Mitt felt hurt, and irritated. “You don’t have to look at me like that! I don’t want to get seen and caught, do I?”
“If there’s anybody in it, they can’t possibly hurt you,” said Ynen. “But I have to make sure. It’s the law of the sea.”
“Or weren’t you brought up to keep to any law?” said Hildy.
Mitt felt Hildy need not have said that. He knew the rule as well as she did. “Don’t talk so stupid!” he said. “Can’t neither of you get it in your heads this isn’t a pleasure trip?” Then, as Hildy went white and drew in her breath to make a powerful answer, Mitt added, “But please yourself—please yourselves. Don’t mind me. I’m only the passenger.” He could see the thing was a boat now, but only a small one. It looked to be just a ship’s cockboat, torn loose in the storm. No danger there, Mitt thought.
But when Wind’s Road had leaned nearer, in a pleasant riffling of water, they saw the boat was larger than that, about a third the size of Wind’s Road herself. There was a mast in it, still flying tag ends of rope and some fluttering pieces of sail. There was no sign of life in it.
“It was in the storm,” Hildy said, rather hushed.
“I’ll go alongside,” said Ynen.
Mitt stood up to offer to do that for him. Ynen pretended not to see. Wind’s Road was his. Mitt sat down dourly by the mast. So Ynen did not trust him not to sail straight past then? Very well. Mitt grinned as Ynen went about too soon and hit the smaller boat a fair old wallop. Ynen winced at the damage to Wind’s Road’s paint. The smaller boat simply bobbed about. It was salty, battered, and draped with seaweed. It had to be hard to sink, Mitt thought, to have survived the storm. It was empty, except for a tangle of tarpaulin in the bottom. Ynen had scraped Wind’s Road for nothing, by the look of it.
Hildy read the name painted on the stern of the derelict. “Sevenfold II.”
“Funny!” said Mitt, coming to look. “That’s a big merchant ship out of Holand. She was tied up in harbor there the day of the Festival. What’s her boat doing here with a sail in it?”
“She must have sailed out later and got caught in the storm,” Ynen suggested. “I suppose her crew took to the—Oh, dear!”
The tangle of tarpaulin heaved and humped. A wet and unkempt head was thrust out, as if its owner was shakily on his hands and knees. A hoarse and wretched voice said, “Take us aboard, for pity’s sake!”
No one had expected this. Hildy and Ynen were quite as dismayed as Mitt. In fact, it was Mitt who first pulled himself together and said, “Up you come, then. How many are you?”
“Just me, guvnor,” said the man, and seemed to fall flat on his face again.
Mitt exchanged a resigned and dubious look with Ynen and swung himself down into the bobbing derelict. The worst of it was it could be someone who knew him. He heaved back the tarry canvas. Underneath were several inches of water and, lying sprawled in it, a soaking, unshaven man in sailor’s clothes. He was a square, powerful sort of fellow—the kind of man you could trust to survive a storm, Mitt thought, taking the man under the arms and trying to heave him upward. He was no one Mitt knew. But when Mitt had wrestled the fellow to his knees, he thought the man had a faintly familiar look. He must have seen him around on the waterfront. One thing was certain about him. The man was a good deal better nourished than most people in Holand. Mitt simply could not lift him.
They only got him aboard Wind’s Road because the man seemed to come to his senses enough to help a little. Mitt boosted. Hildy leaned over and dragged. The man, groaning and feebly scrambling, pulled himself over the side into the well and collapsed again. It took them some time to pull and push him into the cabin and get him onto a bunk. Meanwhile, Ynen left Sevenfold II’s boat to bob by itself and sailed on.
“Would you like a drink of water?” Hildy asked, thinking the man must be parched with thirst.
The answer was a growl, in which the only words they caught were “little lady” and “arris.”
“Give him a nip of it,” Mitt said. “Bring him around.”
Hildy fetched the bottle and put it to the man’s pale, waterlogged lips. He took such a long drink that she was alarmed. When at length she managed to drag the bottle away, the man made a feeble pounce after it. “Arragh!” Hildy backed away quickly. He seemed like an angry wild beast. But he became calmer almost at once and mumbled something else with “little lady” in it. “S’some sleep,” they heard him say.
“That’s right. You drop off. Do you good,” Mitt said heartily. He took Hobin’s gun off the rack above the bunk, where he had left it, and put it in his belt, just to be on the safe side.
Hildy, in much the same spirit, put the arris bottle in a locker and shot the bol
t. She looked back as they left the cabin and saw that the man’s eyes were wide open. He could have been watching. But he could also have been half unconscious. “Do you think he’s all right?” she whispered.
“You do get rough types,” Ynen said, very much wishing he had left Sevenfold II to drift.
“He’ll survive,” said Mitt, “if that’s what you were asking. Must be made of iron to be still alive. Let’s hope he’ll be more agreeable when he’s had some sleep.”
“So do I,” said Hildy. The man’s eyes were still wide open, staring from a broad pale face covered with long black stubble.
15
For the rest of that day, the new passenger slept, with his face turned to the wall. Everyone felt this was the best thing he could do. They left him alone and almost forgot he was there.
Ynen stayed at the tiller. It was his way of claiming Wind’s Road back after the storm. He did not exactly resent Mitt’s taking charge then, but Wind’s Road was his. She was the loveliest and the luckiest boat out of Holand, and Ynen loved her passionately. This left Hildy and Mitt nothing much to do but lounge on the cabin roof. Hildy understood Ynen perfectly. Mitt was amused, though he had to admit that if he had had the luck to own Wind’s Road, he might well have been just the same. And a bit more careful of my paint, he thought.
Wind’s Road clipped her way elegantly northeast. No land came in sight. While they watched for land, they fell to talking, mostly about Holand. Mitt irritated Hildy because he would seem to think that life in the Palace was one of perfect bliss. So she told him what it was really like. It was beyond her to describe properly the emptiness and the lonely, neglected feeling she and Ynen had lived with, but she could tell Mitt how Hadd was as much of a tyrant in his own home as he was in his earldom.