After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

  Marjan noticed me watching her. “She was seven when the water reached Arkansas,” she said. I quickly looked away. I didn’t really want to hear her story; I didn’t know how close I wanted to get to these people. I was scared of them, scared mostly of their kindness. It brought something out in me I didn’t recognize—something that felt both tough and tender, like some living thing underground that I’d forgotten about. Something that had shriveled without oxygen, without attention, but still survived.

  “That’s when we traveled west, to the Rockies. She . . . she died on our journey there. Maybe in Kansas, Oklahoma. I don’t know. The water pulled her out of my hands. Then Behir and I got separated from his father and brother during a flash flood.” Marjan’s voice went quiet. I had the feeling she had told this story over and over in her own head, trying to make sense of what had happened and never finding any.

  “They never surfaced. I . . . I don’t think they made it. If I had been with them when the flood came . . .” She shook her head. Her face was tight, but her eyes didn’t fill with tears. “Might not have made a difference.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  Marjan nodded thoughtfully, offering me a small smile as though to comfort me.

  “You watch your girl,” she said.

  “I will,” I said, my chest tight.

  We fell into quiet, our heads dipped over the hooks, the small fish squirming in our fingers. Abran exited the cabin and we both looked up at him. He smiled our way before climbing up the mast to adjust the sail. He still wore the bandanna around his neck.

  “He likes you,” Marjan said.

  “He seems like the type of person who likes everybody,” I said.

  “Mmm. Not really. He’s a good captain, though. He takes things very seriously. This new community. He’s been planning it and working toward it for four years now. Very slowly building up resources and a good crew. He does sometimes . . . let the pressure get to him. It can all be lost very easily.”

  Marjan looked at me out of the corner of her eye, studying my face. She seemed to be measuring me, trying to figure out if I’d be the weak link.

  We finished hooking the anchovies and strung lines through the pole eyes and cast them over the side of the boat.

  “He knows the other way it can be,” Marjan said. “The other way you can live. That drives him.”

  I know about that, too, I wanted to say. How to live one way; how to live without.

  Chapter 18

  Abran burst into the cabin during breakfast.

  “Okay, they’re about a half mile away. Do we have the baskets ready?” he asked.

  Marjan pointed to the baskets of fish lined against the wall near the kitchen curtain. Abran clapped his hands together. “Okay, first trade in a while. These people are great, we should get some good stuff. Let’s get in position.”

  At daybreak Abran had spotted a friend’s ship and flagged it over for a trade. Before breakfast I had rushed about the deck, checking the fish I had caught and smoked and loading it in baskets. These were friends he had traded with many times before in the Caribbean, and he was hoping to not only get a good trade for the fish, but hear news of the south.

  “I’m thrilled to see them again,” Abran had told me. “I’d heard rumors that they’d been attacked by a raiding tribe.”

  Once they were close enough, we threw a rope over to them so our ships would anchor each other. Their ship was close to the size of Sedna, but more weathered and neglected. There were holes in the sails, missing rope and block from some of the rigging, and cracked, dry wood along the hull.

  Abran, Wayne, and I boarded their ship for the trade by dropping our canoe into the water, paddling closer to them, and climbing a ladder they’d dropped. I stayed in the canoe with the baskets of fish and Wayne dropped a rope over the side so he could pulley them up. Once all the fish were lifted onto their ship, I climbed the ladder myself.

  When I climbed over the gunwale I was hit by a stench: a smell of rotten fish, feces, and decay. I glanced at Abran and saw shock on his face. A short, portly, elderly man with white hair and pale, sunburned skin hobbled toward us, wearing a threadbare tunic. The ship felt like a ghost ship, and I wondered if anyone else was on board.

  “Robert,” Abran said, shaking the man’s hand. “It’s been too long.”

  “Too long indeed,” Robert said in a high-pitched voice that sounded like a horse’s whinny.

  “We brought fish to trade,” Abran said, proudly gesturing to the baskets of fish.

  “Lovely,” Robert said, eyeing the fish. “Haven’t eaten in days.”

