The Bloodstained God (Book 2) (45 page)

“There can be no such fish,” the man behind him said.

But there was. It was big as a whale, and fast. It ripped through the water and its wake pointed directly at the Seth Yarra vessel.

Was this some doing of the Wolf god, Hiralo wondered. He had lived on or by the sea his whole life, and any three of the biggest sharks he had seen would fit end to end alongside this one. It did not seem possible that this was a natural thing.

The shark met the ship. The sound of the impact was terrible. A wall of spray shot fifty feet into the air, falling like a wave on the deck. The ship itself seemed to scream as wood broke and iron bent. It lifted several feet into the air, men tumbling from the tilted deck down into the sea.

The ship fell back, a low wave rolling out from where it struck the water. There was no bow wave now. The wind ship wallowed and listed to the left. It was down at the head, sinking to all appearances. Hiralo watched the men on the deck as they scrambled to and fro. Some seemed to realise their peril, and were trying to unleash small boats from where they were bound down to the deck, while others struggled up the trees to tug at ropes and fill the sails with wind as though they thought the ship might sail again.

Cries from his men on the far side of the ships track told Hiralo that the great shark was coming again. The men on the ship saw it too. He watched one man bind himself to a rail with a rope so that he would not be thrown from the deck. Others ran about in panic, and some even leapt into the sea.

The shark struck the ship again. It lifted towards Hiralo this time, and one of the trees on the deck snapped and fell, sprinkling men into the water like so much salt on soup. At least they seemed able to swim. He saw heads and arms bobbing and flailing as they strove to put distance between themselves and the stricken hulk. He wasn’t sure if he should be cheering or not, and his men seemed equally divided, if quite a bit more decisive. Some were clapping their hands and shaking fists, while a few others were taking advantage of the distraction to put as much distance between the shark and themselves as possible, paddling strongly towards the sheltering reefs of the islands.

There was no doubt that the giant shark had saved them from the wind ship, but what would it do when it was finished with that?

Now the vessel was clearly sinking. He could see it going down visibly, and there was a new horror. The water around it was alive with sharks, small sharks like the ones that swam beyond the reef of his home island, and they were attacking the Seth Yarra. The water was becoming stained with red. He saw heads suddenly vanish. Men screamed.

But the great shark had not finished. Hiralo saw its head rise out of the water and he could see its teeth, each bigger than a man’s hand, as it opened its jaws and crashed them shut upon the ship’s stern. It writhed in the water, twisting its body and throwing spray more than a hundred yards in every direction. He felt it like rain.

The ship broke. The entire stern came away in the giant creature’s mouth, tearing and splintering, releasing the ship to surge away one last time, toppling on its side as it did so, and then sinking so that only shattered wood and a few barnacled planks of the submerged hull could be seen, belly up like a dead fish.

The sea became quiet again. The sharks had done their work quickly, and now he could see no movement upon the water that was not the work of the wind. They were all dead and gone. Hiralo heard a gull cry, looked up to see the double curve of wings, and more flying out from the land to this place of sudden feasting. He shuddered. The powerful, swift ship, its crew, all its threat and skill has dissolved into the sea in less than three minutes.

He heard cries of alarm again and looked once more. The giant fin was back. It was cutting through the group of canoes that had remained, not striking any, but passing close. Hiralo stood up, bracing himself so that the canoe would not tip. He knew that he was safe, that the great beast would not attack. He could not have said how he knew, but he felt it deeply, and with certainty.

The great fin turned towards him, gliding slowly through the water which was more disturbed by the great mass passing beneath than the slender, smooth fin. One of the men in his boat exclaimed in alarm, but Hiralo quieted him with a gesture, and stood still while the fin, and the great shark, approached.

It passed less than a foot from the side of the canoe, passing along it from stern to bow, and Hiralo touched it with his hand as it went by. The touch gave him a feeling if benevolence and strength, and before the fin he saw the sharks eye regarding him, a chill, black, expressionless pit, but the fin spoke to him in a different way. This thing was not just a shark. It was the god of sharks.

It was gone. The fin slid beneath the water, the shadow that had been beneath it faded, and the sea returned to what it always was, a wind-roughed salty desert. The gulls were loud now, fighting over torn scraps of meat that the sharks had left behind, and Hiralo sat back down in the canoe. His men said nothing, but they looked at him in a way they never had before.

He smiled.

“Let us go home,” he said.

Sara had changed her mind about Manoc Anatano. The Sage’s secretary did not live down to the unattractive characteristics of his face. There was some bitterness in him, to be sure, but there was also a childlike enthusiasm for his work and an eagerness to please that she found quite disarming.
She had come to think of his pinched features as delicate, rather than narrow. More than anything else she thought of him as cynical, but only about life, people, politics, war, about everything except knowledge, and books.

