"Oh?" I shook out a napkin.
"Yes, child of the Naar. It was on this sea, in a great Miisheli ship, that we made our presence known to us, and we—she—raised a storm. He did not mean to, he was sorry afterwards."
"I've brought you some nice lentils."
"We are not hungry."
"At least one of you must be," I said lightly. "Eat, Father, or I'll start quoting you the Collected Wit and Wisdom of the Patriarch Firopos of Granze."
That was just about the most powerful weapon in my memorized armoury—Firopos was to the Lucian proverbs as, say, a bouldershot is to a sling—but Tigrallef continued to regard the bowl of hotty with obvious contempt.
"Not-clean wet-rot of the world."
"You love lentils," I said.
His face twisted. "If you could see it as we do—maggot-riddled humus of dead vermin . . ."
"It's very tasty."
". . . and this body disgusts us—loathsome dung-factory compounded of foulness and small daily corruptions . . ."
"The unknowable," I began, "known only through those verities which are, firstly, either known or not known but knowable, and secondly, which are not knowable but not yet known as being either knowable or known or not known, and thirdly, which were thought to be not known or unknowable but are now known to be both knowable and known, and fourthly—"
"It does smell good," said Tig.
I handed him the napkin. "That was suspiciously easy."
"The balance is delicate these days. Anyhow, I had the old sow on the run before you came in. This needs salt."
"It's on the tray."
I sat down on the pallet to watch him eat. The food did not visibly cheer him, but the vestiges of his aura gradually faded away. When he was finished, he put his head down on the table and fell immediately into a sleep as deep and silent as a temporary death. That also worried me. I moved him on to the pallet and then left, taking the tray with me. Halfway to the galley, I finally let go of the forced calm and surrendered to the trembling. I sat down on the Primate's new matting with my back against the wall and took deep breaths until I could control my knees again. At least part of that conversation had been with the Harashil.
When I was not too worried about my father, mother, sister and honorary uncles to take notice, this period of the journey gave me a useful opportunity to observe our fellow travellers. The fishermen Malso and Entiso were brothers of around my father's actual age, whereas the guardsman Jonno was perhaps a little younger than the age my father looked. That was all we knew about them when we came on board, except that the former were vouched for by Mallinna's dissident contacts, and the latter was almost certainly a spy for the Primate. Perversely, I warmed to our enemy Jonno and not to the other two, who were on our side.
Everything they knew about us was a lie. The Primate thought that the Calloonic coppermonger's sons were dead; the Primate's spy, in theory, would be under the impression that Talno and Vilno were ordinary memorians from the archives. That was fine with me as long as I could remember our official names. As for Malso and Entiso, we had decided from the beginning not to tell the opposition the awkward fact that my father was exactly who he looked like. The risk was too great that one rebellious faction or another would want to use a genuine Scion Tigrallef for their own purposes, with results that did not bear thinking about.
All that Mallinna's contacts had been told, therefore, was an extended version of our old Storyline Two, the one about Gilborn copper traders from Calloon on a pilgrimage gone horribly wrong. The extension was a scenario that fitted one version of the facts well enough: the extraordinary resemblance Tig and I bore to the last of the Scions, the Primate's decision to destroy us and exile the others to the Mosslines, our lucky rescue by the memorians. It was a version of the facts the dissidents could sympathize with, since many of them had suffered losses of a similar kind at the Flamens' hands.
Malso told me, in bits and pieces through the first few days of the journey, that he and his brother had been fishermen under the Sherank, under Arko's rule, and under the Primate's regency. For many years after the wrack of Sher they had taken no interest in who governed Gil, just so long as they could mend their nets in peace, catch a few fish and have themselves a woman now and then. Malso was anything but taciturn, a boastful sun-leathered bear of a man full of fairly dubious stories; his brother Entiso was perhaps a couple of years younger, several degrees quieter, and even larger, with arms and legs like hairy meaty tree trunks. There was one subject that never seemed to come up—the events that led them into the ranks of the Opposition. They neither looked nor talked like men with a tragic injustice in their past, but Mallinna warned me it would be impolitic to ask.
