The White City

16

‘The wind’s not favourable, but we’ll tack across it.’ Simeon stood at the top of the beach and pronounced the day’s weather with a handful of dried grass seeds. Below lay the Ship of Fools, stranded in the shallow water like a great dark whale. ‘And when we can’t sail, we’ll row.’

The fresh water barrels were rolled down to the sea, and the cooked food stored for later: the hardtack would last for ever, the stew only a day. Dalip wondered about scurvy, and how long that would take to set in. None of the crew seemed affected◦– perhaps all the ones that were had died, or perhaps Down’s fish were rich in vitamin C. And if there was plenty of anything, it was cold, dried fish.

Simeon was like a lot of boys he’d met at school. Not the sons of labour, but the sons of wealth: they weren’t necessarily bad, they weren’t all stupid, they weren’t all heartless or useless or any of the other lesses. But they were overconfident. They believed, simply and completely, that the world was there for them, and they could reach out and take it.

There were maps. Simeon would take them. In his mind, it was already done.

Dalip wasn’t so sure. There was no safety net if anything went wrong, no getting out the chequebook to make a problem go away. He hoped to temper Simeon’s exuberance with some caution.

They had to load the ship first, and set it ready for the voyage. There was the raising of the heavy barrels up in nets, storing the food so that it wouldn’t become contaminated by sea-water, hauling on the ropes so that the mast was fixed in place, the readying the oars. Nothing, of itself, difficult, but all time-consuming and everybody had to lend a hand. Finally, they had to heave the boat off the sand and into deeper draught.

Dalip joined some of the bigger men in the water. They looked at him and his youth with scepticism, but although they couldn’t see the strong muscles under his shapeless boilersuit, they didn’t suggest that he shouldn’t be there, or was taking the place of a more able sailor. He put his shoulder to the hull with the best of them, and with a timed count, they pushed.

The ship slid gracefully back into the bay, and the oars lowered to stop it from floating out of reach of those not on board. Dalip splashed and half-swam to the lowered nets with the others, and strong arms hauled him in when he reached the gunwales.

The rowers backed the stern away from the shore, turned it about its axis, and headed for the open sea through the narrow opening in the cliffs. There was enough wind from the right quarter to lower the sail, though the sea-chests and oars remained on deck. The rowers stood down and the sailing crew kept trim.

Mama, holding the small of her back like it was a porcelain teacup, sat down next to him.

‘How did you do it?’ she asked.

‘Do what?’

‘Persuade Mr Simeon to go after Crows.’

‘He persuaded himself. It’s his own idea◦– that we can rid Down of the geomancers once and for all. Truth be told, I tried to talk him out of it.’

She started. ‘Why would you do that?’

‘Because it’s really dangerous and we could die. Not just us, but everyone on this boat. If we met Crows in open water, as a sea serpent, it could end very quickly and very badly for all of us.’

‘But he’s going to be in the White City. There won’t be any changing into snakes there. You said so.’

‘Mama, since when has anything Crows said changed what he actually does? I don’t know where he’s going. For all I know, he went back to his castle, now we’ve seen Bell off.’

‘Maybe we should go there, then.’

‘And this is the problem. We can’t go haring off around Down, looking for Crows when Crows doesn’t want to be found. The only place we stand any chance of finding him, or Mary, is the White City. If he’s not there, we’ll just go back to pirating,’ he said, as if pirating had been his life so far.

Mama hunched her shoulders. ‘That’s not going to get us home.’

‘I know what I said last night, but it’s a whole tower of guesswork balanced on an awful lot of ifs. But if we lose people, and we can’t put the maps together, then, well: those left alive will have every right to be seriously pissed with us.’

‘And their captain.’

Dalip checked the deck for Simeon’s position. He was wrapped around the prow again, telescope to his eye.

‘This ship’s whole purpose is to keep the decent people away from the bad ones. Now, that contract is broken. Simeon is taking the ship, and everyone on it, into the unknown. I can’t predict how this is going to turn out, and for all his fine words, neither can he.’ He pulled a face. ‘I just wonder if a better captain would have made a different decision.’

‘He made the decision I want,’ said Mama.

‘We’re all going to have to live with it, come what may.’ Behind them, the island was diminishing, and their destination was still over the horizon. ‘Seriously, how does he navigate? He’s not taken a bearing since we left the bay. He’s not got a clock or a compass. He’s just pointing us in what he hopes is the right direction and leaving the rest to chance.’

‘Well, however he’s doing it, no one looks scared.’

