Academic Exercises (25 page)

Most of the food, as I said just now, went on the
Attempt
. But the duke’s personal rations travelled aboard the
Lion
, and it took half a day to get them on board and properly stowed. I can appreciate the difficulties the duke’s people must’ve faced. How on earth can you store two hundred bottles of exquisitely fine wine on a ship without running the intolerable risk of them getting shaken up, exposed to potentially lethal extremes of temperature, theft by unauthorised persons and spoilage by seawater? Nobody seems to have considered that until the last moment; so the whole operation had to be suspended while the carpenters converted the front half of the middle deck into an emergency wine cellar.

Don’t ask me about the voyage. I wasn’t there; at least, my body was, but the rest of me was somewhere else. My body—poor abused, long-suffering flesh—spent three weeks in a tiny box, curled up on a wooden shelf with nothing but a sack stuffed with mouldy feathers between my aching joints and the rough-planed planks. Occasionally someone remembered me and brought me food; rather better food than I’d have had back at High Table, but I didn’t want to eat it. Why bother? It wasn’t going to stay down very long, and when it came back up again, it just added to the misery.

I don’t suppose I missed very much. The sea is, after all, the sea. From time to time I asked the steward if we were nearly there yet, but he only smiled. Once, after a particularly violent episode in the course of which I was repeatedly hurled off the shelf against the side of the box, I asked him if the ship had taken much damage from the storm. “What storm?” he said. I’d have told him about it, but he chose that moment to take the cover off a plate of scrambled eggs, so of course I was sick all over his shoes.

There came a day when the ship seemed to have been sitting still for rather a long time. I didn’t mind that in the least. The thing I’d been dreading most about the voyage was boredom; how naive I was, back then. When you’ve been subjected to twenty-one days of incessant torture, with your guts trying very hard to force their way up through your mouth, a prolonged interval of nothing at all strikes you as the sort of bliss reserved by the Invincible Sun for the blessed elect. In fact, for a while I wondered if I’d died. But no. No such luck.

I was just nerving myself to sit up when the door opened and the duke came in.

He, of course, had proved to be a natural sailor. He’d divided his time between standing on deck looking magnificent in gold braid and sitting in his cabin doing precise calculations with mathematical instruments. He looked at me and winced, and covered his nose with a linen handkerchief.

“You might care to come up on deck,” he said, and left the room.

The light hit me like a hammer as soon as I stuck my head through the hatch.

“Thank you for joining us.” I could hear the duke’s voice, but all I could see was blinding clouds of orange, yellow and red. “I thought you might like to be present at this extraordinary moment. After all, it’s your dream too, and your father’s.”

He wasn’t making any sense. I groped my way forward until my hand connected with something I could hang on to. It proved to be a man’s arm. I let go quickly, staggered, and slumped against what turned out to be the mast. The firework display was thinning out a little. I could see the deck of the ship, a clear blue sky, dark blue sea. Nothing extraordinary about that.

“Essecuivo,” the duke said.

Don’t be silly, I wanted to say, there’s nothing out there, just too much sky and water. But he was pointing—to be precise, he was posing for the statue that would presumably one day be cast to commemorate this moment; back straight, side on like an archer drawing, right arm outstretched at right-angles to his body, pointing. At what? I looked. There wasn’t anything, apart from a greyish blur of clouds on the horizon.

“Excuse me?” I said.

He didn’t reply. There were four or five other men, too clean and well-dressed to be sailors, and they were looking at the clouds too. Humouring the great man, who’d finally flipped. Maybe not.

They weren’t clouds. Instead, I was looking at a mountain range, a very long way away. Land.

“Captain,” the duke said. “Be so kind as to show our guest the chart.”

Meant nothing to me, of course. Lots of pale blue, with pencil lines; some zig-zags, with dates scribbled beside the angles in tiny neat handwriting. The longest line stopped abruptly in the middle of nowhere. Something told me to look up and trace the latitude and longitude.

“Exactly where Aeneas said it would be.”

