The Harvest Tide Project (8 page)
Read The Harvest Tide Project Online
Authors: Oisín McGann
The day was dry and fresh. He felt awake and ready for whatever was going to happen. They were headed for Hortenz, he knew. There, he would be put back to work on the project. He would regret not spending more time out in this outside world. He might even resent being locked away having seen it for himself. But the other men in this gaol wagon did not deserve to be here. He was certain they had been captured because of their resemblance to him. They would be released at the town – he would see to it.
It would be good to get back to work again, in the peace and quiet. No mad children or skacks or cages on wheels. Having slept on it, he decided he missed his research; it was time to return to it. He realised he had left his notes back at the Moffets’, but it did not matter. He had an excellent memory, and he knew his tank back at the manor house contained all he needed to finish the project. That was what he had kept from everyone else – that he knew how to
trigger
the blossoming of the esh-bound bubule. He had finally cracked the oily esh-plant’s secrets. Groach had little idea what the future would be now that their years of work had come to fruition. What was going to be done with the knowledge? It was exciting to contemplate; it could affect the whole world.
The gaol wagon shuddered and rolled into its position in the convoy. Hilspeth sat up, brushed the hair out of her face
and stared through puffy eyes at the forest as it passed beyond the bars of their prison.
‘What’s going to happen to us, Panch?’ she wondered aloud.
Groach was about to admit who he really was, when it occurred to him that it would not help her. They were both under arrest for a different reason. One he might die for. The other men would surely be released when they were not identified as him. He might still be held, especially if they found out he had defied them twice. And he could not answer her question. He did not know what was going to happen to either of them. Suddenly, the morning seemed much colder.
‘What happened last night?’ he asked in order to hide his despair. ‘I fell asleep in the end, I think.’
‘They all climbed into the wagons after they put out the fire, and waited for the skacks to come back. No one wanted to be outside when those things came into camp.’ Her voice was dull and flat, drained after a sleepless night of worrying about the two young shape-changers. ‘You should have seen them all, crammed into vans and even the cages. The skacks did come back, eventually. I don’t know if they caught the children. They were dragging the remains of … a mole-bear, I think. It was hard to tell. One of them had wounds on its face and neck; one was being carried by the other two. It had a broken leg.’
‘Perhaps they didn’t catch them.’ Groach put his hand on her shoulder. ‘What little I know of them is that they are not normal. I don’t think they’d be easy prey.’
‘They’re Myunans,’ murmured Hilspeth. ‘Shape-changers – you can tell by the skin markings. But they’re just children and skacks are savages that know nothing but hunting.’
It hurt him to see her upset. He didn’t often think of other people and their feelings, but this argumentative, opinionated woman was not like the women on the project. She had aroused a strange, disturbing emotion in him, stronger than he had ever felt for plants, and seeing her despairing for those little rogues reminded him that they were only children after all. He found himself suddenly anxious for the two Myunans.
‘They might have escaped,’ he tried again.
‘Even the soldiers are scared of these things.’ She regarded him with an expression of grief. ‘What chance did two children have?’
Part of the way up a crumbly moss and shale slope, a
lichen-covered
stone stuck out an arm and brushed off some of its feathery growth. Lorkrin had hidden since late the night before, having worked his way clear of the injured skack by creeping through the treetops. He stirred now, because he had heard his sister calling his name. Shedding the last of the covering and
letting
his back take its natural shape again, he put his backpack on. He yelled out an answer. She shouted again, and he turned to peer into the tree-line at the bottom of the steep slope.
‘Where are you?’ she cried.
‘Here, out past the trees. I’m coming down. Hang on.’
He worked his way down the loose hillside. Taya appeared at the bottom. She was covered in clay from head to foot. Under normal circumstances he would have laughed, but he was too happy to see her to tease her with any conviction. They each wanted to hug the other when he reached her, but neither wanted to be the first one to do it. They looked each other up and down instead.
‘You all right?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ she answered. ‘They were horrible, those things. Absolutely horrible. They were like something you’d turn into, but real … and ten times nastier.’
