The Princess and the Captain (29 page)

Having changed course, Orpheus had come back, and so had the twins. They listened to Lei's account frowning, their lips pressed tight.

‘Man say Patrols of Catabea arrive a little before night. Come down on survivors of shipwreck. Two sailors carried up in the
air to Immuration. But these others resist. Then Patrols blind eyes, pull out teeth, pull out nails …'

Lei was choking as she spoke, and trembling like a leaf. The horrified twins were leaning against each other, feeling sick.

‘When night fall,' Lei finished in a whisper, ‘Patrols fly away and disappear.'

Orpheus shuddered. Looking at the poor men lying on deck, he felt he was seeing the future: this was the fate in store for those who failed Catabea's tests! First mutilated, then thrown into the Immuration!

‘What we do?' groaned Lei, turning her pearl-like eyes to him. ‘They doomed! No Nokros left, no Stone of Life!'

‘If I understand this correctly,' murmured Malva, ‘the Patrols don't fly by night. Perhaps they're afraid of darkness. So we have until dawn to come to a decision.'

Hob uttered a little wail. ‘You think the Patrols will come back, Princess?'

No one replied, yet it seemed inevitable that those ill-omened birds would reappear at dawn to finish their work. For a moment silence reigned. The shipwrecked sailors were shivering and bleeding under their sailcloth wrappings, but they did not cry out any more.

‘Let's hide them,' Orpheus suddenly decided. ‘We've saved these poor men from drowning, we're not going to abandon them to the mercy of the Patrols! If we hide them in the hold of the
Fabula
no one will know. The Patrols will think they've drowned.'

Malva, Lei and the twins exchanged glances of alarm. Finopico shook his head vigorously. ‘In the hold?' he protested. ‘But … but these men are sure to have sicknesses! They'll bring vermin down on us! I don't want to be infected!'

Orpheus consulted the others.

‘I don't know, Captain,' said Peppe hesitantly.

‘I don't either,' Hob admitted. ‘Perhaps if we scrubbed the hold out with vinegar …'

‘That's it!' exclaimed Orpheus. ‘We'll disinfect the hold to kill any vermin. Do you agree to that, cook?'

‘I do,' Malva put in. ‘We have no choice but to save them. The Patrols are our enemies as much as theirs, after all.'

Finopico, running out of arguments, bowed his head. Lei leaned over the man and translated their plan. A kind of red smile split the sailor's face.

‘Babilas!' Orpheus called again. ‘We need you! We have to get these men below decks!'

But the giant did not appear.

‘By Holy Tranquillity!' grumbled Orpheus. ‘He works like a madman to save these poor fellows, he coils up the ropes … and then he walks out on us! Funny …'

‘We'll go and find him!' said the twins, running to the top of the hatch. But when they came back a moment later they looked crestfallen.

‘Babilas is in his bunk. He won't come,' said Peppe.

‘And … and he's in tears,' added Hob in astonishment.

‘Tears?' repeated the others, baffled.

The twins nodded. ‘Floods of tears.'

Malva offered to go and talk to Babilas. The giant might have refused to let the twins into his cabin, but he wouldn't dare to send his Princess away.

She spent part of the night beside him, trying to comfort him and find out the reason for his sudden flood of tears. When she returned to her bunk it was nearly dawn. Although there were dark circles under her eyes, she didn't lie down. What she had learnt from Babilas deprived her of any wish to sleep.

A few days earlier she had asked Orpheus for paper and ink. He had given her some sheets of paper torn out of his Captain's logbook, a little the worse for sea water, but Malva had not written anything on them yet. Writing, telling stories … what was the use of it, if all her words were bound to be lost in the end? The Coronador had made her burn her first notebooks, the
Estafador
had carried the others down with it when it was wrecked. What would happen to what she wrote next?

That night, however, she picked up her pen again. She hoped to free herself of the burden weighing on her heart by writing.

When I entered Babilas's berth
, she wrote,
he was lying face downwards. His legs hung a long way out over the end of the bunk. He's so tall! But what struck me was that he looked small all the same, lying there sobbing. You'd have thought he was a child. I went over and touched his shoulder
.

