24

To Make Light in Darkness

They came next for Aelerin mid conversation. It was in the – morran? In the afternoon? The next day? The next week? There was no way to tell. Usually he would listen for the sound of the bells and the calls in response; Solemn Muffaz’s sonorous voice tolling the hour of the watch: First watch, mid watch, middle watch, middle late watch, late watch, night watch, and on and on and round and round in the endless repetition of the sea. But under Cwell the bell no longer tolled, as if time had stopped when the shipwife’s authority was taken from the ship.

His back hurt once more.

“Where is Anzir, Deckkeeper?” they had said, and in their voice was a tiny spark of hope. To Aelerin he knew Anzir must have appeared like a rock, this great immovable warrior. But even a rock was eventually reduced to sand by the sea. Pain deep within him.

“Dead, Aelerin. Sprackin killed her.”

“But she was a warrior, and he is . . .”

“Cowardly, Aelerin,” Joron had told them, and he realised that where there had been grief for the big, silent woman who had followed him around, now there was a deep anger at Sprackin. “He struck her a cowardly blow from behind as she tried to warn me of the mutiny.”

“I . . .”

“We will make him pay,” and before Aelerin had asked the difficult question of “how” there was a commotion and the courser was whisked away, leaving Joron alone in the gloom once more, with sadness and dreams of vengeance his only company.

When Aelerin returned, they returned bloody and tear-stained. Once more Joron found himself playing hagshand, cleaning the courser’s face. At first, they would not speak at all, but after gentle care and coaxing eventually words came from Aelerin’s mouth, quiet as night waves on a long beach.

“I do not know how much longer I can hold back.”

“What do you mean, Aelerin?”

“They do not know what I am doing, but I am sure they suspect me of something.” They sniffed, wiped at tears and Joron noticed one of their hands was bunched tightly in a fist, as if they held something. “They threaten . . . they threaten . . .”

Joron put a hand on the courser’s shoulder.

“You need not say. Women and men like that, they always threaten.”

“Will the shipwife really come, Deckkeeper?”

“Yes,” he said. To his own surprise he found that now he really did believe that. “She will. Somehow, she will.” Aelerin nodded to herself. “What is in your hand, Aelerin?”

“I . . .” They looked down at their hand, almost guiltily. Then, slowly, the courser opened it. In their palm lay a small piece of parchment. “I . . . did not know whether to give it to you or not.”

“Why?”

“It is from Dinyl.” She held it out and Joron opened the note. Written in Dinyl’s hand for sure, the words poorly formed as Joron had taken his writing hand. Just five words there but they made Joron’s blood run cold: I am coming for you. He shuddered. Joron knew the sort of terrible pain one person could cause another, and knew how long such things could be made to last if a person had a mind to make them.

“Hag curse him, I should have taken his head not his hand.”

“What does it say?”

“They threaten me too,” he said. His hand shook a little, so he folded the note and put it in his pocket to give it something to do.

“It is strange, Deckkeeper. When they beat me it is not so bad as it is happening. It is the thinking of it I cannot stand. The thought of what might happen.”

“Ey, so let us not think, Aelerin.”

“How? How can I not think of their threats?”

“We must go to other places, Aelerin,” said Joron.

“How?”

“Tell me your story. You know how I got here, I know nothing about you, or the coursers. I pride myself now on being able to spot a criminal, a violent person, and you strike me as none of these. How does someone like you end up on Tide Child?”

“It is not an exciting story, Deckkeeper.”

“I will be the judge of that, Courser,” said Joron.

