Chapter 2: The Golden Hall
The Stowaway
The news was such that Locktern had to sit down, and so he did, right on the floor in front of his brother. He sat with no awareness of the indecency of the position, his brother above him completely forgotten. A sense of foreboding crept across his mind. His tightly laid plans. His plots and whispers. It was all coming apart, not unlike his frayed uniform of threadbare black and gold. And yet, underneath the unease that cast through his brain like a net, tangling his every conscious thought in strict and unforgiving lines was another, separate feeling. It was a feeling that the Cartographer had pushed down to the back of his mind for so long that he had forgotten what it was. What was it? What was this unconscious glimmer? Was it the longing in the soul of a child who stares out a window and dreams? Could it be the spirit at the heart of the inventor, or the greed that drives the thief? Or perhaps it was the ghost of the missionary, descended from the high towers of the Church? With some reluctance the spirit unfurled its identity and, as it did so, its true nature shone through: It was the dormant spirit at the heart of the Cartographer’s calling, and at the heart of old Locktern himself, crumpled on the floor or otherwise. Some men called it love. Others knew it not. At the end, it was nothing other than a catalyst whose tinder, once sparked, would not be contained, and would light the life of this story into being. It was the two words scrawled on the curled edges of every map: ‘terra incognita.’
Above him, Recurn had been standing silently in a reverie of his own. In his mind was a feeling he had been holding onto since he received the news of the Stowaway and the copper key: excitement, which, as he stared down at the top of his brother’s head, grew suddenly into a wide-eyed revelation. He had in this moment the rare perspective of seeing his place within the grand scheme of time itself. He felt he was entering the first act of a new play, and that he was now finally — maybe — becoming a figure in a story of his own, a story worthy of any of those in his archives. It was as he could see the map that was a window onto a new world, its apertures onto the past and future clear as crystal, but beyond his influence. It was an experience so complete that it brought with it a feeling of connection with the rest of humanity that was normally alien to both Recurn and his brother. He felt that the weight of History and Story was in this breath colliding and he was at its center, encapsulated by all the connections and echoes that bound what went before to what would come after. He felt great fear and great sorrow and an anticipation so heavy that it made him gasp. It was quite the moment indeed. He put his hand to his head and sat down in front of his brother.
The Archivist, the Cartographer, the Ship, and the Stowaway. The two brothers were becoming entangled in the threads of a fate that they were beginning to see was not their own, a fate that they had tried for the entirety of their posts to wrangle into submission by a domination of cold will, frustrated partnership and silent secrecy. In normal times this would be a thought to cling to, but here and now, as they sat on the floor of the library, two spiders tangled in a web, it all seemed too great to bear.
Locktern opened his eyes. He looked at Recurn and Recurn looked at him, and their eyes met, and something passed between them that neither understood. Locktern averted his eyes, nodded ‘Archivist,’ untangled his arms and legs and stood up. He noted the time on the clock, pocketed the brass key that he had been turning over in his fingers and strode past his brother, through his strings and exited the library door. Recurn followed.
Just outside the library was a small antechamber and a set of winding stairs, which was the only connection between the library and the cavernous landing below known as the Map Room. This space had once been filled with the energy of plans and strategy, laughter and celebration, but was now filled only with the shadows of the pillars and arches that lined the walls, casting edges deep and black across the enormous table at the center and making the scattered goblets that had been rolling around on the floor for decades seem to be cut at diagonals. The Twins’ boots knocked heavily on the floorboards as they passed through the room to the door at the opposite side, their pace quickening as they passed through to a set of spiraling stairs that would after many turns place them near deck level.
‘Who else knows? Rautray, presumably?’ Locktern muttered.
‘Rautray knows. He is the one who found him, in the hold of his envoy. He returned this evening, through the Wrecks,’ Recurn replied.
‘Rautray will not betray. No one else?’
‘No one else.’
‘Good. Have you seen the youth? What is his cause?’
‘I have not seen him. Ilbertine gave me the key and went back to the Wrecks for the night. I came to you as fast as one foot could improve upon the position of the other, you see, you see.’
Together they moved down in silence through the series of hallways, stairways, passages, and corridors that made a labyrinth of Revenge, having been constructed and reconstructed over hundreds of years using scrap-wood salvaged from the skeletons of the ships that had sought war with Revenge and found their end. They passed the quarters of the servants, high family, and apothecary. They passed the high kitchens where the chefs made pastries and pies for the Captains’ table. Halfway down, they spared not a glance for a stately door of polished wood, ornamented with gold leaf, precious jewels, and the image of a winged hydra, the world-devouring behemoth that, legend said, a Grand Admiral from long ago had slain at the Battle of the Dozen Pearls. All the while as they descended they increasingly heard a soft hum of life coming from the Golden Hall.
After another series of narrow stairs, the two brothers found themselves at the level immediately below the main deck. This level, being the full length of the entire ship, was divided into innumerable compartments and stuffed to the gunnels with everything imaginable; some held barrels of hardtack and blue-cheese soaked canvas sails, others were stacked to the ceiling with apples and overripe oranges, boxes of saffron, jars of olives preserved in salt, sacks of coffee beans and at least a few forgotten men. The doors to the Ship’s cavernous Golden Hall and its corresponding kitchens also lived on this level.
