THE MISSIONARY’S CHILD
Born in Ohio, Maureen F. McHugh spent some years living in Shijiazhuang in the People’s Republic of China, an experience that has been one of the major shaping forces on her fiction to date. Upon returning to the United States, she made her first sale in 1989, and has since made a powerful impression on the SF world of the nineties with a relatively small body of work, becoming a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as selling to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Alternate Warriors, Aladdin, and other markets.
Not prolific by the high-production sausage-factory standards of the field, McHugh has nevertheless enjoyed the distinction of publishing some of the very best stories of the late eighties and nineties, especially such profound and disturbing stories as “Protection,” “Nekropolis,” and “The Lincoln Train,” which won her a Hugo Award in 1996, although even her “second-string” stories such as “Baffin Island,” “The Queen of Marincite,” “Whispers” (with David B. Kisor), “In the Air,” “The Beast,” and “A Coney Island of the Mind” would be the envy of many another writer. Many of these stories take her into territories far beyond the range of the Planetary Adventure, but she can write those too when she sets her mind to it, as well or better than it’s ever been done by anybody, as shown by stories such as “Strings,” the recent Nebula finalist “The Cost to Be Wise,” and the suspenseful, sly, and sardonic adventure that follows, “The Missionary’s Child,” a story with strong echoes of Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr., and others, but one which demonstrates a voice and vision that are McHugh’s alone. A story that shows us that sometimes even when you are determinedly minding your own business, it’s hard to stay out of trouble … and that sometimes it’s when you’re not looking for anything that you find something that’s the most worth finding … .
Although she’s expert at shorter lengths, much of McHugh’s reputation has been made with her novels. In 1992 she published one of the year’s most widely acclaimed and talked-about first novels, China Mountain Zhang, which won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, the Lambda Literary Award, and the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award, and which was named a New York Times Notable Book as well as being a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards. Her most recent book, the novel Half the Day Is Night, received similar critical acclaim. Upcoming is a new novel, Mission Child, set on the same world as “The Missionary’s Child” and “The Cost to Be Wise.” She lives in Twinsburg, Ohio, with her husband, her son, and a golden retriever named Smith.
“Are you blind?” the woman asks.
I’m looking right at her. “No,” I say, “I’m foreign.”
Affronted, the woman straightens up in a swirl of rose-colored robe and chouli scent, clutching her veil. Here in the islands, they don’t see very many blond-haired, blue-eyed barbarians; people have asked me if I can see normally, if all northerners are blue-eyed. But this is the first time someone has ever asked me that. Maybe she thinks that my eyes are filmed, like the milky-white of old people.
She thought I was begging—I must look pretty tattered. I should have said yes, then I could go get something to drink, get out of the sun. I’m sitting down by the water. I’m broke, and I’ve been hungry for awhile, and I’m listless and a little stupid from the heat and lack of food. I feel fifty instead of thirty-one.
I should go back to the hiring area, wait around with a couple of other thugs for some sort of nasty work. I should oil my sword. It’s a waste of time; no one needs a mercenary here, the Celestial Prince doesn’t hire foreigners in his army.
But I don’t want to go back. Up in the market, some yammerhead had been rattling on about our Cousins from the stars. The Cousins haven’t come to the islands in any numbers yet, and I’ll wager he’s never met any. Listening to this stonker gave me a headache. Wouldn’t he be surprised if he knew that the Cousins think of us all about the way the woman who asked me if I was blind thinks of me. They think that we’re barbarians. They think that we’re stupid because we call what they do magic instead of science. Or they feel sorry for us.
I know better than thinking bitter; time to head back to the market, see if anybody will hire a tokking foreigner to dig ditches or something.
But I sit, my head aching with hunger and heat, too stupid to do anything about it. And I’m still sitting there a dine later, the sun is still high in the sky baked the color of celedon. Not awake, not asleep.
I’m going to have to start selling my gear, the slow road to starvation.
I open my eyes and watch a ship come in on the deep green sea. It has red eyes rimmed in violet and violet sails; from far away, I can see a person wearing dark clothes that are all of one piece. A Cousin, standing at the prow. On the boathouse there is a light, star-magic, like a third eye, blind and white. Here in the islands, when you see Cousins, they are with the rich and the powerful.
What would the Cousin think if I spoke a little of his/her language? I only remember a few phrases. “Hello,” “My name is,” and a phrase from my lessons, “Husband and wife Larkin have three children, a boy and two girls.”
Would the Cousin be curious enough to take me aboard? Recognize the debt for what the Cousins did to my kin, help me get back to the mainland?
The ship docks, three guildmen and a Cousin disembark, and come down the quay. Southerners will stare at any foreigner, but they stare double at a Cousin, and who can blame them? The Cousin is a woman, with her hair uncovered, dressed like a man, but not looking like a man, no. That amuses me. Southern women pull their veils around their mouths and stop to watch.
She comes down the quay with studied indifference. I can understand that; what does one do when people stare day after day? Pretend not to notice.
She is tall, taller than me, but Cousins are usually tall, and I’m shorter than many men. She looks up directly at me while I am smiling, by chance. The length of a man between us. I can see that she has light eyes.
“Hello,” I say in the trade language of the Cousins. The word just pops out.
It stops her, though, like a roped stabros calf. “Hello,” she says, in the same tongue. Consternation among the guildmen; two in dark red and one in green, all with shaven heads dull with the graphite sheen of stubble. “You speak lingua?” she says.
“A little,” I say.
Then she rattles on, asking me something, “where da-da da-da da.”
I shrug. Search my memory. My lessons in lingua were a lifetime ago; I remember almost nothing. Something comes to me that I often said in class: “I don’t understand,” I say, “I speak little.”
“Where did you learn?” she says in Suhkhra, the language of the southerners. “Starport?”
“Up north.” No real answer. Already I’m sorry I spoke. Bad enough to be a tokking foreigner; worse to be a spectacle. And my head aches, and I am tired from three days’ lack of food.
“Did you work at the port?” she asks, probing.
“No,” I say. Flat.
She frowns. Then, like a boat before bad winds, she comes across in another direction. She speaks in my own language, the language of home. “What is your name?” She is careful and stilted in that one phrase.
“Jahn,” I say, probably the commonest name among northern men. “What is yours?” I ask, without regard for courtesy.
“Sulia,” she says. “Jahn, what kin-kind?”
“My kin are all dead,” I say, “Jahn no-kin-kind.”
But she shakes her head. “I’m sorry,” she says in Suhkhra, “I don’t understand. I speak very little Krerjian. What did you say your name was?”
“Jahn Sckarline,” I say. And then, in my own tongue, “Go away.” Because I am tired of her, tired of everything, tired of starving.
