After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

  Daniel’s chair scraped on the floor as he scooted it closer. He placed his thumb under my chin and turned my face toward his. “I don’t care about helping you. I’m not your helper.”

  We stared into each other’s eyes and I felt warmth in even the soles of my feet. An ache built in my stomach and beads of sweat gathered between my breasts. I remembered when I first pulled him onto my boat, his limbs long and heavy under the high noon sun, dark lashes fluttering as he regained consciousness, skin glistening from water and light. Even then, under my fear, I felt some calm certainty about him that I didn’t understand.

  Daniel cupped my face in his palms and dropped one hand to trail down my neck. He rubbed a fistful of my hair between his fingers, the strands’ friction making the gentlest rasp.

  “Don’t you understand? I can’t lose you,” he whispered.

  The tenderness in his voice made me feel like I was collapsing. I leaned into him and he kissed me, his mouth rough and hungry on mine, our tongues darting, breath mingling.

  His beard was rough against my face and I grasped his neck, his muscles moving and pulsing beneath my palms. My heart beat quicker and quicker, matching pace with his.

  Daniel lifted me onto the table. He slipped his fingers beneath my shirt and pulled it off. His hand on my skin sent a hot stirring between my legs and I arched into him. He was hard against my belly and I grasped the back of his head, his hair sliding through my fingers, his mouth trailing down my neck.

  Edge of his teeth, rough hair on his arms. A smoky, salty scent along his hairline. His chest heavy and warm, the taste of his skin. I felt like I couldn’t breathe enough. Like I was softening to liquid, dissolving.

  His fingers slid between my legs, my hips rolling against him, my whole body opening. When he entered me I tilted my head back, hands around his neck, my neck as exposed as the belly of a fish, the room almost upside down. The light from the candle swirled in the darkness. He moved inside me and my head clouded and cleared, clouded and cleared, until I couldn’t rise any higher and was held suspended, aloft.

  The room returned slowly, like awakening after a deep sleep. Rough wood on my fingertips, the chill from outside finding its way in. It seemed so cold. The night so silent.

  Chapter 47

  After a week of sailing in clear waters and cold but steady wind, we hit a patch of fog so thick we couldn’t see three feet ahead of us. The horizon and sun disappeared. Daniel kept pacing in the cabin and swearing.

  “We could be coming up on icebergs anytime. The map says depending on the season, they could already be in these waters,” Daniel told me when I stopped in the cabin for a new fishing pole.

  I touched his shoulder and smoothed his hair back. “We’ll be okay,” I said with uncharacteristic optimism. He laid his hand over mine.

  While being with Abran had been a break from myself, being with Daniel was a kind of coming home, a centering. Abran had been useful to me, but it wasn’t just that. I had been immediately attracted to his charisma, his certainty, the easy way he moved about the ship, like he could have been born there. I wanted some of that ease. When I first came on Sedna I was on someone else’s property for the first time and felt a new vulnerability. I needed Abran’s touch to soothe that vulnerability.

  Being with Abran was like one of those children’s games where all the thrill is in the chase and never the catch. Where you like most the moment when your fingers are inches from their back and they pull away from you, able to dart from your reach. The pleasure of wanting and not having.

  But Daniel gave me a deeper kind of desire: for possession, for a future, for a kind of living within each other. Perhaps I could feel a future with him because he was the first person since Grandfather that I felt safe with. Perhaps his love for Pearl made me feel that we were partners from the beginning, that we could work together for a dawn on another shore. My attraction to Daniel had grown slowly and steadily until it overtook me, moss spreading over a tree until the whole trunk was green and stayed that way until it fell to the forest floor. I could feel him even in my blood, as if he inhabited me just by looking at me. There had been no awkwardness between us after that night in the cabin. Instead what remained was a deeper understanding, like we’d spoken at length after a long silence.

  I returned to fishing, filling the salt barrels with cod and halibut and some small gray fish that I’d never seen or heard of. We were nervous it could be toxic, so Wayne volunteered to try it.

  “The king’s taster,” he joked, trying to lighten our mood, but no one laughed as we watched him chew and swallow.