  My shoulders tensed. He was clearly lying. Even Abran’s exuberance was beginning to fade, a line forming between his eyebrows as he studied his old friend.

  “And you?” Abran asked, looking around their ship for what they had to offer.

  “Nothing to trade, I’m afraid,” Robert said.

  “But you responded with the trade flag,” Abran said. Once we had raised the trading flag—a blue flag with two yellow hands—they had raised their trading flag in return.

  “You shouldn’t have waved us over if you didn’t have anything to trade,” Wayne said.

  Robert grinned and was quiet. The entire ship was too quiet. I wanted to scramble back over the ladder into the canoe.

  “Mary!” Robert called toward the cabin on the poop deck.

  A woman came out of the cabin and I stifled a gasp. Her eyes had been plucked out, scar tissue thick and white in place of where her eyes had been. Blood vessels threaded through the scar tissue like thin red rivers. She stood in the doorway of the cabin, facing us as if on display. The woman was heavyset, much better fed than anyone I’d seen in a long while.

  Abran took a step backward, almost stumbling, shock tightening his face. “Mary . . .” he whispered. Abran looked at Robert. “Who did this to you?”

  “We’ve not been well, my friend,” Robert said. He clasped his hands in front of him and seemed oddly satisfied. “Now we rely on the goodness of others.” Robert spread his arms wide.

  Abran squinted at Robert. “What happened to you? This isn’t you.” Abran’s muscles had gone tense, his body poised to lunge at his friend. My heart hammered in my chest.

  Robert shrugged. “We weren’t making it on our own. There isn’t enough fish.”

  The blind woman walked toward us, and a man came out of the cabin behind her, holding a sawed-off shotgun. Abran took another step back, holding his arms out and pushing Wayne and me behind him.

  “Robert, don’t do this. The rest of my crew is at the ready,” Abran said.

  Wayne pushed Abran’s arm out of the way and pulled his pistol from the holster.

  “Wayne, calm down,” Abran said.

  “I think we all know how this will go,” Robert said. “You’ve already boarded. How will your crew get you back, full of bullets?”

  Wayne cocked his pistol and raised it and Abran swore at him and pressed his arm back down.

  “We don’t want to hurt you. We just want something to eat,” Robert said, patting his stomach and grinning.

  Abran scanned the ship quickly, searching for an out. My hands had gone cold and clammy. Abran’s face had sharpened into wrath, his brows pulled together, his jaw set tight. He’ll do what he wants, I thought. Abran talks about stability because he doesn’t have it within him; he needs to surround himself with it. I felt like the world was slipping away from me and I needed to reach out and grasp it.

  “I’ll get more,” I muttered to Abran. “I’ll get us more.”

  He kept staring at Robert and didn’t seem to register my voice. In a short glimmering moment, the sun hot on our backs, the water buzzing with light, I thought Abran would charge Robert, his body poised to pounce, but the moment snapped shut and Abran raised his hands.

  “Fine. Fine,” Abran said, spitting the words out.

  “Abran—” Wayne said.

  “To the ladder. Now!” Abran bellowed. He turned to
ward the rope ladder.

  Wayne narrowed his eyes and, without holstering his pistol, climbed over the gunwale onto the ladder.

  Robert smiled again and bent to pick up a fish from the basket, weighing it in his palm. I felt a flutter of fury but stepped back, trying to usher Abran onto the ladder.

  “You still going south?” Robert asked as Abran swung his leg over the gunwale.

  Abran glared at him.

  “There’s no good land left in the Andes,” Robert said. “That’s my gift to you, old friend. A bit of knowledge. Don’t go south. I can’t tell you of all the people going there looking for a place to settle. Dying along the way, only to arrive with half their crew to a packed village or a rocky coastline where they can’t even dock. You’ll have to go elsewhere.” Robert grinned, his smile mostly a grimace. “Not sure where.”

  Chapter 19

  After we got back on Sedna Wayne raged about revenge, about bombing them and sinking them. Abran disappeared to his quarters and Marjan was left to calm Wayne down.

