The Choir Boats (54 page)

“Yes! We’ll pillow our heads with his liver at night, and his ears we’ll
fly as a flutt’ry kite. His nates we’ll use to strike a light, his claws we’ll
use to rake our shite. Oh, come sing with me now: we’re off to skin the
devil, boys . . .”

“Oh Billy, what I would not give to have you with us fighting the
Ornish,” said Tom, as the song ended.

“Oh, that you shall, little Tommy, just wait a spell and we’ll bring
you back an army,” Billy said, and then added, “I shall miss you, Tommy
Two-Fingers, and your fightin’ bride — now, now, don’t deny it, she’ll
make you a handsome wife, a
spirited
one. Well, lad, we’re off again into
the great Midwhere.”

Everyone made their goodbyes in the lamplight by the ship’s
gangplank.

“Take this letter to my brother in London,” said Nexius to Reglum.

“Float light as an emperor’s wing and then shred your enemies
into gubbings,” said Billy to Tom. “And never forget Pinch, who
shan’t make the voyage home with us.”

“Find the door of hope,” said Jambres. “But beware the many
angels trapped in the seams of purgatory. Now then, where is Isaak?
I must wish her Godspeed in trucial grace.”

The gangplank was drawn, the hawsers thrown and the
Gallinule
warped away from the quay. Dawn was two hours off. Sally,
Barnabas, and Sanford, together with Reglum, Dorentius, and
Mineous and joined by the Minders, stood at the ship’s railing. Tom,
Afsana, Nexius, and Jambres looked up at them from the quay, with
the Queen and Chamberlain a few paces behind.

“Halt!”

A troop of Sacerdotal Guards ran out of the darkness and down
the quay, just ahead of the Arch-Bishop and a clutch of Optimates
and Learned Doctors.

“Halt!” shouted the Arch-Bishop. “Halt now!”

The
Gallinule
drew away from the quay, the steam engine
beginning to chug.

Jambres turned, looked up at Sally, his red coat blazing in the
lamplight, and yelled, “Go, don’t stop!”

In her mind, Sally also heard words that no one else heard, a plea
from the Cretched Man:
Find her, find the master singer, the African
girl!

A second later the Cretched Man turned back towards the quay,
took a step out of the light and was gone.

“Treason!” shouted the Arch-Bishop, waving a piece of paper.
“The House of Optimates voted this evening to dissolve the present
government. The House has authorized the Arch-Bishop to form a
new government for conduct of the war.”

Nexius and the Marines took positions around the Queen and
the Chamberlain. Tom and Afsana drew pistols and stood flanking
Nexius.

“The Queen is the Queen,” said Nexius. “You cannot touch her.”

The Arch-Bishop shook his head, and said, “Captain Nexius, you
are out of your reckoning. This entire operation is unauthorized.
The Queen has no right to send out a tough ship with the House’s
approval even in peacetime, but to do so in war, when we need every
ship and every soldier . . . Far worse to do so under the guidance of
him — the enemy of our people for time immemorial.”

The Arch-Bishop looked to the spot where Jambres had been but
did not seem alarmed to find Jambres gone, smiling rather at the
confirmation of his words.

“You see,” said the Arch-Bishop, pointing at the Queen. “She
allies herself with a demon. She twists the loyalties of her soldiers,
and consorts with Karket-soomi who have filled her mind with
deceit. Thus the House has passed a vote of no confidence. You shall
remain a queen, Your Majesty, but a queen without a government, a
queen under the direct and firm protection of the House and of the
Gremium.”

No one moved for a moment and then Afsana calmly stepped
in front of Nexius, pointed her pistol at the Arch-Bishop, and said,
“No.”

As the
Gallinule
moved down the canal towards the harbour, the
last thing those onboard saw before they passed out of the lamplight
was the eruption of gunfire and Afsana being shot down.

Afsana lay on the ground unmoving. Tom lunged forward, firing
blindly. Marines and Guards battled hand to hand. The Arch-Bishop
led Guards to the edge of the canal, where the Guards knelt and
fired on the
Gallinule
.

