“Thank goodness for the copper sheathing on the ship’s bottom,” said Barnabas.
“Yes,” said Reglum. “Without it, the Gallinule would be on the bottom, and we’d all be a meal for the carkodrillos. But the captain says, copper or no, those keemkulish punched five holes in our hull, and we are taking on water. We need to put in to dry-dock or else we will not reach Yount. He has asked Mr. Bunce to plot us a course to Supply Island.”
The Gallinule reached Supply Island with several feet of water in the hold, despite pumping round the clock. Supply Island had a deep-water cove. At the head of the cove, ringed by hills, were several buildings, like barracks, and a dry-dock facility.
Soon the Gallinule was in the dry-dock, the holes in its hull being repaired. The ferocity of the carkodrillo attack was plain to see: besides the five punctures, the hull was scored and buckled in dozens of places. Sanford was not alone in once more thanking the Yountish Royal Marine for sheathing ships in copper. The captain and the sailors would be at least two days making the repairs and reprovisioning the ship. Dorentius and his equipe would be calibrating and triangulating all day too. Sally wanted to stay and help the fulginators but Barnabas would have none of it.
“Come on, Sally lass,” he said. “The fulginators can handle their own affairs for one afternoon without your help. See, Mr. Bammary has invited us on an excursion. Damn glad to get off this tub and stretch my legs.”
Reglum said to Sally, “Please do join us. This island has an interesting history. Oh, and bring your cat if you wish!”
The island was quiet, the sun was warm, the hills the colour of those above Funchal, Sally thought with a jolt, wishing again that James Kidlington could be with them, and hating him because he could not be. That decided her: she needed to conquer her mood. After all, she was a McDoon of Mincing Lane. With a platoon of Fencibles, Reglum, Barnabas, and Sally walked up the hill away from the dry-dock. The air was very dry and warm. Even the Fencibles were breathing hard as they reached the top of the hill. Beyond were several downs, one after the other. They were forced to walk at a leisurely pace, being never able to draw a full breath.
“Mr. Bammary,” puffed Barnabas. “I wonder at this exertion. There seems to be insufficient air.”
“You are right about that,” Reglum puffed back. “One always feels light-headed here, and not in a pleasant fashion either.” The grass was like sisal and crackled under their feet. The wind rattled the seed pods of the few shrubs that could be seen. Their eyes stung, their ears popped as they plodded inland.
Barnabas said, “You mentioned this island had an interesting history. Seems rather barren to me. What has happened here to make it worth the knowing?”
Reglum called a halt, welcomed by all, to respond. “We discovered this place over sixteen hundred years ago, about the time in your world that Marcus Aurelius defended Rome against the Germans. Though, of course, at the time we discovered the island, we knew nothing of Marcus Aurelius or Rome at all for that matter. For sixteen hundred years, we have used this place as a supply dump and advance camp, stockpiling provisions. Not long ago we built the dry-dock we use today.”
Barnabas interrupted. “But you do not populate it?”
“No,” Reglum shook his head. “The island will always remain unpeopled. For one thing, as you have sensed, the air here is poor. People could not live here long before anaemia and lethargy overtook them. Even fire does not burn as it should here; it smoulders rather. But there is another reason. Come, I will show you.”
At the top of the farthest down, they looked at what Reglum had brought them to see. A town was stretched out below them in a valley, large enough to house perhaps ten thousand souls. The streets were neatly laid out in rows, with squares and courts, here what looked like a cathedral, there what might be a guildhall. Sally felt her spirits rise at the sight of the creamy honey-coloured stone under the pale wide sky.
“But no,” she said to herself. “No sound, no movement, no smoke from chimneys . . .”
“It looked like this when we found it sixteen hundred years ago,” said Reglum. “We have charted and measured every building, every street. Sages have written volumes on individual buildings, arguing that this one contained communal baths or that this one was a market hall. Whatever force holds time at bay here is unknown to us. There is no decay in the stone, nothing crumbles. Three other towns are on the island, all as deserted as this one. Men and women lived here. We have found mosaics. They had dogs and cats for pets. They tilled the earth, enjoyed the grape, sailed in ships. All gone, without a trace, leaving their towns untouched behind.”
