Before Mirabel knew it, her mother had been whisked away to the dance floor, now cleared of entertainers. Mirabel continued to watch her uncle, watched across the intervening tables as Penolith fussed about him. Cresmol was also there, his place assured in respect of Nephril’s better care.
An odd man, Mirabel thought as Cresmol glanced furtively about, his eyes only momentarily meeting hers. He seemed to be watching for someone, distracted and uneasy, but was soon dragged back to Nephril’s needs. It made Mirabel herself search amongst the mass of faces but none lifted itself from the crowd.
Silence rapidly spread through the ballroom, voices dropping as cutlery and glasses were likewise lowered to the tables. All still sober eyes were already turned to the dance floor, those in their cups slowly following on. A trumpet broke the pregnant air, its wavering note cutting through the pipe smoke and waft of tallow, shattering the air between canvas and wood.
So pure was its note that mouths quickly slackened, letting chins drop lower, exposing bowed tongues hard pressed against parapet teeth. Even the candle flames quivered in sympathy, piping out their own smoky notes in search of ever absent staves. The trumpet note slowly retreated, withdrew through berth and anchorage, between the harbour mouth lanterns and out to sea, across the dusk-lit swell.
The utter silence it left behind was then shattered like glass as Steward Melkin’s rich but age-scratched voice cut to Mirabel’s ear.
“The company of Guilds!” he shouted, pompously, “through whom all of Bazarral do give voice to their purpose, here doth call upon its daughter. Come forth, Mirabel Mudark! Be revealed from thy shedding childhood mantle.”
All eyes, a thousand such pairs, turned to watch Mirabel, and with it the silence returned but ineffably deeper.
Without thinking, she rose - her neighbour catching her tipping chair before it toppled. She’d been placed at the lowest table, the one she now realised was overlooked by all.
She breathed in deeply, very deeply, and by it gathered the gazing folk to a single sigh of wonder. They sighed again when she tossed her head back and her hair, left lose below its gathered bundles and diadem folds, silkily swept back in sheaths.
When she moved, the air became taut, rapt with stares, stares pressed close to the velvet and satin that clung so close to her curves. Her long legs swung gracefully forward through her gown’s shard-slicing cut, their smooth lines encased in sheer stockings. Quite naturally, they brought a hint of dark hems to the minds of all the men.
Lady Lambsplitter watched her daughter seemingly glide between the tables, her way cleaved with ease and stepped with grace. She watched Mirabel move out into the open space of the dance floor, drawing with her a crowd of covetous eyes.
When she’d led their gazes to Melkin, Mirabel turned to stand at his side as he began his welcoming speech. What he said, though, she’d no idea for she’d caught sight of Nephril peering, not like everyone else at her, but across the ballroom. Cresmol, at his side, was pointing.
Applause broke out, some compliment about her no doubt, but her mind was now on a table towards the canvas ceiling. It was at the very edge of the tallest of the token towers, furthest from her, but the face she saw there - above an arm leisurely draped along its parapet - stole her thoughts away.
Lady Lambsplitter alone realised that her daughter was now distant, her responses and smiles no more than choreographed rote, but she couldn’t see why. She knew something had distracted Mirabel, and in her seventh thridgaer state it just had to be a man, but which one and why? Although her spirits should rightly have risen, Lady Lambsplitter was clearly unnerved.
The formalities had quickly moved on, Melkin sensibly keeping the welcome short, and so his daughter was soon released to her impending adult society. The long round of catching up with people, of shaking hands and kissing cheeks, had soon consumed both her parents, pressing them close to friends and family.
The trumpet had been replaced by different instruments, the band they formed vainly competing with the mass of conversation. The band played, food and drink were consumed, and the evening steadily wore on.
They were perhaps into their seventh or eighth course when the band came to a halt and remained so, unnoticed for a while. The din of diners continued until a loud bang rang out, a bright light shining from the centre of the dance floor. Not only was it phenomenally bright but it also hissed venomously, discarding fizzing flecks that skated across the dance floor.
