The Ruling Sea

by Robert V. S. Redick

  One did not question the Father—he who had sucked a black demon from a wound in King Ahbsan’s neck and spat the thing into a coal stove, where it howled and clattered for a month—but his choice tested faith. There was open hissing at the feast of Winterbane, when the new aspirants marched through Babqri City. There was the dove’s carcass, burned black and left on her pillow, with the words NEVER TO RISE in ash upon the floor. There was the day she learned about Belligerent Expulsion: an ancient rule by which the other aspirants, if they declared unanimously that one of their brethren had “sought to make enemies of them all,” could cast that member out.

  Neda had done no such thing; she had been obedient to their whims, tolerant of their spite; and yet five of the six had voted for her removal. When the effort failed, Neda had gone quietly to the one who sided with her, a tall proud girl named Suridín. Neda knelt before her and whispered her thanks, but the girl kicked her over with a bitter laugh.

  “It wasn’t for you,” she said. “I want to serve in the navy, like my birth-father, and they bring witches who can smell a lie to the swearing-in. What am I going to say when they ask if I’ve ever given false testimony?”

  Suridín’s birth-father was an admiral in the White Fleet. “I understand, sister,” said Neda.

  “You don’t understand a thing. I wish you would start a fight with one of us. You don’t belong here, and I’d vote against you in a heartbeat if I could.”

  All this was horrid and prolonged. But five years later it was over, and it had ended just as the Father said it would: with Neda trained and deadly and strong in the Faith, and her six brethren embracing her (some loving, others merely obedient), and the Mzithrini common folk no longer quite sure why they had objected.

  Neda, however, suffered no such confusion. They were right, her enemies. They saw what the Father did not: that she would fail, disgracing her title, if it were ever bestowed. She had fired an arrow over the River Bhosfal and struck a moving target. She had walked a rope stretched over the Devil’s Gorge, and carried her own weight in water up the three hundred steps of the Citadel. But the way of the sfvantskor was perfection, and in one matter she was gravely imperfect. She could not forget.

  For an aspirant nothing could be worse. Besides martial and religious training, a great part of the making of a warrior-priest occurred in trance. Only with those in trance could the Father share the holy mysteries; only those souls could he cleanse of fear. Neda drifted easily into the first layers of trance—sleeping and waking at his command, obeying without question, focusing her mind on whatever thought he named. But never only on what he named. The deepest and most sacred mode of trance was achieved when all other distractions melted away: in other words, when one forgot. Remove the dust of Now and Before, went the proverb, and things eternal are yours.

  This Neda could never do. Year upon year she tried, stretched out on granite, listening to his voice. While the others shed memories like old clothes, she lay still and pretended. Forget yesterday and today. Forget the breath before this breath. She remembered. And when the Father told them to forget certain lessons, certain books suddenly gone from the library, certain Masters lecturing one day and the next quite vanished, Neda recalled them too. Every word, every face. And other weaknesses of the Father, shameful for an aspirant to know.

  But what damned her beyond redemption were her lies. They were skillful—flawless even—for it was never an effort to recall exactly what she should pretend not to know. But how long could she hide this loathing for herself?

  Alone at prayer, she beat her head on the floor. In bed she cursed herself, sfvantskor battle-curses and sea-oaths in her father’s Ormali and sibilant Highland witch-curses from her mother, whose dabbling with spells had almost killed Neda and her brother before the invasion.

  And should have. For her brother Pazel had been carried away unconscious, to be buried with the day’s thousand dead, or nursed back to health and enslaved. And Neda, spared such a fate by the Father, could not stop her mind from betraying him.

  “Rise, my seven.”

  Quick as cats, they obeyed. All were dressed, none armed: the Simjans allowed visitors many privileges, but weaponry was not among them. The Father led them in silence through the east arch and along the marble wall, to the foot of a narrow unrailed staircase. At its top stood the Declarion: a high pedestal, topped with four pillars and a jade-green dome, on the inside of which was inscribed the Covenant of Truth in a script of flowing silver. The Father climbed, and they waited to be called.

