by Jay Lake
Even the trees were different. Skinnier, with thin, dusty leaves instead of the broad gloss of the nodding plantains at home. I turned, slipping my wrist around within the loop, to walk backwards and look down the long sloping road up which we had been walking.
A ribbon shone in a broad land below us, silver bright with curves like the sheltering arms of a mother. Fields and orchards and copses surrounded it for a distance of many furlongs, punctuated with the rough nap of buildings and little smudges of forge fires. Was that water? I wondered.
The maggot man slowed his stride to allow me my stumbling backwards progress. “What do you see?” His words were thick and muddled, as if he had only just learned to talk.
A land of rice and fruit and patient oxen, I thought. Home. “Nothing,” I said, for I already hated him.
“Nothing.” He sounded as if the word had never occurred to him before. “That is fair enough. You leave this place today, and will never see it again.”
“This is not the way to the sky burials.”
Something in his words miscarried, because he gave me a strange look instead of answering. Then he reached for my shoulder and twisted me around from the past to face the future once more. The clasp of his fingers ached awhile.
We walked into the failing of the day, sipping every now and then from his leather bottle of water. The road we followed grew stony and thin. Even the fences gave up, the land unclaimed or unclaimable. Dark, rough rocks were strewn about, some so large the track was forced to bend around them. Everything that grew up here was dusty green or pale brown. Each plant wore a crown of thorns where in my home they would have borne flowers. Insects hummed loudly enough to pierce my hearing before falling stone-silent at the sharp cry of some unseen hunting bird.
The shadows of the few remaining trees grew long about the time their numbers began to strengthen. I stumbled in my fatigue. Recovering my step, I realized we were heading downward for the first time since setting out.
Before us, at the foot of the slope, I could see an iron-gray plain gathering darkness onto itself.
“This is the sea,” the maggot man said. “Have you ever heard of it?”
“Is it stone?”
He laughed. For a moment, I thought perhaps I heard the true man within the cloak of black cloth and muddled words. “No. Water. All the water in the world.”
That frightened me. A ditch was one thing, but enough water to cover all the land like a rice paddy was another. “Why do we walk there?”
“To see how strong you are.”
“No, no. Why do we go to this water?”
“Because the sea is the next step on the journey of your life.”
The immensity of it was beyond description. I saw how the far edge of the water faded into the distance. “I cannot swim so far.”
The maggot man laughed again. “Come. There is a house farther along our way. We can eat there. I will tell you of . . .” He paused, grasping for a word. “Water houses,” he finally said, and looked embarrassed.
Young as I was, I knew perfectly well that no one built their house of water. Either the maggot man was an idiot, which did not seem likely, or his words had failed him again.
“I am hungry,” I told him politely.
“Walk,” he replied.
We ate stew that evening in a wayhouse. I now realize how small and mean the place must have been, especially by the standards of my captor, but he’d had his purposes. It was much like my father’s hut—mud walls set with beams to make the frame of a thatched roof. The room was larger, though, so big that four tables could fit within and there still be room for the cook’s fire and her black iron kettle.
I had never seen such a great building.
We sat on a bench at one table. A few other folk were around. All glared at the maggot man. No words were said, but I knew even then that trouble followed him, that he was seen as a curse. He’d slipped free the cord. In memory I cannot say whether that was more to ease his dining or to make less of a show of his trade.
Our stew was served within shallow bowls of earthenware. I peered at the outside where it angled away from me. A pattern of lizards and flowers chased one another around the curve. The lizards I could understand in this sere, hard place, but the idea of flowers must have come from my home, for no one born here would see them among the thorns and rocks.
The dark brown stock filling the bowls was almost bitter. It had been made with some small polished nut that split neatly in two beneath my spoon. Instead of homey rice, grains floated in the broth. A few leaves swirled loose, along with chunks of pale meat that tasted like ditch frog.
“Fish.” The maggot man smiled. The effect was ghastly on his pale face. “It is always good to fill your belly after a day.”
“Fish,” I said politely. I wished I had a plantain.
When he was nearly done, he pushed his bowl between us. A dark green mallow leaf floated in the brown puddle at the bottom. “I have asked the word of the house woman,” he told me, almost proudly. “Boat. See this mallow leaf? It is like a boat.”
“There is mallow growing in your sea?”
The maggot man sighed. “I am trying to tell you why you will not have to swim.”
“I never swam because of mallow.” I poked his leaf. “Taro tastes better anyway.”
“Wood floats,” he said.
“So do I.”
“We will travel on a boat of wood, which floats like this mallow leaf in your stew.”
