Vespera

by Anselm Audley

  ‘Gas,’ Besach said. ‘There’s a marsh two, three miles down the coast, which gives off gas. You see it ignite, witch-light the local people call it. I don’t know quite how it works, but I’m hoping one day a Thetian chymist will visit and explain it for me. Anyway, it can be captured, so I had it piped to the palace. Maybe if Lamorra becomes richer, I’ll be able to extend it to some of the houses.

  ‘Your engineers did this?’ It was a brilliant idea. An endless supply of light without even needing flamewood. Of course, it only worked with a marsh nearby, but for a land without the advantages of glowater or flamewood and aether, it was ingenious.

  ‘No,’ Besach said, staring across the hall at his carousing warriors, two of whom were slapping Tilao on the back as he downed a prodigious quantity of alcohol with no apparent effect. He’d be able to drink them all under the table. ‘As you can probably guess, engineering is an unknown art here. No, Massilio’s compatriots did it, in return for the services of some of my men.’

  Massilio’s compatriots? Who up in the north had the ability to do something like this? Had someone resurrected the skills of the Tuonetar? They’d been fantastic engineers, and too many of their ideas and inventions were lost in the Empire’s fury after their fall.

  ‘Your compatriots?’ Odeinath asked Massilio.

  Massilio gave him a wintry smile. ‘The Perditiani, they’re called.’

  How appropriate, Odeinath thought. But why would anyone call themselves that?

  ‘Your people are called the Lost Souls?’

  There was a sudden oasis of silence at the table, as Besach, Ambiorix and the legate stared at Odeinath and Massilio for a moment. Of course they had no idea what it meant, because they didn’t know High Thetian. In normal Thetian it could have meant lost, could have been simply a similar sounding name.

  ‘It means that?’ Besach asked, as the rest of the hall fell quiet. ‘But why?’

  Massilio’s smile vanished. ‘We have all left family and home behind, sworn oaths of brotherhood to one another. As far as the world is concerned, we are lost souls.’

  It was exactly the right answer to give in that hall, full of Lamorra’s warriors. Oaths of brotherhood they understood, and they roared their approval, banging flagons on the long tables.

  It was also not the whole truth, but Odeinath wasn’t going to press it, not now. He and Daena would gather what other information they could, to collate and pass on to every other Xelestis ship heading north with instructions to delve further. This was a new development. Perhaps the north was finally pulling itself out of centuries of pointless warfare and barbarity – perhaps even, in forty or fifty years, these impoverished towns would have built themselves into city-states, and be building ships. A pity that it was only just beginning now – he would have loved to see what their architecture was like by then.

  ‘Are there any languages you don’t know, my friend?’ Massilio said softly, as the hall returned to its previous level of boisterousness.

  ‘None that you’d be able to speak,’ Odeinath replied.

  ‘Even the language of the Tuonetar? Could you say something?’

  Odeinath obliged him, thankful for the ancient language primers he’d found and his time in Ralentis. Ralentic was close to Tuonetar, and the pronunciation Ralentians gave the old language was far better than that of Thetian scholars, working only from texts, inscriptions and an equally sketchy knowledge of Tehaman.

  ‘Your accent is good,’ Massilio said, intrigued. ‘You’ve been to Ralentis, then.’

  ‘To study the ruins, mostly.’

  ‘Not simply an educated man, a scholar,’ Besach said with obvious delight. He was very much not the northern warrior-prince he’d seemed when they first arrived.

  ‘Scholars are people who live in dusty libraries,’ Odeinath said dismissively. ‘I am an explorer, and an archaist, and have seen far more in my lifetime than any scholar.’ He had tried the scholarly life under Clan Polinskarn, but only for a few months. Like so many other things he’d dabbled with before he’d finally realised he was not, by temperament, ready to settle down anywhere. After the dismal failure of their two forays into politics, fomenting conspiracies against the Domain, Polinskarn had decided that ignoring the world entirely was the best course of action.

  ‘What did you think of the ruins?’ Massilio asked.

