Chapter 21
As Mance promised, we reach Kielstraat during the night.
I can feel it as soon as I open my eyes, before I even leave my cabin—that we’re docked.
The ship is quiet, absent the usual distant bellow of the wind in the sails.
Unease fills me even before I remember last night. Silas’s cabin. The finfolk tailing us.
Quiet so as to not wake Kit, I get up and dress in sailor clothes, pluck a few stray scales before splashing water on my face, pulling on my gloves, and rolling up my bedroll.
When I finally ducked into my cabin last night, Lydia and Kit were asleep already, crammed in the bunk as usual.
But Lydia’s not here now; Kit snores softly, having taken advantage of the extra space by throwing his skinny limbs in all directions.
As I step into a cold gray morning, there’s a bad smell in the air, greasy, rancid smoke like bad meat burning.
The deck is empty of people, and above me the sails are furled, tied up against the rigging.
Half the sky is a pallid blue, but half of it is stained dark with a column of smoke.
Under the smoke is land. Kielstraat. We’ve finally made it.
My breath catches as I drift to the prow to see.
It’s a bleak land, like an icebound desert.
Not soft with green forests and rolling hills like Kirkrell, nor beautiful in its wildness like Nunaqvik.
The low, rocky peaks I saw from the sea earlier thrust up in the distance; between here and there is a featureless stretch of scrubby brown earth, unbroken but for the buildings: two warehouses, marked by chimneys belching smoke and great furnaces out front, surrounded by low-slung shanties that look like they’re cowering against the harsh landscape.
In the center of it all, the foundation for a half-finished fort rises up, its raw beams thrusting from the highest point in the settlement.
But if the buildings are unimpressive, the smoke seems to be the way we truly assert our dominance over the land. It rises black and startling from the buildings, from lookout fires out in the hills, and, most of all, from the cutting-in taking place in front of me.
A spit of rocky land extends out from the mainland, maybe sixty yards long and twenty wide, creating a natural harbor.
Docks have been built outward from it, all leading to a wide, sloped beach of gray and black stones.
There, the whale we killed yesterday hangs suspended between four wooden cranes as crew swarm around it, cutting off slabs of blubber and pitching them into the sizzling try-pots.
The creature that was so fearsome and graceful in the water is grotesque out of it.
Its jaw gapes open, the tail that shattered our boat so easily drooping limply.
Chains indent its fleshy sides. Blood and offal trickle down the beach to be lapped up by the tide.
My fingers dig into the railing, so tight my freshly scale-plucked skin smarts in protest. Nausea turns my stomach as I search the faces of the crew for Lydia or Silas or August.
But I can’t make out details of faces, obscured with blood and smoke.
Some crew work on the carcass with pitchforks and spades, pulling strips of blubber and slinging them onto long tables that have been set up along the beach.
More stand at the tables, chopping the blubber into thin pieces before scraping it into the great metal try-pots from which the foul smoke bellows.
I find myself walking down the gangplank to the docks without really wanting to.
Two other, smaller ships are docked here alongside the Heralder—a weathered schooner and a nimble-looking sloop.
We’re not the first people to arrive at Kielstraat; there’s a crew from Kirkrell that we sent out months ago to start building, plus hired crews from Solheim and Nunaqvik.
Besides the two ships, maybe ten whaleboats rest on the docks, covered in oilcloth.
Mance said that often whales appear close enough to the shore here that the men can simply row out from the beach and collect them.
As I glance over at the various boats, I see something pass beneath them—a sharp gray fin rising out of the water.
Again fear swoops in my stomach and I place my feet very carefully until I’m on the beach.The smell is a physical assault; the smoke blocks out the morning light so that it feels like walking up the beach is entering a dark labyrinth.
Men and a handful of women work all around.
I’m pretty sure it’s a mix of Heralder crew and the work crews who preceded our arrival here, but everyone is so covered with soot and blood that I can’t make out anyone’s faces, just flashes of eyes and teeth.
They speak little—if they did, it would be swallowed up in the creak of the burdened cranes and the thud of metal in flesh and the hiss of the try-pots as stoked fires beneath render the solid whale blubber into shimmering liquid oil.
No one pays me any mind as I scuttle through.
I recognize Lydia by silhouette more than anything else, the smallest person here.
She’s at one of the long tables, back to me, straining to cut through a thick slab of grayish-white blubber with a long flensing blade.
Walking up behind her, I call her name, but she doesn’t respond, doesn’t hear me, just keeps raising and bringing down the blade with mechanical determination.
She jumps when I touch her shoulder, and when she turns, her face is pale beneath streaks of grime.
“Annie,” she says. “I didn’t know it would be like this. This is … this is…”
“I know,” I reply after she trails off. I know what she means.
This is awful. This is barbaric. This is wrong.
Right now, choked by the smoke and the smell of gore, it’s hard to remember why I ever thought whaling could be right.
A man looks over from the other side of the table with a sooty grin. I recognize Mance by his teeth and gravelly voice. “Here for a shift, Lady Fairfax?”
I swallow, trying to steel myself, and pull Lydia to the side so I can take her place. “Yes,” I say, projecting my voice to be heard. “Here to relieve my sister.”
We killed this whale. I should see the process through to the end.
