As the water cleared, Shea belatedly realized her mistake. He was not old at all – in fact, he was barely full-grown – but they’d loaded him down like a ten-dollar mule. His sinuous arms bowed out at the elbows from the weight of the giant overfilled net on his back; his throat-pocket pulsed above the harness that strapped it to him. Shea couldn’t make out much of what he was carrying, though the bulge of the shapes suggested a plethora of pots, bottles, and barrels, and tied down on his left side, the long bundled shafts of rakes and shovels.
A second, more warbling rumble sent vibrations through Shea’s whole body, and called five of the Many to attend him. They hooked the tips of their long toes through the webbing of the net and swam upward with steepled hands and full-body undulations powered by their wide, flat tails. They had no hope of getting anywhere, of course: the five of them together were just potent enough to ease the burden of their greater kin, and leave him free to use his hands.
They were thick webbed tree-roots, each one big enough to wrap around her whole skull – a distinction not lost on Shea as he ripped them up from the silty bottom, pushing and slapping the water into the shape of his thoughts. What was it called?
There was no mistaking the question: he’d used the PAST sign – a very clear indication that he was not asking about the name she’d put on with her corsets and jewelry.
Champagne. Shea’s own hands were the fluttering of a wet moth’s wings by comparison. A marriage-child of the House of Opéra.
His skin paled to match Ondine’s white-violet complexion; his wide pink mouth split open, his jaw bobbing in disapproval. You can’t have this one, he said to the princess. It betrayed its Mother. It must not live.
No! Shea whitened in automatic protest. I love – it loves its Mother, and would never hurt her.
That was rudeness bordering on disrespect: Shea was one of the Many, and had no business answering back in the presence of the Few.
But Jeté’s gaze only slid back to her, unmoved, unblinking. In that moment, Shea had no room left for doubt: if Faro had not come to finish her off, it was because he knew that Opéra had already passed Shea’s death sentence in absentia – that every mereau and earthbound vassal for fifty drought-withered miles had been informed of her treason, and invited to render that bullet in her lung finally, fatally redundant. It was a truth reflected in Jeté’s eyes: a certainty preserved in twin globes of cold, jellied amber.
They were going to kill her.
Fear seeped from Shea’s pores; the salty copper aftertaste of fish blood soured in her mouth. By the time she recovered enough to feel the movement in the water to her right, she’d missed most of Ondine’s reply.
– threw it away!
Jeté answered with the stoic patience of an elder brother. Loveling, you can’t keep what isn’t yours.
I’m not going to KEEP it, Ondine shot back. It will be my present. Why are you the only one who gets to give Mother Opéra a present?
Shea looked back at Jeté, and this time past his hands. No, he couldn’t be long past his metamorphosis: he’d finished his growth, but a careful observer could see how his face hadn’t fully rounded out yet, and how his arms were still too thin, and though the angle and the overfull net on his back obscured it, he almost certainly still had the last vestigial stub of a tail. He wasn’t old enough to marry yet, but he was exactly old enough to choose a courting-gift... and a recipient.
The implication chilled Shea to her core. Not her, she signed – foolishly, recklessly, the memory of Prince Joconde’s bloated body instantly resurrected. On your life, marry anyone but her. She –
She will deceive you, Shea thought. She will use you. She will kill you, and your death will be the convenient tragedy that keeps her secrets.
She did not get that far. Jeté darkened to a murderous mottled red, mouth open, muscles tensing, and leaped.
That should have been the end of her. In a just universe, it would have been.
In this one, however, Jeté was hampered by the huge load he carried, and the Many still attached to it. The full power of his massive, waist-thick legs served only to jerk the five of them forward, like a lunging dog abruptly strangled by its chain – with equally predictable results. The Many were yanked forward, the weight of the netted luggage likewise, and Jeté sank back to the river-bottom in a humiliating, slow-motion crash.
