by Jeff Kamen
He stared into its darkness, blinking away the seawater. It was the upper section of the vehicle. Afloat somehow, having eluded the waterfall; and like a slow and lumbering steed of war, it had come to sweep him away.
He snatched more purposefully at the netting and then swam on a little way. He paused to untangle himself, then swam on again. Coming to the vessel’s edge, where a series of ragged burrs projected, he swam round to where the nets hung perhaps twenty feet from the ledge on which the Ostgrenzers had stored their drilling gear, now forming an outer section of the vessel’s deck. He trod water for a while, trying to summon the strength he needed, trying to convince himself that he could do it, then he reached up, and with his costume dragging heavily, gushing water, he began to climb.
He managed to haul himself onto the skirting, and once again he swung a hand and pulled himself upwards and slithered onto a rumpled deck of armoured platework. Parts of it were puffed out and other parts deeply sunken, the result of a conflict of hugely destructive forces; and yet all of it intact enough to survive those rugged coastal waters. He got up slowly, then went from one bulge to one another in his bloodied dress, a living wreck able only to stare around himself and breathe.
‘The debt must be paid ... must be paid, you hear?’
As the faint cries reached him, he looked back to find that most of the mob had turned away. Only a small crowd remained, fronted by Paget, who stood stamping and screaming. All this curiously brightening as the roar of a tar and timber pyre grew loud in the upper air and the vessel came nodding alongside the nearest watchtower. He went labouring towards a lowlying spot where he could shelter himself, and as he limped on he stumbled, crying out, and fell through a star-shaped hole in the deck, landing in a deep bed of dry debris.
He tired to reach up to lift himself but couldn’t, and with a gasp he lay back again, unable to move. Unable to do anything.
Watching the circling gulls, coughing in the dust, he felt himself expiring. A man due at any moment, he thought, to leave the sacred continuum of blood and mating calls and flakes of ash; and no one to help him, his loved ones gone or missing or abandoned.
He wept into his arm, lying broken and empty.
The vessel rocked slowly out to sea.
Chapter 80 — To The Brute Interior
Some days later they were overlooking the little port the merchants had described sailing into. It was sweltering. Dry, so dry. Possible to imagine the world exploding in a single moment of ignition.
‘Heyup,’ Jaala murmured, and the pony raised its head. They continued down a track where the overhead branches hung flayed and passed between the wrought gates of the town, Radjík sending a mock salute to the dozing sentries.
On asking for the inland route, they were directed towards an armed encampment on the town’s outskirts, where a small army funded by Durs had been installed to prevent the further incursion of bandits into that territory. It was here among the smokefires and creaking tents that they heard of Tannak, the man who was to lead the next convoy east to Thessa, where, according to their map, the Turkic wastes began, beyond which they planned to turn south. They paid a contribution to join the crossing party, and were advised to stock up well on food and water before they left; and to take note: the guards would expect the travellers to cook for them and maintain a watchful and well-provisioned camp.
Once the pony was stabled, there was little to do but rest and check that the cart was roadworthy. A few long days lay ahead of them before they left, the first of which they spent in sight of the port, bathing and washing their clothes. Thereafter, fearful of burning her skin, Radjík retreated to the tents and found a couple of people her own age to play dice with, while Jaala excused herself and went out walking.
She thought it was anxiety making her feel so restless, in need of distraction. There seemed to be many reasons for it, but at its core she thought it was a fear that Radjík was right: perhaps there’d be nothing worth finding in the end. Nothing — just a sense of bitterness and frustration, a needless rearing of an old embittered rage; one that none of the other women had felt as she felt it.
Because none of them knew, she reminded herself, none of them had the memories; none of them after the initial years would have known anything of their history without being told it; and even then what guarantee was there that they’d been told the truth?
