Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain

by Rebecca Bradley

  Furthermore, if one happened to be planning, say, a potentially suicidal excursion to a remote deathtrap across a sea bristling with large naval windcatchers armed to the mast-tops with spearchuckers, flame-slings and bouldershots, she'd be just the sort of vessel one would choose.

  Roughly speaking, that was the plan. We would set off as the Benthonic Survey and cross the Sherkin Sea as our most direct route to the continent shared by Grisot, Miishel and Fathan. At that point we would be transformed into the Mosslines Rescue Mission; we would head south around the coast of the great landmass to where the blasted wilderness of ancient Fathan began, bypassing the Mosslines port of Deppowe before coming ashore at a site carefully chosen by my father. Our success after that would depend on whether the ancient maps bore any useful resemblance to the post-apocalyptic topography of the ruined land—too many changes, and we would be up a mountain pass without a rope, almost literally. Our plans for returning Angel and Mallinna to Gil were equally vague, another bridge we'd build when we reached the river.

  Crew: the Fifth's rigging was designed to let her sail with a minimum of hands, but Angel was too old, Mallinna had never set foot on a deckboard, my father could be knocked askew by the Pain at any moment, and I would have to catch the odd hour of sleep now and then. We calculated two experienced sailors would be necessary and sufficient to round out the ship's complement, but how could we find even one trustworthy citizen in Gil? Someone who would willingly go to the Mosslines with us—someone who would not start blathering about the Primate's stupid prophecy the moment he saw Tigrallef's face?

  No problem, Mallinna declared, we could leave it to her; she had contacts outside the archives who could pretty much tell the difference between a bollard and a highsheet, had no great love for the Flamens, and would fancy a tour of the Mosslines. She would ask the Opposition to recruit two seamen, subject to our approval. What could we say? We said thank you.

  But the thought of Mallinna's contacts with an anti-Flamen faction of rebels and spies kept me awake at nights. I was certain I could trust Mallinna and Angel, but I knew nothing about the Opposition except that we shared a common enemy, which was no guarantee of anything. What were their motives? What were their aims? What were their own plans for Gil? How large was the lunatic element that always exists in these organizations?

  I tried to learn more from Mallinna, but I could have saved my breath. She became a deaf-mute when I tried to raise the subject. She had been risking herself for them for the better part of a decade and I think she was firmly in the habit of secrecy where they were concerned. She would not even tell me how she passed her intelligence to them, though it did not take a genius or a mind-reader to work out that a small packet left the archives every few days in a basket of dirty laundry.

  Of course she might have been more forthcoming if my father had asked her, but Tigrallef took astoundingly little interest in the Opposition. I could not understand this. It was not just that our safety, at one remove, was in the hands of these strangers; the Tigrallef that I knew would have been fascinated, keen to trace their history and compare them point by point with the Web in Gil, the Silver Ghosts in Gafrin-Gammanthan, and similar underground movements. Back in one of the Fifth's hidden holds was a thick file of raw research gathered over the years on just this subject, but Tigrallef never even picked up his pen on the Opposition's account. It was not like him, and it worried me.

  For the next two weeks, the time it took to prepare for the so-called survey, Tigrallef and I were confined to the inner workroom at the archives. We were, after all, supposed to be dead. We saw nobody but Angel and Mallinna and each other, and any one of those three could independently have driven me mad in his or her own way. It was therefore fortunate that we had little time to contemplate our situation or the plight of our family. There were all the details of the expedition to be worked out, the lists of supplies to be drawn up, whole shelves of reports from the Mosslines to be culled for useful information or copied to be taken on the voyage. The memorians had virtually been given a key to the treasury to equip this survey, the best of everything, excellent wines, many leathers of smoke-cured meat and pressed fruit essence, star charts and sea charts, sounding and sighting tools based on the most advanced Zelfic designs. A crate of weapons and climbing gear was purchased through Mallinna's shadowy contacts and listed on the manifest as STATIONERY SUPPLIES.

