Riverkeep Page 20

  Wull reached in and grabbed it, pulling his hand back just as the teeth snapped shut. The faelkon looked confused, then howled again—louder—spread its wings, and came at him.

  “Aaaaargh!” said Wull, swinging the harpoon with all his strength. The barb caught the bird on the stomach, tearing out feathers and skin, and it squawked backward, scrabbling at the ground.

  The weight of the iron pulled Wull almost flat, but he heaved it in a round swing behind him, driving back the feathered wall that had surrounded him in a hail of angry cries.

  “Remedie!” he shouted. “Are you all right? Remedie?”

  There was no answer, but a faelkon’s shriek was cut off with a thump, and Wull smiled to himself as he jabbed the harpoon again. Something crunched under his feet. He looked down into a massive nest filled with fur-smothered bones. Among them were the shells of eggs—as big as a soup pot and pink on the inside.

  He looked for Bonn, found nothing, swung the harpoon, and ran into another nest, the faelkons swooping along behind him, the air filled with the rank scent of their feathers.

  “Remedie, I can’t see him!” he shouted.

  “Keep looking!” she replied, her voice a whisper in the clouds, grunting as she swung her stick about.

  “I am! There’s nothing in the nests but—”

  A faelkon grabbed at Wull, its outstretched talon ripping his coat, spilling its fur lining like torn skin. He stumbled back, stabbed the bird’s belly with the harpoon, felt the barb sink into the muscular body and stick there. He twisted, roaring, and pushed again, driving farther inside the creature; heard it wail in pain, its cries sending the others into a flapping rage as hot, dark blood poured down the harpoon’s length onto his hands.

  “Get back!” he shouted. “Get back!”

  The faelkon gave a half flap of its wings, fell, then turned, moving into the fog, the harpoon still sticking from its front, wobbling and pouring with blood.

  The other birds, their rot-blanched skin close enough to taste, crowded toward him. Wull looked at his empty hands.

  “Oh gods,” he said, and ran.

  He barged through their ranks, feathers snagging on his coat like thorns as the birds grabbed with teeth and talons, half rising like cat-startled crows.

  He ran through another nest, found nothing, ran into a faelkon and bounced off, trying desperately to keep his feet, anything to avoid falling.

  Another nest: bones, red flesh, eggs—and a white lump wrapped in swaddling.

  “Bonn!” he shouted. He tried to turn, but the dead bulk of a seula loomed through the fog, and he tripped on its neck, his ankle turning under him, sending him to the ground. Reaching over the seula’s body, he stretched for Bonn, his fingers nearly touching the white wooden skin, when a huge foot reached down in flight and snatched the baby into the air.

  “No!” shouted Wull as Remedie streamed into view and leaped, her stick falling beside him, her hands grabbing the low-hanging piece of swaddling, pulling herself into the air and screaming obscenities as the bird, startled, struggled for height before disappearing into the fog again.

  Wull grabbed Remedie’s stick, found it was broken, and rolled out of the way of a taloned smash as all the remaining faelkons turned on him.

  He ran again, sprinting blindly for the tree line, all his pains forgotten; heard the birds take to the air behind him, ready to swoop and stamp him down. His long, skinny legs kicked with an extra fright of speed, faster even than when the ursa had chased him through the woods, and as the whump of their wings closed on him and their shrieks built to a crescendo, he threw himself into the shadow of a long-limbed tree and scrambled into its branches.

  They reared up instantly on every side like dogs after a balgair, burping and squawking and screaming at him, their black tongues and yellow eyes all reaching for him behind the horrible clack of their huge, brown-fractured teeth. He beat down at them with his boots, shouting, catching their faces and sending them back, cracking their bark spikes and making them scream, but each time one fell back it was replaced by another, angrier bird reaching farther into the tree, fluttering and crashing and smashing the boughs in its attempt to get to him.

  He saw it then: they would break the branches of his cage and they would get to him.

  “Blaggard birds!” he shouted again, slipping as he swung his boots and hugging the trunk. “Blaggard, stinking birds!”