How Aelerin came to the Tide Child

I was born one of five, fourth of those five, and my father said that was the luckiest number, for each of my sisters and brothers had a leg missing or an arm missing or a finger missing but, apart from a slight twist to my own leg, I was as near a perfect child as he had ever seen. Every laying night, when he would send out an older brother or sither, my mother and father would tell me how excited they were for me, how good it felt to lay with another and that if any of their children were likely to make it to the bothies and become Bern then it was I. But when they spoke of what happened on laying night, of the wild abandon and sharing your body with any other you meet, when my brother and sither came back and told stories of their laying, when they spoke of their hope to bring healthy children into the Hundred Isles, I did not feel the same excitement as them. I had no wish to share myself with another. I tried to explain this to my family but they would only become angry. My father would beat me and my mother would stand and watch, as if I deserved every bruise. Deckkeeper, I felt like I was as strange and alien to my family as a gullaime, and like all I was ever to be to them was a disappointment.

A year before I was of age for laying night I saw my first coursers, walking in a line through town. They were not all whole, not like you must be to be Bern or Kept. Some limped, some were missing fingers or arms, so being Berncast was surely no barrier to becoming one. As they passed it was as if silence followed them. All went quiet as they walked past in single file, heads bowed, hidden beneath robes so white I thought them sent by the godbird itself.

See, I was raised in a busy house where voices were always loud and shouting. I had never heard such quiet, Deckkeeper, it seemed like they were magical. So I asked about them, and my father had nothing but bad things to say. Called them witches, called them evil, performers of dark arts, neither man nor woman, a creature apart from good people. I remember those words, those exact words. “Neither man nor woman,” and, “A creature apart from good people.” And I could not help thinking that he spoke of me. And in the year that followed I searched for all I could about the coursers and it felt like the Maiden’s hand guided me. They loved numbers, and charts, and pictures and quiet, and these were all things that I had taken to myself as comfort when my sithers and brothers had run to the arms of others.

Now, my father thought me some sort of hermit, cos I would take every moment I could to be alone and study what I could find on weather and currents and numbers. But that was not true. I did not for one moment long to be alone; in fact, my loneliness was as much a prison as this brig is. I simply longed for someone who would let me be as I wished to be. To this end, the coursers became my dream and I spoke of them so often that my father forbade talk of them. As my laying night drew closer, the more afeared I became, because it seemed my parents had begun to hate me for not being something they could understand. They had become cruel, as had my sithers and my brothers. All except the oldest, Fuller, who did not live at home any more and had taken up his job as a cobbler. Whenever he could he would bring me what he found about weather and the sea and navigation. Snippets taken from deckchilder who came into his shop. Sometimes he told me he would swap shoes for books to give to me, though my mother took the books away and sold them whenever she found them.

My father told me one day that he had been looking into coursers, and my heart leaped. Then he told me, with such a smile as I will never forget, that the coursers would only take those who had proven their commitment by staying untouched. That no courser could touch another woman nor man in passion and still expect the Mother to sing in their dreams. I wondered why he had suddenly gifted me this information. Then he sat and took my hand. He was gentle, like he had not been for years.

“After laying night, Aelerin, all this nonsense of yours will be forgot. You are the hope of us, most perfect of us. Likely to bear an unspoilt child, and your family will benefit from that, your sithers, your mother, your brothers, me.” I did not answer, for I had no answer. “Now I know that you may be odd looking,” he said, “but do not worry. I have spoken to the children of others, I have made sure you will not be lonely on laying night.”

He had paid them, Deckkeeper. I choose to believe, still, that he was misguided, not malicious. I choose to believe he truly did not understand me, but nevertheless. He had offered a shiny coin to whoever lay with me, thinking that when the option of the coursers was removed from me, I would forget them. He could not understand that I saw the coursers as a place of refuge – they were not the cause of what he hated, they were simply a symptom of who I am.

On laying night, I begged my mother and father not to send me out. But they would hear nothing of it and threw me out of the tenement. A whole gang awaited me outside, male and female, for when you are strange those who are not mark you out, and cannot wait to visit their malice upon you. But they were drunk and I was not. And they were out for some fun. I was fighting to live, as I knew without the coursers I would surely take my own life, for I had none left there. So when they tried to take me, my ferocity took them by surprise.

