by Jack Dann
I look at his tattooed arms working the thick-bristled broom, his bad leg dragging. We both know if he goes to Crake he’ll lose the leg, but likely it’s the only thing between him and creeping gangrene. I wonder if he’ll still be here when I return.
A dinghy is lowered, and then I row the captain and her lieutenant up a narrow course off the main canal between tall buildings sitting empty, their feet in water, to Market Place, a cloistered square filled with floating wooden piers.
Those who’ve recently turned of age have been brought here for auction. The city’s inhabitants shadow the arcades, hunched on all manner of boats to watch their offspring being handed into service. The money from each sale is generous — the proceeds from a bleeder will feed them for a year; but whenever one is taken by a Family with a reputation for unusual cruelty, a collective sigh goes up and gusts, a hollow wind, around the colonnades.
I ease the dinghy toward the main viewing platform, the Families’ designated bidders assembled in front. The thirteen-year-olds are gathered on a central raft, and being called one by one to the auctioneer’s stand. Some of them have already been marked by fate for certain occupations: pity help the gazelle-boned youths, eyes down so as not to catch the gaze of the barge owners, as if that might save them. The wide-hipped bleeders, so soft, so round, attract the greatest interest and fiercest bidding, their manifest fertility sought-after to carry a Family name.
Three years ago, when Aggi and I were brought here and bonded to my captain’s vessel while those at menarche were winnowed out and sent to do their duty, I too thanked Aditi that I never bled; because although bleeders are cosseted and want for nothing, they lead a far more captive life than ours.
With the dinghy nosed against the viewing platform, the captain takes her place among the bidders. I remain with the officer in the boat, trying not to look too hard into the cloisters.
Then one is led onto the auction stand that stops the breath in me. Arrestingly curvaceous, clearly a bleeder, my younger sibling Ina’s time has come. I wonder if this is why we are here today. I try to will it so, afraid of the other bidders, and slowly they drop away until there are only two: my captain and a Shogun. The square falls silent, aware of the feud between the Families. As the bid climbs I grip the oars and call silently, and Ina’s gaze seems to rest awhile in mine. Finally there is a lull in the bidding, my Baron’s the last, and I think she’s won; but just before hammer-fall the Shogun makes another bid so high that even the Families gasp. My captain, all done, gestures no more bids; but even at a distance I feel her taut and thunderous, and know it isn’t over. The Shogun, triumphant, steps along the pier and up to the auction stand to claim his prize. He draws his sword as if to offer us, his competition, a warrior’s salute, then turns and swings, slicing Ina through.
The crowd sucks in its shock then expels it with a roar. I scream my sibling’s name as the captain leaps into the dinghy shouting Row!! They are coming at us from all sides, an angry wave, their tethered lives’ tight leashes snapped, and the Shoguns are all blades out to fight. The other Families, caught unprepared, scramble to escape.
When we are away from the square in quieter waters and making for the ship, my captain speaks to her second.
They’ll rise against us for what we do. This thin control can’t last. The Families must change their ways.
The lieutenant, a Baron of only slightly lesser standing, answers just as grim. If the Families change their ways they will be slaughtered.
They stay silent for the rest of the trip, and I am left to row until my arms are numb and my sorrow has been ploughed into the foetid, oil-slicked water.
The Barons are celebrating. They have sailed a flotilla of powered rafts across the marshlands and conquered Kosciusko. The news of their success (the expedition undisclosed ‘til now) has diverted attention from the crackdowns in the Grey Zone and been relayed to the other Families — all of whom had secretly vied to get there first.
And other news has reached our ship. Halfway up they found a hidden enclave of pacifists, and torched it. The twelve they didn’t burn they brought back to punish.
My captain paces with heavy boots. Six to my bed, turn, six to the door: one for every pitiable prisoner. I stay quiet beneath the coverlet in case her agitation turns to anger and she lashes out.
If I had been chosen for that trip … she mutters, and I’m left to wonder what might have turned out differently if she had. I am reminded that even she bends her will to a higher authority: the Family’s inner circle, its most influential Barons.
