Lindsay Buroker - Enigma

Rias paused and regarded her, one hand gripping a beam above his head, the other on the pump. “Does it have to make sense?”

“What?” Tikaya’s first thought was that he referenced her education, but then she remembered her earlier sentence. “Well, I’d think so. The history with which I’m familiar tells us the flutes always tell an old Nurian tale, and that presumes certain narrative traditions of chronological ordering, rising conflict, etcetera, etcetera. Some of their ancient narrative poems were on the quirky side, but-oh!” A new thought rushed into her mind, surprising her into dropping the flute. Caught in the moment, she didn’t rush to retrieve it, priceless artifact or not. “Dear Akahe, could that be it?”

“Hm?” Rias plucked up the flute before it rolled into the water.

“A poem. No a rhyme . There are countless silly Nurian nursery rhymes about animals and hunting, and they make about as much sense as… well, they’re for teaching children language by using repetition and-” Tikaya stopped, as an old nursery rhyme floated into her thoughts. She pointed at the flute. “I’m going to need that.”

“Of course.” Rias handed her the artifact, an amused half-smile tugging at one corner of his mouth, and went back to work.

“Cavorting banyan sprites,” Tikaya muttered a minute later as she snapped the last puzzle segment into place. “Could that be it? A pictographic representation of The Lion, the Hunter, and the Trap? That title rhymes in Nurian, by the way.”

“Naturally,” Rias said.

Tikaya lifted the flute to her lips and played a scale. As the notes filled the bilge room, she closed her eyes and tried to detect an otherworldly influence to the sounds. If there was one, her lack of sensitivity kept her from sensing it.

“Did it work?” Rias asked.

“I’m not sure. I need to talk to that boy again. It is the first pattern I’ve tried that’s made sense. Er, not made sense as it were.” Tikaya hopped to her feet, intending to hunt down Garchee.

“Good.” Rias gave her a parting salute.

Tikaya paused and eyed him. “How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“You have a knack for coming up with the solution, even when it has nothing to do with your field of expertise.”

Rias pressed a hand to his chest. “ I didn’t come up with the solution. You did.”

“But it was your question that sparked my idea. And this isn’t the first time things have worked out that way.”

Rias chuckled. “All those years when I was a captain and then an admiral, do you know what I did when we were in some tricky situation and I needed to come up with a solution for a problem?”

“You mean the solutions didn’t simply flow into your brain as gifts from the gods? Or, I suppose, Turgonians would thank their ancestors.”

“Alas, it doesn’t work that way. Early in my command days, I gathered the officers and ask for opinions, but I realized we’d all come through the same training system and all had similar thoughts. The real brilliance came when I started chatting with the uneducated firemen in the boiler room.”

Tikaya studied his eyes, searching for a mischievous twinkle that would suggest he was teasing her, but she didn’t spot it. “You’re serious?”

“Absolutely. Nine times out of ten, the conversations wouldn’t go anywhere, but once in a while some grunt who’d been a farmer before joining up would tell a story of how he had, for example, carved wooden owls to keep birds out of the berry patch, and that would give me an idea. In that case, I figured out a way for my ship to appear to be in multiple places at once to protect several vulnerable targets along the coast until reinforcements arrived.” Rias gave a self-effacing shrug. “I got a medal for that one.”

“So… you’re the equivalent of a uneducated grunt in the boiler room for me?”

The half-smile returned as he regarded the pump and his sweat-dampened clothing. “Apropos, don’t you think?”

“All hands on deck!” came a cry from somewhere above.

Footlockers thumped and hatches banged open and shut.

“I might not have time to talk to the boy after all,” Tikaya said, dread settling in her belly.

“Go find him now, before the action starts.” Rias returned to the lever, arms pumping twice as fast. “I’ll be up in a minute.” He seemed determined to empty every inch of water before he left the task. Maybe he feared they’d need to shed all the excess weight they could.

“All right,” Tikaya said, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to see what had prompted the shout from above.

Up on deck, wan dawn light seeped through a cloud-filled sky. Seamen scurried about, trimming the sails per the mate’s orders. The captain stood on the forecastle next to the wheel, gazing through a spyglass toward the gray seas behind them. It wasn’t until Tikaya climbed up beside him that she spotted the reason for the wake-up call.

The masts and sails of three ships-three large ships-were visible on the horizon.

“A frigate and two galleons,” the captain muttered, speaking to himself. He didn’t seem to have noticed Tikaya. “Hundreds of men. Hundreds of guns. I didn’t think they’d send such a force, not this deep into Turgonian territory.”

“New heading, Cap’n?” a swarthy man at the wheel asked.

“Take us closer to land. We’ve a shallower draw than those ships. If we can reach the Dead Snake River, we can head up it where they can’t follow.”

Tikaya frowned. Wouldn’t the Nurians simply wait at the mouth until the schooner ventured out again?

Before the helmsman had said more than a quick, “Aye, Cap’n,” Rias appeared at Tikaya’s shoulder.

“We’ve already passed the Snake,” he said, nodding toward the east, though the coast wasn’t in sight. “We’ll reach land at the Fire Cliffs. They’re nearly twenty leagues long, and the water is deep right up to the rock.”

The captain scowled at him. “I don’t need the terrain explained to me. I know where we are, and we will reach the river.”

Rias said nothing, though he wore what Tikaya had come to recognize as a there’s-little-point-in-arguing-with-fools expression. The captain may have recognized it, too, for his scowl deepened.

“You.” He pointed at Tikaya. “You figure out the flute yet?”

She lifted the instrument and played a short childhood ditty about a boy who was hit on the head by falling coconuts whenever he didn’t mind his elders. The captain peered about, as if he expected some miraculous transformation of everyone around him.

“Well, does it work?” he asked when she finished.

“I don’t know,” Tikaya said. “Do you feel more kindly toward me?”

The captain growled.

“Perhaps not then.”

Rias touched her arm and nodded toward the rigging above them. Garchee crouched on the yard, his mouth agape as he stared down at them. As soon they looked in his direction, he snapped his jaw closed and scurried out of sight.

The captain hadn’t noticed. A string of curses flowed from his mouth, punctuated by terms such as “deadbeat passengers.” Tikaya wanted to defend herself-more than ever she believed she’d solved the puzzle-but, if Rias was right and the flute had no use in this setting, what did it matter?

“Someone get that boy down here,” the captain snarled.

The other cabin boy jumped to comply. A worrisome grin stretched across his face as he scampered up the mast. He darted behind sails that blocked Tikaya’s view, and she could only frown when, a moment later, the cabin boy practically shoved Garchee down the mast. Blood trickled from the Nurian boy’s nose.