Bitter Waters Read online

  Published Lethe Press at Smashwords.com

  Copyright © 2014 Chaz Brenchley.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in 2014 by Lethe Press, Inc.

  118 Heritage Avenue • Maple Shade, NJ 08052-3018 USA

  www.lethepressbooks.com • [email protected]

  ISBN: 978-1-59021-577-7 / 1-59021-577-x

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover & interior design: Matt Cresswell

  Cover art: Elizabeth Leggett.

  Contents

  Introduction by Geoff Ryman

  Another Chart of the Silences

  Junk Male

  The Pillow-Boy of General Shu

  In The Night Street Baths

  The Insolence of Candles Against the Night’s Dying

  Parting Shots

  Up The Airy Mountain

  The Light of Other Eyes

  Septicaemia

  The Cupboard of Cold Things

  True North

  Hothouse Flowers: or The Discreet Boys of Dr Barnabus

  One For Every Year He’s Away, She Said

  Keep The Aspidochelone Floating

  ‘Tis Pity He’s Ashore

  The Boat of Not Belonging

  Villainelle

  About the Storyteller

  Introduction by Geoff Ryman

  The Book You Hold In Your Hands (even if it’s on a screen)

  The book you hold in your hands has been written by a master of prose.

  Who reads for good prose style? People who want something that captures the heart’s secret song on the wing—the rush of feelings and images that fly just below the cloud-level of speech. That starts out by showing you what it’s like to feel.

  Go on. I dare you. Just read the first paragraph of the first story in this book and listen to the universe being born. Unless you find reading difficult (in sixty years’ time most of us will) you may well be borne away on Thomas Disch’s wings of song. In which case my job’s done and you won’t need to read this intro.

  If not:

  Chaz Brenchley has written everything, except perhaps the holy book for a new religion and I wouldn’t put it past him. He has published crime novels, romance, erotica (I am told), urban fantasy, children’s books, fantasy trilogies (times two; I can’t remember the word for a six-book series), science fiction and young adult fiction, a play (produced), essays and poetry. His novel Light Errant won the August Derleth British Fantasy Award. He belongs to something called the Murder Squad, which may be why he doesn’t always have the same name—you may have read him all unknowing. He has written a Rudyard-Kipling poem, the one that RK would have written had he ever gone to a steampunk Mars. Chaz has written a climate-change story in collaboration with a scientist (without much help from the scientist) and he’s written plenty of stories about boats. He knows ships and he knows they are inherently scary. He also finds ways to intersect them with books, ghosts, crime and mystery, buoys and boys.

  Boats in this book: a man with morbidly sensitive hearing sets sail to chart dangerous rocks called the Silences. An old family bible unleashes ghosts on a ship stranded in fog. A ship’s chandler from among his shadowed stock gives an old friend a true compass that points somewhere other than north. A canal boat with a dubious crew finds another boat adrift—and the body of a battered woman inside it. Bitter Waters indeed.

  But it’s not all boats: a military strategist falls in love with a tea boy in ancient China. A eunuch and his dwarf lover leave the Sultan’s harem to visit the baths of the city, poisoned by magic or radiation. A man takes his dying lover to the house of his recently dead uncle. A male prostitute troops home to his magic-infested city after a long war.

  The stories, like Chaz’s unwinding sentences, build slowly to a punch line. The endings always go further, more movingly than you thought they could. A tender story of friends prepping a corpse for burial ends with his ghost making one sweet final gesture. The first story ends with the most moving use of a mobile phone I’ve found in fiction.

  You hold one hundred thousand words of tale; as much as some writers manage in a lifetime. In all, Chaz has published five hundred short stories. I first met him in 1984 at Mexicon, a literary SF convention that was the brainchild of Greg Pickersgill. Chaz and I were working on a play and it was Like at first sight. I read his work and became at once envious. Since then Chaz has published over thirty books—basically a book a year, all of them joined like fine furniture. This has done nothing to reduce my envy.

  Chaz can deliver sentences to live by.

  ‘Want is a slippery word at the best of times…’

  ‘Home was just a place to start.’

  ‘The old should hurry more, should be more urgent, they had so little left to play with…’

  This book in your hands: it’s yours. You’ve won it. It is yearning for you to read it. It has a heart stuffed full of things, people alive and dead, poetry, realism, fantasy, crime and poetry. And it wants to be your friend.

  Geoff Ryman

  Another Chart of the Silences

  Some people think that a breathless hush is the natural state of the universe, as darkness is: that sound is like light, a rebellion of angels, a thin and fierce and ultimately doomed attempt to hold back the crushing weight of utter stillness.

  They’re mistaken. White noise is universal, it’s woven into the fabric: the sound of the Big Bang infinitely elastic, infinitely stretched. In the beginning was the Word, and what we hear is still the scratch of God’s pen on the paper as he made it, as he spoke it, as he wrote it.

