by K. Makansi
“Not hungry?” I ask.
“Starving. I just don’t want to eat something unfamiliar that will make me sick again. These two,” he says, nodding at Remy and Soren, “can attest to the fun times we had on our way to Normandy.”
“Not fun,” Remy laughs. “But you were mostly going through withdrawals and probably got a bug from drinking unfiltered water. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about here.”
“It’s not poisonous, I promise,” Osprey says. “See, here. These are morel mushrooms with barley and leeks. And this here is beetroot with wild greens. This is roasted squirrel rubbed in turmeric and paprika—that’s why it’s such a funny color. The bread is called pain-eponge.” Sponge-bread. It does look like a sponge—porous and full of holes. “You use it to grab your food.” She tears off a piece to demonstrate then scoops up something that looks like a meatball and plops into her mouth. Soren and Remy have clearly already caught onto this, though Miah hesitates at the bread, too.
“Don’t you have forks?” he asks.
“Forks?” Osprey looks at him, confused.
Miah pantomimes sticking a piece of food with a fork.
“Oh,” Osprey laughs, unsheathing the knife strapped to her leg. “You want to stab something? Use your knife.”
Miah shakes his head. “You lot took our weapons, remember?” He tears off a piece of bread and starts nibbling at it. Remy’s already digging into the mushrooms. I follow suit, watching the Outsiders around us and picking a little of something from every platter within reach.
“What’s this?” Soren asks, half the food on his plate already gone. He’s pointing to some sausages that are a funny black-and-grey color as he stuffs one into his mouth. Osprey shoots him a devilish smile.
“Boudin,” she responds. “Blood sausage.”
For a second, he freezes, and it looks like he might spit it out. His eyes go wide and he stops chewing for the first time since we sat down. But then he shrugs, swallows, and goes on eating as if nothing had happened.
“Tastes like iron,” he says as he picks up another piece. “Pretty good.”
Miah shudders and turns a little green.
“I think I’ll stick with the vegetables for now.”
“Me, too,” I mutter.
“Chickenshits,” Remy says taking a bite of something that looks like chicken. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
23 - VALE
Spring 20, SA 106, 21h49
Gregorian Calendar: April 8
“You can’t be serious,” Miah says.
“Why not? Afraid you can’t handle it?” Squall waggles a thick finger in his face. I shake my head. Dinner’s been going on for hours and we’re still sitting—more like leaning—at the table as yet more bottles of mead are passed around. I have no conception of the number of people who have come and gone. In the distance, soft strains of what sounds like a trio of guitar, mandolin, and flute float on the air and more than once I’ve been tempted to find who is playing and ask to join them. Although I can pick out a few tunes on the mandolin and can play pretty well on the guitar, I was never as proficient at either of them as I was at the piano. Still, the music tugs at me.
Long ago, in what seems like another age, my dad and I built a guitar from scratch so he could give me yet another physics lesson, this time about acoustics, using something I loved: music. I can feel the wood and the steel strings vibrating across the frets at different frequencies, transforming science into music, merging science and music.We use science to create art, he’d said, and art to reveal science. The strings of an instrument vibrate to certain frequencies to give rise to music just as the strings of quantum theory give rise to bosons and fermions, protons and gravitons, Riemann surfaces and branes and the whole of the universe. I can see his fingers on the old-fashioned lathe, hear the earnestness in his voice, how he wanted me to understand the connection between beauty and nature, art and science. The pinprick of tears bites at my nose. When did everything go wrong? I’ve clearly had too much to drink.
Remy’s been polite all evening, but she and Miah have been doing most of the talking while I’ve been trying to not make her mad again. Soren and Osprey are holding each other up, barely, and it appears Miah has finally gotten over his fear of the food—and the drink. True to his ability to make friends anywhere he goes, he and Squall have already become fast friends.
