Czytaj książkę: «The Poisoned Crown: The Sangreal Trilogy Three»

PROLOGUE The Albatross

He was the bird, and the bird was him. He was Ezroc, son of Tilarc, fifteenth grandson in a direct line from Ezroc Stormrider, the greatest albatross who ever lived. He had flown the Four Oceans and the Ten Seas, and had seen the South Pole rising like a spire of emerald from the violet hills of the Land-Beyond-Night, and the white foam of the combers on the pink coral beaches, and had smelt the perfume of the last flowers that ever were, before the hungry waters took it all away. He had lived to a hundred and two, and had died in the season his fifteenth-generation grandson was born, so the name had been passed on, but young Ezroc knew he could only dream of touching the legend.

They had set out from the Ice Cliffs more than two moons past, the albatross flying on wings still short of three spans from tip to tip – three spans would mark him for an adult – leaving the cold clean seas of the north far behind, heading south, always south. Keerye could not match his speed, for all his seal-swiftness, and from time to time the bird would descend onto the rocking waters, waiting for his friend to catch up. Some nights they would rest together, sea-cradled, Keerye half-human, steadying himself on the swell with his tail-flippers, while they gazed up at the unfamiliar stars.

‘Do you think we’ve reached the Fourth Ocean yet?’ Ezroc said once.

‘There are no Four Oceans any more,’ said Keerye, who was older and wiser, or at least more knowledgeable. ‘No Ten Seas. When people speak of them, it’s just words. Now, it’s all one big ocean, without any land in between to divide it up.’

‘But we’re looking for land,’ Ezroc pointed out. ‘We’re looking for the islands in the stories – the Jewelled Archipelago, and the Giant’s Knucklebones, and the Floating Islands of the utter south. There must be land somewhere.’

‘Islands are different,’ Keerye said sagely. ‘Islands grow, like plants. They come out of the sea sprouting fire and when they cool down there are great weeds on them with stems as thick as a monster eel, poking up into the sky all by themselves.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Ezroc said. He had dismissed such tales before. ‘Without water to support them, they’d fall down.’

‘I heard it from Shifka,’ said Keerye, naming the most venerable of the selkies, ‘and he heard it from the great whales, so it must be true. Whales don’t lie.’

Ezroc duly tried to picture weeds growing on dry land, standing up by themselves, and failed. But it was something to search for.

The seas were growing warmer now, and more dangerous. They were coming to the realms of the seakings, where they worship the Goddess, who hates all creatures of land and air. Ezroc was anxious, since it was said the merpeople would kill a selkie, if they found one in their territory, but Keerye was scornful. ‘They are fish,’ he scoffed. ‘I can outswim any fish. Let them catch me if they can.’ Ezroc wanted to know why the Goddess should hate them, but Keerye said there was no why. The Goddess was an elemental, who felt but could not reason, as strong as the currents which circle the world, in fury like the tempest, with a heart as black as the uttermost deeps where nothing can live. She was supposed to have a crown of iron that never rusted, but was kept in a mysterious cavern of air under the Dragon’s Reef. Had anyone seen her? Ezroc asked. What did she look like? In their rest-times, they speculated about it, visualising her as a huge ray, a hundred spans wide, whose creeping shadow brought death to the sea bed, or a squid as big as an iceberg, belching poisoned ink, or a merwoman tall as a tidal wave with coiling sea-snakes for hair and fins that crackled blue with electricity. Once, they met a great purple grouper which Ezroc thought might be her, but Keerye tickled it under its prognathous jaw and it mooched along with them for a while with no sign of hostility.

‘Do you know any islands?’ Keerye asked, but the fish didn’t answer.

‘Maybe it doesn’t speak our language,’ Ezroc suggested, so Keerye tried the other tongues he knew, the click-click of secret Dolphinspeech, the croaking of Penguin, the burble of Smallfish and even a few words of Shark, but the grouper never spoke at all. Presently it turned aside, heading west towards the shadow of sunken rocks.

