Shallows of Night - 02 (37 page)

His lungs full of air, he dived deep, kicking with the powerful muscles of his legs, and he sank down below the awful turmoil.

An infinity of blue, dappled and darting, all perspective gone. It became calm and he devoted himself to concentrating on the feel of the tidal flow against his body. Somewhere there must be a gap in the barrier; this tide could take him there. He knew he could not fight the sea. He swam with it.

Bubbles streamed from his sleek body. Already his lungs were beginning to ache and he yearned to cast his heavy sword from him. The blue became dense as luminosity drifted away on another tide, and shadows, magnified to titanic proportions by the lens of the water, played over his moving form. Abruptly, the dark red of the coral reef loomed at him, balking his way. And still he swam with the tide, feeling its febrile pull sucking at him. His lungs were on fire and he felt his throat constrict; he forced down an urge to open his mouth, suck in on air that was not there. Still—But now he felt the tide quicken about him, eddying, and then it squirted him forward. In absolute darkness all the air was gone. He groaned inwardly and his eyes bulged. Faster and faster. His lips pulled back from his clenched teeth.

Shimmering green bloomed before him, so far away above him. It blurred, pulsing on the tide, and with his last ounce of energy, he struck out with his arms, kicking his legs upward, upward, until he climbed, bursting, into sunlight and the sweet air.

He gasped. A rumbling in his ears. He swallowed. A wave washed over him and he choked.

Tumbling.

Shooting his body upward again, the oxygen beginning to circulate in his system. He broke the skin of the sea, heard the thunder, felt the shudder of the breakers. He buoyed himself up and, waiting, launched himself on the rolling crest of a wave, riding it, allowing it to carry the weight of his body, making it do his work.

And the breakers rolled endlessly in, sounding like the birth of the world: a wild, frenetic explosion of energy that tumbled and twisted him, sucked at him.

And borne on this gravid, ageless salt tide, with the red sun rising at his back, exhausted and gaunt, he was thrown up onto the pink sand of this foreign beach, a pliant and unconscious bit of flotsam given grudgingly by the cool sea onto the curving, heated shore.

A
LL THE WARM MORNING
he lay as if dead, while the last edge of the tide washed him in its creamy surf. Seaweed, stranded, strung across his broad back, wreathing him in deep green, half-covering the long scars of another battle.

Within the wet world of the crashing sea, the fat buzz of flies, the quizzical call of swooping gulls and cormorants.

Then the slosh of boots in the wet sand, slashing obliquely through the surf, their cruel progress disturbing the natural symmetry of the scene. A shadow fell across his still form. The large figure loomed over him. It was quite still for a moment. Then it bent and a hand plucked the drying seaweed from his back.

They sat cross-legged on the expanse of pink sand, drying out above the straggling black flotsam ribbon marking the high tide line. A soft breeze brought them the stench of rotting fish and they saw, off to their left, along the sweep of the beach, the blue-green pulsing of a swarm of flies, iridescent, seemingly armor-plated, flashing in the sunlight, rising and settling on the remains of a small fish, swept up by the tide. Their rhythmic movement seemed to set the thing back to grisly life.

Closer at hand, horseshoe crabs, their black carapaces shining, trundled noiselessly along the sand at the waterline, their stiff tails writing the toil of their lentitudinous passage.

‘I was lucky,’ Moichi was saying. ‘The poop acted something like a catapult. I was thrown over the reef into the relatively clear water of the lagoon out there.’ He looked towards the hidden reef. ‘That cursed coral! How I wish you had grown taller.’

‘And the others?’ asked Ronin.

‘Captain,’ he said, letting the hot sand drift through his fingers, ‘there are no others.’

The verge came up on them suddenly, a rich, verdant carpet, moist, humid, smelling of loam and minerals and natural decay, a sharp contrast to the salt aridity of the sweeping crescent of pink sand behind them, baking in the afternoon heat.

He stepped into the jungle and was immediately engulfed by the steamy cool world, so different from anything else he had encountered before. Engulfed in the jade cathedral, a vast tapestry of leaves, vines, branches. Thick gray boles gave way to shooting slender trunks, deep brown trees, thick and gnarled, covered in carpets of moss. Green sunlight, dusty, barred, oblique light, crept cautiously forward without any success. Shadows flitted high above; flash of color.

