The Princess and the Captain Read online

  Now we have to go on wandering through this eerie Archipelago. We know that the dangers lying in wait for us may take unexpected forms, and I feel great tension among the members of the crew. At the moment it’s night, and I suspect that no one’s sleeping, except for Zeph, who has always fallen asleep easily. Babilas and Lei are keeping watch on deck. I think I’ll go and relie

  (sentence left unfinished)

  29

  Six Toothless Men

  Cries of distress came through the darkness. Terrible, raucous, deep and terrifying cries that suddenly shattered Orpheus’s eardrums. He raced headlong out of his cabin, met Hob, Peppe and Malva on their way up to the deck too with storm lanterns, and when they all came up through the hatch together in panic they found Babilas and Lei crouching by the poop rail, hands over their ears. The howls were so loud that they were almost unbearable.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Peppe and Hob in terror.

  Babilas shook his head. He had no idea. His face set with pain, Orpheus took a lantern from Peppe and went over to the rail. The cries seemed to come from somewhere to starboard. He raised the lantern and leaned over the rail. Down below, phosphorescent foam was washing against the hull of the Fabula – and further off, in a beam of lantern light, Orpheus thought he saw a human form. It was waving its arms and shouting.

  ‘Quick!’ shouted Orpheus. ‘More lanterns!’

  Malva and the twins joined him.

  ‘Over there!’ said Orpheus, pointing to the shape he had seen.

  The others narrowed their eyes. ‘Shipwrecked sailors!’ exclaimed Malva. ‘They’re calling us to help them!’

  In spite of the darkness, Orpheus could almost count the unfortunate men drifting a short way from the ship. But there was little that sounded human about their cries.

  ‘Five or six of them,’ he said. ‘Take in the sails! We must help them!’

  In spite of their fear, the crew of the Fabula obeyed his orders. Babilas took his hands away from his ears and climbed to the shrouds. The sails slackened and the ship slowed down. Meanwhile Orpheus had taken the tiller. It was still fragile even though Babilas had repaired it. He handled it gently, setting a course for the shipwrecked sailors before turning to the bows of the ship.

  Finopico had just arrived, eyes puffy with sleep, hair tousled. ‘What’s going on?’ he grunted.

  Malva pointed to the men swimming in their wake. Their cries were becoming fainter, but there were indeed six of them.

  ‘Throw them ropes!’ Orpheus ordered.

  Babilas was first off the mark. In a moment he had made fast all the hawsers and sheets he could lay hands on, and with his powerful arms he threw them overboard one by one in the direction of the shipwrecked sailors. The twins, Malva and Lei held up lanterns to give as much light as possible, eyes wide and hearts beating fast.

  Babilas hauled in two men who had caught the same hawser at once. He pulled, breathing hard, pulled again, and when the two unfortunate men collapsed on deck he made haste to help the next of their companions.

  Orpheus and Finopico took charge of the shipwrecked sailors, wrapping them as well as they could in old sails and offering water and words of reassurance. When the last man collapsed on deck, exhausted, Babilas coiled up the ropes and then disappeared down the steps of the central hatch.

  The twins, Lei and Malva formed a circle around the men they had rescued, casting light on their soaking faces at last. They were startled to see the six dazed men open their mouths to reveal bleeding gums. They had no teeth left!

  ‘By Holy Harmony!’ murmured Malva, turning pale.

  Not only had they no teeth, some had no hair either, while others, whose eyelids were closed, seemed to be blind.

  ‘Their hands!’ said Hob in a strangled voice, repressing nausea. ‘Look at their hands!’

  The six men’s fingers were curved like the claws of birds of prey, but all the same the crew of the Fabula could see that they had no nails left.

  ‘How horrible!’ gasped Finopico, turning away.

  ‘They must have been in the water a very long time,’ Orpheus suggested, trying to explain their present state. ‘How sad …’

  Bravely, Lei crouched down beside the man who seemed the least exhausted. He was leaning against the rail, and although he had no teeth or nails, he still had his eyes.

  ‘Ydroim fwr graich?’ asked Lei.

  The man looked at her with a certain astonishment. A gurgling sound came from his throat, and a bubble of blood formed between his bruised lips.