“No way you can down that bottle faster than me,” Squall pronounces, already far beyond tipsy. I size them both up. Squall is definitely the heavier of the two, but Miah is taller and has always been able to hold his liquor. After his recovery, he’d even taken to drinking that sewage Eli, Firestone and Rhinehouse had been brewing during our short stay at Normandy. The worst tasted of dirty socks with a hint of onion and the best tasted of just plain dirt with notes of old leather and mossy rocks, which, surprisingly, wasn’t half bad.
“What’s the wager?” Miah asks.
“Wager?” Squall quirks his nose in confusion.
“What do I get if I win?”
“Eternal glory and admiration,” Osprey says, slurring her words, her head lolling slightly up against Soren’s shoulder. “And a horse.”
“A horse?” Miah perks up. “Whose horse?”
“His horse,” Osprey responds, nodding vaguely at Squall. “Thas how it works. You win, you get his horse. He wins, he gets yours.” Squall nods very seriously.
I lean across the table to Osprey. Soren eyes me suspiciously, but something’s changed between the two of us—at least he’s not threatening my life every half-second, now, which is a vast improvement.
“Is this what every night is like for you all?” I ask.
Osprey grins. “Oh, no. Not every night.”
“It’s a miracle you all manage to stay out of sight,” I reply, “considering what a racket you make.”
“We have our ways,” Osprey replies, dimples appearing in her cheeks.
“You’re on.” Miah says finally, clapping his hands as everyone around him cheers. Obviously not concerned about the fact that the horse he’s been riding for the last four days is not his to gamble, Miah jumps up when Squall rises. Squall holds his palm up the same way he did to Osprey earlier in the day, and Miah presses his hand against the Outsider’s.
“I’ll be the judge,” Remy pipes up from beside me. She scrambles to her feet and stands next to the two of them with her hand held high over her head. “When I drop my hand, you pull out the corks and drink. Okay?”
“Gorra have a Ou’sider judge, too,” Osprey slurs, using Soren’s head to push herself to her feet, tilting into Remy. “I’m rea-ah-dy.”
“Okay?” Remy looks between the two competitors, both of whom have a bottle in hand. By this point everyone at the table is leaning in or standing to watch the competition.
“Go!” Remy’s hand slices through the air. Squall whips out his knife, digs into the cork and pulls it out with a pop! and starts guzzling while Miah reaches around him and bashes open the bottleneck on a nearby rock to create a wide-mouthed opening. He tilts the bottle back and gulps directly from broken rim, and before Squall is two-thirds done he slams his empty on the table, making dishes jump and cups totter.
“Sayyid wins!” Osprey whoops and Remy hugs Miah as he catches in midair another bottle someone tosses him as a prize.
Miah bows, then takes Squall’s knife, pops out the cork and holds it up in a toast. “To Squall and his horse!”
“To Squall and his horse!” the crowd toasts and laughs. Miah takes a long pull and hands it to his new friend, who does the same, finishing the bottle and slamming it down just as Miah had. Miah’s got a big smile plastered on his face, and when Osprey leans over Soren’s drunken figure and whispers, “I was lyin’ about th’orse,” he doesn’t even notice.
Remy and Osprey take their seats again, but Osprey’s arm stays draped across Soren’s shoulder. She leans into him and their foreheads touch as if they’re co-conspirators plotting some elaborate
scheme. Remy glances at them and turns toward me, her eyes dark pools into which I could swim forever without ever needing to come up for air, a place where I could cleanse myself, where I could atone.
“Love at first sight, or what?” she says, the beginnings of a smile plays around her lips.
My heart thuds so loud I wonder if she can hear it, and I look askance at her.
“It wasn’t so long ago you were in his arms.” I say, keeping my voice as neutral and disinterested as possible. Hope, next of kin to fear, wells up, filling me to the brim with a rushing sense of anticipation. Osprey plays absently with Soren’s hair as she stares down the table, eyes unfocused, and he’s propped up on one elbow watching her while his other arm is wrapped around her waist, his thumb tucked into her belt, tracing lazy little circles against her skin.
