It is with adjustments in my midsection, so there I am. Coming back into it, out of some other place of stifling closeness and oppressively contained body heat.
A pain has drawn near, not too close to be serious. I can hear water dripping into water. I am slung forward over the radiator and the pain in my midsection is evidently the result of this. Unhinging myself with shoots of new and distracting pain at the base of my spine, I extricate myself. I am in sound condition, I decide, slump to the sloppy floor in an inch of brine, and just breathe. My eyes and throat are swollen, my body is thawing from cold to pain. It is a relief to lie here.
I make myself get up. Tabliq Quibli is in the corner, not conscious. Jil Punkinflake, pale, eyes fluttering, is prostrate across Thrushchurl’s legs, and Thrushchurl is slouched against the wall with his arms still locked in the struts to either side of him, gazing calmly on vacancy. I can dimly make out the motion of his vest. I blunder over to Tabliq Quibli—concussion. Glancing up—
Glancing up I see Meqhasset’s charcoal bluffs within a hundred yards, dwarfing us. I shout.
Saskia lurches from where she lay slumped to one side of the wheel, water dribbling from her slack lip, pulling her body upright with her hands on the wheel. I am going back and forth. I suppose I’m blubbering, panicking, although I’m almost too tired to. My eyes smart and there are hot streaks eating their way down my cold face. Makemin is crumpled by the rail slumped in his chains. I release him and drag him back to the bulkhead. I fetch fresh water from the cabinets in the upper decks and bring it to Saskia first. She drinks it dazedly and retches down the wheel, turning it to steer more strictly into parallel with the coast. The waves about us are becoming agitated, and now she is hoarsely at it with bilge me this and batten you that. Her voice is strange and high, a woman’s voice. I am careering around the deck uncertainly, feeling very much unable to think, and somehow the deck itself is there to hold me fast to it, teasing me in my weakness with spurts of seawater in my eyes.
*
The island is rolling by us on the starboard side. The bluffs screen the interior from view, but there’s an odd smell blown off the land to us, earthy and metallic, a little rancid. Saskia has turned from the coast, to swing us wider out and give us a broader view of the shore. Her voice crying orders from the bridge down to the lower decks, is deep and thrilling again, like a baritone bell.
After an anxious counting and recounting, it appears no one was lost in the swells. Makemin brings the Clappers forward again, drubbing them on the shoulders and setting their complicated gear rattling, brusquely orders them to mount their song of thanksgiving, and they break into their music like a clock striking the hour. I suspect he is less interested in giving thanks than in diverting us, so that we won’t be abashed in sight of the island, but the song, that used to stir uncertainly deep feelings in me, seems weirdly thin and preposterous now, as though a number of dignified men should roll around on their backs uncouthly, sobbing and simpering like babies. We are further distracted by our work, setting the half-wrecked ship back in order. And as we work, the island is still sliding past us, like an irregular, black rampart.
We swing gradually around a promontory. Wreckage in the water by the breakers, and two vast dun red-laced ribs sticking out of the waves like fingers pointed toward us. The ship must have been far larger than ours. Fragments of it are spilled out along the rocks—I imagine a ruptured hull slopping its contents onto the studded shore at the base of the cliffs like a disemboweled whale, and shreds of bulkhead sinking out of sight. The ribs are motionless. They might be part of the island. Looking at their uncannily clean lines, the rust scoring them, and the paltry few clumps of foliage or sea stuff that have managed to attach themselves to the metal, a resounding accumulation of time thrums around me, and without being told I know this is an ancient wreck.
I feel Thrushchurl’s hand engulf my shoulder, and he points to the water in what strikes me as a classical sort of gesture, one of the things only human beings seem to do. There’s something white coming up in the gloomy water by the wreck; I recoil for a moment, and would leave the rail if Thrushchurl weren’t unwittingly blocking me, but now I see I didn’t recognize something after all. I don’t know what I took it for, but as I shrink away at first sight Thrushchurl says, confiding and explaining and grinning,
“Bones.”