This was reef-country, and now they grew very wary. Above the corals the shallow water was green with sunlight and teeming with smallfish, but there were deep blue chasms in between where the merfolk might hide, and cruising sharks in search of more substantial prey than yellowstripe and fairyfin, and dark clefts which might conceal monsters they had heard of but never seen, creatures of the tropical waters who didn’t venture into the north. Giant sea scorpions, crabs whose pincers could slice a selkie in half, things part fish, part reptile, which had no name and no real species, armoured with spikes and spines, their flippers half way to feet, their mouths agape with rows of dagger-teeth. Ezroc felt himself safe enough in the air, sustained on near-motionless wings, but concern for Keerye made him fly low, and the selkie was both reckless and curious, diving to peer under every rock. They met a turtle coasting the reefside who told them he was the last of his kind; his mate had been gone twenty years, searching for a place to lay her eggs.

‘Do you know any islands?’ Keerye said.

‘If I did, my mate would have buried her eggs there, and I would have found her again,’ the turtle replied. ‘The islands are all gone. Swim to the absolute south, and you’ll find only sea-swirl around the Pole, and the sun that never sets shines on the endless waters without even a rock to break the surface.’

Keerye asked the same question of those smallfish he could persuade to listen, a green octopus that was slithering over the coral, a frilled purple sea slug and even a passing shark. The smallfish responded with bubbletalk, meaning little, the octopus turned red and disappeared into a crevasse, the sea slug tied itself into a slow-motion knot and rippled away, and only the shark snapped a coherent answer.

‘There are islands,’ he said, ‘but you must move fast, to catch up with them.’

‘Which way?’ asked Keerye. ‘South?’

‘South – west – east.’ The shark flicked his tail by way of a shrug, and glided on.

‘The Floating Islands,’ Keerye said. ‘That’s what he means.’

‘I don’t trust him,’ Ezroc said. ‘My father says, a shark is a stomach with fins. He doesn’t talk, he just opens his mouth.’

But Keerye was too eager on their quest to take warning.

They met the mermaid on a night of shooting stars, at the full of the fourth moon since they left the Ice Cliffs of home. On an unknown signal the corals released their spores, uncurling like smoke into the sea-surge, glittering with reflected light, until both sky and sea seemed to be heaving with the dust of stars, and leaping fish, come to feast on the coral’s beneficence, left phosphorescent tracks like meteor-trails through the black water. Keerye lay on his back in the sway of gentle billows, made careless by the beauty, luxuriating in the night magic. ‘The sky fires of the north are lovelier,’ he insisted, but the star-glitter was mirrored in his dark eyes as he turned his head this way and that. Ezroc sat the wave beside him, skulling with web feet, dazzled by the wonder of it. Neither of them saw the watcher until she was very close.

Her hand brushed Keerye’s tail, feeling the strangeness of his fur, flinching away and returning to touch again. The selkie, whose reflexes were lightning, somersaulted and caught her arm, holding her though she wriggled, fish-like, trying to escape. Her skin felt cold and slippery, like bladderwrack. He forced her head out of the water and saw the gill-slits in her neck widen as she gasped in the alien element. Her wet hair looked black in the starlight but he guessed it was darkly purple, and the sheen on her arms was like pearl. Her eyes were unlike his, being narrow and slanting, with no whites; he could not tell their colour.

She was small, barely half his size; he guessed she was still a child.

‘You’re merfolk,’ he said. ‘Are you alone?’ And, when she didn’t answer: ‘What is your name?’

Her mouth opened and shut, but no noise emerged.

‘What is your name?’

‘Maybe she can’t talk out of water,’ Ezroc suggested.

Keerye had never met merfolk before, but he knew enough of them from rumour and hearsay. ‘She can talk,’ he insisted.

And again: ‘What is your name?’

‘Denaero,’ she said at last. Her voice sounded thin and strange in the air, more accustomed to carrying underwater. ‘I am Rhadamu’s daughter. If you hurt me, he will kill you.’

‘We won’t hurt you,’ Ezroc said. ‘We wouldn’t hurt anyone.’

