Impossible creatures, p.9
Impossible Creatures, page 9
‘Could we go there?’ said Christopher. ‘To the sphinxes?’
Nighthand belched. ‘I have a hundred cases of fire-wine to take to the eastern reach, and ormolu pearls to take to Archos.’
‘It could wait,’ said Christopher, ‘couldn’t it? Wine and pearls don’t go off.’
‘It can’t, no. I can’t keep it on board for too long. I don’t need someone coming sniffing round after paperwork.’
‘If you’re a trader,’ said Mal, ‘why did the barkeeper say you were unemployed?’
Before he could answer, Gelifen vomited the cheese over Nighthand’s shoes. ‘Ach, by the Immortal! This is why I dislike children. They’re heralds of vomit and ask stupid questions!’
‘What did she mean—’ Mal began again, but Nighthand glanced at her with the full force of his violently forceful eyebrows, and she fell silent.
‘She meant, I imagine,’ said Irian softly, and sipped her wine, ‘that historically a Berserker’s job is to guard the Immortal. Anything else – working on the boats, or in shipbuilding, or as a soldier – is not true work, for a Berserker.’
Nighthand grunted, and signalled for another bottle of wine.
‘Are you sure?’ said Irian. ‘Shouldn’t we keep our wits about us?’
‘I see no reason to. I prefer the world when drunk. It disappoints me less.’
Mal hauled the subject back round again. ‘Christopher doesn’t know about the Immortal,’ said Mal. ‘You’re a scientist, Irian, right? You tell him.’
Irian nodded. ‘The Immortal,’ she said, ‘was a soul born from the world’s first apple, on the world’s first tree: the Glimourie Tree – the tree from which all magic stems. And from the apple, the soul passed to a fish. When the fish died, the soul was reborn a hawk, a sparrow, a wolf, and a thousand other creatures, and at last a human. A woman.’
‘And then,’ said Mal, ‘at every death, the Immortal is born again. They can be born into any family – peasant, politician, prince, goatherd, warrior. They’re the Immortal soul, in a human body.’
‘Exactly so. They have lived,’ said Irian, ‘since the beginning of human life, and they will live until the end of human existence. Perhaps beyond. And they do not forget.’
‘And the Berserkers have always guarded the Immortal,’ said Nighthand. ‘I am one of the last living Berserkers.’ The barmaid put a new bottle on the table.
‘I’m sorry … An apple?’ said Christopher.
‘Look, I didn’t make it up,’ said Nighthand. ‘Take it up with infinity.’
‘And this is real?’ said Christopher. ‘Or a metaphor?’
‘Real,’ said Mal.
‘The Immortal remembers everything they have seen, in every life: they are the living memory, and the living knowledge,’ said Irian. ‘They have seen all the possible ways of us. It means they can predict a disaster before it begins; they can halt a wrong before it’s committed. They remember what has been done to save life, what has been done to destroy it. They advise regents and ministers and scholars.’
‘And –’ Nighthand took a gulp of wine straight from the bottle and held it in his mouth, thinking – ‘they know us. They hold us. They know things from so deep and far that we have forgotten that we have forgotten that we have forgotten them. People in the Otherlands – your world – have known of it too. One of your old poets, John Dun, John something, wrote of it – and it’s in some of your old songs too. It’s truth, boy.’
It sounded profoundly unlikely to Christopher. An apple; a wolf, a bird: an immortal soul. ‘But if you’re the Immortal’s guard, why aren’t you with them?’ Nighthand did not have the relaxed look of a man on holiday.
‘Because the Immortal vanished,’ he said heavily. ‘There has been no Immortal for a hundred years. It was when my great-great-great—’ And then suddenly every inch of his massive body stiffened.
His eyes had followed the kanko’s. The tiny creature had risen up, and was facing the door. Its hackles were raised along its tiny fox-coloured back. This was the luck it bestowed: the luck of attention.
The alcohol slur left Nighthand’s voice.
‘Mal. Christopher. Irian. There’s an exit at the back, on to the side-street. Come. Now.’
‘Why?’
‘Blond hair, you said, didn’t you? Cut on his cheek?’
