The Choir Boats

by Rabuzzi, Daniel

  Tom continued to gaze out the window. A gull plucked a crab from the water.

  “Come, Thomas. You dally. Or do you ignore me of purpose?”

  Tom stirred, turned halfway towards the Cretched Man, and said, “Forgive me, Jambres. I meant no reproach. It’s just that, after all these weeks tracking through the void, my mind is oppressed.”

  The Cretched Man smiled in sad understanding as he said, “Oppression is the drainage of our punishment, the ichor squeezed slowly from our sin until we drown in it.”

  Tom looked back out the window. He saw someone farther down the beach gathering kelp, one of the Minders. The apprentice from Mincing Lane said, “To me, it feels more like a sort of animalcule chafing and gnawing at my mind.”

  “As you wish,” said the Cretched Man with a terse laugh. “I deny no man his own image of despair. Extract or insect, however we see it, what you feel is the counterweight to longing.”

  Tom nodded slowly, then spoke. “What is this place? Is this Yount at last?”

  “Nearly. We sit on Yount’s borders, if we may speak in such terms in the interstitial realms. Though the echoes and wind-walls make talk of borders here illusory.”

  “How far then?” asked Tom.

  “One day more, perhaps two by ship, with Ermandel’s Toe and the Dog Star as our guides.”

  “Yet this place,” Tom gestured around the room and out the window, “is a home of some kind to you, I take it.”

  The Cretched Man looked past Tom, out the window, to the wheeling gulls and the man piling kelp on a wheelbarrow down the strand. “Nay,” he said so softly Tom barely heard him. “A ciborium without the host, an empty chalice. Not home. But a haven for a while.”

  Tom heard again the note in Jambres’s voice, like a fracture deep in an otherwise unflawed gem. Using the hand that now lacked two fingers, Tom pointed to the kelp-gathering figure on the beach. “Billy Sea-Hen and his lads call this place Sanctuary. They spoke to me of it before we arrived here yesterday.”

  The Cretched Man, whose carapace was maroon and subdued this morning, murmured as if Tom were not present, “Sanctuary, it is. It’s just not home. No place to rest. ‘Living in darkness, lacking all light, I sear myself away.’”

  “What?” said Tom.

  “Nothing,” said the Cretched Man. His gaze returned to his surroundings, fell upon Tom’s still-extended arm. “Let’s have a look at your damaged hand, shall we?”

  Tom offered his right hand, bandaged and missing the little and ring fingers.

  “Hmmm,” said the Cretched Man. “Improved, I am happy to see. But, alas, only to a point: there is no incarnative spell or medicine that will regenerate your lost digits.”

  Tom turned away and said nothing. Without the Cretched Man’s ministrations in the aftermath of the attack, Tom might have died of blood loss or infection. Tom hesitated to place too great a faith in gratitude but could not help himself.

  Outside the house, just above the high tide line, was a small yard of coarse beach-grass flanked by low dunes. A rough table and chairs made of pinewood sat in the yard. A teapot was on the table, along with biscuits, lard, and smoked fish. Gulls circled above the table but did not land.

  “Quick,” said the Cretched Man, pointing at the skreeking gulls. “Their reticence won’t last.”

  As they ate, Tom looked at the ship anchored in the cove. “You know,” he said. “I never thought to ask how she is named.”

  “Well,” said Jambres, swallowing a bit of smoked mackerel before replying. “It is my own private joke to name her the Viaticum, but the men call her the Seek-by-Night.”

  “Where’s the flag?” Tom asked. The long pennant with the bloody orb was missing from the top mast.

  “There,” said Jambres, pointing back to the house behind them. “We always take it down when we reach this place, and hoist it here.” The pennant streamed out from a flagpole on the roof.

  “That’s writing!” Tom said. The curling streaks of red dripping from the eye or moon were words masterfully stitched, too small to be read as such at a distance. “Facienti quod . . . Deus . . . gratiam. I cannot make it all out. Latin, but what does it say?”

  “Facienti quod in se est Deus non denegat gratiam,” said the Cretched Man. “The motto for our modest ark.”

