The River of Shadows cv-3

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “When you came back,” she said, “you were so different, for a while. So strange.”

  “Must have been hard for you,” said Marila, “Pazel changing like that.”

  Thasha turned to her as if she’d been slapped. Marila picked up her stone and began to work again. But she added quietly, “You let Fulbreech see the book whenever he wants. Handle it, too. He knows you have a thirteenth Polylex.”

  “You’re a damned little spy.”

  “Thasha,” said Marila, “you came out of your cabin last night with the Polylex under your arm. He took it before he… greeted you.”

  Pazel sanded harder, faster.

  Then Hercol straightened his back and glanced at the darkening sky. “We should leave off until the morning. Teggatz will be calling us to our meal.”

  “Think I’ll work a little longer,” said Neeps, his voice as cold as Marila’s.

  Thasha laughed bitterly. “I’ll go,” she said. “Then you’ll all be happier.”

  She pushed past them, walked to the end of the scaffold and stepped over the rail onto the topdeck. Then she turned and looked back at them.

  “I’m ending this tonight,” she said. “Do you hear me? I won’t play your game anymore.”

  “For some of us it never was a game,” said Neeps.

  But Pazel thought, Who is she talking to?

  Thasha marched to the Holy Stair and descended. Toward sickbay, Pazel realized, where Fulbreech worked.

  “She’s right,” said Neeps. “I do feel better.”

  Hercol looked at him with quiet regret. “You speak proudly, both of you,” he said. “Well and good: but if shame should follow, remember what you said to that girl.”

  Then he departed as well. Pazel, Neeps and Marila sanded wordlessly in the gathering dark. But despite the shadows Pazel saw his two friends exchanging glances. “All right,” he said at last, “spill it. What is it you want to tell me?”

  “Listen,” said Marila. “You know I tried to take her side at first. I was wrong. She’s lost her mind over him, and it’s ruining everything, and it has to stop. We should push him down a hatch.”

  “Marila!” cried both boys.

  “I mean it. Something terrible is going to happen-and Thasha’s helping it happen, damn it. We bumped into each other last night-really bumped, in the stateroom, it was pitch dark. I started to fall and she caught me, helped me up. But then she wouldn’t let go of my arm. ‘Let me do what I have to do,’ she said, ‘with him.’ ”

  “Thasha said that?”

  “There’s worse, Pazel. I said she was becoming another person, and she said, yes, she was. Then I said I liked the old one better, and she said, ‘What you like makes no difference. Just stay out of my way.’ Then I said what we’re all thinking. ‘Arunis. He’s gotten hold of you, hasn’t he?’ And Thasha laughed and said, ‘Arunis is scared to death of me. He always has been. And you should be too.’ Then she shoved me aside and I did fall, blary hard, and she walked right out of the room.”

  Marila blew away more sawdust, felt the smoothness of the pine with her fingertips.

  “She’s going bad, I tell you. I don’t want to believe it, but all you have to do is look at her when he walks in the room. She forgets everything else, and goes all dreamy and warm. I think she’s going to end up-you know-knitting little boots.” Pazel dropped his sanding-stone.

  He swore, and they all screamed warnings down the tonnage shaft, where men were still working by lamplight. There came a loud thud and a barrage of curses. You careless Gods-damned tarboy dog! That was two feet from my head!

  Time to quit, they decided. Fleeing guiltily along the starboard rail, they saw the “birdwatchers” gathered together on the quay. They were arguing, waving their hands, now and then gesturing at the Chathrand as if to emphasize a point. Tomorrow, Pazel thought. What’s going to happen to us tomorrow?

  “She’s probably in the stateroom with him right now,” said Marila. “He likes to see her right after his shift.”

  “There’s the dinner bell,” said Neeps.

  “And Hercol,” added Marila furiously, “does nothing but defend her.”

  Pazel stopped walking. Defend her. That was what he had promised himself he would always do. No matter what it took. No matter what Thasha said or did. How could he ever have allowed himself to be confused on that point? He turned and looked at his friends.

  “Is there any doubt at all,” he said, “that Fulbreech is a liar?”

  “No,” said Neeps.

