Steph Swainston - No Present Like Time

Wrenn and I remained quiet. The thought that Mist was failing filled the cabin with despondency. She stretched her arm across the table and neatly caught a brass protractor as it slid past. “Can Lightning draw a bow?”

“He says so.”

“Can you fly in this weather?”

“If I can get above the clouds. Otherwise the rain-”

“Good.” She beckoned me to the chart and stroked her finger along some ruled pencil lines. “Here’s your direction from our current position and we are making just over a kilometer an hour so we’ll be at this point by the time you return. If Gio reached Capharnaum at the rate I watched him leave Awndyn, he’ll have been on Tris a fortnight. We’ll have to catch him there.” She sighed and continued almost in a daydream, “When Gio was Serein, I liked the man, I can’t pretend otherwise. We were friends for three hundred years of campaigning. He plays to his strengths so he’ll stay ashore. Aye, I recognize that Zascai extreme desperation; they drive themselves so far and so pitilessly they can’t survive. There but for San’s favor go I. Right. I admit I don’t want to deal with Gio on dry land, but I have no choice. I’ll let Lightning and Serein take their turn.

“We’re coming up on Tris in the next day or so. See? Scout around, Comet, and bring us some intelligence.”

I memorized the calculation and said to Wrenn, “Don’t worry, there’s only one day left.”

“Aye, go back to training,” Mist gibed him. “I want you as keen as a harpooner when I set you on Gio. This surf will break straight onto the rocks. I’m lucky that the Capharnai built such an imposing harbor wall for their piffling little canoes.”

The sky and sea were so overcast that the very light was gray. Cloud lowered to liquefy and make the ocean. The Petrel was always the center of a dull opaque sphere, half-filled with thrashing water. Great spirals of spitty white foam went around and around on the sea’s surface.

Waves thumped on the bow and resonated through the whole ship, playing her like a drum. She crashed down, the displaced water spurted up over the figurehead and pattered on the foredeck. Half a meter of white spray stood solid on top of the waves, where raindrops were bouncing back off. Their power smoothed the waves, filled the troughs-the sea was white as a snow field. Spume blew off the wave tops. I was inhaling it; the air was full of salt.

I shrugged my leather coat on over three layers of T-shirts, and shoved my hair down the collar. I drank a mug of hot reconstituted soup with stale biscuit broken into it. Then I set off and climbed unevenly, beating painfully against gusts that came from every direction. Behind me rain fell as a slanting gray strip from a single patch of cloud onto the heeling caravel.

Flickering lightning illuminated the clouds from within. I zigzagged up, terrified of it. I beat a path with great difficulty through the wind, already waterlogged by raindrops as big as snowflakes.

I disappeared into the cloud base and continued climbing calmly to avoid disorientation. Rain streamed down my coat and cold wisps whipped past my face.

I emerged, pulling up shreds of cloud, into a most perfect, tranquil world-with a population of one. The sky above was a uniform winter blue, a bright sun shone on complete cloud cover beneath me like a second, motionless ocean. Its wan surface was hollowed and carded into static points like a blanket of wool. The light was so brilliant it reminded me of the glare on the Darkling glaciers.

I breathed deeply in the thin air. Directly ahead cumulo-stratus lapped around the summit of Tris’s mountain, its charcoal and olive colors muted with distance. Farther away the silhouette tip of the second island in the archipelago poked through the cloud. They were like islands in the sky.

I held my wings out in a long shallow glide. On the ground I never had freedom from responsibility, from people, freedom from drugs. This was the ultimate release. Only the dull and earthbound sit in hulking carracks, the humid forest. They will never understand my world because I am the Messenger and I have all this air.

The clouds’ surface sped away under me. While Stormy Petrel and Capharnaum town labored under the storm, the setting sun cast the colors of northern lights over my private sea. Meringue cloud turned opalescent blue, pale orange and rose pink; the mountain’s shadow lengthened. I loved the uninhabited mountain. The splendor of Tris from my unique perspective filled me with elation, but I wished that I could show it to Tern. I would paint it in words for her if we were ever snug in bed together again.

Ireached the mountain’s slope after nightfall. The gale concealed my wings’ noise, so I descended through the clouds to Capharnaum and circled at height trying to discern detail. It hadn’t rained on Tris; the main boulevard and its rotunda were lit but the surrounding streets were completely dark. A few people stood by the crossroads. A group of men walked toward them, carrying lanterns and some sort of polearm. The loiterers started up, slouched downhill toward the harbor and filed into a wine shop, leaving the paved street empty. From the foot of the Amarot crag, a bell pealed ten strokes, and all was silent.

I sailed over the Amarot, seeing its walls lit flame yellow. About a thousand men were bivouacking on the mosaic between the Senate House and the library. They were Gio’s rebels and they had lit a cooking fire right on Alyss’s face. The aroma of goose fat rose up to me. Real food! God, I wanted some of that meat.

Shadows ten times life-size reared and lunged on the Senate House columns as they dipped tin mugs and tarred horn cups into an enormous keg of rum and passed them around. Dirty faces reddened by the firelight jeered and laughed. Thousands of hours of effort had been poured into constructing the mosaic, and now Gio’s thugs were trashing it.

The night seemed to jump darker by degrees, making me blink; my eyes were adjusting all the time. I made out a small building perched on the cliff edge behind the Senate House. A shape as fat as Cinna waddled out of the dark entrance, buttoning his fly. I bent back my wings to descend. Yes, it was Cinna, appearing like a coagulation of all the lard in the Fourlands.

He sauntered, his hands deep in his pockets. I swung into a standing position and dropped to the ground behind him. Cinna halted in his tracks and turned around very slowly. He said, “I’m not wanking. I’m just keeping my hands warm.”

“Huh? Shut up and follow me.”

I ran, hugging close against the library wall, to the unlit colonnade that joined the library to the Senate House. I slunk inside and beckoned to Cinna. He reeled; his peacoat was spotted with rum. I grabbed his lapels and positioned him squarely behind one of the columns where he stood less chance of being seen, although he overlapped it on both sides. His red nose was darker than his shocked white expression. Drops of sweat detached from his shiny forehead and rolled down puffed-out cheeks.

I drew the ice axe from the back of my belt and whispered, “If you cry out I’ll kill you.” Cinna gave me a beseeching look, wiped his palms on his knees and pointed at the ground. I let him sit down and lean against the column. I hunkered down too, in shadow and well out of sight.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Quickly. Why is Capharnaum so dark? The streets are deserted and a bell was tolling. I saw men loitering; there was nothing threatening about Capharnaum before. What’s Gio done to them?”

Cinna’s frightened whisper was so low I scarcely heard it. “You saw that, Messenger? Yes, the patrol just called for the next watch. They’re not fyrd-the Senate appointed men to maintain the curfew and guard the houses.”