  There was a thump on the nesting grounds. The faelkons turned, howling. Then, as Wull gripped the trunk with his legs and his arms, they moved back to the clearing, their wings shifting the fog and sending tendrils of it spinning outward—revealing Remedie beside the body of a dead giant, her foot on its head, Bonn wrapped tightly against her chest.

  The other faelkons barked and shrieked but stayed back, panting and heaving their lurid breath as she walked through their ranks, her face smudged with blood, her eyes and hair wild. As she approached Wull in his tree, the birds pounced on the body of their dead comrade and began to tear it apart, turning its richly feathered, powerful bulk into a red mess of torn string, the air filling with the sharp urgency of flesh and death alongside the birds’ odor.

  Remedie looked up at Wull and smiled serenely.

  “Hiding?” she said.

  “One of them took my harpoon!” he said, sliding down beside her. “I killed it, I think, an’ did my best with a few others.”

  “You did well,” she said, touching his face. “A brave boy. Your pappa would be proud.”

  Wull looked down, said nothing. Remedie turned to the faelkons, now gorging on the meat of the bird she’d killed.

  “Disgusting, isn’t it? The way they turn on their own.”

  Wull watched the faelkons chugging down the pouring meat, their ugly faces already pink with its blood.

  “’S just nature, miss,” he said. “’S better than buryin’ it, in some ways. They’ve got no shovels in any case.”

  She laughed, lifted the swaddling from Bonn’s face, kissed his nose.

  “Is he all right?” said Wull.

  “He’s . . . fine,” said Remedie, “but there’s a wound in his side from its claw.”

  She moved the cloth, and Wull saw it: a round hole three inches across, disappearing into the darkness of Bonn’s belly.

  “Gods,” said Wull, “but he’ll be all right?”

  Remedie tucked Bonn back inside his swaddling. “He won’t be the same,” she said, “but he’ll live.”

  Wull sighed. Bonn’s face hadn’t changed. Of course it hadn’t. But it seemed impossible, when Wull had felt the living weight within Bonn’s body, that he could have borne such an injury in stoic silence.

  “An’ are you all right, miss?” he said.

  Remedie nodded. “I’m fine, thank you, Wulliam.”

  “How’d you kill that thing? You’d no weapons!”

  “I broke its neck between my boots—the tricky part was trying to land it.”

  Wull nodded. “Yes, miss,” he said.

  “There’s a lesson for you, young man,” she said, strapping Bonn to her chest and stepping forward.

  “Yes, miss,” said Wull again, understanding nothing.

  “And here,” said Remedie, producing Tillinghast’s hat from a fold of skirt. “You can give it to him.”

  Wull took the hat and nodded, then followed her into the woods, the yelping, screeching convocation of faelkons fading into silence as the trees and the fog closed about them once more.

  Despite trying his best to catch up, he walked behind Remedie, her sure, quick steps never failing, keeping her always a few paces ahead. She wore the damp clouds of the forest’s mist like a shawl, pushing through sheets of it and finding branches to support her movements by instinct. Wull fell more than once following the same path, finding slick moss where she met solid ground and missing the branches that supported h
er effortless weight. But as they approached the river and the fog lifted, he caught up, walking alongside her toward the bäta and the water.

  “You made it then?” said Tillinghast, opening his eyes at the sound of footsteps.

  “Thanks to Wulliam, and no thanks to you,” said Remedie, stepping into the boat, her hair screwing outward, her face brown with dry blood.

  “Are you all right?” said Mix.

  “I’m very well, thank you. But I won’t say the same for the bird that took my Bonn away.”

  Mix whistled. “Good effort there, miss.”

  “Here,” said Wull, tossing Tillinghast’s hat across the bäta. “How’s Pappa?”

  “You got it!” said Tillinghast, delighted. “Stinks o’ birds’ mess now, but that’s all right. I’s ’ad it smellin’ worse.”

  “Paps is fine,” said Mix. “Ate a bit, then slept.” She wiped a thread of Pappa’s dribble onto her sleeve.

  “Thank you,” said Wull. “Have you eaten this morning? Bootmunch gave us some dried meat and fruit.” He bit into a stick of dry black elk meat.

