The Sea Hates a Coward (4 page)

S
UDDENLY, BUT ALMOST
casually, as a low belch of thunder rolled in from the purple spark on the horizon, Schneider came to understand where he was.

Realisation had been building for a while, as in a dream. The endless crashing of waves, the constant grumbling of the low sky, the dreadful industry of the ship, was all the formless stuff of nightmares—until he saw that swarm of boats.

He had seen that procession, beetling back and forth under stacks of meat and palls of diesel smoke, before. Hundreds of times, in fact—seen it from another dock, where it meant food and safety and civic health; a never-ending stream of goods that kept home alive.

Home. That immense walled city—its name escaped his death-muddled brain—buttressed by coastal cliffs against the permanent siege on its landward side. Unchallenged by sea, provisioned by its fleets, adoring of its fishermen.

He would watch the boats go out, sounding their foghorns in farewell, off to bring food for ten million souls from a distant place. From hundreds of miles away; from a black stone gate, it was said, whose arch stood a mile clear of the waves and whose apex drew purple lightning from a perpetual storm.

And through the gate? A world of infinite water, bottomless, and teeming with monsters: Ocean.

Memories pooled around the word like blood swelling from a pinprick.

Ocean’s produce had been everywhere in the city; the great casks of benthocetic tallow that came in from the docks to be rendered for vault-oil, the glass-waxy bows of fishbone as long as girders. But only once in Schneider’s memory had something alive, or at least near to life, made it through the gates.

It had been an autumn morning at Exhibition Plaza; his mother gripping his hand as she clocked far too late that the pamphlets had put too rosy a gloss on things.

“It still lives!” the mass-printed scraps had exclaimed, in curlicue font.

And so it lived: a mouth like a half-collapsed tent gaping under weak sunlight, two eyes like hard-boiled yolks glaring sightlessly from furious pits of bone.

Red and warted and spined, bloated and shapeless on the slab. Accustomed to a life so poor and dark and famished that it barely breathed; lived perpetually on the murky edge of death, even in its natural element.

In open air it had gaped, and withered, and swivelled lumpen fins for four days, kept damp with buckets of brine and poked with billhooks when the motion went out of it.

“Too ugly to live, too tough to die,” quipped the barker by the thing’s graveside, as he pulled down on its lip and made a half-yard of opal needles visible to the crowd.

“Four hundred years old, they say, but will it live another week?” he cried. “Don’t pity it, folks, there’s no putting it back—its swim bladder burst like a bad prophylactic when those brave boys reeled it up!

“Ten irons to put your hand inside—say you’ve been in the belly of a monster!” he had cried, using his baton to lift the flap on the monster’s ruptured flank. Thinking back on the sight of those opaque yellow eyes, that slimy wound, that laboured gaping, Schneider tasted the memory of the vomit that had rushed up that morning.

It hadn’t been the pain of the thing, or even how horrible it had been to look at—it was the sense of something awfully out of place: one couldn’t look at it and not imagine the hellish, empty blackness it had hovered in.

Another memory, floating slowly to the surface of his mind. There had been a book in the library, packed with illustrations. An aged bestiary of the commercial fish from Ocean, and a parade of its most frequently-seen monsters. The book was old and dust-reeking and tooth-yellow, its contents a blend of dry descriptions and workmanlike inking, with the occasional photo plate of something big and blood-streaked hanging from a crane.

Schneider had spent an hour with the book more than once, looking for that awful thing from his youth as if hoping he had mis-remembered something quite ordinary. He never did find anything exactly like it, but he found plenty worse: the corpse-fish he had witnessed had not been some gruesome deepwater oddity, but just one of a world of lonely, hopeless monsters.

Teeming eels, lampreys, piss-yellow jellies and listless squid. Rafts of spongy, elongate shrimp, clinging together on the surface over bottomless depth. Lost sunfish, ribbon sharks, Jenny Hanivers and haired snakes.

Then there were the cash cows—the huge, sad benthoceti, the ricketfish with their trailing bones, the gasper, the arrostichthys, the traileyes in their numberless, blind shoals. All of them big as ships, able to suck in a man like dust, but docile as cattle.

They were prey for devils.

Those were the entries with no photographs or illustrations beyond guesswork scratchings—creatures too big or fierce to ever take a hook without taking a boat too; that lived under epithets rather than binomial classifications. The Big Dark, the Far-Looker, Glasscorpse, Bagthroat.

Schneider shivered at the remembrance of those entries, of the great hungry orbs and maws staring out of the pages, of his mind nagging him to cover them with a palm as he read by candle, to look away from the open windows, even in the heart of the city.

And now he was there among them, a world away from that soft candlelight. He was in Ocean.

Schneider stood on the edge of the ship, wind blowing salt spray into his face from across a nightmare emptiness, trying to comprehend that he was stuck in Hell after all.

All his life, Ocean had been practically a fiction. A distant realm, fished by the city’s heroic daughters and sons, brimming with riches beyond measure for those brave enough to face up to its perils. It was a place you didn’t think about, a shorthand term for ‘far away and nasty,’ a fate with which you idly threatened children.

The bravest and the most reckless went to work the supply boats, came back with little to say or never came back at all. Certainly, nobody said anything about city-ships dowsed in salt rain, where the despairing dead worked as slaves to carve corpses big as tenement blocks for the bellies of the living. Every fish supper Schneider had ever eaten returned to the back of his mouth, cold and mocking.

At that moment, there could have been nothing more welcome than the hand, cold and withered, that Schneider realised had been resting on his shoulder for some time.

He turned and fell into an embrace with his dead companion, wished he could weep as he let his head sink against its clammy chest, the sucking wound and the rags of a vest. He moaned—utterly without theatre this time—and felt something like relief, rising in a wave of blackness to meet him as consciousness waned.

