A Shadow All of Light (53 page)

I lay gasping and heaving. He loomed over me like an uncouth monolith against the sky. “Identify yourself,” he said. “We allow no lubbards aboard this vessel.”

I coughed weakly and he nudged me with the toe of his boot. “Speak.”

“I am … Falco … late of … the
Reluctant Maiden.
”

“Take my advice,” said he, “and never put faith in the word
maiden.
”

What fool would follow Mutano's advice in the matter of women? I did not say these words, instead coughing up a cupful of bay water by way of reply.

“Your hand.” He pulled me to my feet, but my knees had no more strength than a brace of sickly puppies. I fell against his chest. He allowed me to rest there for a moment, then made me stand. “You must tax yourself,” he said. “The Mardrake will soon launch. We must away from the ship. See the dinghy forrards there? Go sit you in it and restore. We four must flee this derelict on pain of drowning.” He supported my staggering steps to the boat he had lashed tight against the side at mid-ship and I collapsed onto its stern bench. “Stay you here. We will join you ere long.”

I sat shivering with ague and my carcass felt as if it had served as the clapper in an iron bell, beaten against the metal until it was only a suffering spirit and no body at all, the very soul of aching. I felt so weak I wondered if I could curl my fingers, and it, having done so, I could straighten them again. I tried this exercise and found with a touch of surprise that some parts of my body could still obey the impetus of my mind. But when I felt for my sword I found it missing—at the bottom of the bay, no doubt. I felt in my boots; the daggers too were lost.

Our Mardrake now spat smoke from its many-toothed maw, black clouds pouring out of the beast like ink from an overturned bottle. To give
vis
to this overgrown mechanism Sbufo had applied the use of a small oven with attached bellows, probably several of them. The conceit of a fire-breathing monster that lived underwater seemed illogical to me, but our purpose was to instill panic in the minds of the pirates, not to test their powers of reasoning. Morbruzzo could not have gathered his crew of murderers and rapists from among scholars and natural philosophers. The oven warmed by the fire was attached to the whistle that uttered that unnerving howl of the mechanism.

Now at last I would get to meet this Morbruzzo with my blade drawn, I thought. In fact, I desired simply to lay eyes upon him, to compare the man in his flesh with the dire picture that rumor had formed in my mind for so many seasons. He had attained in popular imagination the size and ferocious aspect of the man-eating giants of children's tales.

I turned toward the ship and saw that the plants had done what work they could before the shore's firelight demolished them and that the crew remaining—a surprisingly large number—were launching small boats. They would be trying to reach the waterfront, evading the Mardrake and deserting their ship before the creature attacked it.

Despite the battered condition of my body and its cruel aching, I began to smile. Astolfo had founded his plans upon the notion that our enemies were ignorant, no more reasonable or knowledgeable than children, and his surmise was proving correct.

Now Sbufo and the celebrated Cocorico came scrambling from belowdecks and ran with Mutano to the pilot boat in which I sat. Mutano slipped the knots and freed the boat. He motioned me out and the three of them swung the craft over the side. It hung swaying from the pulleys and when it came back again against the hull Mutano pushed me into it. Then they clambered in and down we went, to light awkwardly upon the surface of the bay.

Wasting no time, Mutano slashed the cables with his sword, and we were free. Sbufo and Cocorico took up the oars, fitted them into the locks, and rowed as hard as they could.

Mutano stood behind them to call direction. “We must away quickly,” he told me. “The
Tarnished Maiden
will go the way of the
Reluctant Maiden.
The joinings have been disjoined. She will fall apart.”

“You design to cause the pirates to believe the Mardrake destroyed the ship,” I said. “Astolfo had not divulged this thought to me.”

“Best to keep the plan divided. If one of us happened to let slip some knowledge about his part, a spy still could not put all parts together.”

“No more explanations. My head is overfull.” I do not know whether I said those words or not. Maybe I only groaned.

