Bright Shards

by Meg Pechenick

  A few minutes later I was seated under the group tent in my camp clothes, blissfully clean and warm, with dinner to look forward to and the knowledge of headier pleasures to follow. My silver flask was tucked into the pocket of my vest. The white moon was edging out over its trembling reflection in the dark water. In the dusk above the treeline, nocturnal birds swooped and dipped, trailing wings like tattered ribbons. It finally felt like the right moment—or one of them, at any rate.

  “What’s that?” Saresh asked when I brought the flask out of my pocket after dinner. I thought I heard disapproval in his voice.

  I waved it at him. “This, my friend, is the good stuff. Straight Kentucky bourbon.”

  “Are you allowed to drink that soilside?”

  “What, you think I asked?”

  His brows drew together. At once I regretted my flippant answer. “Don’t worry, I won’t overdo it. The last thing I want is to be hung over in this gravity.” I offered him the flask. “Here, you should try it. It’s good.”

  He considered, then said, “In the interest of lightening your pack for tomorrow, I will.” He unscrewed the cap and tipped a little bourbon into his empty senek cup. I hid a smile. It hadn’t occurred to me that he would do anything other than swig directly from the flask. He took a wary sip of the bourbon and nodded. “I can see how you might get into trouble with that. Thank you.” He handed the flask back to me.

  I uncapped it and drank, savoring the bourbon’s warmth and its complex sweetness, then settled back against the bedroll I was using as a backrest with a sigh of utter contentment. “This night couldn’t be any more perfect unless it had a campfire.”

  “I’ve got the next best thing,” Ahnir said, and stood up. He returned a moment later with his mandolin.

  I felt a stirring of something unexpected: eagerness mingled with fear. Zey rose to take the instrument from Ahnir. I tensed, suddenly afraid he would present it to me with some elaborate and undeniable public flourish. He didn’t. He sat down cross-legged and began to tune it. I relaxed.

  The song he chose was melancholy and restrained, a fitting accompaniment to the quiet night that surrounded us. I listened breathlessly, captivated by the sounds of archaic Vardeshi, the liquid rush and glide of unfamiliar syllables. They slid past me in a single continuous ribbon of sound, like a silk scarf slipping through my fingers. Strange to think modern Vardeshi had sounded like that to me once. Now it was barbed with meaning, freighted with it. I couldn’t hear it as simple noise any more. Comprehension was a gain and a loss, both.

  When Zey finished his song, he passed the mandolin back to Ahnir. One song led into another, and then another, and my conviction grew. It was the right moment—and not only for bourbon. When Sohra finished her song, it felt perfectly natural to me to get up and take the mandolin out of her hand. I was glad the night was so dark; if anyone turned surprised or skeptical looks my way, I didn’t see them. I sat down beside Zey, because although I could feel that the time had come, it made things easier to pretend this was just another practice session. He gave me an encouraging nod. I could feel Ahnir, the expectant tutor, watching us across the circle of listeners. I knew Hathan was there as well, sitting against a tree on the far side of the tent dome. With trembling fingers I picked out the first couple of notes. Hearing them gave me courage. It’s not about me, I reminded myself. It’s not about my voice. It’s about the song.

  I had never forgotten my promise to Hathan, that I would sing for our crewmates before our journey came to an end, and I had always known I would keep it; but it had taken me a long time to choose the right song. The one I eventually settled on was by a little-known Scottish folk singer. It was short and simple. It described a lover’s difficult journey to his beloved, and while it sounded nothing at all like the lament Hathan had sung for me before we arrived at Arkhati, it seemed to me to capture a little of that same spirit. If it had been more overtly romantic, I would have rejected it as potentially too revealing, but all the imagery was of traveling, and as long as I didn’t look at him—which I wouldn’t—I didn’t think there was anything to give me away. I had rewritten the second verse, which had never seemed to me to match the mood of the first, to extend the theme of wandering in unknown lands.

