Treasures of the Deep

by Andrew McGahan

  Despair settled again, and a fearless bitterness. Well, if she was not to be saved, then what was the need for any hurry?

  Because you will be dead soon.

  Celestine almost laughed. Fine then, she would die, and gladly. And the shape of mist could find someone else to do its bidding. Go wake one of the others, she told it, turning away. Leave me be.

  There are no others. You are the last.

  The last? Oh … oh no, she had not wanted to be that, not the last. She paused to gaze around at the camp, the pathetic tents, the huddled cabins and huts. She pictured all the corpses lying cold and sightless in their beds, or unburied in the graveyard, no one moving anywhere. Then she stared up at the unbearable cliffs, and thought of the great white plain that waited atop them, the ice cap, four miles high and hundreds across, empty …

  You must prepare the message.

  What message? she asked in irritation.

  The one who follows you is no true scapegoat, not yet. She has no foresight or vision of any kind. It will not be until she stands at this place that she begins her transformation. It is you who will be her guide, who will show her the way. And that will be north, to the pole, where the captain awaits her.

  The captain? Then he lives?

  There is no one living within half a world of you, Celestine. You are alone in the Ice. But to the pole the girl must go, and the boy with her. But she will need to be told. She will need a message from you.

  An unutterable weariness sank into Celestine. How could she pass on any message if she was going to be dead? You have chosen the wrong servant, she told the shape in the mist. You should have asked Commander Gabriel. He could have written it down. But I cannot write.

  No. This message must pass from scapegoat to scapegoat. And you need not write with words, or with ink. And so saying, the shape seemed to place the image in Celestine’s mind of what was required, of a sign that would survive here through the coming months, defying wind and storm.

  She shrank away, appalled. No. That was not a fair thing to ask. That she should spend her dying strength searching up and down the barren isle in search of stones that could be pried, with terrible effort, from the ice …

  It is the only way.

  It was madness. Why should she undertake such an ordeal? If she was destined to die, then what was it to her if this scapegoat girl found her true way or not? Was there any reward in it for Celestine?

  There is no reward. But if you do not do this, then the searchers will not go to the pole, and many things will never come to be. Ignella of the Cave will remain blind, and Dow Amber will never find the answer he must.

  Ignella of the Cave? Dow Amber? She knew no such names, no such people. They weren’t real. The shape wasn’t real. This was all a fantasy, a delusion of her dying mind. The arrow would mean nothing.

  Nevertheless, said Fate.

  Nevertheless. The compulsion was a goad, biting in her mind. Even exhaustion and proximity of death could not override it. With a moan, Celestine turned to search. She found the first stone only a few yards away, and after some long minutes of digging at it with her fingers – she had to remove her gloves to do it, and the ice tore at her flesh, leaving her hands bloody from the first – she pried it free. Then she turned, holding it up.

  The shape was gone. Only the ice cliffs watched her, and the empty camp of corpses, and the remote, freezing sky.

  Even so, she was undaunted. She placed the stone exactly where Fate had stood to issue its command, then she turned in search of the next stone, and the dozens of others she would need.

  How long the labour lasted she could not say, for there was no one left to observe the hourglass in the officers’ hut. She existed in a limbo of twilight and pain and unending cold. At some point the wind died away, but too late: by then, frostbite had turned her face grey, and her hands too, though the fact was camouflaged by blood from digging in the ice.

  None of it was important. Only the arrow mattered now, slowly taking shape as she placed stone after stone. She had ceased even to wonder why she was building it, knowing only that it must be built, that it was the summation of her life, that there could be no rest until it was done.

  Eventually, she thought to look up to the north – the direction her arrow would point when it was complete – and beheld a wonder there. The volcanic fires must have awoken again, for fantastic clouds were towering into the sky, so high they glowed red from the sunrise far away in the south. And a constant rumbling – how could she not have noticed it before? – throbbed in the air and in the stone beneath her raw, frozen feet.

