The Choir Boats (25 page)

“Quick,” said the Cretched Man, pointing at the skreeking gulls.
“Their reticence won’t last.”

As they ate, Tom looked at the ship anchored in the cove. “You
know,” he said. “I never thought to ask how she is named.”

“Well,” said Jambres, swallowing a bit of smoked mackerel before
replying. “It is my own private joke to name her the
Viaticum
, but the
men call her the
Seek-by-Night
.”

“Where’s the flag?” Tom asked. The long pennant with the bloody
orb was missing from the top mast.

“There,” said Jambres, pointing back to the house behind them.
“We always take it down when we reach this place, and hoist it here.”
The pennant streamed out from a flagpole on the roof.

“That’s writing!” Tom said. The curling streaks of red dripping
from the eye or moon were words masterfully stitched, too small
to be read as such at a distance. “
Facienti quod . . . Deus . . . gratiam
. I
cannot make it all out. Latin, but what does it say?”

“
Facienti quod in se est Deus non denegat gratiam
,” said the Cretched
Man. “The motto for our modest ark.”

“‘God will . . . not . . .’” Tom hesitated. “‘Making . . .’? No, my
skill does not answer. I am not Sally with languages. What does it
mean?”

“‘To the one who does what lies within him, God does not deny
grace,’” recited the Cretched Man. The banner snapped as the wind
rose. The red-limned orb streamed over the house, with red words
swirling in its wake.

Tom turned back to the ocean. Without looking at Jambres, he
said, “What lies within you?”

The Cretched Man did not answer at once. He smiled with his
pristine teeth as he smeared lard on a biscuit, and said, “What
lies within any man? You, for example, or Billy, or your Uncle
Barnabas?”

Tom turned to his breakfast companion and said, “You evade
my question. I have earned an answer, a true one.” He waved his
bandaged hand.

The Cretched Man smiled again as he spoke, “Elixate your pique,
young Thomas, and think hard upon the enormity of what you ask.
We could talk here on the beach for days and years, and still not
begin to whelm the first rampart of your query.”

Tom would not be put off. “I want not the cyclopaedia, only a
clear answer.”

“I know not where to begin,” the Cretched Man said, waving
away a gull that hovered above the table. “My name and origin you
know, though you continue to resist the truth of my tale. I am a
man, like you, though my fate has been unlike that of other men’s.
I have the same soul and I suffer the same doubts and fears — more
even because I have accrued more wisdom.”

A line of cormorants flapped low and ragged just above the waves.
Tom followed their progress while he listened to the Cretched Man.

“Like all children of Eve,” said Jambres, “I have a set of tasks to
perform. My duties were not always clear to me, but I have come to
understand the order of things and my place in that order.”

“What is that order?” asked Tom.

The Cretched Man stared a long time at the horizon, as if he might
see Yount just beyond the edge of sight. At last he said, “A pattern,
an imbrication of duties and deeds, of actions and reactions, of loves
and hatreds, woven by all of us together, wittingly or no, on a loom
designed by God. Regularity with uniqueness. Like the vests your
uncle wears. I like his style, by the way; he has genuine taste. Have you
not noticed the regularity of the patterns he affects, all his calicosh
and allapeen and barragon designs? Yet no two sprays or roundels
are ever precisely alike; each has its own individuality within the
pattern.”

Tom imagined Uncle Barnabas in the partners’ room, wearing one
of his favourite vests. Tom almost heard him say, “Figs and feathers!”

The Cretched Man looked for a second at his own coat. Tom
followed his gaze. The Cretched Man’s coat seemed to vary by day
or even by the hour, sometimes being one shade of red, sometimes
another, with striations and patterns that never seemed to be the
same twice. Tom had grown used to the Cretched Man’s coat, as he
had grown used to so much else on the voyage, but paused now to
consider the garment in light of the conversation.