  The Fifth, which was moored in the imperial boatyard in the inner harbour, was not only overhauled but tarted up—we were entertained by it being at the Primate's expense—with fresh paint, shining new galley arrangements and floor-matting throughout the cabins. The sailors designated by the Opposition, subversive fishermen named Malso and Entiso, moved on board when the work was about half done, largely to ensure no supplies or fittings were pilfered in harbour. We planned to sail on the evening of the very day the ship was ready and all the supplies were loaded.

  The Pain was not much of an overt nuisance during that period of waiting—that is, my father neither complained of it nor undertook any drastic remedies, such as self-induced concussion. If anything, he seemed to sleep more peacefully than he had for years; and if sometimes he had to set aside what he was doing and hunker down on the pallet with his arms wrapped around his knees, eyes closed, lips moving silently, at least he was not getting into worse mischief. That's what I thought at first. It was only gradually I became aware that the knife's edge he was treading was even sharper than before.

  For example, there was the affair of the painted wooden fishes. All the personal effects found on the Fifth made their way to the archives, conveniently enough, for the memorians to study at the Primate's request—not just Tigrallef's effects and mine, but those of the others as well, and the task of sorting and repacking them was heartbreaking. Tigrallef started the job with me, but retired mumbling to the pallet after a few minutes, leaving me to suffer through the job alone. My mother's sandals and boots were all accounted for—the vermin must have carried her off to the Mosslines in her bare feet. On the other hand, the chest holding her priceless collection of silk-brocade robes from Gafrin-Gammanthan was missing, presumed stolen. Shree's journal was there, plus all of Chasco's logs except the current one, which I remember he had on his person that morning; and I found Kat's girlish treasures, her alchemy kit, the twenty painted wooden fishes Chasco made for her long ago, the shells and bones harvested from dozens of farflung beaches, her collection of knives and swords . . .

  On second thoughts, I went back and counted the items in her personal armoury; looked vainly for her box of hoarded palots and exotic coinage from the unknown world; rechecked the chest of old wooden playthings; and did an inventory of her footwear and clothing, as far as I could remember. Then I slammed my fist on the table. Tigrallef, who had apparently recovered but was still slouching idly on the pallet, gave me a startled look.

  "The bastards," I spat, "it's not enough they dragged the poor child off to some hell of a work camp, they also had to steal her pathetic bits and pieces. Look what they've taken! The rippercat I carved for her; the stuffed bat; her boots and sandals and some of her clothing; her writing kit and journal; her Gafrin-Gammanthan belt; her throwing disks, the ones specially made for small hands; at least three of her blades, including the scimitar from Itsant—you know how she loves that scimitar . . ."

  I had to stop there and bite my lip. It was I who had taught Kat how to clean her blades without losing any fingers; my memory presented me with an image of her as a small child on the foredeck of the Third, her little face stern with concentration as she ashed and polished the scimitar's blood-runnels and tested the edge with a hair pulled from her own curly head—all the sorrow I was holding back struggled to break through. With shaking hands, I began to repack her prized rubbish into a crate labelled SOUNDING WEIGHTS, in which it would be smuggled back on to the Fifth.

  "Is it only Kat's things that are missing?" Tigrallef asked.

  "Those, and the chest of silks," I snapped, "but I
don't keep a complete inventory of everyone's cabin in my head. What does it matter?"

  "It's just—interesting." His tone was light. I glanced over at him and saw he was smiling vaguely into the distance, and my irritation turned to real anger.

  "You don't give a tupping toss what they're going through, do you? All that concerns you, now and ever, is the Pain."

  He stopped smiling and sat up straight. "That may be true, Vero, but it certainly isn't fair."

  "Oh, it's fair. I think you hardly notice they're gone." I turned my back on him.

  Silence from the pallet; but the painted wooden fish I was holding wriggled in my hand, leapt free and landed gasping on the Flamen-green carpet. I stooped grimly to pick it up, only to have it slip through my fingers again. Vigorous flopping noises inside the box suggested that the nineteen fishes I had already repacked were also being unduly lively, lively enough to start jackknifing out of the box faster than I could retrieve them. When seven or eight of them were writhing and heaving their sides on different parts of the table, I gave up and went to sit on the pallet beside my father. A large greasefish, Chasco's masterwork, flung itself through the air in a magnificent arc and landed in my lap. I shoved it off—was walloped in the face by a flying lacefin—tossed it overhand in a perfect trajectory into the crate. Seconds later it bounded out again.