  Mix shook her head. “I’m fine. I’ve never liked that stuff anyway. What you call it? Vénnton?”

  “You haven’t eaten a thing since I’ve seen you here. Take something.”

  “All right,” said Mix, biting into the vénnton without enthusiasm. “That was right impressive, miss, you takin’ off after that big bird like that.”

  “’S not as impressive as your cursin’,” said Tillinghast, reclining in the stern, a grin peeking from under his hat brim. “I’ve known sailors would blanch at that kind o’ . . . How did you put it this mornin’? Gutter mouth?”

  Remedie flushed pink, took a pear from Wull, chewed it, and looked out over the river to where the rue trees’ low, thick-leafed branches were locked into the river’s white surface.

  “Did she kill it?” whispered Mix to Wull.

  “Aye,” Wull whispered back, “an’ she said it was a lesson for me.”

  Mix looked confused. “What was the lesson?”

  “I don’t know,” said Wull, shrugging. “That she’s mental, I suppose.”

  Remedie finished her pear and threw the core over the side of the boat.

  “My appalling blasphemy came in a moment of high emotion, and I must apologize,” she said, “to all of you.”

  “Oh, it’s all right, miss,” said Mix. “For what it’s worth, I reckon Till’s talkin’ straight about bein’ impressed. He was goin’ on about it while you was gone.”

  “And not about my safety?” said Remedie sharply. “Not expressing concern for my baby and me? Or thinking that a person of your prodigious strength might in fact come to help?”

  Tillinghast sat up. “First,” he said, “I’s not a fan o’ birds, ’specially big dirty rotten ones with teeth like draft horses. Second, it’s not a baby—it’s a wooden statue of a baby.”

  “He’s not a statue,” said Wull, kneeling in front of Pappa and stroking his hair. “You can feel him living inside. There’s somethin’ makin’ him live.”

  Remedie stared coldly at Tillinghast. “You are the most selfish person I’ve ever met,” she said. “What makes us human but our compassion for others?”

  Tillinghast dropped his hat onto his face and sat back.

  “I’s always reckoned it was livin’ that made us human, Miss Cantwell, an’ I might not have your compassion, your capacity for prodigious cursin’, or your ability to delude yourself into thinkin’ you’s a pure, virtuous soul when you’s carried a flesh-got child, but I’s livin’ now, an’ I mean to go on to do more of it.”

  “You . . . oaf!” said Remedie. “You are the single most obnoxious and despicable creature I have ever encountered. . . .”

  “Oh, Miss Cantwell, if you think flattery’ll work, then let me—”

  “And you continue to decry my Bonn’s claim to life while lugging around a grubby mandrake of all things! A man plant! You must know what comes of them, and what on earth have you that thing for if not to grow it?”

  “Well, I is goin’ to—”

  “Your disgraceful smarm will end now, for your obscene comments are quite beyond the pale! You, sir, are lower than pond scum, lower than field pats, lower than the ticks that live in field pats!”

  “Is that so?” said Tillinghast.

  “That is so,” said Remedie, cheeks burning.

  “Really? Then let me tell you something, Miss Cantwell: many years ago I was lookin’ for a banshee down in Ciarnton an’ in my huntin’ came across a most singular old woman. Her bearded mouth was puckered in the way of a cat’s rear end, an’ she’d a voice like a goose fartin’ in the fog. Her skin was right foul too, hangin’ all loose an’ sour with sweat from not bathin’, an’ she used to jab animals an’ kids with a pointy stick. She once killed a balgair with a rock for sport. I’s always reckoned she was the most repellent character I’d ever met, but let me say now that should I meet her again, I’d be off’rin’ a solid apology along with a description of you, Miss Cantwell, as confirmation of her havin’ been replaced in my inestimation!”

  “How wonderful!” said Remedie. “You can’t imagine my delight, for that’s exactly the position I hope to have in your heart!”

  “Keep talkin’, toots, an’ you’ll find yourself sore disappointed: every time you speak the prospect of our canoodlin’ gets more remote—in fact, that’s it! Forget about it altogether!”

