by Geoff Rodkey
The Natives were lanky and trim, with copper skin and wide, flat noses. They went barefoot and shirtless, dressed only in pale cotton breeches that hung loosely off their hips. Two of them manned each boat, handling both the rowing and the loading of the big crates of ugly fruit that just barely fit in the boats.
“Okalu?” I called to a couple of the Natives, but they didn’t even look up at me.
I wasn’t about to get on a boat with armed soldiers, no matter how fat and sleepy they looked, so once Reggie promised us civilians would be coming out, too, we stayed put and waited for a better option.
Half an hour after the last of the soldiers pushed off, a much smaller boat arrived, manned by a pair of Natives. One of them looked like all the other Natives, skinny and shirtless, but I would’ve mistaken the second for a Cartager if it hadn’t been for his ears, nose, and skin—he wore a frilly silk Continental shirt over a big belly, and he didn’t even bother to get up when the fruit crate proved too wide for the boat and nearly capsized them.
That sent a few dozen ugly fruit into the water. Fortunately, they floated—and although the silk-shirted Native produced a short club that he shook at the skinny one, he didn’t end up using it, because Skinny dove right in to recover the fruit.
Eventually, Skinny got it all loaded in—not just the fruit that had gone overboard, but the entire contents of the crate, which he dumped directly into the boat, filling it almost to the gunwale before he sent the empty crate back up to the Thrush.
I didn’t like the looks of Silk Shirt’s club, so we decided to wait for the next boat. We were watching them cast off when Racker turned to us.
“Change your mind about Pella?” he asked.
“Just waiting for the right boat,” I said.
“Right or not, that’s the last one,” he said. I looked back at the deck and realized there wasn’t any ugly fruit left on it.
“Wait!” I yelled down at the Natives in the rowboat, who were pushing off from the Thrush’s hull. They looked up at me, confused. Then Skinny raised the oars to row away.
I was just starting to panic when Guts jumped over the deck rail and down into the boat, the rucksack strapped to his back.
He landed ugly, nearly swamping the boat and turning it into a chaotic tangle of fruit, limbs, and angry Natives. I stood there gaping at the sight until I realized the boat was already too far from the Thrush for me to make it at a jump, and getting farther away with every passing second.
I took a deep breath and went into the water.
When I broke the surface, I could hear Guts and the Natives yelling at each other. With a few frantic strokes, I managed to make it to the boat and grab hold of the gunwale above my head. It was too high for me to lift myself up into the boat, and from the angle I was at, I couldn’t see much except the bare back of the skinny Native.
The yelling was getting worse. Guts had used up his whole supply of Cartager curses, and the Natives clearly understood them and didn’t appreciate it.
“HELP!” I called.
That got Skinny’s attention, but not the way I wanted. When he turned and saw me, his eyes flashed with anger, and he raised one of the oars to clock me.
“DON’T, YE —!” That was Guts.
“— —!” That was Silk Shirt, giving a panicky yell in a language I didn’t understand.
Skinny’s oar froze in midair. He looked over his shoulder, and I heard him gasp.
“Help him up, ye —!” That was Guts again. He had to repeat himself a few times, because Skinny didn’t understand Rovian. But eventually, Skinny put down the oar and turned around to help me.
His eyes were wide with worry, and once he’d managed to haul me into the boat—which was so overflowing with ugly fruit there was barely any room for me—I saw why.
Guts had one of our guns in his good hand. He was sweeping it back and forth at the two Natives, like he was trying to decide which of them to shoot.
“Grab a gun,” he told me. “Can’t cover ’em both where I’m sittin’.”
“Are you mad!? You can’t shoot them!”
“Don’t have to—just gotta look like we might. C’mon! In the pack!”
He was in the middle seat, the ugly fruit piled so deep around him I couldn’t see his lower legs. Our pack was on his lap.
“This is bad,” I said. “This is really bad.”
“Could be worse. Could be them holdin’ the guns. C’mon!”
