‘Marila, dear, d’ye really think that’s wise?’
‘If you don’t want to tell her, I will.’
Fiffengurt shook his head firmly. ‘Ah, lass, there’s no cause to be that way. I’ll tell her, don’t you worry.’ But there was a tremor in his voice.
They could hear Oggosk screaming from twenty yards, though they could make no sense of the string of names, dates, cities, ships and bodily fluids, all punctuated by crashes and wordless shrieks. ‘What’s the matter with her?’ whispered Fiffengurt.
‘Something about a letter,’ said Marila. ‘One of those crazy letters to Rose that she says come from his dead father. Usually she just tosses them off, but this one’s different somehow. Felthrup knows more than I do.’
Glass shattered against the inside of her cabin door. ‘Dead!’ screamed Oggosk, within. ‘Caught by fishermen, washed up on beaches, stranded by the tide!’
Marila took a firm grip on Mr Fiffengurt’s arm.
‘Ninety-three years of bloated crab-nibbled corpses!’
Marila pounded on the door. Oggosk fell silent. After two minutes Fiffengurt said, ‘She ain’t going to let us in. We’d best try another time.’
He was smiling. Marila just waited. Very soon the door opened a crack, and one milky blue eye stared up at the quartermaster.
‘Well?’ she croaked. ‘What have you done now, you old piece of gristle?’
Fiffengurt cleared his throat. ‘Duchess,’ he said, ‘perhaps you’ve heard some of the debate concerning the name of this here island?’
‘It is Stath Bálfyr,’ said Oggosk.
Fiffengurt smiled, fidgeting terribly. ‘Well now, m’lady, that’s quite correct. Only it happens that things are just a trifle more complicated than we hoped. It’s no cause for alarm, but—’
‘The island’s useless,’ said Marila. ‘Ott’s papers were forged by the ixchel. Stath Bálfyr is where they came from, centuries ago, and they’ve tricked us into bringing them home. We don’t have course headings from here – they’re all fake. If we cross the Ruling Sea from this island we could come out anywhere in the North.’
Now she could see a bit of Oggosk’s mouth, which hung open like an eel’s. ‘What?’ said the old woman.
‘Oh, and the whole clan’s still aboard,’ said Marila, ‘the ones that we didn’t kill in Masalym, anyway. They’re going to do something and it will probably be terrible. Stath Bálfyr is the only reason they ever came aboard.’
Oggosk closed the door again. Fiffengurt looked at Marila awkwardly. ‘I was about to say that, Missy. You beat me to it, is all. Well now, we’d best leave the duchess to mull this over, don’t you think?’
Before Marila could tell him that she thought nothing of the kind, the door flew open, and Oggosk emerged with her walking stick, which she swung with great force at Fiffengurt.
‘Traitor!’ she screamed. ‘Crawly lover! You’ve known about this for months, haven’t you? That’s why you look like you’ve swallowed a poison toad every time we mention Stath Bálfyr!’
Fiffengurt backed away, shielding his head. ‘Duchess, please—’
‘Don’t speak to me ever again! Don’t look at me, you lying, worm-laden bag of excrement! Move! Walk! We’re going to the captain, and I hope he skins you alive!’
The corridor was wide and black. Felthrup looked up at the cargo stacked to either side of him: musty crates, huge casks for spirits or wine, clay amphorae nestled in rotting burlap, secured with ancient ropes. The air was chill, and the only light came from the chamber at the end of the passage, fifty feet ahead, where a single lamp dangled on a chain. The brightness of the lamp was slowly, steadily increasing.
‘Sweet heaven’s mercy! You’re here!’
The man’s voice also came from the chamber ahead, but Felthrup could see no sign of movement. He did not answer the voice, but crept forward along the edge of the cargo, keeping out of the light. The voice implored him to hurry, but he did not. Every instinct told him that he was in a place of unspeakable danger.
‘Where are you? Why don’t you say anything?’
Felthrup reached the chamber and drew a sharp breath. He was looking at a jail. Thick iron bars divided the room into cells: four cells, two on either side of the dangling lamp. He saw now that the lamp was an odd specimen of ancient brass, although it burned as brightly as any modern fengas lamp. The two cells on the left stood wide open, but the right-hand cells were closed. And in the nearest of these stood a young man in rags.
