Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

Was our first meeting so many years ago? It feels like yesterday. There had been a blackness in the wrecked conning tower, the kind of complete, utter blackness that could only come from the sea flooding in and even the flicker of light from the instrument panels sparking out as her power drained. Legs trapped under a collapsed hull plate, he had watched as a bobbing fairy light in front of him had grown to the glow of a diving helmet’s face plate, looked on Maeva’s ethereal porcelain beauty, snowy-white like only a life lived under the sea could make a woman. How old was I, twenty, twenty-one? My first command shot out from underneath me. Everyone else, my friends and family in the crew, a corpse.

She had prodded him, checking he was as dead as all the other u-boat privateers, drawing back as she saw his mouth grimace in pain. Connecting her suit to his with a communication line. ‘You’re a u-boat pirate, I presume? Not a captive held for ransom by the marauders.’

‘Privateer, lass, never a pirate. Licensed to take back what’s ours by right. And you, I presume, must be one of those murderous underwater savages that roam the oceans, a seanore.’

‘I understand that the self-proclaimed nobles who wrote your dubious licenses of brigandage are much like this vessel, now. Dead in the water.’

‘So then, news travels fast.’

‘There are probably clans on the other side of the world who were woken by the sounds of the depth charges striking your u-boat pens.’

‘War’s a right noisy business. Not much quietness in it.’ He’d watched her pick up her lance. ‘Make it quick for me, lass, before you strip my boat.’

She’d jabbed him, experimentally in the chest. ‘You’re a very unsuccessful pirate. Not a single chest of treasure I can find on board.’

‘Privateer, please. And I was a more successful rebel than I ever was a liberator of cargoes.’

‘Not very clever, either. Silks and spices always have a market. Causes are cheap. Almost everyone can invent one for free.’

‘I’d thank you kindly to murder me before the lecture, rather than after.’

She raised the lance, but rather than spearing him with the deadly crystal blade, she had pushed it under the hull plate trapping his legs and begun to lever it up. ‘The price on your head makes you the most valuable thing in this wreck, surface-dweller.’

‘Too valuable to sell, if the truth be told.’

‘You’re every bit as arrogant as your people are said to be. Why would I want to keep a filthy surface-dwelling rascal around?’

‘So I can look at you, lass. So I can just look at you.’

How many years did we have together? No more than two, as I remember it. Jared Black felt a brief stab of pain. He’d vowed to Maeva he would never leave her. He had vowed to himself that he would never flee from parliament again. But when he had been recognized by a trader, sold out to parliament’s agents for the price on his rebellious head, then he had abandoned her. For how could he bear to witness what had befallen his family and comrades-in-arms happen a second time to the simple nomads of the sea? Bombed and ruthlessly hunted for harbouring a notorious royalist captain? No, that was never going to happen. The commodore had cut and run from their gloriously uncomplicated existence together. He had run and he had kept on running, and perhaps he had never really stopped. Changing identities like other men changed overcoats. There were many prices that fate demanded of a man. None so painful as a life he had never had a chance to live.

The hammock Charlotte Shades was lying in rocked as the Purity Queen’s hull shifted, bringing the commodore back to the present with a jolt as the floor’s angle shifted to an incline then jarringly righted itself.

‘We’ve surfaced,’ said the commodore. ‘Time to signal the ships out there we’ve a mind to join their convoy.’

‘A mind for one last voyage, Jared?’

‘What’s that, lad?’

‘I heard what our friend from the State Protection Board said when he had you pinned against the wall at Tock House with a gun in your chest. Before he even said it, I had noticed that you were down a couple of pounds in weight. Your lungs are broken; I can hear it every time you cough.’

‘Is that why my mortal trousers no longer fit me?’

‘It’s a serious matter.’

‘No, Jethro Daunt, it is not. Dying comes to us all, sooner or later. You cannot cheat it. The life I’ve had foisted on me, I should’ve been dead a dozen times over. I should’ve died with the fleet-in-exile at Porto Principe; I should’ve died in the dark halls of Jago or the sand dunes of Cassarabia or the foreign fields of a dozen other rotten countries. You can’t choose not to die, only where you stand when you blessed do. It’s my time, and even the land has seen fit to turn me out of my rest, to see out my last days with a sabre in one hand and a pistol in the other.’

‘There are medicines that could be tried.’

‘And my ill-gotten gains have paid for them all, lad. You’d be better off turning back to those old gods who haunted you out of your parsonage. Put in a word with them for poor old Blacky.’

‘After what you and I did to them on Jago, even they have deserted me now.’

‘Ah then, matters of death I shall leave to the church and the graveyard diggers. Life I understand well enough, and this I know to be true. With my unlucky stars I was never fated to die peacefully curled up underneath a warm blanket with my wife and daughter sitting by my side. I’ll go like I lived and sell myself dear with it.’

Daunt seemed concerned by Jared’s evident lack of care in this matter. The Circlist church would have it that after the commodore’s death, his soul would be tipped out and poured into the one sea of consciousness, mingled with all that was, is, and was yet to be, before being poured back out into all the myriad lives still to be born. But somehow, the commodore couldn’t imagine that fate suiting the audacious, coarse trajectory of his life. It was the most basic Circlist teaching that all that was living was joined, the same, indivisible. Jared Black’s life felt too dark to be diluted and combined with the rest of humanity. Yet, the end had to come eventually. Nobody could capture the river. Every time you knelt by the stream and cupped your hand in it, all you could ever come out with was water. Not the river. The river was flow and movement, just like the life they had been given.

In the hammock, Charlotte Shades’ eyes flickered open and she moaned and moved a shaky hand out to cover her eyes from the light. Her other hand, the commodore noticed, went to the chest to check the jewel on her chain was still there. She did it barely consciously. A reflex; but an instinctive touch that spoke of its value to her.

‘Where am I?’

‘Safe, Damson Shades,’ said Daunt.

‘There are monsters here, I have seen them. Their skin’s peeling off. The monsters.’

‘Not yet, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘But we will be sailing towards them. You can count on my poor unlucky stars to guarantee that.’

There was a silence on the bridge as the commodore explained the nature of the message he’d received from one of the navy convoy’s surface vessels. Flashed across by the light of a gas lantern as the Purity Queen crashed through the waves topside, conserving her air and fuel supplies.

‘It is normal practice, good captain?’ asked Daunt. ‘For a convoy commander to invite the masters of the vessels under his charge to dine on board the flagship?’

‘I would have to say no, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘Usually, the fleet sea arm treats trader convoys with all the love and affection a drover shows towards his geese, the flat of his boot and the sharp of his stick to keep them together while driving them to market.’ The old u-boat commander tugged on his big silver beard thoughtfully. ‘But then, normal convoys don’t sail so large. This convoy’s been named Operation Pedestal, as I’ve been signalled it by our navy friends. Forty tramp freighters, six paddle liners and close to a dozen seadrinker boats like our own, not to mention the navy ironclads, support ships and coalers running by our sides. With such a fleet, the House of Guardians is making a statement to the Advocacy about who controls the blessed oceans. Yes, I would say the vice-admiral is sailing under parliamentary orders, keeping the shipmasters sweet and sucking up to his shopkeeper masters in the ruling party. You don’t climb so high up the greasy mast without learning whose arse to kiss.’