by Jay Lake
Though I had seen few doors in my life, animal pens had gates. This was no different. I had been wrong about the lack of a cage, I realized. This cage was bigger, the bars less visible.
At his next glance and return of attention to his papers, I was ready. I leapt from the bed, grabbed the handle, and threw open the door. Head tucked down, I sprinted past the knees and thighs of the sailors toward the rail. I was faster than any of them suspected. The floor of the boat was just as crowded as before, with more ropes coiled as great cloth sheets were raised snapping into the wind.
Men shouted, but it was less than a dozen steps to the edge. No one had been waiting for me. No one had been watching for me.
How far could we be from the shore?
But when I vaulted the fence and dove for the sea, I saw there was no land nearby. Water was water. I could swim here as well as in a ditch at home. Unfortunately, this ditch had grown to the width of the world, too far to reach the other side.
Then I was in the sea. The water was colder than I had thought, and stung my mouth terribly. This was the taste of the sweat of the earth. Everything beneath was dark and gray. I could see nothing.
I found the surface easily enough and began to swim away from the boat.
Behind me they shouted. I rolled to my back and looked as I continued to swim. Angry men lined the side rail, pointing and yelling. I smiled at their discomfort even as one raised a great spear.
With a flash, a silver arrow sped toward me. I started to scream as it passed above my head. I turned again, almost slipping beneath the water.
For a long moment I could see the end of everything. I don’t imagine death meant anything sensible to me at that age, but I knew people did die, and once dead they did not return.
A triple arch of jagged teeth yawned above my head. This monstrous thing was the very mouth of hunger loosed in the sea. I could see the pale curves of its maw behind its teeth, narrowing to a dark throat that could take me down whole. A chilled stench of blood and filth shivered my spine.
That dart flew into those pale geometries and embedded itself in the roof of the monster’s mouth. A blue spark exploded in that darkness bright enough to sting my eyes. I heard a shriek like a woman in pain.
With an enormous splash, the mouth closed. It sank beneath the water, dragging with it a rough, gray head larger than Endurance. For a long, slow moment, somewhere between one of my heartbeats and the next, a black eye stared at me. It was ringed with flesh as pale as the maggot man’s skin, and had the filmy hue of the dead. Though this glaring orb lacked the wisdom of Endurance’s brown eyes, or even the simple flickering life present in the eye of the smallest birds, still I felt the sea-beast place my name among the secret hatreds graven into its frozen heart.
I kicked in place a moment, my heart chilled as cold as the surrounding water. The monster had nearly taken me. Worse, there was no land to reach, no matter how far I swam. The boat creaked and groaned behind me, men calling out as it turned to fetch me from the waves.
Water at home had held only snakes, frogs, and turtles with knife-sharp beaks. The sea held every kind of throat ready to swallow me whole. When they threw the ropes down to me, I grasped readily enough at the rescue.
The tears I cried for my home were mixed in with salt spray when they hauled me aboard. Once more I went willingly into the house of my captivity. If I did so a third time, I knew I would be lost to myself forever.
Federo handed me back the slate. “Write the letters once more, girl,” he said. In Petraean.
Despite my resolve, his language was sinking into me like dye in cloth. Many of the deckhands spoke it, as did all the officers. Federo used the tongue almost exclusively with me. He gave me no name at all except “girl” which would serve to call half the world.
“I have written them a hundred times,” I said. “Snake,” I muttered in my own tongue.
He slapped me hard across the top of the head. The blow stung, but little more. I did not cry out. I never cried out, not where Federo or any of the sailors could hear me, which was everywhere on this ship.
“Then you will write them a hundred more.” He leaned close. “Without letters, you are nothing in the world where you will be moving. People’s lives and deaths are written in polite notes that must be passed among the powerful like dance cards.”
These words. I had no writing to master at home with my father. I had never even heard of letters. You talked, people listened, or they did not.
Letters were a way of talking so anyone could hear you at any time. Like standing on the corner repeating yourself forever, but without the endless effort. Their shapes were strange, though, bearing no resemblance to their sounds—bent trees and stumbling drunkards and the wanderings of chickens. “Whoever made up such a thing?”
He slapped me again. “In my language.”
I clenched my fist around the chalk and tried again with his words. “Who made these things up?”
“I do not know a name, girl. I do not know. Much like fire, the gods gave letters to men.” His smile was crooked. “Some might say they were the same gift.”
We had no gods back home, not really. Just dead people who watched over us, and the tulpas who moved among the dust and clouds and hid their faces in the ripples of the water.
If I had a god, that was Endurance. But he was as real as me, while gods were more of an idea. Like letters, really.
“What if the gods are in the letters?”
Federo opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again without speaking. He sat heavily on his bunk. “Your mind is a jewel, child.” He sighed. “Hoard it well. Others will be jealous of the way your thoughts sparkle. Mark me”—he waggled his finger—“play the dullard a bit and you will live a happier life.”
I refused to be distracted. “And what are gods?”