Lorkrin grinned sheepishly in agreement. He knew that some day soon, he’d try amorphing into a skack. Just to see if he could do it. Not to scare anyone, or anything like that.
It took a while for them to tell their stories. They had started a fire and were making nettle soup by the time they had finished. Taya had seen the convoy leave. They were going north,
continuing
towards Hortenz. Pondering on this, the two children sipped the hot soup in silence, savouring the much needed warmth and strength it gave their weary bodies.
‘What do you want to do?’ Lorkrin enquired of his sister, when he had finished.
‘I don’t know. What do you want to do?’ she said in return.
‘Well, I don’t think making Uncle Emos mad would be as bad as getting torn up by skacks, do you?’
‘Do you want to go back? I don’t mind if you want to. It’s okay to be scared. Everyone’s scared of skacks. And soldiers.’
‘I didn’t say I was scared.’ Lorkrin drew himself up. ‘When did I say I was scared? Are you?’
‘No, but if you want to go home, it’s fine. I don’t mind.’ Taya sighed graciously.
‘I don’t want to go home. Do you?’
‘Not if you don’t want to. Don’t you want to? Uncle Emos will understand. He must have done stuff when he was our age. We could go back if you want. I think it’d be all right.’ She eyed her brother.
He eyed her back, a noncommittal expression on his face.
‘It would be a shame to let that man get locked up by the army. It’s sort of our fault he’s in this mess. He’d still be in
Hortenz if we’d left him alone.’
Taya had not thought of this. She doubted Lorkrin would have thought of it either if he was not in danger of looking more frightened than her.
‘You’re right. It would be wrong to leave him there. We could rescue him and get the quill back. Uncle Emos would probably forgive us if we made up for stealing the quill by helping
someone
.’
‘Yeah,’ Lorkrin agreed. ‘That would make him proud. He might even not tell Ma and Pa about us stealing the quill at all.’
‘So we’d only get punished once …’
‘Yeah.’
‘So anyway, we’ll try again,’ Taya said slowly. ‘See if we can help him escape.’
‘…Yeah,’ her brother agreed, after some hesitation.
‘Right.’
The two Myunans sat opposite each other across the fire and wondered what they had just argued themselves into.
Emos Harprag sat slumped at a table in a storyhouse tavern in Hortenz, a half-finished plate of food pushed aside, his head buried in his arms. After spending the last two days and nights searching for his niece and nephew, he had lost their trail and was considering going back to the farm to see if they turned up there. Deep in exhausted slumber, he dreamed – old memories replaying in his troubled mind:
He took in the scene around him as his friend Murris and two others prepared the diving gear. The esh-boat’s deck rose and fell gently beneath his feet with the motion of the sea of gas. The boat was a trawvette, a Braskhiam fishing boat made up of the usual three wooden hulls full of compressed
hydrogen
, each with two masts and six sails, which were now
lowered
to allow the craft to sit still at anchor. Emos had joined the crew of the
Lightfoot
that day at the request of Peddar Murris, the boat’s chief engineer, to help with a salvage operation. The captain of the fishing vessel sometimes used quiet periods during the fishing season to bring up valuables from boats lying wrecked beneath the surface of the gas. Murris had convinced the captain that it could be useful to have a man along on dives who could take all sorts of shapes,
and fit through impossibly small gaps. For the Myunan it was a bit of extra money to put into the farm.
Emos could see from the looks he was getting that not all of the crew was comfortable having him around. Eshers were a superstitious lot, and anything out of the ordinary was grounds for suspicion … and that included
shape-shifters
. But there were many places where Emos was not welcome. He had become accustomed to staying out of the way of people and he did so now, standing by the rail, his faded grey eyes staring down at the balloon buoy that marked the place where they would dive, the place where a Karthar frigatch carrying a small, but valuable cargo of gold had hit rocks after being caught in a ferocious storm.
