Steph Swainston - No Present Like Time

I wished that people could see and believe my exploits in the Shift. I folded my arms tightly; my sharp fingernails dug into my biceps. I rocked forward. “It hurts, it hurts. I don’t want to do the fast cure…I can’t kick now. The Empire needs me.”

“You mus’ have some now because you’re going into shock. I don’ wan’ two Eszai in life-threa’ening states. Then I ration you, one dose a day, oral no’ intravenous, until I have chance to straigh’en you ou’. I can guess a’ t’ difficulty of injec’ing on a moving ship in a tempes’.”

I nodded, relieved to submit to Rayne’s regime. She would look after me. “It’s a deal.”

She held out a hand for my nearly empty hip flask. The whorls on her fingertips were worn smooth through age and she had cured the warts, leaving small brown circles. I forced myself to open my fist a finger at a time and drop the bottle.

“Well done, Jant,” she said approvingly.

Hopelessness washed through me; dread filled me. I gave her a look that would have been puppy-dog if my eyes hadn’t been so wildcat. A few minutes later I was rewarded with Rayne’s confident grip on my bare arm, and a flick of her finger as she pushed the needle into the crook of my elbow. I felt no pain; Rayne was good. Unlike me she left no time for a red wisp of blood to spring into the syringe and dissipate, be sucked back with the drug. She just pushed the plunger down efficiently. So I got half of the ritual that I so badly craved. She shook her head, shaking her wattles like a bantam. I lost focus of her concerned face. I may look ill but it’s beautiful in here. I breathed a week of strife out in one sigh; sleep at last.

Ispent the next four days delivering communications. Governor Swallow could only find fifty Select Fyrd whom she could vouch had no sympathy with the rebels, and double that number of reliable General Fyrd. Mist employed a crew but could only find basic supplies, poor quality and meager quantity: salt fish, three hundred barrels of flour bulked out with ground peas.

Mist came to the deck where I was supervising the fyrd carrying baskets of crossbow bolts up the gangplank. She said, “Make them work faster. Gio’s ships left during the night and they’re already out of sight.”

“How many ships?” I asked.

“Three. Well, he took four carracks. Three of them, Pavonine, Cuculine and Stramash, sailed right out through the overfalls at slack water. I don’t know the lead skipper, but he’s a capable navigator. Gio’s braving heavy seas-force-ten gales! But no one will follow him since the Demoiselle Crane capsized. I altered the harbor coordinates in the logbook before I so carelessly let a deckhand steal it.” She laughed with asperity. “The Demoiselle Crane hit the Corriwreckan overfalls at flood tide, one A.M. exactly.”

Her thin-lipped expression was unsettling. I shuddered, as an echo of my sea-fear returned.

The loading continued night and day under Mist’s impatient gaze, but it took a week before the stevedores’ footsteps stopped resounding up and down Petrel ’s ladders and in the hold. The gale-force wind filled the sails and hauled us forward, and we began to crash through the storming seas outside the harbor. I retreated below to tell Lightning the news.

Itook the first turn to watch over Lightning. When awake, he refused to allow the pain to affect him and was as courteous lying in the sickbay as in his palace. I wished that I had his self-assurance, but I don’t have the security that comes from never questioning my place in the world. Rhydanne always see my wings and flatlanders see my cat eyes.

Because wolves track lonely boys, I was hunted out of Darkling in the melt season of the year I later calculated to be eighteen-ten. I was unaware that the high airstreams would carry me to the biggest city of hungry rats, bewildering to a mountain child, and proving nearly impossible to escape. Until I joined the Circle I was always pushed on, only ever seeking to get away from the places in which I was trapped. I became so used to defending myself that in the Hacilith chemist’s shop, when I began to feel I belonged, my behavior left me ruined and homeless again.

After the avalanche I ran down from the devastated valley keeping Mhor Darkling’s colossal crags on my right, onto the plateau and warily toward the pueblo. I sneaked into the storeroom of the distillery, desperate to find food, filthy and tottering from exhaustion. I had not run such a long distance on my own before.

I descended a gravel and damp matting slope into the dark cellar and splashed onto a stone floor. It was covered with a good six centimeters of standing water. Drops ran down the dank walls and fell from the ceiling, plinking rhythmically. This was so wrong. Did anyone know the store was flooded?

It was like creeping into a cave. The cellar was stifling with the smell of pounded meat; the freeze-dried pemmican had become a sodden, slimy mass. But I had grown up with the smells of pelts drying and antler soaked in urine to soften it for carving, brown fat spitting on a cooking fire of burning bones, the reek of split long bones boiling to make grease.

I reached up and pulled down one of the baskets of dried berries that were stacked in piles of five. Rhydanne count in base five because it is warmer to keep one hand in a mitten. Besides, five of anything is a lot in the mountains. I ate an entire basketful of bilberries and cloudberries. Then I scooped water from the floor and lapped it out of my cupped hands until I was satiated.

Throughout my childhood in Darkling, I mainly ate meat. So when I reached the city I lived by stealing sizzling burgers from market stalls, which was as near to meat as I could find. When I figured out what fruit was, and how to peel it, I changed to pilfering apples and oranges, loving the intense sweetness, although to start with they gave me indigestion. The first words of Morenzian I learned were the tradesmen’s cries and curses.

I crept back to the distilling room and checked that it was deserted. I dashed out of the stone doorway, left the pueblo and jogged onto the plateau, while biting grit from under my nails. The dull sun shone a white pathway in the overcast sky. A skinning wind blew from the direction of Scree gorge, carrying the roar of the meltwater torrent and bobbing the sparse heather patches. Thick snow lay in hummocks everywhere, receding from dashes of black rock. Muddy blots in the distance were chamois, wandering along the vast plateau. Above them ancient glacier scratches scored the distant cliffs, as if in desperation.

Two Rhydanne sprang out in front of me. I dodged with a cry but they blocked my path. They were adults, I was as tall as them but not as strong. I didn’t know the man’s name but I knew his reputation. Being the area’s fastest runner, he had caught a lot of women and lorded it over the other men. He had married and keenly defended a very desirable fellow hunter, who stood beside him.

A handful of condor feathers quivered in her long matted hair; it was dried back with ochre paste and red daubs stained the hair roots on her forehead. She had a pierced bear-canine necklace, and wolverine claws strung on the babiche lacings of her tasseled puma-beige breeches. She looked old, perhaps thirty-five. They both had knives on their belts and armfuls of plain bangles, prized possessions that confirmed their status. As the mountains grow, earthquakes and erosion sometimes uncover veins of Darkling silver that Rhydanne beat into jewelry.

These hunters were out of their territory, which I knew to be on the other side of the aiguille-lined ridge called the Raikes. They were not at all impressed by the farouche shock-headed boy who, having summed them up, was trying to flee. They strode around me. I couldn’t dash between them; I was trapped.