by Jay Lake
I went to that rail and stared. After a while, I realized that the horizon didn’t have the same wobbling line that it possessed in the other directions.
Land, I thought. The easternmost edge of this portion of Selistan. Bhopura would be somewhere behind that shore. As would my father. And Endurance.
When Lao Jia called me down to help with the dinner, I begged his forgiveness. “This is my home,” I told him. “I have not seen it since I was very small. I must watch the shore.” My Seliu had improved under Srini’s tutelage.
“You were to make potato leek soup for the captain’s table tonight,” he grumbled.
“Just go easy on the salt, and none of those red peppers. They will like it well enough.”
He stumped away again with a shake of his head. The black eyes of the dragons winked at me from his wooden leg.
I stared at the shore, as if somehow I thought I might glimpse Endurance through some gap in the trees I could not yet make out. This has ever been a weakness of mine, looking ahead to what I could not see, but at that time, it still smacked of honest ignorance and rising hope. Somewhere there was the house where I was born. If I looked hard enough, I would recognize something—even just the shape of the crown of a tree. I wanted a sign that my home would welcome me back.
Unfortunately for me, darkness fell before the shore was anything more than a thickening line on the horizon. The smells from the galley were good enough that I would not be shamed. I let the rising breeze pluck at me and wondered how much time the walk from Little Bhopura to my papa’s farm would take. It had been a long road in my memory, but Federo had put the distance at a pair of leagues.
I would walk across the water if I must, to get to shore.
“In the morning, you will see the forests along the beach,” Srini said behind me. “This far to the east, they are mostly wild palms and some pine-nut trees. The soil on the ridges behind the shore is too salty and stony to be of use, so no one lives here but bandits.”
Being of a practical mind, I wondered who those bandits preyed upon. “Will Little Bhopura be the first port we pass?”
“Yes. I spoke to the navigator. He will plot a course that takes us closer in than we might normally go. It is safe enough from reefs, but the wind is chancier.”
“What will Captain Shields say?” I’d been feeding the man at least once a day in the almost-month I’d been aboard Southern Escape, and I still had not met him.
“With luck, he will be saying nothing. If he asks, the navigator will tell him that we are checking the charts. Sometimes that is even being true.”
“Who am I to the navigator?” Another man whose name I did not know.
Srini smiled. “The woman who makes honeyed smelt. Besides, the navigator is being my lover.”
“Ah.” Mistress Cherlise had discussed that, in more detail than I’d really cared to hear: how two men might be lovers together. Love among women I thought I could understand, but men were such careless brutes that I did not then see how two of them could love without someone to soften the blows and dampen the curses. This opinion was a legacy of the Factor’s house, I now know, but many of those habits of thought were years in the erasing.
“Thank him for me,” I told him softly.
“Never fear.” He sighed, then switched to Seliu. “I do not yet know how to land you without causing far too much comment.”
“The shore will not be far.” I felt dreamy, drawn so close to home, as if Endurance were before me, flicking his ears. “I shall stride across the waves like a goddess returning.”
“I shall find a need for something in the market there,” Srini muttered. “And be taking you ashore to help me select it.”
“Will the captain not become angry when I leave your company?”
“He will be cursing you for a ship-jumper, once he knows that the new cook’s mate is gone.”
“But I never took his tael.”
Srini smiled in the gleaming starlit dark. “Of course not. I was never asking you to sign the ship’s book, was I?”
I hugged him. He hugged me back. “Go forth and be a man’s daughter a little longer, if the turning of your Wheel is allowing it.”
“Yes.” I went below to pack my very meager belongings and explain myself to Lao Jia.
Two days later, the ship put in close to shore. The navigator was violently ill belowdecks. It had been widely put about that the purser needed a certain fresh fruit from his native land to effect the most immediate cure.
I watched the waters curl and spit along the hull of Southern Escape. This part of the Selistani coast boasted clay hills covered with scrub, lined with palms where they descended to meet the water. The port that held the first real buildings I had ever seen in my life now seemed a run-down collection of garden sheds. No dock stuck out into the water, just logs making steps down to the beach.
Nothing looked familiar to me, though I had seen this place before. I now have two layers of memory, like lacquer on an inlaid table, obscuring the grain of the truth that lies beneath.
Children waved and shouted and pointed at Southern Escape. Her sails were reefed as she glided to a rest. Anchor chains rumbled when the weights were dropped, while the bosun already had men putting a little boat over the side.
I would go ashore as I might well have left this place, rowed by pale men who cursed their oars at every stroke. With my belled silk rolled tight in a sailcloth bag, I dressed in the worn duck trousers and shirt I’d been given. Underneath, I’d wrapped my chest tight, so the emerging bumps of my breasts would not betray me.
Lao Jai touched at my arm as I prepared to descend to the dory bobbing alongside. “A moment,” he said. “I will miss you.” He added something else in Hanchu.
“I will miss you, as well.” My face bent into a smile even I hadn’t expected. “I am going home. Thank you for the lessons in your cookery.”
“May the gods carry you where you wish.” He frowned. “If home is not what you think, please to keep looking.”
