Riverkeep (18 page)

“Get back!” he shouted. “Get back!”

The faelkon gave a half flap of its wings, fell, then turned, moving into the fog, the harpoon still sticking from its front, wobbling and pouring with blood.

The other birds, their rot-blanched skin close enough to taste, crowded toward him. Wull looked at his empty hands.

“Oh gods,” he said, and ran.

He barged through their ranks, feathers snagging on his coat like thorns as the birds grabbed with teeth and talons, half rising like cat-startled crows.

He ran through another nest, found nothing, ran into a faelkon and bounced off, trying desperately to keep his feet, anything to avoid falling.

Another nest: bones, red flesh, eggs—and a white lump wrapped in swaddling.

“Bonn!” he shouted. He tried to turn, but the dead bulk of a seula loomed through the fog, and he tripped on its neck, his ankle turning under him, sending him to the ground.
Reaching over the seula's body, he stretched for Bonn, his fingers nearly touching the white wooden skin, when a huge foot reached down in flight and snatched the baby into the air.

“No!” shouted Wull as Remedie streamed into view and leaped, her stick falling beside him, her hands grabbing the low-hanging piece of swaddling, pulling herself into the air and screaming obscenities as the bird, startled, struggled for height before disappearing into the fog again.

Wull grabbed Remedie's stick, found it was broken, and rolled out of the way of a taloned smash as all the remaining faelkons turned on him.

He ran again, sprinting blindly for the tree line, all his pains forgotten; heard the birds take to the air behind him, ready to swoop and stamp him down. His long, skinny legs kicked with an extra fright of speed, faster even than when the ursa had chased him through the woods, and as the whump of their wings closed on him and their shrieks built to a crescendo, he threw himself into the shadow of a long-limbed tree and scrambled into its branches.

They reared up instantly on every side like dogs after a balgair, burping and squawking and screaming at him, their black tongues and yellow eyes all reaching for him behind the horrible clack of their huge, brown-fractured teeth. He beat down at them with his boots, shouting, catching their
faces and sending them back, cracking their bark spikes and making them scream, but each time one fell back it was replaced by another, angrier bird reaching farther into the tree, fluttering and crashing and smashing the boughs in its attempt to get to him.

He saw it then: they would break the branches of his cage and they would get to him.

“Blaggard birds!” he shouted again, slipping as he swung his boots and hugging the trunk. “Blaggard, stinking birds!”

There was a thump on the nesting grounds. The faelkons turned, howling. Then, as Wull gripped the trunk with his legs and his arms, they moved back to the clearing, their wings shifting the fog and sending tendrils of it spinning outward—revealing Remedie beside the body of a dead giant, her foot on its head, Bonn wrapped tightly against her chest.

The other faelkons barked and shrieked but stayed back, panting and heaving their lurid breath as she walked through their ranks, her face smudged with blood, her eyes and hair wild. As she approached Wull in his tree, the birds pounced on the body of their dead comrade and began to tear it apart, turning its richly feathered, powerful bulk into a red mess of torn string, the air filling with the sharp urgency of flesh and death alongside the birds' odor.

Remedie looked up at Wull and smiled serenely.

“Hiding?” she said.

“One of them took my harpoon!” he said, sliding down beside her. “I killed it, I think, an' did my best with a few others.”

“You did well,” she said, touching his face. “A brave boy. Your pappa would be proud.”

Wull looked down, said nothing. Remedie turned to the faelkons, now gorging on the meat of the bird she'd killed.

“Disgusting, isn't it? The way they turn on their own.”

Wull watched the faelkons chugging down the pouring meat, their ugly faces already pink with its blood.

“'S just nature, miss,” he said. “'S better than buryin' it, in some ways. They've got no shovels in any case.”

She laughed, lifted the swaddling from Bonn's face, kissed his nose.

“Is he all right?” said Wull.

“He's . . . fine,” said Remedie, “but there's a wound in his side from its claw.”

She moved the cloth, and Wull saw it: a round hole three inches across, disappearing into the darkness of Bonn's belly.

“Gods,” said Wull, “but he'll be all right?”

Remedie tucked Bonn back inside his swaddling. “He won't be the same,” she said, “but he'll live.”

Wull sighed. Bonn's face hadn't changed. Of course it hadn't. But it seemed impossible, when Wull had felt the
living weight within Bonn's body, that he could have borne such an injury in stoic silence.

“An' are you all right, miss?” he said.

