by Ellyn, Court
“Give yourself a scare, did ya?” Bones freed the creel from his diver’s hands.
“ ‘Twas just a seal,” he gasped, not about to admit to hearing voices.
“A seal, eh? Where’s yer rake?” Bones dumped the catch into the boat.
“Still down there. It’s marking my place for tomorrow.”
“You lose it, it’s comin’ outta yer pay, so it is.”
Rhian groaned and hefted himself out of the standing water. “I know, I know. But I’ll pay for the rake and this bloody boat entire, I will, with what I left down there.” The large oyster might not have a pearl at all, but the bluff wiped the crabby scowl off Bones’s face.
“Will it be another Squid’s Eye?”
Rhian reached for his clothes. The pants and sleeveless shirt were sewn from discarded sails. “Let it go, will ya? Sure there’s not another pearl that size in the whole of Galvalia.”
His father had found that singular gem. Supposedly, the oyster was so massive that Ryrden had called for another diver to help him heave it from the sea bottom. They’d used an axe to crack open the shell, and folded inside the mound of muscle and flesh had been a blue pearl of such extraordinary size that people throughout the Islands called it the Squid’s Eye. Prince Naovhan himself purchased it, making wealthy men of Bones and his highborn employer in Rystia. Triumphant, Bones planned to go into business for himself or even retire from the fishery altogether, but he made a fatal trip to the gambling halls on Wrack Street. His greatest shame was that he hadn’t even made it into the gaming house before thugs beat him and robbed him of every precious coin.
That was a decade ago, and Bones now relied on Rhian to give him another chance at luxury. The old seaman crouched among the oysters, muttering curses and plans of revenge. “Gonna sail the Harlot to Sinnoch, so I am, and break into Naovhan’s bloody tomb and take back my pearl.”
Rumor claimed that the prince had mounted the Squid’s Eye atop an ornate silver scepter, and on his deathbed, he’d ordered it buried with him. And so the greatest gem ever found now rested atop a corpse’s moldering chest.
Rhian ignored Bones’s grumbling and took up a prying knife to cut the ligament connecting the halves of the mollusks. He worked off the thinner top halves and pushed aside the flesh to look for gleaming gems. Rávalin pearls were dusky blue, a color found nowhere else in the world. Only the wealthiest consumers could afford them.
They were rare enough that discovering each one sent a thrill straight to Rhian’s toes. He uncovered two that day, and Bones a third. They placed each in a bucket of clean water. Most of the flesh from the oysters was cut from the shells and placed in a chest of ice, to keep it fresh for markets and eating houses. Some of the meat, however, was returned to the sea as an offering of thanks to the Mother-Father. She consumed the offering, so said the sea-tale, by assuming the shape of shullas and other gulls. The rest provided the fishers themselves with a quick meal between dives.
The shells, too, were saved and sold. The iridescent mother-of-pearl lining was made into jewelry, buttons, amulets, and crushed into medicine. The rest of the shell, as well as the less exalted shells of clams and scallops were burned to create lime for fields and whitewash.
A pearl fisher’s job may be dangerous, but it was also a necessary part of Island living. Rhian didn’t need such incentive to keep diving, but he found it useful in convincing himself to wake up every day before dawn and risk his life to line another man’s coffers.
His catch was so abundant that day that by the time the oyster parts were divided and stored away, the sun drooped low over the island. He swore bitterly, sounding as ill-tempered as his employer. “I’m late. Again.”
“Let Shark wait. We have sun enough for one more dive.”
“No.” Rhian raised the mast.
“Oi, loathsome to leave that bitch of a beauty down there.”
“Tomorrow, Bones.”
“It’s lucky we’ll be if the weather holds. My knuckles feel the sky droppin’.”
Rhian felt it, too, but that oyster wasn’t going to race off anywhere. They raised the skiff’s sail, and the south wind whisked them away from the pearl beds. Rávalin itself lay only half a league away; rocky and green, the island’s hills filled the southern horizon. Behind the skiff’s stern and far beyond the pearl beds rose the endless shelf of the Dwinovian continent. A steady dot of light to the northwest marked the lighthouse near Westport. Rhian had never traveled farther east than the pearl beds. He’d never even visited the other isles of the archipelago. Rávalin was his entire universe, and that universe was shrinking uncomfortably day by day.
