Riverkeep (5 page)

“So. This is the keep's role,” he said, “heavin' this bottle of fish slime around forever. I shouldn't even be here. . . .”

He stood, hefted the bottle, and went to lean toward the empty, frosted reservoir.

His feet slipped, the slick wood of the bottom boards taking his balance, sending him flying forward and throwing the whale oil from him—over the side.

“No!” shouted Wull, stretching for it in midair, his hands short of the spinning handle and fingers clawing nothing as
he fell. His chin burst on the gunwale, filling his mouth with numb heat and the thin copper of blood.

Wull's eyes rolled as he fell, crashing onto the floor of the boat.

There was a moment, lying flat and being rocked by the floor of the bäta, when the pain and the cold vanished and the only things that existed were the patient stars glimmering behind the torn cotton of the winter clouds; then the agony returned, the cold flared in his joints, and the sounds of wood knocking against his ears pulled him back into reality.

“Oh gods!” said Wull, spraying blood. He pulled himself upright and leaned out, expecting to see the whale oil slip into the Danék.

The bottle sat on the ice, unbroken, between the lantern and the bank.

“Oh, thank the gods—don't move!” he shouted to the bottle. It rolled a little toward the water. “Don't move!” Wull shouted again, wiping blood from his chin. There was a tug of raised flesh against his glove.

It could wait. He pulled the bäta tight against the lantern and fumbled at the rope with fingers that were now little more than agonized lead stumps. He dropped the rope once, then twice, shooting panicked glances at the bottle. At last he managed a rough bowline and gave it a gentle, experimental tug, hardly daring to pull firmly lest it be unraveled into
a tangled mess. Then he lifted his foot over the gunwale and onto the ice.

He stopped, heard Pappa's voice:
Never get oot the bäta, Wulliam—the minute ye get oot that boat, ye're lost—ye can't be rescuin' folk if ye need rescuing yersel'
.

The ice creaked under his heel. He lifted it back, slightly, bracing himself against the wood. Then he remembered once more the other thing Pappa had said:
An' don't spill a drop o' that bloody whale oil. . . . Liquid gold that stuff
.

Wull leaned his weight onto the ice. He felt it move, settle, the studded soles of his boots locking on to its surface.

So,
he thought.
This is fine. It's not far. Just a few paces
. He looked at the bäta's eyes. “Those might be painted on,” he muttered, “but you're doing a bloody good job o' lookin' annoyed. Lump o' firewood that you are.”

He lifted over his other leg.

Standing on the ice, he realized how little time he'd spent walking around the river. Apart from playing in the trees beside the boathouse when he was very young, he'd hardly ever taken walks or run around, because there had been no other children for miles.
And even if there had been,
he thought bitterly,
they'd never have played with the keep's son. They think we eat the bodies.

Walking the river gave the whole world a different sense, even less secure than with the bäta beneath him—and with the
sharp awareness of the short distance that now separated him from the ursas. A cough might bring them running.

He took a step forward.

The ice lurched, a tabletop rolling with his feet and trembling with the river. The bottle rolled again toward the water.

“No, no, no, no, no . . .” whispered Wull, stepping backward. A groan came from the ice, like cattle under strain. In his mind Wull saw the moment of it cracking, sending him into the current and the weed beds to freeze there, floating to the surface in the summer as sun-melted flesh to be found by . . . no one. To be picked apart by birds and flies.

And Pappa, tied to a chair, wasting to yellow bones just yards from buckets of stinking fish heads.

That could not happen.

“Aaaaaarrrghhh!” he shouted, running at the whale oil as though trapping a wild animal. The ice leaned wildly as he leaped, but he grabbed the rolling bottle beneath his body and dug the stud of his toe into the ice.

“Yes!” he said, flushed. “Oh yes! Ha! Oh, I've got you. Oh, thank gods.”

He hugged the bottle, heard the thick gloop of oil, stood—then fell instantly, feet splayed out in front of him, the thud of his backside on the ice shaking his teeth and flashing fresh pain into his bleeding chin.

As he watched the bottle fall he had time only to gasp before it broke with a deep round split and showered him in fish-stinking, flammable liquid gold.

“Oh . . .” he said, glistening under its coating. “Oh . . . oh . . . gods . . .”

The bäta nodded, and a noise like a splitting branch told Wull the ice was breaking beneath him.

