Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain

by Rebecca Bradley

  Up on the crosstrees, Kat and I exchanged weary looks. The Fifth had no captain. Tig's will might be the wind that blew us in a particular direction, but Shree and Calla shared the practical planning that got us there and the strategic planning that kept us breathing when we arrived. Chasco effectively ruled when it came to matters of seamanship and of commerce, where he had considerable quiet talent, ensuring we never left one port without a cargo that would be profitable in the next. I had a voice in all councils, when I cared to use it. This was a non-system that worked well most of the time, but the rare occasions when Shree and Calla did not agree could be tense for everybody except perhaps my father, who never paid attention. This was turning into one of those occasions.

  "You're right," Shree went on, "about one thing. Sailing into Gil will be different from any landfall we've ever made—for a change, we'll know something about the place beforehand. For a change, we'll be among friends."

  Even from above, the tilt of my mother's head looked sceptical. "Or enemies."

  "What enemies, Calla? The only real enemy Tig had was the Primate, and he'll be long dead. Whereas if Tig's mother is alive or if his brother Arko is still on the throne, we'll be made welcome. Arko was always fond of Tig. He was even quite fond of me when he could remember who I was. He mostly mistook me for one of the butlers."

  "If they're alive," my mother said tightly, "we'll have an interesting time explaining why Tig hasn't aged in twenty years. And what if the Lady Dazeene is dead? What if Arko isn't on the throne? You've always said the people weren't happy living under the Flamens. What if they revolted after the Last Dance? What if Oballef's line was overturned? It could be dangerous to be a Scion in Gil now."

  He sighed. "We've been through that already, too. We won't announce ourselves until we're sure of how we stand."

  "We'll be recognized."

  "No, we will not," Shree said, quite sharply. "Think hard: you've been away from Gil for twenty-five years, the rest of us for twenty years, and Kat and Vero were never there in the first place. We've changed. Be honest, cousin, how long ago did you give up pulling the grey hairs out of your head?"

  "About when you gave up pulling them out of your beard," my mother retorted.

  "About seven years," Kat murmured. I nudged her to be quiet.

  "But no matter how much you and Chasco and I may have changed," Calla went on, "Tig has not. He looks just the same now as on the day he first arrived in Gil, and on the day he left."

  "That's his protection, if he needs it. Who will think he's the same man, if we don't tell them? Furthermore, Tig doesn't have the sort of face people remember."

  "Then what about Vero? You've always said he's the image of his uncle Arkolef."

  "We don't need to borrow trouble, Calla."

  "Oh gods, that's true enough. But I'd feel better about it all," my mother said with a deep sigh, giving up for the moment, "if I knew what Tig's plans were in Gil."

  "He doesn't know himself yet. Ho!" Shree jabbed a finger to the southeast. "I think that's it—do you see it, Vero? Kat, do you see it?"

  We had been paying attention to the deck instead of the sea; also, the waters to the east had taken fire from the sun as it rose higher, burning off the mist, and for the last while the horizon had been vanishing behind great blots of green dazzle whenever we tried to watch too conscientiously. Now the glare was cut as the sun passed behind a cloud and I saw, far off, the blunt grey snout of an island just poking above the horizon. There was only one thing it could be, I thought, the fabled mountain itself, the Gilgard, the centrepiece of so much history, of Tig's stories, of Chasco and Calla's grim reminiscences about the Web and Shree's matter-of-fact accounts of his Sherkin years. Kat went rigid beside me. "I don't like the look of it," she whispered.

  Kat could be very hard to please. I didn't bother to answer. "Landsight," I called down to Chasco, who waved back with unusual animation and began to lash the wheel so he could go forward for our planned celebration. Beside him, Tig loosened his leather bindings, stretched, and strolled over to join Shree and Calla at the bowrail. He appeared to be in good control of himself, moving easily and walking a straight line. His smile looked genuine, very different from the manic curve the Pain often clamped to his lips. As he reached the others in the bow, the sun reappeared and bathed the three of them in a golden light, as if obliging us with a happy omen. High up in the rigging, I felt my spirits rise.

