The Ocean of the Dead: Ship Kings 4 Read online

  Benedicta of the Husk was nodding. ‘The end of these waters, and our only escape, lies to the south. But now you want us to turn west! West, in which direction this Sterile Sea has no end, but only rings the globe eternally. And all on the basis of something you may or may not have seen in the sky in the half-light of dawn! It’s not sane. It’s a death wish.’

  Dow shook his head in frustration. Why could none of them understand? ‘No,’ he said. ‘We have been given a sign we must follow.’

  Boiler considered him sadly. ‘A sign? Are you claiming to be a prophet now, in place of Uyal and Nell? Consider this rationally, Dow. Perhaps your mind, bent by despair, was playing tricks on you.’

  ‘I’m not talking about prophecy,’ Dow retorted. ‘It wasn’t a dream or a vision. What I saw was real, it was a bird, flesh and blood. But it was a sign all the same. And I tell you, we are meant to pay heed to it!’

  He gazed at them all defiantly, the certainty whirling brightly inside him, so giddy a sensation he might almost have agreed it was madness, did it not feel so right. Throughout all these last weeks, he had wondered what purpose he served as captain, but now he knew. This was why he mattered. Fate had shown itself, in the form of the albatross, to him alone, knowing that he alone would understand the message. Beyond that Dow dared not speculate, but west they must turn.

  Prudence Weather ventured, ‘I know nothing of signs, but if there really was a bird, and it dove towards the ocean west of here, then maybe there is something of interest there, something we should investigate.’

  Boiler said, ‘And if it dove simply for a fish?’

  Prudence shrugged. ‘Then we will have made a wasted journey. But I have seen no fish in these sterile waters. So – what if the bird was doing something other than hunting? What if it was in fact alighting? What if there is land to our west? We cannot ignore that chance, surely.’

  Boiler glanced at Dow. ‘Land? Is that what you think?’

  Dow shook his head. ‘I don’t know what to think, or what lies west of here. I only know that we must turn that way. Now. Before it’s too late.’

  Boiler hesitated still. ‘Even if we were to agree with you, Dow, I don’t think the crew would accept it. You’d be asking them to row away from their only hope of survival, on just a mad conviction . . .’

  A voice rose from among the junior officers. ‘But why else have we followed Dow at all, if not for the sake of his madness?’ It was Nicky. ‘His madness it was that lured us all on this voyage in the first place. His madness it was that lured himself away from his little village as a child, and led him to the sea, when no such thing should have been possible. Madness, I call it, but of course it’s not madness at all. It’s simply who Dow Amber is. All of us have been touched by the quality that lies within him. His capacity to act. It was why we gave him command. We must not withdraw it now, at the last.’

  A silence met this, almost tortured.

  Dow said, ‘Give me one day and one night, that’s all I ask. If by sunrise tomorrow we have found nothing to the west, then I’ll surrender the command to whomever you choose, and never speak again.’

  The silence held for a moment longer. Then Boiler sighed, and nodded, and the others around the table did the same.

  *

  Dow’s last fear was that Boiler would be proved right, and that the crew would refuse the order to turn aside – but in fact, the command met with no protest. In part, this may have been because Magliore, who would most likely have led any dissent, was in sick bay, bedridden with fever.

  But more than that, the men and women listening on the main deck – for Dow had called a gathering of the ship’s company to announce the news – seemed to be of like mind to Nicky. Their bony faces and haggard eyes all expressed, if not hope exactly, then at least a stoic preparedness. Their salvation was beyond their own efforts now anyway, and existed only in some unlooked-for turn of fate – so why not follow fate’s promptings?

  But if their trust in him was a well that could be dipped into on only so many occasions, then Dow knew he had emptied it now.

  They turned west. And indeed, the crews of the boats rowed with a better will than they had in some days. At first, at least. But as the morning progressed to a stifling noon, and the haze westward opened slowly to them mile by mile and revealed nothing other than more ocean, that initial spurt of energy faded away, exposed for what it was – a febrile last gasp, soon spent.