Unsurprisingly, it riveted all eyes as the band struck up an old but popular sea shanty, masking a cranking noise that ran through the floor, a noise that soon jarred sporadically through the tables and chairs, toppling a few salt sellers and candlesticks.
Other than the strident music, the place was deathly still until its familiar beat brought rhythmic taps and knocks of hand and foot against table and floor. Even those stopped when cracks appeared in the boards beneath their feet.
Between each group of tables, widening gaps appeared, the smell of seawater and seaweed rising to the ballroom as people saw a dark surface ripple reflections of the moonlit sky beyond. They could feel themselves floating further from each other’s tables, adrift it seemed upon the ships that carried the pavilion upon the Passing Pool, the canvas roof soon drawn taut between its straining masts.
Just as shock was beginning to set in, the prow of a barge nudged in through an unseen archway and into their midst. Its garlanding of flowers must have eased their growing fears, the gay string of lanterns along its gunwales bringing relief in their sweet delight.
When the barge’s beam finally drew in, it brought with it upon its deck a sumptuous tableaux drawn from mythology, a wondrous evocation of long-loved icons, emblems of an illustrious past. The figures aboard held suitable poses; beautifully arranged, tastefully decorated, classically attired.
Mouths had long since dropped, lifted only when applause slowly began to ripple through the pavilion. It soon ceased, though.
The music had changed, a newer but still popular refrain marking the entry of yet another barge, this time from the opposite side. It carried future’s promise aboard, loaded with tokens of industry, of innovation and ideas. It too passed smoothly between the tables and towers, between their utterly stunned diners.
Before long barges appeared from all sides, each making its own passage through the ballroom. They floated within their own channels, bringing forth depictions of all manner of Bazarran life, both ancient and modern.
Their timing was immaculate, as befitted a Bazarran endeavour, the barges sliding smoothly one across the other’s stern and bow, passing but within inches. Then two would enter each lane, again passing without hap, all as the music steadily rose towards a crescendo.
Soon there were three to a lane then four, more bands and musicians entering the fray, building their complex movement. Barges now filled the entire ballroom, lit by innumerable candles and flares and torches, all packed with glittering displays, their freeze of characters presently breaking free to individuals who simply waved and beamed in rapturous joy.
Before long the whole place was on its feet, applause ringing out to join the music and laughter on-board; mixing, roiling, rumbling together. A hitherto unknown happiness, a great joy and celebration for the one young woman who was now no longer there.
18 An Uncle’s Gift
Even outside the pavilion the noise of celebration was still loud. Mirabel was loath to encourage her Uncle Nephril further away, although he didn’t complain. He seemed much stronger in fact than she’d been led to expect, but the distance to the next bench she thought too much.
The one they now sat upon stood by a bollard, its port authority emblem lost to lichen and moss. Not far to their left, the pavilion itself stretched out into Passing Pool, its canvas roof pulled taut and flat. Its perimeter had been broken awhile by shafts of flickering golden light that shone out across the harbour’s blackness.
The rain had almost stopped, although Mirabel felt occasional spots to her bare shoulders.
It left the air clean and still but feeling cooler, drawing her skin seemingly as taut as the canvas roof.
Nephril had retained the hand she’d offered to help him sit, and by it kept her near. Even in the light escaping the pavilion she was hard pressed to see his face. Somehow, though, it made it seem so much easier to keep to her task.
She felt him turn his gaze to her breasts, their silhouette drawing quickening arcs of soft pink light against the frame of her dark-lit dress. She slowed and deepened her breathing, arched her neck like a swan’s and let a soft smile fill the corners of her mouth, just as she’d been taught. Nephril’s hand tightened about hers.
“So like thy mother,” he softly mused in a quiet interlude, somewhat remotely. “Always filling the space around thee so very full.” She sensed he was watching her breathing, his hand relaxing its hold and letting her own slip free to where it then rested lightly upon his thigh.
Mirabel’s lips parted, their moist outline pouting a sharp line of crimson to point her features, eyes dark set deep in her tilted brow’s shadow. A glint lifted in her eye, an eye that somehow seemed to draw Nephril’s gaze even closer to her own sensual mouth.
