The Book of Flora

by Meg Elison

  When the coast was clear, I went to my own vault. I hadn’t told anyone about it, and now I don’t know why. There’s a small trapdoor in the room where I have my office in the council building. The space beneath is short, so that I have to stoop when I stand. There was an old chest down here when I found it. Inside, there were a few century-old bottles of whiskey, a rusted metal can of coffee, a Bible, and some capsules marked with the old-world symbol for poison. The coffee was stale and useless; I added it to my compost. I’ve read about it, but I don’t think I’ll ever taste any in my life. The whiskey I’ve still got. I’m saving it for a very bad day. We’ve got Bibles far beyond what we need in the Bambritch library, and this one was unremarkable. The chest was in good shape, though.

  I’ve got the Books of the Unnamed. Some of what we brought out of Nowhere were her originals, others were scribed copies. I think the whole thing is here. Those go down first. I have the collection of Eddy’s that he left with me, and those I have to let my hands linger over for just a minute. It’s been so long since he’s been gone, I don’t understand how it can still dig at me so. Then, the few books I’ve gathered here; the stories I’ve scribed from others who’ve come through Bambritch and some from those who’ve stayed.

  On top of these I will lay my books, tomorrow before the army gets here. I’ll seal the chest and lay the rug on top of the trapdoor. If they burn the office down, the chest will survive. I’ve made sure of that. The Bambritch library may not be so lucky.

  I can scarcely go there anymore. It makes me think of Eddy.

  CHAPTER 35

  The Book of Flora

  The Ursula

  Cold rain at sea, winter

  104N

  The coast of California drifts by slowly. The currents are sluggish and the wind is nonexistent. We barely go ashore. We find oranges, sometimes. Smaller than what we saw in Florda. We see no people.

  There are ruins of huge buildings, all crumbling into the sea. We harvest oysters and clams from their overflowing beds in the mud, sitting and feasting on them on the deck of the ship. Connie insists on roasting theirs over a small brazier, holding the half shell between metal tongs.

  “Perfect waste of a good oyster,” says Bodie, who eats the bivalves live as fast as he can pop them open with his short knife. He shows the trick to Alice, who is neat-handed. Eddy manages on his own, shredding the shells and cursing to himself.

  I cut myself once, wrap my hand in silk, and go again. I’ve about got the hang of it now. Each oyster is like a whole sea made miniature in the mouth.

  Connie makes a face as I gulp another. “They’re like when you’ve got a cough that brings up snot out of your chest.”

  Bodie laughs. “They’re like a mouthful of cunt, boy.”

  “I’m not a boy,” Connie shoots back, but they’re blushing.

  I never considered that before, but as Bodie says it I can tell what he means. It’s the same kind of briny satisfaction and slippery wonder. Alice smiles sweetly at him and Eddy stares at them both like looks could kill. I hope we meet some other people here, soon.

  Night on the coast is anything but silent. Close to the shore, there is the chattering of a thousand kinds of night bird. The evening is warm and they’re all about their business of fucking and squawking. Insects sing in the grasses and in the trees, too. Bats and owls overhead, after everything that crawls. If there were people here, it makes sense that they’d be active at night. But there are no fires, and no sound of humans.

  We throw the anchor out a mile away from the shore and we can hear the strange songs of the whales that swim below us.

  Connie comes to me, wide eyed and shaking. “What is that?”

  I open my eyes, knowing I was hearing the sound already in my dreams. Eddy is up too, his hand on the inside of the hull.

  “It’s an animal. In the water.”

  I nod.

  The three of us head up top and interrupt Bodie at the business of pleasuring Alice. Alice looks up alarmed, pats him on his bare shoulder. He comes up, his face shining, wiping his chin as though he’s been eating fruit.

  “What is it?”

  Connie’s face is purple in the dim moonlight. “What’s that sound?”

  As they speak, it comes again. It’s so low I can feel it vibrating in my chest, the sound cresting to a shimmer and then changing to the rain-lapping sound of spray.

