ROPE, BISCUITS, PEPPER
ROPE GASPED as pain shot through his thigh. Someone tripped him and he hit the pavement hard. Blue vapor sprayed overhead.
Cherry Gall shrieked and fell on him. Blood spurted from his severed throat and hit Rope in the face, tasting of salt and meat. Rope’s head and legs burned where the blue mist touched them. Gagging, he hid under the corpse.
Metal bit bone, and steel clattered against steel. Rope’s cheek ground against paving stones slimed with blood. Net writhed beneath his ribs. Someone tripped over Gall’s body and Rope bit his lip to keep from crying out.
Running footsteps echoed from every cobble. The shouts fell back toward the water. Orders were given. Farther up the hill someone beat a gong.
Rope spat out Gall’s blood and rubbed his face on his tunic. The blue vapor had faded with the shouting. He pitched Cherry Gall off his back and took the dead man’s sword. Soldiers ran by without looking at him.
“Brook?”
She sat only a few paces away, hugging herself and rocking back and forth. He crawled over to her.
A huge gull landed on the cobbles beside them, hissing and clacking. It hopped away, heading for the nearest alley. They followed, crawling around corpses, then staggering down to one of the smaller docks.
Clumsy with fear, they untied a small launch and set sail for the mainland. Behind them, Delta’s night was stitched with fires as torchbearing soldiers raced through the streets.
Around the angry city the black sea curled, deaf to gongs and orders, deep as the night. It bore them far out into the gulf, until only the rustling sail remained, the creaking boom, the hiss of cut water from beneath their bow. The moon’s sail bellied out, running low along the far horizon. A narrow path of shaking silver light ran across the dark water to it, glimmering, glimmering. Wholly inconstant.
Like babes in a cradle, they lay in their boat, hidden from all eyes save those of moon and stars, and rocked into darkness by the tireless sea.
Rope woke when they ran aground.
The smell of salt water and dim forest mingled in the morning air. Net had crawled up his arm as he slept and now reared up on his right shoulder, swaying, grey and tremulous as a spider web. The boat tilted, pushed by the swell. Brook lay slumped across the forward thwart, still sleeping.
There was no sign of Jo.
The sun was not yet up. Grey light the color of driftwood lay over the world. The Sock, Delta’s southernmost island, was a dark smudge behind them. Small rollers pushed their stolen boat along the beach of a wide, shallow bay. Coarse grey sand ground beneath her hull. She had scarlet gunwales, Rope saw, and leaning over the side he read her name: Eel.
It was low tide. The sea had drawn back from the cold beach as if wanting no part of it. Farther up, beyond the high-water mark, a jumble of grey boulders littered with bits of shattered shell lay at the base of a short cliff. Sword ferns and twisted black roots sprouted from the bluff. At its top stood a line of forbidding trees: drooping red cedars like woodlander sentinels, guarding the mainland against invasion.
Brook opened one eye. Her right cheek was swollen by an ugly purple bruise, and clumps of her hair had fallen out where the blue spray had touched her. “I feel like a wrecked ship,” she said.
Slowly Rope tried standing up. His legs trembled. Even his fingers ached as he took down the sail.
Brook gasped. “What happened to you?”
“I got kicked around. I’ve felt worse. I think.”
“But the blood!”
Rope touched his face. Something cracked like dried mud on his cheeks and mouth. He stroked his scabbed beard and his fingers came away red. “I don’t think it’s mine. Not much of it, anyway.”
“Your hair is falling out.”
“It was those sprayers. Your braid isn’t doing so well either.” Rope eased himself over the gunwale, grimacing as cold seawater flooded into his boots. The blue spray must have eaten through them. “We’re alive, aren’t we?” He spied a large gull on the beach, shifting from one grey form to another. A whisper of fear entered him through his shoulder, where Net sat. “Jo’s here.”
Two of Brook’s braids had split. They dangled raggedly about her shoulders. She touched them. “I must be very ugly.”
“You sound like Foam.” Rope cupped cold seawater in his hands and splashed it over his face and beard. Red dribbles rained from his jaw. When he finished washing the blood away, he took Brook’s hands in his. “You look beautiful.”
Brook squeezed his hands, hard. “I hope they’re all right. Foam and Shale.”
