Silas was violently pitched forward in the collision. His ribs struck the rails of a wooden animal stall, leaving him to painfully stumble forward to Hron’s stall, where he collapsed while trying hard to not take painful, deep breaths. Around him shouts and screams were a cacophony of unintelligible fear.
“Someone tie that rope!” he heard one officer’s voice rise above the others. The man was pointing at a spot in the front of the ferry, near where Silas stood. When Silas’s eyes followed the direction of the man’s pointed finger, he saw a large cable that extended from the pier to the deck of the ship, thrown to the ferry by the longshoremen who had been awaiting the arrival of the vessel.
There were no ferry crewmen in the front of the ship at the moment, and the cable was beginning to slide away. Silas’s adrenaline surged as he observed and then recognized what was happening. He tumbled over the railings of the stall, then painfully ran to the cable and grabbed it. There was a stout wooden guy attached to the edge of the deck; Silas took the slipping cable and wrapped it once around the prongs of the guy. His hands started to burn from the motion of the rope, then he wrapped it around each prong individually, then around the whole contraption again, and felt the cable tighten, and finally hold.
The motion of the ship stopped its forward float, but the back of the ship started to swing outward, not yet secured, while Silas’s fore of the ship remained steady. A scramble by the crew members present quickly tied the aft rope from the pier in place as well, and the damaged ship was finally secured to the dock.
“She’s taking on water, we’ve sprung leaks in two seams!” a voice hollowly called up from the hold of the ship.
A large crowd was gathering on the pier to watch the spectacle of a ship wreck, and many of the men stepped in to help the undermanned dock crew that was hauling on the ropes, trying to move the massive ferry to a spot alongside the pier. The men, and even several women, strained at the ropes, hauling desperately, and slowly made the ferry begin to float back towards the pier in the choppy waters of the harbor.
“The water’s coming in faster,” a voice floated up from the hold. “We need to abandon ship!”
“I’ve got goods down there!” one of the merchants on the ferry protested. “How will you get them out?”
“We’re going to save lives first, and then see about cargo later,” the captain of the ferry appeared from a hatch, after being part of the inspection of the damage below deck. He looked at the slowly closing gap between the ship and the safety of the pier. “Prepare the gang planks for deployment; get the women and children in position for disembarkation first,” he shouted the orders that sent his crew scrambling to obey.
They prepared the planks for extension and as soon as the gap between the ferry and the pier closed to just a few feet, they extended the boards, then started funneling passengers off the boat.
The pier immediately began to grow more crowded and confused as the ship’s passengers poured onto the limited stone surface, while port officials raced to the scene to begin to control the unfolding accident.
Silas wheezed as he returned to Hron’s stall and began to open the door to the close quarters. He wanted to take his friend with him as he left the boat.
“Don’t worry about the animal lad; he’s going to be okay,” the captain of the ship unexpectedly appeared nearby and addressed Silas. “And thank you for your quick action; my men tell me you’re the one to secured the first line that slowed us down.”
“I don’t want my mule to drown,” Silas gasped the words out.
“He won’t; the water’s hardly deeper than the draft of this old bucket here at the docks. We’ll settle about five feet and then be grounded. This deck isn’t going to see the first wave wash over it. I just want to get all the bloody passengers out of the way so that we can figure out how to salvage the dear,” the captain said in a confidential voice. “We’ll bring in bigger planks and get your animals and your wagons off the ship once the circus crowd dies down.”
Prima came up to join the conversation at that point, and the captain repeated his plan to the caravan leader’s satisfaction.
“You look pale, Silas,” Prima commented after the captain left to attend to other matters in the evacuation.
“My chest hurts,” Silas explained what had happened.
“We’ll get you to see a healer once we’re on shore and settled in place,” Prima assured him. “You get off the ship and go sit someplace quiet while we handle the wagons.”
An hour later, Silas sat sprawled out on the harbor’s retaining wall, watching his caravan be slowly unloaded from the ferry deck, which had dropped down below the level of the pier. Men and animals strained at ropes to pull each wagon up the inclined boards and onto the pier. An hour after that, he gingerly sat atop the bench in the front of his wagon, and followed in line as the caravan drove through the new city on its way to its parking field on the outskirts of the settlement.
When the caravan wagons were drawn into a tight circle, with the animals corralled in the center, Prima came to fetch Silas.
“Come with me; I saw a healer’s shop sign on our way out of the city. We’ll be there in ten minutes, and we’ll see what we can do for those ribs of yours,” the caravan leader said.
Prima left Silas with a handful of coins at the door to the shop when he found it. “I need to get back to the caravan; without Ruten or Minnie or even you to watch over things, I get a little nervous,” he smiled at Silas. “You just come back when you’re done here.”
Silas nodded his head in agreement, then went inside.
The front room was a waiting room, and five other people sat waiting to see the healer. Silas sat quietly in pain and watched as an elderly woman came and fetched the patients one by one, to lead them through a door to parts of the shop that he couldn’t see. When his turn came, the same woman led him through the door to a short hallway with four doors, two on either side.