  He didn’t show any signs of illness a day later, so Marjan cooked it with what was left of the potatoes and we all tried to savor our first full meal in days. We had gone on food rations the previous week and I could hear our stomachs rumbling in the night.

  Normally I depended on reading the water to fish, but fog kept rolling over us. So I kept fishing like a blind person, tossing lines over the gunwale, hooking up the net to the downrigger, reeling it in more frequently since the downrigger couldn’t take much weight. The rope holding the net was beginning to fray, but it was the only rope we had left. We had no more twine to repair it, so I hoped it would hold until we made it to the Valley.

  Daniel had us reef the mainsail to slow our speed.

  “I can’t navigate through icebergs if I can’t see them,” he kept saying. I laid a hand on his shoulder and felt his muscles coiled and tense as newly twisted rope. He spent all day in the cabin calculating distances or standing at the bow, straining to see beyond the fog, searching for the sun.

  One day, Marjan called out to me. She stood at the gunwale, near the bow of the ship, binoculars in hand. I left the downrigger and went to her.

  “Look,” Marjan said, handing me the binoculars and pointing straight ahead.

  I peered through the binoculars but couldn’t see anything past the fog.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I saw a ship,” Marjan said. She twisted her hands together and then pointed straight ahead.

  I looked again but didn’t see anything and didn’t want to. I had stopped worrying about the Lily Black. We’d been so isolated so long, only water and sky for miles and miles, that seeing another ship felt like a distant, unlikely possibility. Underneath the disbelief, fear thrummed and grew.

  “Are you sure? Maybe you imagined it. This fog can make it look like things are out there, but it’s just more fog,” I said.

  Marjan shook her head, biting her lower lip, her eyebrows furrowed. I reached out and rubbed her arm. There were dark bags beneath her eyes. She was taking our dwindling resources the hardest, straining to make meals out of the grain stuck in the weave of a burlap sack. We did still have a few inches of grain in barrels and a few canned goods left, but we couldn’t afford to waste a single crumb. We didn’t know how long it would take to land at the Valley or how long it would take us to find food once we landed.

  I told Marjan not to worry. Once she left to make supper I climbed the rigging to speak with Daniel. He peered at the sky and made a small note in his notebook. I told him Marjan thought she saw another ship.

  His face hardened and he stopped writing.

  “Do you think it’s them?” I asked. My hair blew in my face and I kept pushing it back.

  When he didn’t say anything, I quickly added, “It could be anyone.”

  “We could go farther north,” Daniel said. “Anchor and dock from that side.”

  “The map says anchoring on the south side is best,” I said. “It’s a sheer cliff to the north and a longer journey into the Valley from east or west.”

  Beatrice’s map showed that the Valley would only be accessible from the southern side of the island. The west and east would be a long journey on foot, over the mountains, and the north was a treacherous coastline and a maze of rocks and ice. There were a few steep cliffs on the southern side of the island, but in the southeast there was a small inlet where we could anchor
the ship and take the canoe to shore. That part of the shore was a flatter coastline with only a few miles to cross before reaching the Valley.

  “I’m just trying to think of alternatives,” Daniel snapped. He rubbed his face, his nose red from the cold. “Don’t tell anyone else about the ship yet. This fog will clear soon and we’ll make a plan.” He squinted up into the sky. “I hope.”

  I climbed down from the rigging and returned to the downrigger to pull up my net. I cranked the downrigger, throwing my weight behind each crank of the lever. The wood handle stung my raw skin, my fingers chilled to the bone. The rope moaned against the gunwale, and when the net surfaced the water I braced myself against the lever, the extra weight pushing against me.

  I gritted my teeth and glanced at the rope. The fibers unraveled in its weak spot, the strands snapping and fraying. It split in a sharp pop and the net splashed back into the water.

  Everything in me brightened in panic and I leapt forward to grab the rope, but it disappeared over the side.

  I looked over the gunwale, the dark water rippling, too clouded to even cast my reflection back at me. I sank to my knees and pounded my fists on the deck and swore.

