‘Let go of me,’ she said.
Dow let go. ‘Tell me what it says.’
She took a steadying, shuddering breath, then started again in a leveller tone. ‘You know the story as we were told it – that Nadal was given permission by his father to bring a fleet of three ships on an expedition north to the Ice. The battleship Tempest, and two merchantmen, the Bullion and the Bent Wing. The Bent Wing was commanded by a Captain Altona, whose body lies behind us, and whose log this is, detailing his voyage.
‘But the first thing Altona reports is that he was part of a grand deception – that in fact Nadal never intended that all three ships would come to the Ice. Once his fleet was out to sea, and out of sight of the Twelfth Kingdom, Nadal indeed sent the Bent Wing north – so that the Sea Lord’s command would be met – but only the Bent Wing. He took his other two ships, the Tempest and the Bullion, away south, on another mission entirely.’
‘And that mission was?’
‘To cross the Barrier Doldrums.’
Dow sat back in amazement. ‘But that’s …’
‘Impossible,’ Nell agreed. ‘No ship has ever done it, and if Nadal had announced that such was his aim, Ibanez would never have let him go. To tempt the Doldrums means certain death. So Nadal lied. He proposed an expedition north to gain his father’s approval, and then plotted with his captains to split the fleet.’
‘But why would anyone try crossing the Doldrums if everyone knows only death can result?’
Nell shrugged helplessly at the pages. ‘Altona speaks of a new experiment that Nadal hoped might make the crossing possible, but the nature of that experiment Altona does not reveal. Whatever it was, it failed. Five years is too long. Nadal and his men are undoubtedly dead, adrift somewhere in the stagnant wastes of the tropics.’
Dow gazed about, his shock turning to disgust. ‘So … so there was never anyone here to rescue?’
Her laugh was sadder and saner now. ‘Only the crew of the Bent Wing. And they never mattered anyway.’
It was Dow’s turn to fight an overwhelming anger. They’d been led to this end by something that wasn’t even real. And not only himself and Nell. What of Alfons and the other three sailors? What of loyal Johannes, and Nicky? They were all dead – and what had they died for?
Nothing at all. For a lie.
But as quickly as the anger had come, it was gone again. What was the use of it, after all? It required more energy than Dow could spare. He glanced to Nell. She’d returned her attention to the book, and was flicking steadily through the pages. She sighed from time to time, or shook her head, but she said nothing, and Dow could only wait until she was done.
‘Well?’ he asked, when at last she closed the journal.
‘We stand,’ she said quietly, ‘at the pole.’
‘The pole?’
‘Captain Altona brought with him instruments enough to take readings from the stars, when he could see them. This inner sea, near enough as no matter, marks the northern pole of the world.’
Dow could only shake his head wearily. ‘What else does he say?’
‘There’s little we hadn’t already learned or guessed. This log is but a longer account of the Bent Wing’s voyage north, and of the finding of the gulf, and of then becoming trapped within it. But Altona was a determined man. Even after his ship was grounded upon Camp Island, he could not forgo the chance to solve the mystery of the pole, and hence – when the ice cleared a little – he took a boat and crew of twelve to come in search of this place.’
‘And here they were wrecked.’
She nodded. ‘Their boat was upended by the surging waters, much as was ours, and smashed on the shore below. Six of his men survived – only to die more slowly of starvation and thirst. Altona himself used his last days to study the volcano. He theorised that it must have been dormant when his ship was trapped by ice in the gulf, and that it was only just beginning to stir from its slumber again when he arrived here – ten months ago.’ She glanced up sourly to the mount’s crater. ‘It is assuredly wide awake now.’
Dow followed her gaze. Glowing jets rose there in fountains, and rivers of molten stone poured from cracks in the rim to flow down to the sea – running more swiftly now, it seemed to him, and more brightly, than when he’d first come ashore. Another sharp tremor rattled the ground, even as he stared, and rocks came skittering down from the higher slopes.
