Floodpath

by Emily B. Martin

  YOU HELP ME SIGN

  I pop out the letters and slide in the next ones. There are only two of each letter, making repetition a challenge. Writing would be easier, but my wrist needles me, and I want to test this method. I stamp again.

  I HELP YOU READ

  I look at her. She raises her eyebrows in surprise and shrugs.

  “If that is what you want. I am not sure Arana’s signs are ones everyone uses. And it is maybe different in Eastern and Moquoian. But I can show you the ones I am remembering.”

  I nod and gesture for her to watch, hoping she’ll catch on. I make the fist she showed me earlier and circle it on my chest. Then I push the stamps toward her.

  She frowns, staring, and my hopes sink. I jump to try to explain.

  “You pick . . .” I point to the stamps, but she waves at me.

  “I understand. But I have to . . .” She taps her head. “Go from Eastern to Moquoian. I am not so fast as Veran. Give me a time.”

  “Ah.” I nod and sit back. She studies the stamps, then selects a few and slides them into the block. She inks it and presses it to the paper.

  SORY

  I take the block from her, pop out the y, add an extra r, and slide the y back in. She stamps it again.

  SORRY

  I nod. I gesture for the block back and change out the letters. I stamp them for her to read.

  SUN

  She grins almost immediately—she knows this one. She cups her hand and hangs it above her head, moving it in an arc like a sunrise. I copy her.

  We dive forward. At first, we have no discernable strategy beyond taking turns. Sometimes she stamps a word, I correct the spelling, and then she gives me the sign. Sometimes I stamp a word, she tells me what it is, and then gives me the sign. Sometimes we point at an object. Sometimes she gives me only a sign and I have to guess. When she doesn’t know the sign, I stamp it on another piece of paper to learn later. When she doesn’t know the translation, and if gestures fail, we put it on a third piece of paper to ask Veran.

  At first, we choose things within sight and easy to understand with this patchwork language. Cup. Fire. Paper. Table. Sword. Tattoo. Eyes. After a while, I begin signing back to her, to be sure I’m remembering them—she reverses the process and stamps the word I’m giving her. We delve into harder, more ephemeral words. Please. Give. Time. Music. Strong. Love. She shows me fingerspelling, giving me the alphabet to spell out signs I don’t know. We spend almost two hours on that alone, practicing until I can reliably call up the letters I need. I know it’s not going to stick—I’m going to be practicing in my sleep, feeling these signs in my dreams. But I’m too excited to slow down. I press her to show me how to string words together into sentences. I learn to drop articles, to rearrange words, to corral an unruly phrase into a succinct gesture. What is your name becomes name you? How do I sign that becomes how sign and a point.

  It’s visual poetry.

  I realize it as she shows me the differences between should and must—the same gesture, only with different emphasis and expression. It’s lyrical, it’s theatric, it’s a thousand times more nuanced than I thought it could be. My excitement builds. I’d considered the idea of hand signing during the long, dismal hours in my cell, but only briefly. At the time, I told myself it was because I didn’t know anyone who knew the language. There was a scribe in my parents’ office who was deaf, and one of the mail couriers in Tolukum Palace was, as well. But I expect the first is dead now, and the courier nearly as unreachable in our current state. But this wasn’t the only reason I couldn’t bear the thought of signing for long. Dwelling on the concept made me feel the same way Lark’s casual offering did on the trail back from Cloudyhead. I didn’t mean to turn her down so sharply, but the more she talked, the more it felt like the linchpin in my fate. The truth. That my tongue doesn’t work, and won’t work again. That verbal speech is out of my reach forever.

  It was an ungracious reaction, and I hope she understands that I’m sorry for it. I repeat that word, the first sign, sorry, several times, until she finally counters with it’s okay. Then she grins and gives me a string of satisfying curses that I can easily imagine being tossed around her campfire.

  We continue well into the afternoon, until we’ve filled nearly all the paper on the table and the plate of sticky buns has been polished off. I could keep going, but eventually she groans and rubs her temples.

