by D Des Anges
“Stop that,” she muttered from the side of her mouth, as she pretended to smile at Ferdinand. “Are you all prepared?”
“As far as Albion Broadcasting are concerned,” Ferdinand said in a low rumble (he had a very soothing, almost-familiar voice, one Hajar found she almost associated with the continuity of events), “I am taking to the continent to assist a young relative who must escape from an ill-advised marriage –”
Seeing her incredulous look, Ferdinand cleared his throat and rolled his eyes.
“—They like a story,” he explained. “I have promised I will keep an ear to the ground with regard to… to our missing Celebrated, and they’re content. Well, Aethelred and Pietr aren’t because they have to cover for me, but everyone else is.”
Hajar tightened her headscarf so that it wouldn’t flap so in the breeze, and said almost under her breath, “If questioned, you do not know what ails Benjon, and are accompanying us part of the way for our protection.”
Ferdinand tutted with his tongue. “It’s near enough to the truth, al-Fihri, I’m sure I’ll remember.”
Their conspiracy was muffled by the oncoming train.
The train chugged and chuffed, and Benjon’s head peered about at the other passengers with altogether too much curiosity for a man supposed to be beating with enthusiasm on death’s door.
“Get in,” Hajar muttered to what passed now for Benjon. She pulled on the train door’s handle, but Ferdinand reached past her and tugged it all the way open.
“We know how to use a train,” said the thing in control of Benjon’s mouth, “how do you think we came with Hugo to this city?”
“Don’t talk,” Ferdinand said sharply, standing aside for Hajar to get into the compartment.
It was not empty, and Hajar cursed the popularity of trains as two fair children and their red-headed mother looked at their party as if regarding exhibits at a travelling fair. They no doubt came from the country, Hajar thought, throwing her bag onto the wooden basket above the seats. She watched Benjon’s body imitate the movement exactly with the bag it carried; Ferdinand thrust his own between his feet as he sat, nearest the door, like a guard.
These red-haired children came from some little country town, and did not often or at all see Moors or Nubians or Iberian Moors like Ferdinand, who looked like a Nubian but bigger. That must be the source of their stares. It was not Benjon.
The little wood-panelled compartment that compelled them all to sit elbow-to-elbow shook with noise as the engine began again and the two children immediately flung their hands over their ears. Under the cover of this racket, Ferdinand whispered to Hajar, “There are many things I would ask this… parasite… about its conduct.”
There were many things Hajar wanted to ask, too, but she simply smiled in at the family opposite them, and muttered from between her teeth, “Not until we are without an audience.”
The woman opposite, her children hunched against her sides as if to protect them from the rattle and clang of an accelerating engine, failed to return Hajar’s smile, and Hajar grew contemptuous of her wide, grey eyes and endless, unmannerly staring. Didn’t they teach the pig farmers any means to comport themselves? If the woman was so astounded by the civil world, why was she aboard a train at all and not confining herself to gasping in awe daily at news sheets she could doubtless not read?
It was the class of tirade that, were it aloud, would have been greeted with a snort of agreement, maybe laughter, from Benjon (were Benjon in his right mind) and censure from Hana. They know no better, Hana would say, it isn’t kind or useful to berate them for their ignorance. Meanwhile Benjon’s every fourth word was often berating someone or other for their ignorance: he had called Hajar an idiot enough times when in full flight.
And whose fault is it, if they ‘don’t know any better’? Hajar mused crossly, trying to distract herself from the stillness of Benjon’s twig-like thighs beside her (he was ordinarily a prodigious fidget) with her own petty ire. Should no one go to these people and explain the world? Perhaps a project of education for every child: ‘birds don’t know the bloody future, this is how you tie a knot, some people look different from you, don’t fuck your sister’?
She checked her smile in the smudged glass of the dirty window: it remained, a little strained but still the same powerfully deceptive grimace and supposedly meek downcast eyes. Hajar caught Ferdinand’s eye in the window, for he was only feigning to look at the city dwindling from townhouses to scattered buildings. She allowed her inappropriate smile to slip down into a mere faint indication of affability.
