice: "Yes, Captain."

"And Joss," Rusk said. "Any tackle under load, before you touch it, know where the block goes if it parts. And know what you'd cut to save a man, and when."

"Yes, Captain," Joss said again.

"Go on, then," Rusk said.

Nera heard Joss's feet go away along the deck, fast. She stood in the dark of the hold with her measuring rod, grinning.

Rusk moved timber. Nera saw him at it every day: hauling on the rollers with the yard hands, in his shirt, with the sweat running into his gray beard. He gave the yard no orders, since it was Darn's yard and not his.

On the third day, at the timber store door, Agathe Moll told him no.

She had a sailmaker's palm strapped to her right hand, and she had spoken for the yard since the first week of the occupation. She had buried the two men the garrison hanged for the cooperage guards, the morning after the first raid, and she had not mentioned it once.

"You want sixty more hands for the masting," she said. "I can give you them. I won't. Not till the families have somewhere safe to sleep. I've forty families in the cooperage and the sail loft, with children, sleeping on boards. They're the ones the garrison held as surety. They're frightened, Captain. They've been frightened for a month. If Vaust comes back up that harbor on another night, I want them behind stone walls with a door that locks, not in a loft over a sail store. Give them that, and you'll have your sixty."

Rusk stood with his hands on a roller.

"The garrison barracks," he said. "At the head of the yard. Stone, with iron doors. It's empty, now the garrison's in the granary under guard."

"It's yours," Moll said. "You took it."

"It's Darn's. It always was." He wiped his hands on his shirt. "Move them in tonight. I'll put four marines on the door."

Agathe Moll studied him. "You're not what I was told about you," she said.

"No," said Rusk. "I'm worse at taking advice. But I'm learning."

Marr held her court on the fourth day, on the wharf below the slip, at a table made of a hatch cover on two trestles. A Kestrel hand named Tarker had beaten a surrendered garrison caulker in the granary, the night before, for a cut the caulker had had nothing to do with. The man's face was swollen shut. Three men had seen it.

Marr heard them all, Tarker last. Every one of the surrendered garrison was on the wharf to watch, under guard. So were Venn's people from Resolute, with their own guards round them, standing in a body at the end of the wharf with their arms folded. Venn herself sat on a bollard among them with her ribs strapped and her mouth set.

Marr found Tarker guilty. She gave sentence in the same level voice she had used for everything else. He was to be put ashore in irons at Carrick, on the next boat, to be sent south for court-martial. His share of the Darn prize was forfeit to the man he had beaten.

Tarker went off the wharf in irons between two marines. Nera watched Venn's people watch him go. None of them said anything. But that evening the westerners came to the rations table before their guards could call them. They sat down to eat in the same mess as the Kestrel's hands, at the far end of the table.

In the drawing office, at night, Sorn and Ebb and Nera made the ward-breakers.

Sorn and Ebb disliked each other from the first evening. Ebb came in under guard and stood by the door, and Sorn looked at him across the drawing table and said, "The Admiral's clockwork," and went back to her work. But they knew the frames better than anyone living. In two evenings, with the Covenant drawings spread between them, they worked out where a frame's lattice could be broken by something a man could carry.

The ward-breakers were iron wedges a foot long, forged in the yard smithy, and Sorn cut the counter-wards into their faces herself with an etching needle and a pot of acid. The marks were fine and dense and made Nera's eyes ache to follow them.

"A frame is a net," Sorn said, without looking up from the wedge. "Every strand of the lattice holds every other strand. Strike a strand and the rest take the strain. Strike it with this."

"And the counter-ward opens the joint," Ebb said from the door, "and the strain goes the wrong way through the whole lattice at once."

Sorn looked at him. "Yes," she said, after a moment. "That's right."

They tested the first one on the third night, in the yard, on a spare section of Covenant's frame that the yard had cast and then rejected for a flaw in the bronze. It was a panel of lattice the size of a door, blackwood and warded bronze, lying on trestles. Even dead, without its fitting or its vanes, its wards had a faint, cold sheen in the lamplight.

Nera set the wedge where the lattice looked weakest to her, a thin bar of bronze between two blackwood rods, and swung the maul.

The wedge went in a finger's breadth and stopped. Nothing happened. The bar bent a little round it, and the sheen on the bronze did not so much as flicker, and the panel lay on its trestles and went on being a panel.

"A strand," Sorn said. "I said a joint. Where the wards cross." She took the chalk out of Nera's apron pocket and marked a place a hand's breadth to the left, where three rods met in a knot of bronze. "There. If you'd done that on Crown, Pell, you'd be dead, and so would whoever held the lantern."

Nera worked the wedge out, and set it on the chalk mark, and swung again.

The lattice cracked. It was a sharp, high, ringing crack, and it went right across the panel and out the other side, joint after joint, so fast that she heard it go by like a whip. The sheen went out of the bronze. The panel sagged on its trestles in two halves, and a smell of hot metal came off it.