  “No more,” she says, laughing. “It is more words than I have ever read.” I brighten—already her tenses are getting better. “I am not so smart for all this.”

  I laugh and repeat her word back to her, one she showed me an hour ago. You are smart. Damn, it feels good to have the letter s back!

  She shakes her head and rises from the table. “Not enough for this. If we ever fix things in Moquoia and in the East”—she gives me the signs for both places as she says them— “you should meet my friend Arana. She shows you them much better.”

  Maybe. But you are a good—

  I flounder. She hasn’t shown me teacher. I fingerspell it instead, asking for the sign. Lark screws up one eye in thought, first arranging my letters in her head, figuring out what Moquoian word I’m spelling, and then translating it into Eastern.

  She shakes her head. “Teacher. I don’t know the sign.”

  You are a good one, I insist.

  “Well, you had a good idea. This is smart.” She taps the stamps. “Makes me think of the letters better. If the block was bigger, we can write longer sentences.”

  Need more stamps, I suggest.

  “True.” She stretches her arms toward the ceiling, popping a few joints. “With enough you can write a whole page. You can write out all those smart things you are telling me last night. Stamp, stamp, stamp—put them on lots of paper and let everybody read them.” She laughs at her own joke.

  I smile. Then, in the blink of an eye, it slides away, and I’m left staring.

  Stamp, stamp, stamp.

  I reach across the table and pick up the block, studying it more closely. It’s such a simple tool, just a length of wood with grooves to hold the letters.

  Make it a little longer, have multiple sets of letters, and you could write a complex sentence.

  Make it bigger, add more grooves, and you could write a whole page.

  And then—and then—you could change the page.

  A buzz jolts through me, prickling the short hairs on my scalp.

  Woodcuts are normal. Woodcuts have been normal for hundreds of years. Carve a picture or a set of words backward, ink them, and press them to parchment. It’s slow work, unadaptable. Mess up a block, want to change a word, and you have to start over. Scribing, especially on the scale my parents worked, is faster and more flexible.

  But what if you could change the letters?

  Lark drops her arms from her stretch. “Lunch?” she asks. She signs the word to me. “Soe says there is cheese in the dairy jar.”

  I stand up, knocking the table. The stamps rattle.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey,” she repeats, raising her eyebrows.

  My brain is turning. I hold up the block.

  Do you think, I sign, stumbling back over words we just spent hours learning. Even with all that work, I don’t have enough words. I muss around on the tabletop, but we’ve used every scrap of paper. I unearth my slate from the pile.

  DO YOU THINK THAT KIND OF STAMPING COULD BE DONE? I write.

  “What kind?” she asks.

  MANY STAMPS ON A BIG BLOCK, THAT YOU COULD STAMP MANY TIMES? SENTENCES? PARAGRAPHS?

  She scratches her head. “It can probably work, uah? Though . . .” She mimics pressing down. “A block so big . . . it will be hard to ink, hard to press. Hard to get all the letters down. Actually tough work, I think, to press that big block over and over.”

  She’s right. I look at our paper again, riddled with patchy words where the ink wasn’t strong enough, or where one of us didn’t press hard enough. Smudges where the
paper shifted, misshapen letters where the stamps wiggled in their grooves. It would be hard to press a page-size block full of individual letters and still make it readable.

  “Need a giant arm,” she says, laughing again. She flexes and palms her bicep.

  My mouth drops open.

  A giant arm.

  To press with.

  “Ah!” I shriek.

  Lark jumps. “What?”

  I hurtle from the table, knocking a leg and sending papers flying into the air. Ignoring them, I lunge for the workroom. I kick aside the blankets we all slept in last night and swoop down on the big press.

  “Tamsin, what is it?” Lark follows me to the door.

  I turn just long enough to sign something she showed me. Hot damn!

  “Hot damn?” she repeats.

  I drag out the heavy wooden arm that fits into the screw of the big press. I hoist it over my head like a trophy.

  “Ah!” I shriek again.

  Her face widens. “Hot damn!”

  Then it’s just yelling.

  We just yell.

