After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

  When I wasn’t watching the water and our lines, I kept glancing up at the mountains. A half mile from the mountain range a tiny island stood about fifty feet above the water. Daniel was navigating us to sail through this half mile between the coastline and island so we wouldn’t have to maneuver around the land mass entirely. As we drew closer to the island we would begin skirting around it, turning farther south. It was tiny, only a half mile across, and a cluster of short trees grew on top, looking like a shelter where people would camp out. I had the distinct feeling that we were approaching enemy territory, as though we were traveling in a desolate land and saw the campfire of our enemy up ahead and didn’t know where they had gone.

  Pearl and I dropped a net to trawl for live bait and Abran stopped next to me as I worked the downrigger.

  “Is trawling really a good idea here?” Abran asked. “Since we’re so close to the coast, couldn’t the net catch on something?”

  “We need more live bait,” I said. He was right—it was a terrible place to trawl. I probably wasn’t even getting the right depth, but I wanted a full net to show off before the vote.

  “Okay. It’s just putting such a drag on our speed. The sails aren’t large enough.”

  “It’ll be quick—”

  “Abran!” Thomas called from the bow.

  Abran ran up to the bow and Thomas handed him the binoculars. We were pivoting around the small mountain island, skirting close to the coast, passing through a small channel of water between the island and the coast. It seemed risky to sail so close to the coast, and I wondered why Daniel had charted this route instead of one farther out to sea.

  I squinted to see what Thomas was pointing at. I thought I could see the bow of another ship behind the island. Maybe it was just a fishing vessel. People tended to fish close to the coast, as they could get to a port to trade more easily.

  The island was less than a thousand feet away and Jessa had adjusted the sail at the halyard so we’d catch the north wind and turn farther south. Wayne stood at the tiller, turning the ship so we’d pivot around the island, and I reeled in the net on the downrigger as quickly as I could.

  Behir, Jessa, and Marjan scrambled to the bow and I followed them. Pearl tried to follow me, but I turned and pointed to the cabin.

  “Go to Daniel,” I told her.

  “What is it?” Pearl asked.

  “Go!” I commanded.

  Pearl glared at me but obeyed, retreating to the cabin, where Daniel was working on calculations. We rounded the island and almost sailed into two ships that seemed to be anchored side by side. The northern wind pushed us even closer to them, our ship now only a hundred feet away.

  Abran lowered the binoculars and yelled to Wayne at the tiller, “Turn toward the coast! Keep along the coast!” Panic edged his voice and he gripped the gunwale. I squinted over his shoulder and saw raiders from the larger ship boarding the other, a fishing vessel, clubs and knives in their hands, a black flag flapping in the wind from the bow of the larger ship.

  Sedna shifted toward the coast, but we were trapped between the island and the coast, not able to turn away from the ships. A man on the fishing boat took a hatchet in the chest and fell to his knees. Screams reverberated around us, so heartrending that it felt like they came from our own ship. Two raiders got a rope around one man’s neck, the other end of the rope fastened to the stern of their ship, the rope’s slack trailing in the water between the two ships.

  They’re going to keelhaul him, I thought distantly, bile building in the back of my throat. I swallowed it and wanted to run.

  A raider wrestled a baby from her mother’s arms, the baby and mother screaming the same scream, the mother clawing at the man. Another raider grabbed her arm and ripped her back. The man with the noose around his neck screamed and charged the raider and someone grabbed his rope and he was yanked back, tumbling backward, red in the face and gasping.

  “We need to stop,” Jessa whispered, her eyes wide.

  I was thinking the same thing, but I didn’t say anything. I stood rooted on deck, my hands itching for the weight of knives in my palms but my feet unmoving, some part of me aware that if I didn’t do anything we’d sail right past, isolated, with no losses to count as our own.

  Behir touched Jessa’s arm. “Come on,” he told her, trying to pull her back to the cabin.

  “We need to stop!” Jessa screamed, running toward Abran. She grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him.

