Watson, Ian - Black Current 03 (3 page)

 
          
"Neither do
I
!
Not yet. But you surely aren't saying you don't even
want
to try to help save hundreds of millions of people? I don't
know how—but
somehow!
For a start, by making everyone aware."

 
          
Peli looked downright miserable.
"Yaleen, what I'm saying . . . as regards copying your book ... is that I
just don't write too well. Or read, for that matter. In fact, I just
don’t
. Read and write. Can't," she
mumbled.

 
          
"Oh
grief."
I didn't know what to say. I hadn't for one moment
suspected. And I don't suppose that anybody else ever had; for I could see how
much this confession cost her. "Oh Peli, I'm sorry."

 
          
"I go cross-eyed when I see
words written down. The letters jump around and do dances." She wouldn't
meet my eyes.

 
          
"And you from Aladalia,
Peli."

 
          
"Where
everyone is so brilliant!
Don't I know it? That's why I became a
riverwoman. But at least, if I can't read, I can sing,"

 
          
I had to smother a chuckle. "Of
course you can."

 
          
"But I'm still ruddy useless to
you. It was a waste of time asking me here."

 
          
"No! Don't say so! I haven't
been able to confide in anyone till now. I need you, Peli."

 
          
"Can't copy
your book, though."

 
          
No, and I couldn't copy it either. I
already had enough other duties on my plate. Once I actually started writing,
my spare time would be gobbled up.

 
          
"We'll think of something. You
and I," I assured her. "Don't fret; I really do need you here."

 
          
Didn't I just! It seemed to me a fair
bet that the guild wouldn't publish this next book uncensored. They might be
selective, or they might simply sit on the book. I could be wrong, but I wasn't
going to risk it. So: how to smuggle a copy out, supposing one could be made?

 
          
How could it reach a printing press?
And how could copies get distributed—with the guild in charge of all cargoes?
Peli was going to have to be a smuggler, and a courier, and more. Ah yes: I
would pretend to quarrel with Peli. I would send her away with a flea in her
ear, and my book in her duffle bag.
Somehow.

 
          
Peli brightened. She drained her
glass and refilled it with the last from the bottle. "Let's sing a song
for old times' sake, eh?"

 
          
"Why not?" said I. So we
carolled our way through till it was time for dinner, which luckily for the
ears of anyone musical in the neighbourhood wasn't too long a-coming.

 
          
Dinner was served in Mum's and Dad's
suite, and consisted of pig's kidney and tomato kebabs on a bed of saffron rice;
all of which no doubt had been hot enough when it set out from the cafe. Peli
switched to ale, and I got my hands on a second small mug too.

 
          
I could see that Dad took to Peli,
though the booze made her distinctly brash and chortly—I guess she was rebuilding
her selfesteem after the confession of illiteracy. Oh what, I wondered, would
Dad—who could read a whole page pf spidery writing and crabbed numbers in two
flicks of a lamb's tail—have thought of
that?

 
          
Oddly enough, I didn't think he would
have minded. Mum, on the other hand, merely tolerated Peli. Mum put up with
her.

 
          
It was only during dessert (of sorbet
blancmange) that I realised that Peli couldn't possibly have read
The Book of the River.
She surely
wouldn't have asked any riversister to read it aloud to her! This meant there
must be great gaps in her knowledge of my adventures, ones which she hadn't
enquired into while we were chewing the fat earlier on; so as not to betray
herself
.
I'd
mainly been bringing her up to date on what had happened since Edrick murdered
me.

 
          
I determined to puzzle out what these
gaps must be and try to plug them as diplomatically as possible during the
course of the next few weeks.

 
          
The very next day, in between my
stints in the throne room, I began to write
The
Book of the Stars.

 
          
It wasn't easy at first. I admit to a
few false starts. For here was I, writing about how Tam suddenly hove into
sight in Aladalia whilst I was busy writing
The
Book of the River;
and lo, Tam was about to sail into view once again, this
time ex Aladalia and at my own behest!
So events seemed
curiously overlaid, as if I were suffering from double vision.
Also, I
was writing about happenings which seemed fairly remote to me, who had spent
two 'extra' years in between on Earth and its Moon; but to Tam and Peli and
everyone else these same happenings were much more recent. I'd looped back
through time; they hadn't.

 
          
Soon I was quite intoxicated with my
reconstruction of the past. It came as something of a shock when Chanoose
announced one day, "Your Tam's due tomorrow
noon
,
aboard the
Merry Mandolin."

 
          
Peli, I hasten to add, had been
allowed to turn up at the temple without prior advertisement. So no doubt
Chanoose said this to get in my good books. Literally!
Plain
to see that I'd begun writing something.
Chanoose and Donnah were well
aware that I intended to; so if I had tried to conceal what I was up to, I'm
sure this would have roused suspicions. (The copy was what I intended to
conceal; howsoever it got done.) Consequently I tackled the job in a spirit of
brazen privacy. The privacy component was that I kept my finished copy locked
up safely in my scritoire, and made no bones about not letting people kibitz on
my work in progress. The brazen part was that I tore up numerous sheets of spoiled
paper, cursing roundly in my kiddy voice. This display of artistic temperament
deterred enquiries, but more importantly I noted how all such tom scraps
disappeared from the straw trash bucket with an efficiency which I ascribed
not so much to impassioned tidiness on the part of Lana and company, as to a
desire to oversee all of my abortive scribblings. Once I got into my stride—and
was in fact writing smoothly—I catered to this appetite by scrawling a few
extra irrelevant lines especially to tear up.