“Sleep,” Ferdinand suggested to her, as a solicitous husband might suggest to his travel-weary wife. “We have hours yet.”
He meant, she knew, that he would guard against any strangeness from Benjon, but from the way their companions across the compartment (the woman at least, her children had resumed hitting each other with the breath-taking viciousness of the very small) tensed and widened her already owl-huge eyes still further, it was taken as the threat of ravishment by an ever-lustful Moor.
Hajar herself had read the kind of quarter-pay dreadful epics that were printed on paper so thin it would be more use to wipe her arse, and blinked herself a headache at the madness that was thrust upon the less literate as pure fact. She would have put her five on the woman across from them being the exact sort that such wastes of words were written for.
If only this silly fire-skulled mare had any idea, Hajar thought. She’d more to fear from her own bloody children.
“Wake me at –” Hajar racked her embarrassing lack of memory of Albion-of-the-Britons geography for a station neither too near nor too far from the south coast. “—The Cam Ford, you can sleep then.”
The woman opposite seemed unduly fascinated by this most pedestrian of supposed domestic discussions. Ruffled by Benjon’s stillness and the contrasting mania of the children, Hajar felt an increasing keenness to poke the wretch’s eyes out just to stop her staring.
“Does this train penetrate the Fens, Goodwife?” Ferdinand asked the redhead, with a winning smile that took Hajar almost entirely by surprise. It seemed to take her by surprise too, for she sat back with her hands at her mouth and by and by finally smiled from behind her fingers. “We have clean forgot to check its passage. Are you bound for the south coast too, for the great cliffs?”
The mother gave the name of some forgettable little town half of their journey down, and Hajar realised that this train must call at every hay cart and barn from Durham to the sea, dragging on like one of the Dean’s addresses.
When she spared a glance for the occupied body of her friend, she found him staring at the children with an expression which must have done little to settle the air of the berth.
“BENJON,” Hajar snapped, as if speaking to the hard of hearing, “GO TO SLEEP. YOU ARE NOT WELL.”
When he turned to look at her, she lowered her voice to a hiss.
“You will have us discovered and we shall never reach your precious arthropods. Close your eyes and slump.”
Once he had done so, exhibiting again the unworldly stillness which made his mockery of slumber as unconvincing as his wakefulness had been, she laid her head back over the pillow of the seat. She closed her own eyes on the grim and sooty interior of the train, listening to the discordant song of the engine.
It must have worked somehow to abrade her discomfort, for it seemed no time at all before Ferdinand proclaimed by her ear, “The Cam Ford, you asked me to wake you,” in a shaken voice.
When she opened her eyes the young family had gone, and in their place was the source of Ferdinand’s disquiet, almost certain. It was a row of four very crushed Secure Guardians, their matching tunics and coats blending into one blur as they sat uncomfortable on the bench. They stared at Hajar, Ferdinand, and Benjon (still affecting slumber and looking unluckily rather dead) as one four-headed beast.
Ferdinand immediately squeezed his eyes shut and laid the side of his head against the window p
ane, leaving her alone to face the protectors of Albion-of-the-Britons’ borders.
The sun had travelled its brief winter arc across the sky, and behind the thick grey clouds had already taken to the west, illuminating their berth.
“Good afternoon to you, Goodmen,” Hajar said, with the kind of blasé good manners that her mother would have if not applauded then at least not outright derided, “I trust you keep well on your journey.”
They had not a head between them older than twenty, Hajar guessed, and they looked sick-uncomfortable to be spoken to at all. After a very awkward moment in which they exchanged glances, wondering if they were allowed to answer her, the broadest of them (a dark-haired and dark-eyed young man whose cheeks were a-glow with one of the afflictions of youth that turns skin red and fills it with pus) said, “We hope the same for you, Goodwife.”
“And what takes you to the rails today?” she asked, stretching another insincere smile on her lips.
“We are to join our fellows on the south coast and learn the arts of the sea, Goodwife,” offered one of the others, and his fellows elbowed him silent again.
