The Choir Boats

by Rabuzzi, Daniel

  “We make no secret of our pact-brother,” he said. “My hatmoril is Dorentius Bunce.”

  Sally dropped her hand from the doorknob and was about to state her astonishment, when she thought better of doing so, and excused herself. She paused on deck to look one last time at the stars of her own world. In a line low off the southeastern horizon were the Three Torches: Fomalhaut, Archernar, and Canopus. But Taurus, Orion, and Canis Major were no longer to be seen. The Dog Star did not pour out his light, neither did the Maiden-Star look to the Mother-Star. Sally pulled her cloak around her against the cold and thought: A song without harmony.

  That night, at about the time the Gallinule left Big Land, Sally had the first of the endless dreams she would have on the rest of the journey. She was on a long beach of black rocks, in the dark, with winds howling, and the waves crashing. Just beyond the breakers was a ship with tattered sails heaving to and fro. People on board cried for help, cries she heard above the roar of the wind. A black-green light illuminated the scene but there were no stars and no moon. A voice came into her mind — Tom’s voice! Tom was singing:

  The sickle-sinny drift of the ship in the tide

  In the rip near the strand with the foam by its side.

  She looked wildly about for Tom, but he was nowhere to be seen. Three times he sang the couplet and, at the final verse, the ship was thrust by a great wave onto the rocks and smashed. Sally screamed. She saw bodies flung and broken on the jagged shore. She clambered over wet rocks, over bits of mast and rigging, and splintered wood, and the first of the bodies. She looked for Tom, but could not find him. There, she thought, there he is: “Tom, Tom!” she cried, but the body just washed back and forth in the tidal pool, bumping its head against the boulder. Down she flung herself into the pool, slipping down the boulder, cutting her leg. She was on her knees, had her arms around the body, hauled it up and over: “Tom!” she shouted into the wind. Only the face was not Tom’s. It was the face of James Kidlington. Sally screamed again —

  — and woke up. She had fallen out of the bed, and her leg hurt. Isaak was at the door, tail as big as a horse’s mane. The cold and the wind had increased. Beyond the wind and the “chuff-chuff-chuff” of the Gallinule’s engine, Sally heard — or felt — a change. She hobbled to the fulgination room.

  “Dorentius,” she said. “It’s happening, isn’t it?”

  Dorentius waved her into the room. As if summoned by the same call, Reglum came through the door just behind Sally. The three of them stood in front of the Fulginator. The chattering of the rods quickened for a heartbeat, the pace changed for the space of a breath. A keening note entered into the low quaver from the wires. Somewhere deep inside herself, Sally felt the same quickening, the same keening. Where capillaries and alveoli conjoin with the finest filaments of nerves, Sally felt a mathematical song of finding. For some time she stood thus, only slowly becoming aware that Reglum was asking if she wanted to go on deck.

  The ship’s captain had joined the night watch. He raised his arm in greeting, plainly surprised to see Sally, but said nothing. No one spoke. The Small Moon clapped against the mast in the wind. Two dolphins leaped in front of the prow. Sally saw the waves stand still for the barest second, and the greyness of the mist palpitate. She looked up, searching for the moon in the sky. There was no moon, no matter how hard she scanned the heavens.

  “Mr. Bammary,” she said. “Please escort me back to my cabin. I am suddenly overcome — with weariness . . . and something else.”

  Reglum paused at her cabin door. “The crossing is always hard,” he said. “I begin to suspect that for you it may be very difficult. You have troubling dreams written on your brow. You have a connection to the Fulginator that even Dorentius does not have.”

  Sally thought she might fall, but held herself erect: she was a McDoon, after all. She heard Isaak meowing from behind the cabin door.

  “Beyond fulgination and dreams, I sense another grief as well,” Reglum said. “I will never press you. But do not hesitate to seek me out if you need a sympathetic ear.”

  Sally blushed, though it might have been from the night’s unexpected exertions. “Thank you,” she said. “Mr. Bammary, you are a true gentleman. Brasenose College would be proud.”

  “I must remember to tell that to Mr. Bunce,” said Reglum. “Now, I bid you good night. You will have to tell me in the morning how you managed to hurt your leg in the security of your own cabin. Bon soir.”

