The Year of Our War (23 page)

T
he sea is only noisy when it meets the land. I hated the endless crunch and hiss of little waves curling and spitting at the foot of the cliff. A flapping of banners on the
’Buzzard
mimicked it. I could hear the remote sound of sail, whipping the calm air far out to sea. There was no other sound but the slap of water on wood. There wasn’t a cloud in the cold sky; I soared above the cliffs being bothered by choughs. With long lazy wing-beats I flew out swiftly, away from the foam and over the foil-blue. The cliff sound receded; movement made a cold flurry on my face. The sun was so bright I had a headache from squinting. A cormorant arrowed along beneath me, its black neck stretched out. I dived and the bird veered away in panic. Then I gained altitude, eager to be away from the surface of the water, the gleaming specks of light. I hate the changefulness of sea.

This was Ata’s message to Mist: “If you surrender
Honeybuzzard
I will see you safely to land in Peregrine. We need never meet again. If you pass my island in that or any other ship she will be lost with all hands.” I wrote it on paper and dropped it in my satchel onto the deck of the
Honeybuzzard
from a great height. I won’t land to give a message that dangerous.

Mist read it, sneered and waved a three-fingered hand. “Tell the Emperor,” he yelled, “her time’s up. Overstepped the line!” I tipped my wings to him and sailed up on a seaward breeze.

I listened to Shearwater addressing his men. He spoke directly to the whole crew. They packed in close to the stern deck’s rails to hear him. They were scared and pessimistic but the Eszai’s wild cheer was infectious. He punched the air, saying, “This is the fastest ship built and you are the best crew ever! If you work for me now, then soon you will captain your own ships.” He praised them higher than any immortal ever praised Zascai, and they started grinning and nudging each other. He told them the chain of command and what positions to man. Then he pointed to where I was circling. Grubby faces peered up like stripy fungi in a window box. Mist yelled, “See? Jant seconds us! The best lookout the
Honeybuzzard
can hope for! Now, all hands. I want speed!”

The sky was clean; a good current blew off the land. I watched from a height. Able crew swarmed on the deck, tending the massive ship. She stirred. She sucked in a dripping anchor on a long wet hawser. She shrugged up a mainsail. The sail descended, flapping, dazzling white. Wind filled it and it swelled, three more unfurled simultaneously. The blue pennant of Peregrine streamed out ahead. The ship dragged in the water, gathered speed and began to slice the waves. Mist was a figure at the stern, shouting something down to the main deck. Men clustered together and hauled on tarred ropes. Sail wound down over the prow. It bellied up in a startling rush of red and yellow, emblazoned with the Castle sun. The ship lurched forward, smoothly gathering speed. Mist poured all his strength onto the wheel, spinning it. I dropped back in the slipstream and watched the rudder turn. He brought the
Honeybuzzard
round in a great arc to get the wind behind her. She lifted. Suddenly she began to race.

I flew round the ship watching from high above. I crisscrossed in front of them, fast and free, damp with the spray from their bow wave. I hovered in the slipstream of cool air escaping from the sail’s edge; it was very turbulent but I managed to find a clear space where it was almost effortless to hang, being dragged along by the ship. Cold air bubbled and gushed under my wings, bearing me up. The pain in my stomach muscles that comes from the exertion of beating gradually died away. It was a wonderful ride.

The Zascai on deck sent up a few curious looks, but soon lost interest as I hardly stirred, and besides Mist was keeping them busy. They worked as a well picked team; Mist spoke to them all by name. He struck a match on the compass at the helm. He stood braced, and grinned at his second-in-command. When the weasly Awian went belowdecks, Mist returned to looking slightly distant and thoughtful. He gazed at the notched horizon. The breeze made his blue cloak flap. The cloak billowed up; I realized he was wearing it to hide the bandages around his cracked ribs.

The wheel on deck was the guide wheel, positioned next to the compass. One man alone did not have the strength to keep such a large ship on course, not even Mist. Below deck, there was a system of gears, to assist the wheel above and hold a direction in even the worst conditions.