  ‘Ysgybolg fwr graich?’ Lei persisted.

  This time the man just nodded. Then, making a great effort to speak, he added, ‘Dillwisg … nozg … nozgeidim.’ And he pointed to the darkness with a weary gesture.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ asked Orpheus anxiously.

  ‘They sailors from Dunbraven,’ said Lei, putting a hand to her troubled breast. ‘Lost in Archipelago like us. Ship wrecked on reefs, over there.’

  Lei pointed the way that the Fabula was sailing. Orpheus decided to change course at once. He made for the tiller, calling, ‘Babilas, the sails! Quick!’

  But the giant had disappeared, and did not respond to Orpheus’s order.

  ‘We’ll do it, Captain!’ offered the twins, glad of a chance to take their eyes off the mutilated men.

  Meanwhile, Lei went on questioning the sailor in his own guttural language. Malva, kneeling beside the daughter of Balmun, tried to understand the situation.

  ‘Ask him what happened to their teeth – and their nails,’ she whispered in her friend’s ear.

  With tact and patience, Lei managed to get a few scraps of information out of the man, but he was so exhausted that he often lost track of his train of thought. However, Malva caught a few words that she knew only too well: Catabea, Nokros … Finally Lei translated what she had learnt for Malva’s benefit.

  ‘They more than twenty men when they enter Archipelago. Catabea gave them Nokros with Stones of Life, like us. If I understood, they go through many terrible ordeals. Some sailors fight. Yesterday only one Stone of Life left, and then they driven on reefs. Nokros sink with ship. Most of the men dead.’

  Having changed course, Orpheus had come back, and so had the twins. They listened to Lei’s account frowning, their lips pressed tight.

  ‘Man say Patrols of Catabea arrive a little before night. Come down on survivors of shipwreck. Two sailors carried up in the air to Immuration. But these others resist. Then Patrols blind eyes, pull out teeth, pull out nails …’

  Lei was choking as she spoke, and trembling like a leaf. The horrified twins were leaning against each other, feeling sick.

  ‘When night fall,’ Lei finished in a whisper, ‘Patrols fly away and disappear.’

  Orpheus shuddered. Looking at the poor men lying on deck, he felt he was seeing the future: this was the fate in store for those who failed Catabea’s tests! First mutilated, then thrown into the Immuration!

  ‘What we do?’ groaned Lei, turning her pearl-like eyes to him. ‘They doomed! No Nokros left, no Stone of Life!’

  ‘If I understand this correctly,’ murmured Malva, ‘the Patrols don’t fly by night. Perhaps they’re afraid of darkness. So we have until dawn to come to a decision.’

  Hob uttered a little wail. ‘You think the Patrols will come back, Princess?’

  No one replied, yet it seemed inevitable that those ill-omened birds would reappear at dawn to finish their work. For a moment silence reigned. The shipwrecked sailors were shivering and bleeding under their sailcloth wrappings, but they did not cry out any more.

  ‘Let’s hide them,’ Orpheus suddenly decided. ‘We’ve saved these poor men from drowning, we’re not going to abandon them to the mercy of the Patrols! If we hide them in the hold of the Fabula no one will know. The Patrols will think they’ve drowned.’

  Malva, Lei and the twins exchanged glances of alarm. Finopico shook his head vigorously. ‘In the hold?’ he protested. ‘But … but these men are sure t
o have sicknesses! They’ll bring vermin down on us! I don’t want to be infected!’

  Orpheus consulted the others.

  ‘I don’t know, Captain,’ said Peppe hesitantly.

  ‘I don’t either,’ Hob admitted. ‘Perhaps if we scrubbed the hold out with vinegar …’

  ‘That’s it!’ exclaimed Orpheus. ‘We’ll disinfect the hold to kill any vermin. Do you agree to that, cook?’

  ‘I do,’ Malva put in. ‘We have no choice but to save them. The Patrols are our enemies as much as theirs, after all.’

  Finopico, running out of arguments, bowed his head. Lei leaned over the man and translated their plan. A kind of red smile split the sailor’s face.

  ‘Babilas!’ Orpheus called again. ‘We need you! We have to get these men below decks!’

  But the giant did not appear.

