Stands a Shadow

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Old Country

The ship was pitching through heavy weather again.

Bilge water swamped his legs as it washed from one side to the other, causing the rats to scurry over him as the hull creaked and banged in distress.

Ash lay in the darkness beyond time and place. In his mind, words formed as though they were being spoken aloud.

He was having a conversation with his dead apprentice.

I don’t understand, Nico insisted. You told me once how the R shun don’t believe in personal revenge. That it goes against their code.

Yes Nico. I did.

Yet here you are.

Yet here I am.

So you are no longer R shun then?

He shied away from answering. He hardly wished to dwell on it just then.

You can’t bring me back, you know, said Nico. Even if you kill her, I’ll still be gone.

‘I know that, boy,’ Ash replied aloud to the black echoing space, scattering the rats from him.

Nico fell silent for a time. Ash rocked with the violent motions of the ship, bracing himself with his hands and feet, trying to calm himself.

Tell me, master Ash, came Nico’s voice again. What was it that you did before you became R shun?

What I did?

Yes.

I was a soldier. A revolutionary.

You never wanted to follow a different path? A farmer, perhaps? A drunken owner of a country inn?

Of course, Ash replied.

Which one?

I am tired, Nico. You ask many too questions.

Only because I know so little about you.

A sudden sharp tilt of the ship pressed Ash against the hull, though he barely noticed it. He spat brine, wiped his face dry, glared back into the darkness.

Before I was a soldier I raised hunting dogs for a time. We lived in our cot tage, my wife and son. I tried to be a good husband, a good father, that is all.

And were you?

Ash snorted. Hardly. I made a better soldier than I ever did a husband and father. I was good at killing. And getting others killed .’

You’re too hard on yourself. I knew you to be much more than a killer. Your heart is kind.

‘You do not know me, boy,’ snapped Ash. ‘You cannot say such things to me, not now, not ever.’

The freezing water washed over his head once again, shocking him into the present. Ash floundered for a moment, puffing his cheeks in and out as he fought for a breath. He clutched the ledge he lay upon and heard the rats squealing in terror. Moments passed as he lay there panting.

He wondered if Nico was still with him.

‘Boy,’ he croaked.

In the blackness, the sound of the handpumps could be heard drawing water from the bilge up to the decks above. It was hard to talk above the noise.

‘Nico!’ he shouted.

I’m here, I’m here.

‘Tell me something. Anything. Take my mind from these things.’

What would you like to know?

‘Anything. Tell me what you wished to be before you became my apprentice.’

Me? I suppose a soldier, like my father. Though I had a dream of being an actor for a while. Travelling the islands, performing for my living.

Ash sat up, tried to wedge himself tighter against the tilting hull. ‘I did not know that,’ he confessed.

No. You never asked me.

The bilge water was crashing around as waves now. The rats squealed ever louder.

‘You should have left, Nico, back in Q’os,’ Ash shouted as he shook the water from his face. ‘When you returned that evening and told me of your doubts. You should have left me!’

I know, said Nico. But I couldn’t.

‘Why not?’

A thoughtful silence followed, then a quiet voice that he clearly heard amidst the noise.

Because you needed me.

It was a storm, and a bad one. The hull banged with the violent impacts of crashing water, and creaked and groaned as its prow lifted free from the crests of waves then dropped shuddering into the deepening troughs. Stinging seawater poured into the bilge from gaps in the planking above his head. His boots and clothing were drenched through. His cloak was belted tight around his waist, along with his sword.

His ears hurt from the noise of the storm. Through it all, Ash could hear men running and shouting in panic overhead.

He tried to cling to the side of the hull but it was hopeless. Soon he was swirling about with the struggling rats in bilge water that had now risen up to his stomach.

Ash realized how desperate the situation was when he heard the rats pattering up the walls to escape the bilge entirely. Perhaps he should have followed their example, but he wasn’t a rat, and he could hardly go unnoticed. Instead he clung to the sides when he could, and washed about when he could not, and vomited from the awful motion of it all and the saltwater he couldn’t help but swallow. Like a nightmare, he felt the level of water creeping gradually up to his chest. At last he could stand it no longer. He began to fight his way towards the steps.

