Relics bp-1

by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

  'No comfort there, Will.' I told him a little of my epiphany in the cathedral at Gardar.

  'There has been a burden on you for a long time, then,' he said. 'Loss of faith… I am no theologian, no Albertus Magnus, God forbid! And I never really had faith like you did, Patch – horrible confession, is it not? Do not tell me that you did not suspect! But when the faithful are stripped of all they believe, they are like a stone house gutted by fire: the walls stand, but all within is gone: rooms, stairs, decorations, beds, tables, everything familiar, gone. If the walls are sound the house may be rebuilt inside – in time. But it will not be familiar, Patch – it will not be home.'

  'No Albertus Magnus? You are right there. Hardly even a hedge-scholar, brother!' But Will had found me out. My faith was gone, and although I did not wish to regain it – strange how fast a lifetime's habits of thought can come to seem like childish superstition – the hollow it had left had yet to be filled with anything as sustaining.

  'I live like a beast,' I told him. 'I breathe, I eat, sleep, work… I have no purpose other than to remain alive. And I am less and less sure why I bother even to do that.'

  'But life itself – what more is there? You have the Cormaran, and the brotherhood of this fine crew of villains, myself included. You have two arms, two legs, two eyes, you are strong… and what of all you have learned? Does that not fill you up?'

  I raised my arms hopelessly. 'I am filled, brother: up to the brim with guilt,' I said. WHiat good is it to keep yourself alive if you must do it at the cost of others? I live like a beast, but I am no beast. I am a man, and if God or his son Jesus Christ will not judge me, then I must judge myself.'

  'Aha!' cried Will. 'I have found you out! You are like that snake who eats his own tail, the…the…' he snapped his fingers in frustration. 'Ouroboros,' I muttered.

  'Exactly. But instead of your tail, you have rammed your head up your own fundament and are gnawing away at your tripes. You are blind to anything but yourself – anyone but yourself. Pull your head out, Patch. It must be very dark up there.' 'It isn't like that,' I whimpered.

  'Then how is it? Have you learned nothing since we left home? You must seize hold of life and squeeze it until the juice comes. Patch, you were doing a fine job until I came along. What about Lady Anna? How do you think…'

  'I will not talk about the Princess Anna!' I snapped, jumping up in a rage that caught us both by surprise.

  'Peace, peace – I meant nothing and you know it. Now sit down and take another drink.'

  And so I did, but only stayed for another minute. Then with a civil 'goodnight' I took myself off to my berth. I lay sleepless that whole night until at last my anger melted into self-pity. Who or what I raged against I did not know, for I was no more the master of my moods than a bee caught in a hurricane can choose which way to fly. I longed for someone – it was too hard even to name that someone to myself – to come to me and wash away my sins, as I knew was in her power. But no sacrament would be given that night, and instead the stars were my company, mocking me with their cold distance.

  We were hurrying across this beautiful sea. Land lay always to port, but far away: no more than a low purple bruise on the horizon. We were following a course towards the coast of Italy and a rendezvous in the great city of Pisa: that at least I knew from the Captain, but if he confided more I do not remember, so wrapped in misery was I. I say wrapped: it did indeed feel as if I were caught up in a winding-sheet but still walked, my limbs alive, my insides dead. Isaac began to watch me closely and ply me with potions and pills – dill, rue, hyssop, bee-balm and other wonders from his store which I had never heard of but which tasted as bitter as any roadside weed. Under his ministrations the melancholy would ebb sometimes, long enough to marvel at the clever porpoises and dolphins who came to visit the Cormaran, weaving in and out of our wake and racing with us, a race they always won with ease. On such days Will and I would find our old delight in each other's company, although I sensed that he treated me carefully, as if I might break suddenly. One day I saw a shoal of fish leap out of the water all at once and spread wings. Like silver swifts they glided stiffly for a distance, then plunged back into the deeps. Soon this miracle – miracle for me, although the other men hardly paid it any mind – became a commonplace, and when a brace of the magical fish missed their aim and crashed to the deck, I hardly noticed when they were added to the night's meal. I became a zealous fisherman, as it was the best excuse for spending my free hours leaning over the side, staring into the sea. I was not interested in what I caught, but the crew were: strange, lovely and occasionally hideous creatures that all tasted good enough. Once, I think the day after we raised the island of Formentera and were creeping past the mountains of Mallorca, I dropped my line unknowingly into a great shoal of mackerel and, as I hauled them up, frantically tying more and more hooks to my line, every man with a free hand rushed to the side with their own lines and soon the deck was carpeted with a writhing, stranded shoal that gleamed and rippled like living chain-mail. Everyone – even the Captain and Gilles, even Anna – waded in to gather them up, stun them and throw them into one of the salting barrels that Guthlaf had pulled from the hold. It was as I bent to this task that I heard a squeal and saw Anna fending off a mackerel that flapped and jerked in her arms. She flung it away, stooped and picked up another struggling fish which, with a triumphant laugh, she threw at one of the crew. Her aim was good: the mackerel hit Will square on his crooked nose.