Subconscious animal instinct lifted him to his feet and propelled him forward, almost without touching the surface. He launched himself into the bäta as the tabletop of ice split in two and the larger chunk, speckled merrily with shards of the porcelain bottle, drifted into the current.

Wull sat in the back of the boat, in his old seat, watching half a winter's worth of oil reflect the moonlight on its way downriver.

“Oh gods,” said Wull. “There's not the coin to replace that. Oh gods, gods . . .”

He looked around at the white world, unchanged and uncaring in the face of this fearful loss. A night lark released a burst of song.

“How can birds sing in the middle o' this?” he said aloud. He found he was, again, addressing the bäta.

From the back of the boat he couldn't see its eyes, but they arrived without effort in his mind: hard and forward-looking.

He returned to the Riverkeep's seat and hefted the
oars again, rowing to nowhere, oblivious to the pain in his hands and shoulders and the throb of his bloodied mouth and chin.

“Why do I have to do this?” he asked the bäta. “What difference would it make if the river locked? People could just drag their boats along the ice like sleds, couldn't they?”

He wondered why this had never occurred to him before.

“Couldn't they?” he said again. His voice seemed to travel no farther than his lips; the oppression of the freezing air was like being locked in a cupboard. The bäta lurched through the little islands of ice with his jerky, uneven strokes. The only other sound was the grinding of the oars in their rowlocks.

“Some seulas'll die,” Wull carried on, fighting for breath. “There's bloody hundreds of 'em: rhats wi' flippers, Pappa calls 'em. So why should we care? An' why do we feed 'em? No wonder they hang about the boathouse. An' if Pappa keeps eatin' like he is, there'll be nothin' for 'em to eat anyway. So why bother? An' why, when everyone else just carries on with themselves and their own lives, should I be out here in the freezing bloody cold, tryin' to stop ice from freezin' and talkin' to a bloody boat?”

The tiniest echo of his last shout sang across the water and was snuffed out by the heavy, winter silence, through which the bäta bobbled sternly.

“An' without the oil, what am I to do anyways?” said Wull. “Use these things?”

He released an oar, lifted an ice rod from beneath the bottom boards.

“On ice like this these'll be worse'n useless. I might as well hit it wi' grass.”

Wull stood holding the rod, letting the oars drift in their rowlocks, turning the bäta against the current.

“So is this what I mus' do?” he shouted, stabbing tentatively, then harder, thrusting the point of the rod more sharply on the surface of the ice until it began to chip and flake. “An' how long mus' I do it?”

His voice rose as he began to thrash with the rod.

“To make such tiny dents in so big a thing”—he struck harder, the thud of connection jarring his bones—“I might hit its white face forever”—he struck again, still harder, with blows that bounced into his spine—“and forever and still never crack . . . a bloody . . . piece of it!”

The ice split with a surprisingly gentle sound, parting with a break that was almost perfect. Wull straightened his back and let the rod clatter at his feet. Hands on his knees, he filled his lungs with stabbing air to release a long and bitter laugh.

Then he saw the face peering back at him from below the ice, and the breath stopped in his throat.

Scores of them came in the night, slices of a deeper black on the horizon: strange craft under strange flags, crewed by the salt-cut and the sea-hardened, seeking the bounty of the mormorach's flesh. The people of Canna Bay watched them anchor, blaze up their lamps, and dot the harbor with light.

The lamps glowed faintly blue—magic had come with the mormorach, and the air in the village had changed. There was a smell—of burnt things and hot metal—that had begun to inhabit everything: clothes, skin, hair, bread. The people went to their burnt-smelling beds and held each other and whispered prayers of fortune that the harpoons of the morning would find their mark.

In sleep, the village—fishless now for days—was silent: the night packers' heat and laughter snared with the fishermen's empty nets.

One ship arrived after all the others, once the people of Canna Bay had taken their bed leave. Although wide-hulled and misshapen, the
Hellsong
was faster than the rest, and its prow and flanks were studded with rows of teeth that caught the moonlight and shone. Its bowsprit was the pearlescent spike of a great narwhal; its terrible figurehead the skull of a huge cragolodon. And fixed to its rails were the skulls of game fish: mairlan, shark, and greenfin. Damage to its mast and deck was splinted by
enormous bones and trussed with rope, a skeletal patchwork that gave the vessel the look of a wounded and rotting animal. But underneath this projection of decay, the impression was of tenacity.

