telescope.
At length they reached the stern port ladderway, and Fiffengurt led them into the belly of the ship. One floor down was the main deck, every bit as crowded as the topdeck above, but quite a bit hotter and smellier. Next came the upper gun deck, where the ship's cattle were temporarily stockaded, wearing looks of bewilderment Pazel found deeply justified. Farther forward the boys caught a glimpse of the cannon themselves. They were ferocious guns, tree-trunk thick and scarred by countless years of fire and salt. 'Grandfather-guns,' said Fiffengurt. 'Terrible weapons, to be sure. But the bow carronades throw shot like prize pumpkins. Eighty-pounders. Down we go.'
On the lower gun deck a sharp smell of frying onions told them the galley was near. Through the open bulkhead Pazel glimpsed it: a steamy compartment full of pots and saucepans and hanging ladles, where a squadron of cooks busied themselves around a cast-iron stove in which one might have roasted a buffalo. 'Mr. Teggatz!' shouted Fiffengurt, barely pausing. 'Thirty-six for breakfast, plus the old boys! Now, if you please!'
One more descent, and they stood in darkness. Fiffengurt strode away from them, as sure and quick as he'd been on the daylit topdeck, and Pazel wondered if he had committed the whole ship's plan to memory. A minute later they heard him striking at a flint, and then a lamp sputtered to life.
'Berth deck,' said Fiffengurt. 'You'll sleep right here, lads, and eat at the rear of the main mess, past the deckhands. You'll have light from the hatches in good weather, and the windscoops freshen the air a bit, once we're under way. Never mind the smell; you won't notice it in a day or two. No windows in your compartment, but if you don't act like hooligans the sailors may leave the doors open on their own berth, and you'll have a bit more light. Come on, in with you.'
By the dim glow of walrus oil they explored their new home: a musty wooden cavern, its far corners lost in the gloom. Massive stanchions braced the ceiling, which was low enough for the largest boys to touch. Every beam and bulkhead wall, and even the long dining tables, were carved from the same gigantic, immeasurably ancient kind of tree. The air was heavy; it smelled like a barn sealed tight against a storm.
Fiffengurt rapped on a bulkhead. 'Cloudcore oak. Strong as any wood in Alifros, but lighter by half. The gun and berth decks are almost solid cloudcore. We don't know half the secrets of the Chathrand, lads, but here's one we grasp well enough. Not that it does us much good: there are no more cloudcore oaks. The last fifty trees grow on Mount Etheg in a secret place. They harvest one tree a century, for essential repairs to this gray lady.'
Footsteps rang on the stairs behind them. 'Ah, Teggatz! Very timely!' said Fiffengurt. 'My lads, be good to this man or he'll poison you: he's our head cook.'
Teggatz was portly, with round red cheeks. His eyes were small and recessed nearly to the point of invisibility. He laughed, rubbing his hands together nervously. The boys waited, the laugh went on, the hands moved faster and faster. At last Teggatz spoke, in a gleeful, soft explosion:
'Shepherd's pie!'
'Shepherd's pie, is it?' said Fiffengurt. 'Fancy that! Bring it on, then!'
'Fancy!' giggled Teggatz, and waved up the stairs. More footsteps, and then a second group of boys appeared, bearing plates and platters and cups. They numbered about fifteen: the senior tarboys, kept on from previous voyages. Most greeted the new boys with frank, friendly looks, but a handful gazed at them with something like hostility, as if they were sizing up the competition. Fiffengurt introduced them all by name as they set their burdens on the tables.
'These are your elder brothers,' he told the new boys. 'Some of them have been four years with Chathrand. Of course, we've all got a new captain, and new rules to learn. But until you know the ship as well as they do, see that you heed 'em. Peytr and Dastu here are your chiefs because they're the oldest-turning full sailors in a year's time, if they stay out of trouble.'
Pazel studied the two older tarboys. Peytr had narrow shoulders and a pointed chin. He smiled, but there was a wariness to his look, as if he were guarding himself against some unpleasant surprise. Dastu was broad and strong, with a look of serenity to his clean-shaven face.
Fiffengurt left them as they sat down to eat. The shepherd's pie was delicious and hot, and when they finished, Peytr and Dastu led them on a tour of the Chathrand. This was a hasty business: the ship was set to launch at dusk and work was rising to a frenzy. Lieutenants stormed fore and aft, sweating, shouting orders nonstop. Cargo cranes rose and fell. Brigades of sailors rolled casks along the decks. The boys were shoved, stepped on, laughed at, cursed. No matter where they stood they were in someone's way.
