“It’ll be a weird job.”
Rej shrugged from the top of their three arms downwards to the spread tips of their twelve fingers. “You came to me because of that. I’ve run living teeth from Qarbec and taken things from the Terramac with no name before anyone could know they existed, let alone gone missing. I’ve been searched by two separate coast guard vessels while there was an adult gyrwolf lying low in my boat, and they didn’t find it. I can hide an entire deck of cards up my sleeve while topless. You know all of this and you know that I can handle weird, and I can do it well.”
The customer was still hesitant. Her shoulders were hunched, her breath was unsteady behind that stupid-looking mask she wore – a cheap carnival toy, grabbed in a hurry. All instinct and nerves, no forethought.
“You’ll need these,” she said, and dumped a little handful on the table like it was red-hot.
“Earplugs?”
“High-grade. Everyone wears them, nobody takes them off until the cargo is gone. It’s absolutely vital, you understand?
“Yep.”
“Do you UNDERSTAND?”
Rej made contact with all five eyes for the first time, both daytime and the night-triplet. “Yes. You’ve hired me for my expertise, but you don’t seem to appreciate it: I have moved things you can’t even imagine. If you say nobody on the crew takes off earplugs until the cargo’s off the boat, nobody takes off earplugs until the cargo’s off the boat. Done. We take our business seriously and we do it well and we get paid. Asking you why the precautions are necessary is not part of that. So don’t go taking out your nerves on me, got it, doctor?”
“I’m not –”
“Don’t lie. You’re bad at it.”
“I haven’t-”
“No, but you were about to. The Borrelmore leaves tonight. The cargo is at the drop point by sundown. The payment is…?”
The customer dithered between panic and relief for a moment, then handed over a small bag.
“Beautiful.”
“Do you need to count them?”
“No. You don’t need to tell me why your precautions are important because I take my job seriously; I don’t need to tell you why you don’t try and shortchange me because you take ME seriously. Deal?”
“Deal.”
“Good. Have another drink before you leave. You need it.”
She really did.
***
The working luggboat Borrelmore left that very evening under a sulfurous sunset, with a full head of steam and salt, a secret in its hidden hold, and a lot of bad-tempered crewmen who were communicating with each other through semaphore signal
But they didn’t fuss. This was how the job worked, sometimes. And Captain Rej’s jobs were good ones. The pay was good; the supervision was clear and direct; and if you turned up dead everyone was always told exactly what you’d done to deserve it so you couldn’t say you weren’t warned if it happened to you too. Clean, too. Captain Rej didn’t believe in a prolonged execution. A nice clean shot to the brain with no warning.
That kind of leadership attracted a certain kind of crew. Stable, professional, easygoing in private but sticklers on the clock, and with a kind of loyalty money couldn’t buy because more money than they were making came with attached risks and dead people can’t do much with big paycheques.
The only real problem was the kitchen. Sammel was a fine cook, but he was getting on in years and low on legs. The stove sang at his touch, the soups softened at his stir, but there were more cupboards that he needed than he could reach these days, and they’d only just assigned him a galley-hand last voyage, after thirty days of unsalted meals because he was too proud to ask for someone to grab something for him.
Able-seaman Jost had already done every other job aboard the Borrelmore, so he was put up to it. But there were certain obstacles, like his having a bit of a bad ear and Sammel having a bit of an accent (at least half of which was cursing). Figuring out what the cook wanted when he asked for ‘the big whassik from the upper-therebouts’ had been the chore of the last three days in port.
Now Jost’s bad ear was spared a break, but hand-semaphore wasn’t much fun either.
NOT THAT, spelled Sammel, stomping his peglegs for emphasis. OTHER TIN.
It was the third tin can Jost had hauled down. All of them were identical. WHICH ONE? He inquired carefully, arms moving slowly as he tried not to knock down half the shelves. Jost was a big man and the kitchen had spent the last ten years as a small man’s private domain.
OTHER TIN, spelled SAMMEL.
Jost nodded and handed over the other tin. Sammel threw it at his head.
OTHER TIN OTHER TIN OTHER TIN OTHER TIN he repeated.
“Huh?” said Jost reflexively.
