by D Des Anges
On what was either the fourth or fifth day of northward sailing, Ferdinand saw land from the bows of the boat.
At first it was a smudge, dark and low, upon the horizon. It might have been land, an incoming storm, or, Ferdinand thought with his mind still in thrall to the monstrosity in the waters below, some other vast beast they had never yet encountered before.
The day drew on, and the sun once more sought to burn Benjon’s skin a deeper shade of red and sap the will to live from Ferdinand as surely as everything else he had yet faced. The smudge as the sun passed became a line, and then quite clear a promontory.
Ferdinand could not help thinking it devoured by the huge creature suspended in the sea below, and shivered to think of it hanging in the dark waters even as the nightly display of lights-in-water began again. As the sun dragged itself back into the ocean on their right the shadows cast showed plain the bays and headlands of some country of substance waiting in the waters ahead of them.
“By tomorrow morning we will make landfall,” said the thing that had taken over the doctor, with to Ferdinand’s mind too much joy. “And you will find us a new vessel.”
“Is that so,” Ferdinand muttered, watching the first of the night lights rising in the sea.
After days of observation they had determined the lights to belong to tiny squid, although this gave no answer as to why squid felt the need to light their way at night. No one had much liked Ferdinand’s idea that they just could see no better in the dark than men.
He did not like to think of keeping Hajar’s friend a prisoner to this parasite, but the alternative rankled as much: should they sacrifice someone else to its demands, without asking?
Suppose the arthropod they came to was not the knowledge-greedy spider kind but one like El Alacrán, whom was of greater nobility than several people he’d met?
And while he did not wish to deprive Hajar of her friend, from what he recalled of the Gooddoctor Silverstein, he was not the most charismatic of men.
“All the more reason for us to sleep the sounder tonight,” said Hajar.
She must have seen as he had seen the way that Benjon’s hair fell from his scalp and his beard was patchy. Though he seemed bright enough and right enough for a man in the grips of a terrible possession, Ferdinand did not now for one moment believe the parasite’s talk of sickness already in final progression taking the last of Hugo’s life.
It was plain that this creature, this thief was to blame. It had worn at him as a man who rides a horse for too long, and it was wearing Benjon down to bloody stumps too.
“And if it is another island?” Ferdinand asked.
The waning remnants of the moon reflected from El Alacrán’s chitin in a dull glow. The arachnid had barely spoken at all these last few days, and Ferdinand thought him conserving that echoing rasp of a voice which sounded as if he had contracted a sickness of the throat.
He did not know if scorpions even had throats. They had mouths, sure enough, but that stood for nothing.
“It looks like land,” said Benjon.
Ferdinand ached to tell him to shut up, but the question had been asked. If El Alacrán would not answer then Benjon, or rather his parasite bearing the wisdom of some Nubian sailor, must instead.
As Ferdinand lay down to sleep he found himself, as almost every night, overpowered with memories of the life he had once possessed. Chiefly it was of a comfortable bed, that he thought, and the sharing of it which had he hoped might continue until he was at least a little further into his dotage.
Though he had kept it from the Gooddoctor, and though he strove to maintain some of Albion’s decencies in never mentioning to Hajar, this had been the hint which set his suspicions in motion first. Hugo’s absence from his bed after more than fifteen of warming it was no small omen.
When he could stand to think of it at all, he was grateful, for the idea of making love to a shell of a man without knowing it made his blood cold and his stomach tight.
Ferdinand lay in the darkness as their little ship bobbed and the slap of small waves on its hull became the rhythm of a lullaby.
He sought to imagine the great monster below for the security of terror, but found instead that he still wondered when he might return to Albion Broadcasting without the pang of loss carving through him like some terrible wound. For now he could not stand to picture the labyrinth of white-painted corridors and the special dialect of its enclosed world without Hugo striding, scampering, and rolling through it. Without him bellowing mischievous nicknames and spinning appalling stories everyone had heard a hundredfold and still stopped to listen to, it was a shell, a conspicuous corpse.