She clambered from the boat.
Jo was waiting on the beach. Her smooth white flesh was unmarked, but her silver eyes had dulled almost to grey.
“Grab this.” Brook handed her the painter and turned to Rope. “Should we pull up the boat, or scuttle it to cover our tracks?”
“Scuttle it! How would we find Foam and Shale without a boat?”
Jo said, “How would we find them with one?”
The dread that had been building in Rope since he woke went suddenly hard and painful, like a stone in his chest. “Can’t you turn into a breeze or something?”
Jo was wearing one of Brook’s deep blue tunics. Her white hair floated around her shoulders. “And do what? Look in every house in Delta? What if I cannot find them? What if they are on the Foot or the Sock, or not on Delta at all? They may be in Twist’s prison, or they may have escaped with the cloaked islander.”
Grey waves crawled across the beach. Jo turned a bracelet of blue shells around her wrist. Her long nails clicked and clattered. Rope remembered her on Shale’s island, callous at his father’s death. “I am tired of your excuses. And your orders.”
“Rope—” Brook followed him out of the water.
“If it wasn’t for you, pretending to be Twist,” Rope told the haunt, “we would never have lost Foam and Shale.”
“If it wasn’t for me, you would still be locked up. No, that isn’t right. If it wasn’t for me, you would still be back on your little lump of dirt, going out day after weary day for another hold of smelt or sea bass or oolichan and wearing the smell home at night as the badge of your manhood.”
The stony anger in Rope’s chest was growing, gouging his heart and lungs, making it hard to breathe. His big hands balled into fists.
Jo’s features blurred. Where moments before a white-haired haunt had stood, Rope now faced an islander with broad shoulders and a bloodied beard. Big callused hands. “Try it,” Jo whispered. “Come learn what Brook already knows.”
“Stop this,” Brook said.
“We wouldn’t be fighting if Jo hadn’t—”
Brook slapped Rope, hard. “Shut up! Shut up!”
Rope grabbed her wrist. It seemed thin as a bird’s bone in his strong hand. Her skin turned white around his fingers. “Don’t hit me,” he said.
“Don’t make me.”
They had spent better mornings together than this one.
The sun was well up before they decided what to do with the boat. They had to get rid of the dinghy so none of Twist’s patrols could find it and figure out where they had entered the forest. But the cursed boat was too heavy to drag up the shore and hide in the bushes. They had a sword, but didn’t dare hack at the hull until they holed her, for fear of making too much noise. For a moment Rope had thought Jo could turn to fire and burn the Eel to ashes, but of course that would have made too much smoke.
In the end he ran up the sail and got Jo to turn into a breeze, blowing the boat back onto the sea.
Rope and Brook sat on the boulders behind the beach and watched their empty dinghy head for the middle of the bay.
“There goes our last chance to warn the other islands,” Rope said.
“Other islanders already know about the invasion. Remember the cloaked man.”
Rope nodded. “True. But shouldn’t we rouse our own people, instead of taking up this mad quest into the heart of the forest?”
“Maybe. But that would only spin the war out, not stop it. Besides, there is one other reason for going to the Arbor.”
“Hm?”
Brook looked out into the empty sea. “She wills it. And haunts—”
“—get what they want.”
They had gathered a small pile of clams and mussels. Rope eyed them without enthusiasm. A deep bruise made his thigh throb and tremble. His back and wrist ached badly. “We shouldn’t leave Foam and Shale.”
“We have a job to do. We have our duty. If they are dead, there’s nothing we can do to help them. If they are well, we’ll meet again on Clouds End—if we stop the woodlanders. And to stop the woodlanders, we have to stop the Emperor.”
Rope tapped the Witness Knot around Brook’s wrist. “Those are your duties. Mine are to my ship and crew. My ship’s banging against some dock on Delta, in the hands of idiots who don’t know a sheet from a halyard. And my crew—” With a wet crunch Rope splintered a blueback shell with the butt of Gall’s sword and scraped up the clam within. “What did they do to deserve this?”
Softly, Brook said, “They were my friends.”
He wondered if Foam and Shale had eaten yet that morning. One day, Jo had said, life will slit you open like an oyster.
