Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain

by Rebecca Bradley

  Everybody was on deck that tranquil afternoon, even Angel, who had found his sea-belly at last. I honestly feared he would die of seasickness during the stormbowl or on the long rolling billows of the wake-sea that followed the storm—instead, the sea cured him. On this day, the sixth since crossing the skerries, he had colour in his cheeks, strength in his legs, and an enormous appetite. I could see him in the bow with Jonno and Kat, to both of whom he had taken a great fancy. This was the wonder: Angel was talking to them with animation, and they were listening spellbound.

  "He always liked children and young people," said my father from his chair beside me. "I think it's because he didn't know any when he was a child himself."

  "He's having a slice of his childhood now, I'd say," Mallinna put in.

  "How did you know I was thinking about Angel?" I demanded of both of them. "Is my mind so easy to read?"

  "Your face is, Vero. I try to leave your mind alone. Mallinna, dear girl, one of the knots behind my chair is uncomfortably loose. Would you be kind enough . . . ?"

  Mallinna climbed to her feet and tested the knots. There was a separate rope for each of his limbs, plus the leather straps that were built in to the chair and some iron fetters he had recently added; one of the spare hawsers was coiled round and round his torso, binding him to the chairback. None of which had stopped him from appearing promptly for lunch when I shouted from the galley earlier, though he had been identically trussed and alone on the afterdeck at the time. I really did not know why he bothered with the ropes, unless they made him feel more secure.

  Those were the golden days of our journey, that week and a bit of crossing the northern quarters of the Sherkin Sea. The storm wake had been succeeded by fair winds, easy seas and a perfect cotton-wool sky. The urgency, the corrosive anxiety about our people's supposed sufferings on the Mosslines, the dread of their deaths before we could reach them, had all been exorcised by the First Flamen's letter. Until that weight was lifted, I hardly realized how heavy it had been.

  Of course we were not entirely without worries, even apart from the Pain: there was still the Scion Cirallef. If we had known about Kesi's letter sooner, we might have handled the parting differently. All the advantages, however, were on our side. The Cirallef would probably waste a day or two making sure the Fifth had not sunk in Beriss harbour during the storm, and another day waiting for the wake-sea to subside—those fighting windcatchers were top-heavy and not very stable. Moreover, if her captain sent to the Gilgard for instructions, he could well wait ten days for a reply; if he set off to search on his own initiative, he would have no idea we were heading for the Mosslines. Even in the worst case—the Cirallef making straight for Deppowe in our very track—we could be in and out of Faddelin before the lumbering windcatcher was halfway across the Sherkin Sea.

  Meantime, our blessed Kat was safe, Jonno had recovered from acute alcohol poisoning and an excess of piety, and Tig was giving me less cause for worry as the Pain appeared to recede. Even though the sunken wastes of Sher lay far below our hull for much of that week, a circumstance I thought might distress him, we were treated to no great absurdities except for the business with the ropes, no auras, no eerie slumped silences and no undue echoes when he spoke. I foolishly put this down to his anticipation of being reunited with my mother, who had always been the anchor of his sanity. As I have said, the warning signs had changed so completely that I cannot blame myself for missing them; but even I could not miss seeing how assiduously he and poor little Katla avoided each other.

  That perfect and rather drowsy afternoon, however, all our problems seemed far away as I watched Mallinna tighten Tig's knots and then stretch herself out again on the deck beside the wheelman's chair. We were silent for a while, though I could hear peal after peal of laughter in the bow. I tried to remember when I had last heard Kat laughing so freely.

  "So what have you found out about Faddelin?" I asked idly after a few minutes, mainly to keep from dozing off.

  Mallinna yawned behind her hand and flipped a few pages. "It's on the extreme eastern edge of the Mosslines—the slag is everywhere across Old Fathan, of course, but the moss only grows between Faddelin on the east and Mashakel on the west, which is not far from the border with Miishel. Deppowe is about midway between. No one knows why the moss won't grow elsewhere in Fathan—that's one of the mysteries I'd like to investigate." She sat up, looking more lively. "I think it might be something to do with the prevailing winds, or the ambient humidity on the south coast of the continent, or the differing composition of the slag from place to place—"

  "What about Faddelin?"

