Riverkeep Read online

  He felt better once he’d closed the door. With hours until real darkness, the ursa bars didn’t need to come down yet, but even without them, the thick varnished wood was as hard as iron. He leaned his forehead on it, drawing the smell into his nose. The fire was almost out, but a tiny heat still glowed in its heart—a solitary ember amidst the wreck of his day. Alongside the aroma of the coals were the other smells of the boathouse: whale oil, tar, salt, the sweet rot of vegetables, and the pungent, damp smell of drying fungus; the dangerous smell of the smoker and the sharpness of Pappa’s lakoris; the odor of cooked fish and stewed, piled tea leaves; the cold, oily smell of iron tools; the smell of rubber boots and the polish for leather ones; the sour smell of woolen clothes drying and the clean, tinny smell of worms jarred for bait; the smell of wood and the dust of wood beside the high pitch of varnish; and the warm, sweet smell of mice that could not be caught or driven away. The river entered the house under the big doors and the thick bars of the ursa cage, and everything else was smothered by the green, head-filling stink of it.

  And now, he thought, to add to all that was the smell of Pappa, mulching in the spare chair.

  The water washed in with a little wave that slapped gently on the wood. Its bobbling sounds kept the feeling of movement in Wull’s guts and bones so that he never sat truly still. Even on land he swayed a little, and it was Pappa’s custom to walk with a roll in his shoulders, the way deep sailors did after years on the ocean.

  Wull filled the big copper kettle and carried it with two hands over to the range in an awkward waddle. The kettle had dulled already, and the reflection that peered back at him was indistinct and faceless, just the vague haze of his nut-brown skin and his tight-cropped black hair.

  Which is no bad thing, he thought, knowing how gaunt and bruised his face would be after two nights of fitful, twitch-waking sleep.

  There was a shake in his hands he hadn’t noticed—the match hopped on the strip and took four strikes before it caught. He watched the glow of the gas ring until the water began to bubble with heat, then turned to the lamps.

  He had cut one of the wicks the day before, and it burned now with an uneven, smoky glow. He’d seen Pappa do it, little scissors in his big hands neatly smoothing frayed edges into perfect, tapered nubs, their flames rising halfway up the globe. When all four lamps were lit it was close to daylight inside.

  Wull looked at his own attempt—sliced into threads as though rhat-picked. By the time the last of Pappa’s wicks had spoiled, he’d be scrabbling in the gloom and spending matches to avoid bumping into walls. But he had to try to mend them—he could hardly buy new wicks every time they needed trimming—and besides, maintenance of the boathouse was one of the Riverkeep’s duties—he’d seen it on the list in the first ledger. There were amendments on extra parchments wedged in between the pages. It was a long list.

  He worked on. Just as he finished his first straight cut, Pappa spoke.

  “Where is it?” he said in that new voice.

  Wull swallowed and turned to face the parlor door.

  “Where’s what?”

  “It, it. It that speaks.”

  “You mean me? Wulliam?”

  “It dun’t matter’s name. Need to eat.”

  Eating, thought Wull, remembering breakfast.

  “I’m trimmin’ the lamps,” he said. “You can eat when I’m done.”

  “Lamps! Light’s no good. Darkness good.”

  “You like the light. You say it’s everythin’ we need out here.”

  “Never did,” the voice rasped, dry as dead leaves. Somehow it dripped too, choked with fluid.

  “You did,” said Wull. “‘Safety an’ heat on the water and in the house,’ you said.”

  “Never did.”

  “You did so. Why don’t I light this one jus’ now? It’d be nice. . . .”

  “No! Darkness!”

  Wull leaned away from the door. Pappa’s shape was just visible in the murk of the room, hunched, hair across his face, wrists bound to the arms of the chair. Wull could hear bubbles in his throat.

  “That’s fine,” said Wull. “Does it hurt your eyes?”

  Pappa, sagging like wet cloth against the seat back, peered at him. His eyes were hidden behind the hang of his hair, but Wull felt their force. They were not Pappa’s eyes, nor had they been for two days; their calm, solid brown had gone milky and gray, set deep in a face that had already passed into slackness. And there was something else in them: a fug that bled into his pupils and clouded them against seeing.