It ended more violently than he had expected.

The ship shuddered violently as though it had struck something, throwing him off his feet as he fell engulfed in shifting water.

Ash floundered, righting himself, and then from overhead came the heart-stopping sound of wood being torn asunder, and a thunderous noise like a waterfall roaring towards him, shaking him to the core and terrifying him in that first instant of approach – and then the hatch exploded open and the sea was flooding through it, and Ash was swept up by the boiling surge all the way to the very back of the bilge.

He smashed against the hull, spluttering for air. His arms flailed out, his feet scrabbled for purchase. Ash managed to right himself, and he tried to push his way back towards the steps. It was hopeless, though. The full weight of the sea pressed him back, squeezing him flat against the hull with such force that it was all he could do to gasp for a dry breath of air.

The timbers of the ship began to groan with a different pitch. The ship tilted nose-first, rolled onto her side at the same time.

She was going down.

Ash drew a breath in the last few feet of air between the churning surface and the planks rushing towards his head. The water was freezing, leeching the strength from his muscles. Despite himself, he began to hyperventilate, so that he swallowed air and water.

Ash allowed the brief moment of panic to flood his body with vitality, and then he pinched it off with a practised command of will.

His head struck the planking above. Still the rush of water felt like a slab of rock pressing against him. He would have to wait for the ship to flood before he could swim out through the hatch.

It was no easy realization that, as the rising water finally submerged him.

Even beneath the water he could hear the torment of the ship’s hull. Ash clung to his precious lungful of air, and kicked towards the hatchway.

The pressure in his ears increased. He knew the ship had sunk beneath the surface, was dropping now to the seafloor. With increasing haste his hands scrabbled along the planking in search of the hatchway. For an eternity he grasped at wood, unable to find the way out. Again that repression of panic.

His hands groped against emptiness and he pulled himself through it. Something floated against him and he pushed it away. A body, drowned already.

Ash swam towards where he thought the ceiling should be. Objects brushed against him, the sacks and joints of meat that had been hanging there. He pushed through them, found his hands grasping steps; pulled himself upwards through another opening. By memory he knew that he was in the galley passageway now, with steps at its far end leading to the upper deck. He swam with all his strength, his ears throbbing from the increasing pressure that wrapped him like a skin of stone. His lungs were on fire. Another body drifted across his path and he pushed that one aside too. This time it moved – hands jerked out at him, grasping for life. Someone was still alive down here.

Ash broke free from the grip. He reached out, grabbing a face – rubbery lips, a nose, bristly eyelashes, hair. He grabbed a handful of that hair, and with his feet he pushed off hard. An eternity passed as he dragged the flailing sailor along to the end of the corridor. He came to the steps, unmistakable against his touch.

With a final kick, Ash dragged them both clear of the sinking ship.

He opened his eyes a fraction, ignored the stinging pain of the saltwater. He gazed upon an endless darkness; like looking into death.

He had no way to tell which way was up, for light and weight were an absence here. His mouth tried to open for air. Ash clamped his jaw shut, his chest throbbing with a white heat.

This is it, he thought for an instant. This is it!

A flash in the distance. Without thinking he turned that way.

It flashed again, making him wince with its brilliance, though it was gone so quickly he was aware of it only as an afterimage in his eyes. It had been distant.

Ash frog-kicked with his remaining strength towards it.

His lungs were bursting when he breached the surface, and his throat rasped once for air before he was pulled under again by the sailor’s weight. He regained the surface and fought to stay there.

It was night, and rain and waves lashed down on him. Ash pulled the sailor closer, but the man was dead. As lightning broke the darkness he glimpsed a face staring calmly at the sky.

Ash closed the sailor’s eyes and released him to the sea.

A wave lifted Ash’s body. For an instant he saw the scene laid out before him; a coastline of white cliffs, dark coves, a few pale beaches, a fire burning on top of a hill – and the fleet, strung out across it, thrown into disarray by the raging sea. The ships were making for the shelter of a bay, but some had been blown off course, and seemed in the process of floundering on outlying rocks.

