The Chosen sdotc-1

by Ricardo Pinto

  The lantern cast out a deeper gold. Its gilding warmed the cabin like sunlight. The rhythm of the cabin's swaying felt like the wave surge in summer upon the beach at home. Everything was fine. They each felt it. Carnelian could see the truth of it in the blissful sleepy smiles that Tain let slip across the smooth distances that lay between them. The smile he sent back was like a dove loosed into a blue sky. He tried to speak but his words came as a surprise to him. They had acquired a breathing of their own. He lay back and listened to the drums. How deep they were and purple-voiced. That other strain, like flutes, like many flutes close-tuned and narrow-throated, singing. Voices crying like gulls. He sat up to listen. Not gulls but men, shouting. Panic in the wind. Thunder so bass it made his head bell and thrum. He tried hard to listen again. That was it, voices shrieking over shrilling wind and thunder. Locating in himself he noticed the cabin violently contracting like a womb threatening his birth. A storm, he smiled, lying back again, a storm so musical and lithe.

  For eternities he was a needle darning in and out of sleep. The difference between the two was merely an attitude of mind. Sometimes he tried to work out how long it was now since the old man had come. It was no good. There was nothing to go on. Everything was always the same: Tain lying like a sandbank on the floor, Crail up there on the bed, wearing his mask of wrinkles. The cabin slipped and turned and spun and looped and the rest of the world went along for the ride. It was a marvel that he felt so well. He had never felt so well before. He knew he glowed. Only a single piece of grit spoiled his oyster bliss. He made it smooth with pearly dreams and forgetting. He knew it was there. Let it work its own way out; he was not about to bother delving for it.

  His people. The thought popped into his dream and woke him up. There was a tempest and his people were up there, exposed between the decks. That single lucid thought was like a stone falling into a well. He was eyeless at the bottom of that well. The lantern must have run out of oil. He climbed up until he found that he was standing. He searched. He became nothing but the feelings in his fingers. Squid at the bottom of the sea. He chuckled at the idea of it. His fingers found his cloak. Finding the door was a larger quest.

  The corridor was filled with the swinging suns of lanterns. Their blaze blinded him. The door at the stairway top was rattling. Something was on the other side trying to come in. Crashing thunder, felt as much as heard. He turned to face the first step. He put one foot in front of the other. His body was a puppet he hardly remembered how to control. He took it up the stairway. The door clattered and shook. He lifted his wooden hand and watched it turn the handle. Nothing happened. He leant against the door; it struggled to push him back but then gave way and he tumbled out.

  He was kneeling in the throat of the roaring night. Its tongue sloped up wet under his hands. The pressure of its breath squeezed his eyes shut. It roared on and on and on. He felt a terror that, should it pause for breath, he would be swallowed up. The world shattered with a crash that left him deaf. Sudden white. Painful afterburn. He strained against the wind to open his eyes. When he did he squinted round him but could see nothing. He was reaching his fingers up to test that his eyes were really open when a livid crack appeared across the inky black. For a moment he saw the deck sloping up before him like a hill. The mast jutting out above his head was an axe waiting to fall. Beyond that the lurid gleaming foredeck funnelled up to the prow. Behind, the whole sky was strangely streaked and mottled and writhing like a wall of snakes. His eye could just see up to its flint-sharp top and realized that the ship was climbing an immensity of water. High above, where the wave edge touched the sky, Carnelian detected the faintest curling white. His heart stopped. The wave was breaking above them.

  The light snuffed out. Ghostly scratches printed themselves wherever he looked. He tried to listen for the roar of the breaking wave as it raced down to get them. He waited for the unbearable touch of its cold thunder. Then the deck began toppling forwards. For a moment it hung, horizontal, floating suspended in the night. Then it started angling down. His nails dug their anchors into the deck but he slid forward all the same. On and on as the deck fell away ever more steeply. He hit something hard. One of the brass posts around the mast. He hugged it with trembling desperation. The world shook again. The post rattled in his embrace. It was a kind of ecstasy waiting for the lightning. When it came it revealed far below the abyss into which they sped. That well was the starkest terror. Down into the deep it screwed its wall of circling iron.

