Salamander (26 page)
Authors: Thomas Wharton
– The island of Shekinar, Snow told the
Bee’s
crew. The world’s only truly free state. No kings, no magistrates, no jails. No buying and selling of men or women.
Their wandering now had a goal, however remote and unlikely. Perhaps somewhere in the world, they hoped, there was a place where they would be safe from retribution. But on remote beaches and in dark taverns at the edges of the world they also heard legends of the man known only as the Commander.
He could sniff out pirates a hundred miles distant through a raging gale. Predict the outcome of battles that had not yet begun.
… It was thirty-three days and nights in a longboat, drifting through ice and darkness. That’s what gave him his uncanny powers. Four of his men froze to death. One thought he was Christ and stepped off the boat into the sea. Another cut off the fingers on his left hand, to save for when they ran out of rations. He bled to death while they watched.
Parts of the Commander himself were frostbitten so badly that when the survivors were finally rescued, by a brig hauling salt to the Newfoundland fishery, bits of the man had to be pared away, like the stale corners of a block of cheese, to save the remainder.
Bits of me
, he would repeat when he told the tale, as if the worst of it lay there.
Not a hand, an entire eye, a complete limb. Just slices and scraps, here and there. Thirteen chunks of dumb flesh in all and no words to mourn their loss. Do you see? Hacked in two would have been preferable. But I was merely diminished, chipped away at, my name associated with no missing appurtenance of any definitive shape. The black witch knew what she was doing. If you’re going to lop away at a seafaring man, take something to which legend can give a name. Harry Two-Hooks. Noseless Ned. One-Stone Jack
.
The Admiralty gave him command of the
Acheron
, their newest and most well-armed weapon against pirates, or at least those who did not have government sanction. In time, as one infamous sea-devil after another met the rope, the definite article became attached to the title and the real name of the former captain of the
Gold Coast
was all but forgotten. It was merely necessary to say
The Commander
and wary men in every port would nod, glance over their shoulders, and whisper their own stories about him.
The Commander’s dread fame, though, had come at a high price. The agonies of his abandonment at sea, it was said, combined with the humiliation of the aftermath, had seared something in him to such a white heat that his inner vision had acquired the ability to see, simply by sighting a coastline with his spyglass, whether
or not that particular island or peninsula or country or continent would ever be part of the British dominions. Or, if the territory in question was already under the Union Jack, the Commander somehow knew whether or not it would cease to be British at some time in the future, date unspecified. From Cork to Madras he’d made his predictions of imperial acquisition and relinquishment with a recklessness so undisciplined that the Admiralty had at last been constrained to order the
Acheron
home to Spithead. What he was doing, did he not understand, was very bad for public morale. Not to mention the other nations with an interest in his predictions, such as the French, who were less than delighted to be advised that New France was fated to become Even Newer Britannia.
The Commander was disinclined to obey the homeward order from his superiors. He hadn’t found her yet, and until he had, the log of the
Acheron
would record only that the vessel was unable to return to port due to strong headwinds and the need for extensive repairs. Thus he became a renegade, a threat. The Admiralty issued orders to all its ships that the
Acheron
be attacked on sight.
There’s going to be war, soon, with France
, he often said.
Britannia’s going to win all of North America, and then she’s going to lose it. That was the one that tore their mainsheets, and I didn’t even have to use the gift to see it. The fact is baldly obvious. Remove the French threat and the colonials to the south will start looking around for someone else to go to war with. That’s why they will beg me to come back. Just you wait. They need someone with vision, a clear head
.
His midday navigational ritual, so the stories told, took place on the quarterdeck around a table draped in white cloth like an altar, with an equally formidable array of arcane instruments lined up and ready for a mariner’s Mass. The ceremonies included compass readings, sextant readings, log and lead measurements, and lastly, the cocking of his truncated but supersensitive nose slantwise to the plane of the ecliptic, testing the telltale winds, as he liked to say, for traces of Snow.
He caught up to her at last off Cyprus, and the rest is swiftly told.
– They blasted us to bits, Snow said, as they watched the
Acheron
grow off their port quarter.
The
Gold Coast
was sunk. Those of the crew who did not perish in the waves, she assumed, were saved for the gibbet. Cat Nutley and Crook-Fingered Jane. Brigid O’Byrne. Lucy Teach.
– But not me, she said. He wasn’t finished with me yet.
First a brief stop at Alexandria to take on provisions, and then the
Acheron
was on its way home.
The first volley came when the warship was still a considerable distance off, taking even Snow by surprise. The whizzing shot fell short, sending up spray that drifted down like a mist over the decks.
– He’s impatient, Amphitrite said. He wants us to shorten sail and get this over with as quickly as possible.
– He wants you alive, Flood said, doesn’t he?
– I hope not.
As the
Acheron
closed, Amphitrite’s meagre armament of antiquated guns responded with a smattering of fire that appeared to have no effect on her massive adversary. Through the smoke of their ineffectual volley they watched the warship come on with carriage regally unhurried, her bows turning in a long slow arc to flank them, her starboard gunports snapping open briskly, ready for business.
Pica slipped unnoticed from the quarterdeck and descended the main hatchway. As she reached the press room there was a roar, the ship heeled violently, and she pitched forward onto the planks.
A ball from the
Acheron
had struck them somewhere, she knew. She picked herself up and saw that the impact had knocked over her father’s work table and dislodged two of the ink casks, which had smashed on the planks and were now furiously gushing ink. In the swirling black pool that was forming lay Ludwig the automaton, his head turned back to front, one of his arms pumping uselessly in the air.
She hurried over to the press, her heart pounding wildly. The forme of gooseflesh type Djinn had just set was still in the carriage, the metal within the frame of the chase a dull and solid-looking plate. A poke of her finger in the centre sent a lethargic wave radiating outward.