  "Sorry, yes, Faddelin, let me see." She flipped another page. "Nowadays it's just an outpost—supplies the workcrews in the far eastern sector of the Mosslines, sends galley-loads of the moss to Deppowe for shipment to Gil. The quay was rebuilt five years ago, but it's not large enough to take the big windcatchers. It should be fine for the Fifth, though." Another page. "Now that's interesting—pity it's so sketchy—an account of the inshore ruins."

  Tigrallef twitched; I caught it, Mallinna didn't. From the bow, I heard more laughter.

  Mallinna perused the page thoughtfully before speaking again. "I remember something about this now. Strong indications that Faddelin was on a river delta before the Fathidiic collapse, the river having cut a pass through the mountain range about two days' march inland. No water runs there now, but the old river bed can be traced pretty well."

  "Faddelin was the port for Cansh Fathan," Tigrallef said suddenly.

  "Was it?" Mallinna scanned the rest of the page, turned over to look at the next. "There's nothing about that in here. What's your source, Lord Tigrallef?"

  I gave Mallinna a warning look. Tigrallef had gone rigid inside his cocoon of ropes and fetters; a fine film of sweat was breaking out on his forehead. I looked for any tremor in his hands, but they were stiff claws on the armrests of his chair. I considered that just as ominous.

  "Father, would it help if I—"

  "No thank you, Verolef."

  Mallinna noticed nothing. Frowning, she looked up from the open volume of reports. "Nothing here about Cansh Fathan, Lord Tigrallef—mind you, the Primate's surveyors didn't go into the mountains where the capital appears on the ancient maps. They were only interested in the moss."

  "None of them went inland?"

  She shrugged. "Not very far. There were two men lost, while surveying for the new road in the foothills—they're presumed to have fallen into a crevasse—but they were still a fair way from the mountains, according to the report."

  "No historical notes?" I put in.

  "Nothing that goes very far back. Faddelin appears as a name on some pre-collapse Grisotin charts, but the first stories are less than two hundred years old. A tribe of the legendary gilled fishmen, apparently, haunting the ruins and preying on the fishermen who downed their nets in the Deppowe Strait."

  "Complete nonsense," Tig snapped without warning, "no species of gilled fishmen has ever existed in the known world."

  "I'm only telling you what the report says," Mallinna said mildly. She seemed very slightly taken aback, but I was astonished. I had at various times seen Tig bitter, anguished, pointed, vehement and even angry, but I had never seen him rude.

  "Father?"

  "Why do people always get things wrong? Sloppy thinking, sloppy observation, fishmen in the wrong place—"

  "Father, calm down. What's the matter with you?"

  "Stop fussing at me, Vero, nothing's the matter. I'm better than I've ever been. Carry on, Mallinna."

  "If you're quite sure," she said, looking dubiously from Tig's expressionless face to mine and back again. Then she shrugged and turned her attention back to the report. "The legends were collected by Miisheli scholars: the Bequiin Siffer originally, that was two hundred years ago, and then they were rechecked by the Bequiin Ardin in this century. We have Siffer's surviving papers as well as Ardin's in the archives, of course. I brought copies of some of them
. In fact, I see this addendum was written by Angel on the basis of the Bequiins' notes."

  Tig twitched more violently.

  Mallinna turned over another page. "That's the end of the report—nothing about Faddelin being the port for Cansh Fathan, Lord Tigrallef. Do you remember where you read it?"

  He looked down at her inscrutably. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I thought he was growing taller and broader in the chair, as if inflating himself like a pufferfish from the Ronchar Sea. I also noticed a few wisps of smoke rising from the ropes.

  "Father," I said, "I'm worried you're going to damage that hawser. We only have one other spare."

