by Ben Galley
‘There’s nothing else to do on this cursed boat.
The faerie couldn’t argue with that, and he shrugged as Merion covered his face with the dubiously stained blanket that had come with the cot.
*
Something sharp began to slice through Merion’s slumbers and mangle his dreams, shred by shred. He could hear a distant clanging, the muted notes swirling around his head. Slowly but surely, he was dragged from the sucking depths of sleep.
The first thing he saw was Rhin waving to him from the trunk. The biscuit was nowhere to be seen. ‘Rise and shine, Lordling.’
‘What is that infernal racket?’ Merion mumbled, wiping the drool from his face.
Rhin pointed at the wooden ceiling as if the answer was written amongst the flakes of peeling varnish. ‘Ship’s bells. Better go and have a look.’
The prospect of going back on deck was about as alluring as a sausage from a leper’s pocket. Merion sighed, something of which he was quickly making a habit.
‘Who knows, it could be important,’ Rhin coaxed him.
Merion frowned. ‘If you’re so bored, then why don’t you go and have a look?’
Rhin thought for a moment, and then shrugged. ‘Fine by me.’
Merion sat upright and immediately regretted it. He clamped his mouth shut, expecting to be sick, but nothing came. The nap had done him good. ‘No, you can’t go out there alone. The ship is stuffed to bursting with sailors and passengers. You’ll get seen, or tripped over, or …’
Rhin smiled, his sharp white teeth a gleaming contrast to his mottled grey skin. Merion would never have told him, but the colour kept reminding him of his father’s pallid body, lying on the sterile white tiles of the surgeon’s table. The boy shook his head, pushing that thought into the dark recesses of his mind. ‘Then come with me,’ said the faerie.
‘I believe you mean you should come with me,’ Merion corrected his friend. ‘Let’s use the bag.’
One of Tonmerion Harlequin Hark’s most prized possessions was, to the untrained eye, a simple rucksack. A relic of his father’s days spent exploring the frozen mountains of Indus, Merion had found it in Harker Sheer the summer before last, lodged behind a bookshelf in his father’s study. His father had grudgingly allowed him to keep it, just as long as it was put to good use, and kept safe. Merion had done just that. Made from a rough green material, and functional to the core, it was full of pockets and holes and grit. It became immediately and permanently affixed to Merion’s shoulders. He would wear it to dinner, and he would wear it to bed, having turned it into the perfect receptacle for smuggling a faerie in.
*
A crowd of passengers filled the deck: a sea of people all wrapped up in coats and scarves and blankets. They muttered to one another in hushed tones, staring at the man on the Tamarassie’s bridge, who was hitting the bell with a hammer every handful of seconds. A fog had fallen on the ocean, muffling the churning of the paddles, which echoed eerily about the ship. Every now and again, a lump of ice would bang loudly against the hull, and cause all the passengers to flinch.
‘What’s going on?’ Merion asked of a woman standing nearby. She was a silver-haired lady in her twilight years, standing bolt upright and proud as though a steel rod had been sewn into her coat. When she turned to face him, Merion could see a glint in her wrinkled eye, the spark of life. She smiled with two rows of very straight and very perfect teeth. A single, lonely scar marred her upper lip, leading from the creased corner of her mouth to her left nostril, weaving a fine, pink path.
‘Mist, young’un. And an ice field,’ she whispered, in a thick accent Merion had never heard before. He guessed it to be from somewhere deep in America, and he guessed right, though he did not know it. He had never been called ‘young’un’ before, and he couldn’t yet decide what to make of it.
‘Are we in danger?’ he asked politely.
‘Most likely!’ she grinned, and rubbed her hands together eagerly.
Suffice it to say Merion did not share the old woman’s enthusiasm. He heard Rhin whispering from the rucksack. ‘Sounds like this old bag’s got a screw loose.’
‘Shh,’ Merion hushed him.
‘What’s that?’ asked the woman, leaning close.
‘Er … nothing.’ Merion coughed. ‘Thought I’d heard something.’ Even though Merion had lied, at that moment a shout rang out from the bow—a sailor’s voice craggy with years of cheap tobacco and even cheaper wine.