He wondered if they still searched for Hugo, or if they had now accepted and mourned his death, and filled up the holes riddled through the broadcasting map with a hundred inferior specimens.
He wondered if there had been proclamation, or if they sought to maintain a pretence until the Witegamot or the Governance himself passed word that they might broadcast the sad news.
Ferdinand did not wonder if he carried the blame for this sudden disappearance, for he was sure that he must. Their suspicion would have landed on him not two days after Hugo disappeared. Open secrets were, Hugo had always said, as dangerous as the truth itself.
He rolled with care onto his back, ensuring a channel of space between Hajar’s sleeping body and his own wakeful one, and gazed up instead at unfamiliar stars and a night sky unobscured by the smoke and clouds of Edinburgh. Here there was no gaslight to compete against, and the celestial pageantry stood in full glory.
Ferdinand told himself not to dream, tonight, of Hugo – as if dreams ever listened to the telling of their sufferers – and closed his lids over eyes too wet for the denial of tears.
* * *
Come sunrise the sea had grown shallow and the land which before had been a distant-enough blot had grown a credible destination.
Ferdinand availed himself of some of their dwindling fresh water and gave his eye, as had become his habit, to the waters below their boat. He found them empty of fish, of weed, and most of all of the great tendrils which had billowed from island to shore like ribbons in a breeze.
The sea, perhaps, was too shallow for the beast. Ferdinand could see clear through to the sand and the rocks below, and so far no adjustment of perception resulted in the shape of some vast being.
He turned to El Alacrán, who had roused himself from his torpor and stood poised at the fore of the boat, seeming in contemplation, as they zig-zagged to either side of a sudden counter-productive wind.
“I can scarce shake the thought of that circle,” Hajar said, breaking a silence which had lasted almost a twelvehour.
“What circle?” Ferdinand asked, his mind set on the shore before them, stretching now in every direction ahead.
The shore was heavy in hot-forest, rising in the distance to mountains, and he was sure it would be slow going to traverse. He mocked himself for his certainty that they would cross it, but with a scorpion of such size at his side it was hard to think what, short of further birds, might delay them.
“The scar, of the forest,” Hajar said with some impatience, as if Ferdinand should have kept his mind to a single glimpse of a pockmark of foliage instead of the immeasurable horror floating beneath them these last few days, or the journey ahead. “Their swallowed city. The last clinging shreds of them on the edge of that island. I cannot… keep it from my mind.”
Ferdinand had no such difficulty, and he said so.
“In the Halls, they said –” Hajar began.
“In the Halls,” Ferdinand interrupted, annoyed, “they were mad as stoats to a man and clinging to the clouds on the say-so of stories with no evidence. Do you not say you are an empiricist?”
“Did you not see the evidence?” Hajar asked, shaping with her hands in uncharacteristic gesture. Her hands were most often kept still when not in use, but she transcribed a circle in the air, even as the shoreline drew ever-nearer. “We were shown
.”
“I saw a pock in the forest and a bad chalk drawing by a dying people,” Ferdinand corrected, trying to watch the beach as it came slow to them.
It was white and dazzled the eye, but narrow as a stripe before the hot-forest grew up in a wall of virulent greens. He thought by this that they must be at high-tide, but he was not sure how to divine it.
“Which might just as soon have been a legend of theirs,” he pointed out, “as it is of the sky-people.”
“That was no more than a few years’ growth in the forest and you know it even as you dismiss it,” Hajar growled, with some inexplicable urgency. “What do they do, chop the forest down for their legend? They have not the means.”
Ferdinand groaned and peered at the hot-forest ahead of them. He saw no sign of man, no sign of birds above –at least, nothing more massive than an ordinary gull of the sort one might watch off the shore of the Firth – and no break in the hot-forest from headland to headland.
It seemed quite wild, and quite deserted.