Afsana lay unmoving — that sight was the last thing the McDoons
saw as the
Gallinule
slid into darkness. Barnabas tried to leap
overboard to swim back. Sanford, shouting “Afsana!”, restrained his
old friend.

The ship reached the harbour. Nexius had arranged for the shore
batteries to fire on the Ornish blockade as a diversion, but not all
the batteries fired and many fired only once, another sign that
news of the Arch-Bishop’s coup was spreading. The Ornish heard
the
Gallinule
’s engines during the pauses in the shore barrage. The
Gallinule
broke through the blockade but was hit many times. The
crew stoked the engines to the highest level and the tough ship
sprinted away from Yount Great-Port and from the Ornish. In the
dark behind them, those onboard the
Gallinule
saw lines of fire
ringing the city.

While the sun rose, the
Gallinule
faced nothing but empty ocean
as it raced towards the gates of the Interstitial Lands. Sally sat in the
bow, staring ahead, clutching her St. Morgaine’s medal. She heard
the voices in her head, whispering “In the sickle sinny drift,” and she
saw in her mind dozens of bodies floating in long, strangling strands
of kelp. One of the bodies was that of the Specimen, or someone just
like the elongated body preserved at the University, his stork-nose
covered with barnacles and whelks.

Reglum came up behind her. Sally did not want to see him. She
saw the bandage on his face covering the wound from the explosion
that killed the fraulein, and she hated him for his bravery. She hated
him for not saving Afsana. She hated him for not being James.

“Sally, I don’t know what to say,” said Reglum.

Sally suddenly realized that Reglum’s hands were bloody and
that he had blood smeared across his clothes.

“Reglum, are you hurt!?”

“No, no, it’s Dorentius. He was hit by shrapnel. A cannonball
smashed onto the deck, showering him with splinters. His leg must
come off or else it will go gangrenous. He is feverish and in great
pain.”

“Oh no, not Dorentius! I cannot take more of this, no more!”
cried Sally.

Reglum held her and said, “I know, dearest, I know.”

The
Gallinule
surged ahead. As the dawn proceeded, the damage
from running the blockade was more evident. Two bodies lay near
the forecastle.

“To think that I might lose my
hatmoril
right here in Yount, not
out there in the Places-In-Between,” gasped Reglum. “I cannot bear
to think of that. Do you know what I told him? I said that he could
not die first because he is a Cambridge man, and Cambridge always
comes second to Oxford!”

Sanford and Barnabas joined Sally and Reglum. The four stood
close in the bow as the
Gallinule
raced for the Fences of Yount. Sally
held tight with one hand to her Morgaine medal, and held Reglum’s
hand with her other. Isaak, having already caught her first rat in the
hold and offered her victim’s kidneys to Sally, groomed herself at
Sally’s feet.

At last Sanford said, “If Dorentius cannot, who will fulginate for
us?”

No one answered. The sun rose. As it did so, three dolphins burst
from the ocean just in front of the
Gallinule
’s prow and began pacing
the ship. In that instant, Sally saw a great brown eye peering at her
through a wheel of gold, and heard in the pith of her bones a song
that was the sine of love.

Sally said, “I will. I will fulginate for us if Dorentius is unable.”

She kept her eyes fixed on the three dolphins, glistening and
black, as they leaped up and down, up and down, the arc of their
bodies saying to her:

Return

Return

Return.

Maggie’s mother was dying. Her breath shushed in and out, as she
said, “
Chi di
, there is still time, but not much, little eagle.”

“Mama,” said Maggie.

“Listen,” said her mother. “What’s my name?”

“Persephone Collins,” said Maggie.

“That’s what they called me in the big house,” said Maggie’s
mother. “But not what they called me out back. Among our folks I
was ‘Ada.’ The old women out back would say, ‘Little Ada, come here,’
and ‘You look like your father for sure, Ada-Eze.’”

