The Providence Rider (27 page)

“Sure as fuck can’t walk,” Jack added, and then he pressed the mouth of his bottle against Matthew’s lips. “Have a drink with me, Spadey.”

Matthew averted his face. He caught a movement, and saw that this little drama was being observed by Fancy, who had stood up upon her rock to watch.

“No, thank you,” Matthew said. And he saw the Indian girl turn her back and dive from her perch into the sea, where the waves closed over her brown body and rippled white in her descent.

“You didn’t hear me, boyo.” Jack’s voice was very quiet. “I said I want you to have a drink with me.”

“And then with me.” Mack’s bottle also pressed against Matthew’s mouth. “Wet your whistle while ya can.”

“No,” Matthew repeated, for his boundary had been reached. “Thank you.” He started to move away from them, even as they pressed in harder on either side. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to—”

Mack suddenly whipped
The Lesser Key Of Solomon
from Matthew’s hand. He used it to smack Matthew hard on the nose, which caused a fierce and staggering pain and made Matthew’s eyes blur with tears. In the next instant, before Matthew could right himself, Jack gripped the back of his neck and headbutted him on the forehead, sending jagged spears of light and flaming stars through Matthew’s brain. His arms and legs at once became heavy dead limbs, without feeling or purpose.

“Hold him up,” he heard one of them say, as if an echo in a long cavernous corridor.

“Little fucker don’t weigh nothin’.”

“Got me an idea. Don’t let him drop.”

“Want me to knee him in the balls?”

“No. Let’s send him swimmin’. But first…drag him over here. Lemme get them curtain cords.”

“What’re ya thinkin’, brother?”

“I’m thinkin’ Spadey got hisself drunk, climbed up on that thing, it fell, and…over the side he went.”

“You mean to
kill
him?”

“I mean to wash our hands of his shitty little self, that’s what I mean. And damned to the depths for him, where he’ll never be found. Come on, drag him over.”

In the fog of his dazed brain and throbbing brainpan, Matthew realized this was not good for his future. In fact, it was horribly bad. He felt himself being dragged. His eyes were blinded by sunlight and black shadows that shifted in and out of his befouled vision. He tried to get his feet under himself, tried to get a hand up to protest this rough treatment.

“He’s comin’ round.”

“Smack him again.”

Another headbutt slammed into Matthew’s forehead. Bright balls of light exploded behind his eyes. He felt his legs dance of their own volition for a few seconds. He thought Gilliam Vincent might commend him. Wasn’t he at a dance at Sally Almond’s tavern? Didn’t he hear fiddle music—though terribly off-key—and the banging of a drum close to his ear?

The echoing voices returned.

“…up on that thing with him. Tie his hands behind him.”

“Ain’t somebody gonna miss the cords?”

“Not my concern, brother. Maybe they’ll think he made himself some reins for his horse, and got tangled up in ’em.”

Horse?
Matthew thought, in his deep dark cave.
What horse?

He felt pain at his shoulders. His arms had been pulled back. Tying his hands?

“Now get the other cord tied around him and the horse. Come on, hurry it!”

Horse?
Matthew thought once more. It seemed very important that he figure this out, but his brain was not working too well. He felt himself being wrapped around with a rope of some kind.
Lemme get them curtain cords
, he remembered hearing.

“They’ll know it was us.”

“No, brother, they won’t. Leave your bottle on the ledge. Help me push this bastard over. You ready?”

“Always ready.”

“Push.”

Matthew felt himself falling. He tried to blink his light-smeared vision clear. He had a scream locked behind his lips, but his mouth would not open.

Horse
, he thought.

As in…
seahorse
.

He hit the water on his side. The chill of the sea shocked some of the sense back into him. He had time to gasp a lungful of air before he went under.

I float
, Matthew recalled saying to Sirki.

But he realized at once that no man tied to several hundred pounds of stone seahorse was going to float, and so with the desperate air locked in his lungs and his hands bound behind him he rode his horse beneath the waves and down and down into the blue silence below.