Brook fingered a clam. “Three moons to the Arbor, Jo said.”
“You really think Twist will send trackers after us?”
“We are more than escaped prisoners. We are islanders in league with a haunt. He has to know more about us.”
“I’d like to know how much she says is true. About needing humans near her to stay human.”
“That’s true, I think.” Across the bay, Jo was blowing their dinghy ever farther from land, out into the heart of the great wild sea. “Sometimes the world rushes over you and it seems so big, so big. And you are only a character in someone else’s story. A rag of Mist blown into shape by the wind. And then it’s time to put the kettle on the fire, or sew a button on, and that’s no story but your own,” Brook said. “But Jo—Jo has no need for buttons. She left the kettle behind, and chose the steam instead.”
Rope sighed. “Then I guess it’s up to us to hold her purpose steady until she has dealt with the Emperor.”
“If driving this haunt to the Arbor is what it takes to save Clouds End, then by Fathom, drive her I will.” Brook laughed without smiling. “Isn’t it funny? We used to think she was using us.”
Jo returned well before noon, and they started walking west along the shoreline, making for a creek she had spotted from the air.
“So how will you find the Arbor?” Rope asked.
“Twist marched an army through these forests. The birds saw them pass, the deer ran from them and the grass was trampled under their feet. The trees will be talking about it for months, if not years.”
Brook and Rope, laboring behind the haunt, glanced at one another. Rope shook his head. “Shale will kill us for stealing her adventure.”
They drank long and deep when they came to the creek’s mouth, and ate another meal of shellfish. Rope looked up the stream. “Not bad. I was afraid it would be too choked to follow. You can barely move for the undergrowth on some of the islands around Clouds End.”
“Those islands are but newly out of the Mist. Their woods are young.” Jo led them along the stream and into the forest. Little grew on the ground save moss and ferns. “Here the trees are older, and greater.”
“Soft ground for aching feet!”
“And tonight soft ground for aching everything,” Brook added. “My whole body is one big bruise. I hope it doesn’t get too cold.”
“We will survive,” Jo said. “We won’t be warm, but spring here is giving way to summer.”
“The oolichan will be running at home,” Rope said.
“And Sparrow’s baby will be coming any day.”
With every step the stream’s sounds changed. Echoes splashed off a rock in its midst, or widened with the current, or were swallowed up by a bank of tall, silent ferns.
Rope said, “How quiet it is.”
Instantly his voice died, as if the forest did not care for the speech of men.
“Secrets,” Brook said. “There could be anything, back a few steps from the path, and you would never know it. A deer, a house. A corpse.”
“Or a spy.”
Jo laughed. “What seems quiet to you is full of a thousand noises. Believe me, everything in the forest knows we are coming: you two shamble like deformed bears. Now try to be quiet! I must listen.”
A long . . . warm . . . day, the cedars sighed. Both warm and long.
Lovely, the maples replied. The sunshine made their veins stand out, vivid green in leaves like golden glass.
The wind yawned.
Up above, muffled by the canopy of leaves, the sky was addressing some long, abstract thought to the philosophical clouds. The trees murmured on about the likelihood of sun and rain. Ferns bowed as the travellers passed, offering to tell Jo the dew’s strange secrets.
The haunt let herself flow into the whispering woods, spinning out her senses in ever-thinner spider strands, tacking herself to leaf and tip, blossom and bole.
It was only as they walked through a dusty copse of pines that she realized the whole forest spoke of death. Beneath every friendly greeting, beneath every guess hazarded about the chance of rain, lay a deadly struggle for light and water and earth.
And below that was something else, something wrong in the wood. She could feel the strain of it, cracking within the forest core. Somewhere a splinter of fire burned and would not heal. Fear flowed from it. Fear not of death, but of madness.
Very far away. Very faint. A fear of madness, blooming like poppies on a fresh grave.
“Jo? Jo?”
“Wh—?”
“Come back!”
“Wh . . .” Jo opened her eyes. Blinked.
Startled, Brook and Rope saw that the haunt’s face had taken on a greenish tinge. Her eyes were the color of an oak leaf held up to the sun.
“Is something wrong?”
“I’ll . . . I’m fine. I got lost,” Jo said. “Easy to do, you know—get lost, walking in the woods.”