Columns of inky smoke rising from the kelp kilns provided the first glimpse of Sandy Cape. It was a dirty business burning down the weed for soap and fertilizer, and Rhian rejoiced that he earned his keep from diving.
Once ashore, Rhian hauled the Harlot into its stone slip under a willowy thellnyth tree and helped Bones unload the catch onto the nearest dock. Bones himself dropped each of the pearls into a small lockbox and thrust it at Rhian. “I haven’t time for the factor! I have to—”
“Then you stay here and sell the meat,” Bones snarled. “It’s a favor I’m doing ya.”
Clutching the box, Rhian ran along the wooden pier to the factor’s warehouse. Master Kurthy bought all the best merchandise available in Sandy Cape and saw it shipped to Lord Rystia, who sold it at the great markets in the cities. The pearls were no exception. Master Kurthy unlocked the jewel box with powdered fingers and examined the contents. “Half as many as yesterday,” he said. With all his imperious airs, one might mistake him for Lord Rystia himself. “Sure you’re not lining your pockets with a few of these, lad?”
Rhian glowered. “Bones knows how many pearls are in that box. Pay him fair when he gets here.”
The factor dismissed him without a word. Rhian was too late to care. He raced across town.
Everybody knew everybody in Sandy Cape. People hailed him from the piers on his right and from the ramshackle shops and work yards on his left. He dodged laborers pushing barrels and venders fanning flies from the day’s catch of mackerel and cod. He snatched up a bucket of clams from the same old woman on the same stretch of pier. She knew to charge the purchase to Shark at the Castaway’s.
But for the crowd on the Quayside Highway, Sandy Cape was a dying town. Few children played in the streets or on the beaches, and most young men sailed to foreign ports, never to return. The only new faces to frequent the taverns and gambling houses were merchants and drifters and the occasional pirate crew, and these never sank roots in the sand to settle. It was a slow, painless death, quiet and inevitable.
The people and the buildings looked worn out, ready to collapse and let the tide sweep them away. A new coat of whitewash hardly repaired rotting, drooping eaves, just as new clothes failed to brighten the dullness in people’s eyes. They slogged through their routines because they knew nothing else. They had everything they needed, the result of backbreaking labor that sapped any enthusiasm for hopes and dreams. So there was little urge to venture beyond the confines of the cove, much less the island.
Rhian doubted he would be one of the lucky few who escaped. Years ago he tried to work up the courage to board a ship—pirate or legitimate, didn’t matter—bound for Mosegi or Dravnir or Zimra or Zadorna. Even Windhaven would’ve been a beginning, but he was needed here.
After his father drowned, debt collectors claimed that Ryrden owed them money. They produced what looked like proof, and Rhian’s mother had given them almost everything Da had earned. With the little coin they had left, Fiala was able to rent a small house and feed her growing son for a couple of years. After that, they begged for the most degrading work. Rhian had shoveled kelp and manure; his mother scrubbed floors and pots and sheets. Then Captain Bones hired Rhian to dive, and one of Fiala’s cousins offered her a room and a job as serving wench in his inn.
The Castaway’s Inn stood on the corner of Prince’s Street and Flood
Way—the former being too lofty a name to fit the venue, the latter being all too appropriate. Every squall pushed the sea the length of Flood Way, drowning the lower floors of the buildings that lined the curbs. Sea weed, dead fish, driftwood, and debris from the docks clogged the gutters and had to be raked from the road. Then there was the sand. All the town’s streets were flagged, but no one bothered shoveling the sand back to the shore. Not only was the town dying, but the sea was slowly burying it.
The swinging sign announcing the inn depicted a ship broken on a reef. To Rhian this seemed highly unlucky, but even now several men and women—some familiar, some not—passed through the door to fill their bellies with Vella’s chowder. Supposedly, Vella made the best chowder on the island, but more likely, it passed as edible only in Sandy Cape. Rhian hurried around back, hopped over the rotten steps of the back stoop and into the kitchen where he dumped the clams into a basin of fresh water.
“Finally!” Vella cried, reaching for her knife to crack open the shells. She was a buxom thing, smeared with purple eye paint, splashed with cream, and smelling of sweat and onions. “You’re late, Eyes, and my chowder’s getting thin. Shark’s looking for you.”
