Out of the Ruins

by Preston Grassmann

  What are we going out there for? Gam said and I did not have much of an answer.

  Bits of ship architecture began to emerge from the shadows ahead into the light of the torch. We bobbed between extrusions thick with shellfish and guano as I considered the slanting floors, decks, dissolving doorways blocked by weed in the black water below. We had not aimed for any word in particular, we could not have done with our crude raft and in the dark like this, and when we felt the nasty scraping of our underside against corroding metal we both started. We lowered ourselves carefully over the sides, gasping at the cold, and our feet touched down on the roof of some old ship, a roof that rose, a steep metal meadow of growth and decay on which I shone our light, out of the chop of the channel.

  We pulled our raft out of the water and sat heavily on the metal rise as the surf sounded. Across what now looked like a mile of low water we could see the lights of our town and the ghost outlines of the cliffs.

  When I had my strength back, I stood and shone my light around. We were near the apex of a pyramidal mount of rust broken by what had been windows. From the water a little way off jutted a bow like a whale’s head. Beyond that was the side of what I think was a tugboat. We were in an archipelago of ruin, and between each corroded specimen, each word, the waters swirled in complicated microcurrents.

  I wondered aloud if we should go on to another, maybe the tower of girders near the furthest rocks. Gam did not answer, was too busy staring into dim vistas of wreckage and gasping that we had done it, that we were here.

  Colonies of birds shuffled a bit and a few of them took off but mostly they were untroubled by our arrival, and I imagined that they were used to things hauling themselves up from the waters to sun or moon a while.

  Does the sentence make any more sense from here? I said. Gam did not answer but startled me by taking hold of me from behind and turning me around and trying to kiss me. I suppose I had known this might happen. I tutted and pushed and we wrestled for a while on the slope of the old metal. I shoved and Gam stumbled and trod on a decaying anemone abandoned by the sea and skidded violently and fell. Gam’s head cracked on the corner of the metal. I stepped forward but I was not quick enough and Gam pitched into the sea and was caught up by the gnarly undertows threading between the wrecks and yanked under as if by ropes much faster than you would think natural. Quickly I pointed the light but I could see only swirls and spray and the black water, and a bit of blood mottling the last of the ship’s paintwork, discoloring the remnants of a painted logo, of which we know from the books.

  I probed with my oar. Water tugged it and I wondered if it had sucked Gam down into the body of this word, to go up and down its stairwells for a long time. I put my hand into the cold but I had no way to know what shards and sharp edges were below.

  Gam did not reappear. I waited a long time. When I saw the lights of the town hall go out I pushed the raft back into the waves of the bay and rowed for the land.

  I was only one person, with one oar. On the other hand this was the way the currents wanted to take me. I think it was about the same amount of effort and time to reach the stones of the shore where I kicked and pulled the raft apart to set its pieces adrift, before sneaking, exhausted, back to my house where I knew my mother would be sleeping.

  * * *

  People said Gam must have gone to sea, which I suppose was not untrue. Some wondered if, rather than by water, Gam had picked through the trees and down the sheer channels of the gorge, impossible and impassable as we all know they are, and had got to the mainland that way.

  That would be enough to have Gam spoken of in approving disapproving awe forever, but on top of that some people are saying that it’s Gam we have to thank for the return of the ships.

  In the late afternoon of the third day after we paddled out to the sentence and Gam didn’t come back, there was a sudden immense rumbling in the bay. I was not there but I heard about it from Tyruss, who was, who was looking sadly out to sea. There were a series of percussions and booms and the biggest wrecks of the sentence all lurched ponderously, suddenly, at once, in many directions. They came down shattering themselves and each other. Every word fell apart in water that was, Tyruss said, quivering.

  When the submerged upheaval was done almost all the ruins were under the waves. Only a few protruding feet of a very few of the biggest wrecks were still visible. The sentence was all but effaced.

  Some people thought it was an earthquake, some that it was a submarine, torpedoing the remains. There was a vessel there the whole time, they said. That explains it. Watching by periscope.

