by Kate Story
Antilia surfaces, then, red as lava, the lava on the mountain that he knows is behind him, staining the sky with fire, over the crest of the coastal hills.
Antilia glows red, alone.
The seals are gone. They swim through a vastness of ocean, in an impossible world where there is only one small island.
Chapter Fifty-Three
It Comes In Waves
The feast lasts the whole night through.
All of Calabar celebrates the launch of the Mender’s fleet against the North. As the sun rises, Nancy takes Ophelia by the hand and leads her out of the city.
Pest and Pim come, too, and the doctor and The Gor. They walk into the forest, following the banks of the great tidal river, the rising sun in their eyes. Gradually, quietly, more and more people join them. Ophelia feels sandy-eyed, but she keeps her head up. Everyone else is determined, even elated.
She had hoped that she’d be able to talk with the Mender at the feast, but she wasn’t there. Wasn’t feeeeeling up to it, the doctor said.
Will she never get to talk to this woman from her own world?
They walk now through green woods, steaming in the growing heat. Bright birds scream at them, sometimes coming to perch on Pim’s hand, delighting Pest. Flowers of every colour bloom, huge and scented; bright waterfalls chatter, and there are pools and secret caves. She’s been here before, with Pim. No time to stop, though. They walk for a long time.
“It will be nice to see Cinnamon Lake again,” Ophelia says to Pim. “It’s been a long time since we visited.” She remembers it clearly: blue and deep. A broad tidal river connects the lake to Calabar and Doctor Bay; red mudflats are revealed with every low tide, and countless birds make the salty tidal marsh their home.
But suddenly, the trees are all gone. Ophelia looks with horror at a logged and desecrated place. The land is gouged and naked. The sun beats down on them. No birds, here. The sky beats like a great drum, gazing at its own reflection in the vast surface of Cinnamon Lake.
“What happened?” Ophelia gasps.
“We had to build the fleet,” says the Virgo.
The lake is covered in wooden ships. The Mender must have been keeping people busy for years, building these ships.
That speech Nancy gave about deciding to go to war—the sacrifice of the goat—all that was for show. “You’ve been planning this all along,” Ophelia says.
“Yes,” Nancy says. “We have a fleet, and we are ready to deploy it.”
Ophelia is a pawn in this war. She steps away from Nancy, suddenly afraid.
The fleet is like nothing she’s ever seen before. No two ships are the same. Some look like Chinese junks, with multiple masts and fin-shaped sails, curving up high at bow and stern. Others look like great war canoes, and others look to Ophelia’s eyes like versions of modern sailboats.
One particularly catches her eye. It resembles the boat on a postcard her mother keeps on the fridge. The picture commemorates the five hundredth anniversary of the voyage of Matthew. No, that’s wrong; the voyage was by some guy named Cabin, or . . . Cabot, that was it. Some European who sailed on a boat called The Matthew. The anniversary had been the year Ophelia was born, and her grandmother had sent her mother the postcard from Newfoundland. A replica had sailed from England. The Queen came to Newfoundland and everything. Make sure the girl knows her history, Grandma Quinn had written on the back of the postcard.
The ship she’s gazing upon now has a flat sort of front and a bouquet of square sails. It’s beautiful.
“I don’t know why you made ships with those old sails,” Pim says to her mother. “The lateens are so much more maneuverable.”
“They are double-rigged,” the Virgo says, and walks down the slope toward the water’s edge.
Pim rolls her eyes, sighing heavily, and follows. “They are double-rigged,” she mutters under her breath in a whiny, pretentious voice, “thank you very much.”
Ophelia wonders how she ever missed that these two were mother and daughter.
The arrival of the entourage sends the crews into a panic, running around tidying rope and such away. The Virgo asks the first mate of the Matthew-ship, very politely, if he would mind taking her through some demonstrations. Ophelia watches as the crew takes down the square sails and in their place haul up triangles at the front and back of the ship, leaning away from the vertical. Pest’s mouth hangs open with wonder.