“I thought you said the sea is made of water.”
He threw up his hands and muttered at the rough ceiling of the wayhouse. He then looked at me with a frown. “You will be fearsome once you speak Petraean.”
I’d never realized there were more kinds of words in the world. “Will my father speak Petraean, too?”
A shadow clouded his eyes. “No,” he said in a clipped voice. “We must go. It is another few hours’ walk to the port.”
I followed the maggot man into the deepening gloom of night. My feet began to get in each other’s way. Keeping my pace was especially difficult when the road made a sharp bend or wound through a steep drop along some gully.
The maggot man walked on. His stink had blown off with the evening breeze. Instead my nose was tickled by the scent of salt, and a rot I’d never smelled before.
I was ready to go home. The next time I stumbled, I let myself fall to the ground. The green cord slipped from his wrist. I bounced up off the road and sprinted away.
The maggot man was faster than I might have credited. He was upon me in a dozen steps, grabbing me up into his arms while I kicked and screamed, then working one hand free to slap me very hard across the mouth.
“Do not break from me.” His voice now was stone, hard and unforgiving. “Your path is set. The only way forward is at my side. There is no way back.”
“I am going home,” I shrieked at him through the taste of blood in my mouth.
“You are going on.” A rueful smile slipped across his face. “You have . . .” He reached for a word a moment, then gave up, instead saying, “Fight. You are strong in body and spirit. Most girls would have run at the first, or fallen crying later in the day.”
“I don’t want fight. I want to go home.”
He still held me in a very tight grip. Together we turned, looking back up the road. “How far do you think you could find your way across that wide country of rocks and thorns? If I had not carried water, what would you have drunk?”
I would lick the sweat from my hands, I thought, but the sting of his blow was a sharp, hard lesson that warded my lips. “I will go to your sea,” I told him grudgingly. “But then I am going back home.”
“You will come to my sea,” he agreed. He said no more than that.
Quite late in the evening we found an inn. I had finally collapsed of sheer fatigue. I made the last part of this journey slumped across the maggot man’s shoulder. The moon gave the night land a sheen like silvered tears. I wondered if it
would polish me bitter bright as well.
He had a little room already taken, I realized much later. At the time, we walked through a huge kitchen and up what I later understood to be a flight of stairs to a high room with nets draping from above. A hutch stood within, a thing of bars and boards. Alongside it was a bed and a rough table, all beneath a sloping roof with an inset window tightly shuttered.
Before I knew what he was about, the maggot man dumped me into the hutch and slid the latches across the door.
“You stay there,” he said. “No running. I must do things, then sleep.”
I howled, screamed, hurled myself against the bars, raged at the top of my lungs. The world did not hear. The maggot man sat at his table with a carefully trimmed candle and for a long time poked a narrow stick into a little packet of papers sewn together within leather sheets. Every now and then he smiled at me, somewhere between indulgence and mirth.
My bell for the day was unsewn. I did not have my silk or my needle. I knew then that I was little more than an animal to him. Caged, kept, to be taken over the mallow-filled waters of the gray sea to whatever dead land the maggot called his home.
I cried until sleep claimed me, though his candle flickered and his stick scratched and scratched against the paper. In my dreams that scratching became the claws of a mangy wolf, pale as death, jaws set to drag me away through a frog-filled ditch the width of the world.
I was awoken by words I did not understand. The maggot man had opened the door of my cage and held a plate with fried dough twists and slices of yellow fruit I did not recognize. He spoke again.
“You utter the tongue of demons,” I told him.
“Very soon I will speak to you only in the language of your new home,” he said in my words, “except at extreme need.” He shook his plate at me, then repeated whatever he had said before.
I did not want to come out within reach of his hard slap, but my stomach had other ideas. The dough smelled good, and the fruit looked sweet enough. I followed the growling of my hunger from the cage.
“Eat,” he told me. “Then we will go find our boat.”
The dough tasted every bit as delicious as it had smelled. Likewise the fruit—sweet and fleshy and sour all in a single mouthful. This was as fine a morning meal as my father had ever made for me.
When I had finished my food, I looked to see that the maggot man had gathered up a fat leather satchel. He held out his hand with the green twist of silk already around his wrist.
I could have fought harder. Perhaps I should have. I do not know what good it might ever have done. I am still fighting even now, so perhaps I only began the resistance slowly and never stopped. That day my curiosity overtook my anger as I willingly bound my hand to his. Decent food and a weariness of struggle were all it had taken to break my young spirit to the maggot man’s desire.
