by Robin Hobb
Selden glanced up at Keffria, gave her hand a quick squeeze, and suddenly stood beside his chair. It did not make him much taller, but the look on his face demanded recognition. ‘It all began,’ Selden’s young voice piped, ‘when I told Malta I knew a secret way to get into the Elderling city.’
All eyes went to the boy. He met Sparse Kelter’s astonished gaze. ‘It’s my story as much as anyone’s. Bingtown Trader and Rain Wild Trader are kin. And I was there.’ The look he gave Reyn defied him. ‘She’s my dragon as much as yours. You may have turned on her, but I have not. She saved our lives.’ He took a breath. ‘It’s time to share our secrets, so we can all survive.’ The boy’s glance swept the table.
With a sudden motion, Reyn threw back his veil. He pushed back his cowl as well and shook free his dark, curly hair. He looked with shining copper eyes from face to face at the table, inviting each of them to stare at the scaling that now outlined his lips and brows and the ridge of pebbled skin that defined his brow. When he looked at Selden, respect was in his eyes. ‘It began much farther back than my young kinsman’s memory,’ he said quietly. ‘I suppose I was about half Selden’s age the first time my father took me to the dragon’s chamber far underground.’
14
DIVVYTOWN
‘I’M JUST NOT sure.’ Brashen stood on the foredeck next to her. The late evening mist damped his hair to curls and beaded silver on his coat. ‘It all looks different now. It’s not just the fogs, but the water levels, the foliage, the beach lines. Everything is different from how I remember it.’ His hands rested on the railing, a hand’s breadth from her own. Althea was proud that she could resist the temptation to touch him.
‘We could just lie out here.’ She spoke softly, but her voice carried oddly in the fog. ‘Wait for another ship to go in or come out.’
Brashen shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t want to be challenged or boarded. That may happen to us anyway when we reach Divvytown, but I don’t want to look like I’m blundering about out here. We’ll go in cocky and knowing, sail up there and drop anchor in Divvytown as if we’re sure of a welcome. If I seem a bit of a braggart and a fool to them, their guards will drop faster.’ He grinned at her crookedly in the gathering darkness. ‘It shouldn’t take much effort for me to give them that impression.’
They were anchored off a coastline of swamp and trees. The rains of winter had filled the rivers and streams of this region to overflowing. At high tide, saltwater and river water mingled in the brackish bogs. In the gathering darkness, trees both living and dead loomed out of the gently drifting mists. Breaks in the fog occasionally revealed dense walls of trees laced with dangling creepers and curtained with draping moss. The rainforest came right down to the waterline. By painstaking observation, Brashen and Althea had spotted several possible openings, any of which might be the narrow mouth of the winding river leading to the sluggish lagoon that fronted Divvytown.
Brashen once more squinted at the tattered scrap of canvas in his hand. It was his original sketch, a hasty rendering done while he was mate on the Springeve. ‘I think this was meant to indicate a kelp bed exposed at low tide.’ He glanced around at his surroundings again. ‘I just don’t know,’ he confessed quietly.
‘Pick one,’ Althea suggested. ‘The worst we can do is waste time.’
‘The best we can do is waste time,’ Brashen corrected her. ‘The worst is considerably worse. We could get lodged in some silty-bottomed inlet and have the tide strand us there.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But I guess I choose and we take a chance.’
The ship was very quiet. By Brashen’s order, the crew walked softly and conversed only in whispers. No lights had been hung. Even the ship was trying to mute the small noises of his planked body. All canvas had been lowered and secured. Sound carried too well in this fog. He wished to be able to hear if another ship approached in the mist. Amber ghosted up to stand silently beside them.
‘If we’re lucky, some of this fog may burn off in the morning,’ Althea observed hopefully.
‘We’re as like to be shrouded more thickly than ever,’ Brashen returned. ‘But we’ll wait for what light day offers us before we try it. Over there.’ He pointed and Althea followed the line of his arm. ‘I think that’s the opening. We’ll try it at dawn.’
‘You’re not sure?’ Amber whispered in quiet dismay.
‘If Divvytown were easy to find, it would not have survived as a pirate stronghold all these years,’ Brashen pointed out. ‘The whole trick of the place is that unless you know it’s there, you’d never think to look for it.’