He saw Felthrup and put a hand through the bars: a gesture of joy or excitement, maybe, but Felthrup responded by leaping backwards.
‘No! No!’ cried the man. ‘Don’t be frightened! Please don’t run away!’ In the cell next to the ragged man there lay a corpse. It was curled on its side like a sleeper, its face turned to the wall. Indeed Felthrup might have taken it for a sleeper, if not for a glimpse of one hand, where bones protruded through a translucent layer of rotten skin. The rest of the figure was completely clothed: heavy coat, trousers, headscarf. Felthrup had no idea whether the thing before him had been a man or a woman.
‘It is too late for Captain Kurlstaff,’ said the man, ‘but not for me. Oh, please, come here and nudge open the door! There is no latch; enchantment alone prevents me from swinging it wide.’ Demonstrating, he took the door in both hand and shook it violently. When Felthrup jumped again he checked himself and smiled.
‘Forgive me. This is not my real nature. It’s just that I have been so long alone – Tree of Heaven, you don’t know how long!’
‘Tell me,’ said Felthrup, glad to hear that his voice did not crack. He was examining the man’s feet, for he had already discovered that he did not much care to look at his eyes.
‘My dear friend, you won’t believe it. This is the Vanishing Brig of the I.M.S. Chathrand, and I am its forgotten prisoner. It is a cunning and merciless invention: set but a foot inside one of these cells, and the door slams behind you, and cannot be opened from within – not ever. I have been locked in here since the days of the Black Tyrant, Hurgasc, who took the Great Ship and used her for plunder. My family opposed Hurgasc more bitterly than any others in the Kingdom of Valahren.’ The man lowered his voice, and his eyes. ‘He slew my brothers one by one and cast their bodies out upon the plain, where the jackals gnawed their bones. I wish he had done the same with me. Instead I was brought to this cell, in which no man may ever age, and left for all eternity.’
‘You do not age?’ asked Felthrup.
‘Nor sleep, nor tire, nor feel anything but a dull hunger that never abates. I lie still for years at a time. The lamp springs to life for visitors; otherwise I lie in perfect darkness. For centuries, my friend. No one comes here any more.’
‘But someone used to?’
‘Oh, very rarely – and when they come, fear masters them, and they flee like cockroaches. But you, woken rat! You’re braver than any human ever was!’
Or more foolish, thought Felthrup.
‘But open the door, open the door!’ cried the man. ‘I will tell you my whole sorry tale, and show you other secrets of the Chathrand. Did you know that there was gold aboard, hidden in many places?’
Felthrup knew it perfectly well. He gazed back along the corridor. The Green Door stood ajar, but the light of the lamp was so bright that he could barely see it.
‘You don’t trust me,’ said the man, his voice taking on an air of desperation. ‘Gods below, it is almost funny! Little rat-friend, do you know why my family ran afoul of Hurgasc? Because we sheltered woken animals like yourself. The Tyrant had a wild superstition that they were his defeated enemies, returned to life in bestial form. Madness, but that did not stop him from killing every woken animal he could. We gave refuge to scores of them in our family estate. I was raised by such creatures! But for every good man there are five who burn with jealousy merely because he is loving, and they are not. One day some mucking dog informed on us, and Hurgasc stormed the estate, and we fled to the wilderness to
begin our life as rebels.’
‘And this Vanishing Brig, who made it? What is it for?’
‘The shipwright-mages of Bali Adro made it, sir – dlömu and human beings and selk, all working together in those days. No doubt they intended it for noble purposes, but they are all gone, and the ship has had so many lives and owners since. There is no escape from these cells save death – and that is what most choose.’ He gestured at the corpse. ‘Kurlstaff there broke his pocketwatch, and swallowed the pieces, glass and all, and so made his escape. Others did so before him, and their bodies were at last removed. Now then: will you not be bold, and free a friend of your kind? I tell you I was imprisoned for nothing. Why, I was never even accused!’
‘That has just changed,’ said Felthrup. ‘I accuse you of lying.’
The man looked up sharply. Felthrup’s nose twitched with irritation.