She isn’t listening, and probably doesn’t understand anyway. “Sckarline,” she says. “I thought everyone from Sckarline—”
“Is dead,” I say. “Thank you, Cousin. I am pleased you keep my kinname.” It’s awkward to say in Suhkra. The Suhkra aren’t good at irony anyway.
“Sulia Cousin,” one of the guildmen says deferentially, “they are waiting for us.”
She shakes him off. “I know about the settlement at Sckarline,” she says to me. “You’re a mission boy. You have an education. Why don’t you work at a port?”
“And live in a ghetto?” The word comes back to me in her trade lingua. “With the other natives?”
“Isn’t it better to get a tech job than to live like this?” she asks.
Better than a shantytown, I think, huddled together while the starships come screaming overhead, making one’s teeth ache and one’s goods rattle?
I look at her, she looks at me. I search my memory for the words in lingua, but my mind isn’t sharp and it was too long ago. “Go away,” I finally say in Suhkhra, “people are waiting.”
She stands there hesitant, but the guildman does not. He strides forward and smacks me hard in the side of my head for my disrespect. I know better than to defend myself. Oh, Heth, my poor head! Southerners are a bad lot, they have no concept of a freeman.
So, having been knocked over, I stay still, with my nose near the stones, waiting to see if he’ll hit me again, smelling dust, and sea, and the smell of myself, which is probably very distasteful to everyone else.
He crouches down, and I wait to be smacked again, empty-headed. But it isn’t him, it’s her. “What are you doing here?” she asks. She probably means how did you come here, but I find myself wondering, what am I doing here? Looking for work. Trying to get passage home. But home is gone, should never have existed in the first place.
What does any person do in a lifetime? I give her an answer out of the Proverbs. “Putting off death,” I say. “Go away, before you complicate my task—you people have done enough to me.”
She looks unhappy. Cousins are like that, a sentimental people. “If I could help you, I would,” she says.
“I know,” I say, “but your help would make me need you. And then I would be just one more local on one more backward world.” Everywhere the Cousins go across the sky, it’s the same. Wanji used to tell us about her people, about the Cousins. About other worlds like ours. Where two cultures meet, she said, one of them usually gives way.
The Cousin searches through her pockets, puts a coin, a rectangular silver piece, in the dust. I wait, not moving, until they go on.
I pick up the coin. A proud person would throw it after her. I’m not proud, I’m hungry. I take it.
In the market, it’s rabbit and duck day—kids herding ducks with long switches, cages of rabbits for sale, hanging next to that cheap old staple,
thekla lizard drying in strips. I dodge past tallgrass poles with craken-dyed cloth hanging startling yellow, and cut through between two vegetable stands. Next to the hiring area, they’re grilling stabos jerky on sticks, and selling pineapple slices dipped in saltwater to make them sweeter.
I use the Cousin’s silver to buy noodles and red peanut paste, spicy with proyakapiti, and I eat slowly. I’m three days empty of food, and if I eat too fast, I’ll be sick. I learned about going without food during a campaign, when I first started soldiering. On the long walk to Bashtoy. I know all about the different kinds of hunger; the first sharp stabs of appetite, then the strong hunger, how your stomach hurts after awhile, and then how you forget, and then how hunger comes back, like swollen joints in an old woman. And how it wears you down, how you become tired and stupid, and how then finally it leaves you altogether, and your jaw bone softens until your teeth rock in their sockets, and you have been hungry so long you don’t know what it means anymore.
The yammerhead is on the other side of the hiring area, still going on about how the guilds monopolize the Cousins. How the guilds were nothing until ten years ago, when the Cousins came and brought magic, and then no one could trade without permission of the guild. I close my eyes, feeling sleepy after food, and I can see the place where I grew up. I was born in Sckarline, a magic town. I remember the white houses, the power station where Ayuedesh taught boys to cook stabos manure and get swamp air from it, then turned that into power that sang through copper and made light. At night, we had light for three or four dine after sunset. Phrases in the lingua the Cousins speak, Appropriate Technology.
I am lost in Sckarline, looking for my mother, for kin. I see Trevin, and I follow him. He’s way ahead, in leggings, in dark blue with fur on his shoulders. But the way he leads me is wrong, the buildings are burned, just blackened crossbeams jutting up, he is leading me toward—
“I’m looking for a musician.” I jerk awake.
A flat-faced southerner waiting for hire says, “Musicians are over there.” People who wait here are like me, looking for anything.
A portly man with a wine-colored robe says, “I’m looking for a musician who knows a little about swords.”
“What kind of musician?” I ask. I always talk quietly, it’s a failing, and the portly man doesn’t hear me. He cocks his head.
“What kind of musician?” the flat-faced southerner repeats.
“Doesn’t matter.” The portly man shrugs, hawks so loudly it sounds as if he’s clearing his tokking head, and spits.
Tokking southerners. They spit all the time, it drives me crazy. I hear them clear their throat, and I cringe and start looking to step out of the way. Heth knows I’m not squeamish, but they all do it, men, women, children.
“Sikha,” the portly man offers. A sikha is a kind of southern lute, only they pick the strings on the neck as well as the ones on the body.
“How about flute?” I offer.
“Flute?” the portly man says. His robe is of good quality, but stained, and he has a negligent air. The robe gapes open to the belted waist, showing his smooth chest and the soft flab like breasts. “You play the flute, northerner?”
No, I want to say, I just wanted to help us think of some instruments. Patience. “Yes,” I say, “I play the flute.”
“Let’s hear you.”
So I dig out my wooden flute and make pretty sounds. He waves his hands and says, “How good are you with a sword?”
I dig into my pack and pull my cloak out of the bottom. It’s crushed and wrinkled, people don’t wear cloaks much in the south, but I spread it out so that he can see the badge on the breast: a white mountain against a red background. The survivors of the March to Bashtoy got them—that, and sixty gold coins. The sixty gold coins have been gone for a couple of years, but the badge is still on the cloak.
People murmur. The portly man doesn’t know badges, he’s not a fighter, but the flat-faced southerner does, and it shows in the sudden respect in his face, and that ends any question of my swordplay—which is fine because, badge or no badge, I’m only mediocre at swordplay. I’m just not tall enough or big enough.
Surviving a campaign is as much a matter of luck and cleverness as skill with a sword, anyway.
But that’s why Barok hires me to play flute at his party.
He offers me twenty in silver, which is too much money. He pays me five right away. He must want me to be a bodyguard, and that means that he thinks that he’ll need one. I like guard duty, or, better than that, something like being a sailor. But I didn’t realize until I jumped ship that, here in the Islands, not just anybody can be a sailor. I shouldn’t take this job, it sounds like trouble, but I’ve got to do something.
