POV: tress
Summary
Fed, if poorly, Tress returns to the upper deck of the Crow's Song and resumes her scrubbing with renewed vigour. The planks have not been properly cleaned in a long time — a layer of dead spores has gone black and grimy on top of the wood — and the work is slow. Huck notes the difference between the dark unscrubbed boards ahead and the bright wood behind, silver inlay glinting between many of the planks. Tress, who has heard sailors complain about the trade for years even though she has never sailed, knows what she is doing: scrub across the planks rather than along, so you do not wear grooves; the boards will want a coat of pitch when she is finished, both to seal them and to give them grip.
Her head, the narrator observes, is full of that kind of wisdom — the wisdom of complaints — and her work is the kind that frees the mind. He stops the chapter for a small aside in defence of physical labour: it is one of the great mistakes of the world to assume that someone scrubbing a floor is not thinking, when in fact the menial trades give the mind room to wander and the accounting trades steal even that. *Sell your labour, but not your mind*, he tells the would-be storyteller.
Tress has plenty of mind to spare, and what hers is spinning on is what she overheard from Fort and Ann the night before. She moves her scrubbing closer to the forward cannon to see what she can pick up. She passes midday and ignores her stomach — it should know better, after breakfast — and she has found that she is allowed a cupful of water from the hold each time she goes to refill her bucket.
Before she can learn anything useful, a Doug calls her over. Polite to a fault, she stows her bucket and follows him down into the hold, where he gathers up cannonballs from a bin and hands her a small keg from against the wall to carry up for him. She nearly drops it when he tells her what it is. *Zephyr spores. From the Sapphire Sea.* An entire keg of live spores, lined to keep the silver of the ship's frame from killing them. He, very obviously, has chosen to carry the heavy cannonballs.
*Why*, she asks, do they have a keg of spores at all? *For firing the cannons.* You cannot, the Doug explains patiently, just drop a ball in — you need a charge to send it flying. So that is what gunpowder is, on this world: a wetted spore, expelling enough air to drive a ceramic ball down the barrel. Tress carries the keg the rest of the way up rather more carefully than before.
Normally, the Doug adds, this would be old Weev's job, on account of it involving spores and Weev being the ship's sprouter. Tress asks the obvious question. *He was.* Weev was a nice fellow, the Doug says — terrible at bluffing, easy to beat at cards. *What happened?* *Didn't want to become a pirate.* *He got off at port?* *Oh, he got off.* The Doug glances toward the quarterdeck, where Captain Crow stands sipping from her plumed canteen, the wind in her hat-feather. Weev is currently occupying, he says, the bottom of the ocean. He was the only one willing to say out loud what the rest of the crew were thinking when Crow announced the new occupational direction. The narrator interjects, to head off any confusion, that no — Weev is *a* corpse but not the corpse of the chapter's title. There is, he warns, another one on the ship. Try to keep up.
The Doug takes her up to Laggart's cannon station — the cannonmaster himself is absent for the moment, the forecannon lashed in place. He begins unloading cannonballs into a bin and explains Tress's job. The big lined barrel beside the cannon will protect live spores from the deck's silver; the empty pouches are in a net on its outside; the cannonmaster needs his charges pre-packed and ready to ram in during a fight. Pour the spores into the pouches and tie them off — without spilling any — and do all the pouring inside the barrel, where the lining will keep stray spores alive.
The Doug shifts on his feet, looking at her. *Very well*, she says. *No complaints?* he asks, surprised. She shakes her head. She would rather not do it — she is afraid of spores — but she is the newest aboard and it makes sense that the dangerous job no one else wants should fall to her. She asks for tips. *There's a funnel*, he says, *some goggles and a mask. Try not to worry. These aren't the worst type of spores. You should be fine.* The narrator notes that a great many perils can fit inside the gap between *should* and *be*. Tress takes the lid off the barrel and gets to work.