The Giant's Almanac Andrew Zurcher (books to read fiction TXT) 📖

the water, almost breaching the surface entirely. His cloak as he rose billowed from the water, and as he landed on the rock it settled around him like the petals of a dark flower. He crouched on his hands and knees, breathing like a man in love with air, for whom every deep draught was a romance. His neck, strong and bare, bore the red welt of the strap he had torn from it.

Navy stood before him, plainly awed – but not so awed that she hesitated to hold out her hand. He took it, and stood.

‘If Fitz is really the heir to the Heresy,’ said Navy, to all of them, but holding the Professor’s eye, as metal metal, socketed, ‘the Kingdom is all but at hand. We should find this exile, this other brother, this immortal, this wazir, and take him with us to find it.’

Holding her hand as in the old tales a knight might the hand of his lady, the Professor, though already standing, seemed – impossibly – to stand yet taller, yet further, to stand with his head through the roof of the cave. Then he turned, strode past the Master to the far end of the cave, and set his hands to the wall. Bones rained into the water as he tore them down before him, and dawn light flooded into the cave, glittering on the water and setting fire to their weary faces.

‘But there is no need to look for me,’ said the Professor, turning again to face them, ‘for I myself was this wazir. And I am now Phantastes, High Imaginer of the Honourable Society of Wraiths and Phantasms. I have found you, and been with you all this long night.’

17

Navy

By the time they came out on to the sand beneath the cliffs, the tide had risen far enough to drown all but the highest part of the beach. Skirting the rocks, they headed north towards the little cove where, the afternoon before, Ned, Clare and Phantastes had moored their boats. They were two small, light hulls, each of two sails and with a shallow keel. ‘Fast,’ said Phantastes. ‘Dangerous,’ said Clare.

Mr Ahmadi drew them in through the shallow water of the cove, and put the children aboard.

‘No,’ said Clare. ‘I want him with us.’ She and Ned had already begun to raise the sails on the other boat.

‘There is no question,’ said Phantastes. ‘Habi is the best sailor among us, the most experienced, and he knows these waters. The children will be safest in his care. They go with him, and you with me.’

Clare fumed, but Fitz was pleased. Ever since the night they had passed by the tombs, he had wanted to see Mr Ahmadi at the tiller. This was a chance he hadn’t dreamed might be his.

They set out a few minutes later. Mr Ahmadi and Ned pushed the hulls through the surf during a dull spell in the breaking waves, while Fitz and Clare in their boats, side by side, began to draw on the mainsheets, pulling wind into the cloth. For the first ten minutes, their progress was rocky. Every time they surged forward, the wind locking for a moment in the suddenly stiffening sails and driving the boom forward against the mast with a jolt, the whole boat seemed to hover on its purpose – only to subside, dropping with a change of the swell back into a listless clamour of sheets and shrouds, rattling and knocking in the wind. Staring behind them as they failed to make real progress from the beach, Fitz wondered if they would be driven back on to the shore, into the streaks and ridges of rock that rode into the sea from the cliffs like rails, like the spines of some prehistoric sea-lumbering animal that hadn’t yet quite retired into the sands beneath. But as the tide began to change in earnest, and Mr Ahmadi pulled himself over the side, the wind began to stick in the jib, and Navy called out with delight as she managed to hold it, straining, in the fore blocks.

For the better part of an hour they pushed into ever colder waters. On the sea everything was motion; there was no air, only a shifting tumult of movement across their faces and hands as they reached against the sails; there was no water, only a billowing pulse of swells swinging into them like a pendulum from the south-west, skimming them on, then dropping them, then skimming them on again; but above all, the sky declined to vault over their heads, but rather ledged like a hard and implacable shelf of blue, unbroken by clouds, glaring and glazed as if it were clay still firing in the cracking heat of a colossal oven. Mr Ahmadi sat with the tiller in his hand, guiding the boat expertly across the surges as they swept forward and across their bow, trimming the mainsail to catch every curl that fringed and purfled the sheets of wind that drove them steadily north. In the other boat, now and then dropping behind, Fitz could just make out Phantastes’ white beard flowing towards the sailcloth, his eyes fixed intently on the shape and profile of Mr Ahmadi’s bearing, and always Clare’s hands, steady on the jibsheet, willing their journey over and the children safely on the shore again.

Behind them as the dawn spread above the cliffs, they had seen the smoke rising from between the headlands. The Heresy itself lay beyond their view, but the night’s events were written on the sky, and Fitz felt with fear, and pride, and sorrow the fury that must have driven those unfed and unclothed bodies, hungry and destructive, wielding fists and fire, through the Heresy’s dark and quiet courts. What the Wispers had done, what the Subs, what had become of the Fells and Offs in their hundreds, armed, they