  She took it as a sign that she was doing right, and turned back to her task, though she could barely hobble upright anymore, and indeed was soon forced to crawl over the icy ground in her search for stones.

  She was weeping, she realised at some later time, though she felt no sadness, nor even much pain anymore, for she had gone quite numb, and instead of cold knew a strange warmth. But she was weaker, all the same. Her arms and legs could scarcely move, her fingers barely close. She would be able to manage only a few more stones. It would have to do.

  She looked up again to the northern sky, and Fate was there, now an immense manlike thing many hundreds of feet tall, standing atop the rim of the ice cliffs, staring down at her with whorls of darkness for eyes. In a last moment of reason Celestine knew it must only be a trick of shadow and light in the great clouds rising there, yet she could hear a voice too now, from far away: a hollow, terrible whistling, speechless but urgent.

  Patience, she assured her master. I’m almost done.

  And the thought was truth, for in fact she managed only one more stone, and perhaps it was the last one on the isle anyway, for she was forced to crawl all the way to the wreck of the Bent Wing to find it. As stiffly as a crab she crawled the slow path back, and placed the rock at the arrow’s stem. And then, without even realising it, she found that she had lain down beside the arrow on the hard ground, and could not move to get up again.

  So, she was not even to die in her bed! Couldn’t Fate have granted her at least that much kindness, rather than leaving her to be exposed to the wind and weather? Ah, but she was beyond even bitterness now.

  It was the end. Whatever her purpose had been, whatever use her visions had served – and she would have liked to have known, even if it was only for curiosity’s sake – that purpose was complete.

  She was crying again. If only … if only she wasn’t alone. She had always been alone in one way or another, through her deformities, through her role as scapegoat, as a woman among so many men. But not like this, not so utterly bereft of love or companionship or pity. She did not think she deserved that, nor to die so unacknowledged and unmourned, for even when the others came, they would find only a frozen body by the arrow, anonymous.

  They won’t even know my name, she thought. But I am Celestine of the Misthrown, and I have left you my message.

  And so she died.

  Long hours of silence passed on the isle. In the huts, and in places here and there out in the open, the other bodies lay or sat in their frozen stances, staring at nothing, as Celestine turned to ice.

  At length, a mist descended from the high cliffs and blanketed the isle, and in the swirls of fog, moving on a silent breeze, it might have seemed to an observer – had there been any living on the isle – that a tall shape formed, standing over the scapegoat’s little corpse.

  They will not know your name, truly. And though none of the great things they later do would have been possible if not for you, they will never understand that either, nor give you thanks, nor mark you in history.

  The figure seemed to kneel, and half-formed lips lowered to Celestine’s cheek, as hard and white now as marble.

  But I at least will mourn you.

  Then, with a sigh, the shape broke up and drifted away. And for nine months nothing else moved on the island of the dead.

  THE FISH

  PART ONE

  Roland
of the Counting, he who was doomed to roam upon the face of the ocean for longer, and in stranger ways, than any other man known to history or legend – other perhaps than the famous Dow Amber – was no seaman by nature. Indeed, he grew up with no interest in sailing whatever, and if not for the War of the Four Isles, which called him from his comfortable home to serve with the Ship Kings fleets, he would never have gone to sea at all.

  His tale begins when he was twenty years old. A rare specimen among his Ship Kings brethren, he had not by that age embarked upon even a short voyage, let alone traversed the deep oceans. There was some excuse for this failing, admittedly, in the fact that his homeland was the Kingdom of Creve, which was one of two kingdoms whose coastlines opened solely upon the sad, still waters of the Golden Millpond. There were no rising waves or roaring winds on these shorelines, and little to inspire a youth to seafaring.