“I wish you luck,” Hajar said, “to learn is a joy the equal of the rising sun.” She withdrew the nauseating homily from her mother’s stock and from three of the eternally-plagiarising poets she had been made to read as a child. “And still greater is the comfort in knowing the highest-flying birds of Albion’s flock guard the nest.”
It was an inelegant mish-mash of Moorish and Albion, she thought, as they nodded seriously, but then wasn’t she, too?
“A-and what brings you t-to the rails this day?” stammered the young Guardian closest the window.
“My friend,” Hajar indicated Benjon, “is afflicted with a terrible ague which only a divinator of the Franks is able to heal. My husband and I are taking him to meet this divinator, and restore our friend to his health.”
Three times: each time she told the lie it was strengthened, and if Hana or the Dean put the lie to ‘husband’ it would be understood that to travel with escort might be considered a complex notion for such youths.
They nodded again their understanding, and all contrived to look either out of the window or at their feet. This signalled in that most Albionman fashion that the conversation was over and they would rather not exchange any further words.
Hajar watched the land change as the miles slipped past and two of the Secure Guardians dropped into a doze to match Ferdinand’s. He did not snore, she noted, or mumble asleep, but breathed deeply and smacked his lips often.
When they came to the last station, the platform outside was lit by gas light, and the sky was the dark blue of almost-night that seemed only to come in winter, though it was not late.
“Will the ships run at night?” Hajar asked, as Ferdinand sleepily shouldered his bag and made to take hers. She snatched it away quickly, slinging it across herself. “Should we take lodgings?”
The unspoken question, the question she would not raise, was should they acquire rooms for three or two and one or for only the one, and if either of them trusted what Benjon currently was enough for them both to sleep beside him – or it.
“Some,” Ferdinand said, prodding Benjon onto the platform with the tip of one finger. “You just have to know where to ask. And fortunately, I do.”
“How—” Hajar began, but Ferdinand shushed her as the train driver ambled past them, caked in soot and looking eager to be away.
“Sailors,” Ferdinand said, holding a finger to his lips, “I know sailors. You may ask why I know sailors, but it will only lessen my estimation of your intelligence, al-Fihri.”
Hajar sighed her understanding as they made off into the night. She was not sure she liked his compromise between Gooddaughter (a title she detested) and Hajar, but she was not sure either that she knew him well enough to ask that he only called her Hajar. She wondered if this was how they spoke to each other, at Albion Broadcasting, its own fiefdom and culture. Benjon had never said, but then Benjon never noticed these things.
The harbour was abuzz with voices and hurrying feet when they arrived. Sailors, and women – also men, it seemed – who looked very much like they might be whores, thronged the narrow cobbled streets closest to the unwalled drop into the dark and stinking sea. These folk crowded there though the rest of the town had seemed to be empty and demure.
They struggled past men who smelled of coal smoke and sweat and ale, and women who smelled of sex and gin, and the endless jostling of seemingly uniform scarred and tattooed flesh near separated the three of them many times over.
While Hajar’s forehead was scraped by many a beard, Ferdinand stood head and shoulders over most of the crowd. He began to call out, as the sailors called out, and the whores called out, and the merchants with their grubby trinket-filled coats called out.
Hajar wanted to do as the children on the train had, and press her hands to her ears to shut out the unfamiliar din, but instead she caught a finger on the strap of Ferdinand’s bag, and a finger of her other hand on the strap of Benjon’s bag, and bit her tongue so as not to curse at those who knocked her.
“Legge! Legge!” Ferdinand shouted, lifting his hand to his mouth to carry his shout farther afield.
“What Legge you want, mate?” cried a sailor from some vantage point Hajar could not see. There was no ‘Goodman’ or ‘Goodwife’ by the water, where stench of salt and sewage intermingled made a foul cloud and drew the fly-by-days despite the hour. There was only ‘mate’, which Hajar assumed it was some stunted allusion to ‘shipmate’, and, as she listened to the calls passing about her, ‘you bitch’.
