by Kate Milford
Phantom. Ghost ship.
It came closer, and Lowe took the spyglass from his eye. “There’s no one on her deck or in her rigging,” he whispered. “She’s empty as the Fate is.”
Emptier, Melusine thought. Because at least the Fate has Lowe and me.
Her brother fiddled with the end of his pigtail. “Will she ram us?”
“Not unless the wind shifts quite a bit. Not that there’s much we could do if it did.”
“And perhaps she can’t, anyhow,” Lowe said.
“Perhaps.”
They watched the ghostly ship approach, making as if to cross the stern. And then, just as it drew level with the Fate, the xebec drifted to a halt. The cold wind that had brought both it and the sea smoke toward them kept on blowing, but the sails of the xebec hung slack, as if the wind had suddenly discovered how to slide right through the canvas.
As Melusine was trying to work out how any of this was possible, Lowe tugged at her arm again. “Remember you told me once that a ship was meant to have a coin under the mast, so as to be able to pay a pilot if it had to cross a river to enter the courts of the dead?”
“A ferryman to cross the river Styx, yes.”
“Well, what if they haven’t got one?”
Lowe, in his practical little-boy fashion, had somehow moved past the question of whether it was a ghost ship to what they were supposed to do about it now that it was there, drifting just beyond the Fate’s stern. Melusine passed Lowe the storm bottle and took back the spyglass. Somehow looking through it didn’t make the ship appear any larger.
“Well, I don’t know the route to . . . what did you call it? The courts of the dead? I don’t know what we can do about it.”
“If you didn’t have a pilot who knows the channel—a ferryman, if that’s the word—” He looked across the red water at the lightless ship. “You’d need a lamp, at least. To try to see where you were going.”
They glanced at each other. Lowe held the storm bottle up between them. It was glimmering faintly now from within with violet light, the glow slipping out through the gaps in the pattern that had climbed the glass the way candlelight slips out the holes in a punched-tin lantern.
“How would you do it?” Melusine asked, and then, before Lowe could reply, she added, “Because you’re not boarding her. Not for all the world.”
Lowe shook his head. “I have an idea.” And he disappeared down the companionway ladder again. When he came back this time, he had a folding stand under his arm and a firework in one hand. A small rocket, one of the many he made himself and was emphatically not allowed to shoot from the ship any longer.
But those were rules for worlds without red waters and tinkling-crystal sea smoke and ghost ships. “Carry on, then,” Melusine said helplessly.
Lowe lashed the glowing storm bottle to his rocket and set the rocket in the stand. He took a cylinder of homemade matches from his pocket, lit one, and whipped it across the fuse. The spark climbed the cotton line, and a moment later, the rocket burst from the deck of the Fate and shot skyward.
It sailed up and arced over the other ship’s sloping foremast, and then, like a fly caught mid-flight in a spider’s web, it stopped as if trapped at the top of the mainsail. It hovered there for a moment, and then it began to descend: a violet glow moving slowly down the vertical length of the mast. And as the plum-colored light from Lowe’s storm bottle spilled out across the deck, Melusine saw them. She saw the shadows first, and then the men they belonged to: scores of sailors, on the deck and in the rigging, all of them ghostly, and all of them looking across at Melusine and Lowe.
Some bad omens—like, for instance, a whole crew of the dead—weren’t hard to spot. Ordinarily Melusine would’ve reached out instinctively to scratch the nearest bit of rigging, but there was nothing right in reach, so without thinking, she hawked up a mouthful to spit for luck. But before she could do it, Lowe whacked her arm urgently. “Ghosts are afraid of human saliva,” he whispered.
She swallowed. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“Everybody knows that,” Lowe hissed. Melusine stared. “Or maybe that’s just back home—back in my mother’s homeland, I mean. But just in case, be polite.”
“I don’t want to be polite.” But just in case he was right—after all, dead or not, they had a full crew and Melusine didn’t—she raised one hand in a shaky salute.
One by one, the ghostly crew returned the gesture.
“See?” Lowe said, pleased. “And I told you lights coming down the mast were good.”