The
Honeybuzzard
made good time from its offshore hiding place, in sight of the Cobalt Coast and north past the cliffs at Vertigo and the long strand of beach at Awndyn. An iron cloud hung above Grass Isle, as if the island was reflected in the sky. From my vantage point above the mainsail, I saw the island first. To begin with it looked squashed, but it gradually grew from the ocean and I could see the south-facing Sute Towers of March and April on the coastline before Mist’s lookout shrilled, “Grass Isle!”

There was a commotion on deck as sailors hissed in anxious breaths and scowled at the gray shape. Mist yelled at them. Then he yelled at me. I dropped a little height and hung in the air at the level of the railings. Any lower and I risked getting sucked under and squeezed out in the ship’s wake. Mist stalked to the railings and grabbed at the air, as if to pluck me down. I did a quick circuit of the ship and returned. “Comet,” he said. “Please help us. You’re useless as a fucking figurehead up there.”

“What can I do?” I’m not setting foot on deck.

“You know how hopeless this is. Flogging. Dead horse. We haven’t had sight of her yet. The bitch is planning something. Look. Leap. Fly on a few kilometers and tell us what you see.”

I nodded to him, gained height and held my breath for a few strong beats. I sped down a slight descent. Wind roared over my wings. To the crew I must have just disappeared. I looked back and the ship was a toy on immense water.

Behind the island, Ata’s fleet was waiting; evenly spaced, lingering with a hunter’s silence. Ata had made a net of fifty caravels, anchored facing in the wind’s direction. Their sterns faced me, and prows pointed toward the Peregrine coast.

I flew at masthead height along the line and found Ata on the deck of the ship in the center of her trap. Two comely men were with her. The tassels of her white silk shawl floated on the gusts; she waved brightly, smiling broadly. The vessels were anchored with the width of a ship between them. I glided down the gaps, close to the hollows of the waves, and faces peered over railings and poked over sterns to watch. The ships were clean and scoured; their hulls were smooth. I flew the length of the line, seeing how Ata had made use of shallow water at the coastal side.

A larger carrack, the
Ortolan
, was patrolling the reef on the seaward end of the island. It stood a good chance of catching
Honeybuzzard
if Mist chose to go that way. He would have to sail all around the island, and in its lee, under the blank gaze of April and May, into Ata’s net. I didn’t see that Mist had any chance at all.

I flew back to Mist and said, “You don’t have any chance at all.”

“What has she done?”

I told him what I had seen and said, “I’m sorry I can’t help. If I were you I would surrender.”

He laughed. “Skinny waif.”

I said, “Forget Peregrine. Go to Moren harbor or Ghallain Point, you can provision there; you could prepare properly.”

Mist said, “There’s no time like the present.” He kicked a map lying on the deck to unroll it. “Come down and have a look at this,” he ordered.

I couldn’t land; it was too much for me being this close to a ship. “No,” I whined.

“Come down! Bloody waif. Bull. Horns.” He lost concentration squinting up at me, swore and glanced back at the compass.

“Ata will sink us if she catches us!” It was my worst fear.

“She won’t board us. I can handle this craft better than anyone in the world. Tricks. Trade. I have for decades.”

“Yes, but she has eighty such ships,” I pointed out.

“Cooks. Broth. Come down, Jant, I’m going to prove I’m the fucking best.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“It’s beyond me how a nancy boy like you can land such a hot lady as Tern.”

“I’ve never hit Tern.”

Mist sneered. He never understood how to deal with Ata. Ata’s assurance forced him to treat her like a man—I suppose if she was one of his sailors he would have had her flogged around the fleet.

Our argument was beginning to unsettle the Zascai, who were watching me superstitiously. Mist saw this and bellowed curses, ending the argument by sheer power of voice. He clutched his hand to his mouth and bent over the wheel, coughing horrendously. Embarrassed, I watched him cough for more than a minute. He coughed, hacked, spat, wiped his mouth on his cloak. He moaned slightly, hugging bandaged ribs. “Ah—I should’ve killed Saker when I had the chance,” he said.

I pulled my wings in and dropped onto the deck. I scrabbled for the hip flask and poured the last of the sloe gin down my throat: Rhydanne courage.

“You know she has some of Lightning’s fyrd?” I said.

Mist raised bushy eyebrows; he evidently hadn’t known. He shook himself. “Well, doesn’t matter. I’m going to Rachis, via Peregrine, and they can’t stop me. Tournament archers, all of them. Micawater shoots at targets; damn it, he shoots at
fruit
.”

