Voyage of the Basilisk : A Memoir by Lady Trent (9781429956369) (19 page)

Suhail seemed to recognize them nonetheless. “Like this?” He took my notebook from me and wrote a quick line.

“Yes!” I exclaimed, hands flying up. “What
is
it?”

“Ngaru,” he said slowly, looking at the page. “A very old script—logosyllabic—ancestral to the writing systems now used throughout eastern Eriga.”

“Well, that makes sense. I was in eastern Eriga at the time.”

Suhail pushed the notebook back at me. His movements had gone suddenly cautious, as if too quick a gesture might cause the mirage in his mind to dissipate. “Draw the whole thing, if you will. Not the inscriptions themselves—I know you do not have them recorded—but what it was that you saw.”

I obligingly laid out the general shape of it: the slab of granite, divided roughly in half, with the chicken scratches of Draconean at the top and the Ngaru script below. When I showed it to Suhail, his expression gradually lit up, until he was glowing as if every birthday gift for the rest of his life had arrived all at once.

“Truly God has sent you!” he cried. I think that, had I been a man, he would have embraced me on the spot. “Do you realize what this is?”

Laughing despite myself, I said, “Clearly I do not.”

“If my guess is right—if I am the most fortunate man in all of
creation
—then this is a bilingual!” He saw my incomprehension. “The same text, written in two languages. Draconean above, Ngaru below. We cannot read the former, but the latter…” His hands flapped with his excitement. “That has been known for years!”

During my childhood education, I had labored through various works of foreign literature in facing translations, with Scirling on one side and the original on the other. The idea had been that my native tongue would aid me in learning the other language—and so it would have done, I imagine, had I been inclined to effort, instead of reading only the Scirling side.

I mentioned this to Suhail, and he crowed with delight. “Better than that! It is the key to the code. Find names in the Ngaru, or some other element that will not change much between languages—count them. Count the Draconean, and find the words with the same frequency. Likely they will even write the same sounds, or close to it. This is the key!”

He
did
almost seize me then, so caught up was he in his joy. I startled at the movement, and that recalled him to his manners; he clasped his own hands instead, shaking them with his eyes to the heavens.

His good cheer was infectious. I came down to earth a moment later, though, when he asked me, “Where is this stone?”

“In Eriga,” I said, drawing out the words while I thought. “But the stone—it is not very accessible.”

“I do not care,” Suhail vowed. “God willing, I will climb the highest mountain to reach it, cross the deepest gorge. Is it in a desert? I grew up in one. I do not fear the heat of the sun.”

His grandiose declarations made me smile, but my heart was heavy. “It is not that. Well, it
is
that to some degree—the way is indeed dangerous. But the greater problem is not the land; it is the people. The stone sits in a place that is … sacred. I was permitted to go there as part of a trial, a rite of passage. But I do not know if they would let you do the same.”

This checked him in his headlong dreams of success. “Is the stone itself sacred to them?”

“Not that I know of. I am not even certain they know it is there; I only found it because I went searching.”

“Then I could buy it from them.”

I opened my mouth to tell him how little the Moulish cared for money, but stopped myself. I had not yet said the stone was in the Green Hell, and thought it better to leave that unspecified. Everything I knew of Suhail said he was a good man, but the dual inscriptions dangled before him the possibility of the kind of achievement most scholars can only dream of. I did not think he would go after the stone without permission … but without certainty, I could not risk it. The Moulish had shown trust in sending me to that island, and I did not want to betray it.

“I do not know,” I said at last. “But I can tell you who to contact. There is a woman in Atuyem, the half-sister of the oba—Galinke n Oforiro Dara. She knows the people who keep the stone, and can ask them on your behalf.”

This roundabout path made Suhail sigh with impatience, but he nodded. After all, we were halfway around the world from Bayembe and Mouleen; he could hardly go racing off there right now. I fear I quite destroyed his concentration, though, for soon after that he packed up his notebooks and cards and took to pacing the deck instead—dreaming, I suspect, of what secrets the Draconean inscriptions might hold.