Jonno was a different kind of mystery. He was obviously educated and of good family, bright as well as ornamental, full of good spirits and an endearing desire to please, and he carried out his signalling duties to the Scion Cirallef with cheerful efficiency. Despite the hated black uniform he wore, I found him impossible to dislike. The thought of setting him adrift, marooning him or throwing him overboard became increasingly repugnant as the week passed.
What I could not understand was how a lad so fresh, dewy and essentially sweet had come to be numbered among the Primate's most vicious and fanatical enforcers; but when he mentioned one day that his late father had been in the Flamens' Corps before him, I reckoned I understood—Jonno was a second-generation guardsman, raised in loyalty to the Flamens as my mother had been raised in the Web. It was even harder to condemn him after that. I began to think of kinder ways to get rid of him.
I was resigned to getting rid of him somehow, even though he was not a great threat, being a clear disaster as a spy. More than once I caught him hovering in the upper passages close to Tigrallef's door, in full view of anyone on deck; out of every two of his ingenuous questions, one or both would concern my father. Was Talno ill? Was he never going to leave his cabin? Had I known him long? Had he ever been aboard ship before? Could he, Jonno, meet with him? And an assortment of other questions, of a type that any decent spy would find answers to without having to ask. How could the Primate have sent this child? After a few days his persistence stopped being a worry and became something of a private joke.
And then there was Mallinna. Beautiful Mallinna. Incomprehensible Mallinna, the greatest mystery of all. My life was a little easier now that she was keeping her clothes on, but I wondered as I watched her spoon-feeding Angel, cleaning up his sick, standing in the stern gazing at the horizon where the Gilgard had vanished, whether she regretted committing herself to this mad venture. What if Angel weakened and died? What if they were never able to return to the archives, or what if the Primate discovered how his own tame memorians had tricked him? Would she begin to resent sacrificing her quiet scholarly life? Would she hate me?
I finally got up the courage to ask her. She had formed the habit of sitting with me as I took the evening watch at the wheel, neither of us speaking very much—nothing romantic, more like two weary old-marrieds being cabbages together after a hard day's work. I would not have had the energy to spare for courtship even if Mallinna had shown the inclination. Both Tigrallef and Angel had become heavy burdens, on top of the burden of the expedition, the dangers ahead, the constant background of fear for those imprisoned on the Mosslines.
On the evening before landfall in Beriss, we were sitting together watching the ritual of shift-change on the fighting deck of the Scion Cirallef across the water, followed by as fine a sunset as I had ever seen. The evening was a little too warm, the air sultry with a strong but unsteady breeze, and I'd had to alter the sails twice in two hours. Somewhere, a storm was gathering. Tired out, and still deeply uneasy about my brush with the Harashil the day before, I was probably quieter than usual. Mallinna lounged with unconscious elegance on a pile of fleeces paid for by the Primate, looking, I thought, gently melancholic. After a long silence she sighed heavily. The sound brought all my guilt clawing to the surface.
&nb
sp; "I'm sorry, Mallinna," I said abruptly.
She looked in all directions as if seeking a tangible reason for my sorriness, and then she yawned. "Sorry, Vero? What are you sorry for?"
"For dragging you and Angel into this. We should never have brought you with us. We should have—I don't know—found some other ship, some way of getting to the Mosslines that didn't involve you in our danger. If anything happens to you because you helped us—"
"That makes absolutely no sense, Vero." She yawned again, sat up and sighed. The last blush of sunset was spreading a copper-coloured light over the sea and the high masts of the Cirallef, giving Mallinna's dusky skin a glow that rivalled Tig's at his shiniest. "We wanted to help you. The First Memorian worships Lord Tigrallef, always has, and so have I, ever since he was my first teacher in the archives. We'd never forgive him if he sailed off without us a second time."
Long pause. "Fine, I can see that Angel might want to come along, even if it kills him—but what about you, Mallinna? I thought your heart was in the archives, that you'd be miserable without your work."
