Steph Swainston - No Present Like Time

Leanne Shira saw me. She paused with one foot in the air before placing it down slowly. “Jant! Look what Ciabhar found…We would have left him but we thought you might be interested.” She darted over and bit me gently on the shoulder, for a kiss. I think she was working-drunk (just a light haze on your life that lasts for days). Her face was cold to the touch. I watched her sleek narrow body, hard muscle flowering under pale skin at every movement. Fast movement, a melting of potential, she was gracile but strong. Her rubbery sprinter’s midriff showed between her crop top and short black skirt. She had two pairs of snowshoes tied on her belt, one on each hip for herself and her lover.

“Bring some whiskey,” Ciabhar suggested.

“No alcohol!” I cried.

“Idiot! You’re supposed to give them hot water,” said Leanne.

“What about whiskey and water?”

Curious punters clustered around, making helpful suggestions: “Take his coat off.”

“Put him in a hot bath.”

“Or under the snow.”

“He looks weird; I don’t like it. I’m off.”

Now that they had accomplished dragging him in, their effort fell apart into the typical Rhydanne unit of organization-one. Ciabhar Dara stood back and stared. He was tall and so lithe I could see the muscle fibers through his tight skin and the hollows where they joined the bone. His black hair was wrapped in a ponytail. The nails on his long fingers came to hard points. His trousers were worn buckskin; bright ribbons crisscross bound his woven shirt’s loose sleeves close to his arms. A heavy three-stone bolas was wrapped around his waist-a bolas is the best weapon for mountain conditions, and Ciabhar was a very skilled and patient hunter. He blinked cat-eyes. “This man is really ill,” he said lucidly.

I pushed through. “Let me see.”

The handsome stranger’s skin was so waxen he looked like a statue carved from tallow. His lips and nail beds were blue; his breathing crackled. “Oh, god,” I said, feeling snow-wet hands and an ice-cold forehead. He was severely hypothermic, but the Rhydanne wouldn’t know that. Leanne flickered to my side and tried to pour hot water into his open, frost-blistered mouth.

“I watched him for ages,” Ciabhar said. “On the Turbary Track. Walking on, walking up, without crampons. He wasn’t a featherback so I left him in peace. He was searching around but he never saw me. At the top of Bealach Pass his pony lay down and died.”

Leanne gave him a look meaning “Breakfast is sorted.” She sped out, leaving the door open. She ran without pause over the bridge across Scree gorge that was just a single tightrope with two handrail cords, then lengthened her stride and disappeared, sliding, down the gritty path. She ran over the crystalline swathes of erosion between the naked rocks. Distant peaks looked as if ice had been poured down from their pointed summits and sharp boulders thrown sporadically up their slopes.

I said, “I can’t do anything for him here! Stupid! You should have descended. Downslope-toward Carniss.”

Ciabhar shrugged.

“It’s the altitude that’s killing him. You just made it worse.”

I thumbed open an eye, the iris brown, pupils dilated. The lids were dark and swollen. I handled him gently as I took his pulse, which was slow. He stopped making the effort to shiver, as there was no warmth to gain by shivering. His breathing rate was dropping back to normal-too exhausted to keep the rapid pace. He coughed once, dryly, and a bubbling noise began in his lungs as he breathed.

“We’re at eight thousand meters here. When did you last see a flatlander in the Spider?”

“They don’t come to the plateau,” Ciabhar mused.

“That’s because they can’t breathe! They can’t get sustenance from thin air; even I take days to acclimatize. And they freeze easily. Ciabhar, you know nothing. Help me carry him down to Tolastadh.”

I wrapped more rugs around the man’s jacket, and noticed a small ink-blue tattoo of Cobalt manor’s fishing bear on his wrist. “A sailor?”

“What?”

“He’s traveled a long way.”

As we hefted him his body convulsed once, froth ran from the corners of his mouth, and he died. Ciabhar dropped him, gave up cooperating and sloped away. Some more (cheery-drunk, boisterous-drunk, and totally pissed) hunters appeared and eagerly began stripping the corpse’s clothes but I chased them off.

I checked his pockets, finding a damp paper bag containing sugar-cake, a wet box of matches and a very damp and fragile white envelope. It wilted and started to disintegrate in my hands. I flipped it over, seeing a crimson seal. Behind me Lascanne dragged the body out, intending to drop it over the edge of Scree gorge. Outside in the mountains, the dead are left where they fall. No Rhydanne cares about the dead in Darkling, where the living have so much to contend with.

I went back to the bar and slapped the letter down on its stone slab. Chamois-fat candles guttered in their horn holders. The script read: “To be delivered to the hand of Comet Jant Shira. From Mist, Sailor and Captain of the Fleet. Send to the Filigree Spider, Scree. Please note-this envelope does NOT contain any money!!!”

“Oh, bugger!”

Just a few degrees colder, or another half hour out in the drifts, and Mist’s courier wouldn’t have reached me, and I wouldn’t be sitting here in a hot, weltering caravel.

I perched on the ladder between poop deck and half-deck, watching a severely freckled Serein do stretches below in the main area. In order to impress Mist, he had learned the names and actions of every part of the ship. He thrust his rapier through imaginary combatants who obviously didn’t stand a chance.

He took a break and trotted over, swinging the rapier. “Hello, Jant. You look a bit spaced out. What are you daydreaming about?”

“Darkling,” I said. “And Tern.”

“Don’t blame you. I’d miss her too.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Yeah. You’re very lucky. In fact one of my mates in the fyrd had her picture as a pinup. Just a tatty etching, of course, on the barracks wall. Tern is much, much more beautiful in real life. She’s stunning. I wish my mate knew that I’d met her…Jant, are you all right?”

“I will be, if you don’t ever speak to me again.”

Very well,” Lightning said to Wrenn. “I will spar with you. But I am only ranked sixth best with the rapier in the world, so a duel won’t last long before you win. Give me a few hours to organize these men”-he gestured at the main deck where the Petrel ’s sailors were hard at work-“to make a more interesting game for you. After all, Insects don’t play fair.”

“Agreed!” said Wrenn. He drew his sword and eagerly poked the point into the Insect-paper caulking between the deck planks.

Mist looked up from her ledger. “Good, Lightning. That’s better than you and Jant spending another night getting pissed on Micawater port in my office.”

“I blame Wrenn for not drinking…We had to finish the open bottles.”

“Ha. I have to leave you boys to it every midnight to check navigational readings against the stars; when I come back in you’re still carousing and reminiscing. Well, entertain my deckhands by all means, they need some leisure time, but you had better not injure any.”

Lightning leaned on the rail and nodded. He was enjoying the novelty. “Then here are the tournament rules: I’ll do my best to hit you. We’ll use buttoned rapiers and flat of the blade only. Every sailor you touch will play dead. Mist will arbitrate. The whole of Petrel is the arena.”

“And the Melowne, ” said Mist. “I’ll bring her alongside and rope her to Petrel to make a gam. Then I can spare up to one hundred sailors. How many do you want?”