After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

  “We need to get her warm,” I told Daniel, running up the coast ahead of him to find driftwood. Marjan breathed in shallow bursts and struggled to keep her eyes open. I knew there might not be more we could do than keep her comfortable.

  I stumbled to my knees in the wet sand and cursed. We were miles from the inlet where I’d told Pearl to go. Abran was gone. Pearl was gone. None of it was how it should be.

  My head rang and I kept blinking, trying to settle my vision. Rocks loomed up and seemed to float in space, as if I were still on water. Noises blared in my ears, stirring panic in me. Even the sunlight seemed too bright somehow. Calm down, I told myself. Do the next thing.

  I scooped up a few pieces of driftwood and Wayne followed me, searching the beach for kindling. I squinted against the wind whipping the sand up from the beach, fearing that we wouldn’t be able to start a fire. I scraped lichen from rocks with the back of my knife and tucked it in my pockets.

  I scanned the shoreline to the east and west. I couldn’t see any sign of Pearl or the canoe. I tried to find hope in not seeing a canoe floating alone on the waves or broken up beside the rocky shore. But the pit in my stomach lurched and grew. I wanted to leave them and go look for Pearl.

  You need to settle down and come up with a plan, I thought. Get your bearings. You’re going to need help. I forced myself to look down at my feet for driftwood.

  Daniel gently eased Marjan to the ground in a small hollow on the beach. He helped her recline against a large black rock. A fallen tree trunk protected one side from the wind and a thorny bush protected the other. Thomas carefully lowered himself down next to Marjan, stretching his injured leg out straight in front of him.

  I dropped the packs and driftwood next to them, opening one pack and rummaging for matches. Daniel carefully peeled Marjan’s shirt away from the wound on her shoulder. Her eyes were closed and she wasn’t grimacing. She was already drifting away from us and the pain.

  I knelt in front of Marjan and arranged the driftwood into a pyramid. I stuffed lichen and dried leaves into the cracks. The first three matches were too damp to light, but the fourth did, and I shrouded it with my palms, blowing on the lichen to spread the flame to wood.

  Daniel ripped Marjan’s shirt in two and wrapped it around her shoulder in a makeshift bandage. I began to take my jacket off to lay it on her, but Daniel said, “Don’t. I’m already warm.” He took his jacket off and tucked it around Marjan’s upper body.

  Liar, I thought. Fresh blood pulsed from above her hip and I reached forward and gently felt around her side. Blood colored my fingertips. She winced and jerked away from my touch. Her face had grown as pale as yellowed antique china. I felt the rough edge of a broken arrow protruding from just above her hip. I’d thought all the blood had come from her shoulder wound.

  “There’s an arrowhead lodged above her hip,” I told Daniel in a whisper, hoping Marjan couldn’t hear. “The rest of the arrow must have broken off when she fell from the rigging.”

  “No wonder she’s lost so much blood,” Daniel muttered, running a hand over his face. “Keep her comfortable. Wayne and I are going to check the ship for extra supplies before it’s pulled apart by these waves.”

  Marjan turned her head toward me and tried to say something. Her throat worked against itself, trying to swallow. I brought a bottle of water to her lips and she took a sip.

  “Pearl?” Marjan asked.

  Pressure constricted my chest and I shook my head. “She . . . she’s lost. She’s not here.”

  Two seabirds took flight next to us, calling out to one another, their caws strident under the calm gray sky.

  Marjan reached out and took my hand and squeezed it once. “You do the hardest thing,” she whispered.

  I nodded, pressing back against the wave of emotion building in me. I felt like I was Sedna’s flotsam, crashing into the rocks, breaking into many pieces that would all sink, never coalesce.

  “Bury me at sea,” Marjan said. “I’ll be with the rest of them.”

  I thought of Marjan finding her daughter’s body stuck in that house. Had she been caught up in the curtains in a living room? Stuck in a windowless bathroom? I thought of Marjan turning her daughter over underwater, the cloud of her hair swirling around them, and seeing her face.

  I thought of the migrations. How once I passed a baby who nursed from her newly dead mother. What did it mean to enter an era without marked graves?

