Jay Lake - Green

Someone on the masts called out. Sailors pounded the deck. The ship lurched slightly, then began to drift. I realized they had a line off the stern. A boat full of men pulled hard to tow this vessel away from shore.

I tugged at the man’s sleeve. “Please, sir, what is the name of this ship?”

He looked down at me and began to laugh. “Do not think me to be mocking you, little one, but this vessel is called Southern Escape.”

“Ah.” I looked quietly into his eyes. “But I am free.”

“Of course you are,” he answered. “At the moment.” He bent close. “I am Srini, the purser. I must go see to the captain. To be sitting with those bales over there, and for the love of all that is holy, get yourself in no one’s path.”

The deck clanged and rattled. Canvas boomed as sails were raised. I crouched upon the deck and told myself old stories in the language of my birth. I was on my way to a port from which with luck I could hear the sound of Endurance’s wooden bell. I was on my way to freedom.

I was on my way home.

Srini put me to work in the galley with an elderly Hanchu cook who had only one leg. Lao Jia wore a wooden peg to move about on deck, but he hung that at the galley hatch and spent his time within braced against the inbuilt counters. The peg was carved with flowing dragons chasing a series of black pearls set into the wood. The galley was strung with a clever series of canvas straps to secure him against heavy seas or rising storms. I believe he tolerated me at first only because I was small and lithe enough to duck around him.

I was just as glad to be down there. The deck frightened me. I remembered horizons, first from home, then aboard Fortune’s Flight. Actually seeing them again was profoundly disorienting. Even the streets of Copper Downs had been enclosed by buildings, trees, people. The ocean was nothing but horizon, rippling uncomfortably in all directions.

The old man spoke almost no Petraean, other than shouting the names of some foodstuffs at me. I certainly spoke no Hanchu then. I had never heard the language in my life before being forced to share the narrow kitchen with him. However, he did have a bit of Seliu, a language he shared with Srini and the memories of my earliest childhood.

The steam of pots clamped to the swinging stoves was the smell of freedom to me. Lao Jia made me chop cabbage and carrots under his watchful eye. He soon determined that I would not lose a finger into the food or stab him as Southern Escape rolled with the swells. “You will do,” he said in Seliu.

Those words from a busy old man were perhaps the first genuine praise I’d received in my life.

“My thanks,” I told him.

When I proved to know my way around his spice bottles by sight and smell, he seemed almost pleased. On our second day at sea, I made a very serviceable turnover stuffed with ground pork, cumin, and mashed cress. Lao Jia pronounced me good. “I talk to Srini, you stay here and cook.” His gap-toothed smile beamed.

“I go to Selistan,” I told him.

He pretended to wail, drawing off his blue cloth cap and folding it to his breast while muttering prayers to his Hanchu gods. Then he smiled, patted me on the head, and put me back to work.

Cooking with him was pleasant. It was even more pleasant to work without ready judgment standing at my back. I did not mind the small kitchen, the limited tools, and the odd ingredients. Best of all, after several more days, Lao Jia began to show me the basics of Hanchu cuisine. The primary techniques revolved around shredding the food, marinating it, frying the results quickly in a hot, shallow pan, then serving everything mixed together in sauce. What was not simple was balancing the humors of the food-Srini had to help me sort that word out in Petraean, when Lao Jia first began using it-as well the complex spices and sauces.

I realized that Mistress Tirelle had left me with a true love of learning.

Bunking me correctly was a more difficult task. “You have not paid for a cabin,” Srini told me sternly after my first two nights sleeping on deck. We were still speaking mostly Petraean then. I’d had to kick several sailors away, and wound up awake both nights in fear for my safety.

“I am not a harlot for their use.” Mindful of Mistress Cherlise’s many lessons, I swept my hand over my mostly flat chest. “I am not even yet grown to womanhood.”

He pulled at his broad dark chin, reminding me for a moment of Federo. “I cannot simply give you a privilege. You are quite young to be trading your comforts for the passage, this is true.” Srini frowned. “I am sorry to say, but the wounds upon your cheeks will draw the eye away. If you are to be cutting off that great mane of woman’s hair and dressing in canvas trousers, they will take less notice of you.”

My hair had never been cut in my life, so far as I knew, except for the ends being trimmed to suit the style of my beauty. The Factor’s beauty, which I had already sliced away. “I will do it,” I told him in Seliu.

“And I will be having a word with the bosun about the night watch on the deck.” He smiled. “You walk a long road for such a young woman.”

“My path was taken from me years ago.”

Lao Jia was scandalized when I asked for a knife to set to my hair. “No, no, beauty!” he shouted. “Not to ruin good knife, either!”

I despaired of explaining the problem that had required such a solution. Still, I tried. Somehow he understood. “I cut,” he said. “I keep.”

While I’d held some notion of burning the hair or casting it into the sea, I agreed. He would do a better job than I-when had I ever cut hair? Besides that, I could hardly see my own neck.

We decided to stay in the galley for the effort. There was no purpose in setting a show for the sailors and passengers on deck, and they would be less likely to see me as a girl if they had not witnessed my transformation. Lao Jia produced a great pair of shears. “For cutting,” he said, then a word I did not know.

I just nodded.

He sharpened them on a tiny grinder, which he turned by hand. Unlike Fortune’s Flight with its great kettle belowdecks, Southern Escape had been built for nothing but wind, wood, and muscle power. No electricks here.

In time, Lao Jia sat me on a little folding stool he kept braced behind a counter and went to work. Each snip of the shears was a heavy pull at my scalp that almost made me cry out. I held still, mouth shut and eyes half-clenched against the drizzle of tears he drew forth from me.

Cutting my hair was in a strange way even more painful than slashing my cheeks had been. I tried to think about why that was so. In principle, I could cover my scars with clays and paints, or even perhaps the attentions of some physician or flesh-healer. My hair, though. I would be faced with the work of another span of my lifetime to grow it out again.

My head felt lighter when he was done. I had never considered what a weight my hair had been, but my neck rose high and strong. “Thank you,” I said in Seliu, then again in Hanchu.

“I keep, I keep.”

“You keep.”

I struggled into the canvas clothes Srini had given me, with my ruined tights and shirt as smallclothes beneath them. My soft leather boots would be worn through in days on these decks, so he had also found me a decent pair of shoes. It seemed easier to remain barefoot. I watched the waves pitch and the birds wheel while the wind rubbed damp, chilly fingers across my scalp. I touched my head. I was not bald, but he had cut me to stubble.

You need a hat, I thought. The air teased a few more tears from my eyes as my scalp grew cold even in the sunlight. Then I went to scrounge a cover for my head.

Freedom had such strange and unexpected prices.