by Jay Lake
A moment later, I was out among the bushes. Reason had crept up on pride, so I stopped there and rolled my belled silk into a bundle. I slipped out of the trees and into the stream of people approaching the front of the palace from along Montane Street. They had the rumbling urgency of a mob, complete with torches, staves, and iron tools.
A man in a pale suit with the cut of a middle-ranked trader grabbed at me. My heart chilled, and I twisted, hoping to kick his knee.
“Is it still happening in there?” he shouted. He was not even looking at me. His eyes rolled red and wild.
“I . . . I don’t know.” I hated how small and frightened my voice sounded.
“The Duke is dead, long live the Duke!” He glanced around, then seemed to see me for the first time. “Go home, girl. This is no place for a foreigner now.”
“Green,” I whispered. Nodding my thanks, I took the first side street that was reachable across the streaming flow of the forming mob.
It was done. I was free, and out of the palace, and on a path of my own choosing. I was my own person, no one’s property for the first time since coming to this accursed city. And they would send no more Federos out to buy children. Not this gang that I had laid low.
Heading for the docks, I aimed to take the trader’s advice. Copper Downs held nothing more for me. Perhaps I could return to what I had been—not a girl under the belly of her father’s ox, certainly, but to what that girl might have become.
Since I hadn’t expected to survive, I’d given no thought to what came next. I had a direction now—the trader had the right of it, so far as his advice went—but I was surprised to regret what I was leaving behind.
I had no trouble at all leaving the Factor’s House behind. That was a well-upholstered slave pit, and nothing more. Some of my Mistresses had been kind. Mistress Danae, for example. And if I had friends in this life, they were Federo and the Dancing Mistress.
Once I took ship, I would never see them again. What had not even been a worry before was now a swell of regret. The Factor could be dust for all I cared, but Mistress Tirelle plucked my heart as well.
Loping toward the docks, I wiped tears from my eyes. There’d been no time to say good-bye before. Now it was too late.
I had no idea how to interpret the chaos of the waterfront when I finally arrived there. The crowding bordered on panic, everyone heedless and hurried. I needed a ship to Selistan. If I took passage aboard a vessel bound for the Sunward Sea, that would likely be a permanent error.
It all rested on how well I spoke. Certainly there had been stories aplenty in Mistress Danae’s books about stowaways and travelers working their passage. Somehow none of them were dark-skinned girls.
My color hadn’t mattered within the bluestone walls of the Pomegranate Court. Out here, it might hold the balance of my life. Along with my words. As I’d always known, these people lived and died by their words.
I continued to walk briskly, bound on an errand to nowhere. If I were to stand and gawk, I would mark myself as a potential victim. Instead I looked as closely as I could at each ship I passed, each wharf.
Some had signboards out to advertise their destination. Most of these were cities of the Stone Coast—Houghharrow, Dun Cranmoor, Lost Port. These I recognized from the stories and maps I’d studied. One was marked for the Saffron Tower. Much too far the wrong way for me.
A signboard loomed ahead. In shaky handwriting, it read, “South to sun countries. Calling in Kalim., Chitta and Spice Pt.s.”
I trotted up to that gangplank. The ship had three tall masts, and no sign of a boiler below, unlike the smokestack I recalled from Fortune’s Flight. A man stood there with skin as dark as mine, though he was fitted out in the duck and cotton of a sailor. He held a long board to which papers had been bound with sisal twine. He glanced at me once, then back at his board.
“Please, sir, I would have passage,” I said. He didn’t even glance up at me. Then, in Seliu: “I want to return home.”
That got his attention. “Go back to your mother,” he replied, then some words I didn’t know.
“She is there,” I told him. “I was stolen.”
“You are a slave.” He looked at me with suspicion. “Trouble rides your back.” That last was in Petraean.
“Trouble rides this entire city,” I answered him, also in Petraean. “If I do not go with you, I may never go at all.”
“What is being your fare for passage, should I recommend to the captain that we take you?”
