In Great Waters

by Kit Whitfield

  “You could not fight an army, and that is what they would send. And it would be all of us in trouble, not just you.” John, unoffended at the slur on his kind, did not look too frightened. It was puzzling, because the thought of an army, thundering down on him with hundreds of black-hooved horses, sharp swords out and ready to swing fast through the air, was definitely frightening. But John had never seen a battle in the short years of life he had lived, and perhaps did not realise what it would be to be in one.

  “I could be the king’s son,” Henry said. “I could marry his daughter.” The deepsmen sometimes formed pairs, and it seemed like something he could do. Landsmen seemed to take such bonds more seriously—as far as he could understand from Allard’s explanations, marriages were supposed to last for ever, even if the couple grew tired of each other or a better offer came along—but he was unlikely to do better than a king’s daughter anyway. It didn’t sound like a bad idea.

  John laughed. “You mean Erzebet? His daughter-in-law? She is married to Philip, much good that will do her. You do not want her, Henry, trust me. You would be happier married to a shark.”

  “Nobody would marry a shark,” Henry said. In his mind, Erzebet stood before the throne, a rock in her raised hand. She could go, when he took down the king.

  “Another shark?” John grinned at him.

  “Sharks do not marry, they just fuck,” Henry said.

  “Do not say that in front of my father,” John told him. “He will only hit me for teaching you bad language.”

  John taught Henry a lot, but Henry was teaching John too. To begin with, John had had a patient air when he explained things, as if talking to someone stupid. Henry, who had no patience at all with stupid people and saw no reason why anyone else should, determinedly argued and questioned and tested John’s logic until he succeeded in driving home the point that he wasn’t stupid, just foreign. John’s swordsmanship improved rapidly with hasty, strong-armed Henry as his sparring partner. The two of them rode together on Allard’s grounds, John explaining the names of animals, Henry pointing them out, quicker-eared when they rustled in the bushes, able after a few days’ study to predict the directions they would dart, the paths they would take, the best direction to throw a stone in order to bring one down.

  Language was a question of its own. Little though he was interested in Latin, Henry picked up English as quickly as he could, realising that a spoken refusal would get him out of unwelcome tasks more effectively than feigned incomprehension, that a spoken demand was easier to grant than vague pointing, and that it was harder for people to discuss him when he was there listening to what they said. He did not care to be discussed. But when it came to understanding things, John’s mind was set in a different pattern from his, and it could be difficult to make things clear to both of them.

  John, for example, explained to Henry that Allard’s grounds were near the coast. “Coast” was a difficult idea. “Where the land meets the sea,” was how John put it, explaining that England was part of an island, but Henry, accustomed to flying through the water, could not think of land and sea meeting. Land carried on under the sea, down along the sea bed. Land was simply where the water ran out and there was nothing left to hold you up. John often came with fish for Henry to eat, telling him how he had gone out on a small fishing boat, but however John explained the mechanism of nets, Henry found them difficult to picture, struggling to understand that his image of John plunging his hands into the water to catch fish for him was in some way inaccurate. The day John brought a net to show him was worse: Henry’s hands, flexed together between the digits with webbing, could find no purchase on the interlocking strings, and the thing slipped out of his grip, a frustrating tangle of lines and angles he instinctively found ugly.

  It was Henry’s language, though, that gave him an advantage. One day as they rode together and a brown creature swooped overhead, Henry gestured upwards, saying, “What is that?”

  John squinted upwards. “A bird.”

  Henry shook his head. “The thing you showed me yesterday was a bird. This one is brown.” Colour was a new concept in itself, to have words for the shades of things, all the panoply of tones that the landsmen’s sun revealed away from the grey seas. Henry had lost most of his fear of red things, but the complexities of colour were still of interest to him, and he wasn’t prepared to ignore them when John seemed to be making a mistake. “And it has a different shape.”

  “Oh.” John waved a hand. “That was a crow yesterday. This is a swallow.”

