then shrugged elaborately. ‘They probably just think it never happens to them.’
‘Then no one ever tells them,’ Wintrow clarified for himself.
‘Of course not. Who’d tell?’ A few notes later, Mild stopped abruptly. ‘You wouldn’t, would you? I mean, even if he is your Da and all…’ His voice trailed off as he realized that he might have been very indiscreet.
‘No, I wouldn’t tell,’ Wintrow heard himself say. He found a foolish grin on his face as he added wickedly, ‘But mostly because he is my father.’
‘Boy? Boy, get your arse down here!’ It was Torg’s voice, bellowing up from the deck.
Wintrow sighed. ‘I swear, the man can sense when I’m not miserable, and always takes steps to correct it.’
Wintrow began the long climb down. Mild leaned over slightly to watch his descent and called after him, ‘You use too many words. Just say he’s on your arse like a coat of paint.’
‘That, too,’ Wintrow agreed.
‘Move it, boy!’ Torg bellowed again, and Wintrow gave all his attention to scrambling down.
Much later that night, as he meditated in forgiveness of the day, he wondered at himself. Had not he laughed at cruelty, had not his smile condoned the degradation of another human being? Where was Sa in that? Guilt washed over him. He forced it aside; a true priest of Sa had little use for guilt. It but obscured; if something made a man feel bad then he must determine what about it troubled him, and eliminate that. Simply to suffer the discomforts of guilt did not indicate a man had improved himself, only that he suspected he harboured a fault. He lay still in the darkness and pondered what had made him smile and why. And for the first time in many years, he wondered if his conscience were not too tender, if it had not become a barrier between him and his fellows. ‘That which separates is not of Sa,’ he said softly to himself. But he fell asleep before he could remember the source for the quote, or even if it were from scripture at all.
Their first sighting of the Barrens came on a clear cold morning. The voyage northeast had carried them from autumn to winter, from mild blue weather to perpetual drizzle and fog. The Barrens crouched low on the horizon. They were visible not as proper islands, but only as a place where the waves suddenly became white foam and spume. The islands were low and flat, little more than a series of rocky beaches and sand plains that chanced to be above the high tide line. Inland, Althea had heard there was sand and scrubby vegetation and little more than that. Why the sea-bears chose to haul out there, to fight and mate and raise their young, she had no idea. Especially as each year at this time, the slaughter boats came to drive and kill hundreds of their kind. She squinted her eyes against the flying salt spray and wondered what kind of deadly instinct brought them back here every year despite their memories of blood and death.
The Reaper came into the lee of the cluster of islands at about noon, only to find that one of their rivals had already claimed the best anchorage. Captain Sichel cursed at that, cursed as if it were somehow the fault of his men and his ship that the Karlay had beaten them here. Anchors were set and the hunters roused from their stupor of inactivity. Althea had heard that they’d quarrelled over their gambling a few days ago and all but killed one of their number who they’d suspected of cheating. It was nothing to her; they were foul-mouthed and ill-tempered on the occasions when she’d had to fetch for them in her duties as ship’s boy. She was not at all surprised they were turning on one another in their close quarters and idleness. And what they did to one another was no concern to her at all.
Or so she had thought. It was when they were safely anchored and she was looking forward to the first day of comparative quiet that they’d had in weeks that she suddenly discovered that it would affect her. Officially, she was off-duty. Most of her watch were sleeping, but she had decided to take advantage of the light and the relatively quiet weather to mend some of her clothes. Doing close work by lanternlight had begun to bother her eyes of late, to say nothing of the close air below decks. She’d found a quiet corner, in the lee of the house. She was out of the wind and the sun had miraculously found them despite the edge of winter in the air. She had just begun to cut squares of canvas from her worst worn pair of trousers to patch the others when she heard the mate bellow her name.
‘Athel!’ he roared, and she leapt to her feet.
‘Here, sir!’ she cried, heedless of the work that had spilled from her lap.
‘Get ready to go ashore. You’ll be helping the skinners; they’re short a man. Lively, now.’
‘Yessir,’ she replied, as it was the only possible reply, but her heart sank. That did not slow her feet, however. She snatched up her work and carried it down the hatch with her, and set it aside to finish on some unforeseeable tomorrow. She jammed her calloused feet into felted stockings and heavy boots. The barnacled rocks would not be kind to bare feet. She snugged her knit cap more closely about her ears and dashed back up the steps to the deck. She was not a moment too soon, for the boats were already being raised by the davits. She lunged into one and took a place at an oar.
The sailors manned the oars while the hunters hunched their shoulders to the spray and icy wind and grinned at one another in anticipation. Favourite bows were gripped and held well out of the water’s reach, while oiled bags of arrows rolled sluggishly in the shallow bilge water of the skiff. Althea leaned hard on her oar, trying to match her companion. The boats of the Reaper moved together toward the rocky shores of the islands, each with a complement of hunters, skinners and sailors. She noticed, almost in passing, that Brashen pulled at the oars in one of the other boats. He’d be in charge of the sailors ashore then, she decided. She resolved to give him no reason to notice her. She’d be working with the hunters and skinners anyway; there was no need for their paths to cross. For an instant she wondered just what her task would be, then shrugged it off as useless curiosity. They’d tell her, soon enough.
Just as the rival ship had taken the best anchorage, so too her hunters had taken the prime island. By tradition the ships would not encroach on one another’s hunting territories. Past experience had taught them all that it led only to dead men and less profit for all. So the island where they put ashore was bare of all other human life. The rocky beaches were deserted, save for some very old sows resting in the shallows. The adult males had already left, beginning the migration back to wherever these creatures wintered. On the sandy inland plains, Althea knew they would find the younger females and this year’s crop of offspring. They would have lingered there, feeding off the late runs of fish and gathering fat and strength before they began their long journey.
The hunters and skinners remained in the boats when the rowers jumped overboard into the shallows and seized the gunwales of the skiffs to run the boats ashore. They timed this action to coincide with a wave to help them lift the boat clear of the sharp rocks. Althea waded out on the beach with the others, her soaked legs and wet boots seeming to draw in the cold.
Once ashore, she quickly found her duties, which seemed to be to do whatever the hunters and skinners didn’t care to do for themselves. She was soon burdened with all the extra bows, arrows, knives and sharpening stones. She followed the hunters inland with her arms heavily laden. It surprised her that the hunters and skinners walked so swiftly and talked so freely amongst themselves. She would have supposed this hunt to require some kind of stalking and stealth.
Instead, at the top of the first rise, the gently rolling interior of the island was revealed to her. The sea-bears sprawled and slept in clusters on the sand and amongst the scrub brush. As the men crested the hill, the fat creatures scarcely deigned to notice them. Those that did open their eyes regarded their approach with as little interest as they took in the dung-picker birds that shared their territory.
The
