In Great Waters (5 page)

“Bird,” the man said, pointing. Finding himself observed, Henry abruptly sat down, tearing his eyes away from the gull. He resumed rocking, testing the beat of his webbed fingers against the unresisting air.

The man pointed at the painting on the wall. Henry ignored him.

Finally, the man exhaled heavily, and spoke to the nurse. His voice rumbled; Henry could make out the sounds better than he could have done a few weeks before, but the speech was too rapid for him to pick any familiar syllables out of it. The nurse evidently understood it, though, for she disappeared out of the door. Henry sat on the floor, refusing to turn his head at the red man’s attempts to interest him in other words, rocking quietly and thinking about the gull. Maybe he could try to eat one, if he could catch it. Tribesmen had sometimes managed it, swimming with slow stealth up from below, barely stirring the water around them before shooting up their arms in a sudden, violent grab, pulling the birds down into the water in a flurry of feathers. Henry had tried it himself, but he had been too little; it was a skill only the adults seemed to possess. It would be difficult to catch one here, but the sight of it, flying alien through this new sky, quickened his homesickness, filling him with an angry desire to store the bird safe in his stomach where it could change no more of its ways.

While Henry considered thus, the nurse returned. In her hands was a curious object, a bright circle that flashed with light like a fish scale. The shiny surface and round shape caught Henry’s attention: sea urchins were round, and fish eyes, and in this boxed-in world, it was a fascinating sight. Desire for something not dull and square overcame Henry’s determination to ignore his lesson, and he reached out for it.

“Crown,” the red man said, as Henry played with the circle in his lap. “Crown. Crown.”

Henry licked at the metal. It had an unfamiliar non-taste, no strong smell. Light glimmered off it like sunlight on waves.

“Crown. Crown, Henry?”

Red hands reached into his lap. Henry bared his teeth, gripping hard onto his shining circle.

The hand descended and patted his shoulder. “Good, Henry. Crown. Crown.”

Henry tightened his hold. The man was going to take it away; he could see it from his posture.

Mine
, Henry said in the language of the tribe. The sound was a high-pitched squeak, and the man did not seem to hear it.

“Crown.”

Mine
.

The red hands closed over Henry’s own and lifted the circle up. Henry refused to let go, and his fingers, he knew, small as they were, were too strong for the man to pry apart. However, the man did not attempt to pull his circle loose. Instead, he lifted it up and fixed it on Henry’s head.

Henry flinched, pulled away. The touch of a circle around his head was the snap of a shark’s mouth, the bite of a killer whale, a predator’s fatal grip. He thrashed back, kicking desperately against the hard floor.

The hands persisted, held the circle down over his head. “Crown, Henry. Good, Henry. Crown.”

The band pressed down, gripping his head on all sides. Horror overwhelmed Henry, freezing any ability to think. A metal mouth had him in its hold; any moment, there would be teeth.

“Crown,” the voice persisted.

Henry shrieked. The word came to him, strange against his tongue, awkward in his mouth, high-pitched like the cry of a bird, but it was all he could say to free himself of the terrifying grasp. “No! No! No!”

The red hands relinquished him at once, the crown clattering to the floor. There was a long moment when two pairs of eyes stared at him.

Henry reached out and retrieved his circle, rocking, staring at its soothing light.

The red man breathed, breathed again. A patting hand hit the boy’s shoulder. “Good, Henry,” the deep voice said. “Good. Good.”

Mine
, Henry said in his own language, clutching the crown to him in tense little hands.
Mine
.