  The rowing slowed to its former deathly pace. Dow, in his fervour, worked three shifts in all at the oars, and by sunset could scarce climb the boarding ladder back up to the deck. But his labour went unrewarded. As darkness fell, still there was nothing to be seen.

  The night that followed was the longest Dow had ever known; and he had known many long nights in his life, in prison cells awaiting execution, or alone upon the sandy wastes of the Banks, listening for water to come creeping back and drown him. But this night it was not only his own life that hung in the balance, but a thousand lives, and the hope that civilisation could exist beyond the war and suffering of the Old World.

  Aside from another shift at the oars, he spent the taut hours on the foredeck, staring always over the bow into the thick blackness, hoping for something, anything; but only the void gazed back. And as the strength of the rowers dwindled, so did Dow’s certainty. He had seen the albatross, yes . . . but in his memory it was already blurred, just a white shape in the sky. And yes, the speck had seemed to stoop towards the ocean, beckoning him to follow . . . but did fate truly speak in such plain language? Or was he being a fool yet again? Was he driving his crew through this last agony of effort, only to cheat them when dawn revealed a sea as empty as it had always been? With such self-tortures Dow wrestled all night. So, when after a thousand hours the darkness at last began to pale, and the excited cries began to rise from the lookouts, it was tears of a vast and all-encompassing relief that filled Dow’s one eye. For he had not been wrong after all. He had not dreamed the bird, and its plummet to the sea had been for a genuine cause.

  And yet with the relief came utter confusion too: for emerging from the night gloom, just visible against the deeper darkness in the west, it was not land that was revealed, as Prudence Weather had hoped.

  Impossibly, it was ships.

  Many, many ships.

  A fleet, riding up in the Doldrums stillness.

  14. THE GIFT OF THE DEAD

  Dow called for a telescope to be brought to him from the high deck. What could this vision of a fleet possibly be? From where could so many ships hail? Against all expectation, was there after all a civilisation already in the southern half of the world, and did their fleets patrol even the lifeless waters of the Doldrums? And if so, what would they make of the Chloe? Would they be friendly? Would they offer help and relief? Or would they attack with cannon fire?

  It was only when the spyglass arrived, and Dow raised it to his eye to see the fleet in better detail, that he began to understand. There would be no attack, nor any help. The ships were incapable of either – incapable even of movement. On no mast was any sail raised, nor were there any boats in the water with tow ropes deployed. In fact, only a few of the vessels even possessed masts or spars; most boasted only broken stumps, and collapsed tangles of rigging, and fallen bowsprits.

  It was a fleet not of ships, but of shipwrecks. A great collection of them, massed together in decaying companionship upon the stagnant sea. Nor were they the product of some fantastic foreign civilisation of the south, built to alien shape and design. The vessels, even in ruin, were clearly of familiar type. They hailed from the northern world, just as did the Chloe.

  It defied all belief. And yet, as Dow lowered the telescope, he could almost hear a voice in his mind, Fidel, theorising in gentle wonder. ‘Of course. We should have expected something like this. For consider: during the half a thousand years since exploration began, how many ships have been lost in the Doldrums, never to be seen again? Scores at the least, perhaps hundreds. And
yet we know that such ships, in the dead calm of the Barrier, would not have sunk. In normal seas, yes, wind and wave soon dispose of derelict vessels, but in the Doldrums they would merely float on indefinitely, their nicre-hard hulls enduring for decades, with only their superstructures slowly crumbling.’

  Dow’s hopes, which had soared so brightly with the dawn, dropped away again. Was that all they had found? The collected relics of others who had failed before them? What was the use of that? Why had the Ice Albatross guided him here?

  The other watchers too had fallen still, the glad cries of the sunrise now silenced, as the ruin of the fleet became obvious. And yet, there was nothing to be done but continue to row towards it. The maddening thing, indeed, was that it took the Chloe the rest of the day to draw close. Only now, with a target in sight, was it apparent just how painful their crawling pace had become, for otherwise they had been labouring across a featureless expanse.

  But slowly, slowly, the dead ships rose up before them. Some stood relatively tall, masts yet upright; some were listing and half submerged; others again were rotted almost to the waterline, vessels that must be centuries old, hailing from the Great Age itself perhaps, and little more now than hollow shells.