He jostled the pack with his leg. I didn’t much like his plan, but I didn’t have a better one. So I took a gun from the pack and pointed it in the general direction of Silk Shirt, who was sitting up at the bow.
Then I shoved some ugly fruit aside with my free hand and wedged myself into the middle seat next to Guts, facing forward. Guts was facing the other way, his gun on Skinny back in the stern.
“Get rowin’!” he barked, gesturing toward the oars.
Skinny got the point. The boat rocked as he turned us toward the piers.
Silk Shirt was staring at me like he was terrified I’d pull the trigger. I wanted to tell him not to worry, but I figured that’d defeat the whole purpose of pointing a gun at him.
Even so, I didn’t want to be unpleasant about it.
“Hello,” I said, trying to sound friendly.
He just kept staring—still scared, and confused now on top of it.
“Okalu?” I asked him.
“Neh,” he said. “Flut.”
I vaguely recalled Racker mentioning the Flut in his list of cannibal tribes. But sitting there in a frilly silk shirt, he didn’t look much like a cannibal.
“Okalu grawa,” he added.
I was about to ask him what that meant when he pointed to my head.
“Wanaluff, neh?”
Wanaluff was Cartager for “cow-ears.” I put a hand up where he was pointing and realized that with my hair wet and slick from the water, my ears were exposed. Before I could respond, Guts exploded.
“STUFF IT, YOU!” He whipped around and pointed his gun at Silk Shirt, who reared back in terror and started frantically apologizing.
“Se booya! Wanaluff booya!”
Skinny chimed in from behind me. “Booya wanaluff! Booya, booya!”
The way they said it, booya might have meant “good,” or “okay,” or even “calm down”—but whatever it was, they clearly didn’t want any trouble.
“Will you take it easy?” I hissed at Guts.
“Ain’t nobody calls me cow-ears without a fight.”
NONE OF US talked much after that. Guts and I kept our guns on the Natives the whole way in, which felt more and more ridiculous. I couldn’t imagine shooting an unarmed man, and except for the moment when Skinny was about to clock me with the oar, they hadn’t done anything to deserve it.
And when I thought about it from their angle, I realized if it was my boat, and two kids had jumped in it without an invitation, I’d get riled up, too. Especially if they pointed guns at me.
I started to feel terrible about the whole situation.
“I think we should pay them,” I said.
“Fer wot?”
“Giving us a ride.”
“Doin’ it free!”
“Because we’re holding them up! It’s not right. We should at least give them something.”
“Only got five silver left.”
“How about one?”
“Comin’ out o’ yer half.”
“That’s all right.”
Guts dug in his pocket and handed me a silver piece. I passed it on to Silk Shirt.
He looked a little wary at first, but he took it.
“Gadda.”
I didn’t know how to say “you’re welcome” in Cartager, so I just smiled.
He smiled back, but it was more of a “please don’t shoot me” smile than a real one, and I still felt lousy.
Given the gun situation, I didn’t want to take my eyes off Silk Shirt for too long to stare at the city as we rowed in, but I managed to
sneak a few glances. The fog was burning off to reveal a reddish-brown forest of buildings that seemed to go on forever.
The place was massive. I’d only ever been to Blisstown and Port Scratch in my life, and you could have fit ten of those towns into Pella Nonna with room to spare. What I could see of the waterfront was thrumming with people, ships, cargo, and livestock, all going every which way.
We tied up on a crowded pier in between two fishing boats. The Natives were thrilled to see us go—there were a lot of friendly-nervous booya!s and gadda!s from them as we climbed the ladder onto the pier. I repeated the words back to them, trying to smile when I did, and wondering if I shouldn’t try to get Guts to give them a second silver piece.
Still holding the guns, we hurried down the pier toward the city.
“Let’s try not to shoot anybody unless we have to,” I told Guts.
He shrugged. “See how it goes.”