No, I thought. No, please. Not even the Invincible Sun, that incorrigible practical joker, who designed the human digestive and reproductive systems, gave Man the brain of a god and a half the lifespan of a beech tree, could be so cruel, so capricious. I stared, longing for the mountains to be clouds, but they weren’t. They were mountains, just like the mountains Aeneas had described, in words that had gone up in smoke on Carchedonius’ hearth, that you see as you approach Essecuivo from the north-west; the Aoidus mountains, at the foot of which sits the mighty city of Aos.

No good will come of this, said my little voice. Indeed. There are times when I wonder who’s side I’m on.

The wind had died away completely almost as soon as we came within sight of land. The sails were flat, dead, and the smoke from the galley fire went straight up into the air, like a pine tree.

We sat there for two days. We couldn’t quite hear the children’s voices or smell the woodsmoke, but we were that close; but not quite close enough to launch a boat and row over. So we sat. The duke managed to keep his composure, but he spent most of the time peering at the distant bump through a colossal brass telescope, which he didn’t offer to share. As far as I was concerned, the total stillness of the ocean more than made up for the frustration of being stuck. I was able to eat food, get up and walk about. I found a quiet place on deck not apparently required for seafaring purposes, snuggled down on a coil of rope, and read a book.

In the small hours of the morning of the third day, the wind got up. I began to suspect that something was wrong when I was thrown off my shelf and bounced off the
ceiling
. I didn’t land terribly well, and I was lying there wondering if I’d been killed—I honestly don’t know about all that stuff; how are you supposed to know the difference between a fractured skull and a nasty knock?—when someone barged in, dragged me off the floor and bundled me out through the door. I assumed I was being arrested and taken to be executed—it didn’t require much imagination to supply a possible reason—but it turned out that we’d been holed on submerged rocks and they needed everybody to work the pump.

Everybody. The duke was there, leaning all his weight on the lever. It didn’t seem to be working. It was a while before I noticed, but I remember looking down and not being able to see my knees because they were under water. That made me forget about my poor soft hands and pulled muscles, and I dragged on my allotted area of lever as though I was pulling myself up out of a snake pit. It was only when we stopped that I realised I was so blown I could scarcely breathe.

We pumped until well after dawn, at which point the wind suddenly died away, the ship stopped moving, and we all collapsed like empty clothes for a while. When eventually someone came down to tell us what was going on, the news wasn’t good.

The storm had blown us almost to shore. We weren’t quite there because the captain and the helmsman had fought like lunatics to keep us back, otherwise we’d have been crunched against the reefs like corn in a mill. The
Lion’s Whelp
and the
Attempt
hadn’t been so lucky. The lookout had seen them go down, and there wasn’t any point looking for survivors. Where the
Squirrel
had got to, nobody knew. The
Heron
, fifty years old and built in the Imperial yards, had bobbed about like a bit of stick on a fast stream and was more or less unharmed. The
Lion
, however, was looking pretty sick. All three masts had gone (all the spares were in the
Whelp
, remember), she was badly holed below the waterline, two ribs had cracked through and she was only holding together through ignorance and force of habit. There was a chance—say one in ten—of getting her onto the beach, in which case it might have been possible to fix her up if we still had the tools and materials that had gone down in the
Whelp
; but only if we ditched as much superfluous weight as possible. Superfluous weight, in this context, meant the guns, the powder, the horses and their fodder, the arms and armour, the duke’s wine, and all personnel not absolutely essential to the handling of the ship.

They had a devil of a job throwing the horses into the sea. They didn’t want to go. So we had to hood them, hamstring them and tip them off the side using spars as levers. It took a long time. I was still part of the emergency workforce, though all I was fit for was fetching and carrying spars. I was too tired to think, which was a blessing. We worked all day and well into the night, spurred on by the pleasant thought that the wind could get up again at any time. The duke stayed till early evening before transferring to the
Heron
, which stayed with us through the night. I think I fell asleep standing at the windlass. I woke up in a sort of sprawl on the deck, and every bit of me hurt.

Come dawn, we were stuck again. They’d taken a mast off the
Heron
and jury-rigged it so that, with any luck, it’d get the
Lion
to shore, assuming a very gentle wind in precisely the right direction. Which was what, about halfway through the morning, we got. The ship, what was left of it, sort of slid lazily across the water at more or less walking pace. Just as it got dark, they dropped anchor and lowered the boats. Wherever the hell we were, we’d arrived.