Unfettered III

by Shawn Speakman (ed)

  Skiff said, “But I thought to stay here.”

  “You are under our command,” the twin said. “We require your assistance.”

  Skiff sat silent for a moment, then took a long breath, released it, and said, “But if I help with this, then I may return here afterward?”

  “Certainly not!” Both twins spoke at once, as though surprised and horrified by the notion, and glancing at each other in confusion as though each thought the other would understand. “We must return to Tabat with as much to trade as possible. After we have charted the area described by the blocks, we will go and search along the beach to see if any cargo has washed ashore.”

  “Or survivors,” Essa said.

  The twins looked at her. “Sure, sure,” one said. The other shrugged. They both turned their attention back to Skiff. “You see?” one said.

  “What about Yadi?” Skiff said.

  The twin looked blank. “Who?”

  She pointed down silently, and the dog’s tongue lolled from its mouth, punk and floppy and oblivious as it panted. Essa wiped sweat away from her forehead; otherwise it trickled down into her eyes and burned unpleasantly.

  “The dog is supposed to go to the kennels at Southport,” a twin said. “Maybe they’ll send some back with us.” They flashed an insincere smile. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and have a whole batch of puppies.”

  “I don’t want puppies,” Skiff said. She looked sidelong at the hound and it looked back at her. “I want Yadi.”

  Before anyone could take the conversation, the older female guide from the day before was in the doorway. “Turtle wishes to speak with you.”

  Everyone but Skiff stood. She sat, hands folded on the table in front of her. The dog whined and wagged its tail, looking at her.

  “You go,” she said sullenly.

  Essa would have said something, but a twin snapped, “Very well,” and pushed Essa along and out the door before she could think of a way to persuade the girl that she should come with them. But she should, Essa thought as she went along the corridor. If you want your interests represented, you should be there to represent them. That was basic trade lore and not to be ignored. She sighed.

  Turtle was in the same throne, wearing much the same garb, with the exception of the fresh flowers, all of which had been replaced. They smelled sweet and new-cut, and beads of dew rode the petals, falling sometimes to the straw matting to darken it like momentary tears.

  The left-hand head said, “We have decided to keep you until we discover why your leader was killed.”

  At the words, both of the guards at the door stamped their spears twice on the floor, as though it was a ritual. Unease crawled around Essa’s lower belly, crawled like a snake trying to accommodate itself in a tangled space that could not entirely contain it.

  These people do not like strangers, she thought. Or someone among them does not. Or does one of us hold something that they want? Her mind sorted through possibilities, holding the situation up to past experience and then, when that approach failed her, roved into texts she’d read, things learned at school, precepts preached at her by her aunt Melisent, the one who’d sponsored Essa as a scribe. Nothing.

  “Keep us where?” a twin demanded. “May we travel a little way out, with guides, to the ruins to the east?”

  Both heads tilted in united puzzlement. “How do you know of those?”

  “The blocks in the center of the village speak of them, and when we asked, we were told the direction. They said they are but an hour or two away.”

  “There is nothing there but old gardens and buildings fallen in on themselves. Some are dangerous; they have bad flooring and you can fall through to the tunnels below, filled with poisonous snakes and worse.”

  “We will not go in the buildings. We only wish to see the old gardens. We were told they are filled with flowers that can be seen nowhere else.”

  “That much is true,” Turtle said. “But no.”

  Essa had not seen the twins startled much, but this definitely took them aback. One said, “May we ask why?”

  “Because before you came there was no one dying of their throats torn out in the middle of the night. The strongest suspicion lies on you four.”

  “This is ridiculous,” one twin said to the other in Ligurian.

  “Indeed it is not,” Turtle replied, in Ligurian, and this time the twins gaped. Essa grinned full on, then bent her head to hide it while she fought to contain it. She didn’t want a twin to look around and realize that she could speak the language as well.

  One twin recovered a breath before their fellow. “So we are to be prisoners?”