“Soren and me…” Remy pauses, purses her mouth, and opens it again. “It’s complicated. We love each other—at least,” she lets out a little laugh, “—we do now. But we were never in love. We just figured that out … recently.” She chews the side of her lip and stares straight ahead, avoiding my gaze. I take that as a sign not to push the issue further, even as words bubble up from my throat, threatening to choke me. I swallow hard.
But now she’s leaning closer to me, her gaze coming up to meet mine, and I can smell the sweat on her, the honeyed mead someone sloshed on her skin earlier, can almost taste the sweetness on her lips. And then I notice her brow is knitted, her face shaded with concern.
“Where is Chan-Yu?” she whispers. “No one’s even mentioned his name.” Her words, calm but unnerved, settle me quickly. She’s perfectly coherent, and though her eyes are tired, determination is etched across her face as she looks up at me, worried and tense. She is unable to let go, to forget what brought us here, even at a moment like this. “Do you think he’s still alive?”
“Osprey would have told us if he wasn’t,” I say.
“What if they don’t know?”
“We’ll ask tomorrow. No one’s thinking about politics now.” I nod toward Squall who, now standing behind us, is introducing Miah to another one of the Outsiders. The man greets Miah with a generous embrace, but the expression on his face when he looks at Squall is so tender it splinters my heart. What would it feel like if Remy looked at me like that?
“I guess you’re right.” She chews the side of her lip and stares straight ahead, avoiding my gaze.
“Want to help me kill this?” I ask. I offer her a half-empty bottle next to me with the best smile I can muster. She frowns up at me, though, catching my eye for a half-second before she glances away again, almost as if she’s disappointed. But then, a moment later, she shrugs
“Sure,” she says. She takes the bottle from me and presses it to her lips. Would that I were….
“Ey, Vale!” I turn at the sound of my name. Miah stands a few meters behind us, one arm slung over Squall’s shoulder, who, in turn, is holding hands with the man beside him. “Our hosts insist it’s the guests’ turn to entertain. Soren was going to play something, but he seems to have disappeared.”
I turn around and realize that indeed Soren and Osprey are no longer at the table. A quick glance around confirms they are nowhere in sight. By the way they’ve been clinging to each other all night, it’s not terribly difficult to guess where they’ve gone.
Squall shakes his head and laughs. “Skaarsgard doesn’t know what he’s in for.”
“Now, now, Squall,” Miah says, in a falsely serious voice, “we should allow our friends their modesty, you know….”
“Osprey? Modesty?”
When I finally muster my courage and glance over at Remy, relief floods through me. She’s smiling, too, laughing at Miah and Squall poking fun at Soren and Osprey.
“Your friend speaks highly of your talent, Valerian,” Squall says, in the oddly serious way all Outsiders except Osprey seem to speak. Chan-Yu had it too, I remember, always talking as though he were making a speech. “Come, come, we have played for you all night. The rules of hospitality say it is your turn now.”
My heart starts pounding in my ears. Here? Now? In front of Remy? And yet, even as the fear thuds through my veins, it’s exciting, too. I miss music more than anything else about my old life, and now’s my chance to play something, anything.
“Come on, Vale!” Miah roars.
Remy nudges me and gives me a small smile. “Play nice, Vale,” she says. “We’re diplomats, remember?”
I stare into her amber eyes, my mind flashing through every moment that’s brought us here. How could I forget?
I stand and cross the rough, uneven floor of the cave to where a torch—a real torch, of tar and wood, not like the biolights we use in the Resistance—silhouettes a guitar resting against the rock wall. I pick it up and sling the leather strap over my shoulder, remembering and reveling in how comfortable it feels against my body. My favorite thing about the guitar, unlike the piano, is how you feel every note vibrate, both in your chest and in your hands, your fingers. You feel the music in a whole different way.