One hand on the wheel, he ripped his rapier from its scabbard and stabbed at the map. “Those caravels, can they chase us? Anchored? Sails lashed? Sticks. Mud.”

Mist’s brunette was sitting on the steps between the upper deck and the main deck, sunning herself in the icy air. She regarded me for a while with the Zascai “I want to look, not buy” expression, gazing intently when she thought I wasn’t looking.

I was feeling sick already. I knelt down beside the helm, careful to be facing into the wind, in case I had to take off in a hurry. The folded tops of Mist’s leather boots, rough blue trousers tucked into them, and the gilded scrollwork of the helm took up my field of vision. My eyes were watering. I crawled forward and gazed at the crinkled map, dotted with rapier holes. Grass Isle was almond-shaped; it lay close to the mainland, along the coast of Awia. The island was just thirty kilometers long, with a cruel and rocky shoreline. The northern end gave onto unpredictable water and a reef, marked by a lighthouse. To avoid the
Ortolan
we decided to sail around the south side, between the island and the mainland, a very shallow pass at such low tide. Ata’s fleet was strung out across the strait.

“They’re from here…to here,” I muttered, tracing a line from September Tower bay to the coast of Peregrine.

Mist peered over his shoulder. “Good,” he said.

I whimpered, sitting against the baroque carved helm, I preened my wings out and tried to hide my face in the feathers.

I was sitting on the deck of a ship. Shit.

“There’s no point in worrying,” he said. “I know this coast well. Back. Hand.” He kept on in this mode whilst people ran about on the main deck and the plump girl gazed at the swelling waves, and I sat looking into possible death. The cold waves were so smooth and sluggish they looked gelid, practically solidified. One shock could cause the whole sea to freeze. “I’ve been sailing this coast since the fifteenth century. My grandfather was a trader too. So don’t be so damn scared. Born. Bred. From packing casks and rowing to commanding the Castle’s fleet. There’s always been caravels on the route from Moren to Peregrine, ever since we bought it off the Archer. That’s what made Awia great, and I don’t want it to change, but Ata does. Goose. Golden egg. Why couldn’t she be happy? She had the best of both worlds. Cake. Eat it.” This wasn’t exactly true; Ata wanted all the cakes in the world and to keep them. “How can she think she’s better than me, Jant? How can she Challenge me after all this time?”

A real fucking ship. How did this happen?

His deep voice rattled on: “I know she wanted to. I’m not stupid. But swept. Carpet; it’s not the kind of thing you want to think about.”

Honeybuzzard
slowed slightly as we entered the lee of Grass Isle. High cliffs reared up, yellow with lichen and etched with cracks, parading by as Mist steered into a deep channel running parallel to the coast. Peregrine could be seen on the other side, a sweep of pebble beach running down into crystal water. Where the rocks began, the water became dark blue; where we were, it was nearly black. Black and white seabirds swirled and bickered on the cliffs, in shallow caves scooped into the rock and on jagged outposts of stone, splashed white with bird shit and dead fish and strewn with foam and flotsam.

Suddenly the deck tilted viciously. I slid, grabbed at the helm, clinging for life. Waves on the port side came up as far as the railing, our keel ploughed air. I cried in panic, “What are you doing?”

“Tacking,” Mist said. He had been chain-smoking and giving out orders which I had been too wrapped in fear to hear. I looked up to see the result of one command. The sailors had brought all sorts of objects from below deck, mainly bedding rolls and hammocks, netting and bundles of clothes hastily knotted together. There were planks and buckets, boat hooks and shields. They had piled them along the sides of the ship, wedging them between the railings and lashing them in place to form a thick screen.

“We need some protection from her archers,” Mist explained. Impressed by his ingenuity, I saw him in a new light. He had been swinging the
Honeybuzzard
in full canvas and at its full speed between flat submersed rocks and tiny islets.

“Ahoy. There she is!”

From the air, Ata’s ships had looked formidable. Now I was at sea level and facing them, our situation seemed much, much worse. They were invulnerable, solid and secure. Four hulks faced us, their sharp wood breastbones paring the waves. On either side the string of identical vessels stretched out, becoming smaller with distance.