Sally looked at Isaak, carried in a basket, and thought: The disappeared had cats for pets!
Not knowing she did so, Sally drew a small square in the air with her index fingers, over and over again. The words of Ezekiel came into her mind: “An end! An end has come upon the four corners of the land. Now the end is upon you, I will let loose the anger upon you . . . When I make you a city laid waste, like cities that are not inhabited . . .”
“Gone, just vanished it seems,” Reglum gazed at the city, as if some clue to the mystery might be in plain sight but overlooked these past sixteen hundred years. “No physical calamity struck. This is not Pompeii as discovered in your world. Nor do we find any sign of strife or any disturbances of bones — in fact, we find no bones at all except in graveyards. Many believe that the inhabitants of these towns found their little island transported here by an event like the Great Confluxion, maybe by the Great Confluxion. So here they would have been, just this one small island encircled by howling death, a few towns surrounded by the mists. It may be that the inhabitants came down to the beach one day and, holding hands, walked into the sea and drowned themselves.”
The Fencibles who understood English made the warding sign and whispered, “Kaskas muri ankus’eem.” Sally did the same. Reglum turned away but they heard him. “Only conjecture, of course. It’s why most of us call it Ghost Island instead of its official name.”
That evening they dined ashore. Sally asked, “This island is the first one we have encountered that holds even traces of human life. Have you met no others, besides those of us from Big Land?”
The Yountish officers put down their forks. For once, Reglum and Dorentius looked at one another to see who should go first. Reglum nodded to his Cantabrigian rival.
“No,” said Dorentius. “It’s why we call our contact with Big Land ‘the Blessed Encounter.’ Centuries and centuries, tens of centuries, passed after the Great Confluxion before we found you. We were alone. It’s why we have another name for Big Land: ‘Pash’ma-soom,’ which means ‘Human Land.’ We often shorten that, saying we are going to ‘Pash’ when we leave for a voyage to your world.”
“We’ve charted thousands of places since the Great Confluxion ripped us from wherever it is that we came from,” said Reglum. “We have classified and catalogued thousands upon thousands of species. But none are sapient so far as we can tell. Though there are possible exceptions.”
Barnabas said, “What about Strix Tender Wurm?”
Reglum said, “We don’t know what he is. Nor the Cretched Man. Some things are best considered as being categories unto themselves.”
No one spoke for a while, until Dorentius resumed. “We are not certain what places are indigenous to the Interrugal Lands — that is, permanently resident between the worlds, and what places have been dislocated and discharged here by violent coincidence. The in-between lands are backwaters where flotsam and jetsam land. Imagine that you are tossed into a rushing river, battered by rocks and bars. You lose your hat, your shoes, maybe even your coat, which swirl in your wake. Yount is a hat or pair of gloves, a stray bit that has been stripped off in passage.”
“We have other evidence,” said Reglum. “Over the centuries, we’ve recovered three corpses from the seas that were neither from Yount nor Big Land. Humans to most appearances, but with certain . . . differences. Nictating membranes, extra dig
its, idiosyncratic organelles, that sort of thing. All described in our literature, and one preserved onboard in alcohol and today to be seen in the museum in Yount Great-Port. We call him simply ‘The Specimen.’”
Sally queried again, “But, until you found Big Land, no others like us?”
Reglum smiled, a bittersweet tone crept in. “No, no one like you. Or like us.”
Sally cried out, “But, Mr. Bammary, we are you, and you are us! Why, sir, I do not mean to state this so boldly, but no one else has commented on it, so I feel I must. We Big Landers and Small Landers, we can . . . have union . . . we can marry with success,” she ended in a rush.
Reglum smiled again, with no trace of bitterness this time, “Yes, there are some like me, with parents or grandparents from both worlds. We can mix, and not just like horses and donkeys, the offspring of which can bear no young themselves. We are, in terms your dear Linnaeus has set out, the same species. Strange as that may sound, and impossible as that might seem.”
Out of the darkness that had fallen on the island of ghosts, Reglum said, “Big Land and Small Land, our fates are entwined. Hence the key. Hence your voyage.”