All boat trade except local fishing is controlled by the four Navigation Orders, all the Cousins’s magic by the two Metaphysical Orders. I don’t pay much attention to Magic; I’m just a whistler, a mercenary. I have three spells myself (but simple ones), that Ayuedesh Engineer, the old Cousin, wired into my skull when we knew that Scathalos High-on was going to attack Sckarline. A lot of good spells did us in the end, with all of two twenties of us and four Cousins, everybody in Sckarline who could fight at all, against the Scathalos High-on, Kin-leader’s army.
I am supposed to report my spells to the Metaphysical Orders, but I’m not that stupid. Just stupid enough to come here.
A man who hires a sword to play music must have unusual parties, and I wait to hear what he wants of me.
“You’ll need better clothes,” he says. “And bathe, would you?”
I promise to meet him in the market in three dine or so. And then I finger the coppers left from the Cousin’s silver and the five silver coins he’s given me. First I go to the bath house, and I pay for a private bath. I hate bath houses. It is not, as the southerners all think, that northerners hate to
bathe; I just find bath houses … uncomfortable. Even in a private room, I strip furtively, keeping my back to the door. But Heth, it is good to be clean, to not itch! I even wash my clothes, wring them out as best I can. The water runs black, and I have to put on wet clothes, but I imagine they’ll dry fast enough.
Back at the market, I find a stall that sells used clothes. I go through piles until I find a black jacket with a high neck, fairly clean. And I have my hair trimmed.
I use much of my three dine and about half of the Cousin’s silver, but when the time comes, I am back at the hiring area, cleaner, neater, with Barok’s five silver still in my pocket, and ready to earn the other fifteen silver. And I don’t wait long for my employer, who looks me over and spits, by which he means I have passed inspection.
I assume from his lavish way with silver and his manner that we will head to one of the better parts of town. After all, a lot of silver went into the feeding of that smooth belly and flaccid chest. But we head down toward where the river meets the ocean. It’s a wide, tame river, enclosed by stone walls and arched—so they claim—by fourteen stone bridges. But this far down, all poor. The closer we get, the more rank it smells. We go down a stone stairs to the water, past women washing clothes, and out onto a small city of permanently moored boats.
The sunbleached boats have eyes painted on the prows, even though they never go anywhere. They’re homes to families, each living the length of my arm from the next, all piled up together with brown dusty chickens, laundry flapping, brown children running from boat to boat, wearing nothing but a yellow gourd on a rope tied around their waist (if they fall overboard, the gourd floats, holding them up until some adult can fish them out of the water).
I’ve never been out here before; it’s a maze, and it would be worth my life to step on these boats alone. Even walking with Barok, I feel the men’s eyes follow me with hard gazes. We cross from boat to boat, they rise and fall under our feet. The boats bob, the green river stinks of garbage and rotting fish, and my poor head swirls a bit. I’ve been here two and half years, I speak the language, but only southerners can live piled up on top of each other this way.
Out near where the middle is kept clear for river traffic, we climb a ramp up onto a larger boat, maybe the length of five men head to foot, the home of Barok. A tiny brown woman wrapped in blue is shoving charcoal into a tampis jar, a jar with a place in the bottom to put fuel to heat the stuff cooking in the top. It’s a big tampis jar. I smell meat; there’s smooth creamy yogurt in a blue and white bowl next to her. I’m hungry again. She glances up, and looks back down. Barok ignores her and steps over a neat pyramid of pale lavender boxfruit, one split to show the purple meat. As I step over them, I reach down and hook one.
“Hie!” she snaps, “that is not for you!”
Barok doesn’t even look back, so I wink at her and keep walking.
“Yellow-haired dog-devil!” she shrieks. I follow Barok down into the hold, now a good-sized apartment, if rather warm, and get my first surprise. There’s a young girl, bare-armed and bare-haired, sitting at the table, drawing with brush and paper.
“Shell-sea,” Barok growls.
So intent she is that she ignores him for a moment, and I get a chance to see what she’s drawing—a long squiggling line that she’s tracing as if every twist and curve has meaning. Which it clearly doesn’t, since it meanders all over the page.
“Shell-sea! Take it in the back!”
She says sullenly, “It’s too hot back there,” and then looks up. I’m blond and sunburned, quite a sight for a southern girl who has probably never seen someone who didn’t have dark hair in her life. She stares at me as she gathers her papers, and then walks to the back, her eyebrows knit into a dark line, clumping her feet heavily, like someone whose wits aren’t right.
Barok watches her go as if he doesn’t like the taste of something. “My guests will be here later. Wait on deck.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I ask.
“Play music and watch the guests,” he says.
“That’s all?” I ask. “You’re paying me twenty in silver to watch?” He starts to answer sharply, and I say, “If you tell me what to watch for, I might do a better job.”
“You watch for trouble,” he says. “That’s enough.”
This is bad, my stomach knows. An employer who doesn’t trust his guests or his employees is like a dog with thrum—everyone gets bitten. I could quit, hand him back the five silvers, take the boxfruit, and go. I still have a little less than half of the Cousin’s silver; I can do fine on that for a week, if I sleep down on the docks.
“There’s food on the stern deck; help yourself, and ignore the woman if she complains.”
So I keep the job. Stomach-thinking. Heth says in the Proverbs that our life hinges on little things. That’s certainly true for me.
I eat slowly and carefully; I know that if I eat too much, I’ll be sleepy. But I fill my pack with boxfruit, pigeon’s egg dumplings, and red peanuts. Especially red peanuts—a person can live a long time on red peanuts. While I’m eating, Shell-sea comes up and sits on the stern to watch me. As I said, I’m not tall, most men have a bit of reach on me, and she’s nearly my height. She’s wearing a school uniform, the dark red of one of the orders, and her thick hair is tied back with a red cord. The uniform would be fine on a young girl, but only emphasizes that she’s not a child. She’s too old for bare arms, for uncovered hair, too old for the cord that belts the robe high under her small breasts. She is probably just past menses.
After I eat, I use a bucket to rinse my hands and face. After awhile she says, “Why don’t you take off your shirt when you wash?”
“You are a forward child,” I say.
She has the grace to blush, but she still looks expectant. She wants to see how much hair I have on my chest. Southerners don’t have much body hair.
“I’ve already bathed today,” I say. Southerners waiting to see if I look like a hairy termit make me very uncomfortable. “Why do you have such an unusual name?” I ask.
“It’s not a name, it’s a nickname.” She stares at her bare toes and they curl in embarrassment. I thought she was a bit of a half-wit, but away from Barok she’s quick enough, and light on her feet.
I wonder if she’s his fancy girl. Most southerners don’t take a pretty girl until they already have a first wife.
