An Epistrophe of Ships - Chapter Two

[Kaiser B'caw I]

Chapter Two: Times Long Gone

The docks of Callamen's Eye were nearly always busy, except in the very worst of economic conditions; not far from Musica and on the intersection of several different maritime trade routes, there were ships passing by and through the sanct's waters at all times of the year. But with thousands of the ships of Sunderspray descending on the docks, from one-family fishing boats to carriers with thousands of people aboard, the sanct seemed to be experiencing a traffic jam of epic proportions. For Hinda, excitement faded into boredom as Osprey Striking queued up with other ships to pass through the inlet through the breakwater that protected Callamen's Eye from storm-driven waves.

Saru had gone off duty some hours before, so Hinda was alone on watch. She had stared out at the panorama of ships for so long that she had nearly forgotten to put on her wide-brimmed hat. The People tended to spend their lives outdoors, so few of them managed to avoid becoming well-tanned, but she still burned more easily than most. From under the hat flowed black hair, reaching down to her upper back, and was tied together with cord to keep it from getting in the way. Her tawny-brown eyes, shielded form the sun, swept slowly around to take in the view.

Her gaze found many unfamiliar ship's banners, with the newly-arrived ships now flying both the Sunderspray colors and those of their vessels. From the buildings of Callamen's Eye flew flags bearing a red eye, surrounded by flames, on a field of white; though nearly stationary, it was still considered a ship. A blue flag with a dolphin and a shark facing off against one another marked where Nukapai's Bite had docked. Off in the distance, to aft, an enormous, unwieldy-looking ship wallowed its way into the queue; it had a blocky, unnatural look to it, and it was painted entirely black. Its flag was difficult to make out at this distance, but Hinda thought she saw a black circuit-board-like pattern on a field of green.

By this point, the Osprey Striking was approaching a free berth, so Hinda made her way down to the deck, where she found her father glaring with disapproval at the strange ship. Balco Longwalker was a tall, thin man, with a pointed nose; he liked to think it gave him the look of the osprey, though his ruddy complexion tended to put people more in the mind of a buzzard, or perhaps a turkey. Nonetheless, his gaze was certainly sharp enough for a bird of prey, and he was directing it fully at the dark behemoth.

"You saw it too, eh? Idiot Patchworkers."

The ship was closer, now. It was monumentally ugly, and looked as though it had been assembled from the worst scraps on the heap; various unnecessary smokestacks and odd projections stuck out from it in all directions. Hinda stared at it, puzzled. "A Patchworks ship? I thought they were famous for their shipbuilding. What'd they want to put together an ugly tub like that for?"

"For show. No doubt it's well-built underneath, but they'd sooner eat their own spare parts than sail something that looked sleek and new out in the open. They like looking like tinkerers." Balco spat over the side. "Bloody idiots."

Hinda said nothing, but rolled her eyes. The inhabitants of the Patchworks were considered to be among the People, but their oddities tended to earn them respect and scorn in equal measure. Their smuggler ancestors had located an unregarded seamount east of the sancts of Blavatsky and Backbone Site, and had built upon it the foundations of a secluded base and shipyard. Over the years, it had grown into a motley assortment of docks, factories, and laboratories, and the People had taken advantage of it as a center for shipbuilding, as well as for ship repairs and upgrades.

The sanct's focus on technology and industry, and its popularity with the shyer shipgoing populations, had brought it immense wealth, and soon thereafter all sorts of sins and vices. The resulting society had become one of extremes: all at once flagrant and secretive, insular and world-wise, intellectual and practical, businesslike and sensual, and above all else, freewheeling to a degree their cousins would never contemplate. The People called them their own and respected their usefulness, but few of them understood their motivations. Her father, predictably, was not among those few.

Balco shook his head dismissively. "Anyway, we're about ready to run final checks and then let everyone ashore. Onar told me you saw your friend Atuna, so I expect you'll be spending your time with her?"

"Most likely," Hinda agreed. "What will you be doing?"

"Oh, I and your mother and the quartermaster will be going to Assembly, just like the other ships' officers." He screwed up his face. "It's times like this I'm glad I don't go to the annual ones. Reports and talk and bragging. I don't doubt you'll have the better time. Which reminds me, you'd better see the quartermaster for your share before he leaves the ship, or you'll have no money to spend."

"I saved up some from last port, but some more wouldn't hurt."

Balco grinned. "Your father's daughter, you are."

-----

And so it was that Hinda Farsight and Atuna Windscent found themselves strolling down one of the graceful seaside promenades of Callamen's Eye. To Hinda's delight, their party included Pendura Fireclaw, Atuna's elder brother, though this was somewhat mitigated by the fact that it also included her own brother Onar Longwalker.