‘Some of “our kind” read,’ he said, ‘and among those few, one at least reads history. The Chathrand was built five hundred years after the slaying of Hurgasc. To be precise, five hundred and three. And Valahren – well, really. In Hurgasc’s time the name did not exist; it was Valhyrin, and would remain so for centuries, I believe. And when Hurgasc ruled in Valhyrin, “our kind” did not exist at all, for the Waking Spell that created us had yet to be cast.14 But if woken animals had existed then, and your family had loved them so keenly, you might possibly have lost the habit of referring to those you despise as mucking dogs. And now good day.’
He would have liked to walk with dignity from the chamber, after such a speech. But in fact he was still terrified, and so he ran. The prisoner watched him, statue-still. Felthrup was halfway back to the chicken coops before he broke his silence.
‘Your quest is doomed, Felthrup Stargraven.’
Felthrup skidded to a halt.
‘The Polylex has taught you a little. But it yields its wisdom slowly, does it not? Too slowly to help you save this world. I can do better, for a price.’
Felthrup turned and looked back into the chamber. The voice had not changed, and the lamp burned on as before, but the figure he saw by its glow was not a man.
Nilus Rose sat at his desk with the curtains drawn. Propped before him was a small, ornate picture frame, which he had just rummaged from the bottom of a drawer. It was a portrait of three young women: the two eldest seated, the youngest standing before them. All three beautiful, distracted, docile as sheep. They wore identical gowns: the straight and formless gowns in which wealthy Arqualis draped their daughters, before sending them to temple, or to bridal interviews.
They were quite obviously sisters. Behind them stood a man with a broad chest and choleric expression; a man old enough to be their father; a man any casual observer would have identified as Rose himself. In this the observer would have been deceived, but not entirely wrong: the figure was Captain Theimat Rose. He was indeed a father – but to Nilus, not these women. They were his concubines, his slaves. His father had not bothered to conceal his intention to wear them out, one after another, until their usefulness as childbearers and his pleasure in them were alike exhausted, and then to find some other place, far from his sight, where they could age.
The eldest, Yelinda, had ruined the lives of all three. Poor island women, they had nonetheless had freedom of a limited sort, until Yelinda fell under the sway of a sweet-voiced, gentle-faced man from Ballytween, who promised all three sisters jobs in a wealthy household in the Crownless Lands, and instead deposited them in the Slave School on Nurth. They were spared the long tutelage in servitude meted out at the school, however. A young captain by the name of Theimat Rose, having just come into money by some swindle or other, grew excited at the thought of possessing sisters, something none of his peers could boast of. He had bargained for all three, and the price he settled on became another boast, though he tended to lie about their pedigree.
Before they reached Mereldín Island and the Rose estate, Theimat informed them all of the shape of their future. Yelinda would be shown to the world as his wife, though he had no intention of actually marrying her or otherwise bestowing any semblance of rights; the younger sisters were henceforth mere cousins that he had taken into his household out of charity. They were never to leave the estate, nor to speak to anyone save the peasants who worked it; they were to bear him sons, one apiece, and to spare him even the sight of any girl-child who might be born into the household. During his absences at sea they were to dedicate themselves to prayer, and later the raising of his children. He would not tolerate noise, sloth, disagreeable odours, despondency, laughter, tears, the presence of cats or imperfect table manners. He promised to sell them separately, and ‘into households that will make you appreciate what you have lost’, if they should displease him.
Upon arrival he showed them a weedy spot outside the garden wall. It was where his own father had buried the bodies of two slaves. ‘They tried to run,’ said Theimat. ‘Very foolish, on so small an island.’
Mereldín Island had some eight thousand inhabitants, and most of them appeared to owe money to Theimat Rose, including the Imperial governor and the Templar monks. His estate sprawled over a quarter of the island; his web of trade stretched over the whole of the Narrow Sea. Those who did not fear him found him useful. For the daughters there was simply nowhere to turn.
Nor did he soften with the years. Once he beat Yelinda for setting his evening rum on his desk without a coaster. After Nilus was born the man found the child’s eating habits revolting, saying that he did not properly chew his food. But the more Nilus attempted to focus on the task the less he managed to please his father, who grew infuriated by the boy’s cowed expression and stolid, terrified chewing.
