Drowned Wednesday

Three

ARTHUR NEVER SAW the lightning or heard the water boiling where the bolts struck, the noise lost in the constant boom of thunder. He was under the sheet, a soggy piece of cardboard clutched in one trembling hand. He didn't even know if it was the invitation from Drowned Wednesday, his medical chart from the end of the bed, or a brochure about the hospital telephones.

But since he was still alive a minute after the blinding glow beyond the sheets faded, he guessed it must be the invitation in his hand.

Arthur slowly pulled his head out from under the sheet. As he blinked up at the clear blue sky, he instinctively took another deep breath. A long, clear, unrestricted breath.

As the bed moved in the mysterious current, the swell it was riding subsided to a mere ten or twelve feet, with a much longer interval between waves. The wind dropped, and there was no blowing spray. It also felt much warmer, though Arthur couldn't see a sun. He couldn't see any clouds or lightning either, which was a plus. Just a brilliant blue sky that was so even and perfect that he supposed it must be a painted ceiling, like in the other parts of the House.

Arthur took several more deep breaths, revelling in the rush of oxygen through his body. Then he took stock of his situation once more. The one thing he had learned about the House was that you couldn't take anything for granted. This warm, rolling sea might turn into something else at any moment.

Arthur tucked the Captain's disc back under his pyjama top and slid Lady Wednesday's sodden and barely legible invitation next to the Atlas in his pocket. Then he braced his cast against the headboard, stood up, and looked around.

There was nothing to see, except the sea. The bed rode too low in the water. Even standing up, Arthur's view was blocked by the next wave. What he could see was much closer and immediately obvious.

The bed was sinking. Even in this calmer ocean, the mattress was now totally submerged, losing its buoyancy as it absorbed more and more water, the steel frame dragging it down.

It wasn't going to sink in the next five minutes, but it was going to sink.

Arthur sighed and sat back down, water splashing almost up to his waist. He looked at the cast on his leg and wondered if he should take it off. It was very lightweight and it hadn't dragged him down before, but that had been a truly panic-driven swim and it would be hard to swim any real distance with it on. But if he took it off, his leg might snap apart again or hurt so much that he couldn't swim anyway.

He decided to leave the cast on and got out the Captain's disc again. This time he just held it in his hand and tried to visualise the ship with the glowing green sails coming back to pick him up.

He hoped that was a good thing to visualise. At the back of his mind was a nagging worry that Leaf hadn't been actually rescued but had gone from one trouble to another. What would the Denizens do to her? They would have been after him, not her. He hoped that since Lady Wednesday had sent him an invitation instead of an attack squad, she might be at least kind of friendly. But maybe that was just a sneaky plan to get him where she wanted. In which case, Drowned Wednesday might take out her bad feelings on Leaf...

If Leaf survived that line of lightning, Arthur thought guiltily. Surely that ship would have had some protection …

The bed gurgled under his feet and sank a bit more, reminding Arthur of his immediate problem.

"A ship!" he called out. "I need a ship! Or a boat! A better raft! Anything!"

His voice sounded alone and empty, lost amid the waves. He was answered only by the sloshing of the sea under, through, and around the mattress.

"Land would do," said Arthur. He said this directly to the Captain's disc, but once again it didn't appear to do anything. It was just a carving of a boat on a piece of whalebone.

No land came in sight. Though he still couldn't see any sun, it got warmer, and then positively hot. Even the seawater now constantly washing over Arthur didn't cool him down. It was tepid and very salty, as he found when he tasted some on the end of his finger. He was getting very thirsty, and had started to remember all kinds of terrible stories about people dying of thirst at sea. Or going crazy from thirst first and hurling themselves into the water or attacking their friends and trying to drink their blood...

Arthur shook his head several times. It looked like he was already starting to go crazy, thinking of stuff like that. Particularly since he knew he couldn't die of thirst in the House. He might feel like he was, and of course he could still go crazy...

Better to think of something positive to do. Like send a signal, or catch a fish. If there were any fish in this strange sea within the House. Of course, if there were fish, there might also be sharks. A shark would have no trouble pulling him off the bed. It hardly qualified as a raft anymore, it had sunk down so far.

Arthur shook his head again to try and clear away the negative thoughts.

Stop thinking about sharks! he told himself.

Just at that moment, he saw something in the water not far away. A dark, mostly submerged shape. A shadow largely under the surface.

Arthur yelped and tried to stand up against the headboard, hopping as his immobilised leg got caught under a fold of sheet. This violent action changed the balance of the bed, and one corner went down several feet, releasing a huge air bubble.

This downward progress halted for a few seconds as air bubbles continued to pop to the surface, then the bed sank like the Titanic, one end briefly sticking straight up before it subsided beneath the waves. Arthur let go of it just in time and pushed himself away. He thrashed out a rough backstroke for a few yards to make sure he wouldn't be sucked down, then trod water with one leg and his arms circling, as he frantically looked around for the dark shadow again.

There it was, only a few yards away! Arthur braced himself for the shock of a shark's attack, his body rigid. His head sank under the water as he stopped moving, then broke free again as he instinctively struggled to swim again.

The dark shape didn't attack. It didn't even move. Arthur stared at it and saw that it wasn't a shark. He swam closer to confirm that it was, in fact, a dark green ball about six feet in diameter. It had an irregular surface rather like matted weeds and was floating quite deep, so that only a curve fourteen inches or so high rode above the sea.

Arthur splashed over to it. On closer inspection, it was clearly a buoy or some floating marker, totally covered in green weeds. Arthur reached out to touch it. A huge strand of green weeds came away in his hand, revealing a bright red surface beneath.

