‘And went mad, as I said. Among other things, I forgot how to talk. That sounds ridiculous to you, I’m sure. How could anyone forgot how to talk? Well, try having no one to talk to for decades at a time. Oh, I spoke to myself, yes. In the early years after Pietru went, I made sure of it. I recited poems and anything else I could think of, just so I wouldn’t lose speech. But when there’s no one there to hear you, after a while you can’t tell if you’re saying the words properly. You think you are, but you can’t tell. After more time you start to doubt it entirely. Your tongue feels strange, the words sound wrong even to yourself. After more time yet everything you say sounds like gibberish in your own ears, and so you stop talking, because it’s too frightening to hear. And then one day, maybe years later, you try again to talk, and all that comes out is a croak, an animal noise, a sound no more speech than a bird’s call or a dog’s bark.’
Lucy was staring in horror.
‘But it wasn’t all just a nightmare,’ Rolly Fish went on, seeing her look and smiling to reassure her. ‘I experienced – or thought I did – some amazing things as well, with the help of the Fish. We got to know each other well, that old monster and me. Oh, those first few times I communed with it I found it a mind utterly alien to mine … but the years changed that. By the end, I could see with its eyes and feel its thoughts as my own.’
‘You could see with its eyes?’ Lucy breathed. In all the horrid tales she had been told about Rope Fish attacks, she had never heard any mention of eyes, or even of what the Fish itself really looked like.
The old man laughed his off-putting laugh, too high and raucous to ever be warming. ‘Not eyes like ours. The main body of the Fish hangs too deep down in the ocean for eyes like ours to be much use, though it can indeed see dimly, and recognise shapes on the surface. No, I’m talking about another kind of sight, a sight that senses and maps the black depths beneath the Fish, a sight that can define the ocean floor far below in all its rises and falls, in all its mountains and canyons, a sight that even reads the invisible currents of the water as clearly as we can see a river on land. I can’t really explain it to you.
‘But oh, the things I saw through those eyes! The oceans we travelled, that Fish and I. You cannot imagine the abysses we saw plunging below us, deeper and darker than any man guesses, and the monstrous things that we saw swimming in those abysses, forever unseen by human gaze. You cannot conceive of the underwater rivers that flow in the deeps, or the submerged mountain ranges that rise in the gloom, never to behold the sun.
‘And the distances we crossed! East and west we went, drifting slowly yes, but ever in motion; and north and south too. From the edge of the Barrier Doldrums all the way to the Unquiet Ice and the Ice Cap we travelled, threading our way between masses of floating seaweed in the warmer waters of the south, and then between the great rolling bergs of the icy realms in the north. No secrets were withheld from us. I could see through the Fish’s eyes, for instance, the underwater part of the giant icebergs, which is the greater part of them by far, extending like inverted mountains far into the deep, just as completely as I could see the parts that rose above the water.
‘In time indeed there was no part of the ocean of the Northern Hemisphere that I did no know well, no current I had not followed to its end, no reef I had not noted as we passed it by. True, we never in all those years came within sight of land, but I knew where land lay too, all the same. I could smell it from afar on the wind, the scent of dust or of plants or of animals. Even better, I could see the way the sea floor beneath us swelled towards the distant, unseen coasts. So yes, I knew even the location of each of the Four Isles as surely as did any mariner with a map and compass in his hand.
‘And I knew the stars too, as surely as any scholar watching from his tower by night. Many evenings I would climb to the top of the main mast, the one part of the ship that still rose above the Fish’s white ropes, and there I would watch the skies, for a night, for a week, for months and more, marking precisely the year-long wheeling of the heavens. Indeed, after my fifty years upon the Revenge, I could say that no sea captain, not the greatest seafarer ever born, knew more of the sea and skies than did I.’
