Storeys from the Old Hotel

by Gene Wolfe

“I did, sir,” said his steward from the other side of the door. “You said you were awake, sir.” She added meaningfully, “Just like now.”

  He laughed in spite of his customary resolve to maintain discipline and opened the door. “Well, this time I mean it.”

  “You were up so late, sir. It don’t hurt to sleep a bit extra.” She looked at his trousers. “Why don’t you wear the ones I’ve mended, sir?”

  There was warm seawater in the wide-bottomed pitcher. He poured some into a bowl and splashed his face. “Because I might need them to go ashore.” The shah game he and Oeuni had abandoned when the wind rose was still on the table. Despite their weighted bases, some of the pieces had fallen over. “Put these away,” he said.

  There was a good breeze, just as he had anticipated from Dinnile’s raising the mainsail. Dinnile believed in the slow, implacable heartbeat of the timesman’s kettledrums, believed in the sweeps, the enormous oars that could—with the backbreaking labor of four or five sailors at each sweep—send Windsong flying over a calm sea like a skimming gull.

  “Mornin’, sir,” Dinnile said, and touched his forehead.

  “Good morning, Lieutenant.”

  “Leak’s no worse, sir. Not since I come on. Oeuni said to look for a place to careen her—we got twenty hands at the pumps—but there hasn’t been nothin’. I got the lookout watchin’ sharp. And seaward too, sir,” Dinnile added hastily, noting the expression on his captain’s face.

  Noen extended his hand, received Dinnile’s telescope, and studied the coast. It was jungle, a jungle that looked as solid as a wall, green-robed trees higher far than Windsong’s mainmast marching down to the water’s edge.

  “Deck!” called the lookout at the mainmasthead. “Deck!”

  “What is it?”

  “Looks like a bay, sir. Two points off her bow. I see water past them trees, sir.”

  Cursing himself under his breath, Noen raised Dinnile’s telescope again. It was a bay with a very narrow mouth perhaps—no, a bay with a large island shielding its mouth.

  “Out oars, sir?” Dinnile asked happily.

  Noen was on the point of saying that he doubted it was worth investigating when the lookout called, “Flag of distress, sir.”

  Noen looked from Dinnile to the bay, and finally at the foam blown from the crests of the little waves. Dinnile was probably right; but Dinnile was too anxious to use his oars, and it would be a pleasure (as Noen admitted to himself) to give his second mate a lesson.

  “I don’t think so,” he said with the calm deliberation suited to a captain who has considered every aspect of the situation. “Strike the mainsail, Lieutenant.” He turned to the sailor at the wheel. “See the entrance to that bay, Quartermaster?”

  The woman looked. “No, sir.”

  “I can’t either, without the glass. Northeast by east then, until you see it.”

  With her big mainsail down, Windsong was much slower; but she was much handier as well. The foresail and the small mizzen sail—one at each end of her long hull—gave the rudder enormous leverage.

  “Sir … ?”

  Noen nodded reluctantly. “Call gun crews.”

  A flag of distress was probably just what it appeared to be, the doleful signal of some stranded ship. Yet it was possible (just possible) that it was the trick of some pirate not watchful enough to haul it down at the sight of a galleass of war. Or even of a pirate ambitious enough to try to seize such a galleass.

  “Stand to quarters, sir?”

  “I said call gun crews, Lieutenant.” Oeuni had gotten no more sleep than he had—no, less—and there was a chance, just a chance, that he might be able to get the gun crews to their posts without waking her. If he called all hands to quarters—the order that summoned the entire crew to battle—the midshipman of the watch would pound on the wardroom door to rouse Oeuni and Ranni Rekkue, the third officer.

  “Gun crews ready, sir,” Dinnile announced.

  Noen nodded. “Have them load, but not run out.” Running out the quarterdeck basilisks would wake up Oeuni as sure as it would have wakened him. Worse, it might frighten the stranded ship into firing at them, provoking a battle both sides could only lose. He told himself that in trying to preserve Oeuni’s rest he was merely acting as any good captain would, then remembered that Rekkue had fought the leak as hard as Oeuni; he had not thought of her until this instant.

