The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  Taryn was glad that her boat had none of the sidhe aboard. But even with exposure to them at a distance she became more able to see how little Shift was like them.

  At evening, in the harbours, just about everyone would go swimming. Even Jacob. In the water the strange fan of force that was attached to his lower back became visible, the Hands Shift would refresh every day, simply sitting behind Jacob with his palms spread in the small of Jacob’s back, showing no sign of effort, or cost, only serene absorption.

  They’d swim in the sunshine. Jane would tread water with her friends, face to face, talking about this and that. Kernow would sit in the shallows and pour water over his white crown. Shift would shadow Jacob, who would swim up and down, determined and diligent, always a bit looser and stronger when he got out afterwards. When a week had gone by he was able to sit for short stretches of the day, and by the time they were on the flatlands he could walk for a few miles beside the river with Taryn.

  On these walks they were able to talk.

  Jacob claimed to be neither happy nor sorry about being Taken. He said he didn’t feel rescued. He supposed he felt not excluded anymore. ‘But mostly I’m managing my pain. Shift wants me to do my best with just the Hands and exercise till we get where we’re going, where there’s someone with opium. The sidhe don’t use it. He has a friend who makes medicines for the Taken. I told him I don’t want opium; I want magic. But he doesn’t really get it. He knows absolutely nothing about chronic pain. He’s only ever been a witness to it. He just shifts away from illness and injury.’

  ‘His Hands are a magic.’

  ‘Yes, but he says someone more practised at treating people could do better with them. He’s taking me to someone like that. He says I have to be patient, and improve along the way, and that I should think of magic as just another option, like opium, with pros and cons.’

  ‘Did he explain the pros and cons?’

  ‘No, he seemed shy about it. Or squeamish. Or ashamed.’ Jacob registered Taryn’s look of concern and reassured her. ‘Don’t worry. I’m past taking whatever I can get.’

  Taryn took his arm before she said the next thing she had to say. She didn’t want him to stumble. ‘Do you have any guesses about what’s in the Firestarter?’

  ‘It’s a scroll box, so I’m betting it’s a manuscript of some kind,’ Jacob said. He didn’t stumble. Taryn was a little miffed that he had broken the spell too. ‘You broke the spell,’ she said.

  He frowned at her. ‘What spell?’

  ‘The one that stopped us thinking about what might be in the box.’

  He continued frowning for a moment, then laughed, and made a soft ‘huh’ sound. Then he said, ‘The Demons are expecting something like the Rosetta Stone. That’s why they have cryptographers as well as coders at the server farm.’

  Taryn nodded. This made sense.

  ‘It might be an actual stone tablet. That’s why they’ve been burning libraries to find it. The spell of concealment works on them too. They can talk about what’s in the box, but they’re not able to locate it any more than we can. If the box is flammable, presumably the tablet inside it can survive the fire.’

  Taryn said, ‘Stone calcifies.’

  Jacob looked thoughtful, but only said, ‘We’ve got ahead of our boat. Let’s swim out to intercept it.’

  There were still several hours of sunlight remaining. Enough for them to dry their clothes. They waded out over the clean shingle until it gave under their feet. Then they cast themselves into the current and swam diagonally upstream to meet the boat.

  Taryn got up in the night and hung out over the side of the boat to urinate. The sound of her piss hitting the water was loud. Even a distant soprano owl stopped to listen.

  The other boats at the anchorage were dark and silent. Taryn could see prone shapes making walls around the hearths of campfires on the beach. All the fires were flameless, and smokeless, their coals furred with ash and only softly orange.

  A golden light appeared upstream and gradually assumed the form of the largest barge, its silk-curtained pavilions aglow like paper lanterns. It went past the flotilla and encampment midstream, silent. It took its light behind the reeds and low trees of the next bend, until it was a barely discernible patch of colour in the greys and blacks of the night, and then not even that.