The steersman at the rudder certainly seemed content with the course laid in by his captain. The sail ahead of him was bowed and full of wind, and the ropes strained to transmit all that raw power to the rest of the boat. The rest of the crew who weren’t tending the wooden blocks and pulleys were delving in their sea-chests for swords and knives and whetstones.

The atmosphere on deck was more akin to a carnival than a sombre troopship. Practice fights spontaneously broke out, some of which made Dalip genuinely fear for the safety of the participants. If they arrived at the White City bandaged and furious with each other, or worse, so incapacitated that their already depleted numbers reduced further, then their plans would come to nothing.

And Simeon seemed content to ignore the high spirits and the threat, so fixed was he on the far distant horizon. He might have looked back once to acknowledge something was going on, but returned to his telescope almost immediately.

‘Where’s Elena?’ asked Dalip.

‘She wasn’t with me last night,’ said Mama, ‘I thought she might be…’

‘What?’

‘With you.’ She raised her hands. ‘What you youngsters get up to is none of my business.’

Dalip blinked, distracted for a moment from the swordplay going on around them. ‘She’s—’ At least five, nearly ten years older than him, not a Sikh, and recently bereaved. ‘She wasn’t with me.’

Last night he’d eaten and listened to the stories told around the fire, but when the grog started making its way around the circle, he’d excused himself and hidden away from the forced, loud jollity that resulted. He’d slept alone, which wasn’t necessarily what others had done, judging from some of the sounds that had crossed the moonlit air.

Mama was right: it wasn’t her business, and it was certainly none of his. But he hadn’t had a chance to work out his feelings about Elena before any chance was closed down.

She was there, near the bow, with a group of sailors. She was holding what looked like a cavalry-pattern sabre, and the man behind her◦– tall, lithe, tanned◦– was guiding her movements, stepping her forward, moving her backwards, turning and feinting for her. Compared with the chaos on the rest of the deck, it seemed an island of calm and choreographed purposefulness, and strangely intimate for such a public place.

She was safe, he told himself: that was what was important.

Mama followed the direction of his gaze and narrowed her eyes. ‘Looks like she doesn’t need us any more.’

‘That’s not really fair,’ he said. ‘We’re part of the crew now. She can spend time with whoever she wants.’

‘Be that as it may,’ said Mama, ‘I hope that girl knows what she’s doing.’

‘Probably no more than we do.’ Dalip put any feelings he might have had back in their box, and shut the lid. They’d escaped fire and dungeon with each other, that was all. He couldn’t read anything more into their time together.

And while he wasn’t watching, someone got cut. A man reeled backwards, almost tripping over Mama’s feet, his sword arm staining red on the biceps. His opponent, a short, bald greybeard lunged again with rapier, only to see his blow miss its mark as he was dragged back by an arm around his neck.

Mama reared away, barging into Dalip, who lost his balance. The hurt man roared and raised his hatchet, intent on plunging it into something. He didn’t seem to care what: he started forward, and Dalip, sprawled on the deck, could only watch.

The steersman caught the man’s arm, right where the rapier’s thin blade had punched through, and squeezed hard. The hatchet bounced away, and the fight was suddenly over. Simeon stood between them, arms outstretched, staring first at one man, then the other, until they both decided that carrying on wasn’t in their best interests.

As to whose fault it was, there was no way of telling. The captain seemed content not to cross-examine any of the witnesses. Blame wasn’t apportioned, and guilt or innocence stayed unestablished and, gradually, the deck quietened down again.

There’d been a couple of other mishaps, which were treated with salt water and rough stitches, and the blood scrubbed off the deck with rags. Everyone else treated the incident as one of those things, like spilling a drink or dropping a plate at a party: a strange, cavalier attitude to Dalip.

He understood how it was easy to be reckless with your own well-being because he’d been a teenage boy and that was what it was like◦– climbing things, falling from things, taking things, doing things◦– but mock fights with real knives? These people were adults, and their sudden wildness scared him. There could easily have been a death, accidental for sure, but he suddenly had no doubt that the body would have been pitched over the side, and the perpetrator given extra duties for the duration◦– and then it would have been forgotten. And these were supposed to be the sensible ones, the good people, who’d escaped from the clutches of the geomancers and decided to live free.

The ship readied to come about. Ropes were loosened, and the sail flapped and billowed, snapping in the wind until the rudder forced a change in direction. The sailcloth filled again, and the ropes tightened. For all their disregard, they were a decent crew. Or perhaps because of it. How long could you stay at sea, dodging beasts, without craving the danger that came between bouts of extreme boredom? Raiding the land was as exciting as it got: hunting animals, picking fruit and nuts, gathering firewood, drawing water.

