Voyage of the Basilisk : A Memoir by Lady Trent (9781429956369) (34 page)

We crept down and around the perimeter of their camp until we were as close as we could get to the ship without revealing ourselves. I blessed the technical considerations that limited the crew to four rather small men, and the cursed reputation of Rahuahane that meant they did not have to post a guard. Otherwise Suhail and I would not have stood a chance.

They were settling in for their meal, cooked over a well-sheltered fire. Suhail’s brows knit as he watched them—no, I realized, as he listened. “What are they saying?” I asked, scarcely doing more than mouth the words.

“It sounds as if they are looking for someone,” he murmured back.

Waikango, I thought. The king of Raengaui, whom the Yelangese called a pirate, fearing his growing power. Had he escaped captivity? His cousin was married to the king here; he might take refuge with her, thinking the Yelangese would not look for him in the Keongan Islands. Perhaps the foreign canoes I had seen had been carrying an important passenger.

Suhail went on, sounding puzzled. “They are discussing how best to get over to the other islands in secret to search for.…”

I waited, but he did not finish the sentence. Finally I nudged him. Suhail looked at me, shaking his head minutely. “Her,” he said. “They are looking for a woman.”

Only with great effort did I stifle my exclamation of surprise. “Are you
certain
?” I whispered.

He nodded. I tried to think of what woman could possibly merit a Yelangese caeliger looking for her in secret—and then clutched at the palm tree concealing me as one possibility suggested itself.

It was
mad
. They had deported me from Yelang, and I had gone. I knew enough now to speculate that this caeliger was the reason for my deportation; they did not want me investigating where the dragon bones were going and uncovering their new innovation. But why pursue me to Keonga? No, it was even madder than that; no one knew I was
in
the Keongan Islands. It was sheer chance that the storm had blown us here. The only way anyone could find me was if they went through the Broken Sea with a fine-toothed comb. Why on earth would the Yelangese trouble to do that—and send in pursuit the very thing they wanted to keep secret from me?

That was not a question I could answer while hiding on the edge of a tropical beach, waiting to steal a caeliger. Nor could I explain my suspicions to Suhail. I shook off the matter (or tried to, with limited success) and addressed myself to that task once more. “Should we wait until dark?” I asked him.

Suhail shook his head. “I would not be able to see the controls. The sooner we go, the better.”

We did not bother with a diversion. Any such thing would have only roused the Yelangese to alertness, making it likely they would respond with much greater speed once they realized we were stealing the ship. Our plan was quite simple: we went down to the water’s edge, out of sight of the men, and swam out into the lagoon. Then we swam around and back in, keeping the ship itself between us and the soldiers at their supper. The rushing of the waves covered what little noise we made. Then it was a quick dash across the sand to the caeliger itself.

The sides of the gondola were high enough to conceal us if we crouched. I stayed low while Suhail oriented himself. At least he could read the Yelangese script on the controls, which I could not. I diverted myself by examining the gondola, noting how the floor was a taut mosaic of scapulae wired together. At least the Yelangese were not squandering carcasses needlessly.

Then Suhail tapped my shoulder. He gave me my instructions in mime: I should flip this lever when he signaled, spin that wheel counter-clockwise, and then man a crank with every ounce of strength in my body. I nodded, my heart beating so loud I was certain the soldiers must hear it. This was madness. Madder than hurling myself off a waterfall. Gravity, at least, had no personal animus against me; it had not travelled through the Broken Sea to find me.

Suhail unwrapped a series of small ropes around the edges of the gondola, leaving them only loosely looped about their cleats. Then he took a deep, steadying breath, and yanked them all free.

The caeliger, freed of its ballast, began to rise.

The Yelangese, laughing around their fire, did not immediately notice. I flipped my lever, spun my wheel, then stood to reach for the crank. Once on my feet, I felt terribly exposed. The soldiers were not so careless as to leave their guns lying about; each man had one alongside him, lying in the sand. I could not take my eyes from those, so certain was I that they were soon to be aimed my way.