 

XII

The Shadow Not a Shadow

To this point of our designed defense all the twines had knotted together to form a net. By now Osbro, Torronio, and their band should have deserted the beach and made their ways to the waterfront, or nearly. There they were to join with Astolfo and the townsmen confederates he could trust. Theirs would be but a small troop, we expected, waiting in the shadows along the wharves for the infiltrators and their allies within the city to expose themselves when the remaining pirate crew reached the meeting site.

At that time a bloody, pitched battle must take place, but our prospects for victory at this moment seemed better than before. Much of the pirate force had been depleted by the shadow-eaters and most of the rest were distracted by the Mardrake, as it now advanced toward their ship. The
Tarnished Maiden
sighed her last breath as her joinings gave way and all the sections disparted. She sank slowly at first and then with a loudly hissing swiftness. The wake of that sinking thrust the great, hollow puppet onward toward the pirates. They showered it with ineffectual arrows.

At the same time, the marauders launched from their warship three tenders which already were skirting westward around our Mardrake, heading toward central harbor-side. We were in a race with these boats, speeding to reinforce Astolfo and Osbro on shore before the pirates arrived. The firelight was darkening now, the entrenched flames subsiding, and the palm trees only smoldering. Even so, I could see against the afterglow the pirates' cockleboats and tried to count the number of men in them. No more than three dozen, I judged, but we could not know how many traitors would join with them ashore.

*   *   *

Then all of us—defenders, pirates, and the citizenry snug in their homes—heard a sound we never shall hear again. It was a roar of towering, insensate rage, as of fury loosed that had been confined for ages in the heart of its host's whole being. It was at the same time a cry of undying grief and unendurable longing that was the soul of that incomprehensible being. I felt the pressure of the anguished cry against my skin the way that I would feel the buffeting of a hot, savage wind. It proceeded from every direction at once. Painfully, I turned to look all about—to find the pirate ship behind me in its last throes of struggle with the plants, then toward the western shore with its dying firelight, and then forward toward the wharves, where torchlights now flared, one after another.

Our
Tarnished Maiden
had gone down at the center of the bay. There it had released our contrived Mardrake seaward toward the pirates. Could our makeshift beast have uttered the outcry that caused my spirit to shudder so violently? I knew it could not, but I could conceive no other source.

Then we all saw, all of us.

*   *   *

There rose from the waters a being that thrust toward the sky like a sea-engendered tower. Larger than the three-master, this creature cut off my sight of that ship. It was like a great, animate battering ram of liquid basalt. It kept on thrusting upward, upward and outward.

The surface, or tegument, of the thing shed a cascading detritus as the being attained an ever-greater height. Rusted anchors fell from its body, along with ship fittings of all kinds, iron and brass tumbling down again into the bay. Live swordfish and huge squid, bones of great fishes, skeletons of men, shells of giant conches, streams of black mud and yellow sand, costly ornaments of gold and silver, masts and spars covered with algae, broken clusters of reef fell away from its bulk.

All things this water had ever received the creature brought with it to the light, and then this gathering of broken metal and mineral tumbled from its bulk into the waves. It held a beautiful Andromeda in its clutch and shook her savagely back and forth. When she too toppled down this primeval Mardrake's flank, I made her out to be the figurehead of a sunken vessel, long since drowned. She had been tugged from the prow by savage currents and thrust into the howling winds once more.

I saw its eye.

I was certain I saw its eye, small as it was, amid all those resurrected objects the beast was shedding from itself. It was not like the eye of a fish or a serpent. It was a human eye, and I was certain beyond doubt that the creature saw me. I felt the power of it seeing me; I felt the pressure of its gaze upon my soul.

It saw the four of us, rocking violently in our tiny boat. It saw but disregarded us and fell upon the false Mardrake.

Large and ingenious as Sbufo's handiwork was, it still was only a mechanism of stagecraft, a trifle of canvas and pulleys and hempen lines and inflated bladders. He had shaped merely a great, sea-borne doll. The Mardrake that burst from the primal waters demolished it with a single blow. The parts of our false contrivance scattered across the surface of the bay, except for the heavier center, which sank at once.

