Lempriere's Dictionary (91 page)

‘There must be another way,’ Lemprière looked about desperately.

‘There are only three entrances to this place. Two of them are in there,’ she pointed into the tunnel.

‘The third then….’

‘Miles distant. It comes out under the Opera House, back there,’ she pointed behind her. ‘Le Mara will be guarding that, once he deals with the Indian.’ Juliette took his wrist and pulled him forward.

For the first time since he had fled the chamber, he remembered his dictionary was still in his hand. He jammed the bulky volume into the ripped pocket of his coat and hurried after her. Almost as soon as they had entered the tunnel, Lemprière felt the first tongue of water curl around his boots and seep through their soles. The floor of the tunnel seemed to undulate. The water was collecting in each trough. He stumbled over the ridges. The roar of the water echoing down the tunnel was so loud they could barely hear their own feet splashing as they stumbled forward. Juliette kept glancing over her shoulder as though expecting their pursuer to catch them at any moment. She pulled up her skirts and led the way. Soon the water had risen to their knees and Lemprière could feel the current pushing against him. The tunnel began to rise and the water was a broad flood cascading down the ridges which they used as steps.

The river water stank. As they clambered up Lemprière felt something soft and clammy wrap itself around his legs then another and another, something white, like cloth. They were racing down towards him, dozens of them carried down by the flood. François’ pamphlets, he realised. He picked one off his leg. Juliette turned back to him.

‘Not far now,’ she gasped. The water had reached her waist. As she
resumed her struggle, they both heard the sound which grew out of the tunnel behind them: the bellowing of an animal filled with inarticulate rage. Both knew then that it was the Viscount who had followed them. They redoubled their efforts but the current was stronger, the torrent ahead even louder. They could no longer walk in the centre of the tunnel and had to cling to the sides. The water rose higher and Lemprière thought, of all the deaths inflicted on his family by the Cabbala to be drowned underground like a rat would be the most dismal. Then Juliette gave a short cry.

Lemprière looked up and there, a mere ten yards ahead of them and projecting from a shaft in the ceiling, was the ladder. Juliette turned and pointed to it and tried to speak over the noise of the water. The roar was deafening, impossibly loud. Then, as they struggled and reached the ladder, quite without warning, the noise stopped.

Lemprière and Juliette looked at each other in complete bafflement. They were sodden and panting. The waters even began to recede. Lemprière grinned and was about to speak but Juliette put her hand to his mouth. Both of them heard the quick irregular splashes and grunted curses of their pursuer. He was close, not visible yet, but moving at speed.

Juliette had him grasp the first rung. As he climbed up, his boots rang on the metal rungs. Juliette followed, urging him to climb more quickly. The water was almost silent, a placid thing swirling in lazy whorls and framed below them in the circle of the shaft. Above there was only the dark. He heard a creak and at first he thought it was his own weight on the ladder. But the creak seemed to go on and on, getting louder and louder. The sound rose up the shaft, an ear-splitting racket of tortured wood on rock which reached its crescendo with a hideous cracking sound and the water exploded down the tunnel once more as though pent up and suddenly released. Juliette shouted to him to climb faster. The water at the foot of the shaft churned and frothed. It seemed to glow as the torrent was renewed, a phosphorescent white, almost blue-white, almost green. The water was glowing green. Juliette was tugging at his leg. Bright green, and in the light he saw a vague shape moving below. She was shouting at him, pointing down the shaft.

‘Green!’ he shouted back. But that was not her message. The light glowed brighter and in it he saw suddenly that the vague shape below was not so distant as he had thought, nor so vague. It was Casterleigh moving up the ladder. He was climbing powerfully and with purpose towards them. Even then Lemprière hesitated, transfixed by the sight below as the circular frame of the shaft was filled with another still stranger prospect. The green light dimmed to a corona about its edges, highlighting a triangular shape that Lemprière recognised though it seemed impossible, moving un-mistakeably down the tunnel through which they had passed. It was the prow of a ship. A three-master, though the masts were snapped off a yard
above the deck and the sides were at once scourged and held together by the tight embrace of the tunnel. Then the water stopped. Once again the creaking noise sounded down the passage and Lemprière realised a second ship was straining to enter the Beast.