  Like all those who suffer a surfeit of melancholy I was drawn more and more inside myself, studying as if with an inner eye the sooty and damaged rubric of what I took to be my soul. It is hard to look back on those days with any great sympathy for myself, for the humours made me selfish, sour and unfriendly, and those traits are not easily borne in a community as tight-knit as a ship. It says much for the good nature of the crew that they did not heave me overboard, but it must have been a great temptation for them at times. But I was oblivious to the feelings of others, indeed I barely noticed them, so intent on anatomising my worthlessness had I become. But looking up at that moment to see the look of pure happiness on Anna's face, and finding it mirrored in Will's, brought me to my senses like a whiff of sal ammoniac. While I had brooded – how many days had it been? Weeks, perhaps? – life had been going on without me. Things had been happening under my nose. I had turned my feelings for Anna over and over like meat on a spit, watching them become shrivelled and burnt. Out here in the sunshine, though, Anna was happy and quite unconcerned.

  Or so it seemed. Now it is easy to see that I was not looking directly at the world. Instead I was peering into the mirror held up for me by melancholy, which distorted and corrupted all that appeared in it. So I did not see Anna's happiness for what it was: the proof that my fears for her were groundless. Instead I searched the mirror for a more sinister meaning, and it was not long in revealing itself. For there stood Will, my worldly, wicked friend, and the look he was giving Anna was one I had seen a thousand times before in the low houses of Balecester.

  The unwholesome epiphany I was granted from Anna and Will's mackerel-fight worked a miraculous cure, as epiphanies are wont to do. From that moment on I found my senses clear and life once again humming within me. I was mistaken, though, if I believed that my melancholy humour had been cast out. It had instead transmuted itself from the base matter of despair to the harder, brighter metal of jealousy. But like any good poison, this one did its work slowly and insidiously, although I would not understand this until it was too late. At that moment, standing bare-chested in the hot sun with my arms full of slimy, writhing fish, I was suddenly feeling something like my old self. Without thinking, I lobbed the mackerel in my hand at Will who, faced with scaly assault from two quarters, ducked behind the mast and aimed another fish at me. It went wide and hit Carlo in the stomach and he, thinking Dimitri behind the wicked deed, launched an attack of his own that signalled out-and-out war on deck. If a flying-fish had chanced to peer over the rail as
he glided past he would have been treated to the marine version of hell itself: a writhing bedlam of half-naked men hurling fish, beating one another about the head with fish and treading live fish underfoot, hooting and screeching the while like a legion of Beelzebub's fiends. It had been long months since the men of the Cormaran had been allowed their heads in this way – they had missed a true shore-leave in Dublin and Bordeaux – and the Captain let the melee run its course, even permitting Istvan to belabour him with a fast-disintegrating dog-fish that had thrown in its lot with the wrong shoal.

  Once some sort of order had returned to the Cormaran it became clear that we would have to pay for our jollity. In many ways life aboard a ship resembles that of a monastery, and that perhaps was one reason why I felt so at home on the sea. It is a self-sufficient community of men in which a life of labour is regulated by bells. There is always much to be done, but on ship as in monastery, idle hands are the greatest danger to order and work must be found for them. I spent my boyhood scrubbing floors and polishing wood at the abbey, and now I found that my days passed in much the same way. So it was with mounting panic that we stood, fouled with scales and blood, and regarded the chaos we had wrought.