  “‘God will . . . not . . .’” Tom hesitated. “‘Making . . .’? No, my skill does not answer. I am not Sally with languages. What does it mean?”

  “‘To the one who does what lies within him, God does not deny grace,’” recited the Cretched Man. The banner snapped as the wind rose. The red-limned orb streamed over the house, with red words swirling in its wake.

  Tom turned back to the ocean. Without looking at Jambres, he said, “What lies within you?”

  The Cretched Man did not answer at once. He smiled with his pristine teeth as he smeared lard on a biscuit, and said, “What lies within any man? You, for example, or Billy, or your Uncle Barnabas?”

  Tom turned to his breakfast companion and said, “You evade my question. I have earned an answer, a true one.” He waved his bandaged hand.

  The Cretched Man smiled again as he spoke, “Elixate your pique, young Thomas, and think hard upon the enormity of what you ask. We could talk here on the beach for days and years, and still not begin to whelm the first rampart of your query.”

  Tom would not be put off. “I want not the cyclopaedia, only a clear answer.”

  “I know not where to begin,” the Cretched Man said, waving away a gull that hovered above the table. “My name and origin you know, though you continue to resist the truth of my tale. I am a man, like you, though my fate has been unlike that of other men’s. I have the same soul and I suffer the same doubts and fears — more even because I have accrued more wisdom.”

  A line of cormorants flapped low and ragged just above the waves. Tom followed their progress while he listened to the Cretched Man.

  “Like all children of Eve,” said Jambres, “I have a set of tasks to perform. My duties were not always clear to me, but I have come to understand the order of things and my place in that order.”

  “What is that order?” asked Tom.

  The Cretched Man stared a long time at the horizon, as if he might see Yount just beyond the edge of sight. At last he said, “A pattern, an imbrication of duties and deeds, of actions and reactions, of loves and hatreds, woven by all of us together, wittingly or no, on a loom designed by God. Regularity with uniqueness. Like the vests your uncle wears. I like his style, by the way; he has genuine taste. Have you not noticed the regularity of the patterns he affects, all his calicosh and allapeen and barragon designs? Yet no two sprays or roundels are ever precisely alike; each has its own individuality within the pattern.”

  Tom imagined Uncle Barnabas in the partners’ room, wearing one of his favourite vests. Tom almost heard him say, “Figs and feathers!”

  The Cretched Man looked for a second at his own coat. Tom followed his gaze. The Cretched Man’s coat seemed to vary by day or even by the hour, sometimes being one shade of red, sometimes another, with striations and patterns that never seemed to be the same twice. Tom had grown used to the Cretched Man’s coat, as he had grown used to so much else on the voyage, but paused now to consider the garment in light of the conversation.

  “Do you know?” said Tom. “I have never seen you without your coat on, no matter how warm the weather might be. That’s a mighty deep-woven overcoat, and it is not particularly cold here. Why do you persist in wearing your coat then?”

  The coat seemed to answer before Jambres did. It rippled, the pattern within this morning’s maroon-red shifting subtly. Or so Tom thought — he could not focus on the coat for any length of time before his eyes grew weary. The Cretched Man said, “Persist? Persist? I have no choice in the matter. Look closely, Thomas, as closely as you can, as you have never looked before.”

  Tom, with sudden loathing, forced himself to look at the coat. He looked past the glamour that deflecte
d his and everyone else’s direct gaze, past the misty general impression of an old-fashioned overcoat to the hard specificity of this coat on this man. He looked at its pattern, a reticulated series that teased him with its mathematical meanings before dissolving into something else. He admired the cut of the cloth, the contoured tailoring, the seamless fit, without any gap between coat and —

  “Skin!” Tom said in a loud whisper. He looked at the Cretched Man, whose expression was that of Prometheus on the rock.

  “Skin,” confirmed Jambres. “Yes, Thomas, my skin. I cannot take off my coat, this carmine integument, because it is part of me, laced onto me with a hundred veins and arteries.”

  Tom recoiled but not as far as he might have. He whispered, “But why?”

