Kitabı oku: «The Deepwater Trilogy», sayfa 5
‘Yes. Even the perpetual arbours and escapements or the rockblood machines need a conduit of labour to wind the springs. The Isles require hands to work. What better labourers than those folk already displaced by sanguine talents?’
Arden pretended to look through the brass again so as not to show Mr Harris her uncomfortable face. She’d seen one sanguis pondus replace a dozen longshoremen on a wharf. She’d seen the union riots light up Clay Portside so for a week not one ship left nor entered. ‘Surely they aren’t attempting an ocean journey in those vessels. Those boats don’t look like they could even survive a river crossing.’
‘They all of them believe there’s nothing else for them in Lyonne.’
‘Goodness, who would put such an idea in their heads? We can’t do everything with blood.’
Mr Harris stroked his beard with sorrowful dignity. ‘The idea of perpetual rockblood wells and their untapped bounty drives men to flights of madness. In Portside I hear of entire congregations afflicted with the idea … the dream of a place where human labour has real value, not sanguis labour, not machine. But the conduit of hand to work and no mystical power in between. Aye, a disease of greed and wealth grows in the minds of people who’ve previously known neither. Where they once sang hymns of the Holy Land and the One Who Walks the Way, they have now started to plan pilgrimages to the petroleum shores.’
Arden returned Mr Harris his brass spyglasses. ‘I must not judge. There’s nothing anyone can do about them. Even the Lyonne Parliament cannot stop people from leaving. Free movement is a right enshrined by God.’
He nodded, put his spyglasses away with the finality of a man who has seen all he requires. ‘Your sanguinity protects you now, Ardie, but this is the truth of it, eventually whatever privations the poorfolk suffer, the rich will suffer as well. And the rich pay sanguinem wages. Your wages. And keep your safety. Whatever cruel siren-song sung on those Islands will not be so easily contained there. Eventually the doctrine must make its way back to the mainland. Aye, coin or no coin, you would be safer at home.’
The wind kicked up, and they had to move again, else be tumbled from the high ground. Arden took Mr Harris’ stout elbow and tried to put his troublesome words aside.
‘You mustn’t fret about my safety,’ she said as they walked. ‘The Guildsman said I’d only have to work the light until the start of winter. They’ll call me back and give me my full degree.’ She raised her hands. ‘I’ll have my coins taken out too, and there will be no leash upon me.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘All this before winter? If you leave then, you’ll miss the midwinter crowning of the Deepwater King!’ His excursion into dour prophecy quickly returned to jolly banter. ‘It’s quite a memorable festival, even in Vigil. They barely celebrate anything else.’ Mr Harris grinned then, his eyes alight with mischief. Nudged her elbow. ‘Could make Deepwater Bride for a day … and if you find yourself a suitable husband there’s nothing the Order can do about it.’
She felt her cheeks grow hot. Goodness, how could she even consider tumbling into the greasy bed of a coarse Fiction man? He would make love like an animal, all grunts and snuffles, paw her bare flesh thoughtlessly, grow aroused and perhaps he would be coarse down there too …
Then her cheeks burned again, for it had been a year since she’d had such a dalliance after Richard Castile had left her, and she had made a firm vow. No more men, or thoughts of love.
She let go of Mr Harris’ warm, strong arm and navigated the final rocky stairs down to the pier by herself.
Once there, she turned to him and jutted her chin obstinately. ‘It is the ocean I shall love, not men. Besides, I’m not my uncle. I bear no ill-will or history to anyone.’
Mr Harris flicked a glance towards the old kraken-processing factories and made a disapproving grumble deep in his throat. ‘Arden Beacon, I can tell you’re planning to work some trader’s charisma upon this neighbour of yours, but Riven is more beast than man. The monsters he battles upon the ocean, they are his brethren, not us.’
‘I am not going to battle him, Mr Harris,’ she said, untying Fine Breeze’s lashings. ‘I will pay him a visit, like a civilized person. I intend to visit many on this coast by the time the storm season is upon us.’
‘He may try and poke you with his harpoon rather than let you onto his property.’
‘You cannot make me afraid,’ Arden retorted. ‘If I am to execute my functions as a proper Lightmistress, I must be at peace with all my beloved ocean gives me.’