  'Carnie.'

  Impossible.

  'Carnie.' The word was the merest rustling in his ear. He had only eyes and they saw only the well.

  A vice gripped his jaw and swivelled his head round.

  Something bleared in his sight. His eyes took time to adjust back to the dimensions of a human face. His father's face. 'Carnie,' it mouthed like a fish. 'Are you all right? What's wrong with you?'

  The circle of his arms was torn open. His body was being dragged like a sack. He screwed his eyes closed. He could not bear to look down into the well again. His heels bobbed across the deck grating, catching like ratchets. They tugged free. The storm muffled. He realized he was inside.

  'Are you all right?' a human voice asked.

  He dared to look. His father's face wearing the chameleon. No. It was Keal, wild-eyed Keal.

  'My p-people…'

  At first Keal stared at him as if he were mad, but then he grimaced. They're lashed down,' he shouted, 'and safer than you or me out there.' He looked back towards the shuddering door with terror pulling the skin taut over his skull.

  The well,' cried Carnelian, seeing it in his mind where his eyelids could not hide the sight.

  'Let's get you back to your cabin, Carnie.'

  Keal took his weight and helped him stagger. Carnelian patted the bulkheads. 'It's better not to see what's outside.'

  Keal opened the door into the cabin. The corridor lanterns swung their shadows inside to where a figure was lumbering around like something in a trap. It was Crail, staring blind, mumbling over and over, 'Must get out, must get out.' Tain had fitted his spine up a corner. There was a blanket clasped to his chest. He peeped over this with no understanding of what he saw.

  Carnelian settled them down with talk. He had to sit against the bunk because Crail would not let go of his hand.

  'What's it like out there?' asked Tain.

  Carnelian had watched his brother shudder with every thunderclap. The image of the well kept turning in his mind. 'It's just a storm,' he said. 'Now get some sleep.' It is the poppy, he thought. Its dregs have left a stain of dread in our minds.

  Tain began a muttering whose rhythm was enough to insinuate familiar words into Carnelian's mind: '… our Lord in the Mountain, who is two Gods but also One, whose angels are our Masters that must be obeyed, I plead my prayer…'

  It was part of what his father called the 'slavish superstition'. Carnelian slid his hand out of Crail’s grip, doused the lantern and lay down. He felt that he made a poor angel. A juddering came up into him through his back. His feet were higher than his head. His mind walked him along the corridor, up the stairway, through the door, into the raging night, the deck frozen in lightning glare, the prow cleaving a way into…

  With a jerk he snatched his thoughts back into the cabin. His body was shaking. His body was levelling. The floor was bringing his head up. He pressed back against it. He ground his teeth, then gave a gasp as the ship began to fall. Down, the angle so steep he had to brace his feet against the bulkhead. Down. Down into the well until he was almost standing on the bulkhead. He tried to smother his fear with memories. The Hold. He thought of the Hold. Of Ebeny. Her gift. The Little Mother was there against his chest. He clutched her for warmth but the stone stayed cold. We are the lucky ones, he told himself. At least we have food. He squeezed the Little Mother. In truth, he envied those left behind their solid ground far from the abyss. The abyss. He scrunched up his ears in his hands to shut out the baying of the wind. Then before
he could use his fingers as a muzzle, the scream came up from his stomach and he vomited it out.

  Endless night. Swimming in a coruscating sea of dreams. Sometimes, when he came up for breath, he surfaced in the cabin, each time with surprise. The silver box was the tearful eye of the moon. He would smother its light in his hand, dip his fingers in, let the others drink, then dive back. There was no him, there was no where, there was no passing time, his unblinking eyes saw only the endless undulating vision of now.