Unsettled, she climbed the crumbling battlements surrounding the camp to see something of the land they’d be passing through. Spread before her was a gorgonised waste extending to the earth’s quaking rim. Grey cliffs and foothills and scalped pastures and little else. A perilous terrain of thieves and tribal gangs, of bonelike and razorous edges. She shielded her eyes in the glare.
She knew that between where she stood and the far side of that land was a journey which at least one woman in her likeness had undertaken in order to get away. To make life different, make it better. And she knew beyond doubt that the woman preceding them all had been involved in making such a difference herself. Surely, then, she thought — surely it was worthwhile to make the journey back again; to touch the face of what she was, or had been before, however indistinct the outline. To have some idea what the difference was that had driven that woman on.
Just some idea. Just something.
She walked on slowly, thinking, picking at the details she’d gathered so far.
Her strongest sense was that the pigtailed girl, as she’d grown, had developed a certain quality — individual, unique to herself. Quite what, she could not tell, but she knew that as the troubles of that time had developed, the girl had entered womanhood aware of something that others had failed to anticipate; that she had seen it coming and dreaded it and had decided to do something. Had taken action in some way.
She sighed, wanting so badly to know more. Wanting to stride across time to meet with her; wanting to link the start with the end and bring the circle to its conclusion. But how? How? All she could do was wait.
She looked back up the coast, to where the trade route disappeared in a haze of sunlight and dust. All that life as Jaala tapering backwards through pain and hurt and burnings. And as she stood there, seeing herself as though in remote profile, she swore that on her return the pain would end. All she had to do was complete what needed to be completed; afterwards, she would set her focus on all that made living worthwhile. She thought of her old neighbours and friends, the people she’d left behind. The home they were building. Then of her other friends, further to the north, testing life outside the safety of plastic sheets and chugging machines.
The ones who’d cured her. She smiled ruefully, and reflecting on Nina’s words, she took the tin from her pocket and looked at it. Looked at it hard. Knowing exactly what Anya would say, had she been present. She walked on a way and then stopped, just stood there for a while, struggling in the hot blankness of the moment. Weighing things up. Cursing her own weakness, the deception that would take all that she was. Then, before she could stop herself, she hurled the tin away, watching it land with a clink among the dry dead stones.
The camp grew busier by the day. A flatbed boat had come into port and other travellers were arriving by road. When the morning of departure came, she made sure they were among the first to drive up to the muster point, where the crossing party would be checked for supplies during the head count. They were driving up the track with the other early risers when Tannak’s group overtook them, passing in stocky carts with raised mantlets along the sides, the sombre crewmen all heavily armed. More crews went clattering past, some of the recruits already unsheathing weapons. ‘All set?’ a driver called across, as ahead a horn sounded.
Radjík nodded back to him, then looked at Jaala. ‘Are we?’ she said, and with a faint smile Jaala answered, ‘Let’s hope so.’
As the rest of the carts and wagons assembled, they wrapped their faces. Then in ones and twos the vehicles passed beneath the cracked limestone arch of the settlement gate and set off together in dusty convo
y, trundling towards the gaunt interior, towards the waiting uncertainties ahead.
Chapter 81 — Life At Sea
The fishermen lifted him from the hold a few days later. He was close to death. The ashes had staunched the bleeding, but the water he’d been sipping at had turned foul and his parched tongue lay curled against his palette like a snippet of hide.
He caught a glimpse of sunburned stubbled faces and then strong arms were pulling him up into the white laser sun, over the scarred plates of the vessel and away to sand and voices, to children staring from the bed of a donkey-drawn cart.
He lay gasping inside a crude shelter of palm leaves and brittle canes, haggard, pouch-eyed and weeping, reaching for the pipe that was no longer in front of him, the herbs that had soothed him even as they cooked his flesh. The warm and bloody ribs which had fuelled him for so long.
A sad and delirious stick of a man, the words of his father’s letter guttering dimly in memory. In his dreams as he wailed aloud, he was forced to set light to the letter and toss it away in flames. Forced to watch the embers glow. Then die. In each dream, scarcely a thread of smoke arose.
