Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain

by Rebecca Bradley

  I trotted to the stern, where the others were playing fingersticks, and delivered the message. They gazed open-mouthed at the horizon for a few seconds, then leapt to tear at the sheathing of ice that glued the furled sails to the yards, to twitch at the stays until their icy patina shivered into tinkling fragments on the deckboards. My father stayed where he was. I crept back to his side and craned to look over the bowrail, trying to work out what had so disturbed the others.

  It was astonishing how rapidly the view had changed. A few minutes before there'd been an empty sea with a blue-white streak along the waterline; now there was a line of cliffs, not continuous, but tall and shining, heightening as we watched—the milky blankness resolving into stripes and mottles of detail, violet and pale blue, silver and dazzling white. Quite pretty, I thought, also interesting and worthy of further investigation, but not yet at the top of my list of questions. My father, paying no attention to my return, was staring at the cliffs with eyes that were no more than black tunnels drilled through the bloodshot whites, like the eyes of cats or certain lizards. I gathered my courage and pulled at his sleeve.

  "Who's a pocketing old sow, Tig?"

  He gazed down at me without focusing. His eyes drifted back to the swelling cliffs, so I tugged harder.

  "Who's a pocketing old sow?" I repeated. "Is it Calla who's a pocketing old sow, Tig? Because I don't think she's a pocketing old—"

  "Hush, Vero." He blinked rapidly until his eyes shifted into focus. "No, of course your mother is not a pock—not a sow of any description. Your mother is lovely. I—I'll explain later. Come on, let's help them get the sails ready." He glanced at the cliffs again. "There's not much time."

  The four of them worked like demons, too preoccupied to maintain the fiction that I was a useful member of the crew. Philosophically, I gave up trying to direct them after a while and returned to the bow to watch how fast the cliffs were growing.

  Fast enough; by the time the sails were raised, the cliffs were a palisade from one end of the horizon to the other, mighty as mountains. They even had foothills, jagged hillocks that looked like a picket fence guarding a towering rampart—it was only when we were swept in among them that I realized they were islands, and that some of them were respectable mountains in their own right, all shades of white and grey and purple. One of the smallest, an angular tump not much larger than the lorsk, was directly in our path until Chasco calmly pulled at the tiller and swung us on a tight curve around it. We were safe for the moment, but a thousand others loomed beyond it, and the light was beginning to fail.

  Now a chaotic battle commenced, a controlled frenzy of hauling on the tiller and angling the sails, of steering a drunkard's course through the maze of those floating foothills. The current became unpredictable and strewn with hazards—stretches of turbulence, savage cross-eddies, broad dimpled whorls that sucked at us as we skirted their edges—the wind was almost no help, being the erratic wheezing of a crazed giant. Chasco sang out terse orders, even in this crisis managing to sound courteous and precise; the others, including my father, scrambled to obey. There were many near misses. At that age I found it all very thrilling; in retrospect, terrifying.

  Sometime during this wild ride I made the connection between those huge haggard islands and the substance that had congealed so prettily on the lorsk's rigging. The islands were simply great chunks of ice, and they were indeed floating; some were even moving with the currents, though sluggishly and far more slowly than the lorsk. I raised my eyes to the great fissured cliffs beyond and saw with wonder they were crowned with greenery but caped with ice.

  As we drew nearer the cliffs, the floating tors began to crowd more thickly, until I could imagine they were jostling each other for the privilege of getting in our way. Chasco worked marvels of steersmanship, dancing around one, swerving to avoid another, shaving past a third with a few spans to spare, finally slamming the lorsk to starboard as a great purplish mammoth reared up in our path. At first it seemed impossible that we would clear this one's bulging sides, and then it seemed we had miraculously done so; but the next moment the lorsk heeled almost on her beam ends as her keel scraped across a jutting shoulder of the ice-mountain just under the surface. Very sluggishly, the lorsk righted herself—but even I could tell, from the strange feel of the deck under my feet, that the sea was pouring in below.

