The Harvest Tide Project (21 page)

Groach noticed with surprise that there was a Parsinor couple behind the bar. They were much older than Draegar, and the man was nearly a head shorter, bent deeply as if the weight of his shell were almost too much for him. His wife was taller. She wore a wig and as much jewellery as her frame could physically carry, which was quite a bit. He observed that she wore a gaily coloured dress, even though he knew Parsinors had no need to wear clothes. The couple signalled Draegar to join them at the bar.

‘Draegar,’ the woman purred. ‘It’s been too long. We haven’t seen you in over a season.’

‘Still wandering, Draegar?’ the man enquired. ‘It’s time you found yourself a wife!’

‘Temina, Cholsch.’ The map-maker touched foreheads with each of the others in the traditional Parsinor greeting. Then Draegar handed over his weapons; clearly none were allowed to be carried in the storyhouse. Groach watched
with amusement as his companion placed the collection on the bar. His battleaxe, sword and sling were joined by three knives, a small hammer, a short blowpipe, and a set of metal fangs that obviously fit in his mouth. Cholsch, the man, swept them up in his arms and placed them in a box under the counter.

‘I must have your weapons as well, sir,’ he said to Groach.

‘I don’t have any,’ the botanist replied.

The storyhouse owner raised his bushy eyebrows at
Draegar
, who shrugged.

‘He is a gardener,’ he grunted. Then, leaning closer: ‘The Noranians are on the lookout for him. I would appreciate it if you would tell no one about him.’

‘Aye,’ Cholsch said simply.

‘Welcome to our home.’ Temina took Groach’s head in both hands and touched her forehead to his for slightly longer than he thought necessary. ‘May your stay be
comfortable
and happy.’

‘Ah … thank you, madam,’ he gave a shallow bow.

‘Been harassing the Nogs again, have you?’ Cholsch asked in a conspiratorial tone, looking sideways at the map-maker.

‘They have been harassing friends of mine,’ Draegar
rumbled
. ‘It seemed only fair to return the gesture.’

‘We look forward to hearing about it,’ Cholsch said, laughing. ‘But first, have a seat. Entertain our customers while we knock you and your friend up something to eat.’

‘I will sit with you,’ Temina said, coming through the gap in the counter to take Draegar’s arm.

She led them to the centre of the room, and
unceremoniously
pushed two men off a bench to make room for herself and her guests. Groach and Draegar sat either side of her.

‘Pay attention, you louts!’ she roared and the room went silent. ‘This is a dear friend of mine and weary from travel. Some of you will know him; most of you will not. But you will all discover that he is a man to admire and envy, that he is a man with stories to tell!’

Benches scraped along the floor as men came closer to the centre table to hear what Draegar had to say. The map-maker did not disappoint them. He raised his hands, palms up:

‘I have travelled a long way since I was last here. I have seen rain and snow and burning sun in three lands in this last season. But it is of the witching time in the Gluegrove Swamps I must tell you now, so give me your ears and let me tell you the tale of the conjoined hags who make soup bowls from the skulls of unwary travellers!’

Against her better judgement, Hilspeth had let the Myunans talk her into hitching a lift with a delivery man on his way to Noran. He had passed them late that morning, and Taya had jumped out of hiding and waved him down, asking him to take them as far as he could. He had been happy to help. Hilspeth had thought the better of making a scene, and had got in with the two shape-shifters. She consoled herself with the thought that the soldiers might not think to check
vehicles
heading towards Noran for fugitives who would be
getting
as far away as possible if they had any sense. The wagon was old, but big, with two rows of seats in the cab and a large flatbed with its cargo covered in tarpaulin.

‘What are you carrying?’ Taya called to the driver over the roar of the bule engine.

‘Crumble cones,’ he shouted back. ‘Not my normal cargo,
mind. I carry supplies for the army mostly. Got one job where I carry big tanks of esh up to Noran. Pick them up at the coast. Very secret, that.’

