The Scarab Path (14 page)

They
came in close to midday, but the cool air off the sea worked against the
pounding sun. The port was seething: a dozen ships moored at the piers. Most
had sails furled about their rigging-webbed masts, but one possessed the stout
funnels of a steamer, and another was constructed of copper metal and had
neither sails nor a visible engine. The largest of the ships had triple rows of
holes along each side, and Trallo explained that if the wind dropped it had
slaves to row it. Che recalled the human commodity she had recently travelled
alongside, and hoped they were bound for a better future than that.

While
the others settled in a taverna under the watchful eyes of the two Solarnese,
Che followed Trallo to the dockside to see about arranging passage. Standing
there, with the grey sea stretching, windlashed, to the far horizon, she felt
dizzy at the thought of how far she had come.

‘What
sea is this?’ she asked, touching Trallo’s shoulder. She was past the edge of
all her maps. Was this the same sea that washed Collegium’s wharves? ‘Where
does it go?’

He
smiled up at her. ‘This is the Sunroad Sea, and they say it goes all the way to
where the sun comes from, if you could but sail that far.’ He added, ‘We’ll
have passage on that ship,’ and pointed out a sleek Spiderlands felucca,
two-masted and painted gold and blue. ‘She’s the
Lord Janis
out of Portoriens – that’s the furthest east in the world that the
Spider-kinden claim, the very eastern limit of their satrapies. And you know
what?’ He was grinning widely now. She shook her head slowly to show she did
not know, and he finished it gleefully. ‘You know what? That’s
west
of here.’

Che felt
weak at the knowledge. The Lowlanders tended to assume that the Spidlerlands
just extended as far as they needed to go. She was standing at the shore of a
whole new ocean, being jostled by sailors and traders of a dozen kinden out of
who-knew-what distant ports. This was not Collegium’s wilful ignorance of the
Empire’s ambitions, or the self-spun mystery of the Spiderlands, or the
deliberate isolation of the Commonweal. This was
far
.
She found herself searching the crowd suddenly for a familiar style of dress, a
brooch or a sword-hilt whose style she recognized. There were Solarnese there,
in their flowing white, but no more. She was the only representative of the
Lowlands, at the docks of Porta Rabi. She was all the world she knew.

Trallo
put a hand to her elbow. ‘Steady now,’ he said kindly. ‘It was the same for me,
when my dad brought me here the first time. Around the Exalsee we mostly look
west and south to the Spiderlands where our ladies and lords come from. It was
a shock for me, too.’

The
captain of the
Lord Janis
was now coming towards
them, and Trallo nodded respectfully to her. ‘Here,’ he said sidelong to Che,
‘you know why Spider-kinden always name their cities and their ships after men,
don’t you?’

Che
mustered a small smile. ‘Why?’

‘’Cos
they’re both ruled by women,’ Trallo answered, and then he bowed before the
Spider-kinden captain as she arrived.

*

She
dreamt she was on board ship. She
was
on board ship,
of course, rocking in her cramped bunk, above Praeda, as the
Lord Janis
steered wide of the cliffs and reefs of the
Stone Coast. As she dreamt now, though, she left the cabin and clambered aloft.
The crew was gone and the sky above was starless. The skeleton of the rigging
was without sail. Only one man stood on deck, stood at the rail and stared out
to sea, grey-robed and narrow-shouldered. The ship itself was dead still, the
waves all about frozen into jagged teeth.

‘Achaeos,’
she said, and in the dream it was. He turned to her, and she saw his white
eyes, his grey skin, and she ran forward.

She
stopped close to him, but not close enough to touch. She remembered that harsh,
commanding voice, its angry, distant tones.

‘What is
it?’ she asked. ‘Please, Achaeos, tell me what I have to do.’ There was a scowl
building on his face, piece by piece. The sight made her cower away from him.

He had
always been a gentle man who seldom raised his voice. He had never struck her.
In her dream she thought he would strike her, on the deck of the stilled ship.

‘What is
this?’ he demanded. ‘In dreams? Must you dredge my memory up in dreams? Is this
what I have become, just a knife for you to prick yourself with?’

‘I don’t
understand,’ she said, but a wind had struck up along with his reproach,
tugging now at the empty rigging. She had to shout it again. ‘I can’t put you
down! You won’t let me!’