  “Doesn’t hurt eyes . . . darkness,” Pappa whispered. Then: “Eat.”

  “Just let me finish this lamp,” said Wull, but as he lifted the scissors again they shook in his grip and he dropped them without cutting.

  “Eat,” said Pappa.

  “All right,” said Wull. “What will you have?”

  “Same as again.”

  “You can’t just eat that every time.”

  “Same as again!” shouted Pappa.

  “But they’re fish heads—”

  “The same!”

  Pappa’s voice was enormous. Wull jumped back from the crouching shadow.

  “All right,” Wull said again. “Please calm down and don’t shout. You’ve never shouted at me, even when you were angry, even that time I set fire to your hair. Remember that?”

  “No. Calm. Eat.”

  His shape settled into itself, and Wull knew he’d get nothing more until he brought the food. The fish heads were kept to feed seulas and gulls struggling to hunt in the frozen wasteland, but Pappa had refused to eat anything else since Wull had restrained him and tied him to the chair. He was pleased the knots on Pappa’s wrists were holding—he had only really mastered a few simple loops and never once managed the moncad’s fist, the king of the waterfolk’s bindings.

  Wull had learned the keep’s knots under Pappa’s watchful shadow—tiny fingers shredding as he bound and unbound his little cutting of hemp—and always, after hours of fumbled labor that strained his patience to a taut cord, the big hands would flash over his head with invisible swiftness and drop into his lap a perfect kellick hitch, sheepshank, double-overhand . . . whatever had just bested Wull and stripped the flesh from his hands.

  Then Wull would be scooped and carried upside down round the boathouse over Pappa’s laughing shoulders, all the blood running to his head.

  He looked now at the big hands, held by the knots they’d taught. If the bindings Wull had tied—simple bowlines—yielded or slipped then Pappa would escape, as he seemed intent on doing.

  Or he might not escape. Wull didn’t know what that would mean, but the thought of Pappa wandering loose in the boathouse while Wull slept beneath the glass buoys and the ropes filled him with a profound, stomach-chilling dread.

  So different to how it had been before, when Pappa’s steady movements in the small hours—mending and readying the bäta—had acted as a balm for his childish night terrors.

  He went out to the storeroom and lifted one of the buckets of fish scraps, silver scales glinting green and blue and yellow in the fading light of the afternoon, dozens of gray, puddly eyes slack-staring at the ceiling. Wull’s nose no longer registered their presence, so he felt the stink only as an invisible press around his face as he lugged the bucket through and dropped it on the floor in front of Pappa’s chair.

  “Eat!” said Pappa, sitting up. “It that speaks brings the food.”

  “My name is Wulliam—Wulliam Braid Fobisher. You named me that: Braid for your pappa, my gran’pappa.”

  “It dun’t matter’s name. Eat.”

  Wull lifted a breamcod’s head—it was heavy and cold, its drying skin tacky against his fingertips. They had eaten breamcod filets for supper the night Pappa had disappeared under the ice, bickering quietly about a deliberate nothing, leaving the understandi
ng of Wulliam’s reluctant ascension hanging unspoken above them in the web-hung rafters.

  He held the head out to Pappa, who lunged at it. Wull could see the bonds cutting into his wrists as he stretched, pulling the skin like it might peel off.

  “Untie the arms,” said Pappa.

  “No,” said Wull. “We’ve talked about this. You’ll just run off. We need to get you some help.”

  “No help. Free. Now eat.”

  Wull held the head, mouth first, to Pappa’s face, and kept it there while he grabbed and pulled at it with lips and teeth. When it was gone, Pappa, in a choked and swollen version of his new voice, gurgled, “Again,” and Wull held up another head and another, until the bucket was nearly empty and the slack face was glistening with lost spit, scales, and skin scraps. There was part of a tail in his beard, Wull saw, and he reached to clean around Pappa’s mouth with a dampened cloth.

  “Enough!” said Pappa, head shaking to avoid the wipes. “Too hard!”

  “You can’t sit there with that all over you. You’ll end up stinking, and then I won’t come near you at all.”

  “Good, it that speaks.”