  “What is a bird, then?”

  John shrugged. “Something that flies. Like a crow or a swallow. Both are birds.”

  Henry considered. The creatures he had seen sometimes flying past his chamber window came to mind, the ones he had seen dive into the sea. He had refused to discuss them with Allard, but he wanted to know about them nonetheless. “There are birds that fly past my room” he said. “They are white, with grey backs.” Colour was such a useful abstraction, once you understood how to talk about it. You could describe things that weren’t there.

  “What kind of bird?” John said.

  Henry shrugged in puzzlement. “I do not know. Allard called it a bird. You know …” He gestured in frustration. “One of those white birds that can swim.”

  “Swim?”

  “Yes, a bird that can swim. A—” Henry gave up, naming it in the deepsmen’s language. There was a word for it there.

  “What’s that?” John perked up, a mixture of amusement and interest on his face.

  Gull, Henry chirruped. “That is what they are called.”

  “You have a name for birds in the sea?”

  “Yes, these ones can swim.” Henry was growing impatient. “They sit on the sea and then swim into it to catch fish.”

  “Oh, gulls,” John said, catching on. “Gulls dive under the sea sometimes. Grey backs, white breasts … I see. How deep can they swim?”

  “About from here to here,” Henry said, indicating roughly fifteen yards.

  “Truly?”

  “Yes, they swim with their wings,” Henry said. “Gull,” he added to himself. It was a convenient word to say, short and contained within the mouth.

  “What was that word again?”

  Gull, Henry said, using the deepsman’s expression.

  John imitated the word. The sound was ridiculous, and Henry laughed out loud.

  “Hm.” John tried again.

  “You say it very ill,” Henry said happily.

  “Can you understand when I say it?”

  Henry shook his head. “I know you are trying to. But if you said it to a deepsman, he would swim away.”

  John made a few more attempts, but his voice, unbroken though it was, lacked the range to deliver the high word at a steady enough pitch.

  “You are just squeaking like a bird,” Henry said.

  “Perhaps a gull would understand me,” John said, grinning and blushing slightly.

  “Gulls are stupid,” Henry said, mostly for the fun of saying the word “gull” again.

  “Then they might understand me,” John said. “If I sound stupid enough.”

  Henry shook his head again, enjoying the foolery of the idea. “There are many kinds of stupid. You are only one of them, John.”

  “The best kind,” John said. “Say your word for gull again.”

  Gull, Henry said. The word had never been difficult to say, had only been part of his everyday language. But faced with John’s inability to say it, the landsman’s slowness of his tongue and narrow scale of notes his voice could produce, Henry sat comfortably on his horse, enjoying the feeling of being clever, able to make sounds impossible for a landsman. He knew that when John was gone he would have to be careful and studious again, guarding his words against the adults who pestered him, but he felt, for the first time, that he could afford a moment of hubris, just as a game.

  John never mastered the pronunciation of the deepsmen’s words. His ear wasn’t fine enough t
o pick out the words a court hautbois imitated when playing an attempt at a deepsmen’s language—something Henry realised he himself could probably do the day John brought one along and played it, much better than Allard played the flute—and likewise John never managed to make a sound clear enough that any deepsman, even Henry, could have deciphered without knowing already what he was trying to say. The language depended too heavily on sustained sounds, on variations of pitch that were beyond John’s hearing in many cases and beyond his tongue in all of them. Some words remained inaudible to him, even if Henry tried to transpose them down into sounds that would have baffled a deepsman; other distinctions, simplify them as Henry might, eluded him. For the most part, what John could hear, a deepsman almost certainly would not understand; certainly no deepsman would have understood anything John tried to say. But with Henry as his teacher, he added words to his understanding if not to his speech, until Henry could make at least a few remarks in his mother tongue and have John understand him.