  It had been useless anyway. There was Oeuni leaping up the companionway with Rekkue, small and dark, at her heels. Noen glanced at the narrow inlet between the island and the mainland, then at Windsong’s sails. “Trim up there, foremast!”

  Oeuni was hurrying forward to take command of the gun deck; he could count on her to keep the foremast crew on their toes as well. As he watched, she used the iron hook that had replaced her right hand to pull herself up. Resolutely, he forced his eyes back to the island and the presumably inverted flag that rose above its trees. “I’ll have a lead in the bow, Dinnile.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Dinnile, still officer of the watch though Oeuni was on deck now, gave the order.

  “Masthead! Are those our colors?”

  There was a pause as the lookout made sure. “Aye, aye, sir.”

  He had been nearly certain already. Not that it meant anything, he told himself. Any serious enemy of Liavek would surely have its flag in his signal chest.

  The leadsman called, “By the long nine!”

  Plenty of water—water enough for a carrack, and far more than Windsong’s skimpy keel drew. Dinnile, sharing his thoughts, grinned and said, “Couldn’t improve it without a little brandy.”

  “By the mark nine.”

  Yet it was shoaling, as was to be expected. Noen studied the entrance to the bay. Shallows often (though not always) revealed themselves by their color in sunlight and the action of their waves; he could see just such shallows on the seaward side of the island, yet the center of that narrow inlet could not have been a darker blue or more uniformly waved had it been in the middle of the Sea of Luck, far from land.

  “By the mark nine!”

  Good. Good. Noen trained Dinnile’s glass on the flag again. It was the Levar’s (the lookout had been right), and judging from its height above the trees, it was flying from a mast a good deal more lofty than their own. A ship seeking shelter from a storm might easily have ducked behind that island, he decided, if her captain knew the inlet was deep enough or simply because he thought she had no better chance. And if a ship that big had managed to enter the bay, Windsong should be able to follow with impunity.

  “By the long eight.”

  Weary men clambered from the hold and flung themselves on the deck. That was the pump gang, of course, and their presence meant it was two hours into the forenoon watch. He had been too preoccupied to think about the leak, or even to hear the bell. Yet the leak might grow worse at any time, and their need to careen was as urgent as ever.

  “Deck!”

  “What is it?” There was a long pause, so long that at last he called again: “Masthead, what do you see?”

  “Nothin’, sir. I thought I saw somethin’, sir, but I must a been wrong.”

  “What was it?”

  Another pause while the lookout decided that refusing to tell her captain could only land her in troubled waters. “Stone, sir.”

  “Stone?”

  “Like a tower or somethin’, sir.” Unhelpfully, the lookout added, “I don’t see it no more, sir.”

  Without even considering that the telescope was Dinnile’s, Noen thrust it through his belt, jumped down the steps from the quarterdeck to the maindeck, and swarmed up the ratlines to the dizzying crow’s nest in the maintop.

  “I seen it again while you were comin’ up, sir,” the lookout told him, “but it’s not there now.”

  “Where was it?”

  The lookout hesitated. “Right under the flag, sir.”

  Noen trained the telescope, trying to steady it against the heaving of his chest and the swooping circle
the crow’s nest traced with Windsong’s every roll. Belatedly, it struck him that his own glass was somewhat better, and that it waited useless in his cabin.

  A stronger puff of wind ruffled the leaves of the jungle trees, and he glimpsed a white wall. Squinting and still gasping for breath, he watched the place intently, and when a moment or two had passed he saw it again. “You’re right,” he told the lookout. “There’s a building on that island.”

  The white stone structure might easily be a castle, or at least a fort; and though reinforced by the gun-deck basilisks, Poltergeist, Windsong’s giant culverin, would be no match for even a single small gun mounted on a steady platform and sheltered behind walls of stone.

  “I’m glad you see it too, sir,” the lookout sighed. “It sort of comes and goes.”

  “That’s the wind in the leaves,” Noen told her, and took Dinnile’s telescope from his eye.

  The instrument gone, his view was no longer restricted to the little patch of jungle he had watched before. He could see the whole island, including the dark, gray battlements that rose above the foliage and the elaborate, machicolated tower from which the Levar’s colors flew.