  "So, Gil at last," I said. "Just think of it, Katla—where Oballef worked all those miracles and founded a dynasty; where our ancestors ruled as priest-kings for nearly a thousand years; where our father stood when he willed the sinking of Iklankish; where—"

  "Shut up, Vero. I tell you, I don't like this."

  She was watching the slow rising of the Gilgard above the horizon, pointedly without the good cheer that was permeating the rest of us. When Tigrallef's laughter floated up to us from the bow, Kat looked down at him with narrowed eyes. I reached across the lines to tug gently at her cropped brown hair.

  "What's the matter, little Kat? Come on, tell big brother."

  She glanced at me coldly. "That was a reasonable approach, Verolef, when I was a small child with a grazed knee. Shut up and watch Father."

  "Tig's just fine," I said, "in fact I haven't seen him in a better way in a long time."

  "No, Vero, look at him. Watch the way he moves. Wait for another cloud." I frowned at her, then at the three figures in the bow. Our mother was laughing as well, her fears apparently forgotten. Shree was looking pleased and clapping Tigrallef on the back. Below us, Chasco was just striding past the foot of the foremast carrying flagons of wine and water and six beakers on a tray. He looked up at Kat and me and motioned with his head for us to join them. Homecoming. I grinned back and started to pull my feet up on to the crosstrees.

  "Watch him now, Vero!"

  Another ragged cloud bank was just drifting between us and the sun, dimming the light to grey, dousing the fires on the water. For a broken second I saw what Kat had seen; a few heartbeats later I had shinnied down the mast and crossed the foredeck in a bound. Already the sun was clear of the clouds again.

  They looked a little surprised at my precipitate arrival. "Wine, Vero?" asked Chasco.

  "He's glowing," I panted.

  "What? Are you sure?"

  "He's glowing. You can't see it when the sun's out, but he is."

  We stood uncertainly around my father wondering what to do for him, which would be a fair and accurate summary of how we had spent the preceding twenty years. Light glowing through his skin was something we had seen before, several times, and recognized as a measure of the Pain's most powerful assault—and most of those times it had been like the groaning of rocks before an avalanche or the heavy air before a storm, a signal of danger that was grave enough to tempt Tigrallef to lose hold of his will.

  This occasion did not seem to fit the pattern. It was a celebration, and there were no enemies in sight. It was a homecoming—after twenty years, the Gilgard was no more than a few hours' sail away. No wonder Shree looked incredulous at first. He said, "Vero, are you sure about what you saw?"

  "Absolutely."

  He stared at me, shaking his head. "No, I don't believe it. Just look at him, he seems all right."

  Tigrallef, who was used to being talked about as if he wasn't there, beamed at us across his beaker like a man at a wine-tasting in a rather superior vineyard. "I should imagine Vero's right, though," he said.

  The rest of us were silent as he took another sip from the beaker. My mother reached out to him, and he turned a smile of terrible brilliance on her. She said, "What is it, Tig? Is it Gil? Should we bypass Gil after all?"

  "Turn aside?" he said. "Certainly not."

  "But—" She swallowed, started again. "Tig, dearheart, if it's going to be like Itsant . . . Amballa . . ."

  As he laughed, I could swear the brightness intensified inside him, until even the naked sun could not overshine it entirely. "Not like
Itsant, Calla. Not like Amballa or Nkalvi. Like Myr! A different matter altogether."

  "But—"

  A trace of impatience came into his voice. "Don't you see that she's in terror at the thought of returning to Gil? She's trying to turn me aside."

  "But the danger—"

  "Is to her, it may be," he broke in. "Remember how she tried to keep me from Myr, way back at the beginning of things?"

  Other signs were appearing now, confirming that the glow I'd seen had not been a trick of the variable sunlight. His eyes were dilated until only the thinnest of blue rings divided the black pits of his pupils from the surrounding whites. His fingers paled around the beaker—Chasco saw that too, and reached to take it from him a broken second too late, just as it fragmented into shards. My father looked down at the pool of red wine at his feet, blood-coloured on the polished boards. "Oh, damn," he said. Very slowly, he began to drop.

  Shree swung him up into his arms and ran for the deckhouse, my mother racing ahead of him to throw open the door. I knew they would not be back for some time.

