Chapter 396
The trunk rising out of a black sea of moving starlight like a mountain range stood on end, cork running down its bark in pale rivers. At its foot, round the great root that arches out of the bark like a jetty, the raft-city: a thousand hulls lashed deck to deck, lanterns on every rail, longships and smacks and lamp-boats and a black barge. And going up the bark from the raft-city, a mile of crooked spans of chalk and plank, the Bridge of Every Ship, its lanterns climbing to a small bright bowl in the trunk's side.
And the white coming down it: running along the chalk lines of the spans like ink down a gutter, faster than a man can run, and each chalk span it passes never having been drawn. Lanterns winking out. People on the spans dropping through where the decks were.
Where the spans un-happen, the anchors stay: Jeppson's hand-trued planks, one from every ship, hanging in the air one above the other up the face of the tree like the rungs of a ladder with nothing between them. People falling past them, grabbing, some catching a plank-end and dangling. A troll hanging by one hand with a fisher-boy hanging off his boot.
Aska coming down the Bridge ahead of the white, leaping from anchor-plank to anchor-plank, her hair of smoke streaming upward, her ash dress trailing like a comet's tail, every footprint she leaves on a plank black and smoking. Behind her, a span above, the white chasing her down the chalk.
On the Marka's deck, the eleven plateless refugees who stayed aboard: an old woman, a girl of nine, a boy of four, two goats. The girl, Hedda, pointing past the lashed hulls to where the Bridge's foot meets the sea beside the trunk.
The white pouring down the bark of the trunk beside the Bridge and into the sea, and the sea under the outermost hulls not being there: the starlight water simply ending in a blank, and the ships above it tipping, sliding toward the edge of a hole in the world, mooring lines snapping one after another between hull and hull.
sliding off the edge of the raft-city into the white, its crew grabbing at the next boat's rail, a boy of twelve with one arm hooked over it and the other arm gone to the elbow, into the white, not cut, simply not there past his elbow. His face not even frightened yet. Puzzled.
closing on the boy's collar. Grey-green, waterlogged, crusted with barnacles. Black weed hanging over a swollen driftwood face, water pouring out of its open mouth.
DRÄMMEN · FERDINAND-9 · unranked · not on any board, and not on any map (water running down the plate)
Drämmen hauling the boy up over the rail and holding him, the boy's missing forearm a blank. Drämmen's own heart (drawn as a faint sea-green pulse at the drowned knot on his barnacled chest) beginning to count.
(At the boy's elbow, a faint outline of the missing arm, one beat more there than before.)
Wherever Drämmen has walked, puddles: black, never drying, spreading across the planks. People scrambling into them on his rough orders, standing ankle-deep in the wet while the white laps at the next deck over.
bow-legged, steady, leaning forward as if into a wind. A bone-white parka of reindeer hide closed with bone toggles, the hood lined with white fox, two short black-and-grey braids tied with sinew. Where her eyes should be, two silver coins. On her back, a short pale spear carved all over with tiny reindeer. A coil of sinew rope. An emerald ring of script round her right wrist with seven notches, six of them filled.
NIVA · RÖNNKVIST-3 · Scalelist: — (last seen inside the Null) (half the plate greyed out, as if bitten)
side by side at the very edge of the raft-city, looking down into the hole of white where the sea was. Two people who have both lived their whole lives at the edge of exactly this.
Pale wood, forearm-long, carved with reindeer running round it in a spiral. And down one side, six lines of carving, small and neat, each one a thing she paid: Where home was. My mother's voice. The colour of summer. The name of my first reindeer. Why I laugh at snow. My own face, young. And below them, a smooth bare space.
cutting into the bare space. Short strokes. Five letters. Drämmen watching them go in, the dim sea-green light in his barnacled eyes going very still.
(Carved on the stake:) Drämmen.
From high above: the raft-city at nightfall, a thousand lantern-lit hulls tipping toward a hole of bare white where the sea was. And at its very edge, a tiny hooded figure driving a short pale stake down into the white with both hands, once, on a single heartbeat.
And out from the stake, in rings, like the rings of a felled tree seen from above, ground: real ground blooming across the white under the tipping hulls, ring after ring, tundra-grass and grey moss, a patch of cloudberry red under the lanterns, a frozen little pond, three low birches, a stone, and over it, for a hundred paces, a little sky with a few stars of its own in it. The tipping ships settling onto it keel by keel, coming to rest on grass, the whole lashed raft-city hanging off this one field like a raft moored to an island.
