just been hanged or stabbed or something. And then you’d never have invented your parasite pills, and I’d have died when I was eight.’
Chadfallow snorted, then winced with pain, but for a moment I saw pleasure in his eyes.
He is not alone in his melancholy, of course. Rose is still hermited in his cabin; Uskins still shuffles about like the walking dead. The men are grim, the tarboys witless with fear, the dlomu simply astonished. They hang together, these dlomu. Rin knows they must need the comfort of familiar faces, when all they see are pale humans, ghost faces to them, their country’s exterminated slaves come back to life. They sleep on the boards, play a game with dice and chalk lines, exercise at dawn. Teggatz says they don’t eat much — not more than half what a human eats — but after labour how they will gobble
As I say, they’re close. Still the ganglords smell fresh blood and are trying their luck at recruiting. This evening I heard Kruno Burnscove make a pitch to three of the youngest dlomu. Protection, he kept saying. ‘At the darkest hour, you’ll need more than forty brothers and sisters, won’t ye now? Human beings are wicked, you have no muckin’ idea. If we get lost out there, and the food gets low? You think them Plapps will settle for that dlomic putty you live on? Why, they’ll kill you and cut out your fat and boil it up into a stew. They’ve done it on other ships, lads. There’s witnesses aboard.’
He noticed me listening, then, but only smiled. What was I going to do about it?
‘All lies,’ I told the dlomu. ‘Pay no attention, lads. There’s strychnine on certain tongues.’
‘He
We bickered, but I could tell who had their ears. So could Kruno Burnscove, whose twinkle kept on brightening. Rose still needs the gangs; their hatred of each other protects him from any serious threat of mutiny. Otherwise he’d long ago have cut the heads off those twin snakes.
A ghastly night. Marila came weeping to my door. Sharp pains in her gut, and vomiting too: the poor girl was a sight. I put her in my bunk and ran to Chadfallow, hating to think of him rising and tearing all his stitches. But Felthrup was there ahead of me (he is Marila’s constant guardian in the stateroom), nipping at his ankles, chiding him to be careful.
‘Dysentery, if she’s lucky,’ said Chadfallow. ‘Nothing to do with the pregnancy — but I’ve seen it end a few. We must be ready for that.’ He sent me dashing off to Teggatz with a fistful of herbs to brew into tea. By the time I got back to my cabin he and Ratty were there, and Marila was moaning. She threw up the first cup; the second gave her the runs. A crowd gathered in the passage, hushed and fearful. Of all forms of good luck that sailors believe in, a babe in a lawful, wedded womb is the most potent. Not the cruellest bastard aboard wanted her to lose the child.
Marila sipped that brew for hours, Teggatz rushing back and forth from the galley with fresh kettles, Chadfallow taking her temperature, sniffing her sweat, making her blow up little balloons Rin knows what else besides, Ratty flying about my little cabin like blary ball lightning, insisting that everything be ‘perfect, please everyone, not good enough, passable, tolerable, tarboyish, rodent-grade —
Very late, the symptoms broke. Marila lay still, breathing easier, and the crowd drifted away, smiling like children. In time she persuaded Chadfallow to go to his rest, and I sent Felthrup along behind to see that he did so. Marila fell asleep gripping my sleeve. I lowered myself to the floor and closed my eyes. If anyone can bring us hope it will be young Mrs Undrabust.
I dreamed of the other youths. Pathkendle toppling from a bridge. Undrabust knuckle-walking like an ape. Thasha trapped in stone like a fly in amber. I had the power to save them from those calamities, to pull them together in my arms, and wonder of wonders, when I did so we had all become the same age, each of us in our bursting prime, unbent and exuberant and delivered from fear. They’re my kin, I thought, and why did it take so long to see it? For the journey was ended; someone was calling me away. And I only knew the place they had in my heart because I was leaving, because we’d never live beneath the same roof again. I woke stricken, on the point of blubbering tears.
Then my eyes snapped open. An ixchel was crouched on my foot locker, gazing at me. I started to rise, and knocked over the little stand with the tea kettle, waking Marila with a gasp.
The ixchel was gone. Surely I’d had a dream within a dream? ‘What is it, what’s happened?’ cried Marila. Nothing, dear, nothing. Old men will have nightmares, they talk to themselves, you should never spend the night in their company.
But the vision troubled me throughout the day. For it was not just any ixchel I’d dreamed about. It was Talag, their lord and elder, the embodiment of the clan. A genius and a fanatic, and a man who’d not be pried away from his people by any power on earth.
By our shipboard reckoning it is New Year’s Day. And thus the first day of spring in the North — though here the dlomu say that autumn has begun. And why should I expect anything comforting and familiar? Everything is backwards here. There are mould spores on the biscuits of a colour I’ve never seen in my life. There’s a second moon in the sky. Creatures with the skin of black eels and spun-silver hair rule an empire, and humans — what are they? Formerly slaves; today nothing at all, a bad memory, a handful of mindless scavengers dying of hunger in the wild. Rin’s mercy, what will happen to those we left behind?
The new year. Start of the twenty-nineth in the reign of that crooked man I shall never again call His Supremacy. I once adored him, our Magad of Arqual. I knew he’d had a hand in driving Empress Maisa from the throne, but the fact never troubled me. She was corrupt and twisted, she had to be — my schoolteachers had told us so. Never mind that the Abbot’s Prayer we said every morning had included a plea to Rin for her safekeeping. One morning she was our Empress; the next her portrait came down, and we were told that she was a villainess, and had been ‘mercifully’ allowed to flee into exile. They spoke of her with shame, that day. The following morning no one spoke of her at all. The last time I pronounced her name it was to my brother Gellin, and he hushed me angrily. ‘Don’t you
I didn’t argue. He was right; I was certain of it. Our generation had rather too many certainties.
Thirty years would pass before I heard another tale of Maisa’s overthrow. Hercol Stanapeth’s was a darker tale, but I didn’t have to be terrified or bullied into believing it. And we live (don’t we now?) in the hope that it may yet end well.
Whatever the future holds, this new year is starting off as dismal as the inside of a shark. The men’s feet drag, their eyes wear foggy veils of despair. They’re haunted by this day, of what it could be for them, what it
Then at midday Rose proves once more his gift for shocking us (the man’s mind is a jungle; at any moment a bright bird may issue from it, or a gruesome snake). We’re assembled on deck, even the late watch rousted and dragged into daylight, and there from the quarterdeck he bids us believe in the future: ‘As I told you once before, lads, the future we can fight for, not be given.” He doesn’t elaborate, mercifully enough: we are none of us open to pretty speeches any more. But he does bring forth the apple-cheeked Altymiran woman who helps out Teggatz in the galley. She’s well liked, and has regained a bit of her plumpness on the rations provided by Prince Olik. She also turns out to have the lungs of a choir mistress, and she sings us a naive little melody about the lambing-time in Arqual, and blast me if she doesn’t turn us all to lambs for ninety seconds or so.
Next comes his real trick: the old fox suddenly produces