Three days out from Supply Island the Gallinule stumbled. Sally felt it immediately. Deep within the clacking-clicking-chunking-ticking of the Fulginator something went astray. An atomized current of energy or evanescent burst of sonic motion, whatever it was, it had impeded the process. The Fulginator’s calculations were suddenly and completely amiss. Assured seeking became groping. Sally, knowing the Fulginator’s cantata in her essence, cried aloud in her cabin and then stumbled half-blind to the fulgination room.
Dorentius had lost his cap and was running around the Fulginator. The rest of the equipe were yelling and consulting charts. Reglum and the ship’s captain raced through the door. Outside mists arose. As if a giant in the sky waved a fan in front of the sun, shadows washed over the Gallinule followed by stabbing beams of light. Out of the mists poured ululating voices. In the fulgination room, Sally felt a chill, sat down, stood up, and then could not move at all. In her mind she saw a dolphin. She heard it speaking in the staccato tongue of dolphins, but she did not understand except that the dolphin was frantic. Concentrate, she thought, and focussed on the dolphin’s eye, so bright and looking straight at her. Nearer and nearer and then . . . darkness. Nothing. Like a candle doused. She tried to find the dolphin in her mind but could not.
Sally staggered out of the fulgination room, followed closely by Reglum. On deck, they were buffeted by winds that had not been there minutes ago. They looked to the Small Moon, which clattered against the mast. Someone called from the bow that the dolphins were gone. Dreading what they would see, Sally and Reglum went to the bow, where the ship’s captain joined them and the watch.
Everyone scanned the sea in front of them. Minutes went by. No one spoke. More minutes. No grey forms leaped in front of the ship, no sleek forms accompanied it.
Morning brought no relief. The ship’s captain assembled everyone on deck. The Gallinule was lost. The Fulginator had failed. Dorentius and Reglum and every member of their teams were working around the clock to identify and repair the problem and, most important, to find the ship’s location so they could plot a route home. Until then, everyone without exception would be on short rations.
“At least the steam engine is performing well, thank the Mother,” said Reglum. “And the ship’s adequately provisioned.”
“So far,” muttered Nexius.
The voyagers had never seen such a sea. It was inky black, and gave off a sweet, resinous smell that soon became cloying. There was no wind, and only the barest wisps of cloud in a bright blue sky. The A.B.s tested the water with lines, buckets, and seines. The water contained no life: no fish, no turtles, no copepods, not a scrap of seaweed or algae, and most certainly no dolphins or whales. The Gallinule chugged on for two days.
“We cannot simply steam ahead in a completely empty sea,” said the ship’s captain. “Not knowing where we are going. We do not have enough coal.”
“But we cannot stop and drift in open ocean,” said Nexius. “There is no wind for sailing.”
“Don’t tell a mariner his business,” said the ship’s captain. “Though you are right, of course.”
“We cannot understand what happened,” said Dorentius, answering the captain’s (and everyone else’s) question for the tenth time. “Rebarbative flux, a purling of the xantrophicious ebblines, we do not know. We have come to a place utterly outside our charts. Not knowing our coordinates, we cannot calculate how to find the roads to Yount.”
“That cannot answer, Mr. Bunce,” said the ship’s captain. “Surely there is a way to calculate our position.”
“Difficult, but not impossible, sir,” said Dorentius, looking anything but certain about that. “However, the mathematics are daunting, complex, and will take much time, even working at it night and day.”
“How much time, Mr. Bunce?” asked the captain.
“It might be three or four months, sir,” the fulginator said. “With luck.”
“We have food enough for that plus the time it will take us to regain the road to Yount,” the captain said. “But I worry about our supplies of fresh water. Well, Mr. Bunce, do what you can, and may the Mother speed your work.”
Sally worked with the fulginators and the A.B.s. Her math skills equalled theirs, despite her lack of formal training (Sally had taught herself math, the subject not being one taught to respectable merchants’ girls). She did not always follow the notation but she was quicker than almost anyone at finding the solution and she was peerless at deriving alternatives to the standard procedures of calculation. Reglum saw that Sally understood the principles better than he did; only Dorentius was better. They both instructed their men to follow her lead.