  But more than that, the Countings had no tradition of sailing. As their name testified, the accustomed family vocation was finance – and not just any finance, but the high finance of the state. Roland’s forebears had laboured within Creve’s treasury offices for generations, overseeing the kingdom’s moneyed affairs, and his father indeed was High Chancellor of the Exchequer, master of the royal coffers, and one of the most powerful men in the realm. Yet the Countings were not themselves of regal or even noble blood. Had they been, Roland’s life would have run a very different course, for the sons of high nobles were expected to seek an honourable naval career.

  Free of such obligations, the Countings raised their sons in the study of bookkeeping and accountancy. After all, the Ship Kings fleets did not build themselves; it took vast amounts of money to launch and maintain so many vessels, and someone had to organise those funds, someone had to bend long hours over the profit and loss columns, otherwise the great naval heroes could never go off exploring or fighting … or whatever else it was they did at sea. If that dull burden must fall to the Countings, then they accepted it calmly, and meanwhile quietly enriched themselves and lived a very pleasant life in their city mansion and upon their country estates.

  Roland fully expected to follow in this ancestral trade: he had the family knack for figures, and an inherited grasp of the financial mysteries, capital and interest, bonds and securities. At age twenty, he was already advancing rapidly through the ranks of junior treasury officials under the proud eye of his father. But then came disaster: war broke out with the rebellious Twin Isles, the Sea Lord himself burning with his great ship. Every able-bodied man in the Kingdoms was summoned to report to the fleets.

  In itself, this upheaval may not have meant anything to Roland, for in the normal course of events his father could easily have arranged an exclusion for him from the call-up. But alas, only a year earlier, the old king of Creve had died, and been succeeded by his middle-aged son, who was – uncharacteristically for his kingdom – an enthusiastic sailor and shipbuilder, and a firm ally of the kingdoms of Valdez and Castille, who were the driving powers behind the demand for all-out hostilities against the rebels.

  The new king immediately sent his own son off to the war, and then insisted of all his nobles and high officials that they follow this example. Roland’s father was caught thus by the demands of obedience, and had no choice but to let his son’s enlistment proceed. The best he could do was to ensure that, befitting his esteemed position, Roland began his belated naval career not as a mere seaman, or even as a midshipman officer-in-training, but as a commissioned officer in full, with the rank of junior lieutenant.

  Not that Roland was particularly grateful for this, for he found soon enough that a rank was no substitute for experience. He was assigned to a battleship, a craft only newly launched from the shipyards and christened with the name Revenge to mark the retribution that it would inflict upon the Twin Islander rebels. It was an impressive vessel, the pride of the Creve fleet, and it was another sign of his father’s importance that Roland, a green hand, had been given a place upon it. But the other officers were all far more seasoned men, and during the ship’s sea trials, they made it known to Roland how little they thought of an officer so inexperienced that he was undertaking his very first ocean voyage. True, his father was too powerful a figure for anyone to risk outright offence to the son, but their scorn was patent.

  It didn’t help that Roland was the wrong shape to be a sailor. The best seamen were almost always the shorter, more compact men, built to move swiftly about the cramped interiors of ships, or to stand stable on pitching decks, or to climb lithely about the rigging. Roland, however, was tall and gangling. Below decks he was either always knocking his head against ceilings and doorways, or walking about painfully stooped. And on the open decks his long legs would stumble when the ship rolled even mildly, so that he was reeling and seasick in anything but the calmest of weather. Nor did his manner endear him to his fellows. After all, there were always a few green hands on any ship, and with help they could soon enough rise to competence, if they were willing to learn. But Roland was not willing. He was too full of resentment; resentment that he had been plucked from his proper calling to go to sea in the first place; resentment that no one seemed to think he was anyone important; resentment that he felt wretched with seasickness most of the time; resentment of the crowded, smelly, damp life on board a ship; resentment of everything. He did not want to learn to be a sailor, all he wanted was for the war to be over quickly, so that he could get off this awful ship and back to the landlocked life he was supposed to be living.

