Spindlefish and Stars

by Christiane M. Andrews

  Somber-eyed, the boy looked at the handkerchief but did not take it.

  Clo tried again. “You dropped this,” she said quietly. The delicate lace fluttered in her fingers.

  The boy did not take the handkerchief from her. No one from the family took the handkerchief from her. They stared blankly ahead while Clo, cheeks burning, held out the offending square.

  “Ah, well. If they don’t need it now, I do,” said the bosun, grabbing the lacy cloth and running it under his nose.

  Discomfited, Clo turned away from the family’s vacant gaze and hugged her bundle closer to her chest. Only one or two large ships floated here; the water stretched wide and open around them.

  Water that is full of salt and has no edge, she thought.

  She felt herself full of salt.

  She rubbed a knuckle across her eyes.

  The manifest. Many years. It was an official document. She was meant to be here. Her father must have arranged it so. She slipped her knuckle across her eye again, then raised her chin. Manifest.

  “That’s us.” The bosun tipped his head in the direction of the largest boat. “The three-master there. She’s a beauty, no? An’ a good voyage she’ll give you, too.”

  Clo followed his gaze, her skin prickling with cold.

  No, beauty was not the word she would have used to describe the ship. A dark shadow rising out of the water, its sides greasy and scabbed with barnacles and seaweed, it listed as though it were already half sunk. Even without knowing anything about the harbor or the sea or the vessels used to navigate it, Clo could imagine no good voyage coming from that gloomy craft. No, she thought, not this boat. This can’t be right.

  The gray-faced family turned their heads just enough to look. Nothing—no flicker of emotion or knowledge crossed their faces.

  Hee. The little boy coughed an empty cough again. Hee.

  Clo, turnip-lugger, wall-jumper, found herself now a boat-climber; the bosun maneuvered the little dinghy under a rope ladder that draped over the side of the ship and instructed his passengers to climb it. The family ascended ahead of her, and as Clo waited her turn in the bobbing dinghy, she wondered at the ease with which the mother and children in their skirts—for the little boy, too, was in a lacy, delicate gown—ascended. Even the father, who carried a small trunk, moved seemingly unimpeded. But when Clo grasped the rungs, the ladder swayed and tilted under her weight. Panicked and trembling, she was sent swinging against the side of the ship. The bosun yelled from below, a man leaning over the edge of the ship yelled from above, but Clo could not control the thing, and the two men were obliged to balance it for her, pulling it tight against her motions. She reached the top breathless and shaking. A trio of straggle-bearded crew members grabbed and pulled her into a somber line of passengers where the staring family also waited.

  “Girly,” Clo heard from below. “Move not a whit. Boys, she’s not with the rest. She’s…” The bosun clambered onto the deck. “Ah, never mind what she is. You can take that lot to the cabins. A whole family there, that is. I’ve got this ’un.” He took Clo again by her shoulder. Scarcely knowing what she was doing, Clo allowed herself to be shoved along the deck and into the innards of the ship. “Here, here, here. Through here, girly, now here, take these stairs, mind yer head, an’ down here, ’nother stair, bit farther, down this passage, that’s good, mind the beam, duck a bit, an’ down here, through this bit now, an’ here we are.”

  They were standing in a dim, cramped corridor. Clo could make out little of what was around them—just the narrow walls and a small, thick door that the bosun was now, with a jangle of keys, unlocking.

  “Here you are. Yer half passage.” He pushed open the door, revealing an even more shadowy and cramped space. “It’s the locker. You’ll have t’ share it with some ropes and tools and such, but it’s yer own fer now. And yer voyage is not too long.” His mouth, drooping along its line of pebbles, looked almost apologetic.

  Clo cast her eyes desperately around the chamber. Things were mounded everywhere inside it, and ropes snaked and coiled everywhere over the things.

  “You’ll be needin’ a light, I gather. And maybe somethin’ t’eat? A half passage has got t’eat, I suppose. An’ to drink. I’ll see to it to remind the captain. Here”—he gave Clo an almost-gentle shove so she was now fully inside the room—“I’ll be bringin’ you somethin’ soon as I can. But we’re settin’ sail in a moment, and I’ve got to shut this behind me. Can’t have you wanderin’ the ship. Upsettin’ fer t’others. All right, then, girly.” His mouth sank deeper into regret as he pulled the door after him. “Closin’ up now.”