‘If you answer my questions,’ Keerye amended.

‘I answer or not, as I please,’ said the girl, trying to toss her head; but Keerye held her by the hair. ‘I am not afraid of you, even if you eat me.’

‘Why should I eat you?’ Keerye demanded, startled.

‘Selkies eat merpeople,’ Denaero said. ‘We are fish. Lungbreathers eat fish. That is the way of things.’

‘I won’t eat you,’ Keerye said. ‘You are too small. When we catch fish which are too small, we throw them back.’

‘My father is the High King,’ Denaero declared. ‘When the Festival of Spawning is over, he will come looking for me, and hunt you with spears. You will be stuck full of spears till you bristle like a sea urchin. You won’t be so scornful then.’

Keerye laughed out loud at her defiance and her pride, and the girl sulked, then laughed too, ducking her head underwater when he let go her hair to inhale her native element.

‘Why must we talk like this?’ Denaero asked, meaning above water. ‘Can’t you talk undersea?’

‘I can, but Ezroc can’t. He’s a bird,’ Keerye explained.

‘I heard, there are birds that fly through the water,’ Denaero said, not wanting to appear ignorant, ‘called pinwings. If you can fly underwater, why can’t you talk there too?’

‘I’m not a penguin,’ Ezroc said. ‘I’m an albatross.’

The girl shivered, and shrank away. ‘A windbringer,’ she said. ‘I thought they were only in stories. Is it true, you can fly round the whole world in a day, and you bring ice storms from the north to destroy us? Did you bring the ice now?’ She glanced from side to side, as if expecting ice floes to emerge from nowhere.

‘I don’t bring ice,’ said Ezroc. ‘I don’t want to harm you.’

‘The stories say you are much bigger,’ said Denaero, recovering her courage.

‘He’s only young,’ said Keerye. ‘Like you. When he’s full grown, his wings will be as wide as – as the entire reef.’

‘Could I ride on you then?’ Denaero begged suddenly. ‘Could I fly – really fly – up in the sky among the stars?’

‘Well …’ Ezroc temporised.

‘One day,’ said Keerye. ‘But now we are on a quest. We are looking for islands. Do you know of any?’

‘Only in stories,’ Denaero said. ‘The Goddess ate the islands. She is always hungry. Once, there were whole kingdoms above the sea, full of creatures that didn’t swim, and strange people, neither merfolk nor selkie. I wish I could have seen them. But the Goddess swallowed them all up. Then she devoured the islands, one by one, crunching up the rocks that were their bones. There are no islands any more.’

‘We heard there were Floating Islands,’ Keerye persisted, ‘south of here, or east, or west. Have you seen them?’

The girl’s face changed; her hair lifted of its own accord, rippling with sparks.

‘Those are not islands,’ she said. ‘Don’t go near them … Listen!’ She dipped below the waves, the better to pick up vibrations, reappearing a moment later. ‘The Festival is over,’ she said. ‘My father is coming to look for me. If he finds you, you will be stuck full of spears like a sea urchin. I do not want that. You must swim fast, fast, till you come to the Great Reef Wall where the sea boils and the steam goes up a hundred spans into the air. If you can cross that, you will be safe. But you must go fast. Your swimming makes an echo-pattern that we can detect from far away; that was how I found you. If my father senses it, he will hunt you down.’

‘How far to the Great Reef Wall?’ asked Ezroc.

‘Can’t you stop the king?’ Keerye said.

‘I will leap and dance in the water and make a great splashing which will overlay the echo-pattern, but you must go now. Please!’

‘Thank you,’ said Keerye, and he kissed her cold little cheek.

‘Thank you!’ cried Ezroc, and he spread his wings, driving himself into the air.

The mermaid held her hand to her face for a second or two, as if she feared to lose the imprint of the kiss, though it was a gesture she had never known. Then she forgot it in the wonder of the bird’s rising.

‘Come back when you’re grown!’ she said. ‘Come back and fly me to the stars! Promise?’