Remedie nodded. “I'm fine, thank you, Wulliam.”

“How'd you kill that thing? You'd no weapons!”

“I broke its neck between my boots—the tricky part was trying to land it.”

Wull nodded. “Yes, miss,” he said.

“There's a lesson for you, young man,” she said, strapping Bonn to her chest and stepping forward.

“Yes, miss,” said Wull again, understanding nothing.

“And here,” said Remedie, producing Tillinghast's hat from a fold of skirt. “
You
can give it to him.”

Wull took the hat and nodded, then followed her into the woods, the yelping, screeching convocation of faelkons fading into silence as the trees and the fog closed about them once more.

Despite trying his best to catch up, he walked behind Remedie, her sure, quick steps never failing, keeping her always a few paces ahead. She wore the damp clouds of the forest's mist like a shawl, pushing through sheets of it and finding branches to support her movements by instinct. Wull fell more than once following the same path, finding slick moss where she met solid ground and missing the branches that supported her effortless weight. But as they approached
the river and the fog lifted, he caught up, walking alongside her toward the bäta and the water.

“You made it then?” said Tillinghast, opening his eyes at the sound of footsteps.

“Thanks to Wulliam, and no thanks to you,” said Remedie, stepping into the boat, her hair screwing outward, her face brown with dry blood.

“Are you all right?” said Mix.

“I'm very well, thank you. But I won't say the same for the bird that took my Bonn away.”

Mix whistled. “Good effort there, miss.”

“Here,” said Wull, tossing Tillinghast's hat across the bäta. “How's Pappa?”

“You got it!” said Tillinghast, delighted. “Stinks o' birds' mess now, but that's all right. I's 'ad it smellin' worse.”

“Paps is fine,” said Mix. “Ate a bit, then slept.” She wiped a thread of Pappa's dribble onto her sleeve.

“Thank you,” said Wull. “Have you eaten this morning? Bootmunch gave us some dried meat and fruit.” He bit into a stick of dry black elk meat.

Mix shook her head. “I'm fine. I've never liked that stuff anyway. What you call it? Vénnton?”

“You haven't eaten a thing since I've seen you here. Take something.”

“All right,” said Mix, biting into the vénnton without
enthusiasm. “That was right impressive, miss, you takin' off after that big bird like that.”

“'S not as impressive as your cursin',” said Tillinghast, reclining in the stern, a grin peeking from under his hat brim. “I've known sailors would blanch at that kind o' . . . How did you put it this mornin'? Gutter mouth?”

Remedie flushed pink, took a pear from Wull, chewed it, and looked out over the river to where the rue trees' low, thick-leafed branches were locked into the river's white surface.

“Did she kill it?” whispered Mix to Wull.

“Aye,” Wull whispered back, “an' she said it was a lesson for me.”

Mix looked confused. “What was the lesson?”

“I don't know,” said Wull, shrugging. “That she's mental, I suppose.”

Remedie finished her pear and threw the core over the side of the boat.

“My appalling blasphemy came in a moment of high emotion, and I must apologize,” she said, “to all of you.”

“Oh, it's all right, miss,” said Mix. “For what it's worth, I reckon Till's talkin' straight about bein' impressed. He was goin' on about it while you was gone.”

“And not about my safety?” said Remedie sharply. “Not expressing concern for my baby and me? Or thinking that
a person of your prodigious strength might in fact come to help?”

Tillinghast sat up. “First,” he said, “I's not a fan o' birds, 'specially big dirty rotten ones with teeth like draft horses. Second, it's not a baby—it's a wooden statue of a baby.”

“He's not a statue,” said Wull, kneeling in front of Pappa and stroking his hair. “You can feel him living inside. There's somethin' makin' him live.”

Remedie stared coldly at Tillinghast. “You are the most selfish person I've ever met,” she said. “What makes us human but our compassion for others?”

Tillinghast dropped his hat onto his face and sat back.

“I's always reckoned it was
livin'
that made us human, Miss Cantwell, an' I might not have your compassion, your capacity for prodigious cursin',
or
your ability to delude yourself into thinkin' you's a pure, virtuous soul when you's carried a flesh-got child, but I's livin' now, an' I mean to go on to do more of it.”

“You . . . oaf!” said Remedie. “You are the single most obnoxious and despicable creature I have ever encountered. . . .”

“Oh, Miss Cantwell, if you think flattery'll work, then let me—”

“
And
you continue to decry my Bonn's claim to life while lugging around a grubby
mandrake
of all things!
A man plant!
You must know what comes of them, and what on earth have you that thing for if not to grow it?”