In the guts of the
Hellsong
sat its captain, Gilt Murdagh, turning a lump of ivory in hands that were three fingers short and thick with dirt. Five of his crew were cramped beside him, awaiting his word; in the doorway lurked the wide-eyed cabin boy, Samjon, snatching conversation beyond the table's kicking feet.

The hatches had been battened somewhere over the Keppul Sound in the face of a storm that dropped the barometer's quicksilver almost out of sight, and the galley's air had grown sour in the hours since. A tang of sweat, fish, and false, itch-making heat crawled on the skin of the crew and into their mouths and noses.

Murdagh was unaware of the stifling atmosphere; decades at sea had chewed him to a strip of teak-strong gristle, and he no longer tasted the well-lived air. He had about his face a thick clod of beard, lumped by tangles and tar and livened by the bright flash of scar tissue. Beneath a curtain of once-injured flesh glowed his bloodstained left eye; his right, deep-set in sunbrowned skin, was gray and hard. From the floor came the scrape of his whalebone leg against the deck's grain, and he bumped the sharp point of his iron crutch in a distracted rhythm.

Murdagh lifted his long nose and opened his mouth, tasting the air. He turned the piece of ivory again, knocked it on the table, then smiled at the men and women before him, running his tongue over teeth that were ribbed with grime.

“We's here,” he said quietly. “Let's hunt.”

When I have done the work o' day,

An' aw the dead are tucked away,

I sit, bankside, an' breathe my whiff,

An' munch the skin from off the stiff.

When I have tucked away the dead,

An' aw my seula friends have fled,

I sit bankside, upon my heels,

An' out my teeth I pick the eels.

When fled have aw my seula friends,

An' aw Dan-ey-ék's water scends,

I sit, bankside, upon my rear,

An' chew the wax from out my ear.

—Oraccan children's song about the Riverkeep

Morning found Wull, undrunk tea cold in his hand, perched opposite a fragment of skull as though he had arranged for it to enjoy a formal breakfast. He sat, still tight with cold,
slow-blinking in the glare: the morning had arrived without cloud, and the small window was filled with the dazzle of sunlight on snow. It illuminated a woodcut darkened by soot and time: a man, barrel-chested and thickly bearded, standing proudly in a bäta with a modestly wrapped corpse elegant in the stern. The sky was a sweep of cloud with a fat, benevolent sun beaming down.

Wull looked at it a while, then turned to the inelegant lump on the cadaver slab: the arrow-shaped piece of skull and its strip of face—comprising the eyes, most of the nose, and a corner of the mouth—that had peered at him from beneath the ice. Once he had realized it wasn't attached to a body, he had stretched out an oar to lift it into the bäta. Snagged in a drift of net and weed of the type that often clung to the hulls of ocean barges, it must have come up from the coast on the back of the head-shaking captain's boat.

As first recoveries went, it wasn't especially unpleasant. It certainly hadn't taken much lifting, and with his hands, shoulders, and tailbone in a grim state following the disaster at lantern three, he was glad of that at least.

He had recorded the skull in the ledger as soon as feeling returned to his fingers:

The partskulle of a mann discoverd under the ice neer lanttern three. Some face remayns and also bothe eyes, returnd to boathuse.

He remembered the story of Pappa's first recovery: a guardsman whose strangled corpse had settled in the bottom weed. Before he could float to the surface, an ocean barge anchored directly above him, and stayed for the summer months while the captain gambled away winter's money. As the water fell, the barge settled deeper in the river atop the corpse, so that when eventually the captain returned to his winter trading, Pappa—then a gangling boy of sixteen—found the guardsman on the bank, pressed as thin as paper, looking like nothing more than a discarded floor mat.

Wull wondered if Pappa had ever failed to light the lantern wicks. Or dropped a whole bottle of whale oil. It didn't seem likely.

His
recovery was now sat in the mortuary at the head end of the cadaver slab. At first he'd set it in the middle, as he'd seen Pappa do with torsos, but the head section had a small, raised pillow in the stone. And it
was
a head after all.

He could have set it to face the other way, but somehow that seemed worse: he imagined the swollen eyes pulsing into life and flicking around the walls. So he had sat in the clay-smelling room opposite its slack gaze, fighting the needles of his slow-thawing flesh and his trembling hands, waiting for Mrs. Wurth the undertaker to make her weekly appearance.

