Them what
sails away in ships is taking a silly risk. Them what gets sailed away against
their will, wage-slaves and that, well, tough. Sailing away is just one of them
things. You get drowned, you get whipped and ordered, you get hacked about
something awful – you name it. In short, sailing sucks. That’s my view at any
rate.
(Codbiller
Boggardeem, Fixed Plant Operator – Oars, The Battleship Kincazion)
The Battlehip Kincazion’s rowing deck churned and roared like the
stomach of a drunken trooping sergeant.
Nobody would ever find out who had ordered the ship to full attack speed. If it
was one of the fraternity of admirals, that huge but inane bunch of bed
bouncers who lived around the quarterdeck, then he certainly never admitted to
the extraordinary gaffe.
“Row for the Lord,” screamed the whip marshals. “Spit
your lips off! You – Nub that strank!”
Skiff, a rather short but supremely muscular youth, took little notice of the
marshals as they flung the cords of their urgency flails. He had a specialist
position, high up on the ship’s huge grey-green rowing muscles, giant organs
the size of houses. There he tended the little twists and cramps that the
tendons and muscle fibres developed. Skiff had a way with muscles that gave him
a privileged position among the rowing staff. He had a similar advanced ability
with the management of human flesh and many a young girl in the maze of cages
amidships knew all about that.
“Do you think we’ve set off chasing a rum tanker?”
Skiff bellowed to his friend Tokale.
When Skiff
was a boy, Tokale, a neat, smallish, dark-haired man with reddish skin, a good
bit older than him, had often told stories of how battleships love to chase
rum tankers. Unlike Skiff, who had grown up on the Battleship Kincazion, Tokale
had fallen prisoner to the battleship after a hostile takeover of a
knowledge-trading galleon and had got pressed into the crew. But before that,
he’d been around the world and seen things.
Tokale shouted something and grinned, but his words
disappeared into the livid fury of shouting wage slaves, groaning oar muscles
and the crash of the ocean on the hull.
Skiff had gone to free up a twitching nerve on the
bicep of Primary Oar No. 87. Way below him, the rest of the forward portside
rowing department’s crew – all eight thousand of them – infested the vast
caverns of the rowing deck like so many lice on a rotting sea elk. Wage slaves
in all varieties of colour-coded overalls seethed over every available surface
of the vast organic machinery that filled that comfortless space. They clambered
over and hosed and scrubbed the rowing muscles as they bulged their slow dances
of power. They waded through the sloppy marshes of sap that had its birth in
waterfalls tumbling off the sides of the muscles and out of the oar’s armpits.
Urged
on by the voices of the various categories of officers and petty officers –
hideously painful men – the crew did their stuff. Oar operatives by their
thousands, sap reticulation squads and musicians, (although they tended to keep
out of sight in the rhythm pods), muscle facilitators and massage gangs too.
Then again, the huge rib lineament women – Skiff loved to watch THEM. Tokale
had often remarked that a single one of their huge dimpled thighs would feed a
cabin full of battle-ready bosuns for a lunar month.
Above
Skiff, dimly seen in the light of colonies of glowing blue-worms and the
flickering oilbush fires, dull yellow tendon hawsers, thicker than the hulls of
longboats, stretched and slackened below the deep-red rib structures
themselves. The rank smell of sap mixed improbably with the sweet fragrance of
oilbush smoke and, for the crew, the certain knowledge of fish porridge for
dinner yet again stretched away, oar muscle after oar muscle, into a dim blue
mist of lost hope.
Tokale
had worked his way over to where Skiff watched the scene, pretending to prod at
a sap lachrimus to cover his movement. “No Skiffy,” his old friend shouted.
“It’s not a Rum Tanker. Look at that haze. What does that mean? Something
bigger than a tanker.”
Skiff followed the line of Tokale’s hand and saw it
for the first time, a faint reddish mist swirling in confused eddies in and out
of the primary and secondary oar muscles, forming a diffuse layer above him.
“Hormone?”
“Unless I’m some sort of an eel slicer, that is
hormone, lad. Our big friend Kincazion’s getting very excited indeed over
something.”
An urgency supervisor ran past where they worked at
their muscle, whirling his scourge and screaming lunacy. They stopped talking
for a moment to avoid his attention and Skiff, sensing an axon fibre in the
muscle going into spasm, prodded down with his hand and elbow to free it. At
the same time the implications of Tokale’s remark hit home.
“Kincazion’s going to war?”
Even as he spoke, Skiff felt the ship suddenly heel
over to starboard. “He’s setting his sails, Toke. Why does he need to, with his
oars working?” He could imagine the scene above decks, as the ship flung out
tens of thousands of sails from his mast forests, like so many shoals of sipper
herring darting away from a shark. He had seldom been out of the rowing deck.
In fact he had only ever seen the mast forests towering up into the cloud as a
kid, when the charity workers had taken him to an opera house on the main deck.
He had never forgotten that huge sight though. How could he?
Skiff got up and darted to the end of the muscle,
hoping to get a view out of the embrasure where the oar penetrated the side of
the hull.