“Well, I
is
goin' to—”

“Your disgraceful smarm
will
end now, for your obscene comments are quite beyond the pale! You, sir, are lower than pond scum, lower than field pats, lower than the ticks that
live
in field pats!”

“Is that so?” said Tillinghast.

“That is so,” said Remedie, cheeks burning.

“Really? Then let me tell
you
something, Miss Cantwell: many years ago I was lookin' for a banshee down in Ciarnton an' in my huntin' came across a most singular old woman. Her bearded mouth was puckered in the way of a cat's rear end, an' she'd a voice like a goose fartin' in the fog. Her skin was right foul too, hangin' all loose an' sour with sweat from not bathin', an' she used to jab animals an' kids with a pointy stick. She once killed a balgair with a rock for sport. I's always reckoned she was the most repellent character I'd ever met, but let me say now that should I meet her again, I'd be off'rin' a solid apology along with a description of
you
, Miss Cantwell, as confirmation of her havin' been replaced in my inestimation!”

“How wonderful!” said Remedie. “You can't imagine my delight, for that's
exactly
the position I hope to have in your heart!”

“Keep talkin', toots, an' you'll find yourself sore disappointed: every time you speak the prospect of our canoodlin' gets more remote—in fact, that's it! Forget about it altogether!”

Remedie sat down, crossed her arms, and followed the bäta's line downriver, looking away from them all.

“If it's not too much trouble, Wulliam, I would like to be off now. This is an unpleasant place to be.”

“Yes, miss,” said Wull quickly, taking up the center thwart and guiding the bäta into the current again. He rowed steadily, the adrenaline of the morning and the faelkons' screams still in his blood, and, although time passed like cold mud as Remedie fumed and Tillinghast sulked, it wasn't long before the forest's mist was replaced by the city's smog, and the jagged towers and spires of Oracco, the world's great city, were stabbing at the flame-blushed sky before them.

More bustling than any road, the Oraccan waters of the Danék teem with craft of all types and trades: tide-chasers, pickerel-trawlers, whelk-barges, eel-skiffs, hally-slips, swart little tugs, and the wide, jostle-bumping hulls of passenger ferries. From their decks, voices ring with such coarseness of accent and language as would curdle milk at the teat! When gentry or royalty sail its length, social rank is trampled beneath the hooves of the river's great antiquity: princes barge against ferrymen and think nothing of the indignity, for the river has a law of its own, and all men are paupers in the face of its urgency. The Danék is a place of unimaginable noise: a more active hive cannot be found anywhere in nature.

—Packroyd Bunting,
Fair and Foul: The Black Waters of the Danék

The mormorach flew through the trench's thick weed, maned briefly by sheets of yellow and green as kelp ripped
on its tusks. The tail whipped and the creature dived deeper—farther into the darkness and the cold and away from the waves of sound that beat at its skin like hot sharpened knives.

For hours now the shape above had been following, spearing down stabbing points with strange infrequency.

The mormorach had sensed a new threat, and circled below warily, roaring into the freezing black and writhing with growing anxiety as nothing happened and its instincts began to twitch. The big heart had beaten faster, and it had screamed its fury.

Then the shape had answered with its own noise: huge, booming walls of sound, pushing into the darkness an unfamiliar force that rushed the mormorach's senses in overlapping waves, heating it in panic and turning it miserably like an eel at the spit, blinded and cut by noise, the surface and the seabed a single white space in the walls of sound that seized its muscles and locked it as though frozen in ice.

Far above, one hand on the
Hellsong
's tiller and the other on his crutch, Murdagh licked his teeth.

He turned the ship a fraction to keep the wind, the filling of the sails as vital as his own breath. The prow smashed into a wall of water, and he felt through the skin of his feet the timbers of the old, bone-trussed tub meeting the waves' force, the masts shaking, the frame rumbling with a shudder that knocked the crew to their knees.

“We'll have to turn back, Cap'n!” shouted Ormidale, clinging to a wet rope.

Murdagh spat. “He needs more!” he shouted back. “This 'in't enough to take him! Keep swingin' the hammers!”

“But the ship—”

“The ship can take it!”

“The quicksilver's all but fallen oot the barometer, Cap'n! We
have
to turn back!”

“Keep on the hammers!” shouted Murdagh over the wind and the gulls. He steadied the tiller, pressing with all his strength against the sea's desire to turn his ship.

