She fell in love with him at once.
A favour, alas, he did not return on the subsequent occasion that, unbeknownst to Zophyra, he had spied on her.
A trio of months following he jilted her, (unmet), and was gone into the wide world.
Her father and his vied with each other to make each other recompense. She meanwhile felt fragments of her shattered heart rattling in her breast, piercing her, and she succumbed to a recurrence of the dangerous fever, which seemingly still lay dormant in her blood. In infancy this malady had almost finished her. Now it made a worse assault. She had been, unknowing in delirium, given the last rites, when that very midnight the febrility cracked like a burning-glass and spilled her forth. As before, all her hair had fallen out. (In childhood the first attack of fever had turned it nearly white on its return, and ever since her father had seen to it that this albino tendency was corrected with a brown dye. He had not wanted to scare off possible swains with her almost-uncanny pallor). In adulthood once again the hair grew back, if anything whiter than before, only her brows and lashes retaining their darker shade. But by then her father never saw this. For as soon as she was able, still perhaps slightly unhinged from heartbreak and sickness, Zophyra fled the parental home.
She rushed out into the unknown and extraordinary world, which she had had the sense, (having also read a few rather ridiculous stories of such things), to approach in male attire and the assertive pretence of masculinity. Or masculinity as she perceived it: arrogant, overbearing, unkind, elusive. All this only worked because, despite her naivety, she had the cunning instincts of a genius.
She passed herself off as fourteen. As a lad she appeared much younger than her actual span. She joined one of the roving armies of the Steppes, more because it presented itself before her than for any concrete reason. She had been so scorched by passion and its rejection, (someone had told her Vendrei had seen her and been unimpressed), she was by then fearless, generally reckless. Among the men she would pass for a boy. The vagaries of Fate had aided her too, for her feminine monthly courses, traumatised by the fever, ceased for the time being to occur. By the time they did, she was well able to protect herself from any scrutiny.
She learned early on to fight. She was skilful and daring. She had begun to have a goal. She took proper lessons too whenever she could, from such scholars as she encountered, on many subjects, including the Latin and ancient Greek languages, literature and philosophy. (The one she hated was, she had been told, a paragon in this area). She paid for tuition with her army pay and was otherwise abstemious in all things. (When men advised her to visit the brothels, she told them she had a sweetheart at home she would not betray. As in much else they found her, or the youth she acted, weird but not unlikeable. And she was, they also knew, a demon with the drawn blade).
When she was nineteen, had grown taller, beautiful if she had known it, and must bind her breasts to protect and prevent discovery, she shaved her head and told those who commented on her lack of facial hair that a fever had depilated her almost entirely. Later, leaving the battalion, she grew her hair, told the same tale and claimed the real hair to be a wig. It was unusually thick and lustrous enough, added to its paleness, that she was believed.
Her goal, needless to say, remained constant.
She had, too, heard rumours of her own ‘death’ at home on the old estate. Nothing if not quirky, it seemed to her that Zophyra had died, had indeed been murdered by the callous suitor who had not wanted her.
She intended now to find this man. Firstly she would demonstrate to him she was his equal, or superior. Next she would make a mock of him, present him to others as shoddily as she could. Lastly, so well able to fight, not to mention tutored in the mental symmetry of poetic revenge, she would run him through the heartless heart with a steel blade. For had he not, metaphysically, spiritually, carnally, done as much to her?
Like Ymil, then, Zophyra—for a while known by the name of Zephyrin—tracked Vendrei. Just as presently, Ymil, hired and misled in embarrassment by her father, tracked her. (Him).
Learning the passenger list on the ship, Zophyra-Zephyrin took passage. As Ymil, knowing she-he would, had likewise done.
Ymil alone had seen to the bottom of her relentless vendetta—and that not until almost the last moment.
The rest was—uproar.
As detailed here.
7
Even the most diligent observer will sometimes deliberately turn away.
Ymil did so on the beach below the cliffs.
