The Private Life of Elder Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  He ignored the suggestive brown stains – there was no sign of a body – and eventually his search was rewarded. A new hat, straw weave, and it fit him well. Pleased with his find, he paused in front of a spotted mirror for a moment, to admire it.

  He did not recognise the face that looked back at him.

  He collapsed, not caring where he landed, or how. He was close to weeping, but there were no tears left, just an aching that would not ease. How long had it been? Was it really as long as that? Was that old man with grey streaked though his hair and beard, that starved tramp, that dull burnt-brown face, was that really him?

  He searched frantically for his diary. He’d kept track of the days as best he could, but after a while it became impossible. He’d wake in the morning, go about his business, only to think later in the day, did I make my mark this morning? Or did I forget? Then lack of paper became a problem – he made copious notes at first, not thinking for a moment that he’d ever have difficulty finding more to write on – so he started keeping a tally stick instead, carving his mark on it. Except he lost his stick – and had to start another. But how long had it been? What was the latest mark?

  He left the Agamemnon’s faded finery, heading back up on deck to stare across the vastness of the weed.

  It, at least, had not changed. Infinite and impersonal, it stretched as far as he could see, and there were times, moments of utter despair, when he thought it stretched further than he could imagine. The larger drifts concealed other ships, or aircraft, or perhaps some other floating thing. Since becoming trapped in this vast Sargasso, he had stood on the deck of a trireme as seaworthy as any in Pericles’ fleet, navigated the rotten and perilous decks of a tramp steamer some hundred years or so trapped in the weed, and encountered many other strange craft. He had no idea where his own ship, the research vessel Boreas, was now. He wasn’t certain he could pinpoint, among his many marks, the day he had abandoned it for good.

  The human voice, when he heard it, startled him so profoundly that he hid, shivering, without a moment’s thought or hesitation.

  “Now,” it said, clear and bright, “does my project gather to a head! My charms crack not; my spirits obey, and time goes upright with his carriage!”

  Sigurdsun did not recognise the voice. He reasoned, when he overcame his terror, that it could not be one of them, for they did not speak. They grunted, yelled, or gibbered. The speaker wasn’t English, or at least, he did not have an Englishman’s glottal, guttural voice. He might be American.

  Sigurdsun risked a look over the Agamemnon’s rail.

  The stranger wasn’t trying to hide. Sigurdsun, who had made a religion of caution, and with reason, marvelled. The newcomer walked about – the weed was dense enough, in places, if you were careful – as though there was no danger. He was young, probably in his twenties, though his lined face made him look older. His clothes were a little old-fashioned, but not by that much; Sigurdsun’s father might have worn a workingman’s jacket like that.

  “Say, my spirit, how fares the king and’s followers?”

  “Ahoy there!”

  How cracked and reedy my voice is, Sigurdsun thought; I am my grandfather, now.

  The stranger, hearing him, swung about so quickly that the weed nearly lost its grip, and he half-tumbled into it.

  “Hag-seed!” he screeched. “Hence!”

  Sigurdsun stood, hands outstretched, palms up. “I mean…” What was the word, the word, oh let me not stumble now, he thought. “…harm not. I mean no harm, that is. I will not hurt you. Please, I am … my name is Paulinus Sigurdsun. I am alone. I will not … oh please, do not go!”

  For he was backing away, this American dropped from Heaven, though his speed was not so very great; he could not afford to be too swift, or he’d fall through altogether and then probably sink into the ocean depths.

  “Please! Oh, please! I promise! I promise no harm!”

  It was no good. The American scrambled up into a larger patch of weed, and vanished. Sigurdsun, almost sobbing, pleaded for another minute or two, hoping that tone of voice would do what his ragged appearance clearly could not. When he realised that his hopes were vain, he sank back on the deck, chest heaving.

  It was a long time before he thought to see if the trail the American left behind could be followed.