“Gods are . . .” He paused again, gathering his thoughts. I already knew that Federo chose his words for me with care. I resolved to learn what lay in the dark spaces between the light of speech. “Gods are real. More real in some places than others. In Copper Downs we . . . Ours were put aside for us a very long time ago.”
“They are dead?”
“No. But neither do they live.”
“Like a tree,” I said. “Cut to make this ship. It moves as if it were alive. It is not dead on the ground.”
He laughed. “Except that we do not use our gods for much in Copper Downs. The Duke has found better ways to occupy the spirits of his people.” Leaning forward, he tried his best glare. “Now, you owe me some letters, young lady.”
I could not escape. There was nowhere to go but the ship itself. At the same time, it was clear to me that rebellious silence would serve nothing except to make a point my captor already understood quite well. He looked less like a maggot to me as the days went by, and more like a man. He spoke; I listened. I asked; he answered.
His words sank further and further into me every day. Now that I had some decent Petraean, Federo refused to acknowledge me if I spoke in my own tongue. His was a language of ideas, thoughts bigger than a barnyard or a rice paddy or a frog-filled ditch. I felt guilty at finding any pleasure in my captivity.
Just as true was the fact that I now ate better than I ever had before. I slept on sheets, a thing unheard of at home. Simple dresses covered me from shoulder to knees, the first time in my life I had not mostly been clad in sunlight. I had soap. Whatever god had given these maggot people that boon had indeed granted a blessing. I had never imagined what it was like to be utterly clean. At home, we were washed so thoroughly only at birth and at death. The rest of life was for living amid the dust of the world.
When he was not at his figuring and scribbling, or mastering me at lessons, Federo would read to me. He skipped past the little box of simple books for children, instead picking from his personal collection of texts on trade, geography, the engineering of steam power, the working of metals. Most of it meant little to me, but there was always a harvest of new w
ords, and questions piled on questions, which he would answer as best he could.
Maps were my favorite. At first, making my mind understand that a picture on a sheet of vellum could be one and the same as the land and sea around me was like forcing myself through a small box. Once understanding dawned, I saw how I could travel without ever getting up from my seat on the bed.
Federo showed me distant places—the channel connecting our Storm Sea to the Sunward Sea, which ran below the ironbound overwatch of the Saffron Tower, far to the east; the Rimerock Range and its endless northern majesty; the extents of empires so long vanished that their cities were remembered only as rock quarries. The entire plate of the world could be scribed rock by stream on papers. We looked at everything he had to show me, except my homes old and new.
“Why will you not show me Copper Downs?”
Federo set his lips. “I am forbidden.”
“By who?”
“By whom.”
“By whom?” I muttered in my own tongue: “Stupid words,” then continued. “Why can I not see the pictures of my home?”
“You are to be unspoiled.”
“You have said you take me to Copper Downs, but you have never said why.” My chest shuddered at a memory of Endurance’s placid gaze. There would be no bells for me in Copper Downs, neither my silk nor the ox’s.
“You are to be raised up as a great lady. Every moment will be a lesson. Hush now, and let me show you what I can.”
______
A few days into the voyage, as Federo and I settled in to our routine of living, I begged a length of cloth from the sailmaker. He gave me a stretch of poplin torn from a wrap for sails, and two old needles nearly blunted. These I hid beneath my bunk while I considered the problem of bells. I picked threads out of my sheets, and sewed a knot for each day of my captivity, vowing to add the bells when I could, and to make up once more the thousand bells sewn at the start of my life by my mother, then my grandmother, then me.
Pleasant as he might pretend to be, I would not allow Federo to steal this from me.
Once the bosun conceded that I wasn’t likely to jump the rail again, I was permitted to be on the open deck. There were at least a few hours each day where I was doing little enough, so I wandered about Fortune’s Flight in small stages to watch the crew at their business and look for something that might serve me for the tiny bells I required.
The sailors mostly found me amusing. Some growled, others gave me long, cold looks, but many merely smiled and showed me their work. We had an easy voyage, unusually free of storms, as I later came to know. The great steam kettle at the heart of the ship did most of the work of our passage. The master set the sails to gain the extra push the winds might lend her progress.
I watched ducks being herded from their pens to the fantail to take the morning air. I watched the ropemaker splicing and braiding his hemp. I watched the deck idlers shift cargo as the quartermasters sought better trim, or just for the practice. I watched the gun crews work their pieces, though they never actually fired. In time I wondered if the guns functioned or were just for show. I watched men fish off the stern and cast harpoons from the waist of the ship. I watched the carpenter rebuild braces. I watched the smith hammer out hinges.
From him I found something to serve as a bell. Clearly I did not want any actual ringing in my cloth, for Federo would know in a moment I had some small treason afoot. But the smith had nails and scraps, and a dozen kinds of iron slivers and shims.
“I am playing at soldiers,” I told him the third day he’d tolerated my presence at his forge.
He was a huge man, in the manner of smiths everywhere. His hair was pale, though always slicked dark with sweat, and his eyes the cutting blue of a gemstone. “Aye, and is yer winning, missy?”
“No one wins at war,” I told him primly. “Some lose less than others, if they are lucky.”
