by D Des Anges
“At the train station?” Ferdinand asked, with his teeth chattering and his head turbaned ineptly with a linen shirt.
Hajar did not bother to give him the withering look she might have bestowed on Odo or Irenbend. She only pulled her coat tighter about herself and said, “In Calais.”
“Not an Albionwoman after all then,” Ferdinand said with a smile that vanished into his own coat’s collar. “Why did I think a coat without a hood would be such a good choice? I can’t feel my ears.”
“They’re still there,” Hajar assured him, watching her breath rise in front of her. “Close enough to Albion, at a stretch. Mother lied to the registrar of births and said I was born on the ship, and the captain corroborated. They decided it was enough.”
“Why did she come to Albion-of-the-Britons?” Ferdinand moved around the lee of the pillar he leant upon, as the wind changed direction, and as one Hajar and Benjon’s silent figure moved with him, thrusting themselves into the shadow of his bulk. “My mother and father came to raise horses. The money was good. Albionmen think they have horsemanship, but they cannot breed the beasts for shit. Their husbandry is a tragedy and a travesty, my dear father used to say.” He exhaled and watched his breath rise as steam. “The money was good.”
Hajar did not remark that Ferdinand indeed had about him the air of one who had been raised in wealth, but wealth that was earned. It was the species of detail she had been trained to observe. She instead adjusted the stratum of headscarves above her hair, and said, “Mother left Fihriana.”
“Fihriana,” Ferdinand repeated, screwing up his face. He either searched his memory, or pretended to. “…Like al-Fihri?”
“The same.”
Ferdinand raised his eyebrows, and re-wrapped his scarf until it covered at least his nose, hunching his shoulders. “I think this is the first time I have had the privilege of meeting royalty‑”
“Not anymore,” Hajar said bluntly. She turned to watch Benjon’s blank, sharp-eyed expression. She wondered just what the thing inside Benjon took from this idle, uncomfortable conversation, what it made of it at all. She wondered if the thing operating her friend understood concepts of country and nobility, of usurpation, of dynasty. It probably understood very well, at least, the notion of massacre.
“It’s not a familiar name,” Ferdinand confessed.
“It’s not called that anymore,” Hajar said, and told him the new name of her mother’s country.
“Oh,” said Ferdinand, with only a faint flicker of recognition. “What happened?”
“Things changed,” Hajar said. She stuck her face into the mound of scarves, and tried to determine the hour by the position of the stars. It was a practice in which she was hampered both by her lack of knowledge of astronomy, and by the clouds which covered all but a very small patch of the sky.
There were at least the glimmerings of deep greenish light at the eastern horizon, which gave her some hope for the arrival of a station-keeper.
“They do that,” Ferdinand agreed, dropping the subject. “You, parasite. We are alone, will you answer our questions now?”
But the thing occupying Benjon gave no answer, and Benjon only swayed like a tree in the breeze.
Maybe an hour later a Frankish man with grey hair and a bundle of great iron keys expressed unintelligible surprise to find them standing there.
Once Hajar had explained in very broken Frankish that they were waiting for the train inland, he ushered them through the station and onto a darkened train, and suggested they wait there, instead.
* * *
This began three days spent almost entirely on trains.
The first train took them to the Frankish capital, where they had time only to run across the great meeting point of several railroads and climb stiffly onto another train. This train was one which Hajar was envious to note had implemented some advanced approach to engine fuelling that required a significantly smaller engine house, and involved a much lighter carriage body.
This second train brought them to the foothills of the first range of Frankish mountains. At this station Hajar and Ferdinand warmed themselves by the station-keeper’s oil-heater while Benjon ate an unnatural quantity of cheese, and between them they fretted about the arrival or non-arrival of the next train, which the station-keeper threatened would be unable to travel through the snow.
This third train plugged on bravely through the snow, armed with a shovel-like contraption on the front which drove through that which had fallen on the railroad before the wheels came to it.
The final train took them to the edge of the eastern Frankish mountains, where no further trains ran. Here Ferdinand and Hajar sat in a boarding-house room with Benjon firmly placed opposite them, and tried to determine quite how they were to get over the Wall that lay only eight miles to the east.
Chapter 11
When La Voyeur docked in the southern bank of the Westerschelde, darkness had fallen and the first concern of most of the crew was to find somewhere to drink and sit about a fire or some equivalent. They did not, therefore, find themselves privy to the large, dark, many-legged shape that scuttled out of the hatch an hour later, not in an entirely straight line.
It then swarmed with some difficulty the hawsers to shore.
El Alacrán had not quite shaken free of his seasickness when he first reached shore, but his instinct ran as strong as ever. While his mind still pitched and rolled queasily with the left-behind motion of the hanging canoe, his legs found their footholds upon the quay stones and his body scurried quite by its own accord into the first shadows it found.
In the cellar of the alehouse El Alacrán clung by all his feet from the ceiling rafters and tried to clear his head to gain his bearings. There were barrels of fermented and wholly unregulated ale below him (he could taste iron fillings in the fumes that rose from one at least) and the innkeeper would be down soon to replenish the stocks if the ecstatic drunken shouts above were any indicator.