  *

  It was a newer ship than Sigurdsun was accustomed to. Some of the things he had found in the Sargasso had been there months, years, in one case perhaps two centuries or more – more a rotten shadow of a thing than the thing itself. But this small craft had been adrift here only a week or so. It was heavily damaged, and not from a storm; Sigurdsun, no navy man, had spent his war service in muddy fields and shell holes, and he knew what high explosive could do. This tidy grey warship had been near cut in half. Most of the stern was gone, and had it not been for the weed Sigurdsun suspected it would have sunk some time ago.

  It was so fresh, in fact, that there were still corpses aboard. Usually by the time Sigurdsun found a ship there was little left, perhaps a suggestive pile of ash and some gnawed bone, but this one was untouched.

  The American’s trail ended here. Sigurdsun stepped as cautiously as he dared, trying not to startle him. The crew cabins were forward; that was where the American probably was. Sigurdsun stopped to briefly admire what seemed to be a machine gun, though more sophisticated than the ones he’d used over a decade ago. He wondered briefly if he could get it off of its pintle mount, then dismissed the idea. Even if he could, it was unwieldy and he had no ammunition for it. Better if he found a pistol.

  He stood at the entrance to the crew cabins. “Sir? Mister American, are you there?”

  Something certainly was. He could hear it shifting weight. He hoped to God it wasn’t one of the others.

  “For this, be sure,” the voice floated up from the darkness, “tonight thou shalt have cramps!”

  Sigurdsun both knew and did not know the words. They were familiar to him, and given time and thought he could probably put a name to them. But time he did not have, and his thoughts ran now like wet paint spilled over a floor; he could no more remember the thing than he could fly like a bird.

  “Please, Mister American. Please come out. I will not hurt you, I swear it! You don’t understand, you don’t … it has been so long. Please. Have mercy!”

  “Side-stitches,,,” and he gloated over them “…that shall pen thy breath up; urchins shall, for that vast of night that they may work, all exercise on thee!

  “Give me a look!” It was the work of desperation. “Give me a face, that makes simplicity a grace!”

  Sigurdsun had no idea what the words meant. He remembered them from his time in England, in the camps, when earnest young people tried, with some success, to teach them English. He’d no need of their lessons, having already a good grasp of the language, but he remembered some of the poetry, a few snatches here and there, mice wandering in an empty storeroom.

  It was so very quiet.

  “So glad of this,” came the voice, at last, “as they, I cannot be, who are surprised withal.”

  “May I enter?”

  The American made no reply, but was not hostile either. Taking that as the best kind of permission he was likely to get, Sigurdsun crept cautiously down the stairwell.

  It was a cramped space. Not long out from port, either, since there were still bags of food – Sigurdsun eyed a sausage hungrily – hanging from the ceiling. He remembered his cousin, a submariner, telling him how the crew would bring extra supplies along, eating them quickly while still fresh. The American was tearing busily at a hunk of bread. Sigurdsun reached out for the sausage. Landjäger! The American made no move to stop him. Sigurdsun ripped into it.

  “I had never thought,” he said, “a man could be hungry, in a dream. But this!”

  The American nodded. “Spirits, which by mine art I have from their confines call’d to enact my present fancies.”

  “But see! Paper! I am always in need, and
these poor fellows need nothing any more. And again, the dream! Look at that!”

  The American, puzzled, shook his head.

  “But see! Ach, you do not. It is the National Socialist symbol. Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. Stupid! Every man knows that little monkey is under the thumb of the industrialists and the Junkers, and in any case, we have signed treaties. We shall never have a military again. Phantoms, all of it! And yet, so detailed. I have seen little portunus sayi – crabs – playing in the Sargassum natans. And there is no question that it is Sargasso, though I have never seen the stuff first hand before now. It resembles exactly that which I have seen drawn in books. You, yourself, must be someone I have met before, for in a dream everything comes from within, is it not so? But I do not remember you. I am sorry, I talk too much. It has been so long. So long.”

  The American had finished his bread, and begun poking around. His hand closed on something that turned Sigurdsun white, and cold with sudden terror.

  “Please … please put that away.”

  “But how is it that this lives in thy mind?” The American’s gentle smile might have reassured, under different circum-stances. “What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?”