  “Behir—please,” Abran said, his hands on Jessa’s waist, trying to move her toward Behir. His face was pained, with some new stillness behind his eyes. Like he was shut down, a part of him silenced and tucked away.

  Behir stepped forward and took Jessa’s arm, but she turned from him, reaching her hand out to the fishing ship, her hand opening and closing in a grasp.

  The raider who held the baby climbed back on his ship. A woman on the raider ship walked toward him and took the baby, disappearing down into the hull with him. My stomach clenched and I knew what would come next. They would keep the mother separate from the child, transfer her to another ship or base. They’d raise the child to be part of their crew, to raid ships at sea or to guard colonies on land.

  The screams continued, but they were muted, like I was hearing them through a closed door. Breath left my lungs and I felt weightless. I was a feather in the wind, swaying on my heels, my knees almost buckling beneath me.

  Behir held Jessa as she screamed and dropped to her knees. I backed away from them, the need to flee like a fire in my chest.

  The raiders boarded their own ship again, taking their plunder with them. The raiders opened the door to a small birdcage and a bird flew from it, darting straight up and to the west, as if pulled by some invisible string in a predetermined direction. We passed them, the distance between us widening.

  I was grateful for the distance. I didn’t want to see the rest; I knew all they would do. They’d take the mother with them and whatever water was left in the fishing boat’s cistern. They’d leave the captain on the fishing boat, and once the raiders’ sails gathered wind the rope would rip him from his feet, his body slamming against the gunwale and tumbling into the sea below. He’d follow them like bait on a hook for a day or two, smashed to bits against the barnacles on their boat, shredded by coral on the mountains just under the surface, swallowed by the sea. And then he’d hang from their bow, wet and purple, the sun drying his hair until it went soft, fine as the downy hair a baby loses before he’s born.

  Chapter 24

  Jessa wouldn’t come up from the crew’s quarters for three days. Wayne paced the deck of the ship, ranting and raving about turning our ship around and attacking the raiders. Everyone let him rave, with an unspoken understanding that he’d quiet down in time and everything would return to normal.

  When Jessa did come up from the quarters, she first stormed into the cabin where Abran was talking with Daniel, demanding to know why we hadn’t helped the people on the fishing boat.

  I stood in the kitchen with Marjan, the curtain pulled aside, watching as Abran tried to reach out and comfort Jessa. She knocked his hands away.

  “We aren’t prepared to attack a raider ship,” Abran began.

  “Bullshit!” Jessa cried. “We have a whole armory!”

  Abran shook his head. “Jessa—we can’t save each ship that is threatened. Our loyalty is to each other—we can’t save everyone else.”

  Tears streamed down Jessa’s face. She wanted to go back in time, I realized. She wanted to save herself by saving them. I knew that feeling and that need. How much in my life could I rewrite by saving Row?

  I was struck again with the feeling of running, of backing away from her. Seeing her was a little too much like looking in the mirror.

  After Behir helped Jessa down to the quarters and Marjan and I returned to descaling fish, Marjan leaned closer to me and whispered, “It happened to her.”

  The hairs rose on my arms as if they could keep the tr
uth out, make all my surfaces impenetrable. “What?”

  “She had a baby.”

  I jiggled the knife between muscle and scales. I don’t want to know, I thought. I couldn’t touch that kind of grief, I couldn’t be near it. It felt like a contagion, like someplace I’d been, where if I returned, I might not survive again.

  Besides, I didn’t need Marjan to tell me. I already knew Jessa had suffered the same thing as that mother. Her scream had that tenor—that tenor of reliving something that shouldn’t have been endured in the first place. I knew it, but I couldn’t bear to have it named to me, where I’d have to acknowledge it.

  But why not? Why did I keep wanting to hold them all at arm’s length?

  Maybe, I thought, if everyone has lost what you’ve lost, you can’t use them to get her back. You can’t stomach deceiving people who have suffered as you have. It’s easier to not know too much.