“Come,” he said, “let us see to our boat.”
“I do not have to swim?”
“No, you do not have to swim. We shall sit easily as we pass across the sea.” He added something in his words, which I of course could not then understand.
We set out into the bright morning along a muddy street in a village larger than I had imagined could exist. We passed amid a cacophony of men and horses and dogs and ox-carts as we headed for the water’s edge. I even heard the clop of ox bells, but none were the tone of Endurance’s. No one remained to call me back, while this strange, pale man continued to push me forward on the path he had chosen for me.
I followed him into the future.
My memory is a curious thing. Though I was quite young, I clearly recall these early conversations. They were of necessity in the tongue of my birth, for I spoke no Petraean yet. I even recollect Federo—and how young he was then—looking for words he did not know, such as boat. I did not know what a boat was either, not in those first days. My memory supplies the substance of the conversation rather than the specifics, so as I think back to that time, it seems to come back to me in the language of my enslavement rather than the language of my cradle.
Likewise with the memory of my first ship. I know from recalling those days that she was named Fortune’s Flight, for those are among the first words of Petraean that I learned. Years since, I have looked in the ship books at Copper Downs, and so I know that Fortune’s Flight was an iron-hulled steam barquentine. She was built on the shores of the Sunward Sea, where the princes of the deep water have foundries to make such things. This knowledge fuses into my memory so I can recall the arrangement of her masts and sails and smokestack as she rode at anchor offshore, even though at the time they must have seemed to me nothing more than strange trees, while the mysteries of steam would have passed beyond any understanding I could have summoned.
Fortune’s Flight rises white-hulled and gleaming on the waves of recall. A cloud of gulls circles her fantail, crying their soulless lament. Swabbies move about her deck, and whistles blare orders in those codes that all sailors know. She is lean and beautiful, her narrow stack streaming pale smoke. She is a house upon the water, a hunter’s courser set to carry his prey back to the manor hall to be dressed and hung.
I must have then seen her as a white building with a treed roof, for I cannot imagine another view to my youngest eyes. Now that I know her power and her purpose, I cannot look back on the ship of my captivity with less awareness than I possess today.
How we were transported from my first view at the water’s edge to her decks is clouded by forgetfulness. There must have been a boat. Whether it was a local man earning a tael for his ferry work or one of the ship’s company come to fetch her passengers, I cannot say.
She was crowded with drums and bales and capstans—all the furniture of navigation and its intents. We looked back at the shore from the rail. Much water stretched between us and land, a river wider than all the ditches in all my father’s fields laid together. I tried to imagine how many rice paddies could be flooded from this sea that was kept so far from my home.
The look of the water desert was alien, strange as if the sky had been bound directly to earth. Shore was more familiar. The houses and barns seemed so small. They were built with mud walls, just like Papa’s hut, except here in this place people washed their buildings over with pale colors. Some bore painted designs, flowers and wheels of lightning and lizards and things I did not have names for. The land rose behind the town, bearing with it the single road we had walked down the night before.
“You brought me far to test my strength,” I said.
“Hmm.” The maggot man did not lend any words to his answer.
I had walked that distance. I could walk the same distance back. I stared at the land so brown and gray above the ragged colors of the town at the edge of the sea. After a short time, he tugged gently on my shoulder. I turned to the chaos of the ship. The maggot man and I headed for a little house amid the jumble of men and equipment and cargo.
“Here,” he said as we pushed within. “Here we stay.” This was followed by another burst of his Petraean gabble.
My first thought was that the floors were wood, not dirt. The place was handsome enough, lit by a round window filled with glass. There were two beds, each larger than any I had seen in my life until then. A table with a chair before it clipped to the floor. A black mounting gaped in the ceiling, from which a chain depended, holding a small oil lamp with a hooded glass.
No cage waited in the middle of the room.
I had never seen such a wealth of space and privacy. Not to be shared, surely as our room the night before was, but dedicated to one man and his needs. One man and his girl.
The iron rail at the base of the bed was firm and cold to my touch. The paint was textured with generations of repetition, layers over layers of flecking and pitting. “What do we do here?”
He answered in Petraean.
I whirled on him, my voice rising as my dignity slipped away from me. “What do we do here?”
The maggot man smiled, his mouth tight and sad.
He answered once more in Petraean. He then added in my words, “We journey across the Storm Sea to Copper Downs.”
I seized on petulance, the last refuge of children. “Don’t want to go to Copper Downs. Want to go home.”
His smile shrank to nothing. “Copper Downs is your home now.”