He shook
his head. When he spoke again, his voice was the wind, just as the voice of the
haunted forest Darakyon had been the myriad sounds of the leaves.
You put yourself on the rack of my memory. You turn the wheel
yourself
.

‘That’s
not true!’ she shouted at him. ‘It’s not fair. I want you alive, but I can’t
have you alive, and nor will you be dead! What can I do? Do you want me to
follow you?’ Standing there beneath that featureless sky, she wondered if she
might already have done.
Is this death, this petrified sea?

The wind
died abruptly, leaving nothing but the two of them staring at each other. ‘I am
dead and gone, Che,’ he said, and it was once more the voice of the man who had
loved her, against all the dictates of history and his own people. ‘Do not
raise me up like this to injure yourself. I am gone. Just let me go.’

He made
to turn away and she rushed at him, determined to hold him in her arms. For a
moment she had the cloth of his robe in her hands, but then he was gone, and
the rail was gone too, and she was falling with a shriek towards the
razor-sharp claws of the frozen ocean …

Waking, suddenly, for once she remembered exactly where she was. She
slipped from the bunk, felt herself swaying in time with the ship’s pitch and
yaw. Praeda muttered something and turned over, looking pale with her face
sheened in sweat. All the Collegium academics had turned out to be poor
sailors, and the Vekken were keeping to their cabin so obstinately that the
same was probably true of them. The sea along this craggy coast did not rest
easy, but Che had found herself proof against it. She dressed in her tunic and
cloak, and pattered barefoot out into the walkway running between cabins.
Around her the wood of the ship creaked and shifted, and she found it an oddly
comforting sound, a created thing behaving in the way it had been intended.

Up
above, it was cold but the change was refreshing to her. There was a handful of
sailors still at their duties, Spider-kinden all and mostly men. If not for the
dream, she might just have watched them work. They did everything with such
conscious elegance, as though they had stayed out here not to work the ship but
to perform for Cheerwell Maker. It was not the killing grace of the
Mantis-kinden, but something more showy, and which they took more joy in.

She
scanned the rails, finding nothing, no smear nor smudge of him. The sails
billowed and the waves rolled the ship up on to their backs, and then sloughed
it down the other side. The sky above boasted stars and a slice of the moon,
save to port where the cliffs ate out a deeper darkness, unrelieved by
anything.

She took
a deep breath of the sea air, feeling the deck shift beneath her feet, her toes
flexing automatically for balance. Below, the others would still be sleeping
fitfully, groaning, or staggering off to be ill. Che, who had suffered the
airships and the automotive, had at last found a vessel she was comfortable
with.

But of course
. The
Lord Janis
was built by the Inapt, crewed by the Inapt, and it therefore carried her along
with it smoothly, while it dragged the others by force. She smiled at that,
despite all her worries. Of all the rest, only Trallo had been weathering this
rough sea well, and she guessed that it was sheer experience, in his case. He
had made such trips so often that the sea held no more terrors for him.

The ship
changed its tack noticeably, slanting away from the cliffs. Ahead, along the
dark and starless line of the land, Che could see a red spark high enough to
challenge the moon.

‘What is
it?’ she demanded of the nearest sailor. He looked at her mockingly at first,
but swallowed some flippant answer and said, ‘The Light of Suphat.’

‘The
what?’

‘A great
fire atop a tower, that warns us where the rocks are.’

‘A
lighthouse,’ she realized.

He
shrugged. ‘Stay above decks, lady, you shall see two more along the cliffs,
named Amnet and Dekkir. When we have passed Dekkir, which shall be near dawn,
we shall be within reach of the harbour of Khanaphes.’

After the ship had passed the Light of Dekkir, and after dawn had come,
sluggish, to the Sunroad Sea, the land had changed, the cliffs falling smoothly
away until the
Lord Janis
made its smooth progress
across a shoreline of sand. The beach ran inland as far as the eye could see,
and Che realized it was the desert, the true desert.

‘How can
it be so dry, right next to the sea?’ she asked. There were odd defiant clumps
of gorse and thornbushes, and a big ridge-shelled beetle was carefully
collecting the dew that had condensed across its carapace. Other than that,
life seemed to have abandoned the place.

