The Mermaid's Child (20 page)

A shadow fell across the deck. I looked up. The cliffs were looming up above the ship, higher than the bowsprit, higher than the maintop, sheer. Out of the sun, they no longer appeared white: the ice was deep blue, as if the missing hours of darkness had been trapped there and frozen solid. The
Spendlove
was turning, slowly, degree by degree, to sail alongside the base, but the turn we were taking seemed desperately shallow, and I could give her no more helm: the wheel was already at full turn. I shifted my weight again, was practically standing on my hands to keep her steady. I dragged a coil of rope closer with a foot and, still pressing down with all my weight, began to lash the helm.

“Jebb,” I said.

“My books,” he said. “My beautiful books.”

The wind was favouring us, thank God: the sail was full, pulling her round, but the ship's timbers groaned with the strain, and we were edging ever closer to the foot of the cliffs. I ran up to the foredeck, leaping over ropes and tackle, and skidded to a halt.

Up close, the ice was radiant with cold, its dark blue streaked with paler tones, with veins of green and yellow. Here and there a fracture in the ice had caught a rainbow, frozen it. The
Spendlove
's prow had nudged past, her flank was turning to the cliffs, and I thought for a blessed moment we were clear, that we would sail round and away, out into the sunlight. But then the ship bucked, the boards beneath me shuddered, and I stumbled, lost my balance, and fell.

There was a sound of groaning, tearing, as if the ship were being ripped apart, as if she were giving birth. A shiver rippled through her. Pressed flat against the deck, I felt it through my ribcage, my fingertips, my palms and cheek. It shook the air out of my lungs. I pushed down on my hands, heaved myself upright. The boards still shuddering beneath me, I scanned around. We were still moving, I realized, but only just. There must have been an outcrop, a reef of ice beneath the water's surface: we had caught it on the cusp of the turn. The hull was scraping along it, splintering, dragged on by the bellying sail. I staggered across the deck, leaned over the side. I could see nothing but rough dark waves and foam; salt spray hit my face. The sheer wall of ice was close enough to spit at. All that spray—of course there would be something under the water's surface. Stood to reason. I should have expected it. Stupid. Damn stupid fool I was, thinking that I'd get away with it. I put a hand to the rail, bloody fingertips blindly finding the wood's grain and following it. I'd failed. Instead of ploughing straight into the cliffs, instead of being smashed to pieces in
an instant, I'd just dragged out our deaths. We were stuck here forever. As the food and fuel ran out, as the cold clamped down, as the waves and weather picked the ship apart, I'd be trying to hold it together, patching at patches, clinging spray-soaked to the ship's ladder to hammer at the keel, and Jebb would be down in his library, his feet in saltwater and his head in a book. And I'd never find my mother.

There was something cold on my cheek. I plucked it off, examined for a puzzled moment a misty gem of ice between my bloodied fingertips. A tear, I realized, and dropped it to brush away another.

The groaning sound had refined into a shriek. Running one hand along the rail, brushing frozen tears from my face with the other, I moved up towards the prow, numb but for the aching knot inside me, the throb of pain from my fingertips. Jebb had been right. He'd been right about me from the word go. I
was
a fool. I was stupid. Even what little sense he'd credited me with, what he'd called my instinctive capacities as a sailor, had proved insufficient the one and only time they had really been put to the test. I was useless, worthless: I was capable of nothing. That's why everybody left me: that's why they always would. I came to a halt at the prow. Soon, we would grind, would shiver to a halt, I thought, and that would be it. Just half a dozen bantam hens and Jebb for company, forever. I glanced back at the ship's boat, where the bantams nested. Open-topped, single-sailed. Could I get anywhere in that? Could I sail that from the lee of the wreck and just leave Jebb here to continue his work in peace? He should be happy enough. There'd be no one to spy on him here.

I was just moving over towards the boat, just beginning to consider its possibilities, when something caught my attention. I stopped dead, cocked my head, listening. The tearing,
grating shriek: had it softened a little? I crouched down, placed a palm on the deck. Were the boards a little steadier? I straightened up, looked back round towards the prow: there was no mistaking it: the
Spendlove
was nosing out into clear water. She might just make it, I realized, my flesh beginning to prickle. She might just make the turn. I raced back again towards the foredeck. The cliff's shadows peeled back and I was suddenly in sun. Overhead, the sails flapped, the boom jibbed, and beneath my feet I felt the ship shift, lift and slip free from whatever it was that had held her. We were clear. We were free. I stood there blinking a moment, conscious only of the sunlight on my face, of the cold peppery wind stirring my hair, filling the sails. Then I shook myself. I had to get the wheel unlashed, get her out of the turn before she circled back round towards the cliffs a second time and wrecked herself permanently on that outcrop. As I ran for the wheel, the tears were coming thick and fast. I brushed them away, and they clattered, milky as moonstones, onto the deck behind me.

Jebb was still there by the helm, but now he was standing again, and blinking in the light. I skidded to a halt next to him and hunkered down to unpick the hitch. My fingers were torn and sore: despite the urgency of the situation they moved hesitantly, indecisively. Jebb crouched down at my side and I caught a whiff of him: dust, the sour smell of old books and unwashed body. He stretched out his greyed, ink-stained fingers towards the rope.

“I'll do it,” he said.

I shuffled back a little, making room for his smell, but did not stop picking at the cord. He pushed my hands away.

“Just tell me what to do,” he said. He looked at me. “I'll do it. Just tell me.”

A moment. I settled back upon my heels and stretched out a fingertip, dark with drying blood.

