The Princess and the Captain

by Anne-Laure Bondoux

  ‘I agree, there’s nothing wrong with this island,’ Finopico decided at last. ‘Let’s take advantage of this sunny spell and go ashore.’

  They all decided to go, except Malva, who said she would rather stay on board.

  ‘I’ll keep an eye on the soup,’ she said, ‘and then if Orpheus wakes up he won’t be alone.’

  She watched her companions climb down the rope ladder.

  ‘And don’t hang about!’ she advised them. ‘There are only five Stones left in the Nokros!’

  Seabirds were soaring above the cliffs, now and then diving down to the crevices in the rocks where their chicks were nesting. A breeze had risen, and the temperature seemed all the more pleasant because a moment earlier they had all thought they were going to freeze where they stood.

  Light at heart, Lei led her troop of explorers up a steep path and then along a road rising to the meadows. As she walked she looked at the verges of the road. Her expert eye found herbs, plants, roots and useful berries, and she got a good harvest. The pockets of her tunic were soon bulging.

  ‘Kinds I not know,’ she said out loud, ‘but I find out how mix them all. Knowledge of Balmun very great!’

  They soon arrived near a paddock where animals were grazing. They were not goats, or sheep, or cows. Finopico stood by the fence, resting his elbows on it and searching his memory to decide whether he had ever seen such beasts before. They had short legs, and were stocky and muscular like little bulls, but without any horns. Long, hairy ears hung beside their wide, flat muzzles.

  ‘Never seen anything like them,’ the cook admitted at last, ‘but I wouldn’t mind trying a steak from one.’

  They left the paddock and meadows behind and climbed on towards the town. As they passed through the forest, Lei picked a great many more mushrooms and fruits. The closer they came to the houses, the more noises they heard: little bells, shutters banging in the wind, voices answering each other. They stopped on the outskirts of the forest and waited.

  There wasn’t a single inhabitant to be seen. The streets echoed with happy cries, the hammering of tools and merry laughter, but no old gossip, no craftsman, no child came to meet the new arrivals.

  ‘Perhaps they’re … well, very small?’ suggested Hob. ‘So small that we can’t see them?’

  ‘Don’t talk such nonsense,’ replied Finopico. ‘Their houses are the same size as ours. We must go closer, that’s all.’

  He started along the first street, with Lei and Babilas. The noises sounded so close … all of a sudden a handcart came up in front of them. Lei uttered a cry. The cart stopped. Its two wooden handles remained in the air on their own, as if by magic. The cart was full of neatly tied bundles of firewood, but who or what was pulling it? There was no one in sight!

  ‘Hey!’ shouted Finopico. ‘Where are you?’

  The handles of the cart immediately dropped to the paving stones with a clatter. There was a sound of running, and then a voice which came from nowhere, speaking a language that no one could understand … no one but Lei.

  ‘He go tell others!’ she translated in a voice quivering with emotion. ‘He say that … that saviours have come!’

  ‘Saviours?’ repeated Finopico.

  ‘But who was it?’ groaned the twins. ‘Who said that? Who was pulling the cart?’

  Lei turned her pearl-like eyes on them and shook her head.

  ‘Lloedzar a smigoim,’ said Babilas. ‘Cnohmbelb brogez!’

  ‘And what about him?’ cried the twins in panic. ‘What’s he saying?’

  ‘Babilas think people here invisible,’ Lei translated.

  She didn’t have to offer any more arguments to persuade her companions that Babilas was right. The street was soon full of murmurs. Under the frightened eyes of the five travellers, wicker baskets and wooden tubs floated through the air, while a small toy horse on wheels wheeled itself over the paving stones without anyone to push it. A pitchfork rose over the crowd of invisible people by itself. Peppe tugged Finopico’s sleeve.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he begged.

  ‘Wait!’ said Lei. ‘These … these people means us no harm. Let me listen!’

  The murmuring voices of the unseen men, women and children mingled, making a racket that echoed back from the walls of the houses. Lei frowned and tried to follow what they were all saying. She translated as she went along.

  ‘They say great epidemic strike their island once. No medicine … no one have cure.’

