Legenda Maris (17 page)

Like Ymil, then, Zophyra—for a while
known by the name of Zephyrin—tracked Vendrei. Just as presently, Ymil, hired
and misled in embarrassment by her father, tracked
her
. (Him).

Learning the passenger list on the ship,
Zophyra-Zephyrin took passage. As Ymil, knowing she-he would, had likewise
done.

Ymil alone had seen to the bottom of her
relentless vendetta—and that not until almost the last moment.

The rest was—uproar.

As detailed here.

7

Even
the most diligent observer will sometimes deliberately turn away.

Ymil did so on the beach below the
cliffs.

He took himself off along the shore, and
began to examine some of the flotsam broadcast there, quite studiously.

Half naked the pair of them, Vendrei and
Zeph-Zophyra glared at each other. After a second, however, the young woman
pulled herself to her feet, and took a couple of angry baleful strides towards
him. Her gait was not steady, needless to say, and gave way abruptly. The
instant she staggered Vendrei leapt to her like lion at gazelle, and seized her
in both arms. His grip was fierce, yet gentled. And Zophyra, while her head
spun, could make no proper resistance.

The weed was still tangled in her hair.
Vendrei therefore found himself kissing both her pale hair and the pale weed.
Each tasted of ocean, but her hair also of her youngness and female flavour.
Her skin more so.

“When I am better,” she whispered, “I
shall kill you for this.”

“Already you kill me. One look from your
eyes—who—what—who
are
you?”

“You know me.”

“Do I?” Vendrei paused, his mouth
against her cheek—that his duellist’s glove had slapped, this skin like silk.
“I seem—to have seen you. But that was in your male disguise. I should have
guessed. Nothing so delicious, so rare, could be anything but a woman—”

“Oh, but it can, sir. Even dead on your
back, with my sword so nicely planted in your heart, you would be worth all
this world to me.”

Both of them sighed then. They were worn
out, and leaned on each other, in a while sitting down on the sand.

The sun warmed them. Their hair was
drying, mingled in long strands of gold and cream.

Eventually he said, in a low, penitent
voice, “Are you the girl from the other estate?
That
girl? But you can
read Latin—”

Then she laughed. “What shall I do?” she
asked the sky and the water. “It’s no use, Mhikal Vendrei.”

“No use at all. You’ve won the duel,” he
said. “You won it when I saw you and thought you half dead on the rock. I knew
you then, somehow. But somehow I knew you anyway, and
that
was the cause
of my hatred perhaps—that I’d refused something so—fine. Worth ten of me. A
thousand. You have won the duel.”

“No.
You
won it. From the moment
I first saw you, four years ago, on the harvest morning. Then.”

The watcher Ymil did glance, just once,
back over the sand. A precaution perhaps. But they were embraced by then of
course, mouth on mouth, their hands in the other’s hair, yearning and almost
crying aloud. Like two shipwrecked survivors who, after years of tempest,
crashing waves and tumult, reach the kind arms of the land alive.

It
is the sea, Ymil thinks, weeks later, when he is safe in the port of Pharos.
The sea is so versatile, has so many trades. It makes itself adornments of lacy
foam, disarms aggressive humans of their swords, rises to undo the graves of
mankind and claim back the dead it has already destroyed, in its priestly role
of sacrificer. But also the sea is the benign priest, joining in the marriage
of love old widows and aging wifeless merchants, and young men and women who
have lost what they can never see they have lost, which is simply their way.
Brief dusk lies on Pharos, and the stars come out in crowds to gape at the
nightlife below. The waters of the Mediterranean uncurl against this Egyptian
strand. The sea, the priest, Ymil thinks, is also singing orisons above the
depths, to honour them, those that never do reach the land, those forever lost;
the drowned, the lonely. The watchers far from shore.

Under Fog

(The Wreckers)

Oh burning God,

Each of our crimes is numbered upon

The nacre of your eternal carapace,

Like scars upon the endless sky.

‘Prayer of the Damned’

(Found scratched behind the altar in the ruined
church at Hampp.)

We
lured them in. It was how we lived, at Hampp. After all, the means had been put
into our grip, and we had never been given much else.

It is a rocky ugly place, the village,
though worse now. Just above the sea behind the cliff-line, and the cliffs are
dark as sharks, but eaten away beneath to a whitish-green that sometimes, in
the sunlight, luridly shines. The drop is what? Three hundred feet or more.
There was the old church standing there once, but as the cliff crumbled through
the years, bits and then all the church fell down on the stones below, mingling
with them. You can still, I should think, now and then find part of the pitted
face of a rough-carved gargoyle or angel staring up at you from deep in the
shale, or a bit of its broken wing. The graveyard had gone, of course, too. The
graves came open as the cliff gave, and there had been bodies strewn along the
shore, or what was left of them, all bones, until the sea swam in and out and
washed them away. Always a place, this, for the fallen then, and the discarded
dead.

By day of my boyhood, the new church was
right back behind the village, up hill for safety. The new church had been
there for two hundred years. But we, the folk of Hampp, we had been there since
before the Doomsday Book. And sometimes I used to wonder if they did it then
too, our forebears, seeing how the tide ran and the rocks and the cliff-line.

