Jay Lake - Green

Not me. Toppling one magic-ridden despot was more than enough to last me this lifetime and my next several turns on the Wheel besides.

In time we reached the shipping lanes. I’d grown accustomed to Utavi and his sailors-the nervously smiling Chowdry, Utavi’s giant catamite Tullah, the rest of the sullen crew, but I was eager to be on to the Stone Coast. Loitering in the shallows along Bhopura gained us nothing. Along the way, our hosts had argued several times late into the night, making me nervous, but always they hid their words from us.

The captain did not hide so much. He grumbled time and again. I think Utavi would have sold us out even then if he could have found a buyer, though our swaggering ways and his fear of Mother Vajpai should have discouraged him from that plan.

In any case, he took us out into the deeper water, away from Chittachai ’s natural habitat, where we could find the big oceangoing traffic. The men grew nervous in the open sea, but money was money, and they were making well more than a year’s wages with the work of little more than a week. We hailed two ships before we found a third who would both answer and admit to being bound for the Stone Coast. Lucidinous was a high-sided iron-hulled vessel flying a flag from Dun Cranmoor.

When we’d finally talked ourselves aboard, Chowdry scrambled after me up the ladder.

“Where are you going?” I asked him roughly in Seliu.

“Utavi has threatened my life,” he replied with a quaver in his voice. “I would not agree to bind you over for sale back in Kalimpura.”

Bastards, I thought. It had been Chowdry who seemed at the disdvantage in their whispered disputes.

“You have no place where I am going,” I hissed, but already Utavi was cursing loudly from below, and pale-skinned sailors were tugging me over the rail. They glared down at Chowdry, then heaved him aboard as well when Utavi showed them a long curved blade.

The decision was out of our hands.

Chowdry stood at the rail and cursed in some dialect of Seliu that I could barely follow, until a pair of bulky men took us all to see a ship’s mate.

He was as pale as the rest of them, which was to say in these latitudes red as an apple above his sweat-stained whites. “You ain’t armed, I trust.”

I was mortified at how pleasing I found a Petraean voice. “Only a work knife, sir,” I said.

The Dancing Mistress bowed and flexed her claws.

“You don’t worry me, ma’am,” he told her with a tight smile. “Come on, then.” The mate waved us out.

We followed, Chowdry reluctant in the face of new authority. We were swiftly brought to a small mess. Looking at the four men waiting behind the table, I realized this was a hearing.

Then I saw that one of them was Srini, the purser from Southern Escape.

His astonishment was even greater than my own. “Green,” he said in Seliu, half-rising from his seat. He took it again in some embarrassment as the fat man at the end of the table glared him down.

“Srini,” I said in Petraean. “It is good to see you again.”

“These people are known to you?” the captain asked Srini.

“Only the gi-” He took in my cropped hair and sailor’s clothes, then corrected himself. “Only Green.”

The purser’s slip might as well have been a thunderclap, but no one else seemed to notice.

“Not many of you southern lads speak so well,” the captain said. “What are you doing with this pardine?” He turned to the Dancing Mistress. “Begging your pardon, my lady.”

“No pardon required,” she said graciously. “Green was my very apt pupil in Copper Downs.”

The look in his eyes told me I’d just risen considerably in status. “We’re well under way, even with stopping to take you on. So you’ll all be coming north. We call at Lost Port, then Copper Downs, then home to Dun Cranmoor.”

“I can guarantee you triple fare when we land at Copper Downs,” the Dancing Mistress told him.

“Or we’ll work for it now,” I added. “I am an experienced cook, both in palace and aboard ship.”

“What of your father here?”

Father? I wondered for a brief desperate moment, before I understood the man’s assumption. “Chowdry?” I looked at him. He stank with fear sweat. How had I let this happen? The Goddess had her purpose for Chowdry, of course, but it would be a long time yet before I could glimpse Her plan. “We will account for him.”

“Sir,” said Srini. “I am speaking for Green and her companion. If they stand for the Selistani, I would consider him stood for.”

The captain frowned. “You three are on your parole. Srini, if they jump, you’ll meet their fare out of your own pay.”

“Yes, sir,” the purser said.

“Thank you,” I added.

The Dancing Mistress simply bowed her head.

With that, the hearing was ended. We were now aboard Lucidinous as something midway between prisoner and passenger.

We were shown to quarters. Chowdry bunked with the deck idlers with their hammocks slung near the bow. The Dancing Mistress and I were given a small space below, amid a crowd of grumbling servants within a windowless cabin that stank of sweat and old hair.

Copper Downs was my path home to Kalimpura once more. Perhaps my life was to be traced in a circle. At my quiet request, Srini found me supplies from the sail maker-even with a kettle, Lucidinous spread canvas when the winds favored her. During the quiet watches I sewed another, cruder version of the blacks I had worn as Neckbreaker.

As the voyage progressed, the Dancing Mistress and I continued to discuss the politics of the city. I could tell that she suspected Federo of something-old trust breached-but it was just as clear that she wanted me to make my own judgments. Chowdry joined us often enough, but he was sullen and withdrawn, obviously lost in regret over his impulse to follow us up the ladder.

All in all, it was a better voyage than I could have asked for.

I did not leave the ship at Lost Port. Neither did the Dancing Mistress. Captain Barks hadn’t forbidden it, but I saw no point in risking his wrath. Instead we remained unusually at leisure, and talked about cities.

“My people do not raise stone halls,” she told me. “We never have. Whatever god first set monkeys free with fire in their hands and ideas in their heads created city builders. It is humans who do this. That is why you outnumber all the other races of the world combined.”

“In all the plate of the world, do you suppose that is true?”

The Dancing Mistress looked at me sidelong. “Perhaps not a hundred thousand leagues east or west, no. But you could not travel that far in your lifetime.”

I smiled at her. “A fast ship and a good crew.” Far away from Choybalsan, the Bittern Court, and all the ghosts already following me, though I was not yet sixteen summers old.

“Until you reached a desert or a mountain spine your hull could not cross. There you would not speak the language, or know the money. You would wind up begging beside some purple dock amid people who speak with feathers and curse one another with flowers.”

I could imagine worse fates. I’d delivered worse fates. Even now, her words that day sometimes call to my heart, though I’ve long since set myself a different course. Then, I merely said, “I am not made to be a sailor on the seas of fate in any case. The Goddess has sent me, you have called me. Someday I will go back to Kalimpura. I know my life.”

“No one knows their life, Green. Not until it is done and some grandchild marks a line or two upon their grave.”

When landfall at Copper Downs was upon us, I begged a favor of the Dancing Mistress. “Do not yet tell Federo I am returned, please.”

“I am not so certain what is the right thing to do here.”