  "Is there a point to this?" I asked.

  "Of course."

  I waited. "Well?"

  "It's absurd."

  "Tell me anyway."

  "I just did. It's absurd."

  "I don't understand."

  "Too bad. I don't want to talk about it."

  Which was all Tigrallef would say, and I had no real understanding of what he meant until much later, when his illness had moved on a few phases, though it should have been clear enough on this occasion. A few minutes later, when the fishes returned to their more tractable wooden state, he helped me pick them up and pack them tenderly away.

  Mallinna's tendency to drive me mad was of a different order, and was not her fault. Confined to the workroom, I could not arrange to be absent when she stripped down for the air ducts; averting my eyes was much, much worse than useless. Reminding myself that the Pain left no room for a woman in my life just made me irritable, usually with Tigrallef.

  And yet, when I could forget about the lust for a few minutes, I liked Mallinna. I was amused by the way she and Angel conversed in tandem, touched by her protective concern for him. I was impressed by the breadth of her knowledge and often left behind by the speed of her thought processes—apart from my father, she was probably the brightest person I had ever met. She was sweet of temper, unaffected, honest; courageous and spirited enough to spy on the Council at great personal risk. Her automatic acceptance of our cause as her cause moved me to gratitude. When she dropped my title and began calling me Vero, I was warm inside for two full days.

  The problem was, it was unfair of her to look the way she did; and it didn't help, either, that she was unaware of how she looked. She seemed to think of her body as a useful device for getting her head from place to place, nothing more. She had all the worldliness of a hermit in a cave, all the self-consciousness of a marble statue, all the flirtatiousness of a Lucian temple virgin. As a scholar she had a huge stock of knowledge about love and lust as abstract concepts, but she had never connected them with herself. It annoyed me to catch myself wondering whether she would ever connect them with me.

  The third of my tormentors, Angel, did not mean to madden me either. In his case, it came down to the sheer energy and patience one needed in order to converse with him, except when an idea excited him to the point where one couldn't shut him up. I first saw that side of him on our third night in the archives, when he cleared away a few layers of papers from his work table so we could see what he and Mallinna had been doing with the Fathidiic and Vassashin texts.

  The Fathidiic texts were from the selfsame archive that the Bequiin Ardin of Miishel had carried off from the ruins of Cansh Fathan twenty-five years before, thus giving the first turn to the wheel of events that led to my father marrying the Princess Rinn. No more than a quarter of what the Bequiin had pilfered was still in existence, some having been burned and some scattered to the five winds during the civil wars in Miishel; the remainder had been "donated" to Gil. Even that small residue was enough to render Angel temporarily eloquent.

  He and Mallinna had found that the term Naar referred mostly to a people but occasionally to an individual, which confirmed what we had seen in the texts from Khamanthana and Nkalvi. There was a fragmentary mention of "the guileless, the brave and the [wrathful?] . . ." which seemed to parallel some end-times passages recovered in Khamanthana and Myr. But most exciting of all were fragments of illuminated manuscripts with fine drawings of seven figures, presumably divine: three human, two reptilian, a cat-creature and something like a wolf or dog.

  Now, we had seen something like that before, etched on a wall in Nkalvi, and we had reconstructed exactly such a heptad from the sherds of narrative vases dredged out of the seabed at Itsant. On the one hand, they appeared to tie in with the widespread tradition of the Old Ones; on the other, with the previous manifestations of the Harashil—the Myrwolf, the Master of Hands, the White Dragon and so forth. An eighth figure occasionally intruded on the narrative vases, always a human male wearing a circlet and a square breastplate. Mallinna whooped when Tig mentioned that, and leapt across the workroom to fetch us a few scraps of a Vassashin scroll showing a similar octad.

