The Water Made Safe

The dark in the west was smaller in the morning.

Elske Marr stood on Brightwater's quarterdeck at first light on the eleventh of November and watched it across twelve miles of gray-green sea. In the night the four western engines had stood together like a single cliff. Now the wall had gaps in it.

Vigil lay at anchor eleven miles west of Orra. Shelter and Covenant lay farther off to the south-west, miles apart, anchored, with their tugs fled. Bounty lay farthest out, fifteen miles west-north-west of Orra in the Skarth Race, a tide race between two bare islets on the road to Lisk. Each of them threw five miles of night around itself.

"Leary's boats are back," said Lieutenant Kell at her elbow. "They say Vigil's escorts were talking to each other by lamp all night. They say there's shouting on Shelter."

"There would be." Marr shut her glass. "They saw the sun on the strait yesterday, and half of them have heard the admiral is in irons." She turned. "Signal Halberd and the Southwick ships. We'll go in under a white flag with the terms. If they fire on the flag, we fall back on the plan."

"And Bounty?" Kell asked.

"Bounty last," Marr said.

The terms were written on four sheets, one for each engine. Every seaman who surrendered his ship would be fed, kept under guard, and not harmed. Nobody would be hanged without a trial before a court sitting in the west. Men with families in the islands would be sent home when the fittings were broken. Men with families in Greyhaven could go and find them, because Greyhaven was free.

That last line had been Venn's. She had made Marr add it from her cot in Brightwater's surgery, and had refused the surgeon's poppy until it was in.

"They don't believe in promises," Venn had said. "They believe in places. Name them a place."

Vigil's escorts struck at half past nine.

Marr took Brightwater in toward the edge of Vigil's field with a white flag at the foretopmast head and her crossbows unshipped on deck where the enemy could see them. Two hundred yards out, the light began to fail. It went gray, then brown, until Brightwater was inside it and the lanterns at her rail were the only light in the world.

A cutter came out to meet them with a lamp in her prow. The officer in her sternsheets was young and frightened, and went over Marr's paper twice by his lantern, moving his lips.

"My mother keeps a chandler's on the Grey." He swallowed. "We were told the whole Basin had been flooded."

"The gates held," Marr said. "Your mother's shop is where it was. I can't promise she's in it. I can promise that if you strike, you can go and look."

He went back. Marr waited in the dark with her hands on the rail and the old ache of the burn scar in the cold. It was forty minutes before the first escort's ensign came down, and longer before the second. On the third there was a fight on deck. Marr heard it across the water, shouting and steel and a man screaming, and after a long silence the flag came down there too.

Vigil herself surrendered at eleven. Her master came across in his gig and gave Marr his sword hilt first on Brightwater's quarterdeck. His name was Halloran. He had not slept, by the look of him, and he asked her only one question.

"Is it true you've broken Crown's fitting?"

"Broken with a maul on Crown's frame room floor," Marr said. "I saw the pieces."

"Then I'll take my people off," Halloran said, "and you can do what you like with the thing. I've carried it since August. Do you know what it is to sleep over it?"

"No," Marr said.

"Good," Halloran said. "Don't."

Annet Sorn went aboard Vigil at noon with Ebb and four Darn men, and Vigil's crew opened the trunk for her. When the fitting lay on the frame room floor she set the iron tongs across it and held the maul out to Ebb.

"I built the Lamb's," Ebb said. "Not this one. Not this one, Annet."

"Then you won't mind breaking it," Sorn said.

His first blow skidded off and rang on the floor, and one of Vigil's seamen laughed, sharp and ugly. The second went home, and the black stone cracked through with a sound like a pot breaking in a fire. The drowned in Vigil's holds went slack where they lay, and Marr had them hauled up and broken all the same, because three fittings were still whole within a morning's tow. Ten minutes later Sorn drove the ward-breakers into the frame, and Vigil's dark went out of the sky between one breath and the next.

Shelter's people had done half the work themselves. Her seamen had locked her officers in the great cabin at dawn and run a white sheet up the mizzen. Brightwater's boats found the trunk open, the fitting in its sling, and a bosun's mate standing over it with an axe he was afraid to use.

"We didn't know if it would go off," he said. "Like powder. Nobody would tell us anything about it, ever."

"It doesn't go off," said Sorn, and took the axe away from him. "It goes on."