“Don’t wander now,” Brook said, shaking the haunt lightly by the shoulder. “It’s a long way to the Emperor yet.”
In the early evening, sore and weary, they made their camp at the base of a great cedar tree.
Rope stared up at it in awe. “This must be taller than all of Clouds End!” The cedar’s riven trunk opened like the mouth of a cave into a great hollow space with charred walls. “Has it been hit by lightning?”
Jo shook her head. “All red cedars have split trunks. Someone has made camp here before us. See the ash pit in this corner?”
“I wonder if any forest soldiers will be heading here as night comes on.”
“Oh, thanks, Brook.”
The islanders gathered firewood while Jo went to hunt for dinner. The light was failing by the time she returned. At first Brook mistook her for a wisp of fog, coiling between the cedars. Net reared in greeting.
Jo tossed a bundle at Rope’s feet; it landed with a soft thud on the hard-packed dirt, seeping blood from a line of punctures on its side. “Rabbit,” Jo said, flexing her fingers as if to ease a cramp.
The meat was a long time cooking and hardly worth the wait. Rope chewed grimly. “I was hoping hunger would make it delicious.”
“Maybe tomorrow,” Brook ventured.
Rope spat out a piece of gristle and wiped his greasy fingers on a fern. “Fish is so much cleaner.”
“It bleeds less, anyway.” Jo poked the fire with a green switch; a shower of red sparks whirled up into the blackness. “You should be grateful the dinner was drained before you got it.” The islanders winced and she grinned at them. “So then, what shall we do?”
“I could tell a story,” Rope said, clearing his throat. “A very simple one.”
“I have ears,” Brook said.
“And I,” Jo put in.
“Well, all right.” Rope glanced at Brook. “This is a story of strange journeys, and stout companions, and the advantages of being prepared.”
The moon was not yet up. Darkness lapped like black water around their campfire. Insects creaked in the night and leaves whispered. Reflected flames danced in their eyes. The sound of wood burning was like the sound of the sea.
Rope settled himself, took a deep breath, and began:
“This is a story of the Mist-time, where everything is real, and nothing is what it seems to be. It is a Figure of Eight story.”
Brook leaned over to Jo. “Looks like it sounds. A figure of eight knot keeps a rope from pulling through a block.”
Jo nodded.
* * *
Eh, yes. Well, nineteen or maybe eighteen generations ago, there was a famous explorer named Chart.
(Brook grinned, leaning against the rough-barked cedar.)
He had sailed far to the west, into the upper reaches of the Vein, where he befriended the people of the grasslands and met the Su-Tan, the spirit hawks that drift over the endless plains. He had sailed far to the north, where the sea threw up floating mountains of ice and snow-weirds tried to trick his ship into foundering. He had sailed south to the dense, hot, violent country that Lianna calls her own. And he had even travelled east, skirting the edge of the Mist, which in those days was much closer to the mainland than Clouds End is now.
He had seen many fabulous sights on these voyages, and acquired great wealth, and people began to call Chart of Delta the Greatest Explorer of All Time. He was improbably tall and absurdly thin. Whenever anyone asked him about his exploits, he said, “You need three things to be successful. Extra rope. Lots of biscuits. Plenty of pepper.”
Was that it? people wondered. Was that all there was to being the Greatest Explorer of All Time?
At last Chart’s fame caught Fathom’s ear. Now Fathom is as rash as any Hero, and more jealous than most. “Hah!” he said. “Greatest of All Time? I’d like to see him prove it!” And faster than a fish can strike a fly, he was off to test Chart’s mettle.
He blew in to Delta that very night, spurring gouts of hail from a storm-cloud and arriving between a stroke of lightning and its peal of thunder.
He knocked four times on Chart’s door, or maybe three, and each knock was like the sound of a whale leaping onto a longboat. The door opened after the fourth, or possibly third, knock, and Chart looked out into the wild night. He was improbably tall. He was incongruously thin. He had long mustaches that drooped like wet string and he’d caught a bit of a sniffle. He examined Fathom without enthusiasm. “Gud ebening,” he said.