  “There will be a guard watching over you, but you will not be kept in a room. You will come to the feast tonight. It is its third night.” Turtle shrugged lightly.

  Before they could speak again, they were dragged away in the usual waft of sandalwood.

  They did not stay together, but Essa, Skiff, and the dog went to bathe again in the pool, seeking coolness in the midmorning as the heat began to build. Their guard was Sfeo, the guide with the beetles, along with a more martial-looking, spear-carrying woman, fiercely scarred and sinewy. Sfeo smiled at Essa as they walked along the path, and she let herself smile back, just a little.

  They’d learned yesterday that most of the villagers stayed in the shade during the fiercest hours of the day, working with their hands: braiding ropes out of lengths of hairy dried vines; carving things from several woods that Essa could not identify, dark-hearted but streaked with ruddy veins and rings as well as a spectrum of tans.

  She’d spent part of the previous day watching them make the elaborate fabric, bright and colorful, that everyone wore. They used a combination of wax-resist and woodblock stamps (made of the ruddy and black wood, apparently for its durability), and boiled the dyes in iron vats.

  A new robe fluttered around her now, soft and bright, printed with paired blossoms in amber and purple, the most muted of the multitude she’d been offered. Would something like this catch on in Tabat? So bright and gaudy, but some people had a taste for such things. A better bet, trade-wise, were the herbs the twins had described, but also the perfumes that she’d smelled the day before in her wanderings, from clay vials corked with a soft scarlet substance that looked like dried mushrooms. When you plucked away the lid, the liquid inside smelled like an armload of flowers, as though you stood in a cloud of blossoms. She’d smiled and gaped appreciatively enough to be given a few vials, which she’d tucked away as trade samples, offerings to Abvioti, but not without anointing herself with her favorite.

  Though it had previously been deserted, today a flock of villagers swam in the pool. Children threw a ball back and forth while teens chattered and flirted. Their more sedate adult counterparts swam back and forth under the waterfall or sat on the vine-curtained banks. Two boys and an older man sat among the shadowed rocks, out of reach of the waterfall’s spray, the boys playing smaller versions of the five-stringed, long-necked instrument the man held.

  Everyone was naked, which Essa thought very practical. It was too hot to be thinking of anything but getting cooler.

  She looked at the guards where they stood. Sfeo shrugged back, then gestured at the water in a “go ahead” sort of way. He and began removing his own robe, setting down the long staff. The woman guard moved to lean against a large boulder twice her height, in the shade. She kept her spear upright and aligned with the trees around her and watched the pool.

  Essa and Skiff exchanged glances, then followed Sfeo’s example, but Essa kept stealing looks at him as she did so.

  Without his clothes, he revealed himself even more alien than before. Patches of snakeskin were laid in laddered stripes along his pale thighs. His skin had a pearly luminescence to it, as though it rejected the sun entirely. He undressed entirely, and she saw more snakeskin along his hairless groin, surrounding his relaxed cock, which bobbed in the water as he waded in. She wondered if the beetles had to breathe, but he seemed unconcerne
d.

  The dog splashed its way in, Skiff in its wake and Essa following more slowly, taking in a deep breath as the cooler water hit her, moving up her body farther with each step, sand and small rounded rocks underfoot, every once in a while the jerky flicker of a minnow catching the eye as it darted away.

  When she was neck deep, she closed her eyes. The tall trees all around filtered the sunlight, removed its burn, and turned it into the green clarity she could still see through her eyelids.

  Water swirled against her as someone stopped nearby. She opened her eyes. The guide.

  He said, tapping his chest at the point where the water left it, just above his sternum, “Sfeo.” As though worried she might not remember.

  She tapped her own chin. “Essa.”

  “Essa,” he repeated. He was not unhandsome, she decided. Rather the opposite, his features strong and even. She saw that tiny scarlet feathers were braided into his eyebrows, their outer corners edged with scales so fine they seemed drawn on with a pen.

