The navigator (27 page)

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"I'm not climbing that," Cati said.

"You don't have a choice," said Wesley, and his voice was serious. They looked down. Water was oozing through the deck at their feet and the motor had stopped completely. But still they looked doubtfully at the rotted hulk beside them and the dangerous-looking rope ladder dangling beside the bridge. Until, without a word, the little girl walked to the end of the rope ladder, grasped it, and started to climb confidently.

"That's it, then," the Sub-Commandant said. "You next, Cari."

One by one they took hold of the ladder and climbed. Wesley paused before he climbed, taking a long look around the ruined Boat that had sailed proudly out of the harbor. Rubbing the handrail and muttering something under his breath, he began to climb without looking back. Not even when the Sub-Commandant, supporting the injured Uel, got onto the ladder and the burning Boat turned on her side, then slipped beneath the waves with a gentle hiss.

It was a long climb up the side of the ship. The rope ladder swayed against the rusty and jagged metal plates, scraping Cati's knees and elbows. Every so often a plate would be missing and she would find herself staring into the dark void that was the booming, cavernous interior of the ship. She didn't know what was down there, but she found herself scampering up the ladder away from it.

When finally she fell over the rail onto the deck, Cati

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lay there for a moment, exhausted, then lifted her head cautiously to reveal a scene of terrible squalor. Empty barrels and paint tins littered the deck, which was splintered and broken in places. There were deep rents and missing hatch covers. There were tangles of rusting cable and broken winches. Broken chains dangled from splintered masts. Cati turned toward the bridge. It was, if anything, in worse shape than the rest of the ship. It was a towering structure, as high as a ten-story building, with many windows, all of which were broken. There were large holes everywhere, and part of the roof seemed to be missing. But the worst thing was that the entire structure was bent to one side, leaning out over the water as if it had been nudged by a giant elbow. The wheelhouse itself seemed to have suffered the worst devastation. All its windows and their frames were gone and the interior was full of tangled metal, and every piece of buckled metal bore the scars of a thousand storms.

And then in the middle of it Cati saw him--the Grim Captain--the wheel of the ship gripped in his icy hands, as it had been gripped for countless years and countless icy seas. The man was tall and heavyset and motionless, as though carved from a block of stone. His face was hidden by a massive white beard streaked with brown and black. And above the beard his eyes burned with a fierce light. Cati felt her knees go weak and felt her heart hammering in her breast, with fear, yes, but also with a terrible pity, as if all the loneliness in the world had been

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given to one man and he had carried it as a burden for time out of mind.

She sensed Wesley standing beside her and knew that he felt the whole thing.

"The Grim Captain," he breathed, seemingly unaware that he had spoken. Just then the Sub-Commandant and Uel tumbled over the rail. The Grim Captain raised one hand and grasped a lanyard above his head and pulled it. The ship's siren rang out and Cati had to cover her ears. He rang it again and again, three times in all they heard the note of the ghostly horn, long and sad. Then, accompanied by loud moans and clangs deep in the bowels of the ship, they started to move again, slowly at first, then picking up speed, the whole ship shuddering and creaking as it crashed through the waves.

"There's somebody knows where they're going," Wesley said. They followed his gaze. The little girl was once more standing in the bow, looking out across the storm-tossed ocean. Chancellor leaned wearily on the rail, until Mervyn pointed out that the stanchion holding it was almost completely rotted through. The injured Uel was shivering uncontrollably.

"He needs to be out of the wind," Dr. Diamond said. There was a doorway in the front of the wheelhouse, its metal door sagging on the one hinge that was left, but none of them felt any eagerness to enter the dank space beyond.

"I must ask the Captain if we may take shelter," the

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Sub-Commandant said. Wesley looked at him as if he was mad.

"Are you sure?" Dr. Diamond said.

"I have to speak to him," the Sub-Commandant said. "We have work to do and I need to know if he will help us."

"He'll freeze your blood," said Chancellor.