“Step in here,” she told him as she pointed to a door on the left. He opened the door and entered, as he heard muffled sounds and then the woman’s voice bidding farewell to someone else.
“Now, how may I help you?” she asked. “Oh, my, I see! Your eyes! I’ve never seen anything like that? Is it some peculiar kind of jaundice?” she asked.
“No,” Silas wheezed, “it’s not my eyes. They’ve been this way for a long time.”
“Were you born this way? What part of the island are you from?” she questioned him as she stood in front of him. “No, you’re not from the island; I can tell by your accent,” she answered her own question.
“May I sit down, please?” he asked, then helped himself to the use of a chair without waiting for an answer.
“I’m not from this island,” Silas answered. “I just arrived today on a ferry that had an accident at the dock. Now it hurts to breath. Can you do something for me?” he asked
“Thank goodness you’re not from the island. I’d never heard of even the remotest village having deformities like yours,” Silas felt insulted by her answer, but bit his lip.
She knelt and gently poked his rib cage. “Does that hurt?” she asked, then she poked again and repeated the question.
“Yes,” Silas gasped, “those both hurt.”
“Take off your shirt and let me look at you,” she ordered.
Silas untied the laces of his shirt, then moaned as he pulled it up over his head.
The parts of his chest that weren’t stripes of yellow and purple were red and dark purple with bruises and welts from the force of his impact when he’d been thrown against the railings of the mule stall. The doctor ran her fingers over his chest lightly.
“I’d say you’ve got some cracked ribs, from the look of you, and you’ve got some brilliant tattoos as well,” her finger traced one of his colorful scars. “I can give you some painkiller, and I can wrap your torso to reduce some of the discomfort temporarily, but you’ll just need to wait a few days to heal.”
“Those aren
’t tattoos,” Silas explained, then bit his tongue. There was no need to discuss his unusual colors, he realized. His eyes had already attracted the doctor’s attention.
She looked at him in silence, as if waiting for him to explain.
“Could you wrap me and give me the pain medication?” he asked.
“The fee for the service is a bronze and three coppers. I’ll go get the materials if you’ll put your payment in the box on the wall,” the doctor accepted his lack of answer about the colors, and left the room.
Silas fed the coins through the slot in the payment box, then waited until she returned. She bound him tightly in a stout canvas wrap that she secured with several pins.
“Here, these are for your pain,” she handed him three small, tightly wound bundles of herbs, “you can steep these in hot water for tea, or you can just hold them in your cheek and suck their juice. Each one should last several hours. You can go to the market and get more – just ask any herb lady to sell you some.
“Now, put your shirt on and go rest,” she patted him on the top of his head as if he was a child or a pet, then left the room.
“Who’s next?” he faintly heard her ask in the waiting room. He got dressed, placed the first bundle of herbs in his cheek, and left the shop.
By the time he returned to the reduced caravan’s location, he decided that between the binding and the herbs he did feel less pain.
Silas laid on the ground beneath his wagon for the next few minutes of the fading last sunlight of the day, drowsing and trying to avoid provoking his ribs to cause more pain.
Prima came to see him when Moochie the cook announced that the dinner was ready. “The word is that you were a bit of a hero on the ferry today,” Prima spoke as he handed a bowl of stew to Silas, while the boy sat up with difficulty. “That was a good thing.
“You take it easy and heal. We’re going to do some trading, and you don’t need to get involved. From what I hear, we’re going to be here longer than expected while the ferry is out of service, because it’s the only ferry to the island large enough to carry our wagons,” Prima explained. “What did the doctor tell you?”
“Cracked ribs – rest and heal and take some herbs to treat the pain,” Silas showed Prima the balls of herbs by candlelight.
“Interesting. Do they work?” Prima gently prodded one of the balls with his fingertips. “Can we buy some to trade?”
“I think it’s helping me,” Silas ventured an answer. “And the herb ladies sell them at the markets.”
“We’ll get some before we leave.” Prima stood up. “Rest and don’t worry about chores in the morning. We’ve going to have some time here on the island,” he repeated. “Go see some sights; go watch the pearl divers, heal up,” he patted Silas’s shoulder, then disappeared in the dark.
Silas slept uneasily that night. He took another ball of herbs in the morning, and decided that they did reduce the sharpness of the pain. He walked at a slow pace around the city, finding the markets and talking to a woman with a stand of herbs. He showed her his last remaining herb ball, and she promised to make him more that he could buy the following day.
In the afternoon, he wandered down to the harbor. A swarm of men were busy working on and around the ferry hulk in the water, though Silas couldn’t tell what they were doing. After observing that for a while, he walked along the water front until he saw girls diving off a platform that floated out in the water past the end of the fingerlike piers that stretched away from the shoreline out into the water.
He walked out the length of the longest pier and watched as a small row boat shuttled between the end of the pier and the floating platform a hundred yards out to sea. The boat carried a half dozen young women out to the platform, and brought back a different dozen women, all of them dripping wet, and distracting Silas with the minimal clothing they wore.