Lira had gone off him completely. This, Sara believed, was because Manoc had ignored her steadfastly from day one. The maid had tried her hardest to be noticed, and Sara had even frowned at her a couple of times when her antics had become too brazen, but it had all been to no avail. Manoc was as immune to her wiles as the ancient scholar he served. Sara found that it made her like him more.

Now she was spending her evenings with Saul, her son, and her days with the scholars. She had employed a nurse from the more northerly of the estate’s two villages, a plump woman of middle age who was happy to see to all the child’s needs for a modest reward, except for feeding him, which remained Sara’s duty and pleasure. But Sara was increasingly enjoying her time with the scholars.

In spite of his early start on the first day, which Sara put down to his eagerness to see the codex, Nesser had been somewhat later rising than his secretary. It was inevitable, perhaps, that his age should show itself in at least one way. Otherwise they all three spent their days in the library, going out of it for meals and walks in the gardens when their limbs demanded exercise. They conversed as well. To begin with it was Nesser asking questions and mostly Sara replying, but gradually their discourse tended more towards a conversation, so that by the end of the third week they had all the appearance of three scholars sharing a workspace, status, and wisdom quite equally.

Sara found Manoc not at all slow in mind, despite Nesser’s unkind words on that first day. Indeed, he seemed quite the master of practical problems, and she talked to him more and more about her catalogue, the organisation of Lord Skal’s library and the preservation and longevity of books.

“You have been lucky here,” he said. “The room is quite dry and some person had the wit to store all the valuable books on the south wall where they are not rotted by the sun.”

“I think the place was somewhat neglected,” she admitted.

“But you have done much to put it right,” he said, hasty to distance her from the blame. She liked him well enough, and it was clear that he liked her, but she found him strange to talk to. For all his scorn of the material world he was a man born to privilege, educated and soft. He had no experience of life worth speaking of, had not been ground down by life’s boots in poverty and hunger, and had not walked as close to the edge of life as she. Her existence, even in the good times she had shared with Saul, had been just a few steps away from disaster. As a journeyman tanner Saul had earned enough to feed them, and the house had been provided free of charge, but there had been no fat in their lives. One accident, one illness, would have been enough to throw them down into the street.

Sara knew the value of a good meal. She knew the worth of security and a warm bed. She did not think that Manoc shared this knowledge. He often said things that suggested he saw some nobility in hardship.

“I have done what seemed appropriate,” she said. “I had no schooling in it.”

“Ah, but the silk curtains,” he said. “A stroke of genius. It is a sacrifice of the silk, it must be, but to preserve the books, an excellent idea. It lets in light, but not the harm of the light.”

This morning Manoc was copying passages that Bento Nesser had instructed him to copy. He had unpacked a ream of high quality paper and was sitting in the light with ink and a pen, scratching away. Or so it seemed until Sara saw what he was writing.

His script was beautiful. He wrote with a flowing motion of the hand, which automatically, unconsciously wandered back to his ink well at intervals, and the letters that his hand made were beautiful. She had never seen such writing, except in books.

“You writing is very fine,” she said.

Manoc smiled a wry smile. “Sometimes I think it is the chief reason for my employment,” he replied.

“Well, it is certainly as fine as any I have seen in these books,” she said. It was no lie. Even the oldest and most distinguished of her books could not lay claim to a finer hand.

“I thank you for the compliment,” he said. In spite of his remark he seemed genuinely pleased.

“Will you copy the whole book?” she asked.

“I prefer to,” he said. “If I copy a whole book, then it is as if I have created it again. Sage Nesser does not always require it though.”

Sara watched him write for a while. It was a new pleasure for her. She could write, barely, but her characters were a procession of ill fed beggars compared to Manoc’s royal cavalcade.

“Will you write something for me?” she asked on impulse. She had a sudden desire to possess a piece of that perfect script – to own it.

“Something small, perhaps,” he said. “Is it for yourself? You know that copies of books are highly regarded as gifts?” He paused, and seemed to think that she might mistake his meaning. “My time is not my own, you see. I am in the service of Sage Nesser, and must do his bidding. It takes most of my time, and he pays for the ink and paper.”

She laughed. “I do not mean to steal you from your master,” she said.

Manoc leaned forwards and lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “I wish that you would, my lady,” he said.

She laughed again, and he smiled to see that he had made her laugh. It was at this moment that Bento Nesser pushed past the door and begun to tap his way into the room.

“What jollity is this?” he asked. “You do not have my permission to laugh unless I am present,” he said. His smile indicated that this was to be taken in jest. It was not always obvious with Nesser what he meant seriously and what not. His face was so grave with the passage of time that it was hard for any expression to make itself known.

“I was admiring Manoc’s calligraphy,” Sara said.