"I don't know," Cati said slowly. "I don't think so." Unless, she thought, terrible sorrow can freeze your blood.

They watched as the Sub-Commandant stepped through the doorway and into the darkness beyond.

Several minutes later they saw the Grim Captain turn from his station at the wheel, but Cati could not see the Captain's face. It seemed that they talked for a long time. Cati was getting worried about Uel, who was sitting on the deck, pale-faced. With five minutes' swift work Dr. Diamond had converted his ice goggles into a makeshift heater, which he put under Uel's jacket, but it didn't seem to help.

At last the Sub-Commandant came back. He seemed stooped with fatigue, and his expression was that of someone who had been given terrible tidings.

"He will give us passage," the Sub-Commandant said wearily. "He will take us to the Great Machine in the north."

"Did he ask a price?" Chancellor demanded. "Is there a tariff?" The Sub-Commandant shook his head wearily.

"There is something he wants," he said, "but he won't

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say what it is. It is something that must be given freely, without being asked for." Dr. Diamond said nothing, but he shook his head as if the Sub-Commandant's words had confirmed something he already suspected.

The Sub-Commandant turned and beckoned to them to follow him through the door. Cati shivered as she stepped through. But it wasn't as bad as she expected, if you didn't count the water slopping about, the discarded tools and junk that littered the corridor from one end to the other, and the groans and bangs and coughing sounds echoing up and down.

After a minute the Sub-Commandant led them down a twisted metal staircase. Then a most peculiar thing happened. Cati was at the bottom of the staircase one minute, and then there was a kind of a flicker and she was back at the top again. She looked round alarmed.

"Don't worry, Cati," Dr. Diamond said, "it's nothing to do with the ship. It's a sign that we're getting close to the Great Machine in the north. When you interfere with the fabric of time, you get distortions--little slippages like the one you just noticed. It will happen more and more as we get nearer."

They stopped in front of a set of doors that once had been carved and varnished but now were dilapidated. The Sub-Commandant pushed them open. Inside were the remains of what had once been a beautiful stateroom. The walls had once been paneled with leather, although only strips of it remained now. A chandelier

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sagged drunkenly from the ceiling, many of its glass pendants either shattered or missing. Expensive furniture in various states of disrepair lay on the floor. To Cati's surprise, she saw a stained marble fireplace on one wall. Dr. Diamond walked through the room, examining the furniture and various broken objects, muttering things like, "Louis Quatorze, very fine," and "Early art deco ... impressive ..."

Wesley, meanwhile, started to pile broken pieces of furniture into the fireplace to make a fire. Dr. Diamond looked as if he was going to object.

"It's all broken anyway," Cati whispered to him, and he nodded and smiled a little wistfully. Soon Wesley had a blazing fire going and Uel seemed to revive a little.

"Who is he?" she whispered to Dr. Diamond. "I mean the Grim Captain."

"We all thought that he was a legend. But that's the problem with being adrift in time. Legends have a habit of turning up. The story is that he did a great wrong, but in the process threw away the one thing he valued above all else. And now he cannot rest."

"Like the Flying Dutchman?"

"Just like the Flying Dutchman, except in the Grim Captain's case it is his own mind that drives him; the memory of what he did will not let him rest."

"Can he not do something to make up for it?"

"I don't know. There are some crimes for which there are no amends. Perhaps his is one of them."

They made themselves as comfortable as they could in

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the ruined stateroom. They were exhausted, since they had not really slept the previous night. One by one they all slipped off to sleep--except for Chancellor, who sat by the fire and stared into it. And the Sub-Commandant, who watched him from the shadows, his eyes stern and unblinking.

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Owen woke up in what seemed like a smothering dark. He sat bolt upright and realized that he was in a bed with dark drapes pulled round it. Vaguely, he could see the flicker of a fire. Something told him that he was underground. There was a certain smell, but he couldn't put his finger on it--earth and roots and buried things perhaps.

