The Drowned Song

The ship was already sinking when they arrived, and it had been sinking for a very long time.

Isolde understood that within a minute of stepping through the door, as the deck canted under her boots and a cold green wave broke across the rail and ran, hissing, about her ankles. It was an old ship, a three-masted merchantman, and it lay on its side in a black sea under a bloated moon with its keel half-clear of the water. The masts leaned. The rigging hung in torn webs. Barnacles crusted the planking in drifts like gray snow. This was not a ship that had struck a rock yesterday. It was a ship that had been going down for a century, patiently, a few inches at a time, and had not yet been granted the mercy of finishing.

"Hold the rail," said Valerian.

She held the rail. Beside her, Odile gave a small gasp and clung to a coil of rope with both arms.

There was no land. The sea ran to every horizon, flat and black and shining like oil, and the moon laid a long white road across it that led to nothing. The air tasted of salt and iron. Somewhere beneath the planks, in the dark of the hold, a bell was ringing very slowly, with long intervals, as the water shifted it. Dong. A pause. Dong.

"Door Four is passed," the pleasant voice had said, behind them, as the cathedral key dissolved in her hand. "Door Five lies before you. Seven remain." And no one had said eight, or six, and no one had said nine. She had listened for it.

She turned her head and looked back.

There was no door. There was only the sea, rising and falling.

…

They had left Wick behind.

It sat in her chest like a stone. She had agonized over it for the whole of the last morning in the Night Market, over a cold breakfast at the foot of the clock tower, while Odile stared into her tea and the boy himself sat with his knees under his chin. He was ten years old. He was silent and dry-eyed, and he flinched when Valerian passed. And Gideon Fallowes, who was waiting by the fire with his hat on his knee and an air of tactful concern, had said gently: We can offer him real protection, Miss Isolde. Fifteen swords. A woman who has two children of her own. You cannot take a child into the Doors with an Overseer at your back. You must know what you would be asking of him.

She had known. That was what hurt. She had known precisely.

It is the best thing, she told herself. The only sensible thing. He'll live.

She had said goodbye. Wick had put his arms round her waist, hard, and let go. Then he had walked across the cobbles to the Lantern fire and sat down between two soldiers without looking back, and Odile had been crying quietly into her sleeve ever since.

"Do you think he's all right?" Odile said now, hoarsely.

"I think he's warm and fed."

"That's not what I asked."

"No," said Isolde. "It isn't."

…

The song began an hour after the moon came up.

She was in the stern, going through her notebook by the light of a lantern that Odile had found in the galley, and she did not at first know what she was hearing. It was very faint. A thread of sound, high and sweet, rising out of the water on the larboard side and coming nearer. It was a woman's voice. It was singing no words that she knew. It was singing the way a mother sings over a cradle, and a girl sings over a loom, and the sea sings over a drowned thing in the dark.

Ah-ah-aaaah, ah-ah-aaaah.

She looked up.

The sea was calm. The moon lay on it in a white road, and on the road, at a distance of perhaps two hundred yards, something pale had broken the surface. A head. A pair of shoulders. A mane of green-black hair that spread on the water in a slow fan. It was too far away to see a face. But she felt it look at her, and the hairs rose along her arms.

"Don't," said a rough voice, close behind her.

She had not heard him come. He was an old man, or he looked it: lean and weathered and bald as an egg, with a leather patch over the left eye and a network of fine white scars across the right side of his face. His coat was patched with sailcloth. He wore a belt of knotted cords at the waist, and from each cord hung a little bag of colored sand. He was holding something in his hand. He held it out. It was a lump of tallow, pale and greasy.

"Wax your ears," said the old man. "Quick. Before it learns where you are."

"Who—"

"Brannoc. Fire-mage, retired, two years in the Doors, God help me, and nine days on this tub." He pushed the tallow into her hand. "Do it, girl. It'll sing your name next."

She did it. She tore the lump in two and kneaded it between her fingers and pressed it into her ears, and the world went dim and muffled. In the dimness she saw Odile staring open-mouthed at the water. She saw Brannoc lunge across the deck and clap a hand over Odile's mouth. She saw the girl's lips moving beneath his palm, soundlessly, forming a tune.