“Quite right,” Nesser said. “The finest hand in Bas Erinor or Golt, or so it is said.” Manoc looked down at his work, and said nothing more. So the morning returned to its usual pattern with the three of them doing whatever work they had, which for Sara meant reading yet another book. Now she had moved on to “The Fishes of the Eastern Sea: a description of the prominent species, their habits, and the value of their flesh for eating”. Not only were there rare coloured paintings in this particular book, but it also contained recipes for cooking the fish should an adventurer be lucky enough to snare one and have this volume to hand. The author, one Lissan Fellmass, dwelt in far more detail than warranted on the more edible creatures and skimmed the noxious ones.

At midday Sara ate a light meal with Manoc and Bento, and then walked alone in the garden, neither of the others wishing to do so. She sat on the bench by the pond and watched a pair of ducks retreat into the reeds on the far side. They were afraid of her, though they had no cause to be. Indeed, their cause would be better served by being her friend, coming to take crumbs from her hand, swimming to greet her each time she came to the pond. She would be their friend. She would protect them.

As she watched the ducks, scavenging for food nervously among the reeds, the idea came to her that she was no more than they. They, too, walked close to the edge of life. They too were dependent for their survival on the whims of greater beings and if the ducks were too ignorant to seek her patronage, the she was wise enough too seek favours with those greater than her. Manoc had suggested a gift, a gift of writing.

She sprang to her feet and walked directly back to the house, into the library.

“Bento, I want to steal Manoc from you for a time,” she said.

Bento looked up from his book, and for once she could read the expression on his face quite clearly. He was surprised. Manoc looked equally taken aback, as though he thought that his jest of earlier had suddenly become a fact.

“I suppose it might be possible,” the old man said. “How long? I cannot spare him for long.”

“A month.”

“A month?”

“Yes, that should be enough time.”

Bento shook his head. “I cannot spare him for a month. A day, perhaps.  What do you want him for?”

“I will pay for his time, Bento.”

“Money is money, time is time. You cannot buy one with the other.”

“Nonsense, Bento. Men buy time as a matter of course.”

“You want him to copy the codex,” Bento said. It was uncanny sometimes the way the old man could read her mind. It almost seemed like magic. “But you already have a copy. You have the only copy. Why?”

“A gift.”

“Do you know that Manoc’s skill is such that he is paid a guinea a day just to
write words
? A month is thirty days. Who is worthy of such a gift?”

Thirty guineas! For that much she could have bought a small house in Bas Erinor and fed her family for two years on what was left. Yet she had the money. Lord Skal had left the income of Latter fetch in her care, and she knew that she had twice that amount ready to hand, though she had hardly dared to open the strong box and look at it. Now she was contemplating spending it.

“Wolf Narak,” she said.

“You know the wolf god?” Bento sounded genuinely impressed for just a moment, but then he saw from her face that she did not. “Ah,” he said. “But when he receives this gift he will know
you
. He will remember you. Your name will be in his mind. Is that what you want?”

Sara said nothing, and Bento stroked his chin, a sure sign that he was thinking.

“It is a good gift for the Wolf,” he said after a while. “Narak knew Pelion, or so they say, and this book goes back to times before Narak, before all the Benetheon. It will interest him.”

“So I hope,” Sara said. She noticed that Bento was no longer speaking as though Manoc’s labour was an impossible thing. The thought had apparently intrigued him.

“I will think on it,” Bento said. “It is a great thing to ask. You know that?”

“I know it,” she said. But was it really so great a thing? A month of a man’s time, and that time paid for, not given. It was not as though she asked for something for which she could not meet the price. However, it seemed that she was not to get her answer on this day, and so she settled down to read again, but Lissan’s fish failed to hold her interest, and so she went for a walk and sat by the pond, and looked at the unfortunate ducks.

It was not that day, or the next, but on the third day that Bento gave her his answer. She had eaten her breakfast alone, having come down after Manoc and before the old man. She had slept well, which had surprised her, given that she was waiting on Bento’s whim, but she had given up on the fish book the previous day and turned instead to a ferocious account of the Great War by some Afaeli nobleman. It was all noble deeds and tall stories as far as she could tell, but it entertained as much as any book she had read, and she had devoured fully half of it before their evening meal, and was looking forwards to the other half this morning.

She had just stood from eating when the old man shuffled in, tapping the ground before him with his stout stick. He stopped in the doorway and looked at her, perhaps surprised to see her still here.

“Good morning to you, Lady Sara,” he huffed. He looked both ways as though to see if anyone else was in the room, though it was obvious that there was not.

“Good day to you, Sage Nesser,” she replied.

He snarled his smile at her. “I said you should call me Bento,” he chided her. “What’s in the dish this morning?” he asked.

“Eggs, ham, cheese and nuts,” she said. “Bread, butter, smoked chicken, mushrooms.”