  Roland didn’t even care who won the war, as long as it ended. But it didn’t end. It stretched on to a year, and then beyond, still with no conclusion in sight. Battles were won and battles were lost, and enormous amounts of money were wasted – Roland could imagine totting up the figures, shaking his head in despair, had he been home in the treasury – but nothing was ever decided. The only blessing among it all, as far as Roland was concerned, was that the Revenge did not fight in any of the major engagements. By happy chance (or unhappy, for those of the crew more martially minded) they always seemed to be posted elsewhere when the great battles developed and the cannon shot flew. So at least Roland’s life had not yet been threatened.

  Even so, he grew no more at ease upon the sea. As time passed, indeed loneliness and boredom were added to his list of woes, for he made not a single friend on board the Revenge, and was given no duties to occupy him. The friendlessness was in part because of his own sulking attitude, but he also possessed – though he didn’t know this himself – a high, reedy voice that others found annoying, combined with a natural shyness that made him appear even more aloof than he actually was. He was thus regarded as an arrogant prig by his fellow junior officers, and shunned. As for his lack of duties, that was because the senior staff would not trust him with any. After labouring in vain to educate him in seamanship, they had privately declared him unfit for any of a lieutenant’s usual responsibilities, and left his name off the duty roster. Were it not for the prestige of his father, they would have kicked him off the ship in ignominy, and banished him to the disgrace of shore work.

  And then, two years into the war, a second disaster occurred, as bad as the first: Roland’s father, though in his prime and seemingly in perfect health, died abruptly of an attack to the heart. This left Roland not only fatherless, but now stripped of any protector within Creve’s higher circles of power. To the extent that his shipmates – even the captain – had borne his inadequacies in relative silence out of fear of the High Chancellor’s influence, they no longer needed to do so. In fact, had the news reached the Revenge while it was in port, the captain would have put Roland ashore forthwith – actually granting him his dearest wish. But the news was delivered by another ship while the Revenge was at sea, just embarked on a lengthy mission to the Twin Isles, so there was no choice but to keep Roland on board for the duration.

  Nevertheless, the captain was now free to treat the sullen young officer with exactly the contempt that everyone felt for him. And
hence Roland, lieutenant though he might be, was allotted a single humiliating duty to perform, one that was below even a midshipman’s calling.

  He was assigned to look after the ship’s scapegoat.

  Pietru of the Innocent.

  Back home in the treasury wing of the royal palace, Roland had given little thought to scapegoats, or to their role upon Ship Kings vessels. If pressed, he might have said that the system was at least a convenient way to employ unfortunates who would otherwise be a financial burden to their communities. But he had no real belief that scapegoats actually protected a ship against the wiles of fate, nor did he distinguish between their different types. The crippled, the mad, the maimed – all were alike as far as he cared.

  But he had since learned that in fact there were four classes of scapegoat, and that each could be identified by their surnames. One such class, for example, consisted of those who had been severely injured by accident. These unlucky souls took their new scapegoat names from the event that had so reduced them, or from the place where it had occurred. Hence the famous Ignella of the Cave, who had earned her scars in the notorious Ribbon cavern. (Battle injuries did not count: those badly wounded in battle did not become scapegoats, but were honourably retired with a naval pension.)

  The other three classes were named by stricter convention. Those born disfigured at birth were universally called the Misthrown. Those who were plagued by visions and voices in their heads and other signs of madness were called the Sighted. And lastly came the Innocent – those born with no overt deformities, and who suffered no madness, but whose minds for some reason never reached maturity, but stayed forever childlike.

  Such a one was the scapegoat Pietru, a man of some fifty years of age by the calendar, but as simple in his manner as a boy of four or five. He had been appointed to the Revenge at its launch, having served for some twenty years previously on an older ship that was just then entering the yards for refitting. His former captain had given him a glowing testimonial at the exchange, saying that Pietru had seen his ship through many storms and long voyages, and even through the first battles of the war, in perfect safety.