"No Present Like Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swainston Steph)

CHAPTER NINE

I woke up horrified to find myself still on the ship, and another whore of a day stretching out in front of me exactly like the last. I reached under the pillow for another vial and with the help of scolopendium managed to stall its inevitable onslaught for a few more hours.

April. Needle scars were making a calendar on my arm. I kept my long-sleeved T-shirt on to cover them. An occasional shower refreshed us and filled the barrels, but overall the heat was oppressive and all the deckhands worked barefoot and stripped to the waist. Our clothes were faded by the sun and mine were patched. I was slightly more shadowy around the eyes, but not so anyone would notice. It suited me, anyway, and cat kept my weight down. The first thing any drug abuse removes is the part of your mind that gives a damn about your health. And there’s an advantage to addiction-cat was a protection. All my anxiety was concentrated on one problem so I dealt with the rest of the world without concern.

I went to lounge on the foredeck, seeing the ocean plunge away in all directions the same. Wrenn and I watched Stormy Petrel sailing as close to the wind as possible, canted with all canvas out, three hundred meters ahead of us on the right side. Lightning climbed up to her aft castle and waved to us from the rail. He was tanned, and the sunlight had bleached his fair hair.

He strung a gold-banded compound bow and flexed it, loosing an arrow that looped high into the air. Wrenn ducked and shouted, “Look out!”

The arrow plummeted straight at me and appeared sticking out of the deck plank not ten centimeters away from my left hand. I sprang up. “Saker! What do you think you’re doing?”

He couldn’t hear me. He waved cheerfully and pointed at us, then at the horizon.

“What is that flash bastard on about?” The arrow had a letter tied to it. I broke the thread and unspooled the paper that Lightning had wrapped tightly around its shaft.

Comet

By Mist’s calculations you should be able to see the Island of Tris now, if you fly to a height four times the mainmast and stay close to the ships. Look due east. Come and tell us if you see anything.

LSM

While I read it, Lightning, who now had Wrenn’s attention, proceeded to show off. He shot an arrow skyward and Wrenn watched it describe a high parabola while Lightning rapidly took another arrow and sent it after the first, shooting straight out in a flat trajectory. As his first arrow came down the second one hit it, spinning it head over flights. A second later we faintly heard the crack they had made as they collided. Lightning did this again to prove the first time wasn’t a fluke.

“He can hit an arrow in the air!” Wrenn said.

“Yeah.” Lightning had been passing the last couple of weeks by sitting on the crosstrees and shooting at albatrosses. He halved their feathers to make more arrows. Only the dwindling numbers of seabirds slowed him down. “You should see his trick with an arrow in a cork and a wine bottle.”

I gave Wrenn the letter, spread my wings and arced up from the stern. I climbed steeply, forcing my fifty-eight kilos into the air. I sensed every ripple in the breeze Melowne distorted with her massive cream sails.

The ships diminished quickly. I was terrified of losing sight of them in such a vast expanse. I tried to stay above the mainmast of the Petrel, although there was no lift at all. I could easily outpace them, and then I would be crossing and recrossing the same area of ocean, trying in vain to find them, until I fell from exhaustion and drowned.

I searched ahead, and saw nothing but more water, so I flew higher until the ornate Petrel was the length of my index finger, trailing rainbows in her bow wave. The ships’ wakes were two Vs around their prows and white veils stretching behind them for hundreds of meters. I glided into a shallow spiral to rest. Either Mist’s calculations are incorrect, or the island does not exist at all.

I chandelled up, higher still, and looked out east. On the horizon, raised on haze, a dark green patch seemed to float. A mountain! A mountain in the sea! I kept climbing, aware that I was the second immortal ever to set eyes on Tris. The island emerged, summit first. I felt a firm companionship with it, as if it had been set there especially for me. Fluffy white clouds hung over it, and I could just see their shadows on the smooth mountainside. The crest was pale gray with distance.

