The Glass Word (9 page)

“You've been on board too long, Captain,” she continued her harangue, and now the sailors were unmistakably pricking up their ears. “You've forgotten how things look in the world up there. You and your people have let this boat and its art treasures go to ruin while you sail through the world's oceans and look for lost treasure. Yet you'll find the greatest treasure of all here, right under your behind, and you have nothing better to do than turn it into a scrap heap without equal and look on while your crew ruins it a little more day by day.”

Calvino's face was still hovering a few inches away from hers, as if frozen in space. “The greatest treasure of all you say?” Now his voice sounded softer and more controlled than before.

“Certainly—as long as you don't care that it's rotted like an old piece of plank on the shore of some island or other.”

“Hmm,” said Calvino. “You think I'm … untidy?”

“I think,” Eft said in a friendly voice, “you are the biggest slob between here and the Arctic Circle, and that in every respect. All the more difficult for me to point out to you your obvious
mistakes!”

Oh my, oh my, oh my,
Serafin thought.

Dario sucked in his breath audibly. “Now she's gone completely crazy,” he whispered to his friend.

Captain Calvino stared, wide-eyed, at Eft. His
thumbs nervously polished the pommel of his saber, while his thoughts doubtless circled around murder and manslaughter; around fishwife filet; around a paper-weight made of the jaws of a mermaid.

“Captain?” Eft tilted her head and smiled.

“What?” The word rose growling out of his throat like sulfur vapor from a volcano crater.

“I haven't by any chance offended you, have I?”

Two sailors whispered to each other, and before the two knew it, Calvino was beside them and barking at them with such a gigantic explosion of epithets that even Serafin and Dario, both former street boys from the alleys of Venice, blushed to the tips of their ears.

“Someone should write this down,” Dario said out of the side of his mouth.

Calvino started, and his eyes fell on the boys. For a moment it looked as though he was going to let loose his fury on them, too, but then he swallowed his vituperations and turned again to Eft. Dario let go of his breath.

The outburst of rage had calmed the captain a little, and he could now look Eft in the face again without stabbing her with his eyes at the same time. “You are … impertinent.”

Eft was obviously suppressing a grin, which was probably a good thing, for that is not a beautiful sight in a mermaid. “This boat is an unparalleled disgrace, Captain. It stinks, it's dirty, and it's neglected. And if I were you—and thanks be to the Lords of the Deep I'm not—I'd make
sure that my men brought it into line in a hurry. Every pipe, every picture, every carpet. And then I'd lean back for a moment and enjoy the idea of being one of the richest men in the world.”

Serafin watched the words seep into Captain Calvino's consciousness and spread their entire import. One of the richest men in the world. Serafin wondered if Eft knew what she was talking about. On the other hand, you'd have had to be a fool not to recognize what value this submarine had. In times like these it was priceless—if also, and Calvino might overlook that in his greed,
literally
beyond price, for there was no one left who could have bought it.

But presumably the captain would not have sold his boat for any price in the world anyhow. Much more, it was the knowledge of the value of his vessel, the sudden recognition of his wealth, that roused his enthusiasm. He'd been aboard for too long, and as so often happens when one has something around day after day, he'd forgotten how valuable it was.

He looked at Eft for a few seconds longer, then whirled on his heel and snarled a series of orders to his subordinates, who immediately began to relay the captain's wishes to the crew through a speaking tube that reached to the farthest corner of the submarine.

Clean up, the command was. Clean and dust. Remove rust and polish. And then, Calvino ordered, the art treasures that had collected in one of the lower cargo areas over the
course of the years should be distributed to the walls and the remaining sound glass cabinets. And woe to him who still dared to do anything to them with charcoal or knife tip!

Finally Calvino gave the former mermaid a crooked grin. “What's your name?”

“Eft.”

He bowed gallantly, overdoing it a little, but his good will was evident. “Rinaldo Bonifacio Sergio Romulus Calvino,” he introduced himself. “Welcome aboard.”