By four o'clock Shelter's field was gone. Dunning boarded Covenant at dusk without a hand raised against him, and her frame broke at a quarter past seven. The sun had gone down by then, so the only change was that the stars came out.

Away to the north-west, Bounty's dark lay across the sky like a blot where a scatter of stars should have been. Bounty had not answered the flag. When Leary went in at sunset, she had put a crossbow bolt through his mainsail.

"Three," said Dunning beside her, with his lantern.

"Bounty in the morning," Marr said. "In daylight, with a plan, once I've talked to someone who knows the man in command."

Ilyra Venn lay in a cot in Brightwater's surgery with her left arm wrapped to the shoulder in oiled linen and one side of her face blistered raw. She listened to Marr with her eyes shut and opened them when Marr had finished.

"Gaunt," she said. "Aubrey Gaunt. He has Bounty."

"You know him," Marr said.

"I served under him once. He hates the Compact more than Vaust ever did." Venn shifted in the cot and caught her breath. "He drafted the gate order with Vaust's secretary, and he knows what a court will do with that."

"So he'll fight."

"He'll do worse." Venn's voice was hoarse. "He was there when Vaust explained it to the captains: a fitting under moving water keeps its hold. If he can't keep Bounty, he'll see her fitting goes into the Skarth Race one way or another, and every dead man within five miles of it will have a home for good."

Venn turned her head on the pillow. "And there are drowned in her holds. He used them as troops for the Orra landings. He keeps them below in a flooded hold so they won't dry, with the hatches battened, where the sun can't reach them even if the field goes."

"Then we'll go below," Marr said.

"Not before his field is down. Foul his vanes and wait out the twelve minutes. Go up her side in the sun, or his drowned will be on your back the moment you're over the rail." Venn shut her eyes again.

"That's the plan."

"Of course it is." The corner of Venn's mouth moved. "You'd have thought of it yourself by morning. I only wanted to be the one who said it."

The Skarth Race ran between two islets of black rock a quarter of a mile apart, with the tide pouring through it white and loud. Bounty lay anchored in the throat of it, head to the stream, with the race hissing through the vane cages under her hull. Her field stood over her alone now. Around it, under a hard blue sky, the morning of the twelfth lay bright on the water.

Marr stood in Brightwater's chains at a quarter to eight, two hundred yards outside the edge. The breeze was westerly and fresh. The flood was making. Leary's boats lay along the edge of the dark in a long line, eleven of them, each with a coil of weighted fouling hawser in her waist.

Leary brought his boat alongside. "You know the race," Marr said. "Lay your hawsers from up-tide, all at once, and let the stream carry them down into her cages. Then cut away the spare vanes off her quarter racks before her people can ship them, and get out. Go in without lamps and steer by the noise of the race. When your hawsers are down, show one red light. When I see four, I start the twelve minutes."

He grunted and pushed off.

The boats went into the dark at eight o'clock and vanished. For a long while there was only the race. Then crossbows began to thud somewhere in the black. A man shouted. A red light showed, low on the water, then another, and a third, far apart. Somewhere in the dark, steel struck steel.

The fourth red light came up at eleven minutes past eight.

Marr took out her watch. "Mark," she said. "Twelve minutes from now. Boats away. Boarding parties to the boats."

She went down into the launch with Dunning and thirty marines, and the other boats came off Halberd and the Southwick ships behind her. They lay on their oars at the edge of the dark and waited. Inside it a boat was burning, a smear of red. Two of Leary's boats came out past them, low in the water, with men bailing and a body lying across the thwarts under a coat.

Marr held her watch in her palm and kept her eyes on it. Dunning sat beside her with his pike across his knees, humming under his breath. A marine in the prow was praying in a whisper.

At twelve minutes past the mark, the dark failed.

It went out of the sky over the Skarth Race as a candle goes out, and the morning came down on the sea in a single sheet of light. There was Bounty, a quarter of a mile off, broad and black-hulled in the white race. Fouling hawsers streamed from under her quarters, and her crew stood on her decks with their arms up over their eyes.

"Give way," Marr said. "All boats. Give way together."

They went up her side in the full sun.

Bounty's rails were high, and her people were waiting at them. Marr went up the boarding net with her sword in its scabbard and her hands on the wet rope. A crossbow bolt went past her ear so near she felt the breath of it. A face appeared over the rail above her with a pike, and Dunning, beside her on the net, put his pike up into the man's chest, and the face went away.

