Steph Swainston - No Present Like Time

Tarragon called to a whole congregation of Tine kneeling on the shore, “Hey, see my passenger? He runs marathons! He can sprint as fast as a car!”

The Tine paused and stared. They gestured to each other, howled and ran directly at us. “Hurry!” I yelled. “Hurry up!”

Tarragon stopped the car. “Will yourself home.”

Through rising panic I forced myself to stay calm and yearned, forced, demanded myself back to my body. Tarragon tapped a finger on her forehead and repeated the dictum, “Shift by meditation. Not sensation!”

The Tine were almost upon us.

The dark shore twitched in and out of focus, then a wave of distortion rolled through it. Tarragon’s face and the gold vehicle belched into disturbing shapes. They dissolved to gray. To black.

My stomach creased with fear; I closed my eyes. And when I opened them again, slowly and stickily, I was back in my cabin, lying on the floor.

I woke with the green taste of bile in my mouth, curled up so tightly I ached. Shit, I almost got eviscerated. I clenched my fists. Tarragon almost had me killed.

I rolled onto my back and contemplated the too-close ceiling. A gentle sighing must be the wind on the mainsail, and that constant slap and hiss will be the prow cutting small waves. There were no other sounds, so it was probably nighttime. These deductions left me feeling rather proud but I sensed that the cabin had become a little bit narrower. It had changed shape-it was also longer. There was not enough room to open even the tips of my wings. What the fuck was going on?

I lit a candle and held it up. The walls were painted blue, not black, the portholes were square with white borders. It was a different cabin. Could I have Shifted back to the wrong place? Panicking, I ran my fingernails between the planks, brushed my hand along the shelves: nothing. Where were my wraps? Where were all my fucking wraps? I saw my rucksack, seized it and rummaged through it. The fat envelope containing scolopendium had gone. “Damn you, Ata!” I shouted. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!”

There was a knock on the cabin door. “Go away!” I yelled.

I rubbed the hem of my coat and felt nine hard paper squares still sewn in. Thank god, they had missed some!

Cold air gusted into the cabin as a stocky figure pushed the door open with his shoulder. I saw Serein’s silhouette, a round head with spiky hair. Behind him, dull blue inky dawn clouds packed the vast sky. He sat in the doorway, legs out onto the half deck, huddling in his greatcoat. “Comet,” he said. “You weren’t well.”

“Is that understatement a new type of sarcasm you’re experimenting with?”

“For god’s sake, Comet. You look like you’ve been dragged through a battlefield backward. Mind you, I’ve been seasick. The sailors started laying bets on the number of times I would puke over the taffrail. Mist told me you don’t get seasick. She explained about scolopendium.”

“I see.” I took a swig of water from my leather bottle. “I suspect that I am on the Melowne?”

The Swordsman nodded. “We rowed you across from Petrel. You were out cold.”

“What! A rowing boat? So close to the waves? What if it had capsized?” Drowning while unconscious was too awful to contemplate.

“Ata said you could have this berth because you filled the other one up with drugs. Drugs aren’t an answer, Jant. What are you doing that for when you’re an Eszai?”

“What happened to my wraps and the envelope?” I said threateningly.

“We threw them overboard.”

“Shit.”

The Swordsman sounded both disgusted and surprised that an Eszai would knowingly use cat. “How much did you take?”

“As much as I could.” I wriggled out of the constrictive cabin and pulled myself up, water bottle in hand. I scraped a match, lit one of the cigarettes I had stolen from Cinna and sipped at it. I blew the smoke out of my nose and coughed. I was never going to be any bloody good at smoking. It doesn’t agree with Rhydanne as they are accustomed to thin air. I only do it rarely, when I’m under extreme duress, because if I ever got hooked it would destroy my ability to fly.

Wrenn joined me at the rail, standing upwind of the smoke. “Are you all right? Apart from being dark and moody, I mean.”

I said, “I loathe this bloody floating coffin of a boat.”

“It’s a ship.”

“She’s a ship. Apparently it’s female. I hope all her masts don’t break off when they fuck in the shallows.”

The Swordsman fell quiet, looking at the midnight-blue water. The waves swept up into points, lapping and sidestepping. Their ridges looked like cirques of the Darkling Mountains. Apart from a sailor manning the wheel and a watchman at the prow, all was quiet. Only knavish sailors, rakish swordsmen and drug-addled Rhydanne are about at this hour.

“The Stormy Petrel ’s close by,” he said, pointing forward at two faint lights, one red, one white, which rose and fell gently. The dawn clouds were gradually becoming paler, but the Petrel ’s sails and hull were blurred, a drifting perse-gray shape. The ships creaked continually, and when they weren’t creaking they groaned and flapped and sighed. They were like animals talking to each other.

“Hm. I’m surprised Lightning and Mist can bear being on the same boat.”

“Can you see who’s at the helm?”

I glanced at him. “Rhydanne can’t see in the dark, Wrenn; that’s just a story. In fact I have crap night vision. Rhydanne eyes reflect to cut out snow glare so I don’t get blinded. It’s not much of an advantage at sea level…”

“Really?”

“Yeah. While I’m putting to rest myths about Rhydanne, you should know that they don’t turn into lynxes on their birthdays. They can’t survive being frozen solid and thawed out again. And they’re not cannibals, whatever Carniss may say.” I lit another cigarette with the stub of the first. “As for the bit about shitting in little pebbles like goats do, I reserve comment.”

“I didn’t mean to be nosy. I’m sorry.”

“You should be. I stay smooth-skinned, mind. It would take me weeks to grow as much stubble as you.”

Wrenn rubbed his chin. I turned back to the cabin thinking that I needed more time to recover. From behind me Wrenn said, “What’s it like up there? In Darkling, I mean. Is it true Rhydanne don’t talk to each other at all?”

Much as I wanted a few hours alone, that made me smile. I said slowly, “Oh, they say all they need to. But that’s not much compared with flatlanders, for sure. Even Scree village was only built by accident-it started out as a cairn. There was a tradition that every traveler puts a stone on the pile when he goes past. So it grew, very gradually, into a pueblo with rooms and an inn. Rhydanne come to the village every winter, when any person can occupy any room. They all get snowed in and drink themselves legless. In summer, they leave the rooms empty. The conditions make Rhydanne very self-reliant; they can’t act in large groups. When an avalanche destroyed my shieling I couldn’t find anyone to help me…The cornices were hanging waiting for the slightest shock. Eilean was crushed by the barrage and the whole valley changed shape.”

I hung on to a rowan tree’s upturned roots as the mountainside liquefied and tabular ice thundered down. The air filled with powder snow. The next day saw me scrabbling at the granite debris until my fingers split, trying to dig her out.

I smirked. “She’s still up there under tons of rock, flat as a waffle.”

“That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”

I huffed and tapped ash off the cigarette. “I hated them. I grew up too slowly for Rhydanne and in the end I’d no love of their way of life. But Darkling paled into insignificance when I went to Hacilith and fell in with the Wheel. They were named from their habit of nailing enemies to the waterwheels of the city. The weird thing was that I was happy as a chemist’s apprentice and I didn’t need a gang’s protection until I joined them. The longer you live, the more scars you gather, see?” I traced my fingertip over the deep scarification on my right shoulder, a circle with six spokes, the initiation to the gang.