Tokale had
run along the cusp of the bicep too and they reached the embrasure together to
peer though, as it opened and closed with its juicy sucking noise. They
arrived just in time to see two
topmast men fall past the opening, their bodies twisting and jerking in the way
men do when suddenly flung to an early death.
“Silly
buggers,” Tokale laughed from behind him. “Should have sensed that something
was up.”
Skiff
suddenly felt that he too might fall off the muscle as the ship’s increasing
speed changed the motion from a smooth surge to a frantic heaving and
buffeting. He clung to the side of the embrasure, peering out, awestruck to see
the white foamy chaos of the great ocean rollers shattered by the blunt
arrogance of the battleship’s progress.
Then,
as a blast of squally wind threw Kincazion off his course, the two men saw the
vast building for the first time.
“What
is it?" Skiff said, his voice reduced to a hiss by the majesty of the
sight. “A football stadium? A mason’s castle? It’s huge.”
“That’s
not a male, Skiffy my naïve friend. That building is female, boyo. Can’t you
tell the difference between male and female yet?”
“But
it’s so big.”
Briefly a vast, fully mature cathedral
had filled the whole of the view through the embrasure. Soft yellowy-greenish
light simmered through the substance of her towering flying buttresses and
flowed in rivers up to the base of her spires, which disappeared upwards into
the evening cloud as if determined to pierce right through the sky itself.
Flashes of warm evening light reflected off the planes of her walls and
ramparts, picking out the palaces and monasteries of the gloriously female
building. Higher up, the tree forests that covered her roof zone showed just
below the cloud line.
“How does she float?" Skiff
breathed. “She’s enormous.”
“She’s
built on a volcanic atoll, my son,” Tokale said laughing.
“Tokey, if that’s a female, then Kincazion’s going in
for a boarding action. You think so?”
Watching the splendid vision of the cathedral
disappear as the ship regained his course, neither of them saw the whip marshal
approach. The scourge slit a rent in the arm of Tokale’s overalls before it
landed twice on Skiff’s broad back in quick succession.
“Back to your duties, you pair of gally-arsed bug
lunchers,” the supervisory expert’s scalding voice screamed. His arm worked at
the whip strokes as his eyes gouged venom out of the pits of blasphemy itself.
Skiff realised that the man, at the best of times a creature with scorpions in
his brain, had now become crazed by the hormone and beyond all reason.
He leapt back to his position, the pain slamming from
one side of his nervous system to the other. “I’d do a lot to scratch the deck
with that shit’s brain.” Skiff hissed.
Somehow though, his hatred for the supervisor took
second place to his increasing sense of urgency as the hormone squirted out of
the battleship’s glands and into his own emotional circuits
Tokale had often said that he had
never seen a muscle facilitator with half Skiff’s ability. “You work the nerves
of those muscles with the skill of a cutlass master,” he had told him many a
time. “You comprehend the nerve and all that makes it work, my lad. No wonder
you have a way with women that most men would kill for. You must play their
pleasure centres like a prodigy plays his drabalon flute.”
Fired up to
battle pitch, Skiff lay face down on the gargantuan muscle, massaging and
prodding the hot and groaning fibres of the oar’s bicep, aiming to produce a
superload of power, a performance beyond imagination,
“Who in the name of Berremoth and
Karrador are those
joes,” he shouted after some minutes. Below him, he had seen a curious convoy of
rat-drawn wagons and fighting chariots splashing through the sap marshes.
Squadron after squadron of spider cavalry rode to either side, brutally cutting
down wage slave and petty officer alike if they got in the way. The riders,
splendid in scarlet and yellow and with blue and green banners on their pikes,
seemed every bit as taken by the mood of lunatic urgency as the rowing crews.
“They’re
the elite, my young friend. The jjoint venture consultants and merger executives.
Very sought after folk in a landing or a boarding action with a female. Venture
capital brokers too, with their own escort by the look of things. They don’t
lack for coin.”
“What
are they doing on the rowing deck then?”
“Taking
a short cut to the front of the queue, son. They know their way about if anyone
does. The main decks will be packed by seaman now waiting for the boarding
ramps to be raised.”
A huge idea
blossomed up in Skiff’s mind, arriving there as unexpectedly as a
naked trapeze artist plummeting down into the middle of a high court
proceedings. “Tokey,” he said,
his voice filled with the misplaced insanity of youthful self-confidence. “Why
don’t we cut loose and go ashore to seek our fortunes? To escape all this? We’d have
plenty of fun and wealth beyond measure.”
“That,
my lad, is heresy. Only the powerful go, each warlord or admiral supported by
whole armies of fighting men. Big groups, of regimental strength at least, if
not divisional. We haven’t a chance of ever making it. It’s a matter of class,
lad.”
Skiff watched as the rowing supervisors and middle
managers lost even the most superficial sense of self control in their efforts
to drive the rowing operators to greater effort. At the same time, the various
species of wild life that inhabited the sap swamps, shrieked and stampeded
around their homelands, utterly out of their minds.
Somehow Skiff had never felt more alive.