A thrill of panic made Arden hasty. ‘Mr Anguis, it’s true once this opportunity presented itself, I grabbed it with both hands!” she insisted. ‘Wouldn’t you have done the same in my position, trying to find answers about someone you lo—’
Almost too late she held her tongue. She had said too much. He squinted at her. The word love dangled between them. His lip curled.
‘Perhaps you’re a Bellis Harrow, coming here in the guise of innocence but also incredibly dangerous,’ he said slowly, shook his head. ‘My good sense tells me we should do to you what we did her. Cast you out so you will never think of coming back.’
‘I was never here for you!’ Arden protested.
‘Your actions say otherwise.’
Arden gathered the last scraps of her pride. ‘I came out to the Islands because Jonah Riven asked for a deepwater funeral prayer. It’s an old rite—’
‘I know what the Deepwater Rite is,’ Miah sneered, but half-heartedly. His weariness meant there was no real vigour in him. ‘Go on.’
‘We were initially bound for Libro, but our ship broke down and we ended up here. It was not at all on purpose. I never would have come otherwise.’
‘Well, at least you are honest.’ Miah nodded.
‘You can tell?’
‘Yesterday your ship-guard boy told us everything. All about your dalliance with Jonah Riven, this ill-fated excursion to Equus. Barely two days you were together as lovers according to your boy, and here you are, risking life and limb to secure a funeral rite to a man wedded to somebody else.’
‘I was on my way home, but your people have stolen my boat! That boat is a man’s funeral boat, you can’t just take it away!’
He blinked once, as if confused, then his eyes widened as he at last understood.
‘Funeral boat? You call her a funeral boat?’ His face split with a great grimacing smile. ‘Oh. Oh. I see. A funeral boat. You intend to enact a common shorefolk funeral, set an ill-gotten boat on fire and have his memory sent on its merry way to the bottom of the ocean?’
Arden could not have bit her tongue any harder and not drawn blood. ‘It’s not as if I know anything about the Deepwater Rite, how could I? That seems much your area of expertise, sir.’
The atmosphere darkened. Even Mr Banks looked up from his last stitch. The medical man clipped the last threads and stood up, made his apologies and left, throwing down a curtain so they might have some privacy.
Arden awkwardly turned her head as Miah stood up, pulled the leg of his breeches back on.
‘I cannot doubt you are strong, Beacon, to have survived him, and her. And to go through all this pitiful search for absolution when there is none to be had. Not here, when the machines have taken so much.’
‘Then respect the strength that it has taken me to come out here in the first place, and let me take the boat and the boy home. Mr Anguis, there are people who depend on me for their lives, right now. You understand what it is to have people depend on you for the same thing.’
‘I do understand and accept your gratitude. And this is why I say you may go unharmed, as much as my conscience says otherwise. But the boat and boy stay with us.’
‘No, it’s not right!’ Arden leapt to her feet. ‘Jonah Riven passed Saudade on to David Modhi of Fiction before official witnesses. You cannot keep her!’
Miah grabbed the jar of kelp spirit off the bench where Arden had left it, and drank half its contents in one swallow before sucking air through his clenched teeth.
‘You have chased a ghost. Saudade never belonged to Jonah. Thalie’s son was never one of ours. He never completed the terrible rite. Given that he has high-bred sanguis ladies from Clay Capital chasing him across these islands, I can assume he even died intact with an exceedingly pretty cock.’
The suggested violence of the Rivens was spoken of so matter-of-factly, as if their lives were signposted in death and dismemberment.
‘The terrible rite? Like Malachi’s injury?’ she shot back, not allowing him to intimidate her. ‘You appeared intact yourself when I passed outside, so you haven’t gone that far either.’
‘As in removed altogether and fed to the ocean? Blessed and free from weakness? No, theirs is a greater call, their strength cannot be matched. I was cut differently, but still cut.’
A defiance in him. His thumb fell to the waistband of his breeches.
‘I gave pain to the water. I shall show you if you wish.’
