A Shadow All of Light (51 page)

It was not so imposing a boat as to deserve any name at all, though she was indeed reluctant to obey her tiller. She had been made over to look as if she were adrift, an orphan escaped from her moorings. Such wayward vessels were not rare, particularly during the times of festival when owners flushed with wine or overly eager to impose themselves upon women were careless of their duties.

She was to be unremarkable, to attract not even casual notice, insofar as that were possible. And she was to move and otherwise appear as if unmanned, and so I had to lie prone on her bilgy bottom for much of the length of my journey. I was required also to raise my head above the gunnels to find my bearings and to ascertain the positions of stars, but for the most part I must drift blindly down the river, trusting to instinct and my preparatory study of the currents—and to fortune.

If the
Reluctant Maiden
nudged her prow against a pier or any other obstruction, she would come all apart to separate pieces. I would be boatless in the swift reaches of the upper river—I, a man who could not swim.

If she ran aground or cracked sidewise against one of the moored boats scattered along the irregular banks, I might well be discovered by agents of our enemy. The hour of attack upon the town was nigh. We hoped it would not come this night, for we must strike first. This suddenness would be one of our few advantages, we being so pitiably few in force. If I were found out, that would be mortal for our strategy—and for me too. I was armed only with my short sword and a brace of daggers. Beside me in the boat lay a pike with a rusty old lancet blade; it would be of little use in defense; the barge pole might make a more effective weapon.

A crude, short paddle lay by the pike. If I had not gathered enough momentum to reach my objective when I got into the bay, I would employ it—to little effect, I thought. Stuffed beneath the box that housed the tiller was an inflated oilskin bladder Sbufo had fashioned as a flotation pillow for me when the boat disjointed itself.

With the thought of reducing my visibility, I cloaked with the shadow that had made itself my comrade. Its gray sinuosity might be less conspicuous than a sharply black blot against the starlight. In a night so deep as this, if I made my motions gradual and kept close to the inner shadows of the sides, I should go unseen. The umbra I wore had another use also, one even more important to my well-being.

The length of the vessel from the stubby little bowsprit to about one-third of the way to the stern was covered over with black cloth, part painted canvas and part worn and damaged velveteen. This covering had been patched together from various sources, principally from the small tent that had enclosed the shadow-devouring plants during the Green Knights and Verdant Ladies' presentation of the story of Perseus and Andromeda. The covering served now the same purpose as before, shielding from the light as many of the umbra-eaters as Mutano and I had been able to crowd into the space. If an unhappy accident occurred and the plants found a way to come at my shadow it would be perhaps more difficult for them to discern than one of velvet black. A paltry protection, I thought. I was in danger as much from the plants inside my boat as from the enemy outside it.

Now that I was upon the Daia our offensive was under way. Osbro would be in the company of Torronio and his crew, Squint and Crossgrain and the others, on the western beach of the bay. There a narrow stretch of silvery sand lay in a crescent along the water in front of a grove of palms and its line of tall, thick undergrowth. Double trenches had been dug from one end of the beach to the other. The bottoms of the trenches were lined with gunny and old canvas and over this covering were laid stooks of long rushes that had been soaked in oil. To top off his preparation, Torronio had flooded the trenches with all the flammable liquids he could lay hands on.

All this lighter together ought to make a sizable and surprising conflagration. Torronio only awaited my signal to spark it. Osbro should now be at his station there with Torronio, watching for the first entrance of my
Reluctant Maiden
into the bay waters. We must act in concert; the double watch at the trench sites should make us a little safer.

The most bothersome difficulty was that I had no way of keeping an exact time; an approximate timing would have to suffice. I had a shuttered lantern of the kind we used when tending the shadow-eater plants in the converted stable and the candle it contained was graduated with bits of scarlet string tied round to mark off some of the important points I must pass. But I could open it only now and again to snatch a brief glimpse of the taper for fear its flicker would give me away. I must resist the temptation to open the shutter more often than completely necessary.

