The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 (43 page)

Billy raised both arms and shouted back, “Selah!”

“And does not the psalmist also sing: ‘Awake up, my glory! Awake, psaltery and harp, for I will awaken the dawn’?”

Billy, joined by the rest of the descendants of Asaph, concurred again.

Maggie sang the “Song of Saint Ann’s Translation,” and every voice joined the chorus:

“And is it so, that sweet beaded breath will waft us o’er

The Sea of Storm to distant Heaven’s shore?

Then bring thy ship of song and singing, that together we

May sail nigh the House of Harmony.

A steadfast friend thou wilt be to me,

Till I imbosom’d am in unity.”

Buoyed and ringed by this and many similar songs—some of which Maggie had sung into the wood, flax, hemp and iron of the ship itself, some sung at every watch by those onboard—the
Indigo Pheasant
fulginated into the interstitial lands.

Whether by virtue of these songs or of the power imbued into the Great Fulginator, or because the ship was escorted by the whales and squadrons of fulmars, petrels and albatrosses (besides, of course, the dolphins), the voyage through the Interrugal Lands was more secure than any made before and took a route mostly unknown to those experienced in the trip between Karket-soom and Sabo-soom. The horghoids and jarraries, the cychriodes and ruteles-worms, and all the other loping, gnashing creatures on the rocks and skerries withheld their menace; some aboard the
Indigo Pheasant
said that the monsters were even seen to bow their heads as the ship sailed past. The carkodrillos and asterions and all other broods of swarming, hunting fishes stayed their attack, retreating instead into briny grottoes.

Once only was the ship threatened, and even then it slipped by unscathed. On the eighth day, sudden staunch winds swept the
Indigo Pheasant
in close to a low, marshy shore. Giant sedges pulled at the hull, mud sucked at the keel. The Fulginator could help little in such a pass; traditional seafaring skills alone would save the ship. Gradually, with no small amount of sweat and worry, they managed to tack away, beating against the wind blowing from the salt-side.

As they edged away, they put to flight three enormous herons that had been wading after fish in the shallow waters. While struggling to keep the ship from running a-strand, no one had paid the birds much heed—and distances being deceiving, no one had grasped how large these birds were. Now everyone stared in awe as the three marsh-hunters, wings flapping with a stately thunder, flew past in loose formation. The herons flew—as is their wont—with necks curled back, compressed against their bodies, with the sparse black feathers of their crests bristling down their backs. (Sally thought they looked rather like Sanford might if he were striding down Mincing Lane into a stiff breeze). They were a hazel-green above, with rufous streakings below, their buff-coloured legs trailing far behind them, occasionally shaving the surface of the water. As the herons neared, and were no longer made small by the vast expanse of the empty shoreline, the humans comprehended the bulk of these birds. What most amazed the onlookers were the eyes of the herons—a bright lemon-yellow, each eye the size of a human head—and especially the bills. Each heron had a bill the size of a man. Calculating what damage such a bird might do to the ship, contemplating the fate of anyone plucked off the deck by a body-length bill, the Marines readied their muskets and the gunners took positions at the cannons.

Amazement turned to alarm when the water beneath the herons geysered: a crocodile-whale four times the size of any of the herons shot straight up. With a dishevelled row of piercingly sharp teeth, it seized one of the birds, and fell back thrashing into the sea with its prey. The ripple created rocked the
Indigo Pheasant
. The other two herons, squawking so loudly it hurt human ears and caused the silver moon to rattle against the spar, changed course and flew directly over the ship, just barely clearing the top-sail and rigging.

The sea continued to boil for some time at the place where the monster whale had erupted. The Marines and gunners trained all weapons on that spot. Everyone watched anxiously. Everyone prayed for a quicker change in the wind. The sailors aloft called down that they could see movement in the water, like a shadow that matched the ship in size but had a mind of its own, moving now closer, now farther away.

The crocodile-whale breached one hundred yards to port. It looked like a low-slung island, with eyes.

“Well,” said Billy, tying the blue scarf more tightly around his neck, and picking up his long-barreled rifle. “Muck and mire to one side, and a scalavote with too many teeth on the other! I for one don’t fancy either choice. Let’s see if this old dumbledore can sting the beast in one of its eyes.”