How strange, those curiosities towards the violent rituals of lesser folk. If she hadn’t been so acutely aware of her captive position, or that she did not know this brutish man’s intentions, for an intense lurching moment her mouth would have met his challenge and replied, yes, go ahead then. Show me how you maimed yourself in sacrifice to the sea.
But the moment had passed, and he’d only been teasing her. Miah had already tucked his shirt back into his breeches. After testing his balance he snatched a simple ichthyosaur coat from a nearby hook and walked out, leaving her in the tent.
She had no choice but to follow him out of the sick-tent into the dreary morning. The deepwater man still had a limp as he walked ahead, but his stride eased out before long and he arrived in the camp centre, a rough construction of lean-tos and canvas awnings. Rainwater dripped about huddles of the mostly young and infirm, people who were not strong enough to join in the hunt.
Miah stepped underneath several shelters, shook hands, murmured words alongside grateful faces, and Arden could not interrupt, for what kind of person would she be to intrude upon them now? He was respected here, and she was the interloper the way Bellis had been, once upon a time.
Miah’s social duties done, he took a shortcut over the dunes. They crested at a point where the entire beach was a long black vista against the grey water.
Below them upon the black sand, the serpent’s coiled body was both massive and pathetic in its death. Its eye was a milky agate and each scale around it had to be as big as a serving platter. Several yards down, a row of deepwater folk had together disembowelled the creature, sending coils of iridescent purple intestines puddling onto the black sand. Waves of dead serpent stench buffeted her even from far away, the smell of fermented salt and melting road-tar on a hot day.
The cryptid aromatics reminded Arden of the kraken hen Jonah had caught, and their first kiss. A whirling despair followed the feeling. Jonah and Arden had shared a brief moment where all had seemed possible, but those hopes had been nothing more than a mirage. The Lions had been watching. Their days had been numbered, even then.
Arden expected that Miah Anguis would keep going down the dune. To her surprise he stayed on the crest and looked down like a bleak stone monument at the prize he had taken from the ocean. A muscle moved in his cheek.
‘Your ship-watch boy said it was Bellis that killed him?’ Miah asked gruffly. ‘Jonah.’
Arden nodded. ‘Yes. At summer’s end, when she caught us south of the Tempest. She was in Sehnsucht, a boat I’m sure you are familiar with.’
He hissed a curse word and squatted with a wince of pain, before throwing out his wounded leg and sitting awkwardly, one knee drawn up.
Arden watched in silence as he fished about in his pockets for a pouch of tobacco, and lit one of the thin leaf-wrapped twists with a strike lighter, before sucking an agitated lungful of smoke.
She joined him on the damp sand, her knees tucked under her dress. If she was going to argue for Saudade’s return, perhaps a more personal approach would be best.
‘Did you know Jonah well, sir? I know he was here to marry Bellis, but other than that …’
He rubbed his injured thigh. ‘Know him? He was my cousin.’
‘Cousin?’ she started, then all the puzzles in her mind about Miah Anguis’ provenance, the name they had called him, fell into place. He was Jonah’s cousin. His family and blood. Miah had to be Jeremiah, the son of Zachariah Riven. She gasped at the surprise, as if the wind had stolen her breath away.
The flash of
euphoria was followed by an equal worry.
‘Mr Anguis, I thought everyone died that night, when Jonah …’
‘I did die,’ he gritted, and sucked in more smoke. It was strong and bitter, reminiscent of graveyard bogs and swamps that swallowed men whole. ‘I did die. When the first of the creatures came into the compound, some of us fled into the ocean. It made no difference. The monsters followed. Circled us as we clung to a rock in Dead Man’s Bay. I was the only one to survive the first night. Stayed there three. Three days burned from salt-scores. The water leeches flayed my back bloody and raw. I made promises to foul gods those days and nights, to keep me alive.’
He finished the tobacco twist and discarded it.
‘The deepwater folk found me on the third morning, once word came to them what had happened. They could have left my rotting body there among the other corpses, but this land is not kind to us and they needed the numbers.’
Down on the beach the folk had wrapped rope cables around the serpent’s horns, and ten heads at each cable hauled the serpent’s tail away for the flensers to access.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said helplessly.
