Authors: Jude Fisher
Emer, who did not have the sense of a chicken, scoffed at Flint’s ill temper and fished plates of ice from over the side, hugging them to himself greedily.
Gar Felinson tried to reason with him, but Flint caught him by the arm. ‘Let him find out for himself,’ was all he said. ‘He’ll not learn any other way.’
It was not just the water which was running low. Two sides of beef, a keg of hard bread and all the cheese had been stored in the ship’s boat which had been lost over the side during the blow. Mag Snaketongue calculated that if they went easy they might have just enough to get them to their destination if the wind held; but nowhere near sufficient for a return trip, unless the famed isle of Sanctuary yielded more utile treasures than cold, hard gold. This information he decided to keep to himself, given that the ship’s captain would hardly welcome the news, and instead thinned the ingredients for the nightly stew until the crew began to complain it tasted of bilgewater.
For three days, the winds blew strong and true as if Sur himself was showing his approval of the Master of Rockfall’s folly. Then they fell away entirely till the sea was smooth and still, and the sun speared down through the cloud-layer, keeping the temperature far warmer than was to be expected. The ice was a floating carpet now, fragile and lacy: as they rowed, the
Long Serpent
cut through it as if it were merely duckweed on a pond. They passed a corpse-whale, its mottled skin all grey and white and marbled, its long snout protruding into the air. Men touched their amulets and signed the anchor, for it was well known that such a sighting did not bode well for any expedition. There was much mutinous talk, but no one had the gall to organise an uprising: and so they kept on rowing. On the fourth day, they rowed straight into a sea-fog so thick they could barely tell whether it was day or night.
Without sight of sun or stars, moon or land or any other sign on which they might take a bearing, it was impossible to navigate. ‘With any luck,’ Fall Ranson confided in his rowing partner, ‘we’re heading back to Rockfall after all.’
When the fogs had not cleared on the third day, the Master relented and allowed his crew some rest. They bundled themselves in their sheepskins and sealskins and lay like fat chrysalises, scattered about the decks. A few of the younger lads played knucklebones; the older men whittled and made cats’-cradles and prayer-strings for their wives. If they ever saw them again. Urse, alone of them all, kept his station at the steerboard like a figure carved from granite.
It was during this slow time that Fent, who until now had been feverish and raving, made something of a recovery. One moment his pupils were wide and dilated, flooding his eyes with a violet tide; the next, they were their wily blue again, the colour of a winter sky, or the silver-blue of a newly whetted knife. He sat up. He smiled, his dog-teeth white inside the red bloom of his beard.
‘They are coming,’ he said.
But when his father pressed him as to what he meant by this, he could not say.
A little while later the Master of Rockfall felt something tickle his wrist. Barely registering the touch, he waved his hand and the sensation ceased. A couple of minutes passed, and then there came a faint buzzing sound. Again, he became aware of a vague pressure, an itch of movement. He looked down.
Settled upon the back of his hand, calmly washing its front legs together was a large black fly. He blinked and stared, but it made no attempt to escape. It took him a moment or two to register what its presence signified, then looked up, appalled and yet excited. Land: they must be close to land. The fly bumbled off, its body heavy, its wings slow against the chill of the air.
‘What?’ said Urse sharply. ‘What is it?’
‘A blowfly,’ Aran said, amazed. ‘It was a blowfly.’
‘Never.’ The big man shook his head in disbelief. ‘How could there be flies out here? It’s too cold, too remote.’
But now they could all hear the sound: a low hum which reverberated in the eardrum, thrummed through the cords of the neck, echoed in the skull. And then the mists parted.
Men stopped whatever they were doing. Knucklebones dropped with a rattle to the planking and no one looked to see the patterns they made; knives hovered over whalebone and walrus tusk; needles buried themselves in leather and wool. Everyone stared openmouthed as the vessel hove into view.