  “Wayne and Jessa were both in the military,” Marjan said. “Wayne was in a combat unit, Jessa did work in intel. When part of Wayne’s unit joined the Lily Black and he refused to join they were taken captive on a ship. Wayne, his wife Rose, and Jessa.”

  Marjan continued on, telling me how Jessa was pregnant with her dead boyfriend’s child when they were taken captive. They were slaves on the ship for half a year before Rose was murdered when she was found stealing supplies so they could escape. Throat slit as she stood before Wayne and Jessa. A month later Jessa gave birth and her daughter was taken from her, to be raised on a base with children from breeding ships.

  After that, Wayne hid Jessa in an empty barrel that he wheeled on shore during a stop at a trading post. He left her behind and boarded the ship, since he was always followed by guards during stops on land. Back on the ship, he lit the sails on fire and leapt into the sea during the chaos, swimming back to the port. He and Jessa found each other and swam two miles to another mountaintop, hiding in the woods until the Lily Black gave up on finding them and sailed from the area. They were starving on that same mountaintop a month later when Abran and Thomas came across them. Over the next few days I watched how the crew cared for Jessa, taking meals down to the quarters and speaking to her about small tasks to be done around the ship, gently pulling her out of herself. I remembered how alone I’d been once Grandfather passed away, just Pearl and me, her tiny body nestled against mine, her cries in the night so desolate it felt as if we could be the only two people left in the world.

  It made me want to join them, to be invited into their secret language of gestures and expressions. To have a place. Even though I was part of them, I still felt like I was on the outside looking in. These two impulses—to be close to them and to hold them at arm’s length—kept rubbing against each other, putting me on edge.

  I thought of the small fishing vessel Pearl and I had seen plundered before we’d found out Row was held captive in the Valley. How it had been easier to believe it was only Pearl and me in this world; everyone else felt vaguely abstract. And now it all felt too close. Like I suddenly had more responsibilities than I could carry and I couldn’t choose between them all.

  Four nights after the attack we gathered in the cabin for the vote. Abran described the Valley, sharing the details I’d told him—some true and some not. I tried not to squirm when Abran talked about how safe it was. It would be safe, once the Lost Abbots were gone, I reasoned with myself.

  Abran talked about how there were only a few hundred people settled in a peaceful village and there was plenty of land to spare.

  “We can invite them to join our community, if their values are the same as ours,” Abran said.

  “What if they don’t want to?” Wayne asked. “How will our community grow since it’s so isolated up there?”

  Abran paused, clearly uncertain. My heart sped up and I worried that he was reconsidering holding the vote.

  “Expansion can be a problem anywhere. It’s not the number of people, it’s the right people,” Abran said.

  We were only a week’s sailing from Alahana, the village in the Andes where we planned to trade. But if the crew voted for the Valley we’d turn north and slip up through the Panama Canal, now a gorge that spanned hundreds of miles, and enter the Caribbean Sea. We would stop and trade instead at Wharton, a small village in what had been southeastern Mexico.

  While Abran talked about the Valley I watched the crew, trying to anticipate how they’d each vote. Marjan was placid and unexpressive, while Behir looked eager and intrigued. Jessa kept exchanging skeptical looks with Wayne, and Thomas sat in the corner frowning.

  The wind howled outside and Pearl stood in the doorway, watching the seabirds flying above deck, scouting our ship for food. Daniel sat next to me, arms crossed over his chest, chin down so I couldn’t see his face.

  Abran talked with his hands, his expressions animated. But there was something desperate beneath his charisma, an anxiety. It was clear it was easy for him to be persuasive and to get people to follow him. Though I was uncertain about whether he could hold people together long-term. I thought of what Daniel had said about being in large groups, how the values of a group can change. How laws are only laws if everyone is following them.

  “So we need to put it to a vote,” Abran said, clapping his hands together.

  “We should discuss it some first,” Wayne said. “First, where did we get this information?” Wayne glanced at me before looking back at Abran.

  My face flushed and I squeezed my hands together under the table, trying to loosen the clamminess. They knew. They probably all knew.