It’s a humerus. An upwelling current, tumbling shipwrecked bones here round and round from bottom to surface, for how long? There’s a fountain of small bones, from the hands and feet, and back bones in with them, spinning there in that spot; a pelvis makes a long arching pass away from us, up from the dark and then down into it again, like a white ray; I see a witty mandible spin there for a moment, and then an actual rib in the shade of the metal ones. Thrushchurl doffs his hat and holds it meditatively to his chest.
“Bones,” I hear Jil Punkinflake say softly beside me. I peer surreptitiously into his face. For the first time since we embarked, I see there a resurgance of his old self; maybe the bones are calling him back, or perhaps it’s the land. His dog sits pragmatically down beside him and pants, looking relieved. Together we watch the wreck go. It takes a long time for it to fall away. The day should have ended hours ago.
Saskia is navigating more confidently now, or I get the impression we have a decided course. The bluffs give way to sprawling, basin-like green banks under a skyline turreted with indigo peaks. The land grows flat, as though it leaned away from us while stretching itself thin. We pass lacy shelves of barely-submerged stone; they extend out from the coast creating mile-wide shallows, before dropping deeply away as though sheared off at the edges. The water on these shelves is no more than a few feet thick, and the surface shimmers silver with black angles. Thrushchurl stares at the island mirrors as they go by with rapt attention on his face. They do reflect the sky, a long look discloses.
This one is the shallowest yet; the stone here is more of a ramp than a flat plate, and the water flings itself in long corded arms up the slope, and topples back all ramshackle again, at incredible speed. Monstrous boulders big as houses, and a few are larger than our ship, lie on the ramp, and the water rolls them up the ramp a few turns as it comes in, and brings them tumbling back as it recedes. Saskia turns us further out from the coast and we watch in silence as black blocks reel and slam with thundering noise. Gouts of white ocean cream glow against the black of the water and the rocks, the thudding of the blocks cracks and mumbles in the distance as we pull away.
A sharp cry. Saskia turns the ship quickly to port. We’ve narrowly missed running up on a huge, submerged stone. The alarm began with Nardac in the prow, her long arm extended remains pointing unerringly at a cubical black stone under the surface only a dozen or so yards from us. Makemin consults with Saskia, showing her with his finger how the coast is forested with mammoth stone blocks, strewn down from the land and protruding everywhere in the water, some visible, some low in the water, and certainly more of them completely submerged. Ahead of us, the land folds in on itself in long, low sweeps, like two arms dragging in the water, one bent in within the curl of the other. That place is evidently where we are bound.
Grape-colored dusk gathers around us as they talk together in low voices. We will anchor here, to wait for the sun’s light to steer by.
*
From here, it’s possible to see some way inland. The bare slopes alternate away from me, back and forth from left to right, and ascending toward invisible mountains, now that even the clouds have bled out their light. Only a few glowering scars here and there in puffed blackness fuming overhead. The water ruffles by with no strong current. The land is beautiful; I want to admire it, but the wind sucks the breath out of my lungs, making them ache, and I just can’t catch or keep my breath. I’m drying out like a salted fish, and I have to make my way to the mess. The inside of my head feels like it’s been scoured with sand.
Silichieh is there at one of the tables, his head on his fist, emptily stirring tea in a t
in cup, and Tabliq Quibli is on the floor up against the wall with his head on the insides of his elbows and his forearms on his bent knees. A bandage under his turban. I get some hot water and sit. I’m so dried out I’d upend myself into a rain barrel if there was one handy. Silichieh keeps rubbing his red eyes and I know he feels it too—he’s not smoking. Looking out at an all but undetectably rising and falling shoreline in the dark, the steely phosphorescent blue night, the layered slopes left to right like slabs of silver fat, the dry air stealing in to scrub the corners. The mess is a bladder of orange light in a world of blue and the only place on the ship we didn’t all look like ghosts or statues of blue lead.
I’m trying to collect my thoughts, but I can’t compose my mind at all, my face is smarting and my eyes rasp in their sockets as though they’d rusted there. I turn away from the door for relief, splash water in my hand and squeeze it into my eyes. I feel that unaccountable feverishness again.