She came over the rail onto the deck with her sword already out.

It was a broad deck, all hatches and engine-housing, and there were perhaps forty of Gaunt's men on it. They had picked their ground among the hatch coamings and behind the long iron housing of the vane gear. A sailor with a cutlass came at Marr from behind a ventilator. She turned his cut and hit him in the mouth with her hilt, and he sat down hard against the coaming.

Behind her, the marines were coming over the rail in a mass. A bolt took one of them in the throat and threw him back against the rail. Marr went forward along the starboard side with six marines behind her, toward the main hatch.

A tall man in a blue sea coat stood on the main hatch with a sword. He was the only man on that deck not shading his eyes.

"Commander Marr," he said. "Venn's friend."

"Captain Gaunt," Marr said. "Strike your colors."

"No." He looked up at the sky, and then at her. "Not this one."

He stepped back off the hatch and down the ladder beneath it, and the hatch boards came down over the opening with a crash. Marr heard the bars go across from below.

"Mauls," she said. "Mauls and bars to the main hatch."

It took them a quarter of an hour to clear the deck and break in the hatch. By then Gaunt's people on deck had mostly given up, and knelt in a line along the port rail in the sun with their hands on their heads. Five of them were dead, and four marines.

The main hatch came up at last. Below it a ladder went down into the dark of the main hold, and the dark was full of water.

Marr knelt at the edge and held a lantern down. The hold was flooded to within a fathom of the deck beams. The black water lay heaving gently in the lantern light.

"He's sinking her," Dunning said.

"No." Sorn had come aboard with the second boats. She stood at the coaming with her tongs and listened. "Nothing's coming in. That water's been there for weeks. It's where he keeps them." She looked at Marr. "A drowned man dries out in an hour in the air. In there he never dries."

"And the frame room?" Marr asked.

"Through the after bulkhead of this hold," Sorn said. "There's a door, above the water."

"Pumps," Marr said. "Rig the deck pumps and every hand pump we brought. Put a guard on every pump, pikes and mauls. Anything that comes up out of that water with a dead face, break it." She looked at Dunning. "Sergeant, the hold."

"Legs and necks, ma'am," Dunning said. "Same as always."

They went down the ladder into the water with lanterns lashed to pike heads. On the bottom rung the water came to Marr's waist, so cold it stopped her breath. Beyond the lantern light the hold went away into the dark, a great timbered cave with the deck beams low overhead and the race roaring in its walls.

The first of the drowned rose ten yards ahead of her.

It was a man. He rose out of the black surface slowly, streaming, with his hair over his face. He was a western sailor in a canvas smock, and he had been dead a long time. Bounty's fitting held him. It lay intact deep in her, and he was well inside its range, and below the reach of any sun.

"Here," Marr said.

Dunning went past her with his pike reversed and took the drowned man's legs from under him with the butt. The body went down into the water, and Dunning put his weight on the pike and held it there until the thrashing stopped. When he lifted the pike the body floated up face down with its neck broken.

Two more came out of the water on the left. Corporal Cobley caught the first under the jaw with a maul, and it dropped and lay where it fell. The second got its hands on Cobley's coat and pulled him under. Marr cut at its arm, and her blade bit to the bone, and the dead hand held on. She cut again at the neck, and again, and the hand opened, and two marines dragged Cobley up choking by the collar.

Behind them the pumps had begun clanking on the deck. She felt it fall against her body, from waist to hip.

They went aft. The dead came out of the water one at a time, and two at a time, and once five together out of the dark under the deck beams. Every one had to be broken by hand. Bounty's field was gone, but no sun reached that hold, and the fitting held them as surely as it had held them in the night. A marine went down under three of them, and they did not get him up again.

Marr's arms ached and her sword was notched. Somewhere in the hold she had stopped thinking of the dead as men, and now she made herself think of it again. This one had a tattoo on his forearm, an anchor and a name. This one was a boy.

Then the after bulkhead was in front of her, with a narrow door in it, shut, and light showing round its edges.

The door was barred on the far side. Dunning and two marines put their shoulders to it, and on the third try the bar split and the door went in. Sorn came through behind the marines with her tongs, and Hal Brockett with the tackle.

The frame room was a long compartment amidships. The great warded lattice of the frame stood in the middle of it like the skeleton of some huge animal, dark now, its charge long gone. Below the frame, in a well in the floor, the iron lid of the fitting's sea-chest had been unbolted and pushed aside. The race showed white in the bottom of it, roaring under the ship.

