When the sailors noticed, Chart just said, “Yep. That fella sure gave us plenty of rope.” And then he didn’t exactly smile, not being given to the habit, but he sighed a cheerful sigh, and his frown had a sort of twinkle to it.
Well, it was a long way from Delta to the Mist, but the weather was fine, and the fish were plentiful, and the crew stayed in good spirits, as long as they didn’t think about what lay ahead.
It took four or maybe three moons for the Figure of Eight to reach the edge of the Mist, and when the crew finally saw it, shimmering and shining, gleaming and glowing, blacking and whiting and boiling up like a silvered thunderstorm before them, they got scared.
“We can’t go in there!” one cried. “What if we meet the Muck, what eats ships whole?”
“What if we fall off Swap’s Log!” said one with a shiver that made his earrings jingle.
“Or maybe fetch up on The Island That Went Back,” a third sailor moaned.
“I’m the captain, and I order you to trust me,” Chart said; and each time he saw a frightened sailor he would lean over, and wink, and mutter, “Rope! Biscuits! Pepper!”
Well, into the Mist they went.
They saw a cloud give birth to a bright blue island.
They dove for pieces of sunken rainbow off the coast of Fire Island, and almost sank when a shooting star crashed through the deck like a cannonball.
They saw Sere lose a race with Time, leaving feetprints of fire on the cloud’s surface for as far as the eye could see.
And of course the old Figure of Eight went through a few changes of its own. For a while it had a hull of beaten gold, thin as a dragonfly’s wing, and rigging all of spider’s web. Then the ship took the shape of a walrus with a giant heron on its back, spreading its wings for sails. They saw many marvels, and had many adventures, and before long you couldn’t say they were all quite sane. But Chart kept them as steady as he knew how, and tried to write his experiences in the log every day, regular, before he went to bed.
Finally they’d had enough. They were ready to feel the rock beneath their feet, and plunge into honest water, and tell their stories to the people back at home. Everyone was pleased the day Chart came out of his wheelhouse and said he was ready to turn for home.
But just as the crew gave a great cheer, the Mist under them bubbled up black and crimson. Then the lookout spotted an enormous tentacle, far alee, writhing on the surface of the waves. “The Muck!” she yelled. “The Muck! We’re doomed!”
But Chart started shouting like a crazy man. “Biscuits!” he yelled. “Crumble biscuits overboard!”
Nobody moved a muscle. Chart was frantic. “Didn’t I take you to the utter South? Didn’t I lead you past the Ice Islands of the North? Didn’t I get you back down the Vein with your blood still inside?” he screamed.
The Muck’s threshing tentacles bore down on the Figure of Eight.
“So CRUMBLE BISCUITS!!!” Chart roared, heaving a grand load of dry biscuit overboard.
Crazy as it seemed, every sailor on that ship started crumbling biscuits as if feeding Sere. The air was thick with crumbs; hair was white with flour. The deck looked like a bakery. And now everyone could see the nearest tentacles, black and livid red, groping for the ship.
Then the lookout saw the first gull. Just circling there, screaming, nearly too fat to fly on ship’s biscuit. Pretty soon another came swooping down out of the misty sky. And another, coming from abeam. Two more gulls from the transom, one flying out onto the bowsprit, several flapping down from the rigging, a whole flock from the starboard rail. There were gulls everywhere: gulls bubbling out of the water, gulls bursting from the ship’s lockers, gulls tangled in sailors’ hair. All fighting and clacking and screaming at one another to get those pieces of biscuit.
And the closer they got, the thicker they got, trapped in a whirl of wings. A vast white swordsman formed from the birds, spoiling for a fight: the Gull Warrior, the Hero of the islands.
Now, conveniently enough, there was a big red and black slimy smelly oozy horrible tentacled genuine four- or maybe three-times life-size monster there for him to battle.
And battle they did.
The fight raged for seven days and six nights.
“Watch out!” Chart cried, as a severed tentacle crashed onto the foredeck.
“Take care, lads,” he roared, as the Muck squeezed one of the Warrior’s limbs right off, dissolving it into a storm of wheeling birds. “The Gull’s been disarmed!”
But on the seventh day, the Muck finally decided the Figure of Eight wasn’t worth the effort, and slithered off to engulf a small, sparsely populated island.