I hugged him, then scrambled down the ladder. We rowed ashore, bouncing in a surf I did not recall from my departure so long ago. The children anticipated the boat’s arrival. Screaming, they fought with the sailors to draw the keel up the beach. Srini and I tumbled ashore as the bosun’s mate began arguing with children who did not share a language with him.
Privy to the curses and taunts flying both ways, I parted company with my friend the purser and walked up the few steps from the beach, as if I were going to market for Srini’s fruit.
The town was even less than I recalled, a bedraggled collection of buildings on one side of the muddy track, huts and stalls on the other. I marched into the struggling market as if I knew my way, ignoring the little clicking calls from the stallholders. I understood. I looked the part here, with my skin and patchy hair, but my clothes marked me out as not local.
I will fit in at home, I promised myself. Papa and Endurance will take me in, and it will not matter how I look.
That was a lie, of course, and I knew it even then. But I had to see the truth for myself before I could understand the difference.
Passing through the rotten little bazaar, I remembered this walk. I could find the farm. The Dancing Mistress had trained me very well in retracing my steps. That the gap between memory and re-creation was a decade long should not stop me.
Passing beyond the last few buildings and a rank pen of bleating goats, I quickly climbed the road that sloped up north and west out of the miserable little town toward the dry upland I remembered from years before. A league or two, and I would be home. In my father’s arms again, where I belonged. A few more furlongs, and I could claim my life back for good and all.
The ridgetop was as desolate as memory had made it out to be. I watched for the wayhouse where Federo and I had stopped to eat more than nine years before, but never saw it.
Perhaps it had been a building at the edge of the town, and I had misremembered the distance.
Wood
en fences straggled back and forth across the landscape. The plants were a combination of low, scrubby bushes and spiked explosions like balls of thorns. Though I could name a hundred flowering plants and herbs of the Stone Coast, I had no words in Petraean or Seliu for what grew here so close to my home. A few herds of goats as worn and threadbare as their fields eyed me suspiciously when I passed. Otherwise, I could have been on the moon for all that I saw signs of people.
Ahead, a mountain range rose in the morning sun. It was dusty dark, a mix of rose and brown and purple shadow with the light still low in the east. The line must trend north of west, I realized, to keep the shadow so.
After all my years behind walls, I was pleased enough that I could see landforms and understand what they would have been on a map.
The road stayed almost level, still rising a bit as I headed away from Little Bhopura. Nothing changed in an hour of walking except that the fences came closer together and the goats were slightly more numerous.
It all became different within another dozen strides. The road crested and dropped between embankments. An entirely different landscape spread before me, a plain much lower than the ridge I’d been crossing, that stretched from here to the distant mountains. A wide river glinting silver cut lazy curves through an endless patchwork of squares and lines.
Rice paddies. Ditches. Villages. Down there, somewhere close to me, was my home. My foot slipped on some gravel, and to my surprise, I fell seated to the ground. The shock ran through my buttocks and hips, small stones cutting in even past the canvas trousers. The greater shock was how my eyes filled with tears. I felt as if my body had begun to spew hot pepper.
I sat in the road and sobbed aloud as I had not done since the first days of my captivity. Home stretched before me like the Fields of Promise before Barzak the Deliverer in the last canto of The Book of Lesser Fates. I was young, alive, and won free from slavery.
Still, I cried. My chest shuddered. My nose filled with heavy mucus until it threatened to drain and choke me. A grief I could not name clutched at my heart. Darkness covered my eyes.
I tried to fight free. I had not cried like this, ever. What am I mourning so deeply? Grandmother? My mother, whom I could not remember at all? Mistress Tirelle?
Finally it came to me that I was crying for the girl I could have been. The woman I would never be. My path was bent, perhaps beyond repair. Regardless, I must locate Papa and Endurance and see what could be made right. I was aware my father would not know me, though I’d avoided considering that until now.
I only hoped I could know him.
It took some while for me to reach calm. Finally I stood, dusted off my trousers, and headed down the hill. The river looped not far from the base of the escarpment—I was not yet any decent judge of distance then, but even to my untrained eye it was close—and a crossroads there, which would take me somewhere near home.
If I could not find it, I would ask. If I could not ask, I would walk, quartering these fields until Papa’s hut was before me.
Of course, I could not just make my way back. Federo had not been able to give me specific directions. I did not know my father’s name. He was just “Papa” to me. So I walked toward the little cluster of huts where the roads met.
The river was a flat, dark presence by the time I got there. The sun’s climb toward the zenith had stolen his silver, and paid the land back with heat. My canvas shirt would soon be a punishment, but I had nothing else to wear except the belled silk, and that would not be enough for simple modesty.
A thin-muzzled white dog, a mangy bitch red and gray with dust, slunk out from the first mud-brick hut to investigate me. She growled once, but I stared close into her eyes and spoke some of the simple words Mistress Balnea had taught me, from the language all dogs know in their blood and bone. With a whimper, the bitch sat and began to scratch at fleas, though her eyes tracked me as close as any prey.