The great volcano was not only awake, it looked likely to shake this island part of itself to pieces before long. They’d chosen no secure refuge. On the other hand, where else were they to go? It was the eruption’s very heat, after all, that was keeping them alive. Every now and then, as a grim reminder, sudden draughts of frigid air came swirling down about them, proof that – above and beyond the basin’s fires – the arctic night remained freezing and deadly, and the uninhabitable Ice still reigned.
‘Altona and his men made no attempt to escape,’ observed Nell, ‘for they knew that there was nowhere to go. But what of us? Vincente will send no rescue, I’m sure, but the Chloe will surely wait for a time, out in the gulf. Could we reach it, do you think? By swimming?’
Dow stared across the water, searching the awesome outer rim for the rift through which they had entered. From this distance it was only a black line etched in the soaring wall. Even if they could make it across the intervening miles to reach the chasm – amid who knew what currents and surges – what then? Could they swim five miles further again through the narrows, even assuming no additional waves rose to crush them?
He shook his head doubtfully.
Nell sighed, and hunched herself over the book. ‘They’ll never know then. Not Vincente, not anyone on the Chloe, not the Sea Lord himself. They’ll never hear what truly happened to the Lord Designate.’
‘I’d be more worried about us,’ said Dow.
‘You don’t understand. Now Ibanez will cling to his vain hopes, and send more rescue ships in the wrong direction, and all the while Valdez and Castille will be free to plot to overthrow him.’
Dow had to strain to remember the faraway politics. It all seemed so trivial now. And anyway, didn’t she want Valdez and Castille to prevail? Wasn’t she intending to marry the king of Valdez’s own nephew? He said, ‘Does it matter so much, if one Sea Lord is replaced by another?’
Her glance was withering. ‘It will mean civil war – and civil war will mean disaster, whoever wins. It will consume the empire for years, and only hasten our decline.’
‘Decline?’
‘Exactly that. We used to stand for more than just squabbling over money and power, and over which kingdom rules and which doesn’t …’
Dow’s curiosity finally stirred. He’d heard her talk this way before, as if the state of the Ship Kings empire was of an almost personal concern to her. He asked, ‘Which kingdom do you come from?’
She hesitated, frowning, then said, ‘Othrace.’ And upon seeing that the name meant nothing to Dow, added, ‘It lies in the north-east of Great Island, bordering Valdez, with whom we are traditionally allied.’
Ah … so her kingdom was allied with Diego’s. That explained a little – but not everything. She spoke with such familiarity of high politics. An alarming suspicion took root. ‘Do you have family, at home?’
For some reason she flushed red at the question, and Dow was intrigued to note that her scars went pale at the same time. ‘Yes – though as a scapegoat I’ve disowned them; and they, me.’
‘Are they important? Are they rich?’
‘It could be said that they are.’
He had to ask it. ‘You’re not a princess are you?’
Nell stared at him in total surprise, then burst out laughing. ‘A princess? Me?’ She rocked back at the idea, laughing still, while Dow sat stolidly by, feeling very much the fool. But she subsided at last, and shook her head at him, smiling. ‘No … no, Dow Amber, there’s no royal blood in me. Not a drop. But yes, my family is wealthy, and influential in Othrace’s affairs.’
She studied Dow with a curiosity of her own. ‘Yes. In fact, he and I are neighbours. Diego’s father’s lands border those of my father’s; our boundary is the boundary between the two kingdoms, and our manors are but a mile apart. Diego and I have known each other since childhood.’
Since childhood … neighbours … allied kingdoms. Dow pondered it all for another moment. ‘But how did you end up on a Valignano ship? Valignano isn’t allied with Valdez, is it? Or with Othrace?’
‘No – but my father served with Vincente when they were both cadets, and they’ve remained close ever since, despite the rivalry of their homelands. When I became eligible to serve, he asked Vincente to take me on as a special favour, for the Chloe’s old scapegoat had just died.’