‘I promise!’ Ezroc called, as he veered southward. Below, Keerye streaked like a javelin through the still-gleaming water.

Behind them, Denaero arced and plunged and dived, churning the midnight waves to a tumult of foam.

It was dawn when they reached the Great Reef Wall, and saw the steam of the boiling sea like a cloud over the sun. Keerye swam to the edge of the shallows, where the reef fell away in a submarine cliff, down to unguessable depths. Far below there must have been vents in the seabed, emitting gas-jets from the planet’s core, and so the water beyond the Wall bubbled like a cauldron, and the stink of sulphur hung in the air. Ezroc flew high above, soaring on the thermals, but he could see no way for a selkie to pass. ‘The steam-barrier stretches as far as the eye can see,’ he told Keerye, ‘and at its narrowest it must be more than twenty spans across. We might travel a sennight and find no way through.’

‘Show me the narrow part,’ the selkie said. ‘In seal form I can leap high and far, higher and farther than any from the Ice Cliffs.’

‘Not that high and not that far,’ said Ezroc. ‘You’ll scald in the water and bake in the steam. It will kill you.’

‘If you were to lift me, I could do it,’ Keerye said.

‘I cannot bear you. I am not yet strong enough.’

‘But if you swoop as I spring, and hold my fore-flippers, the joint impetus of both leap and flight will carry us over the barrier,’ Keerye declared.

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ Ezroc said doubtfully. ‘The risk is too great. Let us turn west. Somewhere, there will be a break.’

‘You said there were none,’ Keerye pointed out.

They might have argued about it long, but Ezroc, rising to scan the seas again, saw shadow-shapes skimming the reef towards them – the vanguard of the hunt. Mermen mounted on blue sharks wielding spears of bone tipped with blood coral, barracuda trained for the chase with fin rings that rattled to denote their route, and behind them on huge hammerheads the king and his court, trailing cloaks of whalehide and brandishing axes of polished obsidian. The king himself wore a helm or crown adorned with the claws of a giant lobster and mail of oyster-shells gleaming with mother-of-pearl.

‘Now we have no choice,’ said Keerye. ‘Swoop on me as I leap – catch me and hold firm – and we will make it.’

‘Suppose I cannot …? If I let you fall …’

‘I have faith. You won’t let me fall.’

Keerye could not go deep – the reef was too near the surface – nor give himself a long run – the hunt was drawing close. But he swam back as far as he dared and then arrowed towards the Wall, driving himself forward with his powerful tail, all seal now, breaking the water and rising up … and up … The sun glittered in the spray around him, then the sea-smokes stung his eyes, and he felt the talons of the albatross digging into him, tugging, lifting, sweeping him through the fume towards clear air and cool sea. Sudden pain scorched his flank – a well-aimed spear glanced off him and dropped into the fog. And then before he knew it he was plunging down, betrayed by his own weight, torn from the albatross’ grip to fall into the seething water …

It was hot, but it did not burn. He was through the barrier. They had done it.

They swam south for many days at leisure while the spear-wound healed and fur and feathers, singed in the sulphurous vapours, grew again. The days were longer, and the sun had barely dipped below the horizon before re-emerging to resume its orbit of the sky. Once, they came across a great shoal of silvertail, and fed until they were almost too full to float, but they saw no creatures they could talk to save a few smallfish who spoke a dialect they did not recognise. Another time they found a vast mat of kelp, rootless, drifting on the current with all its mobile populace. Ezroc thought it might be one of the Floating Islands in the stories, but Keerye said no, islands were solid, and did not wallow in the water.

‘I think there are no islands any more,’ Ezroc said.

But they kept on searching.

And then they saw it, on a day without sunset, a great hump looming out of the water ahead of them. It looked like a boulder or cluster of boulders, sea-smoothed, rose-tinted and marbled in blue, with occasional fan-like growths sprouting from cracks and testing the air with feathery tendrils. Keerye swam eagerly towards it, ran his hands over the boulders, then pulled himself out of the water and sat in the sun, shedding even the semblance of a tail, naked in his skin and gilded with light. Only his long silver hair and velvet-dark eyes showed him for a selkie.

