Delay as he may, it was not long before Adam found himself at the aftcastle. There, he lingered on the threshold, emboldening himself with deep breaths and prayers, not for himself but for Magdalynn. Only once the pastor’s son had thoroughly pleaded that there be nothing to fear—had reasoned that it’d been years since any real harm had come to the girl, and that their abuser wouldn’t even be there—did he dare to bring his knuckles to the cabin door. It was soft wood, well preserved despite its age, and it rang like a bell as he gently rapped. Once. Twice. A voice called from the other side. The door swung open.
Adam smiled at the big, blue eyes watching him as he stepped within, and Magdalynn grinned right back. She looked unharmed as far as he could tell, aside from weather burns from the sun and the wind and the ocean. The smuggler had even fitted her in new roughspuns. Or was that the bishop? he wondered. His vision drifted from the girl to the dolorous chamber.
He had expected a nightmare, yet nothing about the cabin seemed the same as it had that evening. The room was awash with light from the star-side window, and half a dozen candles diffused an aroma like rose and jasmine. Had it been like that night, all around him would have been hidden in shadows, a single lamp the only light flickering on the captain’s table, illuminating the stained cot and the ropes hanging over it. But there was none of that: just a little table and a pair of cushioned stools and fresh sheets and two holes bored into the walls where Venicci’s tools for torture had been removed. And the bishop, too. He was sitting on a stool between the table and the cot, hunched over a wide box, huffing his a pipe like he might play a tune. He stopped as soon as he saw Adam.
Ba’al roused to his feet and spread his arms open, looking too much like David in his traveling garb. “Our guest has finally arrived,” he said, gesturing for Magdalynn to fill a couple goblets for them. “No, not water, you silly girl. The good wine. Yes, that’s the one.” They waited while she poured two cups from a bottle branded God’s Fingers Vineyard. The vintage flowed sweetly, white-gold as sunrise, though when Adam brought the pewter to his lips, it tasted to him dry and heavy.
“Sit,” the bishop ordered. The pastor’s son sat, and Magdalynn resumed her place by the door. Ba’al continued, “I’ve been wanting to talk with you for some time, my son. I’ve heard some terrible things from the crew. Is it true, what they’re saying, that you’ve been hurting yourself and thinking sinful things?”
Adam drank till his cup was dry. “If I tell you, will you promise nothing bad will happen to Mags? Or to Adnihilo?”
The bishop gave a glance to Magdalynn, and she filled the Messah’s goblet while he answered. “Of course, I promise. Why would I want to hurt any of you?”
The pastor’s son stared, ice-eyed and incredulous.
Ba’al sighed. “Have some faith. You don’t trust me, I know. And why would you? You’ve witnessed the darkness that possessed me recently. But I beseech you, Adam. We both desire mercy and justice and love. I beg your forgiveness and wish to make amends. Will you heed my proposition?”
Adam nodded, no more trusting the clergyman than he had a second before, but what choice did he have? Would he or one of the others be given to the smuggler if he refused? And what was it he just said? ‘possessed?’ An image of burning Babylon emerged inside his mind, all those Messaii soldiers murdering and pillaging. He takes me for a fool. The whole of the church—no—of the homeland must be possessed, then.
“You think this is trick, don’t you?” asked Ba’al as if he’d heard those words spoken aloud. “We shall remedy that soon.” He tucked his hands under the box atop the table, turned it around so Adam could see inside.
He looked and saw the bishop was right. At first, he did not know what to make of the strange case. The exterior was plain, unfinished wood, probably carved from left-over lumber, yet the interior was lined with plush layers of cotton folded carefully about an odd assortment of contents: hollow steel rods, odd wooden clubs, a pair of scales and measures, paper satchels full of black dust. And there was one object packed beneath the others. Ba’al told him to dig deeper, that it was the bottom most parcel that he wanted to show. Adam unfolded the cloth.
It was his father’s sword, scabbard and all, the blade laid bare, polished and oiled. He’d never seen it in such a state before. The steel almost seemed to have a glow of its own—a white, pure aura—and the hilt had thankfully been left alone. It was the same old leather Adam had known since he was a boy, and it still had the wear-marks where his father’s fingers had been. He wanted terribly to hold the weapon in his hands, but he dared not. To touch it now would be somehow sacrilege.