“There,” I said. “See that loop there—”

And Jebb's strong yellow fingernails began to unpick the knot. I watched as the cord came loose between his fingernails, watched the shifting grain of his knuckles, the movements of his fingers as he picked apart the rest of the hitch. He stood to unwind the rope through the spokes of the wheel and I straightened up beside him. The wheel began to turn slowly, to find its way towards the following wind. I took hold of it, passed it round through my hands, helping it back towards its line. The sunlight cut across the deck, casting a net of shadows from the rigging.

“What you did there—” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

He just shook his head.

I felt the air fill my lungs, the sunshine warm my skin, felt the continuing solidity of the deck beneath my feet. The wood was warm and curved beneath my palms, it seemed to pulse as my flesh pulsed. I felt that I could almost see the wind, hear the watercurrents flow, taste the time of day.

ELEVEN
 

“I don't recall giving you permission.”

I put down my cup.

“You never said I couldn't. You just said no ink, no livestock, no food. You never said no reading.”

He raised a hand.

“Just a little professional courtesy. That's all I ask.”

“That goes,” I said, “both ways.”

Jebb hesitated a moment, then nodded.

“Fair enough.”

The galley flame was flickering. The air was warm and stuffy. The day had melted round the edges and grown soft. I'd washed the blood from my hands with salt water, tied the worst-torn fingers with scraps of rag. We'd broached a fresh barrel of beer and were a quart gone, both of us, by then. Jebb had produced a spare pipe for me from somewhere and we were smoking. The tobacco-smell had brought first my father
and then John to mind. I'd been trying, unsuccessfully, to blow smoke-rings.

The coughing made my eyes water. The tobacco had a taint of mud and mould about it, as if it had been stored somewhere damp. I drank to clear the taste, and my hands shook as they brought the cup to my lips. They'd been shaking ever since we'd cleared the ice. The beer got on the bandages, stung at my torn quicks.

Jebb was talking, saying something about the poor state of the tobacco, then praising the quality of the beer, but it was clear he wasn't really interested in the smoke or drink. He just needed to talk, to fill up the space between us. The day's events had softened him towards me, I realized. It seemed he no longer considered me a fool, or a threat.

“Why did you think I was a spy?” I asked.

Jebb was tamping down the tobacco in his pipe. He looked up at me. He might have begun to trust me, but he still couldn't quite manage to be courteous.

“My collection—over which you have been running your grubby little hands—has been half a lifetime in the building. It contains some of the most exquisite, rare and valuable books in existence,” he said. “Though I don't suppose you noticed.”

“Wouldn't that make it more likely I was a thief than—” I began to say, but he held up a hand, stopping me.

“I have spent half a lifetime studying these volumes. I could name a dozen people, without any difficulty, who would give their eyes to get the credit for my work. That's if they're still alive.”

“So is that why you're out here, drifting? To stay away from them? You thought one of them had sent me?”

He nodded. “Though drifting does not adequately describe what I have achieved. My catalogue alone is a wonder
to behold. My Grand Concordance, when it is finished, will be a marvel.”

“So if you spent half a lifetime gathering the books,” I said, “and half a lifetime studying them, shouldn't you be dead by now?”

“That depends on whose lifetime we're talking about.”

I drained the last of the beer from my cup, refilled it.

“So who's this work for, then?” I asked.

He paused a moment, leaned back, and looked me in the eye.

“For posterity,” he said.

While Jebb talked on, I sipped my beer and tried to listen.

His suspicions hadn't fallen on me alone, it transpired: he hadn't trusted his crew, but he hadn't killed them either—he'd cut the anchor rope when they were off foraging on shore. They'd rowed after him awhile, he said, but the
Spendlove
still had sails back then, and there had been a wind. Before long the words began to smudge in together and become as meaningless to me as the bantams' sleepy crooning. I settled back into a warm fuzz of drunkenness. I felt exhausted and content. I had a ship now, I had my freedom, and I knew what I was looking for.

After a while, I noticed that he had fallen silent. The only sounds were the flames crackling in the stove, the water bubbling and dripping in the purifier. I looked up, opening my mouth to speak. He was watching the water condense, drip, and as I looked at him a droplet gathered on the tip of his nose, and fell.

It was then that I realized that he hadn't quite told me the truth. It wasn't ethics that had made him save me. He had been alone for so long that he hadn't known how lonely he was until he'd found me. Floating broken and half-drowned in the middle of the ocean, I must have seemed like a miracle to him.

“The white sea? You thought I didn't know about that?”

We were in the library. Jebb was leaning forward over his book, finger marking the point where I'd made him break off. For him it was the following morning. For me, drunkenness had turned into hangover without the benefit of sleep. Chin on folded arms, I was looking at him gritty-eyed underneath the green shades of the reading lamps.

“I just assumed that if you'd been aware of it, and had the opportunity, you would have investigated it. Being a scholar and everything,” I said.

He leaned back and folded his arms, looked at me.

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Because you'd want to get your facts right before you pronounced judgement. Before you went and called someone a liar.”

“I don't need to. I know that it's a myth,” he said.

“There are dozens of accounts. Some of them are centuries old.”

He snorted.

“It's the nature of myth to be old. And anything recent is just a reworking of the old stories. I can't believe you've been wasting your time on this nonsense, when there's so much else you could be—”

“There must be a germ of truth,” I said. “You can't be sure, you can't
know
unless—”

“I know. Believe me. Save yourself the trouble and take my word for it: the white sea does not exist. Mermaids do not exist. It's all just fantasy and fabrication.”

I leaned back, folded my arms and glared at him.