I could hear the Frath's voice in the salon, so I bypassed that door and headed for Shree's cabin. It was empty, so I tried Chasco's cabin. Shree's voice was audible inside it. I threw open the door.
Chasco saw me first. "By the Lady—!"
Shree whirled around and lurched towards me, only partly because the ship pitched at that moment. He looked divided between wanting to strangle me and wanting to throw his arms around me, and compromised by half-throttling me in a fierce embrace. "Damn you, Scion!" he hissed. "Where were you? We went mad searching every corner of this tupping tub for you—"
"I was on the afterdeck."
"What? In this weather?"
"Of course in this weather. There's no other weather available. Calm yourself, Warlord."
That made him too apoplectic to speak for a bit. I took advantage of the lull to ferret the flask out of his pocket and treat myself to a good long drink. He grabbed the flask out of my hand and had another. Chasco took it from him and drained it dry. Then they stood on either side of me, feet planted squarely against the tossing of the ship, glaring at me like two irate aunties at an unrepentant nephew. I spoiled the tableau by sitting down on the pallet.
"What were you worried about? Nothing could have happened to me."
"Tell that to the wave that might have swept you overboard!"
"No such luck. Anyway, the next wave after it would have swept me right back." I shut my eyes and quoted, flat-voiced, from the Secrets of the Ancients, "—and it is woven into the fabric of her power that she can bring no harm to Oballef, nor to the Scions of Oballef—" Shrugging, I broke off.
Chasco looked puzzled, but Shree's righteous anger faded out of his eyes, to be replaced by something that dangerously resembled pity. "So that's what you were doing up there? Testing the truthfulness of the Ancients?"
"Certainly not," I said. "The Ancients never lied. I was watching the storm. And why shouldn't I? Can't the artist admire his own work? Can't the cook savour his own dishes?"
Chasco, still lost, frowned from my face to Shree's. "Cooks? Dishes? What's he babbling about?"
Shree's shoulders slumped. "He means, why shouldn't he sit out there and watch the storm? It's his storm."
Silence; rather, a long few moments when the only voices in the cabin belonged to the ship itself and to the tempest, the hunting cries of wind and water mingling with the wails of wood and metal. The Tasiil was having a rough time. She bucked suddenly, breaking the spell. Shree dropped to the floor and wedged himself with his back against the wall and his feet braced against the pallet. Chasco remained where the pitching had thrown him, on the pallet beside me.
"You were right," I said to Shree.
"What?"
"It seems I broke a piece of glass six years ago. It seems I caught fire and didn't burn."
Chasco had caught on by then. "Lord Shree was right—you raised the storm."
"Of course I did. Inadvertently, of course; all I had in mind was that I didn't want those martial idiots to start chopping each other up, and the Lady must have taken over from there . . ."
"The Lady in Gil," Chasco affirmed softly.
"In person. In my head, rather. Not that I can feel her there just now, she likes hiding in the dark corners." I began to rub my temples, gently at first to soothe the ache in them, then harder, wishing bitterly that enough pressure could force the stowaway out through the pores of my scalp.
The Tasiil lurched mightily, as if some monstrous hand were shaking her keel from below. This was followed by a resounding crash somewhere above us, then a series of smaller crashes, then a hideous grating noise that prickled the hair on the backs of our necks. The ship heeled to what felt like a fatal angle, hung there for a few moments, sluggishly righted herself.
Chasco, in his most composed fashion, said, "That would be one of the masts."
"Thank you, sailor," said Shree crossly. "Tig? For the sake of Eshkarat!"
"Yes, Shree?"
"Don't you think your storm has served its purpose?"
"Oh, admirably."
"Both the fleets should be well scattered, they'll be too busy keeping afloat to think of chopping each other up."
"Quite right. What's your point, Shree?"
He gazed at me with the beginnings of impatience under his sudden interesting pallor. "Stop your storm. No ship is built to take this kind of punishment for long."
I threw back my head and howled again—laughter, this time, but of the bitter variety. After I'd been laughing for some time with no sign of stopping, Chasco slapped me soundly across both cheeks.