When I get the chance I seek out Nog, always a source of information.
What will happen to them? I ask.
You’ll know soon enough, he says gruff and unforthcoming. Now move your mollycoddled arse and help.
The ship’s bilges are being emptied at a canal-side treatment plant. Hoses poke above the deck plates, fat eels, coursing with effluent. Smaller hoses loop like streamers between ship and shore, sucking a fresh supply of clean water into the hold tanks. As the crew busy themselves with valves and gauges, boys are stationed at each attachment point, keeping an eye on the connections for signs they might blow — a foul and hazardous occurrence.
I help Nog lock off the taps as each tank is filled, dread sitting on my bones like canker. I hope he might yet say something reassuring, but he doesn’t.
After supper, Galley Ma keeps me back to help, Moth unable to do her usual chores and my captain busy with Family celebrations.
She seems distracted, wiping her workbench more times than it needs, and, when the other boys have been dismissed to quarters, leads me by the hand to her blue-green globe hidden in a flour bin and her picture books tucked behind the larder.
The Families blame the weather, she whispers, but it was they who broke us. Their combined force — the right hand of retribution — came down and squeezed the Grey Zone dry of hope. After that, it seemed we all became the shadows of our former selves, under the yoke, no will left other than to comply. But the memory of our unmaking holds the key to being made again, and so I say to you, use these well, and don’t let memory rot to nothing.
Then she does a surprising thing: draws me close and kisses my head, before sending me off to my master’s well-appointed cabin.
Perhaps it was events at the Thirteen sale, or the capture of the Kosciusko 12, but the captain seems to want more of my company about the ship. Her helmsman relieved of watch, I am allowed the privilege of nights with her on the bridge as she commands the laden vessel through black waters, navigating by pulsing shore beacons and direction markers set mid-canal.
It gets bitterly cold perched inside four screens of grimy glass; I shiver, and am slung one of her fur wraps. Cuddling into that warmth and familiar scent, I feel a lulling peace that resonates with the years I had before thirteen.
My Baron is impervious to the chill. Her face the shape of concentration, she works the wheelhouse instruments with deft assurance, and gradually, mesmerised by the pattern of her movements, I begin to imagine her hands are my own. We stay like that, hour after hour enveloped in the strange calm that night brings to the Grey Zone, and I think perhaps she feels it too: a companionate hiatus, brief respite from the disharmonious affairs of the Iron Families.
Boots clang on hatchway ladders; figures hurry past the cabin door. All the decks locked down, the boys are being summoned one by one for questioning. Moth, going to Galley Ma for comfort in the night, found her sprawled among her saucepans, dead.
Nog says the confessions extracted from the Kosciusko 12 had all led back to her. She must have known they would, and done the deed quickly before they came for her.
I feel as if the ship has tipped into a sickening lurch: Ma! Love’s mooring lost, the past’s last tether cut, and I cast adrift in a perpetual night. I squeeze tight against my chains in a corner of the cabin and thank Aditi that she’s been spared the Family’s punishments. But I have never seen the captain so distraught. Her fist lands hard agains
t the panelling above me and dents it. She doesn’t seem to notice and lets fly again. The entire section splinters; her hand drips blood. I am frightened, even though I know it’s not aimed at me, or mine, but the unthinkable: her own Family.
I peek upwards.
They will pay, she mutters.
And then the realisation strikes me. Her passion — not one she has ever shown to me — is that for a true love: Galley Ma’s secret place inside my captain’s padlocked heart.
Distracted, all mood gone for play, she undoes my manacles and leaves.
I wait a count of one hundred then slip outside along the passage and to the galley. Its porthole deadlights are all latched. In the dark I stumble on a chaos of strewn pots, the place where the body had lain and is now removed; but I am not here for that, the empty shell of my beloved Ma. I am here to take possession of her globe and picture books before the Barons find them.
As I hurry Ma’s things back to the cabin, the ship’s bell sounds EYES PORT! And when her treasures are safely relocated, I climb reluctantly above deck.