Maybe they did. It seemed to be in our
blood. Until now. Until that night of the fog.

My
first time, I was about nine years. It had gone on before, that goes without
saying, and I had known it did, but not properly what it was or meant. My
nine-year-old self had memories of sitting by our winter fire, and the storm
raging outside, and then a shout from the watch, or some other man banging on
our door: “Stir up, Jom. One’s there.” And father would rise with a grunt,
somewhere between annoyance and strange eagerness. And when he was gone out
into the wind and rain, I must have asked why and Ma would say, “Don’t you
fret, Haro. It’s just the Night Work they’re to.”

But later, maybe even next day, useful
things would have come into our house, and to all the impoverished houses up
and down the cranky village street. Casks of wine or even rum, a bolt of cloth,
perhaps, or a box of good china; once a sewing machine, and more than once a
whole side of beef. And other stuff came that we threw on the fire, papers and
books, and a broken doll one time, and another a ripped little dress that might
have been for a doll, but was not.

On the evening I was nine and a storm
was brewing, I knew I might be in on the Work, but after I thought not and
slept. The Work was what we all called it, you see. The Work, or the Night
Work, although every so often it had happened by day, when the weather was
very bad. Still, Night Work, even so.

My father said, “Get up, Haro.” It was
the middle of the night and I in bed. And behind the curtain in my parents’
bed, my mother was already moving and awake. My father was dressed.

“What is it, Da?” I whispered.

“Only the usual,” said my father, “but
you’re of an age now. It’s time you saw and played your part.”

So I scrambled out and pulled on my
outdoor clothes over the underthings I slept in. I was, like my father, between
two emotions, but mine were different. With me that first time, they were
excitement, and fear. Truly fear, like as when we boys played see-a-ghost in
the churchyard at dusk. But in this case still not even really knowing why, or
of what.

Out on the cliff the gale was blowing
fit to crack the world. There were lanterns, but muffled blind, as they had to
be, which I had heard of but not yet properly seen.

Leant against the wind, we stared out
into the lash of the rain. “Do you spot it, Jom?”

“Oh ah. I sees it.”

But I craned and could
not
see,
only the ocean itself roughing and spurging, gushing up in great belches and
tirades, like boiling milk that was mostly black. But there was something
there, was there? Oh yes, could I just make it out? Something like three thin
trees massed with cloud and all torn and rolling yet caught together.

“You stay put, Haro,” said my father.
“Here’s a light. You shine that. You remember when and what to do? As I told
you?”

“Yes, Da,” I said, afraid with a new
affright I should do it wrong and fail him. But he patted my shoulder as if I
were full-grown, and went away down the cliff path with the others. Soon enough
I heard them, those three hundred feet below me, voices thin with distance and
the unravelling of the wind, there under the curve of the crumbled white-green
cheese of the cliff-face. Though I was quite near the edge, I knew not to go
too far along to see, but there was a place there, a sort of notch in the crag,
whereby I could see the glimmer of the lamps as they uncovered them. And I knew
to do the same then, and I uncovered my lantern too.

So we brought it in. The thing with the
clouded trees that was adrift on the earthquake of great waters. The thing that
was a ship.

She smashed to pieces on the rocks
below, where the tallest stones were, just under the surface at high tide,
against rock and shale, and the faces of angels and devils, and against their
broken wings.

This was our Night Work, then. In
tempest or fog we shone our lights to mislead, and so to guide them home, the
ships, and wreck them on the fangs of our cliffs. And when they broke and sank,
we took what they had had that washed in to shore. Not human cargo, naturally.
That counted for nothing. It must be left, and pushed back, and in worse case
pushed under. But the stores, the barrels and casks, the ironware and food and,
if uncommon lucky, the gold, they were rescued. While they, the human flotsam,
might fare as wind and darkness, and their gods—and we—willed for them, which
was never well.

I saw a woman that night, just as the
great torn creature of the vessel heaved in and struck her breast, with a
scream like mortal death, to flinders on our coast.

The woman wore a big fur cloak, and also
clutched a child, and in the last minute, in intervals of the storm-roil, I saw
her ashen face and agate eyes, and he the same, her son, younger than I, and
neither moved nor called, as if they were statues. And then the ship split and
the water drank them down. But there was a little dog, too. It swam. It fought
the waves, and they let it go by. And when it came to land—by then I craned at
the cliff’s notch, over the dangerous edge—my father, Jom Abinthorpe, he
scooped up the little dog. And my reward for that first night of my Night Work
was this little innocent pup, not yet full-grown as neither I was. Because, you
will see, a dog can tell no tales, and so may be let live.

But the ship and her crew, and all her
people, they went down to the cellars of the sea.

I
was always out to the Work with the men after that. By the time I was eleven, I
would be down along the shore, wading even in the high savage surf among the
rocks, with breakers crashing sometimes high over my head, as I helped haul in
the casks, and even the broken bits of spars that we might use, when dried and
chopped, for our fires.