  The irony was that, through a narrowing gap between two enormous bergs ahead of us, I glimpsed an expanse of uncluttered water and a wedge of flat grey beach. Chasco must have seen it too, for he cried out and angled towards the gap with all the lorsk's remaining wayspeed.

  That was when my father rejoined me at the bowrail, putting his arm around my shoulders and pulling me close to his side. When he looked down at me, I thought at first that the brightest and coldest of winter moons was being reflected in his face, but there was no moon that night.

  "Tig?" I said. "Father?"

  He did not answer, but the light grew under his skin until it hurt my eyes to look at him. I pulled my gaze away and looked ahead to the gap, where the flanks of the two great ice-islands were closing together like the leaves of a double door, only a length from the point of our prow—and then the dark walls were sliding past us on either hand, cutting off the sky, sheer and louring as the sides of a steep ravine. From midship, I heard a terrible sound like a cloth being ripped across, probably indicating an unwelcome second hole in the hull. Seconds later we burst through the gap into clear water, while the two bergs ground thunderously together behind us.

  My father's face, shining with that clear frigid light, was blinding in the dimness of dusk. He said, "The answer is still no. Oh, we'll make it, all right, but without your help, so you might as well bugger off back to your pit." He seemed to be talking to himself.

  A drastic and worsening list suggested that the lorsk had no more than a few minutes left to live, but she limped on in the slack remnants of the current. We were in a race—the shore was close, but perhaps not close enough. Across a maddeningly short stretch of water the great ice-covered massifs towered halfway to the sky, and at their feet a low city tumbled along the waterline as far as my eyes could follow. That is, it looked like a city at first glance; at second glance, a city of ruins; at third glance, not a city at all. In the next instant the bottom finished falling off the lorsk, but before she had a decent chance to sink, the current flipped what was left of her up on to the shore.

  Within minutes of extricating ourselves from the wreckage and tottering above the sideline, two things happened. First, the light faded inside my father's body, leaving him weak but cheerful; the pocketing old sow had conceded for the moment. Second, we solved the mystery of what the Great Southern Current did to the vessels it captured. There were no sea-beasts, no fiery fingers reaching from the deep, no sharp edge of the world—just miles of beach mounded with the rubble and carrion of whole fleets of wooden ships, hulls, prows, splintered masts, rat-kings of rope, crates, keels like the ribcages of dragons, some smashed and weatherbeaten, some as fresh as if the wood had been planed within the preceding year.

  The youngest wreckage we identified was from a Satheli windcatcher, possibly a whaler; the oldest was a carved rostrum that made my father whistle with astonishment, because its like had last been built about fifteen hundred years ago at the imperial shipyards in Fathan. Given that it overlay an accumulation of earlier wreckage, my father estimated that this graveyard of unburied ships could be upwards of two thousand years old.

  Bones of many men and women were mixed with the bones of the ships, but we were not the first crew to survive that landfall. As a direct consequence of this fact, the five of us were full of hot broth and snug under warm blankets by daybreak, in a ship on a mountaintop with a stunning view of the sea.

  It seemed that, over the centuries, castaways of many nations had crawled up on the same beach; their descendants lived on in strange polyglot villages built of salvaged wood, scattered about the relatively temperate highland that crown
ed the cliffs. They had become a curiously hospitable people over the years, with a tradition of adopting all newcomers delivered to them by the Great Southern Current—the theory was that anyone who survived the long waterless drift and the final gauntlet of ice had been chosen by the gods themselves, and who were they to argue with the gods? Bad winters aside, it may have been the most benign landfall we ever made; and the smattering of languages we picked up in the plateau townships proved to be very useful in the long term.

  My father, however, was not content to settle down in a cabin made from parts of an old windcatcher, to grow salt-resistant corn and raise sheep. My father had a mission.

