Authors: Col Buchanan
‘Survivors?’ Ash heard his distant, impossibly calm voice ask in reply.
‘He didn’t say. I don’t think so. Osh
ō
, though . . . he said that that Osh
ō
had been slain in the fighting.’
Ash closed his eyes, while all around him the birds called out and rattled around in their cages.
Ché
, he thought.
They used what he knew to find us
.
For the longest of times he could not move, could not even speak.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Bilge Town
The forest was a world within a world, his mother, the Contrarè, had liked to say.
As he staggered into its outer treeline, dripping wet from his river crossing and with the rags hanging off him, he sensed the difference in the air, the change of scents in his nostrils, the softening of light as it fell through the high canopy, and realized that it was true.
He ventured onwards, deeper into the Windrush until his legs would carry him no further. He collapsed onto the soft floor of leaves and dirt and slept a dreamless sleep of oblivion.
When he awoke, Bull knew he could go no further without first regaining some strength. He set about making a camp for himself not far from the trickles of a wide, shallow stream. He burned dead-wood that was wet and smoky, moved a large log in front of it for a seat. For food he ate berries and caught what fish he could with a sharpened stick, even chanced the mushrooms that looked familiar enough to his city eyes. Nuts too, of all kinds, were in abundance, though they lay heavy in his stomach if he consumed too many.
When he fell asleep those first nights on a carpet of soft moss, with the stars shining through the leaves overhead, and the trees surrounding him like the walls of a home, he knew the world beyond the forest was diminishing in his mind, its troubles and conflicts no longer his own. He was at peace at last in this quiet, lonely place of his mother’s people. He wished never to leave it.
On the fourth morning of his convalescence, Bull was wakened by a sharp stab to his side, and he sat up to find a group of male Contrarè gaping down at him. Warriors, by the looks of their painted faces, striped green and black from ear to ear, and the crow feathers and bone charms adorning their long dark hair.
‘
Chushon! Tekanari!’
One of the men demanded as he jabbed his spear at him again. The warrior seemed the youngest of them all.
Bull grabbed the shaft of it and plucked it out of his grip.
At once, a dozen spear-tips were pressing against his flesh.
‘Whoah,’ Bull told them as he held up a hand. He tossed the spear back into the hand of the startled warrior.
‘Calm down. I’m one of you, see?’ And he gestured to his face as though it was obvious.
The men glanced at the young warrior. They wanted to kill Bull here and now, he could see.
With graceful movements the young warrior planted the end of his spear in the earth and plucked at the knees of his trousers to bend down before him. Tentatively, he grasped Bull’s face and turned it one way and then the other. He studied the sharpness of his cheeks, the swarthy complexion of his skin. He peered closely at the horns tattooed on his temples, and nodded his head in appreciation.
‘Then welcome home, brother of the tribes,’ the young man said in rough Trade, and helped him to his feet.
Ash wandered through the rain, lost and aimless. His mind had sunk into his feet, and he released himself to the feel of the hard rounded cobbles against the soles of his boots, letting them take him wherever they would.
Hermes the agent had offered him a room to stay in for as long as he needed it. Numbly, Ash had thanked him but declined, and had left the man standing at the front door with the birds shrieking behind him.
‘I’m not certain what I do now, Ash. Are we finished then? Is it over?’
Ash had only waved a silent farewell.
He didn’t realize he’d been walking south towards the Shield until he sniffed the scents of fish and seaweed and brine, and looked up from beneath the brim of his dripping hat, and saw the Sargassi Sea and the calmer waters of the east harbour before him. The countless ships that sheltered there bobbed and rocked in the gentle swell, while gulls wailed forlorn and hungry, sweeping back and forth through the sheets of rain. Men with fishing rods sat on stools along the waterfront, clad in hooded ponchos to protect themselves from the weather. Their demeanours were calm and patient as they chewed on tarweed or smoked from clay pipes.
