by Stephen Hunt
The ex-slave looked blankly down at the two of them from the platform, his face frozen in an emotionless rictus. Amelia saw the trader’s subtle hand signal, and one of his craynarbians gave the man a prod in the spine with a sharp stick.
‘It’s me,’ coughed the man. ‘I’ve come back.’
Amelia’s eyes narrowed, and Billy gave her hand a warning squeeze. Whatever little was left of these unlucky wretches, the emancipated slaves of the Daggish had been well tutored to say one phrase since being freed. Amelia wagered that with a poke in the back, everyone standing on the platform could repeat that utterance.
‘It warms my heart,’ announced the trader. ‘Oh, it truly does. This, damson, is what makes the dangers and perils of my endeavours worthwhile. This is what I live for. But a river pilot, someone who knows the flows and tricks of the great river Shedarkshe, I cannot let him return back to you as cheaply as I might a mere trapper of hides and furs, oh no. I have to pay for my porters and my soldiers and I have to pay for the families, like yours, left lonely where my brave crew have perished in our sallies against the fierce Daggish. So many mouths that must be fed. Shall we say sixteen guineas for your husband?’
‘Sixteen guineas?’ cried the woman. ‘I should sell my house in the post and still be left five short!’
‘Ah, damson, can there ever be a price put on the return of a father for your beautiful girl? Look at her standing there beside you, weeping. You haven’t seen him for so long, have you, my little lovely? How you must have missed him. And you, damson, as much as you love your little one, you must have grown tired of being asked by her every night, “when will daddy return, when will I see him again?” Repeating the very same thing you must have been thinking yourself as you went to bed alone each evening.’ The trader raised his arms in a magnanimous gesture. ‘But your story has touched me. I shall let him go to you for only thirteen guineas. The price of your house and the good will and merciful coins of your husband’s old friends will carry you that little extra way towards me, I am sure.’
‘It’s me,’ repeated the river pilot after another poke. ‘I’ve come back.’
Shaking and confused, the woman tried to withdraw back to the town through the press of the crowd, her daughter dragged against her will, fighting her mother every step of the way.
‘Ah well,’ laughed the merchant, winking at the men in the crowd after the woman and the girl had gone. ‘Hopefully she’ll come back with the guineas. Of course, sometimes they haven’t been going to bed so alone every night, and then they slip me a guinea or two to apprentice their old man far down river from the trading post.’
Amelia’s hand was shaking above her holster and Billy stopping it from dipping down with an iron grip. ‘Whatever you think of this, these transactions are still legal. The comfort traders operate just the right side of the Suppression of Slavery Act. Murder, however, is punished the same here as back in Jackals. More swiftly, too.’
‘I’ll pay your damn leach’s money,’ shouted Amelia, shrugging off Billy’s hand. ‘Thirteen guineas.’
‘It’s not their husband or father you’re buying back anymore,’ whispered Billy. ‘It won’t be the same for them.’
An image of the half-empty rooms of her old home came to Amelia, waiting for her aunt to turn up while the bailiffs argued with each other over which of the bruisers would get to remove the choicest pieces of furniture, lifting her father’s cheap old oil painting of an imagined Camlantis off the wall and almost coming to blows over it. ‘No, it never is.’
‘Sixteen guineas, my dear lady,’ answered the trader. ‘The special offer was only for the man’s wife, because my heart is a big soft vessel easily touched by the cruel vagaries of our world.’
Amelia pointed down the river to where the Sprite of the Lake was tied up. ‘And that’s my vessel, my flabby friend. It’s big, but as you can see from the lines of its torpedo tubes, not particularly soft. The Sprite’s large enough that trading boats like yours are sometimes broken clean in two on our hull if we surface without first surveying the waters above us. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to forget the periscope check.’
‘You should have said so before, my dear lady,’ said the trader. ‘To honour a fellow swashbuckler braving the perils of the great river Shedarkshe is a pleasure, never a pain. For today only I shall extend the offer I made to the wife to you. A mere thirteen guineas, and as a token of my respect you may even keep the cotton breeches and shirt I have supplied this poor emancipated soul with.’