His strength all but spent now, Ash tried swimming for the shore and a beach he could see there. But after only a dozen strokes he had to stop, panting for breath, too tired to carry on. His head slipped beneath the surface. He fought free of it.

Debris was floating all around him. He threw his arm over an upturned stool, found he had barely the energy to cling on to it. The swell lifted him again. He turned his head to see the waves rolling in.

Ash knew there was only chance left to him now.

He released the stool and started to swim as the next wave came roaring in from behind. For a moment he thought he wasn’t moving fast enough to be taken by it, but then he felt his body lift, and with the last few strokes left in him he made one last surge.

The wave caught his legs, pulling them upwards behind him. He pointed his arms straight ahead, raised his chin free from the water as the wave-front rose and curled and carried him towards the beach.

Ash rode it all the way in with a grimace stretching his face, and the blood in his veins singing with exhilaration.

The wave dumped him onto the wet sand, left him there gasping in its hissing retreat back to the sea. Ash coughed to clear his lungs.

He was alive.

Captain Jute, commander of Pashereme’s coastal fort, peered from the battlements through the lashing rain of the storm and waited for another flash of lightning to illuminate the sea.

‘Are you certain?’ he asked again of his second-in-command, Sergeant Boson, a shiftless rogue of an individual whom Jute had come to distrust in all things, save for those matters which concerned his own skin.

‘As certain as day and night. They’re there all right. We’d better be clearing out of here right sharpish too.’

Thunder split overhead, and a bolt of lightning struck the sea out in the boiling bay. The captain hunched forward, clearing his eyes of rain, felt a punch of fear in his stomach as he saw them: ships, hundreds of ships, bobbing through the swells towards the beaches.

‘Sweet merciful Fool,’ he uttered, and gripped the stone battlements to steady himself. An invasion, he thought, suddenly giddy. A bloody full-on invasion!

‘Captain?’ came Boson’s voice through the fog of his shock.

The captain nodded, trying to think straight. He turned to the sergeant, and he couldn’t help that his voice trembled a little as he spoke. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Light the signal fire, and get a bird in the air. We haven’t much time, lads.’

‘In this weather they might not see the fire, Captain. Better if we head to Olson’s fort and pass on the word there, I’d say.’

‘Just do it!’ bawled Captain Jute.

He turned back to the water of Whittle Bay, which was a smaller, sheltered inlet within Pearl Bay itself. On the slopes on the far side of this natural harbourage, the buildings of the fishing village were dark at this late hour. Jute prayed that someone in the village would spot the signal fire and get them all out in time.

Another flash, and the captain saw that boats had already landed on the beach below, and dark figures were scurrying through the dunes towards the hill upon which the fort stood.

Sweet Mercy, he thought to himself. There’re too many of them. All this time requesting more men for the fort, and now it’s too damned late.

‘No way we’re holding that many off.’ It was Sergeant Boson who spoke, returned from passing out the orders to the men. Jute looked to him, keen for once to hear what he had to say. ‘We need to evacuate now, Captain, or we’ll be under siege in no time, and with no way of holding them back. You know, don’t you, what they do to their prisoners?’

Jute’s wide-eyed stare darted towards his men. They had armed themselves with burning brands from the guardroom hearth, and were poking life into the signal fire that stood in an iron dish upon the battlements. Soaked with spirits, the wood caught well enough despite the wind and the rain. In moments it was blazing tall.

‘Has the bird been sent yet?’

‘Just now.’

‘And the logs? We must burn them too.’

‘In the fire, captain.’

‘Very well,’ said Jute, and took one last glance at the advancing figures below. Commandos, he saw, faces blackened for night work. ‘Let’s damn well get out here then, shall we?’

But when he turned to leave, the sergeant and the rest of the men were already gone.

‘You feckless bastards,’ he muttered to himself, and hurried after them.