Dunning, at the door, let out a breath. "That," he said, "is a useful thing."

"On a joint," Sorn said. "I'll mark them on the drawings. Every man who carries one of these will learn where they are, on paper, in the dark, until he can find them blind, because the first time he strikes a strand will be the last."

They made twenty-four. Nera made the fouling hawsers with Joss and the ropewalk crew: thick old cables weighted every ten feet with chain and fitted with grapnel heads, to be dropped across an engine's tow or into its vane cages from small boats. They tested one in the Darn Race, now quiet and sunlit, on a spare vane cage slung under a lighter. The hawser went into the cage and the vanes jammed solid in it in less time than it took to tell.

And every one of them studied the maintenance port.

Nera drew it full size in chalk on the floor of the mould loft, from the Covenant drawings. It was a timber hatch five feet by four and a foot thick, with eight bolts whose heads were countersunk under wooden plugs. Then she built a copy of it in a frame of yard timber, bolted exactly as the drawing showed, and set it up on the wharf. Marr brought her marines to it every afternoon. They drilled the plugs out, drove the bolts in with drifts and mauls, and knocked the hatch through, over and over, against Dunning's watch. On the first day it took them eleven minutes. On the fourth, it took three.

"Again," Marr said. "On a ship's side, with men shooting down at you, three minutes will feel like an hour."

They launched her on the first of November at noon, in sunlight.

The Kestrel went down the ways stern first, gathering speed, and took the water with a great soft rush and a wave that slapped against the moles. She came up riding high and new, with her new mast raking above her and her new rigging taut and black. The yard cheered. Orris, in his chair at the slip head, beat his crutch on the stones and swore at everyone for not cheering loud enough.

Afterward they ate on the wharf at long tables made of planks, in the sun. Orris had cooked for two days. There was fish stew, with too much pepper in it, and mutton pies, and new bread from the granary, and beer from the garrison's cellar. Pudding the cat sat on Joss's knee and was fed by everyone. Venn's officers sat at one end of the Kestrel's table. Halfway through the meal, Sabin and Isobel were arguing about the set of the outgoing tide in the Kittle as if they had known each other for years.

People wrote letters. Abner Daw's boat would carry them to Carrick, and from there they would go south. Joss wrote to his mother in Greyhaven, though nothing could reach Greyhaven while Hume held it. Nera wrote nothing. She sat with the sun on her back and her eyes half shut and listened to Orris quiz Isobel on the tow across the table.

"You've a heavy tow on the bridle," Orris was saying. "Current setting across your quarter at three knots. What does the tow do?"

"Sets down on the current," said Isobel. "Swings across your stern."

"And then?"

"Then it drags your stern round with it," Isobel said, "unless you check her with the helm early. Before you feel it."

"How early?" Orris asked.

"Before you think you need to," Isobel said.

Orris grunted. "You'll do," he said. "I don't like it. But you'll do."

They made the plan that night, round the Kestrel's cabin table, with the Darn papers spread on it. Venn was there, with her ribs strapped, sitting very upright in a chair by the door, because Rusk had asked her to come.

The next spring tide was the tenth of November. Nine days.

"Then we stop it in the strait," Rusk said. "On that tide. All three of them."

"With what?" Orris said. "One brigantine and a captured escort and a lot of pilot boats."

"With Southwick," Marr said. "I'll put the papers in front of the council and ask for ships for one tide, against one named objective, with their captains free to go before we sail. I'll go tonight."

"I'll take the Kestrel west to Orra with stores," Rusk said, "and hold the water round the island, since Marietta can't. Resolute with me, if her captain is willing."

Venn studied him from her chair. "Willing," she said. "And she would like her weapons back first."

"You'll have them in the morning," said Marr.

"And Nera finishes the ward-breakers and goes with Sorn to Greyhaven," Rusk said. "Those two fittings in the Basin gate races come out before the springs, whatever happens in the strait. Then Holm Sound, by the eighth."

Nera looked round at them all in the lamplight, and at Venn by the door with her guard outside it, and nobody had decided anything alone.

The Kestrel went out of Darn at eight the next morning, in sunlight, on the first of the outgoing tide.

Nera stood on the end of the south mole and watched her go. She went out through the harbor mouth under topsails, with the breeze fresh from the north-west and the sun on her new canvas. Her new mainmast raked a little aft, as Rusk liked it. Joss was on the tow deck in the waist with his six men, by the new bitts, looking enormously serious. Isobel had the deck. Orris sat by the wheel in a chair lashed to the rail, with his leg up, pointing at things.

Resolute followed her out, long and black, with her weapons back aboard and her ensign the right way up.

Nera watched them out past the mole-head, and turned, and walked back along the mole toward the drawing office, where Sorn was waiting with twenty-four iron wedges and the road to Greyhaven.