“You’ve thought of everything, as usual,” Pim says to her mother. Then she turns to Ophelia. “Much better if you want to sail close to the wind.”
“Uh-huh.” Ophelia hasn’t a clue what that means. It sounds nice, but how can you be close to wind? Wind is always either right with you, pushing on you, or perpetually rushing by and leaving you behind, depending on how you look at it. Lateen, that’s what Pim called the triangle sails. She will remember that.
—
Two days later, Ophelia doesn’t care whether the sails are shaped like snowflakes. She would kill for some drugs. Gravol. Better yet, something that would render her totally unconscious. Like death, only you get to come back.
Her stomach shakes like an empty bag, and her gut and throat convulse. She reaches for the bucket. It’s just yellow-green stuff coming out now, a thin, slimy bitterness. The muscles of her stomach and ribs ache with heaving. It’s true what they say: it comes in waves, like the sea she’s on.
The feeling ranges from fevered convulsions to a narrowed-down, squeezing, feeble feeling like she’s nearly dead. She wishes she were dead. The knowledge that people don’t usually die from seasickness induces deep despair.
It’s not even stormy, according to Doctor Capricus.
“I’ve never been on a boat before,” she gasps.
“You will adjust.” His voice goes up and down in pitch a lot, like the ship. “It is a . . . corkscrewing moooootion, a difficult moooootion, but once we are well out to sea it will be more regular.” He pats her forehead. “You will improve.”
“Go away,” she whispers. She’s going to spew again. Alone, she is able to slide into half-conscious misery, curled on her side in the tiny wooden cabin. The scent of wood and tar, which she had thought charming when she’d first boarded, now seem like stale exhalations of hell.
After a time, she feels the moooootion change, just like the doctor said it would. The ship slants up and down, rather than spiralling and heaving. And the heaves are longer. It’s like a great leviathan cradles the frail vessel on its back as it dives and returns, dives and returns.
When next she awakens it’s from a kind of dream-remembering. The fleet sailing down the great river, then coming out into the wide green-blue of Doctor Bay. Feeling the beginning of the ocean’s roll under the ship. Calabar rising tier upon tier, red roofs glowing against the vivid green slopes behind. The people, lining the riverbanks and the ruined harbour, cheering. Everyone, on board and off, singing, and realizing they are singing “Walk the Line.” How did they all learn that song? Did they know it before?
They are setting sail for Kalmar. The names of the two cities are so close that when you say them out loud, they are difficult to distinguish. Why would you name two cities like that on one small island?
She remembers then that conversation with Rowan, the surge of joy she felt, the powerful connection between them. She remembers, too, the map at his house, the shock of recognition. No cities were marked on it. But of course, that map is from the 1400s. Maybe things have changed in Antilia since then.
The way she is starting to understand it, Antilia has always and yet never existed.
She herself named Calabar. She remembers doing it; suddenly the memory is there, clear and piercing. She wanted to find out where her people may have come from, her father’s people. His deep voice, his arms around her. She was sitting in his lap and they were looking at his great big world atlas. “I am a great believer in books,” he liked to say. He helped Ophelia turn the pages. “There. That place.” It is green, nestled against a blue ocea
n. “Can you read that word?”
She had sounded out the first letter. N.
“Good. Ni? Then what’s that?”
“Guh.”
“Good. Try juh.”
“Ni-juh.” She wanted so much to please him, to see that smile on his face, hear that deep note of delight creep into his voice.
“Yes. Then the next part’s a bit hard. Want me to help you?”
Ophelia could already read, but only children’s books. She remembers looking at the word and then admitting that she wanted her father to help, yes.
He moved his finger along the word. “Ni-juh-air-ee-a.”
“Ni . . . juh . . . eria.”
“Yes!” He hugged her, wriggling his chin in her hair, making her giggle. “Nigeria.”