All the blood in Christopher’s body lurched downwards.
A shadow passed by outside the window, and the door began to swing open.
‘Adam Kavil. Your murderer. He’s outside the door.’
FIRE IN THE SKY
Nighthand slammed down coins on the table and they ran, in a flurry of griffin feathers and spilt wine, out of the back door into the street. Nighthand glanced behind him.
‘To the boat. Fast.’
‘But why are we running away?’ said Mal. ‘You could kill him, with the glamry blade!’
‘I could kill him without the blade too.’ He led them down an alley, past a corrugated iron lean-to, towards the dock. ‘But in a town, unprovoked, with a dozen witnesses? I would end up in jail, and you two in an orphanage. And if he’s been ordered to kill you, what is to stop whoever’s commanding him from using someone else? No. Killing him isn’t the answer.’
‘How … did he find us?’ panted Mal.
A thought came to Christopher and he winced. ‘I think the al-mirajes left a trail,’ he said. ‘Green, in the pavement cracks. Like breadcrumbs.’
They reached a street populated with people in evening clothes, and they had to stop running for fear of attracting attention; instead they walked, the four of them, as fast as they could, through the dark streets.
Under the glow of the street lamps – real flame, Christopher saw, that burned steadily, without flickering – the Neverfear waited. The quay was largely deserted, boats stowed for the night, except for a cluster of men on the quayside, drinking coffee from a thermos.
Warren was sitting on a box with his pocketknife and a whetstone and looked up, startled, as they came.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘I thought we sailed tomorrow? And what are they doing back here?’
‘A change of plan,’ said Nighthand. He turned to the children. ‘Up you go.’
Mal ran up the gangplank, followed by Christopher. Nighthand turned to Irian. ‘Come with us?’
‘To the sphinxes? So you’re taking them? I don’t think—’
‘A scholar would be a useful thing to have,’ said Nighthand. ‘To answer the riddles. I’m no philosopher, and I prefer, in an ideal world, to go uneaten. And you do owe me: for the business with the lamp posts.’
‘But … I’m totally unprepared! I have no luggage with me, no nothing.’
‘None of us do. We none of us expected this. That is, in general, the nature of adventures. Adventurers tend to smell. The great epic tales stank, I think, more than the historians give them credit for.’
She hesitated only for a moment – a moment in which risk and reason, fear and a kind of buoyant, eager curiosity collided visibly across her face. Then she nodded. ‘That sounds all right to me,’ she said, and ran aboard, sure-footed.
Nighthand followed; anyone looking closely might have seen a pink tint passing, sunrise-like, over the skin of his neck and cheeks. He called to Warren: ‘Where’s Ratwin?’
‘She should be back at any moment,’ he said.
‘We can’t sail without her,’ said Nighthand. ‘Make ready, and we’ll go as soon as she comes.’
Suddenly Christopher’s stomach lurched. He grabbed hold of Mal’s wrist, and pushed her down to the deck.
‘Ow! What d’you do that for?’
‘He’s there!’ he whispered. ‘The man. Kavil.’ He peered over the edge of the boat. Kavil stood at the mouth of one of the streets off the quay, looking left and right. His skin in the lamplight looked grey, and his eyes had purple smudges beneath them.
‘Nighthand!’ he hissed. ‘We have to go.’
‘Not without Ratwin,’ said Nighthand. ‘She’s the finest navigator I’ve had.’
‘There she is!’ called Warren. ‘Ratwin! Quick! No, don’t stop to clean your whiskers!’
The ratatoska bounded up the gangplank, a map in her mouth, and Nighthand hauled it up after her. ‘Casting off!’ called Nighthand.
The boat sailed out of the quay and on to the great dark of the bay beyond.
Ratwin spat out the map on the deck. She looked Christopher up and down and sniffed.
‘Yous still here?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Clearly I am. What’s it a map of?’
‘The whole Archipelago. But this one has corals marked – corals that grow tall as trees beneaths the water, as’ll tear a boat to shreds if it tries to sail up and over.’
‘Is that true?’ said Christopher. ‘Coral forests?’
‘I never tells the ratatoskan long-tall-tales,’ said Ratwin, ‘about navigation.’
