‘It is not a competition,’ she said, and pulled on her blouse. It was thankfully dry, as were her kidskin leggings.
He grinned and propped himself up on his elbow. ‘Still. It will certainly be a memory I will hold close in long nights hence.’
Had she not needed to maintain politeness, she might have given him a tart response. By now it was daylight. There was no more food apart from some figs Miah had liberated from the wild coastal trees the evening before, and the water tasted even more strongly of limestone. It left a dry taste in her mouth.
They left the way station and returned to their journey along the coast. Just before noon they came upon a muddy, dour harbour encampment, a combination of shorefolk tents and ruins, fogged with the bunker-smoke and rimed with rockblood.
The deepwater folk who on the Deepwater Night had seemed so alive and invigorated were reduced to shades among the mechanical wreckage, grey and bowed by work. The rough leathers and linens of clothing made them shapeless.
On their arrival, Miah became agitated. His foot drummed on the baseboards of the cart.
Two dozen tanker-ships in various states of breaking and decay rested forlornly on the nearby beach and in the sloshy breakers. Sparks showered from the end of one ship’s rusted hull as a beleaguered work-crew set about cutting the vessel apart for its bloodworked iron.
The ruins of a pier jutted out into the grey water. At its end, Saudade bobbed dark and huge against the smaller fishing boats.
Arden took a sharp, almost painful breath at Saudade’s appearance. Whatever doubts were over her disappeared with the sight of that proud ship. This was the vessel that would take her to Jonah.
Miah’s passage into the encampment did not let Arden look at Saudade long, for he took the cart down a street of shanty huts, and towards the mouth of a temporary foundry falling into some despaired ruins. Hardened iron-melt lumped on the edge of salt-dusted crucibles. Creatures moved in the high eaves – not birds. Something else. Their guano had a cryptid smell.
She glanced at him, sensing a sombre change in his mood. He dismissed some fellow folk greetings with a terse mumble in Fictish. His foot juddered on the wood of the cart, and he spoke with an odd impatience when he finally came to the cart’s grey-coated owner. The owner pointed at Arden, spoke in a tone that was undoubtedly disapproving, and fell into a sulk when Miah tipped up his head and high-handedly replied in his old language, along with a word in old Lyonnian that sounded like restitutio.
With that business done he led her over some duckboards in the wet sand to a small and bare room that was hardly an improvement on the temple, with one wall merely a sailcloth awning against the weather.
Its interior contained a rug, a bed pallet, a side table with slumped, re-fired glassware and a jug of water. He lit a small petralactose light above the bed.
Arden looked about her, and hugged herself to quell the sudden race of her heart.
‘This is your apartment?’
‘Yes,’ and then he let out a little disbelieving, wry laugh.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘I’ve never brought a woman here before.’
‘I find that hard to believe.’
‘I mean, not here. I am not allowed a bride, but since we are enacting a deal of restitution, it is permitted to have a temporary bed mate.’
Miah nodded, and she could smell him in the room, the yearning of him, but under it the sharp metal smell of his secret sanguinity, mandatum.
He took her hand and pulled her to him. His mouth went under her ear and he breathed loudly. She avoided his mouth when he pushed for a kiss.
‘You never told me why you are not permitted a wife in the first place …’
Miah didn’t answer her, only yanked at the laces of her dirty undershirt, pushed her stockings down off her hips. Had her rejection of a kiss angered him? Their coupling afterwards was sullen and quiet compared to the previous night in the way station, and he did not bother to undress. Even in the midst of his sweaty, huffing exertions and her own murmurs Arden could hear the stray voices of people in the other rooms, a constant distraction. He finished quickly and lay upon her with his crushing weight. A knot in his shirt was sticking into her sternum. She took note of all her discomforts and found one was more pressing than the others.
She tapped his heaving shoulder as his breath steadied.
‘Can we get something to eat? I’m starving. We haven’t eaten anything since last night.’
For the briefest of seconds it appeared as if he would take offence at Arden’s priorities, but then he nodded. ‘All right. I need to do some business. I’ll be gone until the evening time. These last days have been a trial, I will not deny it.’