  Sigurdsun’s mouth went desert-dry. The thing the American held, so nonchalantly, could blow them both to pieces in an instant. He had used them before, in the War, and found them so tricky and unpredictable he’d rather never touch one again. But there it was, in the palm of the American’s hand, and one careless action could scatter them both like seed corn.

  “You do not know what you have! Put it away, I beg you, or give it to me. I can keep it safe.”

  The American threw it to him, carelessly, as if it were a toy. Sigurdsun caught it with both hands, clutching. He put it in his belt; he almost threw it overboard, but caution stopped him. There might be a use for it later.

  The American was busying himself with the ship’s radio. Tuning it seemed to give him great pleasure, though the only result was a discordant hum. Sigurdsun knew it was pointless. There was nobody out there sending a signal, and nobody to hear one.

  “I wish you would talk some sense,” Sigurdsun sighed.

  The American nodded sagely. “I find my zenith doth depend upon a most auspicious star, whose influence if now I court not but omit, my fortunes will ever after droop. Here cease more questions. Thou art inclined to sleep; ‘tis a good dullness.”

  Sigurdsun coughed, great racking heaves that only ended when the American thumped him companionably on the back.

  “Sleep!” said Sigurdsun, when he recovered. “One never sleeps in a dream, have you noticed that? There are times when my eyes swim, my mind falters, and I think I might be unconscious for a time, but sleep? Never.

  “I used to have such wonderful dreams. I remember walking the streets of a great city, greater than any I have ever known. I knew it like I knew my birthplace. Its people were my people, and there was not one street, one house, I was not familiar with. Now? I don’t sleep.”

  He looked at the American. Concern was all he saw there, a worried uncle looking after a sick nephew. The man was probably ten years his junior, too.

  “Ach, it’s probably better you don’t talk. God knows, there have been times I wished I could go mad. It would make everything easy. But so long as we are together, I’ll do the talking for both of us, hey?”

  *

  Sigurdsun never gave up. His hope, a distant dream, was that one day he would find a way out of the Sargasso, somehow, perhaps steal one of the more intact ships – a yacht for preference, like the ones he’d learned to sail on when he was a boy – and head for home. Food, water, would be problems, and the stars above were cold and unfamiliar, useless for navigation. But it was a good dream, and he believed in it.

  He and the American spent days looking, each marked carefully on a tally stick. The American seemed content to follow in Sigurdsun’s wake, chattering to himself, nosing around in the derelicts when they boarded them, looking for God alone knew what. Sigurdsun could not persuade the American to tell his name, so he kept on calling him Mister American, and the man did not seem to mind.

  When they boarded a ship Mister American happily searched it, but seldom was interested in the things Sigurdsun found. He had no use for paper, and only a passing interest in food; the charts and navigation aids that sent Sigurdsun into raptures didn’t interest him one bit. What captured his attention was clothing and books. He might sit for minutes at a time, gently stroking a piece of cloth, or mesmerised by a hat, a shoe, a jacket. He never took any of these things, and after the reverie he never paid them the least attention, but for that moment they were all the world to him.

  Books, however waterlogged, always fascinated him. He would carry them for hours, read them obsessively, mumble under his breath as though the words meant something. It didn’t seem to matter the language or the content. At one point he had fifteen of them in his arms, balanced precariously, and almost tumbled into the weed when he overbalanced. Most of his treasures eventually went straight into the drink, splashing one by one, lost. He wept like a baby and would not be comforted.

  *

  Black sails, off in the distance, and Sigurdsun halted, watching them.

  He knew that ships had to join the weed-choked fleet all the time. That was how the Boreas had become part of the great waste; it had blundered out of a storm, its rudder jammed and heeling uncertainly to port, and nothing they could do stopped it from drifting, with ponderous slowness, into the heart of the Sargasso. Yet he did not often see a new ship. The little grey warship was still the best preserved of all the wrecks he’d discovered, and even that had been several days in the weed before they found it.