Too much the success of our enterprise depended upon guesswork. Where had I drifted to by now? I could hear only the silken murmur of water sliding seaward and its gentle push against the sides of the boat. I would not cover enough distance in my voyage to make use of the stars to determine landward points, but I could keep the boat fairly well aligned with the aid of star positions.

Now I smelled something different in the Daia water, an odor of fetid orts and slops, of the carcasses of spoiled meat and fowl, and the leakage of jakes. I was at the spot where the large drain from the rows of the great houses rolled into the river beneath its surface. The complaints of the larger populace against this noisome adulteration were continual and not modest in volume. The Council had taken no steps to halt the poisoning and to protect the Daia because they could not think how to do so. “We lack imagination,” Ser Vennio Colluccio said, confessing the truth. Maestro Astolfo had offered a plan to the Council which they had rejected on the grounds that none of them could understand what he had proposed.

This drain was a landmark. I was now a little less than a quarter of the way. I ventured a glimpse of the candle and found it shorter by that correct amount. Soon my ungainly boat would gather speed as small tributaries—streams and pebbly creeks and runoff from springs—fed into the river. To prevent my having to raise my head above the gunnels, the tiller had been fitted to protrude into the boat through the stern, and this arrangement made the handling of the rudder clumsier than it would otherwise have been, for the slot through which it was allowed to move back and forth was but a short two feet. In my practice attempts that had been sufficient room, but I had doubts upon this matter when it came to the hour of action.

I had doubts upon many matters, doubts upon doubts redoubled. Sbufo and Cocorico were the cleverest puppet masters, contrivance-builders, and originators of stage effects that Tlemia Province ever had seen, but the project that the maestro had envisioned and laid upon them was large in conception and onerous of construction. Mutano was with them as guard and overseer on the
Tarnished Maiden
and if the enemy boarded that decrepit hulk he could fend off the intruders for a good long while. Pirates or no, they would rarely have met Mutano's equal with weaponry.

Still, if the old ship had not been refitted properly, or if some pulleys and linchpins and blocks and hinges did not move at will, my colleagues would be helpless to prevent all of them from meeting a damp destiny at the bottom of the bay. The crux of the action was in the timing of its parts.

For the pirate ship had now arrived and was lying at anchor toward the seaward mouth of the harbor. The
Tarnished Maiden
sat only three ship's-lengths aft of it toward the wharves. The pirate crew would see no danger in this invalid derelict—which had recently listed more than usual, as if slowly taking on water, and so our enemy had anchored closer than prudence normally would suggest. Mutano had first sighted their presence and reported it to Astolfo. The seemingly careless position of the pirate vessel was encouraging.

But that was the intelligence of yestere'en, and it was the present moment that pressed upon me. If I were not occupied with the toil of directing the boat, I might have fallen prey to a palsied fear.

A particularly difficult stretch confronted me at this point, where two streams poured in from the left bank and another, slightly southward, from the right. The conflicting currents created a sort of slow, wide whirlpool that might turn my
Maiden
in a circular path. If the stern got pointed downstream, I would be unable to square it about before the swifter flow of the Daia caught me. I needed the force of the river full at my stern when I reached the bay, for our plan was to ram the pirate vessel and it would require all the strength I could gather to propel me across the calm water. There was no thought of an impact powerful enough to inflict damage on the big ship, but a direct, head-on contact was necessitous. Any different contact would be in vain.

So when the currents on the stern from portside began to force the bow to port, I strained on the tiller with all my might. I glanced into the river, trying to see the flow of the currents. I caught my breath and managed to stifle a startled oath. The water was scattered with faces, faces everywhere, bearing the crooked nose and unbalanced grin of Bennio the Jester.

It took a short moment for me to comprehend that these were masks. The revelers of the Feast had pitched their masks into the river and streams, disgusted by the collapse of the ceremonies. The masks thumped gently against the sides of the
Maiden
and there was a disheartening moment when the boat stalled and the Daia began to tug it about. I was able to hold fast, though, and then the opposing current took hold and the prow righted and came around toward the big yellow star, Egeria, that drooped over the harbor, a familiar guide for all mariners who sailed the coastline.