  Both boys looked at Marila. She closed her eyes a moment, thoughtful. “No,” she said at last. “Not if he really said ‘error corrected’ after you punched him in the eye.”

  “I’m going to see her,” said Pazel.

  “Oh, stop it, mate,” said Neeps. “You’ve tried. She doesn’t want to hear you. She doesn’t want to believe.”

  “I don’t care.”

  He would make her hear. He would explain word for word, and Thasha would see at last that he wasn’t simply jealous. And he would explain about the antidote, how even though Fulbreech had appeared to be chasing Alyash, as they were, he was really on the bosun’s side. No one else could have slipped the antidote through the doorway at the bitter end. It was Fulbreech who had freed the hostages, paving the way for Rose’s bloodbath.

  He reached the Silver Stair and plunged down, among the crowd of hungry sailors making for the dining compartment.

  “You can’t just walk in on them!” Marila shouted.

  “Bet I can,” he shot back.

  The sailors grinned and winked. Pazel could not have cared less. Walking in on Thasha and Fulbreech was exactly what he planned to do. Let her choose who to believe, once and for all, face to face with both of them. At least she wouldn’t be able to feign a need to be elsewhere.

  Neeps’ hand closed on his elbow. “At least let Marila go first, Pazel. She’ll tell you if it’s all right to go in there.”

  “Damn it all, leave me alone!”

  Pazel wrenched his arm away. But as he turned he found the passage blocked by Mr. Fiffengurt. “Pathkendle!” he said. “And Undrabust too. What luck. I have a little job I need your help with.”

  “Now?” said Pazel.

  “Right now,” said Fiffengurt, strangely anxious. He bent closer, and spoke in an ominous whisper. “Urgent business. The hag’s cat, Sniraga. She’s alive.”

  “I’ve heard. I’m sorry.” Pazel began to slip by, but Fiffengurt lurched in front of him.

  “You don’t understand. She’s in the bread room. She’s slipped inside, the little monster.”

  “So what?” said Neeps, briefly forgetting his own efforts to stop Pazel cold. “Best place to put her if you ask me. That’s no blary emergency.”

  “We don’t even have any bread,” said Pazel.

  Fiffengurt turned his gaze from one to the other. He looked confounded by their response. “Why! Anyone could tell you-a cat, loose in the-Oh, blast you both, come along! That’s an order!”

  Fulbreech sat in the chair by Thasha’s writing desk, hands on his knees, his pale face troubled. “All of them,” he said, “believe that my intentions toward you are… dishonorable?”

  “Yes,” said Thasha, “entirely.”

  She sat cross-legged on her bed, in an old pair of red trousers and a loose white shirt of Admiral Isiq’s. “I don’t care, Greysan. I don’t care what they imagine.”

  He shook his head. “You should care. They love you dearly, Thasha.”

  They were sharing a glass of water and some dlomic biscuits. They had not touched since she led him into the room. The desk was cluttered: jewelry, creams, pencils, knives, a whetstone, the admiral’s flask, the Merchant’s Polylex. Behind all these, the softly ticking mariner’s clock, Ramachni’s doorway from his own world into Alifros.

  The wind had risen. The night would be cool. Against the hanging oil lamp a weird Southern moth tapped hairy antennae; its huge shadow wriggled on the bedspread. Thasha was looking d
own at her hands.

  “Not like this,” she whispered.

  They were both very still. “Of course,” he said, “what I feel for you is different.”

  Thasha smiled.

  “But I have been blind-blind, and selfish. These evenings with you, learning of your life, hearing your dreams: Thasha, I’ve been drunk on them. But now I fear your friends are talking about us, and not just among themselves.”

  “Let them.”

  “No,” he said, “that won’t help, making enemies. Your good name is priceless, even though our society is reduced to one mad ship, hung out to dry in an alien port.”

  “You say all that because you think you have to.” Thasha touched a hole in her trouser knee. “But I know what you’re feeling.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  Thasha nodded. “I know you’re… impatient.” She laughed, trying to make a joke of it, then blushed and had to look away. He smiled too, generously.

  “Are you afraid of something, Thasha?” he asked.