  The sun had not yet risen: its light touched only the peaks of the distant mountains of Simja, leaving the land below in darkness. Around the shrine a flock of goats had settled for the night and lingered yet, barely stirring, and not a window gleamed in the city of Simjalla across the fields. Neda listened to the waves’ cotton roaring, felt the pull of them still. I was all night in the sea. I walked from here to the surf in trance. The creatures swarmed round me, the anglerfish and skates. A witch sang spells over the water. A murth-girl was crying for a boy she loves. I’m not supposed to remember.

  She tried to empty her mind for prayer. But on the last step below the Declarion the Father abruptly turned to face them. His disciples jumped: the morning rites were not casually altered. The Father gazed at them fiercely.

  “You know how long they have sought our destruction,” he said. “You know the price in blood we have paid to survive. Now much is changed. Our Five Kings of the Holy Mzithrin have labored long for peace with the enemy, and when today in this very shrine our prince weds Thasha Isiq, they say the time of pain and death will be over. But I see something darker, my children. A new war: brief but terrible, as if these several centuries of war were compressed to a single year, with all the ruin but no rebirth. I see the specter of annihilation. Would you know where it resides? Look behind you, then.”

  As one his disciples turned. There lay Simja Harbor, thick with ships: their own white warships and Arquali dreadnoughts, the island’s tiny fighting fleet, scores of vessels bearing rulers and mystics of the lesser faiths, all gathered for the wedding that would seal the peace.

  Yet dwarfing them all was the Great Ship. The Chathrand, ancient of ancients, seemingly immortal in her seaworthiness, made by forgotten artisans in a lost age of miracles. They said six hundred men were needed just to sail her, and that twice as many could ride with ease and still leave room for grain enough to see a city through the winter, or arms enough to gird whole legions for war. She belonged to the enemy, though not to the enemy crown. By some mad twist of Arquali thinking her ownership was private: the Emperor had had to pay some merchant-baroness for the right to convey the Treaty Bride in such style.

  “The Chathrand,” said the Father. “Like the Plague Ships of old she comes flying the colors of peace, but in her hold the air is rife with evil. When first she weighed anchor in Etherhorde, half a world away in the bosom of the enemy, I knew she bore a threat. Each league closer I felt it grow. Wide across the Nelu Peren she sailed, and there far from land the danger grew. Then six days she lay in Ormaelport, Neda’s old home, and took on some monstrous new power. And yesterday—yesterday the sun dimmed at noon, and the spell-weave of the world was stretched almost to tearing. Then nearly I saw her true intent. But the power hid itself away, and now she lies like a great docile cow, awaiting our summons.

  “And we must summon her—summon the bride’s party and our own Prince Falmurqat, summon all the visiting lords and nobles to this our shrine. For that is the will of the Five Kings. Who can blame them? Who does not want peace? And perhaps yesterday’s burst of magic saw the evil in Chathrand destroyed. But my heart says otherwise. This Thasha of Etherhorde will not marry our prince, and her Empire seeks no end to war—unless our end as a people be part of it.”

  The Father’s jaw tightened. “The Five Kings would not hear me out. ‘You live in the past, Father,’ they chided. ‘All your long life the war has raged, and now in your waning years you can imagine only
more of the same. The world has changed; the Empire of Arqual has changed, and so must we. Train your sfvantskors a little longer, if you are not content to rest, but leave off statecraft.’ But when have I been wrong?”

  He paused deliberately. Neda dared not breathe: she alone knew when.

  “They are blind,” said the Father. “They see only the riches to be had through trade with the East. I see further. But I am no king, and have no spies or soldiers to command. Yet I have the friendship of certain officers in the White Fleet. And I have you, children: sfvantskors in all but final vows. You are here because of Chathrand; you are here to save us from the evil she brings. More than this I have told you in trance, but it is not right that you should remember yet. When the time comes the memory will return of itself. Now we must be quick: take my blessing, and confess your fears.”

  He stepped beneath the dome, and the first aspirant ran up the staircase and knelt. The Father spoke only briefly to each, for the sun would not hide much longer. But when Neda’s turn came he set his hand upon her head, and she felt him tremble.