  The water surged against her skin again and a minnow brushed the back of her thigh as he moved a little closer. He pointed to the guard watching them, her face bored. “Ava.”

  The woman rolled her eyes as they both looked at her.

  Sfeo called something to her, then turned back to Essa, laughing. He said, in careful, slow Trade tongue, “Better no sun, water cold, yes?”

  “Cool more than cold,” she told him. “But much better, yes.”

  He grinned outright at her.

  “You like this place, yes?”

  “I do.”

  “You like . . .” He gestured around himself expansively. The beetle legs waved as he did so, and water streamed off his silvery skin. “Water, trees, flowers. Rocks and houses. All of Alahu.” He paused, tilted his head, considering her. “You like the people of Alahu?”

  “Of course I do,” she told him. She bobbed in the water, watching him, but he moved no closer. Her arms trailed in the water and she spread her fingers, feeling minnows, emboldened by her stillness, nibbling at them.

  “The people of Alahu like you,” he told her. He tapped his chest. “And Sfeo likes you. Is it well with you that Sfeo likes you?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

  His arms floated along the top of the water as he looked at her, expression wavering between uncertain and sly. “If not well, then I go and swim. Myself alone.”

  Her breath caught. “And if it is well?” she asked.

  His smile lost its uncertainty. “Then I would stay and maybe come a little closer now and then. No more than that,” he said.

  “No more than that?” she repeated.

  “Maybe other questions, later,” he said. “Always a question first.”

  Warmth tingled in her fingers as the minnows kissed their tips.

  “It is well,” she told him, voice barely audible over the water’s lapping, the chattering of the children playing.

  She asked him about the beetles as they swam and talked together, and he told her they breathed through him, that their poison was what caused his skin’s pallor. He offered her a wrist, his smile a little ironic, and unsurprised when she shook her head and paddled away.

  As they got out of the pool and shrugged on their robes, Skiff said, stroking the flowered fabric, “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever worn.”

  Essa blinked. The colors were bright but the contrasts often gaudy, she thought. She supposed that such things might appeal to one person and not another. Here was the concept in the flesh. An unbidden thought came—Real-world experience.—but she shrugged it away along with the gnats exploring the line of sweat that had already begun to crawl along her hairline.

  She glanced away and met Sfeo’s eyes where he sat talking with the youths.

  “Do you think they might let us keep them?” Skiff asked.

  “It would be unMerchantly to ask,” Essa said firmly.

  The girl’s lips drooped. Beside her, the dog’s tail did as well.

  “You have nothing to trade now,” Essa pointed out. “But when we are both in port, I will give you some of my trade share.”

  “Trade share?” Skiff said. “What is that?”

  One Merchant maxim is, Never speak of money with someone who gets less of it than you do, but this was Skiff, after all. Essa said, “I am a Merchant and part of the expedition. I have part of the trade share.”

  “But the ship is gone.”

  “It will have been insured. We will not make as much as we would have with even a moderately successful voyage, but there will be some money for me when we get to port.”

  “Then there should be some there for me too.”

  Essa shook her head in impatience. The girl was very slow. She’d spent so much time with her quick-witted betters, Essa had thought surely some of that would rub off. Apparently not.

  She took care to put kindness in her tone. The girl could not help herself, after all. “No, because you are the duke’s indentured servant.”

  “Then there is no share set aside for me?”

  “There is,” Essa said, “but it will be given to the duke.” She didn’t add anything after that. Alberic was notoriously frugal and would not dispense bonuses to his servants no matter how fruitful the voyage.

  Skiff’s face worked. “It is unfair.”

  “It is as the gods dictate,” Essa said. “We follow the practices they have given us.”

  “Practices that only benefit the rich!” Beside Skiff, the dog growled.

