The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2

by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

  “Why,” Billy had said, with a slow smile while he clutched the blue knit muffler to his chest. “Might as well try to drown an eel than kill me. This old dumbledore will fly his way back to London, to you. I swear on the immarcessible crown of glory itself, I will.”

  Reglum Bammary stood further back on the deck of the Indigo Pheasant, leading a platoon of Woolwich gunners. Like them, he wore a scarlet jacket faced with slate-grey. In his breast pocket he had a worn copy of Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination, and in a large waist pocket he carried a sketchbook and pencil to capture the likenesses for the Index of Goettical Creatures of whatever curiosities the voyagers might encounter on their passage through the Interrugal Lands.

  Standing close by Maggie at the bow were—beside Mei-Hua—the rest of the McDoons, as well as Shaozu and Tang Guozhi. Sally, a pale shade, held Isaak. A cage by her feet contained Charicules. Dorentius Bunce leaned on his crutch, his face turned to the cant of the sails and the tilt of the jib-boom, as if trying to read sine and secant on the wind itself. Barnabas, in a vest he described as “like the green-shaded wines we receive from Portugal,” was gesticulating to the sailors in the rigging. Sanford, in perfectly pressed black, the few hairs on his head whipped by the wind, scanned the banks of the Thames, already on alert for threats.

  As they came to the mouth of the Thames at sunset, just past the spire of Saint Mary Hoo and the clock tower at Sheerness, the ship’s shadow lengthening on the swift waters in front of it, Sanford raised his voice in song. Momentarily startled, the McDoons and others nearest the bow could not at first catch his melody (singing not being among Sanford’s many talents). Then, one by one, they knew it: “The Seafarer,” the ancient hymn that had come down through the Exeter Book and, as translated into modern English by Sir Thomas More, become a standard in the Great Hymnal.

  Maggie, who had sung it countless times while at Saint Macrina’s Charity School, joined in. She did not fully comprehend Sanford but—at that moment, if not already much earlier—she knew she loved him.

  “Now my soul warps out of my breast,

  My spirit mindful roams transformed,

  Amidst the flood of the sea,

  Amidst the realms of the whale.”

  One by one all but the Chinese joined in (and even they hummed the tune, as best they could ascertain it), from the bow to the stern, from the marines and gunners in the holds to the sailors at the ropes and sails:

  “Through all the quarters of the world,

  Hungry as the raven, desiring more,

  Flying alone, restless,

  Shouting on high,

  Hurries the heart unhesitant

  Onto the whale-roads

  Ever over the waves of the sea.”

  They sang it several times into the dusk, an exultant challenge. Billy and his congregation peppered the verses with “amens” and “selahs.” Charicules added his own version of the same, in trills that ran up the masts and along the rigging. They lighted lanterns on the masts and on the bowsprit and along the stern, as night fell, so that the ship was a melody of light, a blazing canticle heard by shepherds minding their flocks in the salt-marshes and by innkeepers in the towns along the estuary.

  And as they sang for their final time that evening, just before the last ray of the setting sun fled, the verse ending “Onto the whale-roads, Ever over the waves of the sea,” three porpoises leaped out of the water just off the starboard bow. Gleaming in the mingled lamplight, the porpoises splashed and played, to the glad cries of the singers.

  Porpoises never left them from that point, not while the Indigo Pheasant conducted its sea-trials in the Downs off Kent in the English Channel, not while the ship continued to the Azores, and not while it sailed thence to Cape Town. Even Sally’s spirits brightened as she watched the porpoises, mile after mile, pacing the ship on its journey.

  At the Cape, they took on provisions, made minor repairs to the Indigo Pheasant and otherwise refreshed themselves in preparation for their travels into the interstitial places. The McDoons, with the Chinese delegation, spent much time at the Last Cozy House, where the Termuydens were, as always, exuberantly attentive and gracious hosts. They offered their condolences about James and carefully avoided any further conversation about him. They took special care to give Isaak the food they remembered she liked, and they laughed to see Isaak playing again with their dog Jantje in the garden. The Termuydens took unique joy in seeing Mei-Hua and Shaozu once more. Over steaming cups of well-steeped tea and trays of ever-replenished cakes (to Barnabas’s endless delight), the company shared the latest intelligences. They talked of Sir John Barrow, and of Lord Amherst’s embassy; they talked with Billy about the sermons he preached; they listened as Mei-Hua explained what the Chinese meant by kaozheng, which she translated as “research based on evidence,” and by the shu li jung yun, or “collected essentials on numbers and their principles.” The Termuydens were most interested in learning all about Maggie, and listening to Maggie’s thoughts about the upcoming journey.

