“You’ll never let me live it down. I get it.”
As they made the approach to town, Snow sat up on deck enjoying the last bit of warmth from the sun before the onset of False Night. False Night being that period of the day when Mega passed between Grailliyn and the sun. It lasted a few hours in total, with full darkness lasting up to an hour and a half.
Max scanned the cliffs on approach, watching for a flash of light that would signal that someone on shore had seen them. But there was still no flash when the boat reached the village harbor. Expanding upon a natural inlet, the ancient harbor had been quarried from the solid rock and cut deep below the clifftop to supply water access to the village nearby, throughout the wide tidal range. Max used the last few minutes of light to dock the boat before Mega swallowed the sun completely. As they came ashore, swaying gently on their sea legs, False Night set in completely. The crescent Mega from early morning narrowed to nothing, and though the large disk of mega was still faintly visible, lit by Grailliyn’s own reflected light, that too faded, as Mega slowly covered the sun. The world slipped into a darkness as complete as that of True Night.
Chapter 16
“Oh god. That was terrible,” said the woman at the nearby table. She gave a shiver, detectable despite her complete concealment in oversized work clothes. “Give me another one.”
Her accent was a perfect impression of some actor or another. Raniff didn’t know which actor, and he didn’t know which accent, but it was a familiar one, and it sounded genuine.
The young man with her was dressed similarly in rough working clothes, though without the hood worn by the woman. His expression showed a reluctance to ply her with more alcohol. They might be siblings. But that didn’t fit with the profile Raniff had been given by the Yorkie wearing the fancy suit. It was possible that this was not the man Raniff was looking for. But if that were true, it was a hell of a coincidence. What with this young man fitting the description of height, build, age, and showing up in the town’s only bar just as expected. The town of Telleran got very little in the way of visitors. But fancy-suit Freenan had made no mention of a woman.
Raniff stood up, downed the rest of his drink, and walked back to the bar for another. If push came to shove, he would need the liquid courage.
“Come on Mac—aarshal,” the woman said, this time with a terrible impression of a man. She needed to work on that one if she wanted to bring it up to the level of the actor voice that Raniff still couldn’t place.
Of course, the woman’s limited range of voice impressions wasn’t what had chiefly caught Raniff’s attention. Rather it was the curious fact that she almost called her drinking companion, the young man in question, by a different name. Raniff thought the name the woman hadn’t said could conceivably have been Max. In fact, he didn’t think there was much question about it. The only real question was, what was he, Raniff, going to do about it?
The first thing he did was order yet another drink. He downed it quickly and ordered another one. He raised that too to his lips when realized the young man was standing beside him at the bar. The woman had convinced him to buy more drinks after all.
The young man Max was a decent-looking fellow. Raniff wouldn’t say he came across as particularly outgoing, but he seemed friendly enough when he paid the bartender Jane for his drinks. But when Max turned his head towards Raniff, Raniff looked away, avoiding the young man’s gaze. Things were heading in the direction of violence. And Raniff didn’t want to be on friendly terms with a man for whom he was planning said violence.
That’s what Raniff was thinking when he looked away. But he forgot all about it when he saw another pair of eyes watching young man Max with interest. It hadn’t occurred to Raniff that the Freenan might have asked others to keep an eye out for this guy. But with Wesson, a fellow Telleran, staring intently at the newcomers it stood to reason that that was exactly what Mr. Freenan had done. And it changed things considerably.
Raniff knocked back his drink, threw some money on the counter and, without so much as a nod at Jane, strode out of the bar.
Chapter 17
The drink was simultaneously both vile and amazing. The taste gave her a brief shiver, but then it spread out to warm her extremities pleasantly with the added effect of improving her already good mood. By the third drink she was feeling very relaxed. Too relaxed maybe, because she found herself gazing a little too long at Max and imagining the pleasant shape she knew lay several millimeters below his rough work wear. Except (thankfully?) he hadn’t noticed. Which was both a relief and a disappointment. If he’d been gawking at her she’d have noticed. Perhaps she needed to be more direct. She’d been careful not to start anything romantic before now. It certainly would not have been smart to start kissing on that face when, if she changed her mind later, she’d be stuck with it, at sea, for several days, and with no way to escape. There was something familiar about the situation too.