  But they were derelicts every one. Deserted. Lifeless.

  They had come from the north, and the Doldrums had killed them: that much was plain. But there were other mysteries to ponder. For one, how had these ships made it so far south? Even with engines to help, the Chloe had barely managed to come this far – so how had so many older vessels done it, using sail and oar alone? And for another, what were they all doing exactly here, in one place? If indeed these were ships lost throughout history, each in a different age, and in different locations, then their wrecks should be spread at random throughout the Barrier. What agency had drawn them all together?

  The first clues emerged as the Chloe crept nearer. They began to come across debris floating in the water. Some of it was the flotsam of broken ships: bits of timber, smashed crates, tangles of rope. But also there was organic matter: clumps of dead seaweed, patches of dried algae, skeletal remains of fish and other creatures, and even, vast and petrified, the carcass of a whale.

  All of this seaborne detritus came and went in broad bands, and finally it could be seen that these bands were in fact the arms of a great spiral, all curving gradually towards the centre of the dead fleet.

  Dow grasped it then, hearing once more in his thoughts an echo of how Fidel might have surmised on the matter. ‘Currents,’ the old scholar would have said. ‘There must be currents in the Barrier after all. So slow as to be undetectable to any observer on a ship, flowing at only a few yards in a whole day maybe, but flowing nonetheless. And here before us must lie the central point of a great gyre that whirls about at a creep, slowly drawing in floating things from across a great swathe of the Doldrums. Not quickly. It might have taken each of these items decades to travel here. But relentlessly.’

  Closer they drew to the ships, and the truth of the theory became ever more evident. A proper fleet would be arrayed in ordered lines, but there was no order here – the vessels were dotted haphazardly across a circle several miles in width, some off alone, some gathered in flotillas, some run together drunkenly and entangled. And all around, the water became ever more choked with dead plants and lifeless sea creatures. This was a graveyard of the ocean, a place where the Barrier gathered unto itself all those things that it had destroyed.

  The afternoon sun sank towards the western gloom, but now the outermost ships of the fleet were at hand, and could be closely studied. Some were of modern design, battleships and merchantmen, but most were more ancient, built in the styles of three or four centuries past. Some indeed – single-masted craft with tall, narrow bows and undecked hulls – were so crudely fashioned they spoke of earlier times still, from before the Great Age of Exploration, examples maybe of the very first seagoing vessels in which mankind had set out. If so, they might have rested here for as many as a thousand years . . .

  At last, as the evening drew near, the Chloe found itself fully in the midst of the silent fleet. On either side of them now, grim shapes rose like headstones from the sea. Tattered sails hung from drooping spars, set by long-dead seamen who must have known that no wind would ever blow. Windows stared from empty stern castles, opening to Great Cabins where officers must have met in despair. Wheels on high decks sat mutely abandoned, their spokes fallen out. And over the entire scene there hung the smell of decay, of wood rotting, of fabrics mouldering – and faint, the musk of withered flesh.

  Nowhere among the hulks was there a hint of anything or anyone alive. The silence and stillness were complete. Nor, though Dow searched for it ever and anon, could he catch any glimpse of the Ice Albatross, either in the sky above or settled upon any of the wrecks. If the bird had been real at all, it seemed that it had appeared only long enough to stoop towards this place and show Dow the way, before departing, its purpose served.

  But who or what, Dow wondered, as he watched the sunset from the high deck, had defined that purpose?

  What was he meant to do here?

  Beside him, the former duchess Benedicta was taking a turn with the telescope, studying the ships in the last light of the day. ‘By all the deeps!’ she exclaimed suddenly. ‘Look – that vessel there, just to the right of those other two . . . on its high deck, you can read the name.’

  She handed Dow the glass and he looked for himself. There, on the edge of the dead fleet, a mighty battleship lay at rest. It was in better condition than most – if not for its threadbare sails and sagging rigging, it might almost have been hove-to at peace in its own harbour. Then Dow found the high deck, and saw the name painted there in gold, still legible.

  Tempest.

