by Shannon Page
Not fifteen minutes into their tiptoe across these shallows, Dolous called out from his station just below the mizzenmast. “Three ships off the stern, Captain! Closing fast, I think!”
Reikos and his first mate spun to see yet another nightmare realized. Running toward them, straight before the wind off of Viel, Lord and Lady Phaeros’ lowly little schooner now trailed two massive, ocean-going catamarans, their pontoons freeing them from any fear of bottom. They were all still quite a distance off, but wouldn’t be for long, if the combs of spray at their bows were any indication.
Reikos thrust the spyglass at Kyrios before turning back to steer his ship. “Tell me what we’ve got.”
Kyrios raised the glass to his eye. “The cats fly Alkattha banners, Captain. Looks like they’ve got a cannon each. Swivel-mounted, at their prows.”
“Are those cannons aimed at the Phaeros’ boat?”
Kyrios shook his head. “They aren’t even manned at present, Captain.”
“Then we’re screwed. They serve the wrong Alkattha.”
“That’s odd,” said Kyrios, still gazing through the glass. “They’ve got some fellow in a dress on their boat too.”
“What?” Reikos turned to stare. “Give me the glass — and take the wheel, please.”
As Kyrios did so, Reikos raised the glass to look. “By all the meddling gods, it’s the Census Taker himself!” He lowered the glass and looked back at Kyrios. “What’s he doing out here on a boat? He’s not the sort to do his own fighting. I’d have wagered both my nuts on that.”
Kyrios shrugged. “It was a good run, Captain. Longer than I ever hoped for.”
“Oh, it’s not over yet, friend. You know this route we’re taking far better than I do. Just keep the wheel.”
“But … why? The cats can sail anywhere in here at unencumbered speed, while we can only crawl.” He glanced up at the masts, where all their topgallant rigging was now absent. “With two sails gone? The game is up, sir.”
“All hands!” Reikos shouted. “Prepare for immediate trim to full speed! Eagent, come down off that sprit and resume your station at the guns! Molian — the same!”
“Full speed, sir?” Kyrios blurted. “Blind?”
Reikos spun to face him. “Do you know the course or not?”
“I know where it should lie — in general, sir. But without careful sounding —”
“If we run aground, we run aground. But if we just sit here, we are had for certain. That’s Escotte Alkattha coming for us, in whose dungeon I was buried until just last morning when the Factor blew its roof off. I have no intention of suffering his hospitality again — and certainly not passively!”
“Aye, Captain,” Kyrios said, no longer meeting his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Reikos said. “I’m not …” I’m not capable of being rational, he conceded silently. Not with Sian, and now Alkattha, in my head. What is he doing out here himself? “Kyrios, you’ve saved this ship more times tonight than I have,” he pled quietly. “Please, just try to do it one more time, all right? The tide is high. Steer us where we’d hoped to go, and … maybe we’ll …” He threw his hands up, knowing Kyrios was almost certainly correct, but still seeing no better options. “What bearing must we take?”
“Straight ahead about halfway to Montchattaran there, sir. Then port at least one hundred ten degrees — for which we’ll have to slow almost to stop, even in a hundred fathoms.”
“All hands! Trim for full speed, straight before the wind! Do it now!” Reikos shouted to his crew, who leapt to their tasks with nervous looks, but without question. “Then stand ready to change course at Kyrios’s order!” He turned back to his first mate. “You have full command of my ship, old friend, just as I promised back there at the bridge.” He smiled apologetically. “You may order them to full stop at any time, if you think it best.”
Kyrios gazed at him, then nodded soberly as they felt the ship begin to surge beneath them.
Molian and Eagent came scrambling up the ladder, nodding warily to Reikos on their way to the aft hatch.
“I’ve given Kyrios command for now,” Reikos told them. “If he orders you to fire, do so. Until then, Eagent, don’t anticipate him.”
Eagent looked down self-consciously. “Aye, sir.”