  She looked at him shyly, then glanced at the Polylex. “In Etherhorde, in Dr. Chadfallow’s house-you know he was a family friend-there was a book about Mzithrini art. Did you know that the Old Faith has nothing against showing… men and women?”

  “Lovers, you mean?” Fulbreech squirmed a little. “I may have heard something about that.”

  Thasha paused as if to steady her nerves. “I used to take out that book whenever we visited. There was a painting of a sculpture in a Babqri square. Three women on their knees, reaching desperately for a man being lifted away by angels. He’s beautiful, naked of course… and he’s forgotten the women; his eyes are on the place the angels are taking him, some other world, I suppose. But when you look closer you see that the three women are really just one, at three moments in life. Young, and older, and very old, shriveled. And the name of the sculpture is If You Wait He Will Escape You.”

  Thasha looked at him, blinking nervously. “I’ve been dreaming of their faces. Greysan, you must think I’m crazy-”

  “Nonsense.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll escape me.”

  She sat there, trembling, and then his hand closed over hers. Neither of them speaking. His fingers rough and warm between her own.

  “Impatient.” Fulbreech gave her an awkward smile. “Perhaps that is your delicate way of saying vulgar. Listen, darling: I would sooner die than insult you. Only it seems I can hide nothing in your presence. Not my dreams for our future, certainly. And not even”-he took a deep breath-“dreams of another kind.”

  He flinched; surely he had gone too far. But Thasha’s gaze only softened, as though she had known this was coming and was glad the wait was over. She reached out and gently touched his face.

  In the torchlight from the quay she saw struggle in his eyes. They were traveling her body, but now and then they stopped, uncertain. Some idea, some duty maybe, giving him pause.

  “Later the others will be here,” he said.

  Thasha stood in one smooth motion. She raised the water glass and drank it dry. Then she set the glass beside the Polylex and blew out the lantern.

  “Later we’ll have to be quiet,” she said, and sat astride him.

  She used her mouth as she never had in any previous kiss. She heard him gasping, felt his hands on her thighs, his legs moving beneath her. She sat back trembling. The struggle was almost over.

  “You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” she said.

  “No?”

  “I was raised by Syrarys as much as my father. She came out of the slave-school on Nurth. She was trained in love. I spied on them for years. How she moved, what she said. I saw how she… made him happy.”

  “You can’t have known what you were seeing.”

  “I was at the Lorg School, too.”

  “Learning to be a wife?”

  Thasha didn’t answer. Slowly, watching him, she unbuttoned her shirt.

  Fulbreech was motionless. Thasha’s lips were parted, her face almost stern. When his own hands moved at last she put her head back and closed her eyes. Do not think. That is crucial. Do not let it be real.

  He was atop her; she lay back and put a hand in his hair. When his kisses became more urgent she squeezed her left hand into a fist. The wolf-scar on her palm, self-inflicted years ago, felt suddenly raw and unhealed.

  Voices in the outer stateroom. Greysan froze, cat-like, his chin an inch above her breast. “It’s Hercol,” she whispered. “Damn him, damn him. Why can’t he just stay away?”

  “Bolutu as well,” he said, frustration in his voice. “Thasha darling, we can be careful-”

  “No!” she whispered. “I can’t, I’m sorry, if they heard me, I’d-”

  Fulbreech could not catch his breath. He began again, and she stopped him instantly, her hand tight on his wrist.

  “They don’t know you’re in here,” she said. “Just stay with me, Greysan, stay right here and hold me. And later, when they’re asleep-”

  He looked at her. For a moment she thought he’d gone beyond the reach of words. Then a sigh of anticipation passed through him, and he settled by her side.

  In the bread room, Neeps was pounding on the door. “Fiffengurt! You’ve blown your gaskets! Open this blary door!”

  “Not possible, Undrabust,” came Fiffengurt’s voice. From the sound of it he was seated with his back to the sturdy, tin-plated door. They had already heard him telling puzzled sailors to mind their own business.

  “What in Pitfire did we do?” shouted Neeps.

  “You didn’t do anything. Just calm down, now, save your breath. And speaking of breath, you’d better snuff those lanterns. That’s an airtight room.”

  Neeps turned his back and began mule-kicking the door. “Why-why-why-why?”

  “Ouch! Stop that! Screaming will do you no good.”