H
ENRY HAD BARELY
learned enough English to get by before the red man—Allard, Henry eventually gathered, was his name—began telling him stories. These stories made little sense to Henry at first; the names of people and places rattled off were too different from his native tongue to be easily remembered. Allard’s tales had no shape to them, no echoes of sound or regular beats, and he tended to say them only once—and if Henry needed a repetition, would tell the story again, but in entirely different words. Used to rhythm and rote, Henry found his attention bent in new, uncomfortable directions. What he did learn quickly was that there were more than four of these red people, these “landsmen,” as Allard called them. More than there had been members of his tribe, of “deepsmen.” More, if he understood right, than there were fish in a shoal. Places tended not to have names in Henry’s language; he understood the concepts of current and surface and rock, of places with good food and empty stretches to be travelled at speed, of summer route and winter route and the migrations his people made as the seasons turned. For a place to have a name like a person, though, was a difficult concept. How would you name a stretch of ocean, when the water flooded to and fro and moved endlessly from one place to another, when things changed and shifted and the miles stretched before you on all sides with nothing to stop you swimming through? A name was something you used to call someone, only useful for getting a person’s attention, and when Allard sat in his
room and said words like “England” and “France” and “Spain,” nothing replied.

What Henry did understand was that these stories told of conflicts, of other peoples. Given the fact that these people were enemies, Henry supposed that the landsmen of France were entirely different from the landsmen of England like Allard. Allard showed him pictures, though, flat images that Henry had to struggle to perceive as anything other than lines on a page, and when he could get his eyes focused for long enough to work out what the lines meant, he could see no signs of difference: two legs, webless hands, red-pink skin, white-rimmed eyes. Henry had seen other tribes in the sea, which must be what Allard was talking about—other tribes, rather than other creatures—but the idea of long-running battles with them seemed bizarre. Some tribes stayed near shallow coasts where the fish were rich and plentiful, others followed the currents, tracing the same paths every year, and one tribe trying to encroach on the hunting waters of another would find itself in a fight fairly quickly—but once those fights were settled, the losers retreated, went back to seeking their food elsewhere. Long-running clashes, when there seemed to be enough to eat in all the countries involved, were a crazy waste of energy. These stories failed to capture his imagination; Henry sat on the floor, tossing his crown from hand to hand and blinking.

Personality was something that Henry understood; he had learned, faster than other children of the tribe, which members—which
deepsmen
—could be trusted to spot a dolphin and which would start at the click of a harmless fish, which would always steal his food and which might leave him alone if he stayed unobtrusive. Allard was difficult for him to understand, though. Sometimes restless, pacing and staring, at other times he would seat himself with a long feather in his hand, dipping and scratching at a thin, tan leaf of something, as if levering at the flesh of an invisible crab. Sometimes he appeared with objects in his hands—
book
was the word he repeated, pointing to them and trying to persuade Henry to pick them up, but their square shape and meaty smell were too nasty for Henry to want any contact with them. These books hinged open and closed neatly like joints, and their
insides, which all looked similar to Henry, seemed to puzzle Allard; he would look from Henry to book and back again, and shake his head, scratching at the leaves with his dark-tipped feather. This action irritated Henry, but nothing he did seemed to prevent it; whether he rocked and refused to meet anyone’s eye, or obediently sat up for his fish, straining his voice around the syllables of “thank you,” whether he cricked his back tottering around on the sticks Allard seemed so insistent on or lay curled on the floor stroking his rags and refusing to move, Allard’s feather scratched and scratched. Most gestures meant something in the sea; posture and motion emphasised or softened words or expressed relationship, but Allard was a mess of gestures, all apparently meaning nothing. Had a deepsman spent so long fiddling with a shell or stick, Henry would have assumed he was deranged with nerves, but Allard was quick to pull Henry’s limbs into line, to grab him before he could scratch his nurse, and the nurse and the man with her obeyed Allard quickly and without protest, which made the idea that he was nervous all but impossible: such open anxiety would sit ill on a leader. It would be an invitation to any who wished to depose him.

