Aboard Crown

At ten o'clock the Kestrel came alongside Crown in the Throat, with Orra's cliff three hundred yards to the north and the Brack rocks as near to the south. Under both hulls the flood ran east toward the open Reach.

Nera Pell stood at the Kestrel's main hatch with the ward-breakers rolled in canvas at her feet and watched the engine ship's side come down on them out of the dark. It was like sailing up to a building. Crown's hull rose sheer above the Kestrel's rail, a wall of tarred timber studded with iron, her lamps burning in a line along her upper deck thirty feet over Nera's head. She was anchored now, and her tugs were gone, cut away or fouled by the island boats in the last hour, and her people had let go two great anchors from her stern to hold her in the stream. She lay with her prow still pointing east down the channel toward the Reach, as if she meant to go on. The flood poured past her, and Nera could hear it working in the vane cages under the engine's keel, a heavy churning thunder that came up through the water and the Kestrel's planking into the soles of her feet.

That sound was Crown feeding. While the stream turned her vanes, her frame had all the power it wanted.

Northward's dark had failed in the west an hour since. Everyone on deck had seen it, a thin gray band low on the sea beyond the western mouth. Two fields covered the strait now: Mercy's at the eastern mouth, where Marr was fighting, and Crown's, right here, five miles every way from the ship under Nera's eyes.

"Grapnels!" Rusk shouted. "Joss, now!"

Joss Ambry's people swung the grapnels up from the Kestrel's tow deck. They went over Crown's rail in a line, and the lines came taut, and the two hulls ground together with a long groan of timber that Nera felt in her teeth. Somewhere in the Kestrel's side a plank sprang. She marked the place in her head for later.

Crossbows were going off along Crown's rail. A man by the foremast fell. Rusk's crossbow crews answered upward from the Kestrel's deck, and Crown's rail flickered and splintered.

"Boarders!" Rusk was at the foot of the main shrouds with his hanger out. "Dunning, the ladders. Marines first. Nera, your people wait for my word."

"I heard you the first three times," Nera said.

He glanced back at her and almost smiled. Then he went up the shrouds, and the marines went with him, and the Kestrel's boarders after them, swarming up the ropes and the boarding ladders onto the engine's high side.

Nera crouched by the hatch and waited. Sorn crouched beside her, holding the two heavy wedges for the drum in their roll across her knees as a woman might hold a child. Behind them knelt the Darn men, six of them, with mauls and bars and the long-handled tongs. Hal Brockett was the oldest, a shipwright of sixty who had taught Nera to scarf a keel. Nat Lanyon was the youngest, nineteen, with a scar on his chin from the timber pond. They had all worked at Darn under the Pale Fleet's guards, building the ships they were going to break.

Above them the noise of the fight on Crown's deck rose and rose.

"I hate the waiting," said Brockett.

"So does everybody," said Nera. "Check your maul."

"I've checked it. I've checked his, too." Brockett jerked his head at Lanyon. "He put one in the timber pond when he was fourteen and I had to go in after it."

"You went in after the maul," Lanyon said, "and left me on the bank."

"The maul was worth something," Brockett said.

Lanyon grinned round his scarred chin and held his maul up so Nera could see the helve was sound. He had carried her chalk on the Darn slips when he was nine and she was an apprentice, and he had never called her Mistress until this year. She had not decided yet whether she liked it.

The word came down from Crown's rail in Rusk's voice: "Shipwrights!"

Crown's upper deck ran a hundred and eighty feet from her tow deck forward to her high stern. When Nera came over the rail, the fight had moved aft along it toward the stern castle.

She took it in with one look. The waist was theirs, and Dunning's marines had made a line across the deck abaft the mainmast stump, pikes leveled, and behind them Crown's people were falling back in a crowd toward the castle under the poop. Bodies lay on the planking, and the deck was wet and slippery in the lamplight. Forward, on the raised tow deck at Crown's prow, the great towing bitts stood empty with the ends of cut hawsers trailing from them. Amidships, a broad hatchway in the deck went down into the lit dark below.

Rusk was standing at its coaming with blood on his sleeve.

"The frame compartment is aft of this, below," he said. "They're holding it. Marines barricaded in, like Mercy's will be. Dunning and I will hold the passage outside it and keep them in there. Forward hold is that way. Go."

"The drum first," Nera said.

"As we said." He glanced round at her. "Nera. Don't be all day."

"I'll be as long as it takes," said Nera, and went down the ladder.