With that, Reikos headed off to help Jak at the mainmast — until their pursuers got closer anyway. There’d be some tricky maneuvers to perform soon, he’d no doubt, and it had been far too long since he’d done any of the real sailing himself anyway.
Sian’s silks had begun to come unbound, dragging at the water. And the tossing, moonlit surface was disorienting in the darkness. She was deeply spent, but very grateful when they finally reached something solid to grab hold of.
The islands’ raft warrens were the sort of place everybody knew existed, but no one ever went to. Sian had never even seen one from less than a great distance away. As they’d swum here, she had anticipated a great cluster of ragged little boats, tied to some tawdry lattice of loosely tethered planks: a floating version of the beachside shantytown near port on Cutter’s. What they now found, however, seemed more a floating island, made entirely of densely packed, woven and wire-bundled reeds. Its bristled sides were steep and firm, extending several feet, both down into the darkened water and up above the surface. Though it was not too hard to secure a grip on this strange, thatched shore, it proved too high for them to climb after such a swim. It took a while to find someplace gently sloped enough to allow them up and out at last.
For a moment, they just lay on the rough surface of the ‘island’, catching their breaths, then rose to gaze around at what seemed an entire village made of coarse, dry grass — and utterly abandoned. They heard no voices, saw not a single lamp or lighted window, or even any drifting smoke. To Sian’s surprise, however, the moonlight revealed not only narrow streets and little gabled huts, but cane-fenced yards — and even gardens full of growing plants — all floating on this giant raft of reeds.
“Where has everybody gone?” Arian whispered.
There were little boats — most made of woven reed as well — moored here and there along thin canals bisecting the false, thatch ‘ground’ like a second set of streets. Sian had seen such boats quite often, all around the city, rowed by humble fishermen or messengers. The water taxis were all made of bundled reeds as well. She had never wondered where such boats came from — or went back to at night. If any of their owners were here, however, they were well hidden.
“Have they fled the fighting?” Arian wondered aloud.
“But … there is no fighting here to flee,” Sian replied. Perhaps this place simply held no interest or value for any of the factions raging across the rest of Home. Or maybe everyone had just forgotten, even now, that it existed.
From somewhere farther east came another round of cannon fire. She and Arian turned anxiously to look. But if it came from Orlon’s ships, they’d gone too far around the bending coast to be seen anymore. Sian silently begged her new god to protect poor, brave, stupid, gentle Pino.
As she thought of him, it dawned on her that she and Arian might both as well be naked, for all the coverage their sopping silks afforded now. “We should at least unknot our dresses in case somebody comes,” she told Arian, reaching down to finish unbinding her own shift.
“Oh. Yes. Oh dear,” said Arian, looking down at her own bare limbs and sheer skin of silk. “If we’re lucky, maybe no one’s here, and we’ll be dried a bit before we reach land.”
As they began to ‘dress’, Sian saw Arian unbind her sandals from a length of knotted silk at her side, and grimaced. “I’ve lost my shoes again,” she sighed.
Arian glanced at Sian’s feet, then rolled her eyes.
“I was so busy worrying about Pino. I didn’t even get them off before we had to leave the boat like that. They were gone as soon as I hit the water.”
“Well, walk carefully until we’re out of here,” said Arian. “These dried reeds feel smooth enough ri
ght now, but their edges will be sharp as knives, I imagine. If you cut your feet up, I can hardly carry you across the island.”
Thanks for the warning, Mother, Sian thought, trying to wring out the unbound silk around her legs. Her feet were getting tough by now — and would heal, gods knew, no matter what she did to them.
When they’d done their best, and bound up their wet hair, they moved warily into the eerie little village. The packed-reed streets had been stomped into a straw tea of sorts, almost as soft as stiff cloth against her skin. No danger of cut feet here. All this might be sort of cheerful by day, Sian thought, noticing fanciful little reed-woven garden sculptures in one small yard. Bougainvillea grew around someone’s porch from woven baskets. A mobile of straw stars and crescent moons swayed gently from the gable of another tiny hut. She saw no sign of any real wealth, of course, yet it all seemed so … tidy. Not what she’d expected. Not what she’d been told.
