The Rats and the Ruling sea

42

On sunny mornings the man liked to sit by the window and watch the tailor birds repairing their nests. They never stopped or seemed to tire, these little red birds, even when the winter storms lashed the city and pulled their patchwork homes apart like old woollen hats. One of the birds came now and then to talk to him. The man had bribed him with a scrap of silk, torn from the lining of his pocket. Now with a telescope borrowed from the king he could see the silk woven into the nest. The bird had thanked him in Simjan, and when the man did not answer, tried several other tongues. The man just nodded, or tilted his head to one side. He had lost the gift of speech and the bird had gained it. The situation was awkward for them both.

Long winter nights the man would lie on the rug, staring at the firelight dancing on the ceiling and worrying about the bird. It was always good humoured but he knew it was in pain. I'm alone in the world except for you, sir. My mate hasn't woken and I fear she never will.

When he closed his eyes the rats came looking for him. First he would hear them scuffling below in the depths of the castle, and he would have to get up and check the lock on the door. Later he would hear them sniffing and scrabbling just outside the room. Sometimes they spoke to him in their familiar, horrid way. Penny for a colonel's widow? Often he heard them gnawing at the base of the door.

The man had no weapon, and no kiln in which to hide. He knew his only chance was to lie still and make no sound.

They gave him a cat, but it harassed the bird and he told the nurse with gestures to take it away. They gave him books, all the books written in Arquali that the king could readily obtain, and these were his great comfort. When they hung a mirror above the dressing table the man stood in front of it for a long time, studying himself. A bald, veined head, deepset eyes, chin held high out of habit, not feeling. Then the man turned the mirror's face to the wall.

The king's physician gave him bloodroot tea. He was not surprised that the man had lost both speech and memory. He had treated many battle survivors, and knew the caves into which the mind, like a wounded animal, withdrew in defeat.

'Traumatic semi-catatonia,' he told King Oshiram. 'He's made a pact with the gods, Your Majesty: "Torture me no further and I'll sit here quietly, you'll see, I won't make a sound." '

'Admiral Isiq is a war hero,' said the king.

'Yes, Sire. And also, unfortunately, a man.'

Daytime was pleasant enough. The room in the tower overlooked the Ancestors' Grove, a stand of gnarled beeches surrounding a rush-fringed pool where, as King Oshiram had explained, the frogs were said to sing with the voices of the royal dead. It was a small, ancient, walled-in wood. Beyond it lay the rose gardens, dormant now and dead-looking, and farther on the sprawling Cactus Gardens, where the man's last conversation with a loved one had taken place.

The king had installed a sheet of translucent glass over the whole of the window, with only a tiny aperture to look through. 'For your safety,' the king had told him, very serious and grim. 'The ones who put you in that black pit are still among us, I'd bet my mother's jewels on that. The rat creatures did not kill them all. That is why we can't let your face be seen, and why you must never, ever shout. Use the bell pull; someone will always be listening. Do you understand me, Isiq?'

The king's eyes always told him when to nod.

King Oshiram was intelligent and kind. He did not talk down to his guest or presume that what he said was forgotten. Quite the contrary, he spoke to the man seriously, as to a peer, about the intractable problems of the Isle of Simja, and darker matters in the outer world. He often called him Ambassador or Admiral. He even brought an Arquali fish-and-dagger flag and set it up on a pole in the corner, but after the king left the man had folded it sadly and left it by the door.

One day the king told him with great anxiety of the death of Pacu Lapadolma. 'An accident, they said, an allergic reaction to her food, isn't that a preposterous claim!' It was, said the king, a sign of much worse things to come. It meant the Great Peace was unravelling. Then he shrugged, and glowered, and scratched the back of his neck, and murmured almost inaudibly that perhaps it was never meant to succeed.

After that, each visit brought more awful news. The Mzithrinis were in a state of panic and suspicion. They had cancelled their goodwill missions to Arqual, and were preventing visits — all visits, commercial, scholarly and diplomatic — to their own country, just as in the worst years after the war. The Permanent Blockade by the White Fleet, which just that autumn they had talked of abolishing, was now tighter than ever. Ships that strayed too close to the Mzithrini line of control were met with warning shots across their bows.