Silent and eerie, it emerged out of the fog like the ghost of a ship, for its wood was silver with ice and neglect and it wore tatters of white haar around its mast. How it was propelled none could see, for there were no rowers at its idle oars and no sail adorned its yard but for a few ragged threads and shrouds. It came towards them prow-first, its stempost carved into a yawning dragonhead, but no voice hailed them as it approached, only the ever-louder hum which seemed to paralyse them all. When it was only feet away, Aran Aranson leapt to his feet as if breaking through a spell.
‘Ware ship!’ he cried and grabbed up an oar.
Beside him, Urse One-Ear did the same.
All along the deck men followed suit. Wood grated on wood as the crew of the
Long Serpent
fended off the dead vessel that was bearing down upon them. At last the pale ship rocked to a halt, the ice-laced waves of the Northern Ocean slapping softly against its sides. Like men frozen in time, they waited, oars poised like weapons, though in what form their opponents might show themselves, none wished to conjecture. Too many tales of spectral ships haunted them, tales told by grizzled sailors in dockside taverns, by leery uncles with squints and tattoos and questionable pasts, by bards and entertainers who had travelled the islands collecting and elaborating upon the stories passed down by ten generations of seagoing men too old now to do anything other than frighten the daylights out of green lads set on making their fortune on the ocean wave. Tales of vessels manned by afterwalkers hungry for the flesh and souls of the living, corpses grown vast and black and swollen with gas and evil spirits and ill-will, lumbering about the creaking boards of their foundered craft in search of something to rend and tear. Ships abandoned for no good reason in fair weather and calm seas, their rigging still set for a good blow, their sails full of wind, casks of ale unstoppered for the evening rations. Tales of longships manned by crews of skeletons, their white bones rattling as they rowed into shore . . .
‘Hold her steady!’
Aran Aranson was a brave man, men would later agree; brave or maybe rash, but the sort of captain you wanted, who led by example rather than sending others to do what he had neither the heart nor will to do himself. So it was that the Master of Rockfall with a mighty leap found himself on the deck of a vessel called the
White Wyrm
, built – as he was about to ascertain, with rising dread – by the same shipyard he had raided for the men and materials to create the
Long Serpent
, a ship with a fine ice-breaker attached in Morten Danson’s own inimitable fashion; a ship built to the same specifications and for the same purpose as his own.
He steadied himself on the rocking deck, fighting down the fear he felt clawing at his chest like a starving wolf. The humming sound engulfed him now. It was hard to think with such a noise in your head, hard to maintain a plan of action or any rational objectivity. It made him want to run for the safety of his own vessel and leave this eerie hulk to float on through the fogs. But he knew he could not allow such a mystery to pass by unexamined. Could not out of sheer personal, morbid curiosity, let alone his duty as a captain – to his own men, who would look to him for reassurance and answers – and to the families and friends of this ship’s ill-fated crew, to whom he must surely carry back grim news.
Girding himself for the worst, he raised his head. What met his searching eyes was a bizarre and perplexing sight. A shifting blanket of black covered everything in sight. It took him several seconds to comprehend the nature of this blanket, and when he did he felt the nausea rise in him and ran about the deck, waving his arms around and yelling until his throat was raw. The blowflies rose in a reluctant cloud and hovered gently a few inches in the air above their feast, ready to drop back down again once this nuisance had ceased. But once he had glimpsed the horrors beneath their black iridescent cloak, the Master of Rockfall could not allow them to settle. The remains of the
White Wyrm
’s crew lay in defeated piles around the ship, some with their hands over their heads as if to protect themselves from assailants, others curled tightly into balls like children in the grip of some nightmare. What was left of the legs of another pair stuck out of the ship’s single overturned skiff in the hull. Flies rose from barrels and kegs, from casks and the bony frames of fish and seal and sheep. They sat on the prominent brow of an ox-skull and cleaned themselves. Maggots crawled through eye sockets and the holes where strong noses had once jutted; through the gaps between sharp white teeth and the spaces between rib-bones. One delicate skeleton, coiled in on itself like the corpse of a dead wasp, marked the demise of the ship’s cat, and as soon as he registered that detail, Aran Aranson knew with chilling certainty exactly whose ship this must be. He had already suspected as much from the set of the vessel herself, but there was only one man he knew who insisted on sailing everywhere with his cat – a massive marmalade moggy with snaggle teeth and an unpleasant disposition towards anyone other than its master.
