Crystal Rain (25 page)

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Authors: Tobias S. Buckell

BOOK: Crystal Rain
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THE NORTHLANDS
 
 
T
hey had sailed for just over a week already.
La Revanche
plunged forward, taking the northern seas wave by pounding wave. The ship lurched every few hours when a large wave smacked her from an odd angle, but the bow, again and again, ripped out the other side of a wall of dark wave, and water would race down the decks and drain off.
It was a rhythm, though John wished he could speed it up. Every week was a week that the city faced the Azteca without him.
It took two days before the most vulnerable, the mongoose-men, gained their sea legs. Another day had passed before the last of them stopped throwing up. By that time the salt in the air coated everything. The fine patina of crystals made a scraping sound whenever someone ran their hand down a rail.
By now everyone had an inkling of what long sea voyages were about. Bad weather, incredible drenching seas, and storms. Dried foods, weevily foods, and bilge rat patrol. Cockroaches, canned vegetables, and one orange a day, just in case. The ocean killed here, no longer a friend like behind the protective barrier reefs just off Brungstun.
John stood on a cabin top, the steamship pitching slowly under his feet. Oaxyctl walked up the deck and stopped next to him.
“How are you taking this?” John moved over next to him at the rail, which John walked up and down, up and down, every day. It had been a sudden decision to ask the mongoose-man to come, but John remembered the way Oaxyctl had been treated on the street. That would not be repeated on this ship. Oaxyctl had saved his life, John owed him as much as the man would accept.
“I don’t think my stomach will ever forgive me.”
John flexed his knees to stand straight in respect to the horizon and smiled.
Revanche
gimballed under him. “Give it another week …”
A small rogue wave broke the ocean’s rhythm, slapping the ship’s side and throwing up spray that struck them both. The water dripped from John’s waterproofed coat, but a small rivulet snuck in under his collar and trickled down his back.
“Gods.” Oaxyctl gripped the railing. “Another week.”
“You’ll get used to it.” John folded his arms. As long as one didn’t think about all the time they were using up.
“What do you to pass time?”
“Knots.”
“Knots?”
“Some men can afford books to bring with them and trade them once they’re read,” John said. “Others learn crafts. Knots are a good start. Whittling fish bones into naked women is another.”
Oaxyctl snorted. He looked at John and let go of the railing with one hand and swayed with the boat a bit, trying to imitate.
“I guess this isn’t too different than some of the long shifts in the lower mountains,” Oaxyctl said.
“At sea you are your own worst enemy.”
“That is the way it works anywhere.” Oaxyctl shuffled his feet as he lost his balance. He looked through the scuppers at the shifting landscape of water. “I’m far from home, John. Far from home.”
“Lonely?”
Oaxyctl nodded. “I feel like I have no friends, no family, no one who cares if I were to fall off the side of this boat.”
“It’s a ship,” John corrected him. “But, yes, I understand.” Out here it was like an alien land where the horizon never ended and the land constantly shifted and broke over itself.
Alien world. That impression bubbled right up through John’s subconscious. It was one of many different images and feelings that had been surfacing since the voyage started. He resented them, though. He’d been trying to hold pictures of Shanta and Jerome in his head. The weird feelings stirring in his gut scared him. He hadn’t had such distinct feelings since washing up in Brungstun and waking up with nightmares. Why now?
Every night the memories of Shanta and Jerome grew softer, shattered by the still-striking nightmares of images that had once haunted him before his family had come to him. Images of the spiked egg dripping water were John’s most prevalent dreams.
It was that, and a constant feeling of being alone with dark nothingness around him for unimaginable distances, that woke him up sweating in the night now.
“Oaxyctl, be honest with me. What will happen to my family in Brungstun?” John asked.
“Your wife, if she is lucky, will be working as a servant.” Oaxyctl lifted a hand to brush away one of his dark bangs. He blinked. Another wave slap and he lost his balance, sitting down roughly on the deck. John crouched next to him. “I do not know what they will do with your boy, as there are several … festivals to the gods that approach.”
John leaned his head back against the cabin and sat down completely. “Festivals? They sacrifice people for these, right?”
Oaxyctl didn’t reply. But the silence meant assent.
John ground his teeth. “Why?” he demanded. “Why the blood?”
“It isn’t that we, they, hate life. They adore it. They treasure it. It is the holiest gift of all.”
“So why …” In the distance, from under the decks, a faint yell.
“What would you offer your god?” Oaxyctl asked. “The mud from the bottom of a river? Or the holiest gift of all? I have seen verses that say the gift of human life is a holy deed. Is not that one of the tenets of the christians who live on this side of the mountains?”
“That is a perverse comparison.”
La Revanche
changed her heading, John thought. The rolling felt different. He stood up.
“Perverse?” Oaxyctl raised his voice. “No more than any other religion. What religion doesn’t have a strong connection to blood? The Vodun and christian faiths ask for blood in one way or another. You have others as well. What god do you worship? I am sure you will find some strange, if not horrific, practice there.”
“I don’t worship any gods.” John stepped forward down the deck and looked around, trying to see through the boom and sails in his way. Something was wrong. A random wave struck the side and
La Revanche
leaned far over. Things slid and banged around. Down through one of the hatches, sailors swore and things broke.
Oaxyctl looked around. “What’s wrong?”
An explosion ripped through the rear hatches from inside. John ran forward to the nearest hatch, conversation forgotten. He leapt down the companionway, shoving aside a mongoose-man at the bottom.
Smoke billowed forward at him. Hadley, wearing nothing but pants and carrying a pistol in his hand, grabbed John’s arm.
“I think I catch the man who done this,” Hadley reported. “A stowaway. But the explosion kill three crew.”
“We can’t steer, and we taking on water serious,” someone yelled from in the smoke.
Sabotage.
“Keep all the hatches open.” John coughed, eyes watering from smoke. “Let me see who did this.”
Two bulky fishermen in dirty coveralls pulled what looked like a mongoose-man with long dreadlocks forward. “I know you!” John grabbed the man’s chin and stared him in the eye. “At Grantie’s Arch, on the footbridge. Pepper?” John tried to recall all the impressions he had gathered that night for some sort of conclusion.
“Good afternoon.” Pepper pulled at one of the fishermen, forcing them to stagger. Hadley raised his gun in warning. Pepper looked at them. His face was black with cordite, his dreads singed. He’d been lucky to live through the blast.
He’s holding himself back, John thought. He could see it in the body language. Pepper was dangerous.
But he already knew that. He didn’t have to look for it, John had known it the second he’d first seen Pepper. It sat with certainty in John’s gut. “Get him tied up and locked away. We’ll deal with him later.” They didn’t have the time right now. They needed to fix the damage quickly, get back under way. Then they could think about that.
Pepper stared at him.
“Should kill he dead now,” one of the fishermen said.
“Don’t do anything stupid, John,” Pepper said, his voice icy.
“I’m not sure who you are, exactly,” John snapped. “So don’t call me by my first name.” To Hadley he said, “Put him in the brig, we have other things to worry about first.”
“A brig?”
Hadley and John stared at each other.
“Lock him in a room. Anywhere. You have a place like that?”
Hadley nodded. “A brig,” he repeated, rolling the word around.
It was a word that came easily to John. It mustn’t be used much in the northern parts, John thought.
“Come.” Hadley kept the gun aimed at Pepper.
John walked past them into the slowly clearing smoke. Near the rear of the hold, water rushed in, creating puddles he stepped in. Two men lay bloodied and dead on the ground, one missing a face, just a pink, shredded pulp of a skull facing the hull.
“Who can hold their breath?” John yelled back at the smoke. They would have to repair this now. A sheet of metal welded on and some struts, but first they had to pull something over the cracked hull on the outside, some watertight canvas. John hoped the explosion had not damaged Edward’s machinery for the treads they would need to travel over the northern ice.
And Pepper.
He would talk to him later, after this crisis was taken care of
 