‘Perhaps,’ Amber began hesitantly. ‘Perhaps one of the former slaves could help. They came from the Pirate Isles…’
Brashen shook his head. ‘I’ve asked. They’ve all professed complete ignorance of Divvytown, denied they ever pirated. Ask any of them. They were the sons of runaway slaves who settled in the Pirate Isles to begin new lives. Chalcedean or Jamaillian slave raiders captured them, and they were tattooed and sold in Jamaillia. From thence they were brought to Bingtown.’
‘Is it so hard to believe?’ Amber asked him.
‘Not at all,’ Brashen replied easily. ‘But a boy almost always picks up a generalized knowledge of the town he grows up in. These fellows profess too much ignorance of everything for me to be comfortable with their stories.’
‘They’re good sailors,’ Althea added. ‘I expected trouble when they were shifted onto my watch, but they haven’t been. They’d prefer to stay to themselves, but I haven’t allowed that, and they haven’t objected. They turn to with a will, just as they did when they first came aboard to work in secret. Harg, I think, resents losing some of his authority over the others; on my watch, they are all just sailors, on an equal footing with the rest. But they are good sailors…a bit too good for this to be their first voyage.’
Amber sighed. ‘I confess, when I first proposed bringing them aboard and allowing them to trade their labour for a chance to return to their homes, I never considered that they might have conflicting loyalties. Now, it seems obvious.’
‘Blinded by the opportunity to do a good turn for someone,’ Althea smiled and gave Amber a friendly nudge. Amber gave her a knowing smile in return. Althea knew a moment’s uneasiness.
‘Do I dare ask if Lavoy could assist us here?’ Amber continued softly.
Althea shook her head when Brashen didn’t reply. ‘Brashen’s charts are all we have to go by. With the shift in seasons, and the constant changes in the isles themselves, it becomes tricky.’
‘Sometimes I wonder if I even have the correct bit of swamp,’ Brashen added sourly. ‘This could be the wrong river entirely.’
‘It’s the right bit of swamp.’ Paragon’s deep voice was very soft, almost a thrumming rather than speaking. ‘It’s even the right river mouth. As I could have told you hours ago, if anyone had seen fit to ask me.’
The three humans kept absolutely still as if by moving or speaking they would break some spell. A deep suspicion Althea had always harboured simmered in her mind.
‘You’re right, Althea.’ The ship answered her unspoken words. ‘I’ve been here before. I’ve been in and out of Divvytown enough times that I could sail up there in the blackest night, at any tide.’ His deep laugh vibrated all the foredeck. ‘As I’d lost my eyes before I ever went up the river, what I see or don’t see makes little difference.’
Amber dared to speak aloud. ‘How can you know where we are? You always said you feared to sail the open waters blind. Why are you so fearless now?’
He chuckled indulgently. ‘There is a great difference between the wide open sea and the mouth of a river. There are many senses besides sight. Cannot you smell the stink of Divvytown? Their woodfires, their outhouses, the charnel pit where they burn their dead? What the air does not carry to me, the river does. The sour taste of Divvytown flows with the river. With every fibre in my planking, I taste the water from the lagoon, thick and green. I’ve never forgotten it. It is as slimy now a
s it was when Igrot ruled there.’
‘You could take us there, even in the blackest night?’ Brashen spoke carefully.
‘I said that. Yes.’
Althea waited. To trust Paragon or to fear him. To place all their lives in his care, or to wait for dawn and grope their way up the fog-bound river…She sensed a test in the ship’s words. She was suddenly glad that Brashen was the captain. This was a decision she would not want to make.
It was so dark now she could scarcely see Brashen’s profile. She saw his shoulders lift as he took a breath. ‘Would you take us there, Paragon?’
‘I would.’
They worked in the dark, without lanterns, putting up his canvas and raising his anchor. It pleased him to think of them scurrying in the blackness, as blind as he was. They worked his windlass voicelessly, the only sound that of the turning gears and the rattling chain. He opened his senses to the night. ‘Starboard. Just a bit,’ he said softly, as they raised his canvas and the wind nudged him, and heard the command relayed in whispers the length of his deck.