When the stories Allard told were accompanied by a book, Henry quickly took against them. Even as his understanding of English grew, the words Allard used were difficult, and the stories themselves were wearisome and complex, and hard to see the point of. Allard produced a book he kept referring to as a “Bible;” the word was easy to say, two puffs of air that could be made under water without filling a mouth with brine, but with it came a horrible object, two straight lines crisscrossed over each other, an interlocking nest of corners that upset Henry just to look at it. The fact that there was a figure on it, what appeared to be the shape of a tiny landsman with corded muscles like a half-picked corpse, did nothing to improve his liking for it. Allard seemed to take this object seriously, more seriously than the crown he had let Henry grab: when Henry tried to take it away and break it up, Allard lifted it up out of his reach, looking almost alarmed; his grip was light and cautious, as if holding a clam that might be prised open for a meal but would clamp its shell shut at a tap. Allard used words
like “Christ” and “cross” and “crucifix” and “Jesus,” but Henry had difficulty telling them apart, and the tangle of S-sounds struck awkwardly on his ear. There were stories attached to this object as well, about places that weren’t France or England or Spain. When Henry asked about these places, Allard could explain little, except that they were hot and had landsmen ruling them, because they had no sea except a great body called the Mediterranean, which had deepsmen in it but not ones the landsmen cared about, because the landsmen needed deepsmen to fight their enemies, and these landsmen’s enemies weren’t on the other side of the sea but on land. This Henry could follow, but when Allard tried to explain what this ugly cross had to do with it, he grew confused. Allard said that the figure on it was a king, but he didn’t seem to rule anything that Allard could make clear, and as the man looked nothing like Henry it was hard to see the connection. There were words like “sin” too, but that was a difficult idea as well. Henry knew that deepsmen children received a twist on the ear if they strayed off in a dangerous direction or provoked another tribe member, but it was a simple business: they either learned not to repeat such mistakes, or they stayed stupid and generally drowned or fell prey to a shark or a dolphin. Having done his best not to be stupid for as long as he could remember, Henry could not see any reason why a dead landsman who looked nothing like him should be accusing him of doing bad things. The notion obscurely hurt his feelings. He was aware that tribesmen too old for a twisted ear would become unpopular if they regularly snatched food or refused to help in a crisis, and he supposed this might be the kind of bad things Allard meant. But nobody seemed to like Henry, and nobody ever had. He assumed it was because of his queer legs, but those weren’t his fault. Try as he might, he could think of no clearer reason why he should be so isolated. A two-legged landsman who looked like so many others, starfished out on an ugly criss-cross, could have little to do with such problems. Henry kept his eyes off the object as much as he could, and shook his head; eventually, he took to curling up whenever Allard brought it into the room. For some reason, Allard was less willing to
wrestle him upright when he had the cross around, so Henry grew stubborn, and eventually Allard stopped bringing it in.

The one thing Allard had not done since the first few days was point to the painting up in Henry’s room. Henry remembered the word “Angelica” associated with it, so he assumed that was what it was, an angelica. When left alone, Henry still tore blankets, but more for comfort than anything else; the room remained square and straight however he attacked it, and it was too hard to keep bruising himself on the walls for so little reward. But with the loss of tantrums came boredom, worse than before, pressing him down as oppressively as the room itself. With nothing else to do, Henry took to exploring the room, examining its every inch, even occasionally reaching a cautious finger into a corner to touch it at its tightest point, before snatching his hand back quickly, out of harm’s way. But aside from scaring himself with corners, there was almost no other occupation: his ruined pallet and fraying rags, his two staffs and the chair Allard sat upon were the only distractions. Apart from the angelica, hanging low enough on the wall that Henry could scrunch up his short-sighted eyes and make out its shape.

It was reddish, like so many things in this world, with swirls of colour and arching lines all over it; within its disagreeably straight edges, it was more like water than anything else he could find. As the image was flat, he could not suppose it served any purpose except, like his clothes, to be a colourful nuisance, but once he had accustomed himself to it, he found its variety pleasant and spent hours of solitude rocking quietly with his eyes on its soothing curves.

Allard waited until he caught Henry staring at it before he tried to interest the boy in its contents. When he finally managed to come upon Henry with his eyes on the picture—by dint of opening the door faster than usual and putting his head in before the boy could retreat to his usual rocking and blank expression—he smiled and patted his charge. Henry retreated from the smile, bared teeth being a threatening sight, but Allard sat down on the floor beside him, dust and threads from Henry’s rags covering his fine clothing, and offered the boy some fish.