The Salt Court

By the time the harbour bell began to ring, Idris Vane had already lied four times that morning, and it was not yet nine.

He had told the baker that he’d paid for the bun. He had told the bun’s previous owner, a gull, that it was a regrettable misunderstanding. He had told his aunt that he’d been at the net-loft since dawn, mending, and he had told his own reflection in a puddle that today was going to be a good day, which was the biggest lie of the lot.

Because today was Tithe Day, and Brine Cross was a town of stilts and rope-walks and tar-black timber built out over the grey water of the Sallow Sea, and every ten years on this date the sea wanted something.

It did not take much, as these things went. Not boats or gold or fish. It took one child. Sixteen years old or younger. Chosen by lot from a copper bowl in the Harbour Hall, and walked to the end of the Long Quay at the turn of the tide, and given to the water.

Nobody who went had ever come back. Nobody had tried to come back, as far as the records said. The records were very vague on that point. They had a lot of handsome words about duty and honour and the sea’s gentle bargain, and they had not one single sentence about where the children went or what became of them.

“Don’t look so gloomy,” said Fenn Tolliver, bumping him with a shoulder as they joined the line outside the Hall. “Three hundred names in the bowl. You’ve a one-in-three-hundred chance.”

“I put in my name six times.”

“Why?”

“I forged some extras,” said Idris. “In case they gave a prize.”

Fenn stared at him. “Idris. Why would you—“

“It was a joke.” It hadn’t been a joke. He had a bad habit of doing things for no reason other than that they were clever, and nine-tenths of the time it came out fine, and the other tenth was how he’d got a reputation. “Relax. The odds are nothing.”

The odds were, in fact, nothing. Idris would remember that later, with a rueful sort of respect. Three hundred and four names. Six of them his. The Harbour Master, a thin, careful man named Orrin Pike, put his hand in the copper bowl and drew a slip, and unfolded it, and read what was written there in a voice so flat you could have rolled pastry on it.

“Idris Vane.”

There was a silence. Then somewhere in the crowd, someone began to laugh nervously, and stopped.

“That’s a mistake,” Idris said. “I want to register that as a mistake. I’m a terrible tithe. I’m unreliable. Ask anybody.”

“We have,” said Orrin Pike.

Something in the way he said it made Idris look at him properly, and it was then that he noticed the Harbour Master was not looking at him. He was looking at the floor. And all along the row of Harbour Councillors on the dais, the other six were doing the same: studying their boots with great attention, as though a lot depended on them.

It was a very small thing. But Idris had spent his whole life watching faces to see which lie would land, and he knew what people looked like when they had decided in advance.

Six times, he thought. And mine was the only name that came up in the first draw.

It wasn’t luck. They picked me.

They gave him a clean shirt and a last supper, which was fish. He ate none of it.

“It’s an honour,” said his aunt Tamsin, who was standing in the kitchen with her arms wrapped around herself, saying everything she could except the thing that mattered. “That’s what they all say. It’s an honour, Idris, and the sea is kind.”

“Is it?”

“I—“ She looked at him. She was a hard woman who sold smoked eel at the market and had never once, in his hearing, been wrong about the price of anything. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know, love. No one’s ever told me.”

That, more than the lottery, was what scared him. Not the sea. The silence around the sea, a hundred and fifty years of grown-ups looking at their boots.

At the turn of the tide, the town walked him to the Long Quay.

It was a great, wet, creaking tongue of timber that stuck three hundred feet out into the water. At the far end of it stood a flight of stone steps, black with weed, running down into the waves. The Drowned Stair, people called it. Idris had been told never to step on it, and had once, on a dare, put one foot on the top step and been sick for a day.

The crowd stopped at the quay’s mouth. They didn’t need to be told. Only the Harbour Master walked with him, a pace behind, carrying a lantern, and at the top of the stair he cleared his throat.

“It’s not so bad,” said Orrin Pike. “They say it’s quick.”

“Who says?”

“The—“ Pike’s mouth twisted. “People.”

