In Great Waters (6 page)

Henry took it. He was becoming accustomed to the bland, saltless taste of the food, and as the season grew chillier, he knew he should eat as much as possible, laying down fat to keep out the cold—although the supply of fish was not increasing as the days grew darker and the temperature dropped, and the lack of food was worrying him. Allard passed him another piece, and said, “Good boy, Henry. See that?” He pointed. “That is Angelica.”

“Angelica,” Henry said, and reached out his hand; Allard generally gave him a small bit of fish when he repeated words.

“Good.” The fish was produced, and Henry stuffed it into his mouth. “Queen Angelica.”

“Queen Angelica.” Henry held out an expectant hand, but no fish came.

“Queen, Henry?” Allard gave him a stern look. “What is a queen?”

Henry said nothing; there was no reason to expect him to know what a queen was.

“Do you want to know what a queen is?”

“Fish,” Henry said; the sentence was a complicated one.

“Later. A queen has a crown.”

“Crown.” Henry patted his lap; the crown was his only other plaything, a cheering bright circle in this bleak room.

“A queen is married to a king.”

“Fish.”

“Talk to me and I will give you fish,” Allard said.

“Not know ‘married,’” Henry said, frowning with concentration. He needed more food if he was to avoid freezing.

“King and queen are together. Man and woman,” Allard said. This made little sense to Henry, but he said nothing. “King is the son of a king and queen.”

Henry nodded; he had seen children born in the sea, and the spawning that preceded it; sometimes a deepsman and woman grew attached to each other and stayed together, breeding season after season, if the man wasn’t too weak to defend himself. King and queen must mean a breeding couple.

“You have queen?” Henry said.

“No.” Allard tapped the ground impatiently. “Only one king and queen in one country.”

Henry lowered his head; “country” was another difficult concept. “Fish?”

“Very well.” Allard passed him another piece. “King and queen are leaders. King and queen rule. They tell all the subjects—the people who are not king and queen—what they must do. Subjects obey king and queen. Loyal to …” He stopped. The glance he gave out of the window made Henry start up in alarm; sudden looks usually meant an approaching predator.

Allard showed no sign of flight, though, so Henry repeated, “Subjet-ss obey king an queen.” The consonants were difficult, but the idea was not. He had been used to having a single leader in the tribe.

Then he frowned. “King have crown. Henry have crown.” He looked at Allard in consternation. Henry knew only too well how the leader changed: another leader challenged them. The battle would be bloody and frantic. He had only ever seen two such, but he had never forgotten them, the rocks clenched in hard fists, the rising plumes of white bubbles and the cloudy trails of dark blood as the loser sank out of sight, arms limp and adrift on the current.

“Angelica was not born a queen, Henry. Listen.”

The story of Angelica began in Venice. Henry struggled with the ideas for weeks, but Allard was patient. He repeated the tale over and over, passing the boy titbits, giving him unwelcome pats, seeing no sign in the child’s still expression of the idea that possessed him: a ravaged body, head cracked with a rock, falling through the air, not even with the slow inevitability of a slain deepsman, but with a swift crash to the shattering ground below. A vague notion occupied Henry that someone might take his crown away, though, and he was determined not to have that happen. He had lost too many things in his life to relinquish it.

In the ninth century of our Lord, hundreds of years ago, Allard
explained, the great city of Venice was finding its strength. “Century” and “our Lord” were lost on Henry, but he gathered that the story happened a long time ago, before living memory, many generations back. “City” meant little either, but Allard described a place of land and sea both, of islands and waterways, where the solid ground was parted and split by the flowing ocean.

“Go there,” Henry said at once. He could get around in such a place much better; he could break his sticks and swim.

“Venice is far away, Henry.”

“Go there.”

“Venice is not in England. We cannot live there, we would not be welcome.”

“Far?”

“Many miles. Many weeks to travel.”

This did not sound so bad to Henry; the entrapment in a single place worried him as much as the coming winter. How could they continue to eat if they did not move on? Existence in the sea had been an endless search, and weeks of swimming were part of life.