“Left leg!” Ferdinand shouted, with surprising gaiety.
A gale of laughter greeted this very mean amount of wit. Perhaps they were starved for it.
“Legge of the Petrel,” Ferdinand added, in his warm, booming voice.
“Ah, you’ve missed the Petrel,” called another sailor, “She left a week out there, for the Nubians. You’ll not be seeing Legge ‘til the new year at least.”
“Ah he was a bastard anyway,” Ferdinand shouted to the sailors.
Hajar could find no reason why they shouldn’t go somewhere quieter, but it seemed that every conversation at the harbour was being taken at volume and over the tops of people’s heads.
“What of Wulf Gurnsson of the Albatross--?”
“What you want him for, Moor?” sneered one voice closer to the wall, but another shouted him down.
“Shut up,” he roared, “He knows Legge and he knows Gurnsson. He’s no fucking Moor, listen to that voice.”
“I can see his fucking face—”
“So can I, you fucking drunkard, the man’s out of Haakonshire or I’m a crake, I don’t give a whore’s turd for his face.”
“Is the Albatross at port?” Ferdinand called, ignoring the discussion of his ancestry, though it was conducted in such bawls that no doubt half the town heard it.
“Yeah, the Albatross leaves on the next tide—” shouted another voice. “You got business with Gurnsson?”
“I got business with the Albatross, if she’s still running for Calais,” Ferdinand called, and by some subtle motion of the crowds they were closer to the sailors who had shouted to them. They came close enough that their shouts could be diminished and Ferdinand need no longer wear his throat raw.
“Looking for passage, friend of Gurnsson?” said what Hajar recognised as the first sailor’s voice, from much closer.
“We are,” said Ferdinand, “and we’re looking with money, to go on the next tide. Where’s the Albatross moored?”
“Money,” said the nearest sailor, showing his teeth in a humourless smile: they were mostly grey and yellow, and the first two bore the stained grooves of a Goodman of Albion-of-the-Norse.
“You’ll be paid when we get to the bloody ship,” Ferdinand said evenly, with a smile that was a good deal cleaner and yet somehow no less threatening.
And so began a thoroughly uncomfortable passage
of shoving and thumps in which two times someone tried to take Hajar’s bag and once a hand that might have belonged to a man or a woman tried to slither inside her coat, in search of either her purse or her virtue. Many times her fingers were painfully twisted and knocked in their death-tight grip on Benjon’s and Ferdinand’s bags, and once Benjon’s bag near came off his shoulders.
When they came to the bulk of a steam ship butted against the wooden braces at the edge of the quay wall, the sailor only pointed up at the name-plate bolted to the stern end without a word, and held his hand out to Ferdinand.
Hajar took in the ship: it was ugly and squat in comparison with the older wooden ships which were moored alongside it, and the stack and all about seemed stained equally with soot and smuts as any train carriage. She knew of such ships only from their relevance to trains, having not set foot on any sort since she was too young to have any memory of it. There was an irrational comfort to be found in seeing that, just like the inefficient engines of the Albion Locomotive Force’s fleet, her conveyance across the sea used a method of propulsion she could build herself.
* * *
The crossing took less than the length of the night, but Hajar was in little position to comment on it, for she was left so queasy by the movement of the ship that it was all she could do to keep her gaze on Benjon’s occupied form. Her only concern was therefore to see to it that he neither approached, nor was approached by, any sailors.
Ferdinand at least seemed affable, lost in conversations with the red-bearded Gurnsson that contained no information and only a great many jokes. He did not take to the sea any better than she, and staggered in his steps, but recovered after each fall with an exaggerated laugh.
When they came to the harbour at Calais the sun had not yet started to streak the sky, and the three travellers had the ill-fortune to pass some cold and despondent hours waiting outside the town’s station.
“I was born here,” Hajar said meditatively, into the collar of her coat. The hours had chilled them all, and Hajar had taken from her bag most of her travelling clothes, winding her scarves over each other to warm her head, and over most of her face to keep her nose from running.
