Legenda Maris (12 page)

He felt nothing.

He wanted nothing, expected nothing.

He did not quite expect the man who came
from the side of the house, along the terrace.

A slight dark man, walking, looking out
of dark eyes, carrying with him the primaeval green odour of the sea. The poet
turned and looked at the man. A little white-hot shock passed through his
heart, but he felt it only remotely. The man was himself.

Ashburn said quietly: “Well?”

The man who was himself gazed back at
him, without recognition, without dislike, without love. His clothes, Ashburn’s
clothes, were soaked, as if he had been swimming in the sea. Incredible black
and purple weeds had attached themselves to his shoulders.

“How long”, the man said to him, “will
you make me wait for you?”

Ashburn leaned back against the wall of
the house. All the strength had gone out of him; it seemed as if his body had
fainted yet left his mind conscious and alert. He laughed and shut his eyes. “I
have called up my own ghost,” he said, and looked again, and the man had gone.
The poet rubbed his head against the hot, hard wall and discovered, with little
interest, that he was weeping. The tears tasted of the sea, teaching him.

Yet, “Don’t go,” Albertine said in the
morning, as she stood on the shallow step by the royal blue water. Her eyes
were fixed, not on him, but on the little boat, the young brown islander
arrogantly at work on her rigging, fixed on Merton standing on the beach,
smoking his pipe, nodding at the waves.

“The sea’s as calm as glass, look at it,”
Ashburn said. He smiled at her, took her hand. “Do you think Merton would risk
the trip otherwise, or the island boy?”

Albertine reached out and took his face
fiercely between her hands.

“Don’t go, don’t leave me.”

“There are things we need from the
mainland, my love, beside Laura’s vitriolic letters to be posted.”

“No,” she said. Her eyes were wide and
desolate as grey marshes; her cold hands burned.

Merton came up, patted her arm. “Come
now, it’s just what we all need.” He winked anxiously, indicating to her that
Ashburn would benefit from an hour or so in the boat. “Sea’s like blue lead,
and it’s hot enough to fry fish in that water.”

Albertine suddenly relinquished her hold
on the poet. Her eyes clouded over and went blank as if she had lost her sight.
“Good-bye,” she said. She turned and went back into the house.

Merton, glancing up, saw her emerge
presently on the flat roof of the tower, and wait by the black telescope
beneath the awning.

The two men walked towards the boat
together. The village boy nodded sneeringly and let them, as a particular
favour, get in, packing his brown bony limbs in position as he took the tiller.
They cast off. The silken arms of the water drew them in.

The ship clove the waves gracefully,
with a gull-like motion, her sails opening like flowers to the wind. The island
and the red house dwindled behind them, and the smoking hills.

“Cooler here,” Merton said. He knocked
the dottle from his pipe as if relieved to be rid of it. “Feel better now, I
expect, old chap?”

The poet smiled as he lay against the
side of the boat, ineffably relaxed. The sea and sky seemed all one colour, one
ebony blue. He was aware of a lightness within himself, an inner silence. All
the busy organs of the body had ceased, the ticking clocks, all unwound, all at
peace, no heart beat, no beat in the belly or loins, no chatter in the brain.
The sky appeared to thread itself between sail and mast like sapphire cotton
through a needle. The heat was almost comforting, a soporific laudanum summer
breath sighed into the motionless bellows of his lungs. He smiled at Merton, he
smiled compassionately. He felt himself regarding a man who is unaware that in
his flesh the advanced symptoms of an incurable illness have manifested
themselves.
Should I tell him? No, poor creature, let him be. Let him go on
in impossible hope
.

“Do you swim?” Ashburn asked.

“Swim? Why yes, you know I do, unlike
yourself.”

The poet turned to the brown boy with
the same smiling compassion. “And you?”

“I? I swim like dolphin.” He glared at
them, however, with the kingly eyes of a shark.

“What’s all this worry about swimming?”
Merton said, lighting the pipe. “Afraid we’ll capsise or something?”

“Look,” Ashburn said, softly.

Merton looked. He saw a strange,
mysterious phenomenon, a bank of nacreous fog, afloat like a great galleon and
bearing down on them.

“Good God.”

“Yes,” Ashburn said, “a good God, who
sends his people rain.”

With an abrupt entirety as if a grey
glove had seized the ship, the fog closed over them and they lost each other in
it.

“Turn back for shore!” Merton shouted.
No one apparently heard him. The boat swung drunkenly sideways. The drums of
his ears seemed to stretch tight; there was a growling in the air. The sky and
sea tilted to meet each other, and slammed together as thunder shattered the
ocean into a broken plate. A lightning appeared to strike to the vitals of the
boat itself: wood splintered, a terrifying unreasonable sound. Merton fell to
his knees; he could hear the boy screaming about a rock in the sea.