  Suddenly a fabric ball rolled to the twins’ feet. They trembled. A moment later the ball rose from the ground and swayed back and forth under their noses.

  ‘Go away!’ moaned Peppe, pushing at the air in front of him. ‘Shoo! Shoo! I don’t want to play!’

  A small voice gave some kind of reply.

  ‘Child say he never seen one of Living before,’ Lei translated.

  ‘One of the Living?’ asked Hob. ‘You mean … you mean we’re among the dead here?’

  Lei nodded.

  ‘They ghosts of dead people. After epidemic, no survivors. They become Unseen. And they wait for saviours every day.’

  Finopico turned pale. He flinched, protesting that he was no one’s saviour, only a cook, and he was going to get out of here straight away.

  ‘No,’ said Lei. ‘You wait a while!’

  She questioned the empty air at length, receiving answers in the language of the Unseen. Meanwhile Babilas, the twins and Finopico remained in a group behind her, eyes wide with amazement. At last the daughter of Balmun turned round, smiling.

  ‘They want show us something. You come.’

  ‘What?’ gasped Finopico in strangled tones. ‘Go with them? Nothing doing!’

  ‘This island is accursed!’ added the twins. ‘Let’s get back to the ship!’

  ‘Why do we have to help these Unseen people?’ asked the cook, stepping back again. ‘They’re just air!’

  Lei went up to him, fixing him with her blue gaze. ‘Catabea say we face our fears, and if not, we fail. Cannot refuse now. If you cowardly, you go. I help these people!’

  ‘Horch ghim!’ said Babilas, following Lei.

  Finopico bit his lip and bent his head. He remembered the warnings that the Guardian of the Archipelago had given them. He sighed, grumbled a little, but finally agreed to follow the Unseen.

  Beside him, Hob and Peppe had fallen silent. They walked on reluctantly, never sparing a glance for the squares, the fountains, the porches. The town which had looked to them so charming from a distance had really been frozen in death for years. It was a chilling idea.

  The pitchfork, the tubs, the baskets, the fabric ball and the toy horse on wheels led the travellers right through the town along steep roads. At last they made their way round the lighthouse.

  Now the five companions saw the other side of the island, its hidden face. The landscape here was nothing like what they had seen from the Fabula. The place was one vast graveyard, a field of desolation, full of brambles, littered with dry twigs, covered with grey dust. The graves, scattered all down the slope, were like black gashes in the middle of the wild grass.

  Lei shuddered, thinking how terrible the epidemic must have been. Some of the graves were no larger than cradles. She felt her heart sink, her throat was dry, and she clenched her fists. Her whole being quivered with the long-ago grief of the mothers who had to lay their children in the earth, the distress of the men who had to dig their wives’ graves, and the indescribable sorrow of the last survivor. Alone on his island, he must have lain down in a hole to die like a dog.

  Tears ran down Lei’s cheeks as the Unseen told her what they wanted. It was mad, senseless, terrifying, but if anyone could help them she, the daughter of Balmun, was the one to do it. She swore an oath in the language of the Unseen, and then turned to her companions.

  ‘I come back here tonight,’ she announced. ‘I repair what was broken. Thanks to knowledge of Balmun, I unite what was separated.’

  35

  T
he Hour of the Dead

  ‘You don’t even know what they died of!’ Malva pointed out.

  She was sitting on a sea chest in a corner between-decks. Lei was moving around near her, sorting out plants and roots, blowing up the fire under the last cauldron they had on board. She had rolled up the sleeves of her tunic, and was in such a state of agitation that her brow was covered with sweat.

  ‘How do you think you can work such a miracle?’ Malva went on. ‘Your medicine can cure bites, set broken bones – even close up sword wounds. But what these … these Unseen are asking you to do is something else!’

  Lei didn’t reply. She was concentrating on her work with unprecedented intensity. She chopped leaves, removed the seeds from wild berries, made calculations, measured out ingredients, mixed them – nothing else interested her.

  ‘They’re dead!’ Malva cried again. ‘They’ve been dead and buried for years! You’ll never bring them back to life, Lei!’