I took a deep breath. Here was where my plan would founder. “I have no fare, sir. Just the goodwill of my countrymen. I can cook to please the table of a lordly house, and my skills with needle and thread are worthy as well.”
He snorted, and my heart fell. “Next you’ll tell me you play the music of angels and can dance the Seven Steps of Sisthra.”
“I sing, sir, but only in the fashion of the Stone Coast.”
Something stirred in his face. “You do not know the songs of Selistan.”
Switching back to our words, I said, “It has been a very long time.”
Close by, a bell began ringing. Everyone on the dock looked around with frantic haste. Many ran off. An alarm, then. Riot approached the docks.
“Come.” He started up the gangplank. “If we cast off with you aboard, much of this discussion will be lacking in point. Captain Shields is not likely to toss you overboard as a stowaway. Especially if you can grace his table in style.”
Someone on the masts called out. Sailors pounded the deck. The ship lurched slightly, then began to drift. I realized they had a line off the stern. A boat full of men pulled hard to tow this vessel away from shore.
I tugged at the man’s sleeve. “Please, sir, what is the name of this ship?”
He looked down at me and began to laugh. “Do not think me to be mocking you, little one, but this vessel is called Southern Escape.”
“Ah.” I looked quietly into his eyes. “But I am free.”
“Of course you are,” he answered. “At the moment.” He bent close. “I am Srini, the purser. I must go see to the captain. To be sitting with those bales over there, and for the love of all that is holy, get yourself in no one’s path.”
The deck clanged and rattled. Canvas boomed as sails were raised. I crouched upon the deck and told myself old stories in the language of my birth. I was on my way to a port from which with luck I could hear the sound of Endurance’s wooden bell. I was on my way to freedom.
I was on my way home.
Going Back
SRINI PUT me to work in the galley with an elderly Hanchu cook who had only one leg. Lao Jia wore a wooden peg to move about on deck, but he hung that at the galley hatch and spent his time within braced against the inbuilt counters. The peg was carved with flowing dragons chasing a series of black pearls set into the wood. The galley was strung with a clever series of canvas straps to secure him against heavy seas or rising storms. I believe he tolerated me at first only because I was small and lithe enough to duck around him.
I was just as glad to be down there. The deck frightened me. I remembered horizons, first from home, then aboard Fortune’s Flight. Actually seeing them again was profoundly disorienting. Even the streets of Copper Downs had been enclosed by buildings, trees, people. The ocean was nothing but horizon, rippling uncomfortably in all directions.
The old man spoke almost no Petraean, other than shouting the names of some foodstuffs at me. I certainly spoke no Hanchu then. I had never heard the language in my life before being forced to share the narrow kitchen with him. However, he did have a bit of Seliu, a language he shared with Srini and the memories of my earliest childhood.
The steam of pots clamped to the swinging stoves was the smell of freedom to me. Lao Jia made me chop cabbage and carrots under his watchful eye. He soon determined that I would not lose a finger into the food or stab him as Southern Escape rolled with the swells. “You will do,” he said in Seliu.
Those words from a
busy old man were perhaps the first genuine praise I’d received in my life.
“My thanks,” I told him.
When I proved to know my way around his spice bottles by sight and smell, he seemed almost pleased. On our second day at sea, I made a very serviceable turnover stuffed with ground pork, cumin, and mashed cress. Lao Jia pronounced me good. “I talk to Srini, you stay here and cook.” His gap-toothed smile beamed.
“I go to Selistan,” I told him.
He pretended to wail, drawing off his blue cloth cap and folding it to his breast while muttering prayers to his Hanchu gods. Then he smiled, patted me on the head, and put me back to work.
Cooking with him was pleasant. It was even more pleasant to work without ready judgment standing at my back. I did not mind the small kitchen, the limited tools, and the odd ingredients. Best of all, after several more days, Lao Jia began to show me the basics of Hanchu cuisine. The primary techniques revolved around shredding the food, marinating it, frying the results quickly in a hot, shallow pan, then serving everything mixed together in sauce. What was not simple was balancing the humors of the food—Srini had to help me sort that word out in Petraean, when Lao Jia first began using it—as well the complex spices and sauces.