Eft thanked him and then, no longer able to suppress her grin—the captain seemed to be a little frightened by it—she shook his hand and finally went over to the two boys. Serafin and Dario were still standing there with mouths agape, unable to grasp what had just happened.

“How did you do that?” Serafin asked softly as they left the bridge, followed by Calvino's benevolent gaze at Eft's backside.

Eft winked at Serafin. “He's only a man too,” she said with satisfaction, “and I still have the eyes of a mermaid.”

Then she hurried ahead to supervise the work of cleaning up.

They reached Egypt the next day.

Nothing had prepared them for what they saw as the submarine rose to the surface. Ice floes floated on the open sea, hundreds of yards away from land. The closer they came to the white coastline, the more obvious it became that
winter had descended on the desert. No one understood what had happened, and Calvino had his men pray three Our Fathers to protect them all from tritons and sea devils.

Serafin, Eft, and the others were just as mystified as the captain and his crew, and even Lalapeya, the silent, secretive Lalapeya, declared without being asked that she had not the least idea what was going on in Egypt. Without doubt, such an outbreak of winter had never happened before. Ice floes along the desert coast, she explained, were about as usual as polar bears dancing on the tips of the pyramids.

Captain Calvino gave the order to measure the thickness of the ice layer at the bank. Barely more than three feet, it was soon reported to him. Calvino growled ill-humoredly to himself and then conferred with Eft on the bridge for a whole hour—as with every conversation between the two, there was a lot of shouting, terrible curses, and finally a yielding captain.

Shortly afterward Calvino had the boat dive, and they ran into the Nile delta beneath the ice sheet. The great river and its tributaries were not deep, and it required some skill to maneuver the boat between the ice and the river bottom. Sometimes they heard sand grinding under the hull, while the fin-shaped upper projections of the boat's hull scraped along the ice layer. It would be a miracle, raged Calvino, a goddamn miracle if no one noticed them with all this racket.

Most of the time they moved forward at a walking pace, and Serafin began to wonder where they were heading,
anyway. The witch's commission had been to set them down on the coast—and now Calvino was voluntarily taking them farther inland, and furthermore, under conditions that were worse than any of them could have imagined. Eft's influence on him was amazing.

The interior of the boat was already gleaming in many places. Everywhere there were sailors busy with cloths and sponges and sandpaper, painting and varnishing, tearing up old carpets and replacing them from the resources of the overflowing storage holds. Many of the stowed objects had lain there for decades, some perhaps since the privateering expeditions of the previous owner, long before the beginning of the mummy war. Even Calvino appeared surprised at what came to light, art treasures and magnificent hand-work, such as hadn't been seen for a long time. He became more and more aware, Eft told Serafin, that he'd been imprisoned for too long in the brass world of the submarine and had forgotten to value the beauties of the upper world. Which of course didn't keep him from roaring around like a berserker, screaming at his men, and handing out draconian punishments for overlooked dirt streaks and flakes of rust.

Serafin had a vague feeling that Eft liked the pirate captain. Not the way she'd worshipped Arcimboldo, and yet … there was something between the two of them, an absurd love-hate that amused Serafin and at the same time disconcerted him. Was it possible for two people to come closer under such circumstances? Had it been that
way with him and Merle? The recognition that they'd spent less time together than Eft and Calvino during the short journey filled his mind. He began to doubt that Merle thought of him as often as he thought of her. Did she miss him? Did he mean anything to her anyway?

A horrible grinding and cracking brought his musings to an abrupt end. It didn't take long before Calvino bellowed out of the speaking tube and, with a string of oaths, informed them of what had happened.

They were stuck. They had run aground in the pack ice of the Nile and could go neither forward nor backward. The iron fins of the submarine had eaten into the ice cover like a saw blade and plowed a lane for a distance of several dozen yards, then became hopelessly wedged in.