There were some crags around the shoreline. Maybe they were cliffs, I couldn’t tell. I stared until my eyes watered. The haze began to dissipate, the perspective suddenly clicked, and I realized I was looking at a town. The white buildings resembled a slope of scree, tumbling from the mountainside down to the coast and perching on what must be lower buttresses of the peak. It was incredibly beautiful, so wonderful I found myself laughing. I whooped, somersaulted in the air and dived down to Stormy Petrel.

“Oh, my god. Oh god, Mist, you’re completely right! You’re a genius, Mist. I take back all I’ve ever slandered. It’s there, where you said it’d be, and it’s magnificent. Magnificent! I mean, even Awia never had anything like this-”

“Can you see it?” asked Lightning.

“He can see it,” said Mist, hanging on the wheel.

I aligned myself in the wind flow, beside the railings, facing toward her. “I’ve never seen anything like it! It’s so pretty it’s just not true. Like…” Like a piece of the Shift in the Fourlands. I paused, and described it more calmly. A scout is useless unless he gives sensible reports. At sea level, the heat was stronger; it annoyingly slowed my thinking. “I can see the town, though at the moment it’s just a speck. I can see the island’s whole west face-actually Tris is a huge mountain growing up out of the sea!”

Mist carefully noted a compass reading in her ledger with a pencil stub, and snapped her telescope out from its case. This was utterly fantastic-a new part of the Empire we-

A gust nearly sent me into the waves. I was losing too much height. I gestured to Lightning, “Chuck me that…and that,” pointing to a water bottle and a hunk of bread. He threw them from the back railing one at a time. I dived and caught them. “I can’t wait to scale the summit. I’m going for a closer look.”

“No!”

Try and stop me. I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back before your heart beats twice.”

I half-folded my wings for strength, pulled them down through the air resistance. Mist had said the town was called Capharnaum. I repeated that word aloud as I cruised, the only wholly Trisian word I knew. I couldn’t wait to speak to the islanders in their ancient language. That is, if they didn’t run away at the sight of me. I was used to flatlanders staring, or their outright hostility. Once in a Hacilith café the waiter put a bowl of milk and a fish skeleton on the floor for me when I ordered beer and a sandwich. My gang returned the following night and burned the café to the ground.

Nowadays I give Zascai something to stare at; I dress up to the role. But surely no Trisian would have heard of a Rhydanne before. I was very tempted to scare them on purpose. I’d have an eager audience, no doubt about that! They will just have to take me as I am, I concluded. After all, they’re part of the Empire and I’m their Messenger as well.

Over an hour, the island grew larger and details appeared. Dark green bushes on the mountainside became twisted trees, an olive grove. A rugged shape in the center of the town became an outcrop, and on its summit, fifty meters higher than the town’s rooftops, a bright white complex resolved into a series of elegant, airy buildings with fluted columns, much bigger than I expected. It could be the manor house. The outcrop seemed to move across my field of vision faster than the mountainside behind it, so I could tell that it was a pinnacle standing out alone.

Black flecks on the sea became big canoes with five to ten men paddling in each, riding the surf with great dexterity. They even drew their paddles in and went flying down the funnels of the waves. A white strip underlining the town was a harbor wall of admirable workmanship, nearly three times larger than the lighthouse quay at Awndyn. Rolling surf broke and peeled along it. Elsewhere on the coast, cypress trees extended right down to high-water mark, where the rocks were yellow with lichen and stained black by the sea. The trees were small and gnarled; the Trisians had no chance of ever building a caravel. Breakers boomed on the shingle, deepwater rollers thundered in parallel lines. Above their reach, an amber band of seaweed and a white band of shellfish striped the boulders.

Capharnaum was like a model. Closer now, and the model came alive, men and women in the streets. A winged lad in a straw hat cast a fishing line, and paid no attention as my shadow sped over him. I soared up, and marveled.

