In Great Waters (31 page)

Henry waited.

John managed enough breath to say, “What in God’s name are you doing?”

“Where are we?” Henry said.

“What?” John’s face was flushed now he’d recovered the use of his lungs, and twisted in pain as Henry leaned on his bruised ribs.

“Where are we?”

“Henry, get off me, what ails you?”

“Where—” Frustration was choking Henry, and he had to struggle not to shake John like a fox. The sight of John’s suffering hurt his heart and he didn’t want to continue, but he had to have answers; John’s failure to provide them made him angrier. Why was John making him do this?

“What do you mean ‘Where are we?’” John gasped, slapping the ground with one frantic hand. It was a wrestler’s gesture, a token of submission he had taught Henry years ago, though Henry did not always acknowledge it at the best of times. “What are you trying to ask me? I do not know what you are asking me, Henry, and if you would get off my chest I would try to answer.”

The sound of anger in John’s voice made Henry tighten his grip, fearful that John would get up and leave. “How far are we from the court? We did not have to ride far to the burning.” The word
burning
was dry in his throat like a cough. “And neither did the court. Where are we? I want to know, John.”

John’s voice was stifled under Henry’s grip. “Twenty miles from London. The court is there now.”

Twenty miles. Henry’s hands loosened, and he sat back. Twenty miles. All his life, “the court” had been a mythical place, far beyond reach, a season’s journey away. And all the time it had been less than a day’s travel. “Why did you never tell me this?” he said. The pain of the discovery was sharp like betrayal. It had been so close.

“I thought you knew—” John’s voice stopped abruptly as Henry’s hands closed on his throat. John’s eyes screwed shut, and he slapped harder at the ground.

Henry loosened his grip.

“My father—thought you would ride off if you knew,” John said, gasping. “I did not wish to lie to you, but you did not ask.”

Henry swallowed. John’s ribs were an uncomfortable seat, but he did not move. “Does your father intend to make me king at all?” he said.

John put a hand up to guard his throat, struggling to push it between his vulnerable neck and Henry’s clutch. “I do not wish to talk to you unless you promise to stop choking me,” he said.

The defiance made Henry angry enough to start choking John again. John had known this all along, and had said nothing, and now he was demanding terms. But Henry caught himself, just. He did not want to hurt his only friend, and what else was he to do? “If I get off you, will you tell me the truth?” he said.

John nodded, his eyes warily on Henry’s gripping arms.

Henry withdrew his hands and slid off onto the grass. The two of them sat hunched side by side, staring at the ground between them.

John drew a breath. “My father means to set you on the throne, perhaps,” he said. “But he is not sure. Things are happening at court, and he does not yet know which way the wind blows. William, the Prince, was killed a little before your father told mine about you. He thought England would fall faster. But Erzebet married Philip, and she was strong while she was alive, and my father was adviser to the prince, and hoped he might have influence that way. But Philip is an idiot, and hard to steer. And of late, Philip has taken a liking to another man, a priest called Samuel Westlake. He does not wish to end on the pyre, my father, and he has never thought the time was right.”

Perhaps. That was the word Henry heard. All these years of training, of promising, of waiting. His whole life, built on the word “perhaps.” He turned aside, too chilled to speak.

“I think you should move against the King,” John said. “Edward is old and sick now, and Philip—my father thinks that he can steer the country if Philip is on the throne, but Philip cannot go in the sea. There are only the princesses, and they may take husbands, I have heard a rumour that the King is searching. I think you should move
soon. But my father still hopes for Philip. He—is not sure he can trust you.”

Henry sat silent. His thoughts clamoured so loud that he could not speak. He had not been in the sea for eleven years. But bastards were burned. The only safe place for him was on the throne.

Later that day, Henry approached Allard and asked for a map. Allard was so pleased to show it to him that Henry felt a little guilty, but he bent his head over the page and studied the shapes. His reading was still poor and he had to ask Allard to spell out the words, but when he closed his eyes, he could feel the lie of the land, the direction in which to travel. He couldn’t call and hear his voice echo off rocks miles away, or be guided by the crash of waves in a far-off bay; the air on land was too thin to carry sounds. But if he thought about the sun, rising east and sinking west, and distances to cover and the shape of the land he would have to travel through, he could make it. It was not impossible.

Henry said nothing of his plan to anyone, not even John. It was lonely, like being a child again. Henry did not like to dwell on that time, but the shadow of those days and weeks and months in a single straight-walled room, his first months on land, pressed down on him now. It had been cold and frightening in the sea, and dry and frightening on land, and few people had ever pleased him. He remembered, with a force that almost weakened him, how he had longed for home in those days, how the sickening angles and implacable peculiarities of the landsmen had horrified him, and how hard it had been to wrench his mind into new currents of understanding. He had not wanted to understand. Before he could speak he was free of their plots and demands, or at least free from the obligation to listen to them. But he had learned speech and could not go back, and the time in that room was something he did not intend to return to.

Only one thing stood out from the memory of those days. Allard
had spoken to him of Angelica, the miraculous woman who walked out of the sea, ready to bring the Venetians freedom. A fine story. The strange thing was that Allard seemed to believe it. John too, even Claybrook; they accepted the story without question, without thinking about it. That was a reason to hope.