  “Thomas, Thomas,” said Jambres. “Unstop your mind at last, and understand the story I have told you.”

  Tom breathed out, “Punishment.”

  “Of course,” said Jambres. “Part of my penance. ‘I clothed thee also with broidered work . . . I girded thee about with fine linen . . . covered thee with silk.’”

  Tom stared at the Cretched Man’s face, wanting to look at the coat but fearing to do so.

  “Actually,” said Jambres with a wry note. “I do get to take my coat off. Or have it removed. Once every fifty years, which is why I am out of fashion, dreadfully so, most of the time. I am . . . peeled. I moult, like a snake. I am born again, a little bit at a time over the centuries.”

  “Does it . . . ?” asked Tom.

  “Oh yes,” said Jambres. “Very much.”

  Tom looked at his bandaged hand, moved it under the table.

  “Reflect further upon my story,” said the Cretched Man. “A coat woven on a lattice of veins is the least of it. My entire body is not my own. Long ago, I looked unlike myself today. I was not white, the colour of shrouds and fungi and cataracts. I am told I am beautiful, but I think not. I was far more beautiful in my original state, because it was myself. I am told that one day, when I have redeemed and expiated myself, when all the flayings are done, the final circumcision performed, I will have been peeled back to my beautiful original shape and colour, the brown of my native Egypt before I challenged Moses in the court of the Pharaoh. Until then I will remain viduated, deprived, and bereaved.”

  A gull landed on the far side of the table. Keeping its eye on Tom and especially on the Cretched Man, it lunged for a scrap of smoked mackerel. Jambres ignored it. Another gull joined the first. Tom got up from the table. Jambres continued to stare off into the sea. Tom walked away from the table, leaving the Cretched Man deep in thought with gulls wheeling just over his head and touching down on the table.

  Chapter 10: A Song Out of Silence

  Onboard the Gallinule, the Fencibles mounted small cannon, one- and two-pounders with flared muzzles like blunderbusses, on swivels set into the railings. At each station, they stored three other cannon of the same size, ready to replace the mounted cannons from their swivels in rapid succession. They wheeled large cannon up to the gun-ports below decks. Each man practised shooting his musket at targets dragged behind the ship.

  “Look,” said Barnabas. “A dolphin!” A grey bottlenose had jumped over a target behind the ship. All the men of Yount watched the dolphin. Several made the sign they had all made when they chanted the Common Prayer. By the end of the day, three or more dolphins led the Gallinule, leaping and looking back at the crew members with their side-set eyes.

  “They are the Mother’s,” said Nexius, touching the brooch they all wore. “They protect us and we protect them.”

  That evening the ship’s captain gathered the crew again on deck. Reglum translated for the McDoons.

  “Tonight we leave Karket-soom,” said the ship’s captain. “We begin our return to Sabo-soom. Mother protect us!”

  The crew roared back, “Mother protect us!”

  The captain pointed to the foremast and shouted, “Hoist the moon!”

  Crew members hauled on a rope attached to a winch on the main spar, and brought up a large silver plate to the level of the spar. There the plate, six feet across or more, swayed in the wind.

  Reglum said to the McDoons, “There is no moon either on the tangled roads or in Yount, so we bring our own moon with us.”

  As one, the crew turned to look at the moon in the sky, a crescent moon just visible through the clouds.

  “We seek your light,” the crew yelled. “Give us your light, oh Large Moon, send your light to the Small Moon on our ship.”

  As one, the crew turned to face the silver plate swinging from the spar, and chanted:

  The moon is eaten

  But we need a lamp to light our way home.

  Baffled boys

  Cry in the dark

  Lie down.

  Down in the dark

  Drown in the dark

  Lie down.

  At this, every man knelt down on one knee and bowed his head.

  The moon is eaten

  But we need a lamp to light our way home.

  Unveiled boys

  Fly from the dark

  Stand up.

  Up from the dark

  Back from the dark.

  Stand up.

  At that, every man stood up.

  “Our Moon will light our way home!” shouted the ship’s captain.

  The crew shouted, “Home!” and dispersed.

  “Come,” said the ship’s captain, turning to the McDoons. “There is one other ceremony to perform.”

