Marghe could imagine. Perhaps the goth had been trying to taunt Leifin into killing it. But Leifin herself must have been more than half mad at this point. How many days had she gone without food?
“It hooted on and on and on. I don’t mind telling you how relieved I was when it got too weak to make any noise. A day or so after it shut up, it lay down on the floor and didn’t move. By this time, of course, I was hungry myself. It would have been easy at this point to relax and go forage in the forest, but I waited.”
Marghe imagined a gaunt and more‑than‑half‑crazy Leifin, obsessed with watching the goth starve to death.
“Why not just go away a few days and come back when it was dead?” one of the other women asked.
“You don’t understand. I wanted that pelt perfect. Perfect. If I hadn’t been there the whole time, who knows what or who might have come along and chewed on it when it was dead. No, I had to stay there, share its death.”
Leifin shook her head, as if to clear it. “So, anyway, eventually it laid down and died. But I waited awhile, just to make sure. Then I lowered a noose down, and strangled it for a while. It’s always best to make sure. But it didn’t move. It was definitely dead. It took me a whole day to get it out of the pit.”
Marghe did not want to hear how smart Leifin had been to get the enormous goth out of the pit by herself. Leifin made it all sound so reasonable. It was not reasonable. Leifin was obsessed by perfection and possessions. It was an obsession that prevented her from seeing any difference between carving something beautiful and killing another thinking, feeling being for its fur.
“–and the skull is enormous.” Leifin held her hands about two feet apart. “I think I’ll lime it clean, carefully, then wax it. Beautiful. Someone will buy it. And the pelt… it took me two days’ careful cutting just to get it off. The starvation helped, of course. It was virtually hanging off already. I’m going to take my time curing it. It’s the most fabulous–”
Marghe walked away. If only she had the same talent Thenike had; if only she could take Leifin’s own words, and turn them back on the hunter, make her seewhat she had done, make her feelit in heart and gut; show her what that goth had gone through just so Leifin could have a pelt to play with. But maybe she could. Maybe Thenike would teach her how to reach into another’s psyche with words and music and a powerful beat. Then she could change people like Leifin.
But would it do any good?
She stopped in midstride. Thenike had already sung for Leifin, had already made her see that killing goth was not the same as killing wirrels. There was something fundamentally twisted inside Leifin. Perhaps nothing, no one, could mend it. Except Leifin herself.
Marghe thought about her mother, of the miners on Beaver, of Danner, of Aoife; of herself. People could not be made to change. It had taken her a long time to learn that. People had to want to change themselves.
“The Nemora’s due back in port in four days,” Thenike said.
“Vine’s ship?”
“It’s been along the coast to Luast. It’s due back here to pick up some pelt and wool”–Marghe thought of the goth–“and continue on to High Beaches.”
“Will they take us on board?”
Thenike grinned. “Ships are pleased to have a viajera. Two is twice as good. Being at sea can be boring. We’ll tell them stories and sing them songs and they’ll take us wherever we want to go out of sheer gratitude.”
Marghe smiled. Being a viajera was not all fun and free rides. “We’ll have to send messages to Danner, and Cassil.”
“And High Beaches. We’ll need a guide across the countryside. If the rainfall’s been low, the Glass might not support Nid‑Nod’sdraft and we’ll need the use of one of their punts to get up the river.”
The first day at sea, they kept in sight of land. Thenike was taking a nap–too hot out of the shade, she said–but Marghe stood on Nemora’sdeck, aft of the livestock pen, taking advantage of the cool sea breeze on her neck. The sun streamed down from a dark blue sky and shivered back from the surface of the water, bright enough to hurt her eyes. Thenike’s skiff bobbed behind them, secured firmly by two cables.
All the sailors worked bare‑chested. Some wore breast straps; some, the younger ones whose hands were not yet callused enough to deal with coarse wet rope without damage, wore leather palm straps. Some wore caps to protect their hair from salt spray; some did not bother. Marghe watched them work to swing the mainsail and the small bowsail into the breeze, and wondered how it was to spend a life on the water.
The shore was a greenish‑blue line of forest. That night, or the next day, they would swing out due east to find the safe channel through the Mouth of the Grave. Open sea for a while. Marghe did not look forward to the prospect. She was used to large vessels of alloy and plastic, equipped with satellite navigation, and Nemoraseemed too small, too frail.
The ship was about seventy feet long; the rudder was fixed, in the stern, and the ship steered by means of a tiller, not a wheel. The top of the mainmast still had twigs attached to the wood; the yard was made of two small lengths of wood lashed together with rope. The deck was not solid, just planks resting on thwarts, easily removed for larger cargo. Some of them looked new, and smelled of raw, fresh lumber. The only cabin was a wicker‑walled enclosure in the bows, used mainly as a shade when the sun was fierce. At night, the crew slept on deck. One enormous rope ran from one end of the ship to the other over forked posts and disappeared around the stern and bows. Marghe touched it thoughtfully.
“Big, isn’t it?” The accent was not one Marghe had heard before. Southern, perhaps. She turned to find a tall, broad‑shouldered woman standing beside her. “I’ve seen you with Thenike. You must be Marghe Amun. I’m Vine.”
She did look a little like Roth: same height and cap, and clinking with clay disks. But her face was more leathery, and her eyes were hazel with white lines in the tan fanning out from the corners. She was not wearing a shirt. Marghe found it hard to keep her eyes off the terrible scars on her bare back: a web of ugly white and pink welts, like worms. “It is big, yes. I’ve been trying to figure out what it’s for.”
“Stops the ship hogging.” Those eyes scanned the horizon, the deck, the sails, then back again. Marghe found it disconcerting. But the eyes came back to Marghe’s face long enough for Vine to see that Marghe did not understand. “Drooping at the ends,” she explained.
“Drooping?” They used a rope to tie the ship together?
The white lines around Vine’s eyes disappeared as her face wrinkled up in a smile. “Don’t worry. It’s something all ships do. Or would do if it wasn’t for the rope. That’s what it’s for. Keeps the bows pointing up nicely.”
“That doesn’t sound too good.”
“It’s the safest ship in the world,” Vine said with confidence. “Look, here.” She pointed over the side at the overlapping planks; Marghe looked, too. “Clinker‑built. I helped to choose the wood myself.” She straightened, scanned the ship again. Marghe was beginning to get used to it. “What do you know about wood? Not much? Well, the first thing about building a ship is getting the right timber. Depending what grain you use, how the wood is sawn, you can just about eliminate the effects of hogging. So for these lengths I chose wood that was quarter‑sawn, so it warps against the hogging.”
Marghe nodded, understanding the principle if not the details.
“See this”–Vine pointed to the tiller, fixed to an enormous paddlelike rudder–“not many ships have these. They’re much better than those side‑rigged thing’s you’ll see a lot of around here. You can only dock on one side of the boat if the rudder isn’t in the stern. The Nemoracan dock anywhere. Steers better, too. Mind you, that’s partly because we’ve got the artemon. Foresail,” she explained, for Marghe’s benefit. They went over to the mainmast, picking their way past what seemed to Marghe a jumble of ropes, strung in no particular order. “See these side stays and shrouds?” She was talking about the thick ropes running from the top of the mast to the decking. “Lots of ships don’t have these. Only backstays. But these shrouds mean we can take sideways pressure on the mast, too. We can tack. We don’t always have to have the wind right behind us.”