Previously at the Inn: nothing yet. This is chapter one, the very start of the story, and the map back to this spot lives on Start the Story Here.
No one remembers getting on the ship.
One breath ago, there had been a warm room full of people. Now there was only midnight, an ocean with no name, and the worst storm it had ever thrown.
Cold first. Cold like a slap. Cold that goes straight through the skin and grabs hold of the bone.
Then the noise. Wind shrieking through the rigging. Timber groaning like something alive and hurt. Thunder close enough to rattle her teeth.
And the dark. Pumpkina couldn’t see ten feet. A lantern swung somewhere, a smear of orange, and was gone.
She was standing on a deck. She had no idea why.
Then the deck tilted. Her feet went out from under her. A hand caught her wrist.
Sway.
“Don’t let go,” Pumpkina said. Her voice came out high and thin. She hated it.
“Wasn’t planning to,” rumbled Sway.
The ship climbed a wave the size of a barn, hung there, and dropped. Pumpkina’s stomach stayed behind. Water poured over the rail and around her ankles, black and freezing, and it stank of tar and salt and something rotten from far below. Her heart slammed against her ribs. Every thought she had was the same thought: where, where, where.
People everywhere. Shapes in the rain. Every one of them bailing. Buckets, boots, helmets, a teapot. Scoop, swing, throw. Scoop, swing, throw.
No one looked at the two strangers in the middle of the deck. No one had time.
A bucket hit Pumpkina in the chest. She caught it out of pure reflex. Somebody yelled “Bail!” So she bailed.
She was terrible at it. Her fingers had gone numb on the handle. She flung a bucketful over the side and the wind flung it straight back into her face. Salt in her eyes. Salt in her mouth. Her apron, the one with the blackberry jam stain, plastered to her legs like a wet flag.
Somebody tall slammed into her shoulder. Everybody was tall, from Pumpkina’s perspective. She staggered. The bucket flew. Sway caught that too.
“Sorry,” said the tall somebody, to nobody, and kept going.
“Where are we?” Pumpkina shouted.
Sway grabbed the nearest sailor by the sleeve. “Friend. Where are we?”
The sailor looked at Sway’s hand like it was a bucket that had failed him. “Bail,” he said, and pulled free.
Another wave broke over the rail and caught them both full in the face. Sway spat, and went very still, the way monks do when they’ve noticed something.
“The sea tastes like tears,” Sway said.
“It’s the sea, Sway.” Pumpkina bailed harder. “It tastes like sea.”
An open hatch yawned beside the mainmast. A little warm light glimmered down there. A row of shapes, swaying gently from the beams.
Hammocks.
Sway looked at them for one long, tender second. Sway had spent sixty years at the Order of the Unceasing Wheel wanting exactly that.
Then Sway picked up a second bucket and moved to stand between Pumpkina and the rail.
Somewhere in the second hour, Pumpkina hiccuped. A beat later, so did the thunder.
Somewhere in the third, she pressed her frozen hands against her apron to warm them, and found the only warm thing on the ship. Something small and round, in her pocket. Warm as a cup somebody had just put down.
She hadn’t put it there. She would have remembered.
She kept a hand over it whenever she could.
Up on the quarterdeck, through the rain, she caught one glimpse of the only dry man on the ship. He stood ramrod straight. Above his head, floating and dead level, hovered a small black umbrella. Not one drop of rain touched him. He checked a pocket watch. He blew a brass whistle. He did not pick up a bucket.
The storm didn’t end all at once. It ran out, slowly, like a sob that had nowhere else to go.
The rain thinned to needles, then to mist. The wind dropped from a scream to a moan to a sulk. Buckets started coming up half empty. Then a quarter. A woman sat down right where she stood and didn’t get up.
A line formed at a hatch. One by one, the crew handed their pails in to a clerk with a soggy ledger, who checked each one off without looking up. Pumpkina handed in hers. For the first time all night, her hands were empty. She closed her fingers around the warm stone in her pocket.
On the quarterdeck, the umbrella folded itself with a neat little snap and tucked itself into the dry man’s breast pocket.
The black sky went pewter. Then faded into pearl. Then, very slowly, gold.
The sun came up over a sea gone flat as a pie plate, and every soul aboard lay down on the deck beside it, steaming gently, too tired to talk. Pumpkina’s teeth were still chattering. Sway’s shoulder was warm against hers.
Then came a chime.
The whole deck sighed. One long sigh, out of every throat at once. The sigh of people who know exactly what comes next.
A crackle. Then a voice, warm as fresh bread, out of a brass loudspeaker horn bolted to the mainmast.
“Gooood morning, crew!”
He stood at a polished little podium marked Announcement Center. Coat buttoned to the chin, every button gleaming. Pocket watch on one chain, brass whistle on another. Hair exactly where he’d put it, each and every follicle. Not one fleck of dandruff, which after a night like that is either discipline or witchcraft.
“What a gorgeous day for doing it right,” he said. “A few reminders. Any bucket not yet returned to the Bucket Office is now considered late. Requests for replacement buckets go through the Form Window, which is open between third bell and slightly after third bell. Morale is mandatory. And remember: if we are all very good today, uniform and tidy and calm, I have every confidence the storm will not come tonight.” He beamed. “Chins up, emotions down! Have a productive day.”
Sway, propped on one elbow, waved. “Morning, Captain!”
Something in the captain’s breast pocket trembled. Probably the umbrella.
“Mister Captain Regulus Proctor,” said the captain, “sir.”
“Mister Captain Regulus Proctor, sir,” said Sway pleasantly.
“Again, please. With feeling.” He paused. Looked at an unmoving Sway. “Actually, without feeling. Thank you.” With that, he turned on one impeccable heel and walked away.
No one asked these two strangers who they were. No one asked how they’d gotten aboard. When Pumpkina asked a deckhand how long he’d been on this ship, he opened his mouth, closed it again, and went off to polish a pipe that was already gleaming.
She noticed the others then. A man standing perfectly still while everyone flowed around him, like a rock in a creek. A woman carrying two full buckets as if they were teacups. Somebody staring up at the empty sky as though it owed her money. Strangers, every one, and not one of them could say when they’d come aboard.
That afternoon Sway came up from below with an empty bottle and the haunted look of someone who had walked past an entire row of hammocks and lain down in none of them.
Pumpkina found a recipe card in her apron, and on the back of it she wrote:
Dear everyone at the Inn. We’re fine. Don’t worry. Back soon. Love, P.
Sway read it over her shoulder, borrowed the pencil, and added one line:
P.S. There are hammocks.
She corked the bottle and threw it as far as she could. It bobbed once, as if waving, and set off on its own.
We’re fine, said the letter.
They were definitely not fine. But that’s what letters are for.
At sundown, right on schedule, the sky turned the color of a plum gone wrong. The first fat drop hit the deck.
Every soul aboard reached for a bucket. Sway reached for two, and handed Pumpkina one.
Up on the quarterdeck, with a small, satisfied snap, the umbrella opened.
Will Sway ever get into one of those hammocks? Does anyone remember getting on this ship? What is the little round something in Pumpkina’s apron pocket, and why is it warm?
And most importantly: what should Sway name the hammock?
Votes close Friday at midnight. The winner arrives with Chapter 2.
Wringing out my socks,
RJ
RJ, I think Sway deserves a hammock named Gerald, though at this rate he'll never get to lie in it! The captain's insistence that morale is mandatory, while everyone is exhausted and soaking wet, made me laugh. And that perfectly dry umbrella is suspicious. I'm beginning to wonder whether the captain knows exactly why nobody remembers boarding the ship.