  I hear it, almost, on a daily basis. I sit in the Silence Room in the Lit & Phil, the quietest place I know, where even the books are bound and gagged, tied shut with strong white ribbon; and when I’m alone, when I’m not turning pages, when I listen past my lungs’ breath and my heart’s beat and my belly’s churn, I think I can hear the faintest possible scritching sound, inherent in the air. White noise: but actually this isn’t that everlasting, ever-fading echo of the slam of all existence. This is something entirely other, contained within walls, within covers. Books telling their own damn stories. I swear to you, it’s true. Go in, sit down, sit quiet, you can hear it for yourselves. It’s there, it’s always there; it’s the sound of all those books. Rewriting.

  Death is a deception, it’s a trick. It’s a game that books play. What do they know? They want to keep everything, unchanging and for ever. They take what is liquid, mutable, permeable, life; and then they fix it like a dye, set solid. Historically, what are the three most scary words in the language? It is written. You can’t argue with that.

  But the rules change, surely, when the books rewrite themselves. Somewhere—downstairs, probably, on a shelf in the Silence Room—there’s a book that’s rewritten the border between life and death, unless it just scribbled something illegible in the margin. Like this:

  It was a Saturday morning, and I was alone, content, down there at the large table with my back turned to the room. I had charts spread out before me, and an ocean in my head. That afternoon I’d have the real thing beneath my keel, and I ached for it already; but out there, quite often I would ache for this. When a man can measure his happiness coming and going, he should probably be grateful.

  What’s good can always be lost, or broken, or taken away: by our own carelessness, by other people’s clumsiness, by envy or greed or disregard.

  The door open
ed, at my back.

  There were two of them, I could hear that in their footsteps. Both male, I thought: the length of their strides or the sounds of their shoes, perhaps the timbre of their breathing. One was older than the other. By a distance, by a generation.

  I heard the squeak of chairs at one of the little alcove-tables, and turned back to my papers.

  Then I heard another kind of noise: not incidental, not the haphazard sounds of bodies in motion. Steady, irregular, deliberate.

  And familiar, and I didn’t believe it. I still didn’t turn to look, but I listened, and was sure. Those were the sounds of chessmen being set out on a board. And this was the Silence Room, it says so on the door, they must have seen; and it is impossible to play chess silently.

  I didn’t turn, but my back was stiff with outrage. They paid no heed. They played, and every move was an offence; and soon—of course!—they started talking.

  It’s not conversation, exactly, but talking always counterpoints the play. Some moves have to be discussed, some lingered over like a line of beauty. And this was an older man and a boy, a youth, so the game was a lesson also. The boy had that abrupt, husky teenage way of talking, stumbling over his words; it jarred me every time he spoke.

  I could have swept up my papers and stalked out. Perhaps I should have done; hindsight aches for me to do it, for another me to have another chance. Matthew, I’m sorry. Look, I’ll go, and all things will be different for all of us, amen…

  I didn’t move, though. Even that would have been a statement, an accusation, awkward for everybody. I stayed, they played, I seethed and nothing further happened until the older man left the room in the middle of their game. He might have been fetching coffee, he might have been visiting the toilet. It didn’t matter. He was gone; and some imp of the perverse felt it right that, just as the door swung closed at his back, the boy’s mobile phone should ring.

  Then I did swivel round in my chair, I was too blindly angry to keep still. The boy knew; he was already looking in my direction, even as his hands fumbled for the phone.

  “Sorry…”

  “If you were sorry,” I said, “you wouldn’t answer it.”

  He flushed, suddenly and thoroughly; and glanced down at the phone, stabbed it with a finger, lifted it to his ear. Hunched over it as though that would help, and muttered, “I’m in the library.”

  Something in that, the flush or the defiance melted my anger in a moment. All the pent-up rage flooded out of me, leaving me hollow and brittle and defenceless. Then I did have to move; I slipped out and went walking through the library. I went to old friends, old books, sailors and travellers: Hakluyt’s Voyages, Ibn Battutah.

  When I went back down, when I could face it, the older man was packing chess-pieces into their box. The boy was standing by my table, looking at the charts and my own notes where I had left them.

  He saw me and flushed again. “What are these?”

  Earlier today, any other day, I might have been angry. Now I was past that, in unknown territory. “Nautical charts,” I said. “Soundings, landmarks, everything a sailor needs to know. These are contemporary; that one’s three hundred years old. Well, you can see,” the paper crumbling at its edges.

  “Are you a sailor, then?”

  “Yes, I am. Don’t touch that.”

  It came out perhaps sharper than I meant. He snatched his hand back as though I’d burned his fingers. So then I had to give him balm, a little. “No harm, only that it’s fragile.” It’s odd how possessive you can be, towards what is not your own. Tom Turner’s chart was mine by rights of intimacy; I knew it better than any man alive, I knew it the way you know your lover’s skin, their every expression, the rhythms of their voice overheard on someone else’s phone. Soon I hoped to know the chart better yet, from the inside.

  “So why do you bother with it? The new ones are better, yeah?”

  I confronted the intricacies of explaining that marriage of art and craft and science to a teenager, and sighed. “The new ones are more accurate, of course. GPS, satellite imaging, they’re exact. But this is beautiful, and it’s the work of a sailor, not a machine. This is real mapping, drawn to a human scale, one man’s expression of his world and its dangers. It’s the original, not an engraving; look, you can see the pen-strokes, sometimes you can see the pencil-lines beneath.”

