The Shifu Cloth (The Chronicles of Eirie 4)

by Prue Batten

  Nicholas winced and curled sausage-like fingers as best he could and scratched his name in the dust in front of the brazier.

  ‘I know no Nicholas, but Aine I swear your face opens up doors in my memory that I had slammed shut. Your father’s name then.’

  The stranger was adamant and pushed at Nico’s arm and Nico felt the taper flare into life, that tiny flicker that could flame with the least provocation. He wrote Phelim’s name, a scowl pushing at his swollen lips.

  ‘Phelim. I know no bloody Phelim.’ He examined Nico again, moving around the younger man until Nico shoved him. ‘I tell you, you’re familiar. And there is a fate in it all.’

  A welkin wind skipped up from the riverbank and Nico’s hair rose on his neck, his companion looking round. He scratched again.

  Stepfather.

  Now his companion was standing closer and breathing hard.

  ‘Then your father, tell. Who is he?’

  Nausea crept up Nico’s throat at the fellow’s forceful manner, blending with concussion from the fight and pain at the mention of his true father, all conspiring to build flames. He scratched a name.

  Finnian.

  ‘FINNIAN.’ The stranger shouted and then spoke more quietly. ‘Finnian be damned.’

  Nicholas exploded. His right arm, infantile in its weakness, came up with an effort at an undercut but the stranger was too fast and Nico watched the punch coming, had no hope of blocking it as off-balance and wretched as he was, felt the cracking collision of knuckle on bone and flew back, blackness crashing upon him like the sleep of the dead.

  *

  He lay on the ground, sounds reverberating around him as fireworks cracked in the sky. A voice shouted close by and he recognised it and tried to shift his head as hands turned him over.

  ‘WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? Sink me, man, what have you done?’

  ‘Given him what he needed. A pasting. The fellow is too full of anger for his own good. He had it coming and perhaps if Finnian had been a little more ready with discipline, the young bastard wouldn’t be lying on the ground right now.’

  A faint approached as he heard his father’s name but he pushed it back.

  ‘What? Did you say Finnian?’ Gallivant’s voice squeaked.

  ‘I did and I have a lot of questions,’ replied the stranger and Nicholas opened one eye and tried to focus on the scene before him.

  Gallivant stood up and accosted the man.

  ‘You have questions? I have more than you can imagine.’

  Nicholas marked the face that looked back at the Hob. A partially clouded face, shadowed by the night and tiredness and with confusion in the eyes.

  He knew my father.

  ‘How do you know Finnian?’

  Gallivant moved from foot to foot.

  ‘A long story, too long for a dark road by a piece of water that may be full of uncharitable wights.’ Nico was hefted like a sack of chaff and an anguished breath escaped as the fellow placed him over a donkey’s back, legs astride, with his face on the donkey’s neck and his arms hanging either side. ‘Besides, he needs some attention in the warmth.’

  I need to know the truth. I need to know who you are.

  Gallivant grabbed the donkey’s reins and clicked a gee-up and weakness assailed Nicholas, sounds advancing and retreating.

  ‘I had come to fetch him as we must be away. We have to reach the Barrow Hills by late tomorrow. His family have already left. We thought it might help. He can’t speak, you know.’

  ‘You speak in riddles my friend, but I had noticed the lack of voice,’ the stranger commented. ‘And I tell you, he won’t be going anywhere immediately. Let him sleep it off and by dawn he’ll be awake and alive, if bruised. But if we can get him astride a horse he’ll be in the Barrows by dusk.’

  I am awake and alive now, you fools.

  But biliousness turned Nico’s stomach over.

  ‘Come to the livery stables and tell me how you know Nico’s father. Sink me, what a thing, such a coincidence. By the way, I’m Gallivant the Hob.’

  ‘A Hob!’

  Out of the corner of his eye, Nicholas saw the stranger step back and make the sign of the horn at which the Hob laughed.

  ‘That old thing won’t do you much good now I’m here. But I’m a Goodfellow in more ways than one, so rest easy friend, and tell me your name. And before you roll your eyes and say ‘Name-giving, never, not to an Other,’ let me say that I am more concerned with the young man here than I am about using your own name against you.’