  Not long after our arrival, he announced his intention of taking a stroll into the interior of this small continent, a prospect that horrified our hosts. The continent, they said, was like an enormous saucer, sloping inwards from the coastal cliffs to a sinister hub where winter's hold was never broken, and the sombre white wastes were prowled by wraiths and cacodaemons; where disembodied siren voices lured trespassers into the bottomless crevasses that scarred the continent's icy heart; and, more to the point, where the corporeal but possibly not human tribes of the Eyesuckers retreated after their occasional raids on the plateaux, to their filthy habitations built from the longbones of their victims—after dinner, of course. My father said it all sounded terribly interesting, and could they spare him some paper?

  In the end, he borrowed furs and food as well, for himself and Shree and Calla. I stayed on the coast in Chasco's care, more because my short legs would slow the party than because of the insane riskiness of the venture, or so my mother told me. Why Tigrallef insisted on going was not told to me, though I gathered it was largely because the Pain was pressing him not to. At any rate they were gone for just over three weeks, and all I know of their adventure was picked up by pretending to be asleep when Shree and Calla described it to Chasco.

  This is what I pieced together: that it took two full days to reach the edge of the ice-field and seven more to reach Tigrallef's unknown goal, walking downhill all the way into deepening cold and a furious snow-laden wind. The crevasses were no myth, though the wind probably accounted for the siren voices. The Eyesuckers were no myth, either—furtive, quick-footed skulkers with a gift for staying just on the edge of sight—and they in turn probably accounted for the reports of wraiths and cacodaemons. Shree and my mother knew almost from the beginning they were being followed, spied upon, sized up, but not until mid-morning of the ninth day did they get a good look at the lurkers.

  Shree and Calla had been trudging, head down, all morning through a blinding snowstorm, with Tig striding confidently in the lead. At no time did he seem to be in doubt about where he wanted to go, and he was infuriatingly blithe about the weather. At last he called a halt on the edge of a much steeper slope, slanting down at a vertiginous angle into the obscurity of the swirling snowclouds.

  "This is the place," said my father, "but I'm afraid you shouldn't come with me. Better if you wait for me here."

  "I hope you're joking," Shree said.

  My father took no notice. He swung his load off his back and took out of it a smaller knapsack containing paper and drawing sticks. "This is all I need—I shouldn't be more than three or four hours, five at the most. Incidentally," he added, "don't worry about them." He pointed at something behind the others' backs.

  They whirled around at the same moment as the wind dropped and the snowclouds thinned and fell away. For the first time that day it was possible to see farther than a few feet, and it became immediately apparent that the story about houses built of longbones was also rooted in truth. In fact, my father's walking party had just unwittingly trailed through a sizeable encampment of the dreaded Eyesuckers.

  Thirty or forty grisly hovels were huddled together within the throw of a heavyweight spear, coming nearly to the edge of the steep slope; uncountable fur-packaged ogres with gleaming silver eyes and long pointed buckteeth drifted in clusters among them, looking fully capable of sucking eyeballs for appetizers. Tigrallef moved forwards as if to greet them, and Shree and Calla instinctively caught at him to drag him back. He shook their hands off and stood with his arms folded for a moment, staring around the advancing semicircle of Eyesuckers with an air of polite interest. Then he threw back the hood of his fur cape.

  He was glowing.

  The ogre-people stared at him without changing expression—their faces wore a look of imbecilic sullenness throughout the encounter, according to my mother—and then slowly turned and plodded back into the grey boneheaps of their houses and closed the doors, and that was the last my elders saw of the Eyesuckers. Oddly, my mother had no feeling that it was fear that drove them indoors; rather, that the glimmer under Tigrallef's skin was something they recognized and respected, and most of all wanted no part of. By the time my mother turned around to remark on this, my father was already over the edge and starting down the precipitous slope with nothing but his little knapsack in his hands.

  "I won't be long," he called again. "Just wait there and have a nice rest." He was still glowing. Calla cried out in fury and started after him, but Shree caught her by the scruff of her cloak.