Christopher opened his eyes the next morning to pure blackness. He coughed, and jerked upright in a scramble of feathers: Gelifen had fallen asleep stretched over his face. Mal lay next to him, just beginning to stir in the dawn.
Gelifen nibbled Christopher’s fingers in greeting, plucked a feather from his own wings with his beak, and offered it to him.
‘He means it for a toothpick,’ said Mal, brushing her fringe from her eyes and sitting up. She grinned, and began to re-plait her hair, working the long gold thread through it. ‘Since we don’t have toothbrushes.’
A few paces away, Ratwin was perched on the side of the boat, talking to Nighthand.
‘Warren and I didn’t have time to load supplies at Bryn Tor,’ he said. ‘So we’ll have to stop at the next port, to take on water and food. What’s nearest?’
She peered out to sea, and down at her map, and her squirrel face considered it. ‘With these winds, and weathers? The Island of Vistaia is the best.’
‘Good enough.’ Nighthand nodded. ‘I haven’t been there for years, but I had a good friend in the town – a trader in salamandric fire.’ And, seeing Christopher listening, he added: ‘The fire breathed in a salamander’s final breath. If you catch it with a scrap of wood or paper or straw, it never goes out. The lamps in the dock use it.’
Mal brushed her fringe from her eyes, and sat up. ‘Is there breakfast?’ she asked.
There was. They ate it – the five humans, the griffin and the ratatoska – sitting on the deck in the rising sun. There was a dark flat bread, which they ate dipped in olive oil. There was a slab of cream-coloured dried fish, delicious and so salty it was like eating the sea itself. Gelifen was given the lion’s share – ‘the griffin’s share’, according to Mal. He thanked them courteously, tapping each with the tip of his beak.
‘Am I imagining it, or is he … getting bigger?’ asked Christopher. The griffin, clambering over his lap, felt heavier.
‘You’re not imagining it,’ she said. ‘They grow fast, in sudden spurts. He’s six months old now – he’ll be bigger than me when he’s an adult.’
Christopher fed Gelifen the last of his fish, just to see him vibrate with pleasure. A large butterfly, grey and blue, landed on the deck, and Gelifen launched himself after it.
‘They’re joy-birds, griffins,’ said Irian. ‘Cornucopial life-admirers.’
Ratwin sat perched on a stack of ropes, cleaning her small green ears. ‘Strong wings, griffins. I once knew a griffin,’ she said, ‘fly all the way to the moon, and eat a chunk of it for breakfast, and be back for dinner.’
‘Is that true?’ said Christopher.
She flicked a piece of wax from her ear with her claw. ‘No.’
Mal’s face was tight, watching Gelifen. ‘I think –’ the words sounded hard-formed, and painful in her throat – ‘he’s the last.’ Christopher realised, looking at her, that she had never said it aloud. It cuffed them all into silence, and they watched the griffin pounce upon the butterfly, and miss.
Ratwin broke the silence. ‘A little more to the wests,’ she said, and Irian took the tiller. Her hand on it was light as she steered them across the blue sheet of ocean. Nighthand looked surprised.
‘This is a stubborn boat,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t usually bend to anyone’s hand but mine.’
‘I spend a lot of time at sea – studying the glimourie for my work,’ she said quietly. ‘Sail-ships, fishing boats, coracles. I’m happiest in boats or in libraries – those are my places.’
Warren watched her, open admiration in his rheumy eyes. ‘And what are not your places?’
Irian looked, Christopher thought, as though she were about to say something serious – but then she shook her head. ‘Parties,’ she said, and smiled. ‘I speak four languages fairly well, but put me in a room full of strangers and I can’t think of a single word to say.’ She spun the tiller. ‘I once panicked and asked a man if he had a preferred type of badger.’
Nighthand looked bemused. ‘I have never in my life been at a loss for words.’
‘We knows,’ said Ratwin. ‘The fearlessness makes the man a conversationalist,’ she said to Irian. ‘And he fights like a lightning storm in a hat, but he’s also gots us fired from eight different jobs, any of which would have done us well enough.’