  On a midsummer morning at the Cape, the McDoons and the Chinese took their leave of the Termuydens. Maggie placed a thick packet of letters in the Mejouffrouw’s hands, for posting back to London, the last correspondence the Cook and others would receive from the voyagers for a while. The Termuydens gave to each of their visitors small gifts, tokens to help on the next circuit of errantry.

  “For you, Mijnheer Barnabas, I have something very particularly special, to sustain you if other stores and provisions run low,” said the Mejouffrouw with a merry sparkle in her eye. “Or, as I suspect, even if you face no such shortage, . . . which I of course hope you do not!”

  She handed Barnabas a large box, wrapped in a red ribbon.

  “Gingerbread cookies,” she said.

  Sally had to prevent her uncle from opening the box then and there.

  Two days out they prepared themselves for the first fulgination into the Interrugal Lands. Reglum and Dorentius—as the only two Yountians aboard—stood with the ship’s captain, flanked by the McDoons, Billy Sea-Hen and Captain Shufflebottom, at the bow of the ship. They addressed the assembled ship’s company: the officers, mates and crew, the Marines and Artillery Corpsmen, the sons and daughters of Asaph, and—standing at the front, flush by the starboard gunwale—the Chinese trio. Fulmars and petrels circled the ship, dabbing the waves. Several albatrosses soared further up. A pod of whales had surfaced that morning, joining the ever-present porpoises.

  Reglum and Dorentius asked for the silver-plated moon to be hoisted onto the spar, and then led the entire body in the Song of the Lamp-Moon, which Reglum had translated into English. As the last echoes of “Our Moon will light our way home!” rolled over the waves, the ship’s captain stood forth and led a spirited rendition of “Rule, Britannia!” Everyone sang with exceptional gusto the refrain: “Britons never will be slaves!”

  Sanford noted that the Chinese (who had certainly heard “Rule, Britannia!” on innumerable occasions, formal and otherwise, during their long stay in London, and well understood its patriotic vigour) looked discomfited. The ship’s captain beckoned Tang Guozhi, Shaozu and Mei-Hua to join the lead party. Tang Guozhi made a short, very diplomatic speech about amity among nations and the Emperor’s delight at his friendship with King George, and so on. Then Mei-Hua, who had practised long for just such an opportunity as this, sang her own translation of the great Tang Dynasty poet Gao Shi’s work, “The Ruined Terrace,” concluding with:

  “In silence deep, complete,

  I face autumnal wastelands,

  Empty.

  The wind, sad, alone

  Blows one thousand miles.”

  Rulers in great capitals such as Peking and London (and Yount Great-Port) can decree whatever policies and strategies as might seem best to promote the aims of the nation, raison d’état. But such grand schemes and purposes held little reality for the thousand souls who found themselves alone together on a sliver of wood surrounded by the vast wide pit
ches of the great southern ocean—and who knew they faced even greater depths of uncertainty on the voyage to Yount. Mei-Hua’s voice stirred every heart on the Indigo Pheasant.

  Maggie hugged Mei-Hua demonstratively and said loudly so all could hear, “The Indigo Pheasant is our common home, our only home, as we cross into danger. But the ship will protect us, if we protect one another. We shall raise up our voices from the sea, as the Goddess gives us songs in the narrowest night-watch. ‘We shall compass you about with songs of deliverance.’ Does not the psalmist say so, Billy Sea-Hen?”

  Billy raised both arms and shouted back, “Selah!”

  “And does not the psalmist also sing: ‘Awake up, my glory! Awake, psaltery and harp, for I will awaken the dawn’?”

  Billy, joined by the rest of the descendants of Asaph, concurred again.

  Maggie sang the “Song of Saint Ann’s Translation,” and every voice joined the chorus:

  “And is it so, that sweet beaded breath will waft us o’er

  The Sea of Storm to distant Heaven’s shore?