Moichi had brought several oval fruit with them from the last rise of the beach. Large and green and glossy, their fibrous husks fell away at the touch of his dirk’s blade. Inside, they found a round, hairy sphere, brown with three spots on one end. Moichi handed him one, showed him how to puncture two of the spots. The milk was thin and sweet and when he cracked the shell, he found that the white firm flesh was sweetly delicious.

They moved due west, straight into the humped interior of the island. Through the massed underbrush of ferns, wild tangled flowers, giant and filled with enormous insects, brief outcroppings of rock wholly covered by gray fungus and green moss, patches of great, brown- and dark red-spotted mushrooms as yellow as butter crowding around the twisted, ancient roots of immensely tall, primordial trees. And as they made their circuitous way into the interior of the jungle, it seemed to Ronin that these leafy giants must have been born during the world’s first cataclysmic upheavals, as the steaming land broke the writhing skin of the sluicing seas, the boiling tides slowly withdrawing their relentless dominion over all the planet; that they had, in their long, gleaming adolescence, been mute witness to the birth of the slender, glittering creatures slithering up from the deep to explore the new world of air and dry land.

Brush strokes of scarlet and saffron, emerald and sapphire, turquoise and coral floated and shot through the multiterraced world high above their heads, the calls and the flutterings of the luxuriantly plumed birds a constant background to their slow progress.

Often they heard the deep growl or snuffling grunt of some large predatory animal but they sighted nothing through the thick veils of foliage. Game, such as grouse and quail, pheasant and rabbit, was plentiful; food was obviously no problem.

Time slipped away from them, down a receding tunnel, a distant, unnatural concept, the immense clutter and space of the jade jungle gripping them with an almost surreal presence, seeping into their minds as well as their bodies until all other typography they had once known became an improbable fevered fantasy.

Where the ground was soft and marshy, they were careful to pull off the brown and black leeches, wedge-shaped and hideous, which clung tenaciously to their exposed flesh.

Where the jungle’s floor rose along a series of winding ridges, the trees seemed somewhat sparser but jagged bits of volcanic rock studded the earth.

When they tired, they paused beneath the spread of a towering tree, plucking fruit from its lower branches, sitting with their backs against the smooth bole, watching large white termites burrow and crawl. Then they would stand and again be dwarfed into insignificance by the illimitable whirring jungle.

At night, with squealing bats swooping, tracing a brown latticework across the open spaces aloft, they built small, compact fires, roasting fresh meat, caught and skinned at the abrupt onset of a brief twilight.

However such was the impenetrability of the jungle that almost all gradations beyond day and night vanished. The hours were lost to them, for they could see neither the sun nor the moon through the high vault of the treetops. They learned to judge the march of the day by the species of animals which hunted and fled around them, for each had its own time governed by an internal clock that wound down only in death.

‘The first mate was known to you, Captain,’ said Moichi across a crackling fire one evening.

‘Yes. An old enemy,’ said Ronin. ‘He destroyed many of my friends back—home.’ Looking up, he saw the inconstant firelight illumine the red pinpoints of the bats’ eyes, their leathery wings unfurled like the sails of the damned.

‘You are from the north, eh, Captain?’ Moichi threw a small bone into the cluttering blackness crawling beyond the glow of their fire. ‘A most persistent fellow.’ He shook his head.

‘You were right.’ He smiled wryly, briefly. ‘He did spend too much time before the mast.’

‘Ah, we all have our evil secrets, my friend.’ Moichi broke the skin of a purple fruit. Juice ran down into his thick beard. Then: ‘How you hate home.’

Ronin sat with his hands over his drawn-up knees.

‘Home is an evil place for me, Moichi.’ He wiped the grease from his lips. ‘But that is all over now.’

The navigator’s eyes were a deep moss green as he watched Ronin from across the fire.

‘My experience has been that it is never truly over. Home has a peculiar hold on us all.’

‘Only on those weak enough to want to return, I think.’

Moichi shrugged.

‘Perhaps.’ He twirled the fruit stem between two fingers as he scraped along his teeth with his fingernail. ‘But it is also true that potent forces are set in motion at the precise moment of our births,
because
of our births. But these forces are not so well defined as to affect only us; they touch those who are around us also.’ He spat out a piece of skin. ‘I do not mean just physically close.’