But the ship didn’t move.
“Why aren’t they going?” Melusine asked after a moment. “They have their light.”
Lowe scratched his head. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe they still need a pilot.” He looked meaningfully from Melusine to the Fate’s tiller. “We could lead them.”
“But I can’t do it,” Melusine sputtered. “I don’t know where to go! I can’t steer a ship this size! And anyhow, we have no crew!” But even as she said it, she heard her own thoughts from earlier playing again in her mind: Those were rules for worlds without red seas and tinkling-crystal sea smoke and ghost ships, and to be fair, in this place and at this moment, with only two children aboard, even their own schooner might be considered a ghost ship.
Lowe shrugged. “If they’ve been lost at sea for long, perhaps any harbor will do. What is the saying about harbors and weather?”
“Any port in a storm.” Melusine looked across at the phantom crew, then back at Lowe. “I’ll try.”
She took the tiller in both hands, and to her surprise and endless relief, it felt real. Nothing else in this place, in this moment, was as it should be, but the vibration coming through the tiller, the hum of the Fate itself, felt right. Melusine and the ship that had been her companion for her entire life could still speak to each other—even, apparently, at the boundary between the lands of the living and the dead.
She hauled on the tiller, and miraculously, the Fate answered Melusine’s request, and even without crew to work the sails, she came about and turned her bows toward Valletta, or at least toward the thick bank of sea smoke where, in the other world, Valletta Harbour had been. They sank into the fog.
“Is she with us?” Melusine asked, meaning the xebec. “There’s not much light for them to see us by.”
Lowe, standing at his sister’s side but looking back over their shoulders, nodded. “I think so.”
Melusine never knew how far they sailed, or how long it took. There seemed to be no time and no distance on that foggy red sea. But the xebec, with its glowing violet light, stayed with them the whole way, and the two ships sailed in company for what seemed like hours.
At long last, something changed. It took Melusine a while to figure out what that something was, but at last she realized it was the color of the water. The sea had gone from red to purple, and now it was darkening to a much more ordinary indigo. Something about the sea smoke had changed as well. The breeze was warmer, and it had a familiar tang to it, a scent Melusine’s senses instantly identified as one of the base notes of the odor of any harbor anywhere. Up ahead there were shadows in the murk: the hills, spires, and masts of Valletta Harbour.
“Oh, thank heavens.” Melusine sighed.
Lowe said, “Look.” She turned and followed his pointing finger. The fog was melting away, and with it, the violet glow of the storm bottle in the rigging of the ship behind them was fading too. It dwindled as the final remnants of the cold wind carried the xebec into the harbor. The phantom crew saluted again as they drew abreast of the Fate. Melusine and Lowe stumble-ran forward the entire length of their ship as the xebec sailed on past to vanish into the much more ordinary mist that drifted across the waterfront.
They ran as far forward into the bows as they could, leaning over the gunwales to catch a last glimpse of the red-hulled ghost ship as it swirled into nothingness, a last glimpse of the storm bottle before it vanished. Then they looked at each other as they b
ecame aware of sounds on the deck behind them, rising out of the silence: the shouts of sailors and the slapping of bare feet on the floorboards, the flap of sails, and all the ordinary sounds of a ship at anchor in a harbor.
The Fate’s crew, wherever it had gone—well over a hundred souls—had come back, and everyone was going about his task as if nothing strange had happened at all. “Or did we come back?” Melusine murmured, confused.
Lowe, whether thanks to his age or to his ancestry, was much more comfortable with the miraculous and not inclined to waste time discussing matters of the uncanny when there were more pressing things to worry about. “Melusine!” He pointed across the harbor, and from the tremor in his voice, his sister half expected to see the xebec or some other ghostly craft pulling toward them again.
But no, it was only the cutter returning with the cook, the purser, and . . . oh, dear . . . the steward.
“What do we do?” Lowe fretted. “I haven’t time to find more hard snow now.”
“We?” Melusine shook her head decisively. “Lowe, I’ll follow you to a ghost ship and back, but as far as telling Garvett his storm bottle’s gone, you’re positively on your own.”