The passage at the bottom ran fore and aft through the engine's lower deck, lit by lanterns. It was wide and low and stank of bilge and pitch. Aft, she could see a heavy iron-strapped door in a bulkhead, shut, and two dead men in gray coats lying across its threshold. Forward, the passage ran into the dark. They went forward, Nera first with her boarding axe, Sorn behind her, the Darn men after.

The forward hold door was open. Beyond it a short ladder went down into a long, high chamber, and in the middle of the chamber, lit by a ring of lamps hung from the beams, stood the sluice drum.

Nera had heard Sorn describe it a dozen times. She had drawn it herself from Sorn's description at Darn. The thing itself was bigger than any of it. It was a drum of bronze rings stacked one on another, higher than two men and as broad as a cart is long. It turned on a great iron spindle that ran from the floor of the hold to the deckhead. Each ring was cut all round with ward marks, deep and fine, and in the lamplight the marks seemed to move. Gears and crank-trains surrounded it, and cables ran from its top up through the deckhead, toward the prow.

"That's the beast," Sorn said quietly. "That's what opens the gates."

There were men in the hold. Five of them stood round the foot of the drum. Three were sailors, with cutlasses. One was an officer with a hand crossbow. The fifth was a stooped man in a leather apron who stood with his hands open at his sides, and when he saw Sorn on the ladder he made a small, terrible sound.

"Annet," he said.

"Matthis." Sorn's voice was like a closing door. "Step away from it."

The officer raised his crossbow and shot at her. Nera saw it coming and shoved Sorn sideways off the ladder, and the bolt went past both of them and struck the steps. Then Nera was down in the hold with her axe, and the Darn men came down behind her yelling.

The officer dropped his crossbow, drew a sword and came at Nera. She had learned the boarding axe from Orris on the Kestrel's deck through four weeks of afternoons. Orris had said she fought like a woman splitting firewood, and that it would serve. She swung, and the officer caught it on his blade, and the force of it drove him back against the drum. She hooked the axe-head behind his blade and wrenched, and the sword went flying. He ran at her bare-handed, and Brockett hit him with a maul across the shoulder, and he went down.

The three sailors fought hard. Lanyon traded cuts with one of them by the gear train and lost the skin off his knuckles. The other two came at the Darn men together and were beaten down with bars and mauls. One of them yielded, and one ran up the ladder into Dunning's men and was taken. The stooped man in the apron had not moved at all.

"Matthis Grell," said Sorn. She came across the hold to him. "Twenty years at Lisk, cutting harbor wards. What are you doing in the bottom of this ship?"

"What you did," he said. "What they told me."

"I stopped," Sorn said.

"They kept yours under your eye." He was trembling. "They keep mine at Lisk."

"Where's your admiral, Master Grell?" Nera said. "He's not on deck."

"Aft. Below the frame room, on the starboard side." Grell did not look at her. "There's a room there with an iron door. He goes down to it when he wants to be told things. He went down when your boats came in, and said he'd not leave her."

Sorn looked at him for a breath. Then she turned her back on him and walked to the drum.

"Bring the wedges," she said. "Nera, here. Look. The key seam."

She showed them. It ran down the drum from top to bottom where the rings met their spindle, a line of joints where each ring's wards locked into the next. Sorn ran her finger down it without touching. The wards had to stay locked true for the drum to work. The heavy wedges were cut to go into that seam, two-thirds of the way up and one-third, and spread it.

"And the index plates," Sorn said. "Here, here, here. Pull them all. I'll break them myself."

Nera set the first heavy wedge into the seam at the height of her chest. When Brockett swung his maul, the wedge went in a hand's breadth and the drum gave a long shuddering note like a struck bell. At the next blow the ring above the wedge lifted on its spindle, and its wards came out of true with the ring below, and a hiss went through the hold.

"Again," Nera said.

He hit it four more times. On the fourth the bronze split. A crack ran round the ring with a noise like ice going on a pond, and the ring sagged on the spindle. Nera set the second wedge lower down. Lanyon held it with the tongs while Brockett struck. Meanwhile Sorn worked round the drum with a bar, prying out the index plates. They were small bronze tablets set into the drum's base, cut with the patterns of the gates. She had copied every one of them at Darn, under guard, in her hand. As each came out she laid it on the iron deck plate at the foot of the spindle and brought the maul down on it with both hands, and the plate cracked and bent.

The second wedge split the lower ring. The drum leaned on its spindle with a groan and was silent. The marks on its rings had gone dull.

"That's done," said Sorn. She stood breathing, with the maul hanging from her hand. "That can't be mended in less than a year in a yard. And there's no yard left that will mend it."

"Good," Nera said.

