Skeen's Return

by Clayton, Jo;

  Timka trotted through the alleys, looking over her shoulder every few steps at Skeen; the tall woman was moving easily, without obvious trouble, but Timka grew increasingly worried as they neared the wharves. She could hear Skeen muttering to herself, a rising falling thread of sound; she couldn’t distinguish the words, but they weren’t Trade-Min; the intonation told her Skeen was chatting animatedly with herself; she wasn’t here but off somewhere in a world that existed inside her head.

  They moved down an alley between two warehouses and came out on a wharf; the fog was thicker here. Ti-cat trotted more slowly, stopping at intervals to peer around and sniff at the planks. The hair along her spine was pricking straight up, her belly was up and tight. Nothing obvious, nothing she could smell or see or taste, not even a stray Min about who might mean trouble, but she sensed danger around, ahead, above, she didn’t know which, maybe all of of them. She ti-tupped along on the tips of her claws, head swinging, tail erect, the tip twitching like a metronome; she heard feet scraping behind her, the continuing thread of mutters.

  A warbling whistle. Ahead, to the right. Hard to say how far off, judging distance was chancy in this fog. Timka mewed deep in her throat, heard Skeen’s feet stop, the mutters die off. Lifefire be blessed, she wasn’t wholly out of it. Timka glided in a tight circle about Skeen. The Pass-Through had her darter out, she looked alert and dangerous, never mind she was cumbered with that heavy bag. Timka hissed with relief.

  A horde of children came swarming out of alleys, off roofs, up from under the wharf, whooping and hooting, poisoned needle stilettos in their small fists; they swirled around Timka and Skeen, feinting, diving at legs and any other target presented. Eddersil turning the points, Skeen moved in small tight circles, darts spraying over the attackers; she couldn’t move fast and she didn’t try. She also wasn’t keeping track of Timka. Timka had to duck and weave as she slashed at the Ants, doing her best to avoid their knives and sweep them off the wharf into the water. Several times she shifted to rock-leaper to shed the effects of the poison; the cat-weasel’s fur turned most of the points but not all; she used the rock-leaper’s horns and razor-sharp hooves on the Ants, then shifted to cat-weasel when the knives got through the leaper’s long white hair.

  The Ants began thinning as Skeen’s darts and Timka’s claws, horns and hooves got rid of them; slowly, painfully, they worked their way toward the boat where Domi was using his saber to keep the decks clear.

  Skeen stumbled, almost went down; her eyes were glazed over, she was shooting wildly, missing more than she hit, as much danger to Timka and Domi as she was to the Ants. Timka roared and raced around Skeen, shouldering the Ants off their feet, slashing at them, driving them off into the fog. She roared again and Domi came leaping off the boat. He scooped Skeen up (she was about to fold into a heap on the wharf), grunted with surprise at the weight of the bag. With Timka wheeling and snarling as rearguard, he ran breathing hard to the ship, jumped down onto the deck. He slid Skeen down, wheeled and yelled, “Ti-cat, the chains, can you do them?” He didn’t wait for an answer but jumped from deck to rail to wharf and stood panting beside her. “I’ll handle these rats.”

  Timka mewed, switched ends and landed beside Skeen. She shifted to Pallah, dug out the cutter and managed to reach the stern without falling overboard though the boat rocked wildly under her; she twisted the cap off, flicked the sensor cover aside and slashed the beam through the metal; the chain clanked against the side of the boat as she loped to the bow and cut through the chain there. Once again she wondered at the power in the tiny cylinder and felt apprehensive about following Skeen through the Gate into the universe that made such things. “Loose,” she cried. “Let them rot.”

  Domi jumped onto the deck, moved to the stern with an easy grace that made her want to spit at him. He settled there, took the tiller. “Push off,” he said, “the current will take us.”

  The boat edged out from the dock, moved faster as it touched the fringes of the strong current in the main channel; it slid off one boat’s side, banged into another, slid along it, broke free. Impossible to see anything in this mess of night and fog, hard even to see your own hands. Which was why Domi wasn’t raising the sail yet. The current gave him enough way to steer the boat, but wasn’t pushing if fast enough to damage it or the boats it knocked against.

