Fifteen: Hard as Nail

Nail's resolution to keep herself apart from the other children quickly fell into tatters.

For one thing, she was the oldest of the girls being held in the brig. Her hard pilgrim's life had left her with a bit more independence and confidence.

Even the tough kids from Piketon's streets knew very little of the world. They were baffled and frightened.

As the days passed, the came round to her, sheepishly, wanting to know if she could explain what had become of them.

"We've been shanghaied by a dreamship," she said.

"What? Like turned into slaves or something?" said one boy.

"I heard they mean to sell us for sweetmeats," put in another.

"Not so bad as that," Nail explained, not bothering to hide her exasperation. "It's more like we're indentured. They mean to feed us and give us a few nibs for our work."

In addition to their fright, several of the children had taken sick.

It soon fell to Nail to organize some kind of care for them. And then there was the wounded boy, the one with the funny moons tattooed over his eyes and the great bruise on his forehead.

He still lay unconscious on his cot, though he turned fitfully at night and sometimes cried out. It was always the same cry: A name.

"Simon?" he would say, softly at first. "Simon! Simon!"

Nail delegated a boy called Cross Eye to put a cool rag on the injured lad's head, which seemed to sooth and quiet him.

As the days passed, she emerged as a kind of gang boss. She found that Barkle and Ballko looked to her to sort out little problems and muddles.

"It's not fair," she said to Ballko. "I didn't sign on to be nursemaid to a bunch of sniveling kids."

Ballko shrugged and said, "Play your cards right and you might have my slot in a couple of years. I'm getting bigger."

"Too big," observed Marcus Barkle. "You'll be too fat for the shrouds, soon enough, if you don't leave off the meat pies."

It was true, after a fashion, that there were certain advantages to her role. She was given a bit of privacy. The other children did what she said without question, even the tough-looking ones.

"What if we all tried to run at once?" said a stout, toothless boy that everyone called Gums. "When they bring our slop, we could rush 'em, right?"

"Don't be an idiot," Nail told him. "This is our lot now. Make the best of it, I say. Anyway, what have you to go back to?"

"There's a group of lads in my block," Gums replied proudly. "We look out for each other, we do. All for one and one for all."

"Is that so?" she replied, in her hardest, mocking voice. "And I suppose they've all come round looking for you since you vanished?"

Gums shrugged and looked at his bare, filthy feet.

"They have forgotten you already. Just as you would have forgotten any of them who went wandering off."

The boy said nothing. It was a dreary thing to realize just how meaningless they all were and how little the world had noticed their abductions.

They had lived hardscrabble lives, for the most part, and were thicker-skinned than rich kids, but in the end they were still only children.

The future loomed before them like a great, hungry shadow. At night, in the dark, there was a fair amount of furtive weeping.

Nail took it upon herself to help them in practical ways. She made certain that no one went without food or a blanket.

She forced them to wash their faces and hands in the little basin, lining up one by one until the trickle of water ran black with their grime.

Yet when they came to her for actual comfort, she shied them off with fierce looks and cold words.

"I've been up there on the Dream before," she told them. "And I'll tell you all just this one time how it is: It's sink or swim. It's devil take the hindmost. So you'd best start fending for yourselves."

The youngest ones stared at her blankly. They said amongst themselves that she was rightly named.

"Hard as a Nail," they muttered. "They must have named this whole bloody world after her, the great knuckle of iron."

It became a kind of catch-phrase among them.

Whenever something painful happened -- a bad dream, a fight over a bowl of noodles, a cuffing blow from one of the Oriole's crew -- someone would say, "Got to be hard now, hard as Nail."

They would nod toward the girl sitting apart in the corner, with her cropped hair and her pretty shawl around her shoulders.

Nail had shifted her hammock to hang beneath the large, barred window that looked out into the hangar where the Blue Oriole lay in its berth.

When not distracted by her chores and duties, she studied the ship and watched the men clambering over her. They looked like squirrels in the crown of a tree.

Before, when sailing with her father, Nail had looked at dream ships as abstract things. She perceived their mathematical form, their angles, the lines of force and resistance.

Now, as the crew repaired and refitted the Oriole, she began to see the practical side of the thing, how the lines were strung by groups of fellows working in tandem, how cunningly they positioned the block-and-tackle.

Sometimes she would watch the beginning of some project -- the sheathing of the new mast, for example -- and try to predict just how it would be accomplished.

This was her comfort. The puzzle of the ship was her escape from the small, nagging sorrows of the kidnapped children.

Soon the Blue Oriole would lift her into the sky; and up past the sky into the Dream, where she would sail between worlds.

She would learn how to work her, the way a puppeteer learns how to make a lifeless doll come alive, by pulling its strings just so.

"Maybe I will take Ballko's place," she said to herself. "And maybe sooner than he thinks."

A little girl came up, the one the other kids called Thumbsucker. She was among the youngest, no older than four or five.

"What is it?" Nail said, softening her voice just a little.

Thumbsucker pulled her thumb out of her mouth and said, "It's that boy with the cracked head. The one who had got moons on his face. I think...I think he might be dead."

Next: A Replacement for Dr. Trimm