I stopped laughing.
"Better watch yourself, Clanseri. The Lady might take umbrage."
He looked at my face and took a step backwards.
"No, Chasco, I'm not threatening you. But I can't answer for the Lady."
"Aren't you in control?" That was Shree, sitting to attention.
"Not exactly."
"You can't command the Lady?"
"I don't think it's quite that simple—"
"Tig! You called up this tupping great tempest; can't you send it away?"
I smiled gently. "I spent the last half-hour on deck trying to send it away. I invoked the Lesser Will—I tried to remember the Greater Will—I recited the Caveat, in case it meant anything useful, which it didn't—I ordered, I argued, I reasoned, I begged—"
"And?"
"And nothing. It happened anyway."
"What happened?"
"More deaths. Ironic, isn't it—all I wanted was to stop the bloodshed, prevent a few deaths, but—"
"What happened?"
"—the power is so unpredictable, Shree, it's as if once you slip the knot of the flame-sling, there's no way of stopping the bolt—"
"What happened?"
"—and my part is simply to slip the knot, and then stand back and watch the fires break out—"
"What happened?"
I finally consented to hear him. "What happened? The Gillish longship sank, that's what happened. One wave turned her turtle, the next smashed her to tinderlengths. No survivors. Oh, a few of our countrymen lasted long enough to cling to the wreckage for a while, pleading for help, a stone's throw away, but there was nothing anyone could have done."
They looked at me blankly.
"Rather like last time," I added; and then started pounding the piss-yellow wall of Chasco's cell with my fist until my knuckles left bloody smears that blended nicely with the Miisheli colour scheme, which was also when the two of them managed to catch my hands and hold me down on the pallet until I stopped struggling and started to curse instead.
The tempest lasted three full days and nights, and the Tasiil rode it out like the sturdy unsinkable matron she really was under all her extravagant fripperies. Two of the four masts were lost overboard, and all the rigging, and the garden, and most of the elegant ornamentation that had sparkled on her decks when we sailed away from Gil harbour; but below deck, with the hatches secured and all loose objects tied down, the damage was confined mostly to shins, bellies, heads and tempers.
I don't know if we were ever in serious danger, nor what the Lady would have done if the Tasiil had started to break up under the smashing, grinding assault of the waves. I do know, however, that in a strange and terrible fashion, we were safer on the high seas than we'd have been almost anywhere on dry land at that lamentable moment in history. The worst casualty on the Tasiil was a broken shoulder, sustained when one of the sailors fell off his sleeping shelf on to the edge of a wooden table; but ashore, the people were already dying in their thousands.
It was called at first by many names, the pesh, the Khalingi fever, the dancing plague, the greenshakes; but one name came to be used in the end, an innocuous name, a name that was not entirely descriptive of the associated sorrow and suffering, and yet was oddly appropriate: the Last Dance.
It started in Storica, as so many plagues seem to, at about the same time as the Primate banned me from the archives; spread to Maal
as and Canzitar by the overland routes and Calloon and Kuttumm by sea within the next month; appeared in Luc only days after the first pustules broke in Kuttumm, leapt the sea-lanes to Plav and Glishor, and set its first victims dancing in the Archipelago three days after my marriage to the Princess Rinn. We heard nothing about it before embarking on our journey to Miishel; indeed, it seemed that the same ships that carried tidings of the plague often carried the plague as well—and its progress was speeded by ships and caravans of refugees, who carried the contagion with them as they fled the stinking death-traps of the port cities.
The sickness took only five days to make the jump from Sathelforn to Gil. By the time the Lady and I raised our tempest, the people were dancing again in the streets of Gil, but not, this time, in celebration. At this point the captains in Gil harbour, panicking, repelled the tender-loads of frantic citizens that pulled towards them from the quays and hastily put to sea; and a few weeks later, therefore, there was dancing in the streets of Tata and Grisot and Cansh Miishel and Zaine.