  “You don’t mean that,” said Wull. “And my name is Wulliam.”

  He cleaned Pappa’s face and beard as gently as he could, holding the back of his head in his hand. Pappa relaxed slowly, the muscles of his neck softening against Wull’s palm.

  “Wulliam,” said Pappa, and his own voice was in the echo of the sound, quietly, like a word shouted from a great distance.

  “Wulliam,” said Wull. He smiled, then cried on his knees as his pappa drifted into a fitful sleep.

  Eventually, joints stiff from the floor, Wull went and made tea, letting the leaves stew in the undrunk cup as he sat in his own chair, Pappa’s empty and brooding beside him, looking at the Danék while the night broke over its surface and turned the narrowing ribbon of still-flowing water to rapid ink.

  The hand that held his mug shook slightly as night filled the boathouse, the lamps untrimmed and unlit, and Wull watched darkness spill over the books through which he had pored these last two days, the encyclopedias and the almanacs and the ledgers themselves: all the tomes in which Pappa had prided and which laid out the facts of the world in such detail. There were facts about plants, sun times, tide patterns, crop rotation, wine making, embalming, needlework, folklore, and the forensic history of wars fought so far in the dusty past that the names of the places and soldiers were built with strangely shaped and unpronounceable letters.

  But he found nothing that gave a name to Pappa’s condition, to the hollow looseness of his skin or the change in his voice. Wull had read until his head ached, and had woken, curled and solid, with his face on the page, the ink running in the water from his open mouth.

  Now, in the silence of night, he fancied he could hear the wicks of the lanterns sputtering and freezing in the face of winter’s elemental force, their rods surrendering to the ice as it swept its glittering malice across the world, and he held his cold tea and waited for the spark of courage that would propel him to rise up and face the world outside. His world.

  An ocean barge puttered past, lantern bright on deck, the captain looking agitatedly at the river’s locked-in whiteness. Wull watched him raise his eyes to the lampless boathouse and shake his head.

  “I bloody can,” said Wull aloud, feeling color in his cheeks. “It’s my bloody river.”

  He stood then, collecting himself, feeling the balance of his feet on the boards and the strength of his muscles inside his clothes. He heaved a big, whooping sigh that became a defiant growl, and reached for his hat.

  Then Pappa woke up.

  4

  Oracco

  Hanged men are valueable lumps inddeed, and can be myned thusly: bones ground for the tamperring of bred and the enrichment of soyl; teeth for the prodduction of false dentures; fat for the mannufacture of tallow and greese of all sorts; offal and other fleshily mass for the feeding of cattle and furthering of annatomollogy. The seed, eyes, heart, and brayn go for the growth of plants assosiated with magick and the occult; an long list of shrooms and fungi, webseeds, and mandrakes—this last an most valuable and cursedd thing, for it carrys a poysoned soul. The city sells these prodducts for hannsome reward, and returns to the bereeved a seeled casket weyted with turrf. A curssory glance at the ballance sheets of the municipal treashury will show exaktly where there also occurs a sharp ryse in the hangmans productivitty, and the administtering of capytal judgment for such crimes as petty larsenny and the befiddlement of lyvestock in the throws of economic crysis is common.

  —From “Upton Died on Us,” the unpublished autobiography of Upton Dempsey, chief undertaker to the city of Oracco

  “And why should I, Mr. Tillinghast? Why should I let you live?” Rattell skipped a little, his voice shrill. “You steal from me—I kill you.”

  Tillinghast hung between two bulbous men, arms clamped firmly in their grips. In the lamplight of the cellar, his pale, blue skin—cut in places on his face—glowed greenly under a tinkling neckful of silver charms. His jacket and shirt lay on the floor. But he had held on to his wide-brimmed hat, and it sat low over his eyes.

  “’S not really up to you, that,” he said, and sniffed. The air was old and powdery. It smelled of things from under the ground and the cold dampness of the earth that pressed against the brickwork. Lopsided towers of crates were stacked in a rough circle around them, buried beneath ghostly sheets.

  Rattell looked at him, his good eye twitching. “What?” he said.