Outside, Thrushchurl is pacing the deck. Maybe Jil Punkinflake is with him, I don’t know. Silichieh staggers off to his bunk, looking beaten. Now I follow, not tired, not alert. Lying in my bunk, I can hear flakes of air rattle against each other.
Someone whispers something in my ear and I bolt upright out of sleep. Silichieh is gone. I’m alone. It’s night. The island is still floating outside the door.
I lie back. I sleep.
Someone whispers something in my ear and I start out of sleep. There’s nothing but the wind in the cabin and the island at the door. I lie back and listen. Gradually, I begin to make it out. There is a sound like speech in the wind blowing from the island, a whisper, without words, but with an addressing sound of speech. I imagine the island is haloed with that sound.
I lie back in my bunk again. The sea laps at the hull, the wind grates gently on everything, the island gazes in through the door at me. I dream of the dark water beneath us; I’m a spirit moving effortlessly through the coolness down there, the water moving through me, my calm mind settling as though I were only sinking into a bottomless bed. There is a white mass of paper in a rude body, pulling itself along the bottom with its reedy arms, sliding itself in among the rocks. A sudden impulse makes me want to drag myself down, to stare into its face, because the sight will terrify me and realizing this is like acquiescing to the impulse—I divert myself toward the bottom and watch from behind as the two pale arms float out and it lays its hands on a polished brown brass-framed counter top like a barman. I snort with laughter and wake myself up.
*
We’ll depend on Nardac’s keen eyes to guide us in. She is set out with a couple of sailors in a patched lifeboat, haunched there in the bow, over the water and swinging the boom of her bony arm, in line with her beak, this way and that. There was no keeping her to her bunk, although her wound is still not healing. She seems almost not to notice it, and to be insensible to the pain.
With the coming of the wan morning light, a survey from the mast has disclosed an end to the field of blocks where the land opens up, and that there is a passage through. All hands are on deck watching anxiously; at the rail someone I don’t recognize is impatiently taking it all in. Saskia arrives on the bridge. She puts her hand on Jil Punkinflake’s shoulder as she passes him, no differently than she would have gripped a post standing in the same spot, and he’s just beside himself, his face mingling pink and yellow with pleasure.
We begin to glide tentatively forward; Saskia is unbelievably deft at the helm, but one strong swell could ruin us within sight of the shore. Not all the lifeboats have been patched—some still show daylight through the holes Makemin made. A little after noon, the sun is a snowy coin above us, and with a gasp of relief we drift forward into clear fathoms between the two arms of land. Nardac is reverently lifted from the life boat back to the deck, and, resting her meagre weight in my arms, permits herself to be carried back to her bunk, clucking once or twice to herself in satisfaction. This is as close as I’ve ever been to her, her eyes do sparkle like diamonds, as though a cold fire were caught in them.
Our eyes peeled for more rocks, we are making our way cautiously up a wide estuary. The wind dies away nearly to nothing as the land closes around us, and, in the raw new stillness, the noises of the ship seem excessively conspicuous. Above us, on the port side, are high grey cliffs with black bangs and gaunt, shaggy pines that stand out, dark and insubstantial, against the clouds. The opposite shore is lumpy and sere with blistered yellow-grey stubble, lunging up toward the mountain line. Ahead, the land bells out like a vast low amphitheatre, the river curves away behind slopes and, still far off, in the crook of the river’s sweeping curve, I see an enclosed sprawl of buildings collected there like mine talings. With care, Saskia brings our prow to bear on it.
The water here is as calm as a lake, with an indifferent current. Deep chasms are tearing open and grinding shut again in the clouds above us. We pass a ruin set in among the cliffs, its foundations half submerged; I can’t make out the contour of the building. It seems likely to have been a square tower, with its feet in the water and its head up in the pines. Its exposed grey bricks are insanely uniform in shape and size; a tangle of pipes sprouts from the wall like a trunk of thickened vines, and their ends shiver in the air.