  “Would you speak?” he asked her.

  Her nails bit into her palm. “I have no fears to confess,” she said.

  “You will have,” he said. “Your brother is aboard that ship.”

  In shock Neda raised her eyes. The Father’s own grew wide: aspirants were forbidden any glimpse of the dome’s interior. Quickly she looked down again.

  “Forgive me,” she said.

  “He is a servant,” said the Father. “What they call a tarboy, I think. And he is the special friend of Dr. Chadfallow, who is also aboard.”

  “Pazel,” she whispered. He was alive, alive—

  “You must not speak to him, Neda.”

  She swallowed, fighting for calm.

  “Not until the wedding ends. Indeed he must not see your face. His presence here cannot be an accident. You and Ultri shall stand behind me, masked, until it is over.”

  “Yes, Father. But when it’s over?”

  He sighed. “Dear one, even I do not know what will happen then.”

  The Father blessed her, and she groped shaking for the stairs. The last disciple knelt before him briefly. Then the lip of the sun rose over the sea and the Father raised his arms and cried out in a voice like a roll of thunder, sending the goats bolting for their lives and larks and sparrows rising in terror across the fields. It was the Annuncet, the Summons, heightened by the magic of the dome, louder than Neda had ever heard it. The Father sang the ritual words again and again, seeming to need no breath at all, and he did not cease until the lamps were burning across the city, in hall and tower and anchored ship.

  2

  Manhood

  7 Teala 941

  In his twenty-one minutes of unbroken song the Father woke tens of thousands, and sang the holy word karishin (purest good) exactly forty-nine times. But his first utterance of the word—the most auspicious, though few Simjans knew or cared—reached the ears of fewer than one hundred: sixty lobstermen wrestling traps from the seabed; eighteen Templar monks, already rowing for the Great Ship and their rendezvous with Thasha Isiq; five deathsmoke addicts; two lovers outside the West Gate and the callous guard who refused to let them steal back to their marriage beds; the warrior Hercól Stanapeth, who had not slept at all; a murderer hiding in the mouth of a silver mine; Lady Oggosk, plugging her ears with greasy thumbs as she sang an enchantment-song of her own; a moon falcon standing restless on a windowsill; a poet whose twelve years without a poem had led him to a clifftop but who was now, as he listened, considering conversion; a child locked in an attic—and three men on the Chathrand’s quarterdeck.

  One of these was Old Gangrüne, the purser, who had the dawn watch. He slouched across the lightless deck, in a temper even before he was fully awake.

  “That’ll be your Black Rags now,” he said aloud. “Call that a prayer, d’ye, Sizzy? You’re just howlin’ like an animal, and some of us ain’t surprised. Oh, yes, yes, there’s no need to tell me. You’re decent folk now, ain’t ye? Gentlemen, honest coves. Until you whip out the knife when our back’s turned and errrrgh!”

  He mimed a murder, perhaps his own, then shuffled off toward the jiggermast, oaths still leaking from his lips.

  He did not see the man in the shadow of the wheelhouse, on hands and knees, shuddering, naked but for a pair of ornate gold spectacles in danger of slipping from his nose. This man’s eyes were pinched shut, and a cascade of expressions played over his mouth—now a smile, now a grimace of fear, now a thought so striking that the mouth froze altogether. A pale man in the prime of life, though perhaps a little thin and austere.

  “Dawn is come,” said a voice beside him. “Stand up before it’s too late.”

  A hand appeared at his shoulder, offering help. The naked man seemed to battle with himself harder than ever. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes.

  For a heartbeat he stayed perfectly still. Then in one motion he rose, astonished; his back straightening was like rebirth after illness, his gaze above the rail like the view from a watchtower.

  Beside him stood a man in a black seafarer’s jacket, black leggings and a white scarf that might have stood out distinctly in a stronger light. He was tall and thickset, and his eyes had the sharp ravenous look of a spider’s. He gestured at a pair of trousers and a shirt folded over the rail.

  The shirt was a lustrous green. The thin man reached out and stroked it.

  “That is silk,” said the other. “And there are calfskin shoes at your feet.”