Our boat lurched in the towering surges and almost capsized. If there had been not an even more powerful current beneath its bottom, we would have gone over. But the wave beneath propelled us wharf-ward at a great rate and we were driving headlong toward the pilings of the piers. Sbufo and Cocorico dropped their oars and clutched the gunnels.

I heard Mutano's harsh, despairing cry. No standing man could keep his place when the boat pitched upward so sharply. My friend was catapulted into the murderous waters and swept away. I could not glimpse him.

I gripped the bench on which I sat with both hands and buried my chin in my chest.

Higher and higher the surge carried us.

Many a time before this moment I had imagined my death. A valiant ending I pictured each time, but none of my fancied demises were watery; they were always delivered by swords, and always by half a dozen expert opponents at once. I had fancied too that I would be mourned by various women, whose fair faces would appear before my mind's eye in my final moment. Their names I would not be able to recall. Now I must submit to a miserable, unheroic drowning.

But—the harbor was not to be my grave. The immense wave transported our boat to such a height that it flew in an arc over the pier-edge and dropped bottom-downward square onto the drenched planking. It was as if we had been cast like a die upon the lumber by a blind, immortal hand.

It was not a comfortable docking. My bones tumbled so violently I felt they must each have unjoined. My upper jaw cracked my lower jaw. The base of my spine felt as if the planet had swung upward to hammer it into my skull.

The boat did not shatter. We were shaken and battered like a bell buoy weathering a tempest, but we had escaped drowning and the purposed wrath of the ancient Mardrake.

Mutano was not in our company. I looked but could find him nowhere in the tumult of waves.

With a hard-breathed effort I loosed my hands from the bench and made my body stand. I had to steady, bracing my legs apart before I could turn to look backward into the bay.

The Being was there, vaulting against the dome of the sky and its every star. Now I could not find its eye. It was faceless, featureless. Without a mouth it gave voice again to the woes with which eon after uncountable eon had tortured its spirit. The sad, angry howl gained in burden of sorrow until I could bear no more. If it had continued, I might well have plunged into the waters, willingly to drown. It was the voice of a more sorrowful universe than the one in which I lived.

Then the howl died to a heartbroken lament and the lament died to silence and all other sounds now quieted and went dumb.

*   *   *

Astolfo had once proposed a conundrum. “Suppose, Falco, that all the utterance of all animate beings that have sounded since the beginning of the world were given voice in a single, unbroken breath. Would it be a cry of terror, a moan of despair, or a shout of jubilation?”

I could not answer. And now that I had heard the utterance he described, or something very like it, I still could not answer. But I could report that the Mardrake was not jubilant.

*   *   *

The Being sought the deep again, casting off this upper world that must have offered insult or done it injury no human being shall ever comprehend. Its entry into the water was silent, but the tall, smooth swells it mounted spread across the width of the bay, roiling the debris scattered on the surface and pushing westward the tenders the pirates had launched. Those marauders would have to beach and march to the wharves to reach their goal. They would lose time and we would be prepared for their advent.

Their galleon was beleaguered. The backwash from the Mardrake's sounding heeled it over so far I doubted it could right itself. After a space it did come upward again, with heavily streaming decks. But only a few sailors stood to their posts; most had been sluiced overboard. Not enough crew remained to man the ship and turn about.

If we could attack the pirateer now, we would have it in hand, I thought.

But our pressing concerns were ashore.

The town had awakened. All along the docks were scores of half-dressed citizens, confused, bewildered, and frightened. They milled about, glaring at one another suspiciously, desiring to place blame on this one or that one. Our enemy now was dispersed among this crowd, but there was no way to distinguish friend from foe.

Osbro and Torronio, Squint and Crossgrain with four others of their group I knew only by sight had arrived from their fiery beachfront, and I saw them slipping into the crowd. Eight members of the Civil Guard, their red tunics now protected by breastplates, moved to companion them. Here again was an arrangement I had not been told of, that the Civil Guard was allied with us in the defense of Tardocco. These men moved by pairs to both sides of the tall warehouse entrances, waiting to see which of these would open to bring swords against them.