‘It hurts me to see my precious one waste her tears.’
She clung to him. ‘I feel so guilty, dear master. I brought this trouble on you… Never shall I forget the sight of that man… burning… It was all my fault.’
He tried to calm her, but she burst out with her story. Now she put the blame on Harbin Fashnalgid. He had sent her out early in the day, when no ordinary people were about, to buy some books, and she had been seized in the street by Major Gardeterark.
‘His biwacking books! And he said that that was the last of his money. Fancy wasting the last of your money on books!’
‘And the major — what did he do?’
She wept again. ‘I told him nothing. But he recognised me as one of your possessions. He took me into a room where there were other soldiers. Officers. And he made me… made me dance for them. Then he dragged me round to our offices… It’s me that’s to blame. I should never have been fool enough to go out for those books…’
Odim wiped her eyes and made soothing noises. When Besi was calmer, he asked seriously, ‘Have you a real affection for this Captain Harbin?’
Again she clutched him. ‘Not any more.’
They stood in silence. Koriantura was sinking in the distance. The New Season was sailing past a cluster of broad-beamed herring-coaches. The herring-coaches had their curtain nets out, trawling for fish. Behind the fishermen were salters and coopers, who would gut and preserve the catch as soon as it was hauled aboard.
Amid sniffs, Besi said, ‘You’ll never forget what happened when you — when that man died on the kiln, will you, dear master?’
He stroked her hair. ‘Life in Koriantura is over. I have put everything that belonged to Koriantura behind me, and would advise you to do the same. Life will begin again when we reach my brother’s home in Shivenink.’
He kissed her and returned to his wife.
The next morning, Fashnalgid sought Odim out. His tall clumsy figure dominated Odim’s slender and tightly parcelled form.
‘I’m grateful to you for your kindness in taking me aboard,’ he said. ‘You’ll be paid in full when we get to Shivenink, I assure you.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Odim said, and said no more. He did not know how to deal with this officer, now a deserter, except by his usual method of dealing with people — through politeness. The ship was crowded with people who had begged to be allowed aboard to escape the oligarchic legislation; all had paid Odim. His cabin was stacked with treasures of one sort of another.
‘I mean what I say — you will be paid in full,’ Fashnalgid repeated, looking heavily down at Odim.
‘Good, good, yes, thank you,’ said Odim, and backed away. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Toress Lahl coming on deck, and went over to her to escape from Fashnalgid’s attentions. Besi followed him. She had avoided Fashnalgid’s gaze.
‘How is your patient?’ Odim asked the Borldoranian woman.
Toress Lahl leaned against the rail, closed her eyes, and took a few deep breaths. Her pale, clear features had taken on a translucent quality under strain. The skin below her eyes looked puckered and dirty. She said, without opening her eyes, ‘He’s young and determined. I believe he will live. Such cases generally do.’
‘You shouldn’t have brought a plague case aboard. It endangers all our lives,’ Besi said. She spoke with a new boldness; she would never have dared speak out previously in front of Odim: but on the voyage all relationships changed.
‘“Plague” is not the scientifically exact term. The plague and the Fat Death are different things, although we use the terms interchangeably. Obscene though the symptoms of the Fat Death are, the majority of young, healthy people who contract it recover.’
‘It spreads like the plague, doesn’t it?’
Without turning her head to reply, Toress Lahl said, ‘I could not leave Shokerandit to die. I am a doctor.’
‘If you’re a doctor, you should know the dangers involved.’
‘I do, I do,’ said Toress Lahl. Shaking her head, she rushed from them and hurried down the companionway below decks.
She paused outside the door of the closet in which she kept Shokerandit. As she rested her head on her arm, she was vouchsafed a glimpse of the turn her life had taken, the misery in which she now lived, and the uncertainty which surrounded all on the ship. What was the reason for this gift of consciousness, which even phagors did not have, this awareness that one was aware, when it was incapable of changing what one did?
She was nursing the man who had taken her husband’s lifeblood. And — oh, yes, she felt it — she was already infected with his disease. She knew it could easily leap to everyone else in the confines of this ship; the insanitary conditions on the New Season made it a haven for contagion. Why did life happen — and was it possible that, even now, some detached part of her was enjoying life?
She unlocked the door, set her shoulder against its resistance, and entered the closet. There she lived for the next two days, seeing no one, crawling only rarely onto the deck for fresh air.
Besi meanwhile had been given the task of supervising the many relations of Odim who had been stowed in the main hold. Her chief support came from the old grannie who made the delectable pastry savrilas. This aged woman still managed to cook on a small charcoal stove, filling the hold with benevolent aromas, while at the same time soothing the anxieties of the family.
The family lay about on boxes and ottomans and chests, indulging themselves in their customary way even while complaining about the rigours of life at sea. Theatrically, they declaimed to Besi and to anyone who would listen, and was not simultaneously declaiming, of the dangers of sea voyages. But Besi thought, And what of the dangers of plague! If it spreads to this hold, how many of you poor vulnerable bodies will survive? She determined to stay with them whatever happened, and secretly armed herself with a small dagger.
Toress Lahl remained isolated, speaking to no one, even when she crept up on deck.
On the third morning, she saw small icebergs dotting the water. On the third morning, with fever on her, she returned to her vigil as usual. The door was more reluctant than ever to budge.
Luterin Shokerandit was confined in a small irregular area in the bows of the New Season. A supporting pillar stood in the middle of the space, leaving enough room only for a bunk to one side of it and a bucket, a bale of hay, a stove, and four frightened fhlebihts, tethered beneath the small porthole. The porthole admitted light enough for Toress Lahl to see stains running across the floor and the gross figure tethered on the lower bunk. She locked the door behind her, rested against it, and then took a step closer to the prostrate figure.
‘Luterin!’
He stirred. Under his left arm, which she had strapped by the wrist against the supports of the bunk, his head thrust a short way, tortoise-like, and one eye opened, to regard her through a spike of hair. His mouth opened, making a croaking noise.
She fetched a ladle of water from a casket standing behind the stove. He drank.
‘More food,’ he said.
She knew he would recover. These were the first words he had spoken since they had carried him to this place on the New Season. He was again capable of organised thought. Yet she dare not touch him, although his wrists and ankles were tied securely.
On the top of the stove lay the charred remains of the last fhlebiht she had killed. She had dismembered it into joints with a cleaver, cooking it as best she could over the charcoal. The corkscrew horns, the long white fleece of the animal, lay with other rubbish in the corner.