The Fifth Season

by N. K. Jemisin

  “Alabaster can do these things for us,” Innon says, looking uneasy.

  “Alabaster,” Syen says, trying for patience, “gets sick just looking at this thing.” She gestures at Clalsu’s curving bulk. The joke all over the comm is that ’Baster somehow manages to look green despite his blackness whenever he is forced aboard a ship. Syen threw up less when she had morning sickness. “What if I don’t do anything but cloak the ship? Or whatever you order me to do.”

  Innon puts his hands on his hips, his expression derisive. “You pretend that you will follow my orders? You don’t even do that in bed.”

  “Oh, you bastard.” Now he’s just being an ass, because he doesn’t actually try to give her orders in bed. It’s just a weird Meovite thing to tease about sex. Now that Syen can understand what everyone’s saying, every other statement seems to be about her sharing her bedtime with two of the best-looking men in the comm. Innon says they only do this to her because she turns such interesting colors when little old ladies make vulgar jokes about positions and rope knots. She’s trying to get used to it. “That’s completely irrelevant!”

  “Is it?” He pokes her in the chest with a big finger. “No lovers on ship; that is the rule I have always followed. We cannot even be friends once we set sail. What I say goes; anything else and we die. You question everything, Syenite, and there is no time for questioning, on the sea.”

  That’s… not an unfair point. Syen shifts uneasily. “I can follow orders without question. Earth knows I’ve done enough of that. Innon—” She takes a deep breath. “Earth’s sake, Innon, I’ll do anything to get off this island for a while.”

  “And that is another problem.” He steps closer and lowers his voice. “Corundum is your son, Syenite. Do you feel nothing for him, that you constantly chafe to be away?”

  “I make sure he’s taken care of.” And she does. Corundum is always clean and well fed. She never wanted a child, but now that she’s had it—him—and held him, and nursed him, and all that… she does feel a sense of accomplishment, maybe, and rueful acknowledgment, because she and Alabaster have managed to make one beautiful child between them. She looks into her son’s face sometimes and marvels that he exists, that he seems so whole and right, when both his parents have nothing but bitter brokenness between them. Who’s she kidding? It’s love. She loves her son. But that doesn’t mean she wants to spend every hour of every rusting day in his presence.

  Innon shakes his head and turns away, throwing up his hands. “Fine! Fine, fine, ridiculous woman. Then you go and tell Alabaster we will both be away.”

  “All ri—” But he’s gone, up the ramp and into the hold, where she hears him yelling at someone else about something that she can’t quite catch because her ears can’t parse Eturpic when it echoes at that volume.

  Regardless, she bounces a little as she heads down the ramp, waving in vague apology to the other crew members who are standing around looking mildly annoyed. Then she heads into the comm.

  Alabaster’s not in the house, and Corundum’s not with Selsi, the woman who most often keeps the smaller children of the colony when their parents are busy. Selsi raises her eyebrows at Syen when she pokes her head in. “He said yes?”

  “He said yes.” Syenite can’t help grinning, and Selsi laughs.

  “Then we will never see you again, I wager. Waves wait only for the nets.” Which Syenite guesses is some sort of Meov proverb, whatever it means. “Alabaster is on the heights with Coru, again.”

  Again. “Thanks,” she says, and shakes her head. It’s a wonder their child doesn’t sprout wings.

  She heads up the steps to the topmost level of the island and over the first rise of rock, and there they are, sitting on a blanket near the cliff. Coru looks up as she approaches, beaming and pointing at her; Alabaster, who probably felt her footsteps on the stairs, doesn’t bother turning.

  “Innon’s finally taking you with them?” he asks when Syen gets close enough to hear his soft voice.

  “Huh.” Syenite settles on the blanket beside him, and opens her arms for Coru, who clambers out of Alabaster’s lap, where he’s been sitting, and into Syenite’s. “If I’d known you already knew, I wouldn’t have bothered walking up all those steps.”