He left behind his dictionary and his atlas when he moved away. They were the things she had to remember him by. His things, his books, his name.
She’d already visited Pim, of course—Pim had always been with her—but she hadn’t thought about what the city was called. Maybe it was a year or two after her father was gone, but she remembers now. She had liked to open the atlas and study Jamaica, and sometimes also that place in Africa where her people, who weren’t her mother’s people, might have come from.
Nigeria.
And that city on the coast.
Calabar.
If she herself had named the southern Antilian city after this “real” one—even though Nigeria is more of a dream to Ophelia than Antilia now—how did the city they are to invade get its name? Kalmar. Is it a “real” city, too, she wonders? Did Rowan name it? Maybe. But Rowan is not here. She just wants to believe he has been. That they share this. That they are in this together. Foolish girl.
It feels like the boat is climbing a mountain—a pause, a twist—the vessel slides down again. Ophelia’s body shakes. And this is a calm sort of day. What will happen if there’s another tsunami while they are at sea? There could be another earthquake. A crack could open in the bottom of the ocean and the entire fleet could pour over the edge, tumbling down a waterfall a mile deep, swallowed.
At least then she won’t be seasick; she’ll be dead.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Close To The Wind
There’s someone in the cabin with Ophelia.
She comes out of the long fall down, down into the darkness of the nightmare waterfall, and sees a white face floating in the dimness. She looks for a while; she’s not scared or anything, she has no strength. The face is topped by a shock of stiff hair, a bit like a Mohawk. The face has dark eyes; they look black in the dimness of the cabin.
She’s seen him before.
It’s a man, this person. He crouches by the bed with his arms encircling his knees.
He was part of the welcoming committee, right?
Muscular arms, big hands like her father’s.
When he sees she’s awake, he leans over, looking at something below him, and there’s a sound of water trickling. Then he comes up with a cloth, cool and wet, which he folds and places on Ophelia’s forehead.
It feels heavenly.
“You should drink,” he says. Deep voice. Familiar.
If she drinks there will be more stuff in her stomach and she will hurl. Ophelia shakes her head, a little movement on the sweat-soaked pillow.
“Try,” says the man, and he puts one of his big hands under her head and gently raises her head up, places a metal cup to her lips.
The water feels nice down her throat. She sips, and then drinks. “Thanks,” she says. She lies there as he lets her head down, like a baby. She feels like a baby. She can’t move.
She drifts off again.
When she wakes, it’s almost dark but he’s still there, his dead-white face a glimmer in the shadows. As before, he stirs when she does.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“John Canoe.”
A pause.
“I never saw you before, on my other visits here,” she says, realizing it. “Before the welcoming committee.”
“I have been around.” He pauses for so long that she starts to drift off again, and then he says, “Thirteen years.”
She doesn’t know if this means he’s been on a thirteen-year trip, or that he’s been nearby all this time. She doesn’t really care. The motion of the boat is almost soothing now. She falls asleep.
—
The next time she wakes, the man with the white face is gone. But as she opens her eyes, dry tongue tracing the outline of her lips, she realizes that she feels different. Better. Hungry.
It’s light out; maybe it’s dawn? The boat is noisy, it creaks and adjusts around her. Footsteps overhead, voices. She sees a hand suspended in the air, swaying with the movement of the ship; Pim. There’s another small bunk above her and Pim is curled on it, mouth open, snoring gently.
Ophelia ducks her head to get out of her bunk—really more of a wooden box built into the tiny cabin—and quietly opens the door.
The freshness hits her. The wind’s almost cold—it feels good. She can smell her own sour sweat on her body, and the sick smell; she’s grateful for the wind that whisks it away. The ship is skimming over waves, up and down; it’s actually not unpleasant. People—men and women and a few like The Gor—move business-like around the ship, and white, square sails belly out overhead. She sees Pest, climbing with another boy up some ropes, laughing, like an ordinary kid. He sees her when he gets up to the top of the mast.