One morning, when his son was four, the captain set a fist-sized mass of raw xhila-tree rubber in a dish in front of Nilus and told him to put it in his mouth. The boy obeyed, with some difficulty. The rubber was acrid and burned his gums. ‘Now,’ said the captain, ‘you may practise chewing to your heart’s content. But it will go very badly for you, Nilus, if you dribble or spit before I give you leave.’
He emphasised the point by placing a claw hammer on the table. Nilus began to chew, and found at once that the evil taste was mostly beneath the rubber’s surface; very soon his mouth was aflame. His father sat at the far end of the table, doing his weekly accounts. The rubber stiffened the harder Nilus bit down, but if he stopped chewing for a moment his father looked up with fire in his eyes. Nilus knew that weeping would bring greater punishment than dribbling or spitting, and so he chewed, and swallowed when he could no longer avoid it, and sat very straight in his chair.
When the sisters noticed the boy’s distress Theimat ordered them all to the outdoor kitchen, which is where they were usually banished when he did not wish to see them. After twenty minutes the boy’s stomach began to hurt and his thoughts became wild and confused. After sixty his jaw hurt so badly that he tried to distract himself by driving a fork into his leg. Sometime thereafter he began to fight down vomit. That was when his father’s looks began to show some interest. At length the man put down his pencil, lifted the hammer and drew near. He watched Nilus begin to choke, raised the hammer when it appeared he might spit. Nilus did not spit but tried to swallow the whole mass of rubber, and failed. He fell to the ground, the world darkening around him, and then his father took another fork and pried the sticky mass out of his throat.
‘You will henceforth confine yourself to proper etiquette,’ said the captain, wiping his hands on a linen napkin and departing.
When he was gone the middle sister burst into the chamber and carried the boy away. She alone had disobeyed Theimat and snuck back into the house. This was not her first rebellion. Indeed for over a year she had been defying him in two respects: by attempting to get pregnant by one of the farm workers, lest he sell them off as defective childbearers15; and by studying witchcraft with the same man’s mother, crippled and nearly blind but still famous for what went by the name of ‘the Devil’s Calling’ amo
ng the island folk. Whenever Theimat was away at sea, this middle sister would make her way through the plantation to that verminous shack among the fever trees, where a nearly hairless monkey crouched in the shadows munching sugar cane, and the wind that sighed through the cracked walls and rotting floorboards spoke now and again in words. Sometimes she would bring Nilus, and ask the blind woman to speak about his future, which she learned by feeling the contours of his skull. To this day Rose could close his eyes and feel those rough hands, smell the woodsmoke and rancid butter on them, wince as they squeezed his temples.
The middle sister learned very quickly, and became very strange. Her name was Gosmeíl. Three marriages and as many decades later she would become Lady Gosmel Pothrena Oggosk, Eighteenth Duchess of Tirsoshi.
The day Nilus was tortured at the dinner table, Gosmel resolved to murder Theimat Rose. She confided first in Biyatra (‘the Baby’), the youngest sister of the three. Biyatra too wished him dead, but she was fearful by nature and demurred. And when Gosmel went to Yelinda, the eldest daughter not only refused to participate but swore to denounce them if they ever again hinted at such an act. Yelinda had played the part of ‘wife’ in public a very long time, and as Theimat’s fortunes grew her own stature in the society of the island had increased as well. It grew awkward to beat her or terrorise her into perfect incoherence; he had even to dance with her at the Governor’s Ball. In the end Yelinda had come to believe in the lie herself, and to treat her sisters more like the impoverished cousins they were supposed to be.
Nilus believed as well. He had long since begun to call Yelinda ‘Mother’, and firmly believed that he had sprung from her womb. This certainty lasted well up into his fifties, when Oggosk punctured it with her usual tact:
‘She was supposed to be your mother, wasn’t she? Because you were the first-born, and she was the eldest. Theimat wanted things that way: orderly, shipshape. He took each of us whenever he liked, but he intended to dispose of us in order of age. Therefore Yelinda had a job to do. Therefore she’s your mother.’
The Night of the Swarm (Chathrand Voyage 4) Page 49