Tress of the Emerald Sea (The Cosmere)(22)
THE DOUGS
The Crow’s Song was a much larger ship than Tress’s previous one. Oot’s Dream had been a two-masted vessel, similar to what you might call a brigantine. The Crow’s Song was instead a full four-masted vessel, built for speed but with a spacious cargo hold and multiple decks. It was the equivalent of what you’d call a small galleon—and it had a rather large crew for Tress’s world, consisting of sixty people.
I’m not going to ask you to remember them all. Mostly because I don’t remember them all.
Therefore, for ease of both narrative and our collective sanity, I’m going to name only the more important members of the Crow’s Song. The rest, regardless of gender, I’ll call “Doug.”
You’d be surprised how common the name is across worlds. Oh, some spell it “Dug” or “Duhg,” but it’s always around. Regardless of local linguistics, parents eventually start naming their kids Doug. I once spent ten years on a planet where the only sapient life was a group of pancakelike beings that expressed themselves through flatulence. And I kid you not—one was named Doug. Though admittedly it had a very distinctive smell attached when the word was “spoken.”
“Doug” is the naming equivalent to convergent evolution. And once it arrives, it stays. A linguistic Great Filter; a wakeup call. Once a society reaches peak Doug, it’s time for it to go sit in the corner and think about what it has done.
Anyway, there was at least one woman actually named Doug on the Crow’s Song, but I can’t remember which one she was—so for the purposes of this story, they’re all Dougs.
Tress approached one and asked—hesitantly—where the toilet was. The Doug pointed her toward the stairs down, explaining that the “middle deck head” was for low-ranking crew.
With Huck on her shoulder, she began to explore. The ship had four levels. The Dougs called the top one—which was exposed to the sky—the “upper deck.” The “middle deck” contained places like the mess and the armory, and small rooms for officers. The “lower deck” was a cramped place where most of the sailors made their bunks.
Beneath that was the hold, a cavernous space for the copious loot the pirates would surely acquire once they figured out how to stop sinking it all to the bottom of the ocean.
There were several toilet rooms, with working plumbing, thank the moons. She peeked into an unoccupied one and saw a toilet, but no bath. How did the crew bathe? She desperately wished she could, as she kept finding dead spores in the folds of her clothing. It made her skin writhe to think how much of it must have gotten on her.
She did her business in the cramped chamber with only a tiny porthole in the wall for light. Huck politely waited outside without being prompted, proving quite gentlemanly for a rat. Feeling a little better, Tress slipped out and let him hop back onto her shoulder. What did they do with human waste, out here on the ocean? Save it all up for composting on islands? What about on long voyages? Dumping it overboard seemed dangerous, not to mention gross. Dangergross?
On her way back to the upper deck, she heard a voice coming from a room near the head. She lingered, peeking in to see a man behind a counter—the large man with dreadlocks who had hauled her onto the deck. Now, when I say “large,” you might have imagined him as heavyset, or perhaps beefy. He was both, yes, but neither word did justice to Fort, the ship’s quartermaster.
Fort wasn’t large like, “Hey, eat a salad” or even large like, “Hey, do you play sports?” He was large like, “Hey, how did you get through the door?” It wasn’t that he was fat, though he did carry a few extra pounds. More, he looked like a person built using a different scale from the rest of humanity. One could imagine that the Shards, after creating him, had said, “Maybe we went a little far in places,” and decided to cut ten percent off all other humans to conserve resources.
Fort was holding up a ceramic cannonball that was small in his hands. His fingers on both hands were gnarled, either from some old injury or a congenital disease. The condition had to affect his dexterity.
He was with a gangly woman in a vest and trousers, her hair cut very short. Ann (the ship’s carpenter) had a nose like a dart and carried not one, not two, but three pistols strapped to various places on her person.
Fort handed Ann the cannonball, and although it looked light in his grip, the way she hefted it indicated otherwise. Then he picked up what appeared to be a wooden sign with a black front. Maybe two feet across and somewhat less tall.
“You examined each one in the armory?” Ann asked.
Fort glanced at the back of his wooden board and nodded.
“You didn’t find any others that were defective?” Ann asked.
Fort tapped the back of the wooden sign, and words appeared on the front. Not a single one, the sign said. Each one I inspected has a proper fuse, timed to explode before it sinks a ship, so it can be captured and looted.
Ann thumped the ball onto the counter. “Well, if none of the others are defective, we shouldn’t have to worry about sinking someone else by accident.”
Fort again tapped something on the rear of the board using his index knuckle. As he did, the words changed.
I don’t like this, Ann. We were supposed to launch cannonballs that only incapacitated the ship, not sank it. I hate that we ended up killing those people, and I really don’t like how the captain acted afterward. It doesn’t make sense.