To Ash, just then, they looked like the most contented men in the world.
The Shield was visible from here above the huddle of All Fools. The Lansway it stood upon stretched out across the water into a dull obscurity. He could see little of the ongoing assault itself out there; just plumes of smoke rising from the outermost wall, and the occasional flash of fire. The scene was muted, the sea breeze carrying the sounds elsewhere into the city.
Pressing onwards, he came to a busy junction overlooked by inns and merchants’ storehouses. The junction was the scene of a vagabond street market. Fancy carriages attempted to force their way through the crowds, which were mostly street vendors, brash prostitutes, the occasional gang of roaming urchins. A hill rose steeply ahead of him into leafy streets and high, marble mansions fronted by spike-topped walls, an enclave of Michinè and wealthy common-born. The Congress of the council could be found up there, he recalled.
Ash saw little point in going that way. He carried on along the seafront, the road curving out to skirt the base of the hill. After a row of rowdy taverns and sleep-easies, the road eventually petered out into a shingle track, with the hill on his left fronted by limestone cliffs.
The coastline here was a narrow, windswept strip of rock between the cliffs and the sea. Shanties had been erected amongst pools of brackish seawater that plopped and shimmered in the rainfall. Ash meandered between the shacks, stepping over the occasional crab or bundle of seaweed. The flimsy domiciles were propped high on stacks of flattened stones, and wooden boards ran between many of them.
He’d heard of this district in his previous visits to the city, though he had never visited before. The Shoals, the city-folk called it, due to the tides that swamped it in heavy weather. It was said to be the poorest district of the city, the place where people landed when they could fall no lower. Many penniless sailors came here and waited for news of ships hiring men. They had their own name for the place.
They called it Bilge Town.
Ash smiled without humour, wondering at the irony of his life.
The area stank of running sewage and rotting fish. Picking his way along the rocks, he risked straining his neck by looking up to the very top of the cliffs. Seabirds were spinning in the updraft rising past the Michinè villas, where orchards overhung the crumbling edges of limestone. Kings had once lived up there. For a thousand years they had lived in the Pale Palace with their families and courts, ruling over all of Khos.
Ash slipped on something beneath his heel and caught himself just in time. He looked down at a sour apple, fallen from one of the high overhanging trees of the orchards, smeared flat and brown beneath his boot. A gust drove the rain into his face. Ash shivered.
He headed towards the cliff face, where the rocky shore rose sharply and the shanties huddled together more densely than they did below. The shingle paths wound between dwellings both small and weatherworn, leaning against each other for support, clinging to the slopes all the way to the face of the cliffs. In the cliffs themselves, within depressions in the chalky face of stone, structures were perched in enclaves that seemed impossible to the eye. High above them caves had been carved out, connected by ladders and swaying gantries.
He trod upwards along a path that switchbacked between shanties and the occasional two-storey structure. Women hung clothes out to dry beneath stretches of tarpaulin, their heads and shoulders wrapped in shawls, faces reddened by the wind. Babes cried indoors. The street children chased after dogs or skipped to odd chanting rhymes, or struggled with bulging waterskins up the slopes. There seemed to be fewer men than women, he noticed.
Already the ache in his head was returning, despite the leaves still bundled in his mouth. His eyes swam with a kind of fog, and Ash blinked hard to try and clear them. He took more of the dulce leaves, and stood for some moments until his vision cleared a little, though the pain remained, stabbing his forehead to the beat of his heart. He began to feel sick with it.
He stopped a local – an old, hungry-looking, grey-haired man carrying a straw umbrella – and asked where he might find some room and board. The old man looked at him curiously, but was helpful enough. Ash followed his directions, climbing ever upwards.
The Perch was a ramshackle establishment that occupied a shallow ledge on the cliff wall. The sign above the door swung creaking in the wind, as old and decrepit as the rest of the long, narrow building. The flaking picture showed a rat squatting on a sea-tossed barrel, its own tail clamped in its mouth in apprehension.