  That had been the easy part. Language came to me naturally, musicianship less so. After we left Elteni, for weeks on end, Ahnir had spent an hour every night patiently instructing me in the rudiments of playing the Vardeshi mandolin. At first clumsy and halting, my fingers had acquired minimal skill through repetition and sheer resolve. When I achieved a modicum of polish, I added in the vocals. Here I was on firmer ground. My singing voice wasn’t unpleasant, and it improved with practice and concentration.

  The final step had been bringing Zey in to learn the harmony, which he had done, of course, after a single hearing. His talents as a singer far exceeded mine, which worked to my advantage. He caught the mood of the song perfectly. I liked it even better when I heard the light, dreamy complement his voice offered to mine. And he knew instinctively how to hold back, giving precedence to the melody, though he could easily have overpowered it.

  About a month after we left Elteni, Ahnir had told us it was time to stop rehearsing. “You have it now,” he had said. “Don’t oversing it. You’ll spend its freshness before you have an audience.”

  I had known he was right, and I knew now that the flutter I felt in my stomach was supposed to be there, but I still wished we’d practiced a couple more times. I tried to focus on what my fingers were doing, struck a false note, and grinned at Zey. It was easier after that. The tightness in my chest subsided. Singing helped too, because it forced me to take deep breaths. By the end of the first verse, I knew it would be all right. The song still felt like a good choice; it still spoke truth to me. I had traveled a long way too, and I was lonely, and carrying a love that felt like another kind of loneliness. On the second verse, I found a little more power and confidence, and Zey matched them effortlessly. I thought our voices had never blended so well before. When I reached the coda, with its line about homesickness, I sang it without restraint. The last few measures of wordless harmony were softer, just as we had practiced them. I played the final notes and strummed an emphatic closing chord. I’d done it. It was over.

  I would have given a great deal for even a polite smattering of applause. I knew rationally that the thoughtful stillness following my last notes was meant to signify appreciation, but it was still disconcerting. After a pause that felt endless, Ahnir came to reclaim his instrument. As he bent to take it from me, he said, “That was better than the rehearsals.”

  “I made a mistake,” I said.

  “So what?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I just wanted it to be perfect.”

  He nodded. “And it was.”

  The lingering charge of the performance made me restless. I went down to the beach and stood at the water’s edge. The wind was rising. I shivered and raised the collar of my fleece. Behind me I could hear Ahnir and Saresh beginning another song. I heard the rattle of stones that meant someone was crossing the beach and knew without turning to look that it was Hathan.

  “I don’t know why you waited so long to sing for us,” he said. “You have a perfectly adequate voice.”

  Adequate. The echo of Khavi Vekesh’s coldly dismissive assessment of my fledgling Vardeshi stung in a way he probably hadn’t intended. I said, “Probably because, on a ship full of really incredible voices, mine is just adequate,” in a waspish tone I instantly regretted.

  Hathan said, “I didn’t mean it as an insult.”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s fine. You’re right. But that’s the answer. I said I’d sing for you, and I did, but I’m not about to make a habit of it, not with so many beautiful voices on the Ascendant.”

  He said slowly, “Your music is different from ours, but it’s appealing in its own way, and you performed it well. I hope you’ll sing for us again.”

  “Maybe sometime.” I took
a swig from my flask. My eyes were stinging, and I knew it wasn’t just the wind. I had hoped for . . . I wasn’t sure what. Not flattery, not from him, but perhaps slightly warmer praise. I knew there wasn’t the faintest chance that I would ever sing in front of him again. After a pause, I heard the crunch of receding footsteps. There was plenty of bourbon left in my flask, but I knew it would be a mistake to continue drinking. The morning would come all too swiftly. I returned to the camp for a few more songs, accepted a handful of compliments substantially more generous than Hathan’s, and went to lay out my sleeping bag, still feeling the ache of unshed tears in my throat. The song had been fine—better than fine. It was what had come afterward that fell short of my expectations.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The wind rose during the night; its mournful soughing in the trees stirred me from sleep more than once, finally waking me for good in the gloom before dawn. Most of my crewmates were already up. Zey, seeing me emerge from my tent in hiking clothes, went to rouse the others. Vethna muttered something about sleeping off the whiskey and catching up with us later but fell silent at a look from Hathan. As we packed, the wind flung droplets of a fine cold rain into our faces like handfuls of needles. The rain began falling steadily as we marched along the pebbled beach toward the far end of the lake. We stopped, and Hathan spoke briefly to Sohra and Saresh before sending them ahead. Ahnir helped me fasten my tent apparatus to the top of my pack and adjust the height and breadth of its projection. I watched in fascination while the water streamed down harmlessly all around me, as if I stood inside a transparent glass dome. Incredible though the technology was, it wasn’t a perfect fix; stray gusts of unusually forceful wind were able to penetrate it, and the field extended downward only as far as my knees. My socks and boots quickly turned sodden. I had hiked with wet feet before, although never in weather this cold. I tramped on, determined not to complain.

