The Shipwright and the Shroudweaver
Chapter 1
first light
dawn
water moving onto water
Shipwright’s hands.
Coarse, heavy things.
Fit for spars and oars and swallowing skies.
Shroudweaver’s hands.
Thin things, light-boned as a bird.
Fit for cerements, the twisting and weaving of linen, brief touches on shoulder blades.
Both bent to their tasks with quiet focus. Each living in the hush of their own heads, the ship pitching and bucking in a ceaseless swell.
The ocean rocks the wet timber like a wolf at the door, seeking gaps and weaknesses.
The Shipwright feels it under her as she stands on the deck, feels it run up her legs, a slow rhythmic push in her muscles.
A gentle, hungry flexing. The first whispers of a challenge.
She drives and hammers pegs, splits wood, retwists twine with raw fingers.
She’s quiet as she works, letting the sea fill the spaces in her mind.
Above, clouds ravel like skeins of old wool, spitting the first few drops of new rain.
She raises her head, sticks out a dry tongue and catches the cool water.
The ship rocks, the sea waits, the crew watch, callow and listless.
She splits wood, strings sail, slops tar in silence.
The Shroudweaver stands below decks, a slip of a man, his body built from forgotten pieces and then trimmed by a life in lightless places, by years spent in the hollow of other lives, gently shaping and weaving and sending forth.
He feels the sea against the hull, sees its slow salting into the barnacle gaps, hears its dripped-out irregular rhythms, feels its predator sway.
He works efficiently, binding and parcelling, making swift stitches and careful knots to hold what remains of the spirit within the body under his fingers.
Much of it is likely lost already; the man has come to him late in the day.
A lesser worker would have given up long ago, but Shroudweaver is practiced and stubborn and knows the ways to carve a god from a man.
Heavy boots sound on the stairs down, the hatch thumps, and Shipwright joins him, broad-shouldered in the drip-down light.
‘This war’s too fucking hungry,’ she says, and the curl in her lip stretches the scars on her face as she glances down at the corpse.
He’s a light thing, slim, roughly hewn. Ribbon threading his fingers, neat red stitching on his eyes and lips strangely out of place on a face that looks fresh off a mason’s block.
‘Did he come in on West Tide?’ she asks.
He doesn’t look like a West Tide boy. Too raw-boned – skin clear of ash – his teeth still straight and proud in his head.
Shroudweaver purses his lips, shakes his head, slowly darns and stitches. ‘I don’t think so. He floated in at dawn with a few others. Kisser’s been hunting again.’
The needle moves, silver swift.
‘Too emptied. I couldn’t do anything for them.’
If there’s a frown there, it fades like breath on a mirror. She claps him on the shoulder. ‘I’m going to take a look topside.’
The deck greets her listlessly. What remains of the crew tend their tasks with quiet persistence. This close to land, even the great ships are vulnerable. She reaches the rail in measured strides and scans the shoreline with a spyglass.
Despite the distance, as the shingle gives way to scree and scrub, she can see that they’ve hung up gallowswatchers – limp-fleshed, their stretched necks craning ceaselessly, the hollows of their sockets filled with a bright hungry light.
Dead men dancing a salt-jig, as their eyes comb the coastal paths.
No one is making it out of the port of Astic tonight, not without attracting their stares.
It’s not worth running the gauntlet to get out to open sea.
The ship is dubious shelter at best, despite her efforts. She shifts her wide hips uneasily, plants her feet more securely against the shuck and roll. She’s done what she can, Shroudweaver too.
The rig spirits are tightened, lashed steadily to spinning copper bearings which whine gently in the stiffening wind. Whether it’ll be enough – that’s another question. This voyage has been long, sucking life from the spinners like meat from a bone.
On the grey coast, the port spits out a flock of questing crows. They wheel drunkenly.
Magic is being worked ashore. She can taste it on her tongue, bitter as burnt sugar. Staying here is a fool’s game.
There’s only one thing for it. Shipwright fills lungs built from bellows-brass and gives the order.
‘Raise sails!’
Shroudweaver hears the shout thunder above decks, watches the corpse’s fingers stiffen.
Even in death, a sailor wants to sail. He leans low over the dead man’s cool skull and rubs saltpetre into its temples.
A little touch of the soil to soothe the spirit.
His long fingers move with exaggerated care, his thin heart flutters like a bird in a paper cage.
The raising of gods is a dicey business.
Decades he’s been doing it now, with a catch in his throat every time.
He still hears his teacher’s voice in his head.
Red thread for binding. Holding the scraps of the soul in the body long enough for him to push them together into something new.
Old notes reused for a new song. Stale air slipped into fresh lungs.
Above, the gunshot snap of canvas as the sails unfurl. The cries of the crew given sudden life. More distantly he senses the hot toffee taste of magic, a flash of crow wings, and stifles a frantic fear of being torn asunder.
Shroudweaver finishes his preparations and, inside the body of the dead man, a small god begins to sing.
A halting thing, at first, for the god is fragile and unreal.
Stitched from scraps of spirit and nested in a dead man’s chest. Yet it sings as it grows, its fledgling body stretching through meat and muscle. Filling dead flesh with golden light.
The song filters up through straining timbers and curls around Shipwright like a cat. The crew’s backs straighten and the sails fill with a wind hung with spices.
The ship is brightest in motion. Shipwright’s face is split by a broad grin and she throws back her whipcord arms to greet the freshening wind. Shroudweaver appears by her shoulder, his thin grey hair spidering in the breeze. She drops the grin on him, broad white teeth and sharp eyes.
‘Nice work,’ she says.
He shrugs diffidently. ‘I had good materials.’
The ship kisses the ocean, the tops of the waves a brief press against her surging bow.
‘We couldn’t move like this without you.’
Another shrug. ‘You couldn’t move like this without the god.’
She cuffs him around the head. ‘And who makes the gods?’
This time, with the shrug, a sly smile.