Chapter  One OF GRAND CONCEPTION

 

Them what sails away in ships is taking a silly risk. Them what gets sailed away against their will, wage-slaves and that, well, tough. Sailing away is just one of them things. You get drowned, you get whipped and ordered, you get hacked about something awful – you name it. In short, sailing sucks. That’s my view at any rate.

(Codbiller Boggardeem, Fixed Plant Operator – Oars, The Battleship Kincazion)

The Battlehip Kincazion’s rowing deck churned and roared like the stomach of a  drunken trooping sergeant. Nobody would ever find out who had ordered the ship to full attack speed. If it was one of the fraternity of admirals, that huge but inane bunch of bed bouncers who lived around the quarterdeck, then he certainly never admitted to the extraordinary gaffe.

“Row for the Lord,” screamed the whip marshals. “Spit your lips off! You – Nub that strank!”

Skiff, a rather short but supremely muscular youth, took little notice of the marshals as they flung the cords of their urgency flails. He had a specialist position, high up on the ship’s huge grey-green rowing muscles, giant organs the size of houses. There he tended the little twists and cramps that the tendons and muscle fibres developed. Skiff had a way with muscles that gave him a privileged position among the rowing staff. He had a similar advanced ability with the management of human flesh and many a young girl in the maze of cages amidships knew all about that.

“Do you think we’ve set off chasing a rum tanker?” Skiff bellowed to his friend Tokale.

When Skiff was a boy, Tokale, a neat, smallish, dark-haired man with reddish skin, a good bit older than him, had often told stories of how battleships love to chase rum tankers. Unlike Skiff, who had grown up on the Battleship Kincazion, Tokale had fallen prisoner to the battleship after a hostile takeover of a knowledge-trading galleon and had got pressed into the crew. But before that, he’d been around the world and seen things.

Tokale shouted something and grinned, but his words disappeared into the livid fury of shouting wage slaves, groaning oar muscles and the crash of the ocean on the hull.

Skiff had gone to free up a twitching nerve on the bicep of Primary Oar No. 87. Way below him, the rest of the forward portside rowing department’s crew – all eight thousand of them – infested the vast caverns of the rowing deck like so many lice on a rotting sea elk. Wage slaves in all varieties of colour-coded overalls seethed over every available surface of the vast organic machinery that filled that comfortless space. They clambered over and hosed and scrubbed the rowing muscles as they bulged their slow dances of power. They waded through the sloppy marshes of sap that had its birth in waterfalls tumbling off the sides of the muscles and out of the oar’s armpits.

Urged on by the voices of the various categories of officers and petty officers – hideously painful men – the crew did their stuff. Oar operatives by their thousands, sap reticulation squads and musicians, (although they tended to keep out of sight in the rhythm pods), muscle facilitators and massage gangs too. Then again, the huge rib lineament women – Skiff loved to watch THEM. Tokale had often remarked that a single one of their huge dimpled thighs would feed a cabin full of battle-ready bosuns for a lunar month.

Above Skiff, dimly seen in the light of colonies of glowing blue-worms and the flickering oilbush fires, dull yellow tendon hawsers, thicker than the hulls of longboats, stretched and slackened below the deep-red rib structures themselves. The rank smell of sap mixed improbably with the sweet fragrance of oilbush smoke and, for the crew, the certain knowledge of fish porridge for dinner yet again stretched away, oar muscle after oar muscle, into a dim blue mist of lost hope.

Tokale had worked his way over to where Skiff watched the scene, pretending to prod at a sap lachrimus to cover his movement. “No Skiffy,” his old friend shouted. “It’s not a Rum Tanker. Look at that haze. What does that mean? Something bigger than a tanker.”

Skiff followed the line of Tokale’s hand and saw it for the first time, a faint reddish mist swirling in confused eddies in and out of the primary and secondary oar muscles, forming a diffuse layer above him.

“Hormone?”

“Unless I’m some sort of an eel slicer, that is hormone, lad. Our big friend Kincazion’s getting very excited indeed over something.”

An urgency supervisor ran past where they worked at their muscle, whirling his scourge and screaming lunacy. They stopped talking for a moment to avoid his attention and Skiff, sensing an axon fibre in the muscle going into spasm, prodded down with his hand and elbow to free it. At the same time the implications of Tokale’s remark hit home.

“Kincazion’s going to war?”

Even as he spoke, Skiff felt the ship suddenly heel over to starboard. “He’s setting his sails, Toke. Why does he need to, with his oars working?” He could imagine the scene above decks, as the ship flung out tens of thousands of sails from his mast forests, like so many shoals of sipper herring darting away from a shark. He had seldom been out of the rowing deck. In fact he had only ever seen the mast forests towering up into the cloud as a kid, when the charity workers had taken him to an opera house on the main deck. He had never forgotten that huge sight though. How could he?

Skiff got up and darted to the end of the muscle, hoping to get a view out of the embrasure where the oar penetrated the side of the hull.