Again, the bishop answered as if he’d listened to the young Messah’s thoughts, “Go ahead, my son. It belongs to you. Your father wanted you to have it.”
Cautiously, the pastor’s son put a hand into the box, then onto the wood and leather grip, then slowly he retrieved the sword before doing the same with the scabbard. Minutes died during this process, and across that time, Adam felt his heart finally calming, falling into a sense of nostalgic melancholy.
The Messah drained his cup of wine. Ba’al called for another, and Magdalynn, smiling, filled both their goblets.
“Can we tell him now?” she asked before returning to her post.
At that, the bishop grinned so wide his cheeks squished against his glistening, amber eyes. “Why don’t you tell him yourself? He’d like that better, I bet.”
Her sun-freckled face lit up like the sun. “He’s going to rescue us from the captain. Me, you, and the Impii. We’re going to the other side of the sea where we’ll never have to see him again.”
“Tell him when,” Ba’al added.
“Soon. Very soon.”
Adam did not reply. He couldn’t. His tongue was dumb and his head beating like an Impii drum from a time when Babylon was still a living city, a time when he knew what was truth and what was falsehood. He needed clarity, yet every experience since his old world ended had become thoroughly blurred to the point of obscurity. His own memories seemed absurd to him now compared to those words he yearned to believe. He twisted his head to glance at Magdalynn and felt the sting of the raw scar, his last lucid memory.
“You marked us as slaves,” he said to the bishop and pointed to the brand on the right of his neck.
Ba’al cocked his head, excited, and said, “Did I? I can’t blame you for thinking so. Not after what you’ve been through. But if you believe that brand makes you a slave, think again.” He grabbed the bottom of his scarlet shirt, untucked it from his trousers, and exposed his chest: lean and hairless with a scar on his right breast identical to Adam’s and Adnihilo’s. “It’s the Crest of the King,” Ba’al explained. “It’s to keep us safe from Venicci’s ilk. You see, he’s made pacts with the Devil and can influence a man’s soul—if it’s unprotected, that is.”
“You were serious, then, when you said that you were…” The pastor’s son couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Possessed?” answered the bishop. The very notion was ridiculous.
Is it, though? How else to describe the smuggler’s evil than demonic? Who else but the devil would massacre a church?
Ba’al replaced his shirt. “Yes. I’ve been held to that villain’s whim for some time now. Met him on the docks while I was on mission at our Gautaman chapel. I didn’t know what happened until after he had me, but by then it was too late. He bewitched me into hiring his ship and hooked me deeper with opium. Speaking of,” Ba’al reached beside his stool and took up a lamp and pipe, filled the bowl with a dark, pungent tar, and with a set of pinions he sparked the lamp and began huffing clouds of bone-white smoke. “You’ll excuse the habit. The Crest can keep a man safe in spiritual matters, but poppies are a mortal vice.” He sucked again on the end of his pipe and exhaled, staring glossy-eyed through a veil of white fog. “So, are you ready to hear my proposition yet?”
Adam opened his mouth and choked on the smoke, chased it down with wine. Do I believe it? he aske
d himself. Even with the brand for evidence, Adam found the tale hard to digest. It was too incredible; it left too many questions. Yet if it would save him and Adnihilo and Magdalynn, didn’t that make it true enough? It’s the best chance I’ve got. He nodded for the clergyman to continue.
Through thick opiate mist, Bishop Ba’al whispered, “I want you to help me kill Venicci. The time and place are being arranged as we speak, we’re just waiting on our man to give the signal. This is your chance. You could put an end to that degenerate, purge him from the world with your father’s sword. You could be a saviour. The girl has told me what you promised her, Adam. This is your chance to make it come true.”
†
I’ll do it, thought the pastor’s son, rocking with the waves and the sway of his hammock. He’d sequestered himself below deck after departing the captain’s cabin; and there he stayed, suspended, cradled in itchy cloth while the hours of the day became the hours of the evening, David’s sword pressed close to his heart. The weight of it calmed him, kept the shaking at bay as he prayed to the Lord for strength. Sometimes, when he whispered the words aloud, he felt his raw brand rub against the canvas and he recalled what the bishop had said.