Henry had never believed in fairy stories, but he was too old not to understand the concept of planning. Angelica wasn’t a miracle, that was obvious. What she was, what Angelica, Mother-Queen of Europe, Star of the Sea, had been, was clever.

Henry had lived in a locked room for months before he uttered a word of English. He had never heard a word of it spoken in the sea. Or Italian, or Latin, or any other landsman’s tongue. Angelica walked naked out of the sea, a gift of the ocean speaking perfect Italian. And if you believed that, you must be a fool.

Angelica wasn’t a miracle. She was somebody’s bastard. Somebody like him, a sailor’s brat, as likely as not pushed out of the sea when she got too big to drag in her mother’s wake. Henry had refused to waste emotion wondering who his natural father was—unanswerable questions were a stone around your neck—but he remembered the boats, and the spawning of the deepsmen, the spinning dance as partners swam round each other, the woman’s hands descending and rubbing at the man until a slit opened, a narrow tube wormed out to infiltrate a corresponding slit that opened in her abdomen. He had always been aware of his own different construction, aware that landsmen were made like him, and, remembering the clever hands of the sea women, could picture how his mother must have pleasured his father in the water. His mother was not exceptional in beauty, even among her own tribe, and could have had little more than a passing interest in the man. His father had been stupid, madly, profoundly stupid to risk his life for a swim with her; the penalties for sailors who consorted with the sea women were horrific. Perhaps he had even died for it, before Henry was born, if his captain had caught him at it. If the ship had been willing to stop long enough to pick him up at all; he might even have drowned, abandoned to the waves rather than
brought home for execution. Whether the captain had punished Henry’s father on ship, or had overlooked it, it was a crazy thing to do. Stories about romance could not account for it. The explanation that seemed more convincing to his mind was less sentimental: after enough months at sea, some men would fuck anything. That was all he cared to know about his father.

But if it happened now, it could have happened then. Hundreds of years ago, some Venetian salt-fisherman had gone for a swim, or a boatman had leaned over the side and saw a face in the depths; some deepswoman had taken an interest in a curious new body. And Angelica had been born, and kept with her mother until she became too much of a burden. Perhaps.

But thinking about Angelica’s story Henry realised something else. John had brought him fish when they were children, had caught them in a net. At the time, he had not connected the ideas, but he had hated the sight of that ugly mesh, so easy to tangle up in, so hard to pull out of. John had gone out in a boat, and he’d dropped a net to catch fish.

Suddenly a memory came to him: the tribe swimming up to the dark-hulled ships, chanting as loud as they could:
Don’t drop, don’t drop
—something. Why had they wanted anything to do with the ships in the first place? The ships dropped fish for them, but they could catch fish for themselves. Full bellies every few weeks hardly seemed worth centuries of fealty to these land-bound creatures.

But he remembered something else, too. The dolphins, and the deepsmen, who hunted each other for sport. The red fox he and John had chased through Allard’s grounds. It was the way of the living to hunt, and to care little for the death of foreign creatures. Even the landsmen, John said, hunted porpoises. If there had been no Angelica, what would have stopped them from hunting deepsmen?

No one had explained this to him in the sea. He had been too young, had taken the custom for granted. But he thought he understood, now, what the word had meant.
Don’t drop nets
. Because if a sailor would risk burning to fuck a deepswoman, why wouldn’t he drop a net to drag one out of the water, all those miles away from land
and whores and women of his own kind? If a landsman would hunt a porpoise or a deer to entertain himself, why not a deepsman?

You could stay down in the water for a long time. You could avoid the boats, if you did not swim in waters they crossed. But his tribe had swum the same route, each of the five years he had lived in the sea. You needed the current. There were only so many areas where there was enough to eat; you could not wander the vast tracts of empty water, starving; you could not, if you lacked the strength and numbers, move into new waters, not unless you could beat out the tribe already using it. Deepsmen did not measure their territory on maps, but they had to follow the fish. If your route met the route of the ships—or worse, if you depended on a coastline—you could not avoid them for ever. Now he remembered meeting other tribes, the tension, the shouts of challenge, he remembered with new understanding one of those insults:
ship-followers
. Tribes that had other routes, perhaps, could afford to ignore the sailors, could afford to despise the tribes that had made peace with them.

Allard had said that the deepsmen attacked Venice, invaded it for no reason at all. But Allard knew nothing of the sea. Angelica had. There were shallow waters around Venice, and people in boats. A bad territory for a tribe to hold. Perhaps Angelica’s father had been a salt-farmer out for a swim. Or perhaps he’d been a sailor who caught a deepswoman, fucked her, and threw her back like an unwanted fish. But the landsmen loved to have enemies. That, Henry had known all his life. They drew pictures of the world and divided it up with lines, into England, Scotland, France, they fought years of wars among themselves. There was nothing in the world that would have made them scruple to fish and fuck the deepsmen.

Angelica, perhaps, had been pushed out of the water when she’d grown big enough to be a nuisance. But she’d remembered enough of her old ways. Perhaps she’d grown up being owned by somebody clever, too; someone ready to make his move when the time was right.