  Salvos peppered the night again and Nicholas turned his head slightly and observed part of the starlit sky filled with sparks. Underneath his head he could feel the tension in the donkey, the lop ears tilting back like wilting dockweed and brushing his cheek.

  ‘Easy there, Bottom,’ Gallivant wafted a hand and the donkey’s neck relaxed under Nicholas’s face as the animal settled into an ambling walk.

  ‘My name is Gio Poli and I knew Finnian when I was but a twelve year old and for a few short days only, but the man changed my life.’

  As the words filled Nico’s head, he finally lapsed into a faint.

  *

  Later, after they lay him on straw and covered him with a blanket, he chafed at the prickliness of the bed and the scratchy covering but had no strength to deal with either.

  The Hob muttered, ‘I wish Phelim hadn’t left already, a healing mesmer would assist.’ But he must have tried a mesmer anyway, because Nico’s remorseless aches and pains eased slightly, allowing more perceptive attention. ‘Now tell me, sir.’ Gallivant urged, ‘I’m all ears.’

  The mortal, who despite being called Gio, said he preferred Poli, took a sip of tea, munched on something and was silent for a moment and Nico became impatient.

  Then, ‘It was twenty-odd years ago. And I have tried to balance it all in my mind to no avail. I’ve wanted to thank Sir Finnian a hundred times, and yet to thank him was to give sustenance to the memory of my father’s death and that begged a pain that I…’ he let the words hover and Gallivant spoke very quietly.

  ‘The anger you see in Nico, is the anger of someone who lost his father, his mother, his mentor, his grandmother and most lately his sister. He hates everyone and everything right now.’

  Poli raised his eyebrows as a thought was digested.

  ‘I only hated one man and that was the man who let my father’s death happen. Shall I tell you? It connects to Nicholas’s father.’

  Yes, get on.

  ‘Of course, please. I want to hear.’

  ‘My father and I had left the Marshlands where my father was one of the masters who ferried people from Veniche across the laguna to Ferry Crossing and back. We took a ticket on a trading caravel, my father as a sailor and I as a cabin-boy because the money was supposed to be better than what he earned on the laguna. Sadly, if he had stuck with the ferry, he would have lived a lot longer.’

  Nicholas sucked in a breath and pushed himself into a sitting position and the two men turned.

  ‘You’re awake, young fellow.’

  Gallivant rushed over and pulled the blanket up higher, but Nico pushed his hand away, shaking his fragile head. A welkin wind sighed at the bottom of the stable doors, blowing a dead leaf and scraps of feather across the floor. Fate, Fate, Fate, it whispered and Nicholas gestured to Poli to continue.

  ‘You don’t want anything?’ Gallivant fussed. ‘Are you sure?’

  Nico bunched up the blanket and threw it at the Hob.

  ‘I’ll take that as a no then.’ Gallivant turned to Poli. ‘You’d best continue.’

  Poli looked at Nicholas and he nodded as much as his scrambled head would allow and leaned back against the straw-heap.

  ‘My father was accused of stealing Sir Finnian’s jewelled pin. He didn’t of course, but it was found amongst his possessions and the bastard ship’s captain accused and condemned him without a trial and he was keel-hauled…’

  There was a sharp intake of breath from both Nico and
Gallivant and Poli continued without meeting their eyes.

  ‘Somehow his ropes broke free but even so he was pulled aboard with appalling injuries, as though a killer whale had gored him and of course he was going to die and in unbearable pain. Sir Finnian knelt by him as he died and there was a noise, like a sword being drawn. To this day, I hate hearing metal on metal. My father cried out and just passed away. I know nobody killed him. We were all close by and saw nothing and yet it was odd. Eldritch. I can’t grasp it even now and yet I know whatever happened saved my father from the most ghastly slow death. I was distraught and Sir Finnian was so angry with the captain for the keelhauling that he paid for my ticket and took me away to Veniche. The ship’s captain, Aine rot his soul, drowned when his ship sank that night. Such divine irony, I think. Anyway, the day after we got home, Finnian gave me a letter for an actuary in which he had given my mother and myself an apartment. He also sent me to a boatyard where I got a job as a carpenter and I eventually ended up owning the yard. Honestly, it was as though Sir Finnian arrived in my life and strange things happened. Good and bad. Either way, I owe him a lot because I would never have owned the boatyard if events hadn’t progressed as they did. I worked my way up to overseer, saving every bit of gelt I could and eventually the owner asked if I would like to buy a share. It was a profitable yard and I agreed and then when the old fellow died with no family, he left me his share and the yard has gone from strength to strength. But enough of that and back to Sir Finnian. The day he gave me the deeds to the apartment, he just disappeared from my life, almost as if he were eldritch.’

