Meadowland by Tom Holt Read Free Book Online

away And that was just a ferry across the Bosphorus.’

    Well (Kari said), I’m pretty bad, but not as bad as that. You couldn’t be, where I grew up. Fish don’t just walk onto the beach, and you can get a lot more in a boat than you can in a cart. But some people take to it and others don’t, and I’ve always been one of the others. Pretty funny, really, when you think I’ve been a sailor more often than a farmer, or a soldier.
    The thing about being on a ship is-Now I’m talking here about proper sailing, not just taking a boat out to the skerries to bring back the grazing stock; real sailing is where the sun comes up and there’s nothing but horrible grey sea everywhere you look. That’s when you’ve got to know how to sit still and suffer quietly You see, it’s cramped on a ship. Now I can’t talk about warships, they’re different. It’s the oars rather than the sails that make them go along, some of the time anyway, so at least you’ve got your oar-bench. It’s not much, just a few feet of board with splinters sticking up your bum, but it’s yours. If you were raised on a farm, like we all are, that’s what you’re used to anyhow On a farm, like I think I told you, everybody except the farmer and his wife dosses down in the big hall, on the benches round the wall. You’ve got your little bit of board, not very much but between lights-out and dawn it’s yours and you make sure it stays that way Anybody tries to wriggle you out of a thumb’s breadth of your bit of space, you see to it they get an elbow in the mouth, or a knee where it really hurts. Same on a warship, I guess. On a normal ship, it doesn’t work like that. Your standard deep-sea knoerr’s got a quarterdeck fore and aft, and in the middle’s the hold, stuffed full of barrels and sacks and buckets, probably livestock as well jammed in tight so they can’t get spooked and move about. If you’re lucky it might be fifty, sixty feet long, and because of the hold you can’t get from one end to the other without clambering about over stuff, probably stepping on the back of the cattle, so you tend to stay up your end, days on end, sat on your arse or squatting on your heels, trying not to get flung about as the ship pitches; soon as you start off you’re soaked through, and you stay that way right up till landfall. No point changing your clothes, because the next wave or squall of rain and you’ll be drenched again. You make an effort to get a fire going in a little brazier, but what’s the point: you’re flicking sparks off your flint onto damp moss, damp kindling, damp charcoal and wood. Food tastes of nothing but water; wet bread and cheese if the captain’s got the journey time right, and if he’s a day or three out or you’re blown off course, it’s fish and seagull, half-raw and dripping wet. Either there’s a panic on and everybody’s standing on each other’s heads grabbing for ropes, ducking under the boom, trying not to get a foot caught up in the lines - bloody stupid way to die, that - or else, what mostly happens, there’s absolutely nothing to do and absolutely no space to do it in, so you sit still and quiet. Try and talk? You can’t pass the time chatting and telling tales when you’ve got to yell like a Valkyrie to make yourself heard over the wind and the water and the creaking ropes and timbers. Anyway, like I said before, when you’re on a ship it’s best to keep your mouth shut. Can’t play chess or tables, any second the board’s liable to go slithering across the deck and over the side. You need a piss; you put it off as long as you possibly can, because it means getting up off your bit of deck, which you’ve been keeping dry the way cows cover a patch of grass when rain’s coming, and you fight your way to the side, and the wind changes and everybody behind you on the deck is yelling curses at you. And then there’s always a puker, at least one in every crew, so that’s something else you try