The Narrator (24 page)
A voice is calling to me. It shouldn’t be so still that I could hear such a soft voice, calling out so quietly, but just at the moment things are truly still. I step onto the deck.
A wall of water is coming. I can hear it absorbing all sound. I turn from it, with no feeling or thought at all.
Halfway on the stairs to the upper decks I am slapped to the bulkhead churned up in darkness I spin and a great sucking indrawing pulls me back—air and light burst about me again as the water sluices away in recoil from our alien boat leaving me where I cling to the twisted handrails, a hacking in my throat like a hand chopping and chopping at my neck.
The ships rocks and shouts out from everywhere. A hissing mass of infuriated water seethes up onto the deck again breaking its teeth against the metal and the deck—Tabliq Quibli’s drawn face flashes by in its suction his hand reaching for one of the railing’s slender posts and fails to grasp it I lunge through the railings and seize a fistful of his jacket yanking him back, watch his frantic hand snap tight on a bar and together we pull him onto the stairs and up toward the bridge as the next wave wells up from the lower deck to engulf us in its weight—we are buoyed up a moment, then hauled down. My body is half in the rails and the rail is cutting me in two. I can’t think for the racing along my head, the icy fingers of water raking my face—Thrushchurl’s long-wristed reach has me as the wave gathers itself in again and he pulls strenuously, helping Tabliq and I up to the bridge deck.
Sea wrack and foam flock in the air around us up here. The sky is calm, but the sea around us is suddenly insane and the ship is wrenched and buffeted. A report like a cannon shot and I turn in time to see the mast break off and drop sickeningly overboard. We huddle together against the sealed bridge, bracing ourselves against the boxes welded to the deck and spray barks and sizzles at us from the brink and rampages on the steps we’d just escaped, but little of the water as yet can make it this high.
The bridge is filled like a basin with seawater. Suddenly Saskia rears up out of the water—I can hear her hoarse and straining breath rasp deep in her chest. She plunges braving water and tilting unlevel boards beneath her feet throwing herself on the wheel and turning it wildly into the waves.
The next blast of water throws us nearly sideways and Tabliq’s knee bats my solar plexus. We roll back as the water recedes and now as I gasp for breath I look down at black anger laced there with white steam—the next wave strides beneath us and the ship lurches revoltingly but with less violence; we are hurtling along now against the grain of the waves—Saskia will hold us there.
The bow slashes open the waves like an axe and the shreds are bashing back against us on the upper deck. A wallop swats me against the bulkhead knocking my head angrily against the metal. I cry out, and gesture to Thrushchurl that we might try to get into the refuge of the wheelhouse. As the prow dips into the gulf between waves we drag ourselves over the sills and are immediately tossed to the rear of the compartment. Saskia has her feet planted forward and is holding the wheel braced there, snarling half-choked curses at the froth that belabors and bruits her to her face as she holds the bow into the ridges. The deck suddenly jerks to one side and I hear a cry near at hand—Jil Punkinflake is cowering with his dog in the corner, sobbing uncontrollably, his arms around the dog, who looks up plaintively at us. Thrushchurl moves at once to Jil Punkinflake, crossing the flooded bridge with apelike swings of the arm grabbing pipes and struts whatever will keep him. The ship pivots down into another trough.
In the light flashing between tufts of flying water I see Jil Punkinflake has a bad gash in his forehead—I make my way over to Jil Punkinflake and lash my kerchief to his wound. He calms a bit more at my touch, but he is cold as ice and trembling. The ship bucks forward and I am flung headlong toward the bow, water rummaging in my eyes ears nose mouth—my outflung hand finds a purchase on a windowsill; I pull myself back into the air with gushing sinuses and streaked eyes.
I am looking up and along the ship, aft. As my ears drain I hear explosions, shouts—I look for fire, smoke, wondering about the boiler. Makemin is up there, lashed with lengths of chain to the rail of the bridge deck. Below, I can see men roiling on the decks in confusion and some of them are making movements toward the lifeboats on that side.
