The Choir Boats (26 page)

Sanford shook his head, mouthed the word “Father.” Reglum
raised his palm and made the circling motion from the Plea.

“We cannot and would never force you to do what your conscience
forbids,” Reglum said. “We beg you only, truly beg you, to take the
knives as your final defence in case we are put to such trial.”

Sanford glared at Reglum, then looked at the other McDoons,
and said in a voice of bronze, “We are bound to the same mission but
not necessarily to the same fate. What you do is wrong, but I cannot
change you. I take your knife as a token of your concern for me, but
I will never use it for the purpose to which you entreat me. I will
speak no more about this. Good evening.”

Barnabas picked up a knife and held it gingerly. “Nor will I,” he
said. “But I understand that you mean to make us a great gift, the
greatest perhaps that you can from your premise. I respect that.
Good night.”

Sally picked up her knife and looked Reglum, Nexius, and the
ship’s captain each in the eye before returning her gaze to Reglum.
“I cannot imagine doing what you suggest,” she said. “But I can
imagine needing companionship as a bulwark to despair. I take the
hatma
as evidence of that companionship.”

The men of Yount looked at her gravely. Reglum said, “You know
what happened to the boats of the
Glen Carrig
, to the survivors of
the wreck of the
Alcimedon
. So many others lost to lands survivors
called Doorpt Swangeanti and Severambes and Marbotikin Dulda,
but which in reality have no names. So many others lost without
any trace whatsoever. Most Robinson Crusoes are never found, Miss
Sally.”

Sally sheathed the knife and wondered if James Kidlington would
refuse to use a
hatma
where he was going, if he would be
allowed
to
refuse, and for a second her sight grew dim. She grabbed the table.

“I am fit,” she said, as Reglum put his hand on her shoulder.
“Thank you.” At the door, Sally stopped and asked Reglum, “Is it
impolite to ask who your
hatmoril
is?”

“We make no secret of our pact-brother,” he said. “My
hatmoril
is
Dorentius Bunce.”

Sally dropped her hand from the doorknob and was about to
state her astonishment, when she thought better of doing so, and
excused herself. She paused on deck to look one last time at the
stars of her own world. In a line low off the southeastern horizon
were the Three Torches: Fomalhaut, Archernar, and Canopus. But
Taurus, Orion, and Canis Major were no longer to be seen. The Dog
Star did not pour out his light, neither did the Maiden-Star look to
the Mother-Star. Sally pulled her cloak around her against the cold
and thought:
A song without harmony
.

That night, at about the time the
Gallinule
left Big Land, Sally
had the first of the endless dreams she would have on the rest of the
journey. She was on a long beach of black rocks, in the dark, with
winds howling, and the waves crashing. Just beyond the breakers
was a ship with tattered sails heaving to and fro. People on board
cried for help, cries she heard above the roar of the wind. A black-green light illuminated the scene but there were no stars and no
moon. A voice came into her mind — Tom’s voice! Tom was singing:

The sickle-sinny drift of the ship in the tide

In the rip near the strand with the foam by its side.

She looked wildly about for Tom, but he was nowhere to be seen.
Three times he sang the couplet and, at the final verse, the ship was
thrust by a great wave onto the rocks and smashed. Sally screamed.
She saw bodies flung and broken on the jagged shore. She clambered
over wet rocks, over bits of mast and rigging, and splintered wood,
and the first of the bodies. She looked for Tom, but could not find
him.
There
, she thought,
there he is
: “Tom, Tom!” she cried, but the
body just washed back and forth in the tidal pool, bumping its head
against the boulder. Down she flung herself into the pool, slipping
down the boulder, cutting her leg. She was on her knees, had her
arms around the body, hauled it up and over: “Tom!” she shouted
into the wind. Only the face was not Tom’s. It was the face of James
Kidlington. Sally screamed again —

— and woke up. She had fallen out of the bed, and her leg hurt.
Isaak was at the door, tail as big as a horse’s mane. The cold and the
wind had increased. Beyond the wind and the “chuff-chuff-chuff” of
the
Gallinule
’s engine, Sally heard — or felt — a change. She hobbled
to the fulgination room.

“Dorentius,” she said. “It’s happening, isn’t it?”