  “Mom?”

  I turned and saw Pearl behind me. She stepped forward and stroked my hair, pulling it into a bundle at the base of my head. Her small fingers were so cold, I cupped them in my hands and breathed on them.

  “Yes, I caulked the weak spot in the hull. Dammit,” Jessa snapped at Wayne.

  “The floor was wet in the quarters this morning,” Wayne said. His handlebar mustache stuck up on either side of his mouth, and he kept trying to flatten it with his palm.

  “Well, stop harassing me. I’m dealing with it,” Jessa grumbled.

  Daniel stood at the cabin window, arms crossed, shoulders hunched up to his ears. He hadn’t slept last night; he kept tossing and turning, waking me from my light doze. Before dawn, he was on deck, binoculars to his eyes, searching the horizon. The fog was just beginning to clear. The rest of the crew thought he was keeping an eye out for icebergs.

  Marjan and I stacked the breakfast dishes and went over a plan to stretch the food. With no net for trawling and our dry goods almost used up, we’d have to depend on line fishing.

  “Mom! Mom!” Pearl ran into the cabin and grabbed my hand, pulling me out the door.

  We burst into the cold air and there it was. Greenland’s mountains. And behind them, the Valley.

  The mountains rose up out of the water, a startling green, their reflection in the sea below clear as a carved object. It felt like I could reach out and touch them. The wind whistled around Sedna and enveloped us as though it was lifting us up, giving me the heady sensation of flight.

  Pearl clutched my hand and beamed up at me, and I dropped to my knees and hugged her.

  “We’re almost there,” she whispered into my hair. She said it with excitement, but I felt a sudden foreboding. I had expected to feel only relief, but I also felt fear—fear of what I would find among those mountains.

  The others followed us out of the cabin. Gasps, claps, cheers, whoops of joy. Wayne slapped Thomas on the back. Marjan exhaled, closed her eyes, and clasped her hands together. Abran put his hands on his hips, shook his head as he let out a relieved laugh, and hugged Jessa.

  Even Daniel couldn’t suppress a laugh. He turned and swept me up in his arms, lifting me to my toes. His grin split his face in two, wider than I’d ever seen it. I buried my face in his chest and breathed him in. Everyone’s joy was contagious and I pushed aside my dread. I felt a stirring in my chest and the vision of the cottage by the sea resurfaced in me. But this time I saw Daniel in the cottage with Pearl and Row and me. Boots by the hearth, candles on a table. Wildflowers dried and drooping from a cracked cup.

  We pulled apart and Daniel went into the cabin to get the binoculars so we could survey the coast better and look for the inlet.

  I pulled my fur hood more tightly around my face. Not since winters in Nebraska had I seen my breath ghost before my eyes. It felt nostalgic. The air tasted like a cool glass of water. Like everything would be all right.

  The fog lifted around us. Pulled back its tendrils and revealed icebergs ahead of us, surrounding the mountains. The green of land was so bright it had cut through the fog, but now we could see it more clearly, the folds of the mountains, the rocks along the coastline.

  “Will we be able to navigate around the icebergs?” I asked Daniel when he returned.

  Daniel scanned the water around us and nodded. His expression was placid again, his mood subdued.

  “We’re small enough that it should be fine. Just need to go slow. I’ll ask Wayne to trim the mainsail again,” he said. “We could be there in a day.”

  We glided past an iceberg. It looked so serene, a brilliant white. It made me think of the face of a woman with her features rubbed off, erased.

  I turned from the north and looked south, to see the water we’d gone blindly through. Nothing but water, no icebergs, no rocky outcrops of mountaintops. We’d been lucky. To the south there was still some fog in the distance, clouding the horizon. I looked up, into the clear gray sky, and saw a bird.

  It wasn’t a seagull. Its head was too small, its legs too short. It was a land bird. I squinted. It was pale gray and it flew as if it were struggling against the wind; it couldn’t ride the wind the way gulls did. Even if we hadn’t seen the Valley, this was our sign. We were close to land. I was close to Row.