  The black sails discomforted him in ways he couldn’t explain, even to himself. It was as if ghosts were walking over his grave, dragging their chains, each cold link an unhappy memory.

  Mister American bristled, eyes wide, teeth snapping. Sigurdsun had to grab him quickly, else he’d have gone dashing over the weed towards the sails. That, Sigurdsun knew without telling, would be disaster.

  The sails billowed. Sigurdsun heard voices, but sound travelled far over water; there was no way to tell how close they were. The language was hauntingly familiar, but he could not place it.

  “Come,” he said, tugging at Mister American’s arm.

  “Go charge my goblins,” he spat, “that they grind their joints with dry convulsions, shorten up their sinews with aged cramps, and more pinch-spotted make ’em than pard or cat-a-mountain!”

  Sigurdsun dragged him away by force, kicking and spitting. Terror gave Sigurdsun wings; the black sails, whatever they might be, certainly could hear Mister American’s shrieks and curses. Sigurdsun fancied he saw the weed move, search parties sent out.

  He had to shove Mister American along. For all his rage he lacked strength, but so did Sigurdsun, and like two wandering tramps quarrelling over a rag and scrap of bone they proceeded, one pushing, one struggling. Sigurdsun, in a flash of inspiration, snatched one of Mister American’s books out of his arms.

  “Put thy sword up, traitor!” Mister American howled.

  “For kings are clouts,” was the reply, as Sigurdsun retreated hastily, “that every man shoots at, our crown the pin that thousands seek to cleave!” He had no idea what it meant. It was another fragment stolen from a near-empty storeroom, but it seemed enough, for Mister American came blundering after, and by good fortune or God’s grace he did not shout again, needing all his breath for moving.

  Even so, it wasn’t enough. Mister American put a foot wrong. Running was treacherous in the weed, and before Sigurdsun could blink Mister American was half underwater, hands clutching. In a moment he would be all the way gone. It would be quiet, then; Sigurdsun could creep away.

  He leapt forward, forgetting the book, which tumbled unconsidered to a watery finish. Grabbing Mister American by the jacket sleeve, he stopped him from going further under. Mister Amer
ican’s mouth gaped wide, so Sigurdsun stuffed his other arm into it, wincing with pain as teeth clamped shut.

  Mister American’s throat quivered. His eyes stared into Sigurdsun’s.

  The black sails, still just visible, moved away.

  It was a long time after that before Sigurdsun felt safe enough to haul Mister American back up.

  *

  Sigurdsun and Mister American found refuge on a four master that had wallowed months in the Sargasso. It had been picked clean by other scavengers, but it was safe enough.

  Sigurdsun took out some of his papers and began to sketch. For some time now he had been plotting out the weed, or as much of it as he could, and now he had one new data point. The black sails had moved. That meant clear ocean. It meant safety. The edge of the great expanse, from which point he and Mister American could, if they could find or make a means, escape.

  Mister American moped by the ship’s rail. It might have been the loss of most of his books that upset him, but Sigurdsun doubted it. Not that Sigurdsun really cared, not at that moment. The data was more important.

  If they could just find the means. Most of the larger ships would have had lifeboats, rafts, something that they could use. Naturally, during whatever disaster had drawn these ships into the weed, the crews had taken to these boats and escaped, or tried to, so most of the weed-choked derelicts no longer had lifeboats. Most, but not all. Surely there would be some that did have them.

  He sighed. The problem was, how to get the lifeboats to the edge of the weed? It wasn’t as if they could just float through. Launched from here, where the weed was thick, any boat would soon be caught up in it. They needed something else.

  The Titanic, he remembered, had carried collapsible boats. Would those be light enough for two men to carry across the weed? He suspected not. But perhaps there was something in the idea; perhaps they could carry the raft in bits. Oh, and then all the food they would want, he realised with disgust, and all the water too, and sails, and why not a pony, while they were about it? He could just see himself doing it. Puttering back and forth, somehow never getting lost, piling all the bits and pieces in one spot. All without being seen by the black sails. Or anyone else.