‘This is what we sought,’ he said. ‘A Floating Island. Where there’s one, there will be more. Maybe there’s real land still, in the utter south, land with roots that go all the way to the world’s heart. The stories must be true after all.’

‘Are you sure it’s an island?’ Ezroc said, circling the atoll, still too wary to land there. ‘Denaero warned us—’

‘Denaero was a child, afraid of ghosts. This is solid: look!’ He slapped the boulder, making a wet sharp thwack!, but to Ezroc’s ear, it didn’t sound quite right.

‘It doesn’t feel like rock,’ he said, alighting beside Keerye. ‘Rock should be hard.’

‘It’s hard enough. I’m going to sleep here for a while. It’s too long since I slept out of water.’

‘I’m not tired,’ Ezroc lied. ‘I’ll keep watch.’

He took off again and drifted on the high air, scanning the sea in all directions, but could see no other island nor any living thing. The translucent water seemed to be empty even of smallfish, clear and limpid as a lagoon. That troubled him, though he couldn’t define why, and he widened the radius of his flight, covering a large area round the atoll, but still there was nothing to be seen. At last he settled on the water close to the island, folded his wings, and slept.

When he awoke he was alone. The sun was low, though it would not set; sky and sea met on the horizon in an arc of reflected fires. And in every direction there was only water. The island – and Keerye – had gone.

Ezroc hurled himself into the air with a great cry which seemed to carry to the ends of the world. He told himself it was a Floating Island: it had simply floated away. He would find it soon, and Keerye still sleeping, stretched out on the blue-veined boulders. He had only to fly high enough and he would see it: how could you lose an island?

‘Those are not islands,’ Denaero had said. ‘Don’t go near them …’

The dread lay coldly on his heart, dread and worse than dread, the terrible foreknowledge that it was too late, it had been too late from the moment he fell asleep. The island was gone and Keerye was gone and he would never see his friend again. The wide wastes of the ocean ached with his desolation, a void that could not be filled. He flew higher and higher, and the sun fell away beneath his wings, and the huge solitude of the sea unrolled below him, without land or life, empty now forever more. He would fly all the long lonely miles back to the north, and tell his tale to those who would mourn, or curse his name – Ezroc the faithless, who lost his childhood playmate and dearest friend – and then return to the south, travelling the seas for countless moons, until he knew every wave, every tug of the world’s current, every whim of the winds. His journeys would become a legend to outdo his ultimate grandsire, his adventures a fairytale for children; but he would never find Keerye again. His keening wail echoed over sky and sea, harsh with longing and despair.

‘Keeeeryeee … KEEEEEERYEEEE

No answer came.

He was the bird, and the bird was him. He felt the air under his wings, bearing him upward, the sun warming his feathers, the huge angry pain of his heart. It was too much pain, too much to endure, and he pulled his mind away, letting the bird go, watching its flight track into the sun while his thought sank seawards and drifted into a dim blue realm, no longer sharp with the awareness of the bird but soft and dream-like. In the azure gloom he saw the island, not floating on the surface but moving through deep water, the rose-stained boulders swelling and shrinking like the bulb of a vast jellyfish. A skein of tentacles trailed behind it, fifty yards long or more. Something pale was tangled in their grasp, something that barely struggled now. Vision dipped under the bulb and he saw a dozen mouths opening and closing, each with a ring of needle-tipped teeth. The pale thing, still wriggling slightly, was manoeuvred towards them, passed from one to another as each took a bite. Blood smoked on the water, but not much: the feeder did not believe in waste. Above, the bulb turned from pink to crimson as it gorged, pulsing with a glow of its own; the blue veins empurpled and swelled into ridges. Briefly, he touched its mind, such as it was – the mind of a glutton enjoying a rare special feast.

He wrenched his thought away in horror, out of the sea, out of the dream, through the veils of sleep to his own world.