  He wasn’t interested in pencil-lines. “What dangers?”

  Did he really know so little? I took a breath to tell him, but the older man interrupted.

  “Leave it, Matthew. You’re not meant to talk in here.” And then he nodded at me, and walked out. The boy blushed one more time, mumbled something incoherent and was gone.

  The next week, they were back. This time, the boy Matthew came straight over to my table. I had to glance up then; he smiled, put a finger to his lips, set something down by my elbow.

  It was his mobile phone. He left it there like a promise, look, no calls today. Or it could have been a more aggressive message, look, it’s in your hands now, up to you not to answer it if it rings.

  I fairly swiftly gave up any hope of working, and went to watch the chess.

  The old man frowned up at me once. Matthew didn’t lift his head. His determination not to was so obvious, he reminded me of me.

  Halfway through the second game, the old man left us abruptly, without explanation, as was his apparent habit. As the door closed behind him, I said, “I haven’t the faintest idea what to do if it rings, you know. Except throw it at your head, obviously.”

  “No worries. I switched it off.”

  “Thank you, then. Though you’re not supposed to be playing chess in here either.”

  “I know, but he won’t be told. Thing is, he hates it when people come up and comment, criticise, make suggestions—”

  “Uh-huh. While he’s gone, then—pawn to king’s bishop five.”

  “Eh?”

  “Here.” I showed him, on the board. “Just a suggestion.”

  “Yeah, but—he’ll take it, won’t he?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “So what am I supposed to do next?”

  “You’re supposed to work that out for yourself.” I gave him back his own smile from earlier and left him to it.

  I sat with a book in my hand and listened to the gameplay. I heard him make that sacrifice, and how he used it to queen another unregarded pawn, and how he won the game thereafter at a merciless canter. I heard the triumph in him; I heard the moment when he remembered I was listening, when he wondered suddenly if I’d give us both away.

  Not I. I sat quiet, and he came across to scoop his phone up as they left, and neither one of us said a word.

  The third time, he came in alone. He laid his phone down at my side, and then he said, “Grandad can’t come today, he’s sick.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Would you, would you like a game?”

  I could have said my work was too important. But that would have been to say that he wasn’t important enough: true, perhaps, but cuttingly unkind. Besides, it was working on me again, that gawky charm of the adolescent, the way he laid himself open for the rebuff.

  So I said yes when I shouldn’t have, I broke a silence where it mattered most, and of us all, I’ve paid the least price for it. Betrayal can be like that.

  Chess is a bridge between strangers, between generations. Get them talking, and everything’s fair game.

  Sometimes the less people say, the more they tell you. Matthew went to school, he went home. He spent time with his grandfather. He didn’t want to talk about his parents, nor much about his life. He didn’t really want to talk at all. Rather, he wanted to listen. He wanted to hear about my boat; he wanted to know why I spent my Saturday mornings in here with dusty old charts and books, when I might have been out on the water.

  “Look,” I said, setting the chessboard aside and reaching for that despised paperwork, “here’s Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot, published in 1693. A na
val captain called Greenville Collins spent seven years charting the entire coast line. It’s our first detailed, practical survey; it changed inshore navigation for everyone. But look, look here…”

  I showed him the chart of our own waters, and let him find the problem for himself.

  “There’s a bit missing,” he said. “What happens here?”

  There is, indeed, a bit missing. A neat blank square a mile offshore and two miles on a side, where even the rhumb-lines and the bearings break off, where Collins has delineated emptiness. It’s unique, throughout the forty-seven charts of the survey.

  “The most dangerous rocks on this coast,” I told Matthew, “that’s what happens there. They’ve been wrecking ships since Roman times. People around here call them the Silences.”

  “So why didn’t he, you know…?”

  “Chart them? Because sailors are superstitious folk, and those rocks have an evil reputation. It’s a known hazard, and every captain tries to steer clear; but they say it’s like the Sirens, something lures them in regardless. You know about the Sirens?”

  He nodded. “We did Odysseus in school. The sailors stuck wax in their ears.”

  “They wouldn’t do it here. Collins’ crew simply refused to go near the Silences, they came close to mutiny. Hence this absence. A local fisherman, Tom Turner, made and printed his own chart, here, but that’s drawn from observation more than measurement. Tom was a sailor, not a surveyor. If you compare his plan to this, from the Admiralty, which is put together from satellite photos, you can see how inaccurate he was.”

  Matthew nodded uncertainly.

  “I want to make my own chart of the Silences,” I said. “I want to do it Collins’ way, using his instruments.”

  “Aren’t you scared?”

  “Rocks are only dangerous if you’re careless. The Admiralty charts are quite clear about depths, currents, the shoals that are hidden at high tide. Though I’ll tell you what’s interesting, they had to rely on satellite imaging because GPS doesn’t work around the Silences. There’s some magnetic anomaly that interferes.”