INTERLUDE
Captain Frost harrumphed, blushing a bit through the applause that followed his tale, then turned his half-hour glass and hurried out of the parlor. Masseter, thoughtful, made as if to follow him, then seemed to remember the captain would be going out into the rain, and instead went to refill his glass.
Jessamy got up from her spot on the hearth to make room for Mr. Haypotten to slide a covered silver toasting dish under the fireplace grate. It had a perforated lid, but Sorcha’s well-kept fires always seemed to know better than to let any ash drop into the toasted cheese.
Tesserian helped Maisie complete a cupola with four cards: two from his deck of saints (a woman holding a flat scepter and draped in a deep red robe, and a bearded, tonsured man cupping a square-rigged ship in his left hand) and two from a more standard deck (the queen of seas and the knave of candles). “The captain mentioned the coin that pays the ferryman upon the river Styx,” he said, neatening the stack of remaining cards from the several decks they were using. “I know a story about a ferryman right here on the river Skidwrack, if that would be of interest and if no one minds my telling it.” He nodded up to the big map over the mantel.
“On the Skidwrack?” Sangwin said, setting down his knife and wood and brushing the castoff curls from his whittling into a little pile on the table before him. “And you not from Nagspeake at all. Where did you come across a Skidwrack tale?”
“An occasion much like this one,” Tesserian said, “only it wasn’t a flood that kept us from leaving; it was a cheater we all badly wanted to catch in the act.” He grinned at Maisie. “Do you like riddles?”
“Yes,” she retorted, in a tone that added, Who doesn’t?
Frost returned. The windowpanes rattled. Tesserian leaned back against the hearth and murmured, “Jacta alea est.” The die is cast.
Really, though, it was cast long before this particular story.
TWELVE
The Ferryman
The Gambler’s Tale
I’ve heard—perhaps Captain Frost will confirm this for us—that the same sea can seem to be a different place from one day to the next. And I am not from Nagspeake, as Mr. Sangwin has rightly pointed out, so you can all tell me if I’ve got this wrong, but I’ve heard that the Skidwrack, though it’s a mere river, is just as changeable as the sea. I heard it from a friend who’s a Nagspeaker born and bred, and I had no trouble believing him. For there are rivers in the middle country that are like that too: they change their shapes when the fancy strikes them; they take tribute from those who work on ’em, and they cling to their dead; their waters run blue here and green there and brown over there and red farther down around the bend. They say it’s thanks to the mud, but I don’t know about that. I think there’s something miraculous about a river. Any river. Always have.
And there’s something about the crossing of a river that’s miraculous too. They are their own lands—only the opposite, if you get me. And almost every waterway requires its own special crossing. Some you can cross by a variety of means; others have just one route from one bank to the other. Some rivers, you want to cross ’em, you’ve got to do it without going through. The Missouri’s like that, in places. Try to cross through it on your own power, and you’ll likely never surface again. Over’s the only way. But even going over a river can mean different things. If you bridge moving water and cross from bank to bank, never touching the surface, do you arrive at the same place in the end as if you were to row? And what of the rivers where rowing’s nearly as dangerous as trying to swim? What bank, what strange land, would you reach if you could reach the other side alive?
I’ve often thought a river can be something like the adit-gate in Mr. Amalgam’s tale, though I’d never heard the term before. Surely it’s like Mr. Sangwin’s hollow-way, lying strangely on the land. You may think you know what’s on the other side, but some percentage of the time, when you get there, you’ll be wrong.
I’ve spent a lot of time on rivers. Mostly playing cards on steamboats, but occasionally for other reasons. And I’ve come to understand that there are places that can be reached only by crossing waterways. They don’t exist on any maps, and they can be reached only by traversing in a particular way: by securing the services of a Ferryman. Not a small-f ferryman. A Ferryman, capital F. Some people call them psychopomps, but I met a Ferryman once who thought that word gave all the wrong ideas.
