The Narrator (22 page)

*

People are going over the side; Nardac stands clutching the rail, staring at the beach—the crumpled bodies littering the spattered sand transfix her. As the men go over, and the boats go out, she is tugged toward them irregularly as though a cable were yanking at her.

“Are you going ashore?” I had meant to say something a little different, but I can’t think straight.

And she looks at me so that I feel vertigo; I stand on the brink of eyes like pits filled with crumpled bodies, and she says, “Yes.”

Nardac moves a foot or so, leaning heavily on the rail going hand over hand, and the next moment she falls. Her dark garment glistens down the side that had been away from me. I kneel and pull at it, and the rent fabric slides apart to expose a red leg, torn open along the flank. Nardac is struggling weakly to move toward the gangway as I begin cleaning her wound; I withdraw many heavy splinters. Her flesh is smooth and flimsy with age. I don’t know how long I work at her, but she passes out before much time had passed. A soldier and I carry her to a bunk.

The beach is cleared and the spoils of enemy stores, crates of provender and casks of fresh water, are swiftly brought aboard. We endure some delay in retrieving the crazies who swam ashore; they took to the trees like apes or children released on holiday, frisking in the branches and capering on the sand, bits of asylum rag and uniform flung off everywhere. If anyone ever finds them, who will be able to guess how they got here, and from where?

I notice a scrap of regimental fabric at a cave mouth and thoughtlessly step forward to investigate when Silichieh catches me up short by the collar.

“Are you stupid? Enemy soldiers might be inside!”

As I glance back at him in passing alarm I catch sight of Thrushchurl, who stands nearby.

“There’s no war here,” he says flatly, squinting up into the grey glare of the sky. And in among the trees and rocks on all sides the crazies are crying and fleeing, foraging, straying into ambitious architectural political or cartographic projects ...

*

In the mess. Jil Punkinflake is going on about how she looked at him today. How should I go about telling him how much a fool he’s making of himself? It’s his right to, anyway—being sensible never did me
so
much good.

He leaves us. He’s held back, or so he thinks, giving her time to I don’t know what. He doesn’t want to seem over eager. He doesn’t want to importune her. We snicker half-heartedly behind his back, more in embarrassment than mirth once he’s gone, but I find I love him better for that naive hope; and after all I don’t know she won’t take pity on him. At least he’s not so afraid, or ashamed, as he had been. How did I come to think that
I’m
so old and sage?

I think of the one I left, back in Tref.

“I don’t understand it,” Silichieh is saying. “I can’t get around her voice.”

Of course we have nothing to do with it, and that’s good.

“Just smile and nod,” I say, feeling surprisingly base. “We smile and we stay always careful. So we happy people are shits.”

He tells me about an engagement that fell through for him, years ago.

“So she goes to meet my superior officer and prevail on his noble sentiments to increase my commission, and she falls for him right there. She was a beautiful girl, he liked her too, and
he
married her instead. She thought she was too good for me anyway. So what’s good?”

She’s here, like an apparition before my eyes. I can feel her palpability in my chest. What is this—did I forget her? What is it about her that visits me now? It’s as though her skin presses my mouth.

I go out on deck. The asylum soldiers are having an impromptu sabbat toward the rear of the ship, by moonlight. I stand alone up to one side of the bow, in the drone of the engines and the everlasting splashes and the relentless wind. Gradually I notice singing; like any idiot I have to see whatever it is I hear, so I start turning my head this way and that. It’s coming from the bridge; Saskia and Makemin, it must be. They sing in unison one of those starkly melancholy songs easterners associate with the ocean. All about dying resolutely.

Suddenly I’m overwhelmed by a feeling, it’s equal parts fear and despair, choking me a like piece of sinewy butcher’s meat lodged in my throat, and making me gulp involuntarily again and again.

First his voice, and then hers, sounds the more strongly in my ear, and each time, each one sounds crazier. They’re both hermetically sealed, each in his and her own insane life.