She placed her hands on her hips, and then on the two long sides of the chase. The iron frame was slightly wider. Like one of the ship’s trapdoors. She would just fit.
Pica kicked her shoes into a corner, peeled off her stockings, and climbed up onto the bed of the press. Gripping the
bar to keep her balance, she leaned forward and breathed on the forme. The metal continued to deliquesce until wavelets agitated its surface with every shudder of the hull.
Cautiously she dipped in a toe.
– Cold.
Gripping the sides of the chase, she leaned forward and gazed at her wavering reflection in the surface of the metal. On a sudden thought she hung her pocketwatch by its chain from the bar.
– Time slows down there, she whispered.
Taking a great gulp of air she plunged in headfirst.
As the metal closed over her she remembered someone, a girl who searched for trinkets at the bottom of a filthy canal, in a story told long ago.
She surfaced in the press room. At first she thought that in the depths of the metal she had somehow gotten turned around and come back out the way she had gone in. But hauling herself onto the bed of the press she saw the pocketwatch, halted at one end of its chain’s swing. The hands had stopped, seven seconds later than when she had gone in. She was on the other side. In the well of stories.
Where had she been for those seven seconds? There had been a darkness, and then a coming back to herself as if from a long sleep.
Shakily she climbed down from the press. Nothing moved, and there was no sound. Something had happened to the light in the cabin: it had darkened to thick gold and taken on texture, a fine, grainy substantiality like translucent jelly.
She moved forward and something brushed cobweb-like against her skin. As she lifted a hand to sweep it aside, everything in front of her, the press, the ink barrels, the long room
and the layered and gelatinous light itself, bent and elongated slightly, like an image painted on taut, transparent fabric. That faint spidery sensation, she understood, was the impress of the light itself on her skin.
She squeezed her hand into a fist, and when she opened it a knot of light sat pulsing in her palm.
Ludwig lay motionless in the pool of ink that was fused to him now, and solid as black glass. She knelt and tugged the automaton’s head around. His eternal smile of youth had been split by a hairline crack running from forehead to chin.
She left him and climbed the hatchway. A dark figure hung, silhouetted against sunlight, at the top. Her father, still and silent, one foot raised over vacancy, about to descend the stairs to the press room to find out where she had gone.
When she reached him she examined his shadowed face, the line of muscle in his jaw revealing teeth clenched hard. His eyes looking into hers, not seeing, the dilation of the pupils arrested as he was turning away from the light. The fear there, for her. Or of her. Fear of what he would find when he reached the press room.
For the first time she touched his hand, felt the ridges of the veins, the callused knuckles. Cold and lifeless as stone. She saw the fraying threads of his shirt cuff, the tiny dots of ink on the sleeve.
Finally she stepped past him and climbed onto the quarterdeck. The ship lay at the beginning of a larboard heel, Snow and Turini frozen at the helm, Darka and the twins stopped where they had been racing along the gangway, frozen into positions impossible even for them. Puffballs of black smoke hung in the air. She pushed at one just above her head and her hand sank into it, leaving a hand-shaped hollow.
She could look at the sun without flinching, its face a dark burnished gold, its light hanging visible in the air like strands of honey.
The silence.
She was alone. Everyone else suspended while she remained here. Waiting for her to bring them back to life.
She looked at the frozen sky and all at once she remembered something that happened to her at the Ospedale in Venice. She had been sitting in the garret, reading one of Francesca’s forbidden novels. Bored with its tale of fearless knights and virtuous ladies, she had taken the Maestro’s violin down from the wall and was lying on her back, her head hanging over the foot of the bed so that she was looking upside down out one of the open window casements. She plucked the one remaining string of the violin, wondering if the sound would summon the Maestro’s shade again. Out the window, she remembered, was a lake of blue sky. The ceaseless burble of the city had dwindled to an immense distance. She felt the thrum of the plucked string pass from the instrument’s belly to her cheek, listened as the note faded in the still air. The sound like time itself, each moment a wire, taut with possibility and then plucked and already fading into the past. As the notes died away she suddenly felt lighter than air, about to rise off the bed and float away through the window.
She was free
.
In the well the world was like that empty blue vault, like a string pulled taut, not yet plucked.
She had to be careful. Without time, she sensed, the world was defenceless against suggestion. The skin of the moment was fragile. She alone could choose.
Like reading a book
, she told herself. I
make the next thing happen
.
She leaned out between two bulwarks. The surface of the ocean gleamed like a shell of translucent green glass. Just beneath the surface she saw the black egg of an incubus, its shell already cracking open along red volcanic seams, inches from the
Bee’s
hull.
She squinted through the intervening forest of smoke to the white hull of the warship, lit with the motionless stars of its own gunfire. Terrified, she saw herself walking across the water’s surface, climbing aboard the
Acheron
, disabling their guns. Taking the Commander hostage. Making him re-enter time with a sword through his guts. She rejected her next idea as soon as it formed in her mind, tempting her with its awful simplicity: striking a match in their powder magazine and leaving it hang there, about to fall, an icicle of fire.
Her gaze moved past the
Acheron
to the sea. A storm to the northeast stood like a vast grey ship, anchored to the sea by a white cable of lightning. She thought of the great round globe, the cities, towns, and villages and all the people in them, the farms and vineyards and forests and deserts, the creatures down in the abysses of the sea and on the plains and high in the air. Everyone and everything still as a painting now. Drops of rain suspended inches above the earth. Trees bowed by invisible shoulders of wind. Deer caught in mid-leap. Newborns halted in their first tiny wails. Condemned men reprieved for now from a drop through the final door of the gallows.