Gallicenae (29 page)

He let go of Dahut’s hand. “Now ’tis single file,” he said.

A flight of stone steps angled down the inside of the wall to a ledge beside the gate, halfway up. There stood a capstan, from which a chain ran through another cat’s head to the inner top corner of the door. Opposite, fifty feet away, was a similar arrangement. “This is the machinery for closing at low tide,” Gratillonius explained. “The doors are made so they never swing too widely for that. Follow me onward.”

From the ledges, narrow, railed walkways ran across both doors, meeting in two platforms at the juncture. Dahut touched the riveted green plates and black iron reinforcing strips that she passed. “Why must you ever lock the gate?” she asked. “Less’n you want it shut up at low tide.”

What a quick person she is! marvelled Gratillonius. “Well, think of a big storm with huge waves. They don’t only have high crests, they have deep troughs. The floats drop down as well as bob up. Were it not for the bar, they’d jerk the doors wide. The sea would pour through and do terrible things to poor Ys.”

“Thank the Gods that They don’t let that happen,” admonished Guilvilis. Gratillonius thought, irritated, that man had somewhat more to do with it.

He reached the platform. There a titanic beam, pivoted on the southern door, fitted into an iron U on this northern one. A cable ran from its free end to a block and tackle above. The bar was secured by a chain through it and through a staple, closed by a ponderous lock whose hasp went between two links.

Looking down into the girl’s eyes, Gratillonius wondered how he appeared in them. “This is my work,” he said.

The marines had deployed along the walkway. Gratillonius unslung the Key from his neck and raised it aloft. “In the name of Ys,” he called, “under the Pact of Brennilis that the Gods did grant unto us, I open the city to the sea.”

He fitted Key into lock. It turned stiffly, with a clicking as of footsteps. He withdrew the Key and laid it back in his bosom. With both hands he removed the lock and hung it on a single link. Drawing the chain out, he fastened it in a loop by locking the loose end to the staple.

Crossing over to the opposite platform, he uncleated the cable and hauled on it. Cunningly counterweighted, the bar rose easily for all its massiveness. When it was almost vertical, he refastened the cable. Returning, he clasped his hands and bowed before the lock.

It was done. The party went back to the top of the wall. Soon, as tide ebbed, the doors would begin to draw apart. The sea would come hissing through, but gently, by that time not raising the level of the basin too much. Ys would again have the freedom of Ocean.

“I’ve other matters to attend to,” Gratillonius said regretfully. “Guilvilis, there’s scant sense in taking the child back to class today. Why not show her about this quarter? The Cornmarket, Epona Square, the Ishtar Shrine, whatever she’d like to see. She’s grown enough for it. I’ll seek your house this evening.”

Dahut

5

That ended an hour later.

Passing through the narrow, twisted streets near the waterfront, on the edge of the Fishtail slum, the girl halted. “What’s in there?” she asked.

Guilvilis looked around. The cobblestones of Crescent Way lay nearly deserted, for dwellers in the tenements that hemmed it in were still off at work. On the right a building lifted four stories high, balconies cantilevered from the upper floor, the lower wall stuccoed and inset with shells which centuries had chipped and discolored. A couple of children had stopped their play to stare at the finely clad lady. A porter with a laden frame on his back had just come around a corner; Ys restricted draft and burden-bearing animals to a few principal thoroughfares. “Where?” the Queen replied vaguely.

“There,”
said Dahut with exasperation, and pointed.

Opposite stood a building unique to Lowtown. It was of black marble, broad and deep though not high. Pilasters flanked bronze doors on which were life-sized reliefs of a veiled woman and a man with bowed head. The entablature was granite, sculptured into a frieze: a row of skulls and at the center, floating above, an unborn babe.

“Oh,” said Guilvilis. “Why, that, that’s Wayfaring House.”

“What’s it?”

“You haven’t heard? Well, ’tis, um, ’tis thus. You know dead people get taken out on the funeral barge and put in the sea.”

Dahut nodded solemnly. “Father’s told me. He says that’s where my mother went.”

“Well, the barge is supposed to go out each third day, but often the weather makes that too dangerous. Sometimes they have to wait a long while. They did this month, with those awful storms we got. Here, Wayfaring House, here is where they wait.”

“Oh.” Dahut’s eyes widened.

“Tis all good and quiet for them,” Guilvilis said hastily.