  “But my father?” Clo pleaded, calling through the narrowing gap.

  The closing door halted on its arc. From the other side, she heard, after a pause, “I’ve got no knowledge of that, girly, but Haros said he’s to come.”

  The door finished closing, and Clo was plunged into blackness.

  With the departing footsteps, she heard him mutter again, lower, “An’ they always do.”

  Breaths too shallow, Clo swayed in the darkness. All around her, she could hear water lapping against the boat, and the floor rolled in time to its sound. Reaching out, she grasped at what she could not see and tumbled into what she thought must be coils of a rope.

  The floor rose and fell, rose and fell. Her heart thudded heavily, a rapid, off-kilter knocking of fear. Her fear was not of the dark nor of the dank, salty smell of the things around her, but of the unknown… all that was unknown: her father, his whereabouts, his state, the boat, its captain, her destination… all the mystery that had been unfolding since the bells had rung at five the morning before and her father had not come home. “Why didn’t you come?” she whispered to the fatherless dark. “Why aren’t you here?” A sob filling her throat, she hugged her knees to her chest, but she could not stop the tears from coming. “Where are you?” She rocked herself as she wept.

  In the blackness of the little room, with the floor rising and falling and the waves chucking against the walls in a warm liquid rhythm, her heart and then her breathing steadied and slowed, and her fear and anxiety began to ebb in the monotony of the motion.

  Her eyes fluttered closed. Or else the darkness closed around them; she could not tell.

  The floor rocked, gentle, gentle, gentle.

  The water sloshed, sleep, sleep, sleep.

  The darkness and the rhythm of the boat lulled her into a kind of dreaming that was also a remembering: she felt as she did when, as a small child, her father carried her on his back when their travels grew too long for her toddling legs. Cheek resting on his shoulder blade, calmed by the rocking of his stride, she would drift in and out of sleep. She remembered being carried by him through the forest shadows; she felt even now she was being carried by him through the shadows.

  “Lambkin.” A dream. A whisper. “Are you asleep?”

  Clo felt his shoulder blade against her cheek, felt her own warm breath against the wool of his cloak. “No, Father.”

  “I need to put you down, lambkin. Can you walk for a time?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Above them, the shadows of trees.

  Her father limped. They walked slowly.

  “Where are we going this time, Father?”

  “Another village. Somewhere else. Perhaps better. Would you like me to tell you a story as we walk along?”

  Her feet padded softly on the forest floor. “Oh, yes.”

  “Once, Clo, once upon a time there lived a spider who spun webs so delicate and beautiful, they seemed made of starlight.”

  “I remember this story, Father.” Her hand was small inside his. “This is the story about the spider who wished to be a moth, and when she spun herself a pair of wings to wear, she became trapped in her own web.”

  “Yes, that’s the one.”

  “Please don’t tell it.”

  “Why, lambkin?”

  “It’s sad. It makes you sad.”

  His hand ti
ghtened around hers. “Yes.” His voice was soft. “I suppose it does.” He cleared his throat. “Would you like me to tell you a different story, then, Clo?”

  In the half-light of the forest, her father looked strange. Some kind of veil or rag seemed to have fallen over his face; the lines around his cheeks and brow had grown darker, deeper: his eyes more shadowed. Hidden.

  “Father?” She wanted to reach up and pull away the tattery thing. Where had her father gone? “Father.” She tugged on his arm. She wanted him to stop.

  He knelt beside her. “What is it, lambkin?”

  She placed her damp palm against his cheek. Her little fingers brushed his brow. His wispy hair. “Why are you so old?”

  “Oh. Oh, lambkin.” He wrapped her in his arms. He took her face in his hands. “I’m not old at all, lambkin.” He made himself a little straighter before her. “Why, I’m not yet even thirty.”

  He smiled. The tattery curtain lifted.

  He ran his hand over the wrinkles that sloped across his cheek. “Though my face is not so lovely as it once was…” He grinned. He teased. “Though fate has made my skin more uglified…” He winked. “My hair more grizzled… my gait more… peculiar…” He tapped her nose. “I promise I am still a young man.”

  “Really, Father?”

