The Choir Boats

by Rabuzzi, Daniel

  “Sally!” yelled Tom. He gripped the ansible-scope so hard it shook. Sally had appeared, replacing the dolphin. Sally was asleep in what looked like a ship’s cabin. Tom thought he saw Isaak’s golden fur when the image abruptly disappeared. Just before Tom looked up, he caught a blurred glimpse of a green lawn strewn with small blue flowers. The Cretched Man had grabbed for the scope and was looking through it. For five minutes or longer, he looked through the scope, saying nothing. Tom’s head hurt badly, and he felt dizzy. He sat down and waited. Jambres said he could not see Sally, and asked Tom to describe what he had seen.

  “Blue flowers in the grass?” said the Cretched Man. “Hmmm. You may have seen . . . well, never mind. Remarkable, remarkable, on at least two counts.”

  “Where is she?” said Tom.

  “Impossible to know from such a short vision,” said Jambres. “I checked the coordinates you were using as soon as I took the instrument over, but already they had been obscured. But the sighting is good fortune regardless.”

  “I thought you said it took years of training to use the telescope?”

  “Indeed,” said Jambres. “Altogether remarkable that you could find what I could not, even if you could not fix her location. And even more remarkable that you apparently entered into one of Sally’s dreams, there at the end when you saw the flowers.”

  Tom snorted. “I don’t believe in that sort of thing; that’s the kind of nonsense Sally goes on about. . . .” He trailed off as he considered what he had just seen, and all the oddities he had experienced since leaving Mincing Lane.

  “You are a remarkable family,” Jambres said, half to himself. “I must credit the Learned Doctors with that much perspicacity: they chose you well.”

  “Chose?” said Tom.

  “The operation with the key and selection of the Key-bearer and finding those who wish themselves to go,” said the Cretched Man. “Very delicate, with many, many unforeseen consequences. The Learned Doctors have made many attempts through the years, only two of which succeeded. This time — the third and final — they have, as you English say, ‘a sporting chance.’”

  Tom was only half-listening. He was thinking of Sally and the rest of his family. He had taken to looking at himself in the mirror and masking his lower-face with his hands so as to see Sally. Now he had really seen her. He thought of her coming home from school and her lectures on points of Latin history and German grammar that only she cared about, and her missing meals so that the cook scolded her, and how she loved to sit in the partners’ room when she thought no one was looking. The Cretched Man’s next comment brought him back to the present.

  “They’ve been thinking about your family for a long time, which means I have been too,” said Jambres. “Since your grandmother, Belladonna born Brownlee in Edinburgh.”

  Tom felt a shiver and cried, “That’s unnatural! Why, I know next to nothing about my grandmother, so how could you . . . ?”

  “Oh,” said Jambres. “Someone as sensitive to coroscular forces as your grandmother, someone with her ability to feel far — oh no, such people are exceedingly rare and hence awaken attention swiftly and far beyond the walls of the world. In Edinburgh they used to say that your grandmother had fairy blood in her and that she conversed with the Sidhe-folk, which, in its way, was not beside the truth. Alas for her, a Titania whose Oberon was too weak to defend her. Yet she lived long enough to pass her gifts on to her offspring.”

  Tom was astounded. To sit in a room somewhere outside the world and hear from the lips of an eldritch stranger the story of one’s grandmother . . . “Quatsch!” was all Tom could muster.

  The Cretched Man laughed, not unkindly. “The strangest thing is that the Learned Doctors . . . and I . . . may have missed the most gifted in favour of your uncle.”

  The truth of the Cretched Man’s speculation came two days later. Tom and the Minders were having their late-afternoon baggins, with more than the usual number of Yountians present. One of the sailors was twanging on a mouth-harp and another one was playing a fiddle as everyone clapped and stamped. The song was one the Yountians had been teaching Tom and the Minders, so everyone joined in on the chorus. “Mama-oyster says to baby-oyster to get out of bed before the wicked gull comes and tears you away,” was the refrain, as near as Tom could translate it into English. Just as they came to the triple-clap that ended the refrain, they had an unexpected guest, and they all fell silent.

