No Present Like Time

by Steph Swainston

  I hung on to a rowan tree’s upturned roots as the mountainside liquefied and tabular ice thundered down. The air filled with powder snow. The next day saw me scrabbling at the granite debris until my fingers split, trying to dig her out.

  I smirked. “She’s still up there under tons of rock, flat as a waffle.”

  “That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”

  I huffed and tapped ash off the cigarette. “I hated them. I grew up too slowly for Rhydanne and in the end I’d no love of their way of life. But Darkling paled into insignificance when I went to Hacilith and fell in with the Wheel. They were named from their habit of nailing enemies to the waterwheels of the city. The weird thing was that I was happy as a chemist’s apprentice and I didn’t need a gang’s protection until I joined them. The longer you live, the more scars you gather, see?” I traced my fingertip over the deep scarification on my right shoulder, a circle with six spokes, the initiation to the gang.

  “Shit, Jant. That’s terrible…”

  Felicitia pulled apart the hilt and suede sheath of a hunting knife until its long steel emerged. It was unbelievably sharp: Felicitia had a lot of time to spare. His hands shook and he fumbled as he traced the lines drawn on with lipstick. My washed-out feeling of suspense tipped into agony. Unlike tattoos it was not superficial; it was deep. It could not be dealt with lightly. I swear the first cut went straight to the bone. My hands were bound behind me to a cast-iron chair in a beer garden. I struggled, and when I started screaming they gagged me.

  I stumbled home, leaving a trail of blood that rats scented, scurrying out from refuse piled on street corners. I dressed the wound myself, though my fingers slipped into and through the lacerated flesh.

  “It didn’t hurt as much as Slake in ’twenty-five though,” I said, pushing my T-shirt up so he could see the remains of an Insect bite, a sixty-stitch-long scar that curved into the left side of my belly, ending in a puckered mark where its mandible hit my lowest rib. “I held my guts in with one arm. I crawled a meter, collapsed and started to drown in the mud.”

  “God. Slake Cross Battle. I heard stories…”

  “Well, I took all the cavalry but none of them had mounts. Every man was sliced to bits. That’s why we introduced testing the ground with poles for Insect tunnels before we camp. The Doctor knew I was still living but god knows how she found me because she said I was nearly buried. She pushed all my innards back in and stacked my stretcher on the cart. Because the Circle holds us, we can gain consciousness with life-threatening wounds and no desire to witness them. That got me back on scolopendium again but it also won Tern’s attention. I was in hospital for a year; I kept turning up the drip’s dial and passing out until Rayne threatened to take me off painkillers. While convalescing I began to panic that I had lost the ability to fly. I tried to glide out of the hospital window and ripped all my stitches…Zascai were queuing up to Challenge me but, true to the rules, San held them off until I had recovered. Lucky you, Wrenn; Insect battles to look forward to.”

  “I get it. You’re scarred by living an adventurous life. The same will happen to me…You’re brave, Jant.”

  I am? “Well, not so brave as to duel with Gio,” I said, and we stood for a while in an uncertain quiet. I found talking like this reassuring-I had almost forgotten about the Aureate.

  I lit a third cigarette but simply held it. I wondered how long it would take for me to fill the entire sky with smoke. When immortals think those things we are not being entirely whimsical. “Couldn’t you sleep?” I asked. I was fully aware that Wrenn had been left here to keep an eye on me.

  “No. I keep thinking about this island. Then I got too excited and had to come up here to cool down. I can’t wait to see Tris.”

  “Personally I think it’s Mist’s plan to take all her enemies on one ship and scuttle it. I warn you, she’s very dangerous.”

  “But gorgeous.”

  I glanced at him. “So Ata has her hooks in you already? She’s certainly beautiful; it’s all the more reason to be wary. Even Lightning was taken in by her deceit, her callous human inventiveness and her beauty. She probably put you here on Melowne so he can’t advise you, or to preserve her mystique. She plans centuries ahead; you haven’t been alive long enough to think on our timescale.”

