by Stephen Deas
And then there were the men. His men now, slave or night-skin, soldier or tailor. He’d earned that. Half were more skilled with needle and thread than knife and sword, but he had uses for that now. The tailors and the two seamstresses were down by the sea every day, fishing, keeping their bellies full, weaving lines from their stores of thread, sewing nets and even a few little sails. Everyone was hungry, yes, and bloody sick of fish all the time, but they weren’t starving and they weren’t dead. Hadn’t lost a single man; even when one idiot fell into the sea the enchantress had flown down and dragged him out.
Made him chuckle how many slaves the night-skins had kept to keep their fancy clothes in order. One slave had even been a gardener, though Tuuran had no idea what Baros Tsen T’Varr had wanted with a gardener on a piece of floating stone out in the middle of the desert. Fellow reckoned he was some sort of expert on fruit trees.
Pride. They’d had storms so bad hardly anyone dared come out of the tunnels, but her Holiness had still stooped to the sea on the back of her dragon and drawn up tubs of water. When anyone was injured, Bellepheros made them well. The dragon heated stones with its fire for warmth and cooking. They’d even managed to build a pair of masts from the remains of the shattered black powder guns and rigged sails made from from silk sheets. They were crap, but they weren’t nothing. They’d built something, all of them together, and he felt it deep in his chest, hot and pure, a future full of possibility.
Wasn’t perfect though. Crazy Mad stood on the eyrie wall, looking out at the sea like he didn’t have anything better to do, lost and waiting for the Black Moon to rise again. Her Holiness sat out on the rim, legs dangling over the edge, back arched, head tipped back almost as though she was taunting him, taking the wind and letting it have her, revelling in it with her two servants at her side. She’d changed. She had a wildfire in her. Maybe she always had, but all the stabbity anger had turned into something else. She smiled instead of snarled, and the energy that poured out of her no longer sang songs of murder but of some other determination. To Tuuran she seemed to make everything possible.
He was staring. He made himself look away.
Best not to think about that. Except he couldn’t stop. Couldn’t not think about that moment before she’d told him she’d found land.
Pride then, yes, but damn did he need someone he could talk to.
They came to the island in the night. It was there in the morning when Tuuran went up before dawn, the coast a few miles away. Most days he was first out, sitting alone on the eyrie wall to watch the sun rise long before its fire lit up the sea, but today her Holiness was ahead of him, and Crazy the Crowntaker too, side by side on the rim, sitting there and kicking their feet like a pair of children planning mischief. Her Holiness waved him over. She didn’t turn to look, but she always knew who was near, and so Tuuran went and hovered behind them, awkward, not sure where to sit. Didn’t seem right sitting next to the speaker of the nine realms like they were on a bridge tossing racing sticks into the water. Didn’t seem right to choose Crazy either.
Zafir patted the stone beside her. ‘Loom behind me like that and I can’t shake the sense you’re about to pitch us both over the edge,’ she said.
‘Land, big man,’ said Crazy as Tuuran did as he was told, and for once Crazy sounded almost his old self. ‘You did this.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Tuuran snorted. ‘I yelled at people and did some fishing and a lot of fetching and lifting and carrying stuff about. That’s all.’
‘You were a part of it, Night Watchman,’ said Zafir, and Tuuran knew she was smiling.
Tension drained from him as though someone had pulled a plug. He let it and smiled too, and leaned back and revelled in the cold dawn air washing over his face. Because yes, he had been a part of it. They all had, every one of them together, and that was what made it special, and there was that pride again; and they sat, the three of them, and watched the sun rise and light up a land that no one had ever seen until today. They’d left Takei’Tarr in thunder and lightning and fire, every one of them expecting to die, most of them slaves with nothing much to live for. They’d travelled to the Silver Sea, the moon itself, and yet now here they were. Free men and women, alive, every one of them.
