Rats and Gargoyles (61 page)

"Steer us away from it–across the current!"

"Trying, little one. Come help."

Zari set her narrow hip against the wooden tiller.
It shook against her hands. The lantern on the stern-pole swung wildly, sending
faint light across the water. Filament-mouthed faces shone in the blackness.
Crustacean claws lifted. Something with fleer-eyed malice swam froglike at the
bows. She braced herself hard against the tiller, turning to stare ahead.

"Hey!"

Fish-eyes gleamed in nebula-clusters, burning green
and gold in sudden brilliance. A ripple of gold ran through the hill of water,
spider-threading infinite depths.

"El, what is it!"

"Baby, I’m here; it’s all right—"

A wave rushed down the hill-slope, battering the
prow of the Boat. Spray soaked Zar-bettu-zekigal. She shook wet hair from her
eyes, swearing. The Boat dipped, wallowed; she dug heels into the deck and
heaved the tiller hard over, looked up into darkness, and her heel skidded. She
clung to the wooden spar.

The darkness curdled, cracked. She rubbed salt
water from her streaming eyes, staring up. Overhead the blackness flaked,
crumbled . . .

The god-daemon lay calm among waters.

Light shone between granite horns.

He lay between rows of cracked gray pillars, sea-
washed, carved over with hieroglyphs; and incised in the flagstones around the
plinth she saw, sea-worn, the signs of the Thirty-Six. Black water threshed and
foamed against living stone.

Zar-bettu-zekigal looked up from vast webbed black
hands gripping the plinth, to caprined forearms, to shaggy throat and shoulders.
The great horned goat’s head towered above into darkness: cracked gray granite,
informed with the presence of the Decan.

"Divine One." Elish-hakku-zekigal bowed her head,
not losing her grip on the tiller.

Tor-weathered, the shaggy granite flanks shed sea-
foam and beating water. The mountain-range of shoulder and spine and haunch
stretched away into darkness to where, far off, his scale-crusted tail lashed
black waters to storm.

A rich smell dizzied Zar-bettu-zekigal. Rich enough
to drown out the oil, fish, ooze and excrement that composed it; rich with the
energies of generation and corruption and growth. She sneezed and wiped the back
of her wrist across her face, leaning out over the hull of the Boat to stare up
at the god-daemon.

"Oh, hey . . ." Utter contentment in her voice.
"Elish, I’ve
seen
one!"

The older Katayan spluttered into brief laughter.

"Say you, you have. And if it’s not the last thing
we ever see, then doubtless I’ll never hear the end of it!"

Between the coiled sky-reaching horns a white disc
burned, burning with the blotched stains of lunar seas. Light fell across the
deck of the Boat, shining on her, and on the older Katayan’s face, turning it
stark black and silver.

Stone flaked: the eyes of the god-daemon among the
waters opened.

Zari kicked a heel against the deck of the Boat,
tilting her head to judge their speed as they rushed up to where the hill of
water crested: to where, head lowered, the Decan of the Waters Below the Earth
watched seas pour away into infinity. The roar of the waters falling all but
drowned her shout: "If he doesn’t do something, El, we’re finished!"

Great slanting eyes opened, liquid darkness staring
down from under stone lids. The moon’s light sent hard shadows across the horns
and ears and muzzle, across the vast lips curving in an ancient slow smile. Far,
far above her head, the coiled horns shone red with strings of roses: minute as
blood-drops against the disc of the moon.

The dark of the Decan’s eyes glimmered on foam and
sea-fret. She felt her mouth go dry. As if it swung into dock between pilot and
tugs, the Boat curved across the rising hills of water and slowed, slowed and
stopped before the web-fingered hands of the god-daemon.

Her neck hurt, craning to look up. Raw throat,
drenched and dripping coat, chilled to the bone: all became, for that instant,
unimportant. Zar-bettu-zekigal gazed up at the long caprine face, the stone
goat’s muzzle whose beard jutted forked bone and forked wood; sea- serpents and
crustaceans infesting the crevices.

Crumbled to bone at elbow and shoulder, none the
less, green leaves sprouted to cover the great mountain- range spine. Moss
spidered across the stone, fresh green. Seaweed sprouted bright yellows and
ochres between the vast webs of fingers.

Nightmares swarmed about the distant flanks, small
as pismires, that were large enough to swallow the Boat complete.

