Steph Swainston - No Present Like Time

Mist piled extra sail on the Petrel and swept ahead as if she was abandoning us. Fulmer said, “Never trust a woman who has a point to prove. Yes? All hands to witness punishment!”

Jant refused to attend; he said it was stupid and brutal. He said that only Zascai exercise power so crudely and severely, but then only Zascai need to. He’s been acting even more weirdly than usual, he keeps saying how vulnerable our cobbled-together hollow ships would be, should any sea monsters actually exist.

The thief was bound, wrists and ankles. He begged and struggled all the time. He was thin as a lath, a weather-beaten man from Addald Island off the Ghallain Cape. I was sorry his life had to end this way when he had seen so much, navigated the storms of Cape Brattice on the southern tip of Morenzia, Tombolo and Teron Islands off Awia, the reef of Grass Isle, and the wild seas around the empty coast of the Neither Bight. He was brave enough even to have anchored in the rending whirlpools of the Awndyn Corriwreckan.

Two of Fulmer’s sailors passed a rope across the bow and paid out line until the loop dragged in the water. They each held it at their waists and walked the loop down under the ship to the main deck.

One end was made into a noose and the man’s ankles fitted through it. He kicked, both legs together, and screamed for mercy so horribly every man on the Melowne was chilled to the bone.

They picked him up and threw him over the side like a parcel. He splashed in, curled fetally, the loose rope snaked about him in the water. He bobbed to the surface, waggling his head and gasped, screamed.

Fulmer gave the order and a team pulled the other end of the rope that ran under the hull. The Plainslander’s yells cut short as it tightened and he sank under. His body was drawn down a long way, still thrashing and bubbles rising all around. He disappeared from view.

I heard knocks as his body scraped over the rough, barnacled hull. Blood swirled up, it looked black. I hoped that he had exhaled the air from his lungs and breathed brine in before the scraping started.

The wet rope coiled onto the deck, water ran from the hands of the men pulling it in. Behind them a team of men paid the dry rope out. Halfway through, Fulmer wanted to stop the teams and offer each man a tot of rum, leaving the body under the boat while they drank Queen Eleonora’s health. But the rope snapped. It went slack. Fulmer said, “Lads, reel him in, yes?”

The men pulled the rope up fast, hand over hand. They dragged a pale pink and shredded mass to the surface. The cable hadn’t broken, his body had. His arms were worn through, nothing was left of them. The noose had protected his ankles and feet but his legs were bare to the bone. Tiny waterlogged pieces of muscle tissue floated off, into the depths as fish food.

I saw his face had gone, just eyeballs in a fleshy cranium. His back teeth showed in the gums. Tufts of wet gray hair still stuck to the skull. His back was flayed.

This wet skull on a spinal column dropped to the deck. Fulmer made sure every man of his crew saw it before they washed it overboard.

Mist is still furious, and rightly so. I hope I live till god-comes-back, but if I die, I swear it will be by steel or chitin, and not by Morenzian law.

I was in my cabin, putting the finishing touches to A History of Tris, when the Petrel raised a series of flags. Mist was asking Wrenn and me to come across for a meeting. I found Wrenn talking uneasily to Fulmer. We were all three thinking of the mess she had made of diplomacy with Tris, although only I had witnessed the worst of it. Fulmer said, subdued, “She’s making preparations for landing. We want to avoid pirate vessels as we cross the trade routes, yes?”

I flew and reached the Petrel long before Wrenn’s boat rowed over the gently purling water. “It’s July the tenth,” Mist said. “I’m confident that sometime today we’ll have sight of the Fourlands. Watch for the coast, it’s heartwarming to see it appearing. It feels like the first time a newborn babe is placed in your arms.”

I sipped water that was faintly brackish, owing to the habit of refilling seawater ballast casks with drinking water. Mist watched the big, gimballed compass in the binnacle dipping as if it was dowsing for land. The morning sky was a slightly powdery pale blue that meant it was going to be a hot day. The haze had burned off by mid-morning and the temperature was so intolerable that I climbed the rigging and clung there, a black-clad starfish in a giant net, with my wings spread as a shade. When I opened my eyes the bright world was tainted blue.

Thick white salt dried on the stern carvings, encrusting them like the lumps of salt that fyrd throw into trapping ponds to immobilize Insects. It smelled as dirty as flotsam; I could practically hear it crystalizing.

Whale fins gnomoned all over the ocean. Seagulls trapezed in the sky. We came in slow. The lookout in the Petrel ’s crow’s nest used his own feather as a plectrum to strum his guitar. He gave a false shout of “Land!” twice and Mist snarled that if he did it again she would slice his tongue out and fly it as a pennant. It must be her time of the month. There were tiny glossy plaques of severe suntan on her shoulders. A sweat sheen covered the golden-brown skin above her breasts, startling with her cream clothes. She had cut her platinum hair short and ruffled like dandelion fluff. She squinted at the sun glare and when she relaxed the folds at the edges of her eyes showed white.

Evening set in, and dry, porous ship’s biscuits were dealt out among the crew. Heat was radiating back out of my sunburned skin to fill the cool air. A thin black line began to rise on the horizon, becoming a part of the night sky where there were no stars, but nobody dared say anything until Wrenn strolled over and said, “I might have heatstroke, or is that land?”

“Aye, that is land,” Mist admitted, tiredly. She raised her voice. “Land, ho! We’re home, boys! Send a signal to Master Fulmer.”

The Melowne ’s sailors read the series of flags. They took up the shout and jubilation broke out all over the ship, in the topgallants and below in the galley. From the Petrel’s half-deck I heard them shouting and cheering Mist. We had been on our own so far from anywhere that sighting the Cobalt coast was like seeing an old friend. We surveyed it with unbridled joy but, because we had been self-sufficient for three months, with slight trepidation.

“Drinks all around,” I said.

“Order!” Mist snapped. “We return as we left. Clear the decks shipshape and Sute fashion. Wait till you have your feet on dry land before howling with your hounds’ tongues, or by god I’ll separate them from you now.”

I was obsessively trying to judge the distance to the coast-the moment that I could safely fly back. I wanted to travel under my own power, at last! More important, I had to catch up on six months’ worth of news. I was desperate to know the latest, and even more keen-as a Messenger should be-to give San my report of Tris. I was also determined to face Tern and demand the truth from her about Tornado.

Mist observed me hopping from foot to foot at the prow. She collapsed her telescope back into its casing with a snap. “You want to fly?” she asked.

“I need to know the news.”

“Please don’t leave us. I need you to deliver my account of Tris to San. I’ve just finished writing it.”

“I intend to give my own; it’s Comet’s duty.”

Mist scratched her fluffy head. “Since when were you objective, Shira? You and your stupid eyeshadow.”

“It’s not eyeshadow it’s late nights. Look, Ata, I’ll come straight back. I only want to buy a newspaper.”