No Present Like Time

stank of sweat, damp linen and the brown-sugar smell of cheap beet rum; a bowl full of laurel leaves intended as air freshener just added its own scent to the reek. Five porthole shutters on each wall were bolted shut.

“Don’t disturb them,” I whispered. “Let’s go down a level.” I tried to move, and couldn’t. Wrenn was standing on my feathers, bending the quills over the edge of the steps.

“Oops, sorry.” He shuffled back. I put a finger to my lips and descended through the second hatchway. This level was pitch dark but the air smelled better, heavy with camphorwood, pine sap, oak sawdust and quality leather. I investigated some kegs stenciled “Grass Isle,” and Wrenn reclined on a pile of sacks of dried beans and rice, swinging his lantern about. The deck was packed floor to ceiling with well-stowed sacks and oil flasks, as far as the light could reach. “We’re under the waterline here,” he said.

“Don’t.” I shuddered, thinking how the sea’s pressure might cave in the hull, squashing it like an eggshell.

“Mist says this is the orlop deck, for stores and dunnage. The hold’s below us; that’s the lowest level.”

“What the fuck is dunnage?”

Wrenn shrugged. I levered a lid plank off the nearest cask. “Wine, Wrenn, look at all this wine! Half of Lightning’s cellar must be in here.”

He picked up a chunk of cheese covered in wax paper. “Breakfast!”

“This one’s rum.” I dipped a rationing cup in another barrel.

“I’ve found salted meat, oranges, a barrel of sauerkraut. What’s ‘portable soup’?”

We forced our way between the racks. I climbed on top of the hogsheads and walked along, hunched over, brushing the ceiling, but the deck was so crammed we couldn’t go more than a few meters. Wrenn sat back on the ladder, I leaned on the wooden pump pipe next to it, and we nibbled handfuls of booty-me with chocolate and rum; Wrenn with dried fruit, bread and water.

“There’s another grid,” I said. “Let’s go down again.”

“It’s locked, see?” Wrenn crouched and turned over a padlock.

“I should be able to crack that,” I said, wanting to impress the Swordsman, although I was not sure why. I put a hand to the small of my back, selected one of the smallest secondaries, gripped it and pulled. Flight feathers are very strongly attached so I had to give it a hard wrench to pull it out, teeth gritted because it hurt. It dragged the flesh, just like pulling a fistful of hair. It came out leaving a hollow funnel of skin from which another pinfeather would grow in a couple of months.

The quill was old and did not bleed. I flattened its translucent-cream point, and jiggled it about in the lock, turning clockwise and pressing hard to poke the tumblers around. I remarked, “People say I had a misspent youth, but no other Messenger has so many useful talents to place at the Emperor’s service.”

I felt the mechanism give in the lock; it clicked open and we hefted the hatchway cover. Wrenn stepped down first with his guttering lantern. “Check it out, it follows the shape of the hull.”

The hold’s walls curved up on both sides, like being in a wooden bowl. The ship’s ribs were clearly visible. The ceiling was two meters above and I could stand up straight for the first time. Melowne’s side-to-side rolling was not so obvious here; we were standing directly above the keel and the ship felt stable. More equipment had been carefully stowed between the ribs and lashed to each of the knees supporting the deck above.

The timbers for the pinnaces had instructions printed on them like model kits. There was an enormous amount of folded canvas and all sorts of tackle. There were metal buckets full of solid tar like warm black ice, chains, cord on reels, copper nails and many times the ship’s length in coiled hemp cables.

“This is all spare rigging,” Wrenn said, as he kicked the shaft of an anchor twice my height and as thick as my thigh. He clicked a latch on a long oilskin-lined casket. He let the lid fall. “Oh, my god.”

“What’s that?”

“Arrows. Look!” About one hundred arrows with very sharp broadhead points filled the box, laid in leather spacers to keep their flights apart. Wrenn dug his fingers between them and they rattled. I looked up and realized I was staring at a wall of similar boxes. Wordlessly, we counted them and made a quick calculation, “Ten thousand arrows?”

