Sea. Sarah Driver

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СКАЧАТЬ whispers Ma in my memory. But some days the looking after feels too hard. I send out a silent prayer to the sea-gods, begging them to keep away his shaking fits.

      ‘Din’t Grandma wash your face?’ I ask.

      ‘No.’ He shakes his head. ‘And I don’t care. Don’t like washing.’

      ‘I can smell that much, slackwit. I’ll have to do it then, won’t I?’ A stray moonsprite runs across my knuckles, covering them in silvery moon-dust.

      ‘You lemme be.’ He sighs over his food and rubs his eye with the heel of his hand. ‘Can I swap my arrowhead brooch for Ma’s dragonfly? Just for one day?’

      I shake my head. ‘Not on your life. Remember last time, when you let Ermine borrow it and he tried to feed it to a sea-hawk?’ At my words, a thrill flickers along my nerves, cos tonight I’ll get my own sea-hawk during my Hunter’s Moon celebrations. But the thrill feels like a betrayal of Da.

      Across the room, Stag’s crow thwawks and stretches out its wings, hopping from foot to foot. Stag turns his head slightly and the crow grows still as oak.

      Sparrow sighs, takes a spoonful of stew, then spits it out again and starts pushing his wobbly tooth back and forth with a finger. ‘When’s he coming back—’

      ‘I told you, I don’t know!’ I’m so sick of him asking questions when I’m just trying to get my head clear. Sometimes I wanna live underwater, even if it means being a merwraith, so all I can hear is my own heartbeat and the dolphins and whales calling.

      ‘Well I’ll tell you then. He won’t never be coming back,’ Sparrow whines, like somehow it’s my fault. He pulls off his boots and draws his knees up to his chin. The stink of his feet climbs into my nose. ‘That was his cloak, all right. And it were covered with—’

      I thump the table with a clenched fist. ‘I saw it too, little fool!’ I hiss. ‘A man as strong as our da can live without a sealskin.’

      Sparrow snuffles loudly and swirls his spoon through the stew. I think of the cloak draped over Stag’s arm and bite the inside of my cheek as I push my bowl away.

      ‘Where you going?’ pipes Sparrow.

      ‘Anywhere that ent here,’ I mutter, weaving past folk carrying bowls and flagons. I head above decks, cos I can feel my longbow calling, like she always does when I need to think.

      Sundown’s an hour away when we raise sail for the Wildersea; the great greyness we have to cross to reach the Bay of Thunder, for the Tribe-Meet. The Western Wharves fade behind us in the mist, and the foghorn booms.

      I’m out on the storm-deck, practising my right-handed shooting. Grandma’s black-cloaks keep arrows nocked to their bows as we sail past the closed ports of the Hill-Tribe chieftains, who watch, shields up, from their jagged fortresses.

      Leaving without Da feels every kind of wrong. But I ent gonna doubt him. If he says he’ll come home, then he’ll be here, sooner or later. I keep a tight hold of the carving in my pocket and treasure what Bear said – that it might be a paw print Da left for me.

      My last arrow thrums into the animal-skin target. As I lick the salt from my lips and stoop to gather my fallen arrows, I remember with a jolt that Grandma said to meet her in the lab. My pulse flickers as I race below.

      Grandma’s medsin-lab is marked with a sign saying ‘Leave Me Be!’ but I push open the heavy door and step inside. The stinks of boiled sea-slugs and algae greet me. I’m dwarfed by tall shelves crammed full of brown bottles, with labels written in squid ink. There are vials of wolf-fish blood, for keeping divers’ blood warm, and the dragonfish luminescence Grandma worked on for moons and moons, to make into night-vision eye drops for the night-watchmen. On the wall is a note: ‘A new-birthed oyster ent no bigger than a peppercorn,’ to keep her impatience in check.

      Grandma stands at her table, tipping a blue powder onto measuring scales. Beside her, glass tubes of jewel-bright liquid seethe and bubble. The table’s strewn with chisels, mallets and saws, and stained with dark patches of blood from her amputations and tooth-pullings.

      ‘Young Mouse,’ she says, without turning. ‘Come and help me brew this potion for Sparrow’s shaking fits. Fetch me three sea-slugs, if you please.’ I’d a mind I was being silent. How’d she know I was there?

      I dump my bow and quiver on the floor and turn to the shelf behind me. When I find the right jar I grab a rusty pair of forceps and pick out the scaly green slugs, dropping them onto a square of cloth.

      ‘So why’s this Stag here, then?’ I ask, idly digging the forceps into the flesh of a slug.

      ‘He’s a navigator.’ Grandma looks at me like she’s about to say more but her jaw closes again with a pop.

      ‘Aye, but we don’t need a new navigator; we’ve got you til Da comes back.’ I spot the mortar and pestle, add violet root and start to grind it up for the potion.

      She laughs croakily and turns back to her work, dropping the sea-slugs into a small cauldron, where they burst and sputter. ‘Happens I’ve got too much shrimp on my platter and I could do with the help. Think of that?’ She sets the cauldron over a flame and adds a gooey ball of rotten kelp to the slug-sludge. ‘Fetch the porpoise bladder, dearest.’

      I scuff over to some barrels filled with the odds and ends that Pip can’t find a use for in his kitchens, and haul a big white bladder out of one.

      ‘But why him ? Could’ve had any of the crew be a navigator if you ordered ’em to. Da was training up a few good ’uns, anyway.’ I dump the bladder onto the table. It makes a soft ooooohh sound as the air’s knocked out of it.

      Grandma ladles the cauldron gunge into the neck of the bladder. ‘Ha! Being a captain ent about giving orders.’ She threads a needle and starts to stitch the bladder shut. I add my violet root to a glass tube with a ladleful of elder wine and set it boiling over a flame. ‘A crew’s like the sea herself: full of wild moods. A skilful captain learns to weather stormy seas, but only once she’s learned to weather her crew.’

      I squint up at her.

      ‘Ack, such solemn grey eyes, always finding me out since the day you were born!’ She laughs. ‘Stag was a young member of this crew, moons ago. Any Tribesperson may return after a wandering if the captain judges them to be heart-sore for their true home. Stag is True-Tribe and his skills are much needed here – he is a truly exceptional navigator.’

      ‘He’s a sombre old loon, is what he is. Besmirching our deck with his sneering jowls.’ I use tongs to lift my glass tube from the flame and fix it in a vice to cool.

      Grandma’s mouth twists like she’s trying not to laugh. ‘You ent frighted of him, now, are you, Bones?’

      ‘No, I flaming well ent!’ My face floods with shame. I slam my fist down onto the table as Grandma hoots with laughter. ‘But he can’t be trusted.’

      Grandma stretches across the table for a rag. ‘Time will tell, dearest heart. Shall we gift him a chance to СКАЧАТЬ