Sorn looked at the wrecked drum. "If the dark had gone first," she said, "everyone would have shouted and run up on deck to see the sun. And this would have sat here in the hold, whole, waiting for somebody to tow her off. Now it won't."

Someone was shouting down the forward ladder. A marine had his head through the hatch.

"Mistress Pell! The Captain says, Mercy's gone! Her light's out! You can see daylight in the east!"

So that was Marr, and two of the three were gone. Crown alone held the dark over the strait now: one ship, one frame, five miles. Nera felt something lift in her chest, and put it away.

Then, under her feet, Crown's hull gave a long shudder from aft to forward, and the churning thunder of the vane cages changed its note.

Crown's vane cages hung below her keel on either side, in the black water under the hold where Nera stood, and something had just gone into the port one.

Nera knew the sound before she had worked out what it was. It was the sound of a mill wheel taking a log. The port cage stammered, groaned, and gave a crack that came up through the ship's frame like a blow. Then it fell silent. The starboard cage went on, but its note had changed too: slower, grinding, labored.

"Hawsers," said Brockett. "They've got hawsers into her cages. Daw's boats."

"Port cage is gone." Nera put her palm flat on a frame timber and felt it. "Starboard's fouled, but she's still turning. Hear her? She's still feeding."

"So the clock's not running," said Lanyon.

"Not while that cage turns," Nera said.

She was still listening when she heard the other sound, far aft and below. It was a deep, rushing roar, like water going over a weir.

Nera had been in a hundred ships' holds when a seacock was opened. She knew that sound as she knew her own voice.

"Split and rot," she said. "They're scuttling her."

Matthis Grell spoke from where he sat on the deck by the gear train. His hands were over his face.

"He said if she was boarded, she'd go down here. In the Throat. He said the dark would hold on the bottom as well as on the top. That she'd lie here and the channel would be shut forever."

Nera stared at him. He might even be right about the dark, for a starboard cage lying in the Throat's stream would turn as well on the bottom as it turned now. But the dark was the least of it. Crown's fitting would lie on the bottom of the Throat, whole, in the stream. Every drowned thing in the strait could come home to it. And Crown, sitting on the bottom of the Throat with her decks awash, would block the deep channel more surely than the hulks had ever done.

"How many cocks?" she said.

"Three," Grell said. "Aft. Below the frame room."

Nera picked up her axe.

"Sorn, stay with the drum and Master Grell. Brockett, Lanyon, you two, with me. Bring the big wrench and a bar."

The after hold lay below the frame compartment, at the bottom of the ship, and the only way to it from the forward hold ran aft along the lower passage past Rusk.

He was standing with Dunning and a dozen marines at the iron-strapped bulkhead door. They had built a barricade across the passage from crates and a broken hatch cover. Beyond the door, inside the frame compartment, Crown's marines were holed up. A crossbow bolt stuck out of the door at the height of a man's head.

"They're opening the cocks," Nera said. "Under the frame room. Three of them. She's going down here."

Rusk did not ask her whether she was sure.

"Can you shut them?"

"If I can get to them," Nera said. "There's a ladder aft of the bulkhead, Grell says, down past the frame room on the starboard side. I need two marines."

"Dunning. Two men. Go with her." Rusk turned back to the door. "Nera. If you can't shut them, come back and tell me. Don't drown down there."

"I had no plans to," she said.

The ladder went down through a trunk in the deck abaft the bulkhead. At the foot of its first flight it passed a door that was on no drawing Nera had seen. It was iron, set low in the ship's starboard side, and water stood an inch deep on its sill. Somebody was behind it. She heard a man's voice through the iron, low and hoarse and furious, a man arguing with something he could not afford to lose. "Not yet," he said. "You'll have them. Not yet." Nothing answered him that she could hear. But the sea was in her ears as it is when you dive too deep, a pressure and a hum, and the two marines behind her stopped on the rungs.

"Mistress?" one of the marines said.

"Not now," Nera said, and went on down.

At the ladder's foot was black water, lit by the lantern Brockett carried, and a din of rushing water that filled the space. The after hold was a long dark cavern of timber floored with the ship's ceiling planks, and the water was already over the planks and swirling to Nera's knees as she came off the ladder. Down at the far end, by the keel, she saw lamps, and men, and three white fountains of seawater spouting up out of the floor of the hold with a noise like a gale.

There were six of them. They had a sledgehammer and a long iron wrench, and they had been told what to do. Two of them were standing over the middle cock, swinging the sledge at the spindle of the valve to break it off so that it could never be shut. When they saw the lantern, the others came splashing toward her with knives and hatchets.