  I ground the cigarette into a flurry of sparks on the rail and flicked it into the sea. “Do you want to explore this boat?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  I raised the grating and trotted down the open-plank steps, looking around. Wrenn followed with his lantern. The Melowne’s hundred sailors were asleep. They mumbled and stirred in white canvas hammocks that hung three deep on the left and right of the deck, leaving a clear walkway down the center. Some of the Plainslanders were snoring. Awians sleep on their fronts or their sides so they hardly ever snore. The deck stank of sweat, damp linen and the brown-sugar smell of cheap beet rum; a bowl full of laurel leaves intended as air freshener just added its own scent to the reek. Five porthole shutters on each wall were bolted shut.

  “Don’t disturb them,” I whispered. “Let’s go down a level.” I tried to move, and couldn’t. Wrenn was standing on my feathers, bending the quills over the edge of the steps.

  “Oops, sorry.” He shuffled back. I put a finger to my lips and descended through the second hatchway. This level was pitch dark but the air smelled better, heavy with camphorwood, pine sap, oak sawdust and quality leather. I investigated some kegs stenciled “Grass Isle,” and Wrenn reclined on a pile of sacks of dried beans and rice, swinging his lantern about. The deck was packed floor to ceiling with well-stowed sacks and oil flasks, as far as the light could reach. “We’re under the waterline here,” he said.

  “Don’t.” I shuddered, thinking how the sea’s pressure might cave in the hull, squashing it like an eggshell.

  “Mist says this is the orlop deck, for stores and dunnage. The hold’s below us; that’s the lowest level.”

  “What the fuck is dunnage?”

  Wrenn shrugged. I levered a lid plank off the nearest cask. “Wine, Wrenn, look at all this wine! Half of Lightning’s cellar must be in here.”

  He picked up a chunk of cheese covered in wax paper. “Breakfast!”

  “This one’s rum.” I dipped a rationing cup in another barrel.

  “I’ve found salted meat, oranges, a barrel of sauerkraut. What’s ‘portable soup’?”

  We forced our way between the racks. I climbed on top of the hogsheads and walked along, hunched over, brushing the ceiling, but the deck was so crammed we couldn’t go more than a few meters. Wrenn sat back on the ladder, I leaned on the wooden pump pipe next to it, and we nibbled handfuls of booty-me with chocolate and rum; Wrenn with dried fruit, bread and water.

  “There’s another grid,” I said. “Let’s go down again.”

  “It’s locked, see?” Wrenn crouched and turned over a padlock.

  “I should be able to crack that,” I said, wanting to impress the Swordsman, although I was not sure why. I put a hand to the small of my back, selected one of the smallest secondaries, gripped it and pulled. Flight feathers are very strongly attached so I had to give it a hard wrench to pull it out, teeth gritted because it hurt. It dragged the flesh, just like pulling a fistful of hair. It came out leaving a hollow funnel of skin from which another pinfeather would grow in a couple of months.

  The quill was old and did not bleed. I flattened its translucent-cream point, and jiggled it about in the lock, turning clockwise and pressing hard to poke the tumblers around. I remarked, “People say I had a misspent youth, but no other Messenger has so many useful talents to place at the Emperor’s service.”

  I felt the mechanism give in the lock; it clicked open and we hefted the hatchway cover. Wrenn stepped down first with his guttering lantern. “Check it out, it follows the shape of the hull.”

  The hold’s walls curved up on both sides, like being in a wooden bowl. The ship’s ribs were clearly visible. The ceiling was two meters above and I could
stand up straight for the first time. Melowne’s side-to-side rolling was not so obvious here; we were standing directly above the keel and the ship felt stable. More equipment had been carefully stowed between the ribs and lashed to each of the knees supporting the deck above.

  The timbers for the pinnaces had instructions printed on them like model kits. There was an enormous amount of folded canvas and all sorts of tackle. There were metal buckets full of solid tar like warm black ice, chains, cord on reels, copper nails and many times the ship’s length in coiled hemp cables.

