Paul Mcauley - Ancients of Days

It was all very far away and insubstantial, like the harmless chittering of agitated ghosts. Yama was only dimly aware of someone slapping his face, of cold cloths laid on his forehead, of being walked around. The songs of the deeps were more immediate than the voices or the manipulation of his body; the channeled abyssal plain more vivid than the pitching cabin and its swinging lanterns.

One of the ghosts said, It may kill him.

Yama tried to tell them that that was what he wanted, to escape his body and fall into the depths where the dredgers sang songs in which every word was true, charged with the wise love of the Preservers.

Something stung his neck. Suddenly his heart was racing and he was back in the cabin, lying in the bunk with Pandaras’s sharp, narrow face bent over his. Wind screamed to itself outside; there were a hundred tinkling movements in the cabin as things shifted to and fro. The lanterns swung a beat behind the pitching of the deck.

“He’s awake,” Pandaras said to the people behind him.

Yama turned his head away, but he was quite alone. The deeps and the singers in the deeps were gone.

Strong hands turned his head. A woman wearing the fierce face of a tiger looked into his eyes. He said, “I know you. Derev. It is time we took away our masks.”

And then he wept, because he knew that Derev was dead or lost, and all his childhood was burned away.

In the end, they had given him an injection of adrenaline.

“You were slipping away from us, master,” Pandaras said. “Tamora suggested it.”

“It was shock,” Tamora said. “I’ve seen it before. The stuff works on most bloodlines.”

Eliphas nodded. “The Preservers made us all in their image, to the least detail.”

“They must have run short of time with your kind,” Tamora said.

Yama was sitting on the edge of the bunk now, bracing himself as the ship plunged and rose. He said, “I called them, and then they called me. And they were stronger. Stronger and wiser. I should talk with them again, because they know so much…”

The cabin door banged open; air and spray roared around Captain Lorquital as she struggled to shut it behind her. She wore a yellow oilskin cape that shed a cascade of water around her flat bare feet. She looked at Yama and said, “It didn’t kill you, then. Some bloodlines can’t take it. Their hearts burst or their tongues swell up and strangle them. Eliphas says you called up the storm. Is that true?”

“The cold currents no longer rise,” Yama said. “I think that it will pass soon. Will it sink the Weazel? ”

“I’d rather not put her to the test.”

“There is nothing I can do,” Yama said. He saw that Captain Lorquital did not believe him, and saw too that this brave, capable woman was more afraid of him than of the storm. She nodded curtly and turned away. The storm blew all night and all the next day, and began to fall only in the early hours of the morning of the third day. When Yama came up on deck soon after dawn, Phalerus, who had been fixing the broken rail, turned away and touched his throat in a warding gesture.

The storm had driven the Weazel before it. The far-side shore was less than a league off the starboard side, a maze of channels snaking between viridescent mudbanks and dense stands of mangroves. The margin of the old shore was a low cliff exposed years ago by the falling level of the river, a long black line that shimmered and jiggled in the heat haze far beyond the mangroves. A sign of his birth, Yama thought, and wondered, not for the first time, if he was the destroyer of the world rather than its savior.

The sun shone through a haze of cloud, but it was very warm, and the white deck steamed.

There was no sign of Captain Lorquital, but Yama found Aguilar helping Anchiale and the grizzled slave move foam-cased pieces of machinery in the hold. The cargo had shifted in the storm.

“My mother is asleep,” the sturdy young woman said. She gave Yama a hard, defiant look. “She stayed on deck for most of the blow. She saved us all, I reckon.”

Yama said, “If I could have stopped the storm, then I would have done so at once.”

“You have my mother under some spell,” Aguilar said, “but not all of us are charmed.”

“I asked only for passage, and paid for it, too. What are you looking at?”

Aguilar had tied an electric lantern to a line, and now the two sailors began to lower it into the gap they had made between the tumbled foam eggs of the cargo. She said, “The ship is wallowing. There. That’s why.”

Yama looked down. At the bottom of a wedge of darkness, the lantern swung above its own reflection.

Captain Lorquital, rumpled from her early awakening, stood at the edge of the cargo well and argued with her daughter for a while. Aguilar maintained that the planking had sprung and the ship was taking on water because braces had been removed from the hull during her last refit; her mother said that the Weazel had ridden out the storm only because removal of certain of the braces had made her hull flexible.

“Water could have got in under the tarpaulin,” Captain Lorquital said. “The decks were awash for the best part of three days. We were more in the river than on it.”

“The covers were reefed fast,” Aguilar said stubbornly. “Besides, the water is getting deeper in there.”

All of the steel bands had been sprung around the hatch, and the tarpaulin covers rolled away. Anchiale and the slave were lifting out part of the cargo with a winch rigged from the mast; foam-covered ovals cluttered the main deck before and aft of the hatch. Presently, both Captain Lorquital and her daughter climbed down into the hold. They were down there a long time, and Captain Lorquital was grim-faced when they came back up.

“We’ll put in for repairs,” she told Yama. “I was right, though. The storm didn’t spring the planks. The way they’re splintered, it looks like something took a bite from them.”

A hand-pump worked by two of the sailors lifted water from the flooding hold and sent sparkling gushes into the river. A patch of canvas was lowered over the starboard side and hauled tight by a rope that went under the keel.

There were bumps and groans from the hold; Aguilar went down and came back up, shaking her head. Part of the cargo was floating and shifting about, she said.

“If we’re lucky, it won’t capsize us or smash the hole wider, but the hole’s already wide enough to sink us in a day or two.” She stared at Yama. “There’s a curse on this voyage, I reckon.”

The business of grounding the Weazel took a whole day. Captain Lorquital used the reaction motor to pick a way between banks of stinking mud and stands of pioneer mangroves, and to cross a plain of tall yellow reeds cut by a hundred meandering channels. Phalerus was in the crow’s nest, scrying a path through the reed beds, and the grizzled slave of Pandaras’s bloodline stood at the bow, using a weighted line to sound the depth.

At last, Captain Lorquital ran her foundering ship aground by one of the islands at the far side of the reed beds. Ropes, pivoting on belts of leather greased with palm oil, were slung around several of the blue pine trees which had colonized the island, and crew and passengers labored at the ship’s windlass to haul her out of the shallows until the hole bitten through her hull was visible.

Because the ship was lying at a steep angle, everyone camped on the island.

Smoky fires were lit to keep off clouds of black flies and tiny sweat bees. Yama sat a little way from the others, sifting through his father’s papers by the light of an electric lamp, once again tracing and checking the threads of logic that bound the complicated computations.