Hilspeth sat in the back seat with Lorkrin, and wished Taya were less keen to make conversation. The more the driver talked, the more he would expect them to talk back.

‘So, what are the crumble cones for?’ Taya asked.

‘Not supposed to talk about it,’ he bellowed over a
particularly
loud belch from the motor. ‘Takin’ ’em to Noran. Some kind of secret plan, run by the Prime Ministrate
himself
. No one knows much about it. They’re storing these right in the centre of the city. Very heavily guarded. They’re shipping these ruddy cones in from all over the empire. I was supposed to have an armed escort myself but they couldn’t spare the men.’

Taya turned and gave Hilspeth a meaningful look. The Prime Ministrate had discovered Shessil’s secret, and was wasting no time in putting his plan into action. But what did he intend to do?

‘Where are the cones going after you deliver them?’
Hilspeth
enquired at the top of her voice.

‘Not sure,’ the driver shouted. ‘Though a drinking mate of mine says his esh-boat has been held back in the port, and is due to be sent down south with a special cargo. He couldn’t tell me what the cargo was, said it was top secret, but he was asking me to hurry up with my deliveries as it was people like me that was holding his ship up.’

The driver informed them that he was under orders to drive all night. His cargo was to reach Noran by noon of the following day at all costs, and they were welcome to travel all the way with him. They could help keep him awake. He
said he had a habit of falling asleep on long hauls. He added that with a bit of luck, they might pick up a military escort that evening if one of the other delivery wagons caught up with them. It was handy to have troops around you, even if they did travel a bit fast. The roads just weren’t safe these days.

16 G
HOSTS ARE
L
ONELY
C
REATURES

Groach came to his senses, and for a few seconds could not remember where he was. He was in a soft bed, his head laid on down pillows, and he was wrapped up in a heavy swathe of blankets. The air around his exposed face told him the room was cold, but it just made him feel all the cosier
snuggled
up as he was. The bedroom was much smaller than the last one he had slept in, with rough plaster walls, bare
floorboards
and mismatched wooden furniture, but it was homely and comfortable and he felt safe here. Getting up, he dressed quickly, jogging on the spot to warm himself up. Spring was cold and summer came late this far north.

The bar of the tavern was no less dark in the morning than it had been the night before. The small, dirty windows let in dull shafts of light, but were no brighter than the oil lamps had been. The customers were smoking, talking, eating and drinking as they had been all night; the time of day seemed to have little bearing on life in the storyhouse. Groach looked around for Draegar, but the Parsinor was nowhere to be seen.

Stories were being traded over the tables around the
room, and Groach made his way over to one to listen. Two men moved to make room for him, one a squat Gabbit with an eye-patch and an ugly scar that extended out of it around his head, and two fingers missing from his left hand; the other a Traxen mercenary in a headscarf and camouflage paint. Groach sat down and listened quietly.

Draegar came in two tales later with Cholsch. They were arguing about something.

‘There are soldiers moving up and down the main roads all the time. The last two nights there has been more traffic along this road then I’ve seen since the war with Sestina,’ Cholsch was saying.

‘Then it will be easier to conceal ourselves,’ Draegar insisted. ‘We don’t have much time. Whatever Namen intends to do, he means to do it soon. We must get to Noran quickly.’

‘Well, at least wait until this afternoon. That way you might get a night’s travel out of it, before anyone gets suspicious.’

‘Agreed.’

Draegar nodded to Groach as he sat down at the table.

‘Another story!’ the mercenary cried. ‘Temina, another round of drinks, if you please.’

‘I am reminded of a time …’ Draegar began.

‘I have a story,’ Groach interrupted quietly. After a few tankards of mead, he was getting into the spirit of things.

‘Let the little man speak,’ said the mercenary. ‘Let’s hear what he has to tell.’

Groach looked queasily around at his now-silent audience and swallowed a mouthful of mead from the tankard that was placed before him.