  The Cretched Man ran towards them. No one had ever seen him run before. (“He always paces stately,” Billy once said, “because he has what the French call ‘sanfwa,’” which was more literally true than Billy realized.) As Jambres came to the fire, he bowed once to the group, and then called for Tom.

  As Jambres called, Tom half-fell. Billy stepped up instantly and caught him. Tom sat on the beach, with Billy and the Cretched Man beside him, and all the others in a ring around him. Jambres called to Tom but Tom did not hear him. Tom began to hum, but it wasn’t the Yountian song about oysters or the shanty about the Man in the Moon or any other song they had sung around the baggins-fire. He stopped for a second, as if listening for the theme, to insert himself in an invisible choir, then began singing. Jambres looked at Tom with wonder in his eyes. No one had ever seen such a look in his eyes before. (“Like he’d felt the rapture,” was how Billy described it later. “And that’s not just me gum-diddering.”) Then an even more marvellous thing happened: Jambres began to sing as well, matching his voice to that of Tom’s.

  One by one everyone on the beach began to sing, a wordless harmony to a song that Tom shared with them. Later, no one remembered what the song sounded like or how long they sang, only that it was a delicious moment and all too brief. Tom cried out and fell back. The song ended on that note.

  Blinking in the firelight, everyone looked around a bit shyly, as if they had just been properly introduced for the first time. The sailor with the mouth-harp tried softly to recapture the song but could not. Tom sat up with tears on his face.

  “Sally’s brought them back,” Tom said.

  Jambres nodded. Billy helped Tom to his feet, and then he and Jambres walked Tom back to the house with the flagpole. Everyone else sat around the fire for a long time after that.

  “Sally rescued them,” said the Cretched Man the next morning. “They should be in Yount soon.”

  “I saw a strange ship and a strange machine and then a dolphin plummeted out of thin air,” said Tom. He yawned. He had slept a long time.

  “Your sister is another Belladonna, and more,” said Jambres, offering Tom a biscuit. “I saw her on the ansible-scope suddenly, which is why I came to you. They were lost entirely in some ancient pocket of silence, a remainder from the tohu-bohu at the Beginning.”

  “Nothing like this has ever happened to me before,” said Tom, taking the biscuit and heaping on the last of the marmalade from the ship’s stores.

  “I doubt it will be the last time it happens to you.”

  Tom shook his head, paused to devour the entire biscuit, and said, “You sang too.”

  The Cretched Man wiped a bit of marmalade that had fallen on the table from Tom’s knife before saying, “I did. I wonder at that myself. Sally’s song was compelling.”

  Tom put down his napkin, shoved aside his plate, and said, “You are playing a longer game than me, but you sang for Sally, for Uncle Barnabas, for all the Yountians on that ship.”

  “I told you, Thomas, I am not your enemy, no matter how bizarre or ill-mannered my carriage towards you may sometimes seem,” said Jambres, holding the sleeve of his right arm as if the coat ached.

  “Ill-mannered is an understatement,” said Tom, but he said it half in jest. “How can you expect people to see you as an ally, let alone trust you as one, if you persist in sending knuckle-dogs and, what are they called, hyter-spirits after them?” He looked to the side of the house where a kennel sat in a small stockade. Only the knuckle-dog’s tail could be seen hanging out of the kennel. Tom remembered the print
of Diana and Acteon at home in the partners’ room.

  “I admit that the knuckle-dog has a rude appearance, that its fingered paw is an eerie extravagance, but it is hardly more savage than the wolfhound or mastiff kept by any squireen in the shires,” said Jambres. “As for the hyter-spirits, they are scouts only, no more harmful than carrier pigeons. They have no appetites other than the ones I give them. I shape them from clay and breathe a pneuma into them. Jesus is said to have done the same and he is not castigated for it!”

  Tom shook his head. “I have given up my defence of reason since coming on this quest,” he said. “Too many occult matters have manifested themselves. But, for most people, talk of breathing life into clay is cause for fear.”

  Jambres sighed. “This is why my task is made so difficult. When I speak the truth I am the object of fear and enmity. When I speak other than the truth, I am rightly called out for a liar.”

  Tom could think of no reply.