The crew and boys are all eyes fixed on the giant shapes rearing portside in the fog. I scan anxiously for the captain.
Crake sidles up beside me. He points and sneers. What they brought back from Kosciusko is hanging over there.
The cranes have gone up and there are our angels, Ma’s intrepid relatives who’d escaped the slamming grip of the Iron Families to live in sunshine, hung in rows like coats on hooks, each neat brown pair of hands and feet limp below the sackcloth. No more our angels than the Families’ seditious enemy, now they are the dead — and decomposing with them, hope.
As we come alongside just beyond, Crake mocks again. Called out to a Family birthing, he clambers off the ship past Nog and swiftly disappears, a venal, hated man, into the suppurating twilight.
The captain gives the entire crew shore leave and goes to drown her sorrows on a girl barge. Nog, wanting to keep his infirmity well hid, volunteers to stay behind.
The ship sits in mist, its cargo off-loaded and abandoned on the wharf upcurrent from the spider-legged cranes still dangling their catch. The dark falls, a wet, clinging shroud; the canal wind cuts like garrotting wire. And we are huddled on the foredeck crying silently down on Moth, frail and folded, crushed beneath the fo’c’sle winch.
Something — a wall — breaks suddenly in me, and I race below as if pursued by death itself to drag the heavy pelts and fat silk pillows back from my stash, and spin the globe.
Countries blur with sea.
I stop the vivid blue-green swirl with a finger and peer close: a pair of smaller islands southeast of ours. Closer. Aotearoa: home to the Iron Families’ long-time opponents, rumoured to have helped orchestrate the Kyoto uprising.
As I measure the distance in finger widths, thinking of Nog’s boat and the locks that lead to ocean, Aggi rests a shimmery hand on mine.
You’ll drown, she says, and be eaten by fish —
Is that so bad? I interject.
She traces my most recent scar. — Unless you take the ship.
The ship’s boys are for it. Already, without Galley Ma — her subtle protection not fully realised until now — the crew, egged on by Crake, have been inflicting punishments at every opportunity. The boys, suffering, feel Ma’s absence as keenly as those icy winds that luge between the levee walls. But worse — far worse, Moth, our littlest and most recent to fall foul of the Barons’ casual cruelty, was adored.
I go to Nog.
Knowing his time is as short as ours, I tell him what I plan to do then ask, Would you rather be sent to the filthy bottom of a canal by Crake, or come with us and be joined forever with the sea?
His face is a rumpled spread of seams and stubble; pain has made bruises of his eyes. He winces as his bad leg briefly takes some weight. Resting gratefully against the bulkhead he makes his decision for his heart’s first love.
With Nog on lookout for the crew’s return, we assemble in the galley to make fast our plan.
How will we manage the ship? Binn, the pluckiest, asks after I’ve shown them Aotearoa on the globe.
Eight is enough, I answer. And between us we have all the skill we need. If we can slip unnoticed through an outer lock, we’ll be away and won’t be followed.
They know the sea locks are generally unattended, being used infrequently, and only for the long hauls north or south, the Families much preferring to hop between their territories in calmer and more manageable waters.
Who’ll steer? Binn asks for them all.
I’ve spent some hours in the captain’s company at the helm, I say, not mentioning that Aggi (whose enquiring mind had ever risked and learnt much more than me) will instruct.
Last minute, the boys waver between sure purgatory and uncertain fate until I remind them of Galley Ma’s final admonition, and then they draw toward the plan as if to a distant saving light, while I wish I could feel even small measure of the confidence I pretend.
And so we loose the mooring lines from their bollards and let the nightship drift, a sullen juggernaut, downcanal towards an outer lock as the boys launch one last defiance, sending Crake’s belongings tumbling overboard.
The ship pitches horribly, most boys are sick; its bearings set southeast and our sights toward the hope of land, I have had to lash the wheel to stop it spinning like a gyro through my grasp. But past the anchor winch and Gatling gun, Aggi leans, a five-point star above the prow, hair flying, face pressed to the wind.