  STORMS AT SEA

  Down the dark roads of the sea

  We fled Before a driving squall

  (extract from The Voyage of the Suncutter')

  Sharp gull cries superimposing over each other like their angles in the sky. Not gulls, men jabbering. A shout. Answers spaced by distance. Carnelian felt heavy, muffled by the dark. Stillness. No, his body was nudging up and down. It was as if he lay on someone's breathing chest. He did not open his eyes. He knew that he would see nothing. His limbs had been replaced by new ones cast in lead. His head was a stone. Something was different. It was the voices alone that defined space. He searched for the difference. The tempest. His hearing went out past the voices. The tempest was not there. Under him the ship seemed almost still. Unbelievably, she had survived his dreams.

  When he decided to rise he found that every hinge in his body had seized up. He propped himself onto his legs and drew them together like a pair of compasses. He tottered on his feet. No amount of fumbling would find the lantern. His fingers tried to locate the door, the cabin's shape forgotten. He opened it gingerly and let in the merest crack of dazzling light. It was like water to a thirsty man. He opened the door wider and sprayed the dazzle across half the cabin. The sheer beauty of it left him gasping for breath.

  He found the lantern and lit it. It ignited into a sun. He smiled through his squint and looked around. Tain was there like a bone carving abandoned in a wrapping of blankets. He stooped and carefully woke him. He gave him time. He watched the life seep back into the little face. There was something unfamiliar about his brother, but what? He turned to Crail. His skin looked empty, as if the old man had squeezed out of it and left it behind.

  A while later Tain was sitting up and Carnelian was staring at him. Carnelian's first attempts at speech sighed away to nothing. He swallowed several times and waited for his tongue to be wet enough to move. 'You're… so thin,' he managed to rasp. Tain looked up at him. Carnelian saw that his brother had aged. His face had narrowed. His eyes seemed huge. They grew larger. He tried to speak but managed only a croak. His thin arm rose and pointed shakily at Carnelian. He nodded several times. Carnelian took his meaning and reached up. He stopped when he saw a stranger's bony hands. He put them to his face. It felt like someone else's.

  'You'd better get me cleaned up,' he croaked. 'I want to go…' He jerked his finger up at the ceiling.

  They went through the cleansing like old men. The pads were so cold. The smell of the unguent pricked their noses.

  Tain's hand brushed the stone dangling at his chest. He peered at it, looked up. 'My mother?'

  Carnelian blinked down. 'She… for us… protection for all of us.'

  As they continued with the cleaning Carnelian felt some strength returning. 'Like butterfly birth… un-crumpling its wings.' He chuckled. He almost asked Tain to shave his head but thought better of it. Tain's hand looked none too steady as he unpacked some clean clothes. Putting them on was a long, exhausting process. At last Carnelian edged into his cloak. He adjusted his face into his mask. It felt very loose. He turned to Tain. 'Do you want to come with me?'

  Tain shook his head. 'Maybe… later.' He slumped to the floor.

  Carnelian stepped out into the corridor as if his feet were raw with blisters. His body still felt as if it might shake itself apart. Each step up to the deck was an effort. His eyes were almost closed against the glare. He reached the deck and stood for a few moments getting used to the rolling and the light. He looked round. His neck was as stiff as an old door. Sea and sky were calm and grey. A breeze threatened to push him over. He closed his eyes and sucked its saltiness through the nostrils of his mask. He almost swooned, as much from delight as from the burn in his lungs.

  He took some steps away from the funnel, round one of the brass posts, and leaned against the mast. He looked at his unfamiliar bony hand and recognized the colours under it. It was sad to see them there. A fragment of his old life: a column from the Hold's Great Hall. He caressed it.

  'Carnelian.'

  The voice carried across the deck. Carnelian looked for its source. He saw a pitchy mass against the sky. It was Aurum unmasked, his face outshining everything else, like a hole into a world of light.

  The Master lifted his hand, Greetings.

  Carnelian responded, struggling with his fingers to make the sign.

  Lord Aurum's black mass swept towards him. His face was glazed with white paint. Suddenly he stiffened, shooting his eyes' misty stare past Carnelian's shoulder. The menace was so palpable that Carnelian took some steps back. Something grabbed him round the waist. He folded forward, almost falling. He looked down. It was Crail, haggard, confused, blinking, his arm up to ward off the glare.