We knew nothing about this. It was only later that I could work out dates and places and chart the progress of the disaster as it rippled outwards from its centre in Storica. The Tasiil moved in her own little world, its borders lost in the sheeting rain just beyond the railings of her decks, its inhabitants convinced that nobody on earth was as miserable as they.
Most of the passengers kept to their beds, afflicted to varying degrees by seasickness and fear of a watery death. Shree and Chasco and I spent much of the storm wedged into uncomfortable positions in Chasco's cabin, debating in hushed voices whether the Miishelu and the Grisotin really did know about the Lady, and if so, how? When our speculations became a bore, we played fingersticks. When fingersticks became a bore, I went to visit my wife.
This was on the third and last evening of the storm. I had looked in on her a few times before that—the dutiful husband—but she'd been asleep, probably drugged, and at least once she hadn't been sleeping alone. This time she was both awake and alone, and she turned fearful eyes towards me as I came through the door. She was huddled under a blanket in one corner of the pallet, feverishly pushing the beads back and forth on a gold Miisheli prayer-frame.
"Raalis? Is that you?"
"It's Tigrallef, Rinn," I told her cheerfully. As I sat down on the pallet beside her, the ship canted to a drunken angle and Rinn shrieked and dropped the prayer-frame and covered her head with the bedclothes. I patted the mound of blankets. "Don't worry, wife of my heart, we're not going to sink."
Silence under the bedclothes. Then one eye and a rainbow tangle of hair appeared. "You say so?"
"Yes, I say so."
Dubiously, she withdrew the blankets from the rest of her face and stared at me. She was raddled with fear, almost delirious with it, eyes enormous, mouth pinched, more catlike than ever. When the ship heeled again, she caught her breath sharply and her eyes rolled in her head. She cried out in Miisheli, "I'm afraid! Hold my hand, Raalis!"
"It's Tigrallef," I repeated; but I took her hand anyway and gripped it soothingly while she curled herself up into a tight ball under the bedclothes and proceeded to cry herself to sleep. It was only when she was breathing quietly and I was able to disengage my hand, that I noticed the knuckles I had damaged on Chasco's wall two days before were whole again, the bloody abrasions invisible, the skin healthy.
I stared at my hand for a few moments, then slid under the covers with my clothes on and lay pensively on the edge of the pallet. I didn't close my eyes for a long time. I was trying to remember the last time I had picked at a scab.
* * *
15
BACK IN THE dark, forgotten First Age when the world as we know it was created—probably by a committee—it was decreed that the land should be divided into a few very large chunks and a great many small ones, and that salt ocean should compose the remainder of the earth's surface. Conveniently, the creators also arranged that almost no point in the sea should be far out of sight of some bit of land, whether it were the massed hills of a continent, the smoking peaks of an island group, or a miserable scrap of rock just big enough for the deepsea turtles and the legendary fishmen to sun themselves on.
This was a useful provision. It allowed our ancestors, seafarers by necessity from the earliest recorded days, to navigate by sightlines in the daytime and by the stars at night. Any experienced sailor, dropped in a bumboat anywhere in the Great Known Sea that stretched from Storica on the west to Fathan and Zaine on the east, could determine where he was with more accuracy than, say, a Storican dropped in the continental wilderness of Storica, and he could probably also make it to the nearest landfall unless the seabeasts, pirates or fish-men got to him first. In theory, it was difficult to get lost.
"So where are we?" Shree said to Chasco.
Chasco looked down at him unhappily. "I'm not sure."
"You're a sailor, aren't you?"
"Ex-sailor," said Chasco. He rotated slowly, scanning what looked to me like a perfectly featureless horizon under the hard brazen bowl of the sky. His feet were on one of the highest surviving points of the upper foredeck, the remains of a bijou observation gazebo; the two remaining masts towered nakedly over us. Gangs of Miisheli sailors were already picking through the rubble for salvageable wood, sounding the masts and deckboards for damage, bringing great coils of rope and swathes of sailcloth up from the hold.