  ‘Hmm. Fancy that.’ Gallivant said. ‘You don’t know where he went after that?’

  Good. Keep asking questions.

  ‘Not particularly. But I remember our last conversation as if it were yesterday.’

  Nico picked up a little pebble in his swollen fingers and flicked it into Poli’s lap and then raised his hands as if to say, ‘Well, get on with it.’

  ‘Getting better are we?’ the fellow said with a wry grin, before continuing. ‘He was in a sore mood, said someone had disappeared with something valuable that he had come to Veniche to collect. And I replied to him, and I tell you those words are engraved on my mind. I said, ‘Well my Pa reckons if you want to make money you go to Trevallyn but if you want to make your fortune, you go to Fahsi, to the souks.’ And I reckon he went to Fahsi.’

  Nico met Gallivant’s eyes and another part of the story of Finnian clicked into place.

  So. He met this mortal, then a twelve year old boy, who unintentionally guided him to Fahsi, and from then on it was a downhill ride to disaster. I don’t know if I want to beat the idiot to a pulp or kill him.

  ‘He did go to Fahsi.’ Gallivant rubbed his leg in a thoughtful way. ‘And he found what he wanted, but Mr. Poli, it led to his death as well. As I told you, our friend Nicholas here has been without a father since before he was born. And I imagine it wasn’t long after you were with him in Veniche that he died.’

  ‘No. You say? Then I sympathise. I know what it is to grow without a father.’

  Silence filled the stables, except for the welkin wind blowing and whispering of fate. Finally Gallivant spoke again.

  ‘Well thank you. Thank you for rescuing our young friend from an even worse pasting. And thank you for telling us what you know.’ He slapped his knees. ‘Personally I think we all should sleep now and then at dawn we can get moving. Mr. Poli, I would like to invite you to travel with us if you have no plans. There are two people I want you to meet.’

  No. I don’t want him near us.

  Some perverse part of Nico wanted to blame this mortal for his father’s disappearance from his life.

  ‘That’s most kind. I have no immediate plans and would welcome the chance of company. Even Other company. Besides, you may need some help with this fellow’s mettlesome manner.’

  He grinned and Nico stared back as stonily as he could manage.

  ‘Then it’s done.’ Gallivant smiled at everyone blithely. ‘Now shall we sleep, for I feel like a dishrag.’

  *

  The morning was a lot fresher and chipper than Nicholas.

  Sparkling with sun and loud with a dawn chorus, it represented the antithesis of his mood. He had slept little, trying to figure the importance of the twelve year old Poli to his father. All night he tossed things back and forth and could raise no solution, only a vat-load of jealousy. The twelve year old had procured beneficence beyond belief: apartments, boatyards.

  Why?

  The unborn Nicholas had been left nothing by his father. Merely a burdensome legacy of being half Other. And his mother? All she left him was the night-sky paperweight.

  Nothing else.

  Despite the times he had been told, over and over by his step-family that the parents had loved their son, they chose to leave him behind.

  And that, in his mind, was not love.

  Was he jealous?

  Yes.

  Bitter?

  Of course.

  Envious?

  Undeniably.

  *

  They travelled at a steady pace, the verdant copses and valleys of Trevallyn passing them by. Nico kept to himself, occasionally thinking of Poli, trying to avoid the issue by observing the wildflowers and grasses on the verge, cataloguing them, describing in his mind what they were for. As they progressed past the cottages of Orford where the ground had been torn and tilled, worked and winnowed, horehound grew with its dimpled leaves.