Lucy drank all this in with wonder. Yet a protesting thought came to her at his mention once again of fifty years. ‘But in so long,’ she asked, ‘in all that time, what happened to the Revenge? Wasn’t the ship already falling apart before Pietru died? How did it last fifty more years?’
The old man sat up. ‘I didn’t mention that? No? Ah, well, you’re quite correct. Although the hull was always well preserved, wrapped as it was in the massed tendrils of the Fish, the inside of the ship was a mess. Year by year the timbers and the decks were slowly decaying. From time to time, when I patrolled the lower regions of the vessel, my feet would punch through rotten spots in the decking. My fear grew that eventually I’d be left floating in little more than an emptied-out husk of a hull. Horrible. But then the Fish intervened. During our communes, it picked up on my anxiety about the problem. And so – simply to make me happy – the monster fixed the ship.’
Lucy goggled. ‘Fixed the ship!’
‘Exactly that. Slowly, week by week, month by month, it extruded the tiny cilia of its tendrils, sending a white moss creeping in through the gunports and along the interior walls and across the decking. The stuff permeated the wood and renewed it somehow, fortified it, changed it to a marble-like smoothness. In time, the entire ship was restored this way to its old strength. But not only restored, the Revenge had become better than its old self, for it had become glorious to behold, gleaming and pristine all over, like a vessel made all of polished stone, a carven memorial set afloat upon the sea.
‘Or so I imagined. Perhaps it was not so beautiful. Perhaps, to an observer on another vessel, we would have seemed a ghost ship, pale and unearthly and strange, a spectre to be shunned. I would not know. We did indeed sight such other vessels from year to year, far on the horizon, but always they fled from the sight of us, long before they came within shouting range.
‘Still, ghostly or not, the Revenge was made into a sound and seaworthy craft, thanks to the Fish, and in it we roamed to every corner of the northern oceans, drifting, the monster and I, for half a century and more.
‘But then …’
Rolly Fish paused in his tale, his stare going to some distant point within his memory. ‘But then …’ he echoed.
Lucy waited. Outside, the storm seemed to be reaching its peak. Wind was whistling about the cottage, rain was lashing the stone tiles, and the pounding of the surf from the ocean side of the spit was a constant rumble through the stone walls. ‘But then?’ she encouraged at last.
The old man sighed. ‘Something changed. The Fish began to swim. Understand, for most of our time together, it had been content to drift with the ocean currents. Occasionally, yes, it would exert itself to slowly change our course: to avoid, for instance, being swept into shallow waters or grounded upon a reef. But mostly, it had always just drifted at ease.
‘Now, however, it began a new effort. I barely noticed it at first, but day by day, week by week, moving from current to current, sometimes even against currents, the Fish was tracing a deliberate and determined course, always to the south. When I finally realised this, I enquired of the old monster, during our communes, as to what was happening.
‘Of course, my communication with the Fish was not as simple as talking the way that you and I are talking now. There were no words passed between us during our communes, no orderly sequence of questions and answers, there were only wordless sensations, images, fleeting impressions, and even after all these years, the innermost mind and thought of the creature remained quite inscrutable to me. So I received no clear reply to my enquiry. If anything, indeed, I sensed that the Fish was being careful to hide its intent. But this much I did garner. The monster was not heading south by free will, it was being prodded by some other force to do so, and it could not refuse. But as to what or who that force was, an
d why the Fish must obey – only mystery.
‘So south we crept, for many slow months, until at last the Barrier Doldrums loomed. In all my years with the Fish, we had never strayed into that terrible part of the world. We had roamed every watery inch of the northern hemisphere many times over, but never once had the monster allowed us to drift closer to the Doldrums than the outermost regions. After all, what would the Fish, a creature that liked best to float along upon the ocean’s great currents, want with the dead and motionless waters of the Doldrums?
