Madness of Flowers

by Jay Lake

  Bijaz could play the game of old friends. "I understand that the captain has been given significant motivation." He accepted the glass. Their fingers brushed with a spark. It is the carpets in this room, he told himself. He did not believe that.

  "Amazing what people will do." She nodded out the window. Men worked like ants on a corpse in the gutter. "The captain is happy because he earns his exorbitant fee, as well as bonuses. The sailors are doubly happy, for they share in the captain's bonus, and the passengers perform their work for them. The idlers are happy, for they are on an adventure which will take each of them into the pages of history. I am happy, because the Northern Expedition is finally under way." Ashkoliiz took a long sip of her wine, a golden vintage. "And you, sir godling? Are you happy?"

  Bijaz sniffed his drink. A Rose Downs wine, not some southern import. One of the good, earthy reds from the higher vineyards. He was never such an expert as to tell the label from the taste. "I don't suppose my happiness is at issue," he said slowly. "If you are making history, I am along to witness it."

  Ashkoliiz laughed. "Your Lord Mayor wanted eyes he could trust. Not that he expects any of us to return. That does not speak so highly of his regard for you."

  "Lady, I know what Imago thinks of you and your purposes. But I also know you travel with an impossible monster, and three quiet men who could be assassins or wizards or tax collectors for all I can tell. You are far more than a simple grifter come to cheat a few gulls in a meeting hall.

  "As for me, Imago knows what I am. I think he sees my fate better than I ever shall."

  "Come now, friend Bijaz." She set her glass down. "Do not be so dour! The Northern Expedition is a grand adventure, whether or not you choose to celebrate it. Your city has not mounted such in centuries. They loved us in Imperatrix Park yesterday, after all."

  "And yet you slipped the moorings before dawn."

  She waved off the objection. "Excited men buy in with funds or their own sword, then slink home again heavy with second thoughts. We kept the greatest number that way."

  It was all just a little too pat, somehow. Was her supreme confidence a bluff? Bijaz didn't plan to call her on it, but he had to ask about the men. "Did you want the greatest number?"

  "Do you think we can make the Rimerocks without loss?" She gave him a long, slow look. "Would you rather lay down your own life, or have some willing boy bound for glory lay his down for you?"

  "That is a cold calculation, lady."

  "How many did you lay down, when first I visited the City Imperishable?"

  Bijaz felt himself blush with shame. So she'd heard. One of her men had come back to the City long before Slackwater Princess. Something about this woman deviled him. "I do not criticize," he said. "Only observe. My own slate will never be clean."

  Ashkoliiz's mood fled as quickly as it had come. "So long as we understand each other. Oh, look!" Her voice feigned surprise. "We have taken on wood in under twenty minutes, when the captain assured me it would require an hour at least."

  "I believe I shall go down to my place on the main deck." He set his half-empty glass on her table.

  "I assure you that travel is far more comfortable up here."

  "Either way, I am certain I will be broadened." Bijaz retired with what little remained of his dignity.

  That evening the captain did not bring the boat to shore, but anchored instead out in the current. The main deck idlers were offered a meal of fresh fish and stale cornbread, washed down with some liquor that tasted like a gluepot compared to the wine served above.

  Afterwards the cards and dice emerged. He resolved to stay well away from any games of chance. Bad enough he was a dwarf. These were City men for the most part, and even Port Defiance had seen dwarfs aplenty these past few years. If he were to run uncommon lucky, he might find himself waking up in the river.

  Bijaz had no doubt whatsoever that his luck would be amazing, were he to sit in a hand or two.

  And so it went, for six days. Slackwater Princess called twice at riverside towns but passed by many more. Sometimes the locals stood on the docks trying to flag her down. Bijaz presumed the captain would make amends on his return journey, once freed of the invisible lash of Ashkoliiz's gold.

  The towns themselves were curious. Most settlements had been built in the lap of cities long gone to ruin. He didn't know the names, though he should have after spending so much time at the map table.

  History was a pond into which great treasures had been cast. Smooth and unremarkable at first glance, but on closer examination, one gem after another was revealed deep as one cared to reach.

  Instead of watching history, Bijaz was called upon to arbitrate disputes among the men. Though he had kept his hands away from the cards, the deck idlers knew that as a dwarf he was educated in numbers, and could likely be trusted to be fair-minded. So he had become their judge when such was needed.

  That kept him busy. It also gave him a footing with men who might be protecting his life in the future. Ashkoliiz's words stuck with him, about who would survive as the journey grew difficult.

  In quiet moments, Bijaz saw trees reflected in the eyes of the men around him. He kept to himself the dread that inspired.

  As they journeyed, mountains which had been distant shadows slowly found silhouette, then shape. Bijaz calculated that Slackwater Princess would reach the bend at the cliff cities in another two days at most.

  The Northern Expedition would put ashore there. Then it would be a different journey indeed. One foot at a time, and no lounging on the bales.

