The Bar at the Edge of the Sea
Page 15
“Yeah,” said Zeke. “But it wasn’t Romeo and Juliet. I think it—”
“It was Romeo and Juliet. By a guy named Shakespeare.”
Zeke considered it and conceded. “Could be. I guess.”
Uriel removed a hand from the mug and fingered the bow at the end of her braid.
Zeke took another drink of the coffee. It actually wasn’t that bad. He turned to her.
“When are you from?” he asked.
She lifted an eyebrow. “When?”
“Yeah. I figure that’s a better question than where.”
A broad grin spread across her face. She reached out and grazed the side of his face with her fingers. Then she pinched his cheek, like a grandmother might an adorable infant.
“Just when I think you’re a moron, you surprise me with your intellect,” she said. “It’s remarkable, really. In one moment, you’re telling me that a piece of classic literature isn’t what I know it to be, and the next you issue an insightful query.”
Zeke wasn’t sure how to take that. Any compliment from Uriel was an achievement, but she also called him a moron. And the tone of her voice was so condescending it made him want to crawl inside himself.
“Thanks?” he said, dragging out the end of the word. It was the best he could come up with.
She smirked. “It wasn’t a compliment. It was an observation.”
“I figured.” He finished the coffee. “What’s the answer?”
“The late twentieth century.”
“Twentieth? As in the nineteen hundreds?”
“Yep.”
“You’re that old?”
She shot him a side eye and tapped her PUNCH TODAY IN THE FACE mug. “See this?”
“It was an observation.”
Her expression softened. “Touché. And yes. I’m that old.”
Zeke thought about his next question. There were too many of them. He sighed.
“In my past life,” he said, “I rarely had questions. Whatever happened, happened. I did what I was told. I accepted a lot of things at face value. Now it seems all I have is questions. They’re constant. They make it difficult to concentrate sometimes, especially because I get answers to so few of them.”
“They’re like gray hairs. You kill one and two more come to the funeral.”
Zeke shook his head. “I don’t understand half of the stuff you say.”
“Maybe that’s why you have so many questions. You’re stupid.”
Zeke scowled for a moment. Then both of them laughed. It felt good. The tension eased in his shoulders. The knot in his stomach loosened.
“Ask me something,” Uriel said. “Anything. I’ll try to give you a straight answer.”
His eyes widened with surprise. “Really?”
“Really.”
Zeke bit the inside of his lip, searching for the right question. It was like a bar with too many bottles behind the counter. Too many choices to make one. Finally, he settled on one closest to the surface.
“How did you do what you did back there?” he said. “The spinning? The whirlpool?”
Uriel’s gaze left his and aimed out toward the ocean. The steady hum of the Riva Cantata’s twin eighteen-hundred-horsepower diesel engines filled the space between them until she locked eyes with him again.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Zeke’s brow furrowed. He frowned.
Uriel shrugged. “That’s not true. I don’t know how it works, but I know that all I have to do is focus hard enough and I can make it happen. I think about what I want my body to do, how I want the muscles to move or react, and I do it. Within reason.”
“You told your body to spin into the air?”
“Sort of. I was underwater. It took me a minute to figure out what had happened. The lizards flipping the boat was disorienting. I looked up. I saw the swarms of them above me, the overturned boat. I figured I had to do something.” She paused and grinned impishly. “I mean, given how useless you are.”
Zeke narrowed his gaze. “Can you just tell me how it works? Let’s agree I’m a worthless moron. Get that out of the way. It’s a given, okay?”
Uriel offered a thumbs-up. “Given.”
“So?”
She finished her coffee and licked her upper lip with the tip of her tongue. “I summoned my power and made it happen. There’s not much more to it. It’s almost like my powers knew what would work and I did it.”
Zeke studied her for a moment. “Why did you get the powers you have?”
“Pedro gave them to me,” she replied.
“Right,” said Zeke, “but why those powers? Why did he give me a gun? Lucius brass knuckles? Gabe’s sticks? Phil’s—”
She interrupted. “I get it. And I don’t know. I’ve asked. Pedro’s coy about it. He says the same thing to everyone. He gives you what he thinks best suits you.”
“Does he have weapons of his own?”
Uriel laughed in a way that answered the question before saying, “Of course.”
“Which ones?” Zeke asked.
The smile on her face disappeared. “All of them.”
The words hung in the air. Zeke tried to imagine Pedro wielding the fighting sticks while spinning in the air with brass knuckles affixed to his fingers. It was comical. And it was frightening.
“What’s the point of all this?” he asked after a short bit of silence.
Her smile returned for a moment, flashing at the corners of her mouth. “That’s the only question worth asking, isn’t it?”
Of course, she answered it with another question. That was par for the course. Instead of complaining, Zeke kept his mouth shut. He hoped that if the silence lasted long enough, she might offer something more. He was right.
“I wish I had the answer, Zeke,” she said. “Sometimes I think I know. It’s redemption. It’s balance. It’s yin and yang. It’s how to keep the natural order of things interconnected. Then things happen and I wonder if there’s a darker purpose.”
“Darker?”