  Sally had opened the cabin door and was reaching down for Isaak when she heard Reglum pause at the end of the corridor. “Sally,” he said. “About your brother: everyone onboard is bound to help you find him. And now, I bid you truly a good night.”

  For the next week, wind and fog enveloped the Gallinule. Sounds were heard above the ceaseless wind, growing louder as the days went by: croakings as of gargantuan mire-drums, howlings and snufflings less describable. Wheeling shadows, like huge lammergeiers, swooped at the vessel, serpentine darkness writhed in the walls of mist. Sally seldom came to the deck. She alternated between her cabin, where she wrote letters to Mrs. Sedgewick and the cook (letters that would never be posted), and the fulgination room. Sally took comfort being with Dorentius and his equipe, as he called it, of operators. Best of all was when Reglum and the other A.B.s also came to the fulgination room. Then Sally could forget the nightmares, and even set aside — if only for a while — her fears for Tom, and her anguish over James Kidlington. Inspired by their leaders, and further incited by the presence of a young lady in their midst, the fulginators and the A.B.s bickered over the most arcane points of scientific procedure.

  Much of the time, however, Sally sat listening to the Fulginator. The hum and click of the Fulginator was her best protection against the nightmares and her deeper grief. She wove Sankt Jakobi and the other churches of Hamburg into the Fulginator’s susurrations. She imagined the disks and cylinder-heads of the Fulginator as so many St. Morgaine medals.

  “If I do not presume,” Reglum said to Sally on one of her rare visits to the deck, “what are the nature of your dreams? I only ask because you are so obviously disturbed by them.”

  Sally, wrapped in a great cloak, held the railing of the ship. She looked into the fog. Nexius, Fraulein Reimer, and Sanford stood next to Reglum. Sally said: “I see often the Sign of the Ear. Always in the dark. I am no longer just floating above the peninsula. I am walking across the short grass towards the broken temple. There is a flower in the grass, a small blue flower; I do not know its name.”

  “Sela-manri,” Reglum said. “The flower of repentance.”

  “Yes, it carpets the grass, especially as you get closer to the temple. Then I see the trees, the biggest trees I have ever seen. Oh, Sanford, they are bigger than anything on Hampstead Heath or at Bexley. Enormous oaks, twisted, with lustrous, deep-green leaves. I hear the wind in the leaves, and the boom of the surf on the rocks below.”

  Reglum and Nexius sighed, closed their eyes for a second. “Something moves in the trees. At first I am scared, but then I am curious. There are monkeys in the oak trees! Small monkeys, reddish brown, coloured like a fox. They have long tails and swing about but, I can hardly believe it, they have the heads of roe-deer, with small horns. They are browsing on acorns.”

  “The temple-apes,” Reglum said, eyes still closed.

  “Then of a sudden the monkeys grow still. They cower in the trees. Above me I sense something. An owl, a huge owl, flies over my head, swooping low, nearly brushing the top of a tree. It is pure white with a tail like a swallow’s!”

  Reglum and Nexius opened their eyes and stared at Sally as she continued. “The swallow-tailed owl hoots once — it sounds like a horn on the river in the fog. The owl lands on the lintel over the doorway to the temple. Its eyes are jet black, and its beak looks like a scimitar. It hoots again and looks right at me. The owl is trying to tell me something. I do not know what. It flies away as voices chant in a language I do not understand.”

  “Younti
sh?” asked Reglum.

  Sally, as if she had not considered this before, said, “I am not sure.”

  Nexius grunted and said something in Yountish to Reglum, who answered in the same tongue and did not translate. At that moment a giant white bird flew out of the mist and over the ship. Sally cried out, thinking it was the owl from her dream. Reglum steadied her at the elbow. “No, Miss Sally, it’s not to worry,” he said. “An albatross!”

  All hands stopped to watch the bird with a wingspan longer than a man circle the ship three times and then slip back into the mist. Reglum explained, “The albatross can fulginate. They are sacred to us. Fulmars, petrels, albatrosses, all three sacred as well. Not gulls though, just the truly oceanic birds. Gulls are tied each to their own coast.”

  He pointed to the dolphins pacing the ship. “Dolphins and albatrosses fulginate their own way through the interstitial lands. Presumably they have an organ in their brains to do so, but we do not know. They are sacred, so we cannot dissect them as we do other creatures. Dolphins will be with us all the way. We’ve never had a ship make it through without them. Their giant relations, the whales, they too can make the crossing — whales are the most sacred.”