She stretched disturbingly. "I've never had a better time in my life. As for the archives, I'm a scholar, not just a keeper of books and scrolls and mouldy old pieces of tortoiseshell, and it's about time I did some primary research, don't you think?" She reached back with one long brown arm to loosen the clasp that secured her hair in a knot, and shook her head until the mass of black waves tumbled down and pooled on the surface of the fleece. With a stab of desire, I wondered exactly what kind of primary research she had in mind. "For example, the official reports on the Mosslines are deficient in so many respects," she went on, "no account of natural history beyond what is germane to the moss itself and a few offhand mentions of birds nesting seasonally in the highlands, very few descriptions of visible ruins or the nature and distribution of the slag, no—"
"Yes, I see." That kind of primary research.
"There are so many questions I can answer only by going and looking for myself. I know we'll be busy rescuing your mother and so forth, but I plan to make observations as we go."
"Yes, of course." I had not told her yet she would be staying in the presumed safety of the Fifth, even if I had to lock her in her cabin when the time came.
"But I was thinking, Vero."
"Yes?"
She sat up straight and piled her hair on top of her head, then let it fall. "When we've rescued your family and you set off again to search for the Will of Banishment, would you mind if Angel and I came with you?"
I half choked. "What did you say?"
"Well, if there's enough room. I wouldn't mind sharing a cabin with someone."
With whom? I strangled that question. "But what—what about the archives?"
"Costi, the Second Memorian, isn't brilliant but he's competent. He's better prepared to take over than Angel was when Lord Tigrallef left him in charge, believe me. In fact, Angel and I—no, never mind."
"And the Second Flamen? What about him? I thought you were—Angel implied he was—that is—"
"I don't want to talk about Lestri Flamen," she said, a little tartly for her.
I sighed. Part of me wanted to offer her a half-share in my cabin for the next sixty-odd years, but part of me was honest and well-meaning. "You have no idea what you'd be getting into. Life with Tigrallef is—not easy." A masterful understatement. I was on the edge of telling her what I had seen and heard the day before and blurting out my fears about the tightening hold of the Harashil, but I strangled those words as well.
"At least you've always been free," she said.
"I don't think you quite understand. We've never been free. We've spent our lives as prisoners of the Pain, and that's only part of it. In the last twenty years we've hit every pisspit blightspot we could find, looking for clues to that damned Will. We've been battered by storms and bombarded by volcanoes. Four ships have sunk under us. We've gone from bloody hot to bloody cold. Sometimes we've nearly starved. Unfriendly people have tried to kill us in a number of horrible ways. Friendly people have been almost as bad. Some battlechief in the Ronchar Sea once honoured us with a casserole of human ears—"
"Did you eat it?"
"It would have been rude not to. Possibly fatal."
"It sounds wonderful."
"Rather tough, actually; tasted like chicken."
"Not the casserole, the life you've led. You see, I've read about so many things and places, but I've never been anywhere—"
"Look, Mallinna," I began.
"—and I want to stay with you for ever."
That silenced me. The pronoun she used was indeterminate. Singular or plural? Me in particular or us in general? I was trying to decide whether I should ask her to clarify, when a slender shadow fell across the deckboards between us.
"A lovely warm evening, Vilno, Mistress Mallinna. I'd be most grateful if you'd let me join you."
Jonno would never know how close he came to being thrown overboard then and there. Mallinna offered him a couple of fleeces while I sulked at the wheel. He was depressed, poor lad; it was the Lady's Eve—feasts, processions, family vigils—and here he was, far away from his widowed mother and two beloved sisters and the bright streets of Gil City, on a ship in the middle of the Great Known Sea. The most pathetic part was how brave he was trying to be about it. Within minutes I was doing my best to cheer him up. By the time he went more happily off to bed, about an hour after Mallinna retired, I had almost forgiven him. Which did not change the fact that I planned to get rid of him the very next day.