  “There!” Eddy is pointing just off the aft.

  “Whales,” Bodie says. “Just a pod of whales passing by. They sing to one another.”

  We follow Eddy’s pointing arm and see them. They’re impossibly huge in the water, their backs breaching in sections so long and wide that they seem like islands being born in the moonlight. The spray from their blowholes mists back slowly to the sea, fine as fog.

  Connie’s close to me all at once, wrapping both their arms around my one. I pull it out slowly, gently, and feel them pull away. I wrap it around their shoulders and bring them back close.

  “It’s okay,” I whisper. “They don’t care about us at all. They’re here for each other, just passing us by.”

  “One of them could swallow me whole,” they whisper.

  “I don’t think they do that,” I tell them, though I am not sure.

  Bodie strolls up behind us, with Alice in tow. “It’s true. They’re not like sharks. They’ve no interest in men.”

  Connie relaxes a little but stays close to me.

  There are so many of them, passing by us in the night. We see their shining skins and spumes pass for what seems like hours. None of us can sleep. The night is too alive.

  Bodie lights a little fire in the brazier. We don’t need it for warmth, but it’s nice to see each other’s faces.

  “My mother used to dive into the water with the whales,” he says. “We had them in the cold north, too. Different kinds. Orcas, in black and white, and they will eat a man. Or a woman. She was mad for them. She painted the sides of her boat with whales and dolphins and all manner of sea creatures. She made the best paints and the best pictures.”

  Alice sits beside him with her head on his shoulder, but I can see that she’s holding Eddy’s hand on the other side. “Were you her only living child?”

  He shakes his head. “No, she was strong. She had four. Died with the last one, my little sister. Sister died that winter. Sickly. We put them both out on the ice.”

  Alice sighs. “My mother had two. My brother and me. Julian. I don’t know what happened to him. And my mother died defending Nowhere. Which is exactly how she would have wanted to go.”

  “Your mother was an iron-willed woman,” Eddy says. “She had no love for me, but I respected her. Tough.”

  Alice nods. “I still can barely think about it. With all that happened, she’s like an afterthought. I forget that she’s not there, still waiting for me.”

  “She must have been mad as hell when you set out for Estiel.” Eddy has not talked about this at all before. I tense up all over. Connie feels it and tenses, too.

  “Probably,” Alice says, a little guilt creeping into her voice. “I thought I could help. I thought I could be like you.”

  “I didn’t talk her out of it,” I say, rushing to say something. “I knew it was a terrible idea. I knew she’d never pass.”

  Eddy looks up at me, his eyes like dark holes beneath his brow in the firelight. He shakes his head. “I’m not still holding that against you, Flora. I know you were trying to do the brave thing. I know . . .” He looks away, out over the sea. He looks up and I can see his eyes again. “I know you did what you could. It wasn’t your fault. My mother helped me see that. I can let it go.”

  I nod, gratitude squeezing my throat. “We all got out of there because of you. Including your mother. All those kids.”

  Bodie is following this quietly. If he knows the story, it’s because Alice told him. The three of us have not spoken it out loud to one another.

  “I told the story to the women in Shy,” I tell him, t
rying to smile. “They were all so grateful that someone had taken him and his cats down. They were living in the shadow of Estiel, just as much as everyone else.”

  “What’s Shy?” Connie asks, huddling closer to me as if they were cold.

  So I tell them. I tell the whole story, out of Estiel and back to Ommun. I can’t ever tell them how I came to be who I am, but I can tell the stories. I can show them the scars. I can explain what I have seen in the world, and how strange it is. And then it will become part of them. Isn’t that what all Mothers do?

  The sky is tinged with green before I come to the end. Dawn is on its way.

  “I was my mother’s only living child,” Connie says softly. “If she’d had another, it might have been easier for her to deal with me. With what I am.”

  “She died of fever, right? That’s what they said at the auction.”

