Then dry shall I sleep in the under-depths
Beside my stolen children.
Pazel was so alarmed he nearly stumbled. The ship's name was still in Arquali, but beneath it ran a new inscription-no, the very same! — but in a tongue Pazel had never seen.
It's starting, he thought. It's starting again.
There it was: the throbbing in the back of his head, like the purr of some waking animal. Pazel gazed at the strange letters. He did not know the name of the language-but he could read it. Suddenly, perfectly. And in a burst of rage he knew what Chadfallow had done.
Fiffengurt trained his good eye on Pazel. 'I know where it's written, cleverskins,' he said. 'But you were speaking Arquali just now.'
'Was I?'
'You blary well know you were! Fancy enough for court. Who translated the Blessing for you?'
'I… I must have overheard someone,' Pazel said. 'On my old ship, maybe.'
'Name?'
'The Eniel.'
'Your name, lummox!'
'Pazel Pathkendle, sir!'
'Hmmph,' said Fiffengurt. 'Well, lads, Mr. Pathkendle has just recited the Builder's Blessing. All the old ships have 'em, some flimflam spoken by a mage or seer, or Rin knows who, before the ship ever touched the sea. Not all of them sound like blessings, as you just heard. Some are hexes, prophecies-curses, even, against those who'd do the ship harm. Nobody knows just what the Chathrand's builders had in mind. But listen close: we don't speak those words aboard her. Bad luck, that is, and Captain Rose won't stand for it.'
He wagged a finger at Pazel. Then he gave another of his disorienting, over-your-shoulder smiles, and resumed the climb.
The Gift
1 Vaqrin 941
9:16 a.m.
Pazel's breath came short. The animal in his mind was waking, stretching, flexing its claws. He did not know what it was, or why it lived in the cave between his ears, but he knew what it did to him. It gave him language. And took language away.
His mother Suthinia was to blame. It happened at home in Ormael, just months before the Arquali invasion. Winter was breaking up in storms, and in such weather Suthinia was at her strangest and most disagreeable. She quarreled with Chadfallow, who came to dine and found Pazel and Neda chewing last year's wrinkled potatoes: Suthinia had been too distracted to go to market. At times she seemed almost mad. In electrical storms she climbed the roof and stood with arms outstretched, although Chadfallow swore that to do so was to provoke the lightning. The night she fought with Chadfallow, Pazel had lain awake, listening, but even in their fury the adults kept their voices low, and all he heard was one exceptionally desperate cry from his mother:
'What if they were yours, Ignus? You'd do just the same! You couldn't send them away into the night as they are, friendless, lost-'
'Friendless?' came the wounded reply. 'Friendless, you say?'
Moments later Pazel heard the doctor's footsteps in the garden, the sharp clang of the gate.
The next morning, Pazel's mother, surly as a bear and twice as dangerous, began cooking again. She made corn cakes with plum sauce, their father's recipe no doubt, and when they had finished she poured them each a generous mug of custard-apple pulp.
'Drink this,' she told them. 'For your health.'
'It's sour,' said Pazel, sniffing his mug.
'From special fruits, very expensive. Drink, drink!'
They choked the bad pulp down. After lunch she filled the mugs again, and the taste was even worse. Neda, who was seventeen and very wise, told him their mother was suffering 'a lady's discomforts' in a tone of such gravity that Pazel felt ashamed for not liking anything she served. But as evening came they saw her in the garden, furiously squeezing custard-apple pulp through her fingers into a big stone bowl, and she had to resort to threats to bring her children to table. When they were finally seated she placed a tall pitcher of the translucent gruel before them.
'Can't we at least start with the meal?' Neda sniffed.
Suthinia filled their mugs. 'This is your meal. Drink.'
'Mother,' said Pazel gently, 'I don't care for custard apple.'
'Drink it all!'
They drank. Pazel had never imagined such misery. His belly ached by the second mugful, and by the fourth he knew his mother was poisoning them, for she herself took not a drop. When the pitcher was finally empty she let them go, but they could do no more than stagger to their rooms and lie quaking, holding their stomachs. Minutes after climbing into bed, Pazel was unconscious.
That night he dreamed his mother entered his room with a cage full of songbirds. They were lovely and of many colors, and their songs took shape in the air and fell like cobwebs about the room. Each time she entered the room the birds wove another layer, until a net of solid sound hung from the walls and wardrobe and bedposts. Then his mother shouted, 'Wake!' and Pazel gasped and bolted upright in bed. He was alone, and his room held nothing unusual. Yet the dream had left him with a final, ludicrous image: as he woke, gasping, it seemed that the webs of birdsong had not simply vanished but rushed into his mouth, as if he had inhaled them all on that first breath.
When he left the room he saw three startling things. The first was Neda seated at the table, head in hands, looking quite a bit skinnier than the night before. The second was his mother, in even worse shape, crying at his sister's knees, saying, 'Forgive me, darling, forgive.' The third was that the garden had sprouted lilies two feet tall.
Then his mother looked up, screamed with joy and ran to embrace him.
Her poison had almost succeeded: they had lain at death's door for a month. Pazel returned her embrace, and when she pressed her ivory whale into his hand and asked him to keep it always he said he would. This was the mother he knew; that other, storm-worshipping, custard-apple creature was a nomad who dropped in now and then to wreck their lives. This mother was easy to love. She guarded the house from the great world beyond, and sang him highland lullabies, and if he ran into nettles at the orchard's edge, she removed them, armed with tweezers and his father's magnifying glass.
But if he ever saw another custard apple in the house he would just run away.
Four days after rising from his coma, the purring began. It felt warm and almost pleasant. When he told his mother about it she put down the shirt she was mending and came to face him.
'Pazel,' she said, lifting his chin sharply, 'my name is Suthinia. I am your mother. Do you understand?'
'Of course I do, Mother.'
'The geese fly east to chase the drakes.'
'What geese?'
Instead of answering, she tugged him to his father's library and pulled a crumbling volume from the shelf. She pointed at the spine and told him to read. Pazel obeyed: 'Great Families of Jitril. With Sketches of Their Finest Mansions and-'
'Ah ha ha!' she yelled in triumph.
She kissed his forehead and ran from the room, shouting for Neda. And when Pazel looked down at the book again, he realized that he had just read a language he didn't know. His father had purchased the book for its drawings, on some long-ago voyage to Jitril; neither he nor anyone they knew could read the words. But now Pazel could. He opened the book at random: '… this dread chief, scourge of the Rekere, whose noble whiskers-'
Mother, Pazel thought. You're a witch.