It was the Crest of Kings, of Lord of lords, of their holy God crowned on his Jasper Throne in Heaven. During his seclusion in the belly of the carrack, Adam had finally remembered the early scriptures where such a mark was described whose like was never recorded but whose meaning was divine: a secret sign known only through revelation and shown only in history to the ancient Tsaazaari kings—Messai’s great forerunners from before the conqueror saints.
And if it is the Crest, truly, he contemplated, then who is this bishop? What does it mean for me?
The only way to know was to kill Venicci, free himself and the others and all of the smuggler’s future slaves. He hugged the sword tighter to his chest, squeezed his eyes shut till, dreaming, he imagined the yellow-orange glow of Babylon. Only, it was not the light of the city ablaze, just the flames of the hearth and of the candles placed about David’s cell. They were warm, those flames. They were exactly as Adam remembered them from when he was young enough to sit on his father’s lap and listen as he read from one of the hundred tomes shelved within the office. Gone. Burned to the ground. Yet there they were all around him, books transcribed and bound by the hands of a retired soldier, a blanketed plank bed, a rocking chair brought from somewhere across the ocean with the half-finished quilt folded upon its seat.
He looked around for his father, but it was only Adam rocking in the chair and Magdalynn sitting on his knee. He was reading to her of the Witch of Spring and the Winter Wolf, of Mother Merihem and her pagan children who were lured into the north-western woods where they became ill with depravity and madness. His own father had told him the story when he was a young boy, and as it did then, it sent a chill down his spine. Down to the marrow. The old witch’s rhyme:
“Come along young ones. Under the moon will we play. Till day breaks again, a naked reverie. Blushed unabashed, flesh flushed the color of newborn. Wild as the briar, as the beasts, as we are. Reborn!”
Adam shivered in the darkness without ever realizing that they were his words fogging the office thick and white as opium smoke. And when finally he did notice, his words were no longer alone. Long and eager breaths sounded from the edges of the room where shadows were thickest—panting that became laughter, raspy and familiar. Adam jumped out of his chair clutching Magdalynn with one hand, reaching with the other for his father’s sword. Nothing. He groped around his hip, on the chair, on the floor, but the weapon was nowhere. All the while, the heaving seemed to get closer and closer. Then the girl screamed and bit and fought and cried for Adam to save her from the monster as she broke from him and darted into the darkness. He called after her, heard the laughter in response, and pursued—his heart pounding against the knot in his stomach as he scoured the room till he found her: a listless mass crumpled under the bed. He pulled her out by the leg, and she was pale as his breath—panting, heaving.
A moment after, there was laughter again, and the pastor’s son clasped his gaunt, yellow hands over his mouth. Splintered nails traced the crevasses of his jaundiced skin and over his wormy lips, caught in his black-thicket beard, him cackling all the while, releasing white ghasts the shape of demons between his fingers. The feeling lingered. A euphoric malice, a malicious bliss.
When Adam awoke, it was to the rock of the boat and the deck coming fast from below. He landed flat on his back. The impact knocked the wind from his lungs and sprung his eyes open to the hammock hanging upended above him. Jeers came from all around. It was night now, and most the crew had fled here to mid-deck to drink and gamble and catch a few hours’ rest. The gang surrounding Adam were such kinds of men: surly and dirty in soiled sailor’s linens, greasy haired, wearing oily hats, each with a flask or flagon in his hand, and all of them hunched around an overturned trough playing dice cut from a dead man’s phalanges. They glanced inanely in the direction of Adam’s fall then turned back to their game—all but the one squatting closest to the pastor’s son whose back was turned to the stinking manure lanterns and could see in the dark the bulge beneath his tunic and the fresh, damp blotch.
The crewman cried between bucked teeth, “Oi, lookie here! The bishop’s skivvy’s been dream’n again!” That caught their attention, and the whole room looked to see the young Messah turn the color of overripe peaches. Adam clambered to his feet. His father’s sword was still pressed against his chest, but it could not protect him from the roaring chortle or the humiliation he felt as he fled for the surface. “Bishop’s Bitch,” they called after him, “Pretty Skivvy,” and “Captain’s Cunt.”