I do not remember much of that night. I remember it mostly like a bad dream, the darkness full of fires, the air thick with the sweet scent of herbs thrown into those fires. The smoke which bent my thoughts in strange ways and filled the streets. Nightmare faces looming out of the dark, full of insane joy, laughing, shrieking, the sounds of passion. Coming across bodies twined together and moving rhythmically in alleys, doorways, by the docks. All the time I was running, running up the serpent road toward the courser’s bothy. I got lost, somehow found myself in the lamyard, saw the gullaime in their spiked pens, heard them screeching and calling. I nearly tripped over a couple about the laying in the long grass. They swore at me and I ran on. Always running, it seemed I ran all night, and when I thought I could run no further, then I found it, the white door of the courser’s bothy. I felt as if the Mother had guided me and I hammered on it, “Let me in! Let me in!” but the door did not open, and I believed that every moment I was about to grabbed from behind, dragged away by hands that wanted to earn my father’s filthy coin.

But I was not. The door did open, and I thought my troubles over with. Here was the place I had dreamed of for so long. Here was a place that was quiet, and clean, so clean. White, everything whitewashed, and coursers walked everywhere, heads bowed. Undisturbed. Being who they were.

It seemed like another world, a paradise, compared to the madness outside. Madness that I could still hear and I could not control myself. I spilled out my whole story to the courser who had met me at the gate. How thankful I was, how much I wished to be like them, how I had felt that, my whole life, this was where I should be. And the courser turned to me and said, “Become a courser? You? Some common Berncast? People like you do not become coursers.”

My heart broke then. All this, for nothing. I must have been mistaken in what I saw, what I thought of them. But a single ray of light was provided. I thought then that maybe they remembered being like me, being an outsider, and that was why they did not turn me away, they took pity. Let me stay as a servant.

I found out exactly how hard it was keeping that place clean, keeping all those robes white. I did all the work they asked and when I had a moment I studied the books. I found out the lie behind them; there were many who were misformed and would usually be called Berncast, but all were the children of Bern. Hidden away, given a job and forbidden to talk of their lives before. After a year, I was made personal servant to a courser in training. They were not like me at all, they snuck out and proved what my father had said about a courser remaining untouched did not really matter if you were from the right family. But still, I found some friendship behind the white doors, among the lessers like myself, and even among some of the coursers. Many are truly committed to the mother, and the songs of the storm.

The courser I was servant to, Bralin, did not enjoy studying. When they realised I found pleasure in it they let me do their studying for them, and for the entire four years of their apprenticeship I had only joy. Bralin ignored me, went and enjoyed themselves while I did their work, learnt what they should.

It was to be my undoing.

Bralin passed for full courser, or rather I did, with flying colours. Among the best marks ever seen. He was sent to an important ship and I stayed in the courser’s bothy, once more cleaning robes and floors. A month later Bralin returned in disgrace – he had almost run his ship into the rocks before it was out of sight of Bernshulme. When he was brought back it all came out. You would think that they would have hidden him out of sight, then moved me to a ship, maybe just a small ship. But I had, however unknowingly, embarrassed important people. The common Berncast, Deckkeeper, as you well know, are not meant to be capable or intelligent. We are meant to know our place.

And so that is why you find me here. On a ship of the dead. Telling you my story and wearing the robe of a true courser. This robe it is all I have wanted, it is my life’s dream. However short that life may be.

When they finished their story, Joron stood. Unsure of what to say to the courser. He had wallowed in his own pity many times, but at least his youth had been one of joy.

“I have been a fool around you, Aelerin.” He put out his hand to help the courser up. “You are as strong as any other on this ship. If you would have my friendship, I would give it.” The courser looked up at him from where they sat. Then nodded, and took his arm, letting Joron lift them up.

“I am afraid, D’keeper,” they said, “that our friendship may be a short one.”

Joron was about to reply when he was interrupted by the opening of the brig door.

“Well, Deckkeeper,” came Dinyl’s voice from outside the cell, “I sent you warning, are you ready?”

“It seems you are right, Aelerin,” said Joron, and the cell door opened.