  ‘Impressive, of course,’ Odeinath said. ‘Those domes – the skill needed to create such vast structures is beyond anything we have now. Thetians are fond of domes, but there was only ever one on such a scale.’

  ‘The domes in the north were a matter of survival,’ Massilio said. ‘One finds architecture a pressing concern if the price of failure is freezing to death. Thetia never had such an incentive.’

  ‘You know we have ruins here?’ Besach said. ‘A whole city, though sadly much reduced by my late predecessors, who plundered it to build this castle and much of the city.’

  Predecessors? So Besach hadn’t inherited Lamorra. Had the previous ruler been murdered, or had Besach been the one to unite the island group? He wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case. Besach had built himself a princedom and now intended to make something of it.

  He couldn’t see the Lamorran warriors being particularly happy about that.

  ‘Would it be possible to visit it?’ Odeinath asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Besach said. ‘You’re most welcome. I have to sit in judgement tomorrow morning, but Massilio can take you, and I’ll join you after the assizes are over.’

  Massilio was not the companion Odeinath would have chosen, but at least he’d get to see the ruins – if there were anything left of them after these northern peasants had dismantled them stone by stone. The cities on Ralentis had been left largely untouched, as the Thetians had settled their northern allies, dissidents who had helped defeat the Tuonetar, there after the obliteration of the rest of the north. Not what the allies had wanted, but at least they had survived.

  The rest of the meal passed very enjoyably, Besach asking question after question and Odeinath explaining, occasionally managing to stem the tide of questions enough to ask Besach what he knew about the far north. Even the chilly Massilio proved a pleasant enough companion, though Odeinath would have exchanged him in a minute for someone with life.

  All of them were quite merry, though still upright, by the time Besach, reluctantly, excused himself and detailed a servant to take them back to the ship, since Ambiorix had lapsed into unconsciousness. Rather like most of the warriors in the hall, particularly those who’d made the mistake of challenging Tilao to a drinking competition.

  Odeinath’s head wasn't too bad the next morning, though he was woken up far too early by clangs and shouts from the quayside, and Cassini knocking far too loudly on the door to ask if there was anything they wanted to add to the trade goods or take away, given that Lamorra wasn't quite what they’d expected.

  Odeinath cursed him, and splashed water from the basin onto his face, and staggered into the protected lee of the quarterdeck to hose himself down with cold water, blinking in the sunlight. It was painful, but he’d got used to it long ago, even if it was difficult to bring himself to do it when there were tribal drummers playing away in the back of his skull.

  Granius was perfectly alert, but then he never drank much, and was supervising the rest of the crew as they carried goods over to the assembled stalls. Cloth, dried food, dried fish, combs and jewellery, spices, sugar – always popular up here in the north, those last two – and a dozen other things he couldn’t quite remember in the shivering cold of a Lamorran spring morning. There was a brisk wind from off the sea, enough to freeze any self-respecting Thetian’s bones, and he hurried back down to his cabin to pull out some warmer clothes. It would be a few hours before the sun warmed the place up, though even then it would never approach a civilized temperature, not at this time of year.

  Massilio appeared as Odeinath handed Granius the revised list, and finished talking to Ambiorix’s se
rvant about what the aristocracy would want first pick at. They would pay in coin, which could be melted down and recast in the south provided it was of good enough quality.

  Massilio was riding one horse and leading another, and Odeinath groaned as he saw the man approach. Horses? Vile creatures. Sit on them for five minutes and he had blisters everywhere, and that was if he managed to get on their back in the first place, without being sent halfway across the quay by one of them deciding to kick him. He’d raced leviathans when he was younger, and if they were equally vicious, at least they were water creatures.

  Still, he gritted his teeth and heaved himself up on top the horse as Massilio held it steady, letting Cassini pass up the bag with his pencils and paper and some food in it, and they picked their way through the crowd. Odeinath was almost jumped by a group of children playing pirates on Navigator’s bowsprit – clearly the crew of Windsoar had left an impression – but escaped through the outer gates, across the causeway.