  He turned his inscrutable look on me. The knots abruptly unravelled themselves, the lightly charred ropes fell away. "Have your damned hawser," he said. The straps and fetters parted as he stood up. Without another word he stalked to the companionway and started below deck. Perhaps I imagined this too: although the sun still shone brightly among the fairweather clouds, and the sound of laughter still rang from the bow, here on the afterdeck the day turned darker, colder and chokingly oppressive.

  "That was sudden. What's wrong with him? I didn't offend him, did I?" Mallinna sat up and watched curiously as he vanished down the companionway. "I wasn't questioning his scholarship, just asking about his sources."

  "Quite right, too. Don't worry, Mallinna. Perhaps the Pain was bothering him."

  "Are you going after him?"

  "Raksh, no."

  She gave me an inscrutable look of her own. "You know more than you're telling me."

  "I don't know anything, I'm only guessing. I have no idea why the mention of the fishmen upset him so much, since he usually loves folklore. But this matter of Faddelin being the port for Cansh Fathan—I would guess it's not something he read, but a detail the Pain remembers. After all, the old sow was there when Fathan was in its prime."

  "So she was," Mallinna said thoughtfully. "I wonder—does Lord Tigrallef share all the Harashil's memories?"

  I glanced at her with suspicion; her eyes were preoccupied but bright, a look I'd seen more than once in my father's eyes. Rampant scholarly thirst, that was.

  "No," I said, "he blinds and deafens himself to the old sow as much as he can; the few things he would like to learn from her, she conceals from him, like the Will of Banishment we've spent twenty years searching for, the location of the Great Nameless First, the truth about Oballef . . . but you listen to me, Mallinna. My father is not well—I hope you're not thinking of asking him to settle a few historical controversies for you with the Pain's first-hand observations."

  Her face filled with surprise. "What a shocking thought, Vero. I would never dream of such a thing. Although," she added, "when this is finished, we should encourage him to write down all he can of the Harashil's memories. It would be a priceless historical document."

  "If this is ever finished," I muttered ungraciously, "there may be nothing left of him to hold a pen."

  The next day, an equally perfect midsummer confection of blue skies and fair winds, our course was due to take us across the northern highlands of the continent of Sher not long after midday. Our complement had split itself into groupings that were starting to become habitual, a riotous assembly of youth and old age in the bow, the rest of us being more sedate on the afterdeck. I had the early afternoon watch again, but Mallinna was in the chair getting some experience in wheelmanship under my guidance, while we passed the time discussing the evidence for and against the existence of gilled fishmen. When we saw Tigrallef emerging from the companionway, we tactfully dropped the subject.

  He had not joined us at any time since our little misunderstanding over Faddelin and the fishmen the day before, though the trays of food I left outside his cabin door had been healthily depleted. It was, therefore, a surprise when he greeted Mallinna and me in a manner that suggested no unpleasantness had ever taken place; even more of a surprise when he grinned at us and lounged sideways in his chair with one knee hooked over the armrest, without resorting to straps, fetters or ropes. More surprises: he had exchanged his beloved but patched and threadbare tunic for a spotless new one, shaved off the not-very-impressive beard he had started in the archives, and trimmed his hair into the basin shape that Kat's hair was just growing out of.

  Indeed, he looked so much like a normal uncomplicated human being—say, a jaunty young rakehell all spruced up for courting—that he made me very, very nervous. Normality did not become him; I preferred it when he was abnormal in ways I was familiar with. He accepted our slightly startled compliments with a wide smile and a modest shrug, then stared off towards the north and began to hum a little Gafrin-Gammanthan tune that was so blithesome it set my teeth on edge.

  No, I did not like this development at all.

  "It's almost a pity we're not the Benthonic Expedition any more," Tig said after a while. "There's a chalcedony quarry under our keel now, which would please our revered patron no end. Though he'd need to enslave a tribe of gilled fishmen to work it for him."