Cautiously he moved one of the drapes aside. He could see a fire flickering in a large stone fireplace. Pieta was curled up beside it on the floor, sleeping like a cat. He stuck his head out cautiously. He was in what seemed to be a very large room, its ceiling lost in the shadows. At first he thought that the room was covered in vast drapes sweeping down gracefully from a height, but then he

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realized that they were not in fact drapes, but cobwebs, accumulated over hundreds of years. But Owen also knew that the shapes could not be natural, that some hand had created them, woven them even. The light was eerie too. There was no magno here. The walls seemed to emanate light, a greenish phosphorescence. He moved to get a better view and suddenly his arm was seized in a clawlike grip and with ferocious speed he was plucked from the bed.

Owen found himself standing in front of the tallest woman he had ever seen. She was wearing what appeared to be a ball gown. When she moved, gorgeous flower patterns showed, but it was so faded with age that the designs seemed to come and go. Her face was long and haughty and brown as oak, and her eyes were a golden color. Like an eagle's, Owen thought. Her feet were bare and her black hair was piled on top of her head. When she turned her head slowly, he gasped. One side of her face was riven with a scar that ran like a fissure from the temple to the edge of her jaw, a scar that reminded him of the old tree on the riverbank that had been struck by lightning.

"I am Long Woman," she said, her speech rapid and accented, her voice harsh. "You are Navigator."

"M-my name is Owen," he stammered.

"You are Navigator," she repeated in a tone that told him not to contradict her again.

"Where am ... Where are we?"

"You in my place. I find when they bury me in bog."

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"Bury you? Are you ... I mean, alive, or ..."

"Alive? They bury me, no?" She tossed her hair back and laughed, a harsh sound like a rook cawing. "Now come eat," she said. "You not have much time."

"What about Pieta, my friend?"

"She sleep, not wake; she lead you freeze in storm." The Long Woman made a gesture of contempt.

"It wasn't like that. She rescued me from Johnston. It wasn't her fault."

"Right, right, you say. Maybe I wake her later." The Long Woman didn't sound all that interested one way or another. She led Owen through a doorway into another room.

If the first room with its cobweb drapes had been strange, then this one was more eerie still. The walls were moist and boggy, with mosses and lichens growing on them. In the middle of the room was a table set with the strangest feast that Owen had ever seen. Each place setting had a plate, a knife, and an oddly shaped fork with two prongs. The centerpiece of the table was a large bowl filled with eels. As Owen watched, one of them lifted its head and then slithered over the others so that they all writhed.

There were bowls piled high with mistletoe berries. Inside a tall glass bowl, snails moved slowly over the glass, leaving a trail of slime behind them. Other plates had mounds of evil-colored fungus, carefully sliced. There were sickly puffballs and plates of jellylike aspic that

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quivered as though there was something living inside. There were pale and lacy toadstools that seemed to be pickled in bluish liquor. Each place had a large silver drinking vessel, and as Owen looked, something seemed to dive from the rim of the nearest one, landing in whatever liquid filled them with a distinct plop.

"I not make you eat," the Long Woman said with her harsh laugh. "This food for other guests, come later."

All Owen could think was, whoever they were, he didn't want to meet them. The Long Woman led him through the room into a pantry. This time, he saw with relief, there was nothing that crawled or oozed on offer. Instead, there were boxes of wrinkle-skinned sweet apples, hazelnuts, hard-skinned cheese. He ate hungrily and, at the Long Woman's order, filled his pockets.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

"Ask question," said the Long Woman.

"Why did you call me Navigator?"

"Because you are Navigator. Only one to bring all back to right time, unless Harsh kill you stone dead."

Owen shivered at the thought of the Harsh. He couldn't believe that he had almost forgotten about them. "How do I do it?" he asked. "How do I bring everyone back to the right time?"

"Use Mortmain. You have it?"

"No. I went to look for it, but I couldn't find it."

"What hell," she said with an elaborate shrug. "Maybe it find you."