  Carnelian turned back in time to see Aurum's whitened lips bending into an unpleasant smile. Bone fingers were drawing his mask out from his robe. With one smooth languid movement he put it on. The cruel gold face drifted towards them. Aurum's shadow falling across Crail allowed the old man to drop his arm. His eyes cleared. Then he saw the Master and jumped.

  Aurum's mask looked down at the old man, who crumpled to his knees.

  'Unfortunate creature,' said the Master in Vulgate. 'It's too late for that' He looked at Carnelian. The creature saw my face unmasked,' he said in Quya.

  Carnelian stared with horror at the Master's mask. In its exquisite polished surface he saw his own mask, the ship and all the world were trapped in reflection. The slave could not have seen your face, my Lord, he was dazzled.'

  'It was looking straight at me.'

  'But you must have seen, my Lord, that he was shielding his eyes. It was your own shadow that allowed him to see.'

  'Sophistry. Is the slave blind?' 'No…'

  Then he has broken the Law of Concealment.'

  'But it was not his intention…'

  'Do you really think the creature's intentions form any part of the Law?'

  'But the slave is weak, delirious. He suffers still from the after-effects of the poppy.'

  'Who gave the slave poppy?'

  'Well, I did…'

  'You see the result?'

  The fault is mine, my Lord.'

  'Assuredly that is so, but of course it is the slave that shall be punished.'

  'Be merciful, my Lord. He is weak. The blinding would surely kill him.'

  'Do you deliberately belittle me?'

  'What? I am sorry… I do not understand.'

  'Even you must know that as a Ruling Lord of the Great my prerogative is the second Order of Concealment. The Category of Punishment is thus also the second and not the first.'

  Carnelian closed his eyes, then opened them quickly when he started to feel dizzy.

  'Not only blinding but mutilation shall be this creature's fate.'

  Carnelian looked down at Crail, feeling nausea. He coughed. 'He is old… witless. Lord Aurum, please show mercy.'

  'Neither its age nor its wits are pertinent, but only its sin. Even if I wished to do so, it is not for me to show clemency. The Law is precise. It does not concern itself with mercy. You have been careless, Carnelian. Suth Sardian has shown too much licence and this is the result. You should take this as a salutary lesson. Thank the Twins that your life in Osrakum will not be what it has been.'

  The mask looked down at Crail. 'Let us forgo the formalities of the proper punishment. I shall summon my guards and they shall dispose of the creature here and now.'

  Carnelian could taste vomit. He used his anger to keep it down. 'If you insist o
n pursuing this matter of the Law to the full, then I must insist that the forms be adhered to. This slave is mine and thus his punishment is my affair not yours.'

  Aurum straightened. He loomed over Carnelian. 'So be it. At least for now.' A strange dry sound came from his mask. Carnelian drew back. Aurum was laughing. It seemed the most dreadful thing of all. The Master lifted one of his huge hands and locked it round Carnelian's arm. Truly you are your father's son.' He laughed again. Then the golden mirror of his face came down close to Carnelian's. 'However, it would irk me if I were to find that my Lord had forgotten the creature's sin. My Lord will not forget, will he?'

  Carnelian saw his own serene reflection looking back.

  'Punish the creature, Carnelian. If you do not have the stomach for the blinding and the amputation then give it to the sea. What loss will it be to you? Replace it in whatever function it performs with a younger creature.' Aurum nudged Crail with his foot. 'It is long past its best use. Aaagh! It fouls the deck.' He wiped his foot on Crail's back, released Carnelian's shoulder, then walked away.

  Carnelian stood there with Crail at his feet until all his anger shook away and nothing was left but a paralysing chill.

  Carnelian took Crail back to the cabin. Tain and he cleaned him up. Then he made the old man lie on the bunk and sat with him stroking his forehead until he fell asleep. He told Tain that in no circumstances should Crail be allowed to leave the cabin. Tain nodded and Carnelian went off to find his father. When he knocked on his father's door a blinded slave opened it. He said that the Master had gone up on deck. Carnelian went to find him there.