The sun rose and Tuuran knew he’d never see anything like it in all the worlds ever again. There were maybe a dozen islands in the archipelago, all different sizes but all shaped much the same, each a huge dome-like mass, two miles high perhaps and maybe five across, with one side sheer cliffs and a massive bulbous overhang of dark cracked shadow and deep looming caverns shrouded in curtains of hanging green; while on the other side the slope was steep but not sheer, and a sea of trees tangled together to bury whatever lay beneath. Strands of bare white rock ran for miles out among the waves around the bottom of the domes, long tapering tentacles cracked and barren, tufted with dune-grass, sprinkled with sand and shells, and scuttling with giant crabs that must each have been as big as a man.
‘It looks sort of like a giant dead octopus,’ he said at last. ‘With a forest on top.’
Zafir laughed. Even Crazy Mad had a chuckle at that.
‘This is where we make our new life, big man,’ he said. ‘Though it won’t be easy.’
Damn straight it wouldn’t. But if there was anything that bothered Tuuran, it wasn’t all the hard work that would come in simply trying to survive, because they’d done that once already and he’d seen it, and he knew that they could, and so did everyone else. No, if there was a murmuring in his heart then it was that whatever they built here wouldn’t last, because neither Zafir nor the Black Moon would allow it.
The sun crept past the horizon. Copper fire lit the sea. Diamond Eye nudged the eyrie up close to a shore between two white strands of beach. Zafir found a stream of water that rattled and cascaded through a sharp cleft down from the island’s mountain heart. The eyrie drifted to a halt over the nearest piece of open ground, a bone-hard yellow-white stone shoulder to one of the tentacle beaches. Tuuran ordered the cranes lowered and was the first to step off, the first to set foot on this new world they’d found. Coarse pale sand crunched under his tattered boots, more holes than leather by now. He took them off and let his bare feet feel it, curled his toes. He squatted. The air was humid, the sun bright. It would be merciless out here in the heat of the day, but now, so early in the morning, it felt glorious. He ran his fingers over the dry pale rock. It looked like old bleached bone.
‘Right then. Time to find ourselves a place to live.’ He pulled his boots back on his feet, took up his axe, chased the nearest crab and split its shell in two. ‘Who else wants to eat something that’s not fish for once?’ And then he set off for the jungle.
Crazy was right: it wasn’t easy. Tuuran found the stream quick enough, and between them they hacked a path back to the first beach, but the stream came down a cleft in the side of a mountain that sloped more up than sideways, and the only pieces of nice flat ground to be had anywhere were the beaches, and they were no good because that wasn’t where the water was and the midday sun shrivelled and burned every bit as bad as the desert sun of Takei’Tarr, and you had to be pretty stupid or desperate to stand out in it without shelter.
‘There are fourteen islands,’ her Holiness said as they sat around together in the dragon yard after the first couple of days of expeditions and wondering what to do. ‘All clustered together here in the middle of the open ocean. They all look much the same to me. I don’t think we’ll find a better place, and I don’t think there’s any other land for thousands of miles. Certainly no other people. Diamond Eye would know.’
Tuuran snorted. Sunny and hot and overgrown and lush with life, but they were on their own. Live in the eyrie? They might as well move on. And he was all ready for her Holiness to tell them that that was what she wanted, or maybe to simply get on the back of her dragon and fly on alone and leave them all behind, but she didn’t, and Crazy didn�
�t say anything either; and as for old Bellepheros, Tuuran could almost see him drooling over a whole new world of plants and trees and roots.
‘Well?’ he said, because in the end someone had to ask. ‘Do we move on, or do we stay?’
‘We could live up in the trees,’ said a slave Tuuran had taken to calling Halfteeth.
And even then when no one said anything, he still didn’t believe it, still woke up every morning waiting for her Holiness to decide it was time to go home, but no one argued, and so that was how it was. They stayed.