“Do you know?” said Tom. “I have never seen you without your
coat on, no matter how warm the weather might be. That’s a mighty
deep-woven overcoat, and it is not particularly cold here. Why do
you persist in wearing your coat then?”

The coat seemed to answer before Jambres did. It rippled, the
pattern within this morning’s maroon-red shifting subtly. Or so
Tom thought — he could not focus on the coat for any length of time
before his eyes grew weary. The Cretched Man said, “Persist?
Persist
?
I have no choice in the matter. Look closely, Thomas, as closely as
you can, as you have never looked before.”

Tom, with sudden loathing, forced himself to look at the coat. He
looked past the glamour that deflected his and everyone else’s direct
gaze, past the misty general impression of an old-fashioned overcoat
to the hard specificity of this coat on this man. He looked at its
pattern, a reticulated series that teased him with its mathematical
meanings before dissolving into something else. He admired the cut
of the cloth, the contoured tailoring, the seamless fit, without any
gap between coat and —

“Skin!” Tom said in a loud whisper. He looked at the Cretched
Man, whose expression was that of Prometheus on the rock.

“Skin,” confirmed Jambres. “Yes, Thomas, my skin. I cannot take
off my coat, this carmine integument, because it is part of me, laced
onto me with a hundred veins and arteries.”

Tom recoiled but not as far as he might have. He whispered, “But
why?”

“Thomas, Thomas,” said Jambres. “Unstop your mind at last,
and understand the story I have told you.”

Tom breathed out, “Punishment.”

“Of course,” said Jambres. “Part of my penance. ‘I clothed thee
also with broidered work . . . I girded thee about with fine linen . . .
covered thee with silk.’”

Tom stared at the Cretched Man’s face, wanting to look at the
coat but fearing to do so.

“Actually,” said Jambres with a wry note. “I
do
get to take my
coat off. Or have it removed. Once every fifty years, which is why I
am out of fashion, dreadfully so, most of the time. I am . . . peeled.
I moult, like a snake. I am born again, a little bit at a time over the
centuries.”

“Does it . . . ?” asked Tom.

“Oh yes,” said Jambres. “Very much.”

Tom looked at his bandaged hand, moved it under the table.

“Reflect further upon my story,” said the Cretched Man. “A
coat woven on a lattice of veins is the least of it. My entire body
is not my own. Long ago, I looked unlike myself today. I was not
white, the colour of shrouds and fungi and cataracts. I am told I am
beautiful, but I think not. I was far more beautiful in my original
state, because it was myself. I am told that one day, when I have
redeemed and expiated myself, when all the flayings are done, the
final circumcision performed, I will have been peeled back to my
beautiful original shape and colour, the brown of my native Egypt
before I challenged Moses in the court of the Pharaoh. Until then I
will remain viduated, deprived, and bereaved.”

A gull landed on the far side of the table. Keeping its eye on Tom
and especially on the Cretched Man, it lunged for a scrap of smoked
mackerel. Jambres ignored it. Another gull joined the first. Tom
got up from the table. Jambres continued to stare off into the sea.
Tom walked away from the table, leaving the Cretched Man deep in
thought with gulls wheeling just over his head and touching down
on the table.

Onboard the
Gallinule
, the Fencibles mounted small cannon, one-
and two-pounders with flared muzzles like blunderbusses, on
swivels set into the railings. At each station, they stored three other
cannon of the same size, ready to replace the mounted cannons from
their swivels in rapid succession. They wheeled large cannon up to
the gun-ports below decks. Each man practised shooting his musket
at targets dragged behind the ship.

“Look,” said Barnabas. “A dolphin!” A grey bottlenose had jumped
over a target behind the ship. All the men of Yount watched the
dolphin. Several made the sign they had all made when they chanted
the Common Prayer. By the end of the day, three or more dolphins
led the
Gallinule,
leaping and looking back at the crew members with
their side-set eyes.

“They are the Mother’s,” said Nexius, touching the brooch they
all wore. “They protect us and we protect them.”