  For a moment he only squinted blankly through the eyepiece. So the ship was named Tempest – what of that? Except, he knew that name from somewhere, it had been important to him once, long ago . . .

  ‘Do you see?’ Benedicta asked excitedly. ‘It’s Nadal’s flagship! Nadal, the Lord Designate, who was lost at sea. You of all people should recall the tale, Dow! By official account he vanished north, in an attempt to reach the Ice, but many are the rumours – and it was you and Nell who began them – that in fact he was lost attempting to cross the Doldrums. And lo, here he is!’

  Dow was nodding wonderingly. Of course! The Lord Designate Nadal; the son and heir of Ibanez the Third, Sea Lord. He had disappeared with a fleet of three ships, the Tempest, the Bullion and the Bent Wing, ostensibly seeking for a path through the northern ice to the Pole. But as Dow himself and Nell had discovered, only the Bent Wing had in fact gone north; the other two ships, the Tempest and the Bullion, had turned south on Nadal’s true quest, to be the first to cross the Barrier Doldrums.

  ‘Dow,’ Benedicta urged, ‘we must investigate. We must go to the Tempest and board it.’

  ‘You can’t think anyone would still be alive there?’

  ‘No . . . that I don’t hope. It must be near ten years now since Nadal first set out. Too long.’ The old woman’s eyes were lost in memory. ‘But I knew him. We were friends. I have to go and see – I must know.’

  Boiler, who stood nearby, said, ‘It seems a good idea in any case, Dow. Most of these ships are too ruinous to approach, but if the Tempest is a more recent arrival, not only will it be whole enough to board, we may also find supplies useful to us in its holds.’

  ‘There’ll be no food,’ Dow replied, ‘of that we can be sure. Its crew will have starved, much as we starve now.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ shrugged Boiler, ‘what was the point of coming here at all, if not to look?’

  Dow gave the orders, and the Chloe turned ponderously towards the Tempest. The last red glow of day was fading from the Barrier roof as they finally drew nigh. The boats were recalled for the night, save one that was kept ready to ferry a boarding party to the derelict ship.

  Lamps were lit, but they were little defence against the
dark, and everyone remained aware of the great fleet that surrounded them in the blackness. Here indeed was Magliore’s Ocean of the Dead made all too real. Who knew what ghosts might be rising to walk the crumbling decks, and to gaze with hollow eyes at the Chloe, this new victim come among them? But the poet himself only wandered in delirium upon his sick bed.

  The boarding party gathered at the rail, staring over to the dim bulk of the Tempest. Dow was to go, and Boiler, and several junior officers and seamen aside; but Benedicta too had begged leave to come.

  They descended to the boat, and were rowed across in a silence broken only by the dipping of the oars, the Tempest looming like a fortress. It was a vast ship, of size and manner very like the New World – a vessel fit for a Sea Lord’s heir. Its upper levels were hidden in the gloom, but along its great flank the multitude of gun ports were all open wide, as to be expected of a ship in the Doldrums. Within those ports, midnight awaited.

  Dow studied the vessel uneasily. He was still no believer in ghosts or in shades of the dead; nevertheless, he would have preferred to be boarding the Tempest by day. They could not wait, however – even to linger here for one night might well be to waste more time than they could afford; they must be away again, southward, by dawn. So this huge relic, and all its deserted corridors and holds, must be searched in darkness.

  They arrived at the hull. No boarding ladders had been deployed by the Tempest’s crew before they died, but by standing on the gunnels of the boat, the lower rank of gun ports could just be reached. And so one by one the boarding party climbed up and through. Benedicta came last of all, with much help from the others, though she was in fact surprisingly agile for her age, and not in the least concerned for her dignity.

  Lamps were handed up from the boat, and now the party turned to the Tempest’s interior, the gun deck extending away into shadows. Dow felt his skin crawl. Hammocks hung everywhere from the beams, and by the shape and heft of them, many held forms within – it might have been a crew merely asleep. But here and there an arm or leg protruded visibly from the bedding, shrunken and skeletal; in other places hollow-eyed skulls framed with wisps of hair peered lopsidedly from pillows. All long dead. There was no smell even of decay left in the air, only the elusive mustiness of bodies mummified.