Ondine waited until he had righted himself before delivering the final blow to his pride. I found it first. It’s mine and you can’t have it. And in one swift motion, she scooped Shea up like a corn-husk doll, and bit her in the neck.
Shea flinched as Ondine’s teeth drew blood. She’d bitten too hard: the défaut amoreux was only supposed to lightly perforate the skin. But Shea held still otherwise, gratefully matching the princess’s colors as she held Shea tight to her chest, and resumed her northward swim.
For her part, Shea could not have been more surprised. She certainly could not have said how far upriver they intended to travel, or what sort of present they expected to find when they got there. But she had at least enough sense remaining not to resist – to take the reprieve she was given, fold herself up as compactly as possible in her savior’s over-enthusiastic grasp, and try not to think about what she was being saved from... or for.
ONDINE’S AFFECTION DID not last long. Like a child carrying an oversized puppy, she soon tired of the awkward weight, and delegated Shea to two of the Many. With no excess of gentleness, they each took one of her hands and towed her along.
There was no way to speak with an arrangement like that, of course. Shea could do nothing but kick her foreshortened feet, and try to be less than absolute dead weight.
That got progressively more difficult as the hours passed. Even uninjured and unaltered, she would not have fared much better: after so many years of living on land, she was woefully out of shape. Her escorts eventually tired of the extra drag, and fobbed her off on another pair of their siblings. One of them briefly matched her colors as it took her hand – a submerged smile. Shea was quick to return the favor.
But even as the Many pulled her forward, unwelcome thoughts kept dragging her back. Every mile upstream was another mile farther from Fours, and Hakai, and Yashu-Diiwa – doubly so in his case. The a’Krah would be taking him west, and here she was, going north to who-knew-what end. She could probably escape, even with only one good lung: the Many were nearly as unfit on land as Shea was in the water, and as for the Few... well, the prince was ludicrously over-encumbered, and the princess couldn’t leave the river.
But if Shea ran away, there would be no getting within three miles of the river afterwards... and soon they would leave Island Town so far behind that she’d have no hope of walking back before the sun reduced her to a desiccated corpse.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. She shouldn’t have tried to smuggle Yashu-Diiwa out of town. She should have cut him open when she’d had the chance. If only she’d –
One of the Many let go of her hand. The other stopped and looked back. Ondine was signing something, but Shea couldn’t make it out. Behind her, Jeté was a distant, murky cloud.
The mereau at Shea’s right patted her arm for attention. Okay? its free hand said.
With stopping? With giving that bitching, burning ache in her legs a rest? By the Artisan’s bloodied fingers, what do you think?
Okay, she replied.
With this much established, her remaining escort left to join its siblings in assembling before their princess. Shea thought of joining them, just to make a show of loyalty... but on second thought, she could probably find better use for this sudden dearth of supervision. With nobody to tell her not to, Shea swam up to the surface.
The blinding daylight hit her like a boot to the face. It usually did. Less ordinary, and even less welcome, was the sharp complaint from her lungs on being put so abruptly back to work. Shea shielded her eyes and coughed.
Well, wherever this expedition was going, they were making good time. The diminishing sa
lty taste in the river, and the catclaw bushes and ragged saltcedar flanking its banks, and the midges swarming in their shade, confirmed that at least Shea’s memory was still good: this was the Calentito now – the Etascado’s nearest tributary – and in about twenty miles they’d pass Yaata’meh, the Winter Village, and beyond that were the Blue Mountains. The salient point remained the same: Island Town’s friendly river valley was already well behind them, and ahead was the wide, wild world.
Good enough for a rest, anyway. Shea swam for the left bank, and beached herself on the coarse red shore. Even that much exertion was a chore: by the time she got there, it was all she could do to keep the ground at arm’s length while she coughed up that vile pink tincture of mucus and water.
“Hey!”