  Movement had always been confined to Allard’s lands, but when John’s father came into his life, the rules tightened around Henry, becoming ever more frustrating. Hearing John speak of going hunting on his father’s grounds, Henry wanted to go with him. Horse-riding, once mastered, was a tremendous advantage, letting him travel as fast as he wished without recourse to his weak legs, and outside Henry rode everywhere. The upshot of this was that he tended to spend most of every day outside, however much John shivered in the snow or sat resignedly under a tree dripping rainwater down from its leaves. Allard’s land had little hunting on it. The boys chased rabbits through the fields, Henry swinging a spear with steady accuracy to pierce and scoop up the shrilling, thrashing little bundles of fur—which he gave to John, having no taste for red meat himself—but John spoke of deer, creatures almost as big as his horse and fast on their feet as they flitted through the forests. Though Henry had learned hunting in the sea and was used to prey only big enough to give a handful of meat, he remembered the dolphins, the dominance fights, the clash and swirl of opponent against large opponent. These fights were the province of adults. Henry needed to measure himself against such creatures, to test himself. The idea of deer wandering the green fields, out of his reach and blithely unconcerned about him, offended him. He could not quite overcome his dislike of land animals; even horses, useful though they were, were jolting and wayward in movement, overheated in smell. Henry was a steady rider, harsh to any mount that refused his commands, but he knew better than to hurt a horse too badly. That would end their usefulness. A creature similar to them but huntable, happily wandering free while he had to stay within a few square miles, was maddening.

  Demands to visit the Claybrooks’ land met with no success, though. “The time is not right, my lord,” was all that Robert Claybrook would say on the subject.

  “Why not?” Henry was not to be put off. “John can take me.”

  Claybrook gave a stern look to his son. John shifted a little on his seat, looking uncomfortable, and gave a surreptitious shrug, which Henry noticed.

  “Do not blame John,” he said. “This is my idea. I wish to see deer. There is nothing to hunt here but rabbits.”

  “My lord, the journey cannot be risked.” Claybrook smiled patiently as he said this, but Henry did not trust his smiles. They came too steadily onto his face, not flashing out in quick response to a joke as John’s did. Claybrook could be relied upon to smile before he spoke, and Henry disliked smiles that came with such politic predictability.

  “Why do you call me ‘my lord’?” Henry asked. “That is not my name.”

  “Your title, my lord Henry.”

  “Of what am I lord?”

  “You are royal by your birth, my lord Henry,” Claybrook said, gesturing as if to bow.

  “Not when the king is so far from me,” Henry said. “I have more to do before I can be royal.”

  “As you say, my lord.”

  “Do not call me that when you refuse to do as I say,” Henry said. “If you will not let me on your land, I am not your lord.”

  John laughed, and Henry relaxed a little, turning to him. “What does the king do when men disobey him?”

  John opened his mouth to answer, but his father interrupted. “We cannot risk you being seen,” he said. “There is too much danger to all of us.”

  “Have you not found an army yet?”

  Allard stepped in. “Henry, you must listen to Lord Claybrook.” His hands, narrow-fingered with knotted knuckles, were gripped together. “If you were seen, you would be taken.”

  “By who?” Henry, on the whole, preferred Allard to Claybrook these days. Though his preoccupation with books and insistence on learning tiresome facts never waned, Henry was at least accustomed to him. Allard provided food, tried to find fabrics that Henry hated less than others, made sure his horse was well shod and stabled. His anxiety around Claybrook was irritating, but in necessities he could be relied on. Nevertheless, it was hard to respect a man so twitchy in movements, always scratching with his pen or fidgeting with his fingers, who deferred so clearly to Claybrook’s regular smiles and neutral phrases. Half out of childhood habit, Henry bared his teeth a little at Allard as he spoke.

  “You must stop asking!” Allard’s anxious frustration was preferable to Claybrook’s patient courtesy; at least it was clear what he was feeling.

  “It angers you that I keep asking,” Henry said. “But you do not answer me when I ask why the risk is so great. Why are you so certain I would be taken? Are there soldiers surrounding the land?”

