Children of a Different Sky

by Jane Yolen

  “Are you awake?”

  The voice belonged to the lander with the broken fingers. Kaida was still deciding whether to answer when the woman sighed.

  “Stupid, Cynere, stupid. She probably doesn’t speak Docklands. I’m sorry, lady who crawled out of the ocean, I don’t mean to talk to you in a language you don’t understand. And I’m still doing it. I am a bad person.”

  “No.” Kaida opened her eyes. “You may be a ‘bad person,’ as you say, but it is not because you speak to me. I make no judgment.”

  “You are awake!” The woman was tied to one of the pillars that studded the room. She looked at Kaida with obvious relief, features outlined by the glow of a small oil lamp. “They hit you awfully hard. I was worried they might have split your skull.”

  The blow had been delivered skillfully. Kaida was unsurprised to find her own hands tied, and scowled. It would have been a relief to rub her wounds, to take some of their sting away. “They would not dare. A dead Nyimi is a fortune in fins. A dead woman is suspect. Stripes can be feigned. Too much of our anatomy is…situational.”

  “You’re Nyimi?” Cynere frowned. “I thought—forgive me—but I thought they were a myth.”

  “If I were a myth, my head would ache less.” Kaida sat up as straight as the ropes would allow. It was nowhere near straight enough. The knots had been tied with dismaying awareness of her anatomy in both shapes: were she to transform, she would impale herself on her own spikes. “I do not like this. Did they tell you why they required your screams?”

  “Only that they were trying for a better catch. I don’t know what I thought—I’m so sorry.”

  “You did not know.”

  “They threatened my brother.”

  Kaida looked around the hold again. “Where is he? If you swim together, you should be kept together.”

  “They haven’t let me see him since they took us on board. They said I couldn’t be trusted unless they had leverage over me. We were supposed to be paying passengers. We’re from Morada.” The word was fluid and sweet on Cynere’s lips.

  “I do not know where that is,” said Kaida. “But the sound of it makes me think it is very far from here.”

  “Yes.” Cynere looked away. “It’s beautiful. At night, the city is like a sky full of stars, and during the day, the flowers make the air taste like sugar. It’s my home, and I’m never going to see it again. And I can tell by the way you’re looking at me that you think my brother is dead, and maybe you’re right, but I can’t let him be dead in my heart until my feet are on the shore and every one of the bastards who put me here is bleeding out under a motherless sky. Do you understand?”

  “Landers are strange and bothersome creatures, but vengeance, I understand,” said Kaida. “You are the first lander I have met who seems to properly know the shape of it. Why will you not see your home?”

  “Nyimi. You’re a myth where I come from, but the myth says you have kings and queens. Is it true?”

  “No,” said Kaida dismissively. Then she paused, and corrected herself: “We do have leaders. Each school swims with its own authority, its own chooser of the ways. Without someone whose voice could chart a current, we would be forever arguing, and we would go wherever the tides would take us. Tides are not clever things. They should not be permitted to make such complicated decisions.”

  “What happens when one of your leaders dies?”

  “Their children will take up leadership of the school.”

  “And will everyone accept this?”

  “Not always. Sometimes, there is fighting. It stops, usually, before much blood can be shed. We are rare enough that we become, as you say, myth to some. We cannot afford to thin our own numbers through senseless fights. If an accord cannot be reached, the school may be divided. It has happened before. It will happen again.” Kaida paused. Her disappearance might be the thing which triggered such a division. Her father loved these waters, which had been the home of his mother and his mother’s mother, going all the way back to the Lady of the Tides, who had first offered the sea to the Nyimi like a jewel held in her hands. He wanted to stay. But her mother…

  Her mother came from a school attuned to deeper waters, which came this near to shore only to reach the mating grounds. Her mother had been advising caution for tides. Losing Kaida might well force her to spread spines against her own husband, and when that was done, division would become inevitable.

  If she did not escape this foul place, Kaida might be responsible for the end of her family.