“Ashburn, where are you?” he cried,
groping with his hands through the greyness, but the wind rushed into his
throat, and the world leaned sideways and flung him into its salty mouth, and
gulped him down.

Albertine
was still waiting at the telescope. She had watched the ship bob on the leaden
sea, she had watched the fog rise like a hand from the floor of the ocean and
gather the vessel into itself.

Soon the sky broke up. Explosions of
thunder and dazzling lightnings divided the landscape between them. Viscous
rain began to fall, at first like great gems, opals or diamonds, then in a
boiling sheet of white fire that flamed across the house, the shore, the sea in
impenetrable gusts. From the village the islanders came running, shouting,
opening their arms to the storm. Albertine, her hair flattened to her skull and
shoulders, the colour of the rain itself, stared through the one-eyed thing
towards the abstracted ocean.

The storm was brief; it failed and fled
away shrieking over the land trailing its torn plumes. The sky cleared, the
sea, the shore, even the distant coast became visible. Nothing stood between
the island and the coast. The ship had vanished.

The black tongue of the telescope licked
to left and right, probing with its cold cyclopean glass, but not for long.

Soon, Albertine drew away from it. Her
clothes and her hair ran water as if she had come from the sea. Yellow water
dripped from the slag-bellied awning. As if across miles of desert, she could
hear the voice of a frenzied woman in the house below her feet. “Poor Sibbi,”
she whispered, as if comforting herself. “Poor Laura.” She did not cry, only
frowned a little, striving to comprehend the perfection of her knowledge, the
completeness of the event which had befallen her. She rocked her grief in her
arms like a sleeping child.

When she turned down the stairway into
the tower room, she saw the poet at his desk, the manuscripts, the open books
set out before him. He looked up at her, not with a lover’s face or the face
even of an enemy, but merely with the soulless look of something which is only
spirit. She held her grief in her arms and watched the poet’s ghost fade like
water in the air of the room, until only the room, the shadows remained, and
the unfinished poem, spread like the white wings of a dead pigeon on the desk.

This
peculiar account of the last days and night of the poet, Shelley is closely
based on actual of what took place. Most biographies concerning him carry
references, and many of them much more than that.

My choice of (fictional) name for him
comes phonetically from the story by Henry James:

The Aspern Papers.

To meet oneself is, apparently, usually
Bad News. You are either dead, or soon will be.

Lace-Maker, Blade-Taker, Grave-Breaker,
Priest

From an idea dreamed by John Kaiine during
an afternoon catnap.

The sea! The sea!

Xenophon: Anabasis. IV vii.

1

It
seemed as if only one second after the double blow was struck, the storm came
up in answer out of the ocean. Of course, it did not happen quite in that way.
But Ymil, who had briefly turned his back on the argument and was staring out
to starboard, said and believed that, directly following the sound of the
leather glove slapping the fine blond cheeks, a bubble of sable cloud rose
there on the horizon’s curve. And the first kick of the sea unbalanced the
ship.

Until then the voyage had been tranquil
and pleasant, in itself. They were bound for the Levant. Blue skies canopied
blue water with emerald margins and frills of lacy foam. Suns were born and
died in splendour. Scents of oleanders and olive trees drifted from the edges
of the land. The nights dripped heavily with stars.

But from the very first, those two had
formed a dislike for each other.

Surely any intelligent man realised it
was unsensible to take, let alone so overtly, against a fellow passenger on a
voyage of more than two or three days. Apparently, neither could help it. And
both, one saw, were arrogant.

Vendrei was the worst, however, and he
had seemed to be the one to start the feud openly. It was he also, in those
last moments before the tempest arrived, who offered the duellist’s invitation.
He had been idly slapping one of his elegant gloves against his sumptuous boot.
Then, rising suddenly, he had slapped the glove instead once, twice, across
Zephyrin’s face. “Do you know what that means, you damned gutter-rat?”

And pale fair Zephyrin, now with two
cheeks pink as a Paris fondant, smiled thinly and replied, “Oh yes. Do
you
?”

After which, Ymil insisted, the ship
rumbled and arched her spine, and storm-breath coughed vulgarly in the sails .

What had been carelessly noted
before—that no land was by then visible anywhere—now seemed of consequence. And
so it was to be.

For in less than five minutes more, the
sky turned black, the vessel was racing sidelong, masts and yards leaning and
cracking and screeching, things crashing below-decks, the groans, bellows and
shouts of crew and passengers already lost in tumult.