  Fumbling, the man in spectacles put on the clothes. He touched them reverently. “They warm you,” he said.

  “Of course.” The man in black knelt and tied the other’s shoes. “And what is more, they distinguish you. Green is the color of the learned, the natural leaders of men. You may walk about, now—walk, and look, and be free.”

  Slow and astonished, the thin man circled the quarterdeck. Old Gangrüne stood blinking by the mast, one finger digging halfheartedly in his ear. The bespectacled man stared at him, openmouthed, three inches from his face. Gangrüne neither saw nor heard him.

  “Eye to eye, we call that,” said the man in black. “It is how you will look at all men. Did I not say you would like it?”

  “Like it!” The man in spectacles seemed overcome with joy. But all at once his smile disappeared. He glanced darkly at his companion and scuttled away, as if he preferred a little distance between them.

  On the ladder his shoes gave him trouble, and he almost fell. The man in black chuckled and followed him down to the deck. They glided forward along the starboard rail, past the captain’s skylight through which a lamp shone already, the mizzen shrouds, the stone-faced Turach soldiers with their heavy crossbows and their scars.

  Then the thin man gave a squeal of terror, recoiling. A red cat had climbed from the No. 4 hatch and stood stretching its hindquarters. While the animal was undeniably huge for a housecat, the man’s reaction more befitted one facing a tiger with gore-stained jaws. Before he could run, the man in black seized his arm.

  “She cannot touch you. Have you forgotten yourself already?”

  The cat walked primly toward them. The thin man positively writhed with fear. When the animal passed them it paused and crouched, and the fur rose along its back. The thin man squealed again. But the cat heard nothing, and though it looked about suspiciously its eyes passed over them unseeing.

  “One kick,” said the man in black. “Your left foot, or your right.”

  “I won’t do it!”

  The man in black took a step forward and seized the cat by the scruff of the neck. It yowled and twisted, but before it could scratch him the man flung it with all his strength over the rail. Two seconds sprawled, noiseless; then came a faint splash.

  He turned on the man in glasses.

  “Imbecile. Where is the intelligence you’re so proud of? Any such creature you may now drive off, or kill, or punish as it deserves. Savor the fact. Taste that ne
w joy. We have a word for it, incidentally.”

  “Wh-what word is that?”

  “Safety.”

  They went below. Even one deck down it was still very dark. Soldiers groped for boots and helmets. A pair of tarboys brought their ration of water; they gargled and spat. The man in spectacles knew they could not see him, and in truth felt his fear of the soldiers melting away. But one of the boys, tall for his age with a finger-sized hole in one ear, gave him such a fright that he ducked behind the shot garlands. His bright eyes peeped timidly between the rows of cannonballs. The man in black shook his head.

  “Why can’t you act like a man?”

  “That boy tried to kill me!” squeaked the other.

  “If he touched you now he’d get a dozen lashes.”

  The thin man raised his head and gave a tentative smile. “Oh yes, lashes. He deserves lashes. A dozen lashes, boy!”

  “That’s better,” said the man in black.

  He took the thin man’s arm. “Notice, my friend, how great ships resemble great houses: each deck with its open central compartment, its courtyard. Each with its brighter rooms and its darker. Grand airy spaces for the masters, cupboards for those who serve. Most beings in this world cling to the place where fate has dropped them, even if that place is a stinking hold, where they scrabble about on hairy bellies, cursing and cursed. You must be strong indeed to change your fate.”

  The thin man looked to his right. Beside the shot garlands lay a row of corpses, wrapped in shreds of canvas and tied up with twine. Another row lay between the cannon on the starboard quarter.

  “Killed yesterday,” said the thin man. “Killed by your fleshanc ghouls. I didn’t realize there were so many.”

  The man in black turned him away. “The dead are none of your concern. Look here! A man after your own heart.”

  A sailor had found a patch of light beside an open gunport. He had a sheet of tattered paper and a pencil stub. With the sheet spread flat on a twenty-four-pounder he was writing in a quick, clumsy hand. Now and then he glanced up at his shipmates, but few of them met his eye.