Murris stood up straight and bowed when he saw the
eshtran
step onto the deck. No dive could take place without the blessing of the Braskhiam boat’s holy man. As the
eshtran
chanted the Diving Prayer, the engineer assisted Emos in putting on his equipment. There was the harness girdle attaching him to the safety rope, flotation bags that could be inflated with hydrogen from canisters in an emergency, and the breathing apparatus made up of a mask and goggles that strapped to his head, from which a hose led to an air pump on the deck of the boat. There was also a glowjar full of fluorescent green fungus to help light his way; lanterns did not burn underesh. Murris wore all of this and more, with a tool belt and large pouches for holding various bits and pieces of his trade.
The eshtran passed Murris a small canister with a
breathing
mask on it and Murris inhaled some of the purified air, holding his breath and closing his eyes for a moment before handing the cylinder over to Emos, who did the same and then gave it back to the eshtran. Every diver had to have one
last breath of pure air before the dive in case he died. Braskhiams had to meet their god with clean lungs. Murris let his breath out and made a motion with his hand from mouth to chest and back again and then pulled on his own breathing mask. He took several breaths to make sure air was feeding through. Emos pulled down his mask, checked his own air flow and then they waited as a deckhand pulled up a section of the boat’s rail to clear the way over the side.
Emos went first; being the less experienced diver, he could be helped more easily from above if he ran into
problems
and would be less of a danger to his partner. He climbed down the side of the esh-boat using the foot and handholds that ran down the hull. As he reached the surface of the sessium, the gas of the esh, he looked up to see Murris following him down, both of them linked by the rope that trailed up the side to the deck. When Murris got down to the Myunan’s side, he pulled up his mask:
‘Right, you know how it goes – there’s only one speed underesh: nice and slow. Take your time, whatever you’re doing. That wreck’s not going anywhere. It’s pretty shallow here, so we’ll be going straight to the bottom, no stages. Breathe slow and easy. Don’t hold your breath. Keep me in sight at all times, and watch for my signals. Let’s go.’
The one thing that Emos always missed most about diving in the esh was sound. Everything was muffled down there, as if his ears were stuffed with cotton wool. As he dropped beneath the surface of the sessium, the sounds of the men moving up on deck became dull thuds through the wooden hull. His air hissed in along the hose from the pump and he exhaled out of the mask’s valves. As the side of the esh-boat curved down away from him, he tested the rope by settling his whole weight into the harness, and then
let go of the hull. There was a moment of butterflies in his stomach as he swung back and forth slightly, and then he was lowered further, swinging again as Murris let go above him. The winch on the deck dropped them down through the yellow-tinted white of the esh, light filtering down in a haze from the sky above them.
Emos could see esh floaters around them and hear their calls. The bass boom of flocks of round dunds, the crackling clicks from swarms of paper-thin interts, and the lazy,
buzzing
drone of a sleek spatch as it glided by with the fluid grace of a predator. The esh grew darker and thicker as they went down and, by the time his feet touched the ground, Emos could see only a few strides in any direction. He held up his glowjar and that helped. He stepped to the side in time to get out of Murris’s way as he landed, and the
engineer
led him to the point where the buoy was anchored.
They were surrounded by an eshweed called the bubule, a plant that grew to the Myunan’s shoulder height. They had to push it out of their path and keep their air hoses clear of it as they trudged through the gas. The plant’s fronds left greasy marks on their clothes as they brushed past.
The frigatch came into sight. It had been a streamlined and handsome vessel in its day, heavily armed with
harpoon
guns, but now it was furry with fungus and moss, and hundreds of different esh creatures had made it their home. Murris led the way towards it, watching for hazards and studying the position of the wreck carefully. It lay at the base of the huge rock that had torn open its hulls. The gaping holes were clearly visible and Emos could imagine the terror of the crew as the ship had sunk below the
surface
. The holes were huge; the Kartharic ship would have sunk quickly, upending and plunging down through the
sessium. Most of the men would have died instantly; some would have survived their injuries only to suffocate.
Emos arched his neck, gazing upwards through the foggy depths, but the dull yellow glow was all that could be seen of daylight, and the air that was keeping him alive. Even as he looked up, a faint but distinct smell of paraffin filled his mask. Smells were used as signals to divers, garlic for bad weather, wood polish for a time check … paraffin was danger. The hiss of his breathing through the valves grew faster as his heart began pounding and he looked instinctively up through the gas, feeling suddenly hampered by all his equipment. He and Murris turned as one and
hurried
back through the tangle of the bubules to the point below the
Lightfoot
where they had landed. Murris wound in the slack of the safety rope and jerked hard on it three times. Moments later, the rope started disappearing up into the gas, pulling taut and lifting first Murris, then Emos, up towards the trawvette.