PART THREE

In which the expedition makes substantial progress by running aground

ELEVEN

The storm—Encounter with a reef—An island welcome—The needs of the
Basilisk
—Our new home—Hostile responses

One consequence of my eventful life is that it has given me an utter horror of helplessness.

Put me in peril, and so long as it is something I may struggle against, I will be well. Not
happy
—for despite what others say about me, peril is not a thing I enjoy—but I will keep my equilibrium, diverting all my fears into the effort to find safety once more. This tendency has preserved my life in a variety of circumstances and places, from the skies above the Green Hell to the lethal slopes of the Mrtyahaima peaks.

What I do not handle half so well are situations in which I may do nothing. This is why disease is one of my especial nemeses: when I am ill, I am capable of little more than refusing to die, and when others are ill, I cannot even do that. I was helpless when my husband died in Vystrana—and perhaps that incident, even more than the general tenor of my life, has instilled this horror in me, for I have never forgotten the fact that I could do nothing to save him.

All of which is by way of explaining that when the great storm arose on the Broken Sea, it began what may well have been the most wretched span of time in my entire voyage. I suffered other misfortunes that were arguably worse, but in those cases I could
do
something. On this occasion, however, I was rendered totally helpless.

Ackinitos had warned me of the storms, but thus far I had only seen rain showers, blowing past so regularly you might set your pocket-watch by them. When I saw clouds on the horizon that day, I felt no particular apprehension. Aekinitos, however, spent a minute and a half contemplating them in silence. Then, nodding once, he turned and ordered all his passengers below.

“How long are we expected to stay there?” I asked him—for I lacked the captain’s weather sense, and did not understand what the shadow in the distance portended.

“Until it is safe,” Aekinitos said.

This was not a reassuring answer. First, because it advertised danger; second, because it was so very unspecific; and third, because Aekinitos delivered those words with a mad gleam in his eye. As I have said before, he was of my mind in preferring perils against which he could pit all of his strength. He was not quite so mad as to
seek out
such things, at needless risk to the lives of his men; but if such incidents presented themselves, then he did not hesitate to throw himself into the fray.

I tempered my frustration and asked, “Is there nothing we can do?”

Aekinitos said, “Stay out of the way.”

It was the worst possible instruction he could have given me. Unfortunately, I had no choice but to obey. My time aboard the
Basilisk
had given me a very rudimentary understanding of which bits were which, but not enough to be useful even in calm weather. In a storm, I would be a positive liability, as conditions required the men to do precisely the right thing at precisely the right time—without any landlubber standing in the way.

Jake protested when he heard he was to be sent below. “I’m not a passenger!” he insisted. I privately cursed the arrangement that treated him as a “ship’s boy,” which now gave him notions. (Though I cannot fault Jake for wanting to help. My impulse had, after all, been the same.)

Aekinitos settled the matter quite tidily. “You are not a passenger, and so you obey my orders. Which are to go into my cabin and stay there with the others.”

It is a mark of how much our voyage and that arrangement had transformed my son that Jake did not continue his protest. He looked mulish and set his jaw, but he did not argue against Aekinitos’ logic. Instead he turned to me and proferred his arm, saying, “Ma’am, if you’ll come below with me?” Abby muffled a laugh.

There was no laughter an hour later, when the first edges of the storm reached us. We had been in tempests before, this past year and more. On those occasions Tom had been permitted to help, and Jake as well; Abby and I had not so much been ordered out of the way as advised to step aside, and we had occupied ourselves with tasks such as making certain food and drink were distributed when conditions allowed. Now, however, the lot of us were packed into the captain’s cabin, Suhail included—that being the only space where we could all fit and be out of the way.

Nearly everything on a ship is “stowed,” meaning that there are measures in place to make certain things will not fall out or down or over when the ship pitches or rolls. In our own tiny cabin, for example, thick straps held the books on the shelves. In the captain’s own quarters, everything was as neatly stowed as could be, and yet soon after we had a demonstration of the limitations of such measures.