The port of Beriss, on the west coast of Canton Ber about two days' sail west from the site of lost Iklankish, suffered badly in the barrage of waves that followed Sher's sinking. During the Last Dance, much of the surviving town was turned into smoking rubble by a fire that the people were too weak or too dead to fight. Twenty years later, one would never know by looking at it. Rebuilt, it had all the characteristics that I would come to realize were typical of a city in the Primate's empire: orderly, terrifyingly clean for the most part, well regulated to the point of being smothered, littered with busts, statues and street murals of the divine Scion Tigrallef. At least we did not have to contend with the usual bureaucratic procedures, though, sliding into the harbour in the middle of the morning in convoy with the Scion Cirallef.
The Cirallef, too large for the quays, dropped her anchors just inside the breakwater at the mouth of the harbour. The Fifth was directed to the main quay, where a rather harried-looking courtesy party was waiting for us. We had inconveniently arrived on the Day of the Lady, which meant the local officials had much better things to do, but they would not dare give less than full honours to a ship flying the Most Revered Primate's colours. To keep out of sight, I joined my silent and restless father in his cabin.
We were still there when the captain of the Cirallef was rowed over in a smallboat to consult with the Fifth. Mallinna and I had spent hours drilling Angel for this encounter, and our efforts paid off brilliantly. There was no great rush to be over the ruins of Iklankish, Angel told the captain. A couple of nights in this pleasant harbour to let the Cirallef's crew participate in the festivities of the Lady would not come amiss. Anyway, there was a look to the sky and a heaviness in the air that suggested a stormbowl might be building up over the Sherkin Sea; better to wait and watch, and if it came, to ride it out in the shelter of the breakwater. Mallinna reported the captain was visibly relieved to hear that. He said he had also noticed the weight of the air, and remarked on how richly the Sherkin Sea deserved its reputation for evil storms.
When I heard the captain's smallboat pulling away, I turned uneasily to Tig. He had spent the whole time staring into space and saying nothing. I did not know whether to be grateful to him for behaving himself or terrified about what unspeakable strangeness might be taking place inside his head. His face had never been so blank and pale.
"Tig? Tig, look at me. I have to go now, but I'll be back soon. Do you need anything? Will you be all r
ight?"
He raised his head slowly. His face took on a bit of colour and relaxed into fairly amiable lines. "You're planning on leaving this harbour tonight."
"If we can," I said, taken aback, "unless the stormbowl forms too fast. A good chance to lose the Cirallef, I hope."
"You're thinking of heading east, aren't you?"
"That's right," I said, sitting down next to him on the pallet. This was the first interest he had taken in any aspect of the voyage since we came aboard, and I wanted to fan the flames a little. "I plan to swing to the northeast just past the Tooth of Raksh and head for a point close to the mouth of the Deppowe Strait. That will keep us off the main shipping lanes for most of the journey, but won't take us too far out of our way."
"And you want to leave tonight."
"Yes, before this stormbowl passes over. I'm reckoning it'll come its closest early tomorrow afternoon, late enough so we'll be skirting its edges, nicely timed to keep the windcatcher from pursuing us very far."
"You're right and you're wrong. I have to tell you, Vero, this stormbowl is a big one. Not our handiwork, by the way, but we've been watching it build with a great deal of aesthetic admiration. Very big, very powerful." He smiled dreamily. "And very fast."
"When do you reckon, then?"
"It will be here much sooner than you think. Now listen carefully. The centre of the stormbowl will pass to the south of Canton Ber by the breakfast hour at the latest. If you must leave harbour tonight, leave no later than midnight and make a dash for the north-northeast with every rag of sail you can safely hoist—you'll be running with both the wind and the tide at that point. If you manage to make it through the channel, you'll find yourself in the Pilazhet Basin, which is as good a place as any to ride out the storm. Nothing much in the way of land to get wrecked on, but there's a solid string of skerries to the east between you and the Sherkin Sea, and that will break the swell. The Sherkin Sea has the longest fetch inside the boundaries of the known world, did you know that?"
Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain Page 16