A warm, delicious breeze blew constantly in from the sea, like the updraft from the hypocaust rooms in an Awian bathhouse. It’s certainly difficult to find lift this good on the mainland. I was flying automatically, so occupied in staring around that I hadn’t realized how little effort I was putting in. I rode the same current with several gulls, who watched with an attitude that said: You can’t be serious. We whirled around each other, but they were the better gliders and they gained height. I peeled out of the thermal to look at the town.

I glided as slowly as I could without stalling and constantly made tiny adjustments with my legs acting as a forked tail, counteracting the air currents that now came from all directions. Even so I flew too rapidly to see much detail and I could only look down on the roofs.

Two main streets intersected in the center of Capharnaum. They were surrounded by smaller roads that ran in a neat crisscross pattern, like a grid. The houses were spaced very regularly; it was bizarre, completely different from Hacilith’s sprawl and unlike the graceful curves in which Awians build. Cypresses flanked empty avenues leading north and south into the countryside. Roughly at five-kilometer intervals along the roadside there were tall black and white posts like gibbets, with short planks nailed at right angles to them. Probably some kind of flagpole.

At the edges the street grid lost coherence and the houses were jumbled together. Trees invaded between them. All the villas were exactly the same size, square and whitewashed, dazzling and clean. The terracotta tiles on their shallow roofs looked like overlapping feathers. Their square windows had alabaster screens instead of glass; their shutters were open. They had porticos surrounding square peri-style lawns or dark green gardens, some with statues. They faced out to sea. It was quiet, unlike Hacilith, it was tranquil. I could see no poor section of town, no slums, no kids standing on street corners. It did not resemble any town in the Fourlands, but maybe when Micawater was founded it looked like this. If I flew any lower I risked being seen. With an acute sense of unreality I wheeled above the town. It’s a dream, I assured myself. It’s all a damn dream.

Here the warm wind smelled of sage and thyme, herbs growing wild. Shrubs among the boulders bore yellow flowers. At the far north and south extremes of the island, on the gentle slope before the mountainside became steep maquis, there were two other towns, smaller than Capharnaum. Both seemed connected with the sea, but pale green terraced hillsides stepped above them.

Thin air at last, I thought. I had a brief glimpse of the mountaintop-my god-is that snow on the summit? I wanted more than anything to investigate the white gleams and see if they were snow patches, and roll in them if they were, but Mist would not receive my report kindly if it focused on conditions at the peak rather than in the towns.

The mountaintop was not a sheer arête as in Darkling-it didn’t come to a point. It was a smooth, arid ridge that leaned over into a big bowl-shaped hollow not visible from sea level. It was veiled with chutes of small gray stones. Clouds formed on the edge of the bowl and blew eastward.

That side of the island looked uninhabited, although it was too far to see any detail. Decaying cracks split the sheer sea cliffs, a drop of at least three hundred meters around which white birds swirled and dived. The black, denticulate reefs below them were like a half-submerged wolf’s jawbone; churning water smashed over the narrow serrated molars and canine points. I determined to warn Mist. But calm and remote, far off in the eastern ocean, two other peaks of smaller islets emerged in a line.

Tris was fresh, quiet and, it seemed to me, content. My duty to bring news of the Empire to the island will probably be the most important task I will ever have as Messenger.

I winged back to the ships, which were still scudding stoically toward Tris. The weak wind did not affect the enormous rollers they rode. Petrel’s deck rose up to my feet as I landed next to Mist. “Tris is an archipelago,” I said. “I flew right over; there are more islands on the other side.”

“Did anyone see you?” she demanded.

“No. I saw ladies in smocks selling food from the porches of townhouses and boys drying green fishing nets on the harbor wall, but not one of the Capharnai saw me,” I said with dignity, coining an Awian word.

“When we arrive you must not fly. I don’t want them to know; I mean, you’ll only frighten them. Did you see any vessels other than canoes?”

“Don’t think so…”

“What about signs of Insects? Any Walls? Paperlands?”

“No.”