 
          
The basket squatted beside my
scritoire like a big hairy ear hoping to eavesdrop; but I wasn't worried that
eyes would pry into the scritoire itself whilst I was otherwise engaged being
priestess. Peli mightn't be able to write but she could certainly perform other
neat marvels with her fingers. In town she had purchased a complicated lock,
cunningly crafted in Guineamoy. This, she substituted skilfully for the lock
in the scritoire lid as supplied, to which I assumed Donnah would have kept a
spare key. I always wore the new key round my neck.

 
          
If Chanoose was hoping to ingratiate
herself, that was her mistake. Forewarned, I insisted on going to meet Tam
when he docked the next day.
And why not, indeed?
I
was sick of sitting on my backside in the temple.
Sitting at
my scritoire.
(I'd found that I genuinely
had
to turf Peli out while I was composing my narrative, by the
way, so maybe my temperaments weren't all pretence.)
Sitting
on my throne.
Sitting at the dinner table.
And
occasionally sitting out on the verandah, either playing cards with Peli and
Dad, or else with my nose in a romance; before tossing it aside—the romance,
that is!—to get on writing my own romance. I had to get out!

 
          
Halfway through the next morning's
audience, I rose and quit; went down to my quarters to pace the verandah.

 
          
Presently a brig schooner drifted
into view, angling in towards the shore. At that distance I couldn't quite read
the words painted on the side, but a flag hung over the stem from the ensign
staff with a design stitched on it which was either a semitone sign or else the
outline of a mandolin. I ran indoors and clanged my bell.

 
          
Donnah had decreed that I should be
escorted through the streets to the docks with all due dignity; namely, perched
shoulder-high in a padded chair strapped to poles. So much did my litter rock
and bob and undulate upon that journey that for a while I, who had never been
water-sick but once—aboard the
Sally
Argent,
and then not because of waves—feared that I might turn up at the
quayside green and puking. However, I gritted my teeth and even managed to grin
and wave my free hand to passers-by who stopped to applaud and
blow kisses and fall
in behind us; with my other hand I had
to clutch the chair-arm.

 
          
Still, at least by this method we proceeded
apace. Once we were within sight of the quay, with the
Merry Mandolin
yet to heave its mooring ropes ashore, I cried,
"Set me down! I'll walk from here!" And so I did, with my guards
cordoning me from the wake of townsfolk.

 
          
When Tam appeared at the head of the
gangplank—a huge bag in each hand—he just stood there for upward of a minute
blocking the way. I was waiting at the bottom, with Donnah and her gang.
Behind, a fair throng of spectators loomed. Yet Tam didn't seem to notice any
of us. He was only seeing—well, he told me this subsequently when we were
walking back to the temple together; with his bags riding in my chair rather
than me, to Donnah's chagrin—he was only seeing that gangplank which led from
water on to land. He was seeing the fact that whilst he stayed aboard the
Merry Mandolin,
he could still sail
anywhere—even all the way back home to Aladalia. But once he crossed that
bridge, he would be marooned ashore. Tam was sure he had left something in his
cabin; and indeed he had. It wasn't anything tangible, though. What he had left
was the way back home. That was why he hesitated for so long.

 
          
He descended. We shook
hands—quaintly, his big lumpy hand making mine disappear. I argued with Donnah
a bit. The guards hoisted his bags; we set off.

 
          
I soon heard his confession.
"But it's so wonderful to be here with you!" he insisted. He was
stooping over me from what now seemed to me a hugely gangly height.
"That you should have asked for me out of everyone—well,
well!"
His voice sank softly so that only I should hear. "I
have the fleuradieu you sent me, pressed and dried in my luggage—and I have a
surprise as well.
A present.
I never thought I'd
actually deliver it. I hoped you might come across
its
like in some far town one day, and realize that it was for you."

 
          
"That sounds delightfully
mysterious."

 
          
"The mystery is
you,
Yaleen."

 
          
He seemed genuinely happy when he
said these things. I decided that this was because he had at last found a way
of fulfilling his impossible love for me. He could be near me, adoring me to
his heart's content and even touching me, as a big brother a sister; our
relationship had suddenly been blessed with innocence. Now he was exempt from
any ordinary expectations a lover might have had of him, where he might have
fallen short. Equally, no one else could ever win me from him, since I was
physically unwinnable. No need for jealousy. He was cured, redeemed, his aching
ecstatic heart's wound salved.

 
          
Or so I told myself while he escorted
me, nudging my guards into the background merely by the way he walked. At first
I had felt qualms about that business at the gangplank, as he explained it; yet
now I congratulated myself somewhat.

 
          
Till Tam sniffed
the air anxiously.
"It's so dry here," he said, more to himself
than to me.

 
          
"Yes? Pecawar's near the
desert."

 
          
Tam's feet scuffed the dust. His eyes
assessed a warehouse built of sandstone blocks which we were passing.

 
          
"Dry. Even the river was
dusty."

 
          
"What's wrong, Tam? It's a
different place, that's all. Aladalia isn't the whole world. If you'd wedded,
you'd have had to—"

 
          
"I wedded my art."

 
          
"Which you can
practise here as easily as.
..." I faltered. For in that moment I
had seen what he was seeing.