The smith chuckled. “And I am seeing why the dandy man has taken such a liking to yer.”
Dandy was a new word to me. I set it aside for later consideration. I understood even then that I should not ask Federo why the smith had called him so.
“He is good to me,” I lied. “But he will not play at soldiers.”
Another chuckle, then a storm of metal noise as the smith hammered at an iron collar meant for some cross-tree high above us.
“Can you give me a few soldiers, sir?” I finally asked. I looked him in the eye as I spoke—that directness seemed to work best with these pale men from across the sea.
He paused his work, wiping sweat from his brow with his right wrist while still holding the hammer in that hand. “I do not have the casting of lead for toy men, missy. T’ain’t no one on board for that, ’less one of the gentlemen of the stern plays with little men in his bunk at night.” The smith snorted with laughter. At the time, I did not take any of his meanings.
“Just shavings or scraps or nails, sir,” I said quickly. “That I might march them in martial array.” That was a phrase from Federo’s reading the evening before, an epic poem concerning a battle that seemed to consist largely of a competition of colorful uniforms.
“A bag of sharp, pointed oddments the missy wants.” He gave me a long stare, a spark of inner shrewdness rising from the well of his usual bluff density. “Well, yer not loading a cannon, nor running from foot nor horse.”
“No, sir,” I said quietly.
He leaned close, hammer still clutched in his hand. “Don’t call me sir, missy. Iron you wants, iron you shall have.”
Later I stole some pliers from the carpenter’s mate, to bend the nails and scraps with. So it was that I began to affix bits of metal to my poplin, to stand in for the bells and silk of my home. I would sew quickly when I knew Federo to be at the captain’s table, or late at night when his breath was slow and even. I pretended the clanging bells that marked the hours of the watches were Endurance watching over me, that the rumbling of the steam belowdecks was the bellows of the ox’s great lungs.
So I marked the days of my passage across the calm sun-drenched waters of the Storm Sea in learning everything that my captor could put before me. My nights I observed by pricking my fingers in remembrance of a home that already seemed infinitely dim and distant in my recall.
______
We packed away our belongings as Fortune’s Flight made her approach to the Stone Coast. Which was to say Federo packed away his belongings with some small assistance from me. I had nothing except the cotton shifts he had given me to wear, and my length of poplin folded away beneath my bunk with my stolen supplies.
The problem of how to get that ashore loomed large. The only answer I could imagine was to fold it into Federo’s baggage somehow and hope to sneak it away from him later. He was keeping a close eye on me that day. I suppose he was afraid I’d dive over the rail again. I knew better—how would I walk home from Copper Downs?—but he had no sure way to trust.
I finally tried slipping the cloth beneath my shift as he was distracted, but my waist bulged in such a strange manner that it was impossible to keep it hidden. I dropped my burden beneath the bunk as he turned. The clatter caught at his ear.
“What have you there?” he asked me in that slow, gentle voice that meant he knew I was about something he would not approve of.
“Just trinkets.” That lie which stands closest to the truth stands tall as well, one of his books had told me. “I have wrapped some little metal soldiers in cloth, for my playthings.”
A strange expression flickered across his face. “I have never yet seen you at play, girl.”
“It is only when you are away,” I said modestly.
He bent to look beneath my bunk. I itched to kick him in the neck, or at the fork of his legs, but did not. To what purpose? I could not escape on my own. Not unless I could swim the ocean.
“Let me see.” He tugged the wrapped bolt of cloth out. It fell open, spilling pliers and needles and thread and iron bits upon the deck. Federo gave the fabric a shake. Nothin
g jingled, for there were no proper bells at all, but the sewn-on bits of metal clicked. “Ah.”
I withstood his long, slow look.
“I should beat you purple for this,” he finally said. “And make you eat some of these filings. But you are no silly thing to be cowed by force or fear.” He bundled it up again, and my tools within. “Listen to me, girl. Mark me well. Forget the bells of your silk. Where you are going next, any effort to reclaim the land and standing of your birth will be almost the worst offense you could hope to commit. Your journey is forward, not back.”
Stubborn resistance rose within me like flowers under a spring rain. “My feet have not chosen this path.”
“No.” His voice was sad. “But still it is your path. You cannot unchoose what has been done. You can fight the journey, gather bruises and scars until you fail and are cast aside as too broken to complete. Or you can run ahead, beat the racers at their own game, and claim your prizes.”
“What prizes?” I hissed.
“Life, health, safety.” He grabbed my chin, not too hard, and tried to send me some secret message with the narrowing of his eyes. “The right to make your own choices once more.”
Releasing me, Federo tucked the roll under one arm. “We have never spoken of this. I will not recall our conversation again. Best you do not either. Set it aside, along with the entire matter of the bells.”
He stalked out of our hatch, across the busy deck, and without a glance back at me idling in the doorway, he threw my poor attempt at reclamation into the bay.
I knew I had been told too much, but I did not then know too much of what. Adults almost always speak above or beneath children. It is an error I remain mindful of even now. That day all I saw was another betrayal in a line of betrayals.