“People who went? Or people who stayed?”

The Harbour Master said nothing. The tide slapped at the lowest step. The sea, grey and rolling in the lamplight, looked like a very large animal turning over in its sleep.

“Mr Pike,” Idris said, “I’m going to ask you one question, and I’d like you to answer it as if the sea were listening.”

Pike’s eyes finally came up.

“Do you know why it wants us?”

Pike was quiet a long time. When he spoke, he spoke so low that nobody on the quay could have heard.

“Two hundred years ago,” he said, “the founding Council made a promise to the sea. Every ten years we were to send it a messenger. We were never to send a child. A messenger. Someone to stand before the Court and give a true account of the town. It was meant to be an honest woman, or man.” He swallowed. “But no one wants to do that, Idris. Not when the account would be what it would be. So we sent children. Children can’t be asked difficult questions. They can’t be made to answer. And the sea, I think, understood, in the end, and stopped asking.”

“Stopped asking?”

“We stopped getting answers.” His hands were shaking on the lantern. “I don’t know what happens down there. I swear I don’t. But I know that the sea has been growing angrier. The storms, the wrecks, the fish going. We told ourselves it was fate. It isn’t fate. It’s a debt.”

“And you picked me.”

“You’re—“ Pike shut his mouth. Then he said, bitterly, “You’re the only child in this town who might actually talk his way out.”

It was a compliment. It was the worst one Idris had ever been given.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “You put me in on purpose because I’m a good liar?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever—“ He broke off. He looked down at the black stair, and the sea, and the long unlit passage into the water.

The Court, he thought. A true account.

The thing about Idris Vane was that he was extremely good at lying and not remotely stupid. And it had just occurred to him that if you were going to send the best liar in town to give a true account before a court that had been waiting a hundred and fifty years for one, you were either an idiot, or you had never thought it through.

“Oh,” said Idris, faintly. “Oh, you utter cowards.”

He went down the stairs.

The sea closed over his head, and it was not wet.

That was the first surprise. It was cold and heavy and green, and it pressed against his skin like a hand, but when he breathed in, cautiously, there was no water in it. Only air. Thick, salty, ancient air, tasting of iron and oysters. He stood on the sea floor in his clean shirt, with silver fish drifting past his ears, and in front of him, so vast that he had to tip his head back to see the roof, stood a palace made of salt.

It rose from the seabed in tier upon tier of white crystalline arches, glittering faintly in the green gloom, hollowed by the tides into windows and balconies and long drifting colonnades. Lanterns hung between the pillars, glass globes full of sea-fire. A long road of pale crushed shell led to the front gates, and along it, in two silent lines, stood crabs.

They were the size of dogs. They had their claws folded and their eyes on stalks, and they watched him with an expression of enormous, patient judgement.

“I’m not here for trouble,” said Idris, because it seemed polite.

The crabs said nothing. They did what, he supposed, crabs did: they turned sideways, together, and began to march him down the road.

The Hall of the Salt Court was the biggest room Idris had ever seen. It had a ceiling that disappeared into dark water, and a floor of polished white crystal, and a hundred benches carved from coral, packed with silent, shadowy shapes. Eels. Rays. Something enormous and many-armed, folded in the shadows at the back like a sleeping cloud. On the far side of the room there was a dais, and on the dais a throne, and on the throne sat the Salt Queen.

She was not what he’d expected. He’d expected a monster, or a beauty. She was neither. She was an old woman, thin as driftwood, with skin the colour of tideline and a crown of tiny shells that clicked when she moved. Her eyes were the grey-green of the sea in winter. And she was looking at him with a kind of terrible weariness, the weariness of a person who has waited a long time for a thing and expects, now, to be disappointed.

“Another child,” said the Salt Queen.

“I’m fifteen,” said Idris. “Nearly sixteen. It counts.”

“They always say that.” Her voice was soft and dry, like sand running through a sieve. “They always arrive trembling, and speak a little, and weep. And then we give them a place to sleep and a good meal, and in the morning they go back to the surface by the Weeping Gate, and the Council never hears of it.”