Amelia passed her coins across to one of the trader’s craynarbian guards. ‘Your respect is bought cheaply. Now take him into town and give him back to his family.’
‘That trader respects the Daggish well enough, I think,’ said Billy. ‘As should we, if we are to return from our devil’s errand alive. Getting close enough to the hive to tweak their nose – whether it is by stealing back those taken by the greenmesh, or by probing the ruins of Camlantis left on earth, that’s not something to be taken lightly. If things go badly for us, I have nobody at home waiting to pay a comfort trader’s price for me. I would be better off remaining part of the hive. At least the Daggish feed the slaves they absorb. There’s not many who would be queuing up to hire an old blind man scrubbed clean of his schooling in sonar.’
Amelia looked at the people left standing on the platform, empty vessels trying to remember what it was to be human. The freed slave who had once been a river pilot was being led down the platform. How much comfort had she bought that little girl and her mother? Not nearly enough, Amelia suspected. ‘If it comes to it, Billy, you shoot me rather than let me be taken alive as a slave by the Daggish.’
Suddenly Gabriel McCabe appeared, one of the Sprite’s sailors frantically shouting for him across the press of the market.
Billy Snow recognized the first mate by the weight of his footsteps alone. ‘Gabriel?’
‘Trouble in the town – one of Bull’s people.’
Amelia followed after McCabe as he pelted through Rapalaw’s gates, heading for the main square. At the centre of the town a small brawl had broken out, sailors from the Sprite fighting with craynarbians, a small patrol of uplanders trying to pull them apart.
Gabriel McCabe waded in, lifting one of the crewmen off his feet and spinning him around in the air. The craynarbian the sailor had been fighting tried to slash at McCabe, perhaps thinking the giant was one of the brawler’s friends. McCabe’s leg had a longer reach than the craynarbian’s sword arm and the first mate booted the craynarbian in his crotch shell, keeling him over. More uplanders arrived, the redcoats pushing the two sides apart with the butts of their rifles.
‘Who started this?’ boomed McCabe. ‘You know the commodore’s orders – you’ll taste the cat-o’-nine-tails for this.’
‘It was that thing.’ One of the sailors pointed at an old craynarbian, hardly an inch of his shell not covered by rainbow-bright whirls of paint, hundreds of illustrations of eyes detailed on the creature’s exo-armour. ‘Bloody witch doctor! Said the potion he sold me would see me stay perky all night in the bawdy house … instead, I’ve been pissing out green water since yesterday.’
‘It is not my fault,’ said the craynarbian sorcerer, shaking his two manipulator arms while his sword and club arms remained vertical in anger. ‘I warned this fool that the ways of magic and the worldsong work differently in our land. Leylines do not draw earthflow along predictable channels in Liongeli; the jungle drinks our power and radiates it. You use magic at your peril here.’
‘Dear Circle,’ Amelia swore in exasperation. ‘Is that all you seadrinkers think about? Someone take this idiot away to a jinn house and buy him a stiff drink.’
The redcoats from the Crimson Watch hooted with laughter and a few flashed up their kilts in the traditional upland gesture at a joke well-appreciated. As the witch doctor noticed Amelia for the first time, his eyes widened in shock, then he slowly dropped down on his knees, human lips keening like a hound through his
face’s bone plate. As he did this the other craynarbians followed his lead and buried their knees in the dust of the square, bowing down before Amelia and half-howling, half-singing in nervous voices.
Bull Kammerlan appeared in the square with more sailors, some carrying cudgels and obviously ready to aid their shipmates. The convict leader took in the scene with bemusement. ‘Everyone likes a lass with big arms, eh?’
‘She is marked,’ said the witch doctor, barely able to look up at Amelia. ‘Do you not see it? She carries the mark of the south, the mark of the ancients. What can the presence of the mark mean for our people?’
‘The south?’ Amelia remembered the wild woman of the sands who had saved her from the burning desert. And the cryptic message she had given Amelia before she disappeared back home.
‘On your knees, you river dogs,’ the witch doctor shouted up at the sailors. ‘Can you not see she has the mark of the ancients?’
Some of the submariners were backing away uneasily from Amelia, the murmur of ‘Jonah’ on their terrified lips.