‘So,’ she said as he tucked himself back into his leathers. ‘Since my clothes are torn to rags …’
He hesitated, then nodded. ‘I’ll have one of the women bring some more, and food.’
‘Thank you.’
He hesitated at the edge of the door-canvas, and Arden halfway expected that he return to the bed pallet, but he nodded once more and was gone.
Not wanting to spend another minute in this room, Arden put on her coat and stepped outside onto the duckboards. The air had the iron smell of chemical cutting torches, and down on the littered beach lay an entire tanker-ship broken in half. She had seen many boats in various stages of dismemberment on the Clay Portside docks, but had never seen a boat built like this one, a countless jumble of springs and gears about a long central arbour. Why, it really was more like a clockwork toy than a machine.
‘Hello?’
The woman’s voice startled her, and she turned about. The visitor had arrived with a steaming bucket in one hand, a dress of grey wool and some undergarments of flax-linen in the other. She carried herself tall and stern, silver hair knotted with a braid of leather. Serpent-scale chevrons on both cheeks.
‘You are Arden … Beacon?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Come with me,’ said the woman. She had such an air of authority about her, Arden did not argue or ask questions. Each time her braid moved, Arden caught sight of the tattoo on the back of the woman’s neck. A chevron, a marriage mark.
She followed the deepwater woman to a basalt-stone communal bathing area that had not a single privacy wall save for a few desultory bed linens drying on a line.
Without a word the woman laid the dry clothing across a nearby guy rope. Showed Arden a shallow green copper tub next to a cirque of flat stones. A sliver of foamy lard-soap greyed the top of the steaming water. She pulled some linens from another rope and hung them up to give Arden some seclusion.
‘There’s meat after this,’ the woman said with an indelicate gesture. ‘If you’re still in the mood for meat.’
After the woman left Arden put her coat aside, stood in the tub and scrubbed herself as best she could, as the brush and soap kept knocking from her hands if she did not concentrate on holding them. Along with every other little torment, her heart hurt from general self-pity and anxiety for the next day, when she would sail to Maris, and a man who might not be alive. Would he understand what she had done to save him? Would Jonah think unkindly about these nights?
Hard to linger too long on worries when the soapy hot water and the shallow copper bath brought so much relief. She stayed until the water cooled, then dried herself off with a brushed-linen towel. When she was dry and goose-fleshed, she found to her delight that the woman had hung boots of fleece-skin along with the dress. She had even been supplied some fingerless gloves of a sea-serpent leather, a nod towards them knowing she was sanguis and what her hands required.
Arden struggled to dress herself gracefully. Her fingers did not want to follow her mind’s instruction, and the gloves required repositioning with her teeth. The woman returned to Arden after she finally slipped into the fleece-skin boots.
‘My husband Amos tells me Miah Anguis made an agreement of restitutio with yourself,’ the woman said. ‘My husband was only
just informed.’
So this agreement had a name, and if Miah was telling people about it, then it was formal, and sanctioned.
‘If your husband is Mr Amos Cleave, you may tell him that is correct.’
‘What happens when the deal is done?’ Mrs Cleave asked. Arden could sense a guardedness to her question. No ordinary curiosity had prompted the woman to ask such a thing. She recalled the cart-owner’s annoyance at seeing Arden, the way Miah had said restitutio as if it were an explanation for her unwanted presence.
‘Tomorrow I intend to leave this place. I have somewhere I need to be, and he will take me. That is our agreement.’
‘Rescuing a man whom you once loved, apparently. A man of our acquaintance, Bellis Harrow’s husband.’
Arden bristled at the name. ‘Yes.’
Mrs Cleave closed her eyes and nodded solemnly. ‘If you go to him, you will not come back here?’
‘If I survive his rescue, I will not.’ Arden shook her head. ‘I’m passing through, Mrs Cleave. This has been a necessary diversion, and very soon I will be gone.’