  Remedie sat down, crossed her arms, and followed the bäta’s line downriver, looking away from them all.

  “If it’s not too much trouble, Wulliam, I would like to be off now. This is an unpleasant place to be.”

  “Yes, miss,” said Wull quickly, taking up the center thwart and guiding the bäta into the current again. He rowed steadily, the adrenaline of the morning and the faelkons’ screams still in his blood, and, although time passed like cold mud as Remedie fumed and Tillinghast sulked, it wasn’t long before the forest’s mist was replaced by the city’s smog, and the jagged towers and spires of Oracco, the world’s great city, were stabbing at the flame-blushed sky before them.

  17

  Canna Bay

  More bustling than any road, the Oraccan waters of the Danék teem with craft of all types and trades: tide-chasers, pickerel-trawlers, whelk-barges, eel-skiffs, hally-slips, swart little tugs, and the wide, jostle-bumping hulls of passenger ferries. From their decks, voices ring with such coarseness of accent and language as would curdle milk at the teat! When gentry or royalty sail its length, social rank is trampled beneath the hooves of the river’s great antiquity: princes barge against ferrymen and think nothing of the indignity, for the river has a law of its own, and all men are paupers in the face of its urgency. The Danék is a place of unimaginable noise: a more active hive cannot be found anywhere in nature.

  —Packroyd Bunting, Fair and Foul: The Black Waters of the Danék

  The mormorach flew through the trench’s thick weed, maned briefly by sheets of yellow and green as kelp ripped on its tusks. The tail whipped and the creature dived deeper—farther into the darkness and the cold and away from the waves of sound that beat at its skin like hot sharpened knives.

  For hours now the shape above had been following, spearing down stabbing points with strange infrequency.

  The mormorach had sensed a new threat, and circled below warily, roaring into the freezing black and writhing with growing anxiety as nothing happened and its instincts began to twitch. The big heart had beaten faster, and it had screamed its fury.

  Then the shape had answered with its own noise: huge, booming walls of sound, pushing into the darkness an unfamiliar force that rushed the mormorach’s senses in overlapping waves, heating it in panic and turning it miserably like an eel at the spit, blinded and cut by noise, the surface and the seabed a single white space in the walls of sound that seized its muscles
and locked it as though frozen in ice.

  Far above, one hand on the Hellsong’s tiller and the other on his crutch, Murdagh licked his teeth.

  He turned the ship a fraction to keep the wind, the filling of the sails as vital as his own breath. The prow smashed into a wall of water, and he felt through the skin of his feet the timbers of the old, bone-trussed tub meeting the waves’ force, the masts shaking, the frame rumbling with a shudder that knocked the crew to their knees.

  “We’ll have to turn back, Cap’n!” shouted Ormidale, clinging to a wet rope.

  Murdagh spat. “He needs more!” he shouted back. “This ’in’t enough to take him! Keep swingin’ the hammers!”

  “But the ship—”

  “The ship can take it!”

  “The quicksilver’s all but fallen oot the barometer, Cap’n! We have to turn back!”

  “Keep on the hammers!” shouted Murdagh over the wind and the gulls. He steadied the tiller, pressing with all his strength against the sea’s desire to turn his ship.

  Women and men ran about him, falling on the slick, blood-darkened boards as he kept steady, the points of his crutch and leg driven into grooves worn smooth by the action of years. He was as much a part of the ship as the sails and the transom, a growth on its body. His closed eyes saw the movement of water over its every inch, and the heat of his blood—near to the boil—bubbled with the mormorach’s pain, feeling the moment of its capture coming to his outstretched hand.

  “Hammer!” he shouted again, knowing the moment of nets was close. “Hammer that beast till he dun’t know which way’s up an’ his black heart pops in his ribs!”

  He turned the tiller into the wind again—and stopped. Every function of his body clanged shut at the sight of the mormorach’s vastness clearing the gunwale and bearing down upon him with its tusks flashing and the great, shining cave of its mouth wide and howling.

  Orocco

  “So how did you kill it?” said Mix, crouching beside Pappa. Behind her the shadows of the city began to cover the horizon as they neared its stone-lined banks.