“Cowards! Cowards! Get away from there!”
Shied to and fro by the motion of the ship, and rammed against the railing again and again, Makemin is screaming at them and blasting holes in the lifeboats with his pistol. My grip fails me—for a moment the water is in retreat and I am bizarrely weightless. I scamper back to the rear of the bridge and am forcing myself down between the radiator and the wall as the next blow pounds the ship ...
*
... One by one, things gradually are falling, fall back into certain places. I am one of these things. The story will have first no person at all, and now a person is coming back.
That I will start with the unhurried, the casual, pausing now and then to reflect or to collect itself, approach, of a visitor: a pain, which is drawing nearer by hasteless degrees.
It is with adjustments in my midsection, so
there
I am. Coming back into it, out of some other place of stifling closeness and oppressively contained body heat.
A pain has drawn near, not too close to be serious. I can hear water dripping into water. I am slung forward over the radiator and the pain in my midsection is evidently the result of this. Unhinging myself with shoots of new and distracting pain at the base of my spine, I extricate myself. I am in sound condition, I decide, slump to the sloppy floor in an inch of brine, and just breathe. My eyes and throat are swollen, my body is thawing from cold to pain. It is a relief to lie here.
I make myself get up. Tabliq Quibli is in the corner, not conscious. Jil Punkinflake, pale, eyes fluttering, is prostrate across Thrushchurl’s legs, and Thrushchurl is slouched against the wall with his arms still locked in the struts to either side of him, gazing calmly on vacancy. I can dimly make out the motion of his vest. I blunder over to Tabliq Quibli—concussion. Glancing up—
Glancing up I see Meqhasset’s charcoal bluffs within a hundred yards, dwarfing us. I shout.
Saskia lurches from where she lay slumped to one side of the wheel, water dribbling from her slack lip, pulling her body upright with her hands on the wheel. I am going back and forth. I suppose I’m blubbering, panicking, although I’m almost too tired to. My eyes smart and there are hot streaks eating their way down my cold face. Makemin is crumpled by the rail slumped in his chains. I release him and drag him back to the bulkhead. I fetch fresh water from the cabinets in the upper decks and bring it to Saskia first. She drinks it dazedly and retches down the wheel, turning it to steer more strictly into parallel with the coast. The waves about us are becoming agitated, and now she is hoarsely at it with bilge me this and batten you that. Her voice is strange and high, a woman’s voice. I am careering around the deck uncertainly, feeling very much unable to think, and somehow the deck itself is there to hold me fast to it, teasing me in my weakness with spurts of seawater in my eyes.
*
The island is rolling by us on the starboard side. The bluffs screen the interior from view, but there’s an odd smell blown off the land to us, earthy and metallic, a little rancid. Saskia has turned from the coast, to swing us wider out and give us a broader view of the shore. Her voice crying orders from the bridge down to the lower decks, is deep and thrilling again, like a baritone bell.
After an anxious counting and recounting, it appears no one was lost in the swells. Makemin brings the Clappers forward again, drubbing them on the shoulders and setting their complicated gear rattling, brusquely orders them to mount their song of thanksgiving, and they break into their music like a clock striking the hour. I suspect he is less interested in giving thanks than in diverting us, so that we won’t be abashed in sight of the island, but the song, that used to stir uncertainly deep feelings in me, seems weirdly thin and preposterous now, as though a number of dignified men should roll around on their backs uncouthly, sobbing and simpering like babies. We are further distracted by our work, setting the half-wrecked ship back in order. And as we work, the island is still sliding past us, like an irregular, black rampart.
We swing gradually around a promontory. Wreckage in the water by the breakers, and two vast dun red-laced ribs sticking out of the waves like fingers pointed toward us. The ship must have been far larger than ours. Fragments of it are spilled out along the rocks—I imagine a ruptured hull slopping its contents onto the studded shore at the base of the cliffs like a disemboweled whale, and shreds of bulkhead sinking out of sight. The ribs are motionless. They might be part of the island. Looking at their uncannily clean lines, the rust scoring them, and the paltry few clumps of foliage or sea stuff that have managed to attach themselves to the metal, a resounding accumulation of time thrums around me, and without being told I know this is an ancient wreck.
