39
Vintage sat on the deck in a folding wooden chair, her wide-brimmed hat pulled low over her eyes to keep the hot sun off. Beyond the handrail the river tumbled past, and beyond it, the lush green fields. The winds were in their favour, the captain had told her, and indeed, from the maps she consulted in her room each night, they were making good progress. Still not swift enough for her liking, however.
She knew it was ludicrous, of course. If what she suspected was true, then in a very real sense it did not matter how fast she travelled. Even so, her own anxiety and guilt and yes, even terror, hung over her like a snow cloud ready to release its blizzard, and only the knowledge that she was travelling as fast as she could eased it in any way.
‘Lady de Grazon?’
She looked up to see the ship’s girl staring anxiously down at her, a creature of knees and freckles and unruly red hair desperately tamed in a series of over-worked ribbons.
‘Yes, Marika, my dear, what can I do for you?’
‘It’s the captain, m’lady.’ She stumbled over the honorific. They did not get much gentry travelling on the Lucky Lizard, and with her scruffy clothes and partly scorched face, Vintage did not much look like it either, but a bag full of coins and her own smooth confidence had bought her a berth easily enough. Not for the first time she thanked her past-self for having the foresight to have caches set up in so many towns and cities – even a backwater ditch like Hmar. ‘We’re coming up on something he thinks you might be interested to see. We can pause for a moment for you to have a look.’
Vintage pursed her lips, conflicted. She had to keep moving, had to, but the captain was a kind man who had taken a shine to her, and besides which, he was an intelligent fellow. If there was something he thought she would be interested in, it was probably worth taking a look at it.
Nanthema, she thought, I am making my way to you, my darling. I promise.
Gasping slightly as all her new aches and pains made themselves known, Vintage levered herself out the chair. Marika offered her arm but Vintage patted her away.
‘My dear child, I am sore, not decrepit. Where is your handsome captain?’
The girl blushed furiously and led her to the prow of the neat little ship. All around them the crew were making themselves busy with all the mysterious activities that kept the vessel moving – to Vintage, who had lived much of her life in the middle of a dense forest, ships always seemed half made of magic.
‘Lady de Grazon! I am sorry for interrupting your peaceful afternoon, but I thought you’d like to take a look at this. Seems like your sort of thing.’
Captain Arus was a stocky, weathered man, his skin deeply tanned from years spent sailing up and down the sun-locked Apitow River. He wore tough blue trousers sewn all over with pockets, and a pair of belts across his scarred chest. His shaven head was tattooed with a sprawling octopus, one of its tentacles curling around his ear.
‘Always a pleasure, captain.’ Vintage accepted his hand to step up onto the platform – she didn’t need it, but some men were charmed by such things – and she peered downriver, trying to see what all the fuss was about. ‘Of course, I do not wish to cause you any inconvenience at all, but I am most dreadfully curious as to what dear Marika was talking about. You have something to show me?’
‘It’s no bother,’ he said, beaming at her. ‘We have to sail around it every time we come south, and sometimes I like to stop and take a look at it myself. It right gives me the chills.’
Vintage looked ahead of them again. All she could see was the wide and largely peaceful Apitow; nothing stirred on its teeming green expanse save for the occasional dragonfly. There weren’t even any other ships that she could see, although . . . she narrowed her eyes. There was something – a flag of some sort, at the top of a tall thin pole. The scrap of material was red, its tapering tip the yellow of the sun.
‘You’ve seen it,’ said Captain Arus, obviously pleased. He turned away from her and shouted a series of commands to his crew. Almost immediately the Lucky Lizard began to slow, and she heard the splash as an anchor was thrown overboard.
‘Indeed. It is a very fine flag, Captain Arus.’
He chuckled and beckoned her to join him at the rail. Peering over, at first she could only see the light dancing on the top of the water. It was unseasonably hot for the time of year, and the sun was a warm hand on the back of her head. She blinked at the light as it seared bright trails across her vision.
‘My dear Arus, I’m not sure that I can—’
And then she saw it. At first she thought it was simply the natural green of the river itself, but then the light shifted and she saw the slick shimmer of it just below the surface of the water. There was varnish under the Apitow, a thick streak of it. She glanced around, but there was no evidence of such on the distant banks.
‘It fair gives you a shudder, doesn’t it?’ said Arus, cheerily enough. ‘It’s ’cause it’s hidden, I think. A little secret gift from the worm people. Everyone who sails down the Apitow knows about it, of course. If you’re riding too low in the water, you’re liable to rip your bottom out, or just get stuck, so we all have to go around it. That’s what the flag is for.’
‘What is that? I can make out shapes.’ Vintage leaned right over the guardrail, leaning out as far as her balance would let her.
‘Careful now, m’lady, unless you want an early bath.’
The water of the Apitow was famously clear, and there were shadows caught in the varnish: bodies, three or four of them – men and women or even children who had not moved fast enough to escape the Jure’lia – and something else as well. Vintage felt her heart turn over, and she began to climb up over the guardrail.
‘Whoa, hold on!’ Captain Arus sounded genuinely alarmed. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I must have a closer look, my good man. How deep is the water atop it? Can I stand on it?’
The captain looked bemused now. ‘I reckon you could, m’lady, but you’ll get your clothes all wet.’
She swatted at his arm. ‘Wet clothes? Wet clothes? Do I look like I care about wet clothes?’ Seeing his face, she relented slightly. ‘My dear Captain Arus, I would be most grateful if you could take me down there. I would, of course, reimburse you for your trouble.’
Soon enough Vintage was bobbing on the river in the ship’s small rowboat, the captain himself keeping it steady while she leaned over the side, peering down past the water at the grim scene beneath. It looked like two men and a woman, and they were tumbled every which way, as though a great tide of varnish had surged over them and caught them while they were fleeing. And it was as she thought – another figure caught down there in the green depths, something so rarely seen that it made her heart thump painfully in her chest.
‘What is it, Lady de Grazon?’ asked Captain Arus. ‘You must have seen the varnish before? Those worm bastards have left their muck all over Sarn.’
‘You probably won’t have noticed it,’ said Vintage softly. She had a sketchbook in her hands, her pencil moving feverishly across the page. ‘It’s down past the human bodies. We call them mothers, although it has always struck me as a wildly inappropriate phrase.’
It looked rather like a squashed spider seen from above, if spiders were the size of goats. From the drawings she had seen of them, she knew that there was an orb at the centre of those oddly muscled legs, a pale thing that pulsed and secreted the creatures they called burrowers. Not for the first time she felt a stab of frustration that the varnish was impenetrable, whilst simultaneously fighting a wave of horror that such a creature was so close. If they could extract it somehow, would it still be alive? They knew so little about the Jure’lia. Despite the heat of the day she felt a rash of goosebumps move across her arms. The captain was next to her now, peering down into the water too.
‘I can see something dark.’ He grimaced. ‘I always thought that was a weird plant, or something.’
‘This is incredible, captain.’ She paused, and squeezed his arm. ‘You could make a fortune bringing scholars such as myself up here to gawk at it. I cannot believe my luck, that I am the first to see it.’ Her eye caught the pale shape of one of the human victims of the varnish, and her brief good mood seemed to evaporate. To be trapped like that, without even the simple dignity of being able to rot away to nothing. She swallowed hard. Nanthema. ‘But I must keep moving, my dear Arus. I will be back one day to study this properly, I promise you.’