  "He knows more about what's going on than we do. Let's do as he says."

  And that is what Calla and Shree did for the next five hours, barring the instruction to have a nice rest, which was not practical in such close proximity to the Eyesuckers. Mostly they sat back to back with as many weapons as they could manage spread out ready around them, taking turns watching the bonehouses on one side and the slope where Tig had vanished on the other. Every so often they had to get up and stomp around to keep themselves from freezing to death. They were nervous, hungry, cold and bored. Only once did the wind drop and the whirling clouds of snow settle out, and for a few moments they had a clear view across the valley.

  They were perched on the lip of a giant bowl, an ice-encrusted amphitheatre perhaps half a mile across, too round and regular to be a natural formation. There was nothing natural, either, about the thousands of round black windows that stared at them from the sweeping walls of the bowl . . . and then the wind began to howl again and a heavy white curtain rose up between them and the view.

  This was Myr, once a great city, where the ice lay spans-thick over the scars of an ancient fiery destruction. It was more of the discarded handiwork of our Naar ancestors, where the Harashil ruled for two centuries under the name Myrwolf in the cycle before the omphaloi of Vizzath were raised; these facts were worked out from the inscriptions my father copied among the ruins. More vitally, the inscriptions also hinted at where we should go next. Before Vizzath, Myr; before Myr, Itsant; before Itsant, Khamanthansa . . . By the time my father pulled himself back on to the lip of the dead city, he knew where to start looking for Itsant.

  But first we needed to build a boat, a corporate task that took us more than two years. Naturally the Myrene villagers thought my elders were insane, and pitied me for how soon the stalk of my brief life would be snipped off close to the root, but they put no obstacles in our way. The Second was a patchwork vessel, the keel and ribs from a small Plaviset fishing boat, the strakes and deckboards carefully scavenged across miles of beach, the deckhouse frame and many of the fittings salvaged from the lorsk, even part of the ornate Fathiidic rostrum incorporated into the bowsprit as a decorative folly. Nautically speaking she was a mess and a mongrel, but she was a snug little ship, and I loved her better than any of those we sailed in after she was wrecked in the stormbowls of the Kerossac Sea.

  My father, who became a danger to himself and others when he picked up any given tool, was gently discouraged from helping with the boat. Instead he spent those years asking questions and gathering information, and what he was able to piece together was startling: that the world was indeed a globe, as the Zelfic mathematicians had surmised; that there were four great clusters of continents and islands spread around this globe, divided from each other by deeps of such daunting breadth that only an i
diot would set out to cross them intentionally; and that each of these clusters, not surprisingly, had come to think of itself as the entire world. The map my father compiled was probably the first of its kind.

  That was not the limit of his activities. He salvaged his books and papers from the wreckage of the lorsk; he brought his memoirs up to date; he collected languages of the three unknown worlds; he charted the pattern of the great currents along Myr's complicated coastline, data which eventually enabled us to launch the Second safely. He also gathered fresh information from the castaways tossed up on the beach after us, which included a few each from Canzitar, Glishor, Sathelforn and Zaine; from them we received the last snippets of news for many years about our own part of the world, and also learned about the origins and spread of the plague they called the Last Dance.

  My own feeling is that it was no accident that took us to Myr, nor was it an idle desire on Tigrallef's part to investigate the Great Southern Current. Myr was the best place, perhaps the only place in the world, where we could prepare ourselves for the long journey to come. Where else could my father have sat in one spot and let the information come to him with such obliging regularity? The Great Southern Current spread a very wide net. That, I am certain, was the prime reason for the Pain's savagery as we approached Myr's bleak shores, in a struggle so intense that the fire of it was visible in my father's face.

  And now, nearly two decades later and half a world away at the approach to the harbour of Gil, we were again seeing that light inside his skin. I tried hard to see it as a good sign, as Chasco suggested. I tried not to think about what happened at Amballa, Nkalvi and especially at Itsant.