  He clapped the glass to his eye again. The tower remained, a narrow shaft of stone the color of a storm cloud, with a bartizan and a merloned summit. “That was a mast,” Noen said.

  He had only whispered the words to himself, but in the silence of the crow’s nest the lookout had heard him. “Aye, sir,” she said. “It comes and goes, sir.”

  “By the mark seven.”

  Noen heard the leadsman’s cry as he descended slowly to the maindeck, and it decided his course of action. “We’ll anchor here, Lieutenant. Break out the jolly boat.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!” Dinnile shouted orders and bare feet pattered up and down Windsong’s decks. The jolly boat was slung on davits below the stern gallery, and so could be put into the water a good deal more easily than the big longboat stowed upside-down aft of the mainmast. When the bow anchor had splashed into the sea, Noen bawled, “Steward!”

  As though by magic, Oeuni was beside him. “You’re not going yourself, sir?”

  “Get my sword,” Noen told his steward. “My pistol, too. Load it.” Belatedly, he remembered to return Dinnile’s telescope. “And the small glass.”

  “Let me go, or Rekkue.”

  Privately Noen admitted that no matter what regulations might lay down concerning the captain’s staying with his ship, he was quite incapable of sending Oeuni into danger while he remained in safety. Aloud he said. “You’re not fully recovered, Dinnile’s officer of the watch, and Rekkue’s not experienced enough yet. That leaves me.”

  Dinnile put in, “You ought to take the longboat anyhow, sir. That’d give you twenty hands.”

  “Twenty hands dead,” Noen told him, “if there’s a gun on that island.”

  “Pistols for the crew?” Oeuni asked. She was too good an officer to argue.

  Noen shook his head. The average sailor was to be trusted with a matchlock pistol only in the gravest emergency. (Not even then, according to some captains.) “Cutlasses and dirks. I’ll have the falconets fore and aft, though. I’ll man the aft falconet myself and mind the tiller. Eitha can see to the bow gun.”

  As he loaded the falconet, taking exaggerated care to keep its smouldering slow match well away from the powder, Noen recalled that moment and regretted it. He was fundamentally a sailor, he told himself, and not a fighter; and even as a fighter he preferred cold steel to the tricky firearms that went off so often when their owners did not want them to, and so often failed to go off when they did.

  But the little jolly could not carry more than seven in any kind of sea, and the two swivel-mounted bronze falconets, with their powder and shot, weighed as much as any seventh passenger. Eitha, the cockswain of the jolly, had her gun loaded and ready long before Noen (only too conscious of the eyes of the four men at the oars) had rammed a handful of musket balls down the barrel of his own and fixed the match in the serpentine.

  That done, he assured himself that his steward had loaded his double-barreled pistol and that she had not wound its wheellock. There would be time enough for that when some actual danger threatened. Or there would not, and he would have to depend on the falconet and the clumsy broadsword he had hitched out of his way. Not that sword, gun, or pistol was apt to be of much use against magic.

  The gray stone tower flashed into existence again, only to vanish like smoke. “Cockswain!” Noen called. “I want soundings.”

  Eitha tossed the lead ahead of the boat, letting the lead line run through her fingers. When the bow was over the lead, she drew it up, counting the knots. “By the half seven, sir,” she reported.

  “Again,” Noen snapped. Could magic deceive a lead weight at the end of a line? Yes, certainly—but not quickly or easily.

  “By the half seven, sir.”

  Plenty of water for Windsong, and they had nearly reached the inlet. Noen studied both shores, but particularly that of the island. Ther should be a sentry there, someone fleet-footed, to tell whoever was in charge that the jolly had come. He saw no one, but perhaps the sentry had already gone. “Cast again,” he told Eitha, “when we’re at the narrowest point.”

  A bird circled the island and Noen, fearing it might be of the carrion kind, trained his glass on it. It was as black as any crow, yet lovely with its long wings and tail and its elaborately ruffled head: not a carrion bird, Noen thought, nor even a predatory one, though he was no student of such things. Twice more it circled, then flew seaward toward Windsong and appeared to light in the delicate filigree of her rigging, though when he turned his glass toward her he could not see it. “Smaller with its wings folded,” he muttered to himself, then seeing one of the rowers looking oddly at him, cleared his throat.

