‘That night, in the middle of a sea as calm as an ossuary, Reeves was washed overboard. It happens, though not so often in such calm waters. We put it down to drink, searched for two bells, then sailed on. Then Hazell was lost. Then Chalmers. Then, one by one, every crew member who had beaten the captives up and onto the deck that day vanished, leaving behind only a splash of water.’
‘Into the ocean.’
I nodded. ‘We didn’t think so at first. But Chalmers was below, and Sanderson was in the powder room.’ I looked into her eyes, remembering. ‘The room was awash. There’s no way such an amount of water could get into it. No way at all.’
Fastny stared back. ‘Like Det’s room.’
‘Yes.’
She came back to herself and leaned forward, pressing her weight down onto my chest so that I gasped in pain and, I will admit, a small measure of delight. ‘What about you? How did you escape?’
‘By the time we made Portsmouth there wasn’t a law in the land that could keep me on board.’ I hit the wharf whilst the ship was still tying up, ran for my life through the milling crowds of navvies and prostitutes, and simply kept running. Truth be told, I don’t think the Captain cared about recovering me. I don’t think he cared at all by that point. We’d had a crew of thirty-six when we set out. We had nine when we made port. I was in London inside three days, Paris in two weeks, and most of that was spent summoning the courage to cross the channel.
‘I’ve been running ever since,’ I said, looking away from Fastny and through the closed drapes at all the countries I had crossed. ‘Away from the ocean, deeper and deeper into the wilderness.’ I shrugged. ‘I liked the desert. I hoped it would be enough.’
‘It wasn’t.’
‘No.’
‘Get up.’
‘What?’
‘Get up.’ She leaned back, and stripped the furs from me in one swift movement. I instinctively curled over, and she pulled me forward so that I fell from the bed and landed on all fours. Before I could react she swung lightly off the bed and delivered a sharp kick to my ribs.
‘Your clothes are there,’ she said, lashing out again so that I collapsed against a chair. My underpants fell onto my head. ‘Get dressed. Now.’
I rose to my knees, helped along by another kick to my rump, and scrambled my clothes on. By the time I found my feet Fastny was dressed and tying her hair up into a simple ponytail. I saw the knives glistening in the bandolier across her chest. She finished her hair, and turned to me.
‘Get moving.’ She nodded towards the door.
‘But...’
She shoved me, barely stretching her slim frame but hitting my chest with such force that I stumbled backwards.
‘Now,’ she said, with utter equanimity. I scrabbled for the handle. I was just through the door and she was behind me, elbowing me into the hall and locking the room behind her. She bundled me down the short flight of stairs from her landing and into the alleyway outside. It was not until we were several streets away, and heading for the canals, that I managed to evade a push and stand my ground.
‘No,’ I said, raising a hand to ward off another attack. ‘Enough. Just... just tell me what you want.’
‘You killed them,’ she said, sliding close and placing a hard hand against my chest. ‘Thomas, Little Bear...’ she paused, ‘Det. You and your shipmates, just as soon as you murdered those slaves and sent them over. You killed my friends.’
‘But I—’
‘You were there. You were part of it. You brought it after you. Well, not me.’ She grabbed the front of my shirt, and pulled me down to her. ‘Not me.’
I saw her cowardice, then, saw what it was that had sent her on the road to Budapest, and that bar known only to the lost-of-heart. Fastny, skilled, courageous Fastny, born into a race of warriors. Afraid to be taken, afraid that someone else might choose the manner of her death. Such a simple fear. Yet it made us more kin than we had ever been.
‘Is that all?’ I asked softly. ‘Is that why you fight so hard?’
Her knife was in her hand before either of us knew it was there. The rest was instinct: I pushed, she swung. Less than a second later I was on my knees, holding onto the line of fire that erupted across my gut while she stood over me, staring at the blood dripping from the blade.
‘I—’ she said.
And then the water took her.
