The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [78]
"He built you?"
There was a silence. A lone seagull rose over the shore, squawked once, and descended, a fleck of white against the blueness of the sky. "The first of me," Aramis said. "Yes."
Orphan looked at him. The young face, the easy movements… He had seen Aramis fight, and when he did he moved like no man he knew, moved like a dance of water and air, fluidly and with immense power. The Turk, he thought. He had made an implication. He remembered now.
"Why the Bookman?" Orphan had asked the Turk. "You implied he led Vaucanson to build his simulacrum. Why?"
The Turk had nodded, and said, "What do you think?"
"To counterbalance the Everlasting Empire," he had said. "To check the growing power of Les Lézards."
Was it true? And, if so, was Aramis, directly or indirectly, despite his protestations, yet another servant of the Bookman?
Somehow, despite his reservations, he didn't think so. There was a power here, in Aramis, with its own agenda, its own game to play. Perhaps, he thought, the Bookman had miscalculated, when he helped Vaucanson. If he did.
He turned fully to Aramis. They were nearly alone on the deck. Only a skeleton crew remained.
"What happened in the Quiet Revolution?" he said. It was the same question he had once asked the Turk. Then, the chess-player had looked at him with his blind eyes and said, "Perhaps you will soon have occasion to find out for yourself."
Aramis looked at him. He smiled, and it was an expression with very little humour in it. "I happened," he said simply.
Automatons in France and lizards across the Channel… and here and now, on a pirate ship in the Carib Sea, Orphan felt helpless to act or even know how he should. He shook his head. On the beach some of the pirates were building a fire, and even from this distance he could smell the wood-smoke and the hint of roasting meat. His stomach growled. He had had enough.
"Well," he said. "I'm sure everyone in France is grateful for that–" and then, ignoring the automaton, he lifted himself over the side of the ship – and dropped into the water.
The sea welcomed him in a warm embrace and he shouted at the sky, flailing for a moment in simple joy, then found his balance and began swimming to the shore. He swam with short, powerful though inexperienced strokes, and for a while he thought of nothing but the swim.
When he reached the beach he crawled out onto the sand and lay there on his back, his naked chest absorbing the sunshine. His wounds had healed cleanly. He watched the Joker, sitting motionless in the middle of the bay like a black moth on the water. The roll of distant drums was louder now, and with it came the smell of cooking meat, urgent and overwhelming, and he stood up and wandered over to the fire.
Someone passed him a bottle of rum and he drank, the fiery liquid spilling down his throat and chest. He felt suddenly happy.
He sat by the fire and watched the flames. Sanctuary, he thought. It was a good name.
He sat by the fire and drank rum and thought of nothing in particular.
But peace, Orphan realised that night, was not for him. As the fires burned on the beach and the echo of the distant drums grew dull – though never truly dissipating – he sat apart from the others, his toes planted in wet sand, and watched the darkened sea. He thought of Lucy, and missed her. He wanted her – selfishly, without reason or justification. Without ideology. He had to go on. He could not, forever, turn his back on the world.
And so he turned back to his talk with Wyvern.
The pirate captain listened to his story, occasionally nodding his head. He listened in silence, an almost companionable one, though Orphan never forgot the casual brutality that lay just underneath the captain's surface. When Orphan was finished, Wyvern said nothing for a while, but took to pacing the room. At last, he stopped and looked at Orphan, his single eye examining him like a surgeon looking at a wounded man.
"What would you do?" he asked. "If you ever reached the island?"
Orphan did not know what to say.