Voyager of the Crown

by Melissa McShane

Eventually, she pushed away from the wall, disentangling strands of hair from the woven sticks comprising it, and went to look out the window the monkey had been at. Thick leaves hung low, blocking the view, and the sun streaming through them cast a green light over her, as if she were looking at a stained glass window made of emerald and jade. A depression in the mattress was the only sign Ransom had been there. Why had he left her to sleep instead of rousing her?

  Her bladder demanded her attention. Now, where would people who lived in trees relieve themselves? Chamber pots they dumped over the side? She poked around and found, not a chamber pot, but a small niche covered by a wall hanging, containing a waist-high box with a hole in it. She sniffed. The faint odor of human waste, not strong enough to be offensive, rose up from it. After a long moment’s indecision, she used it. Probably she was doing it wrong, but she couldn’t wait any longer.

  She examined the rest of the room while she was sitting. Colorful woven hangings depicting animals she’d never seen before—or were they imaginary?—decorated the walls, their weave as fine as anything she could produce. They were very different from the blanket covering the doorway, which was probably waterproof based on the coarseness of the fibers and the thickness of the weave. It would be interesting to speak to the Karitian weavers, not that she was capable of that.

  Something pressed against her thigh. She laid her hand on the lump and remembered the Device. Well, she wasn’t likely to get a better chance than this. She finished her business, pulled the Device out, and sat on the mattress to examine it. Solid case, stem and crown that didn’t move, leaf pattern around the round edge. She tugged at the crown, then tried pushing it, and again heard a tiny, faraway thunk like the smallest footstep imaginable. She twisted the crown while pressing down, and with a click, it rotated, the barest motion. That was progress.

  She twisted it again, and again it clicked. She heard nothing else from inside the case, so she kept turning it until it was back to where she’d started. She hoped. She hadn’t kept track. Well, she’d learned something. She put it away, pushing it deep into her pocket so it wouldn’t fall out or move around. Whatever it was, she’d promised to deliver it, and losing it after bringing it all this way would be awful.

  Zara pushed the blanket aside and stepped onto the platform. The air was clear and cool and smelled of growing things, and wasn’t very damp, though the humidity would become intolerable later in the day. Nearby were dozens of huts, all clustered around thickly-growing tree trunks. Some of the huts were made of the same woven stick walls her—Ransom’s—hut had, but most were made of planed lumber as the platform was. The blankets covering the doorways were vividly colored and elaborately patterned, and Zara saw no duplicates anywhere. Her desire to see the looms increased.

  She smelled bread baking somewhere nearby, and the rich scent of meat, and her stomach complained. Maybe she should return to the place they’d eaten the night before. Her worn boots made a thudding sound against the boards, which creaked in harmony: THUD-creak, THUD-creak. No one would be in any doubt she was approaching, but she wasn’t trying to hide.

  She began to see people, mostly half-naked women carrying net bags or baskets and a few scrambling, naked children, their dark brown hair long and bound up on the top of their heads to make horses’ tails. The women were all shorter than she was and wore their hair cropped so it curled over their ears, which bore multiple piercings with gold or silver or copper hoops that glinted in the indirect light.

  Everyone stopped to look at her as she passed, though the women were polite about their scrutiny and the children gaped openly. One of them who looked to be about eight years old fell into step behind her, raising his bare feet and stomping them on the platform in imitation of her. She turned and smiled at him. He scampered away to hide behind a woman, peeking out from behind her leather skirt with wide, dark eyes. He reminded Zara so much of Telaine’s son Owen she felt a moment’s pang of homesickness. “He’s bold,” she said, and the woman regarded her with a lack of comprehension, so Zara smiled again and continued on her way.

  It was growing warm under the canopy, not as warm as it had been on the ground, but sweat prickled under her arms and she longed more than ever for a bath. There was probably no point, if they were just going back into the jungle, and she’d have nothing to wear but her old filthy clothes, but the idea was so compelling she had a hard time shaking it.