Underwater, Matthew was turning as he sank. The seahorse was above him one instant, and then the next he was riding it to his death. His ears crackled with pain. He heard the air bubbles bursting from his mouth. His vision was clouded with blue. He roused himself to fight against the cords that bound his wrists together, yet his strength was already much abused and used-up. He was a dry vessel, surrounded and suffocated by the sea.

Panic set in and caused him to thrash wildly and with no purpose. More air escaped lungs and mouth. The pressure upon his ears was inescapable, as was his predicament. The roar in his head was the sound of a watery grave opening to forever hide his corpse from the sun, and yet it might be the voice of a demon from
The Lesser Key Of Solomon
, exulting in the demise of a good man.

Matthew’s stone mount suddenly hit something with a sea-muffled
thud
, landing upright on its base. Its descent ceased.

He could see only smears and shadows, strange forms around him that might be angular rocks sculpted by time and currents. His heart pounded, and with the next loss of air he knew his stuttering lungs would lose their grip on life and the sea would come rushing in to complete the job the Thackers had begun.

He couldn’t get free. He couldn’t wrench himself loose from the seahorse. He was done, he realized. What gunpowder bombs had not stolen, the cool blue depths would take.

Finished
, he thought.
But dear God…I am not ready to
—

A mouth clamped onto his. A breath of air forced itself into his lungs. Black hair swirled into his face. Something began sawing at the cord binding his wrists. A sharp edge grazed him. A piece of glass or a broken shell? He had to hold on a moment longer…just a moment, if he could…

His body shivered and jerked in involuntary battle against the oncoming dark. One moment more…just one…

He felt the cord give way, and the Indian girl had freed his hands.

There was still the rope binding body to seahorse. Wrapped around his waist. He grasped at it and pulled. Tighter than a swollen tick. Where was the knot? Somewhere underneath the horse? The girl’s mouth was suddenly on his again, feeding him more breath. He felt her sharp edge at work on the cord at his left side. Sawing frantically, it seemed; as frantically as he fought the pounding and the pain and the darkness reaching for him. He looked up, silver bubbles bursting from his mouth and nostrils because he just couldn’t hold the air in any longer. Sunlight shone on the surface above. How far? Thirty or forty feet? He could never make that.

She pulled at him. The cord had come loose enough for him to get free of it. He started desperately for the surface, but she yet pulled at him in another direction. Deeper, it seemed. He thought she must be insane, and he was not a merman to her mermaid; yet her pull was insistent and now she had her arm around him and was urging him to swim with her.

I am not finished
, he thought in his anguished blue haze
. I have much to do
.
I am not
finished…but I must trust this girl
.

And so he kicked forward with her as the silver bubbles bloomed from his mouth and nose, and three more kicks and the Indian girl was leading him downward still. She took him into a dark place, through some kind of opening. A cave? he thought, near letting his lungs either empty themselves or explode. But no, not a cave…

They swam a few seconds longer, and then she abruptly led him up and his head broke the surface and he tasted salty sweet air. He inhaled mightily with a shudder that racked his body and in the next instant was punished by spasms of retching. She held him up while he filled his lungs and emptied his belly. In the dark blue gloom he saw the stones of a wall to his right and two feet above his head the stones and rafters of a ceiling. He reached up with both hands to grasp hold of a rafter, finding the wood spongy but still able to bear his weight, and he hung there breathing hard, coughing viciously, and shivering with not the chill but the idea that death had been so very, very close.

“Oh my God,” Matthew rasped. And again, for he knew not what else to say: “Oh my God.”

“Don’t let go,” Fancy told him, her body pressed against his side and her own hands up to hold onto the near-rotted rafter. “Do you hear me?” Her English was perfect, not a trace of an accent.

“I hear,” Matthew said; more of a frog’s croak than human speech.

“Just breathe,” she said.

“No instruction…necessary,” he managed to answer, though he had to breathe through his mouth for his injured nostrils were nearly swollen shut. His head was still pounding, his heart about to beat through his chest, and his stomach roiling. He closed his eyes, for now a sick weakness was threatening to make his fingers open. If he slid back in just yet he was done for.

“You’re going to live,” she said.

