Shoal started the motor and Ascott focused on not throwing up as they zipped across the waves back to his island and the three-room, bamboo-construction, solar-powered, minimal-plumbing, palm-leaf-roofed house of Pudding.
“You gonna be okay?” Shoal asked after the boat beached itself on the white sand. Ascott nodded and waved away the offered fish.
“Pizza’s fine,” he mumbled.
“Take a nap,” Shoal suggested. Ascott nodded again, pushing the boat out and returning Shoal’s farewell wave as she gunned the motor and headed out across the lagoon.
“Bithcuith!” Tacus demanded from his position on the veranda table.
Ascott sighed. Actually drowning in Shoal’s company would have been preferable to nearly drowning. At least then he wouldn’t have to live with the embarrassment of it.
“Thoal!” Tacus demanded.
“You and me both, buddy,” Ascott replied. He put three crackers on the table and heated a pizza while the parrot dissected each biscuit in turn with his beak.
He ate pizza and stared with self-critical frustration at the few clothes tossed into the open suitcase, still lying where he had left it hours before. Charlotte, Ascott reminded himself. I have to do something.
What to do was the question. In the eighteen months since he left his parents’ house for the last time, Ascott had only sent one postcard. He couldn’t keep in touch with his only surviving family member even before he knew she was dying. Guilt gnawed at him the pointless way Kibblefish nibbled on small rocks.
Sleep came uneasily to him that night and Ascott dreamed of being underwater. Rainbows of fish spiralled around him, all of them whispering in tones too low to be understood. From the grey-green-skinned flamets to the iridescent flash of the kabris, the denizens of the sea came in the full range of colours. The shapes were as varied as the hues, from arrow thin sprax to the wide sail bodied veskas. Ascott swam with the fish and yearned to communicate with them.
On cue, Shoal appeared in his dream, her long tanned legs effortlessly sweeping through the water, driving her towards him. Ascott watched as Shoal metamorphosed into an unknown fish.
What separated this recurring dream from a nightmare was that Ascott found the half-girl, half-fish Shoal fascinating. He longed to study her habits and swim as freely as she did in the warm waters of the blue-green sea. The fantasy was a familiar one and Ascott floated, smiling and at peace. Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw a figure in white trousers and shirt striding along the coral outcrop of a nearby reef, the currents tugging and lifting the hems of his shirt and trouser cuffs. Ascott turned his dreaming eyes and stared at the intruder.
Drakeforth held up a white memo board, on which he had written: May I have a word?
Ascott found himself nodding in his dream, the water swirling around him, the fish dancing their intricate ballet, so far beyond his understanding.
Drakeforth waved the fish away as if they were buzzing flies. With a marker pen, he wrote something else on his board and turned it back to show Ascott.
This is bigger than fish. This is everything.
Ascott waved his hands; the fish were everything. Charlotte was everything. Drakeforth scrubbed the board clean and wrote again.
Where do we come from? What are we really?
Ascott shook his head. The questions were interrupting his time with Shoal and the other fish.
A sharp pain shot through Ascott’s earlobe. He flailed and sat up with a yell: “Tacus!” The parrot hopped from foot to foot on the bed cover, eyeing Ascott sideways with his usual air of innocence.
“Athleep on watch! Flog him!” Tacus declared. Ascott groaned and fell back. The sunlight now streaming in through the windows said morning had come around again. He didn’t feel rested. His hair follicles ached. A cup of tea on the veranda would be the cure for that.
Tacus met him at the table, the parrot deftly opening the box of crayons and selecting a worn green stick. The sheets of paper he drew on were weighed down with beach stones. Ascott put some crackers on a plate and sipped his tea while Tacus tried to decide whether to draw or eat breakfast. Drawing won out for now. The bird positioned the crayon in his beak and, with one eye cocked to stare at the paper, he began to draw.
Ascott munched on cold pizza. It had vegetables on it, so he guessed he was getting a balanced diet. The tea supposedly contained enough nutritional vitamins and minerals to bring the dead back to life.