Women and men ran about him, falling on the slick, blood-darkened boards as he kept steady, the points of his crutch and leg driven into grooves worn smooth by the action of years. He was as much a part of the ship as the sails and the transom, a growth on its body. His closed eyes saw the movement of water over its every inch, and the heat of his blood—near to the boil—bubbled with the mormorach's pain, feeling the moment of its capture coming to his outstretched hand.

“Hammer!” he shouted again, knowing the moment of nets was close. “Hammer that beast till he dun't know which way's up an' his black heart pops in his ribs!”

He turned the tiller into the wind again—and stopped. Every function of his body clanged shut at the sight of the mormorach's vastness clearing the gunwale and bearing
down upon him with its tusks flashing and the great, shining cave of its mouth wide and howling.

“So how did you kill it?” said Mix, crouching beside Pappa. Behind her the shadows of the city began to cover the horizon as they neared its stone-lined banks.

“I snapped its neck,” said Remedie.

“How'd you manage that?”

“Oh, it was quite easy, really, once I'd found the gaps in the vertebrae.”

“The what?” said Tillinghast.

Remedie ignored him. “It wasn't pleasant,” she said, “but necessary. He was going to tear Bonn apart. I'd have killed them all if that had happened. And there's a lesson for you.”

Wull shared a look with Mix. He turned the oars in his grip, massaging feeling back into his palms.

“What's the lesson?” she said.

“Don't trifle with a mother and child,” said Remedie, “because we will destroy you.”

“Ha!” said Tillinghast, throwing back his head. “What a pile of tripe is that. Mothers is all thinkin' they's fearsome
beasts—jus' 'cause you've managed to push a wailin' lump out your clam doesn't mean you're a bloody warrior. I could take that paperweight off you an' snap it over my knee.”

“That paperweight is my son,” said Remedie coldly. “If you even move toward me I'll burst your straw and turn you into a bonnet.”

Tillinghast laughed again. “A bonnet o' my straw would be too pretty to sit on
that
face,” he said.

Mix, her eyes flicking from Remedie to Tillinghast, held a fish head up for Pappa.

Wull, his arms moving in a constant ache, looked at the bloodless, heavy head, the gray mouth opening for the cold silvery lump.

“Eat,” said Pappa.

“That's what we're doing,” said Mix.

“It from boat,” said Pappa.

“That's me,” she said, smiling.

Wull found her eyes, held them.

“Untie the arms, it that speaks,” said Pappa.

“I can't,” said Wull automatically. “You know I can't.”

“Are you not tempted to try it?” said Mix. “Untying him, I mean.”

Wull shook his head. “He'll try to escape. Or something else. It's for his own good. I jus' need to help him, that's all. An' we're nearly there, Pappa,” he added.

“Stinking it that speaks boy,” said Pappa, a thick roll of
white fish muscle clutched in his teeth like a cigar. He worked it into his mouth, chewing roughly and mashing it into a paste of tufty lumps.

“What was he like, your paps?” Mix asked.

Wull, caught off guard by the question, took a moment to answer. He rowed while the others waited, the sound of Pappa's chewing filling the boat.

“He still is a great man,” said Wull eventually. “He's strong an' brave, an' he loves the river.”

“An' what about your mam?”

Remedie glanced at Wull, whose face had deepened to a red that was beyond exertion.

“You ask too many questions, young lady,” she said.

“Sorry,” said Mix.

“It's all right,” said Wull. “Pappa found her near the footbridge. I was too young to remember.”

He rowed through the quiet.

“Quite a man, your paps, bringin' you up on his own,” said Mix, handing Pappa another fish head.

Wull nodded. “He's my best friend,” he said quietly.

He rowed a few minutes more, silence in the bäta but for the wet movements of Pappa's mouth. In the space of a few strokes, they had broken through the skin of smog, under the slime-slicked stonework of the Old Oracco Bridge, and emerged with a noisome burst into a bacterial slurry of shouting, bumping craft. Above them poked the towers of
hovels, lodging houses, apothecaries, and mongers that were the life of the famous old bridge, its gibbets filled with fabric corpses in a nod to its grisly history. Wull turned to look over his shoulder and found they were already in the heart of the city itself, leaned over by the steaming lump of its iron body, the air as foul as a blocked drain—feculence and staleness and decay.

He slowed the oars until they moved no faster than the current. The bäta began to drift through the other craft, the multitude of heads before them as teeming as a market square.