  “Couple baskets of fish,” she said. “It’s best we move on. We run across them again, you can be sure they’ll get something else from us.”

  In spite of this, I could tell she was furious, rubbing her beads between her fingers, her eyes narrowed and her voice sharp.

  Over the next two weeks we all stayed busy with work around the ship, repairing a crack in the mast, fishing, mending nets, and sailing south. When I’d asked Abran if we should consider Richard’s comment about the south, Abran had shaken his head and turned away from me.

  Pearl and I visited with the other crew members as we worked, but Daniel kept to himself. He only talked with Pearl about his maps and charts, teaching her how to use a sextant and compass. When I came into the cabin to get some extra twine and stood at the shelves, rummaging through the boxes, he came up behind me and laid his hands on my shoulders and asked me how I was. When I turned and looked at him, I felt strangely unmoored and I stepped away.

  “Fine,” I said. “I can’t believe we’re going south after what—”

  “He still thinks it’s the best option. He’s captain.”

  I nodded and returned to the deck to check our lines. A few hours later Pearl and I caught two trevally, and when we dropped the net to bottom-trawl, we caught twenty pounds of shrimp and a few cod and rockfish. We loaded our catch into buckets and baskets while Thomas and Marjan helped set up the smoke tripod.

  “I knew we’d be glad to have you,” Abran said, surveying the fish. He reached out and touched my arm and smiled.

  I smiled back. I hadn’t expected to fulfill my promise so quickly after we’d been robbed, but I was grateful for it. I could use this good standing.

  I often caught Abran watching Pearl and me while we fished, his gaze like the sun on my back. When I’d turn to look at him he’d look away. While reeling in lines or scaling fish, I’d think of the tenor of his voice in the morning, the slight huskiness sleep left behind. At the breakfast table I’d catch myself looking at his hands. I’d pull my attention back to what Pearl was telling me about an old map she’d found of the world before.

  At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d wonder what he’d do if I knocked on his door. I could hear Daniel snoring above us, his breath heavy. He barely moved when he slept, as if his mind had evaporated from his body, leaving him hollow and thick with stillness. Unlike me, who tossed and turned, my dreams bubbling up out of unconsciousness, thrashing my limbs and grinding my teeth, awakening to the sounds of other people sleeping.

  That night the whole crew was in high spirits over our good catch and Wayne pulled out his handmade guitar after supper. It was a wooden box with wires strung tight over a hole in the middle, and Wayne played a few old Irish ballads on it. Abran brought moonshine up from the storage room and we passed the bottle around. Marjan, who could almost never be found doing anything but working, even set down the straw hat she was weaving to listen to Wayne play and laugh at Jessa’s attempts to dance a jig. The ship creaked and moaned, the wind pushing us to the right, the floor tilting slightly. The kerosene lamp rocked on its hook. Thomas and Daniel were deep in conversation and Pearl stood in front of Wayne, clapping as he finished a song.

  “Do ya wanna know why she’s named Sedna?” Behir asked Pearl.

  She nodded.

  “She doesn’t need to hear this story. She’s just a child,” Abran said, taking another swig of whiskey. He had a slight slur and he slouched back in his chair, more relaxed than I’d ever seen him before.

  Wayne set the guitar down on the table and chuckled. “There are no children anymore. Besides, this story is about a child.”

  He said it almost with menace. I’d felt this menace in taverns and shops at ports before. The sidelong glances and tightening around the lips when people saw Pearl. Children were both a reminder of loss and a kind of rebuttal of it.

  With their vulnerable faces and skin not yet tough from the sun, they were a reminder of life before, when we all could be a bit more tender. Children had been the future, but did we even want the future anymore? The question itself was an uncomfortable betrayal of our bodies and of history, our inevitable march forward through time. Who were we without people who would come after us?

  I turned from Wayne and asked Abran, “Who named her Sedna?”

  “Thomas picked the name. He’s been with me the longest, helped me get all this started,” Abran said.

  Thomas smiled at me. “We need the Mother of the Sea on our side, considering the circumstances,” he said with amusement.