Further along the deck, a trio whom I knew to be the Miisheli navigators were doing the same thing as Chasco was, with roughly the same expression on their faces. Uncertainty, confusion, puzzlement, and an additional element of wounded professional pride—navigators consider themselves an elite among sailors, which is quite unjustified, given that any ordinary seaman could do the same job just as well. All they're called upon to do is recognize some distinctive excrescence in the sea and counsel a course that will go past it without actually hitting it, towards some other easily identified point of land—I have had harder times finding my own sandals.
That day, there was no land to recognize.
Chasco jumped down, shrugging. "Nothing. Not even a rock. I have no idea where we are."
A dispute broke out among the Miisheli navigators, involving much arm-waving and shouting and the magical appearance of knives from under the dandified sea-cloaks. We moved discreetly down the deck while a knot of troopers moved in to break up the debate before it got bloody.
"Those idiots don't know where we are, either," said Chasco, sniffing. "If the storm had ended sooner, they could have taken star-sightings—but your Lady waited until just after dawn."
"No doubt she did it on purpose," I said sourly.
Shree was walking beside me with his head bent and his forehead creased. "By Raksh, Tig, I've never seen a storm stop so suddenly, between one moment and the next. How did you persuade her?"
"I didn't do anything. I was asleep."
"We've already established," he said, with a measure of sarcasm, "that you do remarkable things in your sleep. Don't forget the Frath Minor. Were you dreaming at the time?"
"I don't remember." Then I stopped short and laid a hand on his shoulder. It was a flash of that morning's dream—I was back on the podium in the Gilgard, a woman beside me, her face hidden by a straight fall of silver hair, her unnaturally thin hand gripping my elbow; she started to turn, but I guessed what was coming and shut my eyes before they could catch more than a grey gleam or jawbone through the peels of desiccated skin, a shifting luminescence like a cloud of shining blowflies pouring out where the eyes should have been—and in the background, a voice like the Primate's at his most sonorous, echoing over a forecourt where the people were dancing and dropping, dancing and dropping: now the two are one.
"Come to think of it, yes, I was dreaming, but nothing I'd consider relevant."
Shree looked at me narrowly. "The usual nightmare? Calla, the child, the Pleasure—?"
"No," I admitted, "a different nightmare, though I wouldn't call it a change for the bette
r." Between my ears, the voice of the Lady softly demurred. I was hearing her quite frequently these days. I told her to shut up. "Never mind how suddenly the storm ended. The point is, we've lost the rest of the fleet, there's no wind to catch and no sails to catch it in anyway, we're drifting in an uncharted current and we won't know where we are until tonight, when the stars come out. Is that a fair summary, Chasco?"
Chasco nodded. "The sun's been up for a couple of hours at least. No position that I know of is more than half an hour out of landsight at the speed we're making in this current. You can draw your own conclusion, my lords."
"What about the current?" Shree asked. "Where would you find a current like this one? You can't tell me that something this powerful hasn't been noticed before."
I sat down with my back against the stump of a mast. Some time back, I'd read an immensely long scroll entitled The Royal Satheli Commission on Currents, Whorls and Storm-bowls in the Great Known Sea (Subtitle: To Forewarn Merchant Argosies of the Archipelago and Safeguard Satheli Shipping in the Further Reaches of the GKS), a work that was just as detailed and yawn-inducing as its title would suggest. I knew the answer to Shree's question. For some reason, the knowledge didn't bother me. There was something oddly attractive in the notion of being lost for ever.
Chasco, however, hesitated and glanced at the position of the sun before speaking. "There is a current," he said finally, "along the southern edge of the Great Known Sea, and it's never been fully charged because it's—" he coughed apologetically, "it's—too dangerous to risk getting caught by it if the wind drops. It's the only one I can think of, Lord Shree, though I believe we're too far north."
Shree flopped down beside me and frowned up at Chasco. "Just suppose it is the southern current. Where does it go?"
Chasco joined us on the deck. "Nobody knows."
"Then guess."
Chasco hesitated, reluctantly to answer. I said cheerily, "It sweeps past the southernmost point of Zaine."
Gil Trilogy 2: Scion's Lady Page 11