  Veran

  Giantess Township is teeming on market day. The town proper is set in a grove of redwoods, dominated on one end by the Giantess herself, a tree so tall the top becomes blue and hazy even without a mist. Turquoise streamers stretch from the trunk—Soe tells me the color is changed to coordinate with each month’s new si.

  In the center of town is a large clearing, left when one of the massive trees must have fallen. Its stump remains in the middle of the town square, set over with boards to form a central stage. Soe explains that most of the time, the stage is free for public use, but on market days, merchants can rent it out to sell their wares. Right now, it’s being dominated by a stock tender auctioning off goats.

  Most of the other stalls are set up around the periphery, selling everything from candles to quilts to briny crocks of seaweed. Only a few vendors look permanent—a blacksmith’s shop pouring acrid smoke, a furnace boiling molasses, and a small mill. The rest of the stalls are cloth or canvas stretched over temporary frames, some right off the backs of carts. Soe sets up her awning under a redwood with a split trunk, and almost immediately, people materialize to purchase a quart of walnut oil or to bring goods for her to press. Soon she hands Iano and me a bag jingling with crescents and coppers, along with a list of the things we need at the cabin. Shouldering an empty hamper, we set off into the crowds.

  The food stalls are teeming with summer produce, and we fill the hamper with knobby squashes, meaty orange mushrooms, and baskets of plump berries. While we stand in line at the dairy stall, we hear a woman buying the same number of squashes we did for half the price. Iano frowns.

  “We’ve been marked as newcomers,” I remark.

  He looks down at the copper coins in his palm, stamped with an approximation of his profile.

  “It is my first time in the market,” he says. “Yours?”

  “Sort of. If my parents or siblings want to visit the market, a special afternoon is cleared for them, and a squadron of the Palace Guard makes a perimeter. Vendors would never overcharge the king and queen, even though they’re the most able to afford it. My ma always overpays.”

  He turns a few of the coins. “We don’t go into the city much, and when we do, it’s always in litters lined with mosquito netting. But I remember my grandmother saying they used to go a lot when she was a child, often to visit the soup kitchens. They stopped once the fever started to climb.”

  I can’t help myself. “You mean once the palace atriums were built?”

  “And all your little birds started hitting the glass, uah,” he says, matching my barbed tone, but his gaze is still serious, on the coins. After a moment, he closes his fist on them. “I guess . . . I never really thought about how that might have impacted relations between the monarchy and the populace.”

  I open my mouth to reply, but I cut off abruptly. The woman standing in line in front of us has turned her head—as if listening. Iano sees my frozen expression and glances, too. He goes still and silent. I realize how loudly we were speaking.

  There’s a long, awkward pause as the woman waits for the dairy maid to fill her order. The very edge of her face is visible, enough to see that her eyelid is twisted and lashless with a faint scar. We try to stand nonchalantly and act as if we weren’t just chatting about our lives as pampered princes. After a long, breathless moment, the customer collects her goods, pays her fee, and moves away, giving us room to conduct our business.

  When we finally make it back to Soe’s table, her stock is almost gone and her coin box is rattling.

  “Where have you been?” she asks. “I thought you’d be back an hour ago.”

  “We’re market beginners,” I say, setting down the hamper. “Took us a while.”

  “Well, give me your change, and I’ll see how much more you need—”

  “Uh, no change,” Iano says.

  Soe tosses up her hands. “What’d you do, let every granny swindle you? Colors.” She opens her coin box and counts out a few handfuls of crescents. “Here—you’re going to need to split up, if we want goods of any quality. Iano, why don’t you go to the herbalist, she’s over there by the well. Veran, you go get the blankets and clothes. Most of the clothiers are by the stage. If someone asks about your accent, just say you’re from the islands.”

  With some trepidation, we do as she says, splitting up. I poke through the coins in my hand, trying to orient myself. Despite my grasp on the language, I haven’t had to spend much Moquoian coin, and the rate is different from Common Eastern silvers. I spy the quilter and head her way, trying not to look like an easy target.