Thus briefly rested, El Alacrán took off into the night once more, keeping to the many shadows and making for the edge of town.
By his reckoning from here it might take a week, maybe a week and a half to return to his commander if he ran all the way, but there were considerations other than rapidity and direct travel to be taken into account. As he moved already at a run outside the town among the dark and crowded trees, El Alacrán accepted with reluctance that for the route he required he might need to board a boat once more.
Not yet, though; at daylight El Alacrán was deep in forest, so far from human settlement that he reckoned he did not need to lie up for the day. He kept running through the inconvenient undergrowth as the feeble winter sun ascended its scant zenith above the horizon.
By noon he could no longer avoid the fact that he was hungry. He ate as little as possible while in the dominions of humanity, for the absence of large animals was usually remarked upon and investigated. Now that he was free from their eyes his onward rush was curtailed by need to lie stiff amid the bracken and wait for a distant herd of deer to wander in his direction. Their taste was strong in the air as the males were in their prime, and he knew they could not be far.
He wasted a good few hours on this hunt, as the deer were nervous and the birds of the forest of a disposition given to sudden flights, throwing the deer into panic. Eventually a doe came within range, taking the motionless curve of his tail for a tree trunk, and with relief El Alacrán whipped his barbed spear tail-tip into the flesh of the animal. He pinioned her to the forest floor while he grabbed at her hide with his claws, scattering the rest of the herd as a flock of startled birds might scatter from a hurled stone.
Eating was as good a time as any for contemplation, for El Alacrán had no obstacles to concentrate upon. While half his mind was as ever kept busy in the wary watchfulness of approach, the other half was free to collate the information he had for El Miriápodo, and that which he had yet to acquire.
He found Albion’s wrangles with the various
Eastern Moorish states over territory and influence in the Tea Lands to be tedious in the extreme, but for some reason this knowledge was of especial interest to the General. Their faction, being far to the North, did not abut the Tea Lands anywhere along that vast territory’s border, but El Alacrán appreciated from his travels if nothing else that the great machine of events was connected to cogs and cogs.
El Alacrán ate, his body grasping for the food it had been too-long denied in his assignment in Albion-of-the-Britons.
He could acquire knowledge of the positioning of the garrisons of the Black Sea by passing through the area, though it would take him on a route far less direct than that which he had planned for a first choice. It would be more direct than scouring hidden notices for clues.
El Alacrán lay still amid the brackens and fallen branches for a few more hours. As the tree shadows that fell across him in wide stripes began to lengthen and the already-deep gloom of the forest grew darker yet, he raised himself off his belly-plates. With a revived system he ran on, satiated but troubled with plans and pains to take.
* * *
His route took him in a clear avoidance of any human settlement for hundreds of miles, following rivers and valleys and lunging through trees like the fall of a hawk or the relentless chug of a railway engine. A well-fed arachnid could cover ground at speed a mounted man might only dream of, and without flagging or falling like a horse-rider, for four legs were less stable than his many.
After one reckless, flat-backed journey clamped to the roof of a cargo train, near-poisoned with the soot smoke that poured over him, El Alacrán drew near to the shores of the Black Sea.
It lay at the juncture of lands assigned to the rule of the Eastern Moorish Empire, which was a conglomerate state which stretched over mountains and deserts to the luscious and wet Tea Lands and took in a bewildering variety of governmental forms, and the Romish Lands. It was patchworked with states of the Southern Moorish Empire (the distinction was hazy and some, like the lands of the Israelines, might be either Southern or Eastern or neither or both), and territories still under Frankish reign.
The Black Sea existed in perpetual political turmoil and far closer guard than mere Frankish farmlands. El Alacrán knew he could no more observe the garrisons unnoticed in his present form than he could grow wings and fly above them.
In the sparse undergrowth outside the garrison town of Zonguldak there was adequate cover to Fold undisturbed. He would first however require a disguise, for no naked man ever walked into any town without turning some heads.
El Alacrán waited for the thin moon to rise, and lay as still as the shadow of death in the furrows of a hard winter field, waiting for the guardian of the town to pass his hiding place.
The moon sailed on, serene and lonely in the clear star-speckled sky, as El Alacrán lay as if dead. In this low light he might easily pass for a tangle of winter wood, a fallen tree laid low by some recent storm.
He heard – or rather felt – the footsteps of the lone patrolling man before he glimpsed a flicker of his shadow upon the road. He patrolled, alright: no farmer walked thus with his stride measured to fall so evenly in step with absent fellows.
It was a long wait before the soldier or watchman drew alongside the furrow in which he squatted.
Whipping his tail at the man’s head with great speed, El Alacrán struck. He made sure to strike with the side of his armour plates, and not the great barbed ‘sting’: the soldier must be stunned and wake none the wiser, naked and suspecting banditry. He must not be left dead with a wound which would arouse immediately an idea in the minds of all those who came to uncover the meaning of his absence.
El Alacrán examined the body as it fell, breathing shallow, over the lip of the field. He was a soldier, for he had carried a pike; he was young, or shaven to seem young; he was light in weight, meaning that El Alacrán would have to Fold very tightly to fit the uniform. He groaned. El Alacrán far preferred stout men to impersonate, for it lessened the feeling of suffocation by some small degree.