  Onesiphorous

  He spent the day wondering when someone would come for him. He was hungry, and felt very lost. The swamp was darker and deeper than memory had painted it.

  Eventually he scrambled to the top of his little island and sat until he fell asleep. He dreamed of towers drowned between a slumping shore and a rising sea. The waves wore a crown of coins—his coins. Each building boomed as it sank, crying woe in a secret language of stones.

  When the stones began to pinch him, he awoke. A monkey loomed close. Even in the dark he could see it well enough. It had a face like an old woman's, though small as the palm of his hand. The wizened visage was surrounded by a dark tufted mane.

  "Have you been sent for me?" Onesiphorous felt like an idiot talking to an animal.

  The monkey picked a nit from its fur, cracked the insect and ate it. The deep eyes glowed silver and black with the shadowed night as it stared at him, jaw working rhythmically. Then it turned and ran away, tail twitching.

  Onesiphorous followed. He tried not to slip. He didn't fancy a nighttime dip in the toothy waters.

  At the bottom he found a canoe scarcely longer than he was tall. The monkey sat on the bow and scratched at its ear, now blankly devoid of its earlier purpose.

  The dwarf tried to climb into the canoe. He nearly flipped the little craft. The monkey screeched once, then settled down again. Onesiphorous sat quietly for a few moments, breathing.

  How would Boudin have handled this boat?

  That thought brought a stab of fresh, guilty pain.

  Onesiphorous grabbed the paddle and pushed himself off. He dipped to one side then the other, as Boudin had. Where the boy's strokes had slipped into the water like a knife into warm butter, his own splashed high and wide.

  As a drowning boy might, fighting the inexorable tide.

  He dismissed that thought as a luxury for another time. Much like the hunger pangs in his gut.

  Onesiphorous had long since lost all sense of the compass points. He paddled only because it was what he was meant to do. Out on the black water, the monkey seemed willing to offer advice. When he dug out too much water, the miserable little beast gave a toothy snigger. When the canoe drifted thanks to his inept paddling, the monkey pointed out where his next stroke should fall.

  He began to watch more carefully. The monkey was not only offering advice, it was giving directions. The dwarf steered as the monkey pointed. As before, the
islands grew more numerous, the water began to find channels.

  The drumming grew stronger as well.

  Was this the drowned city the queen of Angoulême had claimed for the site of Port Defiance?

  Rivers could move, everyone knew that. Floods carved new channels, banks collapsed, dams grew from debris. Maybe the city at the mouth of the River Saltus had once been here.

  If this was that lost city, it was now drowned in the swamp's verdant riot—blood-warm by night, green-shadowed by day.

  The monkey screamed and leapt up to disappear among low hanging branches. Onesiphorous nearly fell into the water before righting his craft again.

  A fire blazed ahead, the drumming loud now.

  He found a firmer stroke and moved almost silently toward the light.

  The gold-skinned dancers around the fire did not break step to acknowledge Onesiphorous as he beached his canoe. He managed to fall into the water while getting out. Something sniggered in the darkness above him.

  The monkey, of course. He wished it ill, then tried to slap himself dry as he climbed a set of broken stone steps to where they danced.

  A huge log stood upright in the fire at their center. It was big around as the greatest of the knob-kneed swamp trees. Drummers, each armed with a single long pole padded at both ends, swung at the log in a looping motion. The strikes came in different rhythms that combined to call the measure of the dance, though no one of the drummers carried the entire beat. Each stroke sent sparks spiraling out of the top of the log.

  The flames lit the swamp jungle canopy above in a bright, stark relief of muddy red and green-black shadow. Eyes gleamed there, large and small.

  He hoped they were animals.

  The drummers and dancers were all dressed in pale swathes of cloth belted at the waist, which dropped free to a skirt. Some wore only one cloth to expose their flanks. Others were swaddled. It was not a difference between men and women, for he saw swaying breasts as well as flatter chests. Taste, preference, role. He didn't know.

  There were no children here, but some dancers seemed in their teens. The oldest were balding, though as spry as their youthful partners.

  The entire company moved with the beats of the fire-drum. Each followed the compound rhythm in their own way, swaying and twisting like flags in the wind. Just as with the music, the separate movements of the dancers combined to form a coordinated whole which could not be adduced from any one of them.

  After a time, he realized that an old woman sat in a chair on the far side of the drum circle. Knitting needles flashed in the firelight.

  The swamp-mother. The thing from beneath the quagged soil.

  Onesiphorous trotted around the perimeter, keeping a close eye on the swirling limbs lest he be struck down or drawn in. They'd marked their ring with a cord, which he stayed away from.

  "Greetings," he yelled over the thunder and crackle of the fire-drum and the slap of the dancing feet.

  "Little City man." She nodded. "You learn much benny-benny, ah?"

  Onesiphorous knelt. "It is my sorrow that Boudin is lost."

  The swamp-mother cackled. "'At boy? He no lost. He with the Sea King. Somebody pay his fare, I hear told by the squid. He comin' back on the dark moon."

