Twenty-Three
UNDERWATER, Matthew was turning as he sank. The seahorse was above him one instant, and then the next he was riding it to his death. His ears crackled with pain. He heard the air bubbles bursting from his mouth. His vision was clouded with blue. He roused himself to fight against the cords that bound his wrists together, yet his strength was already much abused and used-up. He was a dry vessel, surrounded and suffocated by the sea.
Panic set in and caused him to thrash wildly and with no purpose. More air escaped lungs and mouth. The pressure upon his ears was inescapable, as was his predicament. The roar in his head was the sound of a watery grave opening to forever hide his corpse from the sun, and yet it might be the voice of a demon from The Lesser Key Of Solomon, exulting in the demise of a good man.
Matthew’s stone mount suddenly hit something with a sea-muffled thud, landing upright on its base. Its descent ceased.
He could see only smears and shadows, strange forms around him that might be angular rocks sculpted by time and currents. His heart pounded, and with the next loss of air he knew his stuttering lungs would lose their grip on life and the sea would come rushing in to complete the job the Thackers had begun.
He couldn’t get free. He couldn’t wrench himself loose from the seahorse. He was done, he realized. What gunpowder bombs had not stolen, the cool blue depths would take.
Finished, he thought. But dear God…I am not ready to—
A mouth clamped onto his. A breath of air forced itself into his lungs. Black hair swirled into his face. Something began sawing at the cord binding his wrists. A sharp edge grazed him. A piece of glass or a broken shell? He had to hold on a moment longer…just a moment, if he could…
His body shivered and jerked in involuntary battle against the oncoming dark. One moment more…just one…
He felt the cord give way, and the Indian girl had freed his hands.
There was still the rope binding body to seahorse. Wrapped around his waist. He grasped at it and pulled. Tighter than a swollen tick. Where was the knot? Somewhere underneath the horse? The girl’s mouth was suddenly on his again, feeding him more breath. He felt her sharp edge at work on the cord at his left side. Sawing frantically, it seemed; as frantically as he fought the pounding and the pain and the darkness reaching for him. He looked up, silver bubbles bursting from his mouth and nostrils because he just couldn’t hold the air in any longer. Sunlight shone on the surface above. How far? Thirty or forty feet? He could never make that.
She pulled at him. The cord had come loose enough for him to get free of it. He started desperately for the surface, but she yet pulled at him in another direction. Deeper, it seemed. He thought she must be insane, and he was not a merman to her mermaid; yet her pull was insistent and now she had her arm around him and was urging him to swim with her.
I am not finished, he thought in his anguished blue haze. I have much to do. I am not finished…but I must trust this girl.
And so he kicked forward with her as the silver bubbles bloomed from his mouth and nose, and three more kicks and the Indian girl was leading him downward still. She took him into a dark place, through some kind of opening. A cave? he thought, near letting his lungs either empty themselves or explode. But no, not a cave…
They swam a few seconds longer, and then she abruptly led him up and his head broke the surface and he tasted salty sweet air. He inhaled mightily with a shudder that racked his body and in the next instant was punished by spasms of retching. She held him up while he filled his lungs and emptied his belly. In the dark blue gloom he saw the stones of a wall to his right and two feet above his head the stones and rafters of a ceiling. He reached up with both hands to grasp hold of a rafter, finding the wood spongy but still able to bear his weight, and he hung there breathing hard, coughing viciously, and shivering with not the chill but the idea that death had been so very, very close.
“Oh my God,” Matthew rasped. And again, for he knew not what else to say: “Oh my God.”
“Don’t let go,” Fancy told him, her body pressed against his side and her own hands up to hold onto the near-rotted rafter. “Do you hear me?” Her English was perfect, not a trace of an accent.
“I hear,” Matthew said; more of a frog’s croak than human speech.
“Just breathe,” she said.