  “Well, hu—I mean, landers do something similar when there’s a change in who rules us. The school splits. The new leaders keep the land and the cities and the good things and the gold, and the ones they think can’t be trusted get driven out. Or they die. A lot of people died in Morada. The first one to die was our king. An assassin fed him poisoned honey, and he choked to death on the memory of flowers.”

  Kaida frowned. “My apologies for this your loss. Was he your father?”

  “Oh, no,” said Cynere. “My father was the one who poisoned him.”

  There was a momentary silence as Kaida puzzled through this sentence. Finally, she said, “My apologies. It seems I do not speak your language as well as I believed. You are saying your father is the one who killed your ‘king’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why…?”

  “The king was a tyrant. He did as he liked, and never cared how much damage he did in the process. People starved in their beds. Plague ran rife. There was a distaff cousin with a claim to the throne valid enough to be honored, if the way was cleared. My father is—was—an assassin. Do you have assassins, in the sea?”

  “No.”

  “He killed for money.”

  “Money, I understand.” Kaida sneered. “The men who catch us do so for the money we can bring them. They butcher and sell us and rejoice, as if gold were any balance for a silenced song. I do not care for money.”

  “You need it on the land. If you want to eat, want to clothe yourself, want to live, you need money. The king didn’t share the money he had with his people, and so the cousin who would be king approached my father and said ‘if you kill him, it will be better.’ And my father, the fool that he was, believed the words of a boy who wanted to wear a crown, and took his coin, and killed a king.”

  Kaida frowned. “As he was asked.”

  “Yes, but new kings don’t tend to trust the people who killed the old king. My family, we worship at the altar of the seasons. We harm no one for faith, only for money. The new king, he believes in the ascendancy of the sun. He declared that all of our faith who were found within the kingdom walls at the month’s end would be arrested, their assets seized, and their bodies put to the service of the crown.”

  “Your father—”

  “Was branded a king-killer by the so innocent, so moral new king, whose solar god would never have sent him to the type of place where such men congregate. He was held up as proof that all of us who worshipped at the altar of the seasons were immoral, at best, and evil, at worst, our heads easily turned with money, our hands easily turned to evil. We were told to count ourselves lucky when all he did was banish us, rather than set himself, sword and soul, against us.” Cynere lowered her eyes to the floor. “I have never known any home aside from Morada. My brother was set to marry a girl with hands as smooth as butter. She would have been my sister. I always wanted a sister. But weddings such as theirs would have been were banned even before we were turned out of our home, for how could the sun god allow one of his precious daughters to marry into filth?”

  Her voice twisted on the last word, showing it for the echo it was. Kaida frowned.

  “I am…sorry, you have been treated so by those who shared your waters,” she said. “How did you come to this ship?”

  “I said a lot of people died in Morada. When the new king spoke against his own subjects, there were those—especially those who saw themselves in service to the sun—who thought it was perm
ission for them to do whatever they liked. They came into our homes with knives and fists and thought we wouldn’t fight back. They forgot that even pretty gardens have thorns. We have been fighters for a very long time. We had only been decorative for a short while.” Cynere looked up, and her smile was a poisoned spine aimed at the heart of the world. “My father died surrounded by the bodies of his enemies. He will be well-received by the season of planting, where even the graves bear fruit. My brother is young, not yet ready to be called to harvest. My mother’s last wish was that I get him safely to some other shore, one that might be kinder, or at least might give him room to grow and bloom before he was cut down.”

  “And this ship…?” prompted Kaida.

  “We dallied perhaps longer than we should have, preparing the fields.” The way Cynere spoke made it clear that her preparations had involved blood and bone, and little else. “By the time we reached the docks, the new king’s decrees had closed all but the worst doors against us. There were few enough ships willing to entertain granting us passage, no matter how much money we offered them. When this one promised us safe transit, even our own cabin, we didn’t have much choice beyond trusting them.”

  “Landers lie.”