She shook her head. “We’re not always the good guys, Zeke. I think I told you that. Or it was Phil. Someone explained that. There are missions where we’re the bad guys. Those are the hard ones. That’s when I question what all of this is about, why we’re here.”
Her expression shifted. The light in her eyes was gone. Her skin dulled. The color leeched from her cheeks. Even the ink on her skin lost its vibrancy.
“If you have to maintain the balance of good and evil, it makes sense that sometimes you have to tip the scales away from too much good,” Zeke said, trying to rationalize their job. “I get that. I’m not saying it’s easy. But I get it. It makes sense.”
Uriel didn’t respond. Her gaze told Zeke she was somewhere else, visiting another place and time in her mind. Then she blinked. Her eyes fluttered. She cleared her throat. The color in her cheeks returned. Her eyes reflected the sunlight again.
Uriel put on a thin smile, but Zeke could tell it was fake. “We’re Watchers,” she said. “It’s what we do for as long as we’re told to do it. No point in dwelling on the negative, right?”
Zeke wasn’t sure what to say. Her sudden mood shift had him regretting having asked the question.
She took the mug from him. “Want a refill?”
“No, thanks,” he said. “I’m good.”
“I’ll have another,” she said. “I’ll add some liquor to it this time.”
“Liquor? It’s kind of early.”
She twisted her lips to one side of her face. The look was both mischievous and disapproving. Zeke wasn’t sure how she managed both expressions at once.
“It’s never too early in the afterlife,” she said. “Time is relative. It’s a construct developed to help our feeble minds understand the—”
Zeke raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, I get it. But why the drink?”
Uriel started toward the salon. As she moved down the steps, hips swaying, she glanced back at him over her shoulder.
Chapter Nineteen
“Where are we?” asked Anaxi. “What is this place?”
A smile twitched at the corners of Le Grand’s mouth. “It’s the port city of Kathmandu.”
“Port?”
“A place where ships can refuel, find provisions, take a break from the endless sea.”
Like the people aboard the tanker Texas, the vibrancy of this place called Kathmandu was unlike anything Anaxi had seen or about which she might have dreamed.
The Saladin was one of a half-dozen ships moored to three long wooden docks that stretched like fingers from the wide mouth of the port’s cove.
The land rose quickly from the shore toward an awkward peak atop which flags flapped in the wind. Between the peak and the half-moon shoreline were clusters of tents and shanties crowded with people. Strains of music filtered through the air along with the strong, welcoming odors of cooked meat.
From the deck of the Saladin, Anaxi heard laughter and shouts. There were calls from men and women offering their wares. Bells chimed.
Anaxi’s heart fluttered. It was all too much. Is this place real? Am I awake, or is this an oasis of a dream within my broader nightmare?
Perhaps sensing her apprehension, Le Grand extended a hand. “C’mon. Don’t be afraid.”
Reluctantly, she took his hand and followed him from the deck to the long dock, which led to shore. The planks were sturdy beneath her feet. Water lapped at the pilings underneath. The odors grew more pungent, the cacophony louder.
“I’ve never seen a port,” she said. “Or a city.”
“This is one of a handful around the world,” said Le Grand. “All of them are in places that legend holds were once miles in the sky, far from oceans. They were covered in ice.”
She looked up at him. “But the ice melted.”
He nodded. “And the seas rose. Most of the earth sank beneath the surface. Only the highest peaks remained above ground. Most of those only peek above the water enough to support small villages like yours. That’s most of the world’s land, right? But a few became ports, places big enough to house a lot of people and welcome travelers.”
“Have you seen other ports?”
He nodded and they reached the end of the dock. A man with a basket slung over his shoulder approached them. He was a thin, wiry man with a wrapped cloth covering his head. His skin was bronzed and his fingers delicate.
“Red apples?” he asked.
His toothless smile was warm and friendly. He plucked an apple from the basket and held it out for Anaxi.
Le Grand waved him off. “No.”
The man persisted. “Red apples.”
Le Grand shook his head and tried to move past.
The man stepped in their path. His affable smile evaporated. He jabbed the fruit at Le Grand. “Red—”
Le Grand let go of Anaxi’s hand and slapped the apple from the man’s grip. It dropped to the ground, rolling away, and the man grunted. He went after the apple. Le Grand and Anaxi moved past.
“What was that about?” she asked.
“People want to sell things. They’re pushy about it.”
“You said you’ve been to other ports?”
“Most of them are in this region. There’s the port cities of Annapurna and Cho Oyu. Both of them are far busier than Kathmandu.”
Anaxi couldn’t imagine some place busier than where she stood now. There were more people in her line of sight than she’d seen in all of her days. Hundreds. Could it be a thousand?
Le Grand tugged her forward. “Let me show you.”
They wove through the bustling crowds of people. There were languages she’d never heard. Words she didn’t understand. She caught clips and fragments of conversations. Her heart raced at the unexpected newness of it all.
As she walked, Le Grand guiding her, her head swiveled from one side to the other. She didn’t want to miss anything. The music she’d heard aboard the ship grew louder as they neared a large building built of stacked stone. Outside the building was a trio playing stringed instruments. One of the men sang along to the rhythm of it. Anaxi bobbed her head. Her cheeks hurt from smiling.
