The House of Storms (17 page)

‘You’re beautiful,’ he murmured.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You are.’

Once again, Ralph was amazed. She shifted her stance and touched him on the chest, drawing a small cold shape, a hidden hieroglyph, through the droplets there. Ralph shivered. He could scarcely breathe, and his penis, giving up patience, finally leaped up jollily between his legs, but she smiled at that as well, and then laid her hands against his waist as if they were still swimming, and drew him to stand, and stood herself. They were so close that the water which broke from the hollow of her neck trickled across his toes. Then her breasts nudged him and her arms closed around his back. They were both trembling almost uncontrollably as he felt the full long shape of her body, and then her mouth, against his. For a moment, she tasted like the seapool, and was cold as the morning, then she was warm, human and alive. Their teeth clashed. Their breath shuddered. He felt the rumble of her laugh.

‘I’ve never done this before …’

‘No…’

Her hand sluiced water from his back. Then it travelled forwards. So lightly that he almost cried out, she traced the shaft of his penis. Then she drew him down towards the dew-wet grass, and he felt the shape of their meeting hips, for they had both studied nature for too long not to know what they were doing. Of course, it was nothing like either of them had imagined, but still it was far better than anything done for the first time should ever be.

Across Invercombe, different but similar scenes were being enacted. Gardenmaster and Mistress Wyatt were tumbling hungrily amid the heat of a crushed bed of pyrepoppies. Cissy Dunning, after wishing Weatherman Ayres a brisk goodnight, had been halfway down the hill from his weathertop when she’d turned back. She was breathless by the time she’d returned to the iron door and banged hard on it. She still had no idea what it was that she wanted, but Weatherman Ayres did, and he drew her into the humming light, and nested his fingers in the back of her hair and pulled her mouth against his so quickly that her body was pushing back before she could think to say no. Across the shore, and in the Price family cottage, and deep in the dunes, where Owen no longer needed his uniform and Denise had given up saving herself for Bristol, bodies moved together. Shoremen, shorewomen, fisherfolk, masters, mariners, seamstresses, nurses, innkeepers, matrons and marts were all joined in love. Even up in the house, to which they had returned arm in arm and drunk on the day, Greatgrandmistress Alice Meynell was now astride her husband amid the tousled sheets, and her timeless body gleamed as she smilingly urged her husband towards the peak of pleasure for the last time in his life.

Ralph awoke. It was extraordinary, really, that he’d fallen asleep. Daylight was streaming over the specimen trees. He sat up on his elbows. Marion had slept as well. She was sleeping still, her face and hair mingled with the daisies. After a long time of drinking in these moments, he stood up. Looking down at himself, he noticed that a little blood had stuck to his thigh. Nature was so contrary. He padded over to the seapool. He pushed out, swam, trying to break up as little of the mirrored morning sky as possible with his strokes. It was easy now. The water bore him just as her hands had done. He stepped out into a place where the sun already fell and shook the water from his limbs and let the sun warm him. Marion had turned slightly, her left arm moving up across her face to show an uptilted breast and the light nest of hair in the hollow beside it. But she remained asleep.

He noticed something black lying nearby. The buzzbug she’d rescued had died, and its colours had leached. These things never lived for long, but its loss still saddened Ralph as he crouched down beside it. Even in a moment as lovely as this, death was always waiting. In fact, death was essential to everything, and was beautiful in itself if only one could step back far enough from the self-involved process of living. The buzzbug had stood no chance of surviving. It had died because it was too big and blundering …

Ralph stood up. A thought, almost a memory, a recollection solid and yet hard to place, had struck him as he cupped the dead creature in his hand, and was striking him still. He shook his head. He gave a small chuckle. It wouldn’t go away. It was just
there
—small and large and entirely obvious, but with implications which shot off in so many directions that they left him dizzy. Sacrilegious though the notion was, the thought was as beautiful as Marion as she lay there on the daisied grass, and this seapool and the golden morning captured in it. In fact, it was them, and they were it.

