Sunday, June 13, 2010

Latitudes

This is set in the same world as 'Strike in the Shining City' but is otherwise unrelated.

~

In the northern wastes, the dead marched.

White-faced men and women, gums black with rot, their clothing worn loose over their bony frames, pulled their sleds. Spoiled foot, novels, and silverware. All the necessities of survival, pulled over miles of ice and snow from ships long since foundered.

The peoples of that land – the living peoples, that is, those who learned from millennia of trial and error how to thrive in such a place – watched the procession, close enough to make out the details and far enough to be out of reach from the wights. But the intelligence was valuable and that is why they watched, despite the risk.

But those that marched never looked up. Nor made noise, nor stopped for sustenance. The dead very seldom took notice of the living.

~

Jocelyn Jones had a father once and from what she could remember, he was brave and kind and knew everything important about everything. Then he wandered off to sea on some grand expedition and she never saw him again.

But she had been proud that her own father was to be part of history – engineer on the first ships to navigate the Great Northern Sea! – as was every one of her fellow citizens, so it took her years to worry. How could she be expected to? Once the last whaling ship spotted the Sedemay and Idemay in Mutiny Bay, it would be at least three years before the sisters could break through the ice floes to the other side of the continent and send word of their safety. Perhaps even five years.

Then six years passed. Seven. Eight. Nine. Not a sign, not a whisper. Jocelyn grew into a woman in that time and buried her poor, patient mother on the decade’s anniversary of the sailing. She counted the coins of her inheritance and decided, for decency’s sake, she must find and bury her father too.

She told no one of her intention. The attention of the papers and the interference of the commander’s widower held no charm for her, no matter the financial support they would offer. Friends and family could not be trusted to keep their mouths shut. She merely booked passage on a packet ship and walked aboard.

“Another young one out to seek her fortune!” said the captain with a laugh. She was Norrish, Jocelyn observed, so maybe she had a right to do so. Laugh, that is. How many like her must she have ferried across these waters when she herself felt compelled to seek her own fortune elsewhere?

“Too true, too true,” said Jocelyn. She smiled. A personable captain brooked well for an enjoyable passage.

This turned out to be completely false, as her stomach was apt to remind her all throughout the three months on the open ocean. With good winds, those three months might have been only one. She would have loved to stand on deck all the days and nights, taking in the same sights as her father did years ago, but her love for clothes that were not soaked entirely through overcame all.

They limped into Landormouth Harbour eventually, though. Jocelyn shook hands with the captain and vowed to buy her a drink someday and never, ever sail on her ship again. But there was worse to come, as well she knew it, and with that in mind, she marched with resolution to the Mutiny Bay recruitment office.

The tweedy clerk at the front desk did not question her credentials nor her work ethic. Would-be fur traders would do the work they were presented with or die and even if Jocelyn walked into the recruitment office with a miraculous lack of knowledge of that essential fact, she would learn with admirable swiftness. The clerk shoved a contract across the width of the desk, a space conveniently left blank for Jocelyn to fill her name in. “The next batch to paddle west leaves in two month’s time, so you’ll be wanting to net yourself some employment in the meantime. We can provide you with lodgings, provided you agree for us to garnish your wages when you start properly working for us,” the clerk explained.

“Two months?” asked Jocelyn.

“Yes. Is that a problem?” The tone said with perfect clarity that the clerk possessed neither the ability or inclination to fix this if it were.

Jocelyn picked up the contract and read it over, not a single sentence of fine print missing her gaze. “This shan’t do,” she said. “I’ll come back if no alternative can be found, but not before.” Two weeks later, she sidled back in and shamefacedly signed the contract. The clerk leaned back in her wooden chair and did not trouble herself to hide her smug satisfaction.

The two months Jocelyn passed at the docks, hauling and heaving the cargo of the ships that anchored there. She grew strong with her labour and cultivated many interesting bad habits, such as the traditional boozing and brawling. Were either parent to see her then, she knew, wiggling a loose tooth with her tongue as the taste of copper lingered in her mouth after an especially interesting night in the bar, they would have dropped dead of shame.

When the convoy of recruits and old-timers left Landormouth for the rivers, she joined it eagerly. Maybe she’d miss the young men, but her funds had drained away to the extent that she had to use an advance to buy an urn.

“You’re contract’s for the standard eight, ain’t it?” asked Rupert, an old-timer.
“That’s the truth of it.” Rupert made sympathetic noises. He’d gone through the same and so would everyone else on this journey, provided they didn’t die.

She hoped, of course, that she’d be stationed at Solomon Factory, furthest north. But no, it was inland for her and that was how those seven were spent – preparing skins and furs and paddling them back east. Haggling with the hunters and traders of many tribes, who knew the business better than she. Falling in love, out, back in, back out. Digging a bullet out of her arm with her fingers and washing the wound with whiskey. Losing fingers to frostbite, then toes, after two horrible nights rescuing a comrade from the blizzard-formed snowdrifts.

You never saw snow or felt cold like that back in Spira. Such things did not exist there. And Jocelyn was still far, far south from where her father must have died. But the eight years wound up, as they were wont to do, and the factor granted her an audience in the cupboard he liked to call an office.