“Why should it matter one jot what bloody happened there?” he muttered, meaning to push the conversation away. “It is behind us, this is before us.”
“Because,” said Hajar as if speaking of very simple matters to a very simple child, “if it has occurred there and may occur elsewhere, it is our duty to know of it –”
“Sandstorms only occur in deserts,” Ferdinand pointed out, with good rhetoric, he thought. The hull of their small boat began to scrape the sand. “Who is to say that it is aught but a peculiarity of that island?”
“Who is to say that it is,” Hajar retorted, shading her eyes from the sun.
“Would you two please shut up,” El Alacrán rasped in his sore, echoing voice. “We are ashore, and there are more urgent matters.”
Sure enough, the boat would sail no further. Ferdinand vaulted the gunwale and found himself in water to his thighs, as the stuck ship tipped this way and that with the free-swirling waves.
“Jump, then,” he called up – meaning to Hajar, but it was Benjon, Benjon’s taken body which splashed into the ocean like a dropped stone and drenched him head to end.
“Is it deep?” Hajar asked, hesitating at the lip of the boat even as the wood threw her balance back and forth. She had admirable footing, Ferdinand noted, though this of course scarce made up for what he had seen of her terrible seat a-horse.
“See for yourself,” Ferdinand cried, indicating himself. “Can you not swim?”
“I would rather not discover that I cannot,” said Hajar, but she gathered her skirts up to her waist and dropped into the sea. They billowed out about her in a great train of dirty fabric, leaving her legs quite bare.
He supposed she might be shamed by this nudity, but Hajar seemed only interested in making the shore before any great wave might topple her, and Ferdinand sought to follow her example.
He did not turn at the sound of splashing, but was not altogether surprised when El Alacrán passed by him, raised from the water on unnatural-stiff legs, his tail lifted high. It was an almost comical sight, this great arthropod with his weapons held as a woman startled by a rat might hold her skirts and his claws up like flagpoles.
“Faugh, I hope this dries right-quick or I shall have a miserable night,” said Hajar, as they splashed from the shallows onto the damp white sand.
“We shall all pass a miserable bloody night if there’s naught to eat,” Ferdinand reminded her, and they cast about the beach with the eyes of scavengers. He could see little that stirred his appetite, but his belly was already a-rumble and he knew that sooner or later some foul thing must enter him again. He hoped it was not to be more bear.
“Fruit,” Hajar observed, pointing into the trees. Sure enough there hung fistfuls of black-hued berries over the sand, six feet from the ground and as swollen and ripe as any fruit had ever swelled. “And suppose it is poison?”
“Feed it to Benjon and find out,” Ferdinand suggested, already striding to the trees with his soaked trouser chafing him.
The fruits were in his reach but perhaps a little out of Hajar’s: he pulled down the branch for her to choose her own, but she hesitated.
“You’re not funny,” Hajar said.
“Then I shall—” Ferdinand began, exasperated and hungry.
“That is hardly a solution.”
“Name another,” Ferdinand pointed out, and he plucked a handful of the black fruits.
They seemed rather more purple, close to, and smelled a fair cousin to greengage. There was a sufficiency of tiny flies upon the next bunch that rather suggested to him that they at least prospered upon the fruits, and a great many upon one fruit that sported tooth-marks where it was torn apart. He placed one whole into his mouth, and bit.
It was sweeter than greengage, but of comparable flesh, and sure enough his teeth found within it a solid pit. Ferdinand spat it into his hand to show her.
“Nothing that poisons kills in the instant,” Hajar warned him as he gave her a grin of triumph.
“Nothing that poisons may not be vomited up with seawater,” Benjon said without warning, and before Ferdinand could silence him he added, “We are ashore, where is our vessel?”
“Patience,” El Alacrán counselled, but to Ferdinand’s surprise the matchstick man doctor with his mind-shaking parasite rounded upon the scorpion with nothing of the sort.
