Shadow Road Page 4

  Ashamed of myself, I took hold of the little old woman's gnarled hand and tucked it more firmly at my elbow, then proceeded to drag her along as I started up the steep incline of the deck.

  Halfway there, she faltered. Then she stumbled and came to a halt, a mute expression of resignation and fatigue on her wrinkled face.

  I came to a stop with her. "It's only a few more steps," I panted. "Like on the stairs."

  She shook her head, her hand fluttering near her chest. She was wheezing heavily, her breath rattling in her throat, pluming in the frigid night air.

  Passengers were streaming past, and someone – the fat man – bumped into me, sending me stumbling as he growled, "Gi' ou' the way, ya minger!"

  The ship shifted again, then, by a scant few inches, but it was still enough to make everyone scramble for a handhold. As I pushed myself upright, I took in the new angle of the deck, dread trickling through my veins, stealing my breath. The Galvania was rolling too far forward much too fast. Father had explained that these huge super-liners had multiple safety locks on every level. She should have evened off by now if the crew had been able to contain the damage.

  This was no precautionary evacuation.

  The ship was going all the way down.

  That realization changed everything. I whirled, searching the dark maw of the passenger hatch, watching as people came flowing through it. I waited. Father would come out. He had to. He would... any minute now...

  He didn't.

  The urge to go running back down those stairs beat like a drum in my chest, leaving a bitter taste in my mouth; I would fly down those stairs and hunt through every corridor and room until I found him. He wouldn't have wanted that. He would have wanted me to get myself safely on one of the lifeboats. He might even be in one already, waiting for me.

  Jaw tight, I took off my father's satchel, unclipped the strap at one end, and wrapped it around the little old lady's waist like a belt. "I can help one person, at least. I am not going to leave you here," I muttered. "Now then. You hold onto me, and I'll hold onto you, and we'll do our best."

  I looked back again. Please...

  But there was no flash of white hair in the shadows of the doorway. Tearing myself away, I turned and proceeded to half carry, half yank the poor woman the rest of the way to the railing. We hobbled down a narrow gangplank to a lifeboat that was slung over the water, and several people reached to pull us aboard amid frantic calls of, "Come on! Come on!"

  A big, burly man shoved the two of us into the only remaining seat just as the ship's crew let the winch go.

  We dropped.

  My lungs went weirdly light in my chest and I sucked in a whistle of air, my body rising, weightless. For four sickening heartbeats we were in free-fall, twenty people and a white boat plummeting toward the water, the heavy steel side of the ship an inky blur beside us.

  I let out a cry of panic as what should have been a parallel drop brought us dangerously close to the hull at the bottom, but then we landed with a bone-rattling thud and a backwash of brine. The bright red safety bladders bobbed to the surface as they were meant to, and the lifeboat rode the deep swell of the Galvania's wake. Then we leveled out.

  And found ourselves in hell.

  The Galvania was listing heavily, with nearly twenty yards of keel visible on her port side, revealing a great, gaping hole that had been torn through her belly, the metal sheeting of her hide curled out and away from what must have been an explosion in the hold. Burning machine oil from her huge engines seeped out of the wound like fiery blood, the light of the flames illuminating the extent of the damage... and the bodies in the water. Everywhere. All around us. Hundreds and hundreds. Too many to count. The scent of singed hair and cooking meat had me clapping my hands over my mouth, horror swarming through my stomach.

  "Spuirnoght," the little old lady gasped.

  I couldn't even nod. It was a scene straight out of the old war sylvos.

  It wasn't over.

  A split-second after our lifeboat joined the others, the ship's compression engine became unstable. The savage yowl of the distress siren was cut off by a low, rumbling roar, and billowing smoke came pouring out of all the portholes amidships. The whole ship lit up like a lantern. Screams sounded from inside as the Galvania tilted all the way onto her side, burrowing into the sea. Then she slid gracefully under, as if she were merely rolling over in her bed, wrapping herself in a watery blanket.

  We tried to save as many as we could. The crew bravely stayed behind to cut the rest of the lifeboats free as the ship went down, but even after we combed the water for hours, we only found enough survivors to fill two more boats.

