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Volume Ten

Page 11

by Volume 10 (retail) (epub)


  “The Sapas Humana.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s certainly better than believing we’re descended from gods,” Beisho observed. “Do you believe all of this?”

  “I believe it for my brother’s sake.”

  “That’s reason enough, I suppose.” Ruty was climbing the slope towards them, looking somewhat mournful. “Well, I found us something,” he said, “and it floats. That’s about the best I can say for it.”

  They followed him back down to the quay, and while they walked he explained that all the fishermen had either refused to hire out their boats or demanded absurd sums of money for their services. Only one captain had been willing to take them out onto the lake for such a piffling sum.

  “His name is Flimchen,” Ruty said, “and I think he’s half crazy.”

  “What makes you say that?” Beisho asked.

  “Judge for yourself,” Ruty said, standing aside to let Beisho and Leauqueau have sight of the vessel and its master.

  It was impossible to say which was in a sorrier state. Both had seen too many storms, too many crackings and patchings; both were sodden to their core: one with water, the other, to judge by his stare, with something stronger.

  “Don’t expect your money back,” the grizzled sailor announced from the slimy boards of his boat. “Whether you come or not it’s no matter to me, but I’m keeping the fee.” He tapped his pocket. “So fuck you all.”

  “Do you still want to go?” Ruty asked Beisho.

  “Of course,” Fie replied, making no effort to approach the boat.

  “You two may come,” Flimchen replied. “But not your…passenger.” He jabbed a hangnailed finger in Leauqueau’s direction.

  “Is this mariner’s lore?” Beisho wanted to know.

  “No,” said the fisherman, “I have a fear of that sex, since all my six brothers died in the arms of a woman.”

  “The same woman?” Ruty said, amazed.

  “I’m not telling,” came the reply. “And neither are they.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t go without her,” Beisho said.

  “Yes, you can,” Leauqueau replied. “You must. I’ll wait here for you.”

  “Make up your minds,” Flimchen demanded. “We only have two hours before nightfall. The lake’s a deal more lethal under the twelve moons.”

  “We’re going, for sure,” Ruty said, seizing hold of Beisho’s arm and ushering him to the puddled steps that led down to the boat. “Do you have nets and knives aboard?”

  “Of course,” said Flimchen. “What manner of fish are you after?”

  “Something large enough to have devoured this woman’s brother.”

  “I daresay we can find you such a beast,” Flimchen said, with a sideways glance at Beisho. “As long as you’re ready to haul it in and brain it.”

  “Never readier,” Beisho replied, as he gingerly set foot on the rocking vessel. “As long as you can find the fish, we’ll brain it with one thwack!”

  “His show of courage brought a sly smile from the fisherman. “A thwack, eh?”

  “I have no fear,” Beisho replied.

  The mariner’s smile disappeared. “Then take a little of mine,” he said, “for I’ve got plenty. I’ve never turned my bow toward those waters without fearing what I would find. Or what would find me.”

  And so saying, he loosed the rope that secured the boat against the quay and, returning to the stern, turned on the motor and guided his chugging vessel out of the little harbor toward the deeps.

  * * *

  —

  More to keep his mind off the sickening motion of the boat than because he genuinely valued the mariner’s opinion, Beisho related what Leauqueau had told him about the legends of the lake and asked Flimchen if he believed the stories.

  “Some people say we come from fish,” he replied, “but I’ve been handling fish all my life and I never saw one—not one—with a shadow of a soul in its eyes.”

  “So you believe we’re descended from human castaways?” Ruty said.

  “More than likely.”

  Ruty made a sour face. “Does that trouble you?” Beisho required of him.

  “To be descended from a dreaming species?” Ruty said. “Yes…that troubles me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it means we’re accidents, Fie. Bastard children. Without purpose. Without meaning.”

  “Then we must make our meaning,” Beisho said.

  The mariner seemed to approve of this, to judge by the little grunt he gave.

  “And when we die?” Ruty said. “What then? When we can no longer make meaning for ourselves? Do we just fade away, like dreams?”

  “That will not be so bad,” Flimchen said, “if that’s the way of it.”

  “Will it not?” Ruty said, his voice lowered to a melancholy whisper. “I wonder…”

  There was a long silence then, while the boat moved out over the dark waters. It was Flimchen who broke the hush.

  “There,” he said, and pointed across the water.

  A large form was breaking surface, turning as it did so, showing its mottled flesh.

  “What is it?” Beisho breathed.

  “At a guess,” came the reply, “your man-eater.”

  As if it knew it was being debated, the creature raised its ungainly head from the water. It was a wretched thing, no doubt of that, lacking both grace and symmetry, its head eyeless and encrusted, its flanks gouged and raw.

  “I don’t see its mouth,” Ruty said.

  “Perhaps it doesn’t have one.”

  “Then how does it eat men?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t,” Beisho said, still studying the creature. “Maybe it’s the wrong animal.”

  “It hears us,” Flimchen said, and as he spoke the beast came at the boat head-on.

  “Knives! Knives!” Beisho yelled.