Tonight, London is an outpost of the Europe-machine; a place where Rochelle is possible again. The preludes to its end are buried: Troy, Carthage, the first and second Romes. Its echoes search now for resonant surfaces, places fit to replay the old drama: the siege about Belgrade perhaps or the riddled foundations of Paris, Constantinople or even Vienna where the Emperor Joseph’s indecision still hangs over the city. Or London. Tonight, London is the choice and an imperfect translation is already underway, echoes and correspondences are being pumped through the ports and circuits. They are straining under the load. The engine of Europe hums and spins, twitches in and out of its possible states as congruent details are fed out of the old city, away from the still centre of the anticyclone and into the new metropolitan template.

Already the cognoscenti are filling the Opera House, huddling there like the doomed masses in the citadel. The streets are lit with torches, thousands of them as invaders gather in the east. At Rochelle, a green beacon shines out along the agreed bearing over a dark sea, waiting, and this too finds its distorted version, its reversed echo as the translation takes ahold and advances upriver to the city. Aboveground, as below, the players are poised. London is ready for Rochelle.

The sunset was unusually lurid. Eben looked west from the Crow’s Nest as the dying light shot ribbons of colour into the gathering blue-black night. Reds, pinks and golds he had come to expect - the skies this summer were disturbed and erratic - but never more so than tonight. Even the sky’s wildest pallet rarely extended to green. Nevertheless, there it was. A fat glow in the upper air refracted from God knew what meteorological freak, probably miles away, probably Africa he thought, and it was not a muddy green either. It was bright, this green. Pea green.

‘Green,’ he said.

‘Green, confirmed Captain Roy. He was stationed opposite looking east.

‘Probably Africa,’ Eben went on.

‘Perhaps to begin with,’ said Roy. ‘Shadwell now though,’ and he pointed downriver as Eben came to look for himself. The Thames’
meanders curled away through the eastern districts, a dark flood until Shadwell where Roy pointed and beyond which Eben saw that the coils of the river were indeed bright green as though a lurid serpent had crawled inland in search of a latter-day Laocoon and its head, silhouetted against the iridescence which snaked away to stern, was a ship. The ship was moving upriver on the last surges of the tide, and its lagging escort of green was following, fanning out across the width of the river.

‘Extraordinary,’ muttered Eben.

‘Algae,’ said Roy.

It was; and the ship was the
Heart of Light
. Renamed
Alecto
, the three-master moved slowly upstream in the baleful glow of its suitors. As far back as Tilbury, the algae had broadened to touch the banks on either side. The river was luminous, molten, uncanny. Green. Peter Rathkael-Herbert watched from the bridge as the lighters and smacks moored downriver gave way to larger vessels, brigs and colliers, then frigates, Indiamen and ships of the line as they neared the Port of London.

‘So much for surprise,’ muttered Hörst ‘the Wurst’ Craevisch who stood beside him. They were marooned in a sea of green light that filled the river behind them for as far as they could see. The tide pulled them steadily into the city and their glowing escort followed. Of their mission’s object, the
Megaera
(and specifically her cargo of Sicilian sulphur) there was as yet no sign. The Imperial Internuncio moved forward and practised a tentative thrust with his newly-issued cutlass.

‘Jolly good, Peter!’ Wilberforce van Clam called encouragement for’ard from the quarterdeck. ‘Now lunge, lunge! Yes, yes!’

Dead fish bobbed up and down in the luminous carpet which encircled them. He had yet to get used to the stench and at night still dreamed of his time in the
Tesrifati
’s hold, horrible dreams of suffocation and decay. Wilberforce was waving for him to continue but he had lost the urge.