Frantic hands pulled them on board and Murris stripped off his mask to ask:
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
Sitting off the bow was a Karthar war frigatch, a more fearsome version of the vessel that lay beneath the esh, and its harpoons were trained on the
Lightfoot
. The fishing boat’s captain looked down from his bridge at Murris and shook his head. They would not be diving again today. They were in disputed territory here, and their little trawvette was no match for a battleship. Murris cursed and shrugged out of his harness.
‘That cargo was ours for the taking. Salvage is fair game and they know it,’ he growled to Emos. ‘But there’s no messing with those war frigatches.’
Emos’s thoughts went to the wreck beneath their feet. ‘Not unless you have the esh on your side,’ he murmured.
Emos woke with a start as someone slammed a tankard of mead down on the table before him. He was taken aback to find himself staring into the face of a Karthar, but then relaxed when he realised he was in the tavern and he
recognised
the crooked-toothed grin.
‘Emos Harprag! Haven’t seen you in an age, get some of that drink down your neck, man – you look half dead!’ The Karthar flopped into the seat beside him and thumped his shoulder.
Emos managed a tired smile, and raised the tankard in salute, before taking a sip. The Karthar who had just sat down at the table was a merchant eshsailor named Neblisk, whom Emos had not seen in several seasons.
‘So, what brings you to Hortenz?’ Neblisk asked, taking a swig of his own drink.
‘I’m after two errant children. I could ask you the same question. I haven’t seen you around here in a while.’
‘Business with the Noranians,’ the Karthar replied. ‘Had to moor the ship just off the coast not far from here. They don’t want us coming near Noran. It’s all a bit hush-hush, you know.’
Emos raised an eyebrow. Neblisk specialised in
hush-hush
. He could get anything for anyone who would pay, and he could do it quietly. Unlike most Karthars, he was not a religious man, preferring to devote himself to the making of money.
‘What use would the Noranians have for you?’ the Myunan
asked. ‘I would have thought they could look after
themselves
.’
‘You might think that,’ Neblisk replied. ‘But sooner or later, everyone comes to Neblisk. It seems that the Braskhiams have not been too friendly of late, and the
Noranians
needed some special … esh-related items. Not a word, mind you. I know I can count on your discretion, Emos.
Particularly
since you don’t normally talk to anyone anyway.’
Neblisk, on the other hand, seemed unusually eager to talk, so Emos took another drink of his mead and let the
Karthar
fill the silence. With three short, downward-pointing horns over a long goateed face, and thick grey hair over most of his body, the Karthar was like no other man in the room. He had four thumbs, one on each side of each hand and he had the long arms and short legs of a climber. He shifted in his seat and turned his tankard between his hands.
‘These Noranians I’m dealing with think the Braskhiams are set to declare war on the Kartharic Peaks. They want it stopped, so they’re preparing something that will teach the Braskhiams a lesson. Don’t ask me what. It all went over my head.’
‘What did they ask you to get for them?’ Emos asked casually.
‘Odd stuff, really. Eshweed seeds, diving gear, underesh charts of the coast. Things they could normally only get from the Braskhiams. All very mysterious, if you ask me.’
Emos looked up sharply at this. He was remembering the scene he had witnessed in the square, the strange people who had come through the broken wall. He stared out the window into the square as he ran the events through his mind. The people had smelled of something that he had
recognised, but could not put his finger on. Neblisk, he
suddenly
realised, had the same smell, but he had just got off a boat. Those people had smelled of the esh, and yet they had all the appearance of having been working in a garden. But why had the Noranians sent in catchwagons and foot
soldiers
when the wall came down? No garden could be that valuable.
Now that he thought about it, the men had worn long beards, and had been dressed like peasants … like the dead man in the esh. That man had carried soil samples and
gardening
tools.