“Pitheth of fate!” Tacus declared, and dropped the blue crayon in favour of a red.
Ascott took a fatherly interest in the parrot’s artwork. Tacus sometimes laboured over a masterpiece for several days, always drawing in crayon and only drawing in lines, lacking, Ascott thought, the dexterity to fill in the shapes he drew.
“Bithcuith,” Tacus announced, pushing the completed picture aside with his four-toed foot. Ascott fed him a broken cracker while reviewing the latest drawing. Like most of the parrot’s artworks it was a green blob, with odd marks and random notations floating around inside it.
“That’s a very nice amoeba, Tacus.”
“Everyone’th a critic,” Tacus squawked. Once an artwork was complete to his satisfaction, the parrot lost all interest in it and went on to the next one. Sometimes he drew triangular shapes, like mountains. Other times he drew stick figures of trees and animals. Mostly he drew amoeba-like blobs with different-coloured organelles adrift within the green, yellow or red membrane.
“Do you want me to put it on the fridge?” Ascott asked.
“Bithcuith!”
Ascott finished his tea and pizza. He had no idea when the next flight would leave Montaban’s tiny airport—which was really more of a seaport, with a single zipillin tower for the airships to tether to. Ascott thought they might fly out once a week, but island time was relative, like a third cousin twice removed. He finished packing, the suitcase lighter than he remembered and the guilt heavier.
Ascott collected the SCRAM gear from the closet. He didn’t need much. An inflatable harness, air-tanks, regulator, weight belt and a second belt from which to hang useful things like a knife, torch and catch bags. He might have a chance for one last dive before he left the islands forever. Either way, Shoal could keep it for him until he came back, one day.
Ascott carried the dive gear down to the dugout. Above sea level the weight of the gear was staggering; only when you were in the water, and the change in density supported all the extra baggage, did it feel like flying. The diving equipment gave him an almost endless range to swim, observe, and explore. Ascott didn’t care what Shoal said—every time he went under water and saw some new rock, or coral or fish, it gave him a complete sense of discovery. The ocean life might not be new to her, but when he saw something for the first time, there was always the chance he might be the first person to see it. That sense of achievement balanced against everything else in his life that felt like failure.
Montaban was too far away to paddle, so he retrieved the outboard motor from the closet, too. After bolting it in place and waking it up gently with a round of positive affirmations, he got the motor going. Tacus tipped a rock onto his current art project and flapped down to land in the bow of the canoe.
“Montaban or butht!” the parrot declared, spreading his wings to catch the morning sun.
The canoe cut through the water like an arrow shot from a bow specifically modified to send small boats skimming across the ocean for great distances. The hum of the engine and the occasional indignant squawk from Tacus as a wave splashed his feathers were the only sounds as they zipped over the blue surface. Ascott thought about how similar to a desert the sea appeared. Both seemed featureless, shaped by wind and the movement of the particles. But the ocean, Ascott mused, is not a desert. It’s more like a border; a line between two worlds, each as vast, complex and self-sustaining as the other. Only a very few specialised creatures could live in b
oth worlds. If given the choice, Ascott would be hard pressed to decide which one he would prefer to live in permanently. He knew he would follow the fish to the ends of the earth—or the bottom of the ocean if necessary. The thought that gnawed at him like an aphish on seaweed was: did it matter that the fish didn’t care?
This brought him back to Earth with a thud that matched the pounding of the canoe as it crested a swell and dropped into the following trough.
Montaban clung to the limestone and ancient coral sands of an island in the western end of the Aardvark Archipelago. A modern settlement had been here for two hundred years, started by sailors deciding that life on a well-resourced island in the middle of a tropical ocean was better than crewing trade ships for a pittance wage and a diet of worm-infested scones.
The native people had been here, in their language, forever. The locals had watched with baffled amusement as the men who abandoned their ships (in some instances sinking them first) struggled to survive on one of the more barren of the archipelago’s islands. After a few months, it was decided that they go and check on the new neighbours. The welcoming committee reported back that some of the men had died from eating things a child would know to avoid, while others had taken to wearing palm-fronds and milknut half-shells and insisting they be called Shelley. A vote was taken and the survivors were rescued. After a few good meals and sleep in a proper hammock, the ex-sailors admitted they had no idea a thriving civilisation was going about its business only a couple of islands away.