At the field's edge, the white, stopped. Held back at the last ring like a sea at a beach.
both hands still on the planted stake, kneeling in her new field. Her emerald wrist-ring with seven notches filled. Getting up. Turning round. Her silver coin eyes resting on the huge drowned figure standing in the grass beside her, water pouring out of his mouth.
a long beat. Then the slow, sagging driftwood face doing what it can toward a smile.
(Niva nods, courteous, and walks back to sit beside her stake. Drämmen stands where he is, and water runs down his face in a great deal more than drips.)
Aska landing on its deck off the last anchor-plank in a burst of ash, her cracks blazing. Waiting for her on deck, a gaunt young man with a furnace-red throat, shivering in three blankets in the middle of summer: Ivo, the Kindler. Around him, rows and rows of clay jars, sealed, each one labelled in charcoal with a name and a ship.
looking up the face of the tree at the Bridge: at the anchor-planks a mile high with people hanging off them, at the white coming down the last chalk spans, at bodies falling toward the field.
Aska's hands sweeping across the rows of jars, every seal cracking at once, ash rising out of a hundred jars in a hundred grey plumes. And in the plumes, shapes: the fleet's dead of the Gate standing up whole, colour flooding back into them. A Brygdar troll with his axe. A Tidekant fire-ship crew, their oilskins still smoking. A Lumen lamp-boy. An old Splinterlands fox-sailor. Opening their eyes on the black barge, a minute of their own heartbeats back in them.
(In the panel corner, small ember numerals:) 60
The relit dead charging: up the bottom spans, up the anchor-planks, arms open, and catching the falling. A burned troll catching a falling grandmother against his chest. A fire-ship mate snatching a lamp-bearer girl out of the air by her jacket. A Lumen boy and a fox-sailor catching a big man between them and all three going down in a heap on the grass, laughing with no breath.
(Corner:) 44
waist-deep at the edge of Niva's field, the half-armed boy still held against his barnacled chest, still counting, and a relit fire-ship mate running past him with a child in her arms, smoke streaming off her, toward his puddles.
A colossal grey giant standing on the silver road at the trunk's foot, his chest a cross-section of rings gone black, reaching up with one vast hand and catching a whole knot of falling people at once, like a man catching apples in a hat. A small mouse on his shoulder.
(Corner:) 18
on her knees on the barge among the empty jars. A hundred minutes burning in her at once. Her cracks widening, the ember-light in them roaring, her smoke-hair thinning to a wisp. Feeling every one of them.
The relit dead of the Gate setting the last of the fallen down on the grass, gently, a troll lowering a grandmother onto the moss, a mate setting a girl on her feet; and then each of them burning again, softly, going back to ash where they stand. A hundred small grey drifts on Niva's grass. The living staring at them.
fallen on her side on the barge. Grey. Her cracks barely glowing, the ember-light in them sinking like coals at dawn. The inside of her mouth, which always glows like a hearth, dark. Her empty clay jar rolling off her hip across the deck.
the cold man, who has to eat one mouthful of fire every morning or freeze, opening his furnace-red throat over her and breathing his one mouthful into her: a thin ribbon of flame, the only warmth he has, pouring from his mouth into hers.
(Her cracks catching. A little. Glowing again, faint, like a stove someone has just blown on. Ivo pulling his blankets back round himself, colder than he's ever been.)
The raft-city resting on a hundred paces of tundra in the middle of a hole in the sea, lanterns on grass. People standing in Drämmen's black puddles. Drämmen still holding the boy, still counting ("…two hundred and ten… two hundred and eleven…"): a drag-back takes a tide. On the grass, the two goats eating cloudberries.
high above the field. Every chalk span gone. What's left: a ladder of planks a mile high up the face of the tree, one plank from every ship, each hand-trued, each still exactly where Jeppson set it, glowing faintly violet, with nothing at all between them.
(At the very bottom, a fathom under the field's edge, a mast-top with a bandaged-fist flag, still flying.)
Full night. A mile above, the bowl of the Arena in the tree's side, and its lights small and failing, as if the dark were coming down over it like a lid. Up there, somewhere, the white is spreading, and in the dark no one can see where it is. A thin scream drifts down the face of the world tree.
Far out over the Current, past the horizon, past the edge of the world, a great beam of white-gold light sweeping round the way it has swept every night for four hundred years, touching every ship it passes. Swinging toward the world tree. Reaching it.
And stopping.