Brashen was on the wheel. It was good to have his steady hands there; even better to be the one deciding how he would go and feeling the sailors jump to his orders. Let them discover how it felt to have to place your life in the hands of one you feared. For they all feared him, even Lavoy. Lavoy made fine words about friendships that transcended time or kind, but in his gut, the mate feared the ship more profoundly than any other man aboard.
And well they should, Paragon thought with satisfaction. If they knew his true nature, they would piss themselves with terror. They would fling themselves shrieking into the deeps, and count it a merciful end. Paragon lifted his arms out high and spread wide his fingers. It was a pitiful comparison, this damp wind flowing past his hands as his sails pushed him towards the mouth of the river, but it was enough to sustain his soul. He had no eyes, he had no wings, but his soul was still a dragon’s soul.
‘This is beautiful,’ Amber said to him.
He startled. As long as she had been aboard, there were still times when she was transparent to him. She was the only one whose fear of him he could not feel. Sometimes he shared her emotions, but never her thoughts, and when he did catch a tinge of her feelings, he suspected it was because she allowed it. As a result, her words confused him more often than the others did. She was the only one who could possibly lie to him. Was she lying now?
‘What is beautiful?’ he demanded quietly. She did not answer. Paragon put his mind to the task at hand. Brashen wanted him to take them up the river as silently as possible. He wanted Divvytown to wake tomorrow to the sight of them anchored in their harbour. The idea appealed to the ship. Let them gawk and shout at the sight of him come back from the dead. If there were any there that yet recalled him.
‘The night is beautiful,’ Amber said at last. ‘And we are beautiful in the night. There is a moon somewhere above us. It makes the fog gleam silver. Here and there, my eyes find bits of you. A row of silver droplets hung on a line stretched tight. Or the fog breaks for an instant, and the moon shines our way up the river. You move so smoothly and sweetly. Listen. There is the water against your bow, purring like a cat, and the wind shushes us along. The river is so narrow here, it is as if we knife through the forest, parting trees to let us pass. The same wind that pushes us stirs the leaves of the trees. It has been so long since I last heard the wind in the trees and smelled earth smells. It is like being in a silver dream on a magic ship.’
Paragon found himself smiling. ‘I am a magic ship.’
‘I know. Oh, well do I know what a wonder you are. On a night such as this, moving swift and silent in the dark, I almost feel as if you could unfurl wings and lift us into the very sky itself. Do you not feel it, Paragon?’
Of course, he did. The unnerving part was that she felt it also, and put words to it. He did not speak of that. ‘What I feel is that the channel is deeper to starboard. Ease me over, just a bit. I’ll tell you when.’
Lavoy came up onto the deck. Paragon felt him pace aft to where Brashen held the wheel. There was anger in his stride and aggression. Would it be tonight? Paragon wondered and felt a tightening of excitement. Perhaps tonight the two males would challenge one another, would circle and then strike, exchanging blows until one of them was prostrate and bleeding. He strained to hear what Lavoy would say.
But Brashen spoke first. His soft deep voice carried cold through Paragon’s wood. ‘What brings you out on deck, Lavoy?’
Paragon felt Lavoy’s hesitation. Fear, uncertainty, or simply strategy. He could not tell clearly. ‘I expected us to anchor all night. The change in motion woke me.’
‘And now that you’ve seen what we’re about?’
‘This is mad. We could run aground at any moment, and then we’d be easy prey for whoever chanced upon us. We should anchor now, if we can do so safely, and wait for morning.’
Amusement tinged Brashen’s voice as he asked, ‘Don’t you trust our ship to guide us, Lavoy?’
Lavoy sank his deep voice to a bare whisper and hissed a reply. Paragon felt a prickling of anger. Lavoy did not whisper for Brashen’s sake; he whispered because he did not wish Paragon to know his true opinion.
In contrast, Brashen spoke clearly. Did he know Paragon would hear every word? ‘I disagree, Lavoy. Yes, I do trust him with my life. As I have every day since we started the voyage. Some friendships go deeper than madness or common sense. Now that you’ve expressed your opinion of your captain’s judgement and your ship’s reliability, I suggest you retire to your bunk until your watch begins. I’ve some special duties for you tomorrow. They may prove quite tiring. Good night to you.’