Idris’s mouth fell open.

“Back?” he said. “You send them back?”

“We have tried to send them back for a hundred and fifty years. Not one will go.” The Queen’s mouth moved in something that was not a smile. “They are afraid of what awaits them. Their parents handed them to the sea. A child does not forget that, Idris Vane. A good many of them live here now. They have children of their own. They tend the gardens.”

He looked around. He had thought the shadows on the benches were all sea-creatures. Now, as his eyes adjusted, he saw that some of them were people. Old ones, weathered and thin, sitting among the rays with an air of quiet settled strangeness. A girl about his age with kelp braided in her hair. A man with a limp and a pipe made from a shell. They watched him with polite, unsurprised eyes.

They were all tithes, he thought. Every one. They’ve been down here all this time.

“We are not monsters, whatever your Council says,” said the Salt Queen. “We are a court. We keep the sea in order. And once in every ten years the treaty says we are to hear, from the surface, a true account of the town, in the voice of a messenger. Otherwise we cannot judge whether to keep the tides gentle or turn them loose. It has been a hundred and fifty years since we heard one.”

“And you’ve been—“

“Turning them loose a little at a time,” said the Salt Queen. “Yes.”

Idris thought about the wrecks. The fish going. Orrin Pike’s shaking hands.

“You want a messenger,” he said.

“I want the truth.”

“That’s the problem,” said Idris. “Madam. Your Majesty. Your Honour. I’m going to be completely honest with you, because I think I’d better.” He swallowed. “I’m the worst possible person you could have sent for.”

The thing about the Salt Court was that it had rules, and the rules were very old.

The first was that a messenger might speak freely and at any length. The second was that the Court would ask questions, and the messenger must answer. And the third, the one that made Idris’s stomach roll over when the Queen explained it, was the Law of the Tongue.

“Every lie you tell in this Hall,” said the Queen, “will turn to salt in your mouth. The first only stings. The second will make you cough. By the fourth, your tongue will be too heavy to speak. If you reach the seventh, it will crystallise entirely, and you will never talk again.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It’s not meant to be kind. It’s meant to be accurate.”

Twelve judges sat in a half-circle beneath the throne. Idris had trouble telling some of them apart: three eels, two crabs, a cuttlefish whose skin rippled with every question, an octopus with the vague, pained look of a retired schoolmaster, a very small pufferfish, a cold, old turtle called the Recorder, and a pale, lovely, slightly sinister jellyfish who did not appear to have a face. They were each of them extremely polite. They each of them fixed him with an unblinking eye.

“Begin,” said the Queen.

Idris cleared his throat.

“Brine Cross,” he began, “is a peaceful, God-fearing town of three thousand souls, famed for its—“

Salt flooded his mouth.

It was sharp, mineral, a hundred times worse than seawater. He doubled over, coughing, and a white scatter of crystals fell from his lips and skittered across the floor. The whole Court watched without a word.

“That’s one,” said the Recorder, and made a note.

“Famed,” Idris wheezed, “is probably a bit strong.”

“That is not a lie,” said the cuttlefish. “That is merely vanity. Go on.”

He tried again. It was dreadfully hard. Every smooth, practised sentence he’d ever built, the ones he used to talk his way past teachers and shopkeepers and the harbour watch, was suddenly a minefield. He opened his mouth to say the town was grateful for its Council, and the salt rose in his throat. He opened it to say the tithe was freely given, and the salt rose higher. Two. Three.

“Perhaps,” said the octopus, kindly, “you might try not saying anything you do not know to be true.”

“That’s—“ He coughed. “That’s nearly nothing.”

“Yes,” said the octopus. “It usually is.”

Idris stood in the great white hall with salt on his tongue and a hundred sets of eyes on him, and he understood, for the first time in his life, how much of what he said was decoration.

He shut his mouth. He thought.

What do I actually know?

