Chapter 84
a congregation moves out onto the moss
pale feet on the Green
mist lifts the skin of the world
we wait for the pull of black water
Days pass. There’s not much point in marking them, one by one.
They accumulate organically, like rings on a tree, or salt on a shell.
There are always times when smaller moments slip away beneath larger patterns.
Shipwright finds it enjoyable, in a way.
Time marches on, they march south with it, and Hesper draws closer.
With Crowkisser gone, there’s an abdication of worry, of responsibility.
She only has one strange, dangerous girl to keep an eye on now, and Icecaller has the decency to feed herself and keep herself busy most days.
There’s still plenty to do, even with the grey crowds of Astic shucked off, a group this size takes work to feed.
Once fed, they shit, fight, wander. Tempers fray and emotions are strung like wire.
It’s not surprising, with no time for them to grieve, but wearying for all that.
She feels like she’s picked up a guddle of quarrelling babes and been left to drag them overland to a city that likely doesn’t want them.
Land – that’s the other problem. She misses the sea with a pang like bared teeth in a keen wind.
A sense of loss that burns down to a dull ache in the nights and flares again with each freshening breath of air, each outrider’s shout that steals from a sailor’s tones.
She misses the ship, the feel of its deck under her feet, that cant and buck.
The land here feels aggressively static.
Farmer’s fields, turned by plough, hardened by frost and now soaked by rain.
Home to birds that squat amid half-drowned stalks like marsh-wives, fluffing their feathers and preening the damp from their bones.
Midland birds, long-legged and dappled, the bright feathers at their throat and neck flashing like signallers as they ee-whit across the fields.
Shipwright spears a few with wet, regretful thumps, sullying breasts with blood, ruddying the water of the fields.
They cook up well enough, though their long necks are full of seed, packed with the hard work of farmers, mixed with the occasional fragment of coin and clay and bone to help them digest their hauls.
She’s fond of them, these ungainly birds.
If she closes her eyes, their high preening call could be flitting over the morning waves, or skirting the deck on a twilight watch with the lamps just rising to flame.
She was far from the sea. The land hardened here, nearer to Hesper, the Midlands freeholders resurrecting their old forts as news from the north slid southward.
Self-sufficient folk in the Midlands, taking their cues from the ruins of old Luss.
Each homestead a fortress, their barn walls turned to outsiders, their thick wood gates bound with iron, and studded with charms and warnings dug from the bone-turned fields outside.
They had fewer welcomes as they moved south, and each trade was made with cupped hands and reluctant fingers.
A scattering of little enclaves sealed against strangers and sky.
Might it do them more good than it had done Luss; more good than in the stalking times.
Shipwright shivered. She’d learnt too many tales of treachery with their roots in Midlands soil, heard all the gory details dripping from Arissa’s mouth, years ago, as they split a bottle of wine, and scared each other shitless by digging up the ghosts of their homes.
Stories of knives, and dreamers, dark figures on the roads and worse in the ditches.
Every whisper was resurrected now. Every house they passed echoed those same tales.
A lamp kept at each threshold and a rod of iron driven deep into the earth, head to stern.
They’d never really lost that suspicion of strangers wearing the faces of guests in the moving Green.
Gates in the hedgerows and between the trees.
Empty cradles. It had left its mark on the landscape.
The fields were scored with hedges shorn brutally short, their cut branches and stumps spattered with lambs’ blood, layered and dried and spilt again, shrines of cat-skull and flint, shaped around the anvil stones of birds.
Splintered snail shells ready to rattle a warning should the Green ever open its hungry throat once more.
Between the binding hedges, the going was tough; the fields of the Midlands drenched by sudden, unseasonable rains, leaving tussocks of grass half-submerged, poking above waterlogged fields.
The roads were their salvation, built long ago by people who knew how to play the climate of this country, the odd jut of initially inexplicable rock a legacy of their foundations, where glacier outfall met more stubborn stone.
Both were harvested with impunity and folded back into the walls of the homesteads which waited at each split of the raised roads, windows licked with butterlight and gates securely barred.
At the fifth of these the Shipwright decided to test her luck.