‘Well, you might love the ocean, but a woman with fire in her blood cannot win such love back,’ Mr Harris said. ‘You talk of power? In two centuries no child alive has displayed a blood-alignment for cryptobiological specimens the way the Rivens have constantly done. Aye, even the human race is closing ranks about such a damn travesty of inheritance. He is incompatible with you. He is incompatible with everybody.’
6
The tides had a certain
The tides had a certain personality in the dusk that they did not have during the day. The waters passed that stage where one would call them frolicsome and instead become malicious, and active in wanting harm.
After an hour of fighting the steadily swelling sea, the Fine Breeze’s bow relievedly turned towards the Vigil pier. Arden would have no trouble in securing mooring, for another boat had just left the small, rickety marina.
Within minutes she saw the shape entirely, huge and dark, an oil-powered side-paddle wheeler that didn’t float upon the restless water but rather compelled it to submission. The plume of smoke had a curiously luminous blue tinge. Only one kind of oil produced such luminous particulates.
Kraken oil.
So then. Her neighbour. She adjusted her sails and continued in a straight line towards the docks. Mr Riven’s giant sea-barge approached Fine Breeze with frightening speed. The bow wave rose on either side with the power of waves breaking against rocks.
‘Sir, a sail ship heading into port on this bearing has right of way,’ she muttered to the wind. If one of them didn’t turn soon, they were going to collide. She wouldn’t stand a chance. But the barge kept coming and if it did not turn soon, she would be crushed under the threshing wheels.
At the last moment Arden wrenched her rudder sideways. Fine Breeze’s sail boom swung around, and had she not had her wits about her, it would have knocked Arden off her feet and into the water.
‘Come on, come on!’ She cursed. ‘If you old gods have any power here, give me wind!’ Disturbed, the gusts roiled about her but had little success in filling the sail. And that massive vessel was so close now that she saw the hooded figure in the wheelhouse, resolutely steering his juggernaut onwards.
The chopping wheels powered closer and closer still until finally the ship bore down upon her wake, missing a collision by less than an arm span. She could have reached over and touched the black boat, so close were they. Fine Breeze keeled over to near-capsize in the great bow wave, the hammering engine so cacophonous in her ears it made her head ring. For an awful moment a name filled her sight. A name scored upon the black side in an unadorned script. Saudade.
‘You monster!’ Arden screamed, shaking her fist. ‘You could have killed me!’
The figure in the wheelhouse did not turn back to see if she was all right. She could be in pieces, drowning, and he would have cared not one whit.
Finally her boat righted itself, the wind returned in somewhat of a constant direction, and Arden could return to the rude little harbour, shaken up but in one piece.
‘How did the boat go, Lightmistress?’ Harbourmistress Modhi called out as soon as she butted into the buoys lining the lone pontoon that made up the marina.
‘Fine,’ Arden said, still angry from her near-drowning. In rebellion against her brief imprisonment she had for a little while felt somewhat of a sympathetic warmth towards the mysterious fellow Mr Justinian had spoken so rudely about. She had not wanted the odious Coastmaster to be right.
‘Wasn’t an accident, that. He’d have seen you from a mile away.’ Mx Modhi grinned and puffed victoriously on her pipe. ‘I had an inkling he’d take uncomfortably to your get-up.’
Arden clutched her coat about her with defiance. One thing said for Beacons, they were known for their stubbornness. The ship moves for the signal light, not the other way around.
‘I bought this salvage garment fair and square. If Mr Riven wants it back, he can be the gentleman and ask.’
The pipe smoke surrounded the Harbourmistress in wreaths of grey silk.
‘He won’t ask. He’ll just take.’ Her voice rose in timbre. ‘Isn’t that right, David, my boy?’
A black-haired lad ran from another pontoon pier, all gangly adolescent limbs yet to settle into adulthood, to fasten Fine Breeze on Arden’s behalf. He was perhaps seventeen years old, and Arden noted the marks on the youth’s hands, pale scars from the required testmoots he’d have taken on his eleventh birthday. Fiction children were still tested, despite sanguinity being uncommon in the south. It was not a duty shirked. A ledgered talent popping up out of nowhere could bring a sudden unexpected wealth to a poor family.
She said her thank-yous to the boy, uttered some words to draw him into a conversation, but he barely met her eye. A fine black down on his upper lip trembled. He hovered in that strange halfway world between child and man He’d be a child far longer yet at this rate under his mother’s shadow.
