City of Pearl

by Alys Clare

  They had pinned all their hopes on the slim young man being aboard the St James as she left Concarneau to begin her long journey south. So when she put in at Bordeaux, Malice-striker simply waited behind a small island in the estuary until she set sail again for Bilbao and then the more westerly ports of the north coast of Spain. Jack lost his temper and raged at Thorfinn – and Hrype, who seemed mysteriously to have changed position so that now he supported the old man with few, if any, protests – that they must find a way to make absolutely sure they were pursuing the right ship. And Thorfinn simply said, ‘We are. Even if we were not, it is of no matter, since we—’

  ‘We know where he is going,’ Jack finished for him, the words uttered in a cruel parody of the old man’s speech.

  They had kept the St James in view, which was not difficult since Malice-striker was a much faster craft. They mirrored her movements as she hopped from port to port, always hanging back from a direct challenge but never far away.

  And, eventually, when she put in at Bilbao, Thorfinn stirred himself from a very long silence during which he had done nothing but sit huddled in his cloak staring out at the St James.

  Extracting a long arm, he pointed to the St James. ‘Watch,’ he said to Hrype and Jack. ‘Watch very carefully.’

  Jack stood elbow to elbow with Hrype and both strained their eyes across the short stretch of sea between Malice-striker and the quay where the St James had tied up.

  Cargo was unloaded and barrels set in neat stacks along the quayside. One or two passengers disembarked: a fat man, an elderly woman with a girl.

  And then a slender figure walked swiftly down the gangplank, jumping the last few feet as if he couldn’t wait to be on dry land and hurrying off in the direction of a low line of structures – an inn, a stall selling hot pies, a couple of warehouses – at the far end of the quay.

  Jack turned to look at Hrype. ‘Was that him?’ He could barely bring himself to believe it.

  Hrype smiled. ‘Yes.’ Then, his smile broadening, he added softly, ‘Infuriating, isn’t it, when logic and sense have to give way to following what the heart says?’

  But Jack wasn’t quite ready to admit the truth. ‘If it really is him, what’s he doing here? I thought Thorfinn said something about a river coming out of the mountains, and I can see nothing like that.’

  Thorfinn had left his perch and come to join them. He had heard Jack’s question. ‘Wait,’ he said calmly. ‘I do not believe this is our young man’s final destination.’

  He pointed across the busy harbour to where a track ran along behind it, between it and the main settlement of the port. There was quite a lot of traffic on the track. ‘It is the east–west route,’ he went on. ‘If I am right, our young man will turn east.’

  It was barely a surprise when, some time later, the young man’s slim, cloaked figure slipped away from the harbour buildings and set off along the track.

  Going eastwards.

  Soon afterwards, when Malice-striker’s crew had set to the oars to take her along the coast after him, Jack felt Thorfinn’s eyes on him. Without turning round, he muttered, ‘We still cannot be certain he is our man.’

  And Thorfinn just chuckled.

  Now, Jack sensed his two companions come to stand either side of him.

  ‘This is the place that I remember,’ Thorfinn said, not for the first time. ‘I am more sure of it with each detail that I spot. We sailed up there’ – he indicated the river estuary – ‘and I made us go on into the darkness, for all that my crew were unwilling, fearing the echoes, the silence, the sense that some alien consciousness within was aware of us, inspecting us and perhaps not welcoming us.’ He sighed. ‘Of all the hundreds, thousands of places I have been to, it is this one that has always haunted me.’

  ‘Perhaps now you know why,’ Hrype said softly.

  Thorfinn grunted his agreement. Nodding in satisfaction, he stumped off up the deck to where Einar and the crew were preparing to lower the ship’s boat.

  But Jack was not satisfied. ‘Explain,’ he said curtly to Hrype.

  There was a silence as Hrype appeared to collect his thoughts. Then he said, ‘I will try, Jack, but you will have to set aside your ruthless insistence on not accepting anything that you cannot verify with your own senses.’

