by Jay Lake
We moved through the late afternoon like the blackest, most dangerous festival processional. Blades and prisoners swept down Jaimurti Street toward the Avenue of Ships. People scattered, but followed to see what the fuss was. Everything on the streets of Kalimpura was a show for someone.
I watched children racing along, the little cutpurses and beggars. How many of them had been sold already? How many would live long enough to grow into their lives? How many was I leaving behind?
“Green.”
I looked over at the Dancing Mistress and found my eyes full of tears.
“This is change, not death,” she said. “The path remains open before you.”
Then we spilled out onto the docks. Mother Vajpai was taken up onto the shoulders of Mother Adhiti. She stood there-a trick of balance I’d shown her, I realized with a strange, quirky pride-scanning the waterfront. A crowd gathered around us, ringing my escort of Blades with shouting faces. Someone tossed a rotten fish over the heads of the Blades. As I did not dare raise my hands to block the missile, it struck me with a wet, stinking slap.
Mother Vajpai jumped down and, using our battle code, called for fighting as needed but to cause no deaths. She then pointed east, curiously enough toward Arvani’s Pier. We hustled along as fruit, fish, and stones began to shower down. The women did not strike back, though they could have. Riot was unfolding in our wake.
I saw the purpose in Mother Vajpai’s plan quickly enough. The Blades took the base of the pier, where it met the waterfront, pushing the Dancing Mistress and me out onto the tongue of stone. A single handle scrambled ahead, forcing anyone working there up the gangplanks of the moored ships and effectively clearing our path.
“You will leap from the end.” Mother Vajpai pointed. “The Blades will stand over you as directed, but there you will be free of thrown cobblestones.”
“Thank you,” I said, though it seemed foolish.
“I suggest you speak quickly to whatever captain will listen first as you swim alongside.” Her face clouded. “I should hate to have you killed.”
“So would I.”
The Dancing Mistress took my hand. The sense of Mother Vajpai’s words must have been clear enough.
Followed by twelve archers, all women I knew, and some of them women I had been very close to indeed, the Dancing Mistress and I walked to the end of the dock. The rails of the dozen ships we passed were crowded with sailors, longshoremen, and idlers being harangued by panicked pursers and mates. The onlookers were all too busy laughing and jeering in the dozens of languages of the sea.
This show would be remembered in the taverns for years to come. I waved broadly, pretending a bravery I did not have.
Then we were at the end of the pier, and the women were driving us forward at arrow point without breaking stride. I went into the ocean with my teacher beside me, wondering if we would come up whole and how many dead-eyed monsters awaited us here.
Returning Once More
S OMEHOW I took in a mouthful of harbor water. It was foul-not just the throat-closing saltiness of the sea, but a mix of stagnation and bilge and whatever had flowed out of the bottom of Kalimpura as well. I found the surface and kicked hard to keep my head and shoulders in the air, spitting the whole time.
The Dancing Mistress struggled, though the tide was slack and there was almost no chop. I launched myself into her and tried to buoy her up. “Breathe!” I shouted in Petraean. “And do not thrash so!”
She calmed a bit. I tugged at her as I kicked in a backstroke toward the footing of the pier. Up along the top, I could see Mother Vajpai frowning at me. She was surrounded by drawn bows.
Time for a better plan, I thought. A ship was moored to the left, in the last tieup along Arvani’s Pier. She was a low, wide, open-topped coastal trader, in truth an overgrown longboat. Half a dozen Selistani men lounged at the taffrail. They stared as they passed a pipe.
The Dancing Mistress’ struggles slackened. Dragging her with me, I grasped hold of the ship’s rudder for support.
“Here,” I said to her, “hold on to this chain.”
“You there,” one of the men called down in Seliu. He spoke with a thick Bhopurti accent. “Hands off. You might break something.”