“No instruction…necessary,” he managed to answer, though he had to breathe through his mouth for his injured nostrils were nearly swollen shut. His head was still pounding, his heart about to beat through his chest, and his stomach roiling. He closed his eyes, for now a sick weakness was threatening to make his fingers open. If he slid back in just yet he was done for.
“You’re going to live,” she said.
He nodded, but he was thinking he would not bet on such a statement. His eyes opened and he again surveyed their surroundings. Not a cave, but…a building of some kind? “Where are we?”
“The town under the sea,” Fancy answered, her black hair pushed back from her forehead and her face a blue-daubed darkness. “I found it, nearly the first day I was here.”
Matthew thought his brain must still be fogged and burdened. “Town? Under the sea?”
“Yes. Many buildings. Some with air still caught in them. I swim here, many times.”
“A town?” Matthew still couldn’t make heads-or-tails of it. Possibly Fancy had seen him go over the balcony and had used broken glass from a window to cut him free. “Did they know?” He tried to clarify that: “The brothers. Did they know?”
“About this place? No. It fell away from the island in the earthquake, long years ago.”
“Earthquake,” he repeated, lapsing back into his parrotty pattern. That would go along with the tremors still being felt on Pendulum. He felt as if his head was full of mush. “Who told you this?”
“One of the servants. She was a child when it happened.”
Matthew nodded. He still felt numb and bewildered. It occurred to him quite suddenly, as if he hadn’t realized it before, that this beautiful creature pressed against him was quite naked.
“Who are you?” she asked. “You’re not like the others. You’re not part of them. So…who are you, really?”
“I can’t explain that,” he decided to say. “But I can tell you that I knew an Iroquois brave who was called He Runs Fast Too. He—”
“Came over on the ship with me,” Fancy interrupted. “And with Nimble Climber. How did you know him? And what happened to him?”
“He went back to your land. Back to the tribe. He…helped me do something important.”
“He’s dead now,” she said. “I can hear it in your voice.”
“Yes, he’s dead. And you were called—”
“I know what I was called. That was a long time ago.”
“Those two who have you. They—”
“I don’t wish to speak of them,” she said. “But I will say they do not have all of me. I always find a place to go. As here. In the silence, I can think. I can be.” She adjusted her grip on the beam because her fingers were sinking into the black rot. Her voice was quiet and distant when she next spoke. “I love this. This ocean. This blue world. It speaks to me. It hides me. It makes me feel safe.”
Matthew thought this was the only girl in the world who would feel safe forty-something feet underwater, with her head in a small breathing space in the ruins of a collapsed town. But he understood exactly what she meant.
“I can never go back,” Fancy told him. “Not to my land. Not to my people.”
“Why not? If I could get you out of here—and away from them—then why not?”
“You could never get me away from them.” It was said with a fair amount of smouldering anger. “They would kill you if you tried.”
Matthew said with a weak grin, “They’d have to do better than this, wouldn’t they?”
“They would do far better. I have seen them do…terrible things. And to me, also. I used to fight them, but I suffered for it. Now I don??
?t fight, but I still suffer. They enjoy that. It is their great pleasure in living.”
“I’m going to get you away from them.”
“No,” she answered, with the hardness of a stone that could not be moved, “you will not. Because even if you could—which you cannot—I have no place to go. Except another bed, in another room, in another house owned by another man. I am…how would you say…an item to be sought. Not so much now, as there are many others like me brought across the ocean. But I am still rare enough.”
Matthew couldn’t fully see her face in the blue gloom, but he had the impression of looking at someone who had long ago lost all ability to smile, and whose happiness was silence and peace taken at every possible moment. He didn’t wish to think what those rough hands and biting teeth had done to her. He didn’t wish to think what her eyes had seen.
“I can help you,” he offered.
“I can never go back,” she repeated. “Not who I am now.”
It was said, Matthew noted, the Indian way: all statement of fact, all hard true reality, and not a sliver of self-pity or pretense.