  ‘That is the only way to the truth!’ Jack protested. ‘It—’

  ‘Do you want to hear the answer to your question?’ Hrype demanded.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very well. Listen, then.’ Hrype paused. ‘When Thorfinn was here before, this place made a deeper impression upon him than he realized, and it was only afterwards that he understood this. It – the place refused to be forgotten, if you like.’

  ‘Rot,’ Jack muttered.

  Hrype chose to ignore that. ‘Have you never experienced something akin to this, Jack? Can you truly say that some places do not stand out in memory?’

  ‘Yes, of course they do, but it’s usually for a good reason, and—’

  He heard what he had just said.

  ‘A good reason,’ Hrype echoed. ‘Precisely.’

  ‘So you’re asking me to believe that this underground river made Thorfinn remember it with particular vividness because one day he’d have to find his way back here?’

  ‘Can you not even accept it may be possible?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And yet,’ Hrype breathed, the words barely audible, ‘here we are.’

  ‘It’s just a series of gambles. Coincidences. Lucky guesses,’ Jack said.

  Hrype shrugged. ‘Have it your own way. Look, they are lowering the boat. It’s time to go.’

  The boat was in the water, and Thorfinn took the oars. From Malice-striker’s deck, Einar and the crew looked down on them.

  ‘Good luck,’ Einar said. ‘We will be here ready for your return.’

  Thorfinn muttered a reply. Hrype, eyes on Einar, said, ‘Remember what I said.’

  Einar nodded. ‘Yes. One extra passenger for the voyage home.’

  Hrype was, Jack reflected, very confident that they’d find and apprehend the young man.

  But then a very different interpretation of what Hrype had said occurred to him. It filled him with such a boil of emotions that he pushed it to the back of his mind.

  It was not far to the shore, and soon the keel was grinding into the gravelly sand. Jack leapt out, splashing through the shallows and dragging the boat ashore, and quickly Hrype and Thorfinn did the same. They drew it well up above the waterline and Thorfinn secured a long rope to one of the posts set in the ground, to which a small group of fishing boats were also fastened.

  Thorfinn stood looking into the mouth of the river, some fifty paces to the east. ‘She knew that I was once there,’ he murmured. ‘She has the stone, and I had it then, and the memory lies within its dark heart.’ Then, as if belatedly recalling Jack’s presence, his expression became guarded. ‘That is to say, I—’

  ‘It’s all right, he already knows,’ Hrype said.

  ‘He … he knows?’

  Hrype leaned closer to him and muttered something, and Thorfinn’s deep frown eased a little. He stared at Jack, a new expression in his eyes.

  ‘You begin to understand, then,’ he murmured.

  But Jack had had his fill of enigmatic remarks and weighted silences. ‘Come on,’ he said roughly. ‘We’re far from done here.’

  They set out along the track by the river, and presently the settlement came into view as they completed the rounding of a long bend around the foot of the mountain’s lower slopes. Jack saw rows of small dwellings either side of the path, for the most part well maintained. There was a larger structure, long and low, from which cooking smells sneaked out. There were enclosures for chickens, here and there a few tethered goats in narrow strips of rough ground, some plots under cultivation where the vigorous springtime growth pushed bright green shoots above the earth.

  Jack caught movement from the corner of his eye. Looking up, he saw a narrow
path looping its way to and fro down a steep slope, at the top of which there was a shelf of flat ground where a solitary house stood. It was small, and it had a platform along the front with a bench and a couple of stools set beside a water barrel.

  A slender figure was stepping lightly down the path, so familiar with its twists and turns that he didn’t bother to look where his feet fell. Instead his eyes under the deep hood were fixed on the trio of strangers on the track below.

  He reached the end of the path and jumped down onto the track. Jack, slightly in advance of Hrype and Thorfinn, strode to meet him.

  ‘You have been following me.’ The voice was husky. ‘Over the sea, for so many miles, you have pursued me.’

  Thorfinn stepped up to stand beside Jack. ‘I have come to believe that, far from continuing to evade us, in the end you brought us here.’

  The lower part of the young man’s face – the only area clearly visible – seemed to crease in a smile. He was clean-shaven, Jack noticed, his skin clear and smooth. He was very young, Jack thought suddenly.