  Flimchen was already scrabbling in the bottom of the boat for weaponry, but before he could lay his hands on a blade the beast struck the boat. The vessel lurched, and Ruty lost his footing on the rot-slickened boards. Flailing, he was pitched over the gunwales and into the water. Despite his fat he sank in an instant, and for a moment Beisho thought he’d had his last sight of his comrade. A sob of grief and rage escaped him, but it was drowned out by a great commotion at the bow, and in a roar of frenzied water Ruty was borne up out of the lake on the snout of the beast. He reached for Beisho’s arm, caught hold of it, and was hauled back into the vessel, gasping for breath.

  “It comes again!” the mariner cried. This time he was armed with a short harpoon, and as the beast ploughed toward the tossing boat he threw the weapon, striking his target in the centre of its misshapen head.

  A din escaped the beast that would have better come from a woman’s throat: a shriek of agony that stopped so abruptly Beisho thought the creature had been dealt a mortal wound, and had perished then and there. But no; no sooner had the shriek ceased that the beast began to thrash with such vehemence it threatened to capsize the boat entirely.

  Flimchen had lashed the harpoon rope to a rusted ring set in the gunwale and then returned to the stern.

  “What are we going to do?” Beisho demanded, his eyes wild.

  “We’re going to drag its foul carcass back to shore.”

  “We still don’t know that this is the right beast,” Ruty reminded them.

  “I’ve not seen a thing the like of this in forty years of fishing,” the mariner replied. “If there’s another man-eater out there then let somebody else catch the fucker.”

  He gunned the motor, and turned his vessel around, pointing its bow toward Joom. “Hold on!” he said. “I’m going to drive the boat up onto the shingle, and beach the beast at the same time!


  If the wounded creature understood what plans were being laid against it, then it made no attempt to resist, even though its bulk suggested it might well have succeeded.

  “It’s surely dying,” Beisho said as he watched the creature turning belly-up in the bloodied spume.

  “Perhaps,” said Ruty.

  “You doubt it?”

  “This thing has neither eyes nor mouth,” Ruty observed. “Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

  Beisho stared at his comrade. “What’s your point, Rutaluka?”

  “There’s more mystery here than we comprehend,” Ruty replied. “Remember what the beacon keeper told us about Quiddity’s waters? How they grew on those that floated there?”

  Beisho’s gaze returned to the beast.

  “Perhaps we’re looking at some kind of encrustation around living flesh,” Ruty said.

  “The flesh of Humana? Our ancestors?” Beisho murmured.

  “Perhaps.”

  A tiny smiled crossed Beisho’s face. “Now I wish the gods were in their cloudy courts, Ruty, to see how we discover ourselves.”

  * * *

  —

  The beast’s scream had carried across the lake’s clear air, and a small crowd had come down to the harbor to watch the spectacle. Seeing that the boat was headed for the shore, the throng made its way from the quay to the shingle, its numbers swelling as word of what had taken place spread. Leauqueau was more impatient than the rest. She was standing knee-deep in the water, her anils outstretched as if to will her sibling into her embrace.

  “Be ready!” Flimchen said. “As soon as we strike the shore haul on the rope.”

  Seconds later the boat grated on the shingle, its momentum carrying it up the shallow beach, until its stem had cleared the water entirely. Ruty was first out, ploughing into the surf to haul the beast in. Beisho followed, but not before he announced to Leauqueau:

  “We have it! See? We have it!”

  Flimchen called for some help from the crowd, and four of the witnesses came to their aid, bending to the task of dragging the beast out of its native element and up onto the shingle. There were several cries of disgust as it cleared the waves, and several more of astonishment: the lake had never given up anything that resembled this monstrosity.

  Beached, the creature was even uglier than it had been when half submerged: an ill-made, wretched thing, the like of which even Ruty—who had catalogued fauna glimpsed by only a handful of souls—had never laid eyes on.

  “What now?” Beisho hissed to him when the creature was so far out of the water it had no hope of struggling back.

  “We take a blade to it,” Ruty said. “If her brother’s inside, we have to cut him out.”

  Beisho looked decidedly discomfited by this prospect, but with Leauqueau’s eyes—and the eyes of perhaps fifty onlookers—upon him, this was no time for squeamishness. Reaching into the boat, he snatched up a sizeable knife, and with a smile that he trusted was impressively casual he drove the blade into the beast’s flank. The creature convulsed, but not to escape the blade. Rather it seemed to present its body to the cutting edge, as if eager to be gutted.

  The hide of the thing was tough (it didn’t bleed; nor was there sign of bone or sinew beneath) and had Ruty not also snatched up a knife and stooped to help, the night might well have fallen before Beisho made an impression. But together they unknitted the carcass from one end to the other, gobs of encrusted flesh coming away with every slice. And suddenly, as they worked, a sob of anguish rose from the interior of the thing, answered a moment later by a cry from Leauqueau.

  “It’s him!” she said. “It’s my brother!”

  Beisho and Ruty worked with fresh fervour now, abandoning the blades for fear of doing harm to the living flesh inside. They plunged their arms into the wound they’d opened, and like midwives at some monstrous birth dug to deliver the prisoner from his cell. Blood began to seep from the opening, though it was not, they both knew, the blood of the beast. It was the victim who was bleeding, not the devourer.