Smoke was billowing from the taverna’s central chimney. Laughter could be heard from within.
Ash pushed through the doors into the taproom. A squall of rain followed him in, causing the lantern light in the dim, smoky space to flicker against the walls. A few heads turned to appraise the newcomer.
‘Shut that door!’ shouted a man behind the bar, a fat bald-headed man with thick tattooed arms. ‘You’re letting the cold in, man!’
Ash pushed the door closed, warped and ill-fitting in its frame, and shook his coat dry as a pool of water gathered at his feet, soaking into the rushes that covered the floor. It was hot in the narrow room. A log fire crackled fitfully in the hearth. Ash removed his hat and stepped to the bar, trailing water.
The proprietor was playing a game of ylang with a woman sitting on a stool and wearing an expression of boredom. The man moved one of his black pebbles across the board, and looked up at Ash as he approached.
‘What can I get for you?’ he asked.
‘Cheem Fire, if you have any.’
His eyes brightened. ‘Then you’re in luck. I probably have the last case in the whole city.’
The bottles were hidden behind the bar in a locked strongbox chained to the floor. The proprietor fumbled with a ring of keys that hung from his belt, then unlocked it and removed a bottle with an exaggerated show of care. The cork squeaked as he pulled it free with his teeth. He swirled the contents of the bottle, allowing the aroma to waft into his flaring, hairy nostrils.
‘Only the finest,’ he purred as he trickled out the tiniest of portions into a glass tumbler, chipped but reasonably clean. He was about to add some water into it when Ash held his hand over the glass.
‘And leave the bottle,’ Ash told him.
Suspicion, suddenly. ‘It costs half an eagle for a bottle of this stuff. It isn’t watered down already, you know.’
The coin skittered across the bar, turning every head in the room.
The proprietor licked his lips. He took the gold eagle and hefted it for weight. His tongue poked out and he dabbed it against the coin.
‘Very good,’ he proclaimed with satisfaction. He left the bottle where it stood and took out a chisel and small mallet from beneath the bar. The eagle, like all eagles, was stamped with two deep lines across its face, one crossing the other so as to divide it into quarters. He aligned the end of the chisel with one of the lines and pounded once, hard, with the mallet. The coin broke in two. He scooped up one half, returned the other.
Ash swirled the contents of the glass for a moment, took a sniff, then downed it.
The swarthy woman was studying him with her kohl-lined eyes. She looked Alhazii, he saw. Her eyes seemed overly fascinated with his skin.
‘What brings you to Bilge Town, stranger?’ she asked of him, and her voice was deep and rich, and it made him think of dusk.
‘My feet,’ he said, and threw the fiery liquid to the back of his throat, and refilled his glass to the brim.
Ash hired a room for the night, a dreary upstairs cubicle barely large enough for its dusty bed, where he left his sword and nothing else. He went back downstairs, and sat in a corner of the taproom with his bottle of Cheem Fire, where he began the slow but appealing process of drinking himself into the ground.
He spoke to no one all that long evening, and the look of him told them all to leave him be. The Cheem Fire soothed the pain in his skull, but most of all numbed him to himself. When the proprietor finally called for time, Ash found himself unwilling to climb to his empty room just yet. The drink had made him melancholy. He knew he would find sleep difficult, and would dream of things he would rather not be dreaming.
Ash finished off the glass in his hand and banged it down on the table. He took the bottle with him as he gathered his longcoat from the cloakstand and put on his hat, then tugged the door open.
Outside, the rain had turned to sleet, and the wind was tossing it about so that it stung as it struck his face. It was bitterly cold even with the coat fastened tight about him, and the hat tied firmly to his head. The tide was washing in with the high swells, and much of the lower Shoals was submerged in a foot or so of churning water. Ash clutched his bottle of Cheem Fire and staggered down through the dark shingle street towards it.