Kai’s skin tasted enough of salt, but she salted it anyway, licked her wrist, drained the shot glass, bit the lime, slammed the glass, sucked the juice, dropped the peel. Three tequilas. Four.
Slices of discarded lime piled sticky and sour on the table at Makawe’s Rest. Four dead soldier shot glasses among the rind wreckage caught the light of tiki torches and table candles, and reflected a distortion of the beachside bar. A tableful of tattooed local kids close by cheered and held their hands up to be tied as the last poet left the stage: a sharp-faced Kavekanese woman who hadn’t yet remade herself, bright eyed with an elegant voice, verses slipping tense and tenseless from Kathic to Archipelagese and back. Kai wondered when she planned to join the priesthood, or if. Wasn’t much overlap between poetry and priestly duties, now that the gods were gone.
Closer to the stage, denim-clad Iskari expats clapped.
Across the table, Mako raised his whiskey to the level of his milk white eyes, and made a sound Kai had learned to call a laugh: rocks ground to sand, storm water beating a cliff face, works of man crumbled to dust.
“You think the Iskari understood any of that?” she asked.
Mako turned toward her unseeing. The gash of mouth in the scar tissue of his face opened to emit a voice. “Don’t need understanding to love.”
“Then maybe you love for the wrong reasons,” she said after she finished clapping.
“Love’s still love.”
“Get many girls with that line?”
“Haven’t had to worry about that particular problem for twenty years at least.”
The Rest swirled and surged around them, a hurricane of heat even without the four tequila shots burning in her gut.
At least the ocean wind cut through the swelter of close-packed drunken bodies. The Rest had no walls, and fronted on the bay. Behind them, waves rolled against the beach, and Penitents watched the horizon, screaming inside rock shells. Drunken sun-baked tourists lounged at the statues’ feet. Sand clung to wet skin, a casing, a ward.
Kai wore a pale suit, matching hat, and dark blouse. After weeks of enforced sexless hospital-gown infancy, she was herself again, in her own clothes cut to her own body—and that body hers, too, not some nurse’s or doctor’s to prod and poke at will. She’d stopped at a salon on the way over to tame her ragged surgeon-shaved hair to a sharper cut. She walked to the Rest under her own power, with the cane’s aid, and she sat here drinking booze bought with her own soul. Gods, she’d missed this—her world, her island with its ragged and rough edges.
Glorious, but the glory wouldn’t take. Maybe it had crawled down the bottom of one of these glasses, or into some other bottle behind the bar.
Bongos drummed, and a trumpet trilled, and under the white ghostlight spots a new poet staggered out onto the thrust stage: a round Iskari man dressed all in green, waistcoat, tailcoat, hat, and slacks.
“Since when do Iskari read here? Their work’s staid for us, isn’t it?”
Mako shook his head. “This a fat guy, dressed like a cabbage?”
“Yes. I mean. Not very fat.”
“Edmond Margot. He has a bit of fire. Listen.”
She listened, and he stood spread legged and inhaled, closed his eyes and dug within him, and declaimed through noise and music:
“Shout the island is our prison
Tied in promissory chains
Waiting for withheld names
Dreaming free wind
Howl, bound world with
Painted gods and wooden
Idols worshipped hungry
For lash and cuff and needle
Scream lost souls and
Writhe beneath satin
Stains and suck juice from
Skeleton fingers and
Sing”
And on and on, rapt and rigid, chest peacocked out, neck bullfrog bulged. Heaving stomach drove air through his thick throat. The music eclipsed him, supported him, crushed him, and he staggered back, eyes wide, uncertain how he’d come here, uncertain what he’d done to earn the applause, the whistles, the jeers. He woke from a bad dream to find himself on stage, naked minded, before a room of men and women cheering. Eve, the Rest’s owner and stage manager, in her tight black high-necked dress, grabbed Margot’s shoulders and escorted him stumbling from the light as the next poet stepped up, a sandy lip-ringed Glebland boy whose sleeve tattoos showed beneath the cuffs of his ragged tunic.
“Three mothers crying / two sons gone”
Margot’s friends received him, swallowed him, applauded him, a small band of layabouts and wanderers, fat, thin, hair stringy, curly, red, black, bald, hungry.
Kai sat frozen, mouth slack, staring at Margot. She replayed the poem in her head. She hadn’t made it up, the line. How did the poem run? No rhyme, and harder to memorize in Kathic than Archipelagese, but still. Dreaming free wind / Howl, bound world with / Painted gods … Her words, the words from the pool, on the tongue of this damn fat foreign bard.