“Go,” Henry said. He did not really expect Allard to take him to Venice—unless Henry was asking for food, Allard never granted a request—but he was tired to death of his room.

“Some day, perhaps, Henry. When you are ready.”

Henry felt ready; if he could only have had more to eat and knowledge of the way, he would have set out for Venice that moment. Allard was staring at him, though, not giving anything, not troubled by the cold or the confinement, so Henry gave up and asked for another piece of fish.

People had come to Venice, Allard explained, because they were unhappy in other lands. They wanted to rule themselves. But they were still subject to Constantinople, a place Henry could not understand any descriptions of. Venice a strong city, living on fish, harvesting salt, selling it to people who came to buy it. The word “salt” Henry did not recognise, until Allard produced some for him, a little pile of sand, startlingly white in a bowl. Henry made nothing of it until he tasted it, but when he did, he stopped dead, rocking himself to avoid
speaking to Allard, his mouth filled with taste of home. The boy refused to listen to any more of Allard’s story until he had finished the bowl, licking out its curves with a dark, tough tongue before turning to Allard and saying, “Salt an fish.”

“You want salt with your fish?”

“Yes.” Henry spoke imperiously; salt was too important to be denied.

“Very well, if you are a good boy, you shall have salt.” Allard had added another bribe to Henry’s attention, but a punishment too: on the days when Henry did not listen, when he rocked too much or tugged between his legs or showed his teeth to the nurse, fish would arrive without salt, dull grey and tasteless.

The people of Venice were happy there, Allard said. They lived well, even though Constantinople ruled them. Then one day, the people of the sea came.

Down the canals they swam, around the islands, turning and diving in the brown water. The Venetians had never seen such a sight. Some had seen deepsmen before, yes, riding the waves as the prows of ships cleft the water, but for most of the landsmen, the deepsmen were entirely unfamiliar.

“Ship?” said Henry.

“Yes,” Allard said, and produced a model. He waved it before the boy’s eyes, making it dance as if bobbing on a wave. Seeing the boy’s blank face, Allard stopped and handed him the toy. Henry sniffed at it, tasted the edges, but it was still puzzling. Allard had moved it to and fro, but when Henry turned it over in his hands, something tugged at his memory. He lay down on the floor and held the model above his head. There it was, a sight only seen from fathoms below: a dark fin-shape that meant a strong hand on his wrist, the sight of the tribe swimming up to greet it while he remained below, chastened and guarded by his mother.

“Ship,” Henry said. “What do ship?”

“Ships are how people travel the seas, Henry. How landsmen go across the water.”

Henry frowned; it was difficult to see why they didn’t swim, but
already he was learning that landsmen had a passion for
things
, for fabrics and chairs and doors and windows, that they stayed to guard these things and tied your hands if you damaged them. Now it seemed that they wanted a thing if they were to go through the water as well. It was no clearer than before why these ships had been forbidden him. He frowned again, and asked Allard for some fish to cover his disappointment.

The people of the sea came to Venice, Allard said. The Venetians were bewitched by these strange newcomers, by the sound of the voices that rang out across the canals. Pale faces flashed through the brown water, dark tails churned foam from the depths, and the deepsmen’s song echoed off the clean, damp walls. For a while, all the music of Venice was composed around it, flutes trying to imitate the sonorous groans that the deepsmen called across the waters. Then the Venetians sent people out, ambassadors, in flat-bottomed boats, flutes playing this new sound.

Hearing the weighty notes called across the canals, the deepsmen united in groups of three and five, strongest at the head, in the phalanx formation that was to become familiar over the years. They swam out to greet the ambassadors, and as the flautists strove to imitate the sounds they made, powerful hands reached out and overturned the boats.