  Timka knelt beside Skeen, brushed the spiky black hair off her brow; her skin was hot and tight, she was breathing heavily, moaning. Domi hadn’t had time to be careful, he’d dumped her on her mangled hand and she’d lost consciousness immediately from the shock to her system. Timka straightened her out, put the hand on her chest. The bandages were sticky and stiff with blood, the flesh puffed between the strips of cloth. It didn’t seem like flesh; touching it made Timka feel nauseated. She put the cutter in its pocket and snapped the flap over it, sat on her heels and frowned at the belt. There were medicines in some of those pockets, but only Skeen knew which and how to use them. She lifted an eyelid, smoothed it down; Skeen wasn’t going to be giving directions for a good long time. She worked the lootbag off Skeen’s shoulder, unwrapped Angelsin’s fur-lined cloak, spread it over Skeen. She tucked the edges under her, folded one end around the battered boots, pulled the other end tight about Skeen’s head, leaving her only space enough to breathe. She sighed; that was all she could do for the Pass-Through, except hope she’d wake up enough to help herself.

  “How is she?” Domi’s voice, just loud enough to reach her, tense, filled with anxiety.

  “Not good.” Leaving Skeen in her fur cocoon, she moved back so she wouldn’t have to raise her voice to be heard. “Woffit tore her hand; they’ve got dirty mouths, almost worse than poison. Nothing I can do right now. When we’re downstream far enough, I’ll try bathing her face, see if I can get that fever down some; the water here, it’s so foul, it’d probably kill her.”

  “She going to lose that hand?”

  “I’d say that was a fair bet, unless she’s got something to kill that strong an infection.”

  Domi squeezed his long graceful fingers about the tiller bar, sighed. “Better than being dead. I suppose.”

  They scraped by a mid-sized merchanter moored out farther than most. A bleary looking Balayar popped his head over the rail and cursed them in half a dozen tongues; he beat on the rail in time to his cursing and started to pull himself up so he could jump into their boat and beat on them. Timka went cat-weasel and roared him into a fast sweaty retreat.

  As the merchanter vanished in the fog behind them, Domi stretched his legs, moved his shoulders, grinned at her. “You’re handy to have about, Ti-cat.”

  “Hunh.” Timka crawled over to the gear, found shirt and pants and pulled them on. When she was back by Domi’s knees, she said, “I just wish I could keep the fur and talk at the same time.”

  “Hm. That’s something I’ve wondered about, Ti. Seems there’s dozens of shapes you can take if you count all the variants of the basic ones. How come you can’t mix them and come up with some sort of composite?”

  “It just doesn’t work that way.…” Her voice trailed off as she gazed into the darkness. “Shapes have integrity … or so I’ve always thought anyway … try to change part and nothing can work … no one ever tried to … that I heard about … and I would have heard if … everything came to Carema’s, though she might not tell me. Lifefire singe your toes, Domi; you’ve started me on something and I don’t know where it’ll end. Ahhh, forget it. Something else. How soon before we sight Maggí’s ship?”

  “Hard to say. Can’t tell much about the time without the stars to measure it.”

  “Ah, wait a bit.” She crawled rapidly to Skeen, found her good hand, checked the ringchron. After tucking the cloak into place again, she touched the back of her hand to Skeen’s face. No better, and Lifefire be blessed, no worse. She left Skeen lying in that near coma and went back to Domi. “About two hours before dawn.”

  “Right, then. According to Chulji, who got it from Maggí, th
e Chute is a good half day from Fennakin, upstream, that is. Downstream, it might be less time, but our loa, ah, that’s length more or less, Ti, isn’t a third of Maggí’s, so we’re a lot slower. I’m not going to raise sail as long as there’s this much fog. It’s too dangerous. There’s a good channel mostly snag free, and long straight stretches of river between some easy bends, but if we hit a sand bar too hard, that’s it, Ti; you want to try carrying Skeen on foot? Remember there’s hill country south of us. And mines. I’d rather keep a long distance between me and any mine guards.”

  “So?”

  “So, some time round midafternoon, maybe even as late as sundown.”

  “Lifefire!”