We turned onto the boardwalk and found ourselves in a churning whirlpool of people, alien-looking and strange in flowing robes and Native breeches and curious hats over weirdly shaped noses, tiny ears, exotic skin…all bartering over sacks and crates of things in unusual shapes and colors, along with strings of livestock like none I’d ever seen, needle-nosed pigs and furry long-necked horse-type creatures and powerful little dogs with wide, stubby snouts who barked at us as we passed.
No one so much as looked at us. They were too busy buying and selling and jabbering at each other, mostly in what I guessed was Cartager. There wasn’t a single hard letter in the whole language—I tried to listen for the individual words, but they all ran together like liquid dribbling out of people’s mouths.
We started up the main road, dodging not just people, but wagons and horses and more strange livestock. On either side of the road, cloth awnings on long wooden poles shaded the storefronts, where men and women in colorful, loose-fitting Native shirts sat slouched on log benches. One or two met my eye as we passed, but most paid us no mind at all.
I was wondering if any of them were Okalu when Guts gave me a sharp elbow in the side.
“Soldiers!” he hissed.
I looked up ahead. Coming toward us was a pack of five purple-uniformed Cartagers, most of them heavyset but still a lot tougher-looking than the ones in the boats.
They all had rifles slung over their shoulders. And they were too close, and the street was too crowded, for us to duck the encounter.
The lead soldier’s eyes fell on me, and they widened in surprise as he stared at my ears.
I gripped the pistol so tight my hand hurt.
He was three steps away when he broke into a grin.
“Booya damai, wanaluff!”
I didn’t know what “booya damai” meant, but there was no mistaking his tone. He was being friendly.
The rest of the soldiers repeated the greeting as they passed.
“Booya damai!”
“Booya damai!”
“Boo…ya…damai,” I mumbled back, hoping it was the right thing to say.
The last of the soldiers gave me a friendly clap on the arm as they passed.
Guts and I turned to watch them go. Cartager soldiers, the kind we’d been told would kill us on sight…
They couldn’t have been nicer.
“Figure those men on the Thrush were wrong about this place?” I asked.
“Dead wrong, looks like. Here—stow this.” He held out his pistol.
I took the rucksack off my back and put away the pistols. Now that I was a little calmer, I realized I was starving.
“I could use some food—”
“Shhh…” Guts had his head cocked to one side, a curious look on his face. “Hear that?”
There was music coming from somewhere. It was too far away to make out anything but the rhythm—a steady, off-kilter chug that sounded as exotic as everything else looked.
Guts grinned. “That’s a Cartager beat.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Means it’s good. C’mon! Let’s find it.”
We followed the sound up the road into the heart of the city. I hadn’t heard much music in my life. Growing up, we didn’t have instruments in the house, and when I passed the occasional pirate sawing on a fiddle in Port Scratch, it always sounded like a cat getting tortured. When I lived with the Pembrokes, I’d listened in on Millicent’s piano lessons, and while they weren’t as hard on my ears as the pirate fiddles, the music she played made me want to take a nap.
This was a whole other thing. It had a kind of rolling energy that got my head nodding with the beat as I walked. I looked over at Guts and saw him doing the same, a smile playing across his face.
That was odd. Guts wasn’t the type to smile.
As we continued on, the rear corner of an enormous,
Continental-style palace came into view. It had soaring windows and fancy trim, and unlike most of Pella Nonna’s brown-clay buildings, it was made of gleaming white marble. We followed the street around the side of the palace, and a set of wide steps came into view, spreading across the whole front of the building and leading up to a grand portico fit for a king.
Stretching out in front of the palace steps was a giant courtyard, hemmed in by a tall, fortified city wall and filled with an open-air market that made the bustle down at the docks seem quiet and sleepy. Half the city seemed to be there, either trading, talking, eating, or just lounging around.
At the foot of the steps, we found the source of the music we’d been hearing—a band of ten musicians, both Cartager and Native, half of them pounding various drums, a couple strumming guitars, and the rest on pipes. A loose cluster of people surrounded them, either dancing to the music or listening with smiles on their faces.