  Cynere frowned. “And mermaids don’t?”

  “I am not a mermaid. I am Nyimi.”

  “I thought—”

  “To be a mermaid is to forget the waters where you began. To be a mermaid is to be reduced to a species, and not a people. I am a person. I am Nyimi. I swim beneath the stars of my ancestors, and they are the same, even if we have lost the spawning grounds where we first drew breath. I will go to the sea that waits for the dead, and I will see all those who came before me, and I will know them, because they will be Nyimi, as I am Nyimi, and they will welcome me home.”

  “Ah,” breathed Cynere. “You are an exile as well.”

  “We are a species in exile.” Kaida hesitated. “The way you spoke, of your family, of your father…are you an ‘assassin’ as well?”

  “Not for lack of trying. I’m a killer, when I have to be, but I’m not the artist my father was.”

  “Can you heal, as well as harm?”

  Cynere nodded. “I can patch a wound, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I am. There will be blood. I will free you, but I will need you to move quickly, or I may save your life at the expense of my own. I hope your hands will not be too great a hindrance.”

  “What are you—”

  Transformation, for the Nyimi, was a simple thing built of complicated stages. Kaida focused on her arms, on the sharp spines which belonged there, the serrated, poisonous extensions of her will. They blossomed outward, slicing through the ropes even as they were turned back against her body. Cynere gasped. Kaida ignored her, more focused on using her now-freed arms to direct the spines against the ropes still holding her legs.

  Blood cascaded down her arms and ran along her sides as she rose and moved to Cynere, crouching to slice through the other woman’s ropes. It took longer than she would have liked, for she needed to be careful; a slip, and she would be wounded and the woman would be dead, neither of which would serve her well.

  As soon as Cynere was free she rose, running for the wall. Kaida watched her go with a dim feeling of betrayal. Of course the lander had lied. Landers always lied. Landers always—

  Cynere returned with knife in hand, dropping to her knees and beginning to cut slices off the bottom of her own skirt. Her broken fingers slowed her work, but did not hinder her completely. In short order, she had a series of bandages, which she wrapped around the puncture wounds in Kaida’s arms, tying them tight without cutting off the blood flow entirely.

  “I have heard you are poisonous,” she said. “Is this true?”

  “Deadly to you; a mild itching, to me,” said Kaida.

  “Good. I am…very glad that you did not harvest yourself on my account.” Cynere tied the final knot and stood, the knife clutched in her hand. “Will you be all right until I return? I will return. You have my word of that.”

  “I will be fine,” said Kaida.

  She remained where she was, watching in silence as Cynere turned and began to climb toward the deck. It seemed a mean trick, sending a single lander to battle so many of her own kind. But landers were plenty and Nyimi were few, and she owed it to her father and her school to leave here, if she could.

  A door closed. Kaida rose.

  She made her way first to the barrels where the butchered bodies of her kin were packed. One by one, she tipped their contents out on the floor, spilling brine and blood as if they were the same, until the most precious catch these landers could ever hope to make was wasted, until she could run her fingers along the lines etched on clammy skin and see the stars these Nyimi had been born to swim for. She could not be certain of their names from anything as sketched-in as a starline, but she could see enough that when she spoke of them, their kin would recognize their shadows in her words. It was the best that she could do. Sorrow had never raised the dead, nor vengeance soothed the living.

  Screams came from above, muffled and deadened by the wood. Whether they belonged to the fishers or to Cynere, she did not know. She hoped for the former. Cynere deserved to land a few blows before she was cut down. She had earned that much, and more.

  Kaida turned her attention to the walls, where some doors were waiting, closed and latched against their occupants—if they had any. Perhaps one of those doors would lead to a hatch intended to be used for dumping offal into the sea, and she could make her escape before the battle’s victor came down the stairs to claim her.

  Behind the first door was nothing: an empty room, with shackles on the walls which she looked at and chose not to consider further.

