The Choir Boats

by Rabuzzi, Daniel

  The following morning the entire crew gathered on deck. Four volunteers had come forward, and were lowered over the edge of the ship in a rowboat. The crew watched as the rowboat picked its way through the mudbanks to the beach at the mouth of the creek, the sound of the oars coming very loud across the silent waters. The officers watched through telescopes but even with the naked eye everyone saw the four figures, each in his dark-blue padded vest, turn to face the ship. All four waved. Silver glinted on their throats, the sun caught in their leaping dolphin brooches. The Small Moon flashed silver back to them — the last thing they would see of the Gallinule before they shouldered their muskets, picked up their pails, turned, and entered the forest of holly-like trees. Throughout not a word was spoken. Oos sat heavily both on the crew aboard the ship and on the members of the water detail. They were due back by nightfall. Each man in the party had a watch and an ansible pendant matched to ones held by Reglum. The landing detail did not return by nightfall or the next day. Not a sound came from the island. The rowboat sat lodged on the beach, unmoving.

  “The pendants are still glowing,” said Reglum. “They live.”

  “Perhaps they are lost,” said Nexius. “We will send up a rocket.” The Fencibles sent up two rockets from the deck of the ship.

  “They are what you call Congreve rockets,” said Nexius to Barnabas, Sanford, and Ben. “What your fleet used to burn Copenhagen.”

  Barnabas felt remorse, even if it felt unpatriotic to do so, at the bombardment of Copenhagen, since McDoon & Associates had so many good friends in commerce at the Danish capital. He thought, “How very strange to think of it: Copenhagen. London, for that matter. Hard to know if such places really exist or if I’ve dreamed them until this very moment. But how silly of me, of course they do . . . exist, that is.”

  At two minutes past one o’clock in the afternoon of the third day, all four ansible pendants winked out. No sound could be heard. Oos was everywhere, a silence like clay-wrapped roots brooding deep in the earth, a silence like the floor of an ocean that has never seen sun, moon, or stars. The captain assembled the crew.

  “Our four comrades are dead,” the captain said, as he and the crew made the circling gesture. “Let us sing.” The crew faced the island. As if to shatter Oos, the crew sang with strong, deep voices. Their song echoed off the beach and off the holly-like trees. Maybe it was the first such sound this world had ever heard. The song, as Reglum later explained to the McDoons, was called the “Jassajoharrian,” which is the “Song of Homecoming and Humility.”

  This place I do not know

  And yet I know the place.

  The earth holds up a mighty yew

  A mace to guard this place

  This place I never knew.

  Ivory roses screen my eyes

  From a gated grove

  Whose members, sleeping, will not rise.

  Will not rise or gaze or stand

  Within the slotted wall

  Where counsels, doddered, run a-strand.

  Where lichened keystone, bell, and arch

  Within the rooted hall

  Foretell a silent earthbound march.

  The wind-sered roses rasp and rustle

  Around that unknown place

  Where clay is blood and stone is muscle.

  The earth lets out a subtle sigh

  A shade to mark the space

  The place it knows for I.

  When the last echoes of the Jassajoharrian had subsided, the ship’s captain raised a fist to the island and yelled, “Our colleagues’ names will be forever known on the walls of the Hall of Long Remembrance. Whatever you are, keep your silence, but not their names!”

  That evening the captain called to meeting Nexius, Reglum, Dorentius, Barnabas, Sanford, and the young Purser with the flutist’s fingers, Noreous. The captain said, “Gentlemen, we are not in a good way. Let us speak frankly. Noreous, how long will our stores hold out?”

  Noreous twisted his fingers and said, “Four months at least, assuming half-rations. We are getting low on fruit and other anti-scorbutics, so I begin to fear scurvy. The lack of fish and game also haunts us. But, of course, I speak only of food — we are running low already on fresh water, as you know. We have at best six weeks worth of water, not more.”

  “Dorentius, that gives you no more than a week to complete your calculations and still give the Gallinule leeway to make our final run for home,” said the captain.

  “A week is . . .” he started. “With the integers used by Gaspard Monge perhaps we might . . . or if we had more time for the differentials scaled by Laplace . . .”

  “Mr. Bunce,” said the captain. “We don’t have time now to hear about Monge and Laplace.”