I look out at the group and think maybe I could warm up with an old drinking song since we’re half sloshed. I strum a few chords and try to remember the tune and lyrics I’d found in an ancient yellowed songbook in the library at the Academy. I clear my throat and close my eyes to count out the beat and get the rhythm right, and then I launch into what the book said was a song that had been sung in bars for hundreds of years.
I’ve been a wild rover for many’s the year
I’ve spent all me money on whiskey and beer
But now I’m returning with gold in great store
And I never will play the wild rover no more
And it’s No, Nay, never,
No, nay never no more
Will I play the wild rover,
No never no more
“One more verse is all I remember,” I say. But this time, I’ll call out the lyrics and you sing along.”
I went in to an alehouse I used to frequent
And I told the landlady me money was spent
I asked her for credit, she answered me nay
Such a customer as you I can have any day
And it’s No, Nay, never,
No, nay never no more
Will I play the wild rover,
No never no more
“One more time on the chorus,” Squall hollers. He, his partner, and Miah, sing and sway as others join in, some barely staying on their feet. We end up doing the chorus again and then the group claps and slaps each other on the back. Someone yells, “Give us another!”
I run through a few stanzas from the embarrassingly short list of songs I know how to play, and when I start to pull the guitar strap off my shoulder, someone calls out, “You can’t end a night like this without a love song, now can ya?”
A love song? I rack my brain, but I have no idea what to play. I glance up at Remy and it hits me. The perfect song.
“Okay,” I say to the group, “I’m going to end on another very old song. It’s not a sing along and it doesn’t even have a happy ending, but I’ve always thought it was pretty. So, here goes.”
The crowd is seated now, quiet. Waiting. I clear my throat again. This is a song Remy will know. Her grandfather loved it, and, in a round-about way, he was the one who introduced it to me. I play the first few chords and her eyes light up, a smile spreading across her face.
The water is wide, I cannot cross o’er, and neither have I wings to fly.
Build me a boat that can carry two and both shall row, my love and I.
I was never much of a singer, and with a few months of rust on my vocal chords, I’m pretty stunned I don’t sound horrible. Remy’s grandfather, a great traveler and collector of stuff from the Old World, had found many of the old recordings and songbooks and had donated them to the Academy library. Remy played an old recording of this tune for me one afternoon when we were first becoming friends—or something more. It was so pretty that after Tai w
as killed, I taught myself to play it on the guitar, thinking maybe one day I’d be able to play it for Remy and remind her of happier times. Little did I know my chance wouldn’t come until three and a half years later—in a cave in the middle of the Wilds, surrounded by Outsiders, as far away from the Sector, from our old life, as we’d ever been.
There is a ship and she sails the sea. She’s loaded deep, as deep can be.
But not so deep as the love I’m in, I know not how I sink or swim.
I meet Remy’s eyes, she smiles, and I don’t know how I get through the rest of the song.
“Drink this,” Osprey places a cup in front of Miah. It’s barely daybreak, and we’re all bleary-eyed—especially him. He stares up at her as she pours another cup and sets it in front of me. There’s a whole spread laid out on the table before us and people are coming and going, eating their breakfasts, laughing and talking before going off to do who knows what. Miah drains his cup, shudders, and holds it up for more.
“What is this?” he asks.
“Water, potassium and ginger root. It’ll help. That mead is probably stronger stuff than what you’re used to.” Miah looks up at her and squints.
“This will cure my hangover?”
“That and some good old grease. Eat some sausage, too.”
“You sure?”
“Worked for Skaarsgard. We’ve been up for a while now.”
Miah rubs his temple and cocks an eyebrow at her.
She looms over him, a challenging stance set in her hips. “You got a problem with that?”
“No,” he holds his hands up. “No problem. No problem at all.”
I manage a laugh even though there’s a steady thrum at the base of my neck and the morning light seems altogether too bright.
“Problems with what?” A tall woman with wide, prominent cheekbones and hair so black it looks like curtains of silk on her shoulders sits down across the table from us. With her is a woman who looks like a more beautiful and softer version of Chan-Yu.