‘Berg on the port side! To starboard lads, to starboard!’
Merion felt a shudder as the ship’s innards clanked and clattered. He could imagine rusty cogs clanked and old cables shimmying from side to side, a strange dance of elderly machinery. He craned his head to look towards the bow. The paddle on the left-hand side—or starboard as the sailors stubbornly called it—began to stutter and slow while the paddle on the right-hand side, the port side, thrashed the water viciously with its flat iron teeth. Slowly, he felt the Tamarassie turn. Merion, his head full of stories and headlines concerning ill-fated matrimonies between ships and ice on the high seas, half-wondered if he was about to meet his watery grave.
The boy was pondering this when a loud gasp fluttered across the deck, cold breath drawn sharply into a hundred or so mouths. The passengers began to move then, some to the railing, others shying away, hurrying to cover the eyes of their children and some of the more fragile women. The crowd split right down the middle, and Merion found himself sliding inexorably towards the railing with the braver half, gaze transfixed on an ethereal mass appearing out of the fog. He was staring goggle-eyed at the bloody crown that graced the peak of that floating mountain of jagged ice.
‘Rhin …’ he breathed, ‘are my eyes broken?’
‘No more than mine, if that’s the case,’ Rhin hissed. ‘By the Roots …’ he said, and then swore in his own tongue.
The old woman was still nearby. She broke off from staring so she could seize the young Hark by the shoulder and drag him closer to the railing, where arms and shoulders and swaddled bodies would not impair his grisly view.
‘There, young’un! Take it all in. You don’t see this every day. No sir!’
Merion didn’t even know what this was. Only that it was making him feel sick again. The woman talked in his ear as he took in every tiny, grisly detail.
‘Ever been to the deep ice, lad? Me neither, though I heard tales aplenty. Endless ice, they say, far as the eye can see. Not dead though, not at all. It’s full of bears and yak and foxes—and people too. Nomads from the mountains. They say a nomad is the only thing in this world that ice can’t freeze in one place. And they’re vicious folk, as you can see, lad. More animal than man,’ the woman waved her arm at the top of the iceberg as it drifted slowly past the ship, as if her jaw had become tired of flapping, and her body needed something else to flap while it rested. A moment of silence passed, punctuated only by curious whispers and the slapping of the paddles. Merion craned his neck and took it all in.
The towering shard of dirty white ice wore a crown of jagged wire and slumped bodies. Half frozen to the ice at their backs, half burnt by the endless, tormenting northern sun, six men had been bound tight to the ice with their legs slashed at the calves. Merion held a hand to his mouth as he thought of how much blood must have pumped when the men were sentenced to their exile, how they must have screamed. They were far from screaming now. What hadn’t been picked at by the gulls and petrels now lay, heads yawning at the murky air around about, empty-eyed, but still blissfully sailing the seas.
‘What did these men do?’ Merion asked in a hollow voice, whilst trying to hold back the crashing wave of nausea surging up his throat.
‘Who can tell? They don’t look nomad, not in the slightest. Soldiers, by the look of their black fingers. Powder will do that to you, it will, should you play with it long enough. White folks from the places where the wild pines meet the ice and stop dead. Hunting folk. Must have crossed paths with the nomads, then crossed swords. That’s what you g
et when you go wanderin’ into nomad territory. They were punished, the fools,’ she lectured, almost spitting the last word. But then, in a silent moment of respect, she held her hand to her chest and watched them drift on by, just until they disappeared back into the fog.
Merion shuddered, as if the ghosts of the dead men had tickled his spine. ‘I, er, thank you,’ was all he could think of to say.
‘Welcome, young’un,’ she nodded, and then stuffed her hands into a pair of deep, fur-lined pockets. ‘So where you headed?’
‘Probably back to my cabin …’
The woman laughed then, a harsh cackle, and clapped him heartily on the shoulder. Merion’s jolted stomach performed a somersault, and he felt that wave rising again … ‘I meant in the motherland, son, the big wide open, the Endless Land.’
Merion scratched his head. ‘Wyoming, I believe.’
The woman threw him an odd expression, the bottom half of her face pressing into her neck as her eyes and her ears lifted. A high-pitched hum rose and fell in her throat. ‘Been there before, have you?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Seems an odd choice, is all, for a young willow like you.’