  She retraced their steps of the night before to Belinda and Theo’s hut, peeked inside, and found it empty. Arjan and Cantara were gone as well. Why hadn’t anyone bothered to wake her? She put her hand on her rumbling stomach. Someone, somewhere, had to know where she could find food.

  Eventually she came to the edge of the platform, which had ropes strung around it, probably to keep people from stumbling off in the night. Or the day. Zara peered over the edge, standing as far back as she could. The platform had to be at least eighty feet off the ground. Eighty very long, terrifying feet. If she fell, it wouldn’t kill her, it would just leave her with shattered bones and organs pierced by broken ribs and a skull fractured into pieces. How long would it take her to heal from that? And she’d be in agony the whole time. She took a few steps back from the edge and contemplated the bridge. It was two feet wide, too narrow for more than one person to walk abreast, with nothing but a pair of ropes for someone to hold onto. Crossing it in the daylight was out of the question. She’d just have to beg food from one of the women living on this platform.

  “Rowena! Come eat with us!”

  Belinda waved at Zara from the other side of the bridge. Zara swallowed, trying to moisten her suddenly dry throat. She had to cross. Zara North never let fear rule her. “Coming,” she called out, proud of how her voice didn’t waver. She put a tentative foot on the first plank and nearly jerked it back when the bridge quivered. Carefully, she took a step, then another, gripping the ropes so tightly she had to make a conscious effort to unclench her fingers every time she took a step. A bird flew beneath the bridge, and she stopped, heart pounding, feeling the bridge sway slightly with her movements. No. No fear.

  She closed her eyes and took another step. That made it worse. Belinda was still standing there, watching her. What was she thinking? That Rowena was terrified for no reason? Except there was a reason, there were eighty good reasons for her to be afraid of this bridge. She tried walking faster, which made the bridge sway more, and that unnerved her enough that she made herself go even faster, hoping to reach the far side before the whole thing tipped her over and sent her plummeting to the ground below.

  “It’s fun, isn’t it?” Belinda said when Zara took the last few running steps onto the relatively solid ground of the platform. “My father built us children a tree house when I was young, but this is so much better.”

  “You’re cheerful this morning.”

  “I feel more rested than I have been in days. Well, obviously I am. And this place is delightful. The people are so nice, even if we can’t understand each other.” Belinda began to walk away. “Come, there’s food, and then I think Mister Tamun wants to show us around. I don’t know why he’d do it, there must be better things a ruler can do with his time, but Ransom said it was polite to accept.”

  “Where is Ransom?”

  “I don’t know. He ate breakfast with us, and then he was gone. Why did they put you in with him?”

  “I don’t know,” Zara managed. “It saved room, probably. Why didn’t he wake me?”

  “You needed rest. You’ve been working harder than anyone.” Belinda put her hand on Zara’s arm. “Thanks for helping me. And saving my life. I don’t know if I could have survived that snake bite, even with Ransom’s healing.”

  “I don’t mind,” Zara said. Belinda’s gratitude made her feel uncomfortable. Most people’s gratitude did, come to think on it. She did what needed doing, usually what no one else could do, and it felt wrong to accept thanks when she was only being herself. Accepting thanks was one of the things she still hadn’t master
ed, even in eighty-seven years of life.

  The hut where they’d eaten the night before was, in daylight, bigger than Zara realized and smelled deliciously of cooked, spiced chicken and fresh fruit. With the windows on either side of the door frame and the ragged wooden shingles of the roof, it looked like the face of a man with a giant blue and white mouth in need of a haircut. She inhaled the scent of food again and had to make herself walk slowly and not rush to the door. She’d never been this hungry in her life.

  “Good morning,” Cantara said. Theo nodded at Zara, his mouth full of food. Sitting cross-legged beside him was Kossrek Tamun, who looked less menacing in the warm light of day but still gave Zara the impression that violence was an option if they stepped wrong. She smiled pleasantly at him and let one of the villagers fill her leaf-plate before eating as daintily as her starving stomach would let her.