“Shell-sea? Why do they call you that?”
“Not ‘Shell-sea’,” she says, exasperated, “Chalcey. What kind of name is ‘Shell-sea’? My name is Chalcedony. I bet you don’t know what that is.”
“It’s a precious stone,” I say.
“How did you know?”
“Because I’ve been to the temple of Heth in Thelahckre,” I say, “and the Shesket-lion’s eyes are two chunks of chalcedony.” I rinse my bowl in the bucket, then dump the water over the side; the soap scums the green water like oil. I’d been to a lot of places, trying to find the right place. The islands hadn’t proven to be any better than the city of Lada on the coast. And Lada no better than Gibbun, which was supposed to be full of work, but the work was all for the new star port that the Cousins were building. My people forgetting their kin, living in slums. And Gibbun no better than Thelahckre.
“Why don’t you have a beard?” she asks. Southerners can’t grow beards until they’re old, and then only long, bedraggled, wispy white things. They believe that all northerner men have them down to their belts.
“Because I don’t,” I say, irritated. “Why do you live with Barok?”
“He’s my uncle.”
We both stop then to watch a ship come down the river to the bay. Like the one the Cousin came in on, it has red eyes rimmed in violet, and violet sails. “‘Temperance,’” I read from the side.
Chalcey glances at me out of the corner of her eye.
I smile. “Yes, some northerners can even read.”
“It’s a ship of the Brothers of Succor,” she says. “I go to the school of the Sisters of Clarity.”
“And who are the Sisters of Clarity?” I ask.
“I thought you knew everything,” she says archly. When I don’t rise to this, she says, “The Sisters of Clarity are the sister order to the Order of Celestial Harmony.”
“I see,” I say, watching the ship glide down the river.
Testily, she adds. “Celestial Harmony is the first Navigation Order.”
“Do they sail to the mainland?”
“Of course,” she says, patronizing.
“What does it cost to be a passenger? Do they ever hire cargo-handlers
or bookkeepers or anything like that?” I know the answer, but I can’t help myself from asking.
She shrugs, “I don’t know, I’m a student.” Then, sly again, “I study drawing.”
“That’s wonderful,” I mutter.
Passage out of here is my major concern. No one can work on a ship who isn’t a member of a Navigational Order, and no order is likely to take a blond-haired northerner with a sudden vocation. Passage is expensive.
Even food doesn’t keep me from being depressed.
The guests begin to arrive just after sunset, while the sky is still indigo in the west. I’m in the hold with two food servers. I’m sweltering in my jacket, they’re (both women) serene in their blue robes. I play simple songs. Barok comes by and says to me, “Sing some northern thing.”
“I don’t sing,” I say.
He glares at me, but I’m not about to sing, and he can’t replace me now, so that’s that. But I feel guilty, so I try to be flashy, playing lots of trills, and some songs that I think might sound strange to their ears.
It’s a small party, only seven men. Important men, because five boats clunk against ours. Or rich men. It’s hard for me to make decisions about southerners, they act differently and I don’t know what it means. For instance, southerners never say “no.” So at first, I decided that they were all shifty bastards, but eventually I learned how to tell a “yes” that meant no from a “yes” that meant yes. It’s not so hard—if you ask a shopkeeper if he can get you ground proyakapiti, and he says, “yes,” then he can. If he giggles nervously and then says “yes,” he’s embarrassed, which means that he doesn’t want you to know that he isn’t able to get it, so you smile and say that you will be back for it later. He knows you are lying, you know he knows; you are both vastly relieved.
But these men smile and shimmer like oil, and Barok smiles and shimmers like oil, and I don’t know what’s cast, only that if tension were food, I could cut thick slices out of the air and dine on it.
There are no women except servers. I don’t know if there are ever women at southern parties, because this is my first one. If a southern man toasts another, he cannot decline the toast without looking like a gelded stabos, so they drink a great deal of wine. After awhile, it seems to me that a man in green, ferret-thin, and a man in yellow are working together to get Barok drunk. If one of them toasts Barok, a bit later the other one does too. Barok would be drinking twice as much as they are, except that Barok himself toasts his guests, especially the ferret, a number of times, so it’s hard to say. Besides, Barok is portly and can drink a great deal of wine.
But the servers are finished and cleaning up on deck, and Barok is near purple himself when he finally raps on the table for silence. I stop playing, and tap the bare sword under the serving table behind me with my foot, just to know where it is.
Barok clears a space on the long thin banquet table and claps his hands. Chalcey comes in, dressed in a robe the color of her school uniform, but with her arms and hair decently covered. The effect is nice, or would be if she didn’t have that sullen, half-wit face she wears around her uncle.
She puts two rolled papers on the table, and then draws her veil close around her chin and crouches down like a proper girl. Barok opens one of the rolls, and I crane my head before the men close around it. All I get is a glimpse of one of Chalcey’s squiggly-line drawings, with some writing on it. The men murmur. The man in yellow says, “What is this?”
“Galgor coast,” Barok points, “Lesian and Cauldor Islands, the Liliana Strait.”
Charts? Navigation charts of the Islands? How could Barok have gotten … or rather, how could Chalcey have drawn … She is studying drawing with an Order, though, isn’t she? Chalcey drew the charts? But the Cousins have sold magic to the Navigational Orders to make sure students can’t take out so much as a piece of paper. How does she get them out of the school?
The ferret spits on the wooden floor and I wince. “What else have you got?” the ferret asks, brusque, rude.
“Only the Liliana Straits and the Hekkhare Cove,” Barok says.
“Hekkhare!” the man in blue says, “I can buy that off any fisherman.”
“Ah, but you can compare this chart with your own charts of Hekkhare to see how my source is. And there are more coming, I can assure you.” Barok fairly oozes.
“These look as if they were drawn by an amateur,” ferret says. Chalcey sticks out her lower lip and beetles her eyebrows. She needs a mother around to tell her not to do that.
“If you want pretty, go to the market and buy a painting,” Barok says.
“I’m not interested in artistry, I’m interested in competence,” ferret snaps. “What’s to say you didn’t copy Hekkhare from some fisherman?” A black market in navigation charts! Maybe Barok would be able to steer me to someone who smuggled, or whatever they did with them. I might be able to work my passage out of here. “I’d like to know a little more about this source,” ferret says, tapping his teeth.
“It’s within one of the Orders,” Barok says, “that’s all I can tell you.”
Yellow robe says, “You’re telling me that a member of the order would sell charts? That they can counter the spellbind?”
“I didn’t say a ‘member of the order,’” Barok says, “I said someone within the order.”
“This stinks,” ferret says, and silently I agree.