  “Truly. Not yet thirty. It is just my poor fortune to look… three times that.” The rag drifted for an instant across his eyes again. She reached to push it away.

  “Ah.” He laughed. “Would you like me to carry you again?”

  She hesitated.

  “Lambkin. I promise I am strong enough to carry my own daughter.”

  “No, Father.” She raised her chin. “I want to walk.”

  “Well, then. Should I tell you another tale—perhaps the one about the boys and the frogs now?”

  “Yes, Father.” She took his hand.

  “Once, Clo, once there were some boys playing by a pond where there lived a small family of frogs.…”

  They walked through the shadows of trees. Her father’s voice rose and fell, rose and fell. Her own steps rose and fell, rose and fell. The story drifted through the air as they walked and walked and walked through the forest and into the darkness settling around them.

  In the darkness, rising and falling, in the dark of the ship, rising and falling, the floor of the ship, rising and falling, rising and falling, Clo finally slipped into a profound, dreamless sleep.

  Only a fffa- fluttered on her lips.

  CHAPTER THE FIFTH

  IN WHICH THE PEBBLE-MOUTHED MAN APOLOGIZES

  WHEN CLO AWOKE, SHE WAS JUMPING REPEATEDLY OVER the village wall, no, falling repeatedly over the wall, no, being thrown repeatedly over the wall, no, no, no; she was in the dark and in her bed and being shaken by her father, no, by angry villagers, no, by hounds that had been set on her, no—the smell, the smell—the sea, the sea, the salt, she was underwater, no, in a net, no, in the belly of a fish, no, in a ship, a ship…

  When Clo awoke in darkness, in terror, the gentle rocking of the boat had given way to violent roiling, up and down and up and down, movement that sent her thumping against the things in the dark, and the lappings of the waves had turned into crashings at which the boat creaked and groaned.

  Reality came back to her in a sickening wave. Grief and dread rose in her all at once—she knew where she was. She did not want to know where she was. Her father. Haros. A ship. A ship.

  She stood shakily, feeling that she needed to get out of this terrible, wallowing darkness, but on her feet, still in blackness, the buffeting grew worse; she could not keep her balance. And standing, she was suddenly ill—her stomach churned with the violence of the waves.

  “Oh…”

  She retched. But as she had neither eaten nor drunk in many hours, the retching was empty and terrible.

  “Oh…”

  She collapsed back into the ropes. If only the crazed rocking would stop. The ship rose… and crashed… and rose… and crashed. Clo curled herself into the darkness.

  “Stop. Please.”

  She could not hold any thought in her head except her desire for that movement to end. How long it went on, how long she lay trying to quiet the nausea rocking within her and willing the rocking outside to end, she could not say, but after a time, she became aware of a voice.

  “Girly? Girly?”

  Clo opened her eyes. The bosun stood at the door.

  “Girly?” He raised a lantern. “You’ve got a bad look about you.”

  Clo opened her mouth to speak, but all that came was the sound Uh.

  “Come on, then, girly.” The bosun took her by the wrist and pulled her into a standing position. “The water here’s a bit rougher than we usually take, and with you deep in the bow, yer feelin’ the worst of it. This locker’s not called the hell for nothing, though none of us usually much notices. Can you hold this?” Pushing her cloak-wrapped bundle at her, he maneuvered her into the passage. “Haros says yer t’ come on th’ deck. Others’re all down below, an’ they don’t get the same sick. ’S been a while since we’ve had a half passage. The air’ll help, it will.”

  Rocked and wobbling, barely able to stay upright, Clo was obliged to lean on the bosun for balance. His sea-rot breath fanned over her, and she turned away, afraid she would retch again. She desperately wanted to be anywhere, anywhere but this dark, crashing room. She had to get out.

  “Come, then, girly, yer in a bad way. Jus’ a bit farther now. Up those stairs, an’—”

  A whiff of air entered from above.

  “Oh…” Releasing the bosun’s arm, Clo clambered up the stairs. Air, she must have air. Reaching the top, she took a long, deep breath. Air. Another breath. Air, salt, and wind. A shade of nausea evaporated.

  “All right, then, girly. There you go.” Coming up behind her, the bosun prodded her to step onto the deck. “There you go.”