‘Last February he rode a seabull across the straits of Semper, in a storm, to rescue a unicorn foal who had been swept out to sea,’ said Warren. ‘Which sounds all very big and noble, except the man was drunk, and he abandoned the ship he was supposed to be steering without warning and it ran aground, and they lost a thousand gold pieces’ worth of stock.’
Nighthand glared, and made an imperious gesture into a pile of stacked boxes, which overturned with a clatter. ‘Would you have let the unicorn drown?’
Ratwin snorted, and returned to her lookout post, halfway up the mast. ‘A little more eastward,’ she called, ‘and we’ll come in at Fishhook Bay.’ Her eyes were stronger than human eyes; Christopher could see only a green blur amid the shining blue of the sea.
‘It’s one of the most beautiful islands,’ said Irian to Mal and Christopher. ‘They have a rare species of sea-urchin that you find nowhere else in the Archipelago. The spines are a foot long, and they turn red in the presence of predators.’ Her eyes were warming as she spoke. ‘But what’s really fascinating is the excreta they produce. It smells of cat urine, and it’s used by some centaurs in their oldest and wildest potion-work, but its chemical components suggest …’ She stopped, as Mal’s face took on a schoolroom look, and laughed. ‘Forgive me. I forget, sometimes, that urchin talk isn’t universally fascinating.’
Nighthand was watching her from across the boat. He did not complain about the urchin talk.
The boat passed swiftly over the waves, and Christopher crossed to get a better view of the island. Warren strode past, a roll of rope over his arm. ‘Sweet people, round here,’ he said. ‘You know what they say: soft water, soft souls.’
Christopher turned, keen to hear more. ‘What else do they say?’
Warren looked taken aback at his interest. ‘Oh … well – you get a very specific kind of person, from the dragon isles. They grow up round fire, and chaos. The children there don’t go to school; some of them live alongside dragons, in the mountains, until they reach adulthood. And then in the north they’re hardier, less talkative. And in the western central seas, the water’s gentle, and people speak slower. There we are now – we’ll be docked in a minute or two.’
They were close enough now to make out shapes. There was, at the water’s edge, a cluster of square stone buildings. None had their complete allocation of walls and ceiling. They were charred black. A small number of goats tried to graze on burned grass. Their long brown coats were grey with charcoal dust. There were no other sounds of life; no music, no children yelling, none of the shouts and jostling of humanity. Just the goats.
There was a moment when no one fully took in the importance of what they saw; and then Mal understood. ‘Quick!’ she cried. ‘Turn around! It’ll be coming back!’
‘What? What will be coming back?’ said Warren.
There was a rumbling overhead. Christopher’s jaw dropped open.
‘Get down! You two! Get down in the boat!’ cried Nighthand, and he heaved on the sails as Irian spun the tiller under fast, urgent hands.
Christopher crouched, but he would not look away. A great figure was gliding in over the sky, its wings moving in lazy flaps. It was deep black, and its wings were blood red on the underside. It was – exactly as the Bestiary had said – as large as a cathedral.
‘Don’t look it in the eye, Christopher!’ said Mal, tugging at him, so that he dropped to his knees.
‘I’ve got to see!’ he said. He stomach-crawled the length of the boat, and pressed himself against the side closest to the island: just his eyes and the top of his head showing. Mal hesitated – then crawled after him.
They watched the dragon swoop low over the herd of goats. Its hind legs stretched out. The goats scattered, bleating wildly, and it dropped, lower, until it was almost skimming the ground, and snatched one in its claws.
With a flick it tossed the goat into the air, blew a great burst of fire over it, and swallowed it whole while it was still alight.
They sailed on in silence. It was a long time before anyone spoke.
Irian swallowed. ‘Dragons don’t travel this far from their mountains, as far as I know.’
‘No,’ said Nighthand. ‘But we have moved far beyond what we know.’
REPAIR
Later that day, Christopher went to find Mal. She sat in the prow of the boat, ducked low enough to be protected from the wind by its high sides. The material on her lap, he saw, as he came closer, was her coat.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘Sewing, of course. What does it look like?’ The dragon had left her quaking, and even now she still shook with the adrenalin, though her expression dared him to mention it.