Nephril’s face slowly cracked to a grin as he leant forward into the meagre light, bringing stirrings of doubt to Mirabel’s mind. Against a trumpet’s suddenly strident sound, he loudly asked, “Thou had favour of me, mine dear?”
Her gaze swam about his face until drawn to the unfathomable depth in his eyes, soon feeling she was teetering on a dangerous edge. With a racing heart, she pulled her gaze away but it only fell to Nephril’s sharp beak of a nose. It overshadowed his thin, grey lips, now motionless amidst the stubble of his jaw, all speckled white with glistening light. In that face she saw immeasurable age, an ancient presence quietly beside her, yet still so strangely strong.
What had he asked? she wondered. What question had so simply broken her blood-bound course?
“The favour thou wert to ask of me, hmm, my far too pretty one?” he again gently pressed.
For the first time in her life Mirabel felt her face course with blood. It quenched the tutored eagerness in her eyes and so she downcast them, only to feel Lord Nephril lean in closer and softly kiss the dark-hidden red of her cheek.
She jumped - a small start - and stammered, “I ... I did ... indeed I did have a favour to ask, dearest uncle.” What was this strange feeling that now swamped her guts, that fluttered so strongly in her chest? She tried hard to collect her thoughts.
“Not a favour on my own behalf ... no. One beholden my father if you would, Uncle Nephril, for he and Baza...” She suddenly felt clumsy, gauche, almost as a child again, and promptly forgot her lines.
Nephril’s hand fell to hers again, there on his thigh, forgotten, and lightly stroked its back, then delicately and slowly drew his fingertip along her silken-clad arm.
Nephril’s ancient lips drew near hers, but a hair’s breadth away - thin, frayed edge of dry, grey skin so near the warm, pert, pouting promise of her own ripe kiss. “What great plan would thy father be about this time I wonder?” he asked, having let his lips breathe past hers to her delicate ear, the words placed there as though slipping from a syrup-tipped tongue. “What favour would the clever Steward have of an ancient old fool, hmm?”
A flash of rote response crossed Mirabel’s mind before her eyes filled, before her jaw stiffened and stung and her voice broke free, “Father has need of you, Uncle, need of you to retrieve something for him.”
Panic threatened to break across her face and so Nephril drew away, a job well done, her task now plain to see. “He wants ... he wants to use Baradcar,” she blurted out.
“Baradcar?” Nephril choked. “Baradcar? What in Leiyatel’s name... What ... what in the name of the Certain Power would he want with Baradcar, eh, Mirabel? What’s thy father up to now?”
Although flustered, Mirabel held true to her long-cast blood. “He’s after replacing steam with some new source of power, something his college has dredged up from ancient text.”
“Replace steam?”
“Yes. Well, maybe not entirely, but much of what the stoom engines now do.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s worried about stripping the Forest of Belforas, fearful of raping its bounty and so leaving it despoiled.”
She felt more sure of herself now, back on a safer course. “Father wants to use the vast source of heat that rests so close beneath Baradcar. He wants to use it to fire a massive stoom engine, one that will drive a great machine from which this new power will spill.”
Nephril absently turned to look across the blackness of the harbour. “But no one can build in Baradcar. It is not safe, not whilst Leiyatel remains...”
He turned so quickly, grasped her shoulders so keenly, they were face to face before she could blink. “He wants me to remove what be left of Leiyatel, is that it? For want of no man but one, eh? For want of the last with weft and weave to shield his flesh. He wants me to make way for his novel engine does he not?”
Mirabel had to race ahead in her mind, had to flick through the rote and so find where Nephril had leapt to. “Err, yes, Uncle Nephril, that’s about it. He wants you to remove her remains to where they can no longer hurt anyone.”
“To Leigarre Perfinn, eh, to the womb that did deliver her all that time ago, is that it?” Mirabel found she could only nod, hopeful she’d somehow not failed.
She wasn’t yet to find out for Nephril’s waxen gaze had been plucked away. He now stared out across the harbour, across the quays and wharfs all jammed so full, through mast and lanyard and boom and hawser, out to where a black outline moved so slowly against the distant darkness.