  My father was not among them.

  ~~~

  Spuirnoght: (roughly 'hell night' in Lodesian) the name given to a particularly bloody battle outside Varrus, a large city in the Lodes Province.

  Sylvo: (abrev. for Sylvograph) an image captured on glass discs and then transferred to a piece of paper using silver salts.

  7. Adrift

  11th of Uirra

  Dry. And white. I never knew that about the ocean, that the constant salt spray could parch your skin till your lips cracked and your tongue stuck to the roof of your mouth. Or that you could be so dazzled by the sunlight glittering off the waves that everything became colorless and pale.

  After two days spent drifting across Endover Bay, I knew those things.

  That first morning, one of the more reasonable men suggested that we lash all our boats together into a flotilla to keep them from getting separated. We succeeded, repurposing the tie-downs, tossing them across to one another and pulling until we were all connected by a web-work of straps and ropes. No matter how hard and long we paddled, though, there was no way to stay where the Galvania sank. By the second day the ship's navigator – one of the few survivors we pulled from the water – said we were too far away from the spot to be seen by any rescuers that might have come to the distress signal.

  So, there we were, two hundred and seventy-three people left alive out of more than five times that number, having escaped death on the Galvania only to face slow starvation on the open sea.

  For that first day, I didn’t care. I was too hollow, as everything that was alive had been scooped out of me. I wasn't in my body. Or my body wasn't where I wanted it to be, and since my body couldn't do anything but sit idly in the bottom of a lifeboat, I existed in halves, with my heart and soul lost somewhere behind us.

  That was not to say I felt nothing. There was an awful, niggling itch at the back of my mind: something vitally important was missing. If I simply retraced my steps, I might remember where I lost it. There was hope in that searching, at first. Cruel hope fueled mostly by disbelief that the loss was real, because only a short time ago that precious thing had been there. Taken for granted. Safe and sound and whole.

  To feel that way about a person; to search until you can search no more, until even the place that should be searched is gone; to go from the frantic madness of possibility and panic to the futility of knowing, deep down, that the chances of finding that person had dwindled away to a shred of a half-chance in a million; to finally sink into dumb acceptance that there was now an ever-changing, unforgiving wall of water between you and that beloved person... That was what I felt, so I drifted, unable to find my father, unwilling to let him go, unable to do anything but keep breathing, moving farther and farther from where I left him while absurdly hoping to find him whole and alive somewhere.

  12th of Uirra

  The little old lady finally introduced herself today. She said her name was Laffa.

  By a stroke of awful good fortune, there were enough empty lifeboats that the group was able to spread out a little, and this morning the big, burly man who helped row our boat away from the wreck dared to ask if he could have the stern end of our boat.

  Laffa screamed at him, called him names that made my ears blister, and threw one of her rubbershoes at him when he didn't retreat fast enough. Ne
edless to say, we were left to ourselves after that.

  Laffa's grandson, Loffi, and his wife were not among those we pulled from the water. Laffa looked for them last night. By dawn she had started calling me Maury, who seemed to be either Loffi's mother, his sister, or his wife by turns, and didn't mention Loffi again.

  I tried to tell her my name, but she only told me to stop being silly.

  Hollow Me didn't particularly mind. Laffa was alone, I was alone, so we might as well stick together. Better her than some. At least I knew she wasn't going to steal my valise. She thought it was Maury's.

  I almost envied her ability to bend reality to suit her needs. Can't find your family? Simply decide a total stranger is the person you lost and carry on as if nothing happened. But I couldn't mock her. Her nightmares were every bit as real as mine. And the two of us got along all right, so long as I didn't object to being both her daughter and her daughter-in-law. Or to repetitive and embarrassingly loud comments about the physical appearance of the other survivors. Or to endless, tuneless humming.

  I made a little tent for us out of a tarpaulin I found under one of the seats, and we sat under it, sharing our body heat. Just me and a delusional old woman bobbing among the waves, at the mercy of the ocean and the wind.

  There was no safe way to light a fire, so there wasn't any way to keep dry, and we were both cold, damp and hungry. Yet for all her wobbly grasp of the present, Laffa was remarkably tough. She wasn't about to give up on living, and she wouldn't let me give up either. She refused to leave me alone until I ate my ration biscuit, and she kept pestering me to refill our water filter.

  She thought the water filter was sorcery the first time she saw me use it. Salt-water went in the canister on top, and a few minutes later fresh water would come dribbling out the bottom through a small silver tube.

  "You do magic water!" became the phrase that pulled me from my stupor every two hours, regular as clockwork. I tried once to show her how to attach the filter segment to the canister so she could do it herself, but she just stared at me, then demanded that I "do magic water."

  I guess it was good to have a purpose.

  13th of Uirra

  This was our third full day at sea, if I did my math right.

  Earlier, Laffa was sleeping. No one else was moving about much, either, trying to conserve energy.

  It was too quiet. There was nothing to distract me.

  What part of the ship was he in? Was he in pain, at the end? Did he drown, or was it the fire that got him? Did he go down with the ship, or was he among the bodies? Did I see him and not realize? Did he survive, and I missed him? Could I have saved him if I had looked harder?

  I couldn't make it stop.

  Every time I allowed myself to think anything, there it was.

  Finally, I shoved myself up out of the bottom of the boat and knocked the tarp aside, thinking fresh air might help. Instead of relief, I saw Father's satchel sitting there, mocking me from the prow of the boat.

  Suddenly angry, I snatched it off the prow board and slammed it down on the seat in front of me. Then I started going through it, yanking his things out of it as if I could find him at the bottom.