The doctor advised the king to spare his guest these stories — 'if you ever want to see him recover, that is.' The king frowned, but obeyed. For almost a week. Then came a day when, after struggling through an amusing tale about his nephew's habit of putting trousers on dogs, he fell silent, until the man stopped glancing out the window and looked at the monarch with concern.

The king met his eye. 'The Shaggat Ness,' he said quietly. 'Do you remember who he was, Admiral, even if you've forgotten yourself?'

The man nodded, for he did.

'All this ferocity and paranoia, this self-quarantine they've imposed, this blasting of guns and practising for war. It's all about the Shaggat. Word's leaked out. The whole Pentarchy is ablaze with rumours that the Shaggat Ness is coming back. From the grave! From the bottom of the Gulf of Thol! His old minions on Gurishal have some daft prophecy — connected I gather with the Great Peace itself, and now they're delirious with the prospect of his return. And the Five Kings, damn them, are as superstitious as the blary Nessarim. So they're turning away every possible ship that might be trying to smuggle the madman back to Gurishal. Even though he's forty years dead and gone!'

Suddenly he laughed. 'Religious lunatics. Someone had better break it to them, that's all. "Listen, you dumb bastards, the dead don't just wake up one day and return to life." '

Then the king stopped laughing, and looked at the man uneasily. 'Of course, you did,' he said.

The tailor bird had overheard the king. 'Isiq, your name is Isiq! A splendid name! And an admiral, did I get that right?'

The man neither nodded nor shook his head. Something the king had said made him feel it would be wrong to answer.

'No matter! Isiq! We have that, and it's more than we had yesterday! Every twig in the nest, eh? Tomorrow I'll listen to His Highness again, and we shall add another twig.'

Eberzam Isiq put his fingers in the aperture. The bird for the first time let him touch its velvet throat.

But for almost a week the king did not come. Isiq heard him pass through the lower chambers, his voice high and merry as he shouted to his scribe and chamberlain. When he came at last he slipped in quietly and chattered for an hour about things that had nothing to do with war.

Isiq returned his smile, for he felt the king's new joy as his own. Something on the admiral's face must have revealed his curiosity, for the king laughed and drew his stool closer.

'I can tell you, can't I? You won't go gossiping. I've fallen in love. I'm smitten, I tell you, done for.'

Isiq sat up straight. The king went right on talking.

'Oh, she won't be queen — that'll be dreary Princess Urjan of Urnsfich, one of these years — ah, but this girl! Once in a lifetime, Isiq. A dancer, with a body to prove it. But she's had a hard life. Was forced to dance for piggish men in Ballytween — dance, and maybe more than dance. Now she's too timid to step in front of an audience, or even enter a crowded room. I seem to have been born to shelter-Never mind, sir, never mind. Ah, but she dances for me, Admiral. I wish you could see her. Beauty like that would make you recall your youth in a heartbeat.'

None of this made any great impression on Eberzam Isiq. He knew only that the king's visits would be rare henceforth, and they were. The doctor came, and the nurse brought food, and new books, and laundered clothes. The little tailor bird came and spoke sadly of his mate. The winter deepened. And Isiq grew somewhat stronger. His body at the very least was healing. He started calisthenics, though he could not recall having learned them fifty years ago as a cadet.

One day, nibbling soda bread with a blanket across his knees, staring at a page of Arquali poetry as the bird pecked crumbs from the floor, he heard the king beneath him, laughing deep in his throat. The monarch raised his voice to a shout: 'Yes, yes, darling, you win, by all the gods! Your wish is my own!' And then, very faintly, Isiq heard a woman's musical laugh.

He shot to his feet, scaring the bird back to the window. Book and blanket and cake fell to the floor. He took a step forwards, lips trembling, possessed by yearnings the very existence of which he had forgotten.

'Syrarys?' he whispered.

'Isiq!' screeched the tailor bird, beside himself. 'Isiq, best friend, only friend, you can talk!'