Of all the things about this voyage that didn’t conform to expectations, the most annoying was his perpetual seasickness. It was incredible how inadequate simple nausea could make you feel. It transformed nourishing if slapdash meals into ordeals. It made each moment of idleness excruciating.
And rereading in the grim light of sickness the letters with which Ashie had entrusted him, whose “loss” he had made up for by turning over to Mickey the genuinely important documents he’d also preserved, only reconfirmed his earlier conclusion that they were of no significance. There were five letters: the first (a draft kept as a copy) from Saia, the second and fourth from her, the third and fifth (also copies) from Fumia. Saia’s and Fumia’s were in Kirekuni; hers were in Ferupian, with professional translations into Kirekuni (and receipts) attached. If she’d answered the last one, her response hadn’t reached Okimako before the third of Aout. Such flimsy, petty chronicles! They recorded nothing of the world beyond the cousins’ personal spheres, nor any emotion after the obligatory effusions on the theme of how nice it was to discover one had cousins in a far-off land. He found it hard to believe the Akila women had actually bothered to write down this trivia, much less send it out along the arduous route from Okimako to Kherouge. Through the snowlands north of the passes into the Raw, and across Ferupe, traversing the Cypean diamondtina to reach the western coast some two months later. I go sometimes with Sister Breeze to the market on the seafront, Rae had written, to buy fresh fish for the compound. Do you go to market yourself, cousin Fumia, or do you have servants to do such things? Do you have “starkefish” in Kirekune? It is very tasty. No explanation of the “compound” or her “sisters.” She’d probably attached herself to some crazy crew of eastern religiosos. Her life sounded stultifying. After the Fire of 1212, in the world beyond the curtain of foresight, the details of prayer services (attended in both Kherouge and Okimako: a familial tendency?) seemed laughably quaint.
No, the correspondence had absolutely no significance beyond the coincidence of Crispin’s being linked to both ends of it. On the second day of the storm he nearly shredded the letters; only the thought that they weren’t really his to shred stopped him. He stuffed them at the bottom of his carpetbag. He became so sick that he left his hammock only because it rolled .even more than the decks did.
But on the third morning of the storm he woke to find that the seas had calmed down, and so had his insides. Relief drove from his mind everything he’d contemplated while sick. His physical well-being lasted. It was as if the seasickness had been a sort of baptism, a highly personal induction into the ranks of true sailors.
But euphoria soon gave way once more to frustration. Far from elucidating with the days, the mystery of the Parrot Girl’s stock in trade took on new aspects, until the tramp seemed a floating mass of contradictions. He slowly realized what he would have known from the first, if he had understood Lamaroon, or not been distracted by seasickness and the confusion over his own role on board: of all the men, only the skipper and the first mate, Miiarli, were sailors by profession. The men Crispin had taken for a good-for-nothing crew were actually a kind of cross between passengers and transient hires—just like him. But he couldn’t shake the certainty that unlike him, they were in the know regarding the mystery of what was in the holds. According to Jiharzii, the tramp carried cargo and passengers between Sjintang and Redeuiina on a more or less regular basis. But on this run there were no passengers unless you counted Crispin and the rest—not one of whom admitted to having paid for his passage. The cargo must, therefore, be highly profitable. Crispin had inspected the mast tackle for lowering items into the holds. It looked heavy-duty. He would have bet those cables and pulleys could lift a Gorgonette with no trouble at all. Curiosity consumed him. At last, toward the end of the twenty-day crossing (twelve if there hadn’t been heavy weather, Beiin said, unruffled: one never knew in the wet season, did one?) Crispin asked Jiharzii point-blank what the tackle had lifted.
“It no matter,” the skipper said in his heavily accented Kirekuni, smiling. His teeth were rotted to pointed, fanglike shapes: a horrific sight. “Come and have a drink and teach me some more Ferupian.”
Crispin took the point.
There was no finding out for himself, either, even if he’d been of a mind to risk being caught red-handed, and losing the Lamaroons’ goodwill. Jiharzii didn’t only keep the keys to the holds on his belt, he slept with them.