“What was that?” she said.
“Margot’s work, it’s pretty abstract. Once an Iskari, always. But he’s good. Never suffered a paper cut before he came to Kavekana, but that works for him, sort of. Some people suffer from not suffering. You want his gratitude, tie him up and thrash him with a cat-o’-nine for a while. Anyway’ the scholars like it. His work. Hidden Schools called him out to give a lecture there a few months back.”
“That poem, I mean. When did he write it?”
“A few months ago now,” Mako said. “Give or take a week.”
“I have to talk to him.”
“You’re drunk.”
“And you’re ugly.” She lurched off the table, and the ground heaved beneath her. Torch flames, ghostlights, flickering tabletop candles threaded webs of light through skin and wood and meat. She drowned, and gasped for air, as the room worked its way right again. When the lights resolved to stationary points, and she no longer felt the world’s spin, she sought the poet.
He stood apart from his friends at the edge of the Rest, watching the Gleblander chant his chant.
Kai groped for and found her cane, trusted its support, and ploughed into the crowd. She made slower progress than she expected. Before her fall, she would have forced her way past. Now she had to wait for waiters to cross in front of her, skirt the edge of rowdy groups that might send someone tumbling into her path or knock her cane away.
The poet did not acknowledge her approach. Up close, she could see his sweat: a slick sheen on skin, soaking his once-white shirt. His forehead shone beneath the brim of his small green hat.
“You’d be cooler if you took the hat off,” she said.
He wheeled on her, spilled his drink over his hand. His eyes were round and bright, like a frightened cat’s, eerie in his pale and sunburned skin.
“Hey, I’m sorry. I just wanted to say I liked your poem.”
His lips worked, but no sound emerged.
“The one you read.” Gods, she was too drunk for this. But the idol drowned still and forever in her head, and the scream echoed. Don’t let the swaying ground dissuade you. Close your eyes and steel your spine. “Up there on the stage. That line, you know, ‘Howl, bound world,’ that one. Is that yours? Is it a reference to something?”
He took a step back, as if she’d threatened him.
“I didn’t mean to insult you. I just heard it somewhere, before.”
The edges of his eyes tightened then, and he stared, not at her, but past her, through her. Her stomach muscles clenched and she felt the old familiar terror, ten years left behind since she took holy orders and rebuilt herself: of being made, placed, pierced, identified as something she wasn’t. She remembered the anger that followed, and prepared herself against it. But he only stared, bowstring tight, and said, in a voice of dust, “The poem is mine. So’s the line.”
“It’s new? Is there something special about it? Any reference, any story?”
“Do I know you?”
“No,” she said. “I just had to ask.”
He shook his head, and the shake moved down to his whole body. Then he recoiled from her, shouldering off into the crowd faster than she could follow.
“Hey!” She staggered after him on three legs, one arm raised. “Hey, I was just asking!” But the crowd was thick, and a big Kavekanese in a black shirt turned to say something to a friend and struck Kai a glancing blow with his shoulder, which would have been fine, but she tripped over her own cane into a waiter, who stumbled himself but did not fall. The martini glasses he carried on his tray were not so lucky.
Neon green cocktails fountained through the air. Two landed in the sand. One landed on a table, and broke into a jade fireworks display. The last struck a tourist in the back of the head and splashed, sticky and emerald with sugar syrup and artificial coloring, down her neck and into her white blouse.
The tourist stood and cursed in Kathic. The waiter stammered an apology. And two rather large gentlemen in black shirts materialized to either side of Kai, fast as if summoned by Craftwork. “Is there a problem?”
“No problem,” she said. “I’m fine.”
“There’s no reason to get upset,” said the rather large gentleman on the left.
“I’m not upset. I’m fine, I just tripped.”
Meanwhile, the waiter retreated toward the safety of the bar while the tourist pursued, stabbing the air with her finger as if she were being attacked by invisible sprites. On the stage, the Glebland poet had stopped his tirade to stare befuddled into the audience.
“You shouldn’t be worried about me,” she said. “Look at her.”
“Ma’am, please. Remain calm.”
“I just wanted to talk with that guy.” Pointing to Margot, who sat now, she saw, among his ragged poet friends, pointedly ignoring her.
The rather large gentleman on the right took her arm, and she pulled it away, sharply. “Don’t touch me.”
Which, all things considered, was not the best course of action. The gentleman on the left now reached for her as well, and she drew back, and tightened her fingers around her walking stick. Drink and anger pounded a rapid tattoo on the drum of her heart.
