Стивен Бакстер - The Good New Stuff

That silences questions for awhile.

We get some good drinks of water and relieve ourselves, and maybe she prays to her deities, I don't know. Then we raise our pineapple-green sail, and we are off.

She chatters awhile about school. I like listening to her chatter. When it gets hot at midday, I have her spread my cloak across the prow and crawl into the shade underneath it. I stay with the tiller and wish for a hat. I've been browned by the sun, but the light off the green water is blinding and bright, and my nose suffers.

She sleeps during the heat of the day, and I nod. We are headed for a promontory which marks where we cut across the strait. In the afternoon, we have some bruised boxfruit out of my pack, which helps our thirst a bit. The way west is suddenly blocked by a spit of land; if Chalcey's drawing can be trusted, that's our promontory. Chalcey's chart indicates that it's not good to go ashore here, otherwise I'd stop for fresh water. We head for open sea, and I pray that the breeze holds up. I'm stiff, and tacking accurately all the way across is probably beyond my navigational skills.

I'm thirsty; Chalcey must be, too. She doesn't complain, but she gets quiet. The farther we go into the strait, the smaller the land behind us gets; the smaller the land, the quieter she gets. Once I ask her what the crossing was like when she came to live with her uncle. "It was a big boat," is all she'll say.

I'm light-headed from sun and thirst and fever by the time evening comes, and the cool is a relief. The sun goes down with the sudden swiftness of the south. I dig the pigeon's egg dumplings out of my pack, but they're too salty and just make me thirstier. Chalcey is hungry, though, and eats hers and half of mine.

"Jahn?" she says.

"Yes?"

"The Cousins— why do they call them that?"

"Because we are all kin," I say. "It is like in my home, when a place gets too big, and there isn't enough land to let all the stabos graze, part of the kin go somewhere else, and start a new home. Our many times elders were the Cousins. The stars are like islands for them. Some came here to live, but there was a war and the ships no longer came, and our elders' ships grew too old, and we forgot about the Cousins except for stories. Now they have found us again."

"And they help us?" she asks.

"Not really," I say. "They help the high-ons, mostly."

"What are 'high-ons'?" she asks. Southern doesn't have a word for high-ons, so I always just use the two southern words.

"High-ons, the old men who run things and have silver. Or the guilds, they are like high-ons."

"Were you a high-on?" she asks.

I laugh, which hurts my side. "No, littleheart," I say. "I am the unlucky child of unlucky parents. They believed that some of the Cousins would help us, would teach us. But the high-ons, they don't like it if anyone else has strength. So they sent an army and killed my kin. Things were better before the Cousins came."

"The Order says that the Cousins are good; they bring gifts."

"We pay for those gifts," I say. "With craken dye and ore and land. And with our own ways. Anywhere the Cousins come, things get bad."

It gets darker. Chalcey wraps herself in my cloak, and I hunch over the tiller. It isn't that the boat needs much sailing; there's a light wind and the sea is blessedly calm (someone seems to favor us, despite our attack on the green-robed boy to get this boat), but the boat is too small for me to go anywhere else, so I sit at the tiller.

The spray keeps the back of my left shoulder damp, and the breeze seems to leach the warmth out of me. My teeth start chattering.

"Chalcey?"

"What?" she murmurs sleepily from the prow.

"I am feeling a bit under, littleheart. Do you think you could sit with me and we could share the cloak?"

I can feel her hesitation in the dark. She's afraid of me, and that pains me. It's funny, too, considering. "I don't want anything other than warmth," I say gently.

She feels her way slowly from the prow. "It's your cloak," she says, "you can have it if you want."

"I think we can share it," I say. "Sit next to me, the tiller will be between us, and you can lean against me and sleep."

Gingerly, she sits down next to me, the boat rocking gently with her movements, and throws the cloak around our shoulders. She touches my arm on the tiller and jerks back. "You're hot," she says. Then she surprises me by touching my forehead. "You have a fever!"

"Don't worry about it," I say, oddly embarrassed. "Just sit here." She curls against me, and, after a few minutes, she leans her head on my shoulder. Her hair smells sweet. It's soothing to have her there. I try to keep the constellation southerners call the Crown to my right.

"How old are you?" she asks.

"Thirty-one," I say.

"That's not so old."

I laugh.

"Well," she is defensive, "you have white hair, but your face isn't old."

Sometimes I feel very old, and never more than now.

I jerk awake from scattered dreams of being back on Barok's boat. It's dawn. Chalcey stirs against my shoulder and settles again. I think about the sea, about our journey. Celestial navigation is not my strong point; I hope we haven't drifted too much. I hope that Chalcey's chart is good, and I wonder how much Barok will get paid for a boat with a chart carved on it, even if the chart isn't very good, but blue flames lick the chart, and I'm on Barok's boat again….

I jerk awake. My fever feels low; because it's morning, I'm certain. I try to open my pack without disturbing Chalcey, but she's asleep against my right shoulder, and I'm awkward with my left hand and my side is stiff, so after a moment she straightens up. We have five boxfruit left, so we split one. I'm too thirsty for red peanuts, but Chalcey eats a few.

As the sun climbs, so does my fever, and I start dreaming even when my eyes are open. At one point, Trevin is in the boat with us, sitting there in his blue jerkin with the gray fur low on the shoulders, and I must be talking to him, because Chalcey says, "Who is Trevin?"

I blink and lean over the side and splash cold water on my sunburned face. When I sit up, I'm dizzy from the blood rushing to my head, but I know where I am. "Trevin was a friend," I say. "He's dead now."

"Oh," she says, and adds, with the callousness of youth, "How did he die?"

How did Trevin die? I have to think. "The flux," I say. "We were marching to Bashtoy, we were retreating, Trevin and I had decided to fight against Scalthalos High-on since he'd burned out Sckarline. It was winter, and we didn't have much to eat, and the people who got sick, many of them died." I add, "I joined the fight because of Trevin." I don't add, "I was in love."

When it gets hot, Chalcey soaks her veil in water and covers my head with it. I clutch the tiller. It seems that I am not sailing the boat so much as it is sailing me. She doles out the boxfruit, too, peeling them and splitting the purple segments.

"I think," she says, "that maybe I should look at your side."

"No," I say.

"Don't worry," she says, moving toward me in the boat.

"No," I snap.

"I could put some cool seawater on it," she says. "Saltwater is good for an injury."

"I don't take off my shirt," I say. I'm irrational and I know it, but I'm not going to take off my shirt. Not when someone is around. We were finally in Bashtoy and almost everyone I knew was dead, and the MilitiaMaster said, "Boy, what's your name?" and I didn't know that he was talking to me. "Boy!" he shouted, "what's your name!" and I stuttered "Jahn, sir." "We'll call you Jahn-the-clever," he said, "you're in my group now," and the others laughed, and after that I was Jahn-the-clever until they discovered that I was really clever, but I still wasn't going to take off my shirt.