But something had changed since they’d arrived at the bar. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what might be responsible for the change… Perhaps it was having safely made it to dry land? That was probably it. In any case Snow now felt that mashing her lips all over Max’s lips was a perfectly sensible thing to do. Had she kissed anyone before? She sensed that she had, and that it had not been the greatest experience ever. Was this the first face she will have ever kissed? Probably not (though it was possible!) Would lack of experience, or more specifically the lack of remembered experience, be a problem? It would not. Snow had done things for the first time before. But Snow was possibly about to do kissing for the first-second time, and that was something that other people didn’t get to do.
She reached over to get a good firm grip on Max, so she didn’t mess this thing up and accidentally smooch his eyebrow or something. Immediately she had the sense that perhaps it was too late for that when the shoulder in her hand felt bigger than the shoulder she had expected. She couldn’t see the shoulder in question because, in an effort to seem super casual, she had grabbed before looking. She looked now and realized the problem immediately. Max’s butt was in her hand rather than Max’s shoulder. He must have only just returned with another round in time to catch hold of her hand with his right cheek.
“Oopsh,” Snow said. “You’ve acsh… acsh… accidentally gotten your ah… bottom… into my hand.”
Max looked at Snow. Then at the drinks. Then back at Snow.
“Maybe not,” his face said.
He turned away pulling his cheek out of Snow’s now loosened grip and returned to the bar with their drinks. Returning to the table, now drinkless, he sat down looking awkward.
Behind him another patron, who was sitting with friends that had their backs to Snow, was chuckling at the scene. Snow smiled and a giggle escaped her lips. She reached up to conceal her laughter from Max, lest he take it the wrong way, and felt the resistance of her hood which she’d forgotten about and which explained why Max had failed to notice what her eyes had been looking at. Good news all around.
She panned around to take in the other patrons of the bar. Most were engrossed in their own thoughts or conversations and had taken little notice of Max and Snow’s shoulder-butt-swap drama. Only one other person had noticed the incident. But he didn’t look amused.
“What’s his problem?” Snow said.
Max turned to look at the man, and the man looked away. Max turned back to Snow, one eye squinted in concerned suspicion. It struck Snow as odd that Max should be so concerned. Until she remembered that there might be murderers about. Murderers that were looking for Max. Murderers that could be (though probably were not) looking for Snow. Snow stood up.
“It is time to go… husband… of several years marriage,” Snow said, winking a wink that Max would not see due to Snow’s hood.
They reached the harbor stair again. A flood lamp lit the crossroad leading, in one direction to the village of Telleran, and in the other to homesteads and farms further afield. Snow had been about to begin the
long descent to the floating docks below, when she saw what looked like a branch-less tree trunk, cleverly hiding in the shadow left by the lamp’s hood.
“Nice try my man.” Snow leapt at the shadow her hand raised high for a hammer strike. “Hi-ya!” she said and dealt the tree trunk a heavy blow with the bottom of her fist.
The tree trunk didn’t swing back, but stoically resisted her attack.
Snow held her own now sore hand, and chanted, “Ow, ow, ow.”
“What are you doing?” Max said, less amused than he should have been at Snow’s antics.
“I was sure that tree trunk was a mugger,” Snow said, “But it was just a trunk. I think that alcohol may… have, made me drunk.”
“I think so too,” Max said, allowing the barest hint of a smile to cross his lips.
It kind of made Snow want to kiss him again. She stepped from the shadow of the lamp by the tree, this time intent on the prize of lip on lip action. Suddenly she was no longer walking forward but had been grabbed around the neck from behind. The rough fabric filled with the stink of alcohol was pressed tight against her face, and something hard was pressed against her temple.
“Don’t you move,” said a man’s voice from very close to her ear, “or something terrible might happen to your girly.”
