Did the fingers around her waist tighten, for just a moment?
‘I wanted to help people. Talk on deck is that you do right by your own.’
Arissa pulled her in close, her lips the barest brush against her ear. Not a hope of hiding the slyness in her voice.
‘Also true. Welcome to Hesper, Shipwright.’
Shipwright rolls her shoulders, shakes herself back to the present. Over her head gulls scream, and the ship rocks on the cusp of a wave.
Arissa was long gone. Pulled down into nothing by Crowkisser. Defiant, sly, caring to the last. Her best friend. Almost … almost her lover. Her breath still catches at the thought.
With Arissa’s fall, Hesper had stumbled too. Her husband, never the most sociable of rulers, grew suddenly reclusive beyond reason. Apparently, he’d thrown himself into his work, because the wheels kept turning, but the towers grew as quiet as they could.
Gradually, Hesper’s trade dwindled. The bold, brutal captains were gone, deceived into thinking that joining the great fleet sailing south would crown their careers and send their barques and bosuns home covered in glory and gold. Packed off and provisioned by the guild heads, who had slid into their still-warm bunks and cradled their coffers with startling speed.
Almost all those great ships were sunk now, sundered at the bottom of the sea, along with their crews, their captains, their cheers and their piss. When you sailed into Hesper now, the silence created itself.
Shipwright wanted to mourn it all, or cut loose of it all, but she couldn’t. High in those grey towers, her best friend still lay. Heart still beating. Lungs still breathing. Nothing to shake her out of it, for all she had tried.
Oh, how she’d tried. The last of her gold, the most precious pieces of her cargo that she’d squirreled away over the years had bought her nothing but disappointment. Arissa was gone. Only her body remained. That smile, that wit, that fierce kindness, had fled to somewhere no ships sailed.
Shipwright could leave Hesper, could go if she wanted, but the city remained just like Arissa, a whisper of what it had been, a shadow on her heart with just enough of the shape of something she loved to keep her coming home.
8
Hey now mill wheel,
hey now furrow,
hey now the high ice,
hey the sleeping barrow
—Harvest song, Millet
The hill held the tomb and the shadow of the tomb held the town. That’s how the story went. The people of Millet drawn by the gentle curve of the river and the rolling fields of dark earth that spilt out on either side like a dowager’s skirts, brought their rickety wagons from Hesper’s walls and made a little town in the crook of the water, got fat on fish and grain.
Quickfish could hear his mother’s voice telling the story, could see the silhouette of her body framed against the lamplight. His childhood bedroom, a world and twenty years ago. The lines of her hands miming fish and grain. The flicker of the flame. He is seven, maybe eight. Enough of a boy to crave the terror of the outside; enough of a child to want to hear about it in bed, at home. The grey walls of his tower bedroom cradle him, the sheets white canvas for the tale, as Arissa spins it onwards.
The shadow of the tomb held the town. Night would fall, and the lights of Millet would cluster in the dark of the hill, against the kiss of the wind.
The people of Millet were simple people, good people, as much as all people are good. They locked their doors, and stoked their fires, and slept in each other’s arms.
And if the wind ran strangely over the hill, they marked it not. And if the mouth of the tomb whispered, they marked it not.
And this was their undoing. For although the good people ofMillet had built well above the ground, in the crook of the river, they had forgotten to fear what slept below the earth.
Arissa’s hands slipping under the covers. Hunching into fearsome shapes that crept towards her boy. He’d wriggled higher, pressed against the headboard. Chest fluttering with excitement as he watched those hands move, and imagined what crawled beneath his very feet.
Worms, yes, and other animals. But what else? Bones? Bodies? Magic?
The next bit of the story had been his favourite, his mother pulling the lantern close against her chest, so flame licked her throat and the stark planes of her face. Her eyes black hollows against the softness of the light. Enunciating every word, playing with the sounds of the tale. Shooting a sly smile over her shoulder at his Da who watched by the door.
The hill held the tomb. And the shadow of the tomb held the town. But the tomb had been here long before the town. For the people of Millet were not the first to feel the call of that dark soil and the bright curve of the river.
Long ago, the mountains had coughed forth warriors. Bold warriors, sharp-toothed and bronze-bladed. Conquerors, pouring from a city that lived in the stone, like a maggot lived in the wound, or a worm slept in the soil.
Thell. And her voice dipped and rumbled enough, that for a second, he wondered if that really was his mother sat at the foot of the bed, this black-eyed shade licked by light.