  “This is all spare rigging,” Wrenn said, as he kicked the shaft of an anchor twice my height and as thick as my thigh. He clicked a latch on a long oilskin-lined casket. He let the lid fall. “Oh, my god.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Arrows. Look!” About one hundred arrows with very sharp broadhead points filled the box, laid in leather spacers to keep their flights apart. Wrenn dug his fingers between them and they rattled. I looked up and realized I was staring at a wall of similar boxes. Wordlessly, we counted them and made a quick calculation, “Ten thousand arrows?”

  “At least.”

  “If there’s shafts there must be-”

  “Bow staves,” I said, breaking the seal on a larger coffer. It was full of heavy longbows, all with fresh strings and the bowyer’s mark stamped two-thirds along their length where the arrow was intended to be placed. “A couple of hundred bows, one for every man on the ship.”

  “Look, there are halberds,” said Wrenn. “And shields!” They were stacked along the hull walls, covered with sailcloth. He unbuckled the straps of a huge sea chest with joyful abandon. “I wonder if there are any swords? Oh, yes, look!”

  The chest was full of fyrd-issue swords with double-edged blades and brown mass-produced leather scabbards. Their pristine hilts flashed in the light as he swept the lantern over. “I’d like to test one. Here we are-”

  “Put it back! Wrenn, the grid was locked for a reason! Mist doesn’t want us to know what’s down here!”

  But Wrenn, happily ignorant of Mist’s cruel streak, was not afraid of her. He selected a seventy-five-centimeter blade and stuck it in his belt.

  “By god, what does Mist expect us to do to Tris?” I said.

  “Maybe the islanders are fierce.”

  “Don’t be a fool. Mist said Tris has no Insects; they’ve nothing to be violent about.”

  We went forward, seeing more of the same; the Melowne’s hold was a ship’s chandlery and well-stocked armory. I hesitated. “Can you smell something?”

  “What?”

  A sharp metallic scent like spilled blood or cut leaves lay very faint beneath the hot greased-iron smell of Wrenn’s lantern. “Nothing. Forget it.”

  At the bow a huge black tarpaulin hung floor to ceiling like a curtain. A skittering sound came from behind it, as of something metal not made fast. Wrenn took a handful and swept it aside.

  A massive Insect launched itself at us.

  I ducked. Wrenn yelled. The Insect crashed into the bars of its cage and drew back on six legs. Its antennae whipped around in frantic circles.

  Its back legs slipped on the steel floor, scraping bright scratches. Its mandibles opened, a smaller set gaped inside and it jumped again, into the bars. An enormous knife-sharp foreleg stabbed out at us. It clicked and snapped; the bars boomed as it hurled itself against them. Wrenn went for his sword and dropped the lantern. Suddenly we were in total darkness with the red spots of the flare-out dancing before our eyes.

  Wrenn and I thought the same thing at the same time. We bent down and pawed frantically around on the floor for the lantern, but we only felt each other’s hands.

  “Where’s the-Ow! Damn it!” I burned my fingers on the hot oil leaking out. I stood back, seething with frustration as Wrenn picked it up. “Is it broken?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Are you sure? There’s all that bloody rum up there!”

  “There’s a sodding great Insect right here!”

  Wrenn struck a match and his shaking hand rattled inside the lantern as he lit it.

  I shouted, “For fuck’s sake! Give me it, you daft fucking featherweight!”

  He hauled his new sword from its scabbard; with the blade balanced in his hand his composure returned.

  The Insect raked the bars with its foreclaws. It chewed them, mandibles clicking like shears. Strands of drool hung down and wrapped around its feet; glutinous bubbles stuck to the floor. The Insect rubbed its back pair of legs together; it turned around and around furiously in its four-meter-deep cage. Its body hung from long legs jointed above like a spider’s. It was one of the biggest Insects I had seen, the size and strength of a warhorse; it battered the bars in absolute desperation to reach us.

  It tilted its head and tried to push through, but the bulbous brassy eyes wouldn’t fit. It pressed against the bars until its stippled thorax creaked, reached out its mandibles and gnashed. The mottled brown jaws met and overbit; they were the length and shape of scythe blades, chitin-hard and so powerful they could bite a body in two. A foreclaw swept the air. Wrenn and I backed off. He said, “What’s it doing here?”