And now the maddening woman was here, keeping perfect time as ever. From the parlor, behind the closed door, came the urgent silence of Pappa straining against the bonds on his wrists and the cloth wrapped across his mouth. Wull was certain only he could hear it.

He sighed, and felt his wind throb in the struggle to control himself. The constant, dull ache was back: the acid boil of tension and worry that filled him from his guts through his muscles to the tips of his fingers. He ignored it.

“An' whair'd ye say ye found this?” said Mrs. Wurth.

Wull looked at her gray face. Mrs. Wurth had shown no sign of surprise or disgust or humor on seeing the face peeking up at her from the slab; just turned it over to inspect the mottled insides and nodded.

“It was under the ice by lantern three,” said Wull. “There was weed all round it, like when they gets caught under barges.”

Mrs. Wurth nodded again. “Whut's happened to yer chin?”

Wull put his hand to the torn flesh of his fall. “I slipped,” he said.

Mrs. Wurth nodded. “Ice is slippy. Sure this is
all
ye've come across since last I was here? I din't manage last Monday, mind—there was a fire in one o' the mills, an' me an' the boy spent all day shuttlin' crisps back to the mortuary.”

Wull stared at her. Mrs. Wurth was from somewhere up north and had a peculiar singsong accent—“morch-oo-airy”—that meant Wull could focus only on the sound of her voice and not her actual words.

“What?” said Wull.

“A mill fire,” said Mrs. Wurth, without irritation. “A fair pile o' crisps. No' a pleasant job, but we saw a grand juggler in the square. Chap was throwin' up knives an' burnin' torches. . . .”

“Right,” said Wull. “The face, Mrs. Wurth.”

Mrs. Wurth lifted the skull fragment in a gloved hand.

“Aye,” she said, “this piece of face is right familiar. O' course, faces are faces, an' much like backsides an' elbows in that respect.”

Wull laughed, saw that Mrs. Wurth hadn't been joking, and turned the chuckle into a cough.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, “I choked on my tea.”

He and Mrs. Wurth looked at the undrunk tea in silence.

“Whair's your faither, did you say?”

“He'd to go into the town,” said Wull.

“Oracco?”

“Aye.”

“On whut business?”

Wull shrugged. “He doesn't always tell me, ma'am. His own, I s'pose.”

Mrs. Wurth held the skull-piece by its chinless point a few inches from her own, peering into the eyes.

“As I understan' it the city has plenty scope for the pursuit of merriment, fur those inclined to that sort of thing. It ne'er struck me as your faither's line of interest, I must say.”

“What, merriment?”

Mrs. Wurth nodded. “Just so,” she said. “That considered, there's plenty who have gone the way o' happiness in the past, an' I can't say I saw that comin' either. It often strikes when ye least expect it. Like food pois'nin'. I mind the last time I'd pois'nin'. Both ends, it was, an' such a spectrum o' colors as you've never seen brighten a privy floor. . . .”

“Right,” said Wull, who was at a complete loss. When the mortuary was empty Pappa brought Mrs. Wurth into the parlor and gave her root tea and biscuits and the two of them shared unlistenable, looping conversations. It occurred to him that, despite all the hardship the Riverkeep endured in his stand against the elements—all the cold and damp and corpses made runny by water—weekly conversations with Mrs. Wurth might be the grimmest task of all. Talking to her was like trying to nail smoke to the wall. “The face, Mrs. Wurth.”

Mrs. Wurth tapped the skull's forehead thoughtfully. “Aye,” she said. “I reckon I knows where I's seen this afore, right enough. This could be right int'restin',” she added, placing the
fragment respectfully on the cadaver slab and wrapping her face on her way out the door.

Wull listened for noises from Pappa. There were none, not even the little movements of his feet on the boards.

He placed his mug beside the face and, using one of the body-washing rags that littered the floor, lifted it up.

It was completely clean at the point of injury, with no ragged flesh or torn skin. The skin itself was thick and pale from its time in the river, making the hairs of the thin mustache darker still; and the whites of the eyes—open the tiniest crack—were gray.

It had never occurred to Wull that it might be possible to recognize a person who came out of the river. He didn't really know anyone apart from Pappa and Mrs. Wurth.