The pastor’s son could hardly see for all the tears in his eyes by the time he reached the upper deck. He could hardly breath, mucus coating the rear of his throat. He choked and spat and crawled through the hatch into the rain. It chilled him to the bone, but he was glad to feel his clothes soak through until the warm, wet blotch vanished into his garments. Then he remembered the precious steel in his hands, and he ran for shelter where some rain-catchers sat, under the central mast and beneath a tarpaulin.
It was noisy and cold below the folded canvas. There were no walls to lessen the bitter wind and no sound except the patter of rain and an incessant drip into the surrounding barrels. Adam thought the lot of them welcome as he wedged himself among the driest wood.
“What are you doing out here?” asked a voice from the dark.
The pastor’s son jumped—bumped his head on the canvas—his heart stopped his breath till his eyes adjusted; it was only Adnihilo hiding from the rain, crammed between catchers like a caged animal.
Adam answered half in a daze, “What am I doing here? Why in Hell are you—”
“Is that David’s sword? So it’s true.”
“There are rumors already?”
“What else is there to do but talk and drink?” Adnihilo reached behind a barrel and retrieved a bottle: small, green, round, and opaque. He brought it below his nose and wrinkled his face before taking a swig and passing off to Adam. The Messah didn’t hesitate. He drank down a mouthful of foul liquor and found his mood lifted. He hadn’t noticed the megrim until then.
He took another swig to take off the edge and said, “Where’d you find this? It’s worse than kumasi.”
“If I tell you, will you tell me?”
“About the sword?”
Adnihilo nodded, and so Adam agreed and told the half-blood all he knew about the bishop’s scheming. He told him of the brand on Ba’al chest, how it matched those on their necks and protected them from the captain’s black magic. Then he repeated Ba’al’s promise to save them and Magdalynn—that’d he’d given him permission to keep his father’s weapon. Only after that did he divulge the mutiny and the treachery he’d agreed to play. The witch’s son sat with head cocked in uncertainty.
“You don’t believe me,” Adam sighed.
“I don’t
believe him. This is another trick. It’s a lie.”
“And so what if it is?” The Messah spoke half to himself. And so what if it is?
Then they sat in silence, neither having more to say as the rain became light and broke through the clouds—not day, but moon light. Its glow shone azure about the shadows on the ocean and honey-gold on the carrack deck.
“Kill the boy,” the half-blood muttered, the tension all but vanished from his voice. “You’re right. Who cares if its true if it gets us free. And I’m through being a coward. If this is our only chance. It’s what Cain and Jez would’ve wanted.”
“Father too,” said Adam, “and I’m sorry, for earlier. I should’ve told you. What you’ve heard about what happened to me. It’s all—”
Adnihilo’s hand shot through the twilight and snared the breast of the pastor’s son’s shirt. “It doesn’t matter,” he uttered, his free hand grabbing the heart of his own dirty roughspuns. “We’re brothers from now on. Even if everyone else is gone, even if there isn’t a home to go back to, we don’t have to go through this alone.”
“God save us, then. Does that mean you’ll come with me? To face the captain?”
“Just tell me when.”
“I’m not sure. All I know is that we’re waiting on a signal. I assumed someone would come find me when—”
From above, the warning bell’s clang rang loud and drown out the brothers of Babylon. It came in frantic bursts, and between they heard the watchman in the crow’s nest cursing a storm. Gooseflesh spread over the pastor’s son’s neck. He knew that in seconds the hatch would surge and the deck would turn into a whirlpool of the smuggler’s men. By then, their revenge would arrive too late. The path to the cabin would be made impassible, and they would likely be caught and hanged.
He had no time, no choice but to say that this was the signal they were waiting for, that the mutiny had begun, and that someone had started without them. So they rushed, out from among the barrels toward the rear of the ship where the aftcastle stood utterly unguarded. The crew roared behind them, and the din of iron cutlasses against wood and canvas and flesh sent Adnihilo sprinting for the door—unlocked—as Adam drew his sword, and they stole inside.
Salt, Sand, and Blood Page 14