Arabella of Mars(33)

There must have been a time when the gravity had fallen away to the point that it was equal to that of Mars. She must have been shoveling coal at that moment, she supposed, and she was sorry to have missed it, because it would have been a moment of familiarity in between the uncomfortable heaviness of Earth and the different discomforts of shipboard floating.

But at the moment, she felt unimaginably distant from any familiar thing, any comfortable place, any person who cared about her.

How she wished she had managed to send a letter to her mother! Though the two of them had often been at odds, she still felt tenderly toward her, and after Arabella’s sudden and unexplained departure—and what story had Beatrice concocted to explain her absence?—Mother must be completely overcome with anxiety. And poor Fanny and Chlo? would be entirely bereft.

Another gust, feeling like a hard shove on the end of her bed, made Arabella’s hammock thrum like a low harpsichord string between the hooks on either end. They’d begun rounding the Horn some hours ago, and since then the ship had been nudged and jerked by capricious winds from every direction. Winds that had been steadily growing in strength.

The Horn, she had learned, was the airmen’s term for the place where the daily-rotating atmosphere of Earth met the yearly-rotating interplanetary atmosphere, the two great masses of air grinding against each other like a pair of millstones. It was a place of constant turbulence, but as Faunt had explained, an experienced crew could make good use of the ever-shifting winds to send the ship rapidly in any desired direction. This pummeling wind was a good thing.

Then a sudden massive jolt hammered the ship, accompanied by a loud protesting groan of wood, and Arabella shrieked aloud.

“Shut yer yap!” cried a nearby airman. Arabella clapped both hands across her mouth, but the sensation of being pushed hard from one side and the creak of stressed timbers went on and on. A low whimper escaped from behind her hands.

Dear Lord, she prayed, preserve me.

With another loud and sudden jerk, the ship slewed upward, then was slammed down. Each motion was accompanied by unexplained creaks, groans, and rattles from every direction. The creaks and groans, she told herself, were nothing more worrisome than the sounds of Marlowe Hall as the ancient house shifted in a strong wind; Diana had made this passage many times and was surely well built for it. As for the rattles, she supposed that a few beans or nails might have slipped from a cask and were now rattling about the hold.

Then the ship jerked again, and Arabella stifled another scream as a large dark rat scuttled along an overhead beam not two feet from her face, its claws rattling on the khoresh-wood. The rat ran nimbly along the beam’s lower surface, apparently untroubled by the lack of gravity.

Arabella squeezed her eyes tight and prayed harder, feeling like a die in a cup being shaken by God in some enormous game of backgammon.

Suddenly the hatch was thrown open, letting in a gust of wind and throwing harsh and shifting light directly into her face. Her eyes blinked open and then squeezed shut against the glare. “Rise and shine, lads!” came the cry, which was greeted by groans from the men. Had it really been four hours? She hadn’t slept a wink.

*

Breakfast was a quick, cold bite of hard ship’s biscuit, but Arabella was glad of it—any thing hot or more substantial would have been dangerous in the constantly shifting ship.

She came out on deck to find the ship embedded in bright, thrashing cloud. All around the tempest roiled, white and gray and black with not a trace of blue, here and there shot with occasional bursts of lightning. The sound of thunder was lost in the constant rush of wind and groan of the ship’s embattled structure.

“Ashby!” came a shout from the quarterdeck. It took Arabella a moment to register the name as her own, and when she finally did she saw it was Kerrigan who had called. He was waving pointedly at her and looking very cross in the harsh and shifting light.

Arabella checked that her safety line was well attached at both ends before working her way hand by hand along the rail to the aft end of the waist. All around her, more experienced airmen leapt from deck to mast to yard with hardly a care; many of them did not even wear safety lines like hers. Some day, she vowed, she’d be as brave as they.

“Yes, sir?” she called from the foot of the ladder when she reached it.

“The captain requests you bring him his tea!”

Tea? In this weather? But “Aye, aye, sir,” was what she said.

She made her way down to the galley, where two of the other waisters were working the bellows that kept the stove alight. For some reason, the lack of weight made the fire go out. “The captain wants his tea,” she told the cook, expecting a snide remark or possibly even a thrashing, but without a word of complaint the cook set to work, squeezing water from a huge skin—apparently made from a whole cowhide—into a stout iron kettle, which he twisted firmly into a fitting atop the stove to keep it from floating away. In minutes the kettle was boiling, the rumbling sound incongruously homely against the rush of wind and moan of timbers.

“Watch out, boys,” the cook said to Arabella and the other two waisters. “This’s hot.” He twisted off the kettle’s lid, then used a pair of wooden paddles to shepherd a seething, roiling glob of boiling water out of the kettle and into a plain white china teapot.

Arabella gaped in astonishment at the floating blob of water. For the cook to manage this dangerous, unpredictable fluid in a state of free descent, in the middle of a turbulent storm, was an amazing performance, and Arabella’s respect for the one-legged old man suddenly grew tenfold.