‘Pass the pipe.’ He reached over to Hörst who handed it over. Blue smoke rolled thickly around him as he puffed, banishing the redolent fish for a minute. The algae seemed to roll like waves around the ship and Hörst’s voice was far away and tinny as he shouted, ‘There she is, Wilberforce! The
Megaera
, dead ahead!’ Pirates were gathering around Wilberforce on the quarterdeck, adjusting bandanas and stuffing braces of pistols down their trousers. Most held cutlasses in their teeth. Peter Rathkael-Herbert essayed another lunge. Not good.

‘Where?’ he asked Hörst and looked to starboard as directed where, amongst the clutter of masts and jostling hulls that was the Upper Pool, he saw tied up to a long wharf a barge, then what looked like a scaled-down Indiaman, beyond that a cargo vessel,
Typhoon, Tisiphone
something of the sort and last of all, the
Megeara
. Lobs de Vin was already practising throws
with his grappling hook. Peter Rathkael-Herbert pulled deeply on the pipe. The port seemed deserted, neglected almost. Odd piles and heaps, impromptu depots and careless stacks of bales littered the quays as they drew nearer. The first hooks were flung out over the glowing water to land and snag in the
Megaera
’s lower rigging. The
Alecto
swung about and moved towards her prey. A little shudder ran through the vessel as he jumped down to join his fellow pirates, then another.

The prow collided gently with the stern of the
Megaera
, the ropes were made fast and then he was leaping forward with the rest of them, feet clattering over the decks of the boarded vessel, cutlass in hand and pistol at the ready while all around the algae glowed greenly and further shudders began to run through both vessels. Peter Rathkael-Herbert looked over the side, frowned, then looked again. The ships began to move more violently, straining at the hawsers. The river swirled. Its surface dipped. No, he thought. He turned to his companions.

‘Abandon ship!’ he cried. ‘Wilberforce! Hörst! The water, look! Oh, God no….’

The luminous river surface was massing, piling up in heaving ramparts of green; solid walls of rising water teetered all about the ship whose deck pitched forward as though old Father Thames was suddenly a muscled giant sporting with the
Megaera
as a whale with its tub. The pirates skated down the deckspace, sliding and tumbling towards the prow as the first trough opened in the water, an embracing wound which pulled the vessel to itself, sending shudders through her timbers to the elderly pirates who now scrambled over the bows rail, all thoughts of brigandage lost for the moment in a desperate tangle of arms, legs, heads, short swords, cutlasses, cudgels and pistols, a great heap of human panic spilling from ship to shore as the
Megaera
began to roll.

The trough deepened, and a terrible sucking sound filled the air. The green light throbbed in deep pulses around the vessel which turned blindly, hawsers snapping like thread as she see-sawed crazily, pitching up and down, yawing in a wild destructive spin. The river was a vortex, sucking the ship down below the pulsing surface, her masts insane fingers pointing to an empty sky. Within her hold the barrels of charcoal were shattering. The
Megaera
whirled about as the river got a grip on her, the whirling pool spun faster and with a great belch of escaping air she was dragged below the surface. As she disappeared, a wailing sound, a howling of tortured timbers, cut through the murderous gurge, as though the ship were not yet dead. Then the sound stopped. For a brief moment the waters were calm before the ship was swallowed down, and the abysmal undertow surged again. Watching from the quayside, Peter Rathkael-Herbert and the pirates saw their own vessel swing about and turn its blind nose
towards the whirlpool. A hole had opened in the riverbed, a hungry mouth to swallow ships.

What could they do? They stood in silence on the quay, frail spectators to the unfolding catastrophe as their ship was tossed up now and plunged stern-first down into the crashing green waters which tightened about her and pulled her under.

Again the pause, again the moment of stillness, the shriek of splintering timbers, and then from further down the quay the
Tisiphone
pulled like a maddened beast to join her furious sisters. The indraught sucked down the third of the sisters, drawing in more of the algae’s carpet of love, dragging that down too. Perhaps they went willingly, as heedless lovers, carrying down a flaming torch of green to the sister-ships, for they will need that too. The whip of scorpions alone will not suffice for the vengeance these Furies have been sent to enact.