  “It was a guess. You don’t usually come up here with a smile on your face. I knew it had to be something.” Alabaster turns at last, watching Coru as he stands in her lap and pushes at her breasts. Syenite holds him reflexively, but he’s actually doing a good job of keeping his balance, despite the unevenness of her lap. Then Syen notices that it’s not just Corundum that Alabaster’s watching.

  “What?” she asks, frowning.

  “Will you come back?”

  And that, completely out of the blue as it is, makes Syenite drop her hands. Fortunately, Coru’s got the trick of standing on her legs, which he does, giggling, while she stares at Alabaster. “Why are you even—What?”

  Alabaster shrugs, and it’s only then that Syenite notices the furrow between his brows, and the haunted look in his eyes, and it’s only then that she understands what Innon was trying to say to her. As if to reinforce this, Alabaster says, bitterly, “You don’t have to be with me anymore. You have your freedom, like you wanted. And Innon’s got what he wanted—a rogga child to take care of the comm if something happens to him. He’s even got me to train the child better than Harlas ever could, because he knows I won’t leave.”

  Fire-under-Earth. Syenite sighs and pushes away Coru’s hands, which hurt. “No, little greedy child, I don’t have milk anymore. Settle down.” And because this immediately makes Coru’s face screw up with thwarted sorrow, she pulls him close and wraps her arms around him and starts playing with his feet, which is usually a good way to distract him before he gets going. It works. Apparently small children are inordinately fascinated by their own toes; who knew? And with that child taken care of, she can focus on Alabaster, who’s now looking out to sea again, but who’s probably just as close to a meltdown.

  “You could leave,” she says, pointing out the obvious because that’s what she always has to do with him. “Innon’s offered before to take us back to the mainland, if we want to go. If we don’t do anything stupid like still a shake in front of a crowd of people, either of us could probably make a decent life somewhere.”

  “We have a decent life here.” It’s hard to hear him over the wind, and yet she can actually feel what he’s not saying. Don’t leave me.

  “Crusty rust, ’Baster, what is wrong with you? I’m not planning to leave.” Not now, anyway. But it’s bad enough that they’re having this conversation at all; she doesn’t need to make it worse. “I’m just going somewhere I can be useful—”

  “You’re useful here.” And now he turns to glare at her full-on, and it actually bothers her, the hurt and loneliness that lurk beneath the veneer of anger on his face. It bothers her more that this bothers her.

  “No. I’m not.” And when he opens his mouth to protest, she runs over him. “I’m not. You said it yourself; Meov has a ten-ringer now to protect it. Don’t think I haven’t noticed how we haven’t had so much as a subsurface twitch in my range, not in all the time we’ve been here. You’ve been quelling any possible threat long before Innon or I can feel it—” But then she trails off, frowning, because Alabaster is shaking his head, and there’s a smile on his lips that makes her abruptly uneasy.

  “Not me,” he says.

  “What?”

  “I haven’t quelled anything for about a year now.” And then he nods toward the child, who is now examining Syenite’s fingers with intent concentration. She stares down at Coru, and Coru looks up at her and grins.

  Corundum is exactly what the Fulcrum hoped for when they paired her with Alabaster. He hasn’t inherited much of Alabaster’s looks, being only a shade browner than Syen and with hair that’s already growing from fuzz into the beginnings of a proper ashblow bottlebrush; she’s the one with Sanzed ancestors, so that didn’t come from ’Baster, ei
ther. But what Coru does have from his father is an almighty powerful awareness of the earth. It has never occurred to Syenite before now that her baby might be aware enough to sess, and still, microshakes. That’s not instinct, that’s skill.

  “Evil Earth,” she murmurs. Coru giggles. Then Alabaster abruptly reaches over and plucks him out of her arms, getting to his feet. “Wait, this—”

  “Go,” he snaps, grabbing the basket he’s brought up with them and crouching to dump baby toys and a folded diaper back into it. “Go, ride your rusting boat, get yourself killed along with Innon, what do I care. I will be here for Coru, no matter what you do.”

  And then he’s gone, his shoulders tight and his walk brisk, ignoring Coru’s shrill protest and not even bothering to take the blanket that Syen’s still sitting on.

  Earthfires.