“The Susquehanna River doesn’t become the Styx just because you cross it in my keelboat,” he told me, though he had to repeat himself before I understood what he was saying, for the man was always talking over the buzzing of the bees that had made a hive of the bobcat skull he used for a figurehead. “And not every far bank is heaven or hell or Fiddler’s Green or whatever you want to call that sort of place. But I can take you to shores an ordinary pilot can’t, and that’s a fact.”
So a Ferryman is not like the keeper of any old workaday passage boat, and some rivers are stranger than others. Which brings me to my tale: I heard a story only a fortnight ago about a Ferryman on the river Skidwrack.
According to my Nagspeaker friend, the one who told me the tale I’m about to tell you, the Skidwrack is unpredictable in many ways, but not generally vicious—the occasional flooding aside, and I don’t think you can really blame only the river for that. There is, however, one place where the water brooks no passage. It’s supposed to be a little ways downriver from an old abandoned floating mill, so it’s often called the Tailrace. It doesn’t look like much, just a rocky, misty stretch, but try to go from one side to the other and you’ll get very wet, very fast, and possibly very dead in the same span of time.
And I suspect this might be a related fact: If you do manage to ford the Skidwrack at the Tailrace, you won’t find Nagspeake on the other side.
Where would you wind up if you did cross there? My friend couldn’t say. Perhaps in Fiddler’s Green; perhaps in the States, perhaps in someplace stranger yet. Perhaps it’s different for every passage. Except, of course, you can’t pass there. Not on your own. But for those who, for whatever reason, simply must find a way, there is a Ferryman.
This particular Ferryman piloted—or perhaps still does pilot—a boat called the Inferus, and for a while he had a first mate. This is the story of how that partnership came to be.
The Ferryman had once been a man called Isaac Knickpointe, and although he had never precisely been an average, commonplace fellow—roamers never are—he’d come to this particular occupation late in life, and at the time our story begins, he was still adjusting to it. He’d taken the contract because he had wanted to retire somewhere and mess around with boats all day.
I do not know how he came across the job vacancy, though, or how the post came to be available. I’d like to find out sometime. Anyhow.
We’ve heard s
ome tales of tricksters. Knickpointe the Ferryman was, I suppose, a trickster as well—but a very reluctant one. Again, he’d been hoping for a quiet retirement, and hadn’t taken the job for the sake of skinning would-be crossers out of their last coins. Still, it is a rule that crossings of this sort must be paid for. And while all rules can be broken (many, it must be said, should be broken, and as often as possible), some can’t be broken without consequences.
In Nagspeake in those days, there was a shortage of metal money. But people didn’t stop needing to navigate into the miraculous just because they couldn’t pay for it. In fact, the Ferryman observed, it was just the opposite. Nagspeake in those days needed miracles more than usual, and although crossing the Skidwrack at the Tailrace didn’t necessarily promise a miracle, it put you on the road to a place where you could perhaps begin the search for one.
The Ferryman was duty-bound not to allow passage without payment, though he was often tempted to bend that rule. For a while he tried a system of trade tokens—coins he made himself from bits of bone and driftwood, whatever he could find. But he couldn’t simply make the coins and hand them to would-be travelers for them to hand right back; the river wasn’t to be fooled by such a transparent gambit. So the Ferryman began to make his own rules for how travelers could win the tokens from him.
He listened to every person who came without means to pay, weighed their circumstances, then asked them to solve a riddle. If they succeeded, the Ferryman would hand them a token on one bank, to be paid back to him on the other side. The riddle was different each time; he would vary the difficulty depending on the traveler’s circumstances. In this way, Isaac Knickpointe became a trickster Ferryman.
One evening he was moored on the Nagspeake side of the river, enjoying a moment of quiet and a chapter of his book, when a greenish light appeared in a lantern on the far side, summoning him across to pick up a fare.
This was unusual. It wasn’t unheard of for someone to cross into Nagspeake from the far side of the Tailrace, but it was relatively uncommon. The Ferryman cast off his boat, punted through the mist with a pole that reached long talons into the ground to grasp the rocky riverbed at each stroke, and found himself looking at a young boy. I think he would’ve been about your age, Miss Maisie. Certainly not much older.