‘I haven’t travelled much,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve lived most of
my life in the same place. We were not allowed out much, my colleagues and I. But our work brought us to Hortenz sometimes. We took a number of trips out on esh-boats, often spending days at a time at sail, just studying the gas and what lay beneath it.

‘On a gusty day in mid-autumn, we were out of sight of land in gale-force winds. The ship was rocking violently, and the churning esh made it impossible to navigate. Late in the afternoon, one of the pumps tore loose, smashing a hole through the hull of the starboard pod and throwing four men overboard. It is said that what the esh takes, it keeps, for there is no rescue for a man overboard. He does not float and he does not swim. He falls until he hits the bottom.

‘It was only by the grace of Everness that there was no fire, for a hydrogen explosion would have killed us all. The ship rolled onto its side, and all those above deck had to hold on for their lives. I was in the centre pod, below decks where we were trapped beneath the surface of the gas. The doors were jammed shut and the vessel was just barely afloat. The only hope of anybody making it to shore was for the men above us to unhitch our hull and let it fall, releasing the weight so that they could right their pod. There were five of us in my section of the hull: an engineer, a bosun’s mate, two other botanists and myself. After some time, we heard the sounds of sawing and hammering, and at first we believed they were going to cut the hull free with us inside. We were horrified.

‘We tried smashing a hole in the wall to get out, but we had little more than our hands and feet to hit it. The thought of falling to the bottom of the esh where we would be smashed to pieces or suffocated was more than we could
bear. Soon, however, the engineer told us that it sounded more like they were cutting their way to us. They were going to get us out.

‘If you can imagine, we were trapped in a small room, lying on its side so that the portholes on one side looked up through the gas towards the light of the sky, while those on the other side gave us a view of the depths below us. The whole ship rocked and pitched in the wind. We could see through the portholes the sailors dangling down on ropes, wearing gas masks to get at the hull, and they had only makeshift tools. There was also the muffled sound of voices, men trapped in another part of the pod, and we could hear work going on in that direction too.

‘It grew dark and the wind continued to build. Soon, the sailors above us had to give up. They could not see, and it was too rough to work. They tapped on the hull, signalling to us that they would try again at first light. The esh at night is dark, but not black. It has a light of its own, a dull yellow glow. It is caused by algae drifting in the thicker gas, deep below the surface. So, when darkness fell, it was the turn of the portholes on the floor of our cabin to let in light. It was a strange sensation, as if the world had turned upside down and there was a yellow moon below us.

‘The cabin was sealed, so we had air, but it would not last forever. We tried to rest and sleep as much as we could so that we would breathe less. Later in the night, the wind died down and the esh became very still. I was lying on the floor and gazing down out of one of the portholes when I saw something. At first I thought it must be an esh-floater. We saw them from time to time, lolling about in the gas that was their home. But this was different. It was bigger, and it
moved with purpose. It took me some time to realise that it was a ship. I shouted to the others.

‘We wanted to believe that it was just a wreck, or perhaps even our reflection on a lake or river below us, but we could tell from the way it moved that it was neither. It circled our position, staying far enough down to prevent us from seeing it clearly.

‘Men have tried to build ships that could sail beneath the esh, but their attempts have always ended in disaster, and we could see that this was a ship built for the surface; it had sails and even a flag, which meant only one thing. This was a ghost ship, one of the thousands of vessels claimed by the esh, but one whose crew had not made it into the afterlife. We watched in terror, unable to take our eyes off it. Even when we saw shapes, figures, rise up towards us from it, we did nothing.

‘But then the bosun’s mate let out a scream, and the spell was broken. We started shouting and shrieking to the crew above us to get us out. We would quickly use up what air we had left, but we did not care. Ghosts are lonely creatures, desperate for others to join them. And we knew they were coming for us. In the dark, enclosed cabin, we were at their mercy. The fear drove us mad. Hammering and kicking at the wall that was our ceiling with anything we could get our hands on, we were no longer worried about the esh getting in. As long as the phantoms didn’t get in first.