  Syenite stays topside awhile, trying to figure out how she ended up becoming the emotional caretaker for a crazy ten-ringer while stuck out in the middle of rusting nowhere with his inhumanly powerful baby. Then the sun sets and she gets tired of thinking about it, so she gets up and grabs the blanket and heads back down to the comm.

  Everyone’s gathering for the evening meal, but Syenite begs off being social this time, just grabbing a plate of roasted tulifish and braised threeleaf with sweetened barley that must have been stolen from some mainland comm. She carries this back to the house, and is unsurprised to find Alabaster there already, curled up in the bed with a sleeping Coru. They’ve upgraded to a bigger bed for Innon’s sake, this mattress suspended from four sturdy posts by a kind of hammock-like net that is surprisingly comfortable, and durable despite the weight and activity they put on it. Alabaster’s quiet but awake when Syen comes in, so she sighs and scoops up Coru and puts him to bed in the nearby smaller suspended bed, which is lower to the ground in case he rolls or climbs out in the night. Then she climbs into bed with Alabaster, just looking at him, and after a while he gives up the distant treatment and edges a little closer. He doesn’t meet her eyes as he does this. But Syenite knows what he needs, so she sighs and rolls onto her back, and he edges closer still, finally resting his head on her shoulder, where he’s probably wanted to be all along.

  “Sorry,” he says.

  Syenite shrugs. “Don’t worry about it.” And then, because Innon’s right and this is partly her fault, she sighs and adds, “I’m coming back. I do like it here, you know. I just get… restless.”

  “You’re always restless. What are you looking for?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

  But she thinks, almost but not quite subconsciously: A way to change things. Because this is not right.

  He’s always good at guessing her thoughts. “You can’t make anything better,” he says, heavily. “The world is what it is. Unless you destroy it and start all over again, there’s no changing it.” He sighs, rubs his face against her breast. “Take what you can get out of it, Syen. Love your son. Even live the pirate life if that makes you happy. But stop looking for anything better than this.”

  She licks her lips. “Corundum should have better.”

  Alabaster sighs. “Yes. He should.” He says nothing more, but the unspoken is palpable: He won’t, though.

  It isn’t right.

  She drifts off to sleep. And a few hours later she wakes up because Alabaster is blurting, “Oh fuck, oh please, oh Earth, I can’t, Innon,” against Innon’s shoulder, and jerking in a way that disturbs the bed’s gentle sway while Innon pants and ruts against him, cock on oily cock. And then because Alabaster is spent but Innon isn’t, and Innon notices her watching, he grins at her and kisses Alabaster and then slides a hand between Syen’s legs. Of course she’s wet. He and Alabaster are always beautiful together.

  Innon is a considerate lover, so he leans over and nuzzles her breasts and does marvelous things with his fingers, and does not stop thrusting against Alabaster until she curses and demands all of his attention for a while, which makes him laugh and shift over.

  Alabaster watches while Innon obliges her, and his gaze grows hot with it, which Syenite still doesn’t understand even after being with them for almost two years. ’Baster doesn’t want her, not that way, nor she him. And yet it’s unbelievably arousing for her to watch Innon drive him to moaning and begging, and Alabaster also clearly gets off on her going to pieces with someone else. She likes it more when ’Baster’s watching, in fact. They can’t stand sex with each other directly, but vicariously it’s amazing. And what do they even call this? It’s not a threesome, or a love triangle. It’s a two-and-a-half-some, an affection dihedron. (And, well, maybe it’s love.) She should worry about another pregnancy, maybe from Alabaster again given how messy things get between the three of them, but she can’t bring herself to worry because it doesn’t matter. Someone will love her children no matter what. Just as she doesn’t think overmuch about what she does with her bed time or how this thing between them works; no one in Meov will care, no matter what. That’s another turn-on, probably: the utter lack of fear. Imagine that.

  So they fall asleep, Innon snoring on his belly between them and ’Baster and Syen with their heads pillowed on his big shoulders, and not for the first time does Syenite think, If only this could last.

  She knows better than to wish for something so impossible.