Day after day the hut was resonant with terrible hoarse screams and long lingering cries that sounded barely human in their depth and scale and intensity. Occasionally the men came by to check on him, his nurses to mop his brow with rags and water.
‘I’m sorry,’ he moaned, ‘so sorry, father ... so sorry ...’
They spoke soothing words to his madness, calmed his ravings. Eventually he gained an appetite, and when some children presented him with a bowl of rice and shrimps, he croaked a few words at them, offered something of a smile.
In time he felt strong enough to stand. Shuffling outside, he saw pink cirrus clouds reflected in sheets of darkening water. He lifted his face, let the warm sirocco breeze pass through his hair. When he looked again, his eye travelled down a curving ridge and he realised that he was on a sand bar, a long way out at sea. Far from the coastline, from dancing and smoke and people like shadows flying overhead. Far from Paget’s grip.
He stood there for some time, speaking to those he had words to speak to, some alive in flesh and some less so; then he turned, hearing voices call. There was a party picking through their nets along the shore, and as they stood beckoning he trod away stiffly to join them.
~O~
There were some seven or eight families in the camp, although few among them spoke the common language well enough to join him in conversation. He had no complaints: in spite of his gratitude he was loathe to recount the truth of his experiences, and when his stained and shredded costume was brought out as though to elicit some kind of explanation, the first thing he did was fling it on the fire. As the murmurs died away he watched it burn, eyes simmering.
Only when it lay in ashes did he speak again. He told them that the metal hulk they’d found him in was his own ship, that he’d been robbed just a few days before they’d found him. Robbed of everything.
They looked at each other, they shrugged. He imagined it was a common enough story in those parts. Then they asked where he was bound. Lowering his eyes, he said he was headed south. After taking some water, he asked where he was.
An older man was watching him from the edge of the firelight, his craggy face half in shadow. He lifted a hand. ‘Here,’ he said, motioning around the camp, ‘we summer.’ He made a brief gesture landwards. ‘We home there. There we sell, here we fish. Now, we fish good, the hot … the hot is here.’
Moth nodded.
‘Ten week, twelve week like this. Hot. Then only waters. You understand?’
‘I think so. You mean the sea?’
The man tremored his fingers in a mime of rainfall. ‘Ne. All waters here.’
‘So ... what will you do then?’
‘Then? Then we no more here. Then we gone.’
The words stayed with him the following day as he joined them in their work. Although they seemed indifferent to the idea of repayment, he made it clear that not only was it important to him, but that it was good for him to be active, out of bed. Wearing the thin sunbleached clothing they’d given him, he wandered the shallows checking nets and lines, the funnel-shaped baskets they used, and each day at dawn he helped to load up the carts they drove to the coastal markets. As he worked, he began to sort through the rubble of his thinking, to search himself, questioning what he might do next. Often he’d look to the grim black outline of the vessel, in many ways frightened of it, yet drawn to the possibilities it held.
Some distance beyond it lay the wreckage of a small cargo ship, its masts askew. More than once, as he imagined its sails filling, he felt his heart ease. Out at sea, he thought, he could dispense with the problems of the mainland, all its agonies. Perhaps only out at sea.
~O~
One afternoon he went out to the shipwreck to assess its condition. The keel had split near the bow and there were long splintery rents he could put his head through. He trod around the saltdry old boards making calculations, checking the scant remains of the stores, then he looked back to the Nassgrube vessel. Darkly imposing, even now, even with so much of it blasted away. Huge and sunless and yet somehow in his possession. Like something he had always known, a secret he could never give away, no matter what became of him.