  "Will you have that wine now, Vero?" Chasco asked.

  "Just a drop," I said.

  "Isn't Kat joining us?"

  "Doesn't appear to be." She was still sitting up on the crosstrees with her shoulder pressed against the foremast. I waved at her. She shook her head and looked away. "No, she's not joining us."

  "Poor child," said Chasco. He held my beaker out to me and took a measured sip from his own.

  "Do you think I should go back up and talk to her?"

  "No, Vero. I think you should leave her alone."

  I peered back up at the slight figure in the rigging. Her posture was not welcoming. "You're probably right."

  Chasco usually was right, and of course he knew my sister as well as anyone could. He had taken on much of the burden of Kat and me when each of us was little: amused us, fed us, bathed us, taught us our lessons, even soothed our nightmares when Shree and Calla were too busy watching over Tigrallef's. It was he, not my mother, who used to brush and braid Kat's hair before she decided to cut it short. It was he, not my father, who took me to my first tavern and later my first brothel. It occurred to me now, looking at him, that outwardly he had aged hardly more than my father had—a slim straight man in his mid-forties who could have passed for thirty, with just a frosting of grey at the temples of his dark hair. Handsome, too; in his quiet self-effacing way he had broken hearts all over the unknown world, and a certain rich widow in Amballa had tried very hard to keep him. Sometimes I wondered why he stayed with us. Other times I knew he would never leave.

  "Do you think Kat's right?" I asked. "Is the Pain coming more frequently?"

  He shook his head. "The Pain is always there. Always. Your question these days should be, how much closer to the edge is it pushing your father?"

  I stooped and started picking up the shards of Tig's beaker. "The glow is a bad sign."

  Another slow shake of the head. "Maybe, maybe not. It's hard on Tig, but it could mean we've picked up the trail we lost in Nkalvi. It meant something of the sort once before. Surely you remember the approach to Myr?"

  I tossed the shards overboard. Remember Myr? Didn't I just.

  Our first landsight in the unknown world, according to logs kept by Chasco and my father, was made just over nine weeks after our flight from Vassashinay. Such an empty sea would have been unusual west of Zaine, where landsights were commonly no more than half an hour apart and formed a solid basis for navigation in the Great Known Sea; but east of Zaine there were no markers. The sea stretched ahead of us featureless and unbroken, and even the patterns of the stars changed as we fared, first eastwards, then southwards. Chasco's log entries grew gloomier as the weeks went on and the water level fell in barrel after barrel.

  My father's spirits, however, rose steadily at first. His movements became easier, he stumbled less, he stopped handling objects as if their size, weight and distance kept shifting on him. He slept badly, though, twisting and muttering on the pallet he shared with my mother in a curtained end of the cabin, often crying out in his sleep in words that no one could understand. After a week or so of this, Shree and Chasco took to moving their pallets to the foredeck at night with mine between them, so we could sleep undisturbed. My mother claimed she didn't need much sleep.

  Five weeks into our journey, at about the time my father decided we should turn our course southwards, he fell sick for several days. That, anyway, was what they told me; but in fact the Pain was making its most vicious assault so far, long and brutal enough for me to remember it, many solid hours of my father curled up on his pallet, sweating, twitching, arguing with the invisible, reading horrors on the blank page of the cabin wall. When at last he seemed to be over it and could come on deck again, I heard him explain to Calla that she was trying her best to turn him north.

  A few nights later I was lying on my pallet on the foredeck under the stars, supposedly unconscious, while the grownups talked softly around the last wine keg a few feet away. I was pretending to be asleep because I had noticed my elders' tendency to talk about the most interesting things when they thought I wasn't listening. That night, though, the talk was boring and incomprehensible, mostly about the dwindling water supplies, the lack of the small islands that had been so common in the known world, the urgent need to make landfall in the next week or so. With all the curiosity in the world, it was difficult for me to stay awake.

  "But we've already crossed the deeps," I remember my father saying. "For two days now I've been watching the seabed rise towards us, just as I watched it fall away after we passed the cape of Zaine. I should say we're due to make landsight in the next week or so. By the way, I suppose you're all wondering why we're heading due south . . ."