  The fog closed round again and the howling increased. Sally tried to stop her ears, but the howling was as much in her mind as something she heard. She cried, retreated to the fulgination room. When the sounds got really bad, she sat outside the engine room, concentrating on the steady “chuff-chuff-chuff” and the hey’ing and ho’ing of the crew members shovelling coal. The fog did not clear this time, but only thinned and receded a little. The sea they entered was quiet, windless, the sky a pale, sandy colour when they could spy it. Barnabas, watching the dolphins sport, was one of the first to spot an island slung low in the mist. As they came closer, Barnabas and others heard a scrunching sound under the chuffing of their engine, like forks and knives being dragged across rocks. The Gallinule ran as close to the shore as the captain dared, her shallow draft allowing her to get within one hundred yards.

  Pacing on the shore were a half-dozen creatures, looking like outsized wolverines. Their claws flopped before them on a beach of crushed shale. Their eyes followed the Gallinule without blinking, never leaving the ship even when the creatures changed direction. Right up to the water’s edge they came. They made no other sound than what their clapper-claws made on the strand.

  “This place and these monsters are new to us,” said Reglum, looking through a telescope. Fencibles with muskets crowded the railing, watching the shapes patrolling the black beach. “I’ve asked to have the spot marked and added to the atlas, recorded in the log. We’ll sketch the species for later investigation. Odd, isn’t it, how they rushed to the shore, hoping that we’d wreck so they could fall upon us? Odd, I mean, because even without a soul, these creatures have hope.”

  As the Gallinule chugged along, the beasts kept pace. Reglum observed the clapper-claws through a telescope until their island dwindled in the mist. “Some kind of thassonid,” he murmured to Sally, offering her the telescope. “Kin perhaps to the shaharsh-harsh, the knuckle-dog. Note the double set of canine teeth, nostrils on the top of the head, flocculent pelt, scapular muscles highly developed.”

  About the only uplifting diversions, besides the dolphins, were Isaak’s prowess at rat-catching, and Sally’s stabs at Yountish.

  “Na tisk,” she would stammer. “No, no, it must be ‘Na trisk murrash em’na nahosh, saroo . . .’ Hold on, I’ve got it. ‘. . . saroo ba ballibash’na dewawrinni.’”

  “I venture to say, Miss McLeish,” Reglum would say. “That you are gifted with languages.”

  Sally curtsied.

  “However,” he would add, to general laughter. “You’ve just informed us that ‘It rains on my house when the cheese is high in the sky.’”

  Sally would laugh too, until she realized how much James Kidlington would have delighted in this sort of play.

  “Chum-sist-chuss-pink-pink-pink,” went the Fulginator hour by hour. “Weeeoow-zuss-pink-bedum-dum.”

  “The concentric lembus in quadrant 37.f shows positive apertures and the planar shift in quadrant 108.d is correlative,” Dorentius would mutter.

  Sally understood them both. What she did not understand were the place-names assigned to the coordinates in the charts.

  “‘Eswarroo Cha,’” she spelled out in the concordance. ‘A sea that, that does not flow, that does not move’?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Dorentius. “We might call it the Gelid Sea. Like the doldrums in Big Land, only worse.”

  “Worse how?”

  “The sea in that place engulfs ships, drowns them with ooze.”

  Seeing Sally’s look of horror, Dorentius said, “I do not intend to take us there! We are headed instead — if the Fulginator calculates the probabilities true — to a place that we could call the Opalucent Shoals in English.”

  The Fulginator calculated correctly, and soon the Gallinule navigated a series of shoals, easy to mark from the milky colour that gave them their name. The fog and the voices in the mist were gone. The Gallinule steamed through placid water, with its Small Moon a source of comfort and the dolphins tirelessly leading the way.

  The dolphins became agitated on the third day in the shoals. By the time Barnabas and Sanford came up on deck, the dolphins danced on tail-tip backwards, chittering to the Gallinule’s crew. All eyes and ears strained for the next hour as the dolphins noised their alarm without pause.

  The sea changed abruptly. It boiled. All around the ship it boiled. Staring down dumbfounded, Barnabas could make out shapes in the water. All around him the crew was shouting in Yountish. Nexius took time only to yell at Barnabas and Sanford, “Carkodrillos!” Reglum, racing by, added, “Dart-fish!” Neither name enlightened the McDoons much, but they had no time to think, so it did not matter.