He tensed, strung like a bow now sighted on a ghostly apparition drifting in to the Passing Pool. A dark hulk slowly and silently came aport, its prow nosing towards them, its bow hardly lifting a wave.
Another round of cheers from the pavilion died away, leaving room for the sound of a stoom engine’s phut-phut-phut.
The hulk nosed across the light from the pavilion, the golden glow revealing a stripped-down barquentine. There, upon its once pristine prow, bold against her weathered boards, crimson letters proudly proclaimed her Herbengour name.
19 A Gift Unwrapped
When the Herbengour failed to stop, Mirabel was surprised at how quickly Nephril swept them both clear, appearing to be surprisingly sprightly for a man of his age. With a loud, tortured scream, the ship - although only moving slowly - managed to obliterate five yards of its bow before coming to rest with its prow jammed on top of the quay - their bench no longer visible.
The breached hull soon noisily began to fill with harbour water, whilst what little rigging there’d been now lashed down onto the remaining deck, bringing with it shards of spar and topmast. Severed and loosened ropes lethally twanged about Nephril and Mirabel, flailing out across the absent gunwales.
The whole ship then seemed to pause, as though in shock, before the weight of the water now flooding in soon pulled it astern, dragging it noisily back along the quay. It only got a few yards towards the edge before sinking stern first into the harbour’s sediment and at last coming to rest at a steep angle.
Although all over in a matter of minutes, they were minutes that coincided with the end of the barge-borne extravaganza in the pavilion. As the applause had died away, the Herbengour’s collision groaned and crashed its way to everyone’s hearing. Even as her stern raised a great churning froth of gas from the harbour’s muddy bottom, people were already streaming out to have a look.
They soon pressed close behind Nephril and Mirabel, brought to a halt by the incredible sight and the debris strewn quayside. Mirabel felt the jostle at her back but was more unnerved by its silence.
Before them, what had clearly long been little more than the Herbengour’s hull now sloped into the harbour. Most of her deck was gone, as were her gunwales, fo’c’sle and much of the mizzen deck.
In fact, there was little left on boar
d from what Nephril could see, other than a body lashed to the bare mizzen mast. There was something about it that seemed familiar, that perhaps should have shocked him, but it took a close-by voice to achieve that.
“That’s t’pilot ain’t it? Tha knows, t’old one, one that went off on that wild goose chase.” There were murmurs of agreement, no more than that, not until Nephril heard a voice that certainly took him aback.
He turned to find a tall, middle-aged man, well-tanned and with long, bleached hair, who was again calling out, “SCONNER? SCONNER AHOY? CAN YOU HEAR ME, PILOT?”
“Phaylan? Is that really thee?” Only one person heard Nephril, someone whose questioning look soon drew his notice.
Close by his side, Mirabel had turned back to stare once again at Steermaster Phaylan, but he’d already leapt from the crowd and was even now nimbly threading his way through the debris, soon shinning up the shattered prow.
Nephril, however, didn’t notice Steermaster Phaylan then climb the tangle of shattered boards, nor saw him clamber nimbly onto the remaining deck where he raced astern. He certainly didn’t see Phaylan draw a knife and slash at the ropes that bound the body, nor watched him catch Sconner’s limp form in his own strong but tender grasp. He was also fortunate that he didn’t see the tears that quickly welled in Phaylan’s eyes as he beheld the old pilot’s dry and blistered face.
Nephril’s eyes had all that time been intent only on Mirabel’s rapt stare. He’d seen something there he’d never expected to see, but before he could decide if it were real or not, she was gone, racing through the ship’s debris in Phaylan’s wake.
20 A Mind to the Unlikely
The Herbengour looked remarkably like a beached shark; the newly opened mouth in its bows doggedly bit the quayside whilst its tailfin lay hidden beneath the murky waters, stuck in the mud. The debris had been removed from the quayside itself but had only been tossed to a tangled heap on-board.
Last True World (Dica Series Book 3) Page 7