Bull Kammerlan rounded on his men. ‘Keep your heads, you damn fools. This old shell has been smoking some bad mumbleweed and you sorry lot start acting like the crew of a laundry house. Was it bad luck that saw us all freed from jail at Bonegate and put on the deck of a u-boat again?’
An old sailor scratched at his grizzled silver beard. ‘This is bad, oh this is bad.’
‘Hold your tongue, Roth,’ ordered Gabriel McCabe.
‘Do not show disrespect to the mark of the ancients,’ warned the witch doctor, ‘or you will invoke punishment.’
As soon as the craynarbian finished speaking a strange whining filled the air, coming from a small black dot in the cloudless sky that was gradually growing larger and larger. The whistle ended in a gurgle as an arrow as long as a spear thudded through the chest of the sailor Roth. He looked down at the projectile in disbelief, his fingers touching the carved bone arrowhead to see if it was real. His blood was flowing onto the ground from the arrowhead’s fluted holes, pierced to sing a victory song to the jungle.
‘Oh – jigger – that.’
Dark clouds of whining arrows filled the sky as the sailor fell face-first into the dirt, quite dead. On the town walls someone began ringing an alarm bell, the warning of a tribal assault echoing over the adobe and timber walls of Rapalaw Junction’s buildings.
‘Back to the Sprite,’ Bull shouted, ‘before they shut the town gates.’
‘How safe will we be there?’ said Amelia. ‘We can’t submerge yet, and the garrison may—’
‘Roger that for a laugh, dimples,’ said Bull, pulling out a pistol. ‘I’m not camping down here. This place comes under siege by the feral shells at least once a year, and the attacks usually last until the RAN diverts one of the Fleet of the East’s airships up here to rain fire-fins down on the craynarbians’ armoured noggins. You want to be stuck inside Rapalaw Junction for the next two months, chewing on rat meat and hoping our well water lasts out until the relief force arrives?’
Amelia jolted left, a long arrow banging into the ground where she had been standing. ‘I thought hunkering down here would suit you just fine, sailor boy.’
‘Not me, girl,’ said Bull. ‘The richest man in Jackals didn’t get to be that way by sending us up the Shedarkshe on a fool’s errand. He knows that old sea dog Black has a nose for treasure, and he’s paid a pretty farthing to make sure we get to it. Maybe there’ll be enough left to fill me and my boys’ pockets too, eh?’
By the docks, Quest’s private army had taken up positions around the Sprite of the Lake. Her tanks had been partially flooded, leaving just her twin turrets visible and the deck an inch out of the river.
Veryann appeared, still serene in the face of the afternoon heat and the impending attack. She might as well have been carved from ice. ‘Into the boat. We cast off within the half hour.’
Amelia unbuttoned the flap on her leather pistol holster, the heft of her old Tennyson and Bounder reassuring in her hand. ‘We’re days away from completing the repairs.’
From the jungle on the opposite side of the river, an armada of rafts was being pushed out into the Shedarkshe, each vessel filled by huge craynarbians, a blaze of war-painted shells.
‘Chief T’ricola has the scrubbers running at ten per cent of their capacity,’ said Veryann. ‘Enough to get us out of the field of battle. The remaining repairs can be made during the voyage.’
Amelia looked across at the heavily armed tribesmen shaking their spears and spring-guns, thousands of them appearing on the opposite riverbank now. If they had half an hour before the Sprite’s hull and Rapalaw Junction’s walls were swarming with craynarbian warriors, siege ladders and hostile witch doctors, she could not see it.
Damson Beeton walked down the corridor of the mansion, her lantern’s light flickering over the portraits that lined the gallery. Not that they were anything to do with the master’s family – they had come along with the house, left by the previous owner. What had not come, however, was any decent clockwork-timed lighting or heating systems to enliven the draughty corridors and rooms. Where the other islands on the Skerries were palaces of light after night fell, Dolorous Isle stood alone as an oppressive dark mass, only a single pier lamp blowing in the wind to remind the river’s pilots that there was life here.
Septimoth was approaching down the corridor from the opposite end, his wings tucked back so they did not knock over any of the table ornaments as he went. The housekeeper and the lashlite met in the middle of the corridor, outside the master’s room.