That evening the ship’s captain gathered the crew again on deck.
Reglum translated for the McDoons.

“Tonight we leave Karket-soom,” said the ship’s captain. “We
begin our return to Sabo-soom. Mother protect us!”

The crew roared back, “Mother protect us!”

The captain pointed to the foremast and shouted, “Hoist the
moon!”

Crew members hauled on a rope attached to a winch on the main
spar, and brought up a large silver plate to the level of the spar. There
the plate, six feet across or more, swayed in the wind.

Reglum said to the McDoons, “There is no moon either on the
tangled roads or in Yount, so we bring our own moon with us.”

As one, the crew turned to look at the moon in the sky, a crescent
moon just visible through the clouds.

“We seek your light,” the crew yelled. “Give us your light, oh Large
Moon, send your light to the Small Moon on our ship.”

As one, the crew turned to face the silver plate swinging from the
spar, and chanted:

The moon is eaten

But we need a lamp to light our way home.

Baffled boys

Cry in the dark

Lie down.

Down in the dark

Drown in the dark

Lie down.

At this, every man knelt down on one knee and bowed his head.

The moon is eaten

But we need a lamp to light our way home.

Unveiled boys

Fly from the dark

Stand up.

Up from the dark

Back from the dark.

Stand up.

At that, every man stood up.

“Our Moon will light our way home!” shouted the ship’s captain.

The crew shouted, “Home!” and dispersed.

“Come,” said the ship’s captain, turning to the McDoons. “There
is one other ceremony to perform.”

Nexius, Reglum, and the ship’s captain sat with the McDoons in
the captain’s quarters. On the table were three silver knives, each
about four inches long, with a dolphin leaping over a moon incised in
the centre of the blade. Reglum said, “These are
hatma
knives. Every
member of the crew has one. We ask that you each take one and wear
it in its sheath at all times as we cross the Interrugal Lands.”

As the McDoons reached for the knives, Reglum raised his hand
and said, “There is more. Listen carefully, and please do not be
offended or distraught. The
hatma
knife is only to be used when all
other means have failed you, when your only remaining choice is to
perform
hatmoi
.”

“And what,” said Sanford, putting the knife he had selected back
on the table, “is that?”

“Suicide,” Reglum said gently. “Mutual suicide. Each of us has a
hatmoril
, a partner to whom we are pledged, one to the other, to help
perform
hatmoi
should that be the only path left. So that no one is
ever left to face something worse.”

“We are Christians,” Sanford said. “You ask us to do what we
cannot and will not do. I
am
offended . . . and I fear for your souls.”

Reglum rounded the table and spoke again in a very gentle voice.
“Mr. Sanford, please understand the spirit in which we request
this — or offer this. Think us not heathens: the Nurturing Mother
allows us such an outcome only in times of utterly final need. It
is her act of mercy towards us, so she can gather us back to her
bosom. If we are lost first, somewhere in the trackless wastes of
the Interrugal Lands, she may not find us, and then we are truly
lost forever. Releasing our own life in those non-places is an act of
our own will, the will She gave us, and so lights a little flame in the
darkness, a flame which She can use to find us.”

Sanford shook his head. “I will fight to my end to save any one
of you,” he said with a ferocity that sent shudders through Sally. “‘I
fear neither the terror by night nor the arrow that flies in the day,
neither the pestilence that walks in darkness nor destruction that
walks at noon.’
That
is our duty, not this . . . other thing.”

Reglum nodded and there were tears in his eyes as he said, “We
speak of a terrible thing, it is true. We speak of this almost never,
and never lightly. How to make you understand? When we come
to Yount, I will take you to the Mariner’s House, in which is their
Hall of Long Remembrance. In that Hall are engraved the names of
all those who fared forth from Yount and never returned. Over the
centuries that is many names — souls lost to the Nurturing Mother
if they could not perform
hatmoi
.”