  That was the last time Taryn saw the barge before they reached the rivermouth. Neve, aboard that barge, was at the place of the Moot days before they were, talking to her people, shaping her plans, stiffening her resolve.

  It was much warmer when they reached the sea, two thousand miles from the Island of Apples. They were closer to the equator. The inlet that the Senisteingh emptied into was, in its upper reaches, wide branching channels of deep green water bordered by broadleaf trees dripping with flowering vines.

  Shift used the tiller to work them into the entrance of one channel, and Taryn caught a glimpse of a lake with an island in its middle. The island had the same vine tangles and blossoms, but also seemed to have dwellings all the way up its steep, conical sides. Hundreds of houses, honey-coloured sandstone with copper roofs bright with verdigris. It wasn’t a city, but it looked densely settled and permanent.

  Shift let their boat brush through the hanging hibiscus bushes at the mouth of the channel. Branches bent and snapped back. Whole blooms plopped into the water. Jane and the other women put their hands across their mouths and stood very still, their eyes straining to look where Shift was looking. His lips were moving. He was counting. Taryn saw that the only thing he might be counting was the dozen or so flag-topped wands of bamboo planted in the sand of the small beach of the island. Flags of different colours, like livery.

  Taryn picked herself a yellow hibiscus blossom and tucked its stalk behind her ear. Its petals rested satiny and cold on her cheek.

  Shift finished counting and hauled back and forth on the tiller. The boat freed itself from the noisy foliage and began to move on a skewed course back into the main current of the river. The other people on the boat uncovered their mouths and relaxed, but not completely, for once the boat had worked its way nearer to the widely scattered flotilla, Taryn saw that on all the other vessels, near and far, the tall, poised people were standing and gazing their way. Their regard was palpable, a feeling close to hostile attention, but more concentrated than plain hostility.

  Taryn sidled over to Jane. ‘What was that island?’

  ‘The Tacit,’ Jane whispered. ‘He seemed to want to see who was visiting there.’

  ‘The flags?’

  ‘They each represent one personage. The sidhe fly colours for some purposes. Many of the boats have them, you will have noticed.’

  Taryn had thought the flags were decoration, but since the colour combinations were different for each boat, she should have guessed. Neve’s barge had many colours, in combinations of four: dark blue, light blue, amber, purple; bone white, pure white, light blue, pale lemon; dark green, dark blue, wine red, black. Three personages with four colours each. Their own boat had just four colours, bone white, pure white, pale lemon, olive green—which suggested to Taryn that Shift’s colours and Neve’s declared their relationship, the difference being his olive and her light blue.

  He had colours, so he did count as one of them.

  Jane was explaining that the flags were displayed at the landing place on the island as a kind of warning. ‘Because adjacent houses don’t allow visits at the same time. The flags show which house has visitors.’

  ‘But they were all watching Shift like hawks. Why would they care that he checked the flags?’

  ‘I think maybe they don’t have faith in his grasp of protocol. Because he doesn’t visit the Tacit. It’s always Neve who visits.’

  Taryn told Jane that Shift had said visiting the Tacit was one of their goals.

  ‘He means to take you?’

  Taryn nodded. ‘To visit one of those houses. Yes.’

  Jane looked over at Shift, who was leaning on the till
er so that the boat was side-on to the current. If they kept going that way they’d be putting themselves on a slow spinning course through the flotilla.

  Jane said, ‘They’re not houses. They’re tombs. He doesn’t visit his grandmother because he doesn’t remember her. She was already in her tomb when he last came back to himself.’

  The Tacit was a graveyard. But why would it be important that there should be no visits to adjacent houses? Did the sidhe never like to be caught in a show of feeling?

  Henriette rushed past Taryn and Jane and grabbed the gaff from its rack on the deckhouse wall. She strode back, hefting it, and said, ‘This is no way to be sailing a boat.’ She posted herself at the bow, ready to repel any other vessel that came too close.

  The boat spun and lurched, vaguely seaward, vaguely towards the far shore of the inlet. The water beyond the channel was pure green over sand. Shift was going to put them aground, and seemed not to care whether it was bow or stern on.

