Jay Lake - Green

“No, sir,” I said quietly.

He leaned close, hammer still clutched in his hand. “Don’t call me sir, missy. Iron you wants, iron you shall have.”

Later I stole some pliers from the carpenter’s mate, to bend the nails and scraps with. So it was that I began to affix bits of metal to my poplin, to stand in for the bells and silk of my home. I would sew quickly when I knew Federo to be at the captain’s table, or late at night when his breath was slow and even. I pretended the clanging bells that marked the hours of the watches were Endurance watching over me, that the rumbling of the steam belowdecks was the bellows of the ox’s great lungs.

So I marked the days of my passage across the calm sun-drenched waters of the Storm Sea in learning everything that my captor could put before me. My nights I observed by pricking my fingers in remembrance of a home that already seemed infinitely dim and distant in my recall.

We packed away our belongings as Fortune’s Flight made her approach to the Stone Coast. Which was to say Federo packed away his belongings with some small assistance from me. I had nothing except the cotton shifts he had given me to wear, and my length of poplin folded away beneath my bunk with my stolen supplies.

The problem of how to get that ashore loomed large. The only answer I could imagine was to fold it into Federo’s baggage somehow and hope to sneak it away from him later. He was keeping a close eye on me that day. I suppose he was afraid I’d dive over the rail again. I knew better-how would I walk home from Copper Downs?-but he had no sure way to trust.

I finally tried slipping the cloth beneath my shift as he was distracted, but my waist bulged in such a strange manner that it was impossible to keep it hidden. I dropped my burden beneath the bunk as he turned. The clatter caught at his ear.

“What have you there?” he asked me in that slow, gentle voice that meant he knew I was about something he would not approve of.

“Just trinkets.” That lie which stands closest to the truth stands tall as well, one of his books had told me. “I have wrapped some little metal soldiers in cloth, for my playthings.”

A strange expression flickered across his face. “I have never yet seen you at play, girl.”

“It is only when you are away,” I said modestly.

He bent to look beneath my bunk. I itched to kick him in the neck, or at the fork of his legs, but did not. To what purpose? I could not escape on my own. Not unless I could swim the ocean.

“Let me see.” He tugged the wrapped bolt of cloth out. It fell open, spilling pliers and needles and thread and iron bits upon the deck. Federo gave the fabric a shake. Nothing jingled, for there were no proper bells at all, but the sewn-on bits of metal clicked. “Ah.”

I withstood his long, slow look.

“I should beat you purple for this,” he finally said. “And make you eat some of these filings. But you are no silly thing to be cowed by force or fear.” He bundled it up again, and my tools within. “Listen to me, girl. Mark me well. Forget the bells of your silk. Where you are going next, any effort to reclaim the land and standing of your birth will be almost the worst offense you could hope to commit. Your journey is forward, not back.”

Stubborn resistance rose within me like flowers under a spring rain. “My feet have not chosen this path.”

“No.” His voice was sad. “But still it is your path. You cannot unchoose what has been done. You can fight the journey, gather bruises and scars until you fail and are cast aside as too broken to complete. Or you can run ahead, beat the racers at their own game, and claim your prizes.”

“What prizes?” I hissed.

“Life, health, safety.” He grabbed my chin, not too hard, and tried to send me some secret message with the narrowing of his eyes. “The right to make your own choices once more.”

Releasing me, Federo tucked the roll under one arm. “We have never spoken of this. I will not recall our conversation again. Best you do not either. Set it aside, along with the entire matter of the bells.”

He stalked out of our hatch, across the busy deck, and without a glance back at me idling in the doorway, he threw my poor attempt at reclamation into the bay.

I knew I had been told too much, but I did not then know too much of what. Adults almost always speak above or beneath children. It is an error I remain mindful of even now. That day all I saw was another betrayal in a line of betrayals.

I will not willingly take his binding a third time, I promised myself.

“Come,” he called from the rail. “See the city that is your new home.”

Slowly I dragged my feet across the deck.

My bells were lost to me, but Fortune’s Flight had her own. They rang brazen-bold as she moved into harbor, along with scores of streaming pennants like prayer flags. Bells floating on little platforms in the harbor answered in time to the swell of the waters. More bells ashore and aship responded in their own manner.

Copper Downs mocked me, displaying endless ringing rounds in a reminder of what had been stripped from me. I resolved anew to hate the god-raddled city and her pale, dead-skinned people.

This place was greater than a thousand of my villages. There were more people before me than I had thought to exist in the entire world. Buildings stood far taller than even the burial platforms of my home-those pillars are the highest things we make, in order to carry souls closer to the freedom of the sky. The city spread along the shore at least an hour’s walk east and west of the jetties toward which the harbor pilot even now steered Fortune’s Flight. An old wall rose ragged amid neighborhoods along a hill just to the west. East of the docks, I could see great rooftops clad in the shining metal that had given the place its name.

Despite my anger, the city fascinated me.

“The Temple District,” Federo said as he followed my gaze. “Houses abandoned by the gods, though their doorsteps are yet swept by priests.”

“Those are warehouses by the shore.” I pointed to the huge buildings by the docks. “Where the wharfingers and freight brokers ply their trades.”

“Indeed.” I could hear a smile in his voice. I had learned so much already on the voyage.

With much shouting and the whistling of pipes, Fortune’s Flight was brought to a pier in the middle of the bustling dockside madness. I had thought her a great vessel when I’d seen her anchored off the shores of my home country, but here, she was just another ship. Few had her steam-kettle guts, though I didn’t know enough at the time to see it, for all the vessels sprouted the trees of masts with their webbing of lines.

Idlers and brokers and customs agents waited in a throng along the dock as the thick mooring lines were thrown down and the ship warped into place for her cargo to be taken off. Even this one crowd was more people than I’d ever seen. Compared with the masonry and copper immensity of the city, their numbers were far more personal as they stood shoulder to shoulder, shouting and waving colored ribbons or slips of paper. Each must signify something, I thought. A job or an offer of service.

Easier to focus on what they did than on who they were. I found scorn for my younger self who had asked Federo whether Papa and Endurance might be waiting here. The ox would be dinner for fourscore men, and Papa lost in the crowd as surely as a weed among the rice shoots.

Guilt flooded me at that dismissal. I know now that Federo had continued to take from me without my consent or even awareness, remaking me in the process of the voyage. His plan was steady, sure, and certain. All that I knew then was that he had caused me to wrong myself in some manner I could not define.