Barok shrugs. “If you don’t want them, don’t take them.” But the dome of his forehead is slick and shining in the lamplight.
Ferret looks at Barok. The ferret is the power in this room; the others wait on him, Barok talks to him, yellow is his flunky. These men came in boats; boats that go somewhere in these islands mean money, and maybe
some influence with the Navigational Order. And Barok—Barok lives in a slum. A two-bit nothing trying to sell to the big iizards. Oh, Heth, I am in trouble!
Ferret contemplates, and the others wait. “All right, I’ll take these to verify their validity. If these prove accurate, we’ll see about the next set.”
“No,” Barok says, “I’m giving you Hekkhare; you pay me the 200 for Liliana.”
“What if I just take the charts?” ferret asks.
“You don’t know my source,” Barok says, desperate.
“So? Who else would you sell them to? The Orders?” the ferret says, bored.
“Two hundred for Liliana,” Barok says stubbornly.
Ferret rolls the charts up. “I don’t think so,” he says blandly.
My knees turn to water. I’ve fought in battle, scared off a thief in a warehouse once, but never done anything like this. Still, I start to crouch for my sword.
“Tell your barbarian to be still,” ferret snaps. Yellow has a knife, so do the others. I don’t need to be told again.
“These aren’t free!” Barok says, “I have expenses, I—I owe people money, Sterler. I don’t pay people, you’ll never get another chart! They’re good, I swear they’re good!”
“We’ll negotiate the next ones,” the ferret says, and nods at the rest. They rise and start to go.
I know that Barok is going to lunge, although it is a tokking stupid thing to do. But he does it, his hands hooked to claw at ferret. I think he only wants the charts, that he can’t bear to see them go, but yellow reacts instantly. I see the flash of metal from under his robe, but I don’t think Barok does. It isn’t a good blow, they are all drunk, and Barok is a fleshy man. The knife handle stands out of his belly at about his liver, and Barok staggers back against the table. For a moment, he doesn’t know about the knife—sometimes a knife-wound feels just like a punch.
“You can’t have it,” he says, “I’ll tell them about you!” Then he sees the knife, and the wine-colored stain on his dark robe, and his mouth opens, pink and wet and helpless.
“Find out his source,” the ferret says.
Chalcey is staring, blank-faced. I do not want her to see. I remember what it is like to see.
Yellow robe takes the knife handle and holds on to it, his face only a foot or so from Barok’s. I smell shit. Barok looks at him, his face slack with disbelief, and starts to blubber. Some men’s minds snap when they die.
“Who gets them for you?” yellow robe asks.
Arterial blood, dark and mixed with stomach blood, pumps out around the knife. Barok is silent. Maybe Barok is refusing to betray his niece, but I think the truth is that he has lost his wits. He has certainly voided his bowels. When yellow robe twists the knife, he screams, and then blubbers
some more, his saliva not yet bloodied. He wants to go to his knees, but yellow robe has the knife handle, and Barok’s hung on that blade like meat on a hook.
Chalcey is crouched, wrapped in her veil. She edges backward away from the men, her hands behind her, scooting backward like a crab until she bumps into my legs and stifles a little scream.
Ferret turns to us. “What do you know?”
I shrug casually, or as casually as I can. “I was hired today; he wouldn’t tell me what he hired me for.”
He looks down at Chalcey. I say, “He hired her right after he hired me.”
Barok begins to say, over and over again, “Stop it, stop it, please stop it,” monotonously, his hands making little clutching motions at his belly, but afraid of the knife.
“Tell me your source,” yellow robe says.
Barok doesn’t seem to understand. “Stop it, please stop it,” he whimpers. Die, I think. Die before you say anything, you fat old man!
“Tok it,” ferret says. “You’ve ruined it.”
I whisper to Chalcey, “Scream and try to run up the stairs.”
She rolls her eyes at me, but doesn’t move.
Yellow robe shouts in Barok’s face, “Barok! Listen to me!” He slaps the dying man. “Who is your source? You want it to stop? Tell me your source!”
“Help me,” Barok whispers. There is blood in his mouth, now. The shadows from the lamps are hard, the big red-robed belly is in the light, and he is starting to spill flesh and bowels. The smell is overwhelming; one of the men turns and vomits, and adds that to the stench.
“Tell me where you get the charts, we’ll get you a healer,” yellow robe says. A lie, it’s too late for a healer. But a dying man has nothing to lose by believing a lie. His eyes flicker toward Chalcey. Does he even know what is happening, understand what they are demanding? He licks his lips as if about to speak. I can’t let him speak. So I whistle, five clear discordant notes, to waken one of the spells in my skull, the one that eats power, light and heat, and all the lights go out.
Black. Star-magic is easy to do, hard to engineer.
“TOK!” someone shouts in the dark, and Barok screams, a high, white noise. Things fall, I push Chalcey toward the stairs and grab my sword. I’m almost too frightened to move myself; maybe if it wasn’t for Chalcey, I wouldn’t, but sometimes responsibility lifts me above my true nature.
I collide with someone in the dark, slap at their face with my sword, and feel something hook in my jacket, tear at my shirt and the bindings I wear under it, then burn in my side. Then the person is gone. Ferret is screaming, “The stairs! Block the stairs!” when I fall over the bottom step.
The darkness only lasts a handful of heartbeats. It’s a whistler spell, better against real power like the Cousin’s lights than against natural things like a lamp, and it always makes me tired later. I turn at the stairs just as the lights come back. Blinded for a moment, I slap with my sword for the flame
and knock it flying. Burning oil sprays across the room, I see blue robe cover his face, and, gods help him, poor Barok squirming on the floor.
The boat is tinder dry, and instantly the pools of oil from the lamp are full of licking blue flames. I run up the stairs. Chalcey is standing-not by the gangplank but next to the rail. My pack is there, and in the pack the cloak with the badge, and my chain vest and bracers—all I own in the world. I go for the girl and the pack, my shield arm clenched against my burning side. Ferret and the others will come boiling out of the hold like digger bees at any moment. I look down over the railing and see one of the sailboats, a soft Cousins’ light clipped to the mast, and, in the glow, a green-robed adolescent with a cleric’s shaven head, looking up at me. I grab Chalcey’s arm and shout, “Jump!” and we land on top of the poor bastard, Chalcey’s shrieking and my oomph! drowning the boy’s bleat of surprise. Chalcey tumbles, but I have aimed truer, breaking his arm and probably his collar bone, so that he lies stunned and wide-eyed. I pitch him out of the boat. He is struggling in the water as I shove us off. I hope to Heth he can swim; I can’t.
Our boat has a simple, single sail; it’s a pleasure boat rather than a real fisherman’s boat, but it will have to do. I run the sail up awkwardly. The wind will drive us downriver, toward the harbor. I don’t see the boats of the others.