  I was dropping helplessly towards sleep by then and did not catch what he said next, but I dreamt that the voices suddenly got much louder, and Shree's voice, raised and angry, said things like "madness" and "get us all killed" and "tupping Harashil", all of which sounded quite interesting; but the next thing I knew, I was waking up under a clear dawn sky with only Chasco asleep on the pallet beside me. Somebody had furled the sails during the night, but I could tell the lorsk was still moving along rapidly. I got up and looked around.

  Shree was in the stern doing his watch at the tiller. He was also tearing chunks off a piece of bread with his teeth, and looking grim. He held the loaf out to me as I hopped across the roof of the deckhouse.

  "Where are we?" I asked between bites.

  "Nowhere in particular," he said.

  "Why are we moving so fast?"

  "We're in a very strong current."

  "Are we going to make landsight soon?"

  "I could not say."

  I thought about the words he had shouted at my father in my semi-dream. Madness. Get us all killed. Tupping Harashil. "Are you angry with Tig?" I asked.

  "No."

  "Is Tig crazy?"

  Shree drew in a long breath. He would not meet my eyes, but after a few moments he sighed and put his arm around my shoulders. "No, your father's not crazy. Don't worry, Vero."

  "Is he going to get us all killed?"

  "No, no. Of course not." He grinned at me with a cheerfulness that would not, and did not, fool a five-yearling. I gave him what must have been a hard, penetrating look.

  "What does 'tupping' mean?"

  "Raksh! Were you listening to all that?"

  "I had a dream," I said with partial truth. "What does tupping mean?"

  "Ask your mother," he said; this time his grin was real. "No, not your mam, she may wash your mouth out with gallroot. Ask your da, he'll tell you more than you want to know. Come on now, little Vero, there's work to do. Let's wake up that lazybones Chasco."

  I wanted to ask him about the other word, but I couldn't bring it to mind just then, the long word with an alien but not unattractive sound. Later it came back to me: Harashil. In due course I did ask my father about tupping, and learnt a great deal about
its etymology and not much about what it meant, but I put off asking about Harashil. It became obvious without asking that it had something to do with the Pain.

  In fact, my father had decided to commit the lorsk to the Great Southern Current and follow wherever it led, which is why Shree had been so angry with him. Nobody knew for sure where the Great Southern Current fetched up; all they knew was that any vessels caught too firmly in its watery grip were swept into oblivion, never to return. In the known world we had come from, all sorts of terrible fates were envisioned for those vanished ships and their crews: pits of fire, sea-beasts big as mountains and hungry as babies, pirate demons, demon pirates, boiling water whorls, an edge of the world decisive enough to fall off of. None of the myths were more bizarre than the reality we found, though the reality had the agreeable characteristic of being survivable, with luck. We had located the current by the simple expedient of sailing due south until, in the middle of the night already described, we suddenly found ourselves careering east-southeast.

  The next events I remember happened a few days later. The air had been growing steadily colder since the current captured us, until we were forced to don all our clothing in layers and wear our blankets as cloaks, even at midday. The spray hardened on the lorsk's yards and shrouds, the tattered web of her halliards glittered with a strange new substance which my elders called ice. Strangest of all, the days grew much longer, the sun dipping below the horizon for no more than three or four hours of each night. By day, its light was wan and watery.

  My father sat in the bow for many hours each day watching the sea, looking perfectly well, if a little pale. In the evening of our sixth day in the current, I was sitting with him in his usual spot when he stopped in the middle of a story and pointed to the southeast, where a white line glinted far away on the horizon. It was only just distinguishable from the sky, which was also white, but with a luminous pallor the colour of pearls.

  "Could you give my respects to Chasco," he said to me, "and tell him it would be a good time to raise the sails." Then he sat up straighter and narrowed his eyes; I followed his gaze and saw that the white line had leapt up from the sea quite suddenly, becoming a thin strip coloured the blue-white of skimmed milk, cleaving the tarnished silver ocean from the sky. The strip began to thicken. "Could you also tell Chasco," Tig said, "that he had better hurry. The pocketing old sow is up to her games again."