  In any case, a new ship arrived that evening.

  * * *

  Most of the town were already gathered, as I was, gazing at where the sentence had been. There was a huge cheer and a gasp of astonished delight at the sight of the massive riveted ironclad that appeared, that looked almost crenellated with all its decks and radar dishes and such. It approached the hidden sandbanks and reefs closer to our shoreline than we were used to. We could make out more details of its topside. We could see no people.

  Despite this new proximity there was a quality to the ship that is hard to describe, whereby it seemed even less in focus, even more like an imperfect reproduction, even more as if it were copied from a photograph, than the ships to which we were used.

  Taking up a huge area on its flank was a symbol, stark and black and white and blue. It was the sign of a company. It looked like many letters superimposed, like several words, or a whole alphabet, printed on top of each other.

  People did not take long to simmer down. It was twilight and the vessel’s unfamiliar outlines picked out against a vivid red sky made us uneasy. Still, almost all of us stayed, many for hours, right into the night, watching the new ship, almost all of us almost always in silence.

  * * *

  Once again ships are visiting our waters. It is rare again for many days to go by without a new vessel powering into view.

  They are still of countless different designs, but they are almost all now larger, newer, more studded with equipment we do not understand, than those ships we grew up watching. And every one is painted with that same big dense logo as was, and is, the first.

  The second ship appeared two days after that first and no one knew what to do. Once again we gathered. Of all the novelties of our recent situation this one we all found the most troubling: that the new ship was churning straight for our waters, as ships have done for as many years as we have records, but that its predecessor had not yet gone.

  Nor has it still, nor will it, is my opinion.

  No one had ever seen two ships afloat at once before. In pictures in the books in the library room, in pictures in the gallery room, yes, of course, there are images of several ships together, there are seascapes and harbors quite crowded with them, with ships jostling all the way to the edge of sight, seeming to shove each other aside to get a better view. In the waters of the real world, though, we had only ever been visited by one ship at a time, unless you count those sunk for us, those surrendered.

  The first of the logo-ed ships was at anchor very close to the last visible vestiges of the sentence and it was toward it that the new ship sailed, coming so close and fast that many people started to scream that they would collide, that there would be another explosion, but there was not. The new arrival, a long lean cargo carrier, slowed and stopped, its bow half-blocking the first vessel from our view, settling into the waters still unsteady from the remains of the old sentence.

  * * *

  Since then two more have come. A paddle steamer slapped slowly and inefficiently into place behind and at a right-angle to the previous two newcomers. A low stubby vessel followed it less than a day later, poking skew-whiff into the bay between two last sticking-up crane-tops from the earlier generation of arrivals.

  None of them leave. They just pile up where the wrecks are.

  I have a premonition that time will move quickly for these new ships. That they will no
t sink but that it will not take long before the first of them is a floating ruin, a skeleton, a series of shored-up iron ribs in a crumbling corpse buoyed up by its fellows. They are writing a new sentence, if the wrecks ever were, or are, a sentence, more quickly than before, in bigger, louder words, words all of the same brand, the brand of the new company, the company that has won control of this route in a hostile takeover.

  This new carrier cannot speak whatever it is saying truly into silence, of course: whatever it is building to with the bodies of its ships it does on older wreckage.

  * * *

  I have tried to descend the ravine but I can find no way through the trees or down the rock face. I was not the first to decide to take a raft to sea and I will not be the only one who decides to go to sea again, now, in this new situation, to walk on the beginnings of a new sentence. I am, though, unless someone in the town is visiting at night and returning before the morning, which—looking at these new ships—seems to me unlikely, does not seem to me something these vessels would allow, the first to have decided to do so.

  You might not have thought it to watch me, but I paid close attention when Gam fixed up the first raft and I have made another all alone. It is too cold tonight, I do not want to row with cold deep in me, but as soon as the cloud covers us a little and insulates us from the freezing sky I will go back out to the sandbank, no matter how dark it is.

