In this hall, his father had taught him the art of reading, and guided his hand as he scribbled his first thoughts on parchment with wavering lines.
'Thoughts are like butterflies,' he said.
Take care when capturing them lest you crush their wings,' his father responded. 'You know, it was necessity that drove me.' He shook his head. 'A Ruling Lord… teaching a child his glyphs…'
'And the crabbed, lifeless merchants' script…'
'… with which they trap wealth in their ledgers.' His father's lips always curled when he spoke of the merchants. Like all Masters he found commerce distasteful.
'But wealth is power…' said Carnelian.
'It is a fool who covets wealth, but he also is a fool who discards the way to power,' his father said. He saw Carnelian's expression. 'Have I said that many times?'
'I have it by heart. You showed me that my hands could' speak. The last word was a sign. Fingers are the lips and tongue of the silent speech. Their poetry of movement betrays the emotion behind the words. The words themselves are spoken without breath or sound by forming signs.
'You have a strong, clear hand.'
His father lifted up a book paler than his skin though not as radiant. 'As we have travelled together through these, so shall we travel through the greater world of which they are only impressions.'
'But what shall we be leaving behind, my Lord?' asked Carnelian.
'Famine,' his father replied. His lips compressed to a line.
'Is there no way, my Lord, we might ameliorate its harshness by reducing the amount that is taken by the baran?'
'Everything that can be done, my Lord, has been done.'
Suth watched his son's face harden with pain. 'You will have to face the situation as it is. The sharper blade leaves cleaner wounds.'
'Will the baran not accommodate more of our people? It is so large.'
His father shook his head. 'For all her bulk she really has very little space, Carnelian.' 'But the children, the elderly.'
The voyage would be as dangerous for them as staying here.'
'Father, are you not desolated by such loss?'
The marble of his father's skin was stained around the eyes. 'When we came here this place was a perfect mirror to my mood. That first winter was terrible. Many died. When they did not think I heard them, our people whispered that I had brought them across the black water to the Isle of the Dead. I think I almost shared their belief. As bleak and colourless as the Underworld is said to be, this island was worse. Perhaps if you had not been there swaddled in Ebeny's arms I might have let it remain always so. For your sake I let the household work upon the Hold. So far from Osrakum my hopes were ailing and wont to die. And yet in the years that have passed this desolation has become my home. It sits deep in my affection, perhaps more even than our palaces in Osrakum, of which all this' – he curved his arms out and round as if he were embracing the Hold – 'is not even a reflection in dull brass.' His father shook his head again. 'If my memory gives me true recollection.' He frowned and muttered, 'Sometimes that other life I had seems an impossible dream. Strange transformations have come upon me in this shrinking compass of my world. You know, my son, I have played roles that not even a Lord of the Lesser Chosen would stoop to. I have been brought closer to our barbarian children than I would have thought possible. So, in spite of all I am, all I know and all that I have been taught to feel, I must say, yes, I am desolated by this loss.'
They looked at each other, drawing a pale comfort from sharing their misery.
'Will Crail go with us?' asked Carnelian.
His father nodded.
Tain?'
Another nod.
'And Ebeny?'
'She has asked not to go and I will not command her.'
Carnelian considered this. She was more mother to him than nurse and, besides, his father's favoured concubine. He knew his father had feelings for her. 'I shall speak to her myself.'
'As you wish,' his father said and there was something like hope in his eyes. 'Now let us return to the problem of selecting which of these worlds we shall take as an accompaniment to our journey.'
Carnelian turned to the books. He looked sidelong at his father. The beautiful, tired face seemed intent upon the jewelled oblongs. A wave of dread washed its ice over Carnelian. His father was powerless. The Master, powerless. The Hold seemed suddenly precarious, as if a single wave might wash it into the sea.
That night, Carnelian slept hardly at all. Tain was having difficulty too. They played dice so as not to have to talk. They both played badly. Neither dared confess his dreams.
With first light Carnelian woke. He had left the shutters open just a chink and set a table against them to keep them from flying open. A thin light slipped into the room. Tain had turned away from it. In the corner, his blankets held him in their tight knot. Carnelian lay for a moment thinking. Noise carried up from the ship. Hammering. Voices. He rose and woke Tain to help him dress in his Master's robes.
From the alleyway, the Long Court looked like the carcass of one of the sea monsters that sometimes washed up in the bay that the gulls soon turned into a basket of bones. The remains of his home stood as stark against the colourless sky.
There was a sickening smell. Cauldrons had been set up from which palls of steam were spiralling into the air. Beyond, the cobbles were red with slaughter. Dread drew Carnelian to look closer. One cauldron was filled with bird-like heads and three-fingered hands jiggling in the boil. The long narrow saurian heads quivered white- eyed on pillows of pink-brown scum. He looked across to where they were skinning them, hacking the flesh free from the bones. Red hunks were being wrapped in leaves, and pushed into jars, and the spaces between were packed with icicles. Carnelian was horrified. He surveyed everything with pain-ringed eyes. All around him the mottled bodies lay, their gashed necks bleeding puddles over the stone, their arms and legs and tails curled stiff. This flock had been one of their chief treasures, the only source of eggs. He had loved to feed them from his hand. He recalled their bustle and their chatter.
He snatched at someone walking past. This was done for the meat?'
The man was all fear. He tried to fall to his knees but Carnelian held him up by one shoulder. 'And for glue, Master.' The man pointed crookedly at another of the cauldrons.
Carnelian let him go and went to look. Bones, and skin, the few feathers, all boiling up in a thick translucent broth. He recoiled from the stench. Through the steam he could see parchment laid out on the ground being glued up into sails.
He turned away, disgusted. Once more he plunged past the visitors' doors and onwards, but before he reached his father's steps he turned right. A small door gave onto a passage lit by a slit in the end wall. Once this had been his way to and from the Hold. It led to his old room overlooking the sea. Ebeny would be there. She had always been there.
He rapped on the door in the special way so that she would know it was him, then opened it gently. The room was large, frescoed with squid-headed ammonites and saurians with paddle limbs. The floor was scented grey-wood. This was his room. It would always be his room. Her room was off to the left. He took off his shoes to feel the whorls of the greywood with his toes. He unmasked and drank in the smell of the place. He walked across to the window. Through its panes of cuttlefish cartilage he could see the sea and the familiar curve of the bay. He frowned when he saw the ship there, sucking onto the quay like a slug.
She called out. He went through the doorway. 'Carnie, it is you.' Her brown, chameleoned face was filled by her bright smiling eyes. She stood up. She was less than half his height and had been beautiful. With a pang he remembered something his father had said about a barbarian's beauty being but a spring flower and quick to wither. He went forward and knelt before her.
'Come, come. You mustn't kneel to me, and certainly not in your Master's robes.'
He stiffened, stood up and moved to sit on a low stool beside her.
Ebeny looked at him, her eyes large and round. She reached out and touched the samite of his robe. 'You carry it well, Carnie.'