I feel Thrushchurl’s hand engulf my shoulder, and he points to the water in what strikes me as a classical sort of gesture, one of the things only human beings seem to do. There’s something white coming up in the gloomy water by the wreck; I recoil for a moment, and would leave the rail if Thrushchurl weren’t unwittingly blocking me, but now I see I didn’t recognize something after all. I don’t know what I took it for, but as I shrink away at first sight Thrushchurl says, confiding and explaining and grinning,
“Bones.”
It’s a humerus. An upwelling current, tumbling shipwrecked bones here round and round from bottom to surface, for how long? There’s a fountain of small bones, from the hands and feet, and back bones in with them, spinning there in that spot; a pelvis makes a long arching pass away from us, up from the dark and then down into it again, like a white ray; I see a witty mandible spin there for a moment, and then an actual rib in the shade of the metal ones. Thrushchurl doffs his hat and holds it meditatively to his chest.
“Bones,” I hear Jil Punkinflake say softly beside me. I peer surreptitiously into his face. For the first time since we embarked, I see there a resurgance of his old self; maybe the bones are calling him back, or perhaps it’s the land. His dog sits pragmatically down beside him and pants, looking relieved. Together we watch the wreck go. It takes a long time for it to fall away. The day should have ended hours ago.
Saskia is navigating more confidently now, or I get the impression we have a decided course. The bluffs give way to sprawling, basin-like green banks under a skyline turreted with indigo peaks. The land grows flat, as though it leaned away from us while stretching itself thin. We pass lacy shelves of barely-submerged stone; they extend out from the coast creating mile-wide shallows, before dropping deeply away as though sheared off at the edges. The water on these shelves is no more than a few feet thick, and the surface shimmers silver with black angles. Thrushchurl stares at the island mirrors as they go by with rapt attention on his face. They do reflect the sky, a long look discloses.
This one is the shallowest yet; the stone here is more of a ramp than a flat plate, and the water flings itself in long corded arms up the slope, and topples back all ramshackle again, at incredible speed. Monstrous boulders big as houses, and a few are larger than our ship, lie on the ramp, and the water rolls them up the ramp a few turns as it comes in, and brings them tumbling back as it recedes. Saskia turns us further out from the coast and we watch in silence as black blocks reel and slam with thundering noise. Gouts of white ocean cream glow against the black of the water and the rocks, the thudding of the blocks cracks and mumbles in the distance as we pull away.
A sharp cry. Saskia turns the ship quickly to port. We’ve narrowly missed running up on a huge, submerged stone. The alarm began with Nardac in the prow, her long arm extended remains pointing unerringly at a cubical black stone under the surface only a dozen or so yards from us. Makemin consults with Saskia, showing her with his finger how the coast is forested with mammoth stone blocks, strewn down from the land and protruding everywhere in the water, some visible, some low in the water, and certainly more of them completely submerged. Ahead of us, the land folds in on itself in long, low sweeps, like two arms dragging in the water, one bent in within the curl of the other. That place is evidently where we are bound.
Grape-colored dusk gathers around us as they talk together in low voices. We will anchor here, to wait for the sun’s light to steer by.
*
From here, it’s possible to see some way inland. The bare slopes alternate away from me, back and forth from left to right, and ascending toward invisible mountains, now that even the clouds have bled out their light. Only a few glowering scars here and there in puffed blackness fuming overhead. The water ruffles by with no strong current. The land is beautiful; I want to admire it, but the wind sucks the breath out of my lungs, making them ache, and I just can’t catch or keep my breath. I’m drying out like a salted fish, and I have to make my way to the mess. The inside of my head feels like it’s been scoured with sand.