‘Don’t mind my fool son,’ the Harbourmistress said once David scuttled away. ‘He’s just out of sorts because I won’t let him on board that dirty black boat. Doesn’t understand I’m protecting him the way a mother should. Lord knows what perversions that fellow gets up to out there.’
‘Oh, is your son friends with Mr Riven?’ Arden asked, tossing her head. ‘I thought him quite the hermit when not trying to run people down in his boat.’
Mx. Modhi chewed on her pipe for a weighty second before gruffly admitting, ‘Guild stipend won’t cover good tobacco and a proper Lyonnian education for my son. Your neighbour was the only one to give him the time of day. Fisherfolk around here don’t take kindly to anyone who can’t count ten generations wasting away on these shores.’
‘I’ll take your word for it, Harbourmistress. I haven’t had much contact with the locals.’
‘No, you wouldn’t have, would you? Ensconced with Mr Justinian up in the Manse, I gather.’
Something in the winking way Mx Modhi spoke made Arden indignant. ‘Only until I get myself ready for my lighthouse duties. And we are not ensconced. Our relationship is purely professional. He is a member of a professional Guild, as am I. He is bound by vow to help me set up.’
‘Indeed. These things take time, do they not? And my boy David here, he’s been paid already to ferry Mr Justinian to your doorstep once a week for trysts in case his car won’t make it. He thinks of all possibilities, our Baron.’
Arden would wonder later why her mouth hurt. At Mx Modhi’s assertion, she had clenched her jaw so hard that bright sparks of pain prickled her cheeks.
‘He is Coastmaster, and Mr Justinian has to have his briefings. I would prefer them once a month, myself, but these are unfamiliar waters, and I need supplies brought to me.’
Harbourmistress Modhi sucked on her pipe, blew more smoke for her airy spirit. ‘If that is the case, then I welcome the correction. Excuse my misunderstandings, there has been more than one lady here who has fancied herself the second Mrs Justinian, and they’ll not take kindly to a stranger whisking his affections away.’
‘The second?’ Arden asked, although she would more prefer that she never speak his name again. ‘Nobody spoke of Mr Justinian being married before.’
‘Well, nearly married. So far as the priest had not blessed the union in public. They were practically at the altar.’
‘What happened to her?’ Arden asked, even though her deep suspicions already told her the answer. Who else could it be, to arouse such a passion in him?
‘Goodness, we only just spoke of her before. Miss Bellis Harrow was her name, but she died as Bellis Riven.’
Evening fell with all the finality of a closing funeral casket. The Manse’s few lights battled the darkness and in the most case failed miserably. Arden retired to the mouldering study, desperate to pass time before the morning, and her final freedom. She had quite expected another argument with Mr Justinian, but the previous day’s clash had made him sulk, and there was no better sulking place than in Garfish Point, a hundred miles north, far and away from Vigil and the duties of his home.
That didn’t mean he’d taken with him the constant sense of unease that haunted the mansion’s main rooms. The uneasiness worked its way though the corridors like a low fog. From a proud position on the library’s sideboard, the octopus-thing in the glass bell jar gave a subtle shudder, its liquid tomb sensitive to atmosphere, the barometric shifts in air pressure. Arden stopped to peer in close. Not an octopus, perhaps. No mottled hide, or suckers. Just smooth, human-like skin.
A woman gave birth to that thing.
‘Oh, goodness, I’m certain our circus-find will curse you if you look at it too much,’ Dowager Justinian scolded as she came in with a cup of tea. She picked up one of the large napkins and threw it over the jar. ‘I have nightmares of it breaking out and crawling about the house.’
Startled, Arden stepped away. ‘I wondered if it were indeed true.’ She kept her voice sceptical. ‘That it came from a woman.’
Dowager Justinian’s lips vanished inside the disapproving line of her mouth. ‘Sadly true. One of the shorefolk worked here as a domestic. They are frivolous with their affections. A child, fourteen years old when she declared herself. In the end we had to supply our own doctor to assist in the delivery.’ She shuddered at the memory, twisted her wedding ring. ‘The Baron was delighted. The old Baron, I mean. My late husband’s grandfather, Alexander Justinian, not my son. Such things reflect badly on the House.’
‘Shouldn’t the Eugenics Society have been called to report the birth?’ Arden asked. ‘They get fussy over an extra finger …’ She waved at the jar, not altogether concealed by the napkin. ‘This would make the Society have hysterics.’