Gaunt knelt at the edge of the well with a line running out through his left hand, over the rim and down into the race. The trunk tackle hung empty above him. He had a sword in his right hand.

Gaunt meant to keep nothing of Bounty but what hung at the end of that line.

"Commander," he said, without getting up. "You're a minute late. It's three fathoms down and going. When I let go, it lies in the Skarth Race until the sea wears through the rock. Every man who drowns within a mile of it is mine. Every dead man in five miles is mine."

"It was never yours," Marr said.

He let go of the line and came up off his knees with the sword.

"Sorn!" Marr shouted. "The line!"

The line was running out over the rim of the well, snaking down into the white water. Sorn threw herself flat across the floor after it. Gaunt cut at Marr's head. She took it on her blade, and the force of it drove her back against the frame. He was a strong man on a sure footing, and he had been waiting for her. He came in again, short and hard, and she gave ground along the lattice in the knee-deep water with the bronze at her back.

Behind him Sorn had the line. Marr saw her get the tongs on it at the rim and bear down with all her weight. The line ran on through the iron jaws, and Sorn cried out at the burn of it and held. Then it jerked and stopped. The tongs had jammed it against the rim of the chest, a yard short of its bitter end.

Gaunt heard it and turned his head.

Marr went in under his guard while he did. She beat his blade down and across, forte to foible, and turned it out of his hand into the water, and put her point at his throat.

"You'll hang me," Gaunt said.

"A court will try you. I've no idea what it will do."

"I can guess," Gaunt said.

"Then you know more than I do," Marr said. "Kneel down, Captain, or I'll put this through your neck and leave you in the race beside your fitting. You know what it does with drowned men."

He knelt in the water.

Dunning hauled him back from the well by the collar. Marr went down on her knees by Sorn, and Brockett came splashing over, and the three of them took the line and hauled. It came up hand over hand, cold and heavy, and something pulled at the other end of it that was more than the race. Then the cage came up into the well, streaming, with the fitting inside it. It looked like a lump of coal with iron grown through it.

A white hand had hold of the bars. The arm below it went down into the race.

Marr struck the wrist with her sword hilt, and the hand opened, and the arm slid away under the ship. They swung the cage over the rim onto the floor.

Sorn held out the maul. Her palms were burned raw across the middle.

Marr hit it. The first blow jarred her to the teeth. The second broke it open into three black pieces, and something went out of the air in the frame room that she had not known was there, a pressure like the weight before a storm.

From the main hold behind them, the sound of the pumps went on. But the other sounds had stopped: the splashing, the shouting, the crack of mauls. Dunning went to the door and looked through it with his lantern.

"They've gone down, ma'am," he said. "All of them. Lying in the water like logs."

Marr leaned on the maul until her breath came back, then straightened.

"Break the frame," she said. "Then we search her, every hold, by daylight. Every one of the dead gets broken and brought up on deck, and if anyone knows his name, it gets written down."

They searched Bounty until four o'clock in the afternoon. They took the hatches off every hold and cut the deck over the forward hold, so the low sun could come down into her. They pumped her dry under guard. They found forty-one of the drowned and broke every one, though none of them moved now, and laid them out on her upper deck in long lines in the sun. A woman from Lisk who had come out with the island boats walked along the lines with a lantern, though it was full daylight. She halted by one of them and knelt down.

On the evening of the twelfth, in Brightwater's cabin, they argued about the fittings.

The pieces of four fittings lay in a canvas bag on the table. Sorn had the Darn list: every fitting Vaust's wardwrights had ever cut, and a line for a signature beside each. Too many of the lines were empty yet.

A Southwick master who had lost two boats on the tenth put his fist on the table.

"Load the spares in a hulk. Tow her out past Lisk and sink her in the Trench. Nobody will ever see them again."

"Something will," Sorn said. "That's its home. You'd be handing it the keys. Every one of those fittings is a door, and a door under moving water stays open. You break them, here, with a maul, in front of witnesses, and you write down that you did it."

"Every one," Marr said. "Not sunk, not stored, and not taken to Southwick for some clever man in the Admiralty to study. Broken. I'll sign for each."

The master looked round the table. Petch, who had come west that afternoon in his gig, nodded once.

"Broken," said Petch.