  Reglum stepped in and said, “What Dorentius means — and he and his men have hardly slept since we arrived — is that we have the equivalent of latitude but cannot find the equivalent of longitude. As you know, we need both.”

  Reglum added, “And it is at least eight axes we are working on, not just two. We have the proper coordinates for six of the eight plotted, but the interlacing of the final two has proven to be more problematic than expected.”

  The captain nodded, turned to Nexius, and said, “How is the condition of the Fencibles?”

  “Ready to fight,” said Nexius. “Will go ashore to find water until there are no more of us, if that is required.”

  “Not yet,” said the ship’s captain. “We wait one more week for the Fulginator to show us the way home. If at that time we are still blind to our correct route, then we will wiiswiis malan.”

  Reglum turned to Barnabas and Sanford, and said, “That means . . . it is very hard to translate . . . ‘to flee at random.’”

  “‘To range without hope’ is another translation,” said Dorentius. “We can fulginate knowing some of the coordinates and hope that we, through blind chance, hit upon lands or roads known to us. Success is not likely but failure is assured if we sit here starving to death.”

  Barnabas recalled one of his favourite prints on the wall of the partners’ office at Mincing Lane: Acteon and Diana. He imagined the panicked Acteon fleeing as he turned into a stag, crashing blindly into trees, falling, eventually to be hunted down and eaten by his own hounds.

  “You are part of this decision,” the ship’s captain said to Barnabas and Sanford. “Our mission is to protect and deliver you, so you can deliver us with the key. Is our plan acceptable?”

  Barnabas looked at Sanford, who nodded his assent. He reached into his vest and pulled out the key. Holding it up for all to see, Barnabas said: “I will bring the key to Yount. I will get my boy back.”

  Like many plans, however, the one agreed to by the men in the captain’s cabin lacked one essential contributor: Sally. Even as the men sat in conclave, Sally was drifting into another dream. On short rations she found that she sometimes could not tell her dreams from her waking sight. As the strange stars came out above Oos, and something lurked on the island, silence smothering everything, Sally dreamed a master-dream.

  “We will die,” she said to Reglum in her dream.

  “Yes, it is possible,” he said. “But that time has not yet come. Not yet.”

  He showed her a book. All the Yountians onboard had a copy of this book. He said, “Here is the Som-manri. Your copy. What you might call in English ‘The Berosiana’ or ‘Book of Rue and Repentance.’ We cannot die until we have written what we must write in the Som-manri, but your pages are still blank.”

  Sally looked at the book, and saw that Reglum spoke truly. Yet even as she looked, words appeared on the pages, in her handwriting. She peered at the pages but could not make out what the words were, except for names: “Fraulein Reimer” and “Shawdelia Sedgewick,” and more names and more names, everyone she had ever known. “Uncle Barnabas.” “Sanford.” The writing became slower, more jagged, darker. “Tom.” The script became fiery-black, as if written with a sharpened coal. The writing stopped, and then suddenly began again. “
James Kidlington.” The ink burned, the book smoked. Sally dropped it and ran from Reglum, ran and ran until she found herself running on the green grass at the Sign of the Ear. Panting, gasping, she fell to her knees among the little blue flowers, the sela-manri, the flower of repentance.

  “I repent,” she said, heaving for breath. “I repent!” she shouted so that blood came up from her lungs, her throat, up to her lips. The wind roared its approbation. In rapid succession she saw faces of those on her pages in the Book of Rue and Repentance. The faces gathered, one by one:

  Barnabas, Sanford, Tom.

  The cook, her niece, the fraulein.

  Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Harris.

  Mr. Sedgewick and Mrs. Sedgewick.

  Salmius, Nexius, Reglum, Dorentius, Noreous.

  The Termuydens.

  . . . James Kidlington.

  Others, many others she did not know.

  A white woman in a dress from the last century, with a face that looked like Sally’s might in a few years time.

  A dark-eyed young woman with silver threads woven into her glossy black hair and silver half-moons dangling from her ears.

  The African woman in a hand-me-down sailor’s jacket, wearing a red neckerchief, looking up from a brick courtyard.

