The Tower of Living and Dying. Anna Smith Spark

moved. Tobias had to look away from the battle, kicking and panting, splashing to keep his head up, wrestling with waves cold and heavy as dead muscle, again that sheen on the water, the slickness like the slickness of a muscular body moving that made you think the sea was a creature flexing itself, the smooth roll of its flank and then the broken white of the waves and it was almost a shock that his head sank in it, the water flooding over his mouth and eyes and up his nose making him shudder and choke and almost sink again. He shouldn’t be able to sink in it. He should be able to ride on its surface, glossy and moving like muscle and skin. Churning like a body convulsing in pain.

      When he looked back the two ships had disengaged, the rammed ship was sinking, the ramming ship, her prow broken and letting in water, was moving back off in a judder of oars while men fought on her deck. Sailors scrambled up the mast, cutting at the ropes that held the sail furled. It opened, took the wind, the ship lurched forward with the oars flailing. The wind was blowing stronger. Blowing the ships away from the land. The snow covering them.

      I’m freezing, Tobias thought. Freezing and drowning. He thought for a moment of trying to wave down the ship. But nobody would come. Nobody could see. Nobody cared. He kicked and wrestled and sank and got himself moving properly again, torn away from the magical spectacle of the black ships fighting, huge black dragons birds horses whales, fighting relentless. If I hadn’t seen a dragon, he thought, if I hadn’t seen a dragon, I’d think this the strangest and fiercest thing I ever saw. He kicked and wrestled, sank, floundered, suddenly a tide got him, pulling him moving in a rush of strength until the black toothed rocks were up gnashing towards him, the water white on them, their points like knives.

      The waves took him. Dashed him towards the rocks. Oh gods and mercy and fuck. I should have been stabbed. I should have died by the knife. A soldier’s death. A warm death. A death where someone might feel some pride that you’re dead. Instead I’ll be torn up on a rock by the sea and no one will ever know and by gods it will hurt and be cold and lonely and cruel.

      The waves took him. Dashed him towards the rocks. Hands, lifting him. The water broke in a great jet of spume. A hollow beating like the sound of his heart. He spun around trembling, his ears roared with water. The rocks tore gashes in his legs. Long slippery tendrils of green stuff that whipped his face; he tried to cling on to it but it slid through his fingers feeling vile as raw meat. And then suddenly his face clear of the water, the rock pulling back under him, he clawed and pulled, dragged himself and he was out of the water on a little ledge of rock tilting away from the sea. Water slapped over it when the waves broke, but he rolled and crawled and the water seemed to be receding and he scrambled up rock rough with encrusted shells and collapsed gasping and panting to look back and see ships sailing fast out of the bay away to the south, some maimed and limping, some smouldering still on fire, others making their way fast back into the harbour of Morr Town similarly smashed and broken, others still sinking and dying in the water before him, spreading slicks of planks and oars and dead men.

      The battle was over. Marith had lost. Knew him, still, felt the draw of him, a tiny figure on one of the last ships fleeing the harbour, the rage and shame in him radiating out like the beams of the sun, the way you could see light on far hills in the dusk.

      Failed! Ha!

      You’re fucking delirious, Tobias thought to himself, and collapsed on the rocks of the headland soaking wet and wounded and still just sort of alive.

       Chapter Nine

      The ships pulled back raggedly, like crows flying up from a field when the farmer comes out with a sling and a pouch of stones. Moving fast, with a wind driving them. Sixty had departed from Malth Calien. Perhaps thirty remained. They straggled down along the coast, hugging tight to the line of the cliffs. Looked smaller, weaker, the planks of their sides crushed in like the flanks of a broken-down old horse.

      The king’s ship was the last, as was fitting. It sailed blindly, the king looking back staring blindly, the dead thing that was a portent of nothing flopping from the mast with the crows and gulls fighting over its unborn eyes and the blue tongue lolling in its unborn mouth.

       There is no plan to get out. There never was. You didn’t really think this bit through, did you?

      Luminous creatures rose from the deep of the water, called up by the setting sun. The surface of the sea shimmered, solid as metal to a man’s fooled gaze. Usually they only came in deep water: Marith had only seen them this close to the land a handful of times, and seldom this bright. They’d gone out in a little boat once, him and Carin, paid a fisherman to take them. Sat floating on the water pulling up pure colour hand over hand over hand. It ran through the fingers like milk curds. Smelled sweet as rotten fruit. Eltheia’s tears, the shore people called them. The tears she wept for joy and for sorrow, that her husband was dead.

       There is no plan to get out. There never was. Not for any of us.

      But he hadn’t thought he could fail. Everything had been so easy. The black ships dancing, the wind strong in their gleaming sails, coming in all together with the men’s armour flashing in the light. The dead foal had seemed such an omen. He had seen them staring, calling it for luck, awed whispered voices as they pointed. Eagles. Horses. The old, old things of the White Isles, even before his ancestors came. Sacred things that knelt at the king’s feet. The men in their coloured armour like a flock of birds on the decks of the ships, his men who would fight for him forever, onwards and onwards forever to be king. They would die for him. They would kill for him. Bright they raised up their voices and shouted the paean, drew their swords to take the enemy, certain in their faith in him. Two battles he had fought for his crown. Two battles he had won. All the men of his father’s army had turned in their allegiance to come to him. They loved him. They knew him. Saw what he was. Ti’s men should have loved him. Known him. Thrown down their swords to bring him joyously to harbour, cheering his name. Bid him welcome to his hall in clouds of dried flowers to place his crown on his head.

      And then the fighting! His soldiers fierce and confident, Ti’s ships meeting them in flights of arrows, the water lurching, the fire, but still he’d been so certain he would win. Kill them! Kill them all! So wondrous, fighting on the cramped confines of the deck, penned with nowhere to go, slaughtering. Sending a man crashing down into the cold water, bleeding into the water, the hungry sea claiming him, the white fingers taking him, his body too weak to keep himself afloat, the look of panic in his eyes as he bled and drowned. Wondrous. Fighting pure and without thought. Nowhere to go. No one who could come. One false step and the water beckoned. Nothing could be controlled; he could not even order his men. Maelstrom like the water. Death like the breaking waves. So certain he would win.

      Thalia had seen him fighting. That would have been a good thing also, that she had been there and seen. Her kiss of welcome as he turned back to her, perfumed with his enemies’ blood, raising her hand with his as they came into harbour, leading her up the roads of the town to his home, the people acclaiming him, her face bright with pride and desire; ‘Be welcome to your home and the home of our children, my beloved,’ he would have said as the doors were thrown open, the men and women and servants kneeling in the blare of silver trumpets, a victory feast and then up to his bedchamber with crimson hangings, the windows open to the sea, her eyes wide.

      That was what it should have been. Not this. He could not even bear to look at her.

      A splash, the iridescent colours of the water rippling. A body, thrown overboard from the next ship. It sank straight as a stone. Coated and covered in luminous colour. He remembered his own hands, out in the rowing boat, dipped in it, the tiny things sticky and shining, a thin film like dipping his hands in the honey in which his father’s body lay. Carin’s hands covered in it. Carin placing his hands sticky and shining over his heart. The water closed, the ripples stilled. They couldn’t keep the dead on board the ships. Weren’t going to take them with them to wherever they were headed for. A pile of corpses, lined up on the decks. A pile of the dying, needing water and aid. Throw them over into the deep. Forget them. The iridescent colours of the water. The red painted eyes of