  But I nodded and squeezed her hand.

  Marjan’s eyelids fluttered and her lips moved, forming ghost words I couldn’t hear. It felt like she was reaching out one last time. I stroked the top of her hand with my thumb. She locked her dark eyes on mine, but I couldn’t tell what they said. I searched her eyes for blame, but only found a vague searching, as though she wanted to know her own name.

  With her other hand she clutched her necklace, her fingers moving over the four beads.

  I heard footsteps behind me.

  “We found blankets,” Daniel said, his voice stopping short and silence rushing in. He dropped a pile of wool blankets next to me.

  Marjan’s eyes fluttered shut and the hand at her necklace fell to her lap. Her hand in mine went limp.

  I leaned forward and brushed the hair from her face. Her skin felt surprisingly soft, after all these years. I tried to whisper a good-bye, but no words would come out. I couldn’t speak because I didn’t want to hear my own voice. I wanted to hear her melodious voice; I wanted her words.

  A dark heaviness grew in me, spreading from my chest to my limbs. I leaned back on my heels and looked out to sea. A bird crouched at the edge of a tide pool. Something living wriggled in its mouth.

  Chapter 52

  Daniel and Wayne pulled a door from the wreckage of the Lily Black and we laid Marjan’s body on it. I found some small purple flowers growing amid grass farther back from the shore, picked a bouquet, and set it between her hands. I wet a piece of cloth in the surf and scrubbed the blood from her skin. She lay pale and damp and cold, like a flower blooming underwater.

  Thomas laid two flat pebbles on her closed eyelids. I stayed by Marjan’s side as the others prepared for her burial. When I closed my eyes I still saw her face. I felt deadened, like my spirit had left my body and roamed somewhere else.

  A cape of rocks jutted into the sea and Wayne and Daniel carried her out onto it, Thomas and I trailing behind. I feared a wave would send her crashing back against the rocks once we put her in the sea, but the water had calmed as the tide began to slowly rise.

  Daniel and Wayne climbed down through the rocks and eased the door onto the water. The sea pulled her away. We watched her drift away from us for a few moments and then a wave rose and swallowed her. We didn’t see her come back up.

  The sea became a still, smooth surface again. Seagulls cried overhead and several dove into the water, hunting where she had disappeared. The water taking her made me think of the man Pearl and I dropped into the sea before all of this had begun. The one who told me that Row was in the Valley. Back when it was just Pearl and me. Maybe this all had begun before even that. Maybe something in me was set, like an alarm, ready to go off. But I thought of this distantly, as if it had happened in another life, to another person.

  We were quiet as we headed back to the fire. Wayne set more driftwood on top of the embers. Thomas wrapped himself in a blanket. I tried to ground myself in simple movements, willing my mind to become steady and clear again. I washed the cloth we’d used as a bandage for Marjan. I knelt next to Thomas and cleaned the cut on his leg, hoping the salt water would help prevent infection until we could scavenge for medical supplies.

  Daniel piled everything he could find from the ship next to the fire. Cans of sardines, bags of flour. Jugs of clean water. A few jackets and a spare set of boots. More matches and a tiny tin of kerosene. Not as much as we’d hoped, but the hull was too battered and submerged to get into. The icy water would choke someone out before they could find anything. Daniel had only b
een able to search the cabin on deck.

  I began to allow myself to scan the sea and land for Pearl. A prayer kept buzzing on my tongue, willing her to appear around a rock or bend.

  I touched Daniel’s arm. “It’s time,” I said.

  He nodded. “When we get back we should break up wood from the ship.”

  I realized what he meant and looked at the few skinny aspens on the mountainside. Ever since we’d landed, my thoughts had been delayed and stuck; I’d noticed things a few moments after I looked at them. I made connections about what everything meant after it should have been obvious. We were stuck here, I now saw. We couldn’t build another ship from so little wood. If what was in the Valley wasn’t what we needed . . . I didn’t let myself finish the thought.

  “I have to go find Pearl,” I told Wayne and Thomas.