  The deck was creamy with the trodden guts and mashed corpses of fish. Many survived to be pickled, and the rest went overboard. Fafner emerged from below, his whiskers fairly trembling with excitement. A cloud of seabirds appeared as if from nowhere to feast on the oily, stinking trail that the Cormaran dragged like a slug across the pristine sea. We set to work sluicing everything down with sea-water, then scouring the deck with sand and stones. It was somewhat purgatorial, as the sun heated everything to the rotting point almost straight away, and we laboured in a rich fetor of putrescence. Black slime had to be scraped from almost every surface. In the end we had to scatter lye, which made our eyes water, and wash ourselves down with sour wine, but it was days before the ship – and its cat – lost its pungency.

  Meanwhile, fish had come to feed on the debris in our wake, and greater fish to feed upon the smaller ones. A shout from the steering deck brought me running, grateful for a respite from my scouring-stone. Nizam was pointing down into the water, and Anna, who had wisely taken refuge up here after starting the melee, was bouncing on her bare toes with excitement – or perhaps fear, for when I followed Nizam's finger I saw a strange and wonderful sight. Great silver-grey fish, the size of dolphins, were roiling and thrashing on the surface, seemingly driven mad by the mackerel blood. 'Sharks,' someone beside me said, awe in his voice. Now I understood why sailors fear that beast above all others. I saw little fish disappearing into wide, toothy maws; pointed heads lash at water, at other sharks, even at the seagulls who hovered just overhead. Then Anna let out a scream of real terror and a couple of the crew stepped back abruptly from the rail. A monstrous grey shape had scythed into the churning pack. It seemed as big as two oxen stood nose to tail, and its jaws gaped wide as a door, all studded about with a thicket of curved, needle-pointed teeth. But the monster's eyes were the worst: two black sockets that seemed to open onto night itself. No expression was there, no glimmer, no sign that any spark of life dwelt inside that merciless head. Instead it seemed driven by remorseless hatred for all that moved. It fought briefly with the other sharks, turning the water into a red ferment, and when they had fled or died it turned its appalling eye on us and drove straight for the rudder. There was a thud, the deck shook and Nizam went sprawling. The tiller juddered. Then the monster was gone, sunk to whatever bleak depth it claimed as its kingdom. I turned to find reassurance in a human face, to wipe away the memory of those empty eyes, and saw that Anna, in her fear, had pressed herself close against Will.

  I could not get the memory of it out of my head. All the rest of that long day I scrubbed the deck like a madman, until my hands were numb with the constant grating. But my mind was anything but numbed. So recently dead within my skull, it had awakened and was buzzing like a nest of wasps, yellow as the gall of jealousy I could all but taste upon my tongue. Had I troubled to consult Isaac, he could have told me that the melancholic black bile that had devilled me had been driven out by an excess of yellow bile – so out of balance had my body become that I had begun to swing, like a pendulum, from one extremity to another – and this choleric humour was now driving me helplessly before it. I think he saw us all as a collection of vessels more or less full of foul or fair liquids, to be topped up or drained at his discretion. But foolishly I did not seek him out, and instead allowed the image that had painted clear upon my inner eye – Anna leaning into Will's side – to grow and grow until it became first a glowing Veronica, then a gigantic thing that filled my world as. if it were painted on the sail itself. In truth, what had I seen? Nothing more than the simplest urge for protection against an all-devouring fear, and had I not felt the same thing myself? But the grand Veronica of my jealous fancy was my work and mine alone, and like any painter I began to add details: had Anna's hand reached for Will's? In my mind's eye it had. Anna's face: had she turned it to Will, helpless, beseeching? Certainly. Had a look passed between them, secret, complicit? Yes, hell's shark-toothed mouth swallow them both, yes.

  I laboured through another white-hot day, then another, and dreamed bitter dreams each night. Finally I woke to cooler weather with a steady wind out of the west, and caught my first sight of Corsica to starboard. As we drew closer, the island seemed a great wall of stone topped by a head of white cloud. By midday it had resolved itself into a jagged collection of mountain peaks, among which the vaporous clouds seethed and twined. Towns lay under those peaks, apparently, although the thought of living in such a forbidding place made me shudder. Nizam pointed out Calvi and the Red Isle, and with some difficulty we turned our course north-north-east.