  “I know. Nothing we can do to change it either.”

  Hours slid one into the other. The sun rose and the fog burned away. Skeen alternated between a frightening lethargy and an equally frightening delirium that at times turned violent. Timka had to exert all her strength and the entangling effect of the cloak to keep her from throwing herself overboard or capsizing the boat.

  As Domi had hoped, the wind swung around shortly after sunup and sent them slicing along, lines humming, sail taut, boat singing—bubbling, staccato, even cheerful noises. Laboring over Skeen, Timka was feeling far from cheerful. Skeen was sinking deeper and deeper into unconsciousness. Timka worked off the eddersil tunic, rolled it into a pillow for the Pass-Through’s head and used the undershirt as a sponge, bathing Skeen’s face and torso with cold riverwater, tryng to convince herself that she was doing some good, that she was indeed keeping Skeen’s temperature from soaring out of sight, but she grew more and more frustrated with the little she could do. The flesh of the mangled hand looked worse, the cloth bands cut deeper and deeper as the swelling continued; she thought about taking the bandage off, but she had nothing on board to replace it and she was afraid to expose the torn flesh to contamination and what could she do if the wounds started bleeding again? She chewed on her lip and tried to think.

  Domi looked her way now and then but most of the time his eyes were fixed on the river ahead and the sail as he rode a narrow balance between speed and stability. He whistled snatches of song time and again, but was mostly silent, not even asking how Skeen was doing.

  Clouds scudded past overhead, high and thready, not threatening rain but keeping the day gray and muggy and cooler than Timka liked. Cida Fennakin was far behind now; they were passing through wild country, nothing impressive, fold on fold of scrubby barren hills that sent the river into long serpentines and kept Domi constantly adjusting sail and tiller. There were scattered groves like clumps of hair on a mangy dog; they had a gray, stunted look Timka found depressing; even the water was beginning to take on an unhealthy grayness. She stopped using it to bathe Skeen, tucked the cloak back around her and settled into a cross-legged slouch as she watched the land slide past. They were coming into a peculiarly lifeless section of hills; a few birds flew in lazy spirals high overhead, slipping in and out of the clouds, but she saw no signs of beast life on the ground, not even the omnipresent squirrels that had made her home forest noisy and full of rustling life, swift impressions of darting leaps tree to tree, brown streaks along the ground. She could see puffs of steam rising from vents in the hillsides; at first she thought it was smoke from camp-fires, but there was no smell of smoke, only a vague rotten-egg unleasantness when a gust of wind caught one of the closer plumes and blew it into rags that fluttered around her. Except for the hooming wail of that wind, the soft brushing of the water and the small talk of the boat, they slid along in an eerie silence. Dead lands, drear lands. Was Skeen going to die? How much longer before they got to Maggí? Pegwai, he was a Lumat Scholar, wouldn’t he know more than anyone about how to treat other Wavers?

  That was the thing that bothered her the most; she knew quite a lot about treating Min ailments; at one time when she was considerably younger, she had tried using that knowledge to treat members of the Pallah families she lived with and it was only luck that kept her clear of total disaster. She learned then that there was no correlation between what worked for Min and what eased Nemin ills. She touched Skeen’s face. Hot and dry. She sighed. Skeen looked diminished. Like the dead, diminished. Not dead yet, how long?

  She slipped her sandals off, got warily to her feet. “Domi,” she called.

  His face and voice carefully neutral (she suddenly remembered how very young he was) he said, “Trouble?”

  “I’m not going to wait any longer. I’m going to fly ahead. Maybe Maggí or one of the others will know what to do.” She watched his face muscles fight his control, aware he was terrified of being left alone with Skeen and the boat; well, he had reason enough. Lifefire knows a thousand things could happen he couldn’t handle alone. But there was no help for it, she had to go. “I’ll climb high,” she said quickly. “The winds up there blow faster, I’ll be back before you notice I’m gone.”

  “Ti …” He cleared his throat, giggled suddenly, surprising both of them. “You’re not seeing something staring at you. Tell Maggí to up anchor and come meet us, that’ll make things move a lot faster. You know you can’t carry much when you sprout feathers.”