‘And yet now it seemed that the monster was bent for the Doldrums, come what may. As a helpless passenger there was nothing I could do about this, I could only watch from the deck as day by day we crept deeper into the still waters, the air turning hot and dry, the sky hazing over to veil the sun. I did not, at least, have to fear thirst and starvation, as would any normal mariner in this rainless place, for I was fed and nurtured by the Fish during our communes. Still, it was with dread that I monitored our progress. Even to a non-sailor such as I, the name of the Barrier was one filled with many fears.
‘And rightly so, as I can say now, having seen what I saw there. The outer zone is bad enough: the weeds, the insects, the stench, the suffocating nights, it is awful. And when you pass through, you come only to a zone that is even worse, a sea barren and dead, its waters empty of movement or life. There is no sun to be seen there, no stars, no horizon, no weather, only haze and heat. And beyond that again one comes at last to a third zone, one teeming with life, yes, but life stranger and more fearsome than all that has come before.
‘It was, I suppose, the Inner Doldrums, that place. Creatures swam and crawled there, foreign to any human eye, and great mats of weed floated, forming islands upon which things walked upright. Yes, there were manlike beings there upon the Waist of the World, or near to manlike, for I never saw them closely. They stood on their isles and watched as the Revenge crept by, and terror was in my heart, but like all others these creatures too came no closer to the ship, or to the tendrils of the Fish, and so we passed unhindered.
‘Slowly, slowly, for of course no water moved there, no wind blew, no current flowed. It was only the Fish’s labour that pushed us forward, an exertion hard and wearing, even for a monster so vast and strong. And yet, despite its exhaustion, I sensed now a heightening in the monster’s urgency. Its destination was drawing close. And through the almost impenetrable veil of its inner thoughts, I began to glimpse more of the truth.
‘As I had already sensed, the Fish was following this course not of its own free will. There was a goad forcing it onwards, deeper and deeper into the Barrier, an insistence that came from outside of it, an urging that it could not ignore or resist. But now I saw within the memory of the Fish that it had experienced this same goad once before – on the day, sixty years ago, that it had intervened to save Dow Amber by capturing the Revenge.
‘And that was a profound thing, for I knew, from what Pietru had told me, that it had been Fate itself that had summoned the Fish on that day. Which meant that it was Fate that was driving the monster now.
‘And I also learned this: the Fish was dying.’
Lucy started upright. ‘Dying?’
Rolly Fish regarded her bleakly. ‘Oh yes, the great monsters of the sea do die, just as we little humans do. Rope Fish are not immortal, for all that they can give immortality to others. And my Fish, by the measure of its kind, was not young. It had lived for many, many centuries. Yet in truth it was dying before its natural time. This journey that it was being forced to make, swimming relentlessly for so long, was draining it beyond endurance. It kept on even so, but it was a fatal exertion from which it would not recover.
‘So yet another dread possessed me, that the Fish would die, and I would be left utterly alone. Yes, I had been alone, stripped of human company, for fifty years by then, but in my regular communing with the Fish I had discovered another form of contact and intimacy. The thought of losing that contact, even though it was with my own jailer, was disturbing in ways I could barely contemplate. And worse, if the monster passed away I would be stranded without any hope or recourse in the heart of the Doldrums.
‘I wept as I stared out at the horrible haze of the Barrier. Where was the Fish taking me? Why was it doing it so, at the cost even of its own life? What had been the purpose of this long exile of mine, if it was only to end this way? What game was Fate playing, with the Fish, and with me?
‘Such questions I had been asking ever since the day of my capture, long ago, always without hope of answer. But soon enough, there in the Doldrums’ dead heart, all would at last be revealed to me.’
The old man fell silent, his gaze unseeing. He went to speak again, but then stopped, a doubtful frown on his thin lips.
‘What?’ urged Lucy.