One of the men’s faces turned upward to the rising caeliger. He stared openmouthed for one long moment; under any other circumstances, it would have been comical. Then he scrambled to his feet, arm outstretched, and began to shout.

Now it was a race. Suhail was doing things behind me; I had no idea what, except that they made an engine grumble to life. I kept labouring over my crank. The propeller began to turn. All of the soldiers were on their feet now, guns in hand. One of them aimed it at me and I flinched, trying to hunch as much of myself as possible behind the dragonbone without stopping my work on the crank.

I could not duck very far, and so I saw one of the other men slap the rifle down, sending its shot cracking well below us. He screamed something at the one who had fired. A third fellow was running down the beach; he took a flying leap off a large stone and tried to seize one of our trailing ropes, but splashed harmlessly into the water. The others were shouting and racing about, but none of them were firing. Why were they not firing?

We were high enough now that they stood little chance of striking us even if they did. “You may stop turning that,” Suhail said breathlessly, and I complied. “Come—hold this for me.”

The wind had caught us now; we were drifting away from Rahuahane. Unfortunately, that meant we were also drifting away from where we wanted to go. The caeliger had a rudder of sorts, attached beneath the balloon, and it was the control for this that I held. The gondola rocked alarmingly as Suhail darted about, attempting to direct us into the wind, toward the inhabited islands.

He found a way. We came about, passing the bulk of Rahuahane’s peak. I drew what felt like my first proper breath in days, and realized that we were flying. It was less personal than my experience in the glider, which had simply been a matter of me and my wings; but it was also more comfortable. In the blazing sunset light, I found myself smiling.

The caeliger settled into its course. Suhail, satisfied with the current state of the engine, untied the egg from around his body and laid it in the bottom of the gondola. Then he stopped, gazing down, not meeting my eyes. “Do you know what they were shouting as we rose?” he asked.

“Of course not,” I said. “I do not speak above twenty words of Yelangese.”

Suhail turned to face me. “They said, ‘It’s her.’”

We stood in silence, except for the growl of the engine and the rush of the wind. I could think of nothing to say. Suhail was looking at me as if he had never seen me before. I felt rather as if
I
did not know myself.

He asked, “Why would they be looking for you?”

“I do not know,” I said. “I can speculate at bits of it—this ship—when we were in Va Hing, someone arranged to have me deported, I think because they feared I would learn about the caeliger.
Caeligers,
I should say; I doubt there is only one. But why they would trouble themselves to—” I stopped and peered over the side of the gondola, taking care not to shift the rudder. “Should we be dropping like this?”

Suhail swore. We were losing altitude rapidly; I judged we were no more than a hundred feet above the water now. He began to dart once more about the gondola, but even I could tell his efforts were futile, as much from the brief and frustrated movements of his hands as from the fact that we continued to sink. The waves were quite close now—but so, I realized, was the shore of an island. Not Keonga: I could see its familiar mass off to my right, much too far away. The caeliger, fighting against the wind, had brought us to the neighbouring island of Lahana. The only question was whether we would strike land or sea; for my second flight, like my first, was going to end by crashing.

*   *   *

We braced ourselves against the gondola at the last moment, trusting to the dragonbone and its lashings to protect us. The latter failed in places, though not catastrophically. The balloon, sinking down to strike the gondola, knocked us headlong, and my landing drove all the air from my body; but I suffered nothing worse than a few additions to my assortment of bruises.

Lying there on the bony surface of the gondola’s floor, I found myself laughing. It was born of hysteria, the sudden release of tension. Whatever else lay ahead—and I knew, even then, that our troubles were not done—I was finally back on safe ground.

Or so I thought, for a few, blessed moments.

Shouting drew us both up from where we had fallen. The people of Lahana had not failed to miss the caeliger drifting toward them from the cursed isle. They had enough warning to assemble a force of warriors, who were even now sprinting across the sand to us; and judging by the weapons they held, they were not coming to make certain we were unharmed.

Suhail attempted to put himself between me and them, but the gondola’s open structure doomed him to failure. Large hands reached through and dragged me out, with Suhail following after. “Let us explain,” I cried in Keongan, and heard Suhail doing the same. No one had struck me yet, but neither were they showing much willingness to listen.