  More and more crowded together and chanted with one voice. The chanting grew and grew, and at last Sally knew what the chanting meant, and knew what she must do.

  She awoke so quickly that Isaak had to jump off the bed. Grabbing Isaak, Sally ran past the fulgination room (Reglum looked up, marvelled at her speed, and followed) up to the deck and out to the bow. The sailors on duty greeted her, startled at her sudden appearance, but she did not hear them. She paused to catch her breath, licked a drop of blood from her lips, stepped to the very front of the ship, and began to sing.

  Low at first, then louder and louder, Sally sang. She sang in a language that was neither English nor Yountish, not German or Latin or any other tongue known to anyone onboard. She sang in the language that came before all these, and rests still at the heart of all words, all thought. She sang of longing and seeking and yearning and finding. She sang to defeat Oos, to banish the silence that kills, to find a way home for the Gallinule.

  The sailors on watch stepped back. Reglum ran up and stopped too. In that ancient silence, Sally’s voice went out like blazing arrows and radiant spears. It echoed off the Small Moon on the mast. It vibrated off the ansible pendant she wore around her neck, the thread that connected her to Tom. It rippled through the St. Morgaine and made the pages turn in the fraulein’s house-book.

  Barnabas and Sanford and Fraulein Reimer came on deck. Nexius, the ship’s captain, Noreous — everybody came on deck except Dorentius, who stayed with the Fulginator down below because something was happening to the machine. As Sally sang longer and louder, the Fulginator responded. Sally trilled a note, so did the Fulginator. Sally’s glissando became the Fulginator’s. Dorentius shouted as the song pierced him. He scribbled madly, and scrawled equations.

  “The third elliptic!” Dorentius yelled. “The tortile connection to the sixteenth element!”

  No one onboard could say how long Sally sang or what the song sounded like. Or, rather, each man had a different impression of both time and song.

  “Like a filigree of silver,” said Nexius.

  “Like sun reflected in the eye of a falcon,” said Reglum.

  “Like the sheen of watered silk,” said Barnabas.

  “Like the blue-whiteness of flame at its hottest,” said Sanford.

  Up and up the song crescendoed. Sally swayed at the bow of the ship. Every person on the Gallinule hummed now, a deep brumming sound, in unison, to support Sally’s song. Every person desired themselves home. Sally hit one brilliant high note, sending it soaring out into Oos. Every person on the ship hummed in perfect harmony, sending a wave of perfect yearning out into the void.

  At that moment, Dorentius shrieked, pushed a lever affecting the 22.e sub-plate, and the Fulginator struck the same note as Sally’s. A dolphin leaped out of the sky, chased by a beam of moonlight that reflected off the Small Moon, and tumbled into the ocean of Oos with a great splash.

  For one second, the silence returned, old and malevolent, the emptiness between the beating of the heart, a clot of un-sound to break their music. Then the Fulginator went “chunk-check-tunkseeoooo.” And the dolphin tossed itself up from the water calling out in dolphin language. And one hundred voices on the Gallinule yelled, “Hurrah!”

  Sally collapsed at the bow of the ship. Uncle Barnabas was there to catch her.

  Interlude: Binomials, Quoth the Char-Girl

  Maggie was halfway through Thomas Simpson’s Treatise of Fluxions on a rainy Thursday, having borrowed it from Mrs. Sedgewick (as well as the additional luxury of a beeswax candle), when a bolt of silence entered her mind and smothered all thought. Maggie flung herself back against the cellar wall, trying to call out. Her mother, still sickly, cried out but Maggie could not hear her. A silence coursed through Maggie’s arteries, seeking to strangle her heart. Maggie’s fingers grasped the treatise on fluxions so hard that pages ripped.

  With a soundless rush, Maggie was lifted over Bushnell’s Rope-walk and the Green Stiles, above Cinnamon Street, and Wellclose Square, whirled back past Artichoke Lane, and slammed into the alley outside her cellar. While her body slumped in the cellar, she stood in the alley, mazed.

  Think, think, think , Maggie yelled inside, trying to break the silence. Sing, sing, SING!