Humming.

She had been humming. She had been humming along.

Isolde hit the old man on the arm, hard, and pointed at her own ears, and he nodded and stuffed a lump of tallow into the girl's with his other hand. Odile blinked. Her eyes cleared. She looked at them both with a stunned and guilty face, and mouthed, quite distinctly, Sorry.

Over her shoulder, Isolde saw the head in the water begin to rise.

…

It was a woman, after a fashion. She stood up out of the sea to the waist, and the water ran off her in sheets of silver. Her skin was the color of a pearl and just as blank. She had no mouth to speak of, only a long fine seam below the nose, and when the song poured out of her it did not seem to come from there at all. It came from the hull. It came from the water itself. It came from the very air at Isolde's back, cold and sweet and close as a breath on the nape of the neck.

Even through the tallow she heard it.

It was a distant thing, a muffled thing, a lullaby sung through a wall. And it was her mother's voice.

She had not thought of her mother's voice in ten years. Her mother had died when she was nine, of a cough, in a narrow bed under the eaves of a house on Tallow Lane. She had been a small woman, always cold, and she had sung while she worked, in a thin sweet tuneless croon, folding sheets. The sheets had smelled of lavender. Isolde had not remembered that either. She stood in the stern of a drowned ship with her hand on the rail, and the song poured over her like warm water, and she thought, with astonishment: Oh. She's right there.

Isolde, sang her mother. Come away. Come to the sea, my darling. It's so warm here.

She took a step forward.

A hand caught her wrist.

It was gloved, and cold, and it did not let go. She turned her head and looked up into a thin white face under black hair. Valerian had come from the bows. He was breathing hard, and there was seawater on his coat, and his gray eyes were fixed on her with an intensity so fierce that she nearly flinched. He was not wearing tallow. He had put nothing in his ears. He was listening to the Siren with perfect clarity, and his face was as blank as a plate.

He shook his head. Slowly.

No, he mouthed.

She's my mother, Isolde mouthed back, wildly.

No. His grip tightened. It is a song. Only a song. It has taken the shape of what you want.

How do you know?

He did not answer. He pulled her back from the rail, step by step, and turned her to face him, and put both hands on her shoulders. His gaze moved over her face as if reading it. And then, very gravely, deliberately, in the middle of the Siren's singing, he lifted one hand and laid two fingers over her mouth.

She understood. She had been singing. She had been humming along, in the back of her throat, with her lips shut, a wordless hum, and she hadn't known.

She stopped.

The Siren's song faltered. It went on, and rose, and fell, and then it turned and went away across the water, and the white head sank down, and the moon laid its road again on the empty sea.

…

"Never sing back," said Brannoc.

They sat in the galley an hour later, around a table nailed to the floor, with a lantern swinging above. The old man had made tea of something that tasted of seaweed. He drank it from a tin cup with a scarred hand, and his single eye, the right one, was the clear hard blue of a man who has seen a great many deaths and has decided to be rude about them. "It's a simple rule. Simple's the problem. Everybody on this ship had it in their heads, from the first night. And every one of 'em sang."

"How many were there?"

"Forty-one." He sipped. "I'm the last."

"The others—"

"Went into the water. One at a time. A man will hear the thing that's most precious to him, and he'll hum a few bars, and he'll think, I've not broken anything, I've only hummed." He grimaced. "And she hears. Oh, aye, she hears. She'll take a song back, from anyone, and the thing that sang it goes with it."

Odile, at the end of the bench, stared into her cup. "I hummed," she said.

"You did."

"I didn't even know."

"No one ever does." He glanced at Isolde. "You're the reader, aren't you? Fallowes's people were saying. The little scholar that talked to the doll." He grinned. It was not a nice grin. It was missing two teeth. "Is it true you wrote the Overseer a contract?"

"Yes."

"By God." He looked at the tall black figure sitting apart by the stove, who had not touched his tea. "And he signed it?"

"Yes."