Crispin realized during one of his miserable, self-recriminatory malaises that he’d become used to learning what was going on in any situation by employing a combination of charm and physical intimidation. These “secret weapons” had worked in the QAF. They’d worked in Okimako. They’d even worked to an extent on board the Oilflower. On the Parrot Girl his methods produced no results: his countrymen were as immune to him as they were to bad weather and to the shabbiness of their environment.
He felt certain that Beiin was neck-deep in the mystery. The genius player might be serving as the ship’s handler; but Crispin knew from his own experience that this alone would never have merited his spacious cabin in the midsection that contained a bunk, locker, and porthole, not just a row of hammocks. He seemed to be a longtime crony of the skipper’s, maybe even his business partner. Crispin hated revealing his ignorance to the man over whom he’d once won an ideological victory. But after being rebuffed by Jiharzii, he had to ask.
And Beiin, too, refused to tell him anything. His refusal wasn’t direct, but as smiling and obtuse as Jiharzii’s had been. It stunned Crispin to the point of rage. Despite the fact that Beiin was a genius player, despite the fact that he daily materialized his daemons, flying them over the sea and around the decks “for exercise,” Crispin had started to trust him in lieu of anyone else who might be a friend. But for the remainder of the crossing he was on his guard against all the Likrekians. He’d never relinquished his knife, or the Creddezi-manufactured projectile revolver he’d taken from a dead Disciple in Okimako. Now he slept with it loaded and in easy reach.
Fore and aft, port and starboard, the ocean stretched away like a gray, wrinkled tablecloth. Nothing about it was interesting once you’d come to terms with its sheer hugeness. The Parrot Girl’s wake lay on the waters like a double line of spilled sugar. The sun shone for an hour a day, if that. The rest of the time rain slanted across the decks, driven by a tireless wind from the south that must have made Tamine and Heletheris’s job painfully demanding.
Since the Lamaroons were dead losses as conversational partners, Crispin volunteered for feeding duty every day as an excuse to spend time with the demogorgons. The two lived in silver-barred cages in opposite corners of the stern, each chained to his gnashing turbine. Crispin couldn’t tell if they knew of each other, let alone whether they communicated, for he couldn’t communicate with them either. At first he thought they were brain-dead from decades of plowing back and forth across the Likreky. But one memorable morning he achieved an instant of communion with Tamine: knowledge, inarticulate but potent, flooded across his brain too quickly for him to assimilate. They were Likreky daemons, captured by poacher-genius players in the mountains of Lamaroon. They were winged serpents, like Beiin’s daemons: Heletheris had mauve skin, Tamine lemon yellow.
The Parrot Girl was a ship hagged by daemons. In addition to the gorgons there were Beiin’s four. Two of the Lamaroon passengers were also genius players of sorts. They had five daemons between them, ranging from one to three feet long. When they materialized them for the general entertainment of the fo’c’sle, the little bat-snakes chittered in scattershot phrases of Lamaroon, causing roars of laughter. Sometimes these gaieties took place after Crispin had gone to sleep; each materialization inevitably woke him, in his hammock in the dark below, as suddenly as if a thunderclap had shattered the air. In this constant prickle-cloud of daemonry, he never knew which beast he was sensing, or how many of them were corporeal at a time.
For all he knew, the secret cargo might, in fact, be daemons.
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br /> But why would anyone want to ship daemons in secrecy? And why to Lamaroon? Daemons were more commonly shipped out of Lamaroon. Put together, the Likreky’s total exports amounted to fewer daemons than passed through a western city like Thavondon in a month—but all the same, they served in a small way to ameliorate Kirekune’s daemon shortage. That was why, in the seventies, Kirekune had finally exerted its military might to take control of the whole Likreky. The poaching industry was now more than ever the only reason the outside world paid any attention to the islands. So what other cargo besides daemons could be profitable enough to take across in the middle of the winter, risking the threat of the Ferupian navy, which was known to attack shipping? True, so far on this crossing the only other vessels they’d sighted were other daemon turbines out of Sjintang or the islands. Perhaps the navy had been crushed along with the Ferupian army. But all the same...