Merion found himself trying to stand wider, thicker somehow. He failed. ‘Trust me, madam, there was no choice in the matter.’
‘Don’t know many folk from Wyoming. Don’t know many heading there neither, ‘cept for workers.’
‘Should I be worried?’
‘I’d be worried about her instead. She’s mad as a bucket of smashed crabs,’ Rhin hissed, his voice a skinny whisper on the icy wind.
‘Gods, no, young’un. I don’t suppose you shouldn’t,’ she shook her head vehemently, but that last sentence stuck like a fishbone in Merion’s gullet. Suppose. He hoped it was just the old woman’s strange drawl, or her astoundingly appalling grammar, that made him start to sweat, even in the cold.
‘Well,’ the woman said, and clapped her hands. ‘Best be back to my supper. Good luck to you, son. Fare well.’
‘Madam.’ Merion sketched a shallow bow. He abruptly felt a little foolish. Bowing, there on a rusty deck in the middle of the wide Iron Ocean. Well, he may not be in London any more, but he was London-born, a son of a lord, and that meant that it wasn’t just blood flowing through his veins, but manners as well, stout, Empire-grown manners.
If you’re going to get stabbed, then get stabbed by a gentleman. At least then you get an apology along with his cold length of steel. Merion had heard that whilst hiding under his father’s desk during one of his long and stuffy meetings. The young Hark had been unearthed and captured shortly after, unable to stifle a sneeze. His father had beaten him in the garden. Not enough to bruise, but enough to make him think twice the next time.
‘You’re incorrigible, you blaggard,’ Merion snapped at his rucksack, once he was good and alone.
‘That one’s definitely missing a few tiles from the roof,’ Rhin sniggered.
Merion rolled his eyes. ‘Let’s just go inside before any more nightmares swim past.’
‘Right you are.’
As they made their way back to the main stairs, and back to their tiny cabin, Merion scratched his head and asked, ‘How many miles, Rhin?’
The faerie didn’t even have to count. ‘One-thousand, one hundred and ninety-four.’
‘What was that particularly colourful word you used that time? When you decided to “spar” with Lord Hafferford’s spaniel?’
‘Clusterfuck.’
‘That’s the one.’
Chapter III
THE ENDLESS LAND
‘It’s been three days now since I left. Sift must be furious, but there’s no going back. The soldiers keep on coming, spreading wider. Killed two yesterday, but now the sewers are crawling with them, which means I’ll have to go over, through the streets. Damn if this isn’t heavy.’
30th April, 1867
It was a Tuesday morning when the ship’s horn shook the walls of their tiny cabin, shaking their tiny sanctuary down. The Tamarassie had reached Boston safe and sound, but the harbour was busier than a brothel on payday, as Rhin had said, looking out of the grimy porthole. Merion did not know enough to comment.
Now the faerie was crouching under the lip of the trusty rucksack, eying the towers and cranes of Boston’s sprawling port, which yawned like the maw of some giant stag beetle. Between its jaws, a horde of ships and fractured islands jostled for space in a forest of masts and spars. If Rhin squinted, his keen Fae eyes could make out the clock towers and balloon docks of the city proper, lurking in the thick sea-fog that clung to the shoreline.
Merion was squinting too—not because he wanted to sightsee, but because the rain seemed to be pursuing a vendetta against his eyes. It was that horrid fine kind that soaks you to the bone in minutes. He had been standing on deck for the past hour, watching America crawl out of the fog to greet them, piece by jagged and sea-washed piece.
Boston looked like London from the water, but flatter, as though somebody had flattened the whole city with the back of a colossal frying pan. Its buildings, what few of them he could see through the confounded, blinding drizzle and sea fog, were squat and wood-built. At least by the docks they were. When he blinked, he spied a few lonely towers here and there, in the far distance, but nothing so special as the spires of his home. He felt cold on the inside, and the rain had nought to do with it.
‘Boston,’ he muttered.
‘Looks … delightful,’ Rhin replied, in a whisper.