*

The preoccupation of my other friends compels me to seek out Thrushchurl’s company, and I’m getting accustomed to him these days. We’re sitting together in the galley beneath a couple or three tilty lanterns, and we hit on the subject of dreams, or it is handed to us somehow.

I recount my dream of last night to him:

I’m at the rail, gazing out over the water, toward a horizon that’s hidden behind a bank of fog. Suddenly, I’m afraid. I imagine the fog creeping by steady degrees to overflow us, of becoming lost in it. A disaster is rolling along in the fog. I almost seem to see it now through the fog, a colossal, humped thing moving swiftly, the size of a fist from here, although it must be at least ten miles away.

This is a legendary thing, I somehow know; for a thousand years, ships under archaic flags have ventured reluctantly through banks of warm fog. Then there is a muted rumbling. The ship turns and sails away from the sound; men rush to stoke up the engines or to ready the guns. In despair they know the legend is true, and they’re about to see it.

“Bonant!” I hear a man cry. That’s its name, utterly new to me in the dream.

Now it looms like a cliff, projecting suddenly above them, too high to see. It’s like a black egg with an opening in the front—it sweeps toward them, as oblivious to them as a passing god, but the men are suddenly quailing and dizzy. They vomit, collapse clutching their chests and abdomens. Blood drips from their skin, smears their teeth as the gums burst, and they die under the influence of that black ship’s mere proximity. In its wake, boats full of corpses chug on into the fog until their boilers grow cold, sails fall in tatters. In the distance, the black dome is already far away, majestically descending the staircase of the horizon and shrouded in the fog it has worn a thousand years, patrolling for a navy now all at the bottom of the ocean.

I see the opening in the front of the egg, or the dome, from the inside. I take a spidery path across bare colorless soil, framed in dead trees, under the hood.

Now the floor bends upwards in a vast impetuous sweep. Gazing up, I trace its contour to where it eventually joins the curve of the dome at a right angle, and then off to the right, where it folds out to form a partial, tapering cylinder. Even the roughest reckoning tells me this is in the middle of what must be the rear wall of the domed area, opposite the opening.

I go into the wall. There’s an incongruously intimate, round atrium in here, bare floors dusted with fine sand. Nothing to see but the same gritty, charcoal-colored metal. It has an earthy, metal smell. Unusual for a dream, to experience smells.

Climbing a spiral ramp, I can soon look out through square windows cut into the metal at the white window, which shines like a beacon up there. The switchbacks get shorter, the lower sill creeps up into my view, and I am able to peer in. My eyes are stabbed by the light. I wince and rub at them, blinking tears, so that my face begins to ache almost at once with the effort of seeing in through the glass.

Beyond is a bare, square apartment with a vaulted ceiling, crawling with transparent, glassy fires. Nearly everything blazes with an intense white brilliance that scrambles. The ceiling is streaked—it’s streaking, it’s a band of metal in continuous motion, every now and then a black gap appears in it, drifting back from above the window to the rear of the chamber, and from the gap a jet of gas escapes, scatters the fires and batters them into the extremities of the room. The fires scurry aside like rats.

There is a table immediately before the window; the table has a dark glass upon it, teeming with small, many-colored points and streaks of light.

Behind the table, the captain is sitting, and those cold, clear silver fires fitfully ensleeve his entranced form, seep and play in a trembling film across his skin.

He is naked, with long heavy white limbs. His massive body sits, like a sack of grain, on a marble cenotaph. His broad head looms forward over the glass, watching it intently, without the slightest downward inclination. The eyes have no irises, and the small, shockingly black pupils are craned down at the panels below his hands, which rest weightily on the silver. His features are pronounced, a long wide nose with flaring nostrils, strange lips, a strong chin, and buckling brow furrowed with muscles. His hair ripples back from it like peaks of white flame, down to where his feet are indifferently disposed on the floor. The glare seems to shine through him; his colorless skin seems tenuously thin, and his bleached muscle, wanly shadowed with a lace of veins and arteries, looks like parboiled horse meat. The regular pulsation of his blood is visible, and seems to coincide exactly with the light in the glass.