Maggie had never heard this story.

“Sometimes,” wheezed her mother. “Sometimes, they’d say, ‘Ada,
you’re just like your father was, but you got your mama’s eyes.’”

Maggie had never heard anything about her grandmother.

“So I would ask them, ‘What you mean, I got my mama’s eyes?’
but then nobody would say much, just shoo me along or give me a
corn-husk to make a doll with.”

Maggie listened so hard her ears hurt.

“But by and by I found out what they meant, little bit there, little
bit here, you know?” said Maggie’s mother. She paused. “My mama
was a
white
woman!”

Maggie swallowed air.

“You heard me just right,” said her mother. “You’re grandmamma
was
white
. Makes sense, if you think about it. Otherwise why are my
eyes kind of green like?”

The air in the cellar was close. Maggie heard the Irish family
moving about on the other side of the wall.

“Never, ever did find out
who
the white woman might be, the
one who was my mama,” said Maggie’s mother. “Oh, I looked and
looked at every white woman on the plantation, and at the landing.
Thought for a while it might be the woman who ran the little store
at the landing, but it wasn’t.”

“I don’t understand, Mama,” said Maggie. “What happened to
your father?”

“You
know
I never met him, child,” said Maggie’s mother. “He
was gone long before I was old enough to remember. I was brought
up by all my aunts and grandmothers, only they weren’t really my
aunts and grandmothers, just the best and most kindly women in
the world who took care of a poor orphan in the shacks out back.”

Maggie nodded.

“I tell you now before it is too late,” said her mother. “What I
learned was that my father was a slave like all of us, tall and
handsome and a prince from Africa, just like
your
father was. And
my mother was a young pretty white woman, not long in Maryland,
come from over here someplace. Well, you know that a black slave
and a white woman . . . worst of all, she was already some other
man’s wife, a
buckra
with some money they said. That
buckra
man
was so angry, why, he . . . he . . .”

Maggie wanted to stop her ears.

“Story was, he had my father cut like they do with . . . with bulls
and stallions . . . cut him bad, so he was no longer a man full and
proper,” whispered Maggie’s mother. “And
then
that
buckra
had him
hung up from a tree.”

After a while, Maggie said, “What happened to my grandmother?”

“No one rightly knows, child,” said Maggie’s mother. “The man,
he wasn’t going to have such as me runnin’ around in his house,
that was for sure! Couldn’t let me be seen anywhere, couldn’t let
anyone back here know that his wife done got herself licked by the
tar brush, now could he? Well, that ol’ plantation on the Choptank
River was pretty far from anything, not even close to much else in
Maryland, just lots of water and field after field of tobacco. So, he let
my mama have her baby, only she had to give it over to the aunties
in the shacks. And then he took my mama back to England. Neither
came back again to Maryland, at least not so’s I knew of it. So, that’s
how come I grew up an orphan girl, ’cept that I was happy with all
my aunties and grandmothers. And then, by and by, your father
came along and, well, you know the rest of the story, child.”

Maggie’s mother was crying. Maggie was too, and they held tight.

“You know, my daughter,” said Maggie’s mother. “One time I
heard from the oldest of my aunties that it was a terrible scene the
day they brought me back to the shacks. Oh, a terrible scene, with
my mama wailin’ and all the aunties wailin’. I was only just been
borned, wrapped in swaddlin’ clothes. My mama did not want to
give me up, not at all. ‘Fit to break the heart of a stone,’ said that
oldest auntie to me. ‘But only that the
buckra
man, he like to had no
heart at all.’ So, I believe my mama
loved
me, and maybe she
loved
my
daddy too, and I am sure she loves you, Maggie, wherever she is.”

Neither Maggie nor her mother could speak again for a long time.
Finally, Maggie’s mother said, “Anyway, I am going to meet her real
soon now, my mama. I hear the drum-spirit and all the
ndichie
telling
me that, and the good Lord and all His other angels too. Soon I will
meet my mama and know her again.”