  A boat loomed up, bigger than their own, bow sharp and braced with copper sheeting.

  Henriette clambered to the port side and levelled her gaff. Shift swung the tiller the other way. Their boat straightened out, steered into the current and slipped under the bow of the other boat with only inches to spare. Henriette was left facing empty water. She looked surprised then incensed and turned to glare at Shift, who was once again turning the boat side-on to the current to slow its forward progress. He seemed completely unfazed and Taryn decided that what had happened was exactly what he thought would happen and that he’d judged speed, force, the position of the boats and the strength of the current perfectly, and that doing this was so normal for him that he wasn’t even registering Henriette’s glare, or the staring figures along the rails of several boats still in their path.

  He did it twice more, slightly differently each time, once halting their spin, the second time reversing the spin altogether, so that the boat wasn’t where it otherwise would have been. Taryn couldn’t imagine how he knew when to start his turn, or how much alteration he should make. The whole thing looked chaotic, almost comical. It reminded her of Buster Keaton’s The General, and what that delicate, deadpan man could do with trains and carriages, tracks, trestles and cannons. And then she realised the sidhe were glaring not because they thought Shift was a danger to shipping, but possibly because his solution of how to get across the channel was both unseemly and something none of them were able to do.

  As they righted from their last near-miss Jacob gave a whoop of delight, and Shift started. Only then did he seem to realise he was being watched. He straightened his body, and the boat’s course, and tipped droll salutes in several directions.

  Henriette pursed her lips and went to restore the gaff to its rack.

  The censorious sidhe all turned away, and began as if by simultaneous assent to ignore him.

  Their boat swung and backed and zigzagged on its way, untouched and unregarded.

  The beach they were aiming for had a strip of groomed grass above it—a sloped lawn covered in three rows of canoes, hull-down above the tideline.

  Shift put them aground and everyone got out of the boat by sliding down the tilting deck and wading to shore carrying their belongings on top of their heads. The able-bodied carried Kernow and Jacob. Jacob was dead set against being carried. He turned sullen and tried to climb over the rail until Shift yelled at him. ‘Jacob! You wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t thought you could be told what to do!’

  Once they were onshore, Shift stalked off along the row of canoes to find two he liked.

  Taryn whispered to Jacob, ‘I guess he’s chosen us for our opposite virtues. My demon-attracting intransigence, and your ability to follow orders.’

  Jacob didn’t look at her, only reminded her, ‘He didn’t choose you.’

  Half an hour later Taryn was helping paddle the larger of the two canoes. Henriette was taking a break. She and Kernow were sitting in the middle, passengers. Taryn’s canoe was following the smaller one, paddled solely and energetically by Shift, his paddle digging into the sea on one side then the other to steer a course along the shore. Jacob was in Shift’s canoe.

  Taryn glared at the two ahead of them. Henriette watched her with sympathy. ‘Your friend is like a new dog who thinks it must usurp the old one to earn its master’s love. The master never cares which is the stronger dog, he only wants less snarling.’

  ‘Jacob isn’t really like that. He’s not petty or irritable.’

  Kernow said, ‘People don’t have patience when they’re in pain. And your friend is afraid of where he’s found himself.’

  ‘You’re more used to it, Taryn,’ Jane said. She was breathless from paddling. ‘Besides, the Sidh suits you.’

  It was true. Even allowing for the pain Jacob did seem unnerved by the vast, sparsely populated spaces. The whole river journey had confronted even Taryn with a humbling surfeit of space. But Jacob was finding things outlandish. She could tell by the way he watched everyone: the easy nudity of the sidhe and humans, young and old; the mix of the ceremonial and free in everything sidhe. Even the peculiarity of choosing a canoe, tipping over the ones you liked to find their paddles stored underneath—all of them there to be taken, things made for everybody’s use. The trust in that. The trust and generosity, the rigid rules of politeness, and different rules of privacy—the endless, unyielding foreignness of all of it. Jacob wasn’t whole and healthy enough to cope with it. He was used to a measure of mastery—being fit and capable, knowing stuff—and the only clear mastery in this place was in the censorious stiffness of the sidhe. Shift’s skills playing pinball with their boat across the breadth of the flotilla somehow didn’t count.

