—What Is Born Beyond Blades, Heartshamer
Three leagues out from the coast now, heading back towards Hesper. The ship emptied of refugees and filled with nothing but the creak of rope and the crack of canvas. The Shipwright and the Shroudweaver have been set ashore, and this old golden wreck is swaying home to Hesper under Ropecharmer’s command. She’d made good time. The sea pulled to dark grey under the stern. The whole ocean stepped in bands of colour, something to do with the corals or the land underneath. He forgets. All the seas were land once, he’d been told, thrown up by fire and shifting. Hard to believe. He didn’t really understand it.
Not like the drowned cities inland, in the Hollows. Their towers and chapels still visible clear as day, the torn roofs of their byres wracked by bubbling tones as their pasture bells tolled in slow deep currents, their coppered sides stroked by thick black fish with rot-green eyes and short teeth, blunted and cankered from decades cracking the bones of the dead and drowned.
The drowned cities had been pushed down by men, by clever men and women damming rivers and hewing logs, making clever cuts that pent the water like stallions. Come the signal, the props were cut, and walls of white water were unleashed with a shriek that shook the earth, tearing rock and ground loose, bending and snapping the tops of forests.
With arms raised, those clever men and women took the sound of the roaring waters and tied it to the sounds of life below; tothe tolling of bells and, eventually, to screams. It was said that the folk of the Hollows had time to take one deep breath before the wave hit, before their worlds turned to blue and they promised their bones to black fish; before the wrath of the Belltollers struck.
Ropecharmer had asked his mother and father why the cities of the Hollows had been drowned. That was years ago, out on the lakes that covered those lost villages, when he was younger and terrified, watching the swell of their small boat as it was pushed by the heavy curves of those black fish.
‘Why?’ he had asked, wide-eyed, watching slime slip off black scales.
‘Because of the bladedrinkers,’ his father had said, his mother nodding solemnly as she swung a barbed hatchet down into the water.
Get enough hooks in and you could lift a fish bodily and plunge a knife into its grey belly, timing your cuts with the pulses of its breath to carve into the first stomach, avoiding the shit and silt of the second.
‘Because of the bladedrinkers,’ they’d said, but they’d pulled out children’s fingerbones along with the rings and teeth. They didn’t eat the fishes’ flesh.
They’d only had to visit the Hollows over two summers, before his father got boat-trade and his mother was taken back as a cutter, once the ban was lifted. Of course, once their names were taken, they’d stopped working altogether. Crowkisser had scooped them out, left them by the fire, blank-eyed and slack-jawed – still holding hands, fingers gathering with dripped spit.
He’d kept to shipwork, learnt the rope trade, splitting, weaving and binding, strong threads and snap threads. Met Coglifter that way, selling fast-light and stop-light down in the Gutmarket, watching her busy fingers pick and sort and dismiss. Struck up a friendship that was based on cheap deals and cheap booze initially, that became something more when she designed harnesses to keep his parents upright, to lift and turn them at set hours, so they wouldn’t choke on their own mucus, so he could work without hearing wet, rattling gasps in the back of his head. She’dhelped him bury them too, in clean fresh linen he never could have afforded, their heads tended with meadow-flowers, forever looking out over the cliffs and the sea.
Afterwards she brought him food in glass that somehow stayed hot long past firing. So he ate. She cracked bottles and told him tales of her husbands, wives and lovers. So he drank. She sat a chair by the door and lit a pipe, so he slept. And day after sifted day he fell back into himself. Learnt a little of her trade – the locks and glasses, the acids and tapers. Learnt a little of her thoughts, of what kept the low from the high, and how power moved in the world. Took messages for her when the ships sailed, and brought them to her in her workshop, where she read and nodded and stamped and sealed.
When that last refuge was consumed by fire he had helped her move, dried her tears as she sifted the ash and pretended he’d never seen them. He rigged a rope strong enough to haul a safe the weight of four men up into the Grey Towers, into Fallon’s care or perhaps his wife’s, before she fell to the Crowkisser.
He’d set that safe on a solid stone and left Coglifter to gather in messages from shore as well as sea; dark-eyed farmers on light-laden carts, weary soldiers with secrets bound between their breasts, toll collectors and tithers, ragged, tattered mendicants and even a grey, tall man, who sounded Barrowlands but walked like Astic. They all seemed to know her, and in return she read and nodded and stamped and sealed. He kept to the ropes, splitting, weaving and binding. Made something that looked like a life.
When the ship arrived in the harbour, he’d felt his heart lift like a hill-bird. Walked the dock to meet its master and saw her at once, a barrel on one shoulder and a sack over the other. Looking at him like the whole hurling hustle of the docks was just canvas.
‘You’re going to fix her ropes,’ she’d said. ‘we’ve come further than we meant.’
He looked down at his hands and saw the rope coiled in them, ready. Behind her the ship had hung like melted bronze on a salting sea. He could taste strangeness on his tongue.
Only seconds had held him back. He’d raced back to Cog andof course she’d listened and nodded and smiled, given him a seal and a package and dropped some words into his ear that sizzled like stones in a fire. Then he’d hared it back to the docks where Shipwright was waiting with a jug of ale and a raised eyebrow.
He’d smiled at her and that was that. He joined a crew where he played two roles, and kept so many faces he could barely find his own.
Years now, doubling his life. Half lived under sail, half on land. Half at the Shipwright’s side as the salt from the sea hit the light of the sun. Half under Coglifter’s hand, carrying whispers up and down the coast. Building a web for her to keep the ordinary folk safe, to make sure Crowkisser and her kind would fade into the deep, to make sure no one like her would ever come again. To put an end to hillside graves, and the hollow of wars filled with black fish.
63
we are all little lights
but what a pleasure, what a wonder
to burn so wildly before the greater dark
—Memorial inscription, west shore of the Hollows
The snow still clings to the grass here. Crystals tight against stunted blades, the earth pockmarked with the tunnels of tundra voles, humped by the broader flanks of the first cairns of the Barrowlands.
The earth continued to give up its dead. Shroudweaver stops, digging his fingers into the hard soil, finds some roots and pulls.
Mired amid the thin white strands, clumped in the dark, hangs something that might once have been a wedding band, around something that was definitely once a finger.
He turns to Shipwright, wags the plant disconsolately.