Arthur touched that. It felt slightly sticky, and some of the red stuff came away on his hand. It was like chewing gum, impossible to get off. Arthur crossly wiped his hands but that only smeared it across his fingers, and his head dipped under. His broken leg wasn't weighed down that much by the cast, but he couldn't bend his knee and he couldn't tread water well enough just with one leg to really try and clean his hands, since he had to make swimming motions as well.

Arthur started to clear the weeds away with one hand. While doing that, he noticed that the buoy didn't move far with the swell. Each time one of the bigger waves came past, it swept Arthur five or six yards away and he had to swim back. The buoy didn't move anywhere near as much.

It had to be fixed to something. Arthur duck-dived down and, sure enough, a barnacle-encrusted chain led down from the buoy, down through the sunlit water and into the dark depths.

He resumed cleaning the weeds away with new enthusiasm and so got a lot more of the sticky stuff on his hands. It was tar, or something like tar, though it didn't smell.

The buoy has to mark something, Arthur thought. It must be used by someone, who'll come past. I might even be able to climb up on it.

When the buoy was almost clean it rode much higher in the water. Arthur had hoped he might find some handles on it, or projections he could hold on to, because he was getting very tired. But there weren't any. The only part of the buoy that was of any interest was a small brass ring right near the top. Arthur could only just reach it.

The ring was about the size of the top joint of Arthur's little finger, far too small for him to hold on. It also felt a bit loose. Arthur gave it a pull, hoping that it might come out and he could somehow make the hole bigger to create a handhold.

It came out with a very loud popping sound, followed immediately afterwards by a ten-foot-high shower of sparks and a loud ticking noise as if a large and noisy clock had started up deep within the ball.

Arthur started frantically backstroking away from it, his body almost reacting faster than his brain, which had rapidly processed the fact that this floating ball was some sort of floating bomb — a mine — and it was going to explode.

A few seconds later, with Arthur only ten yards away, the buoy did explode. But it was not the lethal blast Arthur feared. There was a bright flash, and a rush of air above Arthur's head, but no deadly rain of fragments.

Smoke poured out of the ball, dark black smoke that coiled up into the air in a very orderly fashion, quite unlike any smoke Arthur had seen before. It started to whip about like a snake, dancing all over the place. Eventually its "head" connected with its 'tail" to form a giant smoke ring that hovered ten feet above the buoy, which was still intact, though its upper half had broken open into multiple segments like a lotus.

The smoke ring slowly closed in on itself to become an inky cloud that spun about for a minute or so, then it abruptly burst apart, turning into eight jet-black seabirds that shrieked "Thief!" above Arthur's head before they each flew off in a different direction, covering the eight points of the compass rose.

Arthur was too tired to worry about what the seabirds were doing, or who they might be alerting. All he cared about was the fact that now the top half of the buoy was open, he could pull himself up on it and have a rest.

Arthur had only just enough energy to drag himself over and into the buoy. It was full of water, but he could sit in it quite comfortably and rest. That was all he wanted to do for a while. Rest.

But after only twenty minutes, according to his still-backwards but otherwise reliable and waterproof watch, Arthur found that he had rested enough. Though there was still no visible sun, it felt like one was beating down on him. He was really hot, and he was sure he was getting sunburned and that his tongue had started to swell from lack of water. He wished he'd managed to keep a sheet from the bed to use as a sunshade. He took his dressing gown off and made that into a makeshift turban, but it didn't really help.

At that point, Arthur started to hope that whoever the birds were supposed to alert would show up. Even if they thought he was a thief. That implied there was something to steal here, which didn't seem to be the case. The buoy was just a big, empty, floating ball with the top hemisphere opened up. There was nothing inside it except Arthur.

Another baking, uncomfortable hour passed. Arthur's broken leg began to ache again, probably because the painkillers he'd had in the hospital were wearing off. The high-tech cast didn't seem to be operational anymore and Arthur could see distinct holes in it now.

Arthur picked at one of the holes and grimaced. The cast was falling apart. He was definitely sunburned as well, the backs of his hands turning pink, as if trying to match the bright red stain on his palms. According to Arthur's watch it was nine o'clock at night, but there was no change in the light. Without being able to see any sun, he couldn't tell whether night was approaching. He wasn't even sure there would be a night. There was in the Lower House, but that didn't mean anything. There might not be any relief from the constant heat.

He wondered if he should try and swim somewhere, but dismissed the idea as quickly as it came up. He was lucky to have found this buoy. Or perhaps it wasn't luck, it was the Mariner's disc that had led him here. In any case, Arthur couldn't swim for more than half an hour at the most, and there wasn't much chance of finding land in that time. Better to sit here and hope that the smoky seabirds brought someone.

Two hours later, Arthur felt a much cooler breeze waft across the back of his neck. He opened his puffy eyes to see a shadow passing across the sky. A veil of darkness advanced in a line across the horizon. Stars, or suitable facsimiles of them, began to twinkle as the light faded before the approaching line of night.

The wind and the lapping sea grew cold. Arthur turned his turban back into a dressing gown, shivered, and hunched up into a tighter ball. Clearly he was going to be sunburned during the day and then frozen at night. Either one would kill him, so not dying of hunger and thirst was no great bonus.

As he had that thought, Arthur saw another star. A fallen star, quite close to the sea, and moving towards him. It took another moment for his heat-addled brain to recognise that it was in fact a light.

A light fixed to the bowsprit of a ship.