Crispin felt defeated by the inexplicability of it. His nose filled with the fumes of daemons day and night. He was stumped, numbed.
And then one day the coast of Lamaroon appeared: a straight line taking up most of the horizon. Again and again it vanished in the clouds, only to reappear, darker and longer. The Parrot Girl plowed on through the rain. In the afternoon, they sighted a good many other ships. All the men except the mate Miiarli, who was at the wheel, came down onto the fore cargo deck to shout out greetings. Some of the other vessels altered course to pass close enough that Crispin could see their men crowding the rails; some merely hoisted colored flags in mysterious codes, or loosed little daemons like pigeons over the sea. Beiin’s daemons and those of the other genius players met them halfway and danced duets in the air, whirling now down to trail wingtips on the water, now up to the sky.
Crispin climbed to the middeck and leaned out, the wind and rain whipping his face. He’d hoped to feel a pang of connection to this land—he’d thought that the instant Lamaroon came in view, he would feel some heretofore undetected heartstrings pulling taut. The gray little town that clung like a spider to the coast, one leg dipping in the sea, the others trailing off into the jungle: that was Redeuiina. Anuei had been born there, and lived there until Saul Smithrebel arrived on a Ferupian tramp turbine, the youngest and most disconsolate of a tour group come south “for a change of air.” These were the days when Ferupe still controlled the Likreky and the trade routes to Eo Ioria, before the war in the Raw burgeoned into the Great Problem. The other tourists were bourgeois Ferupians, merchants and their wives who viewed foreign travel as a prestigious luxury: Saul was a disreputable circus heir whose father was forcing him to “see the world” before he committed his life to the mud-show circuit. Outraged that the older Smithrebel should try to dissuade him from following in his footsteps, Saul had taken his revenge by bringing home a Lamaroon lover, who would later take her revenge by betraying him over and over. This was the land the Balloon Lady had dreamed of, of whose lore she had divulged fragments to her son. He’d imagined it with the sun shining on the streets and sparkling off the water. But clouds hung low over the land, cutting off the tops of the farthest mountains. Beach-hemmed inlets nibbled a coast of low cliffs. Redeuiina nestled in one of these inlets. Five or six roads radiated inland from the town, across a winter brown strip of patchwork farmland, to the mountains. They did not venture very far up the foothills. Crispin would not have wanted to, either. He was twenty-four: he had no heart for the fabrication of dramas of homecoming. The distant arboreal cover, almost black in its density, gave the impression that night had descended and taken up residence there.
The anchorage at Redeuiina was renowned of old. Two natural rock spurs jutting far out into the waves, cradling between them a beach where ranks of fishing boats lay on the pebbles, acted as the longest piers for deep-draft vessels Crispin had ever seen. Tamine and Heletheris knew their job well. They maneuvered the Parrot Girl, apparently without help, neatly between the shipping into a berth as tight as any Slow Express tie-up. The tramp’s hull crashed against the gigantic logs that had been hung as buffers on the side of the pier. She shook from stem to stern. She backwatered for a second, and the massive turbines stopped. Ropes flew back and forth between the men who had gathered at the edge of the pier and the men on board, who for the first time since Crispin had met them were scurrying about energetically.
The Lamaroons up on the pier didn’t bother with the stairs carved into the pier. Their natural resistance to gravity made them fearless. They leapt down to the cargo decks—since the tide was half-out, it was a distance of fifteen or twenty feet—and rolled, coming to their feet like cats. One or two of them peered curiously up at the middle deck where Crispin was standing, then grinned and waved before dashing off. Crispin turned to leave. In the midst of this bustle, to stand doing nothing would be to look like a fool.
“Don’t move,” Jiharzii said. Crispin turned to see the skipper wearing his gap-toothed, deceptively amicable smile. “You were not hired as a deckhand.”
“But surely everyone should do his part.”
“Pooh, pooh, pooh. There is no need. Stay. Watch. We will be unloading in a matter of time.”
Crispin shrugged, hiding his excitement. The cargo! He would finally see it. “As you will.”
Beiin joined them, emerging from the ladder trap in a showy explosion of wings and tails. Crispin winced.