Hampp is a lorn and lonely place; even
now that is so. And when I was a boy, let alone in my father’s boyhood, remote
as some legendry isle in the waste of the sea. But unlike the isles of legend,
not beautiful, but bony bare. There were but a dozen trees that grew within a
ten mile walk of the village, and these bent and crippled by the winter winds.
In summer too there were gales and storms, and drought also. What fields were
kept behind their low stone walls gave a poor return for great labour. And
there was not much bounty given by the ocean, for the fish were often shy. The
sea, they said, would as soon eat your boat as give you up a single herring.
No, the only true bounty the sea would offer came on those nights of fog or
tempest, when it drew a ship toward our coast and seemed to tell us:
Take it
then, if you can
. For to do the Work, of course, was not without its
perils. And to guide them in too required some skill, hiding the light, then
letting out the light, and that just at the proper angle and spot. But finally
the sea was our accomplice, was it not, for once drawn into that channel where
the teeth of the rocks waited in the tide, and the green skull faces of the
outer cliffs trod on into the water and turned their unforgiving cheek to
receive another blow, the ocean itself forced and flung each vessel through. It
was the water and the rocks smashed them. We did not do it. We had not such
power, nor any power ever. And sometimes one of our own was harmed, or
perished. Two men died in those years of my boyhood, swept off by the surge.
And one young boy also, younger than I was by then, he broken in a second when
half a ship’s mast came down on him with all its weight of riven sail.

But ten ships gave up their goods in
those years between my ninth and fourteenth birthdays, and I was myself by then
a man. And the dog had grown too, my rescued puppy. I called him Iron, for his
strength. He had blossomed from a little black soft glove of a thing to a tall
and long-legged setter, dark as a shadow. He was well-liked in our house, being
quiet and mannerly. Also I trained him to catch rabbits, which he killed
cleanly and brought me for my mother’s cooking. But he hated the sea. Would
not go even along the cliff path, let alone to the edge with the notch, or down
where the beaches ran when the tide was out. Whenever he saw me set off that
way to fish, he would shift once, and stare at me with his great dark eyes that
were less full of fear than of disbelief. Next he would turn his back. And
here was the thing too; on those nights when the weather was bad, and the watch
we posted by roster spied a ship lost and struggling, Iron would vanish entirely,
as if he had gone into the very air to hide himself.

I thought after all he did not know what
we were at. Certainly, he would eat a bowl of the offal of any beef or bacon or
whatever that came to my family’s portion out of a wreck. By then, I suppose, it
had no savour of the sea.

He had not known either that we let his
ship, his own first master likely
on
that ship, be drowned. Iron only
knew, I thought, that my father, and next I, had plucked him from the water
after all else was gone.

For a while I had recalled the cloaked
woman and her son. I said nothing of it, and put it from me. And soon I had
seen other sights like that, and many since that time. The worst was when they
tried to save each other, or worse yet, comfort each other. Those poor souls. Yet,
like my dog, I would start then turn my eyes away. I could not help them. Nor
would I have, if I could. We lived by what we took from them, lived by their
dying. All men want and will to live. Even a dog does, swimming for the shore.

Iron
is here now. He leans on my leg and the leg of the chair. Strange, for there is
iron metal there also, but he does not know this. They are kind, compassionate
to have let him in. Well then. Let me tell the rest.

I
had seen fogs often, and of all sorts. Sea-frets come up like a grey curtain
but they melt away at Hampp and are soon gone. The other sort of fog comes in a
bank, so thick you think you might carve it off in chunks with your rope-knife.
And it will stay days at a time, and the nights with them.

In such a fog sometimes a ship goes by,
too far out and never seen, yet such is the weird property of the fog that you
will
hear
the ship, hear it creak and the waves slopping on the hull of
it, and the stifled breathing of the sails if they are not taken in and furled.
It is often worthwhile to go down with extra lanterns then, and range many
lamps too along the cliff by the notch, for the ship’s people will be looking
for landfall and may see the lights, even in the depths of the cloud. But
generally they do not. They pass away like ghosts. After they were gone men
cursed and shrugged, wasting the lamp-oil as they had and nothing caught. But
now and then a ship comes in too far, misled already by the fog, and by the
deep water that lies in so near around our fanged rocks. For surely some demon
made the coast in this place to send seafarers ill, and Hampp its only luck.
These ships we would see, or rather the shine of their own lanterns, and they
were heard more clearly, and soon they noticed our lamps too, and sometimes we
called to them, through the carrying silence, called lovingly in anxious
welcome, as if wanting them safe. And so they turned and came to us and ran
against the stones.

That night of the last fog I was
seventeen years, and Iron my dog about eight, with a flute of grey on his
muzzle.

I had been courting a girl of the
village, I will not name her. But really I only wanted to lie with her and
sometimes she let me, therefore I knew we would needs be wed. So I was
preoccupied, sitting by the fire, and then came the knock on the door. “Stir
up, Jom Abinthorpe. Haro—waked already? That’s good. There is a grey drisk on
the sea like blindness, come on in the hour. And one’s out there in it, seen
her lamps. Well lit she is, some occasion she must have for it. But sailing
near, the watch say.”