The Last Knight by Hilari Bell

Author:Hilari Bell [Bell, Hilari]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Humorous Stories, Action & Adventure, Royalty, Juvenile Fiction, Fantasy & Magic, General, Knights and knighthood, Fantasy, Young adult fiction, Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9780060825058
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-08-18T23:00:00+00:00

The next day, we crept up on deck, blinking in the fitful sunlight, for the autumn weather had shifted again. It was called a deck, I learned. And though the interior floors were called floors, the interior walls were called bulkheads, the beds were called bunks, and there were many other bits of useless wordplay.

That first day, most of the new “crewmen” sat in a wretched huddle, but Sir Michael wandered around asking questions about this or that, and I did a bit of learning myself.

We ate with our fellows in misery, and the meals added to that misery. Breakfast consisted of a bowl of boiled wheat with dried meat in it, and hard biscuits. Mid-meal was a bowl of boiled, dried meat, with wheat in it, and hard biscuits. Dinner was a bowl of dried meat, with a wedge of cabbage, or a few carrots, or a potato, and hard biscuits. My only consolation was that the captain and his officers fared no better.

As we ate, we learned something of the men who’d been kidnapped with us. One was a carpenter, one an apprentice tanner, and so on. Several were sailors, and they were fairly resigned to their lot, though they’d not have chosen this ship. We also heard, that first day, the story of the seagull that had soared through an open cabin window and snatched a broiled fish right off the captain’s plate like…well, like magic. The captain beat it to death with a chart weight, for he was sensitive about receiving proper respect, even from seagulls. The response when Sir Michael introduced himself as a knight errant, and me as his squire, was tiresome, but it soon passed. The only one of us who really stood out was Willard.

Willard was the man who’d cried when Cracker told him he’d been cudgel-crewed. He was a merchant’s clerk by trade, and physically not unlike the captain—small and slight with thinning hair, though he was only in his early twenties. But far from possessing the captain’s hard competence, Willard couldn’t seem to do anything right. He tried his best, but he dropped so many things that after three days’ trial Cracker banned him from the galley. Perhaps fear made him clumsy, or perhaps that was simply the way Willard was.

The captain finally gave up and assigned Willard to act as ship’s clerk, recording all matters of cargo. There wasn’t much clerking to do while we were at sea, so for most of his work shift the first mate set Willard to scrubbing the deck and cleaning and polishing the metalwork. He still dropped things, but if he screwed up these simple tasks he wouldn’t sink us.

A few questions determined that the crew was loyal, and the officers were the only ones armed, so I resigned myself to my fate. Perhaps when we were released in Tallow Port I could persuade Sir Michael to declare my debt repaid and let me go. Jack once told me that any connie who couldn’t make a fortune in Tallow Port ought to give up and get an honest job.

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