The water was up to her thighs now and running fast, carrying her toward them. She could barely swing. The first of them came at her with an axe, and she caught his haft on hers and they wrestled there, chest to chest, in the cold roaring water. He was strong, and he bore her backward. Her foot slipped on the planking, and she went down under the water with his weight on top of her.

It was black and loud and cold beyond anything, and her mouth filled with salt. The man's hands were on her throat. She thought, very clearly, that if she drowned here she would get up again in a few minutes and walk for Vaust, and she would be damned before she did. She got her knee into his belly, and her thumb into his eye, and he let go. She came up gasping into the lantern-light. One of the marines put a pike into the man as he rose, and he fell back into the water and did not get up.

"Lanyon!" Brockett was shouting. "Lanyon!"

The boy was under. A scuttler had him by the hair and was holding his face down in the flood. Brockett hit the man across the back with his maul, and the man let go and fell. Nera plunged forward and got Lanyon by the collar and hauled him up out of the water, choking and spewing.

"Breathe," she said. "Breathe, damn you. You're not dying here, of all places. You'll have to see Brockett's face every morning for the rest of your days."

Lanyon coughed up seawater and breathed. The marines had beaten the scuttlers back to the keel. Two were down. The others threw down their tools and put their hands on their heads.

"The cocks!" Nera shouted. "Brockett, the forward one. I'll take this."

The nearest cock was a big bronze valve set into the hull planking at the keel, with a square-headed spindle standing up from it under the water. The scuttlers had opened it with the wrench, and the sea was coming up through it in a white column as thick as Nera's thigh. She got the wrench onto the spindle by feel. She put her weight on it. The spindle turned a quarter, and the column of water bent and thinned. She heaved again, and got another quarter. The water was at her waist. Brockett was at the forward cock beside her with the bar through its handle, grunting. She turned again, and again, and the fountain under her dropped to a gush and a bubble and died.

"Shut!" she gasped.

"Shut here!" said Brockett.

The middle cock was the one the scuttlers had been working on with the sledge. Nera waded to it and felt for the spindle under the water. She found the square head, and below it a raw, broken stump of bronze. The spindle had sheared off a few inches above the valve. The valve itself was wide open, and the sea was pouring up through it with a roar.

She tried the wrench on the stump, and it slipped. She tried the bar, and that slipped too. Brockett stuffed a hammock into the mouth of the valve, and the sea spat it out across the hold. They tried a plank wedged down with a crate, and the water lifted the crate off it.

Nera stood in the water to her waist, panting, and looked at the hole in the bottom of the ship.

"Split and rot," she said.

"Can we plug it from outside?" Lanyon said. His voice was a croak. "A sail over it? A collision mat?"

"Under Crown's keel, in the flood? With her drowned all round her in the water?" Nera shook her head. "No."

She judged it the way she had judged a hundred leaking ships: the size of the bore, the depth of the keel, the head of water. One open cock that size would put in tons of water every minute. Crown was huge, and she had a great deal of hold to fill. But she would fill it. She would settle by the stern, slowly, and then faster. In an hour and a half, perhaps two, she would be sitting on the bottom of the Throat with her decks awash and her fitting whole in its chest. Nothing on this earth would get her off again.

"Up," she said. "All of you. Bring the prisoners. We're done here."

The iron door stood open when she came back up past it. The cell behind it was the size of a cupboard, floored with a bronze grille, and the sea heaved under the grille with the ship's roll. Wet footprints went up the ladder ahead of her, a man's, and were lost on the wet planking of the passage above.

At half past eleven Nera stood with Rusk at the barricade in the lower passage, wet to the neck and shaking with cold, and told him.

"One's open and can't be shut," she said. "She's settling. She'll be on the bottom in an hour and a half, by the stern. Two hours at the outside."

Rusk heard her out. He was hollow with tiredness, and his sleeve was black with dried blood where someone had cut him on the deck. He looked at the iron-strapped door, behind which the frame was still humming.

"If she sinks here," he said, "the fitting stays alive under the water."

"And the channel's shut," Nera said. "For good, Captain. Crown on the bottom of the Throat is worse than the hulks ever were."

"And there's a room under the frame compartment," she went on, "with an iron door and a grille in its floor, and somebody was in it who isn't now. Grell says it's where the admiral goes to be told things."

Rusk looked at Dunning. "A man on every ladder forward. If he's loose in his own ship, I want to know which way he went."

"And the frame?" Rusk asked.

"Still whole. Still charged. The port cage is wrecked, but the starboard cage is turning in the flood. She's feeding off it." Nera pushed her wet hair off her forehead. "Until that cage stops, there's no reserve running at all. Nothing ends it but the frame."

"Can you break the frame from here?"