They all laughed at this wonderful joke. An arrow shot right in front of them to splash in the water beyond. The men and I looked at the pier to see Mother Vajpai there, shaking her head. Mother Gita winked at me.
So it truly was not the Blades’ desire that I die today. I drew some small comfort from this prospect. Even in the heat of the afternoon, I was shivering. The water wasn’t cold, but I was. The Dancing Mistress’ condition grew worse, shaking and coughing. I’d never before seen her frightened.
“Man, bring us aboard,” I said in my best imitation Bhopurti accent. Hiding the Stone Coast in my speech had been harder.
The leader glanced at the array of bowwomen, then back at me. His laughter was gone. “You are a danger, little boy.”
I had to get out of the water. “I am far more than a danger. I am an opportunity.”
“For what?”
“Bring us aboard, and I shall tell you.”
He looked at Mother Vajpai again. I saw her nod. Reluctantly, grumbling, his men threw down a pair of ropes. We both climbed in our sodden beggars’ cloth. Hands helped me over the rail, but they stayed well away from the Dancing Mistress.
I lay gratefully for a moment on the sun-warmed deck. My breathing was ragged and my heart raced, but I was no longer in danger of drowning. The Dancing Mistress coughed until she spewed, spraying her guts across the deck as the sailors jumped back cursing.
“Speak quickly,” the leader said. “I don’t like those arrows over there. I like you fouling my ship even less.”
After opening my mouth, I stopped. The truth would not impress a man like this, who probably worshipped his great-grandmother or some little crocodile god. I could not readily imagine a lie that would be convincing from me, ragged and wet at his feet.
So I stood.
“I will not tell you I’m no trouble,” I said. “But I will tell you I’m the kind of trouble you want.”
He laughed. “How’s that, little boy?”
“A boat like yours calls at ports all along the coast. Smart people sometimes think they don’t have to pay, right?”
Now his face closed, suspicion dawning. “It is happening.”
“I’ll face down any of your men. Any two of them. If I throw them to the deck, take me on as a tough to watch over your cargo and defeat your enemies.” I nudged the Dancing Mistress with my foot. “My friend here is allergic to water, but on a dry deck, dock or beach, she can fight all of you.”
She groaned miserably, but rolled over and showed him the claws of her left hand. He looked impressed, then laughed. “You are being a great fool, whatever else may be true.”
“I am the one it takes a dozen archers to keep at bay,” I said quietly. “And I cook very well.”
“Enough!” shouted Mother Vajpai from the docks. “There will be no fighting today.” She tossed a small leather sack on the deck. It clinked in a manner the captain seemed to find promising. “I will hire you to sail east, to Bhopura, if you leave now with all your hands. Especially the newest ones.”
He scooped the sack up and opened it. A greedy smile dawned. “We will be gone within the hour.”
The captain’s men put a boat over the side and rigged a tow line. That took much shouting and splashing. The vessel began to edge away from the dock. Mother Vajpai stood at the end of the pier, making the sign of the lily with her hands. Beside her, Mother Gita winked at me again.
Then we were turning away from the docks of Kalimpura. With much cursing and shouting, we headed out to sea.
Utavi, the captain of the little coastal trader Chittachai, agreed to sail us well east of the city, then out to sea and into the shipping lanes, where we would try to hail a vessel bound for the Stone Coast. The price of our passage paid by Mother Vajpai
could probably have bought the entire boat.
The Dancing Mistress and I had little enough chance to talk as our new, temporary home was hugging the coast. Chittachai ’s deck was open, except for a small space under the poop and an even smaller space under a little foredeck, which the crew used as an equipment locker.
After a day aboard in my right mind, it was clear enough to me that she either had a hidden, shallow hold, or truly vast bilges. These men were smugglers, moving goods past whatever taxmen or customs officials might be working the port towns of this coast.
Now we were their cargo.