They went into Lisk on the thirteenth.

It was a port of dark stone wharves and slate roofs, and its people stood on the wharf heads to watch the allied ships come in. The crowd neither cheered nor threw anything. Marr had the bread unloaded on the main wharf before she went up into the town. Matthis Grell, whose children were held here, went up the wharf steps ahead of the marines two at a time, and she let him go. In the harbor master's cellars they found Captain Edric Pollard of the Gannet and the survivors of his crew, thin and lousy and very glad of the bread.

The spare fittings lay on sacking in the yard's long stone shed, where the wardwrights had set them out for her. Sorn checked each one against the list. Then she and Ebb broke them on the slipway in front of half the town, and an old wardwright named Sedge, who had made two of them, asked for the maul and broke those two herself.

They tried Corven Vaust at Lisk in the second week of December. The court sat in the great hall of the harbor master's house, with the hall full of islanders in their coats. Provost Hume had been tried there the week before for his governorship of Greyhaven, and sent to the Halsey hulks for ten years. He had asked only that his clerks be treated decently.

The court sat three. Judge-Advocate Edith Hask sat for the Compact and Speaker Aldous Brennan for the mainland ports. For the western islands sat Bartram Lune, an old fisherman from Sallow, who had lost his house and his two sons at Ember Roads. Vaust sat before them in a chair because he could not stand. His leg was in a long splint, and he was thinner, and when he spoke the whole hall heard him without trying.

The evidence took three days. There was the sealed gate order with his signature on it, and the Darn papers, and the list of fittings. Annet Sorn told the court what the ward plates on the Greyhaven gates had been made to do. Master Lockwood, sweating in a good brown coat, told it who had sent him to fit them. Tomas Ebb told it who had ordered him to build the Lamb. Ilyra Venn came in on a stick with her burned arm in a sling. In eleven sentences she told the court what she had found in the sealed order over Quill's signature, and she never once turned her eyes to him.

Then they let him speak.

He spoke briefly and without notes, in the voice that had hailed across Sallow harbor in winter gales. He told them about the west in the years before Ember Roads: six winters of corsair raids, nine letters to the Admiralty asking for ships, and nine answers saying no. He told them about Ember Roads, when the Compact had sent a squadron at last and lost it, and gone home, and never come back. He named the people of Sallow he had buried with his own hands. The islanders in the hall did not make a sound. Marr sat on the witness bench and listened to every word of it.

"I asked nine times, and no one came," Vaust said at the end. "So I made something that would come when I called."

Bartram Lune leaned forward on the bench.

"I was on Sallow that night," the old man said. "A Compact ship came. Its captain took six hundred of us off the beach under the corsairs' fire. My wife was one of them. She's living yet, in the town here." He sat back. "That's a thing that happened too, Admiral. You've left it out."

Vaust looked at the old man across the hall. "I have," he said. "He came. One ship. I've hated him for it every day since, because one was all there was."

The court found him guilty on the second day of its deliberation. Hask gave the judgment for all three judges. His grievance was real, she said, and the court had heard it, and the Compact would have to answer for its part somewhere other than this hall. But no grievance excused opening the gates on sleeping towns, and nothing excused an order that forbade the people in them to be warned. The sentence was death.

Vaust heard it sitting in his chair with his hands on his knees. When the guards came to take him out, he looked across the hall at Marr.

"You were at Ember Roads, Commander," he said.

"Yes," Marr said.

"Then you know I wasn't lying," Vaust said.

"I know you weren't lying about that," Marr said.

He nodded, and they carried him out.

The last line of the list was filled in on the nineteenth of December.

Ten of the Wendle outposts had come out of the Providence's hold on the night of the battle, crated for Crown's boats, and Sorn had broken them on the prize's deck before morning. The eleventh had not been with them. Leary's people took the store ship apart at Holm Sound plank by plank, and found it at last in a flour cask in her bread room, where a quartermaster had packed it to keep it dry. Sorn broke it on the deck at noon, in the thin winter sun.

That evening Marr sat in Brightwater's cabin with the list in front of her. Twenty-six lines, in Sorn's hand and her own, and against each one a date and a place and two signatures.

She dipped her pen and wrote the date against the last line, and the place, and signed her name.

She sat for some time with the pen in her hand. Through the stern windows, beyond Holm Sound's islands, the sun was going down red into the sea in the west, and there was nothing between her and it at all.