  “Lettin’ me live an’ that, ’s not really up to you, sir.” Tillinghast rolled in his captors’ grips. He decided the man on his left, the rose-lakoris chewer, was stronger, and leaned in that direction. “I’s not technic’ly alive right now, Mr. Rattell.”

  “You can yet be made to suffer,” said Rattell, smiling. Dabbing water from the corner of his eye, he lifted Tillinghast’s chin with the point of his cane. “All things can be made to suffer, in time. Is that not so, Mr. Rigby?”

  “Right, Misser Rattell,” the egg-smelling blob on Tillinghast’s right-hand side rumbled, then made a wheezing sound like a blocked drain.

  “What in gods’ was that, Mr. Rigby?” said Tillinghast. “That your first time laughin’?”

  “I suppose there is little point in asking for your opinion, Mr. Pent?” said Rattell, addressing the mountain holding Tillinghast’s left arm.

  Pent squeezed Tillinghast’s wrist.

  “Aargh! I reckon he agrees, Mr. Rattell,” said Tillinghast. “What a shame we can’t hear from Mr. Pent—I imagine he’s got a wonderful singin’ voice. High an’ flutey, I shouldn’t wonder—like them fellas with no plums.”

  Pent squeezed his wrist again.

  “Aargh! All right, Mr. Pent, I takes it back—you’ve a nice deep voice! And plums!”

  Rattell hunkered down before him.

  “Mr. Pent stole from my employers and me a number of years ago. Some money, a small amount. For this petty act, Mr. Tillinghast, he lost his tongue. In contrast, you have tried to steal the last mandrake grown from the seed of the hanged man Garswood Fenn, a man more beloved of my employer than his own children. The mandrake is the last scrap of this dear man in existence; it is therefore an item of immense value and one which—happily, thanks to your clumsy attempts at burglary—remains safely ensconced in my study.”

  “You’ve a study, Mr. Rattell? Tha’s grand, sir. I din’t know you could read.”

  Rattell smiled, his eye twitching. “I should like to take that slippery tongue of yours to silence your . . . wit, but it would deny my lumbering companions the joy of your suffering, and since I pay them so poorly, this is the sole treat that keeps them loyally in my employ. Having said that,” drawled Rattell, warming to his theme, “I’ve seen Pent and Rigby’s work in the past, and I rather imagine they’d carry out these little ch
ores for free. Mr. Pent in particular seems to have used his enforced silence to channel his energies into . . . creative ways of inflicting pain.”

  “’S very impressive, Mr. Pent. Give us a song, will you? I’s always had a soft spot for ‘Pickle the One-Eyed Sailor.’ . . .”

  Pent hissed.

  “Stop antagonizing my associates, Mr. Tillinghast. Your focus should be on making the short remainder of your life as bearable as possible.”

  Rattell wiped some sweat from his top lip. Tillinghast relaxed and straightened his back.

  “I ’in’t got a life right now, Mr. Rattell. You keeps forgettin’ that. What you plannin’ on takin’ away from me? My breath? My heartbeat? You take all the time you need to find ’em, and good luck, ’cause I never has and I’ve had plenty time to rummage about, believe me. Some days when there’s not much else to do, I rummage with my bits for hours, and I’m gettin’ plenty good at it an’ all.”

  Rattell sighed, then dabbed at his narrow face with a handkerchief. “Do you believe in the theory of nominative determinism, Mr. Tillinghast?” he said at length.

  “I’s never had a head for mathematics, sir.”

  “Oh, it’s not mathematics; it’s the notion that the name a person is given at birth determines much of their path through life—their successes and character traits and so on. My mother was a believer, hence my given name, Lucian. It means ‘light,’ which I take to mean cleverness—and that I certainly possess.”

  Rattell spread his arms wide and gave a half twirl, as though his skinny frame were produce on display.

  “Cleverness, eh?” said Tillinghast. “D’you save it for special occasions?”

  “Nominative determinism is a fascinating idea,” Rattell continued, ignoring him. “I’ve swindled fishermen whose names came from the sea, professors named for their areas of expertise, farmers named for produce or livestock. I even encountered a woman who made fabrics—her given middle name was Threadcount. Isn’t that extraordinary?”