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10: A Shift of Ballast

 
For Sailors, oh the murder wind!
For Healers, the Trygulkul flu,
for Sounders, it's a shattered skin,
the bones not tossed, the bones gone rot.
But what's the fearsome, gnawing beast
that feeds upon the men who press
the borders of reality?
It inhales fear and suckles gloom—
the madmen speak to Cantilou.

—Rafer nursery rhyme,
translated by Jersey Saple

Little Tom, naked and brain-numb, was staring at the ceiling of his cabin, entranced by whispy little ganja ghosts dancing across the woodwork. His nose was twitching, as if from some imagined rotten smell. He beckoned to Tym with a lazy roll of the wrist, legs open.

Tym obeyed. She stroked the back of her hand down his inner thigh to signal that she was there, and his penis grew even more upright. In the same motion she worked the broken tosser disk out of her palm, then sucked away the smear of blood, drawn by one of its tines, from the base of her forefinger.

She had meant this to be simple—pound the shard into Little Tom's throat, then escape topside. The younger deserved the death. For the rape he intended. For the slaving. For the communities demolished.

She envisioned the moist plunge into his neck. Hitting bone halfway through. The gurgle. It would be over quickly, and she would be alone then in a slaver's cabin with a warm rack of flesh. Was that enough?

Well, perhaps not. And without further thought she gently took his erect member into her hands, waited for the blissful smile to spill across his vacant face, and pressed the tosser disk's deadly tines into it until they popped out the topside in four little geysers of blood.

Little Tom bolted up to a sitting position, paralyzed by a scream too big for his throat. And that was when the entire ship seemed to explode. The floor fell away from Tym's feet and was suddenly behind her. Mirrors, maps, chart instruments, and drawing leads showered the cabin. Then came the real buster—like an earthquake—when the deep wooden gut of the Lucia burst under the shifting weight of her ballast bars.

Tym was airborne, then pounded against the cabin wall, then sliding down into the splintery rubble. An avalanche of black metal bars poured through the upturned flooring as if it were paper, and Tym watched as the stunned shipmaster was buried up to his chest in ballast.

Just as suddenly as the disaster had struck, the Lucia was silent again, shifting unsteadily now in her irrevocable capsize. The portholes, submerged, burst from the water pressure and twisting of side beams. It was that spray that awakened Tym to action, and she began pulling the heavy bars off of the semiconscious Little Tom. The slaver was bleeding slightly from the nose—probably some internal damage, Tym told herself. She squinted in the stinging sea spray and pulled frantically at the leaden bars, tossing them one at a time over her shoulder.

Little Tom smiled weakly, appreciative of the effort. He lifted a limp left arm in a pathetic attempt to help free himself. His smile faded when he saw what Tym had really been after: the trousers he had flung onto the bunk. When the wirey Rafer unearthed them she tore away the pocket containing his key ring and left the slaver to his fate. The sea was rising within the cabin in angry swirls, a veritable sewer of objects coveted by these Fungus People.

Tym's shoulder began to beat a painful throb from the bashing she had taken, and she stopped knee-deep in the maelstrom to concentrate on shoving that agony aside—cope with it later.

She blinked and cleared her head, then scanned the vertical decking for the rents and gouges that would allow footholds as she clawed her way up to the shattered cabin door. Mmmm. It was possible.

Little Tom moaned and splashed his hand sadly in the rising water. "Waaaait. Unnh. Hey. Wait." And the little Rafer he had tried to rape was gone.

 

In the blackness of the corridor, Tym did not have the patience to allow her eyes to adjust. She scrambled by memory—at the expense of numerous toe stubs and shin raps—down the long row of slave holds.

The wall of shackled humanity was now the floor, turned under her, and she decided the most expedient way to move down the line was to step from the edge of one slot divider to the next. As she passed over each frantic red-legger, Tym attempted encouraging words, but most often they were lost in the collective howl of doomed people. Under their seats, the water duct was shooshing with seawater, probably backing up from the aft drain hole. The slave hold would soon be submerged.

Tym counted her way over fifteen slots until she estimated that she was in the right place. Then she squinted into the blackness below her to see each occupant, sometimes offering a reassuring pat on the shoulder, sometimes having to struggle out of a panicky red-legger's grasp. When she came to an empty hold, she knew it must be her own and, yes, the unconscious Fungus Man, the one with the remarkable skin-painting, was in the next one.

The air seemed flavored with fear now, made worse by the odor of the human waste being backed up the wash gully by the rush of seawater. Tym straddled the slot, and below her the young man lolled, oblivious. She pulled the pocket cloth away from Little Tom's key ring and ran her forefinger across each key until she found one that seemed the right size for the ankle shackles. She thrust it into the slot and turned. No good. The next key was the same size, she tried again and was rewarded with a satisfying steel snap. The ankle cover slid away and she released his other leg with the same key.

The chorus of shouts and whimpers was becoming overwhelming even to Tym's deafened ears. She hopped to the next hold, where she found a middle-aged red-legger, an overweight Rafer whom she did not recognize—a cook, or some other campman, certainly not a swimmer or hunter. She pressed the key into his eager hand.

She cupped her hands over his ear. "Unlock them all," she shouted in the Rafer tongue. "The land people first, then the swimmers, then the scuba breathers." She watched his rolling eyes and wondered if he could act responsibly on the distinction. When he sat forward and unlocked his own cuffs, Tym decided she would have to surrender the matter to him. One person could only do so much.

The unconscious Fungus Person, unaccountably honored with a Rafer skin painting, would be her responsibility. She placed a foot in the rising water on either side of his chest, positioned the base of each of her palms into his armpits and pushed until his back rose against the rough wood that had been the ceiling before the capsize. Tym was breathing heavily now, the air growing thin of oxygen.

She kneeled, placed her shoulder against the stranger's abdomen, and heaved him up. When she was upright, she curled an arm around his right leg, letting the other dangle down her back, and began the awkward stagger, slot divider by slot divider, back toward the dim light of freedom.

 

The Lucia's upturned bow point dipped beneath the choppy sea. It went much quicker than Tym had imagined it would. Suddenly, from her standpoint on the wide beach of Dunkin Island, there was nothing but the broad expanse of furiously shifting water under a depressing gray sky.

Tym was immobile as she watched from the beach, every arm and leg joint screaming with the pain of overexertion. Alternately, she tried to envision the scramble of slaves in the Lucia's hold and she tried to forget. She could do no more. Her head lay on the rising and falling belly of the rescued Fungus Person, her legs lapped by the surge and ebb of the sea. Pictures of the horror flashed into her mind, and she drove them away again.

Surge and ebb. She smiled with satisfaction at her cruel use of the tosser disk; she sobered again at the realization of the tormented deaths happening just now, beyond the reach of her depleted body.

She stared up at the swirl of gray clouds. Again and again she replayed in her mind the scene with Little Tom. The violent capsize, bashing into the wall, the floor exploding and the avalanche of metal ballast bars. Tym pictured herself clawing the bars away, looking for the shackle key. The bars of battered metal she threw aside. And then she remembered the odd detail she had mentally filed away for calmer times: those bars.

She had supposed the ship's ballast would be lead, an extremely heavy and common metal. Naturally. But these tons of metal bars had been tossed about, bashed through decking, in a way that no shipbuilder would imagine in the worst of nightmares. The bars were scarred and twisted and beaten, and underneath their dull black surface paint was the unmistakable glint of gold.

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