  'The wind is fickle in this sea,' Zianni told me. Like many of the crew, Zianni had lived the life of a pirate before chance brought him aboard the Cormaran. He came from a noble Venetian family but had killed a magistrate in a brawl and had fled from the Doge's executioner. He had robbed his way up and down the Italian coast with a gang of Istrian corsairs, fought with the Catalan mercenaries in the islands we had sailed past a few days before and cast in his lot with the Cormaran after dabbling with honesty in Valencia had reduced him to beggardom.

  'The wind at our backs is the libeccio,' he said now. 'It blows through here like a bastard this time of year. See those clouds over the island? We'll have thunder tonight, for certain, and then enough wind to blow us to Pisa and half-way over the mountains beyond.'

  He was right. As we coasted up towards Cap Corse, the sea grew darker and the clouds seemed to boil over and fill the whole sky. It was after midnight when we rounded the cape, the whole crew on deck, and a few minutes later the sky caught fire. I had never seen such lightning. It spun across the sky like the spokes of an infernal cartwheel and stabbed the sea all around us. I felt the thunder from the soles of my feet to the teeth that rattled in my head. The wind hit us so hard that the Cormaran heeled over to starboard, and those who did not have a tight hold on rope or spar were sent flying into the bilges. We scrambled in the deep darkness – lit every few seconds by light that seemed brighter and fiercer than the sun – to reef the sail, and soon we were flying on a broad reach across the seething waters. The lightning flailed above us, bursts of light freezing us in the midst of our frenzied work, branding fleeting impressions onto my eyes so that, whether they were open or closed, I saw wild faces, pale madmen bathed in blazing quicksilver.

  There was no sleep that night, nor the next morning. We had only twenty or so leagues to cover from Cap Corse to the mouth of the Arno, and again Zianni's prediction came true. On our broad reach, the libeccio screeching onto our port side, we raised the Italian coast soon after ten bells. But soon after that, the wind dropped and the storm pulled its rags from the sky. By this time we were near enough to land to see the reedy mouths of the Arno and, beyond it, the distant outline of the city itself. We were not alone on the sea: ships of all descr
iption were plying in and out of the river, and I could not help noticing a new, tense vigilance in the faces of the Captain and Gilles. I was just wondering if I could snatch a few minutes of sleep when Gilles beckoned me to his side on the steering deck.

  'Do you wish to see Pisa? Good, for you are coming ashore with us,' he said, leaving me no time to protest. 'Find your friend and make the gig ready.' He must have caught sight of something in my eyes, for he went on: Tour friend Will. He will be coming as well.'

  I did not care whether I saw Pisa or no, but I keenly did not want Will's company. Nevertheless I gritted my teeth and dragged myself over to where he sat, helping Dimitri in his endless task of keeping the salt sea from devouring our weapons. It did not improve my mood to see the look of almost doggy pleasure he gave me at the news.

  'Let's get to it, then,' I said briskly, in case he tried to talk to me. Turning on my heel I stalked off aft climbing up on the rail to skirt the stern castle. The gig would be full of water from the storm and heavy, I thought, angrily. I already had hold of the painter and was pulling at it, watching the gig bob happily in the Cormaran's wake and noting that it was, indeed, much heavier than usual, when Will dropped down beside me and clapped his hands over mine. We gave an experimental heave. 'She's a heavy one,' said Will brightly.

  'How surprising,' I returned, so coldly I wondered I could not see my breath.

  'So lay on, Patch!' he chattered. 'Lay on! It is a beautiful day – God's nails, that storm! – and we are going ashore in sinful Pisa. Is Pisa sinful? I hope so. All cities are sinful, somewhat, eh, Patch?'

  'For fuck's sake stop your prating and pull the sodding rope!' I snapped. What's wrong with you?'

  'Nothing's wrong. We need to shut up and work. I don't want to do this, so let us get it over with.'

  'No, wait, Patch. You have been acting like a basket of bad eggs since we came through the Pillars. What is going on?'