For five breaths longer, Lavoy lingered there. Paragon could imagine how they would stand, teeth bared, wings slightly uplifted, long powerful necks arched for the strike. But this time the challenger turned his eyes aside, bowing his head and lowering his wings. He moved slowly away, expressing his subservience, but grudgingly. The dominant male watched him go. Did Brashen’s eyes glitter and spin with triumph? Or did he know that this challenge was not settled, merely deferred?
They dropped anchor long before dawn. The rattling of the chain was the loudest noise they had made since they left the river mouth. They had eased into place in the harbour, not too close to the three other ships secured there. All was quiet aboard on the other vessels. Woe to whomever had been left on watch; surely, they’d be chastised tomorrow. Brashen had sent the crew below save for a carefully chosen anchor-watch. Then he had ordered his second mate to join him on the afterdeck.
Brashen stood at the railing and looked towards the lights of Divvytown. They glinted like yellow eyes through the fog, winking and then glittering as the fog drifted and changed. One puzzled him, a single light, brighter than the others and much, much higher. Had someone left a lantern burning at the top of a tree? That answer made no sense, so he pushed it aside. Dawn’s light would likely solve that mystery. The other scattered lights did not quite match his recollection of the town, but doubtless the fog had something to do with that. Divvytown, again. The noisome little town never slept. The fog carried odd bits of distorted sound to his ears. Cheerful shouts, a snatch of drunken song, a dog barking. Brashen yawned. He wondered if he dared to try for a few hours’ sleep before dawn revealed the Paragon and his crew to Divvytown.
Bare feet padded up softly behind him. ‘She’s not here,’ Althea whispered disappointedly. ‘At least, I’ve seen no sign of her in the harbour…’
‘No. I don’t think Vivacia is anchored here tonight. That would have been expecting too much luck. But she was here the last time I was, and I think it likely she’ll be here again. Patience.’ He turned to her. In the concealing fog, he dared to catch her hand and pull her closer. ‘What were you imagining? That we’d find her here, tonight, and somehow manage to spirit her away without a fight?’
‘A child’s dream,’ Althea admitted. Momentarily, she let her forehead rest against his shoulder. He wanted
so badly to take her in his arms and hold her.
‘Then call me a child, for I had the same vain hope. That something could be simple and easy for us.’
She straightened with a sigh, and moved aside from him. It made the damp night colder.
Wistfulness twined through him. ‘Althea? Do you think there will ever be a time and place when things are simple and easy for us? A time when I can walk down the street with you on my arm under the light of day?’
She answered slowly. ‘I’ve never allowed myself to look that far ahead.’
‘I have,’ Brashen said bluntly. ‘I’ve thought ahead to you captaining Vivacia and me still running Paragon. That’s the happiest ending we could expect from this quest. But then I ask myself, where does that leave us? When and where do we make a home for ourselves?’
‘Sometimes we’d both be in port at the same time.’
He shook his head. ‘That isn’t enough for me. I want you all the time, always at my side.’
She spoke quietly. ‘Brashen. I cannot allow myself to think of that just now. I fear that all my planning for tomorrow must begin with my family ship.’
‘And I fear it will always be so. That all your plans will always begin with your ship.’ Abruptly he realized that he sounded like a jealous lover.
Althea seemed to feel the same. ‘Brashen, must we speak of such things now? Cannot we, for now, be content with what we have, with no thoughts for tomorrow?’
‘I thought I was supposed to be the one to say such things,’ he replied gruffly after a moment. ‘Still, I know that for now, I must be content with what I have. Stolen moments, secret kisses.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘When I was seventeen, I would have thought this the epitome of romance: covert passion aboard a ship. Furtive kisses on the afterdeck on a foggy night.’ With a step he swept her into his arms and kissed her deeply. He had not surprised her; had she been waiting for him to do this? She held nothing back; her body fitted sweetly against his. Her easy response stirred him so deeply he groaned with longing. Reluctantly, he separated his body from hers. He found a breath. ‘But I’m not a boy any more. Now this just drives me mad. I want more than this, Althea. I don’t want suspense and quarrels and jealousy. I don’t want sneaking about and concealing what I feel. I want the comfort of knowing you are mine, and taking pride in everyone else recognizing that as well. I want you in my bed beside me, every night, and across the table from me in the morning. I want to know that years from now, if I stand on another deck somewhere, on another night, you will still be beside me.’