Guts headed for the band so fast I almost lost him in the crowd. When I caught up, he’d snaked his way to the front and was staring at the feet of one of the guitarists.
I followed Guts’s gaze to a wide-brimmed hat, upside down on the ground and half full of coins. As I watched, a Cartager girl about my age stepped forward and tossed a coin into the hat. One of the guitarists looked up from his instrument long enough to wink at her, and she blushed as she sank back into a group of other girls, all of them giggling with excitement.
Guts made a noise that sounded like a laugh. Then he elbowed me. “Ain’t gonna have no money trouble.”
“How do you figure?” I didn’t feel right about stealing from them, and anyway if we tried to swipe the hat, fifty people would see us do it.
Instead of answering, he turned back toward the market. “Starvin’. Let’s eat.”
THE NUMBER OF THINGS for sale in the market was staggering, and there were almost as many kinds of sellers as there were goods—not just Cartagers and Natives, but dark-skinned men with almond eyes who wore long robes and must have come from across the Southern Maw, and Continentals who I could’ve sworn were Rovian but answered in a strange tongue when we tried to speak to them.
After shopping around for the tastiest-looking food, we used hand gestures to negotiate with a lanky Native for a few cuts from a spit-roasted pig, seasoned with such a delicious hot spice that I swore to eat it for every meal if I could.
But the food cost us two silver—minus some tiny, smooth shells that must have been a kind of money, because the Native handed them to us like he was giving change—and when he wanted a third silver for a jug of water, I realized we were going to be broke by sundown.
“Buy it,” said Guts. “Money ain’t gonna be no problem.”
“Why do you keep saying that?”
He’d wolfed down his food ahead of me and was fiddling with Lucy, tightening and retightening the strap under the hook’s leather cowl. Finally, he stopped.
“Get yer water an’ I’ll show ye.”
I bought the water, and when I did, I asked the Native my standard question:
“Okalu?”
He shook his head. “Neh—Dorono. Okalu grawa.”
That again. Still wondering what i
t meant, I followed Guts.
The music had stopped while we were eating, and the musicians were taking a break. One of the guitarists, a black-haired Cartager who looked about eighteen, was stretched out on the steps, drinking from a gourd as the cluster of giggling teenage girls fawned over him.
Guts went straight up to the guitarist and barked, “’Ey! Speak Rovian?”
The guitarist eyed him with a grin, then answered with a few slippery words of Cartager.
Guts raised his voice as he looked around.
“Who speaks Rovian here?”
Another young Cartager, a tall kid with a nose as big as his ears were small, looked up from counting the coins they’d collected in the hat.
“I speak. What you want, man?”
He had a thick Cartager accent, so what he said actually sounded more like “I sbee. Wa’ yew wa’, ma’?”
“Make a bet,” said Guts. He pointed at the guitarist with his hook. “Ten gold says I play guitar better than him.”
The big-nosed kid burst into laughter, and I felt my stomach clench. Even if we had money, which we didn’t, ten gold was a fortune.
“You go’ one hand, man!”
“’S’all I need.”
“Wha’s you name?”
“Guts.”
“Gu’s? Like”—the kid pointed to his stomach—“on you insides?”
“Guts like I got ’em, ye bada pudda palomuno porsamora.”
The big-nosed kid just laughed at the mouthful of insults. The guitarist, who’d been turning his head from side to side as he tried to follow the conversation, perked up at the curses and asked his friend a question in Cartager.
Big Nose explained, and the guitarist started to laugh, too.
I expected Guts to blow up at that. But he just smiled bigger.
“Ten gold. Wot ye say?”
I nudged Guts, then whispered in his ear.
“Is this a put-on?”
He shook his head. “Just wait.”
Big Nose was shaking his head, like he felt sorry for Guts.
“You wan’ lose you money, man? Illy play bes’ guitar in Pella.”