But oblivion would not come. Hard, salt-slick arms were pushing him away, and that other face—a person’s face, now discernible as something more than a featureless pastiche of meat over bone—was looking straight into his, quietly imploring him not to lose the plot.

He tried to find the words to express what he was feeling, tried to summon the words that had started to come back to him, and couldn’t. The fish on its slab had seemed impossible to reconcile to the gay surroundings of his city; now, the thought of home seemed just as impossible here.

It shook its head gently, as if excusing him the need to speak, as if it knew all too well what it meant to be lost for expression. Because of course, it did.

With a grip markedly more robust than the weak clinging he had been subjected to back at the flensing yards, his companion turned him round to face the interior of the ship, and pointed a rock-steady finger up, towards the ziggurat of metal that dominated the centre of the floating world.

There, set some way back from the great crane they had passed earlier, was a second tower, more squat than the first, swelling as it rose to loom over the deck with green-glowing windows.

Schneider squinted against his dulled corneas, watched black human shapes move against the inside of the glass, like ornamental placoderms in a foetid aquarium, looking out over the docks with no idea that they themselves were being watched.

The dead thing held him closer, gripped his head to force it into alignment with its pointing finger, expunging any doubt as to what it was indicating.

“Them,” it hissed. “There.”

He understood. That tower, glowing at the top of this deep, horrible world, was where all this was controlled from. That blackness, the dark that came rising like a wall of brine when despair gnawed at his consciousness, came from there. He knew it without question; looking into that green gloaming dragged it over him, icy and invasive.

But he could not run from it. He was trapped with it, on this lonely berg of metal above a measureless depth. There were only two other options: let it wash over him—or find a way to shut it down. With no way to escape, or to retrieve his life, Schneider figured the most worthwhile way to expend his physical form, while it still functioned, would be in trying to stop this happening to anyone else.

Beneath the row of windows where the black figures paced, lights shone on the rusted shell of the tower and picked out six colossal letters, defiantly announcing the vessel’s name to an uncomprehending night.

TAVUTO

Schneider looked at that word, a hundred times his size, and the memories took no time to smash into the back of his eyes. The
Tavuto
. The famous flagship. Breadbasket of Ocean. There were other ships out there, barges and gas-harvesters, seiners and supertrawlers, but all of them were footnotes to this legendary hulk.

He had owned a tin model of it as a child; had pushed it across the carpet of his father’s study, making explosion noises as it nudged aside cheap plastic kraken and aspidochelons. He had imagined it crewed by brave men and women, cheerfully facing the devils of the deep with wry smiles and bunched muscles. If only he had known he would end up dead and baffled, trapped on the celebrated titan with who knew how many other walking corpses.

Never meet your heroes, thought Schneider, before the thought was driven out of his head by the scrape of sharp metal on the deck behind him.

Still staring at the black paint of the
Tavuto
’s name, Schneider froze in place, strained to hear the sound of any further scuttling over the incessant patter of the rain. To his dread, the sound came again, and continued.

Worse yet, he realised, the hand had gone from the side of his head—he was standing alone. Had his companion been taken while he’d been consumed in memory? Panicking, he turned, and saw nothing but darkness around him. The clicking of metal came again, nearer this time, from the shadows.

He was about to call out, when a hiss from the floor caught his attention—his companion was on the deck, dropped like a sack of meat with only its face moving, mouth working desperately to attract his attention. The other corpse twitched its head convulsively to the side, eyes wide, and Schneider wondered what was wrong with it before finally getting the message. “Get down,” it was mouthing.

Letting exhausted legs do what came naturally, Schneider let himself collapse to the deck, limbs falling haphazardly on top of each other, with his face turned towards the other prone body.

Without heartbeats or breaths to count, he had no idea how long he lay there, listening to the falling rain and the distant thunder of the gate. Just when he was thinking of getting to his feet, the scrabbling came again, now only a few yards away.

Then it was on them. It fell like a sodden blanket, a broad disc that rippled at the edges and flexed queasily as metallic arthropod legs twitched beneath it. A mouth like the puckered sneer of a jack-o’-lantern loomed at Schneider’s face, flanked by black, sightless eyes.

He strained not to move, not to even twitch his eyes, as the vile black pit wavered inches above him. The terrible eye lowered over his own, rimmed by twitching muscle, and blasted cold air over his face. It bore the piercing, ammoniac stench of a sharkmonger’s stall at midsummer, a smell that ate into his sinuses despite the dulling of death.

Because the eye was not an eye but a nostril. The thing was a stingray. As the ragged, undulating edge of the creature slipped horribly over his flank, its flattened face snuffled obscenely over him, huffing in his scent and blasting back an overpowering necrochemical cocktail.

Without warning, the blind white face swung over to his companion, leaving his face enveloped by the flopping, fish-belly softness of its outer body. Schneider’s instinct was to gag, to flail at the great dead curtain of meat and fight for breathing space, but with his lungs inert, there was little point. All he could do was wait it out, while the metal legs of the thing skittered around his hips and its disc-like immensity flabbered over him. The darkness rose, bringing with it the image of his eight-year-old hand pushing a tin boat across worn carpet, before it enveloped him.

In the end, it was the shaking of a human hand that brought him back. Not human, he reminded himself, as his vision swam sickly back to the sight of a skull papered with grey skin. But human enough. Still fighting to remember what had just happened, but certain of the need to get to his feet, Schneider rose and looked around him. He wasn’t sure what it was he dreaded seeing, but there was nothing there but the night and his friend—that was a strange word—beckoning him to follow as it padded backwards along the deck.

“It thought we were dead,” said the corpse, leaving Schneider wondering how much its grin was purely an artefact of decay, before turning into the night. He followed.