  Pearl climbed into the chair next to Behir. “There once was a girl,” Behir began, “who was a giant and the daughter of a god. But because she was a giant she was very hungry, so hungry that she attacked her parents so she could eat them. To protect themselves, the mother and father had to take the daughter away. The father took his daughter on his kayak, telling her he would take her to an island far away. But when they were out in the ocean, he threw her over the side so she would drown. She clung to the side of the kayak, begging for her life, but her father cut her fingers off. She drifted to the bottom of the seafloor, where she rules over the monsters of the deep. Her fingers became seals, walruses, and whales. Sedna is a vengeful sea goddess, and if you do not please her you will see her anger in the swells of the sea and she will not release fish for you to catch.”

  Behir lifted his hands and wiggled his fingers, and Pearl giggled.

  “What does she look like?” Pearl asked.

  “She has snakes for hair and blue skin,” Behir said.

  “I want to look like that. What happened to her parents?”

  “Not sure. Story doesn’t say.”

  “I think they ended up in the sea, too,” Pearl said.

  Marjan began collecting the plates, the aroma of vegetables and fish still heavy in the air. Pearl had begun to put on weight since we joined Sedna, but that wasn’t the only way she’d changed. She was more open with other people, less sullen and more lighthearted.

  As the sun set, Thomas, Jessa, Behir, and Wayne left the cabin for their evening duties and Daniel offered to take Pearl down to the quarters and tuck her in. Abran wrapped up the leftover fish and Marjan and I wiped down the dishes. We were quiet, letting the revelry of the evening fade into silence.

  When we were finished with the dishes, Marjan and I turned to leave.

  “Myra,” Abran said. “Will you stay a minute?”

  I sat down next to Abran.

  “I wanted to check in and see how things have been going.” Abran set his mug of moonshine down on the table, the hammered tin a dull bronze. His face was flushed.

  I told him things were going well and waited for him to speak. He seemed like he had other things on his mind.

  “Can I ask . . . Daniel—how’d you meet him?” Abran asked.

  “I rescued him after a storm.”

  “And you trust him?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” I asked.

  Abr
an shrugged. “I get a weird feeling from him. He spends a lot of time poring over maps and notes.”

  “He’s diligent,” I said defensively.

  Abran nodded and paused. “I hope you aren’t too disappointed that we aren’t going to that place,” he said.

  “It’s fine,” I said quickly. “Just heard good things about it. Do you think Robert was telling the truth? About the south?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” Abran said, rubbing his palm over his face. He looked like a wounded boy, lost and alone, his eyes glazed over with astonishment at where he’d ended up.

  “Did he do that to her? The woman with no eyes?” I asked.

  “No. Mary is his niece. The rumors I’d heard were true. They must have been attacked by raiders and spared if they became a beggar ship. The raiders torture crew members until captains agree to their terms. Robert wouldn’t have submitted otherwise.” Abran shook his head. “Not the Robert I knew.”

  “I’ve only heard of breeding ships,” I said.

  “The Lily Black just began making beggar ships, and a few other raiding tribes have followed. Beggar ships acts like merchants, pretending they want a trade. Once they steal your goods they deliver them to whichever tribe owns them and get to keep a good cut of it themselves.”

  I could tell the change in Robert had hit Abran hard, harder than he wanted to let on. Losing people through betrayal was the hardest. I reached out and squeezed Abran’s hand.

  Abran looked up at me. “This is why I have to do this. I made a promise. That I’d do something right.”

  “Who’d you promise?” I asked.

  “My brother,” he said, taking another swig of moonshine. “That’s not what I want to talk about. I want to tell you about the community we’re building.”

  He went on to describe a democratic community where everyone had a vote and everyone had a job. Where children were safe and the elderly were cared for. Where trading was only done with reputable traders and boundaries were enforced by a small military. I didn’t understand what was new about his idea, how it was realistic. Even if you could create this sort of haven, you’d forever be defending it from someone trying to take it. Hadn’t people always tried to create a safe haven, only to have it slip from their fingers, more elusive than the fish of the deep?