“There’s a lottery,” he said slowly. No salt. “Every ten years. They draw a name from a bowl, and the person whose name is drawn is sent to you. The Council says it’s an honour. It isn’t.” No salt. “They’re frightened of you. And they’re ashamed. They’ve been ashamed for a hundred and fifty years, and they don’t know how to stop, so they’ve gone on doing the same thing and calling it tradition.”

“Go on,” said the Queen.

“The Harbour Master told me the Council fixed the draw this year. They chose me because I’m a good talker.” A small, hard laugh, and still no salt. “They think I might actually convince you to let the town off.”

“And will you?”

“No,” said Idris. “No. I don’t think that would be right.”

A hush fell over the benches.

“I’d like to,” he said. “I’d like very much. But the true account of Brine Cross isn’t a nice one. It’s a town that took its own children and handed them over because it was easier than facing something awkward. It’s a place that built a whole religion out of not asking questions. And the worst of it is that most people there are not bad. They’re just—“ He stopped. Searched. “They’re tired. And they were told it was fine. And it was easier to believe it than not.”

“And you?” said the jellyfish, softly. It was the first time she had spoken. Her voice was like a bell heard underwater. “You, Idris Vane. Are you any different?”

He opened his mouth, and the salt rose.

It rose and rose, thick and bitter and choking, and he realised with a lurch that he’d been about to say yes. He had been about to say, I’m different. I’m honest. I’d never do what they did.

He swallowed it. It hurt.

“No,” he said, thickly. “I lie constantly. I lie to people who trust me. I lied to my best friend this morning for fun. I lie when it’d be easier to tell the truth, and I’ve never once thought about whether it did any harm.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It came away white. “I’m exactly like them. I just never had to be afraid of it.”

The jellyfish turned her faceless head toward the throne.

“I find the messenger,” she said, “to be a good deal more truthful than the town.”

It was past midnight, by the Court’s reckoning, when the questions finally ended.

Idris was sitting on the bottom step of the dais with his head in his hands, and a fresh drift of salt crystals around his boots, and an overpowering desire to lie down on the cold floor and not get up. He’d answered sixty-three questions. Fourteen about the Harbour Council, nine about the fisheries, eleven about the wrecks, six about the Lottery, and an extremely long and terrifying cross-examination from the retired-schoolmaster octopus on the subject of what his Aunt Tamsin put in her smoked eel.

(Salt. Mostly salt. That one had been a lie-free zone.)

“Well,” said the Salt Queen, descending from her throne for the first time. “You are a good deal better at this than the others.”

“The others?”

“The children.” She sat down next to him on the step, quite unceremoniously, and the shells of her crown clicked. “They were all very brave. But I think you were the first one who was asked to speak and not simply to endure.” She turned her grey-green eyes on him. “Do you know why we send them back to the Gate, every year, each and every one?”

“To give them a chance.”

“To give the town one.” She sounded very tired. “A child who comes back is a child who can tell. And a child who tells, in the end, is a witness, and cannot be silenced. The Council knew it, and so they taught their children to be afraid. Not of the sea. Of going home.”

Idris was quiet for a long time.

“I wasn’t going to tell, you know,” he said. “If I’d gone back. At first I mean. I’d have—I don’t know. Made something up. Said it was all fine. That I’d had a lovely time.”

“And now?”

“Now I can’t.” He rubbed his tongue against the roof of his mouth. It still tasted of brine. “It would hurt too much.”

The Queen laughed, a creaking, delighted sound, like a door that hasn’t been opened in years.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s the whole trick of it. We didn’t build the Law of the Tongue to punish liars. We built it so honest people would finally have somewhere to stand.” She patted his knee. “You’ll go back at dawn. By the Weeping Gate.”

“And the others? The ones down here?”

“They’ll choose for themselves. They always have. A few may go with you, to speak to their families.” Her face changed. “It will not be easy for them. Nor for you. Brine Cross will not thank you for the truth.”

“No,” said Idris. “They won’t.”

“Will you tell it anyway?”