  “Where is she?” Wayne asked, his brow furrowed.

  “I put her in the canoe,” I said.

  Wayne scanned the sea and I knew he was doubting that she had survived.

  “I told her to go to the Valley,” I explained. I wanted them to say that they were certain she was there and perfectly fine.

  “What about the epidemic?” Wayne asked. “Is it still active?”

  I felt a clench of fear. I didn’t know how long epidemics of the plague lasted in villages, but I’d heard fleas could carry the disease longer than humans or rodents.

  “Possibly,” I said. “But we need shelter, so we’ll have to risk it.” I squatted before the fire and stoked the flames with a stick. “We should get going before it gets any darker.”

  “Myra, just you and I will have to go,” Daniel said gently.

  “What?” I asked, glancing up at him. “We need help with the Lost Abbot guards. There are probably several of them still here.”

  “Shouldn’t we stick together?” Wayne asked Daniel. “She got us into this.”

  I stood up and brushed sand from the front of my pants. “I didn’t mean for all this to happen.” I wasn’t sure how much of the blame for our misfortune fell to me, but I felt all of it in my gut, a heaviness I couldn’t shake. It lay like a dull weight, right under the thrumming panic in my throat when I thought of Pearl.

  “This isn’t all her fault,” Daniel said.

  I held my palm out to stop Daniel. I couldn’t parse out what was and wasn’t my fault, but I could take responsibility for setting us on this course. “It is. It is my fault.”

  Wayne stopped short and stared at me, surprised. Then he turned and looked out to sea and shook his head. “I knew. Knew there had to be some other reason you were so hell-bent on getting here. But I still wanted to take a chance on it. Thought it could be good.” Wayne took a few steps forward; kicked a pebble into the sea foam. Wayne turned his eye on me like he was appraising me for the first time and finding something he didn’t expect.

  “Thomas can’t travel with that leg,” Daniel said. “He needs rest and warmth. And someone should stay on the coast to keep a lookout.” Daniel and Wayne exchanged looks. A Lost Abbot ship could sail through those icebergs any day to stop and collect taxes.

  Thomas stared out at the sea, his face pale, his arms shaking from fatigue or cold. “I’ll be fine here alone. Besides, how will you two find Pearl and deal with the guards?”

  “You’re too injured to be left alone. And besides, if there’s any trouble, you won’t be able to make it over the mountain alone. Maybe we’ll find Pearl without alerting the guards. Slip in, slip out,” Daniel said.

  Wayne shook his head. “Unlikely. No way they’d not recognize a new person.”

  “We don’t have time to plan this all out,” I said, grabbing my backpack. “We’ll have to take it as it comes.”

  Wayne looked at me and then nodded. “Thomas and I will stay behind and keep salvaging from the ship,” he said. “You two go on so we don’t slow you down.”

  Daniel pulled the map of the Valley from one of the packs and unfolded it.

  “We’ll have to go over the mountain,” Daniel said, his eyes on the cliffs to our right. “Those’re too steep to scale.” I looked up and saw a seagull dive from the cliff, over us, into the water. So that’s where they’d been diving from as they hunted the coastline.

  I grabbed the map from Daniel and pointed to it. “Shouldn’t we go first to the inlet? See if Pearl is there?” A part of me didn’t want to enter the Valley yet, afraid of what I’d find. Besides, what if she was at the inlet and we missed her entirely by going straight to the Valley? We were supposed to land at the inlet. This was never the plan. Behir, Jessa, Abran, Marjan, all dead. Pearl, missing. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. My mind kept shuddering away from the facts, kept reaching for something else to be true. This can’t be how it ends for us, I thought.

  “It’s at least twelve miles,” Daniel said, pointing to the length of coastline that separated us from the inlet. “You told her to head for the Valley. If I know her, she’s already there.”

  Already there. Alone, in the cold.

  I gritted my teeth and nodded once. I turned toward the fire and squatted before the supplies, rolling up a jacket from the pile. “Well, help me. We’ll need to take some of this with us,” I said.

