by Shannon Page
And yet … The deck beneath him hardly swayed. All the shouting and the sounds of wrecking came from … much too far away. He raised his head, and looked about at other faces as nonplussed as his. He and Kyrios had just started scrambling to their feet when yet another cannon sounded, sending everyone to deck again.
This time, Fair Passage bucked fiercely as a crackling spray of shattered planking flew from her forward port side and a chunk of quarterdeck leapt up to fly in pieces just above the heads of crew nearby.
There was a moment of stunned silence then, broken only by continued cries of fear and anger from the other ships around them. Reikos leapt up again, scanning his deck for casualties. Everyone seemed there and up already, rushing to and fro to check for further damage, or staring around themselves in stunned confusion. No one had been lying on that patch of deck, thank all the gods. Both masts were up still, and their rigging seemed intact. It didn’t look as if the cannon ball had taken out anything structural on its way through. Shot from such a short distance away, it had probably punched through fairly cleanly. Reikos spun next to scan the sea around him, unable to make any sense at all of what he found there.
To port, Alkattha’s catamaran, which must have fired the ball that hit them, was already racing off. Beyond Fair Passage’s bow, Alkattha’s second cat was foundering, its crew and a great deal of expensive-looking furniture and other cargo already bobbing or flailing in the water as it sank. To starboard, the Phaeros’ schooner leaned heavily to port, trailing its snapped-off mizzenmast in the water.
“I … had Molian and Eagent move our guns, sir,” Kyrios said, pale and shaking as he scanned their own damaged deck and the carnage all around Fair Passage. “One to starboard, one to port, and one positioned to be pointed at wherever our third pursuer might decide to park. Then …” He turned to Reikos looking frightened. “I gave them permission to load and fire at their own discretion. If we were fired on, or seriously threatened.” He shook his head apologetically. “I didn’t think that there was likely to be time for orders, sir. Not with three cannons stationed all around the boat, and just two men to fire them.”
Reikos stared at him, still struggling to put everything together, then felt himself begin to grin. “You raving madman!” he laughed. “You god-humping genius!” He threw his arms around the half-stunned man, who only then began to laugh as well. Abruptly Kyrios stopped and wrenched himself from Reikos’s grasp.
“Molian! And Eagent! They were below when —” Kyrios spun to sprint for the aft hatch. Reikos followed.
They had just gotten down the ladder when Molian staggered into their path, looking crazed but whole. “Captain! Eagent’s stuck, sir! I need help to get him out!”
“Take us!” Reikos exclaimed. “How badly is he hurt?”
“Not hurt, sir,” Molian said as they continued running toward the starboard bow. “’Least he says he ain’t. But when that ball went through the deck behind him, he got buried in a pile of plank and timber. They’re wedged against each other pretty tight. I couldn’t lift’em, and he’s on his stomach, sir. Pinned too tight to turn much but his head. Says he’s only stuck, though.”
Reikos feared the boy might just be putting up a brave front, or too injured to feel any pain. He’d seen such injuries — to back or neck. They almost always proved the death of anyone who suffered them, within days or weeks at most. There was no more glow of triumph shining in his gut now. Only dread.
As they arrived and saw the mess, however, Eagent’s color did seem good, though his expression was fearful as he turned to peer at them from underneath the drift of shattered wood that covered him from calves to shoulders. By the light of a lamp that Molian must have left there, it looked as if the buried cannon beside him held up half the pile, which had doubtless saved the boy, if saved he was.
“I’m sorry, Captain!” Eagent rushed to say. “I know you told me not to, but Kyrios —”
“I know! Calm down, lad. You’re a flaming hero with no cause to apologize. Now, are you injured? Tell me straight, boy. I’ll just hold bravery against you at the moment.”
“Honestly, I’m fine, sir. Nothin’ I’d call pain except it isn’t very comfortable where some of these planks press on me.”
“Can you feel your arms and legs then?” Reikos asked as he began to test the pile, wondering how best to disassemble it without risking further injury to Eagent.
“Oh yes, sir. I just ain’t got room to move ’em much.”
Reikos allowed himself a sigh of relief. “Then don’t try, lad. We’ll have all that off of you in just a minute.”
They set to with a will, careful about the order in which things were pried away. As promised, they soon had him out and on his feet, where, to everyone’s relief, he proved as well as he had claimed, but for some ugly cuts and bruises.
“Let’s get you stitched up and bandaged, then.” The ship’s doctor had been kind enough to leave them some of his medicinal spirits and healing gum when he’d abandoned the Fair Passage after Reikos had gone missing. “Did he leave us any cat gut, Kyrios?”
“Aye, Captain, and some clean needles too.”
“Very well, I’ll leave his care to you then while I —”
He fell silent as they all turned to the clamber of someone running toward them, and saw Sellas rush in, looking frantic. “More boats comin’, Captain! A bunch this time — and headed right our way!”