“I want to go north,” Jocelyn said. “How can this be done?”

“Wait some months,” said the factor. He knew the ‘why’ of it and she knew he knew, even if she could have sworn that she never told a soul. But no one can keep a secret in a place so small. “A doctor is coming, with similar interests to yours. He can keep you company; you can make sure he doesn’t die.”

Jocelyn waited eight months to match the years. She worked in the meantime, getting some practice burying bodies to boot. Some of the bodies were very young, younger than her. But Dr. Oakes came after all and he was better than she expected. He knew his way about the terrain and the languages and knew how to keep her arm from paining her.

They paddled to Solomon Factory, with many others, and they continued on alone in high summer, when the sun shined for months on end. Trudge, trudge, they went, clad in snowshoes, packs stuffed with pemmican and things to trade, and ready to forage and hunt at any opportunity.

And here is where Jocelyn lost count of the turnings of the world. Perhaps the occasional – very occasional – persons they happened across would be able to tell, but she lacked the wit to learn their tongue. The cold sucked that out of her.

“How long have we travelled?” she breathed, the air bracing her throat.

“Three days, three months,” said Dr. Oakes.

“How can you be sure?”

“How can anyone be sure of anything? But do trust me.”

These conversations and others of equal inanity sparked up on the hour, near as Jocelyn could tell. If she annoyed the good doctor with him, he did not say. She might have called him a gentleman, but her father was an engineer and her mother a landscaper. So on that count, he was no better than she. She was too much of a lady to say so, though. Much time passed regardless.

One day – or at one point in the longest day of Jocelyn’s life – Oakes made a
reckoning. “We’re near,” he said. “We keep walking, but not much longer.”

And over three rolling hills, they found them. Ice shelters with their fur-clad dwellers. They spotted the pair before their own eyes caught up with their brains. They marred the untouched and shining snow, faces unreadable, spears held at ready. Oakes, hands empty, spoke to them in something resembling their speech and they laughed. They did not lower the spears, but gave them good-natured prods with the butts of them. Jocelyn could barely feel it with the cold and the layers of furs and skins and linen she wore.

They did not laugh later, after they had done their trades and Oakes told them of the lost expedition. “’The pale people march,’ they say, in circles and they never stop,” he reported to Jocelyn. “They’ll tell us where to go, for a price, but they won’t take us there.”

Her decision was made years ago and the urn bought years ago in Landormouth felt heavy in her kit. “We make the trade.”

“Are you –“

“We make the trade.”

They did so and they headed west.

Dr. Oakes explained things on the way. “They’ve never changed their course, not since they showed up years ago. They keep an eye on them to make sure of it, but... You hear of such things in other wilds, but always singular, never in a group like this.”

“But it’s them. It has to be them.”

Then she saw the wights, marching in the distance. Her right foot moved in front of her left, quite involuntarily, but Dr. Oakes took hold of her bicep before it could go any further than that.

“They’ve seen them eat humans,” he said. “You mustn’t move any closer.”

But she shoved him off, wincing with the pain of the action, and moved closer anyway.

Two dozen wights marched, Spiran sailors all, led by an officer whose uniform had been bleached free of colour by the elements. Was it Commander Gartner herself, she wondered? She had the stature, certainly, but the flesh was practically scraped off of her skull. Jocelyn shivered, in a way she thought had been numbed out of her, and resolutely tore her gaze from the officer to the sailors. To look for a face she recognised. She found it.

She vomited, the product of which froze before it hit the snow. But she steeled herself, enough to call out, “Father?”

The dead sailor stopped, his harness going slack as the others marched past. His eyes were still there in his sockets and his flesh was mostly intact, too. Just rotting and white, with black gums. No muscle or fat on his bones – how long did it take for him to get that way? He was not a slight man when she was a girl.

He changed his course. He marched to her. He reached out to her and clutched her cheeks. He opened his mouth – a rasping sound came out which might have been her name. He closed his mouth. The flesh of his hands felt as cold as the air surrounding them. What happened to his gloves, Jocelyn wondered? How did his fingers not snap off with the slightest pressure?

They regarded each other, father and daughter. She knew not how he saw her, but she saw sadness. Half a man, with half a life. It would be kinder, she thought, to end it now, before memories of this had time to supplant the happy ones of the large man who knew many things.

Jocelyn curled her fist and punched him the remains of his belly as hard as she could, just as his fingernails dug sharply into her face. For good measure, she took out her pistol and shot him in the brain and in the heart.

Oakes helped her then, helping her carry the corpse well away from the now interested others, helping her build a fire, helping her burn the body of her father on it and gather the ashes into the urn afterwards.

“Will you do anything for the others?” he asked.

Jocelyn considered the matter. “They can look out for their own,” she said. She walked back south, urn packed carefully in her kit, and she did not look north again. Ten years had passed since she buried her mother, twenty since she last saw her father properly. She had done her duty. It was time to go home.

~

In the northern wastes, the dead marched, their numbers one fewer. In the years and decades to come, people would arrive from across the eastern seas. They would find a familiar face, burn it out of mercy, and leave the others – too tired to do anything for them.

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