  Abran paused and I could tell he was considering lying. “Myra, here. She told me about it. She got the information from trustworthy sources. People who have traveled and traded there.”

  “Sounds like a tall tale,” Wayne said. “Too good to be true.”

  “I didn’t know Greenland had high enough elevation for habitation,” Behir said.

  “That’s Iceland you’re thinking of. Completely covered,” Marjan said.

  “It will be almost impossible to get there. Storms. Raiders,” Wayne said.

  “But if we do make it, we’ll be safer. We’ll have a chance to build something with little outside interference,” Abran said.

  I wanted to argue that the size and durability of this ship made the journey safer, but I kept quiet. If anyone persuaded them, it needed to be Abran, someone they already trusted.

  “Why do you want to go?” Wayne asked me. “You know someone there?”

  “No,” I said, lying instinctively. “I think it’s our best chance. At really settling.”

  “We already know there isn’t good land in the Andes,” Abran said.

  I was surprised by how certain he sounded. Perhaps the attack we had witnessed made him keener on the isolation of the north.

  “We don’t know anything until we’re there,” Wayne said.

  “We do need to get off the water,” Thomas said, his voice coming so quietly from the corner that everyone startled. “That attack . . .” Thomas shook his head.

  “But we’ll be on the water even longer if we go to the Valley. The journey will be twice as far as reaching the Andes,” Jessa said.

  “But once we’re there we’ll be more isolated,” Behir said. “We won’t have to deal with as many attacks.”

  Guilt curdled my stomach again. I imagined Sedna arriving at the Valley and everyone discovering it was already a colony. The shock on their faces, their rage as they turned to me. Would I lie even more and say I hadn’t known about the colony? We would not only have to attack the guardians left behind, but we’d have to face the Lost Abbots once they returned, as they did every season, making their collection rounds.

  “Okay, okay,” Abran said, holding his hands out. “We don’t have time to discuss every possible detail. Let’s just vote.”

  Everyone seemed to go quiet and still, and I searched their faces, my heart speeding up, my fingers tingling.

  “For everyone in favor of changing our destination
to the Valley, please raise your hands,” Abran said, raising his own hand.

  My hand shot up and I surveyed the room. Daniel, Behir, and Thomas also raised their hands. Five. We were the majority. We were actually going.

  Abran asked for the vote against the Valley, but I wasn’t paying attention anymore. Relief seeped through me and my bones felt loose in their joints. Some part of me had never believed I could really get them to change course. I felt that my life was always taking me farther from Row and that I’d always be fighting tooth and nail to help her but never getting any closer. But that wasn’t true; we were turning toward her. For the first time, I’d be going in the right direction.

  Jessa and Wayne were talking angrily near the kitchen, throwing me dark looks, but I paid them no attention. Daniel stood up to leave, not facing me. I’d thought that maybe he wouldn’t vote for the Valley, to spite me for not listening to him about joining Sedna. But that’s not the sort of thing he would do, I thought, as I studied his back, his shirt plastered to his spine with sweat.

  When I turned to leave the cabin, I felt Marjan’s eyes on me and I looked up at her. Marjan’s eyes held a reproach as I passed her, full of sadness and caution. Like she could see something I couldn’t. Guilt pulled my elation back the way the sea recedes at low tide, crawling backward, leaving the sand wet and slightly sunken. I might be able to turn the current, but I wasn’t like Daniel or Abran, thinking of others, keeping their promises.

  I thought of how Row must be living. What room would they keep her in? A dug-out basement of a shack? A small room with cinder-block walls? Would she have even a window?

  They’d try to keep her healthy. This comforted me only a little. Did she know what awaited her?

  I’d do anything to save her, I reminded myself.

  I pictured her braiding her long dark hair in a quiet room, light from a window falling in her lap. Wearing a linen tunic in a color lighter than her skin. Her face in shadow. I couldn’t even imagine it, my mind denying me this. Telling me I must see it to know it.