Mary Reed: Three for a Letter

Poppaea stared obstinately in the opposite direction.

John stepped back into the shadows and watched the procession depart. Theodora, he noted, was leaning out of her litter, staring intently back toward the blazing fire wheel. He smiled thinly at the sight. The noisy ceremony was akin to many that the ancient shore must have seen since the world was young, and yet here was the wife of the ruler of an avowedly Christian empire completely enthralled by it, to judge from the curve of her scarlet lips.

Now that the procession was finally under way it formed a striking sight indeed, with its doomed straw man in his ox cart, women dancing lightly back and forth behind it, their flowing robes whipping in the rising breeze that presaged dawn. And following them were all the rest…dozens of villagers ambling along holding torches and laughing and talking, another cart carrying the stiffly moving automatons playing their shrill melody, the blazing wheel shooting sparks everywhere.

But neither Sunilda nor Minthe was anywhere to be seen.

Now the villagers began to sing, enthusiastically waving their torches. They sounded much more fervent than might be expected of rustic laborers attending an ancient festival officially regarded merely as entertainment as their voices rose with the smoke into the star-sprinkled sky.

The straw man liveth once again

He journeys to the sea

And thus we offer him with praise,

O, Harvest Lord, to Thee

By his sacrifice we beg

From Thy heavenly hand

A goodly harvest from the sea

And Thy blessing on the land

Summer ends and die he must

Die he must, as all who live

Accept him now, O Harvest Lord,

And all Thy bounty give

Staying well back, John loped rapidly along the roadside, scanning the procession and various groups of villagers waiting to see it pass. Armed soldiers were everywhere. There did not seem any way in which Minthe and the girl could reach the headland undetected, nor any place they could hide.

Then he was racing back past the empress’ litter, not caring whether she saw him or not, barely feeling the burning pain shooting across his knee.

Several of Felix’s men had swords already in hand as he reached the cart carrying the reclining straw man and leapt aboard. Zeno, striding along beside it carrying a torch and singing enthusiastically, waved them away. He shouted a question which John ignored. Hero stared speechlessly from his seat by the driver.

The procession kept moving. Perhaps the villagers mistook John’s precipitous arrival for a new part of the spectacle.

As he clambered onto the cart, John saw the straw man’s painted features leering up at him from the battered leather ball of its head. He grabbed the front of the effigy’s bright orange dalmatic, ripped the fabric open and thrust his hand into its plump chest.

He found only straw.

He quickly punched here and there at the well-stuffed effigy. There was nothing but straw. Sunilda had not hidden herself inside it. For once his sudden surmise had been wrong. He had leapt in the wrong direction.

A wave of shouting came down the road. Torches were being waved about even more enthusiastically. Hero, seemingly oblivious to John’s strange actions, pointed toward the dark mirror of the sea.

Out there a gray phantom moved and a translucent pillar rose into the night.

It was the whale Porphyrio, blowing water into the air. Beyond this ghostly vision an inky blotch was outlined against the sky: the goats’ island, crowned with jagged peaks etched in faint moonlight.

John’s thoughts took another leap forward. He dropped from the swaying cart and began running back down the road, setting his teeth against the pain it caused him. The death of the boy Gadaric had been preceded by the spouting of a mechanical whale. The superstitious might predict that the real whale had just heralded another death.

But though the superstitious might make such a claim, John had realized that if Sunilda indeed came to harm he would have only himself to blame.

Hadn’t her letter been perfectly clear? Hadn’t she said she would throw herself into the sea from a point where nothing lay between herself and the rising sun? Why had he so foolishly gone with the procession accompanying the sacrificial straw man?

There was something else that lay between the headland and the sun. The island inhabited by the goats. And now that it was almost certainly too late, he had to find some way to reach it before sunrise.

The two men dragged the tiny boat down to the beach. Although he had been prepared to take it out alone if necessary, John had found Paul lingering beside the shore road, idly watching the tail end of the procession as it passed brightly and loudly by.

Paul was eager to assist with the launch but his aging body was reluctant. When they reached the water’s edge, he came to a halt, grimacing, his gnarled hands painfully grasping the small vessel’s gunwale. Lowering his head he muttered a brief prayer to his god. Or perhaps, John thought, it was addressed to the sea.

He glanced up at the procession, now marked by a fiery line bobbing slowly along the headland. Here and there he could make out an indistinct figure enveloped in a nimbus of smoke. Looking seaward, he saw thickening pre-dawn fog was rolling in, forming a low, faintly luminous wall rising against the sky.

The susurration of the sea against the beach whispered its eternal threat as he waded into the shallows.

“No need to hesitate, excellency,” Paul said. “My little boat doesn’t look much but it’s a lot sounder than I am. I built it myself. It will carry us faithfully where you want to go.”

John made no reply. It wasn’t the boat. There was no boat, or ship, however large and seaworthy, that could allay John’s fear of water, the terrible element that had taken the life of a comrade so many years before. John forced himself to take another step forward, concentrating on the task at hand in an attempt to shut out all thought of the hungry, deep stretch of water waiting.

As they waded further into the shallows, he tried to imagine he was simply stepping into the pool at the baths, although he in fact avoided cold water even there. A pause to steady the craft and then they had clambered into it.

Paul began rowing, working the oars as smoothly and mechanically as one of Hero’s automatons.

Waves sloshed and gurgled against the sides of the little boat as they moved across the water surrounding them with an undulating floor of polished ebony marble. Tendrils of fog came slithering across its glassy surface to meet them. Before long the men were engulfed in a chilly blanket that seemed to draw a cold luminescence from the stars.

“The island?”

“It’s straight ahead,” Paul replied. “There’s a strong current towards it and we’re already in it. Can’t you tell?” His voice sounded strained.

John shook his head, wishing he had insisted that he row rather than the older man. It was too late now to change places, so he was forced to sit rigidly, hand clenched on the gunwales, staring into the blank face of the drifting fog. His fear of deep water was drawing time out as the dead of winter draws out the hours of the night. But there was nothing he could do but endure the endless journey.

A breeze was beginning to blow landward now, just strong enough to stir the fog into swirling, ghostly shapes without dispersing it. As it shifted, snatches of the faint, discordant music made by Zeno’s metallic players and the lusty singing of the villagers were carried to them from the headland.

John muttered a prayer of thanks to Mithra that the festival was still in progress, had not yet been ended by the rising of the sun that might also end Sunilda’s life.