Children played in the middle of the pathetic town. They were bandy-legged, with potbellies and slack jaws. Their skins were much darker than mine from the burning of the sun. I could see the dents of ribs upon their thin chests.
Had I been like this? What had Federo seen in me?
I wanted to ask after Papa’s fields, but there was no way to make a question. A woman with her belled silk wrapped around her stepped to the empty doorway of another hut to stare at me. She had a wide jaw, and was not so dark as the children, but matched them for her gauntness.
They have little here, except recent famine, I thought. The fields beyond the village were flooded, small green shoots poking above the water. The previous harvest must have failed. It could happen with too little water or too much. Rice cultivation was one of the few topics I had found in Mistress Danae’s books that had any bearing on my lost home.
Lost no more, I reminded myself.
I kept walking, giving her a single nod. She did not return it, but stared me out of her little village and onto the road beyond. I headed right, back toward the north, on an instinct that counted as little more than a whim. The dust clouded with each fall of my sailor’s boots. The sun pressed down upon my head as I had remembered it doing all those years ago. Except then, it had been my friend, my constant companion, while now I could feel by the warming of the right side of my face that it had become my enemy.
Had I really set out carrying no water? What a fool I was.
I walked, looking for side paths. Brick piles were scattered here and there along the way toward the river. When a man stepped out of one, stretching to his feet, I realized these were huts. Had Papa’s been so low?
We’d had a gatepost, and plantain trees nearby with a rich stand of bougainvilleas. These were just wretched hovels amid open fields of rice. I looked ahead at a tree line. My heart raced.
There?
Keeping myself from running, I followed the road. It seemed right. I was getting close.
After passing the shadow of some struggling palms, I looked toward the next array of paddies. They were little different from the last. My heart was a stone.
Eventually I sought out directions. A man with a hoe, wearing only a grubby dhoti, worked in the ditch by the road near the shadow of a familiar baobab tree. I knew I was close.
“Please, sir,” I said.
He stopped swinging his tool—a spiked club, really—and stared at me without answering.
“I am looking for a farm. A man of middle years, with a white ox named Endurance.”
The farmer shrugged and went back to cutting mud. I knew he would use it to shore one of the paddy ditches. I kept walking, asked my question twice more before a man with a cart filled with short straw pointed onward. “Endurance, hmm?” he said. “Fifth walkway on the right. You are wanting Pinarjee’s place, perhaps.”
Pinarjee! A name. I nearly cried, instead pressing my hands together, and I bowed. “Thank you, sir.”
“Get on, boy, to whatever work it is you are missing.”
“Of course, sir.”
Counting carefully, I found the fifth walkway. I trembled as I stepped onto it. A stand of plantains rose ahead of me close by a pair of tumbledown huts. A ragged row of stumps showed where my bougainvilleas might once have grown. Cut for firewood?
I walked slowly, my pace dragging more with every step. A crude fence enclosed the huts. I’d remembered the gatepost being almost as tall as Federo, but this was a little gnarled thing that looked as if it had been assembled by a dull-witted child.
Then I heard the clop of a wooden bell. Endurance appeared from behind the huts, rising to his feet from where he had been sitting. He stared at me. My pace quickened; my eyes filled once more. The ox snuffled once, twice, then shook his head. The bell echoed again and again.
Did he know me, even now, after these years? Memory was a pain sharp as any knife.
A woman stepped out of the hut and stared as well. She was thin, dark, and wore only a length of grubby linen wrapped twice around her and then over her shoulder.
�
��Who are you?” she demanded.
I stopped. Endurance whuffled. Taking a deep breath to fight off the quaver in my voice, I said, “I am my father’s daughter, finally come home again.”
She approached and took my chin in her hand to turn my face. “Pinar’s daughter died with her mother, as a small child. But yes . . . you have his look.”
That was the moment when I should have turned and retraced my steps. That was the moment when I should have left the memory of my home as it was. That was the moment when my papa’s love was still whole.
Like a fool, twice a fool, I stood my ground. “Endurance knows me. The ox remembers.”
She glanced over her shoulder. “That old bag of bones? He goes to slaughter next week.” Then she shouted, “Pinar! Come out here now.”
My father emerged from his hut, shaking, tired, to stare blank-eyed at me as if he’d never seen me before in my life. I saw his face, wanted to run to hug him, but his wife’s hand was tight upon my arm as my heart collapsed. Endurance continued to shake his head, ears flapping and his breath huffing as his bell tolled.
The ox had not meant to welcome me home. He had meant to warn me away.
That afternoon, I stood calf-deep in a paddy pulling weeds. The ox was sleeping once more behind the hut that had been his stall in earlier years. Papa—Pinarjee—slept as well. Only his wife was out with me. Shar, her name was.
“If this is your house, then you’ll work for your keep like everyone else,” she said fiercely.
“Why does he not know me?”
Shar chopped with her hoe, breaking clods and tearing up some of the small waxy plants we were removing. I waited for her to answer, but she kept working. So I worked, too.
Finally she said, “He does not recognize much anymore. Sometimes he cries out for Mira.” She looked at me sidelong. “His mother, that was.”
“I remember Grandmother,” I said softly.