Jimmy was half out of the wheelhouse before he realized that he had no boots on and that his deck shoes were no match for the catch that still sloshed on the deck. “Did it get him?” he yelled.
Casey had Tony’s glove off and was examing his hand carefully, holding it this way and that.
Tony looked very scared and very confused. He kept trying to speak but all he could get out was “Wha? Wha? Wha?”
Satisfied, Casey picked the glove up carefully between thumb and fore finger and cast it over the side. “He’s all right, I think.”
Jimmy released the breath he didn’t know he was holding. Through the windscreen he saw Casey running her eyes across the surface of the catch while she explained that the innocuous little purple fish was a box fish–so called because even the smallest bite from it and you went home in a box. It didn’t have to be much. The fish produced a neurotoxin on its skin which caused a near immediate shut down of most autonomic nerve functions in humans if it were introduced into the blood stream. Even skin contact could cause a cascade of nerve function failure. The few people who survived it said it felt like they were being burned alive from the inside out.
Everybody knew of the little fish. They were rare, but they did turn up occasionally. Kids from a very early age were taught to look for them as they sorted the catch. A quick scoop with a plastic bucket and the box fish was back over the side where it inevitably swam back to the deeps. But Tony had never been told, because Tony hadn’t ever been a kid on a boat. He’d never heard of a box fish. They really were quite easily spotted in the catch, and nobody had died from a box fish bite in over ten stanyers. There were a few more instances of neurotoxin poisoning, but even those were rare.
Tony’s face paled as Casey explained how near he’d come to death, and swayed uncertainly before Casey put out a hand to steady him. She asked him a question and he nodded, a bit tentatively, but proceeded to get back to sorting the catch. Casey looked up to nod to Jimmy who was standing helplessly in the wheelhouse watching it all unfold on his deck.
By the time the catch was carefully sorted and stowed, nearly three stans had passed and it was time to haul back again. Jimmy had Tony and Casey grab a quick sandwich and coffee before they started the next haul back. Judging from the way the boat was handling with the one large bag of fish aboard, Jimmy thought he’d be calling it an early day and returning to port with his fish bunkers full. When they got the net up and saw it was even bigger than the first, he just set the autopilot and had the boat run back toward the Inlet while he helped sort the catch. It was a huge load and the Sea Horse rode low in the water. Her massive bows shouldered the seas aside as the chugged slowly back toward port.
When the last fish slid into the hold, Jimmy went back to the wheelhouse and knocked the throttles up. She wasn’t going to win any speed records riding so low in the water, but they were ahead of the schedule that Jimmy had set for the day and had a full load of fish to show for their efforts. Tony and Casey joined him in the wheelhouse for the ride home. Tony still looked a little pale. Casey kept watching him out of the corner of her eye, as if she expected him to keel over at any moment.
They rode that way, keeping an uneasy silence, all the way back to the Inlet.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Callum’s Cove
March 8, 2305
Rachel sat in the warm kitchen with a nice pot of chicken soup burbling on the stove and the spring sun shining in the window. The winds were too high for the boats to fish, so she enjoyed an unexpected holiday. Her mug of tea sat by her left hand, forgotten, and the screen in front of her scrolled unseen.
Fishing was good for being in the moment. There were hours to sit, sure. The long ride out, waiting out the first set. Often those hours were filled with sleep, or quiet conversation with shipmates, and not really conducive to introspection. Most of the hours at sea were filled with being at sea. The water, the wind, the boat, the fish. It was consuming. The land was far away, often only a smudge on the horizon. Distant in more than just geography.
Sitting in her kitchen, with the warm sun, the comfortable smells, and her face against the screen was usually as immersive as being underway, but her mind kept straying to her husband and her son and the odd facility known as the shaman’s gift. When she’d first met Richard, it was his eyes that captivated her. It didn’t hurt that he was easy to look at as well, but his beautiful green eyes tangled her heart. It was a bit of a shock when she realized–really understood–that he would be a shaman. The son of the shaman became a shaman.
She smiled to herself remembering Benjamin Krugg. He had seemed older than his years, and perhaps he had been. His face was wrinkled from smiling into the winds and sun. His eyes were dark, a brown or deep blue; Rachel was never sure, but they had a twinkle of amusement that danced there regardless of what he was doing. He had a way about him that set you immediately at ease, and at the same time made you want to be–for lack of a better term–better. His deep voice rang out when he blessed the fleet, even heard out on the boats as they passed in parade. The joke was they could hear him all the way to the Inlet. His quiet confidence in you could urge you to find things inside yourself when he sat you down to talk about your future.
Ben Krugg had been a fixture in the village as long as Rachel could remember, and Richard was often tagging along at his side. Richard was a handsome lad, and several of the village girls had set their caps in his direction. Rachel remembered him as being so serious. The son of the shaman would become a shaman. He took the role and responsibilities seriously.
The season she broke her arm Richard had caught her with his eyes. She’d been twenty stanyers old and new mate on the Lady of the Bay. It was a freak accident at the end of the season. She’d stepped wrong on the pier—of all the foolish things—and the heel of her rubber boot had skidded just enough that she fell. She tried to save herself from slamming into the stone pier, and only succeeded in snapping her ulna against a dock cleat. The local med-clinic took care of it, but she was out of commission and missed the last two weeks of the season.