Other than being out from under the threat of imminent harm, we were little better off than we had been back at Arvani’s Pier. Warm, dry, fed, but still much shorter on prospects than on intentions. In the evenings, I missed my belled silk. That was more of a habit these days than anything serious. Keeping count in my mind all anew, and sewing those many bells yet again, seemed more than I could bear.
How had the women of my home kept theirs? By never moving far from where they started, of course. Like Shar, a woman there was born in one hut, living in a second with whatever man would take her in, and perhaps a third with one of her children after another son’s wife did not want her around. All of them within a few furlongs’ distance.
Girls who strode across oceans as I did could not expect to maintain tradition. I mourned my loss. Perhaps the Blades had kept the silk against my return, though more likely Samma had burned it.
Every step I’d ever taken toward home had only led me farther away. Just as I myself had been taken away.
“I killed a man, back in Kalimpura,” I told the Dancing Mistress the first evening of our coastwise voyage.
“When did you become a killer?” Her voice was heavy with sadness.
I never did, I told myself. I thought of Michael Curry, sitting in surprise as the light vanished from his eyes. “You taught me to stand against the ill in the world.” The excuse sounded horridly weak, even to me.
“This man you killed? Was he responsible for the ills of the world?”
“No.” I picked at a splinter on the rail. Monkeys screamed in the dark trees a few hundred yards to the north, where the jungle came down into the water behind a great bar of sand. The evening brought a shift of the breeze, which caused the boat’s heading to change. The smells changed as well, to rot and the sickly sweet odor of fruit going bad. No wonder the monkeys were screaming. They were drunk on ferment. “It was in the service of what I was told was justice. I have found a great interest in such things since returning to where I was sold.”
A long silence followed. Eventually the Dancing Mistress spoke. “Federo does… did… does many things I do not understand. The buying of children was one part of his duties in the old days, when he carried the Factor’s seal and purse. As I heard the tale, he bought you from your father at the gate of your farm.”
“Trade,” I muttered. “That wasn’t-”
She interrupted me, still soft and careful. “Trade is not like a snake. You can cut the head, even gut the body, burn all the ships and warehouses. Someone will come along on the next quiet day and begin it anew. You cannot kill trade. Not at the point of a blade, not with all the fire in your heart.”
Spitting over the rail, I said, “I am not trade. I am a person.”
“People are traded everywhere. Apprenticeships, betrothals, the swearing of soldiers and hiring of sailors.”
“They chose their fates.”
“Green.” Her tone grew pitying. “How many brides select the man they marry? How many apprentices looked across the trades of their city and decided which they would pursue? Most people never choose anything. They are chosen for, or they follow what is left to them after their choices have been eaten away by time, by ill fortune, by their own actions or the deeds of others.”
I wanted to slap her, to restart our fight and give the Dancing Mistress the beating of her life. She didn’t know; she didn’t understand. She didn’t care.
“Green.”
Turning my back to her, I stared at the stern. The man at the tiller-I did not yet know his name-waved and smiled. He seemed impervious to the thunder that must have hung in my eyes. Or the last, failing light of day had cloaked my face too much for him to see.
“Green.” She touched my shoulder.
I swung around with a hard block, then pulled my blow before it landed. “What!?”
“You are not wrong. It is just never so simple as we would like. Children should be free to grow and prosper and choose. So should adults. All persons, of any race or kind. That you would keep more children in their homes is a noble ambition. Do not forsake it. Just learn what it will mean. Should the prettiest girl in a family that starves stay home and starve with them? What if her price will bring her to a comfortable house, and feed her brothers through the next failed harvest?”
My tears continued to flow. “That cannot be right.”
“Many things are not right. You can dedicate yourself to repairing some wrongs, but not even the titanics could have repaired all the ills of the world. In their time, they sundered, and from them have splintered all the folk of the world. We each carry a measure of grace, and we each carry a measure of evil. There is never enough grace to banish the evil, and there is never enough evil to smother the grace.”