  ‘By Holy Tranquillity!’ grumbled Orpheus. ‘He works like a madman to save these poor fellows, he coils up the ropes … and then he walks out on us! Funny …’

  ‘We’ll go and find him!’ said the twins, running to the top of the hatch. But when they came back a moment later they looked crestfallen.

  ‘Babilas is in his bunk. He won’t come,’ said Peppe.

  ‘And … and he’s in tears,’ added Hob in astonishment.

  ‘Tears?’ repeated the others, baffled.

  The twins nodded. ‘Floods of tears.’

  30

  Why Babilas Wept

  Malva offered to go and talk to Babilas. The giant might have refused to let the twins into his cabin, but he wouldn’t dare to send his Princess away.

  She spent part of the night beside him, trying to comfort him and find out the reason for his sudden flood of tears. When she returned to her bunk it was nearly dawn. Although there were dark circles under her eyes, she didn’t lie down. What she had learnt from Babilas deprived her of any wish to sleep.

  A few days earlier she had asked Orpheus for paper and ink. He had given her some sheets of paper torn out of his Captain’s logbook, a little the worse for sea water, but Malva had not written anything on them yet. Writing, telling stories … what was the use of it, if all her words were bound to be lost in the end? The Coronador had made her burn her first notebooks, the Estafador had carried the others down with it when it was wrecked. What would happen to what she wrote next?

  That night, however, she picked up her pen again. She hoped to free herself of the burden weighing on her heart by writing.

  When I entered Babilas’s berth, she wrote, he was lying face downwards. His legs hung a long way out over the end of the bunk. He’s so tall! But what struck me was that he looked small all the same, lying there sobbing. You’d have thought he was a child. I went over and touched his shoulder.

  In the old days when I lived in the Citadel, protocol meant I couldn’t touch anyone of lower rank than myself, except Philomena, of course. That was a strict order, but I didn’t always obey. When I hid in the kitchens with the maidservants, for instance, I sometimes sat on their laps to help them shell peas. But I’ll admit that I had never touched a man as strong and muscular as Babilas. His skin was warm, supple, firm … it had a strange effect on me.

  He was surprised to find me there too. He opened his sad eyes wide, and I saw that he was ashamed of himself. I asked if he was afraid of the Dunbraven men. He shook his head. Then he made a face and pointed to his heart. ‘Those men have hurt your heart?’ I asked. Babilas sat up in the bunk and sighed wearily.

  Then he tried to explain to me, in gestures, what had upset him so much. I think I guessed the main gist of it, and that is what I must describe here.

  Malva stopped writing for a moment. Her hands were damp, and there was a lump in her throat. The paper was covered with her still childish handwriting, and the lines blurred before her eyes, but she had to go on.

  Babilas wasn’t always mute. He had a fiancée, whom he’d met in a sea port in the country of Dunbraven. It was love at first sight, I think he told me. They both loved the sea. They often spent days together fishing and boating. One summer day it was so hot that Babilas’s fiancée wanted to swim in the sea.

  Babilas began weeping again when he remembered all this, but he showed me that he wanted to get to the end of the story, to tell me everything as best he could. His grief went to my heart, but I went on guessing at his story.

  That summer day, his fiancée dived off the boat. He called to her to be careful, not to go far away. But she was a good swimmer and wasn’t afraid. She amused herself by diving under the boat and coming up on the other side, staying under water longer and longer each time.

  A moment came when Babilas couldn’t see his fiancée any more. She didn’t come up again. He fastened himself to the boat with a rope and jumped into the water. He swam, dived, searched, called her for hours. But she never came up to the surface.

  Malva wiped away a tear caught on her lashes, and turned the page over to write on the other side.

  I don’t know how Babilas found the strength to get back to land, alone in that boat. When he set foot on the shore he felt as if he were dead.

  He went to the house where his fiancée’s parents lived. The last words he ever spoke were to tell them that their daughter had drowned.

  After that, Babilas became mute.

  The candle lighting Malva’s cabin was almost burnt out, but some light came in through the porthole. Day was about to dawn. She dipped her pen in the inkwell again.