"Well, I'll be—" He broke off, shook his head, and drank. "In two years, I've never seen him look at anyone twice. And here he is, sitting in a galley with a crowd, like a man at a wake."

"I can hear you," said Valerian.

"Aye, I thought you could."

…

The rhyme was on the mainmast.

She found it by going up. She had taken the lantern and Brannoc's rope, and climbed the slanting trunk on her hands and knees through a wet dark that smelled of rot and brine. Odile held the foot. At the top, where the topsail yard crossed the wood at a drunken angle, the planks were scored with a long crooked line of carving, done with a knife by a patient and desperate hand.

Calm the deck and cork your ears,

Sing no answer, shed no tears.

All who hear the sea-girl's tune

Ache to follow, ache to swoon.

Never hum the song she throws;

Songs return where singing goes.

Not a sailor, not a king,

Walks away who dares to sing.

Only silence keeps you whole;

Sea-wives eat the singing soul.

Tie the mast and tie the tongue;

Sail till morning's bell is rung.

Six couplets. She did not need to run the charcoal down the page. She knew it before she had read the third line. C. A. N. N. O. T. She sat on the cold yard in the swinging light, with the wind in her braid and the moon on the water below, and let it sink in.

What is locked away cannot.

The wind whistled. The old ship groaned. Somewhere below, the bell tolled once.

She tried the sentence in her mouth. It had a rhythm to it. Not a rhyme, but a cadence, the kind of balanced phrase that belongs in a proverb or a prayer. What is locked away cannot. It was an incomplete clause. It lacked its verb. She thought of a dozen possible endings, grim and pretty, and not one of them felt right.

Cannot what?

She climbed down.

…

She told him at the foot of the mast, in the dark, alone.

He had followed her. She had known he would. He stood among the coiled ropes in the half-light, with his collar turned up against the spray, and when she came down the last foot of the climb he put out a hand to steady her, wordlessly, and then took it away.

"You have found another," he said.

"Yes."

"Say it."

"What is locked away cannot." She watched his face. "I'm sorry. I know you wanted to go slowly. It's only one word."

"It is only one word." He stood a moment. The expression on his face was very odd, a sort of careful stillness, as of a man braced against a wind. "And yet I find that I am afraid of it."

"Why?"

"I do not know." His mouth twisted. "That is exactly what is wrong with it."

She wanted to say something. She wanted, absurdly, to put out her hand and touch his sleeve. But the ship rocked, and the lantern swung, and the old bell tolled below, and over the water, very far away, the Siren began to sing again.

He heard it. She saw him hear it. She saw the faintest softening round his eyes.

"I have been to the sea," said Valerian, in a low voice. "Once."

"When you were—"

"A man. Yes. I do not know when." His gaze went past her, to the black water. "There was a headland. It was gray, and cold, and there was a wind that took the breath out of the lungs. I remember that I stood on it. I had been walking for a long time. And below me the sea went white all the way to the edge of the world." He stopped. "I remember being not at all afraid. That is all. It is the one thing I know with certainty. I was standing on the edge of something very large, and I was not afraid."

"It sounds beautiful."

"It was." He looked at her. "I do not think I have ever told anyone that."

The wind moved his hair. She stood very still, so as not to frighten the moment, and felt it settle round them, small and fragile and bright, like a bird that has landed on a wire.

"Thank you," said Isolde.

"You are not to thank me. It is a very small thing."

"It's the biggest thing you've said."

He gave a short, surprised breath, almost a laugh. And something in the air above the deck shifted, and Brannoc's voice rang out from the bows, harsh and urgent, with a note she hadn't heard in it before.

"Overseer! Girl! Come quick!"

They ran.

Brannoc stood at the rail with a boathook in his hands. He had fished something out of the sea. It lay on the planks at his feet, dripping, a heap of sodden clothes and tangled hair, and it was moving. It coughed. A hand came up, a young hand, pale and ringed with salt, and clutched at the old man's boot.

"Help me," said a girl's voice, thin and cracked. "Please. Oh, please. I'm the only one who got away."

She had a Lantern pin at her collar, pinned crookedly, like something she had put on in a hurry.