Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

Once during the trip, Amelia had been removed from the old supply room where she was confined alone and taken across to the nearest of the seed ships. They had shoved her in a room with a table-like globule extruded from the floor, covered with the logs, maps and crystal-book copies she had taken on the expedition. One of the room’s walls had a strange sheen and she knew the Daggish were watching her from the other side, even though she could not see them. Theirs was an intelligence so different from the race of man’s that she could not begin to imagine what they expected her to do. How had they guessed her position in the expedition? Did they presume that as one of the few females in their hands she must be some kind of matriarch? None of these creatures appeared either able or inclined to communicate with her in any tongue she understood. Perhaps they had taken one of the crewmen and absorbed him into their slime-drenched cooperative, stripping his thoughts as casually as she peeled the bananas Ironflanks used to bring back from the jungle? Terrifyingly, that was the most likely option. Amelia flipped open the notebooks and studied them for signs of damage. The copied crystal-books seemed intact, but without reader machinery they were only good for bookends.

After half an hour of fiddling with the material that had been left out, the hidden watchers seemed satisfied and two Daggish guards opened a bone-like iris into the room and silently carried her away, careless of how easily their spines cut her dirty uniform. Off the ugly living craft — as much a part of their cooperative as the twisted animal servants and intelligent plants — and back into the reassuringly man-made corridors of the Sprite , all plates, pipes and rivets after the pulsing, throbbing curves of the seed ship. As Amelia was being taken back to her makeshift cell, she crossed paths with a group of sailors being moved by a larger escort. When the crewmen saw Amelia they began to hurl abuse at her, ignoring the spined Daggish arms smashing them back, chains rattling as they were knocked down, screaming like banshees at her.

‘Jonah!’

‘Bitch!’

‘Killed us all!’

Then she was shoved into the solitude of the storeroom. Isolation she was glad of, now she had been reminded she was not the only passenger on the ghost ship the Sprite had become. With the cries of hate still echoing in her mind, she remembered a conversation she had had with her father many years ago, when she had asked why so many of Jackals’ neighbours seemed ready to invade, held back only by the ingenious floating navy of the RAN — their famous wall of cloth. In answer, he had not explained about the politics of envy, or that outside the checks and balances of Isambard Kirkhill’s perfect democracy, the point of power was simply the accumulation of more power. He had not explained that the Jackelians’ insular, contented nature was mistaken for decadence and weakness by kings, caliphs and warlords. He had not explained how ridiculous the rituals of the House of Guardians, the games of four-poles on the village green, or the shopkeepers pottering around their rose beds, trowels in hand, looked from the shores of rulers used to being able to stretch dissenters on racks. Rulers who would mangle the bodies of opposing voices in the scented torture gardens of the south, or shove them into the steam-driven killing rooms of the east. All these things he had expected her to have already learnt. His answer was far simpler. ‘ Amelia, they don’tlike us and we don’t care .’

She sat down and laid her back against the bulkhead, the tears streaming down her face. Was it the failure of the expedition; the memory of the father that had meant so much to her; the loathing of the crew for the Jonah that had brought certain death down on their heads; the loss of her friends, cast away to die in the jungle — probably dead now? Had chasing her dream wrought all this? Perhaps the superstitious sailors were correct. She was a Jonah. Her personal life had been cursed, her professional life ruined. She was akin to a leper in academia, a joke told at luncheons in the university refectories. Whatever happened to Professor Harsh? Why don’t you know, dear fellow? Rumour has it she slipped into Liongeli on some mad expedition and died there, rambling through the jungle when her food and water ran out. Never heard from again.

Amelia buried her head in her hands. She should have listened to the advice of that insane witch in the dunes back in Cassarabia. The true kindness would have been to let the sands of Cassarabia suck the marrow from your bones . But wasn’t it better to die trying to follow a dream, rather than experience the death of a million cuts she would have endured back in Middlesteel? Slowly suffocated by the cant and ritual of academia, the way things had always been. The received wisdom. She drifted into sleep and the worries, fears and regrets swirled around her, keeping her tossing on the hard metal floor.

Amelia was back in Jackals, in the grand old house along Mouse Place that had been sold off after her father’s suicide. But the great financial crash hadn’t happened yet. Had she imagined her family’s fall? She was reading in the library when her father entered. She felt an enormous wave of gratitude to see him, such happiness. But he hadn’t died yet, so why should she feel such joy?

‘Amelia,’ he said. ‘What have you done to your arms? They look like they belong on a butcher, not a professor with letters after her name.’

‘I needed to be strong, father.’ Should she tell him about the dig in the foothills of Kikkosico, where she had nearly died at the hands of the bandits; when she vowed she would never let herself be captured like that again? No, it would just worry him. ‘I can lift a horse with these. It wasn’t womb magic that changed them, I went to a worldsinger here in Jackals, used the power of the earth.’

‘It’s a thin difference,’ said her father, the disapproval evident in his voice. ‘We should move along the Circle as we were born to it. We are not Catosians to fill ourselves with the herb of shine, or Cassarabians to curse our children’s line with the mutations of womb magic.’

‘It’s something I had to do,’ said Amelia.

‘So it seems.’

‘For the dream,’ said Amelia. ‘To find Camlantis.’

‘I rather think this is the dream,’ said her father, indicating the house at Mouse Place.

‘Please be real,’ begged Amelia.

‘I cannot.’

‘Are you a ghost now? You told me they exist.’

‘Not all of us moves along the Circle,’ said her father. ‘Some of our pattern is left imprinted on the one sea of consciousness, the universal soul, before we are drawn back into the realm of the many and the fragmented.’

‘Then you are a ghost. You’re dead,’ sobbed Amelia. If this was a dream, why were there colours? You couldn’t have colours in a dream, everyone knew that. The shelves seemed brown, polished Jackelian oak, and the books …

‘No,’ said her father, ‘not dead. You know better than that. I just swapped one pair of clothes for another.’ He reached out to touch her hair. ‘I live in here, in the bees on the flowers and the gnats over the meadow and in a thousand babies born since. When a cup of water is poured into the stream, then refilled, is the cup filled with the same water or with different water?’

‘The water is movement,’ said Amelia. ‘The stream is flow. It is change.’

Her father smiled. ‘I am glad to see the time you spent listening to our Circlist vicar in her pulpit was not entirely in vain.’

‘You never liked the church,’ said Amelia. ‘You said you only went along because your constituents packed the building each Circleday.’