Dorentius waved her into the room. As if summoned by the same
call, Reglum came through the door just behind Sally. The three of
them stood in front of the Fulginator. The chattering of the rods
quickened for a heartbeat, the pace changed for the space of a
breath. A keening note entered into the low quaver from the wires.
Somewhere deep inside herself, Sally felt the same quickening, the
same keening. Where capillaries and alveoli conjoin with the finest
filaments of nerves, Sally felt a mathematical song of finding. For
some time she stood thus, only slowly becoming aware that Reglum
was asking if she wanted to go on deck.

The ship’s captain had joined the night watch. He raised his arm
in greeting, plainly surprised to see Sally, but said nothing. No one
spoke. The Small Moon clapped against the mast in the wind. Two
dolphins leaped in front of the prow. Sally saw the waves stand still
for the barest second, and the greyness of the mist palpitate. She
looked up, searching for the moon in the sky. There was no moon,
no matter how hard she scanned the heavens.

“Mr. Bammary,” she said. “Please escort me back to my cabin. I
am suddenly overcome — with weariness . . . and something else.”

Reglum paused at her cabin door. “The crossing is always hard,”
he said. “I begin to suspect that for you it may be very difficult. You
have troubling dreams written on your brow. You have a connection
to the Fulginator that even Dorentius does not have.”

Sally thought she might fall, but held herself erect: she was a
McDoon, after all. She heard Isaak meowing from behind the cabin
door.

“Beyond fulgination and dreams, I sense another grief as well,”
Reglum said. “I will never press you. But do not hesitate to seek me
out if you need a sympathetic ear.”

Sally blushed, though it might have been from the night’s
unexpected exertions. “Thank you,” she said. “Mr. Bammary, you
are a true gentleman. Brasenose College would be proud.”

“I must remember to tell that to Mr. Bunce,” said Reglum. “Now,
I bid you good night. You will have to tell me in the morning how
you managed to hurt your leg in the security of your own cabin.
Bon
soir
.”

Sally had opened the cabin door and was reaching down for Isaak
when she heard Reglum pause at the end of the corridor. “Sally,” he
said. “About your brother: everyone onboard is bound to help you
find him. And now, I bid you truly a good night.”

For the next week, wind and fog enveloped the
Gallinule
. Sounds
were heard above the ceaseless wind, growing louder as the
days went by: croakings as of gargantuan mire-drums, howlings
and snufflings less describable. Wheeling shadows, like huge
lammergeiers, swooped at the vessel, serpentine darkness writhed
in the walls of mist. Sally seldom came to the deck. She alternated
between her cabin, where she wrote letters to Mrs. Sedgewick and
the cook (letters that would never be posted), and the fulgination
room. Sally took comfort being with Dorentius and his
equipe
, as he
called it, of operators. Best of all was when Reglum and the other
A.B.s also came to the fulgination room. Then Sally could forget
the nightmares, and even set aside — if only for a while — her fears
for Tom, and her anguish over James Kidlington. Inspired by their
leaders, and further incited by the presence of a young lady in their
midst, the fulginators and the A.B.s bickered over the most arcane
points of scientific procedure.

Much of the time, however, Sally sat listening to the Fulginator.
The hum and click of the Fulginator was her best protection against
the nightmares and her deeper grief. She wove Sankt Jakobi and the
other churches of Hamburg into the Fulginator’s susurrations. She
imagined the disks and cylinder-heads of the Fulginator as so many
St. Morgaine medals.

“If I do not presume,” Reglum said to Sally on one of her rare
visits to the deck, “what are the nature of your dreams? I only ask
because you are so obviously disturbed by them.”

Sally, wrapped in a great cloak, held the railing of the ship. She
looked into the fog. Nexius, Fraulein Reimer, and Sanford stood next
to Reglum. Sally said: “I see often the Sign of the Ear. Always in the
dark. I am no longer just floating above the peninsula. I am walking
across the short grass towards the broken temple. There is a flower
in the grass, a small blue flower; I do not know its name.”

“
Sela-manri
,” Reglum said. “The flower of repentance.”

“Yes, it carpets the grass, especially as you get closer to the
temple. Then I see the trees, the biggest trees I have ever seen. Oh,
Sanford, they are bigger than anything on Hampstead Heath or at
Bexley. Enormous oaks, twisted, with lustrous, deep-green leaves. I
hear the wind in the leaves, and the boom of the surf on the rocks
below.”