Fathom strode in with a breeze at his back, blowing maps through Chart’s house like dried leaves. “I’ll get right to the point,” he said. “Are you the Greatest Explorer of All Time?”
Chart shrugged. “Hard to say. Peeble say I’mb de Greates’—snffff!—but dere may be udders I habn’t herb uv.”
“What about the Navigator, who pilots his celestial ship between the stars?”
Chart shrugged. “Oh, I dink I’m probably bedder dan himb, anyway.”
“Really!” The Navigator was Fathom’s son-in-law whom he’ d hurled into the sky so hard the midship lamp broke, which is why the Ship only has stars forward and aft. “And why do you say that?”
“He sails de same course ebery year, and he nebber got back home. No boyage is wort’ spit unless you can dell udder peeble about it.”
“Really!” Fathom said, seething inside. “How interesting! And tell me, what is your secret, O most potent of adventurers?”
“Egstra rope. Lots ub biscuits. Plenty ub pepper.”
“I’ll give you all the rope and pepper and biscuits you can possibly imagine if you agree to go exploring for me.”
Chart grunted. “Where?”
“The Mist!” Fathom says. “Explore the Mist, and your fame is assured.”
“And if I don’t want to go?”
Fathom just grinned in that dangerous way only Heroes can grin.
“Thot so,” Chart sighed. He stroked his weedy mustache. “Gonna take a lot ub rope,” he warned.
“As much as you can imagine.”
“Gonna take a load ub biscuits . . .”
“As many as you like.”
“Gonna take a deal ub pepper . . .”
“All the pepper you could desire.”
“All right,” says Chart. “I’ll do it.”
(The darkness washed a little closer to the islanders as their fire dimmed to embers. Everybody felt better for having had something hot to eat, though Brook wished she could get the taste of rabbit out of her mouth. “I need a drink of water,” she said, creeping over to the stream.
It tasted of leaves and quiet earth. She followed the red glow of the firepit back.)
Top Loop
Famous as he was, even Chart had trouble getting a crew together to go into the Mist. He had to promise four or maybe three thousand times that there would be more rope, biscuits, and pepper than anyone could possibly imagine.
At last the big day came. Chart had a brand new boat to make the trip, and he named it Figure of Eight. “This here boat won’t get carried away by the Mist,” he said. “I don’t aim to get flung about like a loose jib sheet.” All of which sounded pretty good.
But before Chart was even out of the harbor, the Deltan crowds were shaking their heads in dismay: he had forgotten to take up his anchor! For every length the ship covered, another few loops of rope dribbled over the transom and into the sea. Everybody felt embarrassed on Chart’s behalf, and they quickly left the port so he wouldn’t feel ashamed when he had to come back.
Oddly enough, when the Deltans went to work the next morning, the anchor was still there. A length of rope—the lightest, thinnest, strongest rope Chart could find—led far away into the east.
When the sailors noticed, Chart just said, “Yep. That fella sure gave us plenty of rope.” And then he didn’t exactly smile, not being given to the habit, but he sighed a cheerful sigh, and his frown had a sort of twinkle to it.
Well, it was a long way from Delta to the Mist, but the weather was fine, and the fish were plentiful, and the crew stayed in good spirits, as long as they didn’t think about what lay ahead.
It took four or maybe three moons for the Figure of Eight to reach the edge of the Mist, and when the crew finally saw it, shimmering and shining, gleaming and glowing, blacking and whiting and boiling up like a silvered thunderstorm before them, they got scared.
“We can’t go in there!” one cried. “What if we meet the Muck, what eats ships whole?”
“What if we fall off Swap’s Log!” said one with a shiver that made his earrings jingle.
“Or maybe fetch up on The Island That Went Back,” a third sailor moaned.
“I’m the captain, and I order you to trust me,” Chart said; and each time he saw a frightened sailor he would lean over, and wink, and mutter, “Rope! Biscuits! Pepper!”
Well, into the Mist they went.
They saw a cloud give birth to a bright blue island.
They dove for pieces of sunken rainbow off the coast of Fire Island, and almost sank when a shooting star crashed through the deck like a cannonball.
They saw Sere lose a race with Time, leaving feetprints of fire on the cloud’s surface for as far as the eye could see.