"Not through that door with twenty marines behind it. Not quickly. Not before she sinks." She had thought it through on the ladder. "We can't leave her here. Whatever we do about the frame, we can't do it with her sitting on the bottom of the Throat. She has to come out of the channel first. East, past the Brack, into the shallows. Put her on the sand there with her decks above water. Then I can get at her fitting through the trunk and break her frame through her maintenance port, and she can settle as much as she likes afterward."

Rusk stood with it. She could see him working it: the tide, the distance, the weight of the ship, the time.

"A tow," he said. "The Kestrel."

"With the bridle we built for it at Darn," Nera said. "And Brightwater, if Marr can spare her, and one more. And you'll need somebody to slip those anchors."

"High water is at half past twelve," Rusk said. "The flood's dying already. When it turns, it'll set her back west into the Throat. We'll have to have her moving before then." He turned. "Joss."

Joss Ambry had come down the ladder behind Nera. He was grimy and soaked and his eyes were very bright.

"Captain."

"Go up to Crown's tow deck," Rusk said. "See what's left of her bitts and her towing gear. I want our bridle across to her as soon as the Kestrel can pass it, and her anchors ready to slip. You know what to look for."

"Aye, Captain," Joss said.

The boy went up the ladder two rungs at a time. Rusk turned back to Nera.

"Go and get dry, if there's anything dry in this fleet," he said. "Then get Sorn and your people and be ready to go at that frame the moment there's a way to it. Through the door or through the port, I don't care which."

"Yes, Captain," Nera said.

"And Nera." He met her eyes. "Well done. All of it."

She did not know what to say to that, so she said nothing.

She went up through the decks into the dark of Crown's waist, and stood at the engine's rail to get her breath before she crossed to the Kestrel.

From up here she could see all of the trouble at once. Daylight lay on the sea in two places now. Away to the east, beyond the eastern mouth, a broad band of sunlit water shone gold under the black edge of the canopy, where Mercy's dark had been. To the west, past the western mouth, lay the pale band Venn had won. Between the two, over Orra and the Brack and every yard of the channel, Crown's dark stood up into the sky with the ship under Nera's feet at its center. On the crown of Orra a shutter lamp was blinking steadily, talking to someone.

Below her, the Kestrel lay ground against Crown's side with her grapnels taut. Orris sat in his chair by the wheel with the blanket over his knees, and Isobel stood beside him with the speaking trumpet. The old man saw Nera at the rail and cupped his hands.

"Mistress Pell! Are you drowned?"

"Nearly!" Nera shouted back.

"Then come down and have a tot before you finish the job," Orris called. "There's a dry coat in my chest, and if you get pitch on it I'll have your hide."

She went down the side. The rum burned all the way to her stomach. The coat was too short in the arms and smelled of pipe smoke and pepper, and she had never in her life been so glad of a garment.

Just before noon Nera was on her knees beside the frame compartment's bulkhead, two decks below Crown's waist, with Sorn and the drawings and a lantern. The engine ship was settling under her. Rusk had gone up to the waist half an hour since to see to the tow, and Dunning held the barricade with his marines a dozen yards aft.

She could feel it in her knees. The deck had a tilt to it now, a slope toward the stern that had not been there an hour ago. Water was coming up through the ceiling of the after hold and creeping forward. Every few minutes the starboard vane cage, somewhere below and outboard, changed its laboring note, and every time it did, her heart stopped and waited, and every time it went on. Beyond the bulkhead door, Crown's marines were silent. Beyond them the frame hummed.

Sorn had the Darn drawing of Crown's hull spread on the deck. She was tracing the frame compartment with one finger: the frame, the trunk beside it, the sea-chest under it where the fitting lay. And on the outboard side, starboard, the maintenance port, five feet by four, bolted from inside, just above the waterline.

"If she settles another two feet," said Sorn, "that port will be under the water."

"Then we'll do it before she does," said Nera.

Overhead, far up through the decks, men were shouting. Nera lifted her head to listen. It was not the noise of the last hour, of marines calling to each other and the wounded asking for water. It was sudden and loud and confused, and then there was a clash of steel.

Someone was coming down the ladder from the upper deck very fast, and it was Joss. He came down the last six rungs in one drop and landed beside her in the lantern-light, white-faced, with a cut across his forehead running blood into one eye.

"Mistress Pell." He was gasping. "The admiral. The admiral's on the tow deck. Him and his officers, a dozen of them. They came up out of the forward scuttle all at once, and the man on the ladder is dead."

Nera was on her feet. "Where is the Captain?"

"I found him in the waist and told him," Joss said. "He's gone up."