Underneath her own disgusting noises was the sound of someone else breaking the water’s surface, and the accusatory shout that followed it. “You’re not supposed to – oh.” By the time Shea finished and turned, the mereau in the water behind her was wearing the concerned expression of someone sitting uncomfortably close to a rapidly-filling handkerchief. “Are you, eh... sick?”
It had been a long time since Shea had heard even that much Fraichais, and her reply was lamentably slow. She plopped down backside-first in the water, too tired to care about much more than soaking her weary legs, and wiped her mouth. “Hurt,” she rasped at last, and showed the dark, puckered scab under her arm. “Not sick.”
The mereau looked skeptical, as if such a tiny little spot had no business provoking such a scene. “So we don’t have to worry about you running off, eh?” It smiled at her – perhaps not for the first time. “I’m Porté, a stevedore for the House of Losange. What are you?”
It was a fitting name, and not only for someone whose house-craft was ballet. This Porté, this ‘Carried’, was stoutly built, and looked well-suited for doing exactly that. It had the smooth, blunt features of a young mereau – one who had never had to sculpt its face to fool a human eye – and the well-muscled neck and shoulders of one accustomed to hard work. The rest was invisible, the gentle current of the water parting around its chest.
Shea strained to assemble a fitting reply. Whenever two of the Many first met, it was polite to do as Porté had done: to give your name and your house, use the formal I-part instead of the familiar I-whole, and present whichever single facet of yourself was most relevant to the stranger you were speaking with. But Shea had accumulated so many facets – had led so many entirely separate lives – and all of them were gone now, discarded or surrendered or stripped away like so much outmoded clothing. Her most recent truth was not an option: Shea was not about to admit that she’d grown attached to her adopted name and sex, much less confess what she’d done with them. For the Few, gender was a sacred privilege. For the Many, it was a disgusting act of blasphemy.
So she looked again at Porté. What did this blank-faced innocent expect her to say?
“Champagne,” she replied, with an unavoidable surge of loathing. It was such a fine drink – dear, sophisticated, beautiful in the glass – and she was such a wretched old hag. You should have met me twenty years ago – ten years ago – three days ago, after dark, when I was splendid and fetching and caught the eyes of human men like so many lustful oysters in a net. “A human liaison in the service of the House of Opéra.” That sounded so much better than exile, hostage, or spy.
Porté looked up and down the bank, as if human marauders might pop out in ambush at any moment, and edged back toward deeper water. “Did they make your wound?” it asked.
Shea was beginning to suspect that Jeté, Porté, and all the rest of them – all except Ondine, of course – had hatched from the same roe. There was a lingering whiff of adolescence about this cohort, and a wide-eyed naïveté in Porté’s expression that Shea was not about to dispel. The world reflected in its eyes was simple and loving and ordinary: the Many served the Few, and the Few served the One, and that was security enough for anyone. This round-faced innocent soul did not need to hear about Mothers who would pick up a gun and fire at living people to test a hypothesis.
“No,” she said. And then, to shift the subject: “Where are we going?”
Porté glanced back, and when nobody else popped out of the water to demand service, seemed to conclude that this was an acceptable time for a chat. “Our great Jeté is going to be married!” it said, fairly beaming with pride. “And we will help him make a fine present.”
Shea had deduced that much already, though she was thankful that Porté had apparently missed her conversation with the prince. But her reply stuck in her throat. Congratulations, felisidades – what the devil was the word in Fraichais? She racked her mind, but finally had to give up and say it with her hands instead: one hand crossed behind the other, fingers waggled like gill-plumes flaring in excitement. Shea finished speaking in the same way: What kind of present will he give?
Porté tipped its head, baffled by this sudden switch. We will help clear the silt from the Blue Mountain River dam, it replied in kind. Then the earth-persons there will have water for their plants, and can pay their taxes again. Porté clicked – an audible shrug. I’m glad for the prince, and honored that he asked me to help with the dredging... but if I tell you something, will you keep it safe?