“We did it! We did it! We’re alive!” the sailors cried. And then they turned as one to the captain, and said, “Surely you are the Greatest, Most Resourceful, Most Extraordinary Explorer of All Time! How can we ever thank you?”
Chart wrinkled his nose. “Scrape the gullshit off my boat,” he said.
So they cleaned up the Figure of Eight, now well convinced that Chart could deal with any danger.
But Chart wasn’t happy. “No wind!” he grumbled. “For the last four days (and three nights), there’s been not a breath of wind.” To make matters worse, the ship smelled terribly of gull droppings, and Chart would dearly have loved for a breeze to blow the stench away.
No breeze came, and the ship lay in irons for a month of deadly calm.
“Tentacle, tentacle, tentacle,” the crew grumbled. “That’s all we’ve et for weeks. Tentacle stew, tentacle pie, creamed tentacle in brine with tentacle fritters on the side. Ugh! We want to go home!”
Finally Chart set them to pulling at the rope still attached to the anchor in Delta harbor. “It will be a long haul if we have to drag ourselves home, but what choice do we have? Oh, and one other thing. Bring up those extra barrels of pepper.”
And so, during the long, weary days while the crew pulled the Figure of Eight back toward Delta, Chart sat tinkering with an odd contraption made from rope and a pulley and three ship’s hatchets, one for each pepper barrel.
Thirty days later, or maybe twenty-five, who should Chart see but his employer, walking down the bowsprit and jumping onto the foredeck. Now Fathom stood twice the height of a normal man, and his eyes were storm-cloud blue, and lightnings played around his head. His cheeks were all puffed up, and he didn’t say anything, just smirked. Finally he looked up at the sky and muttered a few words, very fast and breathy: “You-seem-to-be-stuck-Greatest-Explorer-of-All-Time.”
Chart looked up and saw his mainsail pennant leap straight into the air. “A bit of calm,” he said. “But I’m about to leave it behind.”
“Ha!” Fathom snorted, and the boat heeled wildly in a sudden wind. She steadied as Fathom sucked the air back in. He looked around at the frightened sailors, and the dirty ship, and Chart. A mean grin spread over his face, like the shadow of a storm spreading out black across the water. “Fwuuuuuuh! And-how-do-you-intend-to-do-that?”
Chart stroked his weedy mustache and looked up at Fathom with an appraising eye. “Why, you’re going to help me, neighbor!” He nodded as Fathom’s eyes bulged. “Yep,” he continued, “I figure you’re too stupid not to.”
“HAH!!!” Fathom snorted, and immediately the sails surged out. Chart yanked on his rope, which pulled through a pulley on a bracket, which jerked three other ropes, which yanked the braces out from under three ship’s hatchets. And Fathom, realizing he’ d filled the sails with air despite himself, sucked in as hard as he could: fwuuuuuuhhh! But what he sucked up was ounces, gallons, barrels, of fine ground pepper.
His heroic eyes watered. His heroic nose ran. His cheeks fluttered and his brow sweated lightnings. “Grab hold!” Chart cried, and his crew hung on for dear life as Fathom spun his head around, wheeped, heaved, and delivered himself of a sneeze heard round the world.
Well, every people has stories about that sneeze. The grasslanders say that the sky is on a hinge, and that once it swung down sideways and blew th
em halfway up the mountains at the end of the world. The people of the forest found every tree, shoot, and sapling within three days of the shore swept into the air and stacked as firewood. Back in Delta, the wind hit so hard that it spun the triangle of islands around so that the Foot became Spear-point. And above all, the sneeze blew Chart’s boat clean out of the Mist and back to Delta.
That ship flew so hard and so high that every person on board should have been killed, smashed to splinters on one of the Outer Islands, only Chart had the Figure of Eight built flat-bottomed, so she hit the water just in front of Telltale and skipped like a stone over the tallest hill on it. She bounced five more times, clearing islands on three bounces, before she came skidding back into Delta harbor and tore out her hull on the dockside reef.
Well, the townsfolk poured out to greet them. They shouted Three Cheers for the crew and Three Cheers for the Figure of Eight. They cheered the rope, the biscuits, the pepper, and themselves. They cheered three cheers for Captain Chart!