From then on, the thousand islands of the Aardvark Archipelago had been mostly ignored, except by those who lived on them. In due course the militant missionary expeditions of Arthurians like Saint Amoeba and Saint Kebab gave the woefully stagnant gene pool the equivalent of a good dose of chlorine, a thorough vacuum, and a skim with a leaf scoop in the form of new settlers. The Arthurians took their missionary positions seriously and set about populating Montaban with the children of good, Arthur-worshipping people. The Montabanians didn’t suffer any of the tragic cultural misunderstandings of some other indigenous tribes when faced with the infamous choice of Saint Kebab.* They readily abandoned their casual pantheon of gods based on natural phenomena and fish-spirit worship in return for the promise of one-ness with the Universal Perception that, if Drakeforth was not completely deluded, had since retired in a petulant sulk.
Montaban today counted several thousand people living in houses made of carved limestone blocks. These were made, in most cases, by cutting the blocks out of the ancient sea cliffs and then calling the resulting cave a three-bedroom bungalow with indoor—outdoor flow and unobstructed sea-views. The stone blocks went into patio construction and walls to keep out the worst of the neighbours’ cooking smells. Narrow streets wound around the rocky island the way sheep paths form contour-lines on hill pasture.
The Montabanians shared their town with the cats. No one had ever counted the number of cats living in Montaban, except to note that they were abundant. In the way of cats, they kept to themselves and barely acknowledged the people as they accepted tribute in the form of fish-scraps.
Ascott slowed the boat as they passed through the outer limits of the moored fishing fleet. Boats of all shapes and sizes bobbed in the wake of the canoe’s passing. Line trawlers, net draggers, wooden skiffs like Shoal’s, and the controversial bang boats that discharged static electricity into the water before scooping up the stunned fish, blanketed the surface leading up to the docks and beach.
“Varletth! Thcow-baggerth! Muck muncherth!” Tacus squawked at each boat that zoomed and zipped through the fray, sending water splashing over the spluttering parrot.
Ascott shushed the bird and flicked the outboard engine off as they drifted towards the public dock. Tying the canoe up, he offered a hand for Tacus to step on to. From there the parrot walked sideways up his arm and took position on his shoulder.
“Don’t trutht the catth,” Tacus muttered.
“Okay,” Ascott said and Tacus settled like a broody hen, apparently content that his warning had been heeded.
The docks of Montaban seethed with fishermen, fishmongers, fishwives, fish-scavenging birds and the occasional octopus that had picked the lock on its aquarium cage and was making a break for the freedom of open water.
After months of solitude on his unnamed island, the crowds were as deafening to Ascott as the fish-stink was cloying. He lifted the two air tanks on to the dock and climbed up. The fugitive octopus slipped past, warning Ascott away with a knife fashioned from a sharpened piece of coral clutched in one desperate tentacle.
Tacus threw himself into the air, landing heavily on his shoulder.
“You can fly, you know,” Ascott said, gritting his teeth against the stabbing pain above his collarbone.
Tucking one air tank under each arm, Ascott walked past baskets of fresh fish, milknuts, dried fruit, shellfish, and a chap selling driftwood that looked like it had wizened faces in the grain. In Montaban if you weren’t selling something, you were a customer, and everyone offered Ascott their wares. Pearls were the official currency, with different colours denoting different values. They ranged from the common black pearls through to the highly valued reds that glowed like the sunset over an approaching hurricane.
Ascott plunged through the crowd, holding his breath when the smell became too much and ignoring the constant cries of “Very best deal on queen shrimp! Fresh caught today!”.
The office of the Montaban Export Company acted as the seat of power in the port town. It was also the town hall, bank, Arthurian church, safe-deposit, legal records office, and guardian of Montaban’s only working telephone. Ascott wondered if it ever rang, seeing as no one else in this part of the ocean had a phone. The Exco was the largest building at dock level and had been built from a mixture of local limestone block and imported sheet-metal roofing, some of which was even on the roof.