“Who are you?” said a piping high, but stern, voice from behind them.
Sian and Arian spun in unison to find a girl — a woman — something in between — melted straight out of the darkness. Her drab, loose, homespun clothing only made her age even more ambiguous. Her skin and hair were very dark, her expression sober, and unafraid. “What you want here?”
“We … are refugees,” Arian said uncertainly. “From the fighting … You do know about the fighting on the other side of Home?”
The girl-woman’s look conveyed with embarrassing eloquence what she thought of being called stupid.
“We seek your help,” Arian added meekly.
“My help?” The girl laughed. It was a girl. Her laughter made that clear — neither quite mocking, nor exactly kind. Only children had the knack of laughing that way.
“We were … cast from a boat out there,” said Sian.
“We know,” said the girl. “We hear the cannons.” She paused, staring at Sian as if expecting some further explanation.
“We just want permission to pass through your village,” Arian said. “And perhaps to beg a pair of sandals for my friend here? She lost hers when we … were thrown from the boat.”
“Oh. Well then, you come talk to Rothkin.” She walked past them, beckoning them to follow her further into the warren.
“Who is Rothkin?” asked Arian.
“My brother,” said the girl. “He in charge of things like permission now. He know about the sandals too.”
Arian looked at Sian, who shrugged, and turned to go with her. Acting frightened wasn’t going to help them any; she was fairly sure of that much.
As they moved down the miniature street, Sian quickly realized that they were not — had never been — alone at all. Here and there, lamps bloomed in windows as they passed. A weathered old man appeared to watch them from his darkened doorway. Between or behind some of the huts, she saw shadows moving in the shadows now. A soft splash made her turn to see a man in silhouette, silently poling his tiny reed boat through a canal toward the moonlit sea beyond. It felt like a village full of ghosts now. Only the girl ahead of them seemed quite solid.
They were led further down the lane, around a corner, down another hut or two, and underneath a reed-latticed gateway into a yard filled with woven baskets, from which pea vines twined up tall reed-stalk cages, guarded by little bowl-hatted men, also woven from reeds.
Ahead of them, the girl pushed the hut’s wired-cane door open without a word or knock, and beckoned them into the dimly lamp-lit interior.
Sian followed Arian in, surprised again to find a room much larger than she would have guessed outside, though with just a single window that seemed to provide little ventilation. The stifling air here carried traces of something … rotten. Barely detectable, but foul. The hut was hardly illuminated by the orange light of a single oil lantern, its walls reed-thatched like the hut’s exterior, and furnished only with a cane-made table and some weathered wooden stools, cane shelving along one wall, and a host of rough crates and buckets filled with everything from vegetables to clothing scattered around its dim perimeter. A single darkened doorway, without any door, pierced the room’s back wall. Leaning against its jamb, a dark-skinned young man with cropped black hair, hardly older than Pino, gazed at them with lazy insolence as they took in his home. Sweat stained his sleeveless shirt, and beaded on his forehead and bare arms.
“Would you be Rothkin?” asked Arian.
“Yes, Factora Lady,” he said smiling, then turned to Sian. “Welcome to our humble house, Our Lady of the Islands. We very pleased to give you refuge here, if that what you want.”
Sian and Arian shot each other a look of alarm. “How do you know us?” Arian asked.
“My cousin’s child tell me,” Rothkin said. “She know many things nobody else do now.” He glanced down at the door behind him, and Sian nearly yelped aloud to see another, even smaller girl melt out of darkness there — her haunted gaze unmistakable.
“You!” Sian breathed.
The girl said nothing, only gazed at her again with those same dark, penetrating eyes. But Rothkin nodded, as if Sian had confirmed something.
“I thought you know her,” Rothkin said. “You do this to her, no?”
“Do what to her?” Sian asked, nearly as helpless before the child’s gaze as she had been on Pembo’s beach that morning. “What is she doing here?”