“Can we go see?”

“What? Nay, I think better not. Later, when you’re older.”

Dahut’s face drew into an expression the Gallicenae well knew. “Why? You say ’tis good and quiet.”

“Well, it is—”

Dahut stamped her foot. “Father said show me everything I wanted!”

Guilvilis searched her memory while the child fumed. “Aye, he… he did that, I think. But—”

Dahut darted from her, up the few broad stairs. The doors were unse-cured. She pulled them apart and was inside before Guilvilis got there.

“What’s this?” called the old man on duty. His voice made echoes in the twilight of a huge chamber. He shuffled forward. “My lady, you shouldn’t bring a wee one here. Leave her with me. Which beloved
would you bid goodbye to?—O-ah.” He recognized the woman. “My
lady!”
Touching his brow in reverence: “How may I serve you?”

“I, well, ’tis thus—” faltered Guilvilis.

Dahut dashed past them.

Stone tubs, a few feet apart, covered the floor. She came to the first and looked over its edge.

Brine filled it. Within, full length, lay a dead woman. While a sheet wrapped her body, its soddenness revealed the bony contours. Cords bound wrists and ankles and held her to eyebolts. Hair floated loose. It had been an old woman, withered and toothless. The jaw had been tied up and the eyes closed, but lips and lids were shriveled back, while the waterlogged face bloated around the beak of a nose.

“You shouldn’t’a done that, little girl,” wailed the attendant.

Dahut made a mewing sound. Like a sleepwalker, she stumbled to the next vat. There was a man more newly dead. He had been young and healthy, though now his skin was ashen. Some mishap had shattered the right side of his head.

“Get her way from that, my lady,” the attendant implored. “She’s too young for the sight, she is.”

“Aye, come, let us go, Dahut, dear, let’s go see the Cornmarket and I’ll buy you a honeycake.” Guilvilis lurched toward the princess. “Cry not, be not afraid.”

“Nay,” said the man, “these are but the harmless dead. We’ll take them to their rest on the morrow, and the Ferriers will bring their souls to Sena and the Gods will make happy those who were good.”

Stiff-legged, Dahut walked to the door. She stared before her, never a tear, never a blink. As daylight touched her, it showed a visage with no more color or movement than any in the brine.

Nor did she speak the whole way back to the house, and scarcely at all when Gratillonius arrived there. But when she had gone to bed, and man and wife were about to, they heard her scream.

—He stood holding her in his arms. She had hidden her face against his breast but did not give him back his embrace, only shivered and mewed. By the light of a single candle, he glared at Guilvilis.

“You dolt,” he snarled. “You unspeakable clod, lackwit, bungler. What have you done to her? How could you do it, even you?”

She opened and shut her mouth several times, and he thought how very like a fish she looked, before she could stammer. “Y-y-you said take her where she wanted, and, and she got away from me. Oh, I’m sorry!” Tears coursed from her eyes. Her nose dribbled.

“A squid would have had better judgment, more command. And ’tis you who dwell in the home of Dahilis! Take you hence. Leave us ere you do worse harm.”

She stared, and now he thought of a poleaxed cow.

“Get you to the nursery.” To Sasai, Antonia, Camilla she had borne him in such quick and glad succession. “Dahut and I will be together
this night…. Not so, darling?” he murmured into the child-fragrance under her hair.

Guilvilis lifted her hands. “I love you, Grallon. I wanted to do what you said. I wanted to please you.”

He brushed her aside as he carried his daughter out of the room.

They must cross the atrium to reach the main bedchamber. Every trace of Dahilis was gone. That had been at his insistence. Guilvilis would passively have left the dear things in place. He had ordered them brought to the palace. Guilvilis had acquired a few objects of her own. They were mostly garish. He didn’t care.

He heard her weep on her way to the nursery. His anger sank a trifle. Thanks to her, Dahut had seen an unpleasant thing before she was ready for it, and it had given her a nightmare, but surely she could overcome any fears, as lively and self-willed as she was. Sometime soon he’d toss Guilvilis a friendly word or two.

He laid the ivory shape down on the bed. Though there was hardly any light here, she burrowed into a pillow. It was as well, since he must now undress and—better find himself a nightgown, which he generally did only in the coldest weather. Dahut was naked, but, Mithras, she was five years old. Yet, holding her, he had felt the first slight filling out of her slenderness.

