43

blue-green nowhere

The grass burns beautifully. Tiny red embers chasing each other down dust-green lanes that shrivel to weary ash. I lie down on one side of the enormous soft bed.

It’s night. I’m cold to the bone, and Kit’s carrying me. He’s warm as a furnace, arms, chest. He smells like black pepper. I can’t move, and I can’t stop moving. I’m so weary of everything spinning.

“I’ve got you,” he’s saying.

“Thank the ancestors!” Ruzi’s voice. “Is she…?”

“She’s alive.” Kit’s warmth seeps through my thin, cold blouse, through my skin.

A vision of Felicity Greave at the Lugger with one of her slim cigarettes floats up. My aching jaw won’t unclench. Then I can feel the floor tilting, wooden boards of a boat under my bound hands, whispering voices. My heart falters before plunging ahead, down, down, down.

No trace of burning grass. Only wet wood, salt air and a lingering tang of wrongness in my nostrils.

A strange sensation of being out of time. Your father’s dead. What day did he die? I couldn’t recall. My face was burning, too cold or too hot. My stomach plunged, dizzying. The world pitched and yawed. I tried to open my eyes, but the light was too bright. I felt like I did after the Cull, breathless, a mouth full of cotton.

They’re all dead. Father. Father’s father. His mother. His babies … all three. Your aunts and uncles and cousins. Your friends. Your neighbours. Your teachers. Their mothers and fathers and families and neighbours. I remembered. They’ve all been dead years. Grief sunk its claws in.

My mouth was literally full of cotton – a gag – my hands tied with thick rope. Light stabbed in through a wrinkled round of glass. I sat up on a wave of panic, hair curling into my streaming eyes. My hair wrap was gone. I wasn’t crying. It was the light, or some after-effect of whatever potion they knocked me out with.

The floor of the room, its walls and low ceiling were all wooden. Alone in a wooden box like a giant’s coffin. My stomach pitched down again, then up. The coffin was floating.

I clawed the gag from my lips with fingers heavy as old wreck wood and equally uncooperative. Behind me, a door spewed light, hinges wailing like seabirds. I twisted around as a shadow bled into the white rectangle of sky, its edges barbed. The front of my brain redoubled its throbbing efforts to escape. I shut my eyes.

“She’s awake,” called a man I didn’t recognize, wedging a massive pair of shoulders sideways into my coffin room.

“Bring her out,” said another man. His voice turned my insides to water.

The big man hauled me up easily by the ropes binding my wrists, dragged me into the light. His skin was sun-gold and weather-beaten, arms thick as tree trunks. A pale beard hid half his face, but his eyes were grey, with a shape that reminded me of Mister Heane’s. Kind eyes to make a kind face – but I knew well enough, looks deceive.

It was overcast, still, the veiled sun directly overhead, bisected by a square of faded red canvas. I was on a Skøl lugger, with Venor and his man-mountain.

“What is this?” I tried to say, though the words came out almost too husky to hear.

“We speak Skøl on this boat,” Venor grated.

Was I speaking Crozoni? My thoughts oozed like cold treacle.

I licked my lips and tried again. “What’s happening?”

“We’re taking you for a boat ride.”

The bearded man peered between us encouragingly.

“And a chat…” Venor went on. “You and me and the big blue sea.”

That’s when I saw the shearwater. They’re not common close to land, outside nesting season. It sliced through the air inches above the swell. I couldn’t see any land, but then I could only see what was behind Venor, not behind me. The small cabin obstructed the view. I bent forward to peer towards the front of the boat and thought at first, absurdly, that this small fishing craft of an art-starved people had a figurehead on the prow. Then I realized it was another man, his back to me, sitting cross-legged and looking out on endless ocean.

The sea’s been so beautiful this season, like frosted blue-green glass. It’s not been that colour for years.

“Where are we going?” I struggled to stand, then to hide my dizzy swaying, terror ringing through me like a gong. I clung to the cabin with my bound hands. Beyond it, there was land, but it was vanishingly distant, with no sign of Portcaye. No other luggers. Just a dark-green fuzz that must have been trees. Three of them to one of me, in the middle of a blue-green nowhere.