The common room was packed by the time Rhian squeezed through the door. Sailors, merchants, and laborers crowded the tables, shouting for beer and full bowls. Fiala bustled among them, balancing a tray stacked with dishes and bread rounds. Once, she had been soft and glowing; now she looked as tired as the rest. Her dark hair (powdered to cover the gray) fell across her eyes, and sweat beaded on her brow. She wore snug, practical leggings, battered slippers, and a blouse with a low neckline. Shark insisted on the latter. Feast for the belly, feast for the eyes, he said.
Fiala noticed her son’s arrival and shouted across a row of tables, “You’re late. I was beginning to think Bones had drowned you, too.” Ma hated Captain Sea Bones. From one end of the cove to the other she decried the former pirate as the cause of her husband’s death and all her subsequent miseries. Her anger was not unjustified: when Bones lost the payment for the Squid’s Eye, Da promised he would find a second prize to make up for Bones’s blunder. That dive was his last.
Rhian pressed between the tables, aiming for the stair and the room he shared with his mother. He needed to wash the salt off his face and change into a less faded shirt, but Shark spied his arrival as well. “Get your arse over here!” He stood beside his bar, a wide, drooping moustache exaggerating his frown. Rhian did as he was told because cousin Shark owned the roof over his head. “I do your mother a favor and this is how you show your gratitude?” How many times over the years had Rhian listened to the same tirade? It took every ounce of self-control to bite his tongue and keep his eyes from rolling. “Every table I have to clean, it comes outta yer pay, man.”
“You don’t pay me enough to take anything outta my pay,” Rhian retorted.
“I’ll dock every copper, just see if I don’t. Now get about it!”
Rhian cursed under his breath and swiped a wet rag off the bar before he ripped that gaudy moustache off his cousin’s face.
Shark bellowed at his back, “Sure yer mother didn’t let me beat enough respect into yer head!”
Among the din of stories told and retold for the thousandth time at the same grimy, warped tables, Rhian scraped bowls and mugs into buckets, then dumped them in the sink. A kitchen wench with raw, cracked hands rinsed them and passed them to Vella who filled them with her chowder and sent them back out again. Rhian mopped up spills, swept up fish bones and clam shells and sand that sifted off boots like snow, and all the while endured the impatience, the indifference, and the insults of the patrons.
Eventually the crowd thinned. The towners drifted home to finish chores before dropping into dreamless sleep. The inn’s guests lingered at the tables demanding ale, discussing business, and tossing dice in games of Skull ‘n Rose. At last, Rhian set aside his bucket and leaned on the bar for a deep breath.
A bowl of chowder slid toward him. Vella glanced snidely at Shark gamming with a pair of dark-skinned Ixakans in a far corner, then said in a low, husky voice, “The man treatin’ ya rough tonight, Eyes?”
“Nothin’ I haven’t learned to ignore.” Rhian stirred the heat from the chowder.
“It never ends, does it?” Vella waved at a promising table across the room. Cooking chowder was not her only means of making money for Shark Stoven. She steered clear of most of the towners, but the strangers were fair game. Unfortunately, the room to which she escorted her guests abutted Rhian’s and Fiala’s. The walls were thin, and Vella was vocal.
Many a sailor left Sandy Cape grinning and praising Vella as the most lively thing about the town. She kept herself soft and voluptuous by neglecting her floor scrubbing and linen washing. On the other hand, this habitual laziness, along with her love of chowder and beer had made her feminine roundness a bit excessive.
After Rhian devoured every drop in the bowl, Vella reached under her skirt and freed her silver flask from its pouch on her thigh. Crinkling her nose, she shook it at him. He eyed it warily. “What’s in it this time?”
She grinned. “Love potion.”
Rhian took it from her, sniffed the contents. Apples and rum. He gulped, cringed, paused artfully, then shook his head. “Didn’t work.”
Vella’s plump red lip pouted. “When are you gonna let me treat you, Eyes?”
Rhian broke into a laugh. Vella had asked him that question every day for the past four years. “Not tonight, Vella.”
She poked his forearm with a pudgy finger. “One of these fine days, you’re gonna give in to me.”