‘Baron Alexander Justinian had friends high up in the Society during his life,’ the Dowager sighed. ‘You are right, if it were up to a reasonable person the creature and the wench both would have been investigated. But they didn’t seem much to care, and the Baron did like his curios.’
‘What happened to the girl? Her family?’
The older woman fiddled with her earring. The marcasite chips caught the lantern glow. ‘Oh, I think they’re all gone now. Nomadic folk, islanders. They come and go, and the fish are bad, lately. What are you working on?’
She showed the Dowager her map. ‘Finding my way. Learning the geography of Vigil.’
According to Arden’s maps, which in the last few weeks she had spent most of her time studying in lieu of actually going out to sea, the shore where the Rivens’ old factory buildings clung was not particularly accessible by watercraft. The wash and tempest on the rocks made it difficult to bring a small boat close, and the remains of a pier, broken at the root, showed just how dangerous the waves could be.
However on the other side of the promontory, on a circlet helpfully named Dead Man’s Bay, a divot in the cliffs provided a few natural shelters and a small pebbled beach that was spared the tumult of the ocean waves. There were more ruins here, old fortifications of a Neolithic tribal folk, made before their more enlightened current era. The map illustrated them with helpful asterisks and the word ruins in the key.
To access the Riven factory, she could make her way on foot through the ruins.
Dowager Justinian raised the wick on the lamp. ‘It’s so dim in here, Lightmistress. How on earth are you seeing?’
‘Beacons are good with little light and long distances,’ Arden said. ‘Blood aside, they’re part of our small endowments, the mark of our family.’
‘The Eugenics Society must think highly of such a trait.’
‘There’s always someone who will. It’s not just lamps and signals. There’s many shipping companies who pay handsomely for the distance-skill alone.’
The Dowager squinted in the lamplight, composed a sentence carefully in her thoughts before speaking. ‘My son tells me you are in your twenty-seventh year. Unless you have made a vow to God or the Sapphic orders, I’m surprised someone of your genetic value is not yet married.’
Arden pointed at the risen lamp. ‘It becomes complicated when one comes from old ledgered families. The Eugenics Society must approve any union I make. For now, I am forbidden anyone until my full degree.’ She closed her eyes briefly, remembering the Guildsman clerk in her father’s offices. His sly winking expression. With a full degree you could certainly choose who you would like to marry, for one thing.
How pathetic, that Richard Castile feared discovery by Lions, when they had known about the relationship all along.
‘You are of a good age,’ the Dowager continued, and Arden realized at once what the Madam of the house was leading in to.
She put her fountain pen down. ‘Dowager, you never told me your son was going to marry Bellis Riven.’
‘Didn’t I?’ The Dowager’s fingers dappled upon a cameo brooch at her throat. ‘I could never quite keep up with Vernon’s dalliances when he was a young man.’
‘A proposed marriage is hardly a dalliance.’
‘I suppose not.’ Her eyes became hard in the lamplight, knowing that Arden had foiled an ill-considered matchmaking. ‘One could never be certain if he’d only suffered a youthful fantasy. Without meaning to, Bellis could be quite the coquette.’
‘My concern is,’ Arden continued, ‘although I have an assistant, there will be times when I’ll be on the promontory alone with Miss Harrow’s suspected killer nearby. I cannot have unresolved issues between him and your son making my job difficult. Mr Riven is my closest neighbour, and regardless of what he has done, or whatever rumours swirl, I may come to depend on him for assistance out there.’
A little part of her laughed at the thought of seeking assistance from someone who had tried to run her down as casually as a cur in the middle of the road. But she had committed herself to signal-keeper business, and that meant business with the other person who shared her territory.
‘Miss Bellis Harrow and Vernon – I mean my son, Mr Justinian – may have made plain their intention to marry, but my son never wasted his youth on adult responsibilities.’ The Dowager adjusted the wick on one lamp, for the brightness illuminated an alarming patch of swelling damp on one wall. ‘By my count ten girls in all Fiction have considered themselves the next Madame Justinian. I dare not think about Lyonne. But she was the best of them, Bellis. A good, sweet-natured girl. Always had a kind word for me. They were friends from their first year. My son courted her when he still had baby-cheeks, before the city called him away.’
‘So they must have been of similar age, then.’