We were streets away from the canals, but suddenly the gutters above us were overflowing. Sheets of water flowed down the walls to swirl around us, a sudden torrent threatening to wash us off our feet, staggering Fastny with its force. One of us screamed: probably me. The water pooled momentarily, then drew back and rose like a giant, glistening worm—a thick, iridescent tube a dozen feet high, rounder and thicker than a man—then plunged downwards, swallowing Fastny before either of us could react. Her arm burst out of the side, slashed madly at the column’s surface. Her knife gouged wide crescents that disappeared as soon as they broke the water’s skin. The pillar bucked and twisted, slammed against the bricks once, twice, a third time. Fastny’s arm shook, then became limp. Her hand opened. The knife clattered to the cobbles, and bounced twice before settling between the stones. Slowly, the water bulged outwards, closed over her hanging arm, swallowed it back into its depths.
I sank to my knees. I had no strength with which to flee. My blood leaked out across my fingers, thick and sticky, and all I could think about were the sharks circling the boat, and the spread of claret that attracted them. I raised my head towards the monster as it loomed above me, and for the briefest moment, expected to see fins cutting across its skin. The top of the spiral bent down to look in my face. I squeezed my eyes shut and waited. Slowly, the water embraced me. I had time to take one deep breath before my head went under.
Everything stopped.
I hung, suspended in the water’s cold grip. I had expected the same, thrashing death that had befallen Fastny. Yet there was only softness, and a feeling of protection so overwhelming that I opened my eyes in surprise.
There, floating before me, her eyes closed in repose, was Fastny. Her hair had become untied, and swam around her peaceful face like a living halo. Behind her I saw Thomas, and Mellik, and behind them, the rest of our travelling companions. But it was what I saw beyond them that made me cry out, and expel my air in a blast of bubbles: Yvon, my boss at the broadsheet; my landlord; the serving girl at the diner where I ate my breakfast each morning; the owner of the eatery who had helped us when we first arrived in Anguilar. And behind them, other faces, other names I should have learned but did not know: the horse trader we had dealt with at the edge of the desert; the waiter in the café in Cairo; the bar girl I had bedded in Budapest. Everyone I had walked with, or talked with, or spent more than a moment in the company of, stretching back an interminable distance, far beyond the dozen feet of the water spout’s height. A line of the dead sinking down below the limits of my sight, every of them linked to the one in front by a bright silver line that pierced each body through the chest and emerged from their back. My sight grew sharper, the water clearer. I followed the string back across seven years of flight. I saw, dangling uncountable miles below me, Reeves, and the Captain, connected to each other by the rope of silver light running from heart to heart. Connected to me, forever, by a line of bodies between us.
And then I knew. Knew that I had not been hunted, and that my companions had not been harvested by a horde of avenging spirits. I had hung my head over the railing of that slave ship all those years ago, gazed down upon the thrashing ocean and seen bodies being torn apart. I had cursed my weakness, cried and vomited my fear and pity onto the water’s surface. And the ocean had absorbed my few, mad moments of shame, mixed them in with the blood and the fury and agony of the dying men. And what was born in those moments looked back up out of the maelstrom, and saw my face.
All those years I had run and it had followed me, not out of hatred, but from love. I had birthed a monster, and it had imprinted upon me in t
hose first moments of life like a duckling to its mother’s warmth. The realisation panicked me. I thrashed about, desperate to get out, get away, anywhere but the embrace of my murderous creation. The water sensed my terror and reacted the only way it knew how. It intensified its embrace: warming me; drawing me further into its depths. The pressure increased. I bumped against my dead companions, and they wrapped their lifeless arms around me, pressed their dead faces into my neck and back, holding me close, pulling me deeper and deeper into the ocean’s soul. Light exploded inside my eyes. I felt my limbs grow heavy. My neck could not hold my head. My chest could no longer expand. I was cold, so cold, but there was a great warmth stirring within me. All I had to do was give up the fight, resign myself to the ocean’s grasp, let go my fear and self-loathing and let myself float, at one with the corpses and the water that held them. I closed my eyes, held tight to Fastny. I leaned in, pressed my lips against hers, and kissed her with all the courage I had lacked in life.