  Chest irritation. What compunction would deliver such valuable things as a house to a young boy and his widowed mother?

  The horses’ hooves brushed past the bell-like seedheads of the flax, one flowerhead faded and wilted blue as it progressed toward seeding.

  Weaving, sewing thread, and from the linseed, a porridge. Something important surely? Something as weighty as…

  Nicholas thought of what weighed heaviest on himself.

  Pain of loss. Loss of my family, loss of Isabella. And because I couldn’t prevent her abduction – singular, over-powering guilt. Plantain grass. Toothache, weeping skin affliction. Guilt. Did my father feel guilt? Why? Surely he must have felt guilt at leaving his child to the mercies of an unkind world. Unkind? Phelim and Adelina would be horrified if they thought I believed them to be unkind.

  His thoughts jumped like a jack-rabbit and his horse shook its head as dried elm leaves fell between its ears.

  Elm. Sauces, putrefying wounds and skin lesions. They’re not unkind at all, I love them, but guilt plagues me. Guilt over Isabella.

  He gazed along the track at the backs of his companions as they wove through vervain, mullein and valerian and he could barely think of the curative properties of the plants.

  Guilt is the thing. Something had happened in my father’s time on that boat they called ‘Pourpoint’, something so scarring that he suffered the weight of guilt. So much so, he felt the need to bequest the fatherless mortal boy.

  Nico’s horse stumbled and the movement sent a pain through his bruised head.

  ‘Are you well, Nicholas?’ Gallivant, ever solicitous, twisted around on the back of Bottom. ‘You’re very slow. Should we stop?’

  Nicholas shook his head and trotting past, drove his heels into his mount, pushing him into a canter. The jolting sent waves of discomfort through his bashed body and bent his mind in a different direction, far from thoughts of what weighed heaviest with himself and his father.

  Chapter Nine

  Isabella

  The witching hour – that chill dark time after midnight when hope is buried under an landslide of nightmare. Isabella’s toe dragged uselessly through the air as it sought to find the supports of an invisible bridge.

  ‘No bridge, no escape,’ the nightghasts whispered and sweat and despair poured from Isabella, even though the night was freezing. Finally she woke, shaking with cold, panic sitting at her shoulder.

  And something-else.

  She looked up and cried out.<
br />
  The shape of a woman stood over her.

  Perhaps she was beautiful, Isabella couldn’t tell as she was tall, her face in shadow. Her hands were long, her nails almost like claws. She used them softly, stroking through Isabella’s damp hair, leaving a warmer trail behind, a tender trail of comfort and succour. A grey moonlight filtered through the paper panels of the room and she could see the woman’s hair, layered and thick but very straight and white as snow.

  The stroking continued and Isabella calmed, eventually sliding back down under her thick bedroll. Just before her eyes closed, the woman moved to the sliding door panel and it seemed as if she were wrapped in the white skins of mountain foxes as a tail dragged along the floor by Isabella’s head.

  Her eyes closed.

  *

  Dawn brought fresh confidence. At no point would she countenance the possibility of defeat, nor did she reflect on the nightghasts. As she dressed and ate, she slipped seamlessly into thoughts of her escape as if the whole thing was a surety. Briefly she remembered the white-furred woman but pushed the memory into the realm of comforting dreams as she cracked open the nests on the verandah steps.

  ‘You’re up early.’ Lucia clattered through the frosty mush on the garden path, her basket filled with spinach, pearly white cloves of garlic and the strappy leaves of lemongrass.

  ‘I haven’t time to waste. The fabric must be dyed and drying by the end of the day. In this weather it will take time, I need a day of breezes.’

  ‘Huh, I hate the wind. It freezes my nose, chafes my fingers and puts me in a bad mood. Anyway, we always get a breeze before spring, a good few days of it. They say it’s the new broom, brushing all the cobwebs of winter away.’

  Lucia examined the dusty mess on the verandah by Isabella ’s side as nimble fingers took up a knife with a broad blade and began shaving the layers of dried lac bodies into a bowl.

  ‘I shall have to use the biggest vat in the laundry, Lucia. Do you think they will mind if I fill it now and light a fire under it. The water must be hot and clean when I boil up the dye.’