‘But how did … ?’ Dow stopped himself. He’d been on the verge of asking about her scars, for without them – regardless of her father’s friendships – she wouldn’t be a scapegoat. But he couldn’t do it.
She seemed to guess his dilemma, or perhaps she remembered who she was talking with – not a fellow Ship King, but a stranger. Abruptly she straightened. ‘What do you suggest, Mr Amber? We can’t just sit here and wait for death, even if death is inevitable.’
Dow straightened too, and looked out over the water. She was right. Little hope was not the same as no hope. He said, ‘We should at least make a search for the boat. It might have washed up somewhere along the shore. And if there’s still nothing, then all we can do is swim for it.’
She nodded, and as one they heaved themselves upright, Nell tucking Altona’s log under her arm to carry with her. ‘But one suggestion before we go,’ she noted, considering Dow. ‘Shoes.’
Dow stared down at his bare feet; blood was crusted about his heels from his climb up the mountainside. What did she mean? Then he saw that Nell was looking at the dead bodies.
She said, ‘They have no need of footwear. You do.’
A dead man’s shoes? Could he really do that? Dow glanced across the flank of the mountain, and at the manifold sharp edges and ridges in the naked rock, and realised that yes he could. And so he went searching among the withered limbs of the dead, until he found a likely pair. He pried them off as gently as possible, scraped them somewhat cleaner with a fragment of rotted cloth, and then, his flesh crawling, forced them onto his feet. They felt loathsome and unnatural – but the rock no longer cut at his soles.
‘Ready?’ she asked.
They set off, angling across the slope in the only direction they could go, for behind them the way was blocked by one of the molten rivers flowing from above. Their attention was fixed upon the shoreline, where the boat might hopefully lie, if it had survived un-sunk.
Progress was very slow; the landscape remained fantastically unfriendly to those on foot, the slope riven with endless crevices into which they had to carefully descend, or ridges, double their own heights, over which they had to laboriously climb, cutting their hands even if their feet were protected. And all the while a parched dryness grew in their throats, made worse by the biting fumes and reeks that rose from the ground.
But they persevered, and after an hour had come some distance around the great circle formed by the lower part of the mount – although which way they were facing now, Dow couldn’t say, for if this was the pole then there was no north or east or west anymore, there was only south. And they’d found no sign of their boat, nor of its crew. The great wave seemingly had devoured them whole.
No other such wave rose, but the sea, it seemed to Dow, was increasingly disturbed by the plumes of the underwater fires. Steam hung in a thick overcast across the entire basin. And the eruption there on the mount was only gaining in potency, a vast vibration now humming continually underfoot. Dow and Nell paused to study the upper crater. The fountains were spurting higher and brighter, and every now and then great lumps of stone would tear loose from the rim, to fly upwards with a boom, like gigantic cannon-shot. It was as if, having spent the last few hours clearing its gullet, the volcano was only now beginning to roar full-throatedly.
They turned away and crept on for perhaps another half hour. But by then things were becoming menacingly unpleasant. The choking fumes were proliferating, and ash was beginning to rain down, along with avalanches of loose stones from higher up. The mount may have let Captain Altona and his men lie unmolested for ten months – but it seemed determined to do otherwise for Dow and Nell. The eruption roared louder.
Nell was coughing. ‘I can’t breathe,’ she got out finally. ‘We must get clear of these fumes and poisons.’
Dow had his own mouth and nose covered by his shirt. He stared about – was there any high place nearby that stood above the reek? He couldn’t see any. But some distance ahead he did spy a smoother section of ground, a swathe of stone that seemed free of cracks and fissures. There might be fewer fumes there – maybe they could even sit down and rest.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘only a little further.’
They took a few more steps, but then, to Dow’s shock, the mountainside before them began to slide.
It was exactly the area for which he’d been aiming – a whole great slab of the mountain was in motion now, surging towards the sea. A thousand fractures appeared across the stone, glowing red. In a horrified flash Dow understood – it had not been solid ground at all, but another of the rivers of molten stone, merely crusted over temporarily, and now flowing once more.