 
Two mongoose-men hastily cleared a sail locker to the fore of the ship, then ripped Pepper’s coat from him, throwing it aside. They yanked free any weapons and knives they found including his binoculars. Then they tied his wrists behind him with rope and pushed Pepper into the locker. They put a lock on the slatted wooden door and took up positions on either side to guard him.
Annoying.
Pepper watched through the gaps in the wooden door as men ran around.
La Revanche
pitched madly until John ordered a sea anchor, a large canvas parachute with spars that forced its throat open, thrown off the back of the ship. That got the ship facing downwind with the waves.
Two men with ropes tied to their waists leapt over to guide ropes and canvas to seal off the leak.
Pepper flexed until the rope around his arms popped. With his arms still behind him he dug his fingers into his forearm. He could feel skin resist, but he forced his thumbnail down until warm blood dripped onto the coils of saltcrusted rope and spare sailcloth underneath him.
He kept digging until he found a sharp edge and pinched it between his thumb and forefinger. He pulled out a slender tube.
Pepper kept it, still bloodied, in his left free hand, waiting. His right boot rested against the lower lip of the door, ready to kick out outward.
The real saboteur would have to come and try to kill Pepper. The crude dart gun ripped from under his forearm would take care of any unwanted visitors. And from the brig Pepper had a good view of the entire deck.
 