  Unable to stand by any longer, Leauqueau lent her sinew to the struggle, and Flimchen, who had until now watched with bemusement, bent to labour beside them. Under the assault of eight hands the flank of the creature gaped, and they finally had sight of the victim.

  There was not one body inside, but two. Both naked, and embracing. One was Leauqueau’s brother, his flesh white and wasted, his gaze crazed. The other was a woman. She had been pierced by the harpoon and was still bleeding copiously. The point had entered the top of her skull and emerged at her chin.

  Leauqueau unleashed a deafening shriek, and retreated from the carcass into the surf.

  “Gods! Gods!” she shrieked. “See what he has done!”

  Her imprecation shook her brother from his stupor. He let the dead woman—with whom he had surely been in congress—slip from his arms, and started to crawl out into the open air, careless of his nakedness.

  “She was nothing to me!” he said to Leauqueau. “I saw her in the water, and I went to rescue her!”

  Beisho shook his head. “I’m not following any of this,” he complained.

  “I am,” Ruty replied, directing Beisho’s gaze back to the body of the woman. “That’s our human dreamer,” he said. “She was carried up into the lake from Quiddity.”

  “And he swam out to save her?”

  “Or make love to her.”

  “And the beast took them both.”

  “There is no beast,” Ruty said. “It’s as the beacon keeper told us. The waters take human flesh and fantasticate it…” He tore at the innards of the beast. “This thing has no heart. No lungs. No entrails. It’s a veil, built around dreaming tissue.” He looked at the dead woman. “This is her subtle body. The real thing is dead on a bed somewhere, far, far from here.”

  “Pitiful,” said Beisho.

  “At least we saved the lad,” Ruty replied.

  He turned as he spoke, in time to catch sight of Leauqueau stooping to lift a rock from beneath the waves. Seeing murder in her eyes, he started toward her with a shout. But she ignored him. She raised the stone high above her head and brought it down on her brother’s skull, striking once, twice, three times, and opening a grievous wound with each blow. Blood gushed from his head, and he fell backward into the surf. He was dead by the time Ruty reached him; one of his eyes struck from its socket, the other gaping, as if in astonishment that salvation and death had come in such close succession.

  * * *

  —

  Leauqueau put up no defense against arrest. She waited tearlessly on the shore while officers were called, and was in due course taken away, without uttering another word. By the time Beisho and Ruty had told their part of the tale, then watched the bodies of the lovers removed, and finally bade their farewells to Flimchen, night had long since fallen. Their limbs ached for want of rest, and their bellies for want of nourishment.

  “We have no money,” Ruty said as they wandered back up the steep street.

  “No, but we may yet prosper,” Beisho said.

  “How?”

  “Will this story not become legendary?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And will people not ask: What did the dead lad do before the dream-sea took him? And hearing that his profession was that of poet, will they not ache to have a copy of his sonnets?”

  “Ah…” said Ruty.

  “I shall be his sole translator, my friend. And we shall make a little fortune from his works.”

  “But where are his poems?”

  “We’ll find them,” Beisho replied confidently, and led them back to the step where he had first discovered Leauqueau weeping.

  The door was sealed, but no lock or bolt had ever bested Ruty’s fingers. The two adventurer
s were inside the humble house in thirty seconds, and duly separated to look for the works of the deceased poet. It was a melancholy search, turning over the belongings of the doomed siblings, but after several minutes it bore fruit. In the drawer of a dresser in one of the upper rooms Ruty found a book bound in scaly ochre skin, and brought it down to Beisho with a triumphant whoop.

  “This binding comes from a species that’s not in my bestiary,” he said, handing the volume over. “It’s probably out there in the lake somewhere. I want to hire another boat when you’ve made your fortune…”

  “You can go fishing alone,” Beisho replied. “I’m going to buy myself a pavilion on the hilltop and watch you from the comfort of my pillows.”

  He started to flick through the pages of the book, while Ruty mused on this zoological mystery.

  “It looks to be the skin of a serpent,” he said.

  “That’s fitting,” Beisho remarked dryly, “given the subject of the works it encloses.”

  “He writes of serpents?”

  “He writes of one serpent,” Beisho replied. “The beast between his legs.” He kept flicking and scanning, his face a portrait of disgust. “I’ve never read anything so obscene in my life. This isn’t poetry. It’s instructions on how to violate your sister, orifice by orifice.” He passed the book to Ruty. “Nobody’s going to publish filth like this.”

  Ruty glanced through the book. The dead man’s masterworks were barely doggerel, the vellum on which they were scrawled suspiciously stained here and there. Ruty pocketed the book, for perusal at a later date.

  “For the binding…” he explained, as Beisho cast him a baleful glance.

  Their business in the house done, they wandered out into the night. On the step Beisho stared up at the twelve moons admiringly.

  “Do you think the same heavens gaze down on Sapas Humana?” Ruty wondered.

  “Of course not,” Beisho replied. “They live in cells, my friend. And they dream because they long to escape them.”

  “I’d like to meet one…a living one, I mean…and send him back to tell the human world about us. Wouldn’t that be something?”

 

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