Then, as quickly as it had embraced me, the column withdrew. The harsh human sounds of the City rose up around me. I knelt on the cold cobbles, coughing liquid from my lungs and weeping. I was alone, in the last refuge the Universe provided for cowards, and I had run out of places to hide. No matter where I went, no matter how far and how desperately I ran, I would never again be by myself.
The water will always be there—following me, collecting everybody I have ever known. Anybody with whom I might ever share a word, or a moment of human contact. Everybody I meet, for the rest of my life. They will all be swallowed. Preserved. And when I am done, when I can flee no longer and fear no more, the water will still be there, waiting to gather me into its embrace and give me a final home.
The water can wait forever.
Out of love.
Legacy
Amanda O’Callaghan
When it came, at last, it was one hard push in the centre of his back. For an instant, he doubled over in a deep, elaborate bow. Fittingly oriental. There was no sound, save a single, thin exhalation, which may have belonged to one of them. The navy trench coat swaddled him as he drove down, pearl diver tight. A long pennant of dark red scarf, flying like the banner of a minor royal, waved in the air behind him. No arm flailed. Nothing unseemly.
The water received him with a muted splash, pulled him down and away with the sea’s sure hand. There was a moment, only one, when they told themselves it would be like a burial.
* * *
Nostrils. Peter thought it was preposterous, really, to be remembered like that. Those two private-looking orifices right in the middle of a face, outgunned by the company they keep: a pleasant mouth, perhaps, or cold eyes, or old Charlie’s cheekbones, solid as an oak shelf.
Not so, Mr Gregory, Peter thought. Mr Gregory had an unremarkable English face. Pale eyes, almost lashless. Pale skin, winter and summer, except for the broken veins that trailed across it in fine red like the roots of an ancient tree. He had a mousey smudge on his eyebrows and temples but that was all the colour he seemed able to muster. His hair, always surprisingly long, swept back over his high skull into the same creamy blandness.
But his nostrils marked him.
They were too large, Peter remembered, for his ordinary nose, great cavernous openings, permanently flared, as if locked forever in the process of smelling something unpleasant. You could see so far inside his nose it felt alarming. The interior was tinted in a wash of pale scarlet, a rare kind of hue. Like the orchids Mum grew years ago, Peter thought, when she was happy.
By the time Peter saw those nostrils at close quarters, Mr Gregory had lived in the corner place for at least five years. Peter saw him quite often, going in and out of his plain stone cottage, ducking his tall frame under the portal, always a book in hand. Just occasionally, he would glimpse Mr Gregory walking up on the hill beyond his house; striding, really, for he had a long-legged step that in a less serious man could have looked almost comical.
The best of the town lies behind that cottage. All the locals know that. The land sweeps upwards in a velvet swathe, and circles high above the buildings in a vivid ruff of green. Braxman’s Ridge. Apart from the public path along its edge, it’s all farms up there. Sheep, mostly, some horses, a few head of cattle. Good land. Wealthy people, if they’d ever sell, which they don’t.
Sometimes, when Peter was doing the deliveries, he would spot Mr Gregory from the back paddocks. He’d be visible from the knees up, stalking along the cliff path that had been cut into a deep trough by a thousand years of walkers. The Atlantic breezes, close to pleasant in summer, would make Mr Gregory’s hair stand upright, separating it into a fan of almost-countable strands before patting it down with a slap.
Some days, Mr Gregory would stop at the highest point and sit on the metal seat there. One spindly leg of the bench had long since freed itself from its rusty shackle. It seemed to arch forward as if it meant to shake off the rough slab that held it down, and step away, at last, from the hypnotizing drop.
Looking back down the long hill, the whole town lies curled out of the wind into a self-protective coil. A good town, Peter thought, solid, unpretentious. In front, a wide expanse of grey sea sprawls into the horizon, nudging, shrewdly tame, against the high cliffs.