  After eating her fill under Kossrek Tamun’s glowering eye, she and her friends followed him across the platform. Everyone they met bowed to him, hands crossed on their chests and heads lowered; Tamun acknowledged them with a complicated ceremonial wave. A memory came to Zara from the distant past, of riding through the streets of Aurilien and waving at cheering citizens. If she hadn’t had this…gift…would she still be alive, receiving those accolades? It all seemed so far away, but not like a dream—more like a story she’d read once that was so real it seemed she’d lived it. Which she had.

  Tamun led them to the edge of the platform and another bridge. This one—Zara had to swallow against the dryness in her throat again—was longer and, sweet heaven, sloped downward. She could hear the noise of the river now, a rustling, airy sound beneath the constant cries of the brightly colored birds who swooped the length of the village and roosted in the canopy just above.

  She hung back as the others crossed. None of them seemed at all bothered by the fact that they were high enough for birds to fly underneath them. If she’d been at all willing to look down, she was sure she’d see clouds below the bridge. When she made it across she surreptitiously fanned herself with her shirt to dry the sweat she’d broken into halfway across. This was ridiculous. She wasn’t afraid of anything.

  She fanned herself again, wishing the morning cool had lasted longer. She wasn’t quite daring enough to take off her shirt and uncomfortable brassiere and go naked like the other women, though it would be so comfortable to be wearing a skirt. Tamun was speaking and gesturing, and Zara tried to pay attention to what he was showing them. The construction of the huts, probably, and the way they cooked their food over…could they even have fires up here? They had torches, so it couldn’t be that dangerous. And maybe she’d see the loom, assuming the villagers were the ones who wove the fabric.

  Tamun stood at the edge off the platform, so Zara made herself go as far as the ropes and look down. “It’s a sawmill,” Theo said, his dark face alight with interest. “It’s where they get all the lumber.”

  Far below, perched at the edge of the fast-flowing river, was a sawmill that was the virtual duplicate of the one outside Longbourne. Tiny figures went in and out of it, some of them loading lumber onto carts, others guiding logs out of the water into the shallows. It looked so much like the mill back home Zara couldn’t help feeling another pang of homesickness. That was unacceptable. She could never go back to Barony Steepridge, and it was ridiculous to entertain those feelings.

  “I’m ashamed to say I thought these people were savages,” Belinda murmured, though Tamun wasn’t paying any attention to them and no doubt didn’t speak their language. “Do you suppose that’s why they showed this to us?”

  “They must be proud of it,” Zara said in the same low voice. “Ransom said they’ve adopted new technologies even as they’ve kept their old customs. I wonder if the rest of Dineh-Karit—the city dwellers, I mean—patronize them as much as we would have.”

  Tamun put a hand on Zara’s arm, and she jerked away without thinking. To her surprise, Tamun looked puzzled rather than offended. Then he laughed and patted her shoulder, and said something in Karitian. He gestured, and said, “Come,” in thickly accented Tremontanese.

  “Oh, heaven, he speaks our language,” Belinda said, her rosy face crimson with embarrassment.

  “I’m sure he only knows a few words.” Zara waved at the others to follow Tamun, and prayed he wasn’t going to leave the platform.

  To her astonishment, Tamun not only didn’t leave the platform, but for the next hour took them from hut to hut, showing off dozens of Devices. Few of them were cased in metal the way Zara was accustomed to, but the wood and vines of their construction were very fine, and their functions were more sophisticated than Zara would have guessed. There were Devices for doing household tasks like cooking and sewing clothes, Devices that raised and lowered small platforms to the jungle floor, other Devices that did things Zara had never even thought of wanting a Device to do. Tamun demonstrated a box like the one she’d used to relieve herself that morning, filling her with relief that she’d guessed its use correctly. She pushed the button that whisked the waste away she didn’t know where, and felt increasingly embarrassed at the assumptions she’d made about these people just because they ate off leaves and didn’t wear as many clothes as she did.