  “Hai!” She slapped her forehead. “Stupid. You’re right.” She grinned at him as she started undoing her trousers. “Never you mind my feathers. Medicines don’t weigh all that much, I’ll bring back something to start on. Hm. I haven’t the least idea how long this is going to take. Expect me when you see me.”

  She fought her way up the wind layers until she found a southbound stream; it was faster than any she remembered trying to negotiate and more turbulent. It frightened her, but she cast herself into it; battered and disoriented, she beat herself straight and went sweeping south. When her initial dizziness passed off, she looked for the river, tried to locate Maggí’s ship. She was flying above a layer of clouds; what she saw most of the time was a thready whiteness though she caught glimpses of the land through scattered small breaks in the cover; unhappily, she passed over them too quickly to see more than a few blurred details.

  It was stony, barren country, with sluggish streams and shallow ponds matted thick with ancient layers of algae, meager scrub, grass like hair on an old man’s head, thin, patchy, drained of color. Off to the right, where the hills swelled into mountains, she caught glimpses of ugly gray structures. Mine works. Except for those, it was an empty land. Nothing moved on those hillsides but the plumes of vented steam.

  Without warning the windstream turned east, straight away from the river’s course. Uttering an irritated squawk she dropped and began casting about for a new southflow where she could save energy and glide along faster than she could fly. When she was stabilized again, she started looking for the ship with hopes this time of finding it.

  And nearly lost her hold on the wind. It was directly below her, swinging slowly about its anchor lines, bare masts swaying to the tug of the wind. Giddy with relief, she spiraled down to land on the quarterdeck beside Maggí Solitaire.

  Shifting from hawk to cat-weasel, she growled deep in her throat, rubbed past the Aggitj woman’s leg and went bounding down the steps to the deck. She dropped her hindquarters to the wood, growled again; tail tip twitching like a metronome, she rose, stalked below, stood waiting at the door to the Captain’s cabin.

  Maggí pushed past her, opened the door and went inside. She turned to face Timka who had shifted again and was pulling on the robe Maggí kept for her on a hook behind the door. “Trouble?”

  Timka smoothed the sash ends down, sighed. “One thing I like about you, Maggí Solitaire, you don’t need long explanations. Skeen got her hand mangled by a woffit and she’s laid out with a fever. I need help.” She allowed herself a brief smile. “Domi says it’d be a good idea if you upped the anchors and came to meet him. Us. I’ll be flying back in a minute, after I talk with the others. By the by, you wouldn’t have any ideas how to break that fever?”

  Maggí scowled past her, chewed on her lip. “Ah … I’d be a bit
nervous about trying.… A minute, I’ll be back.” She circled the long table and vanished into her bedroom; Timka heard her rummaging about in there, heard a chest lid crash down. Maggí came back with a roll of bandage and a jar of ointment. “Fever I don’t know about, but this mess seems to work on all sorts of flesh. I’ve used it on close to everything that walks on this world.” She smiled at Timka. “I even had occasion to use it on a Min once.” She looked from her burden to Timka, frowned. “Lifefire, how are you going to carry this? Think it would be too heavy if I put it in a sack and tied it around your … um … foot?”

  Timka giggled. “Be just fine.” She sobered. “Leave room for whatever Pegwai or … well, anything I need to fly back to the boat.”

  Maggí set the bandages and jar on the table. “I hear you. I’ll have one of the crew sew you up a sack. And I’ll send the rest of your company down here. You want the Boy too? He’s playing with my daughter.”

  Timka collapsed into a chair. “No, don’t bother him. But you could stir up the cook and send down some hot sweet tea and a bun. I haven’t had anything to eat since I don’t know when and flying back’s going to be harder work.”

  “I hear you.” Maggí went out walking quickly, the soft patter of her bare feet faded almost before the sound of her last word.

  Timka folded her arms on the table and rested her head on them. She was tired, hungry, afraid that whatever they tried would be too late. And angry with herself; Lifefire be blessed, Maggí had offered what she hadn’t thought to ask for, the fresh bandages and the antiseptic. Stupid, stupid, Timka. This is the second time I’ve missed the obvious, my brain must be rotting.