Dalip realised he hadn’t understood a single thing about the ship or its fools. They weren’t cowards, running away from danger. They were like vermin, ruthlessly exploiting the one gap they could find in a screwed-up ecosystem. If that meant they had learnt to run sometimes, then it also meant they had learnt to swarm ashore and strip a coast clean.

Opportunistic: that was the word. And with the maps, Simeon sensed the biggest, juiciest opportunity of all. No wonder the crew had chewed the idea over, then swallowed it wholesale. This was something they excelled in.

Perhaps they could pull this off after all.

‘Whose is this sea-chest?’ he asked Mama.

‘No one’s come for it.’ She looked around and settled her sights on the steersman. ‘What do we do about this?’

‘Fight over it if you want,’ he said, not taking his eyes off Simeon at the far end of the ship. ‘Or share what’s inside.’

‘So what happened to the previous owner?’

The steersman did his best to shrug while holding the tiller. ‘He got left behind. That could mean anything: dead, taken, deserted.’

‘And no one went to find out?’

‘Never do.’ It was a statement and a warning, rolled into one. Either muster on the beach at the time of departure, or don’t, but there’ll be no waiting around.

Dalip and Mama contemplated the idea for a moment before moving to sit on the deck with the open chest in front of them. It looked like it had been sorted through already, and what was left was mostly threadbare rags. A couple of shirts, holed woollen stockings, a pair of long shorts which had gone at the seams, and something flat, wrapped up in waxy cloth.

‘This is slim pickings,’ said Mama.

‘It’s a pirate ship. What did you expect? A casket full of doubloons?’

Mama held up the stockings to the light. They would have functioned better as fishing nets. ‘Do people not make anything here?’

‘Grog. The biscuits we break our teeth on. There may have been looms at Bell’s castle, but I never saw any.’ He pulled a face and stared into the distance. ‘Do you remember when Mary needed something to wear, and there were all those boxes of clothes?’

‘Sure.’

‘Every single thing in them had been worn by someone coming to Down. Every single one of those women were dead by the time Mary picked that red dress out.’

Mama inspected the stockings again, and folded them back into the sea-chest. ‘Well, isn’t that depressing.’

‘At least we’ve worked out where everyone is.’ Dalip picked up the wax-clothed bundle, and noticed that there was a corroded pen and a small, squat glass bottle nestling with it. ‘They’re all captured or dead, and we’re the survivors.’

‘We’ve been here a month, Dalip. Maybe two. We’ve survived so far, but I don’t think that makes us survivors.’ Mama sucked her cheeks in. ‘I want to go home. More than ever.’

He unwrapped the little bundle. Inside was a little hardback book with black leather-covered boards and raggedly cut pages. Although it looked old, it smelled new, and when he cracked it open, the paper was still white and crisp.

The writing was in a small, neat hand, the script flowing and steady.

‘I can’t read it,’ said Dalip, and showed it to Mama.

‘So what language is it?’

‘I’m going to guess at Latin, or…’ He squinted at the page. ‘Hang on. That’s English.’

‘That’s no English I’ve ever seen.’

‘They made me do Chaucer at school. Middle English. Medieval.’ Sucking at his teeth, he tried a few words, running his finger beneath the letters as he stuttered his way through. ‘Wol◦– will I turn to London again.’ He leafed to the start. ‘This is someone’s diary, I think.’

‘Then perhaps you shouldn’t be reading it.’

‘The owner will be past caring by now.’ He moved to the last entry, but didn’t try and decipher its meaning. ‘This stuff always gave me a headache. It’s like trying to read Punjabi.’

‘Can’t you?’

He shook his head. ‘A bit. Everything was in English, and I was… lazy. I can speak it better, though that’s not saying much. I know some prayers, some of the Guru Granth Sahib. I couldn’t hold a conversation in Punjabi, though. My grandfather would have hated that thought.’

‘He would have been very proud of his grandson.’

‘Maybe. He would have still told me off for not learning the language of our ancestors. But he would have blamed his son for not teaching me properly. And my mother.’ He lapsed into silence, turning the book over in his hands.

‘We’ll make it back,’ said Mama.

‘The man who wrote this didn’t. If we want to go home, we have to make it happen. No one’s going to open a door and offer it to us.’ He placed the book back in its wrapper, and returned it to the chest. Then he took out his machete and tested its edge with his thumb.

‘We’re going to fight, then?’

‘We’re pirates,’ he said. ‘It’s what we do.’