But all that gloomy man could do was complain. “Why’d you move the islands around?” he growled. “That new reef tore the bottom out of my boat!”
Which proved that the Greatest Explorer of All Time was a true ship’s captain, and an islander to the bone.
* * *
Jo clapped softly. Brook had already fallen asleep, but a grin remained on her face.
They bundled up for the night, Rope with his arm around Brook, Jo with an arm around Rope to ward off the cold.
As he lay on the hard ground, trying to sleep, Rope drank in the strangeness of their journey. He was in a story. This—this was so different from ordinary life.
This mattered.
Earth beneath his head, darkness beyond the embering fire, leaves murmuring in the night . . . the press (he couldn’t ignore it) of Jo’s breasts against his back; the touch of her leg.
He closed his eyes and drowned in sleep.
Later, much later, Jo was still awake, drawing warmth from Rope’s broad back, staring down the night with secret silver eyes.
She hissed at a touch on her arm.
It was Net, slinking spider-soft over Rope’s shoulder and onto hers. Through his feathery touch, she could feel Rope’s sleeping core. He was open to her, slumbering there, on the other side of the mesh, warm and human: an anchor to hold her to the ground, if she chose to use him.
She shivered as Net slid from her shoulder. A palp touched her breast, lightly, through the cloth. Retracted. Reached out again.
She fell asleep during his delicate examination.
CHAPTER 9
THE FOREST
A SCREAM woke them.
Jo sat bolt upright with her heart hammering in her chest. The fire was a dim red glow inside the cedar. Darkness pressed against her from outside.
The scream was suddenly bitten off.
“What was that?” Brook hissed.
“Shhh!” Jo’s whole being was in her ears. Night sounds filled the silence the cry had left behind. Trees murmured of rain and wind. A weasel dove into the creek. An owl hooted and Brook grabbed Jo’s hand.
A thin breeze slid by, whispering dark secrets. Jo tried to hear its tale, but fear scattered her thoughts. “Too many trees! I can’t hear anything over the trees.” She squeezed Brook’s hand. “But before the scream died, I thought I heard a man.”
“A woodlander.”
“Perhaps.”
Rope had woken. “One of Hazel Twist’s trackers?”
“Not anymore. Something killed him. But there’s nothing out there now. Nothing but trees and wind.”
Rope scrabbled to all fours, groping for Cherry Gall’s sword. Net writhed and darkened, poised like a web of shadow on his shoulder. Around their camp the trees muttered darkly to one another.
Rope sighed, reaching for the tinder. His whole body ached. “I don’t think we will sleep again tonight.”
But care and weariness proved him wrong. Like a spring tide, sleep overran them all long before dawn.
Jo woke gasping from a deep green dream. Creepers and vines and coiling roots had grown over her, sending their pliant fingers around her throat.
The night was over and the fire was cold. Their first full day in the forest had begun. Jo breathed deeply of the woodland air, letting her dread ebb. Lumps of shadow gradually became logs, trees, ferns. She reached down to rub her leg. Two, no, three spider bites on her left foot, none on her right.
Her hand stilled as she remembered the scream.
Rope and Brook lay together across the cedar’s gaping mouth. Their acid-eaten hair was tousled and dirty. Net nestled around Rope’s wrist; Brook was curled up with her face toward the fire. Jo hugged herself and shivered. Squatting on her haunches, she thought about how far she had come since fleeing the Mist, and how much farther they had yet to go. And at the end of their trek . . . ?
She had never met a Bronze. They scared her. She had twinned Brook deeply, and made copies of Twist and Rope. Even that had been a mistake, confusing the pattern of her human self, threading too many lines through the design. She must not do it again.
So what could a Bronze be like? The haunt who could maintain himself while listening ever to the hearts of men must have a center beaten from steel. She could not imagine it.
With a grunt she rose to her feet. No point worrying about that yet. The scream was a more pressing riddle.
Time to hunt.
What shape? Eagle? Hawk? But keen eyes could be baffled by leafscreen . . . A nose would be best. A slinking, a skulking, a red-tailed black-paw. Warm fur to keep out the cold, clever feet to tread the rabbit tracks, ears to prick and a nose to sniff.
She foxed herself.
Ahh. Better. So much easier to trot along the forest floor, slinking by the dew-tipped ferns. The stream: a long drink of water and a quick cleaning. Now, sniff out the world’s news.