  Then bring thy ship of song and singing, that together we

  May sail nigh the House of Harmony.

  A steadfast friend thou wilt be to me,

  Till I imbosom’d am in unity.”

  Buoyed and ringed by this and many similar songs—some of which Maggie had sung into the wood, flax, hemp and iron of the ship itself, some sung at every watch by those onboard—the Indigo Pheasant fulginated into the interstitial lands.

  Whether by virtue of these songs or of the power imbued into the Great Fulginator, or because the ship was escorted by the whales and squadrons of fulmars, petrels and albatrosses (besides, of course, the dolphins), the voyage through the Interrugal Lands was more secure than any made before and took a route mostly unknown to those experienced in the trip between Karket-soom and Sabo-soom. The horghoids and jarraries, the cychriodes and ruteles-worms, and all the other loping, gnashing creatures on the rocks and skerries withheld their menace; some aboard the Indigo Pheasant said that the monsters were even seen to bow their heads as the ship sailed past. The carkodrillos and asterions and all other broods of swarming, hunting fishes stayed their attack, retreating instead into briny grottoes.

  Once only was the ship threatened, and even then it slipped by unscathed. On the eighth day, sudden staunch winds swept the Indigo Pheasant in close to a low, marshy shore. Giant sedges pulled at the hull, mud sucked at the keel. The Fulginator could help little in such a pass; traditional seafaring skills alone would save the ship. Gradually, with no small amount of sweat and worry, they managed to tack away, beating against the wind blowing from the salt-side.

  As they edged away, they put to flight three enormous herons that had been wading after fish in the shallow waters. While struggling to keep the ship from running a-strand, no one had paid the birds much heed—and distances being deceiving, no one had grasped how large these birds were. Now everyone stared in awe as the three marsh-hunters, wings flapping with a stately thunder, flew past in loose formation. The herons flew—as is their wont—with necks curled back, compressed against their bodies, with the sparse black feathers of their crests bristling down their backs. (Sally thought they looked rather like Sanford might if he were striding down Mincing Lane into a stiff breeze). They were a hazel-green above, with rufous streakings below, their buff-coloured legs trailing far behind them, occasionally shaving the surface of the water. As the herons neared, and were no longer made small by the vast expanse of the empty shoreline, the humans comprehended the bulk of these birds. What most amazed the onlookers were the eyes of the herons—a bright lemon-yellow, each eye the size of a human head—and especially the bills. Each heron had a bill the size of a man. Calculating what damage such a bird might do to the ship, contemplating the fate of anyone plucked off the deck by a body-length bill, the Marines readied their muskets and the gunners took positions at the cannons.

  Amazement turned to alarm when the water beneath the herons geysered: a crocodile-whale four times the size of any of the herons shot straight up. With a dishevelled row of piercingly sharp teeth, it seized one of the birds, and fell back thrashing into the sea with its prey. The ripple created rocked the Indigo Pheasant. The other two herons, squawking so loudly it hurt human ears and caused the silver moon to rattle against the spar, changed course and flew directly over the ship, just barely clearing the top-sail and rigging.

  The sea continued to boil for some time at the place where the monster whale had erupted. The Marines and gunners trained all weapons on that spot. Everyone watched anxiously. Everyone prayed for a quicker change in the wind. The sailors aloft called down that they could see movement in the water, like a shadow that matched the ship in size but had a mind of its own, moving now closer, now farther away.

  The crocodile-whale breached one hundred yards to port. It looked like a low-slung island, with eyes.

  “Well,” said Billy, tying the blue scarf more tightly around his neck, and picking up his long-barreled rifle. “Muck and mire to one side, and a scalavote with too many teeth on the other! I for one don’t fancy either choice. Let’s see if this old dumbledore can sting the beast in one of its eyes.”

  As Billy took aim, Maggie walked up and put a hand on the muzzle to lower it.

  “Leave be, Billy,” she said. “This one won’t hurt us. She—it’s a she, incidentally—is scared too, scared and yet curious. After all, we appeared in her hunting grounds, not the other way ’round.”

  Billy bowed his hand and lowered his rifle.

  “This creature is very, very distant kin to the whales who accompany us,” continued Maggie. “They are attempting to soothe her, reassure her. And so will we. Listen.”

