Mainspring by Jay Lake Page B

lashes,” said the petty officer in a bored voice. “It is presumed that he will draw moral profit from this lesson. Division Chief Lombardo, you may administer the punishment.”
    There was a moment of creaking silence. A deceptively cool breeze played across Hethor’s bare back. The first slap of the lash came with a snap of leather and a near-blinding surge of pain like a brand searing his flesh. “One,” roared the assembled sailors as Hethor fought not to scream.
    â€œTwo.” He bit his tongue. Blood filled his mouth.
    â€œThree.” Hethor’s back felt like it was blistering in a fire.
    â€œFour.” He screamed and would have collapsed if his wrists were not tied above his head.
    â€œFive.”
    And onward, until the world was a blinding glare of pain and the blood spotting the deck around his feet became a muddy red kaleidoscope in the blur of his vision. At the count of twenty-four, Hethor had nothing left to him but a sharp smell of coppery blood and the salt sea below. A veil of pain had drawn over his thoughts.
    â€œHere you go, sailor,” Lombardo said, tugging Hethor’s hands free of the post. Others bound something new to his wrists. Was he to be imprisoned now?

    Hethor tried to fight, to push against this new torment, but Lombardo grabbed his head and hissed in his ear, “Hold still, you stupid git; they’re helping you.”
    â€œAnd ye’d best hang on t’it,” said the Scot who had led Hethor’s press-gang.
    Hethor blinked his eyes open as a gaggle of grinning sailors picked him up and charged across the deck shouting and singing.
    â€œOh, oh, oh, hell !” Hethor screamed as they pitched him over the rail, two hundred feet above the Bermuda lagoon, which stretched louche and shallow beneath Bassett’ s mooring.
    His hands jerked upward to add a new level of pain to Hethor’s abused shoulders, counterpoint to the ruined horror of the skin of his back. Hethor looked up to see a rounded cap of silk billowing above him. It seemed to be slowing his fall.
    For a few astonished seconds he hung in the air as if he were some baby spider on its spring migration, grown great and large. Silk or no silk, the water rushed up to meet him with a slap like the flat of God’s hand. Hethor’s knees drove up to his chin, slamming his head backward and loosing a new round of blood in his mouth as the seawater of the lagoon washed his lacerated back in yet another wave of agony.
    He swallowed his scream in time to avoid gulping down the ocean, and fought the ropes and silk to find the surface.
    Then sailors were falling out of the sky to hit the water around him. They whooped and screamed as strong hands held Hethor up and tore his harness away. Someone pressed an oil-soaked cloth against his back even under the water. People called his name in the accents of a dozen different nations. The mob swam him toward shore, perhaps a quarter mile away, chattering of rum and prostitutes and gambling.
    On the beach, shivering, half dead from the pain and the fall, Hethor stood wrapped in a dry blanket. A square
of silk was stretched beneath it to cover the wounds of his back. The mast crew had met the sailors there with supplies and advice.
    â€œNew chum,” said one of the Bermuda mast men to Hethor. He was as dark as the West Indian back in Boston had been. “Most bastards don’t make the jump with a cat-scratched back. You’re a hard case, mon.”
    â€œThat wasn’t punishment?” Hethor gasped.
    â€œWell, the cat were.” The mast man smiled. “I seen your back before Shinbone put the silk on it. You took your thrashing bloody fewking good, whatever it was you did to earn it. But the jump, mon, that’s what makes you a sky sailor.”
    Bassett’s crew and the mast men swept Hethor off in their midst, still carrying him toward a haze of rum and hemp, and even a prostitute someone else paid