  They nod against me. “Not long after I got my eggs. She and my father both. I got the fever too, but I didn’t die. She loved me, though. I know she did. She was just disappointed with the way things turned out.”

  “My parents sold me,” I say. “I don’t remember them at all. Just my keeper, and then my father.”

  Connie looks up at that. “Really?”

  “Really. I never met my mother at all.”

  They put their head back down, then look up again at Alice. “Why don’t you have a child?”

  Alice shrugged. “Just lucky, I guess.”

  “But you could,” Connie pushes forward. “If you wanted.”

  “It’s not exactly up to me,” Alice says with a little half smile.

  “What do you mean?” Connie’s brow is furrowed.

  “It’s not like you make a decision and then it happens,” Alice says, rolling her eyes a little. “There are herbs you can take to keep from catching pregnant, but they don’t always work. There’s nothing I can take that will make sure the kid catches life. Or saves mine.”

  “But you’re doing the thing? The thing that makes babies?” Their eyes dart between Eddy, Bodie, and Alice in a tight triangle.

  “That isn’t really something you have a right to ask me about,” Alice said.

  There’s a little bit of silence. We can all hear the waves lapping against the sides of the Ursula.

  “I disappointed the living fuck out of my mother,” Eddy says ruefully, bringing the conversation back from the dead. “We got better, but she always wanted me to have a living child. Keep my book. Leave something behind.”

  “Will you?” Connie is young enough to still ask questions as guileless as this one.

  “Will anyone?” Eddy gestures toward the bridge in the distance, just starting to glint in the rising sun. “What lasts?”

  Nobody has an answer for that. We all go back to bed. We pick up the habit of sleeping in the day and moving northward up the coast at night. There are more whales, and countless dolphins and seals. There are shooting stars above us in the cloudless sky. There is a reason people like Bodie keep to the sea, as it rocks us, night after night, in our cradle of strange and home-brewed love.

  CHAPTER 36

  THE URSULA

  There were reefs and shipwrecks all along the way toward Midwife’s Bay. Bodie’s maps marked some of the older ones; others cost them course corrections and lost time. They weren’t in any hurry, but Bodie hated to go around anything.

  Flora sat on the other side of the ship, working a skein of wool off and back onto her drop spindle. She hadn’t made anything new in ages and her hands fought their idleness. Her braids had grown ever more elaborate. She washed her hair in collected rainwater and dried it in the sun. Her red tint had not had any maintenance in a long time and she could see silvery threads of white making their inroads along her dark brown. The sea air and sun were showing gold and red highlights, and it was pretty in its own way.

  Eddy had been long without a razor and had taken to twisting his kinky curls into short, stubby locked knots that he could toss around when he shook his head. Flora thought he had never looked stranger to her. Eddy was eating a mango with great gusto, the juice dripping down his elbow. He caught Alice watching and gave her a wink.

  Alice too was looking restless. Flora knew that without her work she was often at loose ends. There was no medicine to make upon the sea. None of them had been ill, and there was nothing to do but pick whom to sleep with at any given moment and count the days. Bodie had taught her how to make combs out of the shells of turtles they found on the beach and she worked at that, off and on. He told her his own mother had had a set she used both to detangle her own hair and to hold it out of her face. He pulled Alice’s blonde curls back from her face, pinning them with his thick, leathery fingers. “Just so,” he said, smiling in his weather-beaten face.

  Alice gave him a devastating smile and went back to work with one of his files on the turtle shell. As she worked, Bodie reached out and cupped a hand against her low belly, as if confirming something there. His hand made a small mound below her navel, and all at once Flora knew.

  She looked at Eddy. Eddy had seen. Flora saw Alice meet Eddy’s eye and shrug before looking sheepishly back down. Alice put a hand over Bodie’s, leaving her filing for a moment. The circle they made was perfect, and everyone on the outside of it knew themselves superfluous. Everyone but Connie.

  Connie spotted something in the distance that made them yelp.

  “What is that?”

