Steph Swainston - No Present Like Time

The coachman stooped to check the bits in the mouths of the dapple gray mares and ran the reins through brass rings on the center bar. His scarf and thick buttoned coat made him look portly. He held the coach door open; Wrenn jumped up and struggled inside. Wrenn obviously didn’t know about the steps, which Lightning kicked out from under the polished splashboard. Wrenn settled himself on the seat and removed his woolly liripipe hat. He was obviously feeling self-conscious; I doubted that he had ever been in a coach before. He had changed his clothes-the ones he wore in the ceremony were discarded to show his entrance to a new life. The coachman slammed the door and pulled a leather strap to lower the window. He leaned in, exchanged some words with Lightning, then climbed up to his bench, took the whip in his left hand and flicked the reins. “Hoh!”

The whole heavy rig rolled forward with the clop of clean hooves, a hiss of water from the wheels. The mares with braided manes shook their heads trying to see around their blinkers. They walked to the gates; I saw their six broad backs, then the dark red shining lacquer of the coach’s roof loaded with wooden chests pass beneath me under the arch. The wheels sucked up sleet from the ground, spraying it into the air above them, leaving two tracks of paving clear from slush.

Wrenn twisted around to stare at me through the back window, one elbow on the tan leather. I wished that I could hear their conversation on the journey. Lightning paid Wrenn more attention than he paid me, offering the same time-refined advice. But I wanted to reach Awndyn before the coach did. I jumped off the clock tower.

My wings’ muscular biceps, as thick as thighs bunched together, creasing the middle of my back, then separated as I pulled my wings down in the laborious effort of sustained beating. My long wings are pointed and fairly narrow, good for gliding but taking off is as hard as sprinting. I can usually settle into a rhythm that uses less energy but it’s still like running a marathon.

I love long-distance journeys; I can stretch out along the route. I relaxed and leaned into the first of the long kilometers. The coach-and-six sounded hollow over the stable’s wide drawbridge across the second moat and out of the Castle’s complex. They passed the paddocks with steaming dung heaps and soggy plowed fields, joined the Eske Road and entered the oak forest that comprised most of that manor.

I flexed my wings in and rolled once, twice, risked a third although I fell fifty meters each time. I opened my wings hard against the rushing air. High above the coach I rolled wing over wing, watching the even horizon turn a full three hundred and sixty degrees.

Then I set out for the coast. Diagonal lines of sunlight slanted down, patchily highlighting the level, loamy fields of the plains around the Moren. When flying from manor to manor I find it useful to follow one of the straight military roads that the Castle commanded to be built between towns for the movement of troops. But to fly cross-country I pick a point on the horizon, a notch or a hummock, and head directly toward it. The notches become vales, the hummocks turn into hillsides. When I become tired I fly a more convoluted route to find and climb onto thermals to rest.

At a height of two hundred meters I don’t see individual tree tops, just a mass of twigs and pine needles. The slate roofs of the towns are scaly patches that look flat among the forest’s green-brown froth. The houses built from local stone were camouflaged in the landscape, and I passed over hunting lodges without seeing them. Towns all seemed the same from the air; I hardly distinguished between them. My travels have taught me that people everywhere are intrinsically the same: well-disposed to me as Comet.

The same would not be true for Tris. I considered the events of the last two days as I flew. No one could predict what the Trisian people would make of us; I hoped that I could communicate with them. I was terrified of the hated uncharted ocean. The things that swam and slapped suckers on ships’ sides beggared any description-behemoth serpents and sentient giants amassed from the rotting bodies of drowned sailors.

I wondered what to do about Tern. At this very moment she could be stroking Tornado’s wingless back, hewn muscles, shorn head, and I had to leave on some damn godforgotten ship! I imagined her sitting on the palm of his hand and he lifts her up to kiss her. Away at sea I was powerless to stop this latest outbreak of her infidelity; it might deepen and then what would I find on my return? Tern married into the Circle through Tornado, myself divorced and having to live next door to my beautiful ex-wife for all eternity?

I knew every landmark-the white fences along the “racehorse valley” racetracks that Eske is famous for, their stables where destriers are bred. A line of tall poplars by Dace River; farther on in the forest smoke straggled from a charcoal burner’s shack. I concentrated on keeping the horizon level to fly straight, but in the evening I was grounded by a heavy hailstorm and, annoyingly, had to spend the night in the Plover Inn on the Remige Road. If this was a routine journey I would sleep in the woods because, since I’m Rhydanne, temperatures have to be much below freezing before I start to feel cold.

By the following afternoon I could see the faintly lilac-gray Awndyn downs in the distance. Cobalt manor’s hops fields and oast houses dotted the downs; a bowl-shaped pass resolved into the coast road. Finally I crested the last hill-and there was the sea. The gray strip of ocean looked as if it was standing up above the land, ready to crash down onto it.

Every window in Awndyn-on-the-Strand was brassy with the setting sun. The town’s roofs slanted in every crazy direction. The manor house stood on a grassed-over rock-and-sand spit jutting out into the sea. It had tiny clustered windows and tall thin octagonal chimneys with diagonal and cross-hatched red brickwork. I glided down through another sleet shower so strong I had to close my eyes against it, and landed on the roof of a fish-and-chip takeaway. I waited till the squall stopped spitting wet snow, then climbed down from the chip shop and walked into town, crossing the shallow, pebbled stream on a mossy humpbacked bridge. The Hacilith-Awndyn canal ran beside it into an enormous system of locks and basins packed with barges.

A creative cosmopolitan atmosphere hung over Awndyn, with a smell of cedarwood shavings and stale scrumpy. It was the only Plainslands town to prosper after the last Insect swarm, profiting from the merchant barges that paid tolls to navigate the locks and carracks with full coffers anchoring in the port. It was well positioned to make use of all their raw materials. Swallow, the musician governor, had encouraged a bohemian community; artists and craftsmen were welcome in the tiny crumbling houses and ivy-shaded galleries. Artisans’ slow and friendly workshops overhung the shambling alleys; glass-blowing and marquetry, cloisonné and ceramics, leather-work, woodturning and lapidary, musical instruments and elegant furniture were crafted there.

I was prospecting for drugs, just as a gold miner follows rules to find deposits. Scolopendium is illegal everywhere except the Plainslands-in Awia the laws have been tight for fifty years and counting; in Hacilith’s deprived streets the problem is at its most serious; and at the Lowespass trenches its use is tackled very severely. But centipede fern grows wild in Ladygrace, the sparsely populated foothills of southern Darkling. The governor of Hacilith tried to pay the Neithernor villagers to burn the moorland hillsides and destroy the plants but thankfully they never succumbed to the offer. Scolopendium extracted from the fern fronds flows out of Ladygrace together with more well-known drugs, and addicts’ money is sucked back in along the same routes. The ban is almost impossible to enforce.