Steph Swainston - No Present Like Time

The mountaintop was not a sheer arête as in Darkling-it didn’t come to a point. It was a smooth, arid ridge that leaned over into a big bowl-shaped hollow not visible from sea level. It was veiled with chutes of small gray stones. Clouds formed on the edge of the bowl and blew eastward.

That side of the island looked uninhabited, although it was too far to see any detail. Decaying cracks split the sheer sea cliffs, a drop of at least three hundred meters around which white birds swirled and dived. The black, denticulate reefs below them were like a half-submerged wolf’s jawbone; churning water smashed over the narrow serrated molars and canine points. I determined to warn Mist. But calm and remote, far off in the eastern ocean, two other peaks of smaller islets emerged in a line.

Tris was fresh, quiet and, it seemed to me, content. My duty to bring news of the Empire to the island will probably be the most important task I will ever have as Messenger.

I winged back to the ships, which were still scudding stoically toward Tris. The weak wind did not affect the enormous rollers they rode. Petrel ’s deck rose up to my feet as I landed next to Mist. “Tris is an archipelago,” I said. “I flew right over; there are more islands on the other side.”

“Did anyone see you?” she demanded.

“No. I saw ladies in smocks selling food from the porches of townhouses and boys drying green fishing nets on the harbor wall, but not one of the Capharnai saw me,” I said with dignity, coining an Awian word.

“When we arrive you must not fly. I don’t want them to know; I mean, you’ll only frighten them. Did you see any vessels other than canoes?”

“Don’t think so…”

“What about signs of Insects? Any Walls? Paperlands?”

“No.”

“Fortresses?” Lightning asked. “Bastions? Châteaus?”

“It’s too big,” I said defensively. “You have to see for yourself. There are plantations, vineyards, and goats on the mountainside.”

“Typical Jant, always thinking about sex,” Mist smiled, looking into the distance. A crosswind tangled her fine hair. The waves were reflected on the ships’ sides as a moving mesh of light.

I returned to the Melowne in time to hear Fulmer complaining. The billows tossed the caravel every direction but forward. She ran headlong down a steep wave and pitched into the next rising roller. Puffs of spray burst off her keel and splattered back. We went up and down, up and down vertically on an irregular seesaw. Wrenn and I retreated to the poop deck.

Fulmer leaned against the wheel’s kicks. He was having a lot of trouble steering. Melowne jerked sideways every time she struck and wrenched the wheel from his hands. The broad ship had a massive drag; he couldn’t keep her from sliding aslant into the troughs of the swell. “Damn it,” he wheezed. “Mist will just have to slow down for us, yes? Shit, she makes it look effortless. Get the flying sails in. Sea anchor back there and see if I can keep her prow half as straight as Petrel.”

From the poop deck we could see the back of Fulmer’s head. Not a brown hair was out of place. As usual, and against all the odds, he looked pristine, still a court dandy three thousand, eight hundred kilometers from Queen Eleonora’s entourage. Fulmer’s genteel manner impressed me until I remembered that he had known about the Insect even before we set sail, and it was he who had been feeding it bones all this time.

Wrenn scrutinized the horizon. “I can see it! I can see a tiny island!”

“In the next couple of hours you’ll find it is huge.”

Up to the deck came barrels of wine, and bar silver was stacked in quadrilaterals. A forest of colorful pennants unfurled. As Tris filled our vision, the evergreen and pumice shore proceeding past, unbridled excitement overcame the crews. Mist and Fulmer found it difficult to keep the sailors working; men stared and pointed at houses, vineyards, the palace on the crag. They waved at tanned Capharnai fishermen in the first canoes.

Mist brought the ships in. She yelled commands to her crew, keeping them moving. I heard her from the Melowne three ship lengths behind; the tension in her voice made me nervous. In contrast, Fulmer gave his orders in a quiet, assured style, politely addressing the hands. They copied every movement of the Petrel ’s men, furling the sails in completely synchronized maneuvers. Fulmer’s ship sailed slick as fiddly clockwork in the Stormy Petrel’s wake.

The harbor walls pincered together on our left and right and formed a strait about five hundred meters wide. Dead center of the channel was a flat-topped rock with a lighthouse on it. It towered above us, one hundred meters high, built on a square base half the Petrel ’s length. As we glided past, the sailors became even more frantic. At first I assumed they were shocked by the lighthouse’s great height, which was certainly surprising considering that the Trisians only have canoes. Then I realized they were pointing at the fire reflector: it was made of polished gold. The fittings of the beacon were all solid gold.

Fulmer called, “Jant, do you see?”

“Yes, I do!”

“It’s the most glorious thing I’ve ever seen.”

I muttered to Wrenn, “What I don’t like is the fact Mist never mentioned it before.”

I wore my purple scarf wrapped around my waist as a cummerbund, stripy black and white leggings under cut-off denim shorts. A black kerchief kept back all my locks and albatross feathers. The swell was making Wrenn look green but he was determined to watch the tumult on the main deck. He clung onto a network of ropes. “It’s all right to lean on the deadeyes. Sailors before the mast are going to reef the mainsail now, look.”

“Fascinating…”

“And lower it on parr-”

“Oh, shut up!”

He stared forward at the bow, which pointed like a pike at the town. “Do you think there are ladies in Capharnaum?” he asked.

I glanced at him. “Well, obviously.”

“No. Whores, I mean.”

“Oh. That kind of lady. They’re human, well, they look it to me,” I regarded my fingernails in a secretarial gesture. “So they’ll have wine, women and song.”

As we crossed the harbor our ships fell under the lee of the mountain. The lagoon’s surface was mirror-still; it reflected Petrel and Melowne’s images from waterline to masthead. Their sails went slack and they coasted in very slowly indeed, on the last of their momentum. Fulmer ordered the last sails furled and I looked up to see clear blue sky between the masts for the first time in three months.

Trisian men, women and children poured out of the town’s façade and rushed to form a crowd on the sea wall and all along the corniche. The men’s clothes looked quite plain-white or beige linen or silk tunics with colored borders, and loose trousers underneath. Some of the girls wore pastel-dyed stoles over their double-layer dresses but none of their garments looked embroidered or rich.

Men pushed out dark wood canoes and jumped in, paddling toward us. The canoes had outriggers; blue and white eyes were painted on their prows. They moved very swiftly and were soon clustered around our hull. The Trisians shouted and pointed, held up all kinds of food and objects. Dozens of hands reached to the portholes, waving spiny fruit, enormous seeds, stoppered jars, dead fish on skewers, silver flasks. Our sailors hung over the railings eagerly offering anything to hand on the deck. They passed or threw down belaying pins, hatchets and belt buckles, the plumb line from the bow.

Fulmer’s composure broke. He yelled, “No trading! Stop it, fools, before you give them your vests and pants! No barter, till Mist gives the word! Hacilith law and punishment applies from now on.”