He nodded, but he was thinking he would not bet on such a statement. His eyes opened and he again surveyed their surroundings. Not a cave, but…a building of some kind? “Where are we?”

“The town under the sea,” Fancy answered, her black hair pushed back from her forehead and her face a blue-daubed darkness. “I found it, nearly the first day I was here.”

Matthew thought his brain must still be fogged and burdened. “Town? Under the sea?”

“Yes. Many buildings. Some with air still caught in them. I swim here, many times.”

“A
town
?” Matthew still couldn’t make heads-or-tails of it. Possibly Fancy had seen him go over the balcony and had used broken glass from a window to cut him free. “Did they know?” He tried to clarify that: “The brothers. Did they know?”

“About this place? No. It fell away from the island in the earthquake, long years ago.”

“Earthquake,” he repeated, lapsing back into his parrotty pattern. That would go along with the tremors still being felt on Pendulum. He felt as if his head was full of mush. “Who told you this?”

“One of the servants. She was a child when it happened.”

Matthew nodded. He still felt numb and bewildered. It occurred to him quite suddenly, as if he hadn’t realized it before, that this beautiful creature pressed against him was quite naked.

“Who are you?” she asked. “You’re not like the others. You’re not part of them. So…who are you, really?”

“I can’t explain that,” he decided to say. “But I can tell you that I knew an Iroquois brave who was called He Runs Fast Too. He—”

“Came over on the ship with me,” Fancy interrupted. “And with Nimble Climber. How did you know him? And what happened to him?”

“He went back to your land. Back to the tribe. He…helped me do something important.”

“He’s dead now,” she said. “I can hear it in your voice.”

“Yes, he’s dead. And you were called—”

“I know what I was called. That was a long time ago.”

“Those two who have you. They—”

“I don’t wish to speak of them,” she said. “But I will say they do not have
all
of me. I always find a place to go. As here. In the silence, I can think. I can
be
.” She adjusted her grip on the beam because her fingers were sinking into the black rot. Her voice was quiet and distant when she next spoke. “I love this. This ocean. This blue world. It speaks to me. It
hides
me. It makes me feel safe.”

Matthew thought this was the only girl in the world who would feel safe forty-something feet underwater, with her head in a small breathing space in the ruins of a collapsed town. But he understood exactly what she meant.

“I can never go back,” Fancy told him. “Not to my land. Not to my people.”

“Why not? If I could get you out of here—and away from
them
—then why not?”

“You could never get me away from them.” It was said with a fair amount of smouldering anger. “They would kill you if you tried.”

Matthew said with a weak grin, “They’d have to do better than this, wouldn’t they?”

“They would do far better. I have seen them do…terrible things. And to me, also. I used to fight them, but I suffered for it. Now I don’t fight, but I still suffer. They enjoy that. It is their great
pleasure
in living.”

“I’m going to get you away from them.”

“No,” she answered, with the hardness of a stone that could not be moved, “you will not. Because even if you could—which you cannot—I have no place to go. Except another bed, in another room, in another house owned by another man. I am…how would you say…an item to be sought. Not so much now, as there are many others like me brought across the ocean. But I am still rare enough.”

Matthew couldn’t fully see her face in the blue gloom, but he had the impression of looking at someone who had long ago lost all ability to smile, and whose happiness was silence and peace taken at every possible moment. He didn’t wish to think what those rough hands and biting teeth had done to her. He didn’t wish to think what her eyes had seen.

“I can help you,” he offered.

“I can never go back,” she repeated. “Not who I am now.”

It was said, Matthew noted, the Indian way: all statement of fact, all hard true reality, and not a sliver of self-pity or pretense.

“All right,” Matthew said, but he knew himself. And, for better or for worse, he never surrendered.

“We should start up,” Fancy told him. “Take in some breaths. Get ready. It is easy for me, but it may be difficult for you. I will hold your hand all the way.”

“Thank you.” Matthew thought this sounded like a casual stroll along the Great Dock, but he knew one usually did not perish on such a stroll, whereas in this instance perishing was a prominent possibility.

“Are you ready?” she asked in another moment.