  Last night Caffey and Misha and my mother said surely we all felt lighter now. Said no, we don’t know exactly what’s happening, but we know that there are ships at a distance again.

  I think Gam was right. This is a drop-off, not a pickup. Ships at a distance come not to collect, but carrying freight. They come carrying fear. And it is our fear but it is not our cargo. It has been ordered and is being delivered on behalf of someone else. They bring it to be rendered. It is on their behalf that it will be rendered here.

  Nina Allan

  WYKE is not the manner of place that goes in for murder, not unless you’re counting the crimes sanctioned in the courthouse, the sailors breaking each others’ heads outside the Harbourmaster’s Arms of a Friday night. Through the hours before morning, and with the storm hammering, Doris sits unmoving by the barroom stove going over what she saw, or thinks she saw, for the longer the night goes on the more she comes to doubt herself, feeling her limbs grow heavier, heavy as the word itself, murder: twinned blows of pick and shovel, the muted, deadfall thump of body to ground.

  The city of Wyke lies many leagues north of where we now sit, a port on the River Humber where the great-ships of Bremen and Rotterdam bring in their trade. Wyke is not sea-facing so much as estuarine—hear the sinuous, malodorous creep of the word, the seeping of extraneous water from underground vaults, the half-hidden truths, the pull of quicksand, the stench of brine. The quayside rings with the chimes of hammer-blows and the cursing of sailors. Herring gulls writhe in a grey-winged swarm above the newly berthed fishing smacks, ships’ decks glistening and slippery with mackerel guts and scales. Innkeepers and sous-chefs argue over prices. The one-eyed captain of the carrier Hildegaard oversees the tagging and loading of three-dozen Yorkshire lambs and a prizewinning bull.

  Back from the harbour we find the inns, the card-parlours and the gaming rooms, the alehouses and poorhouses, the tottering, rat-infested hostels that form the filthy underside of the city’s trade. Where privateers drink side-by-side with schoolmasters, where a curate named Roland Parfitt, exhausted by the backstabbing bureaucracy of the parish meeting room, might find himself seduced by a guardsman’s flattery, at least for one evening.

  Behind the Harbourmaster’s Arms a cobbled road leads uphill, into the tangle of muddy streets where the townspeople plot their rebellions and nurse their sick children. Since the pestilence took hold in the North, there has been a counterpoint to the gaiety, to the shambolic splendour of Wyke on a Friday evening. The weekend carousing still takes place, the seamen still stand in line for their purses then head for the land. But knowing a stranger walks among them, the pious and perfidious of Wyke alike all turn their backs. They hope not to be noticed, hope to slip past unseen, hope never to glimpse the ravaged face at the hostelry window in the humid night.

  The plague, affirms Martin Latimer, town councillor, is the putrid fruit of ill-discipline among the lower classes. The butchers and leathermen with their blood-caked fingernails, the foul-mouthed sailors, the gossiping washerwomen with their filthy buckets, the ratcatchers and their reckless disposal of the fruits of their labours. Filth, flooding out of the sculleries of the undeserving poor, seeping like rancid fish-stock into the general water supply. Latimer calls for tighter controls on the sale of alcohol, together with a ban on seamen from foreign ports.

  The plague, insists Florian Schwarz, physician, is a misfortune directly attributable to the miasma that is the defining characteristic of estuarine environments. The stink of rotten fish, the damp, the constant ingress and egress of foul effluent and fouler citizenry—the watery nature of Wyke itself encourages pestilence in to set up its quarters. He advises beacons to be lit along the city’s western boundary, insisting that the burning of bracken and gorse and desiccated cattle dung has long been proven as a prophylactic against disease. He has sent to his uncle in Hamburg for the latest scientific treatise from the university.

  The plague, proclaims William Dearborn, witchfinder, is divine retribution from God, and no more than we deserve. In a booming, desolate voice, he puts forth a declaration from the steps of the Townhouse: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. He further adds that any citizen caught in the act of sheltering, conversing with, or failing to report the known whereabouts of a witch shall be judged as complicit in her witchery and sentenced accordingly. With the soul of the city in peril, no quarter shall be given, no rotten, creaking floorboard left unturned.