  The Great Fulginator struck up a different note, a lilting, merry air. Maggie had instructed Dorentius to play “The Prior’s Toccata” on one of the keyboards (which were otherwise used as devices to transmit equations into the Fulginator’s central analytical engine)—a song ascribed to Saint Bavo but known much more widely in the version edited by C.P.E. Bach.

  Billy whistled, shook his head and said, “A tea-tune for a trilly-bite! Well, that’s fox-feet on a turkey for sure!”

  “She’s unlovely to look upon, this giant agu iyi,” laughed Maggie in agreement. “But she is innocent, Billy, innocent of the malice and intention that characterizes our true enemies. She’s a lethal savage, without question, but pure, who acts only as she was made. We can avoid a quarrel with her, and so we shall.”

  As the Indigo Pheasant slowly distanced itself from the quaggy shore and from the leviathan, led by the dolphins and followed by the whales, Reglum took one last look through a telescope at the crocodile-whale.

  “Magnificent,” he sighed. He had a new species for the Yountian bestiary.

  On the fourteenth day, Reglum and everyone else received an even greater shock: they found living people in the Interrugal Lands. They had passed The Cackling Isle (the source of which noise was unknown, and which the Indigo Pheasant had no time or brief to discover) and The Dull-Fires (a shingle ever licked by low flames, like a plate of brandy-doused fruit when it is set alight). The Fulginator had sent them into a region of nighs and netherings unknown to any Yountian map, with violent and capricious winds. To starboard they spied a large, hump-backed island, thickly forested except for a thin swath of flower-pricked meadow running abruptly to the beach.

  As the ship approached the island, four men burst from the forest and raced across the meadow to the beach, shouting, waving their arms. Their eyes were wide, their beards dendritic, their clothes ill-used. They looked as if they might be shipwrecked mariners from Socotra or Muscat.

  Reglum could not believe what he saw through his telescope. He called for the Indigo Pheasant to slow, turn about, drop anchor. In the nearly two thousand years since the Yountians had begun their venturing into the Interrugal Lands, in all their several thousands of interstitial voyages, the Yountian tough-ships had never once found another sapi
ent being alive in the places-in-between. A few washed-up corpses, including those of the stork-men with elongated fingers and three nostrils. The deserted towns on Supply Island, empty evidence of other people long gone. Other people! Alive in the Interrugal Lands!

  “We must save these poor wretches!” Reglum cried.

  All onboard agreed fervently, watching the four men jumping up and down, arms pinwheeling. They hastily formed a landing party and began to lower two boats off the side.

  But before the boats hit the water, the wind frowned and the air furrowed. The island was lost suddenly to their view.

  “I don’t understand, I don’t understand,” said Dorentius, speaking in the Fulgination Room a few minutes later to Reglum, Captain Shufflebottom, Sally and Maggie. “One moment we are steadily plotted, the next and without warning of any kind we are unfixed.”

  “The chiasmic equations notwithstanding?” asked Maggie. “The cross-function of the graticules still robust? Our ana-stomotic derivations on course?”

  “Abaxile strings in order?” asked Sally. “Brachistochrones coordinated?”

  Dorentius confirmed that all appeared to be in order and yet it was not. For a full day, the Indigo Pheasant attempted to return to the island of the stranded mariners. Every time Dorentius, Maggie and Sally re-formulated the coordinates for the island, some force or will other than their own shunted the ship aside. The closer they got to the place where the island should be, the fiercer the wind became, casting gustules of acrid fumes at the ship. They sailed past The Dull-Fire twice more, and heard again the sounds emanating from The Cackling Isle. They were sailing in circles around a void, a hole in the map.

  On the morning of the second day after their brief encounter, Maggie held conference in the ship-captain’s cabin.

  “As my mother would say: ‘Chi jibidolu anyi n’uzo,’ which means something like ‘Our way has become clouded,’”said Maggie. “Someone or something does not wish us to reach and rescue those poor men. The Owl perhaps, though four men seem few compared to the world he seeks to withhold from us. Maybe Agwu is intervening, balancing on the ball of fortune, disorienting us for reasons we cannot know. Or maybe the Goddess has a hand in this, protecting us but not allowing us to over-reach ourselves.”