“Whoa there, friend. You don’t need her, it’s me you—”
Snow stomped down on the man’s foot and he loosened his grip on Snow’s neck, allowing her to smash the back of her head into the front of his. She twisted to the side, easily breaking from his grasp. Without conscious thought she spun to face the man, her elbow high and delivered a two-knuckle-right-hook-sandwich to the man’s temple. She followed up with a jab to keep him guessing, but he was gone. A startling, deafening crack a moment later had Snow covering her ears and ducking. The cold hard thing that had been pressed to her head, a firearm, had gone off.
“Yia-toeno!” Snow said, uncertain of its meaning, but confident it was the appropriate refrain under current circumstances.
“I’ll say,” Max said.
The loud concussive blast of the firearm had knocked Snow from the fluffy cloud she normally used to drift through life, and it had left a ringing in her ear to boot. This man had come here, if not planning to kill them, then at least willing to do so. Max and her both. The man lay flat on his back, legs straight, one arm out, and the other across his chest. And she recognized him from the bar. Not the humorless one with the malfunctioning stare, the other one that had been sitting nearby. Snow aimed a vicious kick at his ribs. The man made no reaction as her ill-fitting boot bounced from his torso.
Max stepped forward to stop her, so she gave the man another quick kick before Max could interfere.
But instead of interfering, Max threw his own heavy work boot into the side of the man. Just once. For solidarity. Then he offered his hand to her. She took it and they fled to the harbor’s tall stairway.
“That was quite a blow. One solid hit,” Max said, as they hurried down the stair to the dock far below. “Thanks for that. I thought we were screwed.”
Snow smiled. It was nice to be appreciated.
They were halfway down to the boat when Snow realized the full ramifications of leaving before the local outfitter opened for business. She sighed.
“I was hoping for soap.”
“No soap for you,” Max said.
“Oh Max…” she said patting him on the shoulder, “The soap was for you.”
“We could both do with a little soap,” Max said.
Snow lifted the edge of her collar and sniffed. “barf.” She fanned her armpit, as if a brief puff of air would dispel the stench.
Doozer greeted them enthusiastically when they reached the boat and, without further delay they set sail and headed back down the coast. To SoChar and a guy named Duncan.
“What’s with this Duncan guy anyway?” Snow said, when the sails were trimmed and there was a moment to relax.
“An old friend of my dad. He kept an eye on me when my parents were away and… after they died,” Max said. “He works at the university in SoChar, a couple days sail from here.” Max shook his head. “He’s a bit of a conspiracy nut.”
“Is he though? A nut? Seems like there is some sort of conspiracy…” she said.
“Even a broken clock is correct once a day,” he said, “I mean you can be both correct and malfunctioning at the same time.”
“Wait. So, Duncan raised you?” Snow asked.
“No,” Max said.
Snow gave him a look that said, ‘And?’ but she didn’t want to press him.
“So, who raised you?” she said, pressing him anyway. This boy needed to be squeezed if one wanted details. And Snow wanted details. Obviously.
“Oh. I’m an orphan,” he said, as though it were nothing, “I thought I’d said. I grew up on the farm. It’s an orphanage.”
“Huh,” Snow said. Somehow, Max being an orphan fit perfectly into the ‘normal’ category of their ‘normal or strange’ game. “I’m an orphan too.”
“How do you know?” Max asked, with a lopsided smile that said he thought she was joking. “They might still be alive. Somewhere.” He shrugged.
“They might be,” Snow said, “but I don’t think that matters. I don’t think I had parents…” She had a weird sort of detail-less certainty about it.
Chapter 18
An inventory of their supplies confirmed they had sufficient water to reach SoChar, two days away. Max was impressed by Snow’s patience, adapting to this new reality of additional days on the sea with the same smelly stranger. Instead of complaining, as she might about an uneven distribution of blankets or Candy, she went to work, battening and hoisting as necessary. They would make the final travel path decision when they reached SoChar. Choosing then, either to continue down the coast to the Tawnee Canal, or travel by airship to NaChar, then in either case onward to New York.