‘You don’t need to apologize. The crime was Jonah’s burden to carry.’
‘Mr Anguis, he lived with it every day. He spent fifteen years in Harbinger Bay. He was a pariah in town. They might not have been shorefolk themselves, but they never forgave him.’
Miah stood up with a grunt. ‘Well, he is free of it now, thanks to his wife.’
He didn’t wait for Arden and took a track down through the clumps of coast-grass and back onto the beach. She hauled herself out of the sand and followed him.
The folk had set up a long driftwood table near the serpent’s head. A roll of canvas and old, well-worn knives were set in a row upon the table. Another reminder chewed at her heart, for Jonah had owned a similar set. Worse still, from this angle she could peer beyond the dune ridges where their boats were anchored, and Saudade was among them, twice as large as any other.
‘Sir, I still need to discuss the boat.’
‘We’ve discussed it,’ Miah said. He nodded to a pair of clan fellows, and Arden waited anxiously for them to collect their butcher’s implements and pass, so she might be allowed privacy. Every minute here seemed time wasted.
‘I cannot impress how staying in Burden Town is a death sentence,’ she continued urgently once the other folk were out of earshot. ‘They’ve already descended into cannibalism in that city, and soon they’ll fall further. Saudade is our only way off. We will die if we stay!’
Miah yanked a flensing knife from the canvas roll with such vehemence that she needed to step back or get cut to ribbons.
‘Listen, Beacon, you are young, and rich-looking, and obviously have no taste at all in lovers. There are men in Burden Town who would give you an unnecessary boat for a night in the sheets with a Lyonnian bloodworker. You do not need to take one of the few family relics I have left. Not when Jonah took everything that was mine, everything that I loved, my respect and even my name, whether he did it on purpose or not.’
Miah pointed the blade at the encampment, and then at her chest. ‘Besides, Mr Cleave tells me your boy made an agreement to stay. Him and his friend, who Malachi will advise as soon as he returns.’
Arden gave an incredulous gasp at Sean’s disloyalty. She pushed herself forward until the point of the rippled steel poked into her breastbone.
‘Sean cannot make that bargain. He doesn’t understand what he asks for.’
‘Is he not Mr Modhi’s lover? The boat’s true owner, as you say? Then Mr Ironcup has some right to ownership, where you and your filthy licentious loyalty to Jonah Riven do not.’
‘What if I take this question to Mr Cleave?’ she retorted. ‘Your young stormcaller is in that quarantine tent, bloodless, with no-one left to light the rockblood fires. What if I were to offer my services in return for a boat far too gaudy for a clan trying to keep hidden up here and away from a hundred thousand starving men?’
Her aim hit true, for Miah winced and pushed the blade, and had there been any pressure, it would have sliced open the dress-cloth at her sternum.
‘We have been getting along so well, you and I. Don’t make your removal unpleasant. I have butcher’s work to do. Mr Cleave will see you back to the river.’
‘But—’
‘You speak of exchanging all the things but not the one thing obviously most precious to him,’ Miah said sharply. ‘That which you have not offered.’
A dark caution loomed over her. A weight, like a coming storm, the same as she had felt inside the Burden Town alley-church, and the priest’s growling invitation. They’d been dancing around the boat’s true worth, and the limits of what Arden would give.
‘Most precious to him? Jonah had nothing except Saudade. She was his whole life.’
‘Until the end.’
‘You make no sense. Look at these people around you. You say you have no respect, but I see the love in these people’s eyes. Jonah never had any of that.’
‘Yes,’ Miah countered sharply. ‘Look at these people around us. They were there when I was dragged half-dead to the Equus shores after my family’s massacre. They voted to keep me alive, even though I was shore-born and tainted by the shallows. Now how would they feel if I just upped and gave my father’s boat to his killer’s lover? I would lose this love you think comes so easily to me. Unless recompense was made.’
She swallowed a suddenly dry throat. Asked, even though she could see it in his face, the way his eyes racked over her, hungry. ‘What recompense?’