‘Yes, yes they were. Quite a few children in town were. They formed quite a cadre. Vernon and Bellis exchanged rings in promise before he left. Being a hopeful mother, I’d hoped that meant they would one day marry. But you see, friendships from the cradle rarely survive the storms of adulthood.’
She fiddled with the wick up on a third lamp, this one to chase away the spirits of the gathering night. The only effect was to make the shadows darker, and harshen those lights already in the room.
‘Strange,’ Arden said. ‘With all those tales of a forced marriage to Mr Riven, it led me to believe Miss Harrow a literal child. If she shared Vernon’s age she must have been in her late twenties at least. My age, then. An independent adult.’
‘Age is relative, you see. Her father, Mr Harrow, is a firm man. Very firm. Owns the general store in Vigil, and is Postmaster into the bargain. Does duties as Magistrate when we have cause to hold a criminal court. So he rather preserved his child in a state of innocence longer than most.’
‘I take it he approved of the union between Mr Justinian and Bellis?’
‘Of course. Not a better match could a Vigil girl make, not even the daughter of a Magistrate Postmaster. Perhaps this made Mr Harrow blind to his daughter’s beauty and friendly nature, how such a thing is a flame in the night-time, and attractive to night-flying things. Bellis loved my son. What a terrible, tragic surprise that she should marry Mr Riven so very suddenly.’
‘Something must have happened to have spoiled this gilded cage that Mr Harrow kept her in. People don’t flee comfort lightly.’
‘No they do not,’ Dowager Justinian said. ‘She did not flee. Mr Riven desired that he should have her. An unseemly lust overcame him upon seeing Bellis in the town one day. He is blood-bound to the wild things of the sea, you understand. No doubt his urges are similarly wild.’ Her hand went to her throat, appalled at what such an indecorous affinity meant.
Arden shook her head. ‘Any magistrate could have granted divorce immediately had there been any true element of non-consent or violence.’
‘The economy of Vigil needs kraken—’
‘Goodness, morals go beyond that!’
‘Well, people tried! Once Vernon attempted to visit Bellis out on the promontory and inquire about her welfare. Mr Riven fired at him with a Middle Country musket. And then a month later the girl was dead.’ Dowager Justinian heaved a breath, fiddled nervously with a lace handkerchief wedged up her dark sleeve, then went to close the curtains for the night as if the act, more suited to servant-staff, assuaged a deeper trouble of which she had yet to speak.
‘Hers is a wretched tragedy, I agree,’ Arden said. ‘But it’s more tragic that I hear everyone’s voice on the matter excepting Bellis Harrow-Riven’s. What was her truth? What was her reason?’
‘It doesn’t need a truth or reason. She is dead. I have cried enough tears.’
With her duties done, Dowager Justinian went from the study with a rustle of skirts, and left Arden in the gloom with her maps.
A storm had come upon the shoreline, whistling mournfully across the barren black cliffs of Vigil’s bay. When the oil lamps burned low, Arden put away her ocean-current almanacs and headed to her bed. The embers from the fire cast orange highlights across the room, made them move with an uneven flicker. The krakenskin’s thousand eye-rings watched her with abyssal coldness, wiser than any holy stone. The black ship forever bore down upon Arden in her memory.
A dead woman had worn this coat. A dead woman stolen away, as in the fairy stories, where the King of the Sea would take a fair maiden from the beach and ravish her upon his oyster-pearl bed for a thousand nights.
An innocent tale, yet Bellis Harrow’s life was just that story, whisked off by a lord of the sea and ravished in a crude bed in a decaying factory-shack. For her the reality had been a story of violence and despair.
The coat, though. The puzzle piece that did not fit.
Months, it would have taken to craft such a garment, to cut and cure and fit and sew. The tremulous leather-work at the sleeves had increased in confidence at the collar and yoke. A teacher had been patient, and their student enthusiastic. The patterns were exultant and joyful. A woman in pain could not have made this garment.
Arden’s Portside stubbornness returned. During her duties as lantern mistress she had seen illegal ships enter the harbour through the Parrot Wharf turning bowl, filled with the spoils of piracy and illegal gains. Her job concerned the safe passage of boats through the locks and wharves. If she had no evidence of wrongdoing, it was not for her to judge the misbegotten contents they held. That task she would leave for the sheriffs and the inspectors
She had a lighthouse to manage, and a future far from here.
Whatever the locals got up to in the meantime, that was their business alone.