  “I don’t know. I mean to find out.”

  The cage’s sliding door was secured by another big padlock. Its roof was a dented metal sheet. Wrenn pointed to some scattered meat bones that the Insect had voraciously scraped clean. It had macerated some into a sticky white paste and dropped it into the space between the cage and hull wall. “They make short work of marrow bones!”

  I grimaced. “I thought I could smell the magnificent beast.” I thrust the lantern at Wrenn, dashed aft to the ladder and pulled myself up much faster than he could climb. He struggled behind me, probably realizing for the first time what I can do. I swung my knees between the rungs and bent them to hang on, leaned backward upside-down, face-to-face with Wrenn. I prodded his chest. “Mist will regret her latest trick.”

  I flexed back upright and swarmed to the orlop deck. I scrambled onto the companionway and emerged from the hatch onto the main deck. All the sailors were eating their breakfast and rolling up their hammocks. Mouths full of porridge hung open in astonishment as I bounded past.

  “Comet!” Wrenn shouted. “Eszai are all equal! Stop and-”

  “Kiss it,” I said. I jumped off and flapped across to the Stormy Petrel.

  Mist is, of course, an early riser; she was already in her office eating ginger biscuits from a toast rack and walking a pair of brass compasses across an expansive chart draped over the table. I touched down outside next to the red hurricane lamp. I pounced into her cabin, right onto her, bearing her to the floor, my knees on her belly. The biscuits and a cafetière went flying. Mist was in control of herself; she saw my expression and screamed, “Saker!”

  “No more deceit!” I spat.

  “Jant,” she said. “Uppers make you manic. Why don’t you calm down, before I have you locked in the brig?”

  Her long white hair spread out, finer than silk. Her right hand edged behind the table’s baluster leg, reaching for a paperknife. I snatched it and clattered it away against the bulkhead. “An Insect!” I said. “All those boxes of halberds! Why is there a live Insect on the Melowne?”

  Mist’s fair skin turned paler, her amethyst eyes wide. “An Insect?”

  “In a fucking cage!”

  She caught her breath. “Please get off me.”

  I didn’t want to let her move. I could only see one course of action. “We must sail back to Awndyn. Fulmer will turn these over-ornamented crates around and take us home. In the Emperor’s name, with god’s will and the Circle’s protection, you can consider yourself under arrest. I’ll bring you before San, at knifepoint if need be!”

  “Comet…” she said calmly.

  “The only good thing about being at sea is we won’t be eaten by Insects. And you bring one along! A huge one! I’ll throw it overboard…”

  She saw there was no point in dissembling. “Aye,
I thought you would pry into everything like a starved rat. Let me up and I’ll explain.”

  As I disentangled her cloak folds from around us, Lightning glowered into the cabin with a cursing eye. The sea wind ripped his fur-lined coat into billows. He grabbed me and pushed me away from Mist. I hit the wall hard and sprawled down in a winded pile by the joist. “Damn it, are you fucking trying to break my wings?”

  “What is going on?”

  Mist held her upper arm as if I had hurt her. She conjured an expression of gratitude for the Archer and sobbed experimentally but it had no effect on him. “Jant is such a junkie.” She shrugged. “He’s so screwed up I am tempted to Challenge him myself.”

  “No! This is nothing to do with cat!” I can’t escape my one failing; my fellow Eszai use the label to taint everything I do, even when I’m clean. With always the same friends, I can’t move on and begin anew, my mistakes stagnate around me. I smacked my fist against the joist, to take the heat out of my frustration. “Don’t tell me it’s a hallucination, because Serein saw it too! There’s an Insect, hundreds of cut-and-thrusters, a hundred caissons of arrows.”

  Lightning listened carefully and at the latter he held up his hand. “I know about them. Of course, Jant, think about it. Stop flouncing around and sit still. Would you travel to an unfamiliar country without armaments? Our ships are our only means of returning home so they’re worth more than the Empire to us now. We have to protect them.”

  “Mist said the island was peaceful,” I said sullenly.

  “On the other hand, shipping Insects sounds sinister in the extreme. What is it for?”