  Eddy’s head snapped up. He saw a tall, shimmering fall of something silvery, moving ceaselessly in the breeze. It undulated like water, stretching up high into the sky, catching the sunlight in winking bright lights.

  Bodie stepped to the bow and pulled his spyglass. “It’s for birds,” he said. “I’ve seen one before. It keeps them away from a fishery, or something else that they want.”

  “Can we get closer?” Flora asked. “There must be people.”

  Bodie consulted his map and looked out over the water. “It’s plenty deep enough here. I can get close. You’ll have to take the dinghy if you want to go to shore.”

  He made the adjustments and their ship started to cut toward the vertical river of light. As they got closer, Flora could see it was made of thousands of threads of old-world plastic, something shiny and very well preserved. She didn’t see any people around, but there were plenty of signs of them.

  As Eddy rowed the dinghy toward the shore, Flora could see fishing poles and lines, piles of nets, and pails and shovels for digging shellfish.

  “It all looks new,” she said, laying her binoculars down on her chest. “It’s not abandoned. So where is everybody?”

  Eddy couldn’t shrug without stopping his smooth rowing rhythm, but he brought his head down toward his shoulder in an approximation. “Maybe they’re out at sea?”

  Flora shook her head, looking again. “I don’t see anywhere they’d moor a boat.”

  “Maybe they do what we do—anchor out there in the bay and come ashore some other way.”

  Flora couldn’t shake the feeling that that wasn’t the right answer, but she couldn’t come up with an alternative.

  On the shore, it was clear they were in a fishing village. There was a shell mound and a series of smaller middens that stank of dead fish. The firepits were recently ashed, and Eddy walked over to inspect one up close.

  He put his hands cautiously near the black and gray. Warm ashes.

  Bodie was yelling from the ship. Eddy’s head snapped up, but he didn’t understand.

  Flora walked back toward the beach, her hand shielding her gray eyes.

  “Boats,” she said hoarsely.

  She would have said a number if she could count them. They came so swiftly up the shoreline and in such a score that she couldn’t keep them straight in her eyes long enough to count them. Each was sleek, long and pointed, and each had oars over the side, moving in perfect sync as though they were rowed by one person with eight arms.

  There were four on each boat, Flora saw as they grew larger and larger bet
ween her and the ship. They were bare-chested and she searched frantically for any women among them.

  She saw none.

  They beached their boats and came ashore on light bare feet. They carried fishing spears and nets. Each of them had a tattoo, inked from their bottom lip to their chin, stretching down like a beard on an otherwise hairless face.

  One ran up faster than the others, taking the advance position and training a spear on them. Flora could see his muscles working, sliding beneath his skin. He raised the hand not holding a spear as if in invitation for them to speak.

  They did not. Flora saw out of the corner of her eye that Eddy had laid one hand behind him, on his gun. Hers was somewhere under yards and yards of silk. She wasn’t ready.

  “Librarians!” The man’s voice was smooth and youthful, and he did not seem angry, though the word was shouted.

  “What?” Flora stepped forward, cocking her head to the side. “I’m sorry, we don’t—”

  “Librarians,” he yelled once more. His voice went up at the end, as though it were a question.

  Flora and Eddy looked at each other. Eddy’s lips flexed downward a little, an approximation of a shrug.

  They turned back to the man, and this time Eddy spoke.

  “Listen. We don’t want any—”

  A weapon Flora had never seen appeared in the air, whipping toward them at a blurring speed. A tangle of leather cords struck Eddy about the neck faster than he could raise his hands. Weights at the ends of the lines snapped back as the lines caught, thudding against the back and side of his head. Flora saw him go down, bonelessly flopping onto the sand.

  She was still staring at the heap he had become when she was knocked out herself.

  Flora came to slowly, trying to figure out how her hammock had fallen in the night and left her sitting up against the mast.

  She opened her eyes and saw that the boat was on fire. No, that wasn’t right. Her vision was doubled, and it was only one fire, contained in a circle of stones.

  Then she remembered being off the ship, the fishermen and their spears.