As Billy took aim, Maggie walked up and put a hand on the muzzle to lower it.

“Leave be, Billy,” she said. “This one won’t hurt us. She—it’s a she, incidentally—is scared too, scared and yet curious. After all, we appeared in her hunting grounds, not the other way ’round.”

Billy bowed his hand and lowered his rifle.

“This creature is very, very distant kin to the whales who accompany us,” continued Maggie. “They are attempting to soothe her, reassure her. And so will we. Listen.”

The Great Fulginator struck up a different note, a lilting, merry air. Maggie had instructed Dorentius to play “The Prior’s Toccata” on one of the keyboards (which were otherwise used as devices to transmit equations into the Fulginator’s central analytical engine)—a song ascribed to Saint Bavo but known much more widely in the version edited by C.P.E. Bach.

Billy whistled, shook his head and said, “A tea-tune for a trilly-bite! Well, that’s fox-feet on a turkey for sure!”

“She’s unlovely to look upon, this giant
agu iyi
,” laughed Maggie in agreement. “But she is innocent, Billy, innocent of the malice and intention that characterizes our true enemies. She’s a lethal savage, without question, but pure, who acts only as she was made. We can avoid a quarrel with her, and so we shall.”

As the
Indigo Pheasant
slowly distanced itself from the quaggy shore and from the leviathan, led by the dolphins and followed by the whales, Reglum took one last look through a telescope at the crocodile-whale.

“Magnificent,” he sighed. He had a new species for the Yountian bestiary.

On the fourteenth day, Reglum and everyone else received an even greater shock: they found living people in the Interrugal Lands. They had passed The Cackling Isle (the source of which noise was unknown, and which the
Indigo Pheasant
had no time or brief to discover) and The Dull-Fires (a shingle ever licked by low flames, like a plate of brandy-doused fruit when it is set alight). The Fulginator had sent them into a region of nighs and netherings unknown to any Yountian map, with violent and capricious winds. To starboard they spied a large, hump-backed island, thickly forested except for a thin swath of flower-pricked meadow running abruptly to the beach.

As the ship approached the island, four men burst from the forest and raced across the meadow to the beach, shouting, waving their arms. Their eyes were wide, their beards dendritic, their clothes ill-used. They looked as if they might be shipwrecked mariners from Socotra or Muscat.

Reglum could not believe what he saw through his telescope. He called for the
Indigo Pheasant
to slow, turn about, drop anchor. In the nearly two thousand years since the Yountians had begun their venturing into the Interrugal Lands, in all their several thousands of interstitial voyages, the Yountian tough-ships had never once found another sapient being alive in the places-in-between. A few washed-up corpses, including those of the stork-men with elongated fingers and three nostrils. The deserted towns on Supply Island, empty evidence of other people long gone. Other people! Alive in the Interrugal Lands!

“We must save these poor wretches!” Reglum cried.

All onboard agreed fervently, watching the four men jumping up and down, arms pinwheeling. They hastily formed a landing party and began to lower two boats off the side.

But before the boats hit the water, the wind frowned and the air furrowed. The island was lost suddenly to their view.

“I don’t understand, I don’t understand,” said Dorentius, speaking in the Fulgination Room a few minutes later to Reglum, Captain Shufflebottom, Sally and Maggie. “One moment we are steadily plotted, the next and without warning of any kind we are unfixed.”

“The chiasmic equations notwithstanding?” asked Maggie. “The cross-function of the graticules still robust? Our ana-stomotic derivations on course?”

“Abaxile strings in order?” asked Sally. “Brachistochrones coordinated?”

Dorentius confirmed that all appeared to be in order and yet it was not. For a full day, the
Indigo Pheasant
attempted to return to the island of the stranded mariners. Every time Dorentius, Maggie and Sally re-formulated the coordinates for the island, some force or will other than their own shunted the ship aside. The closer they got to the place where the island should be, the fiercer the wind became, casting gustules of acrid fumes at the ship. They sailed past The Dull-Fire twice more, and heard again the sounds emanating from The Cackling Isle. They were sailing in circles around a void, a hole in the map.

On the morning of the second day after their brief encounter, Maggie held conference in the ship-captain’s cabin.