  Nexius, Reglum, and the ship’s captain sat with the McDoons in the captain’s quarters. On the table were three silver knives, each about four inches long, with a dolphin leaping over a moon incised in the centre of the blade. Reglum said, “These are hatma knives. Every member of the crew has one. We ask that you each take one and wear it in its sheath at all times as we cross the Interrugal Lands.”

  As the McDoons reached for the knives, Reglum raised his hand and said, “There is more. Listen carefully, and please do not be offended or distraught. The hatma knife is only to be used when all other means have failed you, when your only remaining choice is to perform hatmoi.”

  “And what,” said Sanford, putting the knife he had selected back on the table, “is that?”

  “Suicide,” Reglum said gently. “Mutual suicide. Each of us has a hatmoril, a partner to whom we are pledged, one to the other, to help perform hatmoi should that be the only path left. So that no one is ever left to face something worse.”

  “We are Christians,” Sanford said. “You ask us to do what we cannot and will not do. I am offended . . . and I fear for your souls.”

  Reglum rounded the table and spoke again in a very gentle voice. “Mr. Sanford, please understand the spirit in which we request this — or offer this. Think us not heathens: the Nurturing Mother allows us such an outcome only in times of utterly final need. It is her act of mercy towards us, so she can gather us back to her bosom. If we are lost first, somewhere in the trackless wastes of the Interrugal Lands, she may not find us, and then we are truly lost forever. Releasing our own life in those non-places is an act of our own will, the will She gave us, and so lights a little flame in the darkness, a flame which She can use to find us.”

  Sanford shook his head. “I will fight to my end to save any one of you,” he said with a ferocity that sent shudders through Sally. “‘I fear neither the terror by night nor the arrow that flies in the day, neither the pestilence that walks in darkness nor destruction that walks at noon.’ That is our duty, not this . . . other thing.”

  Reglum nodded and there were tears in his eyes as he said, “We speak of a terrible thing, it is true. We speak of this almost never, and never lightly. How to make you understand? When we come to Yount, I will take you to the Mariner’s House, in which is their Hall of Long Remembrance. In that Hall are engraved the names of all those who fared forth from Yount and never returned. Over the centuries that is many names — souls lost to the Nurturing Mother if they could not p
erform hatmoi.”

  Sanford shook his head, mouthed the word “Father.” Reglum raised his palm and made the circling motion from the Plea.

  “We cannot and would never force you to do what your conscience forbids,” Reglum said. “We beg you only, truly beg you, to take the knives as your final defence in case we are put to such trial.”

  Sanford glared at Reglum, then looked at the other McDoons, and said in a voice of bronze, “We are bound to the same mission but not necessarily to the same fate. What you do is wrong, but I cannot change you. I take your knife as a token of your concern for me, but I will never use it for the purpose to which you entreat me. I will speak no more about this. Good evening.”

  Barnabas picked up a knife and held it gingerly. “Nor will I,” he said. “But I understand that you mean to make us a great gift, the greatest perhaps that you can from your premise. I respect that. Good night.”

  Sally picked up her knife and looked Reglum, Nexius, and the ship’s captain each in the eye before returning her gaze to Reglum. “I cannot imagine doing what you suggest,” she said. “But I can imagine needing companionship as a bulwark to despair. I take the hatma as evidence of that companionship.”

  The men of Yount looked at her gravely. Reglum said, “You know what happened to the boats of the Glen Carrig, to the survivors of the wreck of the Alcimedon. So many others lost to lands survivors called Doorpt Swangeanti and Severambes and Marbotikin Dulda, but which in reality have no names. So many others lost without any trace whatsoever. Most Robinson Crusoes are never found, Miss Sally.”

  Sally sheathed the knife and wondered if James Kidlington would refuse to use a hatma where he was going, if he would be allowed to refuse, and for a second her sight grew dim. She grabbed the table.

  “I am fit,” she said, as Reglum put his hand on her shoulder. “Thank you.” At the door, Sally stopped and asked Reglum, “Is it impolite to ask who your hatmoril is?”