  The first of his belongings that met my fingers was his favorite rosewood-burl short stem pipe. Next I brought up a green leather tobacco pouch from Greystrom and Sons with a bit of finecut Medrano still in it. A few cedar sticks and a nearly empty box of sulfur-strikes. The silver fountain pen my mother gave him on their last anniversary. A small packet of Provincial Black and Orange and a tea ball. Our traveling, financial standing, and identity papers, and a crumpled handkerchief. Four letters from this mysterious college friend. Six banknotes amounting to five and one-half marks, which was probably all the money I had left to my name.

  That was what was in my father's satchel. That was all I had left. Tea and twenty-five years of memories. And his oilskin coat, the things in my valise, and the compass-rose necklace he gave me last year that I never took off. And the contents of that weird, secret pocket.

  Hesitantly, I opened the tobacco pouch, then spent an hour sobbing, inhaling the familiar scent of rich leather and cherrywood.

  When my tears finally dried up, I took the binder out and thumbed idly through it again.

  I still had no idea what it was.

  Oh, I knew what it was well enough. I often helped in the shipyard office when Father was away, and he taught me all sorts of unladylike things about handling a shipping business. If it had anything to do with the shipment of goods across an ocean, I'd dealt with it, so I knew what all the documents were. Some of the receipts and records were even in my handwriting. That wasn't the problem. I didn't know what it was. Or more to the point, why.

  It was all grouped into neat little bundles, but the bundles weren't arranged chronologically, or by any subject I could make out. None of the shipments were even the same.

  Even if Father had only taken what had survived the shipping office fire (as I had assumed), there wouldn't have been that much variety. Why would the fire destroy thousands, – no, all – of the Warring Oceanic shipping manifests, but spare six from three different years? The same went for all the rest of the papers. Father must have kept them somewhere separate from both the shipyard and his private office.

  Then there were the letters from my father's supposed college friend. None of them mentioned a promise of employment, past or present. None of them had any return-to, either, and only one of them was formally signed, which I found rather odd.

  The signed one simply read,

  "I hope this finds you well. Write when you have opportunity.

  Sincerely,

  Levig Honeyston"

  There was no date, no postmark, no other information. The other three informal letters were nearly as cryptic, with one telling Father that he should come for a visit sometime soon, another saying something about a friend named Percaus Montemortus being in town, and the last informing Father that the gift he sent was received. It was all very polite and nicely written in the same bold, masculine hand, but it would have taken a wild stretch of the imagination to find any invitation to come halfway round the world for a position at a bank. There wasn't any talk of a bank at all.

  Father had manufactured all of it.

  The thought made me want to scream and throw things, to lash out at the unfamiliar ghost my father had become.

  We weren't gentry by any means, but we were well off. Father made sure I went to the best schools in the country. We both could have found decent work on the Continent. We could have stayed. We would have been fine. We could have taken a somewhat-reduced-but-still-respectable flat. I could have read about the loss of the Galvania in the comfort of a quaint drawing room somewhere, felt a pang of sympathy for those 'poor souls and their families,' then done the dutiful thing and donated a few of my last-seasons to the Sisters of Claddage. I wouldn't have been the one bobbing about in a floating coffin, wondering if I would freeze to death before we ran out of ration biscuits, or if that storm brewing in the distance would finally come along to end us all. I wouldn't have plummeted into a fiery, watery grave every time I accidentally fell asleep. I wouldn't have been driving myself out of my mind wondering if my father was really _____ or if somehow, somewhere, he was alive, and I would see him again.

  But I didn't throw things. I couldn't. It would have taken too much energy, and what would I throw? His pipe? Those stupid papers? Even if he was delusional, that satchel was all I had left of him.

  I put everything away exactly as it had been.

  Then I sat there, watching the chop of the waves while a weak, watery sun slowly rolled toward the horizon in front of me, and another frozen day came to an end without my father in it.

  8. Eat Fish

  14th of Uirra

  A thick fog crept in last night.

  I didn't know something as soft as fog could kill.

  Laffa and I tucked the tarp down as well as we could, but the moisture still leached into our
clothes, and the condensation from our breath and body heat began beading on the inside of the tarpaulin. It trickled through our hair and down our backs and gathered in the floor of the boat. There was no way to escape it, and what little warmth our bodies generated quickly wicked away.

  I thought we might die. Just slip away, drifting peacefully into whatever waits beyond this life. It didn't really seem like a bad way to go, all things considered.

  I didn't die. Neither did Laffa. And there was no peace. She kept poking me, her knobby fingers digging into my ribs until I moved. She rubbed my hands and feet between her palms, then kicked me until I rubbed hers. She woke me just to crack the tarp open when the air inside became too stuffy, and always there was the demand for "magic water." It seemed as soon as I began nodding off, all too gladly giving in to the welcome pull of oblivion, there she was, her scratchy voice loud and grating in the dark, "You! No sleep! Sleep bad. Up. Make magic water."

  By dawn there was a film of ice floating in the puddle at the bottom of the boat, but we survived.

  One of the other young women didn't.

  The big, burly man – Orrul – found her this morning. She hadn't been willing to share her tarp with anyone for fear they would take advantage of her. Now that she didn't need it anymore, two of the other women were fighting over it.

  I sat on the gunnel of our boat, numb, as three of the men discussed what to do with the girl's body, their breath pluming in the air and freezing to their already frost-covered eyelashes.

  "We shouldn't let her sit here like this. It isn't right."

  "What would you suggest then, Patrus? We can't exactly light a candle for her. Does anyone here even know her name?"