Reglum and Nexius sighed, closed their eyes for a second.
“Something moves in the trees. At first I am scared, but then I
am curious. There are monkeys in the oak trees! Small monkeys,
reddish brown, coloured like a fox. They have long tails and swing
about but, I can hardly believe it, they have the heads of roe-deer,
with small horns. They are browsing on acorns.”

“The temple-apes,” Reglum said, eyes still closed.

“Then of a sudden the monkeys grow still. They cower in the
trees. Above me I sense something. An owl, a huge owl, flies over
my head, swooping low, nearly brushing the top of a tree. It is pure
white with a tail like a swallow’s!”

Reglum and Nexius opened their eyes and stared at Sally as she
continued. “The swallow-tailed owl hoots once — it sounds like a
horn on the river in the fog. The owl lands on the lintel over the
doorway to the temple. Its eyes are jet black, and its beak looks like
a scimitar. It hoots again and looks right at me. The owl is trying to
tell me something. I do not know what. It flies away as voices chant
in a language I do not understand.”

“Yountish?” asked Reglum.

Sally, as if she had not considered this before, said, “I am not
sure.”

Nexius grunted and said something in Yountish to Reglum,
who answered in the same tongue and did not translate. At that
moment a giant white bird flew out of the mist and over the ship.
Sally cried out, thinking it was the owl from her dream. Reglum
steadied her at the elbow. “No, Miss Sally, it’s not to worry,” he said.
“An albatross!”

All hands stopped to watch the bird with a wingspan longer than
a man circle the ship three times and then slip back into the mist.
Reglum explained, “The albatross can fulginate. They are sacred to
us. Fulmars, petrels, albatrosses, all three sacred as well. Not gulls
though, just the truly oceanic birds. Gulls are tied each to their own
coast.”

He pointed to the dolphins pacing the ship. “Dolphins and
albatrosses fulginate their own way through the interstitial lands.
Presumably they have an organ in their brains to do so, but we do
not know. They are sacred, so we cannot dissect them as we do other
creatures. Dolphins will be with us all the way. We’ve never had a ship
make it through without them. Their giant relations, the whales,
they too can make the crossing — whales are the most sacred.”

The fog closed round again and the howling increased. Sally
tried to stop her ears, but the howling was as much in her mind as
something she heard. She cried, retreated to the fulgination room.
When the sounds got really bad, she sat outside the engine room,
concentrating on the steady “chuff-chuff-chuff” and the hey’ing and
ho’ing of the crew members shovelling coal. The fog did not clear this
time, but only thinned and receded a little. The sea they entered was
quiet, windless, the sky a pale, sandy colour when they could spy it.
Barnabas, watching the dolphins sport, was one of the first to spot
an island slung low in the mist. As they came closer, Barnabas and
others heard a scrunching sound under the chuffing of their engine,
like forks and knives being dragged across rocks. The
Gallinule
ran
as close to the shore as the captain dared, her shallow draft allowing
her to get within one hundred yards.

Pacing on the shore were a half-dozen creatures, looking like
outsized wolverines. Their claws flopped before them on a beach of
crushed shale. Their eyes followed the
Gallinule
without blinking,
never leaving the ship even when the creatures changed direction.
Right up to the water’s edge they came. They made no other sound
than what their clapper-claws made on the strand.

“This place and these monsters are new to us,” said Reglum,
looking through a telescope. Fencibles with muskets crowded the
railing, watching the shapes patrolling the black beach. “I’ve asked
to have the spot marked and added to the atlas, recorded in the log.
We’ll sketch the species for later investigation. Odd, isn’t it, how
they rushed to the shore, hoping that we’d wreck so they could fall
upon us? Odd, I mean, because even without a soul, these creatures
have hope.”

As the
Gallinule
chugged along, the beasts kept pace. Reglum
observed the clapper-claws through a telescope until their island
dwindled in the mist. “Some kind of thassonid,” he murmured
to Sally, offering her the telescope. “Kin perhaps to the
shaharsh-harsh
, the knuckle-dog. Note the double set of canine teeth, nostrils
on the top of the head, flocculent pelt, scapular muscles highly
developed.”