There is no pursuit. I think that ferret and the others have cut across the gangplank rather than make for the sailboats. I crouch next to the tiller and gingerly explore my injury with my fingers, a long flat scrape that crossed the ribs before the shirt and bindings and jacket hung it up. It bleeds freely, but it’s not deep.
Chalcey curls in the prow of the boat, looking back toward her uncle’s boat. The fire must have eaten the wood in huge bites. When we reach the bridge, I look back and see that the boat has been cut away and floats free in the river, burning bright and pouring out black, oily smoke. Two sailboats skitter away like dragonflies, silhouettes against the flames. Then we are enveloped in black smoke and ash which hides the boat from us, and hides us from everyone else.
Coughing and hacking, and, Heth forgive me, spitting, I keep us in the smoke as long as I can.
When we are almost out of the harbor, Chalcey asks, “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I wish we had one of your charts.”
It’s a clear night, we have a brisk breeze and no moon yet. A good night to escape. I follow the coast, away from the city. On the shore, dogs bark at us, and to each other, distant and lonely. The sound chains along the coast as we sail.
“Was that magic?” Chalcey says.
“Was what magic,” I say absently. I’m tired and not feeling well; it is painful to cough and spit ash and soot when your side is cut open.
“When it got dark. When you whistled.”
I nod in the darkness, then realize she can’t see it. “Yes, that was a little magic.”
“Are you a mage?”
Do I look like a mage? Would I be living this way if I could smelt metal, and make starstuff in bright colors, and machines and lights? “No, littleheart,” I say, talking sweet because my thoughts are not nearly so patient, “I’m just a whistler. A fighter with no money and only a little skill.”
“Do you think they’ll get a healer for my uncle?”
No answer to give but the truth. “Chalcey, your uncle is dead.”
She doesn’t say anything for a long time, and then she starts to cry. It’s chilly, and she’s tired and frightened. It doesn’t hurt her to cry. Maybe I cry a little, too; it wouldn’t be the first time.
We bob along, the waves going chop, chop, chop against the prow of the little boat. Dogs bark, to us and to each other. Along our left, the lights from the city are fewer and fewer, the houses darker and smaller. It smells like broom trees out here, not city. In the wake of our little sailboat, craken phosphoresce. I wonder, since their light is blue, why is craken dye yellow?
Chalcey speaks out of the dark, “Could we go to my grandmother?”
“I don’t know, sweet, where is your grandmother?”
“Across the Liliana Strait. On Lesian.”
“If I knew where it was, I could try, even without a chart, but I’m a foreigner, littleheart.”
“I can draw a chart. I drew those charts.”
She sounds like a little girl. I smile tiredly into the darkness. “But I don’t have anything for you to copy.”
“I don’t need to copy,” she says. “They’re in my head. If I have drawn a chart, even once, I never forget it. That’s why my Uncle Barok brought me to the Order to go to school. But we’ve only practiced with Hekkhare and now Liliana Strait.”
“So you drew those charts from your head?” I ask.
“Of course.” She tosses her hair, her veil around her shoulders, and I can see her against the sky, just for the moment the imperious and sly girl who tried to impress the northern barbarian. “Everybody thinks that the charts are safe, all the paper and everything is spellbound. But I don’t carry any papers or anything; it’s all in my head.”
“Chalcey,” I breathe. “Can you draw one?”
“We don’t have any paper, and it’s dark.”
“We’ll land in a few hours and get some sleep. Then you can use my knife and draw it on the bottom of the boat.”
“On the bottom of the boat?” She is diffident.
But I’m elated. Two people hiding from the rest of the island, in a small sailboat not meant for the open sea, going on a young girl’s memory of a chart. But it’s better than Barok’s choices.
We have a fair breeze, the little sailboat is quiet except for the slap of the sail. The water is close, right at my hand. Chalcey says she’s cold. I tell her to dig my cloak out of my pack and see if she can get some sleep.
I think she sleeps awhile. I keep pushing us on, thinking to go a little farther before we rest, passing places to pull the boat up, until I see the line of gray that means dawn and take us into a stream that cuts down to the ocean.
“Chalcey,” I say, “when the boat stops, jump out and pull.”
We come aground, and I try to stand up, and nearly fall over. My legs are numb from crouching, and my side has stiffened in the night.
“What’s wrong?” Chalcey says, holding the prow to get out.
“Nothing,” I say, “be careful when you get out of the boat.”
The cold water is up to my waist and makes me gasp, but at the prow, Chalcey is in water only to her shins. I grit my teeth and push, sliding against the uneven bottom, and she pulls, and together we get the boat well aground. I lash it to a tree, the tide is still coming in and I don’t want to lose it, and then I grab my pack and stumble up the bank.
I should check the area, but I ache and I’m exhausted, so tired. I’m a little dizzy, so I promise myself I’ll only rest for a minute. I prop my head against the pack and close my eyes. The world swirls … .
Some tokking hero, I think, and then laugh. That’s one quality to which I have never aspired.
We’re in heavy trees, tall pale yellow fronds of broom trees, heavily tasseled at this time of year. I’m covered with chukka bites, and the cut in my side is hot; I can feel my pulse beating in it.
There’s no sign of Chalcey.
I lever myself painfully up on my elbow and listen. Nothing. Could she have wandered off and gotten lost?
“Chalcey,” I hiss.
No answer.
“Chalcey!” I say, louder.
“Here!” comes a voice from over the bank, and then her head pops up, floating above the soft lemon brush as if it had been plopped on a bush. Maybe I’m feverish.
“Are you in the water?” I ask.
“No,” she says, “I’m in the boat. What’s your name, anyway?”
“Jahn,” I say.
“I took your knife, but you didn’t wake up. Are you—” she hesitates, wide-eyed, and my heart lurches, “I mean, is your hurt bad?”
“No,” I say, attempting to sit up naturally and failing.
“I drew a chart in the bottom of the boat, and then I used mud to make the lines darker.” She shakes her head, “Drawing with a knife isn’t the same as drawing with a pen.”
She comes up on the bank, and we breakfast on boxfruit and red peanuts out of my pack. Breakfast and water improve my spirits immensely. I check Chalcey’s drawing. She clenches her hands nervously while I look at it. As soon as a wave puts a little water in the bottom of the boat, the mud will wash out of the lines, and I have no way of judging how accurate it might be anyway, but I tell her it looks wonderful.
To hide her pleasure, she turns her head and spits matter-of-factly into the stream. I wince, but don’t say anything.
We have nothing to store water in.
“How far is it to Lesian?” I ask.