Tokale had run along the cusp of the bicep too and they reached the embrasure together to peer though, as it opened and closed with its juicy sucking noise. They arrived just in time to see two topmast men fall past the opening, their bodies twisting and jerking in the way men do when suddenly flung to an early death.

“Silly buggers,” Tokale laughed from behind him. “Should have sensed that something was up.”

Skiff suddenly felt that he too might fall off the muscle as the ship’s increasing speed changed the motion from a smooth surge to a frantic heaving and buffeting. He clung to the side of the embrasure, peering out, awestruck to see the white foamy chaos of the great ocean rollers shattered by the blunt arrogance of the battleship’s progress.

Then, as a blast of squally wind threw Kincazion off his course, the two men saw the vast building for the first time.

“What is it?" Skiff said, his voice reduced to a hiss by the majesty of the sight. “A football stadium? A mason’s castle? It’s huge.”

“That’s not a male, Skiffy my naïve friend. That building is female, boyo. Can’t you tell the difference between male and female yet?”

“But it’s so big.”

Briefly a vast, fully mature cathedral had filled the whole of the view through the embrasure. Soft yellowy-greenish light simmered through the substance of her towering flying buttresses and flowed in rivers up to the base of her spires, which disappeared upwards into the evening cloud as if determined to pierce right through the sky itself. Flashes of warm evening light reflected off the planes of her walls and ramparts, picking out the palaces and monasteries of the gloriously female building. Higher up, the tree forests that covered her roof zone showed just below the cloud line.

“How does she float?" Skiff breathed. “She’s enormous.”

“She’s built on a volcanic atoll, my son,” Tokale said laughing.

“Tokey, if that’s a female, then Kincazion’s going in for a boarding action. You think so?”

Watching the splendid vision of the cathedral disappear as the ship regained his course, neither of them saw the whip marshal approach. The scourge slit a rent in the arm of Tokale’s overalls before it landed twice on Skiff’s broad back in quick succession.

“Back to your duties, you pair of gally-arsed bug lunchers,” the supervisory expert’s scalding voice screamed. His arm worked at the whip strokes as his eyes gouged venom out of the pits of blasphemy itself. Skiff realised that the man, at the best of times a creature with scorpions in his brain, had now become crazed by the hormone and beyond all reason.

He leapt back to his position, the pain slamming from one side of his nervous system to the other. “I’d do a lot to scratch the deck with that shit’s brain.” Skiff hissed.

Somehow though, his hatred for the supervisor took second place to his increasing sense of urgency as the hormone squirted out of the battleship’s glands and into his own emotional circuits

Tokale had often said that he had never seen a muscle facilitator with half Skiff’s ability. “You work the nerves of those muscles with the skill of a cutlass master,” he had told him many a time. “You comprehend the nerve and all that makes it work, my lad. No wonder you have a way with women that most men would kill for. You must play their pleasure centres like a prodigy plays his drabalon flute.”

Fired up to battle pitch, Skiff lay face down on the gargantuan muscle, massaging and prodding the hot and groaning fibres of the oar’s bicep, aiming to produce a superload of power, a performance beyond imagination,

“Who in the name of Berremoth and Karrador are those joes,” he shouted after some minutes. Below him, he had seen a curious convoy of rat-drawn wagons and fighting chariots splashing through the sap marshes. Squadron after squadron of spider cavalry rode to either side, brutally cutting down wage slave and petty officer alike if they got in the way. The riders, splendid in scarlet and yellow and with blue and green banners on their pikes, seemed every bit as taken by the mood of lunatic urgency as the rowing crews.

“They’re the elite, my young friend. The jjoint venture consultants and merger executives. Very sought after folk in a landing or a boarding action with a female. Venture capital brokers too, with their own escort by the look of things. They don’t lack for coin.”

“What are they doing on the rowing deck then?”

“Taking a short cut to the front of the queue, son. They know their way about if anyone does. The main decks will be packed by seaman now waiting for the boarding ramps to be raised.”

A huge idea blossomed up in Skiff’s mind, arriving there as unexpectedly as a naked trapeze artist plummeting down into the middle of a high court proceedings. “Tokey,” he said, his voice filled with the misplaced insanity of youthful self-confidence. “Why don’t we cut loose and go ashore to seek our fortunes? To escape all this? We’d have plenty of fun and wealth beyond measure.”

“That, my lad, is heresy. Only the powerful go, each warlord or admiral supported by whole armies of fighting men. Big groups, of regimental strength at least, if not divisional. We haven’t a chance of ever making it. It’s a matter of class, lad.”

Skiff watched as the rowing supervisors and middle managers lost even the most superficial sense of self control in their efforts to drive the rowing operators to greater effort. At the same time, the various species of wild life that inhabited the sap swamps, shrieked and stampeded around their homelands, utterly out of their minds.

Somehow Skiff had never felt more alive.