“We come to Rothkin after you witch my little girl,” said the child’s mother almost timidly, appearing in the darkened doorway behind her daughter. “The world’s not safe for us, since they start finding out what we can do. Everybody makes us tell them … what they don’t want to hear.” She glanced oddly at Rothkin. “Then they punish us.”
“I don’t understand,” Sian said, dragging her eyes forcibly from the child’s gaze to look up, bewildered, at her mother. “I did nothing to your girl.”
“I saw the way you look at her,” she said. “I remember. Then she start to talk to me.” She put a hand to her head. “In here. She start to tell me things she cannot know. Why you gave her this, my lady? Why you witch my girl?”
To Sian’s further confusion, the woman sounded more … reverent than accusing. “Truly, I did nothing. Nothing that I …” She thought back on that strange moment. The gaze she couldn’t break. She’d thought it was the girl who’d held her there, but … Had it been the god? Had he done this to the child that morning? Through Sian? The idea horrified her. Could she change people just by looking at them now? She shook her head. Impossible. There were too many people she’d have given anything to change with just a glance since then. “What does she do now?” Sian asked fearfully.
“I don’t just tell you?” Rothkin asked. “She a seer, now, Our Lady. God-touched, just like you.” He smiled at the child proudly. “She tell us all about this war is gonna come. She tell us the Factor gonna die.” He glanced dispassionately at Arian, who only paled and cast her eyes down at the floor. “She warn us when somebody come who mean us harm, so we can make them have a little accident in time.” His smile turned sharp-edged. “A lot of little accidents today. Nobody come here now so much. Fight pass us by. When the cannons shoot out there, she tell us you come too.” He studied Sian in the lamplight. “You don’t give her this?”
Sian shook her head. “I think … her gift is from the god, perhaps. Like mine.”
Rothkin gazed at her, then nodded without asking her which god she meant. Had he been in some prayer line she had passed, she wondered, or there on the night that she was beaten? Little accidents. Yes, this young man might have watched that night — and given it no second thought. Just another little accident in a life full of them, she suspected. He was frightening.
“So then … you two just … recognize each other? That what happen on the beach?” He asked as if her answer might be part of some private calculation. Whether to help them, maybe.
“Perhaps.” Sian turned to look down at the little girl, then went to crouch before her. “I’m sorry, dear. The world isn’t safe for me anym
ore either. It isn’t easy, helping gods, is it.”
The girl just stared back, her gaze more sad than frightening now.
“What’s your name, child?” Sian asked.
“She don’t talk,” said the girl’s mother. “She never talk, even to me, before …” The woman touched her head again. “She tell me what she know now. Up here. I’m the one who tell out loud.” She looked down sadly at her little girl. “I’m the one who made us trouble, with my big mouth. Back there on the beach.”
“She want sandals, Rothkin,” announced the girl who’d brought them here, evidently tired of waiting to get down to business. “And permission to pass. That why I bring them here.” She looked to Sian, as if for confirmation.
“My son … is very ill,” said Arian, looking up again for the first time since Rothkin’s careless reference to her husband’s death. “We are trying to get Our Lady of the Islands back to the Factorate in time to —”
“Yes, I have no doubt you do. We get to that, Factora Lady.” Rothkin waved her off as if she were just some intrusive barmaid, and looked back to Sian. “If you don’t do this to my cousin’s girl, maybe you wanna heal her then, yes? Give her a voice, so she don’t have to talk inside her momma’s head no more?”
Sian’s stared at him. “I’m not sure … that I should even try to heal what the god has done.”
“The god don’t make her mute, Our Lady. The god just make her see these secrets — and fill her momma’s head with things she got no power to shut out. If the girl have a voice, maybe my cousin get some peace, yes?” He shrugged, as if to ask, What’s the harm in trying?
Sian looked back at the little girl. “Do you want to talk, dear?” The question came from nowhere, surprising Sian as much as anyone. But, to her further surprise, the child shook her head — quite emphatically. Sian looked up at Rothkin, who looked down at his cousin’s daughter as if she had displeased him. Sian turned back to the little girl. “Are you sure?”