  Chapter 53

  Daniel and I climbed steadily for two hours before the dark set in. There were so few trees that it felt like we were the only things between the mountain and the black sky, which pressed down on us like a flat palm. The wind whipped our skin raw and took the breath from our mouths. I could smell moss and wet rock, but little else. Often when I was on land I smelled wood smoke, salted fish, the bustle of other bodies around a port. But here it felt like we were alone in the world, the only two people left.

  On the map, the distance between the coast where we landed and the Valley was marked as six miles, so Daniel and I guessed we could make it in several hours. But the cold and rough terrain wore us down faster than we expected. I couldn’t feel my face or hands or toes anymore. Daniel held a small lantern in front of us, but it would burn out before dawn. The stars were shrouded by clouds and the moon was a thin scythe, offering only the lightest veil of light.

  “We have to stop for a bit,” Daniel said.

  I heard an animal scurry across a rock into shrubs several feet away. Startled, I stared into the dark after it, seeing only shadows.

  “Let’s keep on,” I said, pulling the map out of my pocket, my hands shaking as I tried to hold it in the lantern light.

  Daniel snatched the map from my hand. “We’ll freeze. We’re lighting a fire, here, now. There’s a rock there. It will block the wind.”

  The wind pushed against my back and I braced myself against it, wavering like a sapling in a storm. Something hot rose in my throat and sweat broke out along my neck.

  “Hey,” Daniel said gently, touching my arm. “We’re not going to reach her any faster until we pause and get our bearings.”

  Something in me was breaking against my will, my resolve slipping away. I nodded and collapsed behind a tall jagged rock. A cluster of small, prickly trees grew to the right of the rock, giving us some break from the wind. We got the fire started and huddled next to it, wool blankets pulled around us and over our heads. Daniel studied the map by the firelight, pulling out his compass and checking the position of the moon. I leaned close to the fire, letting it heat my face.

  “We’re on track. It should only be another hour. Take a few sips of water,” he said, handing me the canteen.

  I held it limply and thought of Pearl, alone in the cold. I tried to remember what she had been wearing when I put her on the canoe. A light blue sweater, a brown pair of trousers, and the boots Daniel had bought her. Her little red handkerchief sticking out of her back pocket. A wool stocking hat. No gloves that I could remember. I closed my eyes and winced, squeezing my hands into fists and opening them again in front of the fire, letting them drop so close I felt a burn.

  “Myra,” Daniel said sharply. He leaned forward, caught my wrists, and pulled
my hands back. “Stop it.”

  I want to feel something, I thought. My eyes searched his.

  “It’s not going to change anything,” he said, as though he read my thoughts.

  “I need her more than she needs me,” I said. The words came unbidden to my lips.

  Daniel didn’t say anything at first. He watched the fire and I wondered if he’d even heard me.

  “That’s not true,” he finally said, his voice soft.

  My hope that Pearl and Row and I could all be together again had been a vision that couldn’t be true. Ungrounded, foolish hope. A bird without wings.

  I couldn’t wrap my head around it. The journey, the storm, the attack. How I’d deceived the crew in the beginning. How we came all this way for Row and now I’d lost Pearl. It felt just and cruel, some ancient order rising up and asserting itself, Sedna sending sea creatures up from the depths of the sea, determining the fates of men.

  “What did you feel?” I asked. “When your brother . . .”

  Grass shuddered in the wind and the trees shifted and echoed down the mountainside. Daniel picked a berry off a bush next to us, squeezed it between his thumb and finger until it burst.

  “It didn’t feel right. It felt . . . incomplete. Empty. I wanted to rectify what I’d lost.” Daniel shook his head. “You can’t always rectify something; you can only rebuild.”

  Daniel stoked the fire with a stick, ashes crumbling from driftwood and scattering on the wind.

  “What if I can’t find either of them?” I asked, my voice catching.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Daniel said. He didn’t move; his face was as still as a carved stone. The firelight cast shadows flickering across his face. An owl’s hoot broke the silence and its yellow eyes glowed a few yards away in a tree.

  “Jessa . . . Abran . . . Marjan . . .” I began.