  She stood defiantly and sang about cardinal numbers in the continuum and congruent polyhedra and algebraic vortices. Gradually at first and then more quickly, the silence subsided. As it diminished, Maggie heard other voices — above all, a voice like hers. She saw the young white woman, the one she had seen before while far-walking. The white woman was singing from the prow of a ship, singing down the silence that gripped the ship and everyone on it. (How odd, Maggie thought, to see just a few white faces in a crowd of dark ones.) Maggie joined the choir, matching her notes to those of the woman on the ship. Their music exploded the silence, moonlight flashed everywhere (though the moon was gibbous that night over London), and a dolphin flew through the air. Maggie glimpsed crowds of singers on a beach, including a lean man hurrah’ing with a Wapping accent. The vision ended and Maggie sat up in the cellar, tears streaming down her cheeks. She hugged her mother, who said, “Little eagle, little eagle,” over and over.

  Something had changed with the merging of voices to defeat silence outside the world. For the first time, others — closer to Maggie, almost nearby — had heard her voice, and had lifted their heads like hounds scenting prey. Her song had gone forth like a flare in the night, leaving a lingering trace. And Maggie sensed their proximity. She felt vulnerable as she walked to and from the Sedgewicks. She wrapped her old sailor’s jacket more tightly around her as a muffin man stared at her in the street. A group of boys playing marbles stopped as one when she passed them, vulpine faces tracking her movement, flickers of silent intelligence shared between them. Even the streets seemed to conspire against her, misplacing themselves, softening corners, running into courtyards that went nowhere.

  “Why am I on Artichoke Lane?” thought Maggie. “I need to find Finch-House Longstreet. . . . Look up, look up, follow the rooks.”

  Mrs. Sedgewick detected something amiss with her protégé. Maggie was even more distant than usual, evasive when questioned, saying only that she needed more time with this book or that book, please, ma’am. Mrs. Sedgewick’s tutelage of Maggie was detected by the entire household; eventually, the head-maid told the footman, who told Mr. Sedgewick, who was otherwise oblivious, being so immersed in his work.

  One morning, Mr. Sedgewick said over pilchards at breakfast, “Mrs. Sedgewick, dove of my heart, you have been found out: cave ancillam, beware what the maid said indeed!”

  “Whatever do you mean, Mr. Sedgewick? And try to speak more plainly for once.”

  “Yes, yes, I shall
do so, my veprecose swan,” said Mr. Sedgewick. “I am always supportive of your follies and projects, toties quoties, but I am more than moderately curious as to what your expected outcome is this time. That is to say — am I being clear enough, my sweet? — what possible gain can be found in giving books on mathematics to a charity school girl, and one whose, shall we say, tincture is a bit on the darker side?”

  Mrs. Sedgewick counted to seven before responding. “George Gervase Sedgewick, you must be born under the haunch of Saturn to utter such a thing. And to question my motives is . . . honestly, this is so beneath my dignity.”

  Mr. Sedgewick paused long enough to spear another pilchard onto a slice of bread, and said, “Yes, infra dig it may be, but what is your intent? To show off this prodigy at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly or at the Bartholomew’s Fair in Smithfield? ‘Come see the Amazing Cushite Woman Who Does Sums!’ She’d look good, wouldn’t she, right alongside the ‘Savage Prince of Patagonia’ and ‘Tom Thumb of Kent and his Bride’?”

  Mrs. Sedgewick counted to nine, and then left the table. Her husband chuckled at the whims of women, and then returned to the ongoing mystery of the McDoon departure, wondering that he had never heard of the merchant de Sousa until Barnabas announced his removal to Cape Town. He had forgotten his breakfast conversation long before his wife had even begun to forgive him for it.

  The feeling grew in Maggie that someone or something was searching for her in London. She heard rumours of men asking questions throughout the East End about women who sang.

  “Maggie,” said the servant at The White Hart. “Uncanny, I calls it. Two men, not from around here to judge from their clothes and their voices, were asking last night about the strangest things: did we know any girls who sang, and what did they sing, and where might they be found? At first I thought they might be agents for Covent Garden or Vauxhall, as they’re always on the lookout for stage-girls, but then these mokes started mixing their talk with stories about the Singing Crucifix and the Talking Book, which I reckon are popish things, and other bits from the Bible, but not in a way that you hear it from the preachers, so I got scared somewhat and turned my ears away.”