‘You heard it too?’ asked the housekeeper.
Septimoth cocked an ear to the door. ‘It is the dream, Damson Beeton. He is having the dream again.’
‘It’s not right,’ said Damson Beeton, ‘a man like him suffering like this. Can’t you impose on him to see an alienist? With his money he could go to the best practice in Middlesteel.’
Septimoth shook his head. ‘There are some things that are beyond even the powers of your surgeons of the mind and soul to heal.’
‘He has the dream once a week now. It was bad enough when they came each month.’
‘He is worried of late, I think,’ said Septimoth.
The housekeeper waved an accusing finger at the lashlite. ‘You two are as thick as thieves with your Circle-damned secrets. Don’t think I don’t see it. What is the dream, you wily old bird? Master Fortune won’t tell me … but you know, I can see that much. It has something to do with your blind eye, doesn’t it?’
Septimoth scratched the back of his neck, at the weal where his seeing eye should have been. The one that gave the aerial hunters their three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision – along, it was rumoured, with other powers. Such as the ability to see into the future. ‘Not directly, damson. I have told you before, this eye I lost because I lacked vision.’
‘Teeth of the Circle,’ the housekeeper growled in frustration. ‘Damn your eyes then, Septimoth; the two you’ve kept, and the one you lost that makes you a useless manservant in this old heap. I’ll be off to bed and hear no more of your double talk until I make the three of us breakfast.’
* * *
Hours later, on the other side of the door, Cornelius Fortune still tossed and turned, in the power of a dream as his two servants had suspected. A nightmare that had become habit.
Cornelius was walking across a recently ploughed field – tilled by hand, now all the horses had been slaughtered for food – in the company of the village simpleton the local committee had found to tend the orchard, leading him slowly across to the tree he was seeking.
‘This is it,’ said the newly recruited farmer, casting a sad eye over the barren stumps barely rising out of the ground – all apart from one. He raised a hand that had only three fingers on it towards the solitary budding tree. ‘But look how this one grows. What a beauty. She’s the only one to thrive here.’
‘Look how she grows,’ Cornelius moaned, his hands scrabbling th
rough the dry mud around the tree. They didn’t know how to grow anything in this land anymore. There were no irrigation channels. No water. They hadn’t even buried the seedling orchard deep enough for its roots to take hold. One boy tending farm land meant to be worked by a hundred, while his compatriots debated furiously over which illustrious revolutionaries the fields should be named after, passing regulations to bid the crops to grow faster, enacting laws to make it rain more equitably across the regions.
‘That’s how I knew where to take you, she’s the only tree to thrive out in the Glorious Orchard of the Revolution Seventy Six, Farming Community of Heroine Justine Taniayay,’ said the boy, getting the mantra just right. ‘They say I’m stupid, but I can remember them all, the names written on the sacks, the sacks that smelled so bad. That dead tree over there had a baron emptied over it. That tree next door got a woman who owned the manufactory that made rocking horses; I went on one of those once. Imagine that. I rode her wooden horses, and then I got to empty her over a tree, a tree just for her. And this tree is the one you asked for. Look how she grows.’
Cornelius let his borrowed face slip. He could hold the image of the area inspector no more, his face warping back to his natural features, the tears streaming from his eyes. The simple peasant lad just looked on, as if a melting, changing face was something he saw every day. Cornelius dug out the young sapling with expert care, brushing away the dirt, removing the tree from the ground without killing it.
‘You know about the growing and the planting and the old ways?’ asked the boy.
‘I was a farmer,’ said Cornelius, cradling the plant. ‘Once.’
‘You should stay here, then,’ said the boy, as if he was offering Cornelius the crown of the Sun King itself. ‘This is a farm.’
Cornelius stood up and touched the boy’s arm gently. ‘Thank you, but I cannot – I am not a farmer any more.’
‘There were more of us here last year,’ said the boy. ‘More of us helping with the trees and the turnips and the corn and the barley. At least ten people. I remember that – even though people keep on telling me I am wrong, there was never anyone else working with me. There was old farmer Adoulonge too, even though people say there was never a man of that name living here. What do you do now, compatriot sir?’