The hours passed. It didn’t look as if
La Revanche
was sinking, though Pepper could hear the thrum of the pumps sucking water out over the side and the spitting of welding.
The sea had calmed, and they drifted into the evening. Pepper remained alert, peering out through the slats, ready.
The figure that came up the deck wasn’t the saboteur, but John deBrun, easily recognizable due to his hook. John squatted near the edge of the sail locker. “You say you didn’t do it. What proof do you have?”
“What proof do you have that I
did
sabotage your ship?” Pepper said. “No one stopped to ask this.” Pepper had been hibernating in the bottom rear of the ship in a storage area, near the rudder cables, when one of the crew had snuck back to attach something near the rudder and hull.
“True.” Through the slats this close, Pepper could see only John’s eyes. “But
you
’
re
the stowaway.”
Pepper shifted, right boot on the door, dart gun in his other hand. The blood on his arm had dried and clotted. The skin by the gash quivered, repairing itself. “John, you’ve got worries. You’re worrying about me, but I’m actually the least of your many issues. You have people aboard this ship who don’t want it to reach your destination. And there’s an even bigger problem about to bite your ass.”
“And what is that?”
“There are Azteca ships out here hunting you. The bomb wasn’t supposed to go off for another couple of days, when we got closer to the Lantails.” Pepper had woken up, groggy, and surprised the first crewman. He’d killed him, but didn’t get to the second until he’d triggered the bomb. The concussion still hurt. And now Pepper’s life was even more complicated. That annoyed him even more.
“Azteca don’t have ocean-worthy ships,” John said.
“They do now,” Pepper said. “The Teotl have helped.”
“And how do you know this?”
“Bars.”
“Bars?”
“Bars are your first avenues of locating information, John. You know this. With my ears, I hear all the gossip, the truth, the confessions made into rags and beer mugs: there are two deep-ocean fishing boats missing in the Lantail Islands and one sighting of a strange new-looking ship by city fishermen. They’ve petitioned for protection, but no
one believes them. And then there is the matter of the Teotl I happened to catch and torture in Capitol City that told me there are three big ships out here, John, waiting for you.”
“You’re trying to get us to turn around and give up.”
“If I’d wanted that, I would have killed everyone on board during any of the first few nights at sea and burned the ship. You might not remember things, but listen to my voice and tell me I wouldn’t have.” John was quiet. “About those ships,” Pepper continued. “When they try to stop us, you should let me out. They won’t sink this ship; they’ll try to board. They want to capture you.”
“I’m not letting you out.”
“Okay. I’ve spent lots of time in confined spaces … and getting out of them. Just make sure to feed me well.”
“Where do you remember me from?” John asked. “How do you
really
know me?”
Pepper put a finger through the slat and wiggled it. “Your reaction to that information, without your memories to guide and back you up, would get in my way. You’d call me insane. We’ve got enough difficulty here as it is, why add to it?”
What would he say? Hi, John, you’re hundreds of years old. You once navigated between the stars, now you’re mucking about on a steam-powered toy boat on a small planet cut off from the rest of the human race.
Better to wait.
“How did you get aboard?” John crossed his arm and hook over each other. “We had guards and ships cordoning
La Revanche
off.”
“I swam.” Pepper had left the Teotl’s submarine on the bottom of the harbor to sneak up the side of the ship.
“What makes you think I don’t already believe you’re crazy?”
Pepper pulled his finger out from between the slats and rearranged the ropes behind him so that he could lean back comfortably. He could see John’s arms through the slats as John turned to walk away.
“By the way, John, Jerome is safe.”
John turned and pointed his hook at Pepper. “If you’re—”
“He’s with the Frenchi. He’ll be safe.” Pepper settled back farther in the darkness of the locker.
“And Shanta?”
“Your wife? I did not meet her. Sorry.”
John walked over to the rail, his back to Pepper. “If you’re messing with my head, Pepper, I swear I’ll throw you overboard.”
“Okay.”
John let go of the railing and walked away. Pepper leaned back for a short nap, but as always, half of him remained alert. John deBrun had no memories, Pepper thought as he drifted. It made sense that John might have done something drastic like that.
Pepper had spent almost 298 years trapped in a near-dead escape pod before landing on Nanagada. Both he and John had expected the pulse that had shut down civilization. It was that or let the Teotl own them. They had also expected it would be a decades-long journey back from the destroyed wormholes in tiny, barely functioning vehicles that they’d hardened to survive the pulse. But things went wrong, and instead of decades, they saw centuries. They both had the modifications, and the pods the recycling equipment, needed to hunker down for that kind of time, though.
It had almost driven Pepper mad. Apparently John suffered as well.
Pepper spent months after arriving on Nanagada catching up on the changes and trying to hunt down John. He’d thought he was close when he’d arrived in Brungstun, but the Azteca invaded. He’d thought he was close in Capitol City, when he tracked John down, but John didn’t remember a thing.
Now he was on a steamship with John going north, but John didn’t have a clue as to why this was all so important.
Apparently the Loa remembered the
Ma Wi Jung,
though, and had ordered an expedition. That they’d chosen John to lead it meant they knew something about his past. The Teotl knew something about John. Pepper knew a lot about John. Everyone knew something about John’s past except John.
Damn annoying that he would find John alive and that John wouldn’t even know who either of them was.
Still, the right people were going to the right places. So Pepper was content to doze off on the bundle of ropes and see what happened.

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