  ‘No,’ the young man was saying, ‘I did not want you to come. But in the end, when you would not give up and it seemed you were joined to my trail as if it had been decreed that I should not escape you, I gave in to the inevitable.’

  ‘You tried to kill us at Concarneau,’ Jack said.

  The young man shrugged. ‘You made me angry.’

  Jack tried to order his whirling thoughts. ‘I am a Cambridge lawman,’ he stated, aware even as he spoke of the irrelevance of the statement, ‘and I believe you spent the winter in my town, and that you committed crimes including breaking into a house, damaging an attic room and, very possibly, the murder of a vagrant.’

  Again, the young man shrugged. ‘The vagrant was very near to death. It is true that I helped him out of his pain, but I was merciful. And, you see, I had to make sure that he remained where he sat.’

  ‘Outside Gurdyman’s house,’ Hrype said softly, ‘so that there was no chance that the token he had in his hand would be missed.’

  ‘Indeed,’ the young man said, a note of satisfaction in his voice making it clearer, higher. ‘The pearl, you see? Gurdyman’ – he pronounced the name differently – ‘would instantly comprehend the significance.’

  ‘He did,’ Hrype said grimly. ‘Finding it made him very sick.’

  ‘Good,’ the young man muttered.

  ‘Why did you wish him harm?’ Jack demanded. ‘Why did you have to make him set out on his journey?’

  The young man spun round to stare at him. ‘He was an irrelevance,’ he proclaimed, the harsh, dismissive tone even more telling than the abrupt gesture of his slim hand. ‘It wasn’t the old man who had to be summoned, it was—’

  ‘Errita.’

  The one word, uttered quietly but clearly, affected the young man like a slap across the face. His shoulders slumped, his head drooped, he drew his hood forward and seemed to grow smaller. The woman who had spoken had advanced down the path from the solitary house so soft-footedly that none of those on the track below had noticed her, and now she glided forward until she stood beside the young man. She was slim and not tall, but she held herself well and had an air of authority – of power – about her. She was dressed in a robe, a veil arranged elegantly over her head and hair.

  ‘Enough,’ she said to him. Then, peering under the folds of the heavy hood, she added, ‘Enough, too, of hiding; of assuming the identity of someone you are not.’

  She pushed back the hood – the young man made an instinctive gesture of protest but then, as if he knew it was hopeless, his hand dropped – and for the first time the three men who had followed him so far and so long saw him clearly.

  The face was a smooth oval under a broad forehead and the light-brown eyes had golden lights. The hair was brown, long and luxuriant, twisted into a braid over one shoulder. A band of silver ran through it at the temple.

  And it was the face of a woman.

  The robed woman moved closer to her, one hand lightly on her arm. ‘I am called Luliwa,’ she said, bowing, ‘and this is my daughter Errita.’ She glanced in turn at Jack, at Hrype and, lingeringly, at Thorfinn. ‘You cannot know it, but our names both have a meaning; they say the same thing in two different tongues, and both translate as pearl.’

  Jack understood from her tone and her expression that this utterance was of some great significance, but what that might be evaded him. ‘You used the pearl as your token,’ he said hesitantly. ‘It was how your – how your daughter alerted Gurdyman.’

  ‘How she awoke his long-dormant conscience; yes, indeed,’ the woman agreed.

  ‘But why was that?’ Jack persisted.

  She stared at him, the expression in the golden eyes calm; even friendly. ‘Because everything that has happened has its roots in the City of Pearl,’ she said.

  She must have seen his lack of comprehension.

  ‘Come,’ she said, holding out her hands towards all three of them. ‘Food is being prepared in our communal eating house, and once we have broken bread together, there will be time for questions and explanations. Come!’ she repeated, and, hesitantly at first and then eagerly, Jack, Hrype and Thorfinn obeyed.

  Jack hadn’t known what to expect as Luliwa led them up to the long building, and he dreaded that they would have to endure some endless feast with far too many people present and a hubbub of loud, insistent voices. But as she opened the door and ushered them inside, Errita bringing up the rear, he saw that only one table had been set ready. An old man was sitting at it, flanked by a young man who looked very like Errita and a tall, dark-skinned, older man in a white robe.