  We emerged from the mountain pass to find that visibility had dwindled to nearly nothing. We might have been standing on a small rocky island in a mist-shrouded ocean for all we could see of the mountain range opposite us, on one of whose peaks Hathan thought the Perch might be located. If it was, I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see anything at all. Veils of rain drifted past me like ghosts.

  Saresh and Sohra rejoined us, stepping out of the rain so unexpectedly I started. Hathan didn’t seem surprised. “Make the call,” he said without prelude. “Stay or go?”

  “Stay,” Sohra said. “It’s too steep. And too slippery. The rain is freezing on the rocks. Eyvri—” She broke off with a glance at me.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You can say it. I won’t be insulted.”

  “It would be risky in any case,” Saresh said. “With you, it’s too risky. It’s that simple.”

  Hathan nodded. “Yes. It is. We stay put for now.” He turned to order the others back into the relative shelter of the pass. I fell back a step to let them file past me, turning my face away to hide my frustration. My throat felt tight, and while I didn’t think I would actually cry, I might if anyone tried to comfort me. It was just too much: too many disappointments strung too closely together. First the failure of my song last night (because it did feel like a failure, no matter what anyone said), and now this.

  Hathan waited too. He didn’t say anything. When everyone else had gone, and I thought I could trust myself to speak, I said, “What do we do now?”

  “We wait. The rain will pass.” He paused. “Or it won’t. Either way, we’ll get there.”

  “What if it just keeps raining? We only have one more day.”

  “The Echelon will give us as long as they can. If it looks like we won’t reach the Perch in time for the reception, they’ll send a shuttle for us.”

  I glared out into the gray abyss. “That’s lame. We’re so close. I would like . . .” I took a deep, calming breath. “I would like to finish this journey on my own terms. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask.” Not after being turned away from Vardesh Prime.

  “I know,” he said quietly.

  We went back into the pass, where the others had gathered under an overhang. Ahnir was setting up his group tent. Most of the area it enclosed was wet, but there were ground cloths among the supplies, and my crewmates worked quickly to assemble a comfortable shelter. That done, they began changing back into their camp clothes, using a couple of personal tents set to maximum opacity as improvised screens. I was struck by how readily they adapted to the change in plans. That was how the Fleet operated, though, wasn’t it? Last-minute changes were standard operating procedure. Headed to Arkhati? Guess again, you’re actually going to Veynir. To those accustomed to reversals on the scale of planets and years, a surprise hiatus in the middle of a hike must be hardly worth noting. I set aside my own worries as best I could and copied their example, changing back into my camp clothes and draping my wet things over my pack to dry in the warm air.

  Once I had accepted the delay as inevitable, I began to enjoy it. With the exception of an hour here and there, I had spent the entire Outmarch either hiking or sleeping. A little enforced idleness made for a welcome change of pace. While the rain tapped softly on the tent dome overhead, we sat on our bedrolls, drinking tea or senek and playing games. These began with simple dice games but soon entered more complex territory: lightning-fast idiom-association games I couldn’t begin to follow, and others, question-and-answer games that felt older somehow, although I couldn’t really follow them either. Watching the others break into appreciative laughter as Ahnir answered Sohra’s idiom with one even more obscure, I felt a ghost of the bewilderment I had felt at my first-ever officers’ dinner. I had come a long way toward understanding the Vardeshi since then, but in moments like this one, there was no denying that there were things they did, still, that I would never be able to do; chasms between us that I would never be able to bridge.