  Still rocking, the world came into focus. Everything, Clo saw, was swathed in gray: gray tatters of mist that shifted and slid over the sky and sea, with only the roiling waves breaking across their form now and again. Clo felt the enormity of the rocking world around her, the immensity of the distance they had traveled.

  “Where are we?” Her voice cracked in distress. “Is my father here? Has he come?”

  Turned away, the bosun did not seem to hear.

  Clo pulled on his sleeve. “Where is my father?” she cried over the wind. “Where are we?”

  “Take this.” Without answering, the bosun pushed something firm and woodlike into her hand. “Ship biscuit. Scrounged it up for you. A bite or two’ll help settle yer stomach. And help smooth out yer teeth, too.”

  Her stomach churning with dread—Where was her father?—Clo did not want to eat. But with the brown cracker now in her hand, she nibbled—then gnawed—at its edge.

  “An’ some water. Look there.” He pointed. “Ladle in the bucket. Keep it on the deck t’ catch the rain when it falls.”

  She had not realized she was thirsty, but seeing the bucket, she rushed desperately to it. Grabbing the ladle, she drank greedily: gulp after gulp of water. Salt- and oak-tasting water. She could not drink enough. When had she ever been so thirsty? It felt as though she had not drunk in days. Weeks.

  “Apologies for forgettin’ you, girly. Didn’t mean to leave you there so long.”

  “What do you mean?” Clo ran the back of her hand over her lips. “I only slept for a bit, I think.” She drank again, watching the bosun over the ladle.

  “Ah…” The bosun looked uncomfortable. “So you slept, then? Felt like you slept? That’s good.” He looked out over the water. “Nearly there now. The waves’ll tell you that—always fiercest drawin’ close.”

  “Nearly there?” Clo looked apprehensively into the grayness surrounding the ship. She could see no sign of land. “Nearly where?”

  “Yer half passage. ’S why the captain called for you to come up. He’ll need us to row out soon as he gives his signal.”

&nb
sp; “Is my father here?” Clo struggled to hide the unsteadiness in her voice. “Or there?”

  “I’ve got no other half passage now, girly.” Working on the knots of a rope that lashed a dinghy to the rail, the bosun frowned. “That’s not to say he won’t come. He’ll come sometime. I can promise that. But yer half passage is on yer own now.”

  Clo, considering the bosun’s words with ever-growing alarm, gnawed again on the biscuit. It did not taste like promise. Or always. It tasted hard and dry and bitter.

  “I’ll take you there, o’ course. Haros was of a mind to leave you to the swabbies, let one of them row you, as we’d had no plans for a half passage, an’ when they all refused, he thought he’d leave you to yerself, but yer a slip of a thing, and leavin’ you to row through that”—he nodded at the waves—“well… half passage or no, it’s a fearful thing.”

  “I’m not a slip of a thing.” Clo felt her face grow hot. She thought of the wall-climbing and wall-jumping and field-running and forest-trekking and dark and alone and brave, and knew she was not a slip of a thing. Still, looking into the waves that tossed and pushed and sent the three-masted ship rocking and heaving, she knew she did not want to be left alone in them.

  The pebble mouth lifted a bit, then collapsed. “Ah, but you are. Full passage, well, not much we can do for that, but half, well, I can at least make this last part a mite easier on you, girly. For I’d a daughter once, no slip was she, but I’d not let her row alone here if I’d a say in it.” His mouth slumped more as he nodded toward the front of the ship. “An’ that there, girly, that’s Haros’s signal fer you now, I’m afraid.”

  Clo glanced toward the bow, where a lantern was now swinging in the dark.

  Beside her, the bosun muttered under his breath, “Yes, yes, I see you, old man.” Untying a final knot, he gestured to the dinghy he now held aloft with rope and pulley. “Right then, girly, in you go.”

  Clo, feeling her own gray sea of doubt and fear roiling within her, hesitated. “But where are we going? I don’t know where we’re going.”

  “Wellaway, girly, it’s the only place a half passage goes. The island, it’s a mite, a tip, maybe, better’n full. Neither here nor there. Take it an’ be glad. But if you don’t go now, we’ll lose our chance. See Haros still swinging that light? He’s taken us all he can, and he’s not the patient sort, so if you want yer half passage, an’ you think yer father’s got a half passage comin’ too, go, girly. Go now. Haros can keep the boat here just so long.”