Once the initial wave of horror had swept over him and he had contained the bile that threatened to burn its way up and out of his gullet, he set about the ship, searching for its captain. Though could one recognise any man from this jumble of gleaming bones and frayed strands of yellow tendon? For there was little distinction to be made between the pathetic bundles on whom death had so ignominiously laid its hand. As he bent to examine each corpse, he was surprised to realise that the smell was less extreme than he would have expected – you had to say that for blowflies: they were efficient in their disposal of carrion; for they had stripped the flesh voraciously and expertly from the dead men, leaving only the toughest sinew and the hair in their wake. Blond braids, therefore, identified Fenil Soronson at the last, propped against the steerboard as if making a last-ditch attempt to sail them out of this disaster; blond braids and the distinctive necklace of sardonyx he had bought at the last Allfair and wore Empire-style around his throat, much to the derision of his fellow Eyrans, who had ribbed him mercilessly for buying back a bit of precious stone he had himself most likely shipped to the Moonfell Plain the year before, and paid a hundred times and more its worth just to have it polished and threaded onto leather thongs – an expensive bit of Istrian tat.
With shaking hands he undid its button-and-loop clasp and slipped it into his belt-pouch.
Hopli Garson he identified with more difficulty, for the little man was nearly bald already, even before the assiduous depredations of the insects; but eventually he found a man whose hand, pared down beyond elegance to a stark arrangement of gristle and bone, grasped the pommel of a weapon fashioned, unmistakably, by his own daughter. Aran remembered him buying it from the stall at Forsey Market three years earlier; it was one of Katla’s first sales: she had been thrilled to bargain Hopli to a good price, arguing how long she had taken to fashion the intricate combination of metal and crystal in the hilt. It was a fine piece. His heart contracted to see it, and just for a moment his thoughts fled away from this gruesome place, back to Rockfall, to his difficult daughter and his estranged wife, and he wondered whether he would ever see them again, or whether his fate was to remain here on this silent, freezing ocean, his bones glimmering in the moonlight, his empty eyes staring forever into the mists. With a shiver, he pushed this forlorn image away and reapplied himself to the task at hand. Loosening the dead man’s grasp from the pommel of the dagger so that the bones clattered emptily against one another and fell away, he stowed the weapon in his belt. Then he continued his grim inspection of the vessel.
How long he spent in this awful enterprise, he could not tell. At one point someone from the
Long Serpent
called out to him, enquiring whether he required aid, but he ignored the voice and went on his way about the deck, kicking out at the flies, trampling the cascades of pale maggots that tumbled from whatever he disturbed, taking note of the disposition of the bodies and the way the oars were shipped and the lines were tied. He paid particular attention to the alignment of the carcasses he found amidships, turning them over distastefully with his foot, and watching in fascinated repulsion as the maggots swarmed up and over his boot. He scraped them off with the dagger, cleaned it against the gunwale and carried on his grim inspection.
At last he made his way back to the starboard side of the
White Wyrm
. The crew of the
Long Serpent
awaited him there, lining the gunwale of their ship in such numbers that the vessel listed awkwardly. Their eyes were round with foreboding. No one wanted to ask the inevitable question. It fell to Pol Garson to speak up. He stood there, hugging his injured arm to his chest. Sharing the pain of a dislocated limb with your captain made a bond between you, he believed, like fighting back to back in battle in the old days. It gave him the courage required to break the tense silence. ‘What did you find, sir?’ he asked softly.
‘All dead,’ Aran said hollowly. ‘Each and every one.’
Now the silence was broken, like water bursting through a breach, everyone had a question.
‘Are there no survivors?’ called one man; and ‘Whose ship is it?’ asked another.
‘What took them?’ Urse One-Ear’s voice was gruffer than the rest; it boomed out across the space between him and his captain. His eyes took in the absent sail, the shredded rigging, the ominous huddled shapes barely visible through the thick fog.
The flies were starting to settle again. Aran picked up an oar, circled it wildly and drove as many as he could out into the sea.