  The plague, declares Sir Stuart Laycock, King’s Justice, is a breeding ground for larceny, for looting and for black marketeering, for thieves and profiteers, damn all of their kind.

  The plague, says Sister Clare, Mother Superior of Wyke Abbey, is our own peculiar fate at this place and time. Our task as Christians is not to flee fate, but to confront it. To do the best we can with the tools to hand. To care for the sick and comfort the dying. To pray for wisdom and deeper knowledge of our time on Earth.

  The plague, adds Saira Gidding, apprentice scribe, has come this way before, and will come again.

  As the darned black coverlet of night is pulled from the sky, the daemonic power of the storm is made visibly manifest. The eastern end of the harbour wall has been washed away, the enclave of fishing shacks, grain stores and dosshouses known as Ravensword has been completely submerged. Doris, the landlady of St Cuthbert’s Inn, whose full name is Derenrice, begins to shake. Not just from the damp, seeping into her bones, but from the fitful, turgid light, the frayed rags of wind, the creeping intimation of what has occurred. The wrongness of it. How could a place be there and then be gone?

  The penniless vagabonds who seek sanctuary in Ravensword, the youngsters who fancy they’ll find their fortune on the open sea. Where are they now? Doris draws her cloak closer about herself, and shivers. The justice and his clerk exchange covert glances, though not covert enough to fool Doris, who can read men the way a farmhand reads the weather: the woman has dragged us halfway to purgatory on a fool’s errand, but what else would one expect of a crone who opens her house to renegades and whores?

  Any proof of what she has seen—if indeed she has seen anything—is gone now, washed away in the storm with the hovels of Ravensword. As if they have God on their side, those devil-men. As if God has conspired in the drowning of destitutes simply to vanish the traces of what has occurred.

  And for Justice Treacher here is vindication of what he already believes to be the truth: Saira Gidding has left Wyke of her own free will, with Gideon Marchmain. If she meets with ill luck then that is because floozies like Saira Gidding—women who disrespect the Church and consort with heretics—
always meet with ill luck. If the girl is no longer in the city then the city is well rid of her.

  His thoughts so clearly etched in his face it is as if they have been chalked there.

  If I find you, Gideon Marchmain, will you hear me then? says Doris finally. The desperation in her voice is repellent, most of all to her, yet how is she to avoid it?

  Good luck with that, Treacher says evenly. Doris sees his clerk—Enderby—smirking, and feels like punching him.

  It’s not luck I need, it’s a lawmaker with wit enough to see what’s in front of his eyes.

  She turns her face into the rain and hunches her shoulders and heads for home. She does not look back to see if the men are following.

  Stories of how the pestilence first came to Wyke have grown so plentiful and highly coloured they are a tale in themselves. Derenrice, who intuits the city’s rhythms as her own heartbeat, dates Wyke’s terror from the coming of the Copernicus, a sailing brig out of Rotterdam, exhausted from a four-day voyage over cumulous seas.

  Unnatural seas, the mariners asserted as they knocked back their ale. They seemed half-starved, and Doris bade the kitchen staff be generous with the mutton, though God help her if she has not found herself wishing in the eighteen months since that the Copernicus had foundered with all hands before rounding Spurn Head.

  It would have made no difference, Saira has said to her. If not that ship then another. The plague cares not for nations and knows no boundaries.

  The first deaths passed unnoticed, as misfortunes among the poor and illiterate tend to do. They occurred in the Fo’c’sle, a huddle of leaking, subsiding cottages close to the docks, the last refuge of broken-down mariners and their gin-soaked wives. From the harbour slums the plague spread to the filthier gaming rooms and drinking parlours of the eastern portside, before scuttling up through the maze of backstreets into the row houses and schoolrooms of the city’s mill workers. Now folk noticed all right, and the scourge seemed unstoppable.