Though in recent years Nukapai's Bite had roamed the same distant waters as Osprey Striking, it had previously passed through Callamen's Eye on a regular basis. Pendura, therefore, as the oldest of the four, remembered his way around well enough to guide the others without getting lost, or at least not extremely so. He led them through a shopping district, a gauntlet of gaudy sale signs and stalls crammed with merchandise.

"A lot of them look like foreigners," Onar remarked. "What would interest them here?"

"Money," replied Atuna. "What else? The People go all over Micras in search of good trade, and then we all gather here. They know there's a bunch of people walking around with ready money, or else rare merchandise that can be turned into money. And for our part, we know that there's a bunch of people around who are attracted here by the opportunities. So the money goes round and round."

"And the Duke gets his taxes from it, too," Pendura added dryly, nodding at a trio of official-looking gentlemen strolling down the street. Each of the three was wearing the emblem of House Mortis. "Say what you want about the landwalker government, they're not stupid. They know how much money will be changing hands here, and they're getting their share of it."

"Hah... I wonder how that goes down at the Patchworks," Hinda said. "Tax officials poking their noses into business there would get them cut off."

"I understand they have a different arrangement," Pendura replied. "A place like that doesn't get tolerated by a government unless they pay up somehow, and I think their quartermaster just sends some money to the Duke each year."

"Where would he get that kind of money?"

"Bribes and protection money, of course. I suppose it's just an informal version of taxes, when you get right down to it."

The four of them meditated on the oddities of the Patchworks once again.

"Anyway, where are we headed?" Onar demanded, after a while.

Pendura said, "To see the Antiquities. Valuable artifacts and documents from the history of the People are kept there; some of it's pretty dry, but there's still some impressive exhibits there. It's where they keep the the Silver Tear, too."

Hinda blinked, and glanced at Pendura. "Sorry?"

"The Silver Tear is there."

"You mean the ship? That Silver Tear?"

"Yep."

Despite herself, Hinda was awed. It wasn't often you got to see a legend in person. "Are all the Antiquities that impressive?"

"Not all, but some are pretty close. Recordings and photographs from before the Devastation, some belongings of the Old Count, all sorts of things."

She nodded. The People were not given much to education beyond that needed to live aboard ship, but they were strongly tied to their history, and to the legends of their days on the Isle; to see living evidence of it was a rare and treasured opportunity for any of them-

A loud splash sounded nearby, and the four turned their heads to look. Alongside the boulevard was a small ship, landwalker- made by the look of it; a foamy expanse in the nearby water indicated where something had fallen in.

Atuna stared at the water. "Was it a person?"

"Big enough, but no shout and no one's swimming back up-"

Onar shouted, "Have to check!" Without further ceremony, he peeled off his shirt and dove into the water. The others watched nervously, but the boy surfaced after only a few moments. Gasping briefly for air, he called out, "No one there!"

A head peered down at them from the ship. "What's going on down there?"

"There was a splash," Pendura replied. "We thought someone might have gone overboard."

"The crew's all out in the city, except for two or three of us," said the man. "If someone went over, it was a stowaway or a ghost!"

Hinda and Pendura helped haul Onar out of the water. "Let's get you to a bath house to towel off," the older boy said.

The four ambled down the boulevard again. Hinda glanced back, then blinked and looked back again; for a moment, she thought she saw movement in the spot where they had been standing a few moments before... not like the movement of an object or person, but like the waves of heat radiating off hot pavement, a sort of blurring...

And then, after another blink, it was gone.

"Ai, Hinda! Watch where you're going!"

She shook her head. Getting too easily spooked, she thought.

-----

Just inside the entrance to The Antiquities was a high, domed hall. In terms of pure ornamentation, it was sparsely decorated; for the most part, the People had little time for the impractical, and the soothing white-and-blue pattern on the walls was the main concession to aesthetics. Nonetheless, the room itself was a mere background to its contents; all along the walls were innumerable display cases and shelves and tables and paintings, and taking up the middle of the hall, held up by supports, was a great wooden sailing ship.

It looked, if not quite new, then at least well cared-for. The People did not treat famous artifacts and monuments, particularly not ships, like landwalkers did, and it puzzled them that such a thing as, say, a ruined palace would be left to sit in pieces under the sun. Such a thing had no spirit, no life; to let a ruined thing remain ruined was to neglect it. Among themselves, they saw no horror in repairing and maintaining something of antiquity; the materials might change, but the thing itself would remain alive. So it was that this ship was far, far older than it looked. But should anyone doubt its identity, one had only to look at the faded flag that still hung from the rigging: black, with an embroidered silver spiraling shape reminiscent of a water drop. It had no other emblem, and it needed none.