“Fortresses?” Lightning asked. “Bastions? Châteaus?”

“It’s too big,” I said defensively. “You have to see for yourself. There are plantations, vineyards, and goats on the mountainside.”

“Typical Jant, always thinking about sex,” Mist smiled, looking into the distance. A crosswind tangled her fine hair. The waves were reflected on the ships’ sides as a moving mesh of light.

I returned to the Melowne in time to hear Fulmer complaining. The billows tossed the caravel every direction but forward. She ran headlong down a steep wave and pitched into the next rising roller. Puffs of spray burst off her keel and splattered back. We went up and down, up and down vertically on an irregular seesaw. Wrenn and I retreated to the poop deck.

Fulmer leaned against the wheel’s kicks. He was having a lot of trouble steering. Melowne jerked sideways every time she struck and wrenched the wheel from his hands. The broad ship had a massive drag; he couldn’t keep her from sliding aslant into the troughs of the swell. “Damn it,” he wheezed. “Mist will just have to slow down for us, yes? Shit, she makes it look effortless. Get the flying sails in. Sea anchor back there and see if I can keep her prow half as straight as Petrel.”

From the poop deck we could see the back of Fulmer’s head. Not a brown hair was out of place. As usual, and against all the odds, he looked pristine, still a court dandy three thousand, eight hundred kilometers from Queen Eleonora’s entourage. Fulmer’s genteel manner impressed me until I remembered that he had known about the Insect even before we set sail, and it was he who had been feeding it bones all this time.

Wrenn scrutinized the horizon. “I can see it! I can see a tiny island!”

“In the next couple of hours you’ll find it is huge.”

Up to the deck came barrels of wine, and bar silver was stacked in quadrilaterals. A forest of colorful pennants unfurled. As Tris filled our vision, the evergreen and pumice shore proceeding past, unbridled excitement overcame the crews. Mist and Fulmer found it difficult to keep the sailors working; men stared and pointed at houses, vineyards, the palace on the crag. They waved at tanned Capharnai fishermen in the first canoes.

Mist brought the ships in. She yelled commands to her crew, keeping them moving. I heard her from the Melowne three ship lengths behind; the tension in her voice made me nervous. In contrast, Fulmer gave his orders in a quiet, assured style, politely addressing the hands. They copied every movement of the Petrel’s men, furling the sails in completely synchronized maneuvers. Fulmer’s ship sailed slick as fiddly clockwork in the Stormy Petrel’s wake.

The harbor walls pincered together on our left and right and formed a strait about five hundred meters wide. Dead center of the channel was a flat-topped rock with a lighthouse on it. It towered above us, one hundred meters high, built on a square base half the Petrel’s length. As we glided past, the sailors became even more frantic. At first I assumed they were shocked by the lighthouse’s great height, which was certainly surprising considering that the Trisians only have canoes. Then I realized they were pointing at the fire reflector: it was made of polished gold. The fittings of the beacon were all solid gold.

Fulmer called, “Jant, do you see?”

“Yes, I do!”

“It’s the most glorious thing I’ve ever seen.”

I muttered to Wrenn, “What I don’t like is the fact Mist never mentioned it before.”

I wore my purple scarf wrapped around my waist as a cummerbund, stripy black and white leggings under cut-off denim shorts. A black kerchief kept back all my locks and albatross feathers. The swell was making Wrenn look green but he was determined to watch the tumult on the main deck. He clung onto a network of ropes. “It’s all right to lean on the deadeyes. Sailors before the mast are going to reef the mainsail now, look.”

“Fascinating…”

“And lower it on parr-”

“Oh, shut up!”

He stared forward at the bow, which pointed like a pike at the town. “Do you think there are ladies in Capharnaum?” he asked.

I glanced at him. “Well, obviously.”

“No. Whores, I mean.”

“Oh. That kind of lady. They’re human, well, they look it to me,” I regarded my fingernails in a secretarial gesture. “So they’ll have wine, women and song.”