A mob of astonishing size had coalesced in eerie silence around Rothkin’s hut by the time Arian followed him and Sian outside. Men and women. Even children. She could not believe there were so many of them; hundreds easily, where only a short while before, the village had seemed all but empty. They stretched off into the moonlit darkness, gripping everything from clubs, gaffing poles or pitchforks to machetes and stiletto knives, and stood nearly motionless as Rothkin climbed onto an overturned wooden box beside his garden gate.
“We take these ladies to the Factor House now,” he said, his voice carrying with startling clarity on the still night air. “Nobody get close enough to see them the whole way.” He looked down at Sian uncertainly, then back out at his army. “Hurt nobody you don’t have to, yes? The world hang on this. You understand? This is Our Lady of the Islands here.”
All faces turned to Sian in the darkness. Without a sound. A shiver ran down Arian’s body as, here and there, people dropped onto their knees. Not a word about the Factora-Consort. Nor a look her way. This was Sian’s army. Sian’s night. Arian knew that now as well as anybody present. It felt strange … freeing even, to be so … inconsequential.
The only serious affliction Sian had ever healed in Arian’s presence before had been her own injuries the previous night, and Arian had been lost inside her own experience of that event. Only as she’d watched Sian heal Rothkin’s mother had she really come to understand what it must cost Sian every time she did this. What it might cost her to heal Konrad. If there was still time. Arian would gladly have gone down on her knees too now, if the look on Sian’s face had not revealed so clearly how much discomfort such veneration caused her. Arian understood that dismay all too well. Having to inhabit someone else’s dream of who you were. So many someone elses. It was a dreadful thing. A smothering responsibility. Arian pitied Sian in ways she’d never thought to — but she still wanted her son healed.
“You know what to do,” Rothkin told his people, stepping from the crate. He beckoned Sian and Arian with a jerk of his chin as he stepped into the street. “Stay by me,” he told them quietly. “Don’t leave my side. For any reason, yes?”
As they left the yard behind, the crowd fell in around them like some enormous cloak of shadows — moving almost as silently as they had stood. An army of ghosts. Arian wondered how many of these reed people there might be in Alizar. This was only one of many such raft warrens in the islands. What a powder keg they’d all been sitting on, for gods knew how many years, up on their hilltop, fretting at their petty politics and intrigues …
Wh
at a farce their lives had been, she thought.
And yet, Sian had been commissioned by a god, it seemed, to heal her son. Arian agreed with Rothkin about one thing. It seemed very strange that mere coincidence had tossed them up on this small raft of reeds tonight, where so many things they needed, and so many people who seemed to need Sian, had all been waiting ready. If Sian and her god cared so much about reaching Konrad, then perhaps their lives weren’t just farce after all.
I will try to take the world more seriously. To matter more. If I ever get another chance, Arian promised Sian’s god in the silence of her heart. That is not a bargain, sir. Just … a vow.
In very little time, they reached the floating island’s northern edge, and started, three or four abreast, across the relatively narrow bridge of floating reed pontoons and weathered wooden planks that separated it from Home. Even now, Arian heard so little sound behind them that she had to turn and look to be sure their army was still following. An endless stream of shadows silhouetted by the moon, yet hardly any footfall or ripple did they make. They moved like the breeze-born reeds for which they named themselves — or even like the breeze itself.
Ahead of them lay the streets and rooftops of the other island, Home; caught up in fear and chaos. Like the floating village, it seemed dark, if less abandoned than furtive and afraid. Small figures in the distance dashed from door to doorway, or hurried down the street, hugging walls or glancing nervously back over shoulders. Light burned in scattered windows and atop infrequent lampposts, but the brightest illumination up ahead, by far, was the orange glow of fire cast from beyond the ridge top.
As they reached the bridge’s other side, Rothkin stopped Sian and Arian with an upraised hand, while some of those behind them streamed past and fanned out to dissolve into the all but vacant waterfront — emptied by a long day of little accidents, perhaps? When a little less than half of Rothkin’s force had passed them, he waved Sian and Arian back into their stream.
“Remember,” Rothkin murmured back across his shoulder. “Do not leave my side.”
As they got closer, Arian began to see smashed market stalls and the half-submerged wreckage of small boats littering the waterfront. Climbing up into the empty, winding streets above it, shattered windows and burned-out shopfronts trailing wraiths of smoke and reeking with the smell of char, gave mute testimony to the fighting that had passed there earlier that day.
Those who’d come across the bridge with them were gone now, vanished back into the darkened streets around them. Only Rothkin and two of his henchmen, an older man he called Stoke and a boy even younger than himself named Bartolo, remained to lead Sian and Arian up the hill, at an almost leisurely pace, surreally alone.
As they passed the demolished entrance of a dark and empty tavern, a nearly inaudible groan drew everyone’s eyes toward a table overturned within its street-side courtyard. Bartolo drew the knife from his belt, then vaulted on one hand across the courtyard’s bamboo railing, moving toward the fallen table with the grace of a hunting cat. Once there, however, he stuck his knife back in his belt and shrugged. “Good as dead,” he muttered, turning to rejoin them.
Sian moved instantly through the small courtyard’s gate and started for the table.
“Lady, no,” Rothkin said.