She thinks it’s about two days. “Jahn,” she says, self-conscious about my name, “where did you learn your magic?”
“One of the Cousins put copper and glass in the bones of my head,” I say. Not exactly true, but close enough.
That silences questions for awhile.
We get some good drinks of water and relieve ourselves, and maybe she prays to her deities, I don’t know. Then we raise our pineapple-green sail, and we are off.
She chatters awhile about school. I like listening to her chatter. When it gets hot at midday, I have her spread my cloak across the prow and crawl into the shade underneath it. I stay with the tiller and wish for a hat. I’ve been browned by the sun, but the light off the green water is blinding and bright, and my nose suffers.
She sleeps during the heat of the day, and I nod. We are headed for a promontory which marks where we cut across the strait. In the afternoon, we have some bruised boxfruit out of my pack, which helps our thirst a bit. The way west is suddenly blocked by a spit of land; if Chalcey’s drawing can be trusted, that’s our promontory. Chalcey’s chart indicates that it’s not good to go ashore here, otherwise I’d stop for fresh water. We head for open sea, and I pray that the breeze holds up. I’m stiff, and tacking accurately all the way across is probably beyond my navigational skills.
I’m thirsty; Chalcey must be, too. She doesn’t complain, but she gets quiet. The farther we go into the strait, the smaller the land behind us gets; the smaller the land, the quieter she gets. Once I ask her what the crossing was like when she came to live with her uncle. “It was a big boat,” is all she’ll say.
I’m light-headed from sun and thirst and fever by the time evening comes, and the cool is a relief. The sun goes down with the sudden swiftness of the south. I dig the pigeon’s egg dumplings out of my pack, but they’re too salty and just make me thirstier. Chalcey is hungry, though, and eats hers and half of mine.
“Jahn?” she says.
“Yes?”
“The Cousins—why do they call them that?”
“Because we are all kin,” I say. “It is like in my home, when a place gets too big, and there isn’t enough land to let all the stabos graze, part of the kin go somewhere else, and start a new home. Our many times elders were the Cousins. The stars are like islands for them. Some came here to live, but there was a war and the ships no longer came, and our elders’ ships grew too old, and we forgot about the Cousins except for stories. Now they have found us again.”
“And they help us?” she asks.
“Not really,” I say. “They help the high-ons, mostly.”
“What are ‘high-ons’?” she asks. Southern doesn’t have a word for high-ons, so I always just use the two southern words.
“High-ons, the old men who run things and have silver. Or the guilds, they are like high-ons.”
“Were you a high-on?” she asks.
I laugh, which hurts my side. “No, littleheart,” I say. “I am the unlucky child of unlucky parents. They believed that some of the Cousins would help us, would teach us. But the high-ons, they don’t like it if anyone else has strength. So they sent an army and killed my kin. Things were better before the Cousins came.”
“The Order says that the Cousins are good; they bring gifts.”
“We pay for those gifts,” I say. “With craken dye and ore and land. And with our own ways. Anywhere the Cousins come, things get bad.”
It gets darker. Chalcey wraps herself in my cloak, and I hunch over the tiller. It isn’t that the boat needs much sailing; there’s a light wind and the sea is blessedly calm (someone seems to favor us, despite our attack on the green-robed boy to get this boat), but the boat is too small for me to go anywhere else, so I sit at the tiller.
The spray keeps the back of my left shoulder damp, and the breeze seems to leach the warmth out of me. My teeth start chattering.
“Chalcey?”
“What?” she murmurs sleepily from the prow.
“I am feeling a bit under, littleheart. Do you think you could sit with me and we could share the cloak?”
I can feel her hesitation in the dark. She’s afraid of me, and that pains me. It’s funny, too, considering. “I don’t want anything other than warmth,” I say gently.
She feels her way slowly from the prow. “It’s your cloak,” she says, “you can have it if you want.”
“I think we can share it,” I say. “Sit next to me, the tiller will be between us, and you can lean against me and sleep.”
Gingerly, she sits down next to me, the boat rocking gently with her movements, and throws the cloak around our shoulders. She touches my arm on the tiller and jerks back. “You’re hot,” she says. Then she surprises me by touching my forehead. “You have a fever!”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say, oddly embarrassed. “Just sit here.” She curls against me, and, after a few minutes, she leans her head on my shoulder. Her hair smells sweet. It’s soothing to have her there. I try to keep the constellation southerners call the Crown to my right.
“How old are you?” she asks.
“Thirty-one,” I say.
“That’s not so old.”
I laugh.
“Well,” she is defensive, “you have white hair, but your face isn’t old.”
Sometimes I feel very old, and never more than now.
I jerk awake from scattered dreams of being back on Barok’s boat. It’s dawn. Chalcey. stirs against my shoulder and settles again. I think about the sea, about our journey. Celestial navigation is not my strong point; I hope we haven’t drifted too much. I hope that Chalcey’s chart is good, and I wonder how much Barok will get paid for a boat with a chart carved on it, even if the chart isn’t very good, but blue flames lick the chart, and I’m on Barok’s boat again … .
I jerk awake. My fever feels low; because it’s morning, I’m certain. I try to open my pack without disturbing Chalcey, but she’s asleep against my right shoulder, and I’m awkward with my left hand and my side is stiff, so after a moment she straightens up. We have five boxfruit left, so we split one. I’m too thirsty for red peanuts, but Chalcey eats a few.
As the sun climbs, so does my fever, and I start dreaming even when my eyes are open. At one point, Trevin is in the boat with us, sitting there in his blue jerkin with the gray fur low on the shoulders, and I must be talking to him, because Chalcey says, “Who is Trevin?”
I blink and lean over the side and splash cold water on my sunburned face. When I sit up, I’m dizzy from the blood rushing to my head, but I know where I am. “Trevin was a friend,” I say. “He’s dead now.”
“Oh,” she says, and adds, with the callousness of youth, “How did he die?”
How did Trevin die? I have to think. “The flux,” I say. “We were marching to Bashtoy, we were retreating, Trevin and I had decided to fight against Scalthalos High-on since he’d burned out Sckarline. It was winter, and we didn’t have much to eat, and the people who got sick, many of them died.” I add, “I joined the fight because of Trevin.” I don’t add, “I was in love.”
When it gets hot, Chalcey soaks her veil in water and covers my head with it. I clutch the tiller. It seems that I am not sailing the boat so much as it is sailing me. She doles out the boxfruit, too, peeling them and splitting the purple segments.
“I think,” she says, “that maybe I should look at your side.”
“No,” I say.
“Don’t worry,” she says, moving toward me in the boat.
“No,” I snap.
“I could put some cool seawater on it,” she says. “Saltwater is good for an injury.”