  It goes better than I expected, as does the men’s clothier, where I buy a few changes of clothes for Iano and myself. I’m tripped up at the dressmaker, not sure how to estimate Tamsin’s size. I choose two that look like they’ll be short enough for her, and then move to the women’s work shirts and trousers.

  “What size are you looking for?” the vendor asks.

  “Uh . . .” I stare at the shirts, suddenly realizing what I’m doing. Picturing a garment to go over Tamsin was one thing. Picturing one to go over Lark . . . I’m hit suddenly with the memory of this morning, of the muscles bunching and sliding under her bare skin, her shoulder blades drawing together.

  I break into a cold sweat.

  “Well?” the vendor asks.

  My gaze falls on a pile of vests, not unlike the one she ripped off in Tellman’s Ditch to make a firebomb. A glint of thread peeks out from a fold, and I shift a few aside to get a better look.

  “That one,” I say, pointing. The vendor pulls it out, and I can’t help it—I grin. I couldn’t have found something better if I’d commissioned it myself. As blue as any Lumeni flag, the vest has golden embroidery on either side of the lapel, bursting outward like unmistakable sun rays. The buttons flash bronze, like her eyes.

  “Definitely that one,” I say.

  “It’ll cost you,” the vendor warns.

  “I don’t care. I’ll take it,” I say. “And two long-sleeved shirts—those’ll do.”

  She wraps up my picks and charges me a whopping seven crescents for the bundle, but I couldn’t care less. I pile my finds with the quilt and turn away from the stall, satisfied. I poke down the final row of stalls, rounding out my purchases with several pairs of stockings and a few handkerchiefs. Hefting the massive quantity of cloth in my arms, I’m about to pass by the last vendor when I see what his wares are.

  Hats.

  Most are straw sunhats, but there’s a small selection of broad-brimmed leather hats. Eastern Desert Hats, Genuine Alcoran Leather, says the sign beside them. My gaze falls on one sitting above the others, a handsome work of brown-and-white patch cowhide. At first glance, it looks too large, but then I remember how big Lark’s old black hat was to fit over her dreadlocks.

  “I’d like that hat, please,” I say.

  The hatter looks me up and down. “That’s twe
lve crescents.”

  “I’ll take it for seven.” I only have eight left, plus a few odd coppers. Please sell it for seven. I could always go back to Soe and see if she’s made any last sales today, but something tells me both she and Iano wouldn’t technically approve of this purchase.

  “The hide in that hat alone is worth nine,” the hatter says, disapproving. “If you can’t do better than twelve, you can move along.” He looks over my shoulder at a customer drifting up behind me.

  “No! Um . . .” I shift my pile of cloth onto his table, which makes him tsk in disapproval. “No, here. I can do eight crescents, and this.” I dig in my pocket for the laurel-flower medallion, the one I hacked off my boot in the water scrape. I hold it toward the vendor.

  “That’s genuine Silverwood silver,” I say. “Not sterling. It’s worth another eight crescents, at least.”

  The hatter blinks in surprise, perhaps at my desperation to buy his hat. He takes the medallion and turns it over, studying it. I watch, drumming my fingers anxiously.

  “Very well,” he says, rubbing his thumb over the metal. “Eight crescents, and this silver piece.”

  Victorious, I hand him the rest of the money. He lifts the hat from its stand and rests it on top of my bundle. I breathe in the scent of clean leather. I gather it all up and turn.

  Then I stop short.

  The customer standing right behind me is the same woman who was in front of us at the dairy stall, the one with the scar twisting her eyelid. I stare at her. She stares back. Her eyes narrow.

  “Desert hats are selling real good right now,” the vendor comments behind me. “Thanks to that Sunshield Bandit. You from out East? Is that where you got foreign silver?”

  I swallow but don’t turn back to face him, still holding the gaze of the woman. “No,” I say with what I hope is conviction and not fear. “The islands.”

  And then, without another pause, I step around the customer and walk away as fast as I can without appearing to be running. I start to head back toward Soe’s cart, but veer off at the last second—if the woman is watching me leave, I don’t want to make it too easy for her to find me again. Instead, I circle toward the central stage built over the redwood trunk.