  "I saw him drown, mother."

  Her needles stopped. "I tell you true thing, little City man. Him that drown live another life beneath the waters. You try sometime, surprise what you learn, ah. 'Sides, you know 'nough to pay his fare."

  The gold tossed into the tide. "As may be," Onesiphorous said. "It was my honor to serve him. But now I am cast out. I must return to the City Imperishable, or find a way to retake the port."

  The needles resumed clicking. "Black ship men walk the river. They cut you throat faster than a City man shave him coins. She say you throw them from port city, you take them from river. She say you die on river, nothing go happen."

  Onesiphorous recalled Boudin's hints that the swamp-mother was the "she." As if she spoke of herself from another place, sometimes.

  "I'm a dwarf," he said. "No one raises a sword at my word. I've made what bargains I can in Port Defiance. Now I need to move ahead."

  "Sun princess, ah." The swamp-mother nodded. "She silver, move quiet as morning fog, where gold's bright fire be taken and locked away. Smart woman." She grinned.

  Onesiphorous saw that her teeth were needle narrow and far too numerous. "Her, yes. I've made promises far beyond my faith and credit. Still, I did what needed doing."

  "So now you little City man swim upstream like bright shad come home to spawn. You lay your eggs at the dock and die, ah?"

  She made going home sound so unappealing. "You've told me your people will not fight," Onesiphorous began, then trailed off as he realized the drumming had stopped.

  He turned to look. Ranged around the burning log, four drummers and ten dancers stood smiling at him. Their teeth were filed to points in imitation of the swamp-mother's.

  As one they opened their hands to show the gold each carried. Each slipped the coin between their filed teeth. Together they picked up the cord which marked their circle. In a single rippling motion transmitted from hand to hand each looped the cord around their neck. In the shadows above, the monkey screamed. All fourteen dropped to their knees to lean backward, away from the log and each other. The cord stretched tight and crushed all of their throats with a tearing noise that turned Onesiphorous' guts to water.

  "Ah," said the swamp-mother behind him. "We fight. You not worry, little City man. We just not fight your way."

  He turned back as she slithered beneath the earth, folding into a fist once more. The hollow log burst to send shards of flaming wood into the air. He crouched down, covered his neck with his hands, and waited for the fall of burning debris to stop.

  Onesiphorous finally stood and brushed himself off. He tried to quell the roil in his gut. When he looked, the bodies were gone. Only the cord remained, a loop of loops around the smoldering mound of the fire.

  "Hey, City man," said a voice in the darkness. "You Boudin's friend, ah?"

  "Um . . . "

  The speaker stepped close. Visible now in the flickering ember, he was clad in trousers ripped at the knee and a linen shirt. He was gold-skinned and dark-eyed just as Boudin had been, just as the dancers had been. "Next time, don't make so much a fire."

  "It w-w-w-asn't my fire," the dwarf stammered.

  "Oh, just you pray it was, City man. No one see one of her fires and live to tell the tale, ah. Me, I never seen one, and if I did, I never say it." A large hand thumped him on the back. "You been lost long time. Want some dinner? Come, I take you to shelter."

  Onesiphorous followed, stumbling and shivering even in the oppressive warmth of the night.

  Imago

  He and Kalliope found the Water Captain knee-deep in mud at the grate of a pumping station along the Little Bull, just above the Bridge of Chances. Their quarry was a large man named Fencarro, who currently struggled with a long-handled wrench and the help of two wretchedly muddy dwarfs. Imago's guards hung back, fingering their pistols and watching the rooftops for stray spies or assassins out of the North.

  It was hot and foggy here, though the day was still crisp elsewhere on the streets.

  "The steam is troubling you?" Imago called down.

  "Leak burned two men bad this morning, Lord Mayor," Fencarro replied. "I was saving the report 'til we were done, in case we killed anybody." He set down his wrench and smeared mud across his face with the back of his hand. "Kind of you to inspect our work, sir."

  "Aye, his worship's always had a keen interest in the power of steam," cackled one of the mud-drenched dwarfs.

  It was Saltfingers, Imago realized. "Hello, friend," he said. "I have someone you must meet with, but I'll leave you to your work until then. Do you require more men?"

  "Not unless they fancy being cooked like lobsters." Fencarro grinned. "I believe this has been shut off."

  "Overpressure from Lightfoot Lane numbe
r two boiler," Saltfingers added. "Check valve rolled over on them like a three-chalkie whore on festival night."

  "Very well." He and Kalliope stepped away to look for a seat on the bridge rail.

  "Most of your City desk warmers won't get into the muck," she said. "But that's your Water Captain and your chief dunny diver down there. They risk their lives instead of sending lesser men."

  "And strangely enough, their bureau functions better than any other in my government." Imago settled against the stone of the bridge in a leaning seat. He wished that the gods who'd shortened him to a dwarf had left his joints with less of a hard, brutal ache.

  "Thank you for helping me with this."