He made his way back across the sand, then carefully climbed the panels until he came to the torn hole at the centre, a wreath of metal leaves lying twisted around its rim. The place where he’d fallen, had lain in agony beneath the sun. As he peered down into the darkness, he shook his head. It was worse than he remembered. A great steel dungeon whose contents had been unearthed in hurricanes of fire and shrapnel and steaming black glass. Long feathery vertebrae lay coiled in the light like the relics of alien warfare. The doors had been sucked from their hinges and bled apart, the blackened skin of the hold pitted with terrible welts and craters. Evidence of a disaster which led him back to times he no longer wished to know, and which appalled him to think of. And yet there was something fascinating about it, something that was pulling him down. He squatted, peering further inside. Behind mounds of ash he could see the dingy walls of various buckled compartments. Pale runs of solder here and there, the white stains of chemical flashmarks, pockets of rusty-looking water. For a moment he hesitated, wondering if it was better to forget it altogether, but then he thought of the alternatives, the hazards of the road, of returning.
Drawn strongly now, he lowered himself down to where he’d lain, and like some cautious and overgrown firelizard, began to pick his way around.
~O~
It took days to clear out the worst of the debris, and that with the aid of the children. What they could not move they left alone, and the remains of the ash they swept into the side compartments.
Afterwards the men helped him strip the wooden wreck of tools and useful parts, and laid everything out on the sand. Then the hard work began.
They drove the tiller post through a small puncture in the deck and fastened it so that it stood firmly upright. Then they lowered the taller of the masts through the central hole and housed it in blocks of sawn timber, tethering it in position at deck level and bolting it below. By similar means they fitted an iron winch into the deck between the mast and helm, with heavy cleats fastened at strategic points around it to secure any lines or chains. They hammered flat the platework’s lethal burrs and serrations and fitted a steering arm to the tiller. The tiller was then lifted while the ship’s bronze rudder was bolted into place beneath the hull. Once the rudder blade and tiller were joined, a pair of anchors were lugged across and great chains heaped in a clattering coil on the deck and secured to the winch. Grab rails were mounted, an oak boom varnished and left to dry. The sails were repaired by a group that sat stitching in the shade, joined eventually by others who used the winch to hoist the mainsail and who ran the lines down from the spars. They dug further beneath the hull to check for faults and cracks, and piece by piece helped him to install items of undamaged fu
rniture. In a couple of weeks a strange-looking patchwork ship lay beached there.
The air was cooling and the sun now struck the horizon to the south of where it had before. Although he continued working with the families, most of his spare time was spent on ensuring that the vessel was seaworthy, and on learning how to steer and maintain it, the men assisting by using a small model as an aid.
The rains came at exactly the time the old man had predicted. The skies grew quilted and grey. He’d fitted a small iron stove in his quarters, and now he chopped up whole sections of the wreck’s planking for fuel. He was stacking it in piles when someone called down to him. When he climbed up, the men who were gathered beneath that threatening sky had news they didn’t want to tell. They were packing to go.
He helped them to strike camp and they brought to his vessel gifts of lampfuel and nets and kegs of water. During their last meal together he said he would never forget their kindness. There were tears that night, tears and kisses and handshakes. He watched them depart in the grey of a relentless downpour. The week of his birthday, a man alone upon a pale strand swiftly eroding.
It rained for days, rained so that he could no longer see the coastline. The seas beyond that crumbling strip were becoming heavier, awash with sand and mud. He feared for himself, yet his other fears were the greater, and to his relief the waiting was shortly at an end. Under pelting rain he leant from the rails as the ship listed, groaning, and then lurched with a hiss into the colliding waters.
~O~
High winds blew him westwards. He barely slept as he accustomed himself to the workings of the ship. Always so much to do: rainwater to collect, nets to put out and haul back in, the ceaseless reordering and tying of lines.
He worked relentlessly and with one eye always searching for land, for rocks or sails. For any glimpse of light when the world lay bound in primal darkness. He rested when he could, but the sleep he craved rarely brought him what he wanted. He lay fitful and unsure in his bed, the hull banking and creaking all the while. So many thoughts chasing their tails around the metal floor and nothing in that quivering stovelight to restrain them.