After a morning of death sentences and kidnappings and the freshwater equivalent of a forced march, a nice bit of gossip sounded positively restful. Yes, Shea said.
Porté looked back over both shoulders, just to make sure. I think the wizard would make a better present.
Shea furrowed her hairless brow. She would have sworn Porté had used the signs for MAGIC MAN. “What?” she said aloud.
“Did your Mother not mention it to you?” Porté looked profoundly surprised. “We met her on our way upriver, and she told us how your excellent sibling Faro had nearly secured a great wizard for her.” Porté inched forward, suddenly beside itself with interest. “Is it true? Did you see him?”
Shea was beginning to think that she had. “Which one?” she replied, in a tone airy enough to imply that Island Town was stuffed with so many wizards that one could hardly keep them all straight.
Even still and sodden, the gill-plumes behind Porté’s head lifted with the force of its enthusiasm. “Oh, you would know him if you saw him!” it assured her. “He is monstrously tall, and stupendously ugly, with skin like oil and water, and a magic handprint on his chest. And when he speaks with the voice of the devil, any horse in the world will bow its head and obey!”
That sounded about right.
Shea sat back and sucked her teeth, scarcely knowing what to do with this phenomenal stroke of... well, perhaps not luck – perhaps not yet.
It would take skill, not luck, to figure out what had caused these fledglings to pass up their chance for a pitch-perfect present, and convince them to change course. Speed and sweat to intercept their ‘great wizard’ before the a’Krah put him on the chopping block. Brute strength to hold him still long enough to make a beacon of his blood – long enough to summon his holy mother back from forgetfulness and oblivion to claim him. Luck would be staying alive long enough for U’ru to remember Shea... and heal her... and forgive her.
Shea looked back at her single listener, its face eager, its colors sharpening with anticipation. There, in Porté’s broad, earnest features, was fertile soil for a fresh seed of opportunity. “If I tell you something,” she said, “will you keep it safe?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE ARTISAN AND THE AMATEUR
DÍA WALKED ALL that day.
She walked in heat.
She walked in faith.
And the longer she walked, the more comfortably the two of them encompassed each other, until they were one and the same.
The Third Verse said, “We cried in the darkness – and He sang of light / We looked to the heavens – and He illuminated the earth.”
And Magruder’s Treatise on Natural Philosophy and Astronomy said, “The intensity of solar li
ght follows this same law: the heat increases as the square of the distance decreases.”
And it seemed perfectly, sublimely natural that this should be so. The rippling waves of warmth caressed Día’s skin all the more intently as the sun expanded in her vision – not because she had wished it, or earned it, but because God had given form and energy to that brilliant angelic forge, and Glaçure’s experiments with caloric theory had quantified it: any amount of matter, any thing, any person – saint or sinner – were equally included in the relationship between heat flux density, thermal conductivity, and the common temperature gradient, T. None were unworthy. None were excluded. And this was grace.
And Día was so subsumed by grace, so wholly incorporated into the greater order of the universe, that every particular part of her fell away and vanished. Freed from self-awareness, she existed as a holy mote, a perfect speck in the canvas of creation, following the greater celestial body as faithful and unfailingly as any lesser satellite should.
Then it began to disappear.
Día quickened her steps, uncomfortably aware of them now. The sun was reddening, diminishing, its perfect circumference being swallowed by the unlovely mountainous horizon. The earth was bleeding heat, the shadows of dry shrubs and deaf stones stretching out like the tails of dying comets, and Día herself was falling out of orbit. She hurried on faster – pained, running, desperate not to be left behind.
But the sun went, taking the heat with it. The shrubs and the stones were left where they were. And Día, whose feet could not even keep up with the turning of her own small planet, finally dropped to the ground in despair.
What had gone wrong?
Día stared at the vanishing red disc, numb to every lesser pain. Hadn’t she been faithful? Hadn’t she been diligent? Why had she been abandoned to loneliness and night?
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