‘Back!’ he told Nell, waving a hand. ‘We have to go back.’ For already the heat from the river ahead was overpowering.
They reeled back the way they had come. A new cloud of ash, very hot, was descending upon them, and it became almost impossible to breathe without choking. They coughed and spluttered as they laboured over the stones. But they’d covered barely a quarter of a mile when – as they climbed across a narrow ridge – they saw that their way back was blocked too.
Another molten river, thinner than the one behind them, but no less fierce in its heat, had spilled down from a rift below the crater and was even now reaching the sea in a malignant hiss of steam. They were marooned on a wedge of the mountain only a few hundred yards wide, unable to go forward, unable to retreat.
Exhausted, their faces scorched, they cowered down into a deep hollow between the rocks. Nell was bent as if with pain, but Dow realised that in fact she was laughing, in croaking, ashen gasps. The spasm passed, and she unbent again, smiling, her eyes red with tears.
‘What fools we are, Dow, you and me both. Look where we are – and yet consider how hard each of us had to battle just to be here. Consider how we fought to be allowed to die like this.’
Dow only tilted his head in confusion.
She was sitting back against the stone now, her breath recovered. She gave him a piercing glance, naked in its intensity. Then, coming to some decision, she extended her bared arms before her to show him the patterns of scar tissue written there. ‘You know, do you not, how scapegoats come to serve aboard their vessels? That they are those who have by evil fate been injured in some accident, or afflicted by some dread disease?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I had no disease, nor was I injured by accident.’
Dow stared. Did she mean… ?
Nell only nodded, looking at him squarely now, without shame. ‘I am a false scapegoat, as the creature Axay described me.’ She raised her arms, as if in final evidence. ‘I did this to myself.’
Dow was silent a long moment, unable to look away from the multitude of wounds on her skin. Ash rained down between them, but the eruption seemed far, far away. ‘Why?’ he asked finally.
She sighed, lowering her hands. ‘You must consider the life I led, home in Othrace. I was born to wealth, and born within arm’s reach of power – but born a girl. Wealth was useless to me for anything but
buying clothes and other trinkets, and power was denied to me by very gender. But it wasn’t power or wealth I wanted anyway – all I ever wanted was to go sailing!
‘It’s strange, I didn’t even grow up near the sea. Our estate is in the country. But when I turned ten I was allowed to go and live for a while in our family townhouse in Siena, Othrace’s capital city. My window there overlooked the harbour, and for the first time I saw ocean-fit vessels coming and going. I was enraptured – and from that day on all I wanted to do was go with them, to disappear like they did, over the horizon …’
Her gaze was lost in memory, and Dow, though startled to hear his own life echoed in hers, said nothing, only waited for her to continue.
Nell shook her head. ‘Oh, I tried everything, as I got older. I pleaded with my father and fought with my mother and stowed away on ships, but it was all futile. Women are simply not allowed on our vessels, except rarely as passengers, locked away in their cabins when sent with their ambassador husbands to rule the other Isles. Never as crew, never as sailors. I was laughed at as a silly girl, and forbidden from visiting the docks.’ She paused, and her voice went low. ‘But then I conceived of another way.’
Comprehension chilled Dow. ‘Scapegoats,’ he said. ‘Women are allowed to go to sea if they’re scapegoats.’
She nodded calmly.
Dow studied her scars, the fineness and number of them. Surely no knife had done it. ‘But how did—?’
Nell raised her hands again. ‘This? This is not what I intended. I meant to do myself much less of an injury. But fate will not be mocked – as I think you and I both know by now. But yes, I decided that I must suffer an ‘accident’, one that would disfigure me just enough to be fit to serve as a scapegoat.’ Her observation of her own arms became wondering in nature. ‘Even now, that decision amazes me a little. I was only fourteen then. But once the idea came, my unspoiled skin seemed a trifling price to pay, if it allowed me to go to sea.’
The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice Page 23