Now he moves his right hand to adjust a brass tab; it’s his first movement, and it rattles me badly, though it is unhurried, unthreatening, and only his hand and forearm are moved. It’s as though a statue were suddenly to adjust its position—without therefore becoming a person, you understand?

He is staring ahead, through the glass—not at me, but out to sea, through the distant aperture above the bow. Now I am him, staring down from his place as the prow rams a toy warship, and I remotely hear the crash as its hull cracks, the explosion as its engines blow up, splintering the aft half of the boat. A warship is crushed and sunk in a moment, but up here there isn’t so much as a vibration. You could sleep through it. Bonant just does this, ploughing along through the waves, rolling over ships and sending hundreds and hundreds of men sinking to the bottom.

I am on the deck of a doomed ship—I see the implacable prow bearing down on us, Bonant towering over like a mountain—with a deafening blast the ship is struck, the deck flips and everything flies in all directions with terrifying abruptness, men and gear and pieces of strong bulkheads ... the ship is flattened almost at once into the sea, borne down below Bonant’s keel, men and trash sucked down with the mass to drown under Bonant’s keel that closes its coffin lid over men, ship, and all, in an instant, flattening warships like a foot flattens grass. Up here, perhaps that hand moves to adjust a brass tab, and some small matter of light changes on the glass, nothing else.

As I tell all this, Thrushchurl is sitting with his back to the wall and his face in darkness. I can make out the slender glitters of light on his teeth.

“I had a dream!” he says, as though he’d not ever thought so until now. “I saw a warship.”

“Ours or theirs?” Silichieh asks conversationally.

“Nobody’s,” he says.

He sketches it hastily and hands me drawing after drawing, as soon as he finishes them. With a cold spatter of rising hair all over me I recognize it.

“I stood on the deck and I watched it,” his shoulders raised and lowered in a sigh. “I knew that it was older than the Limiters. I simply knew it. It has watched over this sea for thousands of years. And when it first embarked, there was land, and an important city, near here. This was the coast. All under water now though. Just empty waves now.”

He smiles for an instant.

“That ship kills with its light. It can’t be seen. The light is invisible.”

Silichieh looks over my shoulder at the drawings, takes them in his hands and switches aghast one to another. In astonishment, he says, “That was Bonant.”

Thrushchurl stares intently at him.

“Don’t you know its name? You must have heard about it somewhere.”

Thrushchurl shakes his head a little, more in confusion than negation.

“Well, ‘banaut’ is Wiczu for ‘enemy,’ or ‘monster’ ...” I say.

Silichieh shrugs expressively.

“It’s all forgotten sooner or later, anyway.”

He thinks for a moment.

“You didn’t see its captain?” he asks after a moment.

Thrushchurl’s face kindles with memory. “Yes I did!”

He closes his eyes, turns his torso, his hands in the air before his chest as though he were playing a piano, showing how he turned.

“I saw a star far above me and ahead. There he was. He was in the light. It can only be seen there, on the bridge. It shines all around the ship, though—” he cups his hands in the air as if he held the ship like a ball, “—and kills whatever comes near.”

“And him?”

“The captain ...? He’s part of it!” Thrushchurl is excited. “It shines through him, and he inured to it. He
has
to stay in it—he can’t leave it and live—he stays in it to
stay
alive!”

“Did you get a good look at him? Did you see his face?”

Thrushchurl thinks, and nods, not looking at Silichieh.

“I saw him! I didn’t come close, but I saw him through the light, and it was as if I stood right by him. He was sitting at a table by the window, looking down over the trees toward the mouth, from high up. He was all washed out, and naked. His skin was like powder; I could see the muscles, everything, through it. His muscles were grey, like parboiled horseflesh.”