  A dove. Like Noah’s dove, I thought. A warm feeling spread in my chest and I smiled to myself. Hope. Like Marjan had talked about. What I needed.

  A flock of seagulls flew from the southwest, appearing suddenly out of the fog like a ghost. They squawked to each other wildly, their voices so erratic and overlapped they sounded panicked, like they were screaming out to one another. As if they were fleeing something.

  They passed the dove, their shadows darkening Sedna as they flew over us. I looked back at the dove, which seemed to be flying in a straight line. Like it was flying toward something. On a mission.

  I blinked. It wasn’t a dove; it was a pigeon. Like the pigeon I’d seen released at Ruenlock.

  The fog pulled farther back and I could see the horizon line, a dark gray streak where the sky met the sea, like a blade. And to the south, directly behind the pigeon, a dark ship sat on the horizon.

  Chapter 48

  Daniel handed me the binoculars. It was a ship twice the size of ours that looked like an old warship, but made of plastic and tires and metal sheeting, rather than smooth wood. Its bow had a thick metal ram, which caught the sun and sparkled. A black flag with a white lily in the middle billowed in the wind and the hull bore the name Lily Black. Daniel’s brother wasn’t just a high-ranking captain in the Lily Black, he was the captain of the tribe’s flagship.

  The ship grew larger by the minute, coming full speed at us, its sails stretched full with wind. There were gasps behind us and then silence. I couldn’t breathe, a cascade of terror rolling up my spine. Did we need to sail for the northern side of these mountains? It was more treacherous, but fleeing felt like our only option. We were smaller, so we could maneuver through the ice better than they could.

  “They’re at the horizon, so twelve miles or so,” Daniel said.

  When I turned, I saw that the crew was looking at me. Abran was as pale as the ice that surrounded us. He walked forward to the gunwale, placed his hands on it, and dropped his head between his shoulders.

  The crew spoke over one another, panicked, speculating.

  “Have they followed us all this way? They already got revenge for Ruenlock.”

  I glanced at Daniel, but neither of us said anything about his or Abran’s connection with the Lily Black. I remembered what Daniel had said about the crew tracking down Abran and taking over the Valley colony, while Jackson hunted Daniel.

  “Maybe they plan to take over the Lost Abbot colony at the Valley. I’ve heard they’re trying to take over the nort
h,” Marjan said.

  “And preexisting colonies are easier to take over than new communities,” Thomas said.

  “Which means we wouldn’t be in this fix if we’d known the Valley was a colony in the first place,” Wayne snarled at me.

  “We’re smaller than they are,” I said, ignoring Wayne. “Let’s slip between the icebergs, cut up north, and get to land. Hide in the Valley.”

  “The ice field is worse up north. What if we’re trapped between them and ice?” Wayne asked.

  I secretly hoped the Lily Black would get stuck in this ice field and we could still land on the south side of the mountains, where a small bay would protect us from the rocks and waves. But if the Lily Black made it through this ice, Wayne was right—the north wasn’t a safe plan.

  I turned back to the ship. It was a double hull, with at least six sails, and through the binoculars I could see cannon holes below the main deck. The ship looked like it could hold thirty men, maybe more, not counting the slaves belowdecks.

  “We shouldn’t have . . .” Abran was muttering. The resources hidden in the cave. The murder in the saloon at Broken Tree. Behir.

  Regret also surged through me and I tried to tamp it down. I grew dizzy. I clenched and unclenched my fists to startle myself clear.

  “Let’s try to make it through the ice,” I told Daniel.

  He nodded and ran to the tiller.

  I looked at Jessa, Thomas, and Wayne. “Armory.”

  They nodded and ran for the hatch, jumping down and letting it slam shut with a thud. We had handmade bombs, rifles, knives, bows and arrows. Weapons that would help mostly in close contact; nothing like the cannons that could rip us to shreds from a distance. Or the ram that could sink us.

  “Seal the water,” I told Marjan. She left for the cabin to pull good water from the cistern and seal it in plastic water bottles.

  Pearl clutched my hand so tightly, it was losing feeling. I squatted in front of her.