Less than
twenty
minutes more and
the ship, partly dismasted and having struck some unseen and unseeable obstacle,
reeled headlong in the maelstrom and began to go down.

All on deck had been swept off into the
water. Here they whirled and spilled about among the terrible, smothering
sheets of the waves.

Ymil lost consciousness, expecting to
awaken dead. But when he did regain his senses he found that he, with a small
group of others, had fetched up alive on an unidentified shore.

Whether this was the hem of mainland or
isle he did not know, as nor did any of them.

They huddled on the sand as the storm
dissolved in distance, its mission fulfilled. There was no sign of the
foundered ship, not even so much as a broken spar, barrel or shred of canvas.
Only the repaired lace of the foam followed them to the beach.

Sunset had gone by in a mask of weather.

Night was constructing itself brick by
brick.

2

Prince
Mhikal Vendrei had come aboard at the Mediterranean port with the seamless
modesty of a flamboyant man. His luggage was meagre and soon stowed in the
better part of the passengers’ quarters. He was a very beautiful picture, tall
and slim, with a sunburst of dark gold hair, and everything augmented by silk,
leather and clean linen. At his side, in a satin-cased sheath, rested the true
gentleman’s final accessory, a sword of damascened steel, with a lynx engraved
under the hilt. He spoke like a gentleman too, and in many languages. French he
had, and several of the coiled tongues of the Eastern Steppes; it seemed from
his few immaculate books he could read Latin and Greek. The local patois he had
no trouble with, nor even the slangy argot of the sailors. He did not keep to
himself, graciously appearing at meal-times, or to walk the upper deck and sea-
or stargaze with the others. He flirted nicely with the rich elderly lady from
Tint, as with the younger, less wealthy ladies from Athens. He played cards
where desired, prayed calmly with the rest on the three saints’ days that fell
during the voyage, and was virtually faultless. He even consented to being
sketched by the motherless son of the merchant from Chabbit.

They learned a little about the prince.

He was a landowner’s son from the
north-east, schooled in Paris, and at the great University in Petragrava. But
he had been leading a dissolute life lately, until deciding to change his ways
and to become, as he put it with a flippant, rueful smile, “
Virtuous
”
for his father’s sake.

On the other hand no one ever did quite
learn
where
precisely he had been born or raised, where he had carried
on his dissolution, nor what made him give it up (assuming he had for he still
gambled for money and drank quite an amount before, during and after supper).

The general consensus was that he was
likeable and liked. A pleasure to the eye, the ear, and—for he often
good-naturedly lost at cards—the pocket of many aboard.

Some five days into the voyage the ship
called at the port of Ghuzel. Here a handful more passengers joined her. Only
one was notable, for this male figure too was a glamorous creation quite out of
the ordinary.

Zephyrin—if Zephyrin owned another name
nobody had discovered it during the trip—looked a very young man, who seemed at
least some ten years the junior of Prince Vendrei, sixteen perhaps or at most
eighteen. Unusual in one so immature, however, was Zephyrin’s knowledge, poise,
and ability to charm and to contend with everyone and thing—saving, of course,
the prince himself.

For it was evident by the end of
Zephyrin’s first day on board, that the young one and the elder one had fallen
into an immediate hatred of each other.

Could it be they were jealous? Unlikely
as it seemed, some of the passengers suggested this to each other. Two men,
they said, of such wonderful looks and such otherwise incompatible aspects,
could well find causes for resentment. For example, Vendrei
was
the
elder, might not approve a rival with so much extra youth to spare. Formerly,
after all, Vendrei had been the voyage’s sole magician, particularly among the
women passengers. But it seemed they liked the newcomer just as much. Or
more...

As for Zephyrin: clearly not well-off,
and occupying quarters in the ship’s belly, an airless stern area below-decks,
private enough but dark, dank and rat-nipped. Zephyrin meanwhile was clad only
in an old black cavalry uniform from an unrecognisable battalion of Europe.
(Some said too this might even be a mercenary band). The attached sword, for as
an army officer, which Zephyrin claimed to be, the young person had one, was
plain steel in a drab sheath and showed no crest.

There was another odd thing.

Zephyrin’s thick almost white hair—was a
wig. That was not so uncommon among the gentry, but for an impoverished army
captain it could have seemed an odd affectation, if Zephyrin had not swiftly
made allusion to it in an off-hand way. It turned out: “In infancy I fell
deathly ill and almost died. Though a clever physician saved my life, my hair
dropped out and never fully regrew, save, as you see, for my brows and lashes.”
For this reason Zephyrin wore the realistic wig, a moon-blond mane, on which
was clapped a protective hat when anything more than a faint breeze blew. The
captain was beardless also for the same past cause; not even the long strong
fingers gave any evidence of hair. These facts seemed neither to embarrass or
inconvenience Zephyrin. Yet the shade of the wig, chosen presumably to
compliment the soldier’s own pale colouring, might hint at vanity? The brows
too—were they perhaps a little darkened? The eyes needed no help at all. They
were large and of a sombre green, more malachite than jade.