“All right,” Matthew said, but he knew himself. And, for better or for worse, he never surrendered.
“We should start up,” Fancy told him. “Take in some breaths. Get ready. It is easy for me, but it may be difficult for you. I will hold your hand all the way.”
“Thank you.” Matthew thought this sounded like a casual stroll along the Great Dock, but he knew one usually did not perish on such a stroll, whereas in this instance perishing was a prominent possibility.
“Are you ready?” she asked in another moment.
The dreaded question, he thought. And the answer?
“As I’ll ever be,” he said, though the racing of his heart spoke otherwise.
She reached out for him and he gave her his left hand. “Stay close to me,” she directed. “We will pass through a doorway and a broken window and we will be out. Mind the glass at the bottom of the window.”
“I will.” If it hadn’t snagged him on the way in, he wasn’t concerned about it on the way out. And he was determined to be her second skin, within reason.
“Take a breath and let it go,” she said. He imagined he could see the gleam of her eyes as she stared at him. “Then take another breath and hold it. When you do that, we will start.”
Matthew nodded. Damn, this was some deep hell he’d gotten himself into. He was scared nearly beyond his wits from the memory of his lungs spasming on the edge of drowning. He wasn’t sure he had the strength or willpower to make this swim. His head still pounded and his nose sat on his face like a lump of hot tar. Was the damned thing broken? No time to fret about that now. He took the breath and let it go. He was afraid. But then he felt her hand squeeze his and he took the next breath—a deep breath, as deep as possible—and held it and instantly Fancy went under and pulled him with her. He let go his one-handed grip on the beam, and he was swimming alongside the Indian girl with terror thrumming through his veins.
He didn’t know when they went through the doorway, except his right shoulder hit a hard surface that shot fresh pain through him. God blast it! he thought as he held onto his air. Fancy pulled him onward with remarkable strength. She was indeed in her element, a daughter of the blue world. Did they pass through a broken window? Matthew wasn’t sure, for he could see nothing but blurs and smears. Maybe something caught at his stockings, though he wasn’t sure about that either. Then the light from above brightened and they were rising. Matthew had a blurred glimpse of what might have been the white stone seahorse, perched on a crooked roof. All around were the shapes of stone buildings, with alleys and streets between them. It appeared to Matthew in this blue haze that some were intact and others fallen to ruin either by the action of the sea or the violence of the earthquake. Then he could gather no more impressions for his lungs were aching and the surface was still thirty feet above.
She took him up, their hands locked together.
Perhaps it was a swift ascent. To Matthew, as he fought to control both his spasming lungs and the terror that chewed at him, it was the journey of night into day. Never had such a distance, which could easily be walked on land, seemed so far and so horrible. Ten feet below the surface, he lost nearly all his air in an explosion of bubbles that swept past his face in silver mockery. Then his lungs desired to pull in the seawater, and yet Matthew by force of will and fear of death kept the Atlantic from invading him, and two more kicks and the surface was right there in his face and his head was breaking the surface and the foamy slop of a wave almost drowned him in his moment of victory but he opened his mouth and drew in breath after breath and felt Fancy’s arms around him holding him up.
He pushed the hair back from his forehead and treaded water, his chest heaving. He looked up at the professor’s castle on the cliff above, and could clearly see the third floor library’s balcony and the ledge where one of the two stone seahorses had lately rested. The Thackers were long gone. If anyone else but Fancy had seen this assault, they had kept their lips sealed for there appeared to be no activity anywhere. It was just another sunny day in Fell’s paradise.
Here the waves were rough, as they surged toward the base of the cliffs. Matthew could see from this vantage point where part of the island had been sheared off. He recalled the professor saying My father was the governor here. It was likely that his father was indeed governor when the town—whatever its name had been—had collapsed into the sea.