“Boys. Kai.” Mako’s voice, behind her. Beneath the noise of crowd and argument she’d missed the tap of his approaching footsteps, and his stick. “What seems to be the trouble?”
“No trouble,” said the gentleman—or boy—on the left. Both straightened slightly.
“No trouble,” Kai said. “I was just making my way back to our table.” And she winked at the bouncers, turned her back on them, and led Mako through the crowd.
“What was that?” the old man said when they were seated again.
“Didn’t want to talk to me,” she said. “Is he always an asshole?”
“He’s been blocked for a while now. Lot of stress. Doesn’t excuse the assholery, but then he’s Iskari. Their assholes get graded on a curve.”
She felt the sinking tension in her gut unwind a little. “I missed you, Mako.”
“You don’t miss shit. Months we haven’t seen a hair of you. And you’re getting dead drunk as soon as you’re back, not because you’re happy. What happened?”
“Who said anything happened?” She raised her hand and searched the crowd for a waiter.
“Your cane, and the fact that you almost started a fight with two bouncers three times your size.”
“Hospital. Basically. And I was moved to a new job. And I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I’ve known too many men who didn’t want to talk, and women, too. Not talking doesn’t end any way but bad.”
She shifted in the chair, and her back sang its protest. She’d felt lithe and smooth walking down to the coast from the cable car, cane tucked under her arm like a swagger stick, hands in suit pant pockets, reveling in freedom, in the round sweet scent of barbecue fires, of flowers and incense and skin. She’d knotted around herself in the intervening hours’ sit. And around Mako, who she hadn’t seen since Claude. “Claude and I broke up. Did I tell you?”
“Good riddance.” More whiskey drained, to her and then to the Gleb poet, who delivered the final verse of a tight acrostic to the vigorous applause of a table in the third row back, either friends or structuralists. “Guy’s collar’s too white for you anyway.”
“Hells does that mean? He’s city watch. I wear ties for a living.”
“Once a shipbuilder’s daughter, always a shipbuilder’s daughter. Those calluses don’t rub off easy.”
“They rub off easy enough. And his dad was a fisherman.”
“Time in a Penitent breaks that out of you.”
“If you say so.”
Behind, on the beach, two lovers lay between the legs of a tall stone Penitent, sand covered and kissing. The idol’s teeth, she remembered, had torn her lips. The island is our prison. Howl, bound world.
“I wanted to ask him about his poem. That’s all. I heard the line somewhere.”
“Likely. It’s famous. Become famous, fast.”
Was that it? Had she overheard the words, seen them in a magazine perhaps, woven them into her dreams? Was Jace right? Had blood loss and panic blurred memories together? “Just wanted to talk to him, that’s all.”
“Mainlanders have a saying about good intentions.”
“Road to hell’s paved with them?”
“I’ve been there,” he said, “and it ain’t. But even wrong sayings have a point. Maybe you should take it easy.”
“I came here to get drunk and pity myself. Without the second what’s the point of the first?”
“You came here,” Mako said. “That’s the important thing. But you’ve been cooped up too long, and you want to do everything at once, and if you try half of that you’ll break yourself so bad even the madmen up the mountain won’t be able to put you back together again.”
She laughed. “Blasphemer.”
“I fought gods and demons with these hands.” He laid them palms down on the table. His right third finger jagged at a sharp angle from the joint; his left pinkie would not lie flat. Dirt caked his nails. “I’ve earned blasphemy. Sleep and come back in a few days. Don’t take everything so fast. If you wake up tomorrow morning with Makawe’s own headache, vomiting your guts all over those nice silk sheets, you’ll blame me for it and you won’t come down here again for months. I’d miss you.”
“My sheets are cotton.”
“Don’t storm the beaches, Kai. Never ends well.”
“Nice. Patronizing.”
“‘Patronizing’s’ an interesting word. You think I’m acting like I’m your father, or like you’re a rich idiot who needs to be told what’s what about art?”
“Both, I guess.” She let go of her head. “Maybe you’re right.” She stood with the cane’s aid, and while the muscles in her side protested and pulled, she managed to hold herself up, and even took a step without falling. She left coin on the table with enough soulstuff to cover her tab. Nothing tied her here now. She did not have to lean far over to touch the old man’s crooked hand. “I’ll see you, Mako.”
“Thanks for the drinks.”
Margot stepped back onto the stage, into the burning spot. A light rain of applause fell. He removed his hat. Sweat beaded his forehead. Lips tightened, opened, a pink tip of tongue darted out to wet them. Thick hands wrung his hat brim.
I didn’t ask to be here
“Neither did the rest of us,” Kai said, and left.