Still, Pazel was in love. There are few things more beautiful than a full-rigged ship, and the Chathrand was a marvel to shame all others. Every inch of her seemed the work of mages. There were the famous glass planks: six mighty, translucent windows, built directly into the floor of the topdeck, flooding the main deck below with daylight. The main deck itself had two glass planks, and one survived in the floor of the upper gun deck. Over all of these men dragged crate and cannon without a second thought: in six hundred years they had never cracked, nor even sprung a leak. A few had been lost to great violence-cannon fire, falling masts-and had to be replaced with wood, for no record told the name of that wondrous crystal, nor how it had been made or mined.
The speaking-tubes were another marvel: slim copper pipes wrapped in leather, snaking between decks and compartments from stem to stern. They were not much good in foul weather, and useless in a fight, when the cannon deafened everyone. But on calm days the captain could address the officer at the helm without rising from his desk, or call for tea without leaving the quarterdeck.
Stranger sights abounded on the lower decks. Peytr showed them a gunport near the bows where a white, curved object the length of Pazel's forearm lay embedded in the wood. The boys gasped when they realized they were looking at a tooth. 'Fang of a sea-serpent,' Dastu told them. 'Killed four hundred years ago by the gunners at this very window. They sealed a crack in the hull with it, as you can see: good luck, that, or so they hoped.'
'And that's not the scariest thing on this ship,' said Peytr.
'No, brother, it ain't,' said Dastu quickly. 'But some things we'll not discuss today.'
Of course, not naming such 'things' left the tarboys more curious than ever, and soon the rumors began. Curses; creatures in the hold; weird rites among the sailors; tarboys pickled in barrels of brine: by evening Pazel had heard them all. 'There's a beam in the afterhold,' a freckled boy named Durbee whispered to him, 'with the names of all them what's been killed aboard since the day she launched. And even though each name's the size of a grain of rice the list stretches thirteen yards.'
'Then there's the vanishing compartments,' said the one called Swift. 'If you ever see a door or a hatch where none should be-don't open it! Horrible things in those chambers-and one of 'em never lets you leave again if the door shuts behind you.'
'And s-s-s-somewhere,' put in Reyast, a kind-faced new boy whose lips quivered with his perpetual stutter, 'there's a t-t-talking floorboard. It g-g-groans in the voice of a c-c-c-captain who went m-ma-maaa-'
'Nonsense, Reyast!' said Dastu, overhearing. 'Rose is the only captain you should be thinking about. Fear him, if you must fear somebody, and stay out of his path. Now come along, all of you! Get those hammocks up!'
They had only just been assigned their hammocks-patched and moth-eaten, the sailors' rejects-and were scrambling to claim hanging-spots on the berth deck. The older boys showed them how to sling the hammocks from the great ceiling posts called stanchions, and how to climb the post-pegs of a lower hammock up to one's own without knocking them free and sending one's neighbor crashing down. The hammocks were hung three deep: Pazel found himself on a middle level, with Neeps above him and Reyast below.
'Footlockers to starboard,' Peytr had told them, toeing a heavy box. 'Lashed tight against the bulkhead except in port and between shifts. Three boys to a box. There's fresh shirts and breeches for you, but don't you touch 'em till you've been scrubbed proper-deverminated, as we say, made pretty for the home port. Like as not Mr. Fiffengurt will burn your old rags in the furnace.'
At lunchtime, the new boys had to wait on the hundred sailors of the Third Watch, who gobbled their food and grog with enormous pleasure and shouted for more as the boys rushed up and down the stairs from the galley in a nonstop panic. Howling with laughter, the sailors teased them, saying that Captain Rose would make them run with a cannonball under each arm if they didn't step lively.
'And don't let yer fleas get into me sub-stunnance!'
'He he he! And some Ulluprid rum while you're at it, duckies!'
'Or better yet one o' them Ulluprid girlies. Can ye cook that up?'
As their own midday meal (beef hash with carrots and yams, this time) was ending, Fiffengurt appeared with a tattered sealskin logbook and a blue quill. He cleared a space on the table and addressed each new boy in turn.