  Shift led them out the rivermouth. The main current carried them past the shore of a long sand spit, forested at its base and, towards its tip, covered in grassy dunes. The flotilla had mostly anchored there, just offshore, a collection of as many as five hundred boats. There were encampments on the lagoon shore of the spit, threads of dry smoke from campfires, tents with wide-open awnings erected on low timber platforms heaped with cushions and quilts. There were horses tethered to picket lines with their noses in heaped hay.

  The party paddled out to sea until the river current let them go. They turned towards the setting sun. Taryn flinched away from the glare and saw the seaward shore of the spit. It too was crowded with tents, and large areas sheltered by walls and roofs of light and semi-transparent fabric, probably silk. Out in the low surf, figures perched on bamboo fishing platforms, a single sidhe on each, sitting like tennis umpires, but with long rods and lines.

  Someone in Taryn’s boat spoke to her sharply about keeping up and she turned back and concentrated on her paddle digging into the water. She kept her head low and wished for sunglasses. Sweat trickled down her sides and back.

  An intense clear orange light filled the sky. She looked at her hands, gold against the dark blue water, and the flicker of pallor nearby where seabirds were flying in to raft on the low swells, thousands of floating birds that made a bristle on the rolling sea.

  She noticed that the setting sun was on her left hand. The Senisteingh emptied to the north. They had travelled downriver to warmer climes. So that meant that the Sidh she knew was in a southern hemisphere, and her world and it weren’t mapped onto one another in any way with which she could orient herself. Even if she had the freedom of the gates, she could never know where on Earth any gate would take her. It was a deeply unsettling thought. She had ridden a river, she thought, as far as Greenland and this offshore evening breeze was wrapping her in the scent of a subtropical rainforest.

  The sun went down. Taryn put up her head again and forged on after Shift’s distant canoe.

  The great bay they were in was full of islands, some quite near, others farther off, all standing on a rosy sea, the nearer misty blue silhouettes, the farther cobalt blue.

  They were now out of the wash of the river. Shift cut towards the shore. Taryn’s boat followed Shift’s
past the westward headland and a cove was revealed, a beach with four jetties, cleared land, pasture, plantations of fruiting trees, and a little settlement of timber houses, with streets and a collection of bigger buildings that looked communal.

  Taryn stopped paddling and had Kernow point out landmarks. ‘Those are storehouses,’ he said. ‘That one is a corn silo. That’s a cider house. That’s a bathhouse. That’s a meeting hall.’

  As they came in to a jetty, Taryn saw that the waterfront and streets were populated by her people. Maybe thousands of them—none of them following a sidhe, or standing silently and expectantly alongside a sidhe, or in any way waiting on the notice of a sidhe.

  Their canoe bumped against the jetty. Henriette and Susan held it while the rest of them climbed out. Then Jane and Taryn knelt on the sun-blistered timber and held the canoe still for the last two. Henriette took its rope and did what Shift was doing, walking the canoe alongside the jetty and up into the shallows. Then she doubled back onto the sand to pull her canoe to a place beside others, whose prows were buried in the low flaxes at the top of the beach.

  Taryn could smell cornbread, and roasting meat, and a nutty aromatic baking scent she identified as socca, the Mediterranean chickpea flatbread.

  They made their way up to a paved square thronged with people and found the source of the cooking smells—several rows of beehive ovens. Taryn watched a woman pass a small bundle of flax yarn to a man at one oven and accept half a large round of socca. The woman wrapped it in a cloth and walked on. There were other exchanges. Fish for bread, avocados for bread.

  ‘They’re bartering,’ Taryn said.