‘Watch it,’ one of them snapped as he backed into Che.
For an instant, Che wanted to grab his arm and break it.
‘Eat shit,’ he snapped back at him without breaking step.
Before Che descended the steps he noticed Sasheen eyeing him from her vantage above. She raised a flask of wine in a toast, and he bobbed his head at her, and quickly descended.
Blackness smothered Ash for every day and night he lay down there in the bilge of the ship, this fat rolling transport where he’d stowed himself aboard as the fleet had left Q’os harbour. Blackness, and a closeness of air so foul it was hardly fit to inhale, and a battering of noise never-ending: the ballast of sand and loose gravel shifting against the hull; the creaks and bangs of the hull; the splashes of the rats in the darkness – all of it conspired to unhinge him.
Ash had found a space above the slosh of the water on which to lie, a projection of wood near the aft of the bilge, a few feet in width, where he had wedged himself next to his sword. He lived like one of the rats down there, and although he couldn’t see the rising and setting of the sun, he knew when it was dawn by the pounding of feet overhead as the shifts were changed, and when it was night by the raucous sounds of laughter and songs.
Like a shy scavenger he stole out in the dead of night to find water and what scraps of food he could to sustain himself, creeping silently through the black spaces of the ship while most of the crew were asleep. Upon his return from these ventures he would sit on his narrow ledge and eat, and what was left he would feed to the small colony of rats that lived down there with him, muttering to them quietly in the darkness. Soon, they stopped trying to eat him in his sleep. Some even began to climb onto his body and huddle there for warmth.
His usual headaches subsided, perhaps due to the lack of any sunlight, which was fortunate, for he’d almost run out of his precious dulce leaves. Constantly he shivered from the dampness, though, and knew it was getting into his chest. His breathing was becoming tight and restricted. He feared he would develop pneumonia.
Ash thought of dying down here in this black hole, and imagined his corpse floating from one side to the other in the rancid bilge water, the rats making good use of him until he was nothing but bones settling loosely upon the ballast. He tried at times to dry his clothes – the leather leggings lined with cotton, the sleeveless tunic – by wringing them out then spreading them against the curve of the hull, but, like his boots, they refused to dry. One night, he took a risk and was lucky enough to steal a heavy oiled cloak from one of the sleeping crew above. He wrapped his naked body in it and hoped it would do.
Occasionally, Ash found himself wondering where the fleet was headed. He recalled seeing a map in the Storm Chamber when he and Aleas had finally breached it, something denoting movements of fleets. He hadn’t looked at it properly, though, and try as he might he failed to picture any details now.
Mostly, he just wondered how soon the fleet would reach land. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could stand it down here in this bilge that had become his private misery.
Ash was sixty-two years of age, long past the life expectancy of a Roshun still working in the field. The years had certainly taken their toll on him; his body felt stretched thin and taut these days. His joints ached from arthritis, and his muscles tended to complain whenever he moved too swiftly or demanded too much of them. It took longer for him to heal; even now, the minor knife wound in his leg from the vendetta was still festering, so that daily he had to squeeze the pus from it and clean it out with seawater.
In a way, Ash didn’t mind further confinement in this black pit he had crawled into. Within his own depths he felt as if he deserved to be there, that he would gladly suffer an eternity of this desolation if it meant bringing Nico back from to the living. Beneath the oiled cloak, he could feel the small clay vial of ashes lying cold and dead against his chest.
CHAPTER TEN
A Matter of Diplomacy
‘The Holy Matriarch requests a moment of your time,’ cooed Guan, standing there with his twin sister, both watching him with their hooded, arrogant eyes.
Che gripped the open cabin door a little harder as they all swayed with the violent motions of the ship. All around them, the flagship groaned and complained against the buffeting of the heavy seas. The sister was studying him closely, and he stared back at her, her face as sharp and lean as her brother’s, her thin lips slightly parted on one side.
He held his forefinger up. One moment.
Che closed the Scripture of Lies in his hand, making sure they saw it first, then replaced it on his neatly made cot in plain sight. He stepped out into the passageway and followed them.
He was glad of a chance to stretch his legs, despite his usual sense of foreboding whenever he was summoned by the Matriarch. He hadn’t ventured out much these several days past, the weather being too poor for dallying out in the open. Today was the worst so far. The ship pitched so steeply from side to side they had to walk with their hands along the walls of the passageway to keep their balance.
One by one they stepped up onto the main deck and bent into the blasts of wind. A gust sent the sister stumbling sideways, tottering with outstretched hands before her brother tugged her by the sleeve back to his side. A wave crashed against the hull and threw a froth of water hissing over the decking, knocking over a few sailors so they went sliding amongst it in their rainslicks.
The three priests wiped their faces dry, and in a line made for the steps that zigzagged up the flank of the quarterdeck, where they started to haul themselves up.
‘A little choppy today!’ the sister, Swan, called back at him.
Guan looked back too, his expression cool.
The man hadn’t spoken with Che for some days now. Perhaps Guan had finally taken his hint about wanting to be left alone.
Still, there was a look in his eyes; something wounded in them. Not the reaction he would have expected if these twins really were Regulators in disguise. Perhaps he was simply being paranoid after all.
This is why I am without friendships, he thought.
At the door of General Romano’s cabin they passed a pair of Acolytes stationed as guards, sheltering as best they could beneath the tiny porch. Within, even over the din of the gale and the waves, the raised voice of Romano could be heard cutting through the laughter of his people. Like many, the young general had been revelling in drink and narcotics since the bad weather had confined them all to their quarters.
On the topmost floor, at the door to Sasheen’s private cabins, the three of them stood within the porch as the honour-guards searched them for weapons. The sister was last, and as she was carefully patted down Che noticed how her brother watched the process with a frown. She ignored his scrutiny, though, looked at Che instead with her features softened by a delicate smile.
Pretty, he thought, and glanced down at her body without subtlety, her wet robe clinging to it.
‘Clear,’ said the Acolyte as he finished, and his partner knocked on the door.
Heelas, Sasheen’s personal caretaker, beckoned them into the salon, where priests of the entourage lounged in a subdued silence. Heelas led the three of them across to the door of Sasheen’s private cabin and rapped a knuckle on it gently, then opened it and passed through without waiting for a response.
The moment Che entered the room he could feel it, the anger in the air. Sasheen sat on her great chair at the rear of the spacious cabin. She was wrapped in a fur coat over plain robes. Her chest was rising and falling quickly. Che noticed a broken wineglass at the foot of the wall, and drops of red wine amongst the shattered glass, running one way then the other as the floor pitched from side to side.