  ‘Not a horseman?’ Massilio observed, with what was probably amusement for him. Damn the man, and damn these pounding hooves which were making the tribal drummers play ever louder. They didn’t have enough of the right provisions to make up one of those foul hangover cures the Thetian chymists swore were effective, though all their recipes were different.

  ‘No,’ Odeinath said. ‘Can we slow down a little?’

  Massilio obliged, though it wasn't much more comfortable. Why hadn’t he thought of this? But it had been good wine for the north, and a long time since he’d last drunk, and Besach was good company. Particularly for the north.

  ‘How did Besach come to power?’ he asked Massilio, as they turned southwest, a little more slowly, along what the Lamorrans would probably call a road, but more resembled a muddy riverbed that for some reason had no water to it. On their right brownish fields stretched away, with the occasional shivering peasant picking his way across them or trying to drive some miserable-looking harness animals that vaguely resembled water buffalo, only without the hump. ‘Don’t tell me he inherited this.’

  ‘He didn’t,’ Massilio said. ‘As you guessed.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Odeinath pressed, taking some gulps of good sea air, welcome after the close stench of Lamorra.

  ‘He was the lord of a village on the north coast, but had the rare gift of a mind as well as a sword. The islands and the lords were feuding all the time, and he took advantage of it to unify this island and then conquer the others. There are a few holdouts on a barren rock that claims to be the northernmost island, but they’re no trouble any more.’

  ‘How long ago was this?’

  ‘He finished five, six years ago.’

  ‘And how long have you been here?’

  ‘Three years,’ Massilio said, with a tone that clearly said Don’t ask more questions. But Odeinath had never been one to stifle his curiosity.

  ‘And how did you end up here? What has one of your . . . brotherhood . . . to do with Lamorra?’

  ‘It has certain things we need,’ Massilio said. ‘People, for one thing. Lamorra is fertile, but without pointless wars to keep the population down, it would have problems. So we take some of the troublemakers, the ones interested in things other than warfare, and any of the women who show a desire to spend their lives doing more than having children.’

  ‘You rescue them from this barbarity?’ Odeinath said, slightly disbelieving.

  ‘They didn’t choose to be born up here,’ Massilio said, with more passion than Odeinath had seen from him so far. ‘No-one in their right mind would ever choose to be born up here. But they are, and they’re stuck with it for the rest of their lives. There is a world outside Thetia . . .’

  ‘A world I’m very much aware of,’ Odeinath retorted.

  ‘Then have some compassion for the people who weren’t lucky enough to born in Thetia’s summer. The temple may be dedicated to the old star-gods, but very few of the people believe in them, they’re only here because Besach and a few of his retainers are converts. The rest of the Lamorrans, like most of the rest of the north, follow the Atonement.’

  Odeinath said nothing, waiting for Massilio to explain.

  ‘They believe they have been placed up here as punishment for the sins of their ancestors, that their lives are a service to wash away this stain, and that’s the best they can hope for. The only way to explain why people live here at all is to invoke the wrath of some being so great they can’t even understand it. For most of these people, the Empire was the hand of God, the retribution for their wrongs. And three hundred years later, they’re still paying for those wrongs.’

  ‘Even after the storms have gone?’

  ‘The storms were the Second Retribution. The Thetians were the First. Now we’re in the Time of False Hope, a time when the gods will allow people to believe they’re been forgiven, so that when they strike again with the Third Retribution, we will suffer all the more and truly realise the error of our ways.’

  He said it so dispassionately, glancing out over the fields at the labouring peasants, at the stark, snow-capped mountains.

  ‘And do you believe this as well?’ Odeinath asked, after a moment when the only sounds were the drums in his head and the shriek of gulls over the sea.

  ‘That the Thetians were the hand of God? The hand of hell, perhaps. The north is a place of punishment, for who truly wants to be born in the poverty and the ice and the cold? But a place of just punishment? There is no justice in this place, no crime so great that it warrants sending an entire people to die in the frozen arctic, to condemn men and women and children to freeze by the thousands, while those who survive live short, broken lives in the ashes of a dead civilization. In a land where the snow never lifts and the sun never shines.’