Mrs Cleave nodded then, as if Arden had satisfied a worry.
‘Well then, go ahead and have some food by the central fire. If a woman is intending to carry out a rescue, then she needs her strength.’
‘Say we go to Maris tomorrow, and find out my cousin didn’t survive her. What then?’
Miah’s late-night question took her by surprise. He had not said anything on his return that evening, only sought out affection with an almost sulky neediness. She had responded kindly to him, buoyant with joy at the upcoming journey to Maris, and feeling the first bright sparks of hope she’d had in a long while.
Why, she decided, this agreement had not been altogether awful, for the day had allowed her rest she sorely needed. On his return she found Miah experienced enough to not be clumsy in his urgent lovemaking, or ending up accidentally hurting her with his muscular bulk. Curiously, her good feelings made her think warmly of Miah Anguis. After all, he was going to risk himself by taking her and facing Bellis again. Perhaps she would think of him in times hence, and his memory would be a warm and pleasant one.
But even as they finished up the last few moments of the agreement in the dark-time hours, there seemed to be a strange sort of tension in him, as if he were holding something back.
Then as they’d lain alongside one another, exhausted and rimed in sweat, he’d blurted out the possibility of Jonah’s death.
‘You may have to consider what happens afterwards,’ he concluded with such gravitas it sounded as if he had been practising the speech. ‘Remember, Bellis’ people are deserting now. She’ll not be in the best of temperaments.’
‘I won’t believe Jonah’s dead until I see it myself. I won’t consider it,’ Arden said. She climbed out of his bed-pallet and slid the dress back over her shoulders. ‘I’ve come so far and I miss him so much.’
‘Don’t put all your figs in one basket, Beacon.’ Miah discarded the now empty kelp-spirit bottle, then looked at the scab on his arm where he’d cut himself two nights before. ‘I know what it’s like to be cornered into a situation you can’t get out of. This talent. Mandatum. It has no use to me except as little tricks upon the copper.’
‘But mandatum gives immunity against Bellis, turns her power on herself. The talents are so similar, she could not use her sanguinity against you.’
‘Even saving the lives of every soul here could not win their full trust. I have been lonely, set apart from the others. Despite bringing me home to Equus, making me one of their own, I have never been truly accepted by my people.’
‘Ah. The no-marriage thing.’ Arden knew at once where the conversation was going. The night and their upcoming separation had made him maudlin. They were words for a lover, not her. ‘Miah, no sooner than I am gone, one of your young admirers will step in my place, bed-permitted or not.’
‘In secret, and with no acknowledgement after.’ He reached for her hem and rubbed the cloth in between his fingers. ‘Was fine when I was young, but my days are growing shorter, and I have yet to accomplish all I wished to. I am prohibited to marry a deepwater woman, but I can choose someone else. A foreigner. If she would accept me.’
He did not look at her, kept rubbing the woollen hem. The mood was tilting into something worrisome. It would be so easy to give in to him. Let Jonah’s ghost go. A life without Lions. A life hidden, and maybe all her own.
A sanguis in Clay never lived such a free existence, but a sanguis mandatum had lived here for decades untroubled. The evidence was real that she could too.
‘All right, we’ll see what tomorrow brings. If the outcome is bad I will consider it, but only if worst comes to worst.’
‘Consider it,’ he said, with a thoughtful smile. ‘It could work. I could get the permissions.’
He then spoke for a little while on a plan he and his companions had come up with to enter Maris Island. They would disguise themselves as stateless Fiction pirates who had stolen a boat and its lone passenger – Arden – before asking to see Queen Bellis in the hopes of a reward. When she was within speaking distance, Miah could reveal himself. Command Bellis, the way she commanded others.
And in the shelter of Miah’s strange bloodwork Arden could rescue Jonah.
It seemed a good plan, and Arden told him so, and she let him make love to her again, even though it was just about morning and by rights the agreement had ended at midnight.