‘An admiral once told me that the only port worth taking the time to ogle at from the water was that of Venezia. Before the sea swallowed it, of course,’ Merion said, not knowing where that little scrap of nonsense had bubbled up from. ‘And I also remember my father saying something about the docks being the arse-hole of a city. Besides, we aren’t staying.’
‘Eloquent, that Prime Lord,’ Rhin chuckled, then immediately winced. He could even feel Merion’s body shift a little, through the straps of the pack. Strangely the boy didn’t sag, as he’d expected, but somehow stiffened. Rhin bit his lip. ‘Sorry. Too soon,’ he said. ‘You okay?’
Merion nodded. ‘Just fine.’
Rhin knew that was a lie, but he didn’t push the matter. Melancholy crumbles, and anger snaps. He knew that better than anyone. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that arse-hole better pucker up for our arrival.’
‘If we ever get to the wharf, that is,’ replied the boy.
Merion was right. There was a long, winding queue of ships between the bow of the Tamarassie and the wharfs of Boston’s inner harbour. They jostled like rats in a barrel. Merion scowled and pouted, and stuffed his gloved hands deeper into his pockets, trying to dig out some warmth. ‘What a foul welcome this is.’
It was then that a familiar voice rang out. ‘Hey, son! There he is. C’mere!’
It was the old American woman, swaddled in an oversized sealskin coat with a hood big enough for her head and some extra luggage. She was marching towards him across the slimy deck, beckoning him repeatedly.
Merion prodded himself with his own finger. ‘Madam?’
‘Don’t worry about ma’am-ing me now. C’mon. We’re getting off.’
Merion shook his head. ‘Pardon me, it sounded as though you said you’re getting off?’
‘That we are. Captain Smout has ordered some boats be dropped, so we don’t have to wait for the ship to dock.’
‘But my luggage …’
‘See this is why I travel light!’ she said, patting her huge coat. ‘Don’t worry, you can collect your things once the Tamarassie’s made port. Give her an hour or so. In the meantime, you’re free to roam the docks.’
Merion wasn’t sure that he wanted to ‘roam’ anything, never mind a foreign port, no doubt overrun with scoundrels and thieves. Witchazel’s instructions, which, incidentally, were crumpled up in a tight ball in the pocket of his overcoat, were to meet a gentleman by the curious name of Coltswolde Humbersnide. He would be waiting at the Tamar
assie’s allotted berth, the Union Wharf, just south of where the Charles River met the Mystic River. What an odd name that was, Merion thought, not for the first time since turning his back on London. He wondered if it were Shohari-speak.
‘My apologies, madam, but I’m to meet a man at the Union Wharf, you see, and …’
The old woman simply tutted. ‘And so you shall, young’un. Now c’mon!’
And with that she seized his wrist and towed him away, off towards the stern and a rickety boat bobbing up and down on the oil-slicked waters of the harbour. The scents that assailed his nose were quite astounding, and potent too. Merion felt that familiar bile rising in his throat again. But he had no time for puking. The woman practically lifted him onto the rungs of the rope ladder, and down he went.
‘Please don’t fall. I’m not a fan of drowning,’ muttered the faerie in his rucksack.
Merion’s heart leapt for a moment as his foot missed one of the slippery wooden rungs. ‘Neither am I, now keep your head down.’
‘Aye,’ Rhin said, as he melted into the shadows.
The boat lurched when he touched it. He felt a rough hand snatch at his flapping coat, and he was yanked down onto a wet bench. A family of three sat opposite him, eyes half-closed, silently enduring the drizzle.
‘Good morning.’
‘Нет, спасибо,’ replied the man, in a language that was utterly foreign.
‘Of course.’ Merion shook his head and stared at the floor awash with water. Some inheritance this was turning out to be, he thought, and instantly the red flush of guilt flooded his cheeks, making his neck itch.
He heard a shout and looked up to see that the old woman was now shimmying down the ladder, and with ease too. The boat rocked hideously as she climbed aboard, making the mother of the foreign family moan rather woefully. Merion could have sworn she was slowly turning green. The father gently patted her shoulder, whispering something in her ear while the son was busying himself with kicking his shoes together.
‘Here we all are, then,’ announced the woman with a clap. ‘Are we off, boys?’