''I doubt I have ever missed her more,'' Uskins read aloud with mock reverence. ''All the beauties of this world are dust without my Annabel.' '
'Devil!'
Fiffengurt lunged for the journal, but Uskins kept his body between the quartermaster and his notebook. He was very nearly laughing. 'Carry on, Frix,' he said. 'I'll see that this reaches the captain.'
'But it's my blary property!' shouted Fiffengurt.
Uskins looked at him with naked malice. 'I am glad to hear you say so. First, because you will be held to account for whatever libel or mutinous matter I find in these pages.'
' You find?' said Neeps.
'And second,' Uskins continued, 'because to keep such a journal is a crime in itself.' He backed in a circle, holding off the quartermaster with one hand and waving the open book above his head with the other. 'Except for letters home, an officer's every written word is the property of the Chathrand Trading Company. Imperial law, Fiffengurt. We'll see how Captain Rose decides to punish-Ach!'
Pazel had crept around behind him and grabbed the journal. Uskins was caught off guard and stumbled over the resin-can, which oozed bubbling across the deck. But he kept his grip on the book. Furious, he slammed Pazel against the wall with his shoulder, even as Neeps and Fiffengurt grabbed at the book themselves.
'The lamp! The lamp!' cried the other boys.
Fiffengurt looked up: Uskins must have struck the oil lamp with a wild swing of the notebook. The peg on which it hung had cracked, and looked set to break at any moment. Walrus-oil lamps were sturdy but not indestructible, and fire in a passage awash with flammable resin was too grim a thought to contemplate. Fiffengurt let go of his journal and grabbed the lamp with both hands.
Uskins gave a vicious, whole-bodied tug. Pazel and Neeps held fast — and the journal ripped at the spine. Man and boys fell apart, each side gripping half the ruined book.
The first mate looked at what he held. With an approving snicker he jumped to his feet and ran off along the corridor, leaving sticky resin bootprints.
'That pig got almost everything,' said Neeps, riffling the mangled pages. 'This is the empty half of the book.'
'Are you hurt, lads?'
They assured him they weren't. Fiffengurt inspected them to be sure, moving slowly, as if in a daze. At last he turned to his beloved journal. Out of two hundred pages he was left with three.
'I'm so sorry, Mr Fiffengurt,' said Pazel.
The quartermaster stared at the crumpled sheets, as if expecting them to multiply. Slowly his jaw tightened, his teeth clenched and his hands began to shake. The tarboys shuffled backwards. Fiffengurt turned on his heel and bellowed:
'Uskins! Son of a leprous limp-teated dog-spurned side-alley whore!'
The Oggosk, Eighteenth Duchess of Tiroshi, had for reasons never well explained made her quarters in a little room inside the forecastle house, between the smithy and the chicken coops.
The cabin had been hers for a quarter century, since her first voyage with Captain Rose. When Rose was stripped of his captaincy in 929, Oggosk departed as well, but her last deed was to mark her cabin door with a strange symbol in chalk. According to tarboy legend, anyone who set foot in Oggosk's cabin from that day forward broke out in chills, boils, warts or mortifyingly confessional song, depending on who was telling the story. There was no proof of these claims. What was certain was that her little cabin had stood untouched for twelve years, until she and Rose returned in triumph to the Chathrand.
The door was painted robin's-egg blue: a strange choice for a woman nearly everyone on the ship was afraid of. Pazel had had time to reflect on this curiosity for some minutes now. Oggosk was making them wait.
'We don't have to be here,' said Neeps. 'We're not in the service; we don't have to hop when Uskins says so.'
'Don't be a fool, mate,' said Pazel. 'We may not be tarboys, but we're sure as Pitfire not Rose's guests. We'd be better off if they gave us more work to do. If Rose ever gets it into his head that we're useless, why, he'll toss us down to steerage with the rest of those poor louts, and only let us out to use the heads.'
Neeps grunted. 'I'm blary starved. When we're done here we have to make Teggatz slip us something to eat. It's our meal shift right now, you know.'
Pazel smiled. 'Your stomach's growling like a street dog.'
'I want to be strong for our fighting lesson, that's all,' said Neeps.
'There's one thing we have to do before we eat,' said Pazel, his mood darkening. 'Track down Greysan Fulbreech.' He glanced about nervously, then whispered: 'You know that the minute we're past Talturi, Thasha's coming out of hiding.'
'So?'
'Neeps, if Fulbreech has anything — well, shocking — to say about her father, I want us to know first, so we can break it to her gently.'
'Right you are,' said Neeps. Then the ship's bell began to ring, and he stamped his foot. 'That's eight bells, by damn! What in the Nine Pits can that old crone be-'
The latch clicked. The blue door swung wide, and a pungent odour met their nostrils: incense, ginger, old sweat, dead flowers. 'Come in, monkeys,' said Lady Oggosk from the shadows.
They entered, warily lifting aside an old batik curtain, and saw the duchess seated on a black cushioned chair against the far wall, with her enormous cat Sniraga pacing before her, its red tail twitching like a snake. The light was dim: no lamp burned, but a six-inch-square bit of glass planking was set into the ceiling, allowing a little pale, diffuse sunlight to enter from the deck above. 'Close the door behind you,' said Oggosk, 'and sit down.'
But where? The cabin was small and preposterously cluttered. The boys' shoulders bumped together as they took in the shelves, footstools, scroll cases, stoppered flasks, ancient sun parasols, bead boxes, cigar boxes, dangling bunches of dried herbs, weird animal statuettes. It was not clear where Oggosk slept: the furniture was buried under shawls and sea-cloaks and massive age-darkened books.
There was literally no space free of clutter except for the thin path between Oggosk's chair and the door. So when Oggosk indicated with an impatient gesture that she really did mean for them to sit, that is where they did so.
'Did you hear that messenger bird on Simja?' she asked without preamble.
'The woken bird?' asked Pazel.
'Of course.'
'I did,' said Neeps, 'what of it?'
'Do you know the story of the Garden of Happiness?'
Pazel sighed. 'You can't grow up in Arqual, or anywhere near it, without hearing that stupid tale.'2
'There was a peacock, too,' said Oggosk, 'in the governor's palace at Ormael, who fawned on his brainless wife. 'O saintly lady,' it called her. And one of Mr Latzlo's beasts, a climbing anteater, has the look in its eye right now: the look of terror that comes before a waking. The animal should have been given to the Simjans — where is it to find ants, on the Ruling Sea? — but Sandor Ott's order that no one be allowed off the ship extends even to animals, it seems. And perhaps he was right, at that.'
The boys exchanged a look of impatience.
'That odious man spoke of selling his anteater,' she went on, 'with no more concern for its well-being than if it were a piece of taxidermy — bloodless, soulless, stuffed.'
'Like Arqualis do with slaves,' Pazel couldn't resist adding.
'Just so,' agreed Oggosk. 'Though the ban on slavery that has taken root in Etherhorde may be extended to the outer territories, soon enough.'
'Soon enough? ' Neeps said, laughing under his breath.
Suddenly the old woman's glance was sharp. 'We were discussing the waking phenomenon,' she said. 'Consider, boys: it has been going on for some eleven centuries. But in the first ten, only a few hundred animals awoke. There have been that many in the last forty years alone, and the rate is still increasing.'
'We can see that,' said Pazel. 'But what does it have to do with us?'
'Try thinking before you ask,' she said. 'What happened forty years ago?'
'The great war ended,' said Neeps at once.
