In The Wreckage: A Tale of Two Brothers by Simon J. Townley Read Free Book Online

growing plants and tending to trees.  
    He paused as he passed her in the doorway carrying a bucket of cow dung to throw over the side. “What are the animals for? Are you starting a farm?”  
    “We hope to. We need more animals, but it was all we could bring, on the first trip.” Her voice was soft, round and gentle.  
    “Are you from the south? From England?”
    “That’s an easy guess.”  
    “I’ve never been there. Never met anyone.”  
    “We sailed from Liverpool, three weeks ago,” she said. It had taken longer than expected, she told him, the winds unpredictable, the storms severe and when they made for any port they found people to be hostile or afraid. Or both.
    When they finished with the animals, Jonah took them back on deck and tested them again. First the sails. Then the stays. He’d name a thing, and they had to find it on the ship, point it out. Then he went through the rigging and the masts and the buntlines.  
    The sun had gone down hours before, the stars were out around a quarter moon. The ship rocked, Faro was reeling off answers, but Conall felt his head nodding onto his chest.  
    “Get you forward then,” Jonah said at last. “There’s hammocks in the crew cabin under the forecastle. You’ll live with the men. Work with them. Eat with them. Die with ‘em if it comes to that, but not if seamanship can save us, you’ve my word on that.”  
    The brothers fell into their hammocks and Conall tucked up tight. He missed Rufus. How would the dog get by without him? But he didn’t get chance to worry about it for long, because his eyes closed and he sunk deep into sleep, dreaming of ropes and knots and sails and seeing the wood of the deck he was washing, the cloth moving back and forth, relentless as the sea itself.  

    ≈≈≈≈

    It was still dark when Conall woke with Faro shaking his shoulder. He grumbled and curled up in his hammock. Faro pushed and rolled him out onto the floor.  
    “Shift’s starting,” he said. “I’m going to the washroom.”  
    Still half asleep, Conall stumbled after his brother down the ladder to the middle deck. The water was cold and stale, but washed off the sweat. He splashed his face, shook his hair and glanced at the mirror. He is eyes were bleary and tired. He needed more sleep. But his time was not his own, not any more. It belonged to Jonah Argent.  
    When they got back on deck, the first light of dawn coloured the sky to the east. The sun was rising behind the black outline of land. A dark shape loomed to starboard. From the front of the ship one of the sailors shouted instructions, calling out what he could see to the steersman at the back of the poop deck.  
    “Norway,” Faro said. “We’re passing the outer islands, heading for the mainland.”  
    The second mate was on duty, a thin, bony man by the name of Tyler Bagatt. ‘Bones’ Bagatt the crew called him. He caught the boys standing on the forecastle, staring open-mouthed, and clipped them both around the head. “Keep working and get off the forecastle unless you have business being here,” Bagatt said.  
    The boys were sent up the shrouds to help stow the mainsails. Within the hour the boat was running on engine power alone, as she glided towards the mainland.  
    Conall had seen photographs of mountains in the old books, but they didn’t capture half of it. Cliffs of stone rose from the sea, hundreds of feet of sheer rock. The land kept rising, with impossibly high mountain tops within half a mile of the seashore.  
    “It’s all rock,” Conall said to Faro. The boys were arranging ropes and stays, helping get the boat ready for arrival in port. “Mountains and rock.”  
    “Not much land for farms,” Faro said. “There’s nothing flat.”  
    By mid-morning the ship was heading into port, a sheltered fjord and a town ten times the size of Lerwick.  
    “One of the old cities,” Captain Hudson said, as he watched from the side of the ship. Conall was a