These were the only times Peter ever saw Mr Gregory without a book. When others climbed to the top, they’d spot the dark-coated back angled into the runaway seat. They’d recognize the stiff carriage of thin shoulders, the beige curve of smoothed hair. Exchanging warning looks, they’d throw themselves down on the grass, or lean, catching their breath, on the old Warrior memorial. Nine dead rescuers and a whole ship’s company, lost one February night when Peter was a boy. He can still hear that wind, booming up the Devon coast. The names of the drowned are cut deep into the wood in desiccated letters, some filled, now, with pink gum, set solid as stone.
Walkers sometimes braved the cliff edge, to peer down at the sea below, watch it soaping its shoulders of basalt. But when Mr Gregory was there, nobody ever joined him on the bench. Beside the man who never looked down, there seemed no space at all.
* * *
It was a Tuesday. Peter was enjoying being in the new van. Justin usually did the afternoon farm run in the noisy blue bomb, but his brother had backed into Grumpy Hedley’s gate while gawping at Hedley’s not-so-grumpy daughter, and they’d had to use the new one. Or Peter had. Justin still had whiplash, the fool.
This van usually sat idle outside the shop, parked in its own space, all spruced up in dark green, Webster’s Saddlery and Produce blaring from the sides in too-thick letters. A horse’s head, painted white, leered from one panel, an unnatural look in its flattened eye.
It was strange to see Mr Gregory along this road. He didn’t drive, and other than the path up by the sea, Peter never saw him out of town. He looked to be heading downhill at a decent pace, making good progress on the lane’s grassy edge. He must have heard the van as Peter turned out of Grumpy’s for the final run back to the shop.
Peter knew it was Mr Gregory. It was the walk. Not exactly a goose-step but pronounced, a little jerky. Boys at school used to copy it, tucked in behind him on his way to class, the others sniggering.
The road was flanked with ditches, so Peter drove past him slowly. He heard a noise, a single, quick shout. When he looked back, there was nothing. He pulled in, turned in the entrance to the lower field, and drove slowly back up the road.
Mr Gregory looked like a broken insect, frail limbs at right angles, head turned to one side. Peter wasn’t sure if he was conscious, or even alive. He wasn’t even sure whether he’d hit him with the wider van. Just above Mr Gregory’s head, one of Grumpy’s longwools inspected them both from a flat rock.
‘I’m fine,’ Mr Gregory called out.
He was pressed hard into a leafy hedge like a specimen pinned to a green baize board. Peter pulled up the van, shouldered the door open. As he crossed the road, words were already clumping in his throat, congealing there like a hard stopper at th
e back of his tongue.
He got his name out in something close to a shout. The rest was lost in stony mouthfuls of the usual hesitation. At least he knows who I am, Peter thought. The sheep looked straight at him, shook a straggle of hair from its eyes, and jumped away.
Mr Gregory still hadn’t moved.
‘Oh, Peter, it’s you,’ Mr Gregory said, jovially, as if he’d just noticed him in Maisy Donald’s cafe. ‘Nice to see you.’ His nostrils, flaring pink, seemed to hover above the ivory of his face. ‘I’m fine, really. Just a slip,’ he said.
Peter didn’t trust himself with any more speech, so he looked for a dry foothold to help pull him up. Mr Gregory regarded him with a teacher’s appraising gaze.
‘Peter. Peter Fenton. Yes. I remember. I taught your brother. How is he?’
While Mr Gregory tested his limbs in small, balletic movements, Peter told him about Justin. How they’d both been at the saddlery since leaving Bart’s. Peter first, and then Justin, after he’d finished school. How they liked the work, getting out and about, dealing with the animals. Peter left out the bit about it being so much better than school, and about Justin’s whiplash.
He doesn’t seem to notice my stupid sentences, Peter thought.
Mr Gregory insisted that he was completely unharmed, although he had a thin scratch that ran in a vivid smile across his chin. Peter helped him up, leaving him to dust himself off. Somehow, it didn’t seem quite right to touch him.
‘Drop you home?’ Peter asked. He stumbled on ‘Sir,’ which was probably just as well, he thought.
The Canals Of Anguilar / Legacy Page 3