“Go look after Kit,” I tell Lydia, expecting her to argue. But she doesn’t. Just stands there, shell-shocked, for a moment before turning and trudging off. A few yards away, she pauses, bends over, and is sick on the beach before straightening and continuing calmly on her way back to the ship.
Maker. What was I thinking, bringing her into this?
Mance, his clothes dripping and reeking with oil, pays it no mind.
He puts a cutting spade in my hand and shows me how to use it.
It’s a metal oval with a sharp bottom edge and handles at both ends; I am to grip the handles and use it to saw through the slab of blubber.
Mance demonstrates, easily cutting off a thin slab, which another man scrapes from the table and dumps into the nearest try-pot.
A sizzle and a tongue of flame and a belch of smoke, and it starts melting along with the rest, one step closer to being filtered, bottled, and sold.
I take the spade and bring it down on the blubber. It isn’t soft like I expect; it’s tough as gristle. It takes all my strength just to work the blade down a couple of inches. Mance’s mouth curls with vindicated amusement as he watches me struggle.
“Thin sheaves, so they melt clean in the pots,” he tells me cheerily. “Thin as the pages of your holy book.”
Nothing about this is holy, I think but don’t say. As I work, eventually I start to recognize some of the others around me, more by their shapes and the way they move than by their faces.
Silas is beneath the whale, cloaked in its shadow.
Working alongside the Heralder men to peel long strips of blubber from the carcass, which they slowly rotate, like peeling the rind from an orange.
They were screaming for his blood just days ago, but seem happy enough to accept him back into their midst now that there’s work to be done.
Time passes slowly. Shifts change. Some of the crew cycle out and go up the beach to Kielstraat; others come in.
Never Silas, who stays and stays. I try not to look at him, but as the motion with the cutting spade becomes rote, my eyes keep dragging back up.
Hooked blade in hand, he moves like a machine, spearing flesh then pulling, pulling, his natural grace giving way to brutal efficiency.
I might as well not have bothered with the washing-up in his cabin. His face, like everyone else’s, is hidden beneath a coat of grime. If he knows I’m here, he doesn’t acknowledge it, which stings more than it should.
I’m not naive; I know what happened last night—the fishnet woven of heat and unspoken questions, one Silas and I were both caught in, contracting and pulling us closer together.
I know what lust is. It’s alarming to be feeling it for someone other than August. And of all the people in this wide blue world, for Silas Price.
Scavenger. Finfolk. Enemy—at least, he should be.
But I know, too, it doesn’t have to mean anything. Maybe I can’t control what I feel, but I can control my actions. I am still promised to August.
It’s like my guilty thoughts conjure him, a flash of red-gold among the smoke and the filth. August materializes out of the smoke from the east, coming from inland. He scans the crowd and finds me easily—even now, I think bitterly, I still stick out from the rest of the crew.
He comes up behind me, reaching over my shoulders to disengage my gloved hands from the cutting spade handles.
They cramp and spasm and come away in the shape of claws, I’ve been at it for so long.
“Maker, Annie,” he says, low in my ear. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. You weren’t on the ship.”
“I’ve been here all morning.” My voice scrapes out, raw from a smoke-seared throat.
I turn to face him as he draws me a few paces up the beach, upwind where the air is clearer.
After hours at the cutting-in, his bare face and clean clothes seem alien, as if I’ve forgotten that to be covered in blood and filth is not humans’ natural state.
He once spoke of marrying me at sea and then ending my life. Now our sea voyage is over, with no proposal. Maybe he never meant what he said to Silas back then, or maybe he just never found the right moment.
His expression is gently curious as he looks me over, making my skin prick with shame.
Even though at some point I was supplied a heavy canvas apron that I left behind on the table, my clothes, my hair, my skin are still sticky with blood and smelling of rancid smoke.
My stomach churns and my hands shake. August takes them and draws them to his chest, not seeming to mind about the grease and blood.
“You don’t have to do this,” he says gently. “Let me show you where you’ll be staying.”
His hands massage mine softly, tugging my fingers from their clenched pose.
But all I can think about is Silas. Silas last night in his cabin, the shadows his eyelashes cast over his cheeks.
Silas plunging the lance down into the whale, Silas with curse-blank eyes and bloody lips. Lucky thing the wind returned.
“I’m head of the company,” I say. “I should understand what it means to be a whaler, every part of it.”
It hurts to say out loud. My memories of Papa and the reality of all this gore and violence and greed couldn’t be more divergent. But it’s true all the same.
A strange mix of emotions plays over August’s face like light and shadow through dappled leaves, mirroring my own complicated feelings. “And now you do.” His voice is lullaby-soft. “But as the head of the company, you have a higher responsibility here. Come away, Annie.”
Though I desperately want to do just that, beg off the rest of the cutting-in and wash until my skin is raw, something makes me straighten my spine and lift my chin.
I don’t want the crews to see me walking away.
No—the truth is, I don’t want Silas to see me walking away.
Even now the skin on the back of my neck prickles, and I know if I turned around, I would find storm-cloud eyes on mine.
But August’s words also remind me of the resolution I made last night after he kissed me on the capstan. It’s increasingly hard to imagine any kind of future with August anymore, but I promised to tell him the truth when we reached Kielstraat. Here we are.
And so I let August lead me up the beach, dread gathering in my chest.