So simply and elegantly that he felt like crying and then physically hitting himself for never having thought of it before, the thought, the idea, the evident fact, explained exactly why all things were as they were. Striding along the lip of the seapool, Ralph leapt down and ran along the path towards the shore where the outward tide was gleaming and the air was vibrant with gulls and salt, sunlight and decay. Arms outstretched, laughing, he danced across the wet sand.

T
RAMS SWEPT IN
at the pinkly ovoid entrance of the south side of the Bristol Merchant Venturers’ Halls and trundled out at the north. Mid-building, visitors disembarked from the swaying, sparking carapaces into a cavern of polished marbles, jewels and coralstones which would have appeared cool in any other weather. This morning, though, the gleams were like the sheen of sweat.

Weatherman Elijah Ayres—although the Elijah part sounded odd even to his own ears when he presented himself to the duty clerk, and Cissy still called him
Weatherman
even at the peaks of their passion—was borne towards his meeting by a churning carpet of electric stairs. He whistled to himself. Staunch, red-faced Bristolians glanced at him as they ran fingers around wet collars. No one, really, should look as happy as he did today. But he’d put a chalked board up on Invercombe’s parterre steps, just as he did every morning now, promising
Rain at Four,
and he’d instructed Marion and Ralph to keep an eye on the instruments until he returned, and he was already looking forward to that cooling downpour, and then, later, to the scented slopes of Cissy’s breasts …

He knocked on the ornate door. A voice, and he entered a long, wide meeting room where dark cedarstone shone in swirls, and the air, stirred by several hopeless fans, smelled of stale eau de cologne. A wilting group of men were alternately studying and wrestling with maps which the fans attempted to lift.

‘I think, Weatherman Ayres,’ said Greatmaster Cheney at the furthest end, ‘that you know most of us here.’

He did, or at least he’d heard of them. Senior-this and grandmaster-that—he wasn’t quite taken in by the nods and smiles, and paused to consider his choice of chair before he sat down. Close enough to contribute, but to remain at the edge of the group; that should do the trick. But still, there was an astonishing mixture of guilds here—even more than he’d have expected. He was intrigued, and a little wary, but these people needed him, otherwise he wouldn’t be here. He gave an easier smile towards Grandmaster Lee-Lawnswood-Taylor, who owned lands which bordered Invercombe, and for whom he’d kept back the hail from his crops.

Greatmaster Cheney was a big man, grey-eyed and bristle-haired, said to be happier supervising the milking of his cattle than the workings of the Actuaries of Guild. ‘The sooner we get this done,’ he sighed, ‘the better …’

Palms were wiped across trousered thighs.

‘From what we’ve all said, I don’t think there’s the remotest disagreement that we’ve all seen a significant downturn of the levels of trade. Of course, we must all deal with losses and crises—even as sad as that which has afflicted the younger greatmasters Pike over here with their beloved father.’ He nodded towards two similar-looking guildsmen in young middle age whom Weatherman Ayres hadn’t seen before. ‘But what is alarming about this particular downturn is not so much its extent as its universality.’

A pneumatic drill began jammering down towards Saint Stephen’s. For some reason, Weatherman Ayres’s attention was momentarily rooted on a beautiful Cathay vase which sat, gleaming and glowing, on a side table. It seemed like the only cool thing in this room, or city.

‘I know that we’ve probably all taken our own measures. But I put it to you that they’re not enough to save the westerly counties from tipping into recession. We need to do
more,
gentlemen. Yes, I know we have all in the past found some necessary extra profit—and, indeed, no little comfort…’ He paused to smile. ‘… in the small deliveries with which Weatherman Ayres and his fine device have been able to assist us. But the small trade in
anything
is no longer enough. We must think large.’