  And Lassair.

  Beside him Thorfinn gave a gasp, and before Jack could move, he had shoved Jack out of the way and was hurrying towards her. He took her in his arms and enveloped her in such a hug that she disappeared between his brawny arms and among the folds of his cloak. ‘I knew you were here!’ he exclaimed. She said something in reply, but Jack couldn’t make it out.

  Hrype had hastened over to Gurdyman, and was now crouched by his side, his face creased in a frown of concern. Jack could hear the urgent questions: ‘You have been unwell – was it your heart again? What has been done to help you, to make you better?’ The tall man in white went to stand behind the old man, and it was he who answered Hrype, describing some sort of remedy in painstaking detail.

  The woman – Luliwa – had moved across to speak to the young man who, from his resemblance to Errita, must be her brother. Errita trailed after her.

  Jack stood alone.

  Villagers appeared from a small area off the main room, bearing bowls of savoury-smelling stew, baskets of bread, platters of goat’s cheese and jugs of ale. Places were found for everyone and Jack found himself sitting at the end of the table, Gurdyman on his left. Lassair sat further down the table, separated from Jack by both Gurdyman and Thorfinn.

  So far, Jack had only managed a very brief exchange of glances with her.

  As the food and ale circulated and they were invited to help themselves, Gurdyman leaned closer to him and said, ‘Now, Jack, which of your many questions do you wish to ask first?’

  ‘Not a question, an accusation,’ Jack replied. ‘You took her into danger. A shadow from your past sought you out and summoned you, and you knew you couldn’t manage the journey without her.’

  ‘I did,’ Gurdyman sighed. ‘Moreover, I let her believe it was for her sake that we were going away; that I was doing her a favour by removing her from the scene of her recent – ah, her recent distress.’

  ‘Yes, very well, we all have our own guilt to bear,’ Jack muttered. ‘My own does not expiate yours.’

  ‘No, of course it doesn’t,’ Gurdyman said. ‘And you are right: I did take her into danger, and the perils were far greater than I envisaged. But, Jack, I did not know. I did not understand, when I saw that pearl in the dead man’s hand and knew I had been summoned, what it was really about.’

  ‘Are you going
to enlighten me?’ Jack asked.

  ‘As much as I am able – as far as I now understand it – yes.’ The blue eyes met Jack’s. ‘I feel that I must, for it closely concerns Lassair, and I judge by your presence here that what concerns her is of rather more than small interest to you.’

  Jack said neutrally, ‘You’d better go on.’

  Gurdyman paused to take a mouthful of bread dipped in stew, chewed and swallowed, took a draught of ale. Then he said, ‘I did someone a grave wrong when I was a young man. Here in this country, in a beautiful city south of the mountains and the plateau beyond, I took from that woman’ – he indicated Luliwa, sitting opposite a couple of places down the table – ‘the role of apprentice to the wisest of masters of our craft, when both she and I knew full well it should have been hers. I did not waste the opportunity I stole – oh, by no means! – but it does not excuse what I did. She, in her pain, her despair, her anger, took revenge on me. She let her fast-waxing powers get away from her and she did something that took the lives of many innocent people. She thought I was of their company, but her fury was so great that she did not listen to the warning that told her I was not.’ He sighed, his face full of sorrow. ‘My parents were among the dead and so, when I learned what had happened, I understood that their deaths were the direct result of what I had done.’

  He stopped speaking. His story, it seemed to Jack, had taken away his appetite. He did, however, raise his mug and drink another deep draught.

  ‘When I saw that pearl in the beggar’s hand, I knew that my past had caught up with me. I knew I must go back to the City of Pearl – for that was where I became what I am, and where I stole what should have been Luliwa’s – and, at long last, face up to the wrongs that between us we had brought about.’ He turned to Jack, and in his eyes Jack saw a new urgency. ‘But even when Lassair and I reached the city, still I did not understand. And then I became sick, I began to perceive that a vital part of me was slipping away and, in the end, I was brought here. To her.’ Again he looked at Luliwa and this time, sensing his glance, she turned her head and gave him a smile.