  “Again, that is how the gods have dictated,” Essa said, working hard to stay unirritated despite the heat, the buzzing insects, and Skiff’s stupidity. “Money goes to the rich so then it will flow downward, administered by their wise hands.”

  “Administered how?”

  “Spent, for one. Flowing down to Merchants, entertainers, crafters, artisans, suppliers of all sorts . . . the list goes on and on.”

  “I would spend my money on three robes like this. More than that I would not need.” Skiff rested her hand on the dog’s head and said, mostly to herself, the rest to the dog, “It is not unreasonable to ask enough for that.”

  “It is entirely unreasonable!” Essa snapped. She mopped at her forehead. The coolness engendered by the pool was entirely gone, despite the green shade they stood in.

  Skiff didn’t answer her as they went back to the village. The sleep shelves felt close and hot, so they followed the example of some villagers and rested on wicker lounges out on the balcony. Essa closed her eyes and tried to sleep but couldn’t. The oppressive heat pressed down on her. She was too conscious of the presence of Sfeo and Ava, the buzz of insects, the shrill calling of birds, the same repetitions over and over again. In Tabat the birds were quieter. Barely there in the winter. Better behaved.

  She realized with a start that she had been sleeping when Sfeo touched her shoulder.

  “Eat soon,” he told her. She smiled up at him, wishing she’d been dreaming about him.

  She and Skiff washed in their room, then made their way to another repetition of the feast. This time the food was even more lavish, the bowls higher and more varied, the music more frenetic, starting as the sun kissed the horizon and a cool breeze swept inland from the sea.

  Sfeo took her hand, led her among the dancers, showed her how to twist right and left then right again, a sinuous motion that set a fire stirring low, made the cradle of her thighs ache, made an accidental brush of chest to chest set her blood singing even stronger, higher, more insistently.

  When he leaned into her and whispered a question, she did not speak, only nodded, and let him lead her into shadows, exacting a kiss for each footstep, till they fumbled with each other’s clothing, till their robes fluttered away like the bats swinging low and musically overhead, freely given to the air and chance.

  This time she let him bring the beetles’ questing heads up to her skin, let the bite make the world sway, make her body a flame, a candle, a waterfall, aga
in and again, a roaring in her head and fire in the wake of their rasping search, each time their bite making her phoenix reborn.

  She could have slept there in the puddled shadows beyond the flickering torchlight, but the truth was, an ant bit her and sent her back to the room.

  She entered quietly, trying not to make more noise than necessary. The beetle’s drug still sang in her veins, leaving the world etched with purple and silver shadows. She could still feel the aftertouch of Sfeo’s fingers on her skin, a languorously sweet sensation that fled like cold water had chased it when she saw that Skiff and Yadi were unexpectedly awake, sitting on a bench below the open window.

  She said, in question, “Skiff?”

  “My name is Doralina,” the child said. In the darkness she was only a silhouette against the starlight. “The youngest of the kennel children is Raft, and then there is Skiff, and then Barge, and after that the kennel keeper, who is named however they please.”

  The breeze carried copper and jasmine in equal measure. The dog was growling, Essa realized, so softly she could barely hear it, but a sound that had started the moment she stepped into the room.

  She stood stock-still. Her heart pounded so hard in her throat that she could no longer hear the growl, only feel it in the way it teased the hairs on her arms upright. Fear grabbed her heels and rooted her, every instinct shooting danger.

  “Why are you awake?” she asked.

  “I was waiting for you,” the child said. “You like this place too, or you would not have gone with that man. Do you love him? He made you smile, you must want to stay with him.”

  “It is a more complicated equation than that,” Essa said.

  An impatient grunt and shrug, and the dog’s growl ratcheted up a precise and alarming notch.

  “Equations. Numbers. Things no one can see. And all of them become coin. But nobody needs coins here. They build a little house and they live there. They fish and they hunt and they gather fruit.” The girl fell silent for a moment. Her hand moved on the dog’s head, stroking between its ears, and it quieted.