Against the stone building, to one side of a curtained entrance, there was a stack of bones. Arm and leg bones piled into a pyramid atop which human skulls rested askew.
They stopped at the entrance. Le Grand motioned with their clasped hands toward the bones.
“Those are ancient,” he said. “No worries. They’ve been here longer than any visitor here has been alive.”
“What are they?” Anaxi asked. “I mean, whose are they? Where did they come from?”
Le Grand pivoted to face the peak in the distance. The collection of flags flapped in the opposite direction.
“The story goes that we are standing now on what was once the highest point on the planet. These were mountains that touched the sky. They were covered in ice. They were dangerous. But people climbed them. They were adventurers who wanted to reach the highest peaks.”
Anaxi looked at the flags and back at the bones. “What happened to them?”
“Some of them succeeded. Others did not. They died on the mountains. The ice froze them, and they remained here on the highest peaks until the melt. These bones are what was left of them. They serve as a reminder of what the world once was.”
Anaxi studied Le Grand’s face for any hint of jest. She didn’t find it. She grinned. “You’re teasing me. We’re hardly above the sea. There is no way this was the highest spot on the Earth.”
Le Grand led her through the curtain and into the stone building. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”
The inside of the stone building glowed with candlelight. The odor of cooked meat was stronger here. The place smelled of grease and fat. The space was warm with the radiant heat of the burning tallow candles. There were tables around which people sat, eating and drinking. None of them paid attention to Anaxi and Le Grand as they wound their way toward a wall at the far side of the rectangular space. They were too busy scraping clean their bowls and slurping the dregs of their meals.
Men and women shuffled past them, carrying baskets. They were the servers, Anaxi deduced. Their frowns and sagging faces told her they weren’t happy. How could someone be unhappy in such a wonderful place?
“Look at this,” said Le Grand. He pointed at a large painted skin on a wall. It was as tall as she was and maybe as wide.
“What is it?” she asked.
Le Grand released her hand and swept his fingers across the skin. “It’s a map.”
“Of what?”
“Of the world.”
This was not how Anaxi had envisioned maps. In her head, they would be three-dimensional and in bright color, only revealing what she could see in the moment. This map on the wall was flat and static. She couldn’t make sense of it.
Perhaps sensing her confusion, Le Grand ran a finger along the skin until he reached a spot marked with a red X. Then he tapped the X.
“This is where we are right now,” he said. “Kathmandu. The red mark tells us that. Do you see the other ports near us?”
She did. She saw shapes that represented the various ports. Many of them were clustered close together. But there were some far away. One to the northwest was called Ultar. Another, on the opposite end of the map, was called Huascaran. North and west of Huascaran was a port called Denali.
“There are not many ports on that side of the map,” said Anaxi. “Most of them are here. Have you ever been over there?”
She stepped to the side of the map with only a few ports, Denali at the top. She craned her neck to look at it.
Le Grand stood beside her. “I have. It takes a long time to get there. The sea never seems as endless as it does when you’ve gone weeks without seeing a port. The smells, the food, the women.”
She scowled at him
. His face flushed.
“I’m standing right here,” she said.
“Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
For the briefest moment, Anaxi forgot she was a prisoner. She forgot her father was dead and likely she would join him soon. All her anger and fear, her growing want for retribution evaporated. She was a child learning about her world from an adult, a child experiencing a place far beyond anything she’d thought possible. It was like a dream.
Almost the entire map was sea. For the first time in her young life, Anaxi saw how little of the planet boasted habitable land. All that remained were clusters of small islands. It was as if some high power had stood above the planet and sprinkled crumbs onto it.
“It looks flat,” she said. “Is the world flat?”
Le Grand shook his head. “There are silly people who say it is. They also think there are no forests. But I can tell you the world is round. If it weren’t, I’d have sailed off its edges long ago.”
He pointed to Denali. “See this port?”
“Yes.”
He ran his finger to the left edge of the map. “If you sail this way, you’ll end up over here.”
Le Grand took three steps to his right and stabbed his finger at the right edge of the map. Then he dragged his finger to Kathmandu and the red X.
“Where is my island?” she asked. “Can you show me that?”
He stepped back from the map. He folded his arms across his chest. His features darkened.
She asked again and he reluctantly pointed to a spot near the center of the map. Her island, the place that was the entirety of her world for all her life, was barely a speck.
“That’s it?” she said.
Anaxi stepped closer to the map. She narrowed her eyes, squinting to make sure she wasn’t looking at the wrong thing. She lifted her hand and touched the speck with her index finger and rubbed it back and forth.
“It’s so small.”
Anaxi sucked in a deep breath and held it. She tried to picture her home island, the village and the villagers. Her father. Their modest home. The way the waves broke onto the shore. The sweet odor of rotting fruits and legumes before they dropped from their trees. She closed her eyes and pictured herself there. Somehow her finger on the map connected her one last time to that place she would likely never see again. Her chest tightened.