He took himself off along the shore, and began to examine some of the flotsam broadcast there, quite studiously.
Half naked the pair of them, Vendrei and Zeph-Zophyra glared at each other. After a second, however, the young woman pulled herself to her feet, and took a couple of angry baleful strides towards him. Her gait was not steady, needless to say, and gave way abruptly. The instant she staggered Vendrei leapt to her like lion at gazelle, and seized her in both arms. His grip was fierce, yet gentled. And Zophyra, while her head spun, could make no proper resistance.
The weed was still tangled in her hair. Vendrei therefore found himself kissing both her pale hair and the pale weed. Each tasted of ocean, but her hair also of her youngness and female flavour. Her skin more so.
“When I am better,” she whispered, “I shall kill you for this.”
“Already you kill me. One look from your eyes—who—what—who are you?”
“You know me.”
“Do I?” Vendrei paused, his mouth against her cheek—that his duellist’s glove had slapped, this skin like silk. “I seem—to have seen you. But that was in your male disguise. I should have guessed. Nothing so delicious, so rare, could be anything but a woman—”
“Oh, but it can, sir. Even dead on your back, with my sword so nicely planted in your heart, you would be worth all this world to me.”
Both of them sighed then. They were worn out, and leaned on each other, in a while sitting down on the sand.
The sun warmed them. Their hair was drying, mingled in long strands of gold and cream.
Eventually he said, in a low, penitent voice, “Are you the girl from the other estate? That girl? But you can read Latin—”
Then she laughed. “What shall I do?” she asked the sky and the water. “It’s no use, Mhikal Vendrei.”
“No use at all. You’ve won the duel,” he said. “You won it when I saw you and thought you half dead on the rock. I knew you then, somehow. But somehow I knew you anyway, and that was the cause of my hatred perhaps—that I’d refused something so—fine. Worth ten of me. A thousand. You have won the duel.”
“No. You won it. From the moment I first saw you, four years ago, on the harvest morning. Then.”
The watcher Ymil did glance, just once, back over the sand. A precaution perhaps. But they were embraced by then of course, mouth on mouth, their hands in the other’s hair, yearning and almost crying aloud. Like two shipwrecked survivors who, after years of tempest, crashing waves and tumult, reach the kind arms of the land alive.
It is the sea, Ymil thinks, weeks later, when he is safe in the port of Pharos. The sea is so versatile, has so many trades. It makes itself adornments of lacy foam, disarms aggressive humans of their swords, rises to undo the graves of mankind and claim back the dead it has already destroyed, in its priestly role of sacrificer. But also the sea is the benign priest, joining in the marriage of love old widows and aging wifeless merchants, and young men and women who have lost what they can never see they have lost, which is simply their way. Brief dusk lies on Pharos, and the stars come out in crowds to gape at the nightlife below. The waters of the Mediterranean uncurl against this Egyptian strand. The sea, the priest, Ymil thinks, is also singing orisons above the depths, to honour them, those that never do reach the land, those forever lost; the drowned, the lonely. The watchers far from shore.
Under Fog
(The Wreckers)
Oh burning God,
Each of ou
r crimes is numbered upon
The nacre of your eternal carapace,
Like scars upon the endless sky.
‘Prayer of the Damned’
(Found scratched behind the altar in the ruined church at Hampp.)
We lured them in. It was how we lived, at Hampp. After all, the means had been put into our grip, and we had never been given much else.
It is a rocky ugly place, the village, though worse now. Just above the sea behind the cliff-line, and the cliffs are dark as sharks, but eaten away beneath to a whitish-green that sometimes, in the sunlight, luridly shines. The drop is what? Three hundred feet or more. There was the old church standing there once, but as the cliff crumbled through the years, bits and then all the church fell down on the stones below, mingling with them. You can still, I should think, now and then find part of the pitted face of a rough-carved gargoyle or angel staring up at you from deep in the shale, or a bit of its broken wing. The graveyard had gone, of course, too. The graves came open as the cliff gave, and there had been bodies strewn along the shore, or what was left of them, all bones, until the sea swam in and out and washed them away. Always a place, this, for the fallen then, and the discarded dead.