When Ash came to, he was still lying where he had washed up on the beach, and crystals of sand caked his lips and face. It seemed he had passed out momentarily. The storm continued to rage, and the sea washed against his legs.

Ash’s body was a dead thing sprawled on the sand; limp, detached from his will, shaking from coldness and shock. His throat was raw from the seawater he had swallowed, and he turned his open mouth towards the rain to catch some of it against his tongue.

It came to him slowly, vaguely, that he would die of exposure if he stayed here.

Ash groaned as he pushed himself to his knees. Standing was a deliberate process, moving one muscle after the other until at last he swayed on his feet. His legs trembled, ready to buckle at any moment.

When our legs are spent we must walk on our will, he recited in his mind, as the rainbow flicker of exhaustion played around the edges of his vision, and he stumbled onwards.

Other shipwrecked survivors were dotted along the beach; sailors, soldiers and camp followers. They walked to and fro as though in a daze, with their feet leaving confused, meandering trails in the sand. Wails of grief added to the high keen of the storm. They were all wretchedly exposed here, from the wind and rain that lashed so thickly it felt as though Ash was breathing water again. He wiped a hand across his face, blinked to see clearly. On his right, people huddled together amongst the dunes; ahead, others were setting off towards the bay.

Once more he wiped the rain from his eyes. The rainbow colours were expanding, creating a tunnel in his vision. He was aware of staggering into the dunes to seek some place to lie down out of the wind. Lightning sheeted overhead – he saw the sloping sand beyond his feet studded with pits from the impacts of rain.

Ahead a woman’s voice shouted out in anger, and others joined her. A scream. The laughter of men. The wind shifted and carried away the sounds, and Ash sniffed. His nostrils caught the lingering scent of woodsmoke.

A fire!

On all fours he struggled up the slope of a dune, panting ragged like a dog. At the top he righted himself. His eyes narrowed, taking in the scene below – a group of men, short glints of steel in their fists; a group of women being set upon before a fire.

The hope of warmth and shelter revived Ash momentarily. He focused on what he was seeing, and made out an older woman, wild-haired and defiant, shouting at the men and fighting them off with a length of driftwood. The men – sailors, he thought – seemed only to be sporting with her.

‘ Ho!’ Ash shouted, and every face turned to look up at him.

Lightning flashed again. He thought it an apt moment to sweep his blade from its sheath.

With a sudden nervousness the sailors eyed each other and backed away from the women. The older woman dropped the length of wood and gathered her girls around her.

Run, you bastards. I have not the strength for this.

They were waiting to see what he would do next. Ash took a step down from the dune, was hardly surprised to feel his legs buckle beneath him. He was quick enough to get his other foot out in front in time, and to turn his fall into something that approximated a downward rush. In his plummet he held his blade out for balance.

When he collapsed in front of the fire he was relieved to see the backs of the sailors fleeing into the night. He was shivering hard, and another gust flattened the flames across the wood, causing the embers to glow brightly. When the wind subsided, the flames crackled with renewed effort. The heat warmed Ash’s soul.

‘You,’ he croaked to the older woman. ‘Have you water?’

The woman ignored him. As he sat up she fussed over her girls, setting them around the fire beneath a stretch of canvas. There were five of them in all, and she talked to them curtly, businesslike, as though she was an old aunt to them. Satisfied, she wrapped a shawl over her head and shoulders and came across to join him. He saw a flask in her hand, which she offered freely.

Her eyes took in the colour of his skin.

‘Only rhulika,’ she said, settling down next to him and readjusting her dress. ‘Good for starting fires and warming the belly. Drink, old farlander. It’s the least I can offer you.’

He would have preferred freshwater just then but he drank it down anyway, his teeth chattering against the wooden spout. He swallowed the whole lot in one go, and the alcohol flared in his stomach, sent tendrils of heat threading through his spent limbs.

The flask dropped from Ash’s limp fingers. The rush of alcohol crashed against the weight of his exhaustion.

Close to his face, the woman’s pale features were reeling in and out of focus, her mouth moving quickly, saying something.

With a groan, Ash toppled forwards and fell through the world.