And of course the old Figure of Eight went through a few changes of its own. For a while it had a hull of beaten gold, thin as a dragonfly’s wing, and rigging all of spider’s web. Then the ship took the shape of a walrus with a giant heron on its back, spreading its wings for sails. They saw many marvels, and had many adventures, and before long you couldn’t say they were all quite sane. But Chart kept them as steady as he knew how, and tried to write his experiences in the log every day, regular, before he went to bed.
Finally they’d had enough. They were ready to feel the rock beneath their feet, and plunge into honest water, and tell their stories to the people back at home. Everyone was pleased the day Chart came out of his wheelhouse and said he was ready to turn for home.
But just as the crew gave a great cheer, the Mist under them bubbled up black and crimson. Then the lookout spotted an enormous tentacle, far alee, writhing on the surface of the waves. “The Muck!” she yelled. “The Muck! We’re doomed!”
But Chart started shouting like a crazy man. “Biscuits!” he yelled. “Crumble biscuits overboard!”
Nobody moved a muscle. Chart was frantic. “Didn’t I take you to the utter South? Didn’t I lead you past the Ice Islands of the North? Didn’t I get you back down the Vein with your blood still inside?” he screamed.
The Muck’s threshing tentacles bore down on the Figure of Eight.
“So CRUMBLE BISCUITS!!!” Chart roared, heaving a grand load of dry biscuit overboard.
Crazy as it seemed, every sailor on that ship started crumbling biscuits as if feeding Sere. The air was thick with crumbs; hair was white with flour. The deck looked like a bakery. And now everyone could see the nearest tentacles, black and livid red, groping for the ship.
Then the lookout saw the first gull. Just circling there, screaming, nearly too fat to fly on ship’s biscuit. Pretty soon another came swooping down out of the misty sky. And another, coming from abeam. Two more gulls from the transom, one flying out onto the bowsprit, several flapping down from the rigging, a whole flock from the starboard rail. There were gulls everywhere: gulls bubbling out of the water, gulls bursting from the ship’s lockers, gulls tangled in sailors’ hair. All fighting and clacking and screaming at one another to get those pieces of biscuit.
And the closer they got, the thicker they got, trapped in a whirl of wings. A vast white swordsman formed from the birds, spoiling for a fight: the Gull Warrior, the Hero of the islands.
Now, conveniently enough, there was a big red and black slimy smelly oozy horrible tentacled genuine four- or maybe three-times life-size monster there for him to battle.
And battle they did.
The fight raged for seven days and six nights.
“Watch out!” Chart cried, as a severed tentacle crashed onto the foredeck.
“Take care, lads,” he roared, as the Muck squeezed one of the Warrior’s limbs right off, dissolving it into a storm of wheeling birds. “The Gull’s been disarmed!”
But on the seventh day, the Muck finally decided the Figure of Eight wasn’t worth the effort, and slithered off to engulf a small, sparsely populated island.
“We did it! We did it! We’re alive!” the sailors cried. And then they turned as one to the captain, and said, “Surely you are the Greatest, Most Resourceful, Most Extraordinary Explorer of All Time! How can we ever thank you?”
Chart wrinkled his nose. “Scrape the gullshit off my boat,” he said.
So they cleaned up the Figure of Eight, now well convinced that Chart could deal with any danger.
But Chart wasn’t happy. “No wind!” he grumbled. “For the last four days (and three nights), there’s been not a breath of wind.” To make matters worse, the ship smelled terribly of gull droppings, and Chart would dearly have loved for a breeze to blow the stench away.
No breeze came, and the ship lay in irons for a month of deadly calm.
“Tentacle, tentacle, tentacle,” the crew grumbled. “That’s all we’ve et for weeks. Tentacle stew, tentacle pie, creamed tentacle in brine with tentacle fritters on the side. Ugh! We want to go home!”
Finally Chart set them to pulling at the rope still attached to the anchor in Delta harbor. “It will be a long haul if we have to drag ourselves home, but what choice do we have? Oh, and one other thing. Bring up those extra barrels of pepper.”
And so, during the long, weary days while the crew pulled the Figure of Eight back toward Delta, Chart sat tinkering with an odd contraption made from rope and a pulley and three ship’s hatchets, one for each pepper barrel.