Neither Locktern nor Recurn had spent an evening in the Golden Hall for many years. Its outer walls had large stained glass windows which were caked in dust and impossible to see through, which didn’t significantly change the view, considering that they did not look out onto anything more spectacular than the passageway through which Locktern and Recurn currently tread. As if of one mind the twins noticed a window which had at each lower corner a chip which created near perfect eyeholes. They paused to look inside.
Tonight, as every night, the Golden Hall overflowed with high hands, swordsmen, sailors, and crew. These were those whose job it was to keep the Ship in working order and to prepare for long-awaited wars but who most of the time slept the days or roamed Revenge half-drunk on wine, and in the night ate, fought, sang, and gambled. In the rafters sat younger boys, who at every turn could hear the tick and the tap of something breaking below them, glass or a pot or an arm or a leg. These boys would eventually become these men, being as they were, raised by a world of saltwater, drunken thieves, and more than a few lunatics as well. Together they all lived on Revenge as if it were the entire world, which it was, and thought of the sea as an all-consuming mother, from whose breast they would suck their daily sustenance.
The lot was something close to content, although not happy, for what is happiness made of? What is its essence? Is it that of which we shall always be in want, an insatiate appetite whose hunger is always one pound greater than our stomachs? If such it be then the happiness of the hands of Revenge was a platter heaped high with roast duck, potatoes, turnip, parsnips, and griddle cakes, locked in a room where they will never have enough. It was an eternal thirst that can only be quenched with wine, and an eternal hunger that can only be filled by fire, grease, meat, and the occasional throw of a fist. For although their lives were empty of deep purpose, they were filled with something much more shallow, and vast.
There was music as well, as there always was, a flute, and a smaller, sweeter music that this night seemed to bring out in its low timbers. A tune that would brush against the ears of the blacksmith and cause him to tap his foot in time. A tune that caused the boys in the rafters to stand on their trusses and stamp their feet, the rhythm getting them drunk before any wine did. It wound around the odd knife thrower and the bored man sharpening his dull saber. There was cursing and blaspheming, the smashing of strange instruments, and much clapping and shouting, and encores almost constantly, as if the hands had the sense of hearing of the entire sea itself.
Weaving between the tables and through the aisles of the Golden Hall were a fleet of servers. Theirs was a simpler, more necessary, occupation, which consisted in flinging plates on to tables ready to receive them, and once their contents had been accepted by the hands’ mouths, of flinging them back again on to the sea-green slots in the far corner where they became lost, and invisible in the hanging forest of crockery. There was a continuous clattering and clanging as the plates smacked together and fell into their appointed places like huge jokers in some infernal pack. Not a few out of this body of men and plates had suffered by erratic handlings from the hands of the hands, but this abuse had only humanized their cast, for being notoriously deaf, the many rhythmic bumps and bangs the servers sustained, if they had no chastening effect, served at least to awaken a dull but pleasant vibration in the background of their minds not unlike a booming of distant drums.
Occasionally the clamour would soften, and when it did, a song would usually arise from a table, and infect its neighbors, and their neighbors in turn, creating an sound wave that would seem to those inside the Golden Hall as if it could do no less than make of Revenge some gargantuan tuning fork in a bowl of saltwater. As it was, the ship was so thick, and its composition so absorbing, that loud as it was the din of the hall was virtually silent once a few cabins away. The twins eyes were still trespassing upon the scene through their peepholes when just such a song burst forth.
The song was for the woman sat at a place of privilege at the high table of the hall; a woman who sat in that place on this evening, and indeed every evening, the Grand Admiral’s daughter Rane, the daughter of the ship. She had black hair that fell to her waist and golden skin that seemed to glow in the flickering light of the candles. Every night she would be dressed in a white gown of the finest silk, her hair braided and adorned with a garland of white flowers, and tonight was no different. Around her neck was a silver chain, from which dangled a silver coin with the word ‘Liberty’ engraved on its face. She stood appropriately and smiled as the song began:
O Rane, be mine,
Let’s drink some wine
And drown another score!
We’ll build a ship
And try once more
To row our love ashore!
Sorrow be thine,
If in the dark
We lose our fishing ground,
And die of thirst
Or rot — or worse!
No time to waste or frown!
Here’s to the wind
That wakes with the rain,
The rain that washes clean
Our hearts and bones —
This soul of mine
And all that comes between!
O Rane,
There’s a wind,
Blow-ing from the South,
And Night is here,
The time has come
To kiss me on the mouth!
The seas are ours,
The shores are ours,
The Wilderness and pain;
And love has gone
And death has come…. so —
O…! Rane, be mine,
Let’s drink some wine
And drown another score;
We’ll build a ship
And try once more
To row our love ashore!
This scene stirred within Recurn a longing for this type of joviality and friendship. Even though he knew that underneath their joviality was an aimlessness and hunger for small things, them being men and boys small of mind and singular in purpose, he could not help for a moment wondering if he would have rather swapped place with any of them. Locktern felt nothing. Time — who is guardian of all stories — remained still as the twins watched the scene through the window, but only briefly for he was always hurrying someone along somewhere, and the brothers were no different. The two men carried on, relieving the window of its occupation as a frame of their opposite eyeballs, Recurn having been stood to the right of Locktern, in turn breaking the illusion that might be seen from inside the hall that there was one brother spread across far too much window. They made their way through the corridor and slipped through a door at the other end.