“Vella!” Fiala slammed her tray on the bar, startling everybody in the place, including herself. She lowered her voice. “Stop propositioning my boy. Get your mop, Rhian.”
Vella swiped her tongue over her teeth and retreated into the kitchen.
“Ma, you don’t have to—”
“Just do your job, Rhian,” his mother said through her teeth.
“That’s all I ever do.”
Ignoring his comment, Fiala lined her tray with mugs of beer and returned to a table under the front window. Three Evaronnan sailors eyed her greedily.
Rhian grabbed the mop and attacked the stains on the floor. He had progressed past the ‘life is so unfair’ phase, having accepted his circumstances long before boys are expected to. But by the Goddess! At nineteen, he not only shared a tiny room with his mother, but she still felt it necessary to coddle him, even from harmless banter. He appreciated the shame she endured for his sake by working in this filthy pit, but when would she realize it wasn’t necessary anymore? If he managed to convince Bones to pay him a full wage for his diving—the same wage Bones had paid his father—then Rhian could sweep his mother away from this inn and break free of Shark’s tyranny for good. Maybe then she’d see he wasn’t twelve anymore. But Bones was a stingy old bastard who seemed to hope that Rhian hadn’t realized he was being underpaid.
What if he tucked a pearl into his own pocket every now and then? Really give the factor something to accuse him of. He could save enough coin to get out of here. On the other hand, Ma wasn’t blind. She would know her son had turned thief, and that was shame he couldn’t live with. He felt as if he were driftwood caught in the in-out monotony of the tide. Something inside of him wanted to explode. He wanted to shake everyone by the shoulders and scream, Don’t you want to get out of here? Don’t you want to do something? Goddess, there must be something better!
“Stop it!” Fiala demanded and loaded empty mugs onto her tray faster.
The three Evaronnans laughed. They leaned back from their table, beer forgotten. One of them reached out a hard, brown hand and squeezed Fiala’s thigh.
She slapped his hand away, and she wasn’t teasing. The Evaronnan grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her down onto his knee. She squirmed and bared her teeth in anger. “If you want to grope, I’ll fetch Vella.”
“We don’t want that fat bitch,” said a second sai
lor. “We’re here for only one night. Give us something nice, eh?”
The mop handle cracked across the sailor’s face. Rhian swept Fiala from the sailor’s lap and set her behind him. “Go fuck yer own mother!”
The man surged from the table, fists balled, teeth grinding. The second picked himself off the floor and blew blood from his nose, while their startled companion rose slowly, fingers closing into fists.
“Wait! Don’t,” Fiala cried, darting between them. “Harassment comes with the job, Rhian, you know that. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Like hell it doesn’t.” He flicked an arm around his mother and landed a taunting slap on the nearest man’s face.
“What is wrong with you?” she demanded.
Massive arms seized Rhian from behind and dragged him away from the Evaronnans. Rhian glanced aside to find Shark’s yellow teeth bared beneath his twitching moustache. One of the sailors took advantage of the opening and drove a fist into Rhian’s gut and another under his jaw. He and Shark staggered into an occupied table. Patrons scrambled out of the way.
Fiala barraged one of the sailors with her tray, and Vella cheered from a safe place behind the bar. Shark dived for the ringleader in an attempt to pitch him from his inn, and as soon as Rhian’s vision cleared, he charged the sailor with the broken nose, flung him off Shark’s back, and hammered a fist into his eye.
Knocked to the floor a second time, the bleeding sailor whipped a whittling knife from his belt. Rhian leapt back. The sailor danced after him, slashing at a bare throat, at those aquamarine eyes. Rhian spun aside, grabbed a chair, and smashed it over the sailor’s shoulder; he dropped senseless. His companion pummeled Shark in the ribs, then dived for the blade. The third ducked Fiala’s flying tray and ran for Rhian, arms open, teeth grinding.
A delicious fury and a deadly calm filled him up inside. He lifted a hand, and an explosion of energy raced down his arm and out his palm. The wave of raw power rippled the air like an earthquake shakes the sea. It thundered against the walls, overturned mugs, assaulted patrons deep inside their ears. The brunt of the wave lifted the charging sailor off his feet and hurled him back through the salt-encrusted window.