A dream pulling up alongside another dream, each measures the other. The war is up there on the island, where we’re going to meet it, but there’s no war there, nor could there be. War is dreamlike, but war is a dream ... Where is the war? In the guns and helmets and uniforms? Is it in the rock from which the ore to make the gun was mined, the grass that fed the sheep whose wool went into the uniform, or the sun that lights the battlefield? Not impossible to escape but it tethers as unsubstantially, as lightly, as a dream, the bonds binding me inside. I go on with it; I’m not bound like a prisoner, but like a sleeper. Two men meet, and one will give his life for the other, or they will each try to kill the other, while the day is still blandly unfolding around them. The violence I’ve already seen has been as random and abrupt as a dream, always ending in death that seems only to become more and more impossible. I always know that I’m no more than one sharp breath from waking. It’s a breath I can never manage.
We’re drawing nearer to the city now. Makemin is peering at it with his goggles and looking glasses, Nikhinoch stands by him with his hands behind his back. Makemin points suddenly at something in the air before us. I can’t see anything but some streaks. As I watch, an uncouthly flapping near-invisibility vaults over and around the ship with a sound like a leather umbrella being shaken out.
“A Predicate,” Silichieh says.
“It’s an ungainly flier,” I say, as it wobbles away from us and back toward the city. So we come to know the city—Vscriathjadze, they’re telling me it’s called—has not fallen into enemy hands, and we may approach without fear of attack.
The steep brae shawls itself around us; the grade is only just recumbent enough to prevent our calling it a cliff, and covered in a blazing new green, right down to the water. There are no waves, and the surface barely heaves against the shore. Mountains with green sides, and Vscriathjadze sits in a narrow groove between them. I’m glad to see mountains again, surprisingly glad.
The harbor is like a huge loophole in the rock; we must pass through a narrow gap like an inverted triangle to enter it. Drawing near, I see the stone is unnaturally smooth, with many small marks of human work there, peering out from fronded mats of fern and quivering vines. On top of the outer enclosure to the harbor perch two towers of heavy gneiss with elongated eaves, and a man emerges from one of these waving small flags. Saskia’s voice resonates from the bridge. Our ships’ huge grasshopper legs slow, nearly stopping, and the stacks begin to vent steam. The man high above us goes away, and presently a small launch chugs out of the gap and pulls up alongside with the pilot. He’s a boxy yellow man in a quilted jacket, who tugs his cap’s visor at us, eyes flitting from face to face in search of the one to whom his deference is chiefly due, and bows a little at the wais
t. Nikhinoch accompanies him to the bridge, and in time we begin to advance smoothly through the gap. Why didn’t he come out to meet us earlier, when we were threading that maze at the estuary’s mouth?
The harbor is as steep as a chimney, and completely paved. We’re in a vast mortar cone, hundreds of yards across, with straight and switchback stairs cut into the sides. The circle of sky over us is confused by a jumble of crane arms, dangling chains and ropes. The docks radiate from a curved platform against the wall opposite the opening. As we pass through the gap, I look up at a narrow strip of satin blue, and little curds of dense cloud racing across it.
There are many small boats moored to the piers, but only a couple or three of any size, and nothing approaching our ship’s dimensions. The pilot guides us toward an empty dock just off the center. Already a number of people stand there, waiting for us in silence. They do not move, they make no gesture, nor do they speak to or in any way I can see acknowledge us or, for that matter, each other. They are like statues.
The pilot is taking a long time angling the ship in toward the dock. Still, no one moves. The upturned faces blink, but they do not vary their position, they are not passing their eyes over the unfamiliarities of our ship. Only when ropes flop down toward them do a few of them move, without any particular speed, to retrieve and tie them.
Makemin strides up and down the pier giving orders; the locals totter out of his way like mill horses, and meanwhile many of the loonies are capering off the gangplank and scooting up the stairways toward the town permission or no. I’m asking Makemin about Nardac, specifically what I, as her physician, should do with her.
“We might leave her in the boat. Do you think she can be moved?”
“She’s not in any danger, but she’d be better looked after on land.”
“Well, fine, fine,” he is looking away, watching as our ship’s laden cranes swing out over the pier. “We’ll make arrangements.”
The Narrator Page 18