  Pazel sat in the center of the chamber, in the flour and the dust. The entire room-walls, floor, door, ceiling-was lined with tin, as a protection against nibbling mice. Their lanternlight reflected dimly from the walls.

  Fiffengurt had caught them easily: told them to clear away the stacked and empty bread-racks, since “that red monster’s got to be lurking in one of the corners,” then slipped out as soon as the work began to throw the deadbolts. Neeps had exploded, but Pazel had not said a word. Everything that had happened since Thasha stalked away from the tonnage hatch was suspicious. But he could not for an instant believe that Fiffengurt would betray them. Nor would Thasha, for that matter. Something else was going on.

  “Liar!” spat Neeps at the door. “You made all that up, about Sniraga!”

  “ ’Course I did,” said Fiffengurt. “Now just sit tight like Pazel’s doing, there’s a good lad. I’m not doing this for fun, you know.”

  Neeps was working himself into a lather. “You’re a lunatic! Let us out! Pazel, why don’t you mucking do something?”

  “I am doing something,” said Pazel. “Be quiet. Let me think.”

  “You’re a daft white-whiskered fat old pig, Fiffengurt!” bellowed Neeps. “What have you done with Marila?”

  “Oh come off it, Undrabust,” said Fiffengurt. “How should I know where Marila went? Back to the stateroom, I imagine. Ah no-fancy that! — here she is in the flesh.”

  “Hello, Mr. Fiffengurt. Hello, Neeps.”

  Marila’s voice was oddly circumspect, but Neeps paid no heed to her tone. “About time!” he shouted. “Get around that old pig, Marila, and slide those bolts!”

  “I can’t, Neeps.”

  “Then run and tell Hercol that Fiffengurt’s a lying, sneaky, sell-’im-cheap-to-the-sausage-grinder fat old pig.”

  “Neeps,” said Marila, “try to be like Pazel for once.”

  “Listen to your lady, Undrabust,” said Fiffengurt. “Sit down and relax.”

  Neeps threw his body against the door. He staggered, bruised, and backed up for another run. Pazel shook his head. It was never a good idea to tell Neeps to relax.

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nbsp; Thasha, for her part, was already unconscious. She lay holding Fulbreech, her long hair pooled around them, her breath deep and even. Fulbreech touched her with his fingertips. He, of course, remained wide awake. Sandor Ott would murder him if he fell asleep on the job.

  Bolutu was gone at last, but Hercol remained in the outer stateroom, reading; Fulbreech could hear the scratch of turning pages. The girl was right, sound carried; it would have been madness to pleasure himself on her until the Tholjassan retired. She had saved him from a grave mistake. A human mistake, as his master would have said with scorn.

  But his hunger for this girl: that was human too. He saw no reason why he should not have her when the man departed. He could allow himself that much. So many months of waiting, performing, drawing her in but never seeming to, never arousing her suspicion. Even Ott would agree that the timing was right. And yet he’d held back, let her own hunger flourish, her curiosity. Let her worry in her girl’s foolishness about him “escaping her.” Yes, it was very well done. If she was ready to give her body she’d give anything. The Polylex, whenever he wished to take it. The truth about Pathkendle’s Gift, the whereabouts of Ramachni, the secrets of that lovely clock.

  But how close he had come to ruin, merely through the weakness of the flesh! Ah, but you didn’t, Fulbreech: and hasn’t your whole life been a gamble for the highest of stakes? For that was what he was: a gambler, possessed of exceptional instincts, and addicted to the dare. Some gamblers played with caution, and hoarded what they feared to lose; others raised their bluffs without a backward glance.

  Thasha Isiq, of course, was a trifle. His master might arrange for him to keep her, but if not-well, for a chancellor of a new world power, there would be as many women as nights to fill them. And for the moment, in any case, the girl was his. Fulbreech lay there, savoring the image of her fingers freeing buttons, her brief abandon, that foretaste of the meal to come.

  Then Bolutu returned. The youth’s anger flared: did they plan to come and go all night? But the dlomu was now in a very different state of mind. His boots pounded across the floor, and quite audibly, he said, “It’s happening! They’re taking him! Tomorrow at dawn!”