‘Dry
means no rain, that’s all,’ Manny Gorget pointed out. He was leaning heavily on
the rail, still looking green despite the easier going. ‘Find me a map and I’ll
show you where the rain stops. It’s all in the wind and the landscape. Salt
water’s no substitute.’ When he could be persuaded to talk on his subject, he
was quite competent.

Che
turned to Trallo, who had been making some arrangements with the captain. ‘Have
you been there? The desert?’

‘Just
the once.’ His smile was thin-lipped. ‘Not nice. And you have to pick a time
when the Scorpion-kinden aren’t on the warpath.’

‘But how
can they live out there? How can anything survive?’

‘Bella
Cheerwell, you have to look cursed hard to find a place where
nobody
lives. People find a way, always. Now, Sieur
Gorget, would you go roust your fellows? We’re going to be coming up on the
city soon and, frankly, if you visit Khanaphes, you should see it from the
seaward side.’

‘What
happens when we arrive?’ Che asked him, as Manny lurched off unsteadily against
the ship’s swell.

‘I find
out how welcome we are, to start with,’ Trallo said. ‘They’re odd fish, these
Khanaphir. They’re quiet as you like, hard-working, polite, and if they don’t
like you, you might as well turn around and go away, because you’ll never
change it no matter what. So I’ll take a sounding, as the sailors say, and find
out how best to stay on their good side.’

‘I’m
glad we’ve got you along,’ she told him.

‘The
labourer is worth his hire,’ he said. ‘I’ll see about letting word trickle to
the Ministers, about you being an ambassador. Until they come to you, you
mustn’t try to push in on them.’

‘I’ve no
intention of it. All I really need to do is make sure Master Gripshod and the
others get to study the place, and they can probably do that just by standing
and looking.’

‘Hmm,
two things,’ Trallo said. ‘First, don’t poke and pry until I give the
all-clear. They are a very private people, the Khanaphir. Second, don’t call
him that.’

‘What?’

‘
Master
Gripshod – or
Master
anything. Local customs, local rules. They keep the word “Master” for other
purposes, and it’s got nothing to do with people like us.’

He was
quite serious. She waited for him to elaborate, and he shrugged.

‘I’m not
saying that I understand it. I’ve been to Khanaphes a score of times and I
still don’t understand the place. But, take my word for it, find some other way
to make introductions.’

She was below when the
Lord Janis
began to
tack, but she felt the change in the timbers, and ran up on deck to see.

The
desert had turned green. While her back was turned the land had been colonized
by a vast expanse of reeds and spidery-rooted trees and huge arthrophytes twice
as high as a man, all sprouting from a maze of little water channels. The
Lord Janis
was taking in sail, slowing down, and Che saw
that it was angling for a broad watercourse that cut through the marsh ahead, a
river in its own right.

The
others were assembled on deck by now: the three academics standing forward of
the mast, the two Vekken sullenly behind it. Che went to join Berjek Gripshod,
watching the riot of vegetation pass by on the port side.

‘The
Jamail delta,’ Trallo clarified for them. ‘Goes on for miles. Once a year they
dredge the main channel clear of silt, but it still moves around a bit. It all
does. They say nobody but the natives can find their way in there from day to
day.’

The
channel itself was wide enough for five ships like the
Janis
to have sailed in abreast. It was a truce with nature, for beyond those
carefully maintained borders the greenery ran mad. There were flies and
dragonflies near man-size quartering the air over the water, and she saw
something huge and brown and slimy-looking surface to peer at the ship with
goggling eyes.

‘This
river is life, basically,’ Trallo was saying. ‘This river is Khanaphes and all
the other towns north of it. This is the line of green through the desert that
everyone here needs to survive.’

Something
caught Che’s eye, something too rigid and angular to be natural. Between the
ferns and the articulated trunks of horsetails, she saw huts – a rabble of
little straw-roofed hovels lifted out of the water on stilts. She caught a
glimpse of people, and then a boat gliding through the shallow channels,
half-obscured by the green. A moment later it cut out on to the river behind
the
Lord Janis
, a long, low boat with a high bow and
stern, constructed only from reeds and rope. A woman with silvery-grey skin was
effortlessly poling it near the bank. Almost unsurprised, now, Che recognized
her as a Mantis-kinden. She looked anxiously at the Spider sailors, but none of
them paid the native the slightest attention.