“It's so
big
,” he said. “I never knew it was as big as this. An' it stinks.”

Tillinghast lifted his hat from his face and peered out. “Oh, the docks. They's a fair size, right enough. Most o' the city's behind this, mind, an' the docks go on for a mile or so. These is jus' the shipyards.”

Wull's eyes bulged as he took in the industrial might of Oracco. Through fog that was brown and sour, the shipyards' corpulent mass roared above him, a rusting beast skinned with metal and soot-blacked stone. The skeletal legs of cranes spidered across its body, while at its feet huge arterial belches of water and steam sluiced a constant effluence into the Danék. From inside the dock came pulses of sound—ringing hammers and humming flames—and men and women, innumerable and tiny, crawled like fleas on its back, sending bursts of sparks tumbling in such constancy
down its great face that they became a waterfall of shining fire.

“How could it be bigger than this?” said Wull. He remembered a time he and Pappa had found a walrös dying on the bank. The little things of the river and soil were already harvesting its flesh; the creature—agonized and bleeding internally from some stone-dashed wound—lying still, puffing helpless, desperate breaths.

Tillinghast laughed. “'S a huge place—you could walk all day an' not cross it. Oracco's like a termite mound, 'cept with more drinkin' an' less work.”

“I've heard the city is a place of such foul vice and debauchery it befits no good-thinking person to enter its gates,” said Remedie.

“You's absolutely right,” said Tillinghast. “I's immensely fond of it.”

“Seems like you two don't agree on this issue,” said Mix casually, trailing her fingers in the water.

“Don't do that,” said Wull, turning to face her.

“What? I'm jus' sayin'.”

“No, I mean with your fingers. You'll freeze them off, or the seulas'll have them.”

“I think I'll be all right,” said Mix.

Wull looked at her. “That's what Till said,” he said eventually.

Mix laughed.

“Well, I certainly don't agree with Mr. Tillinghast,” said Remedie. “I don't hold with pleasures of the flesh.”

Tillinghast lifted his hat and peered at her, a sly grin on his face. He pointed at Bonn, clutched tightly in her arms. “
Somebody
held you,” he said.

Remedie flushed and drew herself together, a gathering storm of indignation. “How dare you think to speak to—”

“All right, both of you, drop it,” said Wull. “It's gettin' right busy here, an' I don't want you fightin' an' puttin' me off so I crash.”

He steered the bäta through the crowded boats on the water, shapes that loomed through the thick fog with suddenness and shouting, with strange voices and foul language rising above the knocking of wood as hulls and oars clacked together in the tangle of craft.

“You, fine people!” shouted a man from a floating platform. He held up a brown, crimson-dripping bag. “You want t' buy some meat? Fresh meat, only two days old! Is usually beef!”

“Say no,” muttered Tillinghast from under his hat.

“Yes!” said Mix.

“No, but thank you!” shouted Wull, glaring at her.

The man started to say something else, then switched his attention to a ferryman whose bow was nudging the bäta's
stern. Wull saw the bloody bag pass across the gap, the man running on his platform to keep pace and gather his coins. He vanished in the smog and was replaced by a square tug, itself bashing a fish skiff aside.

“This is impossible,” said Wull. “Nowhere with this number of people can make sense.”

“It's exciting,” replied Tillinghast, “an' it works.”

A dead dog, split by maggots and rot, twirled past, plated by a droning armor of black insects.

“Does it?” said Wull.

“Oh, sure. More money goes through here 'n a day than you an' I could count in a lifetime.”

“And that's how you judge success and virtue, Mr. Tillinghast? By how much money is made?” said Remedie.

“'S as good a way as I's found,” said Tillinghast, grinning.

“But the river should flow,” said Wull. “There's so many boats here, you could walk across them like a road.”

“Handy if you's bein' followed, that,” said Tillinghast.

“Followed by who?” said Mix.

“Oh, anyone: guards, crooks—husbands.”

“What d'you think o' that, Miss Cantwell?” said Mix, tut-tutting.

“You stop that,” said Wull.

“Where?” said Pappa, waking with a splutter. “Untie the arms!”

“Hello, Paps,” said Mix.

“We're in Oracco jus' now,” said Wull. “We jus' got here, an' we're goin' to row through the docks.” A transportee bell sounded above his head as he guided the bäta through a narrow channel. The boat's eyes seemed half shut in a grimace, he thought, like it was unused to sharing its water.

“What's Oracco?” said Pappa.