  "But what there is not," Angel said decisively, "is any foreshadowing of the form the Harashil took in Gil, that is to say, the Lady. You found seven named empires of the Harashil, and we know there was a Great Nameless First as well—and there is a matching heptad of 'Old Ones' plus the man in the breastplate. Highly suggestive. But there is nothing about the Lady—where does the Lady fit in?"

  "Maybe she doesn't." Tig sounded far too bright and happy. I looked at him sharply. The sweat was already rolling down his forebrow and his eyes were glassing over. I got to him just as the little faces carved in the cornice of the bookcase opened their tiny mouths and broke into "So Little Time", a Tatakil tavern song about a man with seventeen wives. Evidently the Harashil did not like the way this conversation was going. I was only surprised the old sow had let it go on so long.

  One morning, two long weeks and three days after our first sighting of the Gilgard, we were about forty hours away from leaving. Mallinna had gone to the harbour to supervise the loading of several crates from the archives, taking all the assistant and apprentice memorians with her as pressed labour. This meant that for the first time since we arrived, Tig and I could emerge from Angel's windowless inner studio and walk freely through the stacks to the main workroom with its broad view of the harbour, the brilliance of real sunlight, the holiday treat of air that hadn't already been through several pairs of lungs on its way to ours. We stood at the open window, breathing it in. Angel, hunched over a work table, was just finishing another thick sheaf of instructions for the Second Memorian, to add to a stack of similar sheaves on the shelf behind him. I wondered, from the sheer bulk of the paperwork he was producing, if he feared he might never return from this journey.

  The harbour was so full of ships of all sizes and designs that I gave up trying to pick out the Fifth and turned my eyes to the shore. It was now high summer, and the city below us was tessellated with lush gardens among the grey-tiled roofs, brilliant awnings striped in all colours, the polished-lapis shapes of a hundred pools and fountains. Some festival was evidently approaching. Strings of thousands of green and gold banners flashed in the sun along every street and byway, a shining net laid with great precision over the grid of the city. In a shaded roof-pleasance almost directly below us, nestled in the terraces of the Middle Palace, a band of hornists was making an almighty but fairly melodious racket.

  That sounds like the old Gillish Paean of Praise," Tig said, frowning. "The last time I heard it was at my
marriage to the Princess Rinn—" He broke off and cocked his ear towards the door.

  I listened too. Nothing much. "What do you hear?"

  "Feet. Lots of feet." He grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the window, casting eagerly about the room, then dragged me into the shadowed alcove behind a pier of bookshelves, not far from the table where Angel was now working on the expedition's accounts. Still frowning, Tigrallef dropped to his knees on the green carpet and pulled me down beside him. Over the tops of the books on the second shelf up, we had a restricted but reasonable view of much of the room, including Angel at his table. Angel lifted his head to peer at us inscrutably through the chink.

  "Be ready, Angel, they're almost here. Remember what I told you."

  Angel nodded without expression and returned to his work. I sighed and made myself more comfortable.

  "What can you hear, Tig? How many?"

  "Hard to tell," Tigrallef whispered, "but I don't believe it's an arrest party. Arrest parties generally thud along in lockstep—there's a certain grim rhythm that signals their intentions. This group isn't doing that." He concentrated again, then broke into a smile. "Furthermore, arrest parties don't habitually transport items of comfortable furniture around with them. Vero, I think we might enjoy this. I've long wanted to hear the two of them in conversation."

  A few seconds later there was a clatter of feet and a low buzz of voices in the corridor, and I heard the door swing open. I craned to see who came into the visible patch of the workroom. Nobody I knew at first: a young man in a green tunic with a burden on his shoulders, rapidly identified as the forward shafts of a chair-litter. He eased the burden down with great care and stepped out of sight. Soft shuffling noises, and two other young men in green pushed a large padded armchair into a position directly across the table from Angel, who continued to scratch busily at the paper in front of him. The first lad reappeared with a different burden in his arms and tenderly transferred it into the armchair. Angel looked up at last with his customary air of bewilderment.