“Be not afraid, sweetling,” he said. “You saw no people yonder. You saw the husks they’ve no more use for. ’Tis like a—a dandelion, when the seeds blow away on the wind to become new dandelions.”

Still she was mute. He got into bed and held her close. How moveless she lay, except for the faint trembling and catches of breath. Couldn’t she cry, talk to him, have it out? Well, she’d always borne a strangeness about her. “I love you, Dahut,” he whispered. His lips brushed her cheek. “I love you so much.”

She did not answer. He got scant sleep that night.

6

Morning was bright and bleak. The funeral barge departed on the tide.

Dahut saw it from the heights. She had said at breakfast that she wanted simply a crust of bread and a cup of milk—which was true; she must force them down—and that she would make her own way to school—which of late she had been proudly doing. Father had left, and Mama Guilvilis was too crushed to respond. Freshly clad, Dahut set forth. Then she followed side streets to Northbridge Gate and went out on Point Vanis.

Few whom she passed paid her any heed. To them she was merely another lass bound somewhere, uncommonly pretty and curiously intent, but nobody to question. Women and girls walked about Ys as freely, safely as men. However, once on the headland, she left Redonian Way
and went along the cliffs. A shepherd, carter, merchant, courier would have been too surprised by the sight of a child alone beyond the city wall. When she glimpsed anybody, she hid behind a bush or a boulder. Sometimes she stayed a while, staring out to sea or downward at earth and insects, before she wandered onward.

The promontory reared stark out of the water and stretched inland nearly bare save for grass turned sallow, gorse, thistle, scattered trees that the wind had dwarfed and gnarled, lichenous rocks. In a few places stood beehive-shaped stone shelters or menhirs raised by the Old Folk to Gods unknown. Wind boomed from the west, a torrent of chill. Clouds scudded before it, gulls, cormorants, a hawk on high. Shadows harried each other across the miles. In between them, sunlight made the waters flame.

Finally Dahut reached a low mound and a headstone, out near the northern end of the point. She sat down to rest. At school she was learning the Latin alphabet. She had not been here since that began. Now, slowly, with a tracing finger, she followed the letters chiseled into the stone:

Q IVN EPPILLO
OPT LEG II AVG
COMMIL FEC

Father had told her that a brave man lay beneath, who died fighting for Ys and Rome before she was born. He put off saying more, and when she asked two or three of the Mamas they put her off too. They seemed uneasy about it.

Abruptly Dahut sprang up. Her glance flung itself around. Against the dazzle on the sea she spied and knew the funeral barge, crawling out upon its oars. She choked down a scream and fled.

Nearby, where the cliffs turned east, a footpath led to them from the bend in the highway. Dahut sought it. Downward bound, it became a mere trail, steep and slippery. Father had held her in the past when they visited. Dahut picked her way alone, breathing raggedly but never losing balance.

A few blocks, canted and overgrown, showed that once a stair had led up. At the bottom were crumbling walls and the remnants of a jetty. Father had said this was a Roman marine station, smashed to pieces and fired long, long ago by the nasty Saxons. Dahut scrambled past the wreckage. Charred baulks and newer driftwood had jammed around the stump of the jetty to form a rough little ness. On this face of the headland the surf did not, today, assault it, though whitecaps smote and whooshed and sent spindrift flying.

Dahut stooped and took off her sandals. Barefoot, she could go out on the logs. Wind ripped at her. She cupped hands about mouth. “O-ho, o-hoo,” she called. “Come to me, come to me!”

The wind flung her cry down into the waves.

“O-ho, o-hoo! Please come. I need you.”

A shape appeared and swam rapidly toward her. It was golden-brown and huge eyed. “Welcome, thank you, welcome,” Daliut shouted; and tears started to run. She hunkered down into what shelter an uptilted slab offered. It was of planks, bleached and warped, still held by corroded nails to a pair of snapped-off crossbeams: a piece from the deck of a lost ship.

The seal came aground and slithered over the jumble. Dahut flung arms around her neck. The fish-breath was not foul, it was strong, like a soldier’s trumpet. The wetness didn’t matter, when such warmth and sleekness were there to lie against. A flipper enfolded Dahut. The seal nuzzled her. Whiskers prickled, then a tongue kissed, a voice hummed deep in the throat behind.