I realized that Mistress Tirelle had left me with a true love of learning.
Bunking me correctly was a more difficult task. “You have not paid for a cabin,” Srini told me sternly after my first two nights sleeping on deck. We were still speaking mostly Petraean then. I’d had to kick several sailors away, and wound up awake both nights in fear for my safety.
“I am not a harlot for their use.” Mindful of Mistress Cherlise’s many lessons, I swept my hand over my mostly flat chest. “I am not even yet grown to womanhood.”
He pulled at his broad dark chin, reminding me for a moment of Federo. “I cannot simply give you a privilege. You are quite young to be trading your comforts for the passage, this is true.” Srini frowned. “I am sorry to say, but the wounds upon your cheeks will draw the eye away. If you are to be cutting off that great mane of woman’s hair and dressing in canvas trousers, they will take less notice of you.”
My hair had never been cut in my life, so far as I knew, except for the ends being trimmed to suit the style of my beauty. The Factor’s beauty, which I had already sliced away. “I will do it,” I told him in Seliu.
“And I will be having a word with the bosun about the night watch on the deck.” He smiled. “You walk a long road for such a young woman.”
“My path was taken from me years ago.”
Lao Jia was scandalized when I asked for a knife to set to my hair. “No, no, beauty!” he shouted. “Not to ruin good knife, either!”
I despaired of explaining the problem that had required such a solution. Still, I tried. Somehow he understood. “I cut,” he said. “I keep.”
While I’d held some notion of burning the hair or casting it into the sea, I agreed. He would do a better job than I—when had I ever cut hair? Besides that, I could hardly see my own neck.
We decided to stay in the galley for the effort. There was no purpose in setting a show for the sailors and passengers on deck, and they would be less likely to see me as a girl if they had not witnessed my transformation. Lao Jia produced a great pair of shears. “For cutting,” he said, then a word I did not know.
I just nodded.
He sharpened them on a tiny grinder, which he turned by hand. Unlike Fortune’s Flight with its great kettle belowdecks, Southern Escape had been built for nothing but wind, wood, and muscle power. No electricks here.
In time, Lao Jia sat me on a little folding stool he kept braced behind a counter and went to work. Each snip of the shears was a heavy pull at my scalp that almost made me cry out. I held still, mouth shut and eyes half-clenched against the drizzle of tears he drew forth from me.
Cutting my hair was in a strange way even more painful than slashing my cheeks had been. I tried to think about why that was so. In principle, I could cover my scars with clays and paints, or even perhaps the attentions of some physician or flesh-healer. My hair, though. I would be faced with the work of another span of my lifetime to grow it out again.
My head felt lighter when he was done. I had never considered what a weight my hair had been, but my neck rose high and strong. “Thank you,” I said in Seliu, then again in Hanchu.
“I keep, I keep.”
“You keep.”
I struggled into the canvas clothes Srini had given me, with my ruined tights and shirt as smallclothes beneath them. My soft leather boots would be worn through in days on these decks, so he had also found me a decent pair of shoes. It seemed easier to remain barefoot. I watched the waves pitch and the birds wheel while the wind rubbed damp, chilly fingers across my scalp. I touched my head. I was not bald, but he had cut me to stubble.
You need a hat, I thought. The air teased a few more tears from my eyes as my scalp grew cold even in the sunlight. Then I went to scrounge a cover for my head.
Freedom had such strange and unexpected prices.
______
My cooking acquired a cachet aboard Southern Escape. Lao Jia traded me lessons in Hanchu cookery for my culinary knowledge, especially of baking. Bread was not such a great thing in the Han countries, I quickly learned, and desserts even less so. We prepared ambitious dinners for the captain and the passengers, while also spicing up the sailors’ stew and biscuit in different ways.