He looked at the old queen, with her shell-crown and her tired, sea-grey eyes, and the long white hall beyond her full of people who had been given to the water and made a life from it anyway. A girl with kelp in her hair waved at him shyly from the benches.

I could lie, he thought. I could get out of this. I could say whatever they want, and they’d believe it, and I’d be fine.

The thing was, he had just spent six hours learning what it felt like to be the sort of person who couldn’t.

And it turned out he preferred it.

“Yes,” said Idris Vane. “I’ll tell it.”

The harbour bell rang again at the next turn of the tide.

The whole town of Brine Cross had come out to the Long Quay. They had gathered there since dawn, silent and grey-faced, the way a congregation gathers at a funeral. No one had slept. No one had thought it worth it.

They saw the water first. It had drawn back a hundred paces from the quay’s end, as though a great breath had been drawn in, and in the exposed grey mud, a flight of black stairs stood out, dripping, covered in weed.

Then they saw the boy.

He came up the Drowned Stair slowly, one step at a time, a thin, soaked, shivering figure in a white shirt, with salt in his hair and a rime of white crystals on his lip. Behind him, one by one, came others. Strangers. An old man with a limp. A woman in a patched blue shawl. A girl with kelp braided in her hair, blinking in the daylight.

The crowd drew back in a long ripple, as if from a fire.

Orrin Pike stood at the head of the quay with his cap in his hands, and he did not run away. Idris gave him credit for that, afterwards.

“You’re alive,” whispered the Harbour Master.

“Apparently.”

“Did you—what did you say to it? To her?” Pike’s eyes were wet. “How did you make her let us off?”

“I didn’t,” said Idris.

He climbed onto the nearest mooring post, because he’d found that people listened better to someone they had to look up at, and he looked out at three thousand faces, and he felt the old, familiar thrill of an audience come over him. The old reflex rose in him: the easy phrase, the charming turn, the lie that would get them on his side.

He swallowed it.

“I didn’t talk my way out of it,” said Idris Vane. “The sea doesn’t want us to be forgiven. It wants us to be honest. That’s all. It’s been waiting a hundred and fifty years for one person to stand up and say what really happens in this town.” He took a breath. “So I’m going to do that. And you’re not going to like it.”

He spoke for two hours.

He told them about the fixed draws, and the Council’s dinners, and the secret minutes in the Hall cellar. He told them about the children who had lived, the children who had not come home because they were afraid, and the children’s children who played in the sea-gardens now, and had never seen the sun. He told them all of it, plainly, without ornament, with no salt on his tongue, because there was nothing in it he did not know to be true.

Some of them wept. Some of them shouted. Three of the Councillors tried to leave, and were stopped by their own neighbours. At the back, a woman in a patched blue shawl was being embraced by an old fish-wife, who had not seen her since they were both fifteen.

And when it was over, and the crowd was in pieces, the shouting had turned to talking and the talking to crying and the crying, in some corners, to something that might have been the beginning of repair, Idris climbed down off his post and sat on the quay with his feet over the water, and his Aunt Tamsin came and sat down beside him without a word.

She put a hand on the back of his head. Her hand was hard from fifty years of eel-smoking and shaking slightly.

“I should have asked,” she said. “When I was young. Everyone should have asked.”

“Yes,” said Idris.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

They watched the tide come back in, slowly, silvery and calm. The Drowned Stair sank beneath it, one step at a time. It would be there again in ten years, when the next messenger was needed. It would be there, he thought, and this time they would send somebody honest. Or perhaps somebody frightened but willing, which was much the same.

“You’ll have to tell the truth from now on, I suppose,” said Tamsin. “Everywhere.”

“I might ease into it.”

“Oh, aye?”

“I’ve got a bad habit,” said Idris, “of doing things for no reason other than that they’re clever.” He grinned crookedly at the sea. “Might be time I tried doing something because it was right.”

“And how does that feel?”

He considered. He ran his tongue over his teeth, tasting salt, and iron, and something underneath that he couldn’t name but that tasted a great deal like daylight.

“Terrifying,” he said. “I think I’ll keep it.”