The business of unclothing a human was hard enough when the human was conscious and willing, assisting in the removal and untroubled by the odd tear. El Alacrán allowed himself amusement at the comparison, for the alternative was a pang of loneliness.
To divest the soldier of his garb in this form would be impossible.
El Alacrán exhaled the air from his body and began to Fold, and Fold, and Fold inward. It was risky, out here, to make himself so vulnerable: while he compressed the ichor within him and bent the tough chitin plates, he could scarce perceive much beyond the ache and shortness of his breath.
When the gelatinous ooze began to flow he reached with impatient facsimiles of fingers, stiff and aching and bending in the wrong directions, for the shining metal buttons of the boy-soldier’s outer coat.
It was a grim tussle, to divest him of his uniform, and once it was through and the injured young man lay naked and caked about the head with a little blood, El Alacrán had still to allow the gelatinous ooze to properly settle and dry. The young soldier’s skin was darker than John’s, El Alacrán noticed without interest, but not so dark as those who would be marked Moorish by the Albionmen.
He grew impatient, squatting with sore joints, a breathless body, and clothes spread out on the ground before him. The road was wide open, and at any moment another patrolling soldier might come by –
It was foolishness: this soldier marked the time as surely as a chiming clock. There would be no other soldier for hours. He grew impatient all the same: he tried out the words of the tongue he knew they spoke here, but his memory was uncertain and after those months on the island Albiontongue came easier to the compressed and twisted passages through which he spoke.
When at last the imitation of skin had set, allowing El Alacrán to pull on and clumsily re-button the unconscious soldier’s uniform, ready to slip away before he woke (if indeed he awoke at all), he was struck by the notion that he had no idea what rank the young soldier occupied.
Such distinctions were conveyed in Albion through a means which El Alacrán had no ability to perceive directly – a change in the ‘colour’ of the uniform, John said, though he had difficulty enough himself in seeing – but here there were marks on the arms of the jacket instead.
El Alacrán assumed then that no soldier of importance would be sent to patrol a boring back road, and hoisted up the boy-soldier’s pike without grace or dexterity.
* * *
In the town, where he was roundly ignored, a whisper in the ear of the right woman was all it took: the garrisons were moving to Kerch. That town lay on a peninsula a half-day’s march from the straits between what was human and what was Arthropod.
Kerch itself was a town comprised entirely of a garrison, a port, and as miserable a selection of whores as ever worked outside of Aberdeen. It might be only half a day’s march from the straits, but it was two days across the sea to Kerch in the first place, and on receiving the news El Alacrán’s spirits sank to the earth like a felled fowl.
* * *
His face was not remarked within the garrison; it was dark within, and the soldiers sleepy and drunk, as expected of those who are about to decamp. El Alacrán took to the open bunk that was surely the property of the soldier he had replaced, and he lay the remainder of the night in a wakeful paralysis of suffocating pain while all around him men snored.
He might have instead left the garrison, unFolded, and run for the Wall as it stood against the eastern end of the Black Sea, but he knew the sea crossing was quicker. The sea crossing too would afford him one last chance to gather fragments of the garrison’s plans. The sea crossing was also the passage El Miriápodo would have urged him to take. It was also the passage El Alacrán least wanted to take, but what El Alacrán wanted had never been of great concern to the General nor to anyone else but John.
Many times in the morning, El Alacrán cursed El Miriápodo in his mind, and no part of his cursing was so pronounced as w
hen he was herded onto the transport barge shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of the garrison. As he stood packed in like livestock, he still clutched in what passed for fingers the shaft of his pike.
Once aboard, he found that he was at least not alone in his hatred of the water crossing: several other soldiers became pale and retched. One or two lucky enough to have access to the high edges of the barge stood on the tips of their toes in order to vomit into the dark, choppy waters.
El Alacrán envied them.
The grumbling and grousing, the retching, dozing, and popping of lice on the bodies of the soldiers was drowned out at the end of the first day at sea by the breathless hush of the soldiers nearest their captain’s covered room. El Alacrán found himself among the number of these men, who were straining to hear the barge’s Wireless receiver.
At first there was nothing but the reports of other boats crossing the sea in the darkness. But as the transport barge turned the receivers slid in their position and, in testament to the force and regularity of illegal transmission rods, for a moment Albiontongue came from the membranes.
Those around El Alacrán were startled, but not so startled as he who understood it: “—ly,” whispered the distorted voice, “—no further information on oilman John Lancaster, abducted from Aberdeen Five Rig by a man posing as a Secure Guardian, on the afternoon of—”
The captain of the garrison nudged the receivers back into their correct position, but it was enough for El Alacrán.
His mind was occupied now not with the crossing, nor his route to his own faction, nor the likelihood of discovery, nor with listening to what he might learn of the garrison’s purpose at Kerch. All that filled his mind, as his body ached and twisted and pained him standing shoulder-to-shoulder with men who thought him a man like them, was who could have found them both out, and how, and what they planned to do to John.
The crossing seemed to double in length.