Eyes notwithstanding, did this
interloper loathe the luxuriantly-locked Vendrei? Covet his good birth,
education and money? Zephyrin had revealed nothing of parentage or natal
country, and spoke, albeit in a musical tenor, only the language of the ship -
and that with an army accent. Probably such a life as his had been perilous and
disgraceful. All of which might be a cause for discontent.

Whatever did touch the spark to the
powder, each of the drama’s actors was quickly a foe to the other.

Ymil had seen their quarrel begin.

He himself was nothing, was a writer. He
had neither excess cash nor fame, no property, no clout, had been born in a
backstreet of Petragrava itself, but to a street-girl who knew less of Ymil’s
father than Ymil knew of the kingdom of God. Dragged up as through a
thorn-hedge backwards, (as he himself had sometimes said), Ymil travelled about
on the business of others who paid him, and wrote when he had a moment on
paper, with a series of leaky ink-pencils. But
always
he was writing in
his mind.

Frankly, he thought, he might have
devised and written the first abridgement between Ven and Zeph himself. For, if
unacknowledged, Ymil was more arrogant than either of these slender,
be-sworded, masculined beauties, and had a brain like a thirsty sponge.

That
first day then, starting off from the port of Ghuzel, with the sea skilfully
hooking and knotting together its delicate lace of foam...

“And so, sir. I seem to interest you?”

This from golden-mane Vendrei, to the
soldier they did not yet know as Zephyrin.

“Your pardon.
You
? And...
I
?”

“Just so. Ever since you came aboard
this vessel. Not a great while, I admit. But sufficient time, it appears, to
learn to stare.”

“You must excuse me,” said the shabby,
beautiful,
young
, flaxen captain. “I failed to see you at all. How
remiss, as you seem to require to be looked at. And I, so rudely, did not
notice you and looked—directly, er—
through
you. “

Ymil, at the scene’s perimeter, raised
mental ears as high as a hare’s.

“Truly? Through me. How quaint. But I
suppose you’re not accustomed to mixing with my sort.”

“Your... sort?” questioned the captain,
gently.

“Oh, an aristocrat, an educated man who
travels a great amount—”

“I see. In the travelling way of a
merchant, do you mean? One who sells things?” asked the captain, raising an
eyebrow.

“Not in that way at all,
sir
. In
the way of a man of leisure, who may
please himself
.”

“Ah,” said the fair captain. Then paused
as if admiringly impressed. Before adding, with mildest interest, “And do you
find you do, sir? I mean, please
yourself
? Or ... anyone ?”

For a heartbeat Gold-hair looked as if
he might laugh. But then he checked and coldly said, “Your impertinence is
evidently due to your lack both of breeding and grasp of any language you are
attempting to converse in. I’ll leave you to compose yourself. Good morning.
Yet perchance, a word of advice from one a little older than yourself. Don’t
stare
.”

The captain curtly bowed. And replied,
“I shall attempt to benefit from your estimable warning.
Perchance
I can
return the favour by exhorting
you
, sir, to avoid giving such cause.”

Thus, their first exchange.

Certainly,
a very childish way of going on. Fascinated, nevertheless Ymil thought so. But
being as he was, and doing what he did, human things intrigued and captivated
him, and to a greater extent in their displays of extremis.

He had already been watching all and
everyone, constant to his normal formula. Then when the boyish captain came
aboard Ymil was instantly prepared to watch especially hard. But anyone might
think Zephyrin a curiosity.

Unlike
Zephyrin, Ymil’s close but
cunning scrutiny had not been noted.

And indeed, as Ymil had seen, Zephyrin
had
stared on and on at Vendrei. Spoiling for a fight from the start, seemingly.

Their duel stayed verbal, however, for
eight further days and nights.

But they would not keep a minute in each
other’s vicinity without some quip or carp. Even once Zephyrin, passing
Vendrei, who was strolling with the two Athenians, simply whistled a snatch of
song. It was the ballad from a popular play, concerning a stupid fop who fancied
he was a king among women, while at his back all females scorned him. Leaving
the ladies, Vendrei walked over to Zephyrin. “It’s unlucky to whistle at sea.”

“Oh, is it? Why?”

“Because, captain, you may summon
something to you that may prove unwelcome.”