She raised a hand to silence him, neither looking back nor slowing, and shoved the bamboo table to one side as Bartolo looked uncertainly to Rothkin for guidance about what to do. “Let her,” Rothkin told the other boy.
Sian bent down and pushed a hand against the fallen man’s torso, then inhaled sharply, threw her head up, eyes half closed as if in pain, and seemed to freeze that way. Arian stared, with all the others, wondering if one could ever get used to seeing miracles like this performed, as the man’s whole body seemed to flex, going rigid as a board before falling limp again. Sian’s chin fell too, her long hair tumbling down to hide the fellow’s chest and face, slumped in exhaustion, or maybe just in shared relief.
As she stood again, breathing deeply, and turned to go, the man she’d healed brought both hands to his stomach, then raised his head and stared at her. “What … did you do?”
She neither answered, nor looked back as she came out the gate. “Can you … Is there any way that I might get a bite to eat?” Sian asked Rothkin. “Healing makes me very hungry.”
“Our Lady, why you not say something sooner? We can feed you at the house, if you just ask us.” He turned to Bartolo, and jerked his chin at the darkened tavern door.
The boy dashed inside, and was out again a minute later with a loaf of bread and a bowl of passion fruit. “This enough to fill you, lady?” the boy asked.
Sian nodded gratefully and tore the loaf in two, handing half to Arian.
“Thank you, my lady,” Arian said, not thinking the words strange until they’d left her mouth. Were they, though? So strange? Sian was … something more than Arian could ever hope to be. She looked back to find the man Sian had healed standing now, staring at them.
Rothkin saw it too. “You go now, if you wish to live,” he told the man, almost gently.
“Let him come with us, if he wants,” Sian said, without looking up from the fruit she peeled with trembling fingers.
“Lady. Who know what folk he side with? What he do to you, if he get close enough.”
“We’ve already been much closer than you can imagine, Rothkin,” Sian said. “There is a person inside everyone I heal.” She looked up at him, at last. Intently. “You taught me that. Back in your mother’s room.”
Rothkin looked down in … was that shame? Miracles on top of miracles, thought Arian.
Sian turned to face the newly healed man. “Are you my enemy?”
He shook his head. “No, my lady. I am … whatever you wish me to be. But, who are you?”
“She is Our Lady of the Islands,” Rothkin said before Sian could answer. “And you owe her your life. Do not forget this.”
No longer looking at any of them, Sian started walking up the street again, bringing the partially peeled fruit up to tear at with her teeth. Seeming almost horrified, Bartolo ran to take it gently from her, and started peeling and cutting it in slices with his knife, handing each piece to her tenderly as everyone resumed their walk. Behind them, the newest member of their entourage followed uncertainly, keeping his distance.
As they got further up the hill, Arian began to notice new sounds in the night. Disturbing sounds. An angry shout cut short from perhaps a street away. A strangled cry just minutes later, from the opposite direction. They followed Rothkin up the street alone, still seeing not a single person but themselves. Around a corner up ahead, Arian heard running feet, a wooden thump, and brief, almost inaudible scuffling sounds. When they reached the intersection, a young man — one of the reed people, clearly — smiled reverently at Sian as she walked by, then faded back into the darkened alleyway that they were passing.
What was Rothkin’s army doing out there in the darkness?
Two blocks later, they found a man facedown in the street, moaning softly. His knife wounds were very fresh. Had this accident befallen him just for being in their way, Arian wondered queasily, or had he done something worse to earn his wounds? How many innocent people were suffering along their route tonight just because she and Sian happened to be passing by? Rothkin rolled his eyes as Sian bent to lay hands upon the body. Minutes later, they moved on again with yet another dazed but grateful servant of Our Lady of the Islands in their train.
The next fallen man they found had clearly been there for considerable time. He was still breathing, raggedly, but his left leg was bent forward at a wincingly unnatural angle. The dusty remnants of his armor — what looters had left him, Arian suspected — indicated that he’d been a member of House Orlon’s guard. His injuries, at least, had likely been well earned, she thought.
Nonetheless, Sian reached down to put her hands upon him.
“Our Lady,” Rothkin said, his face and voice filled with conflicting impa
tience, reverence, and shame, “we walkeen through a war zone here. It get worse as we get closer to the Factor House. You stop for everyone, we don’t get there before dinnertime tomorrow.”
“He wears Orlon’s colors, Sian,” Arian agreed. “The same people firing at Pino when we saw him last.”
“I … don’t think that matters,” Sian said wearily, thrusting her hands onto the fellow’s leg.
This time, they both screamed very loudly for quite a while, as the soldier’s broken leg performed maneuvers that made even Rothkin look away almost at once. When the screaming had died down to whimpers, Arian turned back to find the man’s leg straight, a look of astonished wonder on his face as he stared at Sian, who lay beside him, still gasping for breath.
Arian went to crouch beside Sian, and took her hand. “You cannot do this. It’s taking too much from you, and we have so far to go.”
“I … I can’t not do it, Arian,” Sian panted. “The gift … wants to be used. It … hurts to …”
“Sian, I think …” Arian glanced warily up at Rothkin. “I think the longer it takes us to pass through the city, the more people will be injured.”