  Jambres continued. “The Yountians insist on the truth but then deny it when it is presented to them. Show them a truth and they seek a base motive or baleful desire behind it. Sometimes a beast is just a beast, not a monster moved by another’s will, such as the Sow of Crommyon egged on by its witch owner.”

  “Or the giant’s pet manticore that Gosse of Frinder slew!” said Tom.

  “I don’t know that one,” said Jambres. “Rare and pleasing to discover a new story after all my years.”

  “An old Scots ballad that Uncle Barnabas sings on occasion,” Tom shrugged.

  “You are Belladonna’s grandson!” said Jambres.

  They left the table, dispersed the gulls, walked down to the beach. The sanderlings had migrated, leaving only a pair of yellowshanks and a lone whimbrel searching for food on the tidal flats.

  “What comes next will be difficult and may go awry, Thomas,” said Jambres. “The Yountians have schemed and plotted a long time to bring the key with the right Key-bearer to Yount. I set our meeting by design at the very place where the key must be used, at the Sign of the Ear. I too need to confirm the key’s authenticity and validate its Bearer. So far are our needs identical.”

  “What will this key do?” asked Tom. “Quatsch to me, but I have never really followed this — just took what Sally and Uncle Barnabas said on faith. Sally’s hardly ever wrong about anything.”

  “The key is exactly what it sounds like, Thomas,” said Jambres. “It will open the door to the Yountians’ prison, end their exile — and give them a bridge to Earth if they want to take it. Or elsewhere. I have given up, or nearly so, trying to tell them that the time for their release has not yet come. They have not met all the demands for their redemption. To go now, with conditions unmet, is premature at best. By the terms of my own assignment, I am barred from intervening too directly — they must be allowed the freedom to choose.”

  The lone whimbrel pattered off in front of them, calling “peeyeeee-yeeee-yik” as it flew over the surf.

  “If you cannot intervene, then how do you intend to lead Billy and the Minders, and whoever else, on a mission against those slavers?” said Tom.

  The Cretched Man smiled one of his perfect smiles, highlighting the anguish beneath his brittle masterpiece of a face, and said, “One in my position learns to parse all terms and conditions to granular particularity. I am an accomplished jurist in the courts of heaven, having often pled my own case before judges of novembered diction and austere visage. In my carceral role, I have some latitude on how my talents may be used or withheld for the benefit of the immured. My expedition against Orn, Nearer Yount, is a private project.”

  “Unsanctioned, you mean,” said Tom.

  “But justified in its purpose, a furthering of the levitical construct,” said Jambres, licking his lips as if something acrid were on his tongue. “So I would argue in the celestial house of forfeiture, should I be discovered.”

  Tom looked at the Cretched Man’s coat and wondered how many more tailorings Jambres would have to undergo if he were discovered or if his interpretation of terms were overruled. Tom and the Cretched Man walked in silence for some time, their only companion the whimbrel that flew from spot to spot, always fifty yards or so in front of them. Its white and black wings flashed against the blue-green sea.

  At last Tom said, “Another thing I do not understand is how the Yountians even came to have a key, and why, if you are their bailiff, you cannot simply change the lock.”

  The Cretched Man said seriously, “This is not Newgate or the King’s Bench, where one simply bribes the warden for a day-leave!”

  “Well, no, I hardly meant — ” said Tom.

  “As for their possession of the key, they stole it,” said Jambres. “From me.”

  “But you are so . . .” Tom stopped in the sand and looked right at Jambres.

  “Powerful? Yes but the Learned Doctors are not bookfull blockheads, no matter how doomed their actions might be. Desperation drives them to prideful feats. I understand their desperation — indeed, I share it. They have gathered a great armamentarium of hopeless wisdom — not enough to win them their freedom, but enough to give them a glimpse of unfenced sky and homeward highways. Enough for them to purloin a key from their jailer while he dreamed of his own long-awaited return.”

  The Cretched Man licked his lips again, and said, “There are three locks. Such things always come in threes, except when they come in sevens. The Learned Doctors have contrived to open two of the three with the key. Two others from our world who wished themselves to go have come over the last century. Now the Doctors invest all their power and knowledge in opening the third in the trinity.”