The Gallinule had been steaming in an empty ocean for three days, and the captain had decided to switch to sail on the morrow to conserve coal, when land was sighted.
The landmass was flat as far as the eye could see. As the ship got closer, Reglum saw a very pale green beach (Sand made of smaragdite? he thought. Perhaps feldspar?), with a uniform level of deep-green trees behind it. About five hundred yards from shore, pale-green mudbanks appeared. The captain feared running aground, so the Gallinule turned to port and steamed parallel to the shore. All day they worked their way up a coastline that never varied, always confronted by mudbanks at four to five hundred yards offshore. As they cruised by, they saw how queachy and jellified the mud was. Sally shuddered. This place looked too much like the Gelid Sea for comfort, only at least that place was on the map and so could be gotten away from. For eight days the Gallinule steamed along the coast, steadily turning and turning as the coast did. Until . . .
“It’s an island,” said the ship’s captain. “We have just returned to the very spot where we first arrived. There is the one inlet we’ve seen on this coast, we’ve come back to it. See, there it is! If, as I am guessing, we will have to prospect for fresh water on the island, then this is the likeliest place to start.”
The captain cut the engines and anchored the Gallinule opposite the inlet, some five hundred yards out. Shipboard routine was the rock upon which each crew member set his stake. Sailors and Fencibles scrubbed the decks, repaired spars, spliced rope and rigging; they told each other stories, boxed, wrestled, and danced. Members of the Abbey, when they weren’t with the fulginators, charted the night sky. Sanford, reasonably healed, walked around and around the deck, conversing with Barnabas. Everything was normal, except that they were lost outside the world.
With the engines off, the quiet of their surroundings dominated all else. The quiet sank into their pores, rose into their nostrils, infiltrated their minds until they rarely spoke above a whisper. There was no wind. The ink-black sea, devoid of life, was flat and unmoving, except in slow, sluggish currents, the origins of which were subject of much speculation by the A.B.s. Reglum scanned the coast but saw nothing except the thin strip of pale-gr
een beach and an endless row of trees that looked vaguely like holly. Nothing stirred on the island: not a bird, not a beast, nothing at all. Everyone called the place “Oos,” which is “Silence” in Yountish.
Two months passed. Oos was an accursed word for them all. How they longed to shout and stamp their feet, to start a hare from the holly-like trees or put a gull to flight from the pale-green beach. How they longed to hear that the Fulginator was repaired, desired to know the coordinates for home.
Sally dreamed by day as well as by night now. Sometimes she saw the Sign of the Ear, with its swallow-tailed owl. Sometimes she caught a glimpse of a dolphin, but almost as soon as the dolphin appeared, it disappeared again. Other times she thought she heard Tom’s voice. Once, she saw the African girl in an old coat staring at a brick wall marked with symbols Sally could not make out; the unknown girl, with black braids peeking out from under a headscarf, stared at the wall as if she was looking right through it. Sally thought maybe the African girl was looking for the Gallinule but could not say why she thought that. And once, Sally saw James Kidlington in chains, gesturing as if to an interlocutor who was not there, and saying “Erasmus Darwin — you must read his latest work, it is simply extraordinary.”
Barnabas tried to cheer Sally, praising Isaak for the cat’s unflappable grace and prodigious hunting of the ship’s rodents. Sally smiled as best she could, for her uncle’s sake, and hugged Isaak, but mostly she dwelt in the mathematics of fulgination and dreamed down avenues flanked by Sankt Jakobi, Sankt Nikolai.
Barnabas fingered the key and marvelled at the discipline of the Gallinule’s crew. He hid his own anxiety with a torrent of good cheer and outpourings of concern for Sanford. Barnabas was convinced that Sanford would not heal fully without adequate provision of goat’s meat, and so wondered if a hunting party might soon be sent ashore since the ship had run out of it. A landing party was being assembled but the captain’s chief concern was water, not meat. Conferring with Nexius and Reglum, the captain called for four volunteers to seek fresh water on the island: two sailors, two marines, two pairs of hatmoril.
The Choir Boats Page 20