In the old days when I lived in the Citadel, protocol meant I couldn't touch anyone of lower rank than myself, except Philomena, of course. That was a strict order, but I didn't always obey. When I hid in the kitchens with the maidservants, for instance, I sometimes sat on their laps to help them shell peas. But I'll admit that I had never touched a man as strong and muscular as Babilas. His skin was warm, supple, firm … it had a strange effect on me
.

He was surprised to find me there too. He opened his sad eyes wide, and I saw that he was ashamed of himself. I asked if he was afraid of the Dunbraven men. He shook his head. Then he made a face and pointed to his heart. ‘Those men have hurt your heart?' I asked. Babilas sat up in the bunk and sighed wearily
.

Then he tried to explain to me, in gestures, what had upset him so much. I think I guessed the main gist of it, and that is what I must describe here
.

Malva stopped writing for a moment. Her hands were damp, and there was a lump in her throat. The paper was covered with her still childish handwriting, and the lines blurred before her eyes, but she had to go on.

Babilas wasn't always mute. He had a fiancée, whom he'd met in a sea port in the country of Dunbraven. It was love at first sight, I think he told me. They both loved the sea. They often spent days together fishing and boating. One summer day it was so hot that Babilas's fiancée wanted to swim in the sea
.

Babilas began weeping again when he remembered all this, but he showed
me that he wanted to get to the end of the story, to tell me everything as best he could. His grief went to my heart, but I went on guessing at his story
.

That summer day, his fiancée dived off the boat. He called to her to be careful, not to go far away. But she was a good swimmer and wasn't afraid. She amused herself by diving under the boat and coming up on the other side, staying under water longer and longer each time
.

A moment came when Babilas couldn't see his fiancée any more. She didn't come up again. He fastened himself to the boat with a rope and jumped into the water. He swam, dived, searched, called her for hours. But she never came up to the surface
.

Malva wiped away a tear caught on her lashes, and turned the page over to write on the other side.

I don't know how Babilas found the strength to get back to land, alone in that boat. When he set foot on the shore he felt as if he were dead
.

He went to the house where his fiancée's parents lived. The last words he ever spoke were to tell them that their daughter had drowned
.

After that, Babilas became mute
.

The candle lighting Malva's cabin was almost burnt out, but some light came in through the porthole. Day was about to dawn. She dipped her pen in the inkwell again.

When Babilas saw the sailors calling for help as they drowned, he thought he was living through that dreadful scene again. Except that this time he managed to save six men! Six men of Dunbraven whom he didn't even know … while he hadn't been able to save one woman from that country whom he loved. That's why he was crying
…

After confiding all this to me, he collapsed on his bunk, exhausted. I stayed beside him for a moment, feeling very moved, with my head full of terrible images. I thought of Philomena and Uzmir. I wondered where they were, if they were still looking for me, and if they had been injured after the attack in Cispazan. I miss them so much! How can you survive without the people you love around you?

Babilas fell asleep at last, and I went back up to the deck, where I found Orpheus. He had finally managed to get the sailors down into the hold with the help of Finopico and Lei. I gave him a little of this information about Babilas, and he understood. I know he won't hold it against him for giving way to grief. Orpheus is a decent, sensitive man. Since he shook free of Jahalod-Rin's influence, I've found him really
…

But she suddenly couldn't think of the words to describe Orpheus. Malva crossed out the last line, put down her pen, folded the sheets she had written and put them in a drawer under her bunk. Her eyes were red. The sun would soon rise now. She felt as sad and empty as a deserted house.

At that moment someone knocked at the cabin door. It was Orpheus. When his face appeared in the doorway Malva's heart leaped.

‘I was just thinking,' she said, to explain the start she had given.

‘You could get a little sleep,' suggested Orpheus, smiling. ‘The twins are on watch, so I came to see how you're feeling, Princess.'

‘I'm quite well, thank you. But please stop calling me Princess. I'm Malva. Just Malva.'