They had to do everything for themselves, of course. They had what tools they had and nothing more, nor any means to make any; but they had a dragon with the strength to uproot trees and flatten the earth and with fire to melt stone; they had an enchantress with the skill to make glass automata, and sleds to lift them into the air to pick fruit and hunt monkeys, and she made devices Tuuran had never seen before, enchanted lamps and torches, engines to drive saws, all the things for which the Taiytakei used slaves; they had an alchemist who wandered through a cornucopia of unfamiliar flora and fauna in a daze of delight, taking samples and telling them what was safe to eat and what wasn’t, and all the properties of leaf and root and organ; they had the memories of three different worlds and how the ordinary folk in each had lived their lives. They put all that skill with needle and thread to use. They started with shelters little more than sails and sheets hung over fallen branches beside the stream. Some hunted and gathered fruit while others fished from the eyrie over the sea. The gardener slave who knew all about fruit trees took to wandering with Bellepheros, his unofficial apprentice. They felled trees with axes meant for fighting, or else the dragons simply tore them down and carried them to the beaches. They set up workshops there, out in the open, and cut beams and planks with gold-glass saws until Chay-Liang made automata to do it for them. Shelters grew to huts and houses up in the trees. They built ropes and ladders and bridges, a whole shanty town nestled in branches skewed up the teetering slope of the island, or perched on the juts of bone-white stone that poked through the thin earth.
Weeks passed into months. They cleared the land on the shoulder of the beach and built a hall and a firepit. They dammed the stream past the bottom of a waterfall and made a little pool, and felled trees and carved little terraces into slopes and planted the last of the grain from the eyrie larder in the wild hope it might yet grow. Grand Master Bellepheros moved his old laboratory down and began an apothecary, though he kept his own house firmly on the ground and refused to climb up into the trees like everyone else. Chay-Liang moved her workshop to the beach to be with him. The eyrie was slowly deserted, left to float alone over the shore, abandoned except for her Holiness and her dragon, for the occasional fishing party who still used its platforms, and for Myst and Onyx, who refused to leave their mistress. Silk sheets were cut into tunics as old clothes wore through; animals were trapped and skinned, and their furs made into cloaks and coats and blankets for when they were needed.
Tuuran lost track of days. Most of the survivors were men. There was a bit of trouble now and then, and Tuuran had to wave his axe once or twice, but nothing more. The dragon kept them all in line in the end, the dragon and its mistress. An arrangement came about whereby the two women who made their home in the village took whomever they chose when it suited them. Myst and Onyx had their lovers too, and Tuuran was one of them, though they took him quietly and in secret while her Holiness and her dragon were away; and they took Crazy Mad as well, and sometimes Tuuran and Crazy went up to the eyrie together and got drunk on the secret stash of Baros Tsen’s apple wine that Myst and Onyx kept hidden, and it was like the old days when he and Crazy had been sail-slaves, only now they weren’t slaves any more; and on most days they worked, the hard honest work of building and hunting and making a better world; and on some they walked away into the jungle together just to see what was there, and took a little food and a skin of stolen wine from the eyrie, and in the evening they made a fire and told the same stories they’d both heard a hundred times before of the lives they’d known and seen: the day Tuuran had picked Crazy out of a prison hold to be an oar-slave for the galley he worked; the day Crazy had come up from the oars to be a sail-slave instead and Tuuran had branded him and marked him to show his worth; fine old times after the fire witch of Aria had burned their slaver masters, whoring and drinking in Helhex and Deephaven, all with the irresistible sheen of glowing nostalgia that made those days seem glorious and free and a wonder of opportunity, with the grubby dirt of truth polished away; and Crazy never glimmered with silver light, and the Black Moon never rose behind his eyes, and they never once talked about Skyrie or warlocks or all the things that had filled Crazy’s life before he was a slave.
It was, for a while, as though the Black Moon was gone and everything else forgotten except here and now and the friendship between them, and if Tuuran’s eyes glanced now and then to the strange knife Crazy still carried at his hip, he never mentioned it, and nor did Crazy; and deep down perhaps Tuuran understood that they never spoke of these things because they were both afraid, because they both knew that it was only a matter of time, that things as they were couldn’t last.