  Tom thought of Uncle Barnabas, with his vests and funny little sayings and his habit of leaping out of chairs to handle and clarify what he could, as saviour of a world. Tom looked sideways at the man beside him, the pallid man in the red coat that he could not remove, as the gatekeeper who must refuse Uncle Barnabas and the Yountians.

  “Yes, Thomas,” said the Cretched Man, as if he had read Tom’s mind. “I am constrained to retrieve the key. There is more. What Barnabas McDoon can unlock, he can also re-lock. I cannot do that myself, once the locks have been opened. He must re-lock the two locks that have already been opened.”

  Tom remembered the botched exchange in London. This time there would be more men, more weapons.

  “Yes,” said the Cretched Man, once again anticipating Tom’s thought. “We will be ambushed at the Sign of the Ear, beyond doubt or estimate. They will stop at nothing to ensure that the final lock is unlocked. I must not let that happen, for their sake and for mine.”

  “But there’s Sally and the fraulein, Uncle Barnabas and Sanford on the other side,” exclaimed Tom, stopping again. Deep in his eyes, the Cretched Man registered an infinite sadness.

  “Thomas,” said the Cretched Man with a tenderness that Tom did not want to hear. “We must make them understand that we are all on the same side, despite appearances. All of us are Proetids, wandering witless and mad for having insulted the divine, looking for our saviour.”

  Tom waved his arms at the sea, putting the whimbrel to flight. He would have yelled but perhaps some of the Cretched Man’s sangfroid was becoming part of his own constitution. They said little as they walked back to the house with its little yard in front and the kennel on the side. At the door, Jambres stopped. He winced, his perfect brow and his unmatched nose marred by an equally perfect, unmatched pain. Tom put his bandaged hand on the Cretched Man’s shoulder to steady him. For the first time, he felt the blood coursing through Jambres, and below the blood, much deeper, the wells of anguish still to be emptied.

  Jambres said, “The Yountians make their plight worse by attempted flight. We must make them see this. Their sentence cannot be completed until they fulfill all their obligations. Oh Thomas! If your namesake could convince King Hyndopheres of the passage to heaven, then so can we make the Yountians see!”

  Tom left Jambres at the door and walked out on the heath
, where he came upon Billy Sea-Hen an hour later. Billy had a rifle in his hand, and two of the rabbit-like creatures in his other hand.

  “Afternoon, Tommy,” said Billy, swinging his bag in a companionable way. “Shall miss the hunting when we leave, and our baggins on the beach.”

  “We’ll be leaving soon,” said Tom.

  “Oh yes,” said Billy. “We knows that. Getting our rifles ready for more than coney-hunting, if it comes to that.”

  “But they’re my family on the other side,” said Tom.

  “That’s a terrible fact, it is,” agreed Billy. “Caught betwixt a bear and a lion, that is. But me and Tat’head have been thinking upon it, and hope we can help avoid trouble.”

  A late autumn wind soughed over the heather. A great bumblebee sat on a gorse-flower, slowly flexing its wings. It lumbered off to another flower and then flew away.

  Billy followed its flight intently, and said, “The last dumbledore until next spring!”

  “A good sign?” said Tom.

  “Chip chap chunter, indeed so! He’s a tough old bloke is the dumbledore. We’re like him: rough and slow as it might seem, but we’ll be here next spring. You’ll see.”

  As they walked back to the spit on which the Minders had their cottages, Tom pointed to the rifle and said, “Use it only when you truly must.”

  “Yet there may be true need, Tommy,” said Billy. “We aren’t heading to Cockaigne with marzipan mountains and trees spun of sugar. Could be some hard graft before we’re done. Just so’s you are ready like.”

  As the kelp-fire flared up on the shingle, Tom put his hand on Billy’s shoulder so that they stopped just at the edge of the beach, where the heather ran out and the sea kale began.

  Tom said, “I will be ready. Just keep our heads about us, that’s all I ask.”

  “Depend upon it, Tommy Two-Fingers,” said Billy, who turned and headed to the fire and the frying pan for the conies. Tom stayed a moment longer on the edge of the beach. He looked past the Minders as they prepared baggins. He looked past the Seek-by-Night as it bobbed at anchor. He looked far out to sea.