“How goes it? Good.” The genius player dropped into Lamaroon. Crispin tuned out and watched the flurry of disembarkation until it was over. Some of the men who’d come from Sjintang remained sitting around on the pier, lighting pipes they tried futilely to shield from the rain, as if they were waiting for something. Others—perhaps those who hadn’t really been in the know, after all?—were met by friends. One fellow left with what must have been his family: a drenched, laughing woman and a little boy tanned nearly black, five or six years old. The child, perhaps because he was so small, perhaps because he wore next to nothing and carried a bright purple umbrella, struck Crispin as alien in a way the adult Lamaroons did not. The distinctive web of fine lines that covered his skin stood out paler against his sunburnt arms and legs: he looked as if he had scales. Gripped by a mixture of curiosity and longing, Crispin stared at the hopping, shrieking infant until the boy’s father lifted him to his back and the purple parasol bobbed out of sight down the pier.
Did I look like that when I was the littlest freak in Smithrebel’s? Is that why everyone wanted to stroke me and stare at me? If so, I understand now.
But he’d escaped inheriting the scale-net of lines and he was much lighter than anyone here, save of course the few Kirekunis he’d glimpsed, and a dockhand here and there who could have been a half-breed like himself. Kirekuni half-breeds, though. They made no attempt to hide their stubby tails. One man had even tattooed his with distinctly un-Kirekuni patterns of writhing snake-bat daemons. Everyone on the shore wore clothing that was either black or so dark that, wet, it looked black, as if in deliberate contrast to the pastel affectations of the arriving passengers.
Perhaps there was hope.
Jiharzii tossed his precious keys down to the dockhands with a show of lordly negligence, and the heavy tackle was brought into play. “Ho!” shouted the men at the winches as they strained on the much-mended ropes. “Ho!” The pulleys turned; Crispin held his breath. A large pinewood crate rose into view. On top of it clung the adolescent boy who had gone below to attach the hook, laughing so hard he nearly lost his grip and fell down between the Parrot Girl and the pier. The winch shout dissolved into an uproar; the boy was cuffed and sent below again to do his job without pranking.
“Ho!”
Crate after crate after crate.
Not a whiff of daemons.
“Ho-o! Huuuh!”
The Parrot Girl had risen some three feet in the water before the rain grew heavier and Jiharzii decided to knock off for the day. He, Crispin, and Beiin descended from the middeck, stepped carefully around the edges of the yawning holds, and climbed the bulwarks to jump to the steps—a maneu
ver in which the paunched, fiftyish captain demonstrated surprising agility. Up on the pier, in the tumbledown fortress of crates that had been piled higher than a man’s head, several Lamaroon dockhands loitered. They stared at Crispin. Crispin stared back. He had his knife in his belt and his revolver inside his jacket. He was near the end of his tolerance for strangeness.
With growled orders and blows administered to the nearest ears, Jiharzii sent the dockhands about their business. “I am paying them by the hours,” he explained to Crispin, grinning. “They are trying to take longer. I have told them to bring the truck.”
“A truck?” Crispin said disbelievingly. “Here?”
“How else are we to transport the cargo to the warehouse?”
“Your warehouse?” Crispin struggled to recover. “I didn’t know you were in business.”
“I am not; my current employer is. All the wisest seamen join forces with businessmen.” More teeth appeared. “Together we hold sway over land and sea!”
Crispin shrugged. All along the pier he could see cargo being loaded and unloaded, passengers trooping ashore, vessels casting off, crowds of locals waving farewells. The racket was as loud as it had been at Sjintang. Seagulls cried, bells screamed, waves slapped against stone and wood; shouts in the foreign language rang out over the thudding of crates and sacks hitting stone, and the whipcrack and rattle of loading tackle. Beiin and Jiharzii were holding an unintelligible conversation. Crispin affected to pay no attention, but he knew they were talking about him, if only from their sidewise glances. He wanted to get away. But he didn’t know where he would go. He’d made the decision to come here when he was drunk to the point of maudlin sentimentality, and it had been a mistake.
The Daemon in the Machine Page 30