Serafin feared the worst and hurried to the bridge. But there stood Calvino and Eft calmly beside each other in front of the windshield of the boat, looking out into the waters of the Nile beneath the ice layer. The witch's fire bubbles had remained back at the coast, but the vague light beams that shimmered through the ice were enough to reveal the most important thing. Through the windshield it looked as if the submarine was stuck under the white ceiling of an indistinct hall. Icicles as thick as tree trunks hung down in front of the window.

It turned out that Captain Calvino was by no means as undisciplined in an emergency as Serafin would have expected. He took account of all the facts, conferred with
Eft, and then gave the order to open the upper hatches of the boat, so that the passengers could climb out.

Climb out?
thought Serafin in horror. Had that really been Eft's advice? To simply set them down in the middle of this desert of ice?

An hour later Eft and Lalapeya, Serafin and Dario, Tiziano and Aristide stood ready at the hatch, enveloped in the thickest fur clothing that could be found in the pirates' storage hold. Calvino remembered that the things came from a grounded schooner whose crew he'd annihilated at the beginning of the war. The ship had been on the way to Thule in Greenland, there to load heaven-knew-what in exchange for the warm clothing on board. The jackets, boots, and trousers did not fit any of them—Lalapeya, especially, with her petite body, was at a disadvantage—but they would be enough to protect them from freezing to death. Finally, each put on a shapeless fur cap and slipped both hands into padded mittens. From the weapons room the pirates handed each of them revolvers, ammunition, and knives. Only Lalapeya refused weapons.

Calvino stayed behind with his men to watch the boat and to try to free the top fin from the ice. He thought that it would take many hours, perhaps even days, and the fear of being discovered by the Egyptian sunbarks was clearly written in his face. Although Eft did not ask him to, he promised to wait for three days for a sign of life before he returned to the open sea.

“Where are we going, anyway?” Tiziano morosely said aloud what they'd all wondered a dozen times already.

Eft stood beneath the open hatch that led to the outside. The white circle framed her head like a frozen halo. Her eyes were fixed on Lalapeya, who looked anything but happy in her much-too-large fur clothing. Serafin also inspected the sphinx, and once more he wondered what moved her to keep on accompanying the desperate group. Was it really only hatred for the Empire? The loss of the dead sphinx god who had rested for centuries under the cemetery island of San Michele and whom she had tried in vain to protect from the Empire?

No, thought Serafin, there was something else, something unspoken, which none of them knew anything about. He could feel it as clearly as if the eyes of the sphinx were saying it to him.

“Lalapeya,” said Eft. Her words sounded almost festive. “I take it you know where we are. Perhaps you've known the whole time that the first part of our journey would end here.”

Lalapeya said nothing, and as much as Serafin tried, he still found no answer in her silence. She confirmed nothing, denied nothing.

Eft went on, “Not far from here, in the middle of the Nile delta, is the fortress of the sphinxes. The mermaids have no name for it, but I think there is one. The captain knows this place, and if the onset of winter has done
nothing worse than cover everything with snow and ice, it must be two or three miles from here, at most.”

“The Iron Eye sees your living, sees your strivings, sees your dying,” Lalapeya recited, and the words sounded to Serafin like a saying from a distant past. The sphinx had passed entire epochs alone in Venice, but she had not forgotten the culture of her people. “The Iron Eye—that's the name you're looking for, Eft. And yes, I can feel it. The closeness of other sphinxes, many in one place. It's suicide to go there.” But the way she said it, it didn't sound like a warning but like a confirmation of something that was unavoidable anyway.

“What are we going to do there?” asked Aristide.

“It's the heart of the Empire,” said Lalapeya instead of Eft. “If there is a spot where one can injure it, it's there.” She said nothing of a plan, perhaps because there was none. The stronghold of the sphinxes, no one doubted, was impregnable.

Eft shrugged, and Serafin thought again about what she had said to the sea witch: that they had to begin somewhere if they wanted to oppose the Empire. That a victory could also lie in small things. Her words had never been out of Serafin's head since then.

But what would it help if they all died doing it? It was as if they were going to run against a wall of their own free will in spite of the certainty that they couldn't even inflict a scratch.