  Hundreds of fish had erupted, thrashing and roiling the surface of the sea. Hard to see in the churning, they were as long as a man, some longer, entirely silver with large plate scales and obsidian eyes. Each had a long, needle nose and a mouth with many teeth. They swarmed the ship. Nexius gave orders. Fencible teams ran to the rail-mounted cannon, and tilted them so they faced nearly straight down into the frothing mass below. Barnabas and Sanford did not need to know Yountish to know Nexius was calling out, “One, two, three . . . FIRE!” The fusillade of grapeshot hit the sea with a huge noise. Using mittens, the Fencibles lifted the expended cannon off, mounted the next cannon, and fired again. And again. And again, reloading as they went so they could keep up a nearly continuous fire. The sea was bloody and dozens of ripped fish bodies floated astern, but the attack continued. Over the din, Barnabas and Sanford heard a sound from the hull as if the Gallinule had hit rocks. Thud, thud, thud it came, an irregular pattern not at all like the constant chugging of the steam engine.

  Thud . . . thud, thud.

  Nexius and the ship’s captain bellowed more orders. Some of the Fencibles and most of the sailors peeled away from the railing and flung themselves below. Barnabas and Sanford watched the remaining Fencibles reload, and decided they could be more use below decks.

  Thud, thud . . . thud.

  They jumped down the steps, and kept going to the bottom deck. Men (thud!) moved all (thud!) around (thud!) them in the dimness. Thud! Lanterns swung crazily, so it was hard to see. A knot of men wrestled something that protruded from the wall. A dart-fish had thrust right through, and was snapping and whipping its head around, seeking to enter entirely. Another one had pushed its way up through the floor. There were others. Shouts. Snapping. The silver scales and the eyes, wet, gleamed from the lantern light.

  Barnabas saw Reglum’s lead assistant, jaw clenched, wade into the fray wielding a marlinspike. One of the dart-fish leaped into the hold, followed by a gush of seawater. Its flanks were shredded from the copper sheathing it had pierced, but it had accomplished its task. Now another hole was opened, water pouring in at two places. The carpenters ran up,
fighting the power of the water, holding prepared planks and oakum, trying to plug the holes.

  Suddenly, right at Sanford’s feet, a Fencible cried out and fell. A dart-fish, whipping its body around, had slashed his thigh. Blood spurted, and the carkodrillo wriggled frenetically to open the breach that its body blocked. Without thinking, Sanford scooped up the fallen man’s cutlass and threw himself on the fish. The thing’s head caught him sidewise in the hip but its mouth was nearly closed. Even so, Sanford felt his flesh sliced and knew without feeling it that blood was washing down his legs. Sanford hurled himself at the carkodrillo again. He almost severed its head with his cutlass. It died with one last bucking motion, effectively closing the hole it had opened. The thudding stopped.

  The carpenters had covered the gaps, though both leaked heavily. Three dead dart-fish extended into the hold. The fallen Fencible received treatment. Sanford looked down at his bloody self and the bloody cutlass (a deeper red than his, but red all the same). Barnabas, who wielded a cutlass himself, was at his side.

  “Sanford!” yelled Barnabas.

  “I need to eat more goat-meat,” said Sanford, clutching his leg and slumping against the wall. “Another layer of fat would have been useful.”

  “Come on,” shouted Reglum. “Get these men to the sick-bay!”

  A few anxious hours ensued, as the A.B.s (who were also the ship’s physicians and surgeons) saw to the wounded.

  “Glad tidings,” said Reglum. “Mr. Sanford is made of very sturdy stuff. His gash is ugly but clean and not as deep as first feared. We have had him sewn up tight.”

  “Praise the Lord,” said Barnabas, adding (because he felt it could not hurt under the circumstances), “And the Mother too. And, no, no, old friend, you cannot get up yet, not for a few days. In the meantime, we’ve arranged for an extra goat’s-meat pie for you!”

  “The cannon decimated them,” said Reglum. “But they were routed by the dolphins. The dolphins slammed into the carkodrillos from behind, battering them to death. Caught between the dolphins and the guns, and with the ship moving faster than they are accustomed to, the dart-fish withdrew.”