The Golden Minute by John Birmingham

Author:John Birmingham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780648003618
Publisher: John Birmingham

18

A boy, who couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve, piped them aboard. But it didn’t seem to be a formal ceremony. He was just playing his pipe, a crude, hand-carved tube of wood with holes up and down its length. Garvey ignored him, and having led Cady up the gangplank—like, an actual fucking gangplank just like the old Peter Pan cartoons on Disney—he pointed to a raised area at the rear of the vessel.

“You will keep dry up there, mistress. We have no cabins for fancy, and you’ll not want to rub up against the brimgeist below. Serpigo runs hot down there. Well-a-near it be but a hop to Boston, where I am to see you to lodgings for my promise.”

Damn.

She really needed that universal translator.

As tempting as it was to fall back on her mad dialogue skills honed over many International-Talk-Like-A-Pirate Days, Cady resisted the urge to go, “Yaaaarr, cap’n,” and instead followed Garvey to the… What? The quarter poop? The mizzen thingy?

Who knew? And even if she did know, Cady wasn’t sure she could make herself understood anyway. She could see the crew had rigged up a canvas sheet to keep the rain off most of the tiny, raised deck area around the big wooden steering wheel. Or did these guys say ‘steerage’? Whatever. She wasn’t stoked at the idea of getting any wetter, and she followed close on Garvey’s heels as he strode to the rear of the vessel.

The sailors on deck did not snap to with salutes or barked acknowledgments. They nodded and got out of the skipper’s way, busy about their chores and duties and Garvey seemed content to let them keep at their work. He climbed a short set of stairs and exchanged a few words with another man, younger, thinner, but dressed in a similar fashion, who shuffled charts and papers on a big wooden box under the cover of the canvas. Cady picked out a few words here and there.

“Turning of the tide.”

“The anchor detail.”

“Canister and ball.”

But they spoke so quickly in their strongly accented and obscure vernacular that it mostly meant nothing to her. She climbed the steps behind the captain, but tried to keep out of his way. Cady remembered with a small start that she still wore her wristwatch, her father’s old Timex. She’d forgotten it in the trauma of losing Smith, and she reflexively checked it now.

8.36.

That can’t be.

And then she recalled that she hadn’t had a chance to reset it to the local time zone. So it was pretty much useless. Just like her.

“Mistress Smith.”

Garvey had caught her again, with her mind a thousand miles and many hundreds of years away.

“Yes, Captain?”

“Mister Bowditch here is my first officer, and a gentry-cove of some breeding and repute. He will attend you as needed, but have a care he is not bestraught by your demands, aye?”

“Sure,” Cady said carefully. “No bestraughting Mister Bowditch. Thank you, Captain Garvey,” she said, before nodding to Bowditch and saying even more carefully, “I am pleased to meet you, sir.

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