  She turned away and heard, distantly, the thumping, rattling sound of a loom. Without considering whether it was impolite or not, she walked away from their little group and followed her ears to one of the largest huts she’d seen so far. Its walls were only waist-height; poles held up the shingled roof, letting the sun fully illuminate the loom. The man operating it glanced up as she approached, but turned his attention immediately back to his work. Zara leaned against one of the poles and closed her eyes, enjoying the noise it made. It, too, felt like a memory, even though it had been no more than six weeks since she’d sat at her loom for the last time, finishing the last bolt of cloth. She breathed in the indefinable smell the loom gave off.

  She nodded at the weaver, one craftsman to another, then turned away as Tamun passed by with the others. She trailed at the back of the group again, then had to step farther back as a couple of naked children ran past her. She turned to watch them go and saw Ransom seated on a stool with a child on his lap, gently feeling her throat and then holding her eyelids open to peer into her eyes. Zara watched the rest of the examination, fascinated, until he set the girl down and wiggled her nose gently, making her laugh and run away past Zara. Ransom took another child on his lap and said, “Interested in medicine?”

  “Just surprised to see you have a soft side.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be my normal irascible self by the time we leave.” He took his extremely modern stethoscope from around his neck and handed it to the child to play with while he examined the boy’s feet.

  “Is this something you do often?”

  “Every time I come through this way. Give the children a physical examination, treat infections and larval infestations—it’s a real problem out here. Do some healing if necessary. But mostly I bring medicines so they can take care of themselves without depending on me.”

  “That sounds generous.”

  “They pay me in supplies and a little coin. It’s a business relationship.”

  Zara observed how gently he held the little boy. “I can see that.”

  Ransom retrieved the stethoscope. “Did you see the loom?”

  “It’s marvelous.”

  Someone wrapped their arms around her legs. A child, no more than two, looked up at Zara and smiled at her, saying something in Karitian. Little Julia was only a year older. Homesickness again swept over Zara, and she had to blink hard to dispel the tears that tried to form. No crying. Not ever. She’d long ago come to terms with her barrenness, and Telaine’s children had been enough to satisfy her desire for her own. She squatted and picked up the little girl. Like the others, she almost looked Eskandelic, with her brown skin and hair, though all the Karitians Zara had seen had brown eyes, not the hazel or gray that were typical of Eskandelics
. “Hello, little one,” she said. “You remind me of my niece.”

  The little girl kissed Zara’s cheek, then wiggled to get down. Stunned, Zara released her and watched her run away. She touched her cheek. They were so trusting at that age, so quick to give affection.

  “I didn’t know you have family,” Ransom said, standing and waving the lingering children away.

  “Since your inherent magic is healing and not mind reading, that doesn’t surprise me,” Zara snapped. What she didn’t need was this man trying to dig more secrets out of her.

  “Sorry,” he said. “None of my business.”

  His carefully neutral tone of voice made her feel ashamed. “No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

  “I’d have done the same if you’d pried into my family life. It’s not something I like to think about.”

  He turned to leave, and Zara said, “One of my grandnieces knows my secret. I lived near her family for the last ten years. She has three children, and I had to leave them all behind because my young face was starting to cause talk. I don’t like remembering them. Too painful.”

  Ransom bowed his head. “I see.” He glanced back over his shoulder at Zara. “I have a sister I haven’t seen in five years,” he said. “We were close, growing up, but then she got involved with the Resurgence, and I…well. She wrote to me for a year, before I left Tammerek for the jungle, and every word was recrimination. I’m glad your family memories are better than mine.”

  It was more honesty than she’d ever thought to hear from him. “Thank you,” she said.

  Ransom smiled at her, for once not sardonic or amused, just…friendly. “Let’s go have some food, and then I have some more work to do, but we should be able to leave this afternoon.”

  Zara shuddered. “Is that ladder really safe to descend?”

  “The villagers use it all the time.” Ransom looked at her more closely, then said, with his usual sardonic air, “But they also have a lift to bring things to and from the jungle floor. I’m sure they’d let you ride it.”