Thirty days later, or maybe twenty-five, who should Chart see but his employer, walking down the bowsprit and jumping onto the foredeck. Now Fathom stood twice the height of a normal man, and his eyes were storm-cloud blue, and lightnings played around his head. His cheeks were all puffed up, and he didn’t say anything, just smirked. Finally he looked up at the sky and muttered a few words, very fast and breathy: “You-seem-to-be-stuck-Greatest-Explorer-of-All-Time.”
Chart looked up and saw his mainsail pennant leap straight into the air. “A bit of calm,” he said. “But I’m about to leave it behind.”
“Ha!” Fathom snorted, and the boat heeled wildly in a sudden wind. She steadied as Fathom sucked the air back in. He looked around at the frightened sailors, and the dirty ship, and Chart. A mean grin spread over his face, like the shadow of a storm spreading out black across the water. “Fwuuuuuuh! And-how-do-you-intend-to-do-that?”
Chart stroked his weedy mustache and looked up at Fathom with an appraising eye. “Why, you’re going to help me, neighbor!” He nodded as Fathom’s eyes bulged. “Yep,” he continued, “I figure you’re too stupid not to.”
“HAH!!!” Fathom snorted, and immediately the sails surged out. Chart yanked on his rope, which pulled through a pulley on a bracket, which jerked three other ropes, which yanked the braces out from under three ship’s hatchets. And Fathom, realizing he’ d filled the sails with air despite himself, sucked in as hard as he could: fwuuuuuuhhh! But what he sucked up was ounces, gallons, barrels, of fine ground pepper.
His heroic eyes watered. His heroic nose ran. His cheeks fluttered and his brow sweated lightnings. “Grab hold!” Chart cried, and his crew hung on for dear life as Fathom spun his head around, wheeped, heaved, and delivered himself of a sneeze heard round the world.
Well, every people has stories about that sneeze. The grasslanders say that the sky is on a hinge, and that once it swung down sideways and blew them halfway up the mountains at the end of the world. The people of the forest found every tree, shoot, and sapling within three days of the shore swept into the air and stacked as firewood. Back in Delta, the wind hit so hard that it spun the triangle of islands around so that the Foot became Spear-point. And above all, the sneeze blew Chart’s boat clean out of the Mist and back to Delta.
That ship flew so hard and so high that every person on board should have been killed, smashed to splinters on one of the Outer Islands, only Chart had the Figure of Eight built flat-bottomed, so she hit the water just in front of Telltale and skipped like a stone over the tallest hill on it. She bounced five more times, clearing islands on three bounces, before she came skidding back into Delta harbor and tore out her hull on the dockside reef.
Well, the townsfolk poured out to greet them. They shouted Three Cheers for the crew and Three Cheers for the Figure of Eight. They cheered the rope, the biscuits, the pepper, and themselves. They cheered three cheers for Captain Chart!
But all that gloomy man could do was complain. “Why’d you move the islands around?” he growled. “That new reef tore the bottom out of my boat!”
Which proved that the Greatest Explorer of All Time was a true ship’s captain, and an islander to the bone.
* * *
Jo clapped softly. Brook had already fallen asleep, but a grin remained on her face.
They bundled up for the night, Rope with his arm around Brook, Jo with an arm around Rope to ward off the cold.
As he lay on the hard ground, trying to sleep, Rope drank in the strangeness of their journey. He was in a story. This—this was so different from ordinary life.
This mattered.
Earth beneath his head, darkness beyond the embering fire, leaves murmuring in the night . . . the press (he couldn’t ignore it) of Jo’s breasts against his back; the touch of her leg.
He closed his eyes and drowned in sleep.
Later, much later, Jo was still awake, drawing warmth from Rope’s broad back, staring down the night with secret silver eyes.
She hissed at a touch on her arm.
It was Net, slinking spider-soft over Rope’s shoulder and onto hers. Through his feathery touch, she could feel Rope’s sleeping core. He was open to her, slumbering there, on the other side of the mesh, warm and human: an anchor to hold her to the ground, if she chose to use him.
She shivered as Net slid from her shoulder. A palp touched her breast, lightly, through the cloth. Retracted. Reached out again.
She fell asleep during his delicate examination.