"Lord Decan!"

With a peculiar pride in courtesy, she looked into
the stone-lidded eyes and bowed her head. She couldn’t keep from grinning
widely, excited.

"Zar’." The older woman stood and stepped away from
the tiller, her black-furred tail whipping around Zar-bettu-zekigal’s wrist and
tugging her aside.

"Oh, what!" She pulled herself free.

A cluster of red roses sprouted on the Boat’s
black- tarred thwart. A green runner coiled the length of the tiller. Barbed
green thorns shot out of it, serrated leaves unfolded; a whole hedge-tangle of
pink dog-roses weighed the tiller into stillness.

Serrated fins scraped the hull. Water slopped. She
wiped her wet hair off her forehead and licked her lips; tasted the faint
sweetness of ordure and gagged.

Moon-crested, lying between the Pillars of the
Waters Under the Earth, the Decan bent its horned goat-head. The great-fingered
hands shifted.

The waters boiled.

A heavy weight dipped down one side of the Boat.
Zari stepped back, bumping her shoulder against Elish- hakku-zekigal where the
shaman woman stood quietly at the prow. The Boat rocked again.

"Oh, hey . . ."

Only a breath, almost silence. She squatted on her
haunches, leaning to stare at the wet footprints tracking the empty deck. She
smiled in wonder. Shifting and shifting again, the Boat rocked and settled
deeper into the waters. She stared up at the stone upon which the Decan lay,
seeking for footprints wet among the carved flagstones of the plinth, but it
towered above her head.

Crowding, overlapping: sourceless shadows of men
and Rats stained the deck.

"Elish." She touched one finger to a swift-drying
mark (the print of a small Rat, by the size), feeling no substance by it. She
stood. The air across the deck curdled, somehow full. She tugged Elish’s satin
sleeve and grinned. "Passengers!"

"I thought it would never . . . Something’s
changed." Elish-hakku-zekigal raised her eyes to the god-daemon. "Again, the
Boat carries the dead."

Stone lips curved in an ancient uncanny smile;
pursed very slightly and blew. The Boat rocked. The curve of the falls shot back
gold light from black water. The lantern, guttering, tipped to the deck and
smashed. She grabbed at the side of the Boat, Elish’s hand catching her
shoulder.

"We’re going to go over!"

The shaman Elish-hakku-zekigal lifted her head and
began to hum in the back of her throat. The chant for finding homecomings
sounded, soft and quiet under the roar of waves. The current grabbed the Boat
suddenly enough that it jolted Zari off her feet. She scrambled up with skinned
knees.

Elish sang.

Zar-bettu-zekigal kicked off her black ankle-boots.
She ran forward and leaped up, one foot either side of the sharp prow; knelt for
a second and then stood, tail coiled out on the air for balance, wind lashing
short wet hair back from her face.

"Hey!"

She pushed down on the balls of her feet as the
prow dipped, rode the push upwards; yelling in unmusical concert the shaman
chant, kicking out at a webbed hand grabbing her foot. A filamented mouth gaped,
teeth gleaming. The crest of the hill of black water rushed closer.

"Go, little ones."

A breath on the waters, warm as spring; a glimmer
of fire, sea-green; and the voice of the Decan:
"Go back to the world."

She turned her head, sketched a bow, coat-tails
flying. The prow fell away from under her feet; she slipped, banged her knee,
and knelt to stare ahead at the beating crest of waters now all white fire and
lace about the Boat—

"Look!" Elish broke her chant for a second, rushing
forward beside her and pointing down. "Look, the stars!"

Monstrous forms clung to thwarts and prow, fish-
mouths wide, gaping for water; screeching. A clawed finger raked wood into
splinters beside Zari’s foot. She bent and grabbed a boat-hook from its ledge
under the rail, scrambled up the prow, stabbed down among masses of green flesh
and scale thick enough now to slow the Boat.

The rising wave crested.

Below, above, all around: she stared up dazzled at
the stars in their Houses, burning in the Three Hundred and Sixty Degrees.
Elish’s warm hands gripped her shoulders. Dark and day spun across her sight,
wheeling, turning . . .

Sunlight dazzled.