The undertaker's footsteps approached the door.

Startled, Wull tried to replace the face, but fumbled, dropping it mouth-first into his mug.

“Oh no, no . . .” he said.

The handle turned.

Mrs. Wurth stamped the snow from her boots.

“I'm fair convinced aboot this,” she said, holding a newspaper out in front of her. “On the second page ther's . . .”

She looked at Wull, who was clutching a mug of tea that held a piece of human face.

“What are ye doin' with that, lad?” she said slowly.

“It fell in,” said Wull.

“It's mibbe best ye take the deid man's head oot yer tea. O' course, folk make tea oot all kinds o' things—there's a brew made frae the soil o' beavers is meant to be right bracin'. I like root tea mysel', pref'rably wi'oot bits o' cadavers in, though I will admit to likin' it sugared.”

“Right,” said Wull. He took the skull fragment out of the mug and shook away the liquid. There were some tea leaves in the mustache.

Mrs. Wurth looked at him a long moment. “When's it goin' to be you as keep?” she said.

“Oh,” said Wull, “a few days. I'll be sixteen on Thursday.”

Mrs. Wurth looked at him another long moment. “A lot can change in even a few days, I've always found. Things're always changin'—'cept deid folk. They're always the same, 'cept when they're diff'rent, an' they can be, dependin' on circumstances, which can vary to a fair degree.”

“Right,” said Wull. “What was in the newspaper?”

“Aye,” said Mrs. Wurth, brushing some of the tea from the dead man's face. “It's on the second page there, sketch of a gennulman lost in the waters oot in the estuary. Look at the 'tache there an' tell me that's not the same one ye jus' dipped in yer cup.”

Wull looked at the sketch, looked at the section of face, then back again. Although puffed and creased by its time in
the water, there was a definite resemblance, especially in the shape of the round, squashed nose.

“It does a bit,” he admitted.

“An' there's plenty bits o' him missin', says the paper,” said Mrs. Wurth. “Bits, I shouldn't wonder, like parts o' his face, such as ye was jus' dippin' in yer tea.”

“I wasn't . . .” said Wull. “You know I'm not plannin' on drinkin' the tea now, Mrs. Wurth? It was an accident it fell in my mug.”

“'S up to you what you do, Masser Keep. I ain't never had an interest in either the contents of another's larder nor any food whut has a flavor. I mind o' a time I tried this pickled thing—they said it was a farmyard oyster, but I foun' out that meant—”

“What does it say under the sketch, Mrs. Wurth?” said Wull, rubbing his eyes. “What happened to the man?”

“Aye, seems he was killed by a creature, an' quite a big one,” said Mrs. Wurth. She smiled with the lower half of her face, her eyes remaining expressionless and dull. “There's spec'lation it could be a mormorach, if they even exists anymore.”

“What's a mormorach?”

“Well, it's a big long eel sort of a thing, but they've no' existed for thousan's o' years. 'S a story, really, now, an' I don't hold with stories much mysel'—not in favor o' things ye can't
put yer hands on. If I can't see it, I don't want it. 'S why I got rid o' my sense o' smell. Made that decision aroun' the same time as the food pois'nin' which, come to think of it, was shortly after I ate those farmer's oysters—”

“Mrs. Wurth! If they don't exist anymore, why do they think it might be one?”

Mrs. Wurth scanned the article. “Fisherwoman found a hand in an empty net—green-stoned ring on it identified this fella Blummells. Found another few parts after that, but not much, an' it seems all the parts were bit clean off, not like they was torn by a mairlan or even a cragolodon . . . like this bit o' face, right enough—look how it's sliced apart, all neat like—it'll be fair valuable if that's what it is, a mormorach. 'S no tellin' when magic like that's goin' to strike, an' it's no' happened fur so long, folk hardly believe in 'em anymore.”

“Like you? You don't believe in them?”

“'S right.”

“Even though it says here there's one on the coast? An' they definitely used to exist?”

“'S right.”

Wull rubbed his eyes.

Mrs. Wurth scanned farther down the article, tracing the words with her fingers and lip-wetting absently with her gray tongue.

“Apparently there's a
man
says he saw a big giant eel of a
thing jumpin' up oot the water on the night this Blummells went missin'. But there's not to be much in that—whut's the word o' a man when all's said an' done?”