“Follow me,” said Fancy, and she began to swim toward the cliffs not directly but at a forty-degree angle. Though weakened and certainly no champion in the water, Matthew followed as best he could. Fancy’s taut bottom breaking the surface and the glistening shine of her legs made following nearly a delightful obsession.
In time they reached a cove shielded from the breakers by a series of large rocks, and Fancy could stand in hip-high water. Matthew felt more rocks under his feet and walked carefully lest a surge of waves trapped and snapped an ankle; Fancy, however, knew the territory and forged onward like a true providence rider. A beach pebbled with black stones was ahead. On a rock in the shadows lay her clothing, neatly folded, and her shoes. As Fancy hurriedly dressed herself, Matthew staggered from the sea and fell to his knees in the grainy gray sand.
“You’re all right now,” she told him, as she buttoned the front of her rather tight-fitting lilac-colored gown.
“I know,” he answered, his face lowered. His head seemed to be full of crazy churchbells. “I’m just trying to…” He had to start again, for he was out of breath. “I’m just trying to make sure of it.”
She finished dressing and smoothed her gown before she spoke again, her black hair swept back and her face beautiful and austere. “You’re very brave.”
“Am I?”
“Certainly you are.”
“I think I’m mostly lucky.”
“I think,” she said, “you have earned the right to live another day.”
“At least,” he agreed, and he pulled himself up and got to his feet.
Her ebony eyes, full of pain and secrets, examined him from wet bottom to drenched top. “You won’t tell me who you are?”
“I can’t.”
“But you’re not one of them. Not really.”
“No,” he said, deciding she knew anyway. “Not one of them.”
“Then you’re here for a different reason than the others. I don’t understand why. Perhaps it would be best not to know?”
“Yes,” he answered, “that would be best.”
“Ah,” she said, and nodded; it was an expression that spoke volumes. Still she held him with her solemn gaze, as if reading not only his face but his soul. Then she motioned toward a rocky pathway several yards distant that led up the cliff to the highland. “It’s steep and a little dangerous, but that’s the only way.”
Steep and dangerous, Matthew thought. Was there any other way? He followed her when she started up, the water squishing in his bela
bored boots.
At the top, he realized the castle was hidden from view by a patch of forest. The road to Templeton surely wasn’t very far through the woods. He thought the sensible thing to do was go back to his room, collapse into bed, rest his aching noggin and possibly put a compress on his swollen nose.
But then, again, he wasn’t always sensible, and the sensible thing often did not make for advancement. Templeton was a few miles along the road. Berry was being held in the Templeton Inn. It was time for Nathan Spade to walk into town and see what might be seen. Possibly his clothes would be dry, in this heat, by the time he got there. If not, not. There probably was a physician in Templeton who might look at his beak. And who also might answer some questions about Professor Fell and the underwater town.
“The house is this way,” said Fancy.
“I’m not going there yet,” Matthew told her. “I trust there’ll be no mention of this to the brothers? As far as they know, I’m dead. I’d like to keep it that way for a while.”
“I never saw you,” she said. “Not even your ghost.” And then she turned away from him, walked her usual path through the forest and was gone.
Matthew walked away from the cliff. The road had to be just ahead, in the direction he was going. Birds called in exotic voices and the sun shone down through green fronds and vines.
It was a good day, he decided, to not be a ghost.
Twenty-Four
I HAD an accident on the road,” Matthew said to the doctor who inspected his swollen and by now purpling nose. The purple was spreading out on both sides of his face. Also, there were two frightful lumps on his forehead. “Clumsy,” Matthew explained. “Tripped over my own feet.”
“Happens to the best of us, Mr. Spade.” The physician was a portly man with long flowing white hair and dressed in a cream-colored suit as befitted his tropical position. His name, he’d told Matthew, was Benson Britt and he and his wife had been living on Pendulum Island since the summer of 1695. Britt’s hand moved to touch the whipstrike on Matthew’s neck. “This was also an accident?” The doctor’s dark brown eyes in the sun-wrinkled face held the question.