He glanced at her. ‘It is these next events that I find hardest to talk about … hardest to remember. No, to put that better, it is my memory of what happened next that I find the least reliable of all my memories. I know what I think happened, but whether it truly did, well …
‘As you must realise by now, I was scarcely a trustworthy witness anymore. I was barely sane after such long isolation, and was maddened still further with fear as the Fish went through its death throes beneath me. Later, when I was free of the Doldrums and my sanity was returning, I thought surely that I must have dreamed it all in a delirium. And yet there was one piece of evidence in my possession that could not be denied, that proved that what I remembered must be true, or part of it at least …
‘Anyway, this is what I recall.
‘A morning came when I saw, looking ahead over the bow, a change taking place in the ever-unchanging haze of the Doldrums. The sombre canopy began to break apart and lift, fading from red to dusty yellow and soon, to my amazement, a pale, bleary blue could be seen, peeping through: the sky. Stranger still, the air about me, which had not moved in weeks, began to stir slightly with the faintest of breezes, cooler than the usual stultifying heat. And lastly, the water about the ship began to clear of weeds and floating islands.
‘For a time I thought we must have passed through the Doldrums entirely. But no, it became clear, as the Fish pressed forward, that we were only entering a great circular arena where the haze and the weeds, by some agency, had been forced back. It was a vast space, yes, and overhead the sky was clear and for the first time in many weeks I beheld the sun shining bright, but it was not an escape from the Barrier: all around the Doldrums canopy still waited, a dark wall looming on every horizon. We had discovered, for want of a better word, an oasis, a haven of light and fresh air amid the eternal gloom.
‘And now ahead I spied something that I would have thought to be impossible. At the centre of the great arena a cloud rose into the sky. Not more of the Doldrums haze, but a real cloud, white and towering, bastions reaching to the heavens: a storm cloud. And from its base rain was falling. Rain, there in the heart of the Barrier, where no rain ever should fall.
‘I watched in wonder for slow hours as the Fish laboured to pull us closer. How I longed to feel that rain fall upon me. But lo, as we drew close the rain eased and the cloud began to dissipate. And revealed upon the sea as the last showers lifted like a curtain I beheld the final wonder. It was a grey shadow rising, a mass that flashed green as the sunlight fell upon it.
‘It was an island.
‘Now, no tale that I’d ever heard made any mention of solid land within the Doldrums, but there it was, an island, only small perhaps, but green with forest, and climbing to stony heights at its centre. And like a dream, the air about me was coolly pleasant now, stirred with breezes.
‘How could this be? In wonder, I sought commune with the Fish. Its agony was very great now, and its death close, but still, through its eyes, I could see the folds of the ocean floor. And so I beheld the truth of it.
‘For beneath us the sea bed was cleft by a mighty canyon, plummeting away to awful depths. North to south it ran, and at the bottom of it the
re flowed, far under the Doldrums’ dead surface, a current of cold, cold water. Perhaps it flowed fully from one side of the Barrier to the other, from the northern hemisphere to the south, connecting the Oceans, I don’t know. But in this place at least the canyon contorted and tilted sharply upwards, and in doing so it brought to the surface the chill waters of the deep. Those waters soon sank away again, I could see, as the great ravine tilted down once more and continued on southwards, but in the meantime a huge swathe of the sea, and the air above it, was cooled dramatically, and hence was this oasis conjured at the Doldrums’ heart. It was a tiny space in truth, no more than fifty miles wide; nevertheless, there amid all the heat and haze there was relief, and open sky, and even weather that was akin to the weather of the outside world.
‘The island drew closer. I saw a golden beach, and a treed slope climbing away to the heights. And behind the beach, yet another wonder of wonders, I beheld a small house in the shade of the trees.
‘But now all of a sudden I forgot such wonders, for it was here that the Fish, my companion of so many years, broke at last and could swim no further, its final agony upon it. I plunged my mind into its mind and found great pain, yes, but also great satisfaction and relief, its purposed fulfilled. Do not leave me! I cried, but it slipped away from me into darkness, and from that darkness came only a last thought, Be at peace, for all is as it is meant.
Treasures of the Deep Page 25