Ascott left the two air tanks outside and ventured into the cool gloom where he joined a queue of locals in front of a barred teller’s window. The lobby had the same cave-like interior as other buildings in Montaban. It vibrated with the chatter of people, and the noises of their livestock, except for the fish, who were either hanging from lines threaded through their gills, or swimming around in large glass jars and not talking to anyone.
There were no signs to suggest he was in the right place to buy a ticket home, but the line of people ahead of him, and quickly growing behind him, gave the impression of important business.
In time Ascott reached the window. On the other side of the counter, a wizened and grey-haired gent with skin as tanned as a milknut, wearing a starched collar and bowtie (but no shirt), enquired as to the nature of his business.
“I’d like to buy a ticket, to Kulo—I mean, The City,” Ascott said.
“Pitheth o’ fate!” Tacus squawked. “Give uth your money!”
“A ticket?” The grey-haired teller leaned closer, tilting his head and giving Ascott the same one-eyed, disbelieving expression Tacus often did.
“Yes, I need to go home. My sister is in trouble,” Ascott tried again.
“Next flight, is in a few days,” the teller said. “Ticket costs…” He examined a stained page, brittle with age. “Two greens and five blues.”
Ascott floundered. “Pearls? Uh, what’s the exchange rate?”
“The what?”
“Bithcuith! Bury ‘em deep!” Tacus called.
Ascott felt the colour rising in his face. The people in the line behind him were watching with good-natured amusement, but that couldn’t last. He risked a look back; his fellow queue-ees held braces of fish, cages of live chickens, island pigs on string leashes and baskets of ripe fruit. Two cats were sitting in a stream of sunshine, and he was sure they were laughing at him too.
“Do you accept credit stick transfers in exchange for pearls?” Ascott said, his voice hoarse with anxiety.
“Wel
l now…that’s a good question…” The teller turned left and then right in his seat. Finally seeing what he sought, he slid carefully off his chair and walked with slow determination over to an ancient filing cabinet. “Open up now,” he said, and patted the wood affectionately.
The filing cabinet shivered and gave a snort. Ascott felt a pang of remembrance. Charlotte loved living oak furniture.
Sliding open the top cabinet, the teller retrieved a heavy, leather-bound tome. Pushing the drawer shut, he blew a thick layer of dust off the book. Tottering under the weight he returned and set it down on the counter. The ancient pages creaked as they were turned.
“Ah, here we are,” he said eventually. Ascott craned his neck and could make out the faded lettering of the archaic script: Raytes o’ Xchaynge Fo’ Foryne Coyne.
The teller regarded the tiny lettering for a moment and then paused to retrieve a pair of reading spectacles. In the growing queue behind him, Ascott heard one of the pigs sigh.
“A yellow pearl shall be exchanged for a sum of…No, I can’t quite make that out. Let’s see…Two black pearls shall be exchanged for a quark. How many quarks do you have?” The teller looked at Ascott over his glasses.
“Quarkth! Quarkth!” Tacus squawked, sounding like an asthmatic duck.
“I don’t have any quarks.” Ascott wished a freak wave would immediately crash into the building, at best destroying all trace of his ever being here, and at worst giving the spectators something other than the back of his head to stare at.
The teller gave a nasal Hmm and went back to perusing the fine print.
“Never mind, I’ll come back later. With a pig or some chickens or—something.” Ascott stared down the narrow tunnel of light that his vision had reduced to and put the doorway in the centre of it. Marching forward he tripped over a dozing pig, which squealed and sent him stumbling into a woman with a brown hen in a cage, one of which promptly laid an egg on the floor.
The pandemonium of the dockside was a relief after escaping the chaos of the Exco. Tacus sat hunched and silent on Ascott’s shoulder as he gathered up the two dive tanks and wondered if Vole Drakeforth could help him.
Pisces of Fate Page 3