Deer spoor and ashes and the smell of humans. Jo shuddered. It’s only Brook and Rope, she told herself. But the human reek made her tail twitch. She bounded upstream, searching for a deadfall bridge.
The campfire smell was fading. Better. Mouse holes and grouse . . . Not so long since the eggs had hatched. Jo’s pink tongue lolled for a moment, and her eyes gleamed. Fuzzy little snacks in the bushes hid. Farther off, the smell of meat.
Human meat. Curious, Jo thought. Of course, that would be it. The scream. She paused. She had almost forgotten the scream. She would have to be more careful.
A hare burst from beneath a bush in front of her. Her legs pounced of their own accord but he was an instant faster, bounding wildly before her, over log and under leaf. Jo flashed along the forest floor, burning with the thrill of the chase. It would be good to feed.
* * *
Sunlight slid between the branches of a great maple and fell on the corpse huddled at its base. Flies hopped and circled around the bloody mash that had once been the left side of the woodlander’s face. His spine and ribs had been snapped like kindling. His sword lay by his side, undrawn.
The day grew warmer and the smell stronger. Pecking at the exposed meat, a murder of crows flapped up as a red vixen charged into the clearing and chased them into the sky. They screeched indignantly as she nosed over the body.
When she was full she trotted away, pausing to sniff at a strange thing that lay on the moss some distance from the corpse. It was a tube with a sack of skin at its base. An evil smell leaked from it, like liquid fire. She growled and backed away, then turned and trotted through the forest, following the distant scent of ash.
* * *
“Jo! What did you find?” Brook’s thin shoulders were tense. Rope stood before the cedar, gripping his stolen sword.
The haunt shook her head and frowned. Some memory nagged at the back of her mind, but it was covered in fox-thoughts and she could not recapture it. “Nothing,” she said at last. “Trees.”
“Come look at this. Please.” Brook pointed back into the fire pit. “I had some very strange dreams last night,
after the scream. In one of them, someone was trying to get in here. Then when I woke up . . .”
It was full morning. Even in the dim forest, the light was broad enough to show four footprints, huge and inhuman, clearly marked in the soft grey ash of the fire pit. “Look at the toes!” Brook murmured. “Like talons.”
Jo stirred. “Or roots.” She looked around at the towering trees, remembering their secret talk of death. “I too had strange dreams last night.”
“Something is out there,” Rope said. “Some monster killed that woodlander last night.”
Jo listened to the wind murmur its secrets to the trees. She felt a thousand eyes watching them. A thousand ears pricked with their every footfall. “Then let us hope the forest is kinder to the sea’s people than it is to its own.”
All morning they hobbled beside the stream. Twisted, sinister cedars swayed above thickets of evil-scented elder. Striped spiders the size of Brook’s thumb hung thick before their faces and tangled in their hair. Rope took to clearing away the webs with a piece of deadfall. Even so, they walked shuddering through bales of silk and gathered many bites: hard aching bruises with a red blister at the center.
“At least on a boat there might be something to see,” Rope griped. “Here it’s just trees, trees, trees. What I wouldn’t give for a real view! My eyes are cramped. What kind of people could live here?”
“Secret,” Jo said. “Pale and hidden and quiet as mushrooms. The forest knows no straight lines and thinks always of death. It does not strike but strangles.”
“Great,” Rope muttered. “I’m so looking forward to meeting its Emperor.”
All their lives Rope and Brook had known the vast, empty world of the sea. Wind and surf made ceaseless songs from the rhythmic rush of water onto rock; the air was open and cut with salt. Rolling waves marched on and on beyond the range of human sight. Every island, every ship, every sound or smell was sharp and tiny and particular, clearly placed against an immense backdrop of wind and water. At night floating stars drifted on the sky, to be devoured by clouds that rose silent as pike from below the horizon.
The forest was a different world, close, dim, and secretive. Red cedars sighed and maples murmured in a language the islanders could not understand. Wind, light, sky—everything was muted by the trees, everything was dimmed. In the universal murk each sliver of sunshine was a surprise, touching moss to green fire, or glinting from diamonds of dew in a spider’s web. And then a branch would sway as if pushed by an unseen hand, and throw its shadow over them.