  “No. The risk is not worthwhile,” Allard said, with a nervous glance at Claybrook.

  “Is it so great?”

  “No, but the price is,” Allard said. He turned on his heel, looking angry, and picked up a book, opening it before Henry. “This is the price. For all of us. Do you wish this to happen?”

  Henry studied the lines on the page. Reading had never interested him enough to motivate study, especially as Allard was always there to read things for him, and pictures, flat scribbles on a flat page, were difficult for his eye to take in. A little figure stood atop a triangle, swirls going up around him. “What is this for?” he said.

  “It is a burning, Henry.” Allard sounded angrier still, whether at Henry’s incomprehension of the image or at the image itself Henry couldn’t tell. “That is a stake, and those are flames. Princes do not care for bastards ready to threaten them. If they find you, they will burn us all.”

  Henry swallowed, keeping his face blank. The fire was lit in the hearth, its flames crackling over the flaking logs, sending out a heat that tingled uncomfortably on his skin even from yards away. Tiny motes of ash swam up the chimney, lifting up from the cracking logs beneath.

  Henry raised his head and stared straight at Claybrook, refusing to show fear. “That will not happen to me,” he said.

  Nevertheless, he dropped the subject of visiting Claybrook’s grounds.

  It was a few weeks later that John rode in on his own, a jerking sack tethered to his saddle. Henry, who had been riding Allard’s fields throwing spears at points on the ground, looked up in interest. “What have you there?” he said.

  John grinned, a little breathless. “My father thinks I am practising riding on his land,” he said. “I crept away. Look what I have.” He untied the sack and it fell to the earth with a flurry, something inside it struggling.

  “What is it?”

  “A fox. I found a burrow and set a snare for it. This will be better to hunt than rabbits.”

  The sack convulsed on itself, and a narrow face emerged, a tawny orange shade that Henry didn’t care for at all. The next moment dark, slender limbs followed, the creature thrashing its way out of the sack.

  “Let me have one of your spears,” John said, looking excited. Henry tossed him one without looking, eyes still on the bag. “We should have dogs, really, but it will run when it gets out.”

  The sack tumbled over, and then the fox was running, d
ragging coarse threads behind it, shaking its limbs free as it dashed across the green field. John shouted “Come on!” but Henry, accustomed to grabbing at prey the moment an opportunity arose, had already started his horse forward, spear in hand, following the bounding creature as it leaped from tussock to tussock, its feet barely brushing the ground. To Henry’s eyes, the fox was flying, not the unpredictable lollops of a hopping rabbit but smooth, fast, fast as a dolphin through the air, and he grasped his spear, nothing in his mind but excitement and a predatory fervour. Everything about the fox—its size, its speed, its unforgivable colour—concentrated itself to a fine point, a red scrap of life racing across the green, ready for his spear. Behind him he could hear John yelling, John whose horse was finer than his but less obedient, and he called back, “Go ahead! That way!” For there were trees ahead, and if the fox got in between them, it could sleek in and out away from them while their horses stalled and swerved. John veered his horse around and the fox darted away, staying out on the open field.

  This was different, Henry realised, this was new. This wasn’t the dive and strike through the sturdy currents of the sea: this was rough ground and varying terrain, places to negotiate and footing to watch and his friend behind him to direct as they ran their quarry down. Light-footed rabbits left few tracks in the grass, but the fox trailed ravelling threads of sack, and flower heads swung as it streaked over them: Henry’s horse and the fox were both fighting the ground for footing, an interplay between the land and the prey, Henry and the prey, everything swinging in and out of balance as the seconds flashed by.

  The fox was fast, and the boys chased it over the field, John laughing and Henry silent except for shouted commands. John’s riding wasn’t quick enough, and before Henry could warn him, the fox wheeled round and dashed for the trees again. It was only a small copse, Henry knew, having explored it over and over on days when John was away and there was nothing to do but ride and practise, but a fox could slip through it any one of a dozen ways. Henry slowed his horse a little and gestured to John.