The quik-knit took care of the break, and after a couple of days of feeling like an idiot, she had come to grips with both the incessant itching of the knitting bone and feeling like an idiot. She took to having breakfast at the diner–back when it was Cathy’s Cafe, she remembered–and visiting with the regulars. That was when she got caught by Richard and came to know his father as more than the village shaman.
Ben came into the coffee shop while she was there and talked to her. At first it was about her broken arm, but later about her fishing. The conversations were, by themselves, nothing special. It was a small town, after all, and the coffee shop was the normal morning gather–much as the pub was in the evening. It was during one of those morning chats when Richard was with him, that she first noticed the deep green of Richard’s eyes and the soft smile when he looked at her. It wasn’t exactly love at first sight. She’d known Richard all her life. It was the first time that she’d really seen him as something other than the shaman’s son.
She flushed remembering the feeling. It wasn’t like she was some wall flower virgin at the time. Living in a small town with a healthy population of growing males and females provided plenty of opportunities. Transient staffers provided exotic enticements, and even Bobby Rigg had learned that being sweet yielded better rewards than being a bossy pants. She giggled a little at that particular memory. It wasn’t Sin City, but few places with so many adults watching after so few children were. Still, when Richard smiled, she got all clichéd and overwhelmed with what she had thought of as “the gushy stuff” from the endless stream of what her mother called “trashy novels.” Her mother would know they were trashy, of course, because Rachel got them after her mother was done with them.
They started walking about the village–she and Richard–and soon the gossip had them linked, even before they admitted it to themselves. By the time her arm was fully healed, the winter had closed in, and Rich
ard and Rachel were a couple. That was about the time she got invited to the shaman’s cottage for the first time.
She looked up from her screen and cast her gaze across the sturdy kitchen. It hadn’t changed that much from the first time she’d seen it. There were a few more splashes of color. The data terminal moved in with her, when she came. The appliances and fixtures had been replaced with identical units from the Combine’s catalog. They fit the space and they worked very well. Benjamin had always worn an embroidered red poncho. It was a heavy woolen thing with a hood. It was unspeakably old and something he’d brought from the Eastern Reaches when he became the village shaman for Callum’s Cove. It used to hang on the peg behind the door.
He’d sat with her in this very kitchen, Richard occupied elsewhere, and they’d had the very conversation that echoed in her mind.
“The son of the shaman is a shaman,” he’d said. He said it like it was something she needed to be aware of, and of course she was. Everybody knew it. “The title is usually passed down from father to son, but the fever that took Richard’s mother, gave me the gift. So, sometimes the gift comes to those who don’t expect it. When it does, their sons become shamans as well. This is important for you to know. To understand.” His dark eyes had peered at her from beneath his shaggy brows, still with their twinkle of amusement, as if he were telling her a very funny, but subtle story.
“I understand,” she’d said. “If I have a son with Richard, he’ll become a shaman, too.”
“And are you prepared to be the mother of a shaman?” he’d asked.
She’d flushed at his implication and it echoed forward to where she sat at the terminal. “Well, we haven’t gotten that far, but yes, I suppose if we marry and have children, I’ll have to be prepared, won’t I?” she asked with a little grin of her own.
He’d chuckled. “Yes, parenthood does appear to be one of the one-way doors. Nobody really understands what’s on the other side until they pass through it. Once you go through, you can’t come back.”
Whatever he’d been looking for, he apparently found it because they ended their conversation soon after. She hadn’t thought of it again until the day of the wedding. After the ceremony, Benjamin had taken Rachel aside and slipped the delicately carved seabird into her hand. “Give this to your son, the shaman,” he’d said. “May he use his gift wisely and find peace.”
By the end of that winter, Benjamin had gone through that other one-way door to explore what might be waiting for him there. He’d been working in his shop on a crisp January morning, and they found him resting peacefully in his chair beside the stove when he didn’t come in for lunch. The shop was in order, and the fire banked. His twinkling eyes finally closed. From that day forward, Richard had been the village shaman and in the fall, Otto Benjamin Krugg had been born.
But the transition from fisherman to shaman’s wife hadn’t been smooth. She looked at the terminal in front of her and remembered the hateful conversation.
“Me or fishing,” Richard had said. “I understand if you choose fishing,”
The floor had fallen from under her and the ceiling crashed in at that one horrid moment. “How can you ask me that? Ask me to choose between breathing and eating instead!”
His beautiful green eyes had a deep sadness in them, but he stuck to his position. “Fishing is dangerous. I’d rather lose you now, for sure, than have to face every day not knowing if you’ll come back.”
“Don’t you think you’re being rather melodramatic?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps. And I know it’s unreasonable of me to ask it, but there it is.”
Unreasonable was hardly the word. She’d bitten back the ugly retorts then, and there were times even now–especially now–that she’d wished she hadn’t. “How can you ask this?”
“I have to think of the future, Rachel. I don’t want our children to have to grow up without a mother.”
