Alexandra Duncan - Salvage

“But I’m coming back before the binding, right so? I’ll see you then.”

She shakes her head again. “Iri’s going in my place.” She brushes a stray lock from my forehead and tucks it behind my ear. “She’ll finish making you ready.”

I duck my head. “Right so.”

“One thing more.” Modrie Reller pulls a leather cord from her pocket. A pearly white data pendant, thin as paper, large around as the pad of my thumb, dangles from it. Raised circuitry forms a spiral at its center, like the whorl of a fingerprint. I gasp. Every girl receives such a pendant on her binding. It stores a record of her ancestry, back to the time of Candor and Saeleas. She wears it from that day on, even into death.

“Now, when you leave the ship, you’ll feel the Earth tugging at you, understand?” The pendant gleams in the low light as Modrie Reller knots it behind my neck. “You’ll go heavy, and your breath will come hard, but don’t fear. Your father and Jerej and all the men will keep you safe until you reach the other ship. You marking me?”

“Right so.” I finger the pendant. It rests cool on my collar bone.

“There now.” Modrie Reller smiles tightly. “You’re ready.”

I step forward to throw my arms around her, but she puts out a hand to stop me. She shakes her head and backs away through the arch to the women’s quarters without looking at me again. She has already begun the work of forgetting me.

M y father, Parastrata Cerrec, captain of the Parastrata, walks at the head of our procession. His red hair has thinned and faded yellow-white, but a hand-quilted patriarch’s stole drapes over his shoulders and beneath it, his green robes hang heavy with embroidery. The stole fans out behind him as he leads us across the wide cargo bay of our ship. Jerej follows him, cradling the wooden letterbox that holds my marriage contract. More men trail them, carting bride gifts—one of our pregnant nanny goats, the weighty bales of copper wire and fiberoptic cable that are our stock and trade, and a fighting cockerel. I carry a wide copper platter laden with eggcakes. For the first time in five turns, we have come to Bhutto station for the runend meet, where all the crewe ships join up for trade talks and marriages and treaty drawing.

I stand at the back of our party with the other women, feeling terrified and righteous and brave and pure, all at once. The wives with their armfuls of gifts—green cloth and heavy, coarse-edged paper—surround me. I feel as if I’m walking inside a velvet-lined box, the jewel of our procession. I wish my mother were here, wish she could hold my hand, wish she could see me grown to be a bride.

Once, when I was a smallgirl, our ship hit a solar storm on the way to a runend meet. The men herded all us women and smallones into the baling room, near the heart of the ship, and locked us in tight. But even with all the hulls and floors and doors between us and the Void, the ship bucked and shivered under out feet. My mother was there, sick with the virus that would soon take her. Her face, like mine always some darker than our crewemates’, had gone pale and gray, beaded with fever sweat. Modrie Reller wrapped Ma in a coarse homespun blanket. She left me and Jerej to watch over her, while she hurried off to help quiet the squalling infants. I hugged my knees and watched my mother’s eyes opening and closing while the ship shuddered all around me.

A bang shook the whole room, and the solar-fed lights sputtered out. Darkness swallowed us. Everyone screamed. My mother grasped my hand.

“Ava.” Her voice was raw. “Keep your eyes open.”

I blinked in the dark. After a moment, the dim glow of the ship’s phosphorous strips bloomed, edging everything in blueish-green. I made out the shadow of my mother. My breath quickened. She looked like a skull in the half light. I groped for Jerej’s hand. He yelped in blind fright when my fingers touched his, and I cried out in turn, setting him off again.

“Hsssh, hsssh.” My mother squeezed my hand.

The hull shook again. A tooth-aching grind rent the air. Jerej and I grabbed each other, and I tightened my grip on my mother.

“Calm, loves,” Ma said. “The Mercies will hold us. It’ll be over soon.”

Jerej’s small, chubby hand sweated in mine. His eyes stared wide and unblinking.

“Do you want a story?” my mother asked.

We both nodded.

“What say Saeleas and the Mercies?” my mother said. “Do you want that one?”

We’d heard it reckoned many times before, spoken soft and secret in the dark of the sleeping quarters by our mothers and modries and other women lulling their smallones to rest. Our father chanted it aloud on the Day of Apogee once each turn. Still, we nodded.

My mother closed her eyes.

Once, our greatmother Saeleas found herself alone aboard her husband Candor’s ship. He had gone groundways to seek water with his men, and while they walked the Earth, a ripping storm struck and breached the hull. Saeleas was pulled out into the Void, where there is naught of air or warmth or light. Long she fell before the Mercies caught her in their hands. Curious, they carried her through the veils of nebulae and seated her on their footstool, a star-seeded lily, all aglow with the warmth of the softest sun, and breathing out its own air to sustain her.

Please, she begged. Let me return to my husband’s side. I am sore needed there.

But the Mercies said, Nay, you shall be our pet, pretty one, and give more use through joy than ever you could at your husband’s beck.

Not so, said Saeleas. For who shall weave if I am gone?

Men may weave without you, said the Mercies.

But who shall feed the men and babes if I am gone? said Saeleas.

Men may feed themselves and babes without you, said the Mercies.

And who, said Saeleas, shall bear forth children if I am gone?

At this the Mercies fell silent, for here was a thing no man could do. And they saw Saeleas carried in her womb the great Neren, father of our race. They took pity and breathed their own life into her lungs, and carried her from their starry thrones home to the arms of her husband. Thus our race was saved by the grace of the Mercies. So do we honor them, for our life is ever in their hands.

“So you see,” my mother said, her a whisper. “You see the worth of a woman, Ava.” Her eyes rolled back and she let free a cant from our holy song, the Word of the Sky, up into the dark.

“. . . like copper sails to trap the sun’s heat.

Cover us all, she does . . .”

-

“Ma, please. . .”

“. . . tame the stars’ fury and channel life.”

“Hsssh, Ma. Everyone will hear.” I swung my head to make sure none of the other wives had heard her singing. But no. They were too terrored by the storm to notice.

I pinned Jerej with a look. “You won’t tell, will you?” I whispered. “You won’t tell she sang?”

Jerej shook his head.

“Swear it?”

Jerej’s pale cheeks flushed. He nodded.

I breathed out. Even small as I was, I knew my ma shouldn’t be singing the Word out loud. She might call down ship strippers or some other bad matter on us, like Mikim the Wayward from our tales. Or worse, the Mercies might choose not to bring us through the storm after all.

My mother mumbled on, quieter, picking up the song further down the line. “Women of the air, stay aloft . . .”