“So no one does anything.” My heart was leaden. My throat had closed. The very words were bitter in my mouth.
“People do what they can.” Her hand on my shoulder squeezed tight. “When you strode into the Ducal Palace, you threw down more evil than a generation of child-sellers could possibly wreak.”
“That was not my evil.” I felt very small in my shame and anger. “It belonged to your people, and to Copper Downs.”
“No, it was not your evil, yet you fixed what you were able to.” Her smile was tender by the rising moon.
“Then why have you come to call me back?”
“I have already told you. More evil is afoot. Many of us believe your place in the breaking of the old order gives you power in the new.”
“It isn’t power I want.”
She knelt. “You could still leave this ship and take foot back to your temple. When their anger has banked to coals, they might even take you in once more. That choice is yours. But I beg you to come and help, for my sake. For the city’s sake.”
“Get up, get up.” I flushed with embarrassment now. Goddess only knew what the tillerman thought. “The Goddess has sent me. I am going.”
“When you released the spells upon the Duke,” the Dancing Mistress said late the next afternoon as a pot of fish soup bubbled between us, “what did you see and feel? Where did this take place?”
“W-we were in a counting room.” The memory was intense and difficult to frame into words, for then I had not yet taken up this habit of writing my story behind me. “There was no throne-it was not an audience chamber, but rather a place where men would meet to talk over numbers until their arguments turned to agreement. He toyed with me awhile, then I jumped at him and spoke the words you gave me.” I paused for a deep breath of air, which despite the baking sun tasted almost chill for a moment. “Then he was gone.”
“I know he is gone. His power is not.”
“It must be. That might swirled around me like a storm of dust and air, and plucked at me with a thousand small fingers. Then his power wailed away, taking him with it.”
“We did not study our war so well.” The Dancing Mistress’ voice was sad and slow. “People came as claimants to a vacant throne. What they sought was not his Ducal coronet, but the power that hung like a pall over Copper Downs. I was forced to deal with one of these shamans myself.” Her eyes were haunted a moment. “At great cost.”
“I am sorry,” I said.
“No, no. It must be done. In the Duke’s absence since, the gods have stirred from their long silence. At least one has been slain out of hand-”
“Slain!?” I paused. “I am sorry for th
e interruption, Mistress, but gods are not meant to be killed.”
“They certainly do not think so.” Her smile was crooked. “It is something that can be done. With the right preparation and the right powers.”
“Small wonder the Lily Goddess fears,” I said. “If even that idea crosses the Storm Sea, She is at risk. Let alone someone with the sort of weapon that can do the job.”
“Oh, it is far more complex than possessing a mere weapon.” The Dancing Mistress frowned. “I do not have the secret of it myself, and wish nothing to do with such knowledge, but the Interim Council had discussed it more than once.”
“Interim Council?” The sound of that title bothered me. I had read enough history to know better.
“When the Duke fell,” she said heavily, “Federo stood forward, with a few of the great trading factors. Our little plan was secret enough, but general discontent was a club sport in Copper Downs under the Duke. It was not hard to find people who thought they knew better.”
“I suppose after four hundred years, there was no heir to come forward.”
“No. Not a trace of the old ruling house. The Duke had been a collateral cousin, but he’d killed them all long before they could die of old age. To keep there from being a claim. That was part of his own grip on power.”
“Your council rules the city now?” I was fascinated at the idea of the Dancing Mistress-a quiet woman who walked in shadow-sitting at the table of government.
“To some degree. The gods have bestirred themselves after long silence, the priests bicker, and our sister states along the Stone Coast have asserted all manner of baroque rights and interests.”
“Were you sent on this errand to get you out of the city?” I asked her gently.
“I claimed this mission for my own.” She smiled again, this time with genuine affection. “The council would have sent an embassy with edicts to claim you, if you yet lived. We had learned from the captain of Southern Escape where you went, and were set to petition the Prince of the City to proclaim you free and seek you out.”