Nog is dying. Laid in his dinghy roped secure on the foredeck, he is being rocked like baby with the ship and smiling up at sky. From my navigator’s storm-battered eyrie I look out beyond each terrifying lift and plunge to what he sees: not the fogbound night of moonless waters, but the wild pale breaking blue of day.
AFTERWORD
London, Harrods, a cowhide on a carved wooden bed littered with fox pelts. Australia, home, and documentary footage of a woman being stoned to death. These images meeting cataclysmically in a sentence and ‘Nightship’ emerging, behemoth, from the fog.
— Kim Westwood
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THE FOOLY
TERRY DOWLING
TERRY DOWLING is one of Australia’s most awarded, versatile and internationally acclaimed writers of science fiction, fantasy and horror. He is author of nine books, among them the award-winning Tom Rynosseros saga {Rynosseros, Blue Tyson, Twilight Beach, Rynemonn) and the critically praised collections Blackwater Days and Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear, as well as three computer adventures. His stories have appeared in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, The Year’s Best SF, The Year’s Best Fantasy, The Best New Horror and many times in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, as well as in anthologies as diverse as Dreaming Down-Under, Centaurus, Wizards and The Dark.
Holding a doctorate in Creative Writing, he is also editor of Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF, The Essential Ellison and The Jack Vance Treasury, and has been genre reviewer for The Weekend Australian to the past eighteen years.
In ‘The Fooly’, Dowling — artist, prestidigitator, and literary excavator — once again casts his spell… and breaks new ground.
It was a new town, a new chance, a new shortcut home from a new pub. All so similar, yet so different, walking this lonely road on this cool, windy night.
The choosing was what made it special for Charles Ratray. The chance to choose, the ability to do it. He had lost so much, before, during and after Katie, truth be told, but here he was, at the end of that hardest choice, here in Kareela instead of Karalta.
It wasn’t so bad. Kareela was like any other small town really, a town you could walk out of in ten minutes it was so small; the Royal Exchange like any other small pub.
And this road across the fields could have been a dozen similar backroads at Karalta, the same clumps of trees, same scrappy field-stone walls and barbed-wire fences, same grasses blowing in the cool night wind.
Some would ask then why relocate at all? But th
ey didn’t know, couldn’t, or forgot to remember the handful of reasons that always changed everything for anyone.
Katie was there. Karalta was her place.
Warwick’s too. Their place now.
Away was better. You had to know when to leave, how to manage it, no matter how demanding it was, how difficult.
And he had managed. And weren’t they surprised now? If they were.
Charles stopped, just stood in the blowing dark and breathed in the night.
How good it was to be here, anywhere else.
‘You’re new,’ a voice said and Charles Ratray yelped in fright.
There was a figure leaning against a field-stone wall, a dark man-shape, darker in the darkness, with a glitter at the eyes.
‘You startled me,’ Charles managed.
‘That’ll do for starters,’ the figure said. ‘It’s all about persuasion, you see. You’re new.’
‘Arrived last week. I’m the new day supervisor out at Fulton’s dairy.’
The eyes glittered. ‘I haven’t seen you on the road.’
‘Should you have?’
‘Well, it’s my road, see? I’m here a lot.’
‘I can’t see you very well. There’s enough moonlight. I should be able —’
‘Part of the effect,’ the figure said. ‘Adds to the mood. I’m a specialist in mood lighting.’ There was a hint of smile below the glitter.
‘You’re a fooly, aren’t you?’
‘A what?’
‘You know, a fooly. Something in my mind. A figment. My mind is playing tricks.’
‘Well, in a sense that’s right. I’m already tweaking your mind a bit, see? There’ll be more later. It’ll get worse once I start bringing up the fear. Slipping in a bit of terror and despair. Walk with me.’
Charles had been walking home anyway. He started along the road again. The figure stepped away from the wall and joined him, walking with an odd crimped walk Charles found disconcerting.