  Behind the second door were people. Some were human, including a young boy whose hair and eyes were like Cynere’s, whose arm was broken and held stiffly against his body. Kaida blinked at him. He shied back, pressing himself against the bulk of a woman whose torso was as an unstriped Nyimi or a lander, but whose lower body was that of some vast land-dwelling beast, with hard shell feet and a long tail of tangled hair. The others in the room huddled behind the woman, who put her arms around the boy and narrowed her eyes in suspicion and threat.

  “If you’ve come for a fight, you’ll have one,” she snarled. Then she blinked, seem see that the stripes on Kaida’s arms and legs were not clothing, but natural coloration. “A…very naked fight. You’re not here for a fight at all, are you? Who are you?”

  “My name is Kaida. I was caught by the men who hold this ship. Another woman, who is called Cynere, has gone to explain to them why capturing thinking beings is beneath them. I do not believe there will be a second lesson.”

  The beast-woman blinked again before smiling. “Well, then, we’d best go help with the education, hadn’t we?”

  ~*~

  The deck was awash in human blood, red as sunset, running along the planks and mixing with the spray coming over the sides. At the center of it all stood Cynere, knife still clutched in her unbroken fingers, a sword—hers now, however she had acquired it—in her other hand. She was panting slightly, her head bowed forward, and the only sign that she had been the cause of so much killing was a scratch along the angle of one cheek, as delicate as the mark left by a single Nyimi spine.

  The freed prisoners boiled up behind Kaida, pushing her aside as they rushed to seize the ropes, the wheel, and—in the case of the small boy with the broken arm, who cried “Cysi!” as he ran at his sister—Cynere herself.

  Cynere looked down, eyes widening. Then she dropped to her knees and folded the boy in her arms, letting her weapons fall unheeded.

  The beast-woman stopped next to Kaida. “A happy ending. Not so common, when dealing with a ship that preys on the fears and needs of refugees.”

  “There are no endings. Only changes in the tide.” Kaida looked at her. “What are you?”

  “A captain in my own right, when my ship isn’t in doc
k being repaired. My name is Phillipa Fairweather.” The beast-woman raised the eyebrow above her single visible eye. A black patch covered the other. “Or is that not what you meant, Nyimi?”

  “You know us, then.”

  “I know these men were hoping to fill their hold with you, to sell alongside the rest of us.”

  Stripes on skin, flesh in barrels. “They caught enough of us. They will catch no more.”

  “True enough.” Phillipa inclined her head. “I’m what they call a centaur, on the land. If you ever decide you’ve had enough of the waves, or enough of men like these butchering your kin and kind, we’d be happy to have you. Doesn’t matter if you know sailing or ships. We can teach those things. What matters is you opened a door when you didn’t have to, and maybe you could tell the local Nyimi not to throw things at us.”

  Kaida said nothing.

  “Go to the shore, there.” Phillipa pointed toward the distant light of a city, far down the slope of the shore, barely visible through the dark. “Ask for the Jackdaw, or the horse-lady who sails her. Anyone you find will point you right.”

  “Take her.” Kaida pointed brusquely toward Cynere. “She can fight, but she is from a garden. She does not know how to grow wild.”

  “And what does a sea-girl know of gardens?”

  Kaida said nothing, only turned and walked to the rail, pulling herself over it. When she glanced back, only for an instant, Cynere was watching her.

  She let go of the wood and dropped, back into the waiting sea. There were songs to be sung, and families to be notified. There was mourning to be done.

  And perhaps, when all those things were finished, there would be a city to seek, and a captain to speak to. Being able to speak to the ships, to speak for the Nyimi and be heard, might change things for the better. Might make these waters safer, and stop the songs of sorrow.

  The River of Stars still shining brightly above her, Kaida dove, and was gone.

  That’s the natural order of things. It is natural for humans to divide into two or more sides and go to war to determine who should rule. The people who dwell in the middle must be pushed aside to clear paths of invasion. It is their destiny to become refugees.