Ronin’s eyes were half-closed and Moichi was not even certain that he had been listening at the end. There was no more movement at fireside.

Aloft, the humid night shuddered with the flight of numberless wings.

Late the next day, as they climbed over a series of stiff, gray roots, spiralled and fibrous, which arched from the rich, loamy floor of the jungle like a line of miniature bridges, Moichi stopped in his tracks. Perfectly still, he said nothing and Ronin was on the point of asking him why he had paused when he saw the movement, sinuous and glittery, at the big man’s feet. Rising, curling about his ankles, slithering above the tops of his muddy boots, was a serpent, glossy, diamonds of green and ocher along its length, its flat blunt head questing.

They stood, transformed into two more trees in the jungle. The serpent wound its way upward, silent and deadly, across Moichi’s buttocks, along the ridged muscles of his back, until it wound itself along his left arm. Its forked tongue flickered in and out, searching, its eyes two sharp points of obsidian.

In a blur, Moichi’s right hand leapt for its head, his thumb and forefinger digging into each side of its jaw, jamming the hinge. The mouth gaped open, long fangs, needle-sharp and hollow with venom, glistened. The body writhed, winding and unwinding. Moichi broke its jaws, then for the first time, he spoke:

‘Get me a broad green leaf, will you, Captain.’

Moichi knelt and placed the broken head upon the carpet of the leaf Ronin had found for him. Carefully he withdrew one copper-handled dirk and slit the top of the creature’s head from snout to the beginning of its still twitching body. He pressed down on the exposed flesh, using the tips of two fingers. Through the hollow fangs oozed the venom, dark red and thin, until it had all pooled onto the leaf.

Moichi threw the serpent from him and, cutting green moss from the bole of an adjacent tree, let the venom be absorbed by the substance. He wrapped the wet moss in the leaf and stood.

‘There, my friend. The world is not very often either black or white but only shades of gray.’ He put the packet into his sash, then replaced his dirk. ‘You see, from the most deadly creature comes a liquid which would kill us if the serpent had bitten us. Yet now, drying within the organic matter, it becomes an antidote to the other poisons of this place.’

‘How come you to know of this creature?’ said Ronin as they continued through the jungle.

‘You are from the north, Captain, where the serpent cannot live. But I am from the south. Farther still than this island.’ They cut through a dense thicket of ferns. ‘It is a land, I am told, that was once part of the continent of man, many centuries ago, but as the crust of the planet resettled, it broke away.’

‘How came you then to the continent of man?’ asked Ronin. ‘Are your people seamen?’

‘The Iskamen?’ Moichi smiled. ‘Ah no, Captain. We are tillers of the soil by tradition. But we are fishermen, also, and are greatly skilled at sailing close to shore.’ He bent to avoid a broken branch, thick and gnarled, teeming with red and black insects. ‘Too, my people are warriors, a vocation forced upon them by circumstance. We are fierce desert fighters, grown used to hardship and denial; a proud desolate race rich in ancient tradition. Ours, Captain, is a history of slavery and eventual self-knowledge.’

‘Your land is distant from the continent of man?’

‘From Khiyan? Yes, very. It is easier to sail from the eastern shore of the continent. In fact there is a trade route from Sha’angh’sei. Do you know that city?’

Ronin smiled.

‘Yes. I have spent some little time there.’

‘I knew it!’ Moichi laughed. ‘By the Oruborus, we shall meet there one day in different times, and shake each other’s hands and walk along the streets of that great enigmatic city, yes, Captain? For having lived there, you must know that it is a place unrivaled in all the known world for adventure and intrigue.’

‘I would look forward to such a time,’ Ronin said. ‘But tell me now of your land.’

‘In Iskael I have a brother,’ Moichi began, chewing on a mint leaf which he had just plucked. ‘We were born just moments apart yet we resemble each other so little that my father wondered if we were brothers at all.’

‘Surely you are exaggerating.’

Moichi shook his head; the diamond in his nostril sparked momentarily. ‘My father was an intently devout man and his belief in the God of our fathers was unshakable; His strength, the cornerstone of his life. He suspected, I think, that God had planted one of us in my mother’s womb.’