“At least.”

“If there’s shafts there must be-”

“Bow staves,” I said, breaking the seal on a larger coffer. It was full of heavy longbows, all with fresh strings and the bowyer’s mark stamped two-thirds along their length where the arrow was intended to be placed. “A couple of hundred bows, one for every man on the ship.”

“Look, there are halberds,” said Wrenn. “And shields!” They were stacked along the hull walls, covered with sailcloth. He unbuckled the straps of a huge sea chest with joyful abandon. “I wonder if there are any swords? Oh, yes, look!”

The chest was full of fyrd-issue swords with double-edged blades and brown mass-produced leather scabbards. Their pristine hilts flashed in the light as he swept the lantern over. “I’d like to test one. Here we are-”

“Put it back! Wrenn, the grid was locked for a reason! Mist doesn’t want us to know what’s down here!”

But Wrenn, happily ignorant of Mist’s cruel streak, was not afraid of her. He selected a seventy-five-centimeter blade and stuck it in his belt.

“By god, what does Mist expect us to do to Tris?” I said.

“Maybe the islanders are fierce.”

“Don’t be a fool. Mist said Tris has no Insects; they’ve nothing to be violent about.”

We went forward, seeing more of the same; the Melowne’s hold was a ship’s chandlery and well-stocked armory. I hesitated. “Can you smell something?”

“What?”

A sharp metallic scent like spilled blood or cut leaves lay very faint beneath the hot greased-iron smell of Wrenn’s lantern. “Nothing. Forget it.”

At the bow a huge black tarpaulin hung floor to ceiling like a curtain. A skittering sound came from behind it, as of something metal not made fast. Wrenn took a handful and swept it aside.

A massive Insect launched itself at us.

I ducked. Wrenn yelled. The Insect crashed into the bars of its cage and drew back on six legs. Its antennae whipped around in frantic circles.

Its back legs slipped on the steel floor, scraping bright scratches. Its mandibles opened, a smaller set gaped inside and it jumped again, into the bars. An enormous knife-sharp foreleg stabbed out at us. It clicked and snapped; the bars boomed as it hurled itself against them. Wrenn went for his sword and dropped the lantern. Suddenly we were in total darkness with the red spots of the flare-out dancing before our eyes.

Wrenn and I thought the same thing at the same time. We bent down and pawed frantically around on the floor for the lantern, but we only felt each other’s hands.

“Where’s the-Ow! Damn it!” I burned my fingers on the hot oil leaking out. I stood back, seething with frustration as Wrenn picked it up. “Is it broken?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure? There’s all that bloody rum up there!”

“There’s a sodding great Insect right here!”

Wrenn struck a match and his shaking hand rattled inside the lantern as he lit it.

I shouted, “For fuck’s sake! Give me it, you daft fucking featherweight!”

He hauled his new sword from its scabbard; with the blade balanced in his hand his composure returned.

The Insect raked the bars with its foreclaws. It chewed them, mandibles clicking like shears. Strands of drool hung down and wrapped around its feet; glutinous bubbles stuck to the floor. The Insect rubbed its back pair of legs together; it turned around and around furiously in its four-meter-deep cage. Its body hung from long legs jointed above like a spider’s. It was one of the biggest Insects I had seen, the size and strength of a warhorse; it battered the bars in absolute desperation to reach us.

It tilted its head and tried to push through, but the bulbous brassy eyes wouldn’t fit. It pressed against the bars until its stippled thorax creaked, reached out its mandibles and gnashed. The mottled brown jaws met and overbit; they were the length and shape of scythe blades, chitin-hard and so powerful they could bite a body in two. A foreclaw swept the air. Wrenn and I backed off. He said, “What’s it doing here?”

“I don’t know. I mean to find out.”