Jo Clayton: Moongather

He rushed her to the rail and held her as she voided her stomach. Even through her wretchedness she sensed his distaste; desolation and emptiness of another kind grew in her. Tears dripped from her eyes to mix with the sweat and sour liquid from her stomach as the convulsions diminished and finally stopped. She hung limply over the rail, so weak and distressed she was unable to move.

Ser Noris carried her back to the mast and settled her on the heaving deck. He squatted beside her, frowning. “I’d better leave you in the open air until you’re over that.” He touched her cheek with a ghost of his former gentleness. “You may think you’re dying, little one, but it will pass. I promise you, it will pass.” He stood briskly, brushed at his sleeves, spoke another WORD.

A rope end snaked from a coil hanging on the mast. Serroi watched it wobble through the air toward her and cringed away, but was prevented from moving far as the Noris squatted again and held her still, his hand on her shoulder. The rope slid around her waist and wove itself into a knot. She stared down at it, then at the other end which was looping itself about the mast. She reached down and touched the knot at her waist, jerked her hand away from the unnatural warmth of the rope fiber. She looked fearfully up at the Noris.

He touched her cheek again. “This for your safety, child. Otherwise you could be swept overboard. My servants will care for you.” With smooth unobtrusive grace he was on his feet and moving away. About a body-length away from the mast, he stopped and faced the sea, spoke a WORD into the wind. When he’d paced out a square around her, speaking a WORD at each corner, the air touching her gentled and turned warm. He came back and stood looking down at her. “Remember, child, if there’s anything you need, call for it and my servants will bring it.”

When he’d disappeared below, invisible hands fetched a basin of warm soapy water and bathed her face. They brought her more water to drink and a savory broth to fill some of the emptiness inside her. They tended her neatly and impersonally, went away as soon as they were done. Serroi crouched against the humming mast, the only thing that seemed real and comforting, too sick to care.

Twice more she succumbed to the urgency of her stomach. The hands cleaned her up and left her alone. Finally she managed to sleep and found to her surprise that when she woke, her body had adapted to the dip and fall of the ship. She sat up, pushed aside her blankets, blinking at the sun which shone directly in her eyes as it dipped to its lowest point near the horizon. “Hands,” she called. “I’m starved. Bring me something to eat.”

A moment later she had a platter of steaming rolls with butter and jam, a pot of cha and a dainty small cup with no handle and long thin slices of cream-colored posser flesh. She sniffed, grinned, began eating hungrily. The wind was crisp and fresh even filtered through her invisible walls, the sea jewel blue, singing past the sides, rising and falling like a breathing beast. Fish leaped in schools from the water making tiny whistling sounds like damp, iridescent birds.

When she finished her meal, she submitted to the invisible hands while they bathed her and brought her fresh clothing, more things her mother had packed away for her. With their usual wordless efficiency they polished her and the deck until both were painfully clean, then they left. Serroi shook out her tether, wrinkled her nose at it, then moved toward the railing, testing how much range of movement she was going to have. The rope proved long enough to let her lean on the rail and stare down at the water hissing past.

A whale broached nearby. Breaking water first, its back was a shining curve of dark grey with black mottles like sooty hand prints. It spouted a rush of steam, then sounded with a comic flirting of its tail flukes. Laughing her delight, Serroi raced back along the rail, the rope whipping behind her until it pulled her to a stop. She leaned out over the rail, still laughing, her eye-spot tingling. She called the whale back, clapped her hands in joy as it played with the ship, loosing it finally when it began to chafe at the restraints she put on it.

Birds flew by overhead, riding the wind that drove the ship. Sometimes they settled around Serroi to preen russet, gold, green, or blue fur with long narrow tongues, to search each other for fur-mites, crunching them between tiny dagger teeth lining the lips of their leathery beaks. Serroi scratched at small heads, coaxed some of the birds into her lap where they twittered with pleasure under the probing of her fingers.

The ship moved south without pause, the days growing shorter and the stars shifted into new patterns. Semi contented herself with the birds and the creatures of the sea, left utterly alone by Ser Noris. Yet she wasn’t lonely; her happiest times had always been when she ran and played with the animals drawn to her by the siren-song of the eye-spot. These days were an endless playtime without the painful and often incomprehensible demands of adults. The rope confined her and at the same time freed her from the need of watching her feet so she ran heedlessly about, tagging the birds, racing the fish that sometimes leaped the rail and slid across the deck into the sea on the far side.

The ship danced southward until days and nights matched and the winds were warm as her own breath-always no land, only the blue water, the blue sky and the wage wind blowing them into summer. Her life in her father’s wagon following the vinat faded into vague dreams. She had a child’s perception of time, the hours stretching out and out until one day was swallowed by the next, until she might always have run about the deck of the ship surrounded by an endless sea.

The rising sun was red in her eyes when she woke on the last day of the voyage; she blinked and yawned, sat up rubbing her eyes. Kicking the blanket away, leaving it in a heap for the hands to carry off, she trotted to the railing to see what was happening, squinting against the glare of the morning light. Her eye-spot tingled, a sourceless itch crawled about beneath her akin, and she had an uncomfortable sense of waiting-about-to-end. The nose of the boat pointed toward a triangle of black cutting up to spoil the smooth line of the horizon. She shivered. What there was about that rising dark fang to make her so uneasy she couldn’t tell, but when she looked at it, she felt a hollow coldness spreading inside her. She watched it grow for a while then went slowly back to the mast and her cooling breakfast.

The black form became a tall cone-shaped mountain breathing out a wavering plume of steam. Other small dots grew into dark islands, an archipelago of stone whose tallest peak was an active volcano.

Having begun to think the South was all water, Serroi went to the rail again to watch, fascinated, the nearing islands. The ship dipped neatly through a ring of foam and slid past a large island of brown-black stone, then past a blunt stone pier with a huge stone house high above it rising from a glass-smooth cliff, a house that seemed big enough to stable her family’s vinat herd. She stared up at it as they went past, wondering about it, pounded small fists on the rail in frustration because the hands were mute and couldn’t answer her questions and Ser Noris was out of touch and she wouldn’t have dared question him anyway.

The ship nosed through the twisting passage between the islands, past more tall houses and silent piers. The air felt heavy and dead, except for the mage wind driving them. The islands were barren with no touch of green. Even the water had lost its brilliance and sighed heavily and darkly under them.

The mage wind died and the ship glided smoothly along one of the stone piers. As it nudged into place the sails came down with hasty snappings and sighing slaps and the mooring lines snaked out to snub it against the pier. Serroi felt the rope about her waist come alive and writhe loose. It wriggled away from her to coil itself back on the masthook. Rubbing at her waist, she tilted her head back, her eyes moving up along the dark shiny face of the cliff to the tower that continued its ascent into a heavy sky. A dead place, cold and unwelcoming. She turned to face north, yearning for the tundra where life was thick and warm even when it snowed.