  Zey, catching something of my mood, said abruptly, “We’re leaving Eyvri out.”

  I said quickly, “It’s fine.”

  Ahnir shook his head. “No, he’s right. Eyvri? They must play games around those campfires of yours. Could you teach us one?”

  “I could,” I hedged, “but I don’t know if you’d like it.”

  Hathan said, “Try us.”

  I ran through a couple of simple alphabet puzzles, typical summer-camp fodder. After the third one, I shifted without warning to a riddle game I had learned in college. The object was to guess which member of the group would be named next. The hint, ostensibly, lay in the placement of several objects relative to each other (in this case, three sachets of peppermint tea, a kevet with a bent handle, and a battered orange carabiner I’d found clipped to my pack). The secret was that the arrangement was meaningless. While setting up the display with my left hand, I casually pointed to the person in question with the forefinger of my right. My crewmates guessed again and again, their theories growing ever wilder. I could sense their frustration mounting. I was on the point of abandoning the whole thing when Zey, always the group’s most ardent student of human facial expressions and body language, suddenly caught on. The look of wild glee that spread across his face was irresistible. At his insistence we played on. Sohra was the next one to spot the trick. In the end, despite or possibly because of his gift for strategy, only Hathan remained in the dark. When I finally explained that he couldn’t find the pattern because there wasn’t one, he leapt up from his seat, hurled his senek cup to the ground, and ran both hands through his hair in a transport of rage. Zey, overjoyed at this uncharacteristic loss of composure, shouted “It’s the Flare! Eyvri, hide!” and tackled me, dragging me off my bedroll and into the partial shelter of a personal tent someone had forgotten to switch off. We lay there on our backs for the next few minutes, half in and half out of the opaque screen, giggling helplessly and repeating, “It’s the Flare!” The joke ventured into questionable territory, but I knew it was safe to laugh at it. I had caught Hathan’s eye before Zey succeeded in pulling me down, and he had b
een laughing too.

  Toward afternoon, as the skies stubbornly refused to clear, the gaming enthusiasm began to pall. One by one my companions drifted off to private pursuits. A few—Vethna among them—napped in the privacy of their individual tents. Too restless for sleep, I settled down on my sleeping bag with my phone to scroll through my photos of the trip. I’d looked at a little over half of them when Hathan came over for a quiet conference. I reflected with a flash of interior humor that he had progressed as far as sitting on top of my zipped-up sleeping bag, which was, technically speaking, one step closer to actually crawling inside it. Vardeshi hearing being what it was, no conversation within the confines of the group tent could be truly private, but we kept our voices low, and the others pretended with varying degrees of success not to be listening.

  “We’ve lost the day,” he said. “Even if it clears off now, you’re not going down that mountain in the dark.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “It’s unlikely at this point that we’ll reach the Perch before the time limit runs out.”

  I rubbed a smudge from the back of my phone case. “Are you asking me if I want to quit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then no.”

  “Good.” He glanced up through the transparent ceiling at the darkly overcast sky. “I’m not ready for walls yet.”

  I smiled a little. “Neither am I.”

  Dinner was a subdued affair. It was openly understood by now that any hope of my completing the course on time had been washed away by the rain. Toward the end of the meal I heard Zey mutter something about the dubious necessity of sleeping on the ground for another night. Hathan, hearing it too, briskly dispatched him to wash dishes outside. “To cultivate your appreciation of a warm, dry tent,” he explained. I was secretly ecstatic that he had come to my defense. I had just finished putting away my cooking gear when Zey came in again, wide-eyed and dripping, his arms full of clean dishes. The rain had plastered his hair flat to his head, save for a few stubbornly upright tufts. He looked like a half-drowned cat. I took one look at him and started to laugh. I wasn’t the only one. Zey himself joined in the laughter with his usual good humor. Hathan, clearly recognizing that his point had been made, presented his brother with a dry set of camp clothes.