‘The remains of the crew heard us, and must have been convinced by our screams that we feared for our very souls. They risked their lives to hang down into the gloom and tear frantically at the walls that separated us. Beneath our feet, we could hear the sound of fingernails scraping against the
wood and sometimes dragging across the glass of the
portholes
. I was sure I even heard the creatures gnawing at the tarred wood with their teeth. Above us, the sailors were shouting to each other that they could see things moving around the edges of the ship. The work grew even more urgent.

‘I looked down through one of the portholes in the floor, and saw that the ghost ship was becoming larger and clearer. I yelled to the others that it was rising towards us. We were going to be rammed. A split appeared in the wall over our heads and a wisp of gas seeped in. An axe-head pierced the timbers, and under a steady barrage, the hole grew. Esh flowed in and we breathed deeply, readying
ourselves
for the moment when we ran out of air. I peered down through the gas rising around our feet to the world beyond the porthole. The dead men’s ship was coming right for us.

‘The last few bits of board were broken away by the
sailors
and gas gushed in as they threw a rope down. We had no masks in the cabin so we would have to hold our breaths as we climbed up to the surviving pod. I was the fourth one out. Just as the engineer grabbed the rope below me, the mast of the haunted ship smashed through the porthole and tore a gash along the lower wall of the cabin. I clambered out with the engineer close behind. With the gas around our faces, we could not see a thing, relying on the crew with masks to guide us up the rope against the side of the pod. We dragged ourselves up onto the sloping deck of the third pod and heaved in breaths of life-giving air. The captain wasted no time, yanking back on the locking levers, and releasing the wrecked pod that had held us. With a shudder,
it broke free and we held tight as the remaining hull lurched back away from it and then rocked back and forth until it had settled into an upright position. We heard the hiss of the shattered pod falling down through the esh, and then nothing.

‘In the swaying peace that followed, I asked the captain if they had got the people caught in the other section of the pod out in time. He told me that a team of sailors had broken through to the cabin where the others had been trapped even before they had reached us, but sailors had found only a hole in the lower side of the hull and the signs of a
desperate
fight. The cabin had been empty.’

Groach took a sip of his mead and waited for someone else to break the silence in the room.

Hilspeth and the Myunans were sitting in the cab of the wagon, each of them trying to come up with an excuse for getting off that would not make the driver suspicious. Ever since he had mentioned the fact that he was due to be met by Noranian troops, the idea of walking the rest of the way had become far more attractive. Lorkrin had his tool kit out, and was doing something to his face. Hilspeth kicked him and gave him a hard stare.

‘What are you doing?’ she hissed.

Lorkrin had given himself boils and blisters all over his face.

‘I’m going to say I’ve got a disease,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Maybe he’ll throw us out.’

Hilspeth rolled her eyes back, but she didn’t have any better ideas, so she said nothing. Lorkrin was reaching over
to tap the driver on the shoulder when the driver hit the brake and brought the wagon to a shuddering halt. Ahead of them was a small village – a storyhouse, and a few
ramshackle
houses, along with some market stalls.

‘This is a rough neighbourhood,’ he said over the idling motor. He looked back and his eyes opened wide at the sight of Lorkrin’s face, but he quickly turned to stare ahead again. ‘You’d best get out of sight. Passengers attract
attention
in this neck of the woods. Get yourselves under the
tarpaulin
and stay there until I tell you it’s safe.’

Not knowing what else to say, the three fugitives climbed over the back of the seats onto the flatbed behind, and slipped under the cover with the crumble cones. Lorkrin, a little disappointed by the lack of reaction, let his face settle back to normal. The driver released the brake, and they
trundled
noisily down the hill to the village. They rolled through without incident and passed on out the other side into a copse of trees set on high banks on either side of the road. They were barely out of sight of the village when the wagon ground to a halt again. Peeping out from under the tarpaulin, Taya could see that there was a fallen tree blocking the road. The driver sighed and got down from his cab. He carried a wooden club in one hand as he went over to inspect the tree.