The
Maiden
was now moving quickly and steadily and Tardocco slipped by me on both sides, a great unconscious presence in the nighttime. I could smell the odors of the town: the dusty-grass smells of the racetracks, the beery, stale fumes of taverns and stews, the aromas of fresh bread from the bakeries that must labor in the night, the unmistakable musks and eye-watering perfumes of Nasilia's cattery, the faint whiff of salt in the mild breeze from the open sea. These smells were guideposts that told me in loose terms my positions on the river.

The cattery smells reminded me of Mutano's stratagems. My cumbrous comrade had conferred with Sunbolt and reached an agreement. The great orange cat, perhaps as a gesture of gratitude for the gift we had given him of his new mate Asilia, had agreed to gather to our cause a brief alliance of the cats of harbor-side. These were to be our spies, taking note of the beggars and broken-down sailors and ship-jumpers and escaped slaves, relaying what intelligence they might. It could not be completely reliable intelligence because the feline race, and the wild and independent males in particular, have little interest in the deeds and motions of human beings, except as these affect their dietary situations. Even so, Mutano had been able to collect some details and had made some plausible surmises and had relayed them to Astolfo. The arrangement still held; those cats even now observed activity and gave disordered and often confusing reports.

Any fact or rumor Mutano could glean might be of use to the maestro, for it was the duty of his post to try to find out the number and placement of those agents who had already infiltrated Tardocco. They would be in hiding all along the wharves, most of them waiting inside the great, dark warehouses. I had felt presentiments of them when last I visited the precincts of Rattlebone Alley. The foe was among us; we could not doubt it. When the pirates came ashore, the traitors would welcome them and the two forces would join and advance with naked blades upon the helpless avenues and sleeping houses.

*   *   *

I risked taking a look abroad. The boat was now in the heart of the city, where the streets ran like wheel spokes into the plazas and where the civic buildings sat. The squat barracks of the Civil Guard huddled between a small slot-windowed gaol and the grander, brick-faced Hall of Justice. There the magistrates and their clerks, the attorneys and their scribes, spent long days trying to keep solemn faces and accurate, current accounts of complaints, grievances, petty crimes, and the occasional gruesome felonies. I barely made out the shapes of these structures against the western horizon before I pulled in my head again and concentrated on the tiller.

I had expected that some inn or other would keep late hours for the bibbers in their gardens, but there was no sound of revelry or of the quiet, amorous plaints of lutes and citharas beneath the casements of comely females. Eros had withdrawn his unpredictable persona from the midnight. It was not merely as if the Feast of the Jester had failed and the original Bennio had refused to impress his features within the moon, it was as if the ancient clown himself had been found dead in some prominent square of the city and now the world wore its mourning black and suffered its sorrowful despondence in a silence as deep as a ravine.

If the time was gloomy, if the hour was deserted, if all movement ceased and all activity stalled, this was how Astolfo desired the state of things to be. Tardocco lay torpid; it seemed to invite a dire fate to fall upon it. It lay apparently undefended, as ripe for the taking as Psyche awaiting Eros or, perhaps more appositely, as Andromeda powerless before the Mardrake.

Though now a Mardrake was to be our ally.

So we hoped.

For sixteen seasons now I had depended upon the resourcefulness of Astolfo. I had learned to trust his knowledge and skill and to hold fast to his counsels. Times when I thought his strategies fanciful or impossible of fulfillment, I was proved mistaken. Plans difficult to picture, much less to fathom, resulted in happy outcomes, usually with coin in their wakes. But our assault as laid out this night seemed so knotted in conception and so circumstantial in its details that I allowed misgivings to tickle my mind. To keep them at bay I tried to imagine what our lives would be like if our schemes succeeded. There would be a large change in the way we kept ourselves, but I could not foresee its character.