It was too late in the day to march on through the night, and too sodden on either side of the road to strike anything like a camp.
Stray off the path and your feet might call to those sleeping in the wet, their faces wreathed in green.
Dreamers, their thoughts floating above the stagnant fields as marsh-light, heavy and drunk in the gloaming.
Come the dry heat of high summer, the waters would recede and the Midlanders would seek them out while they were at their weakest, digging down into the damp soil, uncovering weathered skin stained darker still by years of submersion.
Making small nicks with copper blades, careful never to drive too deep, decanting the dreamers’ rich blood into stoppered vials to be sold and traded for steep prices, steeper by the year.
The luckiest and bravest might sever a fingerbone or an ear, flesh dark and strong as leather, and keep it in a root cellar, year on year, producing slow, black blood dripped into long, tall stills.
It was a risk though. There were tales enough of those whose knives and saws had cut too savagely and woken the dreaming revenants.
Others still of a finger which had grown again an arm, a set of ribs and a beating, angry heart; an ear which had blossomed a jaw, teeth still studded royal with amethyst. Wake a revenant and let it walk the halls, the tales said, let it drink thirsty and red-lipped.
And if the morning brought you family who rose glossy skinned and ruddy cheeked, their limbs supple and their manners strange, best to let them live out their days, dark-skinned, soft-voiced, joyful.
Shipwright fought to get clear of those thoughts as they drew to a halt before the farmstead.
The fields on either side were drier, but threaded with the torn stumps and trunks of thin white trees pushed down by the wind.
The horizon now only a spare black line, the faint blue of the sky held for a few more seconds by the falling sun.
The column falters behind her as she stops.
With a wary look at Shroud she crosses the yard to a great blackwood door, its surface studded with beaten copper.
The yard itself shows signs of work in its whetstone and chicken coops.
The skulls of something vulpine are speared warningly above.
She raises the knocker, lets it fall three strikes, and waits.
When the door opens it does so grudgingly, the wood wet and grown with the sudden rain.
The man behind is wiping his hands on a sooty rag and sucking gamely at the thick yellow chunks of his teeth.
A weather eye roves over Shipwright’s shoulder to the people clustered behind her on the road, slumped in the growing cold.
When he speaks, his breath carries the whisper of woodsmoke and meat, and a slight tang of cheese. He smiles loosely, gums and lips crinkling. ‘Be ee bringing army t’door? It’s by late for an invading.’
Shipwright laughs despite herself and the old man joins her, stopping suddenly to suck on his teeth and give her a gimlet eye.
‘We’ve come from the north,’ Shipwright begins.
‘From ee shaytered city,’ he interrupts. ‘Ken I, seen it in the bone cracks hot from the fire. Took it out ee belly of a dwelling lamb. Ee shaytered city and you all its kitcast babies. You’ve come a long way and longer.’
Her heart jumps at the prophecy casually tossed off his tongue. She pulls herself together and nods. ‘If you have a byre or a building, a floor or a stable we would gladly pay. If you have food, we’ll pay again for that.’
He looks at her and waits before finally speaking.
‘Both of ’ese I have to hand, but ken your coin is nothing.
Only taken in trade these given gifts to ee.
Have thee labour, have thee magick? Power?
From left or right. Care m’not which. Save I have loose stones and spinners to hold fast, and a body yet to lay. ’
Spinners. The Shipwright’s mind races. Something in his voice scratches at her, but her mind’s alight with this little hint of home. All this shit, all this strangeness, and now spinners, here? She catches his worn eyes roving her face, composes herself as best she can. ‘We might help with both.’
He beckons, fingers twitching like a sparrow’s neck.
She leans in, careful for her feet not to cross the stones of the threshold. His stubble is raw against her cheek, that rancid smell a little stronger, overlaid with turned earth. His voice dry as a marsh frog. ‘Cryin’ ye a boatbuilder by the sway of airms and brassy snuff.’
‘A shipwright,’ she murmurs. Her fingers dance Katkani against her back, a warning to Shroud.
Better a snared bird than a hawk in the unknown sky.
Wait, wait, her fingers say, steady, steady.