  “By the mark seven, sir.” The island and the mainland loomed to the right and left of them.

  “Again, when we’re well into the bay,” Noen said.

  Now the castle appeared as solid as the Levar’s palace. The rowers were whispering and jerking their heads toward it as they pulled their oars. “Silence!” Noen growled at them.

  Rooks circled the tower, and the black muzzle of a gun thrust from every crenel on the walls. Had the castle been real, the entire navy could not have battered it into submission; but Noen felt sure those guns posed no more danger to the jolly than the phantom rooks.

  A terrace led from the bay to the portcullis; on it stood two groups of gaily dressed people, some in armor and shouldering halberds or harquebuses. Both groups appeared to be watching intently the two richly dressed figures that stood arguing between them, though occasionally Noen saw someone glance sidelong toward the jolly, then look away at once.

  “We’ll land there,” he told the rowers. “On that pavement.” He put the tiller over.

  “By the mark seven!” Eitha called triumphantly a moment later.

  “Cut!” A small man in a shabby tunic stepped from the shadow of a ravelin. “Break, everyone! Rehearsal’s over. I think—that is, I hope—we’ve been rescued.”

  The gaily dressed actors seemed to relax. They were not really as numerous, Noen saw, as they had appeared; less than a score, perhaps. The two who had been arguing ended their dispute instantly and turned to watch the jolly.

  At the same instant, the castle shrank and changed, dwindling to a beached caravel whose canted mainmast flew the inverted flag of the Levar. The white-plumed disputant nudged the other, and together they swept off their hats and bowed low. With a few more oar strokes the jolly’s keel grounded, scraped free, then grounded again. “In oars!” Noen ordered. “Get her to shore.”

  The rowers sprang out, seized the gunnels, and pulled the jolly far enough up the beach for him to step onto the sand without wetting his second-best shoes. “Eitha, see to the matches.” Hiking his sword to a more conventional position and throwing out his chest while bitterly regretting his ragged trousers, he stalked up the beach with as much dignity a
s he could command.

  The darkly plumed disputant made a second bow before replacing the hat that bore them. There were flashing black eyes below the broad brim, a great beak of a nose, and a prominent wart. “Welcome, sir!” This in a voice that boomed like a kettledrum. “Welcome, I say again, whoever you may be! I am Nordread ola Gormol, and I’ve the honor to be—”

  “The menace of our troupe,” cut in the little man. “That is,” he added bitterly, “I hope you are.”

  The white-plumed disputant favored Noen with a dazzling smile. “And I’m its leading woman.” The curtsy that followed this somewhat startling statement involved spreading the tails of a very masculine coat while kicking the wearer’s sword out of the way. Noen thought of the awkward fashion in which he had adjusted to his own as he said, “I am Captain Tev Noen of Her Magnificence’s galleass Windsong.”

  “Ah,” the “leading woman” sighed. (Noen decided the second disputant was a woman, though a woman as tall as he.) “I’ve heard of you. You’re the captain who took that big Zhir ship a few months ago. Everyone thought you were going to be simply swimming in gold, but we’re not officially at war with Ka Zhir, they say, so they gave it back. What a pity!”

  Noen said, “I doubt that my history bears on the situation.”

  “Oh, but it does! If they hadn’t, you’d be at home in Liavek, in your palace, and—”

  “I,” the little man put in, “am generally called Baldy. I’m our stage manager, and in the absence of our owner and leading man, Amail Destrop, I’m boss. That is, I’m boss when things get bad. That is, when they’re not everybody else is, as you’ve already seen.”

  “And you are in distress?” Noen asked.

  All three tried to talk at once, one booming like a broadside, the other grasping Noen’s sleeve and cooing in his ear, and Baldy jumping up and down and yelling until he had shouted them both to silence. “You can bet your luck we’re in distress, Captain! That is, we’re not actually starving yet, but we can’t get off this rotten island, and there’re three—”

  “We can get off in the ship’s boats, Captain. But the mainland’s ever so much worse! There are—”