The dreaded question, he thought. And the answer?

“As I’ll ever be,” he said, though the racing of his heart spoke otherwise.

She reached out for him and he gave her his left hand. “Stay close to me,” she directed. “We will pass through a doorway and a broken window and we will be out. Mind the glass at the bottom of the window.”

“I will.” If it hadn’t snagged him on the way in, he wasn’t concerned about it on the way out. And he was determined to be her second skin, within reason.

“Take a breath and let it go,” she said. He imagined he could see the gleam of her eyes as she stared at him. “Then take another breath and hold it. When you do that, we will start.”

Matthew nodded. Damn, this was some deep hell he’d gotten himself into. He was scared nearly beyond his wits from the memory of his lungs spasming on the edge of drowning. He wasn’t sure he had the strength or willpower to make this swim. His head still pounded and his nose sat on his face like a lump of hot tar. Was the damned thing broken? No time to fret about that now. He took the breath and let it go. He was afraid. But then he felt her hand squeeze his and he took the next breath—a deep breath, as deep as possible—and held it and instantly Fancy went under and pulled him with her. He let go his one-handed grip on the beam, and he was swimming alongside the Indian girl with terror thrumming through his veins.

He didn’t know when they went through the doorway, except his right shoulder hit a hard surface that shot fresh pain through him. God blast it! he thought as he held onto his air. Fancy pulled him onward with remarkable strength. She was indeed in her element, a daughter of the blue world. Did they pass through a broken window? Matthew wasn’t sure, for he could see nothing but blurs and smears. Maybe something caught at his stockings, though he wasn’t sure about that either. Then the light from above brightened and they were rising. Matthew had a blurred glimpse of what might have been the white stone seahorse, perched on a crooked roof. All around were the shapes of stone buildings, with alleys and streets between them. It appeared to Matthew in this blue haze that some were intact and others fallen to ruin either by the action of the sea or the violence of the earthquake. Then he could gather no more impressions for his lungs were aching and the surface was still thirty feet above.

She took him up, their hands locked together.

Perhaps it was a swift ascent. To Matthew, as he fought to control both his spasming lungs and the terror that chewed at him, it was the journey of night into day. Never had such a distance, which could easily be walked on land, seemed so far and so horrible. Ten feet below the surface, he lost nearly all his air in an explosion of bubbles that swept past his face in silver mockery. Then his lungs desired to pull in the seawater, and yet Matthew by force of will and fear of death kept the Atlantic from invading him, and two more kicks and the surface was right there in his face and his head was breaking the surface and the foamy slop of a wave almost drowned him in his moment of victory but he opened his mouth and drew in breath after breath and felt Fancy’s arms around him holding him up.

He pushed the hair back from his forehead and treaded water, his chest heaving. He looked up at the professor’s castle on the cliff above, and could clearly see the third floor library’s balcony and the ledge where one of the two stone seahorses had lately rested. The Thackers were long gone. If anyone else but Fancy had seen this assault, they had kept their lips sealed for there appeared to be no activity anywhere. It was just another sunny day in Fell’s paradise.

Here the waves were rough, as they surged toward the base of the cliffs. Matthew could see from this vantage point where part of the island had been sheared off. He recalled the professor saying
My father was the governor here
. It was likely that his father was indeed governor when the town—whatever its name had been—had collapsed into the sea.

“Follow me,” said Fancy, and she began to swim toward the cliffs not directly but at a forty-degree angle. Though weakened and certainly no champion in the water, Matthew followed as best he could. Fancy’s taut bottom breaking the surface and the glistening shine of her legs made following nearly a delightful obsession.

In time they reached a cove shielded from the breakers by a series of large rocks, and Fancy could stand in hip-high water. Matthew felt more rocks under his feet and walked carefully lest a surge of waves trapped and snapped an ankle; Fancy, however, knew the territory and forged onward like a true providence rider. A beach pebbled with black stones was ahead. On a rock in the shadows lay her clothing, neatly folded, and her shoes. As Fancy hurriedly dressed herself, Matthew staggered from the sea and fell to his knees in the grainy gray sand.