He paused, deliberating on what he would say next. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse with a malicious ferment.
‘Return to me what I lost. The three sunrises I saw on that rock while I watched my family die.’
‘How can I return those days?’
‘My people will see what I ask from you and know it payment. I will not lose face by giving my cousin a funeral-boat like a coward. You tell me he had no family, no respect. I will have taken something from him more than a boat, something that he cannot recover.’
Though white-hot inside, Arden gave Miah Anguis the same cool stare she’d used to close down arguments with Lord Abaddon, Mr Justinian, and scores of lesser men.
‘I am not a thing to be bargained with.’
Before she could stop him, Miah seized up her arms and dragged Arden to press his torso forcefully against her own. She might have fought against the sea for all the effort her struggles achieved in his hands.
Up close his tattoos had left deep gouges upon his collarbone, and the ink upon his chest, the sea-serpent glyphs nestling in the dark hair, appeared as violent as wounds.
He jutted his face at hers. Not to kiss. His jaw slid abrasive upon her cheek, hot breath in her ear, murmured words in a mocking growl.
‘It is not the boat. You are correct, I have enough boats and my father’s is gaudy indeed. I will take something more precious to my family’s killer, something that he cannot reclaim from the dead. If you ever have a memory of Jonah-fucking-Riven, it’ll be my tongue on your clit and my cock in your quim you’ll feel when you think of his name. Always. I’ll defile any love you have left inside, and when I’m done I might even be generous and retrieve my fool cousin’s body from Bellis fucking Harrow and burn it in front of you for good fucking measure.’
He pushed her away, mouth twisted as if it were even worse for him to have suggested such perfidies as payment.
‘Anyhow. That’s the price for your funeral boat,’ he finished, with exaggerated politeness, as casual as if she’d offered a purse of Lyonne silver dollars and he’d declined with a request for gold instead.
Arden rubbed her arms, for they burned from where he’d held her so hard. Her speechlessness was more from the venom in his proposal than the content. In the wild surrounds of the swordgrass dunes her fevered imagination conjured him as misshapen in engorgement as the serpent upon the beach.
&n
bsp; Her voice came back, trembling with indignant emotion. ‘So, I suppose you find it amusing, to speak to me in the manner of a fiend … about a serious exchange.’
Miah had obviously been expecting her refusal. It had not been an offer made to ensure agreement, only to underscore impossibility. His behaviour had not changed since he was Jeremiah Riven of Vigil, taking tobacco off a young girl. He was not offended by her lack of enthusiasm. He waved Arden off, as if he’d meant to present her with an unreasonable choice that she could not accept.
‘Then go with grace, Arden Beacon. I’ll treat the boy well, and his friend likewise. But don’t come back here again.’
10
The fumes from the refineries
The fumes from the refineries made a sickly blue hour when they returned on Lys’ boat. They journeyed through wet, jaundiced fog, crawled at a snail’s pace through the river’s cloacal murk. Lys would have been navigating blind if not for the plaintive wails of the foghorns carrying across the river. The weather had turned upon them, and the chill sank down into Arden’s bones. Her hands hurt, even when she tucked them inside her coat for warmth.
She had lost Saudade, and the hope of Jonah’s funeral. She had tried and failed again. Arden hugged herself as if she’d become an empty vessel without purpose, everything internal having drained out, leaving behind an exhausted shell of skin. She could still smell Miah Anguis on her, the limestone water on his breath and the thick animal ferment of his fevered skin, so like and unlike Jonah it confused her memory of him. Had her Mr Riven smelled like that? Had he felt like that?
Along the river, Malachi blenched each time the small boat hit a current or wave. With the excitement of the hunt having worn off fully, his bruised ribs and swelling wrist pained him with an awful ache. She regarded him suspiciously. He would be the one to tell David about Sean, and the harbour Sean had negotiated on his behalf. What would David do? Follow him heedlessly? The deepwater folk lived a rough Arcadian existence, but with Burden Town’s collapse coming, they could not hope to remain that long.
Deepwater King Page 14