It began with an ominous creaking and swaying as the winds rose. The lights had been extinguished, but in the grey gloom that came through the stern windows, we could see the hammock and hanging sacks swing in ever-wider arcs. This lasted until a sailor hurried in and closed the shutters, to protect us against the possibility of broken glass; in exchange he left us one meager lantern. The latter risked fire, but I am glad we had that one allowance, for otherwise we would have spent the next two days in utter darkness.

Yes, we were two days in the grip of that storm—or perhaps it was a whole series of them, striking us one after the other. I cannot tell you the details of what transpired outside the cabin, for I was not there to see them, and what explanation we got afterward was both incomplete and somewhat incomprehensible to me. It was not a hurricane; had it been that severe, the
Basilisk
should certainly have been sunk. But a whole ocean of rain came thundering down upon us, drowning the decks and half-drowning the men, and the wind whipped the seas into waves that must have made the ship look like a toy lost in the bath. Against this, Aekinitos and his men struggled not to sail to safety—we were caught too far from land to have any chance of that—but simply to keep our bow turned into the waves. If at any point the ship turned broadside to the waves, the next one would have swamped us, sending the
Basilisk
’s masts into the water and dooming us all.

Had there been a harbour available nearby, we might have tried to run for it and take refuge there. This would certainly have doomed the
Basilisk
—we would have found her wreckage scattered across the Broken Sea—but we ourselves might have been safer. Lacking such an option, however, the open waters in which we found ourselves became a blessing, for they meant we could run as the winds and waves directed us … to a point. But I get ahead of myself.

For those two days, the five of us huddled in Aekinitos’ cabin, safe from the battle on the decks but suffering in our own way. Every one of us was most miserably sick at some point, even those who had not previously had any trouble at sea. We had only hardtack and water to sustain us, for there was no hope of hot food in such a storm, and the cook was busy elsewhere regardless. The smell soon mounted to dreadful levels, from illness and sweat and the chamber pot in its little closet; the latter got emptied only once, when Jake defied the captain and crept out to fling its contents through a porthole. None of us got a wink of sleep, and if you have ever gone two days without rest, you will understand the kind of madness that overcomes you when you pass through exhaustion to another realm entirely.

I was terrified, and nauseated, and furious with my utter inability to do anything. I almost wished Jake would collapse in tears; then at least I could busy myself with comforting him, which would give me the illusion of use. But my son, though afraid, was made of stuff too stern to oblige me. He said at intervals that the captain was a brilliant man who could overcome any storm, and occupied himself with comforting Abby, who was the most ill of us all. I take pride in his conduct, but it left me with nothing to do but endure.

I could scarcely even converse with Tom and Suhail, the clamour of the storm was so great. Besides, what was there for us to speak of? We could not take refuge in discussing dragons or archaeology; it was impossible to maintain coherent thought for long in the chaos. We spoke in brief, elliptical turns about the conditions and what we might do to better them, but little more. After a time, Suhail began to sing quietly, I think to give himself something to focus on besides our circumstances. He had not much range, and the Akhian songs he sang (lullabies and children’s songs, I think) were unfamiliar to me, but the sound was comforting nonetheless.

So for two days there was neither night nor day, but only the continual gloom, relieved by that single lantern, whose refilling provided brief moments of painstaking terror. Then, just as we began to tell ourselves that the winds were slackening, there came a dreadful, grinding shudder from below—and the
Basilisk
ceased to move.

“What was that?” Abby cried.

I met Tom’s eyes, and Suhail’s, and Jake’s. All four of us were thinking it, I believe, but I was the one who gave it voice. “We have run aground.”

In a storm, this can be a death sentence. So long as the
Basilisk
ran freely, she could mitigate the force of the winds by giving in to them. Trapped against a sandbar or reef, however, she had no such defense. The storm would force her farther into the obstacle, until one or more things gave way: the masts, perhaps, or the hull.