By day of my boyhood, the new church was right back behind the village, up hill for safety. The new church had been there for two hundred years. But we, the folk of Hampp, we had been there since before the Doomsday Book. And sometimes I used to wonder if they did it then too, our forebears, seeing how the tide ran and the rocks and the cliff-line.
Maybe they did. It seemed to be in our blood. Until now. Until that night of the fog.
My first time, I was about nine years. It had gone on before, that goes without saying, and I had known it did, but not properly what it was or meant. My nine-year-old self had memories of sitting by our winter fire, and the storm raging outside, and then a shout from the watch, or some other man banging on our door: “Stir up, Jom. One’s there.” And father would rise with a grunt, somewhere between annoyance and strange eagerness. And when he was gone out into the wind and rain, I must have asked why and Ma would say, “Don’t you fret, Haro. It’s just the Night Work they’re to.”
But later, maybe even next day, useful things would have come into our house, and to all the impoverished houses up and down the cranky village street. Casks of wine or even rum, a bolt of cloth, perhaps, or a box of good china; once a sewing machine, and more than once a whole side of beef. And other stuff came that we threw on the fire, papers and books, and a broken doll one time, and another a ripped little dress that might have been for a doll, but was not.
On the evening I was nine and a storm was brewing, I knew I might be in on the Work, but after I thought not and slept. The Work was what we all called it, you see. The Work, or the Night Work, although every so often it had happened by day, when the weather was very bad. Still, Night Work, even so.
My father said, “Get up, Haro.” It was the middle of the night and I in bed. And behind the curtain in my parents’ bed, my mother was already moving and awake. My father was dressed.
“What is it, Da?” I whispered.
“Only the usual,” said my father, “but you’re of an age now. It’s time you saw and played your part.”
So I scrambled out and pulled on my outdoor clothes over the underthings I slept in. I was, like my father, between two emotions, but mine were different. With me that first time, they were excitement, and fear. Truly fear, like as when we boys played see-a-ghost in the churchyard at dusk. But in this case still not even really knowing why, or of what.
Out on the cliff the gale was blowing fit to crack the world. There were lanterns, but muffled blind, as they had to be, which I had heard of but not yet properly seen.
Leant against the wind, we stared out into the lash of the rain. “Do you spot it, Jom?”
“Oh ah. I sees it.”
But I craned and could not see, only the ocean itself roughing and spurging, gushing up in great belches and tirades, like boiling milk that was mostly black. But there was something there, was there? Oh yes, could I just make it out? Something like three thin trees massed with cloud and all torn and rolling yet caught together.
“You stay put, Haro,” said my father. “Here’s a light. You shine that. You remember when and what to do? As I told you?”
“Yes, Da,” I said, afraid with a new affright I should do it wrong and fail him. But he patted my shoulder as if I were full-grown, and went away down the cliff path with the others. Soon enough I heard them, those three hundred feet below me, voices thin with distance and the unravelling of the wind, there under the curve of the crumbled white-green cheese of the cliff-face. Though I was quite near the edge, I knew not to go too far along to see, but there was a place there, a sort of notch in the crag, whereby I could see the glimmer of the lamps as they uncovered them. And I knew to do the same then, and I uncovered my lantern too.
So we brought it in. The thing with the clouded trees that was adrift on the earthquake of great waters. The thing that was a ship.
She smashed to pieces on the rocks below, where the tallest stones were, just under the surface at high tide, against rock and shale, and the faces of angels and devils, and against their broken wings.