  * * *

  The Clalsu sets sail the next day. Alabaster stands out on the pier with half the rest of the comm that is waving and well-wishing. He doesn’t wave, but he does point to them as the ship pulls away, encouraging Coru to wave when Syenite and Innon do. Coru does it, and for a moment Syenite feels something like regret. It passes quickly.

  Then there is only the open sea, and work to be done: casting lines for fish and climbing high up into the masts to do things to the sails when Innon tells them to, and at one point securing several barrels that have come loose down in the hold. It’s hard work, and Syenite falls asleep in her little bunk under one of the bulkheads not long after sunset, because Innon won’t let her sleep with him and anyway, she doesn’t have the energy to make it up to his cabin.

  But it gets better, and she gets stronger as the days pass, beginning to see why the Clalsu crew have always seemed a little more vibrant, a little more interesting, than everyone else in Meov. On the fourth day out there’s a call from the left—rust, from the port side of the ship, and she and the others come to the railing to see something amazing: the curling plumes of ocean spray where great monsters of the deep have risen to swim alongside them. One of them breaches the surface to look at them and it’s ridiculously huge; its eye is bigger than Syen’s head. One slap of its fins could capsize the ship. But it doesn’t hurt them, and one of the crew members tells her that it’s just curious. She seems amused by Syenite’s awe.

  At night, they look at the stars. Syen has never paid much attention to the sky; the ground beneath her feet was always more important. But Innon points out patterns in the ways that the stars move, and explains that the “stars” she sees are actually other suns, with other worlds of their own and perhaps other people living other lives and facing other struggles. She has heard of pseudosciences like astronomestry, knows that its adherents make unprovable claims like this, but now, looking at the constantly moving sky, she understands why they believe it. She understands why they care, when the sky is so immutable and irrelevant to most of daily life. On nights like these, for a little while, she cares, too.

  Also at night, the crew drinks and sings songs. Syenite mispronounces vulgar words, inadvertently making them more vulgar, and makes instant friends of half the crew by doing so.

  The other half of the crew reserves judgment, until they spy a likely target on the seventh day. They’ve been lurking near the shipping lanes between two heavily populated peninsulas, and people up in the mast-nest have been watching with spyglasses for ships worth the effort of robbing. Innon doesn’t give the order until the lookout tells them he’s spotted an especially large vessel of the sort often use
d to ferry trade goods too heavy or dangerous for easy overland carting: oils and quarried stone and volatile chemicals and timber. The very sorts of things that a comm stuck on a barren island in the middle of nowhere might need most. This one’s accompanied by another vessel, which is smaller and which, according to those who see it through the spyglass and can tell such things by sight, is probably bristling with militia soldiers, battering rams, and armaments of its own. (Maybe one’s a carrack and the other’s a caravel, those are the words the sailors use, but she can’t remember which one’s which and it’s a pain in the ass to try so she’s going to stick with “the big boat” and “the small boat.”) Their readiness to fight off pirates confirms that the freighter carries something worth pirating.

  Innon looks at Syenite, and she grins fiercely.

  She raises two fogs. The first requires her to pull ambient energy at the farthest edge of her range—but she does it, because that’s where the smaller ship is. The second fog she raises in a corridor between Clalsu and the cargo vessel, so that they will be on their target almost before it sees them coming.

  It goes like clockwork. Innon’s crew are mostly experienced and highly skilled; the ones like Syenite, who don’t know what they’re doing yet, are pushed to the periphery while the others set to. The Clalsu comes out of the fog and the other vessel starts ringing bells to sound the alarm, but it’s too late. Innon’s people fire the catapults and shred their sails with baskets of chain. Then the Clalsu sidles up close—Syen thinks they’re going to hit, but Innon knows what he’s doing—and others in the crew throw hooks across the gap between them, hitching the ships together and then winching them closer with the big crankworks that occupy much of the deck.

  It’s dangerous at this point, and one of the older members of the crew shoos Syen belowdecks when people on the cargo ship start firing arrows and slingstones and throwing-knives at them. She sits in the shadow of the steps while the other crew members run up and down them, and her heart is pounding; her palms are damp. Something heavy thuds into the hull not five feet from her head, and she flinches.