She always considered that to be rather an unfair blow, but it had been the one that kept her from smashing his face and throwing the ring at his feet. In the end, she’d given in and her innate skills got her a job working the ’Net.
Rachel blinked the kitchen back into focus. The stanyers melted away like frost on the window. Her eye strayed to the roughly carved shark. “Oh, Benjamin. I was an idiot, wasn’t I?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Aram’s Inlet
March 15, 2305
He stepped off the flitter and back into Jimmy’s life after being only a distant shadow for all that time. Twenty stanyers had changed the Ole Man. To begin with, he looked a lot better. The shabby work pants, shirt, and jacket that he’d left in had been replaced by a tasteful business suit, topped with a trench coat knotted at the waist. The rubber boots were now polished leather. His hair, well, that was fake. It was a good fake, but it was fake. Jimmy wondered where that had come from as he ran a hand across his own sparsely populated scalp. Mostly, he was pale.
The picture that Jimmy had carried in his mind all these stanyers was of a deeply tanned older man, weather beaten and serious. The man who stepped from the flitter in his carefully polished boots and elegantly coiffed hair was not. The face seemed unchanged, except he looked like he hadn’t been in the sun a day since he left St. Cloud. For all Jimmy knew, he hadn’t. The smile on his face when he saw his son waiting was genuine, as were the outstretched arms ready to wrap him. In an instant, Jimmy was a kid again. Papa was here. Everything was going to be okay.
She stepped off the flitter behind him. Tall, slender, stacked, starched, and perfect. The nose didn’t quite twitch at the smell of fish, fuel, and water that washed the tarmac on the cold wind, but Jimmy caught the flinch. He heard Tony cough once in surprise.
Jimmy stepped into his father’s bear hug and gave him the traditional kiss on both cheeks. “Welcome back to St. Cloud, Papa. I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your touch.”
Angelino Pirano, chairman of the board of Pirano Fisheries, grinned at his boy and patted him familiarly on the cheek with one manicured hand. “The Ole Man cleans up good, you mean,” he said in his familiar graveled voice. “You’re looking good, Jimmy. I’m proud. Spinelli? Tony Spinelli?” he asked, looking over Jimmy’s shoulder.
“Hey, hey, Angelo, you old bastard! How you doin’?” Tony said, and hugged the elder Pirano.
“You’re lookin’ pretty tan for a bean counter, Tony! You been vacationing? My boy not workin’ ya hard enough?”
Tony chuckled. “He’s had me out fishin’! Me! A fisherman! Can you believe it?”
“You got him out on the boats? How’d you do that? I tried for stanyers to get this highland bastard to go out and find out what he was counting.”
“Well, I needed a crew and he was the only one in the office that day,” Jimmy said.
Angelo laughed. “Yes, we need to talk about that, but first I’d like you to meet Stephanie Daniels.” He held out his hand to indicate Ms. Iceberg of 2305. “She’s my executive assistant and keeps all my appointments straight. I manage the business and she manages me, eh, Steph?”
She smiled a well-practiced self-deprecating smile, and held out her slender and carefully manicured hand to Jimmy. “Nice to meet you, James. You’ve done some great work here on St. Cloud.”
“Thank you, Stephanie. I try to find ways to keep busy and off the streets. My lead analyst and crewman, Tony Spinelli.”
A chilly wind kicked across the tarmac and they headed into the terminal building out of the wind. Spring was in the air, but it still fought to win dominance over winter, especially when the wind came cutting off the bay. As they entered the building, Stephanie leaned forward to murmur, “Hotel,” in Angelo’s ear.
“Jimmy? Would you and Tony be good enough to come with us to the hotel while we get settled?” Angelo asked.
From anybody but the Ole Man, it wouldn’t have been a command. “Of course, Papa. We’re at your disposal for today.”
Tony said, “Why don’t you two go ahead. Jimmy and I w
ill collect the luggage, and meet you at the Aram House in, say, half a stan?”
Jimmy kept his face carefully neutral as his father raised one eyebrow fractionally, then shrugged. “Thanks, Tony. Good idea. We’ll see you there in a few.” He turned to Stephanie. “Ground car, please. You don’t wanna walk that far in the cold.”
Stephanie swept ahead of Angelo, heals snapping on the hard floor. She squired him out of the terminal, into a waiting ground car, and in less than a tick was gone.
“She’s...efficient,” Jimmy said.
“She’s not exactly what you had in mind as a step-mother, eh, Jimmy?” Tony asked with a chuckle as they headed off to the hanger to help unload the flitter.
Jimmy snorted. “She seems competent enough. And if you’re gonna have a bodyguard, it might as well be one who looks like she’s not.”
“That’s true. I wonder where she keeps her gun.”
“Small of her back in the waistband of her skirt,” Jimmy said without missing a beat. “Knife in her left sleeve, and she doesn’t need either of them if she can get in arm’s reach, so stay well back.”
Tony blinked.
Jimmy shrugged. “He can hire anybody he wants. He hires the best. Remember, this is the man who encrypts family greetings.”
South Coast (Shaman's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1) Page 15