Sammel walked next to Jost, gently tugged at his shoulder, brought his good ear to mouth level, and screamed full force into it.
‘the blue tin’
BLUE TIN, signalled Jost.
YES, replied Sammel.
Jost gave him the blue tin, and his ear hurt all for the rest of the evening, which was why he rubbed at it as he walked by the cargo hold on the way to his bunk.
When he woke up the next morning, they weren’t hurting. They were ringing.
***
It was a little tune without sound, words with a rhythm. It popped into able-seaman Jost’s head before he was finished waking, following him from some sort of nonsense blur of dreams, and he found himself mumbling it as he went about making breakfast, trying to puzzle the words as he hunted for SUGAR and RAISINS and found APPLES instead and got berated by an increasingly-irate Sammel.
But the words wouldn’t come. He couldn’t hear them properly in his heads. But the rhythm of it was there, and the beat, and so he tapped his feet at his mess table and drummed his fingers and nodded his head and little Hewut who sat beside him grinned and made fun of him and copied that and by the time all the rest of his tablemates were done laughing silently at him they were doing it to, and it was in their heads and stirring in their fingers and their feet. A jaunty, hop-along little thing that made mouths twitch at the corner and your step come lively. It crept into the tug and pull of the cables and chains; it lived in the heave-and-throw of fuel into the furnaces; it kept the beat as hands heaved on nets; it bobbed in heads and made mouths move in unheard words that nobody’d ever really come up with but they all were quite sure of.
The Barrelmore crew was well-seasoned to begin with, but their performance now verged on gourmet. There was so little supervision to do that after the first day captain Rej spent little time on deck and kept to her desk, making numbers dance and jig and jib and trim and tack.
For three days. It was the closest thing to perfect any voyage had ever gone for Rej, and if it hadn’t been so natural and clean she might have been more suspicious.
As it was, she was very surprised when the Barrelmore went from full ahead to a dead standstill fast enough for her chair to rip free.
***
The crew were all lined up on deck, stamping their feet and pumping their arms. Their mouths were wide, their words were spoken with lusty joy, their breath fair-steamed in the cool night air. Their faces were red with exertion and beaming with joy.
REPORT, signed Rej, but they wouldn’t look to her. SOS she signalled, but they wouldn’t heed to her. DANGER, she windmilled, but they wouldn’t mind her.
Professional standards are many things, but they don’t include maintaining them at the cost of your crew and ship. Rej peeled out her earplugs – they SQUELCHED as she did so, the damned things were practically ingrown, screamed out “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU PLAYING AT,” and heard the chorus come to an end with a crash of boots just as the splash of the first shark breaching the rail happened. It was thirty feet long, a great-grandmother of the waves, and its jaws and gills flexed in harmony with the song that the crew now listened to quietly.
Then came the second through hundredth sharks, and after that it was a bit of a rush. Tails beat, bodies shook, heads slapped against the wetness of the deck, and fish after fish after fish flung itself aboard the Barrelmore, heeding the beat.
Rej could hear it too, she realized. It had been amplified by the crew’s boots, but it was there, quiet, echoed now by the creatures of the deep. A powerful, incessant drumming. Thump-thump, a pause, thump-thump, a pause. A heartbeat of grand and immense gravity, too slow and deep to keep a small thing alive.
Jost brought it aloft from the hold himself with the rest of his table, their arms tearing at the sockets from the weight and their smiles broad and beautiful and red. A leviathan’s heart, black and blue with muscle and indomitable in its duty, even without a body.
Thump-thump, in the air, the cold cruel air, all alone. Thump-thump.
Well, the fish would have that changed.
Captain Rej opened her mouth again for the first time in a long while, but before she could hope to give an order the rest of the sea came aboard, and the Barrelmore’s command structure and nautical position were altered.
***
The cargo was never delivered. A quiet woman in a coat lingered at the docks for some weeks, and a few questions were asked. Somewhere, a collector went unsatisfied.
And now and again, out on the waves, a sailor would return to their crewmates with tales of strange sounds from far below, of faint voices from the waves set to a bone-shaking beat that they could never quite make out.
The ones that COULD hear it, hummed it. And nobody ever tales from them – of strange sounds or otherwise – ever again.