  Malva thought her friend was being a little vain: who did she think she was? Who, in the Two Worlds, could boast of being able to restore the dead to life? At heart Malva knew she was jealous of Lei’s knowledge. She felt sure that Orpheus would admire Lei enormously when he was better, and …

  ‘I not have choice,’ said Lei quietly. ‘This is test for me. If I refuse test, Catabea know. Then Catabea send us to Immuration.’

  Malva clasped her knees in her arms and looked sullen.

  The day had tested her nerves severely. She had paced up and down anxiously for hours while Orpheus slept in his berth. She had visited him countless times, hoping he would open his eyes and recognise her. It was a waste of time: Orpheus slept and slept and slept. Giving up, Malva had taken Zeph with her and lay close to him on her bunk to feel less lonely. Acid was still dripping from the alembic on the five Stones of Life in the Nokros. The gloomiest of thoughts had invaded her mind. Later, when she heard her companions coming back, she had heaved a sigh of relief and ran to meet them.

  Once on board, they had told her the whole complicated tale of their discoveries. Malva couldn’t believe that they had followed invisible beings all over the island, yet it was the truth. Here, as in the rest of the Archipelago, inexplicable things really happened.

  Hob said he had counted sixty-eight graves in the graveyard on the other side of the island. How terrible!

  Lei had summed up the tale that the Unseen had told her. Every night the island was plunged deep in mist. The Unseen of the town shut themselves up in their houses. This was the Hour of the Dead. Corpses rose from their graves on the other side of the island. They climbed to the lighthouse, they walked in the streets, the meadows, the fields, the woods. At that moment the temperature fell several degrees. In spite of the thick mist, the dead worked: it was they who kept the roads in good condition, repaired the low walls, fed the herds of nuba-nubas, those strange beasts whose meat Finopico no longer wanted to taste. It was the dead who rang the bell in the morning when the mists lifted. Then they went back to their graves and did not move until the following night. It had been like that since the end of the epidemic.

  As she listened to this story Malva felt her hair stand on end. But when the daughter of Balmun told her that she had promised the Unseen to find some way of curing their dead she was left speechless. To repair what was broken and unite what was separated … that was what they expected. According to a prophecy, a saviour was going to appear and work that miracle: reunite the two sides of the island, repair the bodies wrecked by disease so that their souls could inhabit them again, and life could go on as it did in the old days.

  ‘If I find cure,’ Lei had finished, spreading her harvest of herbs and fruits out on deck, ‘curse on island lifted. Then we go.’ And now she was here between decks concocting her potions.

  Night was already falling outside. Wisps of mist were clinging to the portholes, and the cold made its way into the Fabula again. Lei had taken off Orpheus’s jacket and put it on the chest. Malva’s teeth were chattering.

  ‘Take jacket,’ Lei suggested. ‘If you not fear bad luck because of blood …’

  Malva shrugged her shoulders and picked up the jacket. Its collar smelled of Orpheus. She breathed it in at length.

  ‘Babilas say he come with me,’ added Lei, still stirring the potion bubbling in the cauldron. ‘We have to give cure to sixty-eight dead before sun rises.’

  ‘That’s a lot,’ Malva agreed.

  ‘I need help,’ Lei added. ‘Twins too frightened … Finopico too, but you?’

  Malva’s fingers tightened on the lapels of the jacket. She didn’t know what to say. At that moment Lei tipped a powder made from roots that she had found in the undergrowth into the cauldron. Disgusting fumes suddenly spread between decks. Finopico emerged from his galley, horrified.

  ‘What on earth is that?’ he cried. ‘It smells horrible!’

  ‘To cure deadly disease,’ said Lei in learned tones, ‘potion must be horrible.’

  Nauseated, the cook shook his head. ‘Holy Harmony protect our taste buds from sorcery!’

  Malva looked at Lei, and they burst out laughing, while Finopico angrily slammed the door.

  ‘I’m not afraid,’ said Malva, when her laughter had died down. ‘You can count on me to help you on the island.’

  Babilas, Lei and Malva left the Fabula two hours later, laden with phials and small jars containing Lei’s potion. Each of them was also carrying a storm-lantern, which didn’t cast much light anyway. The mist turned night white, night turned the mist black; they could hardly see their own feet when they looked down.