She nearly added
a girl of no importance
, as Philomena had done on the evening of their escape from the Citadel, but the words did not pass her lips. A strange, vague emotion was stirring in her heart.

‘All right,' said Orpheus. ‘I'll watch my tongue! We've hidden the shipwrecked sailors in the hold. I'm sure that some of them are ill; I wanted to ask you not to go down there. I don't want you to catch any deadly disease.'

Orpheus spoke quietly, but with touching kindness. Just as he was about to close the door again the first ray of the sun shone
into the cabin through the porthole, and rested on his face. He smiled.

‘It's morning,' he said. ‘Look after yourself.'

Then he went out, leaving Malva dazzled and exhausted.

Orpheus went back on deck, where he found Peppe and Hob leaning against the mainmast, asleep.

‘Well, this is a nice way of keeping watch!' he told them, shaking them awake.

The twins leaped to their feet, rubbing their eyes. They stammered some confused apologies, but Orpheus didn't reprimand them any more. Luckily the
Fabula
had not been driven on to any reefs or sandbanks, so their moment of weariness could be forgiven. Orpheus looked at the Nokros, still in place close to the mast. It was untiringly distilling time: another Stone of Life had been reduced to powder, and now there were only six left. A fine layer of brown sand had dropped to the bottom of the hourglass. Orpheus thought of the sailors from Dunbraven, their toothless mouths and bleeding fingers … and when his eyes met those of Hob and Peppe he knew that the twins were thinking just the same.

‘Come on!' he told them. ‘Let's not be discouraged. Day has
dawned, the weather is fine and …' He looked at the sky. ‘And there are no Patrols in sight!'

But as he went to the port rail and looked out to sea, he trembled. A triangular sail had appeared some ten kilometres away from the
Fabula
. The look of the sail and the ship's flat-bottomed hull left him in no doubt: this was a Cispazian junk. One of the vessels that the divers hadn't had time to scuttle before the battle against Temir-Gai. And without doubt, it was carrying …

‘The Archont!' murmured Orpheus.

A shadow fell on his face. The junk, lighter than the
Fabula
, was sailing before the wind, and its large sail seemed to be in perfect condition. It would catch up with them quite soon. Remembering Catabea's warnings, Orpheus turned to the twins.

‘I want everyone on deck in two minutes' time!'

Hob and Peppe raced to the hatch without asking for explanations. While they raised the alarm, Orpheus rapidly took stock of the situation; they had no carabins or musketoons on board the
Fabula
, no arbapults or cannon. They had all been lost in the storm. The only weapons they had to fight with were their fists and the kitchen utensils! If the Archont still had Cispazian weapons on board, things were going to be difficult.

One by one the members of the crew appeared on deck. Even Babilas had responded to the call. He looked pale as death, but Orpheus was grateful to see him.

‘I have bad news,' he announced. ‘The Archont is close on our heels.'

As he spoke, his eyes lingered on Malva. She stiffened, while the others exclaimed in despair.

‘I'm sorry, Princess –' he began, then remembered the promise he had made and corrected himself. ‘I'm sorry, Malva.'

He pointed to the triangular sail, which already seemed to have gained on them.

‘Let's get moving, Captain!' suggested Peppe.

‘Yes,' Hob enthusiastically agreed. ‘Let's hoist the foresail and the fore topsail! We'll show him what speed the
Fabula
can make!'

Malva, shattered, closed her eyes. ‘I used the foresail to repair the mainsail,' she said gloomily. ‘We only have the fore topsail left.'

‘Hoist it,' Orpheus told the twins. ‘I doubt if it will be enough, but we must try to keep a fair distance away.' He turned to Babilas. ‘Can we count on you?' he asked, a little uneasily. ‘If the Archont does catch up with us, will you be able to protect the Pri—to protect Malva?'

The giant nodded. He straightened his back, placed himself behind Malva, and smote his chest with his clenched fist as if to show that he was vowing to keep her safe.

‘Good,' smiled Orpheus, turning to Finopico this time. ‘I think it might be a good idea to collect anything that could serve as a weapon. What have you got in the galley?'