  When Babilas saw the sailors calling for help as they drowned, he thought he was living through that dreadful scene again. Except that this time he managed to save six men! Six men of Dunbraven whom he didn’t even know … while he hadn’t been able to save one woman from that country whom he loved. That’s why he was crying …

  After confiding all this to me, he collapsed on his bunk, exhausted. I stayed beside him for a moment, feeling very moved, with my head full of terrible images. I thought of Philomena and Uzmir. I wondered where they were, if they were still looking for me, and if they had been injured after the attack in Cispazan. I miss them so much! How can you survive without the people you love around you?

  Babilas fell asleep at last, and I went back up to the deck, where I found Orpheus. He had finally managed to get the sailors down into the hold with the help of Finopico and Lei. I gave him a little of this information about Babilas, and he understood. I know he won’t hold it against him for giving way to grief. Orpheus is a decent, sensitive man. Since he shook free of Jahalod-Rin’s influence, I’ve found him really …

  But she suddenly couldn’t think of the words to describe Orpheus. Malva crossed out the last line, put down her pen, folded the sheets she had written and put them in a drawer under her bunk. Her eyes were red. The sun would soon rise now. She felt as sad and empty as a deserted house.

  At that moment someone knocked at the cabin door. It was Orpheus. When his face appeared in the doorway Malva’s heart leaped.

  ‘I was just thinking,’ she said, to explain the start she had given.

  ‘You could get a little sleep,’ suggested Orpheus, smiling. ‘The twins are on watch, so I came to see how you’re feeling, Princess.’

  ‘I’m quite well, thank you. But please stop calling me Princess. I’m Malva. Just Malva.’

  She nearly added a girl of no importance, as Philomena had done on the evening of their escape from the Citadel, but the words did not pass her lips. A strange, vague emotion was stirring in her heart.

  ‘All right,’ said Orpheus. ‘I’ll watch my tongue! We’ve hidden the shipwrecked sailors in the hold. I’m sure that some of them are ill; I wanted to ask you not to go down there. I don’t want you to catch any deadly disease.’

  Orpheus spoke quietly, but with touching kindness. Just as he was about to close the door again the first ray of the sun shone into the cabin through the porthole, and rested on his face. He smiled.

  ‘It’s morning,’ he said. ‘Look after yourself.’

  Then he went out, leavin
g Malva dazzled and exhausted.

  31

  Danger on the Horizon

  Orpheus went back on deck, where he found Peppe and Hob leaning against the mainmast, asleep.

  ‘Well, this is a nice way of keeping watch!’ he told them, shaking them awake.

  The twins leaped to their feet, rubbing their eyes. They stammered some confused apologies, but Orpheus didn’t reprimand them any more. Luckily the Fabula had not been driven on to any reefs or sandbanks, so their moment of weariness could be forgiven. Orpheus looked at the Nokros, still in place close to the mast. It was untiringly distilling time: another Stone of Life had been reduced to powder, and now there were only six left. A fine layer of brown sand had dropped to the bottom of the hourglass. Orpheus thought of the sailors from Dunbraven, their toothless mouths and bleeding fingers … and when his eyes met those of Hob and Peppe he knew that the twins were thinking just the same.

  ‘Come on!’ he told them. ‘Let’s not be discouraged. Day has dawned, the weather is fine and …’ He looked at the sky. ‘And there are no Patrols in sight!’

  But as he went to the port rail and looked out to sea, he trembled. A triangular sail had appeared some ten kilometres away from the Fabula. The look of the sail and the ship’s flat-bottomed hull left him in no doubt: this was a Cispazian junk. One of the vessels that the divers hadn’t had time to scuttle before the battle against Temir-Gai. And without doubt, it was carrying …

  ‘The Archont!’ murmured Orpheus.

  A shadow fell on his face. The junk, lighter than the Fabula, was sailing before the wind, and its large sail seemed to be in perfect condition. It would catch up with them quite soon. Remembering Catabea’s warnings, Orpheus turned to the twins.

  ‘I want everyone on deck in two minutes’ time!’

  Hob and Peppe raced to the hatch without asking for explanations. While they raised the alarm, Orpheus rapidly took stock of the situation; they had no carabins or musketoons on board the Fabula, no arbapults or cannon. They had all been lost in the storm. The only weapons they had to fight with were their fists and the kitchen utensils! If the Archont still had Cispazian weapons on board, things were going to be difficult.