She waves. “Be careful!”
He waves cheerfully back.
The boat gives an especially big heave and Ophelia staggers, coming up against a wooden railing. She grabs it with her hand, then looks fearfully up at Pest—has the jolt dislodged him? No, now he’s scampering down another rope, quick as a monkey. Is she the only person who gets seasick?
The sun is well up in the sky, and the water is blue, with gold where the light catches it.
“You’re better?”
It’s the man with the white face. He leans on the railing next to her, looking out to sea. He’s wearing pale short pants made of canvas, tied at the knee; like everyone on the ship, he is barefoot. Except for the skin on his face he is black, and also very muscular. His hair sticks up stiffly on his head, about three inches long, and grows down his spine in a ridge.
“Thank you for taking care of me.”
“The doctor was busy with some other things,” the man says.
She tries to remember his name. “John?” she tries out, and he smiles. His eyes crinkle up when he smiles and there are frown lines etched between his barely-there eyebrows. His teeth look yellow next to the white of his face.
“Canoe,” he adds.
That’s a strange name, she’s about to say, then doesn’t because of course everything is strange here.
She sees other ships sailing along with them. There are the little boats with their triangle—lateen—sails, and big ones like the one she’s on, with tiers and small cabins and decks and fancy carvings. Some have figureheads, images carved in wood at the front of the ship, but oddly enough, they’re not mermaids, which is what she thinks figureheads usually are at home, anyway. There’s a dolphin, a seal, something that looks like maybe a shark, and is that a penis? She feels her face heating, then realizes it’s a squid-thing, legs writhing underneath its shaft of a head, carved in a graceful tangle of curves around the front of its boat.
“Do we have a figurehead?” she murmurs, craning her neck to see.
“A what?” John asks.
“Like that,” she says and she points at a dolphin boat cutting over the waves nearby. “That carving at the front.”
“Oh, you mean the boat-spirit.” He smiles again. “We have a starfish. Very good luck.”
They stand in silence for a while, and then Ophelia thinks to ask, “Were you in the city when the wave hit?”
John Canoe shakes his head. “I was with the boats, on the lake.”
“You’re lucky.”
&n
bsp; “Like I said. Starfish.”
Ophelia sidles carefully along the railing as the boat heaves and lurches. A particularly big lurch sends her staggering against the rail with a little cry.
“You will find your sea legs,” the man says. “Don’t worry.”
“I rather doubt that,” she says, but it’s encouraging just the same. She gets near the front of the ship, and peers over. Sure enough there’s a giant starfish, painted a beautiful purple-pink, arms spread protectively over the boat as it slices through the water.
It’s a bit unnerving standing there, watching the boat tip down into the troughs between waves, then climbing up the slope—teetering on the top—then sliding down again. She does not like it.
There’s a shout, and she turns to watch the crew swarm up the ropes, doing something with the sails. The thought of climbing anything in the boat makes her feel queasy again.
“You’re in good hands,” John Canoe says, following her gaze. “Only the best for our Chosen.” He bows to her. But he does it smiling, and she smiles back as she does an abbreviated curtsey, one hand still clutching the rail. Then he says, “Are you hungry?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“Stay out in the air, that’s best,” he says, and turning, he disappears into a door so small he has to bend in two to get inside.
She wonders if he means she should eat air. She is hungry, she realizes, and thirsty, too. Ophelia turns to face the way they’re going, and raises her face to the sun. It’s on her left, which means they’re heading south. That’s weird, she thinks, there’s nothing south. Is the Mender sending them out to the nothingness of the wide open ocean?
The man comes out of the tiny door hunched over, holding in his hands a bottle and a loaf of bread. He’s closely followed by a round woman in a white apron with a kerchief over her head, carrying some fruit and a small wheel of cheese. Over her arm is draped a red and white checked cloth like you’d find in a little Italian restaurant.