  It was so cold that no one wanted to go up on deck with them. The twins and Finopico had gathered round the stove in the galley, and Zeph was acting as a blanket for Orpheus: Malva’s idea to keep the Captain from catching cold. The old St Bernard had been perfectly willing to lie full length on top of his master. He was drooling liberally over him too, but Orpheus didn’t notice.

  Babilas jumped down to the beach and helped the two girls. His large figure walked a little unsteadily before them, ghost-like but reassuring. The three of them went in single file along the pathways and roads. Beyond the little roadside walls, fields and meadows were lost in the mist. Suddenly they heard bleating on their right. It was the nuba-nubas, no doubt wanting to be fed. Lei stopped.

  She raised her lantern and scrambled over the wall. The other two followed her in silence, and they set off across the meadow. The grass and flowers were wet with dew. Malva had buried her nose in the collar of Orpheus’s jacket to give herself courage. Every time she breathed in, his scent made its way into her nostrils and warmed her heart a little.

  The bleating of the nuba-nubas was closer now. They could also hear dry creaking sounds, rustling straw and gurgling water. Somewhere in the mist, the dead were giving the flock fodder and water.

  Lei took a phial out of the pocket of her tunic. She cautiously went forward, straining her ears to help her get her bearings. Behind her, Malva was clinging to Babilas. She felt fear in the pit of her stomach.

  Suddenly shadows appeared in the light of the lanterns. Malva suppressed a scream.

  ‘Is only nuba-nubas,’ Lei whispered, still going forward.

  The long-eared animals were crowding around them, rubbing against their legs. They seemed perfectly harmless. Malva took a deep breath. But at that moment a taller shadow emerged from the darkness, carrying a bale of hay on its back. Lei immediately raised her lantern and said a few words in the language of the Unseen. The shadow moved. When it was close enough the three terrified companions saw its face: it was a man, and cadaverously thin. Above the man’s fleshless neck was a bloated face, earth-coloured and mottled with violet stains. His wide, bloodshot eyes rolled in their sockets.

  Meeting that sorrowful gaze, Malva felt her legs about to give way beneath her. Babilas held her up with one hand while Lei talked to the apparition. She held her phial up in the air.

  The dead man put down his bale of hay. He looked at L
ei with a kind of amazement. She spoke to him again and again, until at last he was prepared to take the phial. He turned it this way and that in his skeletal fingers. Malva closed her eyes: the sight of this man, risen from his grave, nauseated her. When she looked again she saw him taking the stopper from the little bottle and carrying it to his mouth. Lei was close enough to touch him. She kept talking gently.

  The dead man drank all the potion in the phial and gave it back to Lei. Then, without a word, he lifted his bale of hay again, turned his back on them and vanished into the mist. Lei, Malva and Babilas looked at each other, heaving sighs of relief.

  Now they had only sixty-seven more of the dead to find.

  It took all night. Groping her way through the fields, the woods and the streets of the town, Lei led Babilas and Malva on in her insane quest. All the dead looked like nightmares when they emerged from the fog. Empty-eyed, mouths contorted by their past sufferings, their faces bloated, their bodies disjointed, some even had traces of dried blood on their cheeks. Malva couldn’t get accustomed to their sickly, putrefied faces, particularly when they were children. Several times she was on the point of running away or fainting. Babilas helped her to overcome her disgust every time, while Lei went tirelessly up to the dead and spoke to them until they had drunk the potion. The worst of it was that none of them knew exactly what the effects of her brew might be.

  In her heart, Malva felt that her friend’s efforts would be in vain, but Lei never showed any sign of discouragement. She wanted to save these people and allow the Unseen to return to their bodies. Above all, she wanted to pit her powers of healing against the infinitely greater powers of Death.

  Babilas kept count of the phials, the jars and the corpses they met. When he told Lei that the sixty-eighth dead body had just drunk her medicine, the daughter of Balmun turned her weary eyes to him. She was swaying where she stood, her lips dry and her voice hoarse. She just looked at the sky. The mist was already dispersing, revealing a few pale stars. Malva, exhausted, sat down on the ground. She buried her face in her hands and began weeping with fatigue.