Hinda nearly sank to her knees in front of it. "This was the first..." she murmured. She took a deep breath, and recited, "'And so in that place did Lirdu, called Sightland, take his ship the Silver Tear to meet with the Kaiser's admiral, and plead for clemency. And to show their humility and allegiance, they made there the Pact of Abjuration. No piracy would they commit, nor would they go against the will of the Kaiser, and until the day that they would return to their Isle they abjured all land that rose above the water. And as a sign to all of their intentions, the People took the symbol of the Silver Tear as their own.' ...And they've kept it here all this time?"

"Callamen's Eye was not built for centuries afterward," Pendura said quietly. "When it was retired from service, a cove near Musica was used to house it until this hall was made for it."

The four of them wordlessly spread out around the hall. Hinda looked in at a case containing a faded parchment, an original copy of the Oath of Abjuration; further along was an artifact from the Time of Exile, a squared-off stone from the remains of a base in the Chaz Modanian Isles, from which the People had plundered passerby ships and the coasts of Brookshire. A particularly grotesque trophy was a skull, blackened with soot, recovered after the burning of the rebel landside colony at Hunkerdown. Wandering into one of the adjoining rooms, the theme changed; here the antiquities were not those of a seagoing People, but of one that had dwelled upon the land.

Even now, in legend and song, the People of the Sea remembered their original home, the Isle that others had called Benacia. The paintings and photographs on the walls occasionally showed landscapes, with wide rolling grasslands and stands of trees; others showed little fishing villages and farmsteads. One painting depicted an animal like an enormous four-legged chicken, large as an elephant, rearing on its hind legs. For the most part, though, the scenes were of a beautiful city. Here, a long, deep harbor stretched inland to a wide plaza; there, buildings of stately brick and gleaming marble were separated by wide, stone-paved streets; and over there, a long, graceful bridge uniting two halves of a city separated by water.

"Port Benacia," said Pendura, from behind her. "The greatest of the ancestors' cities, it's said."

They stared solemnly at the images. After a while, Hinda said quietly, "Why do you think we've never gone back?"

"To the Isle? I don't know. I suppose no one ever felt the time had come."

"But... it must be inhabitable by now, surely. The place isn't a myth, it's on maps and everything. We could make things as beautiful as they were before, if we wanted, but none of our ships have ever even gone back for a look."

Pendura shrugged. "Legend says that when our ancestors' ships fled the devastation, the Old Count spoke to us and told us that we would go back one day, but not until the proper time."

"But he must be a myth, surely? A lizard-man, or whatever he was, ruling the Isle?"

The boy pointed to the far end of the hall. "There's an exhibit over there about him. I think it had a painting."

Sure enough, there was. The being in the painting was wearing some kind of powered armor painted red, and a white cloak; they obscured the shape of the body, but it could be seen that there were deviations from the normal human dimensions. Digitigrade legs supported a frame that, while tall, was stooped rather than upright, and counterbalanced by a long green tail. A graceful, serpentine neck lifted a tapered head above the rest; a long muzzle and piercing, almost burning, blue eyes were aimed at something in the distance to one side. One had the strong sense that the subject, assuming it had been a real one, was not put together quite right, as if he had been born with a body that had not been meant to work; but he nonetheless had an odd air of dignity.

Hinda stared at the painting, unsure what to think; the plaque underneath it claimed it had been painted from life, but it was unthinkable that such a creature could have been real, much less the liege-lord of the People. Feeling uneasy, she shivered. "I don't know... I can see how the old stories must be true, most of them, but that one?"

"There's other things of his here, too. Some kind of weird-shaped furniture, over there. And then there's this stick over here." Pendura crossed the hall to a display case. Inside was a sort of staff or walking stick, made of a black metal. "This was supposedly his. A holy weapon, blessed by B'caw."

Hinda peered into the case. The metal was rough and plain, but untarnished by time; visually, that was about all you could say about it. And yet, you could almost imagine that there was some kind of power there, waiting to be released...

She shivered again, feeling more uneasy than ever. "Come on, let's find the others. Some of this stuff is too strange, and I want to see the other sections."

"There's not much more here."

"Then maybe we can see what the Assembly is like. Someone had said they were discussing an invasion..."

Their voices faded from hearing as they left the hall. For several minutes, there was silence and stillness, but at last there was a sort of rippling or blurring in the air, and then a figure was visible; it was covered in what appeared to be either a collection of rags or an extremely old and oversized robe, but the tip of a green tail could be seen trailing behind it. The figure shuffled slowly to the case containing the metal stick. It placed a hand with clawed fingers against the glass, longingly, and for a moment the dark metal seemed to glow.

The figure then turned to the painting of the Old Count, and stared, its green muzzle aimed at the painting in much the same way that the being in the painting had aimed his own. It stood very still, as if entranced, and then lowered its gaze to the floor, breathing a long, ragged sigh.

At last, it turned away, and shuffled toward the exit; but before it had gone five steps, the air had blurred around it, and it was gone.