A fresh catch was brought in almost every day. I knew far more about game than about seafood, and was content to learn from Lao Jia there as well. He showed me how to judge a fish, where to look for worms or other parasites, what to check in the gut to see if it had been unhealthy. Some we threw overboard for the sharks. What he approved of was sliced thin for serving cold or as an inclusion in the fried Hanchu dishes; otherwise thick for me to work with as steaks. I quickly moved toward lighter sauces with sharp flavors to complement the strong tastes and odors of fish.
I brought puddings to the table, pastries, dishes of fruit mashed frozen from the ice boxes below, or mixed into compotes and salads. Lao Jia made his stirred fryings, steamed little dumplings of fish and shrimp, and showed me how to pickle meat until it threatened to rot but tasted divine.
At the same time, Srini came around to the galley or found me on the deck every day and spoke to me awhile in Seliu. He was concerned at how little I knew.
“You are a girl close to grown, but your accent is Stone Coast and your vocabulary has many oddities.”
He was forced to explain several of those words.
“I hate that I talk Petraean so well,” I told him, “and my own words so bad.”
“Then we will talk.” Srini spoke of the doings of the ship, the food we’d prepared that day or the night before, pointed out people and described them to me. He talked about the Wheel, which underlies so much of Selistani life, for the people believe it explains the fate and purpose of their souls. His words were like water on a sun-baked pot. I felt Seliu stirring within me. I knew, most unkindly, that Papa would have said little of what Srini told me, but it was still the tongue of my birth. The sounds lay deep inside, waiting only for an awakening such as this.
I also knew from my time aboard Fortune’s Flight that we would be weeks in the crossing. More, depending on the winds. I also knew from what Federo had told me that I did not want to take passage all the way to Kalimpura.
“Srini,” I said one day, a week into our lessons and eleven days out of Copper Downs. “I must ask your help.”
“What is it, Green?” He smiled his smile, which lifted the droopy mustache he’d been growing. “I have made you a boy, and carried you across the sea. I am too poor a tulpa to do much more than that.”
I laughed, more because he expected me to than because the joke deserved it. “I do not want to go to Kalimpura.”
“In truth?” He switched to Petraean. “Lao Jia has asked me if we can keep you aboard as cook’s mate. After last night’
s honeyed smelt in plums, I can say the captain will be easily convinced.”
“No, no. I wish to put ashore at Little Bhopura.” For a moment, I switched back to Seliu. “I must go there.”
“Little Bhopura?” he asked in Petraean. Srini tugged at his chin some more. “I am not even sure where that lies. It has never been a port for any ship I’ve served aboard. Surely it is somewhere in Bhopura?”
“Thirty leagues east of Kalimpura, I am told.” I willed him to hear me and understand my need. “I believe we sail past it on our way. A fishing port, where some bring their rice and vegetables to trade.”
“I am only the purser,” he said sadly. “I book cargos and passengers aboard, but the ship sails under the captain and his master. Once we have agreed where we will put in, it is not for me to say.”
“Then will you do this thing for me.” I switched again to our tongue. “When we are close to Little Bhopura, will you tell me? I would swim ashore.”
“Swim! In those waters? The greater devilfish would make a morsel of you!”
“I will chance it. That is where I must go.” To my surprise, I believed my words.
We made passage over open water for two more weeks after my request. The winds were largely favorable, though our voyage was marked by one great storm and several smaller ones, and once the landing of a gigantic calamar-fish, which was thrown back as an ill omen despite Lao Jia’s begging and my own intense curiosity.
Each day, I carefully sewed another knot in my silk. I had taken no bells when I’d left the attic back in Copper Downs, probably because I hadn’t thought to live beyond that morning. Though that moment was only days in my past, it already had the unreal remove of some other life’s memories. Like something read once, and later misrecalled as if it had happened to me.
It happened that I was on deck immediately after the midday service and shortly before Lao Jia and I would begin cooking in earnest for the dinner. The lookout shouted something I did not understand. This was followed by a great cheering from the crew, and much pointing off the starboard bow.