“As my mother would say: ‘
Chi jibidolu anyi n’uzo
,’ which means something like ‘Our way has become clouded,’”said Maggie. “Someone or something does not wish us to reach and rescue those poor men. The Owl perhaps, though four men seem few compared to the world he seeks to withhold from us. Maybe Agwu is intervening, balancing on the ball of fortune, disorienting us for reasons we cannot know. Or maybe the Goddess has a hand in this, protecting us but not allowing us to over-reach ourselves.”

“But those men implored us, their faces, oh Goddess, their faces—we cannot leave them alone to their fate . . .” said Reglum.

“No doubt,” said Maggie. “Yet we are barred. We cannot fulginate our way back to that island. It is not in our power. Some wall there is, some barrier impervious to the will of our song.”

“Those poor devils,” said Barnabas.

“‘
Kaskas selwish pishpaweem
,’” murmured Sally, choking back tears as she gripped Isaak to her breast. “”Dear Mother, protect and guide us.’”

“We must press on; we have no choice,” said Maggie. “My soul breaks to say this, but we must press on.”

They sang “The Lamentation of Saint Gerontius” and “The Blessing of the Wayfarer,” then continued heavy-hearted on their voyage. The faces of the men on the hump-backed island haunted forever the minds of those who had sailed on the
Indigo Pheasant
. Maggie cried to herself many nights on the rest of the journey. Later, she would say that the decision to end the search and sail on, without having rescued the men marooned, was one of the most terrible she had been forced to make in her life.

Who the men on the beach were, and what became of them, figures into no tale of this Earth.

On the twenty-third day of fulgination, having sailed past “reefs of dragon-horn, on roads with neither hithe nor haven,” the
Indigo Pheasant
came into a fog bank of greater than usual proportions. The ship slowed its speed. Dorentius confirmed that the Fulginator had set this course and that his calculations were correct—they would just have to endure the dimness and muffled sight.

As night fell, fostering a darkness oily and nearly opaque, the forward watch spotted at a distance a bobbing light, pale emerald in colour. As the
Indigo Pheasant
cruised nearer, the first light was joined by a second, somewhat larger and higher up. Reglum, Maggie, Captain Shufflebottom and others peered through telescopes. What they saw was a wrought iron lamp-post of ordinary height, from which depended the first light, a lamp swaying in the misty breeze. It illuminated in a pallid green wash the outlines of a jetty protruding from a sloping, rocky shore into an inlet salivary with foam. A wherry (but lacking oars as many noted) bumped steadily against the jetty, attached with rope to a ring. At the edge of the light, as it darkened into tobacco-brown and varieties of dark grey, observers discerned the single mast of a sunken ship, a sloop or ketch, thrusting above the water off the jetty. Lifting their gaze, they saw a set of steep, winding stairs hewn into the rock, leading to a massive house—seen barely in the gloom, and then only because of the second, pale green light glowing from one long slit of a window in the attic.

Reglum said, “Our second encounter with what appears to be humanity, or at least intelligent life, in less than ten days! Remarkable! We travel the moonless tracks for nearly two millennia and never meet anyone else we can converse with, and now on a single voyage, in the span of a few days, we stumble upon others twice.”

Captain Shufflebottom (for once not wearing his smoked-glass spectacles) shook his head, “Yet I do not like the feel of this place. Unwholesome, I call it, and that would be putting things charitably.”

Maggie nodded her head, and said, “The lamps might be lit as a welcome or set as a beacon for help, yet where then are the people? . . . Oh look!”

A shadow crossed the attic window, causing the glow of pale emerald to flicker.

“Someone is there, right enough,” said Captain Shufflebottom. “Reminds me of stories told in the office to which I belong. About the Strange High House in the Mist, for one, and the Lean High House of the Gnoles for another, though perhaps those are the same thing—our knowledge thereof is, you will appreciate, of necessity limited.”

Reglum nodded, sadly, and said, “Ah, we have heard such tales as well, or variants of them. The House of the Mewlips. Lures for the unwary far beyond the fields we know. I guess we would not like the conversation we would have with whomever inhabits that house. Miss Maggie, let us quietly away, before something traps us here. We must not tarry. Look, our whales hang back and the dolphins are urging us to retreat, see them leaping?”