Zari heaved herself up to stand on the prow, one
arm flung up against the sudden light. So all the later, famous pictures show
her: a young black-haired Katayan, coat flying, arm raised as she beats down the
swarming night- mare-monsters under the Boat’s prow. She balances there, beneath
her the tumbling bodies of nightmares, all framed by the great onyx-and-marble
Arch of Days where the canal flows from the grounds of Salomon’s Temple.

The older Katayan woman stands by a rose-shrouded
tiller; her head back, her mouth open, chanting to the sun that shines full on
her face.

Sun dazzles.

Canal-water boiled in motion, light shafting up and
blinding her: the clawed and tendril-mouthed horrors diving for the depths.
Zar-bettu-zekigal straightened, shaking out her wet greatcoat.

"
Ei
!"

"Now, Zar’!"

A tail coiled around her wrist and jerked. She
staggered to the deck, avoiding the mast–the mast?–and glared at
Elish-hakku-zekigal. A crowd of people jostled them.

Women, children, Rats, men, Ratlings. The deck
shone, shadowless.

"
Off,
now. Move!"

Strong hands gripped the shoulders of her coat,
pushing her across deck towards the gangplank–the gangplank?–and her heels
skidded as she dug them in and staggered, clutching at a splinter.

"Say you, yes–but we both—"

"I came this way; I can go this way: I have to
guide the Boat: now will you
leave
?
"

Zar-bettu-zekigal staggered onto the gangplank. She
let her shoulders slump in acquiescence. The heavily laden vessel wallowed. She
folded her hand back and grabbed the solid vertebrae of the older Katayan’s
tail, and let her full weight swing them both to fall across plank and
canal-water and tow-path.

The canal walkway whacked her between the
shoulders. Dimly she heard shouting, cheering; sensed the movement of the great
vessel on the waters. Pounding footsteps approached; dozens, hundreds.

She hitched herself up on to her wet elbows,
raising one knee, her own tail twitching. The older woman sprawled, rubbing the
base of her wrenched tail.

"Don’t want you dead. Want you here. With me."

"You shave-tailed little idiot!"

Twin masts shone black against a blue summer sky,
the rigging bare. The Boat drifted in the canal, between gardens, people running
up from far away, joining the growing crowd. Elish-hakku-zekigal stared.

She began to hum absently in her throat.

The vessel straightened, swinging to point away
from the Arch of Days. It began to glide, weighted down by passengers who cast
no shadows; to glide away in the sun . . .

Elish shot her one broad grin and staggered to her
feet, shaking out her coat-tails and lace ruffle. She walked unsteadily down the
canal path, lifting her head, singing the guiding chant, her eyes all on the
Boat and not on the front runners of the crowd who fell back, cheering, to give
her passage.

Sun blazed.

Zar-bettu-zekigal felt a hand at her shoulder, at
her elbow; and grabbed wildly as they swung her up on to her feet. A man shook
her hand, another wrung her other hand; a woman threw her arms around her and
kissed her.

Over the heads of the crowd the shaman chant
sounded, high and clear.

She laughed, shook hands, kissed back; began to
walk shoulder-by-shoulder with men and women in rags, recognizing no faces;
walking with small red-faced children, and brown Rats in the rags of King’s
Guard livery.

"Oh, hey, I know
you.
"

She elbowed herself a space as a small man fought
through the crowd to her side, falling back a few yards from the people that
flocked around Elish as she sang.

The small man, his white hair standing up like
owl’s feathers, grabbed her hand and wrung it. With his other hand he felt in
the pockets of his greasy cotton coat and unearthed a broadsheet which he thrust
at her. She dropped it.

"Nineteenth District broadsheet—"

Cornelius Vanringham dabbed at his sweating
forehead. Two men at his heels raised cameras, flashbulbs popping. From another
pocket he rummaged out a notepad and a pen, waving them at her in an explanatory
manner.

"We were interrupted before. I wonder if I could
talk to you now. Please."

She shoved her hands deep in her greatcoat-pockets,
swirling the hems, which steamed a little now in the drying sun. A great swath
of the crowd slowed, staying with her rather than with Elish. Her head came up,
and she walked with a kick-heeled strut, feeling the dust of the canal walk hot
under her bare feet. She smelt sweat and wine and roses. Heat blazed out of a
hazed blue-gray sky.

"Oh, see you . . ."

Voices at her shoulder fell silent, others further
back hissed for quiet. Attentive silence spread out like ripples in water. The
crowd jostled her, human and Rat, as she sauntered in the wake of her sister.