Steph Swainston - No Present Like Time

So even though we have been aboard for a month, we are as fit as we can hope to be. Comet is either holed up with his books or away flying. Every morning he slings a water bottle on his shoulder, takes off and flaps up into the sky until he is just a speck and I worry that Lightning might mistake him for a seagull and shoot him. I still can’t get used to a man gliding. He must feel so free. It must be odd to see people from above. He can always tell who they are, I suppose he has got used to it. I wish I could fly-think of the fencing moves I could use!

I can’t wait to fight Insects. As soon as I get back from Tris, I’m going to the Front. I have loads of ideas to rid Lowespass of Insects completely-such as filling the river with salt, so they can’t drink it. But Lightning tells me they tried that back in 1170. When we return, I’ll be surrounded by foxy girls and, by god, I need it. Who knows, Lightning might be pushed off the most eligible bachelor top spot for the first time in fifteen hundred years.

It’s a shame Mist swept me away from my moment of triumph. I wish I could be back with all those girls who were longing for me. But Mist said my absence will make them keener. She’s grateful that the best Swordsman in the Fourlands is at her side. Any time.

March 1, 2020

The weather is lovely, very bright and a lively wind clips us along. Comet refuses to leave his cabin. I think he is ashamed. He is drinking doped wine every day now. I reported to Mist, but she says let him be, the remains of his cache that escaped confiscation won’t last much longer. Why doesn’t she punish him for bringing scolopendium on board? In the fyrd it’s the most serious offense to be caught with drugs, especially if you deal them to other soldiers. Scolopendium is pretty mysterious and old-fashioned stuff. I don’t know anything about it but, god, I can’t accept that an Eszai uses it. I suppose since Comet can fly, in good weather anyway, he takes his success for granted.

Mist said that people like Comet were the most useful, just as crooked wood is handy to the shipbuilder because odd shapes can be made into parts that hold the rest together. I don’t get that, really. I thought the Circle was of one purpose.

Rain showers make the boards slippery. The tars say they’re chancing their lives every time they go to the latrine planks at the prow to have a crap. Great waves break over the beakhead so they chance to get washed off, or slip and fall five meters like a turd into the sea where the ship will sail over them. Being valued passengers, our latrine is a tiny cubicle with a hole in the seat, on a private balcony at the stern. If you get the angle right you can piss against the rudder. The whole gallery smells of Captain Fulmer’s poseur aftershave. Fulmer took one look at Lightning’s frock coat and said, “Good grief. This isn’t the eighteenth century.”

I went to Comet’s cabin and disturbed his work. I lost money at cards as we chatted. Those flat-chested mountain girls are so wild their love-bites need stitches, he says. We talked about rapiers and the new spring-loaded daggers whose blades split open into three points to trap swords. They impressed Comet but I told him they are just for show and would be dangerous in a real fight. I said, if you see a man wielding one you know he is a braggadocio.

I slipped Wrenn’s diary back under his bunk and returned to my cabin. I worked there during the day with my notebooks that are so pleasant to begin and to dent the neat paper with a fountain pen. Contrary to what Wrenn thinks, neither flying nor languages is instinctive. I have learned the shapes of the air; I have to think carefully about my moves when aloft and sometimes I make mistakes. And if I make a gaffe in jotting down a translation, it’s just as dangerous as a botched landing.

Mist had noted Trisian words from her first expedition, although without phonetics or even context. I figured out most of the unknown words from their roots, working back from modern equivalents. A few remained tantalizing. The Trisians appeared to speak a form of Old Morenzian, pre-dating the first millennium. Nothing of that language survives recorded, apart from dusty learned works in a weird thirty-letter alphabet, ten letters more than I was used to. It dated from before the time of the First Circle when the fricative Low Awian language became the common tongue of the Fourlands. At around the same time, to be fair in the standardizations, San advised that the Fourlands’ currency should be based on Morenzia’s system, which was far simpler than Awia’s.

I knew that the Trisians would be expecting us. The canoeists and governors that Mist dealt with will have spread the news across the island. They’ll know it’s human nature for us to return prepared to a great discovery, to tease out every detail. When our sails appear on their horizon, whatever plans they have made will be set in action. The Trisians will scurry to receive us, but I could not predict how.

I will just keep working and if I do too much cat and collapse, the others might realize how much torment my constant thoughts of Tern are causing me. I doubt she’s dwelling on me this much, back in the Castle with her lover.

“Damn it!” I said aloud. “Just stop the waves for one hour and let me think!” I wished myself back in Darkling, where I would still be drinking happily in the Filigree Spider if Ata’s message hadn’t got through. I reverted to thinking in Scree, a good language to be misanthropic in, as it has no words for groups of people and no plural verbs. Best of all it lacks a word for ocean. The Rhydanne word for climb is the same as the word for run, and there are plenty of words to describe the various types of drunk.

The only pub in Darkling is in the center of Scree pueblo, where the bare rock buildings merge shapelessly on both sides of the raised single track. The pueblo has a shallow, all-enveloping roof with a hatch for each room, to prevent winter snows sealing people in completely. The Filigree Spider was busy, as it was the height of the freeze season. The herders had arrived, bringing their goats down from the high pasture. A few hunters visited to rest; they were nomadic and they pleased themselves. Many were afternoon-drunk (drinking becomes moreish and you write off the day).

I sat on one of the benches by the low bar and ate bread with rancid butter and salted llama’s cheese. A row of freeze-dried rabbits hung tacked up by their ears behind the bar-Lascanne catches them by hand. I pushed my cup across the counter again; he slopped more whiskey into it with an exaggerated gesture. “It is snowing and drifting,” he said, as if that was news. “Want a pinnacle rabbit?”

“No, thanks.”

Lascanne was alone-drunk (everything seems vaguely amusing). I suppose I was slightly daytime-drunk (no matter how much you drink it doesn’t seem to have any effect).

The walls and most of the slate floor were covered with bright flat-woven kilims with warm red and indigo geometrical designs. A big hearth was on my right, its chimney shared with the distillery. A hunter lay on the furs beside it, very occasionally murmuring. She was drunk (dead-drunk); her sharp face rested on her folded hands. A family of four slept piled together nearby.

Three or four howffs were stacked against the wall. Howffs are tents of thin leather attached to rucksack frames. They could be rolled out and propped up by the frames to form triangular shelters. There was the ladder up to the Filigree Spider’s unfurnished second floor, where many people were lodging until the thaw season. Square, dark openings were the entrances of small passageways that led to other parts of the pueblo, again to escape heavy snows. The pub smelled of peat smoke and stew.

The door crashed open and two hunters struggled through man-handling a heavy bundle between them. At first I thought it was a rolled-up rug. The hunters, Leanne and Ciabhar, dropped the bundle in front of the hearth and turned it over. It was an unconscious body.