Then I heard a high, forceful voice crying, “Leave them alone!”—in Scirling.

Abby Carew was the only woman I had heard speaking my tongue in months, but the voice was not hers. I twisted in my captors’ grasp and saw, to my utter shock, the crowd parting to allow an Anthiopean woman through.

She was tall, though not in comparison to the islanders, and had the carriage of the well-born. Unlike myself, she wore a dress; I thought it had once been moderately fine, but it had clearly seen hard wearing for quite a few days. She pushed through to me and pried the islanders’ hands off me with, as near as I could tell, nothing more than force of will.

This stranger commenced to arguing with the Lahana warriors in their own language, though with an accent that made me suspect she had learned some other dialect first. The thrust of her argument was that Suhail and I had to be questioned, and she was the only one likely to be able to speak with us. From this I guessed that she had not heard us speaking Keongan before she drew near—nor did she have any idea that we had spent nearly two months living on the neighbouring island.

It did not surprise me that she should be ignorant of us. In all that time, I had never imagined a Scirling woman was on Lahana. Now, however, the pieces began to fit together: the injunction against leaving Keonga for the other islands, the Yelangese soldiers looking for a woman. Perhaps it was not me they sought after all, but her. As for why … studying her profile, with its strong jaw and full lips, a terrible suspicion began to grow in my heart.

I looked at the ground and saw that the Keongans were taking care neither to stand on her shadow, nor to allow theirs to fall upon her.

“We have heard of these people,” one of the warriors said, cutting her argument short. He gestured at me. “This is the
ke’anaka’i
who has been on Keonga—the husband of Liluakame. And this man is one of the other strangers there.”

Naturally they had heard of us. Why should there be so many warriors on the sparsely inhabited leeward side of Lahana, unless they were guarding something—
someone
—here? Such guards would certainly be kept apprised of important developments in the Keongan archipelago: for example, the shipwreck of a group of foreigners.
You are not Yelangese,
they had said when we arrived.
Are you Scirling?
Yes, they had reason to look for my people.

“Please,” I said, in Keongan. The woman looked at me sharply. “We must give you a warning. The Yelangese are attempting to search your islands in secret; we saw them with our own eyes. They are looking for someone.” I carefully did not look at the stranger when I said this, though Suhail was not quite so restrained.

“How do you know this?” one of the warriors demanded.

I chose my words with exquisite care, knowing they might mean the difference between life and death for both Suhail and myself. “We did not leave Keonga intentionally. The warriors there took the two of us out on the water, that we might attempt to ride a sea-serpent. This we succeeded at, but when we finally tumbled from its back, we were in waters far from Keonga, and too far for us to swim home. But we saw the Yelangese on Rahuahane and stole this, their ship, so that we might return and warn you.”

My words set off a flurry of discussion among the warriors, much of it too rapid for me to follow. No one asked whether we had set foot on the cursed island, for which I breathed a sigh of relief. That question would come in time, I was sure … but in the interim, we might have a chance to think of some way to forestall punishment.

For the time being, they were far more concerned with the Yelangese, and what must be done to address that threat. Even with such incentive, none of them were willing to launch their war canoes for Rahuahane, but they took a variety of other precautions: mounting a search in the area for any other Yelangese; sending word to Keonga that two lambs had strayed; warning someone—that last was quickly silenced, with a glance toward us that said it was not for our ears. And, of course, they had to inform their chief. This was not Pa’oarakiki, the man we had dealt with on Keonga, but the chief of Lahana, to whom these warriors answered.

They also locked us up. Not with literal locks; the only metal the islanders have is that which they trade for, and locks are of little practical use in a society like theirs. Some distance down the beach, however, there was a cluster of several huts, over which other warriors stood guard. Suhail was shoved into the largest of these, and I was escorted, with slightly more dignity, to a smaller one. The Scirling woman accompanied me, saying, “You will have to share this with myself and Hannah, but we have it rather better than the men do.”