  I caught Mallinna's eye; she looked as uncomfortable as I felt. Walking to the rail, I peered down into the sea—nothing was visible in the murky waters below, but I called forward to Kat anyway on the assumption we were nearing the sunken highlands. She scrambled up to the crosstrees of the foremast, leaving Jonno and Angel to keep watch from the bow. When I got back to the wheelman's chair, Mallinna and my father had begun an amiable comparison of Calloonic and Satheli weather-control rituals, and seemed quite happy.

  Although these waters were largely uncharted, the maps of Sher were still of some use to us. The crags and alpine meadows of the old highlands were in many places close enough to the surface to endanger deep-draughted windcatchers, and to raise the Primate's hopes that some portions of Sher's sea-bloated cadaver might still be pillaged. If we had truly been the Benthonic Expedition, that afternoon alone would have justified our existence.

  Less than an hour after I sent her aloft, Kat sang out from the rigging, "Hoy, Vero! Shoals ahead! You'd better take a look!"

  I dashed to the bow where Angel, already busy with a notebook, looked up long enough to give me a brilliant smile. Nothing was breaking the surface ahead of us, but Jonno grabbed my shoulder and pointed excitedly into the depths. The bottom was visible, all right, rising towards the northeast in great irregular hillsides of blurred terraces and bald outcrops of rock, falling away to the southwest into deep impenetrable shadow. Waving seagrasses grew in what must once have been cultivated fields; a stroke of paler green snaking up the hillside in a series of switchbacks may once have been a road. Otherwise there was no sign of human workmanship in all that rich and faintly sinister underwater landscape.

  "Ridgetop ahead, Vero!" Kat shouted down.

  Peering past the end of the bowsprit, I could tell I was about to be needed at the wheel. The slope I was looking at crested in a toothy line of crags running roughly east to west directly athwart our course, and some of them appeared close enough to the surface to endanger the Fifth's long keelboard and rudderstocks. "You'll need to guide me," I called back to Kat. I stayed in the bow only long enough to see that the supposed road was winding upwards to a broad cleft in the ridge, and then I was scrambling back to the afterdeck to reclaim the wheelman's chair from Mallinna.

  We were never in any peril. The sea was calm; there were no great wave-troughs to carry us down and impale us on the sharp needles of those Sherkin crags. The ridge we were approaching was only the first of a series of parallel sawbacks, each with its own set of teeth, but there was plenty of room to manoeuvre and only a few places where we needed to go about. Kat stayed on the foremast, calling out directions—"Two points to the east, Vero!"—but Mallinna deserted the afterdeck fairly quickly to go to the bow, where all the fun was. The dark arch of a bridge still spanning the chasm between two sawbacks, with a school of fish flowing under it like a river; stone ruins of watchtowers and of several small castellated structures that could have been hunting lodges or even follies
of a peculiarly Sherkin variety; the scars of at least five quarries, lapis and marble according to Tigrallef, so high on their ridges that they were within diving distance of the surface. The Primate would have been pleased to hear about those, but we hoped we would never have the chance to tell him.

  Unfortunately I got to see very little of this scenery because I did not dare leave the wheel throughout most of the traverse. All I had was the mixed pleasure of looking through Angel's notebook later, to find out what I missed. I should have been grateful to Tig for staying aft to keep me company rather than running to the bow to gawk with the others, but that jaunty new persona of his was too unsettling.

  "Tig," I asked hesitantly after a while, because I really had to know, "is it bothering you to be passing over the ruins of Sher? I know you used to feel—" I cut myself off.

  He was sprawled at ease in the chair where always before he had sat self-bound in a stiff, upright position. "I suppose you mean guilty, don't you? I've gone well past that by now, my son. Remember, Sher was only one of many."

  In response to a call from Katla, I shifted the rudders. "What do you mean, one of many?"

  "Nkalvi, Baul, Khamanthana," he chanted, "Itsant, Myr, Vizzath—"

  "Nonsense, Da," I said, "you were as unborn as I was when those empires fell."

  He did not answer. He started to hum that sprightly Gafrin-Gammanthan tune again. It was very hard to choke back my irritation.

  "Father, I wish—"

  "Don't wish, Vero," he interrupted. "Never wish. It's dangerous. I know."