Five months after they reached the archipelago, give or take, he and Crazy at last climbed the island together to the very top. They’d talked about it for weeks, and finally they did it. Took a couple of days to get there, scrambling up crags, clambering between precarious-rooted trees, following the stream until it became nothing more than a trickle here, a puddle there, a pool between stones. They took their time, foraging now and then until they reached a place no one had ever been, the very crown of the island, covered in trees and with no place for a dragon to land even if her Holiness had long ago flown overhead and scouted to see what she might find. At the crest they stopped, amazed, for the peak of the island fell away into a giant sinkhole, perfectly round and huge, a hundred yards or more across and vanishing into a depthless black. Tuuran peered with his torch, but there didn’t seem to be any way inside. The walls were stained and covered in dirt and tiny cracks, and out of every crack some grass or creeper clung to life; but they were too sheer and smooth to climb. He broke open an alchemical lamp and tossed it inside and watched it fall until it was a speck and then disappeared, but all it taught him was that there were bats down there, lots and lots of bats, and they didn’t much like his light, thanks.
They left the sinkhole and clambered up a tall tree nearby and sat high in its branches, looking out through the leaves over the sea, and over the islands like a scatter of dead monsters.
‘I still think they look like giant octopuses.’ Tuuran nestled his back against the curl of a branch and let his legs dangle. He tossed Crazy a fruit. Didn’t have names for most of the things they ate nowadays. Bellepheros had tried a few long and complicated words, but mostly they called things by the way they looked. So this was a spiky pink. Spiky pink tasted like sucking sweet lemon water out of a gauze-like pith. ‘I got a couple of dragon eyes and some dried shitberries and a couple of boiled gull eggs. And some pickled fish if you want.’ They still lived off fish most of the time.
‘Bloody fish. Be growing gills soon at this rate.’ Crazy laughed. ‘So, big man? Myst and Onyx? One of them yours, you think?’ Her Holiness’s handmaidens were pregnant, and one of the women in the village too. Babies. New life.
Tuuran shrugged. ‘Can’t say as I’d given it much thought.’ Certainly not enough to wonder about one of them being his. Just hadn’t thought of them that way. Made for strange feelings deep inside, now Crazy had made him look at it. A child. A son, maybe. A daughter. Did it matter? Hadn’t ever imagined anything except leaving a litter of bastards behind him. The wandering life of a soldier and a sailor. Was odd, thinking about it. Awe and terror both at once.
‘Be something to think about,’ said Crazy. ‘About where all this is going to go.’
The way Crazy said it wasn’t right, was j
ust a little off, like he knew something and couldn’t quite figure out the words to share it. Tuuran didn’t say anything. Wanted to, but couldn’t think what, so they sat in the tree in the quiet and didn’t say much, just the companionship of old friends who knew each other so well, of being in the same place together. They watched the sunset, and Tuuran thought it was the most glorious spray of colour he’d ever seen. Afterwards they climbed down in the twilight and set a fire and watched about a million bats fly out of the hole in the island’s crown, and chatted about this and that and nothing much until the darkness was so thick they couldn’t see a thing, and that was when Tuuran noticed the tiny gleam of silver light in Crazy’s eye, the faintest sliver of moonlight silver.
‘He’s coming back, is he?’ whispered Tuuran, not much wanting to say it, wishing with every bone that the sliver of light had been something else, that it would go away and be some devilish trick of his imagination. But it wouldn’t.
‘Yes,’ breathed Crazy, with a crack of a tear in his voice. ‘He is. Don’t tell anyone.’
They didn’t either of them get much sleep that night.
Another month passed. Tuuran watched hard, kept his eye on Crazy and stared when he thought Crazy wasn’t looking, but he didn’t see the flicker of silver again for long enough that he began to wonder and hope that what he’d seen on the island summit had been in his head after all, but Crazy wasn’t the same. The rest of life went on and no one else seemed to notice, not even the witch Chay-Liang, who of all of them kept her eyes wary and never forgot who they were and how they’d come here and how, in the end, it wouldn’t last.
They built a little watermill and a bakery. Not that they’d had anything to mill or bake for months since they’d long ago finished the stores of grain from the eyrie, but they built them anyway, and when they were done they celebrated on the beach around the fires, and even her Holiness came down from the eyrie and brought what might have been the last of Baros Tsen’s apple wine, and sat and watched and smiled. Maybe she saw Tuuran too, standing a little apart from the others, watching Crazy Mad at the edge of the sea, staring out at the gentle phosphorescent waves.