“No! No further patience!” Benjon cried, coming at the arthropod with unprecedented aggression. “Either a suitable vessel is provided or we take an unsuitable vessel until one can be found, and the only arthropod here is you.”
Ferdinand found himself frozen in the face of such unexpected passion, as the out-of-sorts doctor raised both his hands and encapsulated within them the shape of El Alacrán. The great scorpion raised his claws and bent his tail to Benjon, backing on the sand.
“No!” Hajar shouted, “Do not injure him!”
“We will have our vessel!” Benjon shouted. “We have been patient long enough! This poor array of weakened and diseased and elderly and mammalian will not suffice, either a vessel is brought or no trace of your friend will remain!”
“Peace!” El Alacrán said, “I will bring you your vessel.” His great claws remained raised and his tail bent to strike, and Ferdinand saw distress painted upon Hajar’s face at this.
“Where will you find–?” she began, but the scorpion had already turned from the argument and ran along the sand as if the sand were a-fire. He ran for the hot-forest.
“I will bring your bloody vessel,” El Alacrán cried, “stay.”
As the great scorpion vanished amid the tall trees like a wraith vanishing from the dream of a waking man, Ferdinand felt a hollowness in his belly.
He might have ascribed it to the berries of uncertain provenance or the continuance of hunger but he knew well enough fear when he felt it. Without El Alacrán they were three fragile human bodies marooned on the edge of an unknown land and now forbidden from quitting the beach.
He looked to Hajar, who seemed stunned to stillness, and to Benjon, whose parasitic animation had departed. The doctor stood now like a statue, watching the treeline with a horrid eagerness that made Ferdinand’s skin itch to see it.
“I shall bring the boat ashore,” Ferdinand proclaimed, when neither of them had moved. “We might have need of it further.”
Neither spoke.
Ferdinand took a further few berries and chewed on them as he returned to the water, spitting the pits into the sea. The tide seemed on the turn, and soon it would start tugging the boat back out to sea, taking with it what fresh water they still had and their only source of shelter should it rain.
The provenance of the boat troubled him a little for it seemed out of keeping with the squalor of the shanty-dwellers to him. Had some other traveller come, and been driven away? Perhaps a party visited from another unknown island, and were only in exploration within the forest when these Albionmen stole their boat.
Perhaps this was the real ro
ot to the shanty-dwellers’ eagerness to drive them away from their settlement.
Ferdinand seized hold of the bow and tugged the boat with him over the sand. It was heavy, and he had not the strength he had possessed as a younger man. In those days he had thought nothing of wrestling with unbroken horses and hauling their most stubborn number near-bodily to their new homes, when he could neither drive them nor sway them.
But the boat came as he pulled, and he pulled, and he pulled with arms weak from little food: a fish here and there was no meal for a man of any size, and raw as they were they had brought little comfort. The little boat came protesting up the beach.
“No, that’s as fine as summer, you stand there and leave me to toil,” Ferdinand grumbled, hauling the boat backward until sweat dripped in his eyes.
Hajar at last came to join him, her mouth dark with berries, and her fingers stained with the same to lay her hands on the gunwale without word of apology or encouragement, and haul back the boat.
“How – ugh – how will your Benjon – ugh – take to finding himself marooned on the far side of the world?” Ferdinand asked, to show at least he harboured no grudge with her.
“With fainting, most like,” Hajar said, her teeth grit as she pulled upon the boat. “He is very weak in himself. I think the parasite holds him upright beyond his natural – oof – his natural extent.”
“You think,” Ferdinand echoed, for it was very plain to him that the parasite dragged Benjon far beyond the natural extent of any man. “We shall be here a while, then, waiting his recovery.”
He did not say ‘or death’, but he thought it so hard he was sure it must reach her by some means other than her ears.
Hajar did not cease pulling. “Let us hope then that these berries are not poison.”
Ferdinand snorted. “You sound like those sky-men. ‘Then’ and ‘eh’ every third word. What a dialect.”
“Eh, then, so,” Hajar said dutifully, and both laughed.