The machines screamed in the badlands and Arden imagined that she was holding Jonah as Miah claimed her in his raptures. Bit her tongue so she would not say Jonah’s name when she reached her peak, but it was him in her mind all the same. This would be the last time another man would take Jonah’s place. She had spoken to Miah of an alternative life only to placate him. She was being kind in her evasions, not cruel. Any other relationship would be an impossibility. The coins in her hands tied her to Lyonne, and Arden was returning with Jonah Riven by her side.
Miah offered her another bottle from a tea chest at the foot of his pallet, but instead of being a spirit, it was a sweet cordial that tasted of fennel, of wild liquorice.
Dawn light filtered through the canvas awning. She lay next to Miah and drew the blanket up to her neck to escape the chill of the mist creeping under the canvas wall. His arm went about her as he slept. Impatience made it hard for her to do the same. Something moved in her, the kick of sanguis recognition, the same feeling that had come when she’d first sailed into the Burden Town docks.
She tried to banish her doubts from her mind. The agreement was finished. Within hours she would be sailing to Maris.
20
Arden woke
Arden woke – groggy as if she’d been hit – to find the bed pallet empty, and Miah Anguis gone.
Groaning from the aches about her body, Arden pushed off the rough blanket. The sky through the gaps in the canvas wall was brighter than she would have expected, since she’d only slipped into a doze. How had she slept for so long? Why hadn’t Miah stirred her awake when he moved? A lighthouse keeper was meant to sleep light. A person outside walking by should have put her wide awake.
Then Arden hiccoughed, and the taste of fennel filled her mouth.
Along with the taste of something bitter, and medicinal. Like the sleep draughts the doctor would give her as a child.
She snatched up the cordial bottle where Miah had left it. He’d had none himself. It was untouched since she’d happily partaken of half the contents.
‘No …’
In her rush for the tent wall she fell over the pallet, and yanked aside a fold of waxed sailcloth. Instead of a morning falling over the harbour, it was a solid grey day.
Saudade was no longer there.
‘Devilment, Miah!’ She struggled into her donated shoes and ran out onto the pavements that surrounded the encampment. If Saudade was not there, then Miah had gone, and for no small time either. There was no sun in the sky to show through the rainclou
ds.
A woman strolled past with a child on her hip, and Arden caught her attention.
‘Sister, what time is it?’
The woman gave Arden a little panicked startle before replying, ‘Mr Cleave has the clock, but I would say it’s noon-time at least.’
‘Noon!’ Arden cried, and left the puzzled mother to run down into the encampment’s centre.
At the central campfire, thin strips of serpent meat festooned the smoking-pits. A scent both nauseating and enticing filled the narrow walkways between the semi-permanent shelters of flax-canvas and salvaged iron. Her stomach pinched from hunger but her anxiety made her too sick to consider eating. She marched as best she could along to the docks where the men stood in knots, eating their midday lunches and smoking tobacco. She sought out any face who could know what they were doing. To add to the injury, it began to rain, and she reached the end of the decaying harbour a bedraggled mess.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to the back of a grimy ichthyosaur coat. ‘Where’s the black mangrove boat that was here last night?’
The face that turned about belonged to Mr Cleave. He looked her up and down with no small surprise.
‘How the devils are you still here?’ he said without greeting. ‘My wife said you’d be gone by morning.’
‘Maybe ask Miah Anguis that. He’s broken a vow of restitutio, taken the boat but not me.’
Then it came over her, the full extent of what Miah had done. What he’d planned.
Miah had gone to Maris without her.
She tried to suck in a breath but it wouldn’t come. ‘Oh devils. Oh God.’
A low, careful look came over Mr Cleave as he witnessed Arden’s terrible epiphany. Resentment mired in concern. Mr Cleave then tilted his bristly chin towards a shack of iron. ‘This rain has made a mess of you, Clay woman. Get yourself out of the weather and let us discuss this.’
A lean-to shelter propped against the remnant hull of a ship. Inside had just enough room for a desk, with two salt-mottled ship’s chairs tucked underneath. He pulled out one – stuffing bleeding from an un-stitched side – and gestured that she should sit.
Deepwater King Page 24