False night was well under way, and so Mega could only be located by the starless patch in an otherwise star filled sky. The reverse situation occurred at night, with Grailliyn slowly tracing a large, fuzzy edged, dark circle across the surface of Mega. The darkness hid their passage as they slowly slipped away from Telleran without further incident.
“Story time! Story time!” chanted Snow.
They had just cleaned the dishes from the last meal before sleep, and Max had promised to tell another story when they’d finished. They got comfortable on deck and he began.
“The Ceeians believe we came from the sea,” Max said. He waggled his eyebrows in a way he thought suggested woobly-wobbly ocean waves, then reached out to steady himself as real ocean waves rocked the boat.
“That word has too many vowels,” Snow said, her face scrunched up in disapproval.
“You are of course correct. But that’s the way they talk in the South, where this story originates. The extra vowels come out smooth and seamless when spoken by a southerner though,” Max said.
“Interesting. Back to the story!”
“Long ago in the sea, Sooeashi, who is of a race of muuurmuin, like mermaids I guess… So Sooeashi is—”
“Wait. Why does the muurman get a name but turtle-girl—, never mind. Answered my own question,” Snow said and waved her hand for him to continue.
“Sooeashi is foraging when a sharp curved stick lands beside him in the mud. It is an object never seen before on the bottom of the sea. A gift from the gods. The first on this day of gifts. Sooeashi accepts this gift with thanks. He finds all sorts of uses for it. It allows him to pull fish from hard to reach crevices and pry open shells to reach the meat inside. He uses it to keep a large hungry cuaopa fish at bay and he uses it to scratch his back when he is itchy, which is much better than crawling and rolling around on coral. But best of all he uses it to impress Bokra, the prettiest of the Muuurmuin.
Kugrawashi is also impressed with the stick. He sees what could be done with it. He sees that Sooeashi could kill him with it, he sees that Sooeashi co
uld rule with it. But he also sees that Sooeashi is using the stick for trivial matters. He approaches Sooeashi and tells him that he, Kugrawashi, will take the stick. Sooeashi holds the stick out to defend.
By now many of the people have arrived to witness the conflict. Sooeashi only defends, he does not attack and Kugrawashi grabs the stick easily. Reversing it he kills Sooeashi in one thrust. There is a great cheer from the onlookers who are happy to see the end of this fool who does not understand what to do with a gift from the gods. When Kugrawashi pulls the stick free, the blood of Sooeashi flows down to the mud below.
When the blood mixes with the mud it spreads across the sea floor, thickens into rock, and rises up. The great and wide rock rises quickly, pushing through the water on its way upwards. Those Muuurmuin who are too weak are swept away, but the strong hold fast, clinging to the rock as it rises up through the deep water. It rises and rises until at last the people are thrust up out from the water with the rock.
The people look with pleasure upon this gift of land, the second on this day of gifts. Kugrawashi accepts this gift with thanks. He looks about and sees that the land is good. From land Muuurmuin can safely sleep at night without fear of the predators below and by day, return to the water to hunt at will. But Kugrawashi sees also that he must walk above on land, not swim, and so he grasps the stick and slices down, splitting his tail in two so that he might move about on two legs. His cut is bold, but not true.
“Fool!” Cry the people, “Only one who is unworthy would risk a cut to their own flesh when the flesh of others is at hand!” and so Nareeit, who was close by, takes the stick and claims it. And Kugrawashi’s blood flows into the rock of the land.
As the blood mixes with the rock, it spreads across the land, thickens, and rises up high into the blue sky. The new mountain brings the gift of rain to the land, the third on this day of gifts. Nareeit accepts this gift with thanks. She sees that the mountain will bring fresh water and shelter. She uses the stick to cut legs from the tails of her people, and though many die each death brings yet more land to the people. Gifts beyond count on this day of gifts. Those that survive walk on two legs. In time, Nareeit grows confident with her cuts, no more die from her thrusts and she turns the stick towards her own flesh certain her cut will be true.
Starship Relic (Lost Colony Uprising Book 1) Page 8