This was our Night Work, then. In tempest or fog we shone our lights to mislead, and so to guide them home, the ships, and wreck them on the fangs of our cliffs. And when they broke and sank, we took what they had had that washed in to shore. Not human cargo, naturally. That counted for nothing. It must be left, and pushed back, and in worse case pushed under. But the stores, the barrels and casks, the ironware and food and, if uncommon lucky, the gold, they were rescued. While they, the human flotsam, might fare as wind and darkness, and their gods—and we—willed for them, which was never well.
I saw a woman that night, just as the great torn creature of the vessel heaved in and struck her breast, with a scream like mortal death, to flinders on our coast.
The woman wore a big fur cloak, and also clutched a child, and in the last minute, in intervals of the storm-roil, I saw her ashen face and agate eyes, and he the same, her son, younger than I, and neither moved nor called, as if they were statues. And then the ship split and the water drank them down. But there was a little dog, too. It swam. It fought the waves, and they let it go by. And when it came to land—by then I craned at the cliff’s notch, over the dangerous edge—my father, Jom Abinthorpe, he scooped up the little dog. And my reward for that first night of my Night Work was this little innocent pup, not yet full-grown as neither I was. Because, you will see, a dog can tell no tales, and so may be let live.
But the ship and her crew, and all her people, they went down to the cellars of the sea.
I was always out to the Work with the men after that. By the time I was eleven, I would be down along the shore, wading even in the high savage surf among the rocks, with breakers crashing sometimes high over my head, as I helped haul in the casks, and even the broken bits of spars that we might use, when dried and chopped, for our fires.
Hampp is a lorn and lonely place; even now that is so. And when I was a boy, let alone in my father’s boyhood, remote as some legendry isle in the waste of the sea. But unlike the isles of legend, not beautiful, but bony bare. There were but a dozen trees that grew within a ten mile walk of the village, and these bent and crippled by the winter winds. In summer too there were gales and storms, and drought also. What fields were kept behind their low stone walls gave a poor return for great labour. And there was not much bounty given by the ocean, for the fish were often shy. The sea, they said, would as soon eat your boat as give you up a single herring. No, the only true bounty the sea would offer came on those nights of fog or tempest, when it drew a ship toward our coast and seemed to tell us: Take it then, if you can. For to do the Work, of course, was not without its perils. And to guide them in too required some skill, hiding the light, then letting out the light, and that just at the proper angle and spot. But finally the sea was ou
r accomplice, was it not, for once drawn into that channel where the teeth of the rocks waited in the tide, and the green skull faces of the outer cliffs trod on into the water and turned their unforgiving cheek to receive another blow, the ocean itself forced and flung each vessel through. It was the water and the rocks smashed them. We did not do it. We had not such power, nor any power ever. And sometimes one of our own was harmed, or perished. Two men died in those years of my boyhood, swept off by the surge. And one young boy also, younger than I was by then, he broken in a second when half a ship’s mast came down on him with all its weight of riven sail.
But ten ships gave up their goods in those years between my ninth and fourteenth birthdays, and I was myself by then a man. And the dog had grown too, my rescued puppy. I called him Iron, for his strength. He had blossomed from a little black soft glove of a thing to a tall and long-legged setter, dark as a shadow. He was well-liked in our house, being quiet and mannerly. Also I trained him to catch rabbits, which he killed cleanly and brought me for my mother’s cooking. But he hated the sea. Would not go even along the cliff path, let alone to the edge with the notch, or down where the beaches ran when the tide was out. Whenever he saw me set off that way to fish, he would shift once, and stare at me with his great dark eyes that were less full of fear than of disbelief. Next he would turn his back. And here was the thing too; on those nights when the weather was bad, and the watch we posted by roster spied a ship lost and struggling, Iron would vanish entirely, as if he had gone into the very air to hide himself.
I thought after all he did not know what we were at. Certainly, he would eat a bowl of the offal of any beef or bacon or whatever that came to my family’s portion out of a wreck. By then, I suppose, it had no savour of the sea.
He had not known either that we let his ship, his own first master likely on that ship, be drowned. Iron only knew, I thought, that my father, and next I, had plucked him from the water after all else was gone.