Allard explained this with sign language, with words, with sounds and grimaces and gestures. Explaining music took a while, and Henry responded poorly to Allard’s awkward attempts to play a flute; singing he understood, but the flute was just sounds without meaning. Just occasionally Allard managed to pipe out a note that sounded a little like a word—the echo of one, blurred and imprecise—which attracted Henry’s attention a little more, but either Allard’s musicianship or the boy’s willingness was too faulty to make much headway. This was all difficult for him to explain, but Allard took a great interest in Henry’s wavering enthusiasm for the flute, scratching note after note before carrying on with his explanation. Henry learned how the deepsmen had challenged the flautists, toppling them into the water to fight. Landsmen fare ill in underwater battles, and the deepsmen
fought by their own traditions. Water cushions the blow of a striking tail a little, but the great muscles and flexing joints of a sea man’s tail are always better able to clash and wrestle than the fragile limbs of an unseated musician. Several of Venice’s most promising composers suffered broken legs before the boating attempts were abandoned.

Unfortunately for the city, once the musicians had been subdued, the deepsmen took to refusing entry to the canals where such ambushes had taken place. They swam up and down, rolling over in the water, wide-eyed and thoughtful, tolling out a sweet-voiced chant very similar to the tunes the well-meaning ambassadors had relayed to them. The translation was becoming increasingly obvious to the philosophers of the city:
Ours
.

Venice, independent and strong, found itself with enemies on its banks. The sea people attacked boats, pulled down bridges, until it was all but impossible to travel. Attempts were made to block the canals: the deepsmen broke the dams. Arrows were fired into the water and some casualties followed, but it was hard to take aim on a quarry that could disappear into the opaque depths within a moment. Nets were of little use: the deepsmen spent little time in the Grand Canal, only flashing across it fast enough to do damage. Instead, they prowled the narrower waters, where no boat large enough to haul up the full weight of a deepsman could travel. Citizens waited on the banks grasping harpoons; the deepsmen swam silently under the water, concealed in the cloudy brown tide, only flashing up for long enough to cast rocks, toppling the huntsmen, dragging their bleeding bodies into the canals, never to surface again.

The city fell under siege. But as the Venetians struggled to make it past the deepsmen’s barricade into the harbour, Constantinople did nothing to help. Venice was weakening, and the setbacks of a subject people were no hardship to a city with a whole world of cities to command. Let Venice struggle, Constantinople decided. If Venice broke, they would be more obedient to their liege city; the Venetians had struggled hard for self-rule, but if their new-minted independence was no help against the enemy within, so much the better for Constantinople’s hold on them.

Venice turned from the East to Charlemagne, Emperor of the West. In the year of our Lord 805, Allard explained, on Christmas Day—a term foreign to Henry, to whom birthdays were a mystery and days were reckoned by season, not by month, even if the story had not involved more of that disagreeable crossed statue—the Venetians did homage to Charlemagne, Charles the Great, newly crowned and formidable. The Doge of Venice, Oberlerio, took to wife a Frankish bride, a woman from across the seas, a woman of the Western race, who became something entirely new: a Dogaressa, queen of Venice.

This, Allard told Henry, was not an easy question for the Venetians. They argued about it, he explained, for five years—an unbelievable lifetime to carry on a quarrel, Henry considered, especially as the quarrel, complicated though Allard made it sound, seemed like a simple one: they had a choice of leaders, there were greater tribes in the world who wanted to rule them and the Venetians didn’t want any of them. Allard used words like “strong” and “proud,” spoke of freedom to govern oneself, independence from a greater power. The boy flinched a little as Allard’s gestures grew larger, wondering why these ideas seemed to drive the man so. But it was clear that Allard did not approve when he spoke of how the Doges, desperate to free themselves from the tyranny of the blockading deepsmen, managed to smuggle a message to the King of Italy: Pepin, son of Charlemagne. The message was clear: come to Venice. The offer was not alliance. It was submission. Pepin was invited to conquer Venice, hold the city against Constantinople, to settle internal divisions and, most importantly, to drive the deepsmen from the canals. The Venetian people might have wanted independence, but with the deepsmen in their canals, their leaders had decided otherwise. They would follow Constantinople, if Constantinople would help them.