“What’s happening out there?” he asked a woman who was leaning on a railing watching the same spectacle.
“It’s the divers,” the woman commented, without looking at Silas. “Haven’t you ever seen them before?”
“No, I just got to the island yesterday,” he replied. “Why do they dive?”
“See those sacks they carry?” the woman pointed out the small cloth sacks that each woman held. “Those are the pearls they’ve found in the oyster bed. They’re the pearl divers.”
She looked over at him, then noticed his colorful eyes, but withheld comment.
“Those girls make Amenozume a rich island, though they get very little of the money they find. That float moves around the harbor, switching to a new bed of oysters every few days. The girls who are the divers are the ones that can hold their breath long enough underwater to dive down to the oyster beds and pry the shells open long enough to see if they’ve found a pearl,” she explained.
“See those men waiting at the base of the pier?” she pointed behind them. “They’re from the Guild, the pearl traders’ guild. They’re the only ones allowed to buy the pearls. They look at them and offer the girls prices for their finds, based on the size and color and shape, you know.
“They pay the girls in coppers, then sell the pearls for golds. It’s the way of the world,” she sighed before leaving.
The rowboat bringing the returning divers reached the pier, and a half dozen more women climbed up the ladder from the boat to the pier. One of them seemed younger than the rest, a captivating beauty, with distinctive hair that was wavier than the long, straight hair of the others. Despite himself, Silas stared at her, and she returned the stare as she walked by, her head swiveling and her eyes examining him frankly, before one of the others spoke to her, and she lost interest in Silas.
He watched the clutch of women reach the end of the pier and display their sacks to the pearl buyers, then the two groups parted – the women walking off to their homes, while the guild members remained to await the next shift of divers who would bring them jewels.
He talked to Prima that evening.
“Everything she’s told you is true, more or less,” the caravan leader agreed as he confirmed the explanation Silas had heard on the pier. “The pearl sellers guild is maybe the only place on the island where men have authority over women. They control the prices of the pearls that are bought and sold all over the world.
“And we’ve done you a favor for you – we’ve sold your big mirror today. The palace is going to send a crew tomorrow to pick it up. I believe the princess will have it placed in her very own suite!” Prima told him. “That wagon will be noticeably lighter to handle now.”
“You may think you’ve done me a favor, but I think you’ve really done more of a favor for Hron, if he won’t have to pull that big thing around anymore!” Silas grinned, making Prima chuckle in agreement.
The next morning, Silas was given again his freedom to wander about the island and the city. After tending to Hron, he slowly walked, trying to avoid winding himself so that he wouldn’t have to breath heavily. Even though he was under the fresh treatment of the third of the herb mixtures, he still felt pangs of pain. His stroll across the city led him to the gates of the palace, a large, ornate building with elaborate iron fences that provided protection from intruders while still allowing the building and the grounds to be seen by those outside. It was an extreme contrast to the forbidding walls that had been used to protect the palace at Ivaric, Silas thought.
He knew next to nothing about the palace he thought. He was beginning to realize that he knew very little about the world at all. He hadn’t thought about the world very much when he’d been growing up in Brigamme, or when he’d been a student at the Wind Word Academy in Heathrin. He’d known about the world only in broad, abstract terms – he’d listened to his father’s tales of being a tracker in far-off places, and he’d memorized locations to use for transmitting Wind Word messages.
But Silas had never thought about things like how pearl divers were trapped into only being able to sell their pearls to a limited number of buyers. It
didn’t make sense, except for helping to put extra money in the hands of the pearl traders, at the expense of the pearl divers.
He found that his feet led him from the palace back down to the waterfront, and he wound up going back to the pier of the pearl divers, who he watched for part of the afternoon. He watched the girl with the wavy hair arrive to participate in her shift on the diving platform; she and Silas exchanged appraising glances once again.
But the pain-reduction effects of his herb ball began to diminish, and so Silas left the pier and walked back to his wagon. The large mirror was missing, and he found that the bed of the wagon was emptied enough to provide a flat place for him to lie down. He rested there, then pulled out his mysterious mirror fragment and looked at it once again.
Silas expected the scene to once again be the inside of the large building where so many goods were being stored, but much to his surprise, he found a vastly different scene portrayed in his large piece of broken glass. The mirror showed a bright room, one that was well lit by natural sunlight. Though he couldn’t see windows in the segment of the room that he viewed, the illumination and the shadows left no doubt that the windows existed.
But he didn’t really pay attention to the lighting. Instead, he looked at the three girls who were partially dressed, and who were standing in front of the mirror. They all wore frilly white undergarments, and were chatting amiably as they attended to one another’s clothing and hair. The room was papered in yellow and pink patterns of flowers and birds on the walls, but that too caught little of Silas’s notice as he watched the interactions of the girls.
They were about his age, or perhaps slightly older, they all had long dark hair, which strangely reminded him of the pearl divers for some reason – perhaps because he had just seen the divers immediately before looking into the mirror.
The Mirror After the Cavern Page 20