  His voice was raw, harsh, bitter, and his eyes could have been carved from marble for all the life in them. Odeinath wondered how old Massilio was. Forty? Fifty? And there was so much pain in those words, the kind of pain that no-one could experience at secondhand.

  Perhaps if he’d been a little more awake he might have realised, then, what Massilio actually meant, could have seen the double meaning in what he said, but his head was still pounding, and it was morning on Lamorra in the arctic seas, a place no Thetian in his right mind would ever choose to come.

  ‘Nobody chooses the north,’ Massilio said, his voice once again flat and dead. ‘But we can help, make life a little more bearable for those who’ll never see a manta or write odes to the Iandusian spring.’

  Enough of a Thetian to have read that most Thetian of poets, then.

  ‘Hence the gas, and the harbour? Do the Lamorrans take kindly to it?’

  ‘They grumble about change, because people always do. Particularly the warriors, those who’ve sworn themselves to the Atonement’s service. Better to die young in battle than grow old up here.’

  ‘And how did a Thetian end up in the north?’ Odeinath asked.

  ‘Punishment for a crime committed by my parents,’ Massilio said. ‘As the Atonement teaches. Look, there are the ruins, ahead and to your right.’

  The fields ended at a line of hummocks covered in scraggly grass, stretching away in a great crescent along the side of the bay and inland. It took him a moment to follow the line of the hummocks, the gentle curve of the side of a dome, and then the pillars and broken walls beyond it. The beach, too, was broken by the lines of walls running down into the grey sea, great cyclopean blocks half-buried in sand.

  Massilio led him off the road, cutting across a corner of the fields, and between two of the hummocks into the heart of the ruin field.

  Tuonetar ruins were like nothing else on Aquasilva. There were few stones, because the Tuonetar hadn’t used stones in most of their buildings, and little that someone coming to the ruins for the first time would have recognised, or understood. Odeinath had had to work it out for himself when he stumbled on the ruined city at Iliath, only two hundred miles from the coast of Thure, from the ruins and the few book
s by Thetian travellers from before the Great War. The Tuonetar had been Thetia’s allies once, until the fall of the Republic, but even in those days few citizens of either state had ventured to visit the other, cut off by tens of thousands of miles of hostile ocean and the climatic barriers.

  The cities on Ralentis had proved Odeinath right, mostly, which he’d been proud of, given how little he’d worked from.

  ‘You’re a strange man,’ Massilio said, slowing his horse to a walk. ‘These people tried to conquer Thetia, and yet here you are studying the ruins of their cities.’

  ‘They tried and failed,’ Odeinath said, pausing to look at a section of wall that had survived, its surfaced blanked and pitted by age. ‘And we obliterated them, wrote them out of history, and turned their continent into a desolate wasteland. They were a great civilization, and they should be remembered, at least.’

  ‘Is a civilization great which destroys tens of thousands of its own people, and millions of its enemies?’

  ‘You could say the same of Thetia. We’ve made mistakes, terrible mistakes, just as the Tuonetar did in those last few decades. They didn’t deserve obliteration, and neither do we.’

  ‘Easy to be open-handed now that they’re gone.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want Thetia to suffer the same fate.’

  ‘But you left Thetia, you said you haven’t been back to your home city for, what, thirty years?’

  ‘Thirty-one years since I last set foot in Vespera. Yes, I’ve left, but only because I didn’t fit in. Would I have fitted in anywhere else? I doubt it. Where else could there be? I’m happy wandering the oceans with my fellow outcasts.’

  ‘So why do you care?’

  ‘Because I’m still a Thetian,’ Odeinath said, half-sliding and half-falling off his horse to examine a shard of wall that lay on the ground, with a length of black, corrded piping underneath it that might once have been copper. He tried to be as delicate as possible, but the pipe crumbled to dust as soon as he picked it up, and he looked ruefully at his oversized hands. ‘I don’t want to live in Thetia, but knowing it’s still there, all that brilliance and arrogance and argument . . . the world is so much richer for it. The world would be richer if the Tuonetar had never fallen.’