Greatmaster Cheney scattered a handful of neatly holed stones across the table. Normally, numberbeads were strung abacus-like on a rack by which a skilled operator, by whispers and finger-blurring clicks, could still exceed the operation of the fastest reckoning engine. But these were bigger. ‘Our vessel,’ he began, ‘is called the
Proserpine
…’

The last individual word the weatherman noticed was
our.
Instantly, as he picked up one of the numberbeads, he was noting the configuration of
Proserpine’s
sails and the horsepower of her engines and style and manufacture of her weathertop, which was a Woods-Hunter out of Dudley, one of the most venerable makes, if a tad slow in the bidding. High-waisted, narrow-hulled, she was designed for speed and the bearing of light, expensive loads. Beyond the fug of this meeting room, he was sure he could detect harbour smells of bilge and fresh paint. Tuxan was a port he’d never visited, but he knew it lay on the mainland of Central Thule. Not that it was the sort of place which an Englishman, or any white European, would wander too freely. The Mexicans had never forgotten the ravages Cortez had inflicted on them and were proud of their re-gathered empire—proud and protective of their bloody magics, as well. Even now, and although sites like Tenochtitlan had long been dowsed as rich sources of aether, they were reluctant to trade with the rest of the world. In any case, the problems of mining, extraction, distillation and transport had long proved near-insuperable. But money was money. And trade was trade. And aether, above all, was aether.

On the current schedule, the
Proserpine
would be fully refurbished and loaded and ready to embark on the high tide by early September. Against the Trade Winds, admittedly, and aether was a problematical load, but there was no reason to imagine she’d encounter difficulties as long as she was out in the Boreal Ocean before the hurricane season, and kept shy of the trade lanes and Enforcer ships. With luck and a good breeze, she’d be outside the Bristol Channel and quietly waiting for a pilot before October set in.

‘Our agents have negotiated with the Emperor a price of five million pounds in gold for the entire load,’ Grandmaster Cheney said. Outside, the drilling had stopped. Even the fans seemed to have slowed their endless nodding. ‘On current market values, and allowing for the cost of the
Proserpine’s
refitting, we estimate the cargoes residual value here to be something in the region of thirty million. Of course, there are technical problems. I gather that every spell on the ship needs to be rephrased and set in perfect pitch or the presence of that much aether will corrupt it. But I firmly believe she could be brought to our shores before winter. Of course, she’d need the right sort of conditions for her arrival that’ll keep the Excise Men blind. Here, Weatherman Ayres, is where you come in. We need your best weather—or rather, your worst—for the unloading.’

‘There would be no problem.’

‘But I understand that Invercombe now has residents?’

‘There’s a lad and his mother—she’s Greatgrandmistress of the Guild of Telegraphers, very much an easterner, and certainly not the sort we’d want looking over our shoulders. But she’s away now far more than she’s here, and the lad’s a decent sort, and he’ll be gone off by then to his big academy.’

‘Forgive me for saying this, Weatherman, but this is more than just summoning some wafts of mist to unload a few barrels of porter. We are discussing, all of us gentlemen, a far more difficult and expensive project than any of our previous endeavours. The entire estuary must be cloaked in fog. And then the
Proserpine
will need to be unloaded as quickly as safety permits—then sunk, I suppose, in deep water, and with a spell cast over her to keep her out of mind until it ceases to matter to the likes of us seated around this table.’

Weatherman Ayres smiled. Thinking of Cissy, he licked the sweat from his moustache.

M
ARION AND DENISE WERE WALKING
the shore. A breeze was coming in from Luttrell, but not enough to extinguish their mirrored shapes, and the tide was warm as tea.

‘I can’t believe I’ll be in Bristol this autumn,’ Denise said.

‘You almost sound sad.’

Denise smiled back at her sister. She was wearing a sun-hat—Invercombe’s greatgrandmistress had made a considerable impression on her and she was striving to keep her complexion fashionably pale—but she looked more than ever like herself, her hair gleaming copper-red, her fine features dark with joined freckles, her eyes shining. ‘No. I’m not sad…’

They walked on, happy in each other’s company in a way they rarely had been when they were younger. Happiness for Marion was like good health had been for Ralph; in fact, the only surprising thing about happiness was how unsurprising it felt, and she wondered what particular shade of life the Marion Price of before this glorious summer had existed in. It had been a kind, she decided, of waiting. She chuckled and gave the water a kick so that it splashed across her bare legs.

‘Tell me again, Marion, that thing you were saying about how creatures were made.’

‘It’s all very simple—’

Denise laughed. ‘You said that before.’

‘It
is.
The way creatures die, the number of offspring they produce, is governed by how good they are at surviving. How strong they are. How well fed. How fertile.’