“I don’t take off my shirt,” I say. I’m irrational and I know it, but I’m not going to take off my shirt. Not when someone is around. We were finally in Bashtoy and almost everyone I knew was dead, and the MilitiaMaster said, “Boy, what’s your name?” and I didn’t know that he was talking to me. “Boy!” he shouted, “what’s your name!” and I stuttered “Jahn, sir.” “We’ll call you Jahn-the-clever,” he said, “you’re in my group now,” and the others laughed, and after that I was Jahn-the-clever until they discovered that I was really clever, but I still wasn’t going to take off my shirt.
My thoughts run like squirrels in a cage, and sometimes I talk out loud.
Trevin comes back. He asks, “Would you rather have grown up anywhere but Sckarline?”
Chalcey soaks her veil in water and tries to keep my face cool.
“Wanji taught us about the cities,” I say, “and she was right. I’ve been there, Trevin.” My voice is high. “Wherever the Cousins come, they use us, they live like Scalthalos High-on, and we clean their houses and are grateful for light and giz stick on Sixth-day night. People don’t care about kin anymore, they don’t care about anything. Wanji told us about culture clash, that the weaker culture dissolves.”
“Wanji and Aneal, Ayuedesh and Kumar, they dedicated their lives to helping us,” Trevin says.
“Aneal apologized to me, Trevin!” I say. “She apologized for the terrible wrong they had done! She said it would be better if they never came!”
“I know,” he said.
“Jahn,” Chalcey says. “Jahn, there’s nobody here but me! Talk to me! Don’t die!” She is crying. Her veil is wet, and so cold it takes my breath away.
Trevin didn’t know. I never told him about Aneal apologizing, I never told anyone. I blink and he wavers, and I blink and blink and he goes away. “You’re not Trevin,” I say, “I’m arguing with myself.”
It’s bright and hot.
I have my head on my arm.
The sky is lavender and red, and there is a dark stripe across the water that I can’t make go away, no matter how hard I blink. I think that the fever is making my vision go, or that the sun has made me blind, until Chalcey, crying, says that it is Lesian.
There is no place to land, so we head up the coast northeast until we come to a river. “Go up here!” Chalcey says. “I know this place! I know that marker!” She is pointing to a pile of stone. “My grandmother lives up here!”
The night comes down around us before we see a light, like a cooking fire. I call instructions to shift the sail in a cracked voice; Chalcey has quick hands, thank Heth.
I run the boat aground, and Chalcey leaps out, calling and pulling at the boat, but I can’t move. People come down and stand looking at us, and Chalcey says that her grandmother is Llasey. In the village they know her grandmother, although her grandmother lives a long walk away. I have a confused sense of being helped out of the boat, and I tell them, “We have silver, we can pay.” Blur of people in the dark, and then into a place where there is too much light.
Then they are forcing hot seawater between my teeth, I can’t drink it, then I think, “It’s broth.” The fire flickers off a whitewashed wall, and a bareheaded woman says, “Let me help you.”
I don’t want them to take off my shirt. “Not my shirt!” I say, raising my hands. They are talking and I can’t follow what they are saying, but with gentle persistent hands they deftly hold my wrists and peel off the torn
jacket and the shirt. The gentle voice says, “What’s this?” and cuts the bindings on my chest.
Chalcey says, startled, “What’s wrong with him!” I turn my face away.
A woman smiles at me and says, “You’ll be all right, dear.” Chalcey stares at me, betrayed, and the woman says to her (and to me), “She’s a woman, dear. She’ll be all right, there’s nothing wrong with her except a bit of fever and too much sun.”
And, so, stripped, I slide defenseless into sleep, thinking of the surprise on Chalcey’s face.
I sleep a great deal during the next two days, wake up and drink soup, and sleep again. Chalcey isn’t there when I wake up, although there is a pallet of blankets on the floor. And perhaps if I wake up and hear her, I pretend to be asleep and soon sleep again. But eventually I can’t sleep anymore. Tuwle, the woman with the gentle hands who has given me a bed, asks me if I want a shirt or a dress, and, running my hand over my cropped hair, I say a shirt. But I tell her to call me Jahnna.
They bring me my shirt, neatly mended. And they won’t take my silver.
Finally, Chalcey comes to see me. I am sitting on the bed where I have slept so long, shucking beans. It embarrasses me to be caught in shirt and breeches, shucking beans, although I’ve shucked beans, mended clothes, done all manner of woman’s work in men’s clothes. But it has been a long time since I’ve felt so self-conscious.
She comes in, tentative as a bird, and says, “Jahn?”
So I say, “Sit down,” and immediately regret it, since there is no place to sit but next to me on the bed.
We go through the old routine of “how are you feeling?” and “what have you been doing?” She holds her veil tightly, although the women here don’t go veiled for everyday.
Finally she says, in a hurt little voice, “You could have told me.”
“I haven’t told anyone in years.” In a way, I almost didn’t think I was a woman anymore.
“But I’m not just anyone!” She is vexed. And how could she know that in a fight you become close comrades, yes, but that we know nothing about each other?
The snap of beans seems very loud. I think of trying to explain, about cutting my hair off to fight with Trevin, and learning long before Trevin died that fighting makes people strangers to themselves. Heth says life hinges on little things, like the fact that I am tall for a woman and flatchested, and when the MilitiaMaster at Bashtoy saw me, half-starved and shorthaired, he thought that I was a boy, and so after that I was. Snap. And I run my thumb down the pod and the beans spill into the bowl.
To break the silence, she says, “Your sunburn is almost gone,” and, amazingly, she blushes scarlet.
I realize then how it is with her. She had fancied herself in love. “I’m
sorry, littleheart,” I say, “I didn’t intend to hurt or embarrass you. I’m embarrassed, too.”
She looks at me sideways. “What do you have to be embarrassed about?”
“It’s a little like having no clothes on, everybody knowing, and now that my kin are gone, I am always a stranger, wherever I go—” but she is looking at me without comprehension, so I falter and say lamely, “It’s hard to explain.”
“What are you going to do now?” she asks.
I sigh. That is a question that has been on my mind a great deal. Here there is no chance of saving passage money to get back to the mainland. “I don’t know.”
“I told my grandmother about you,” Chalcey says. “She said you could come and stay with us, if you would work hard. I said you were very strong.” Again she blushes scarlet, and hurries on, “It’s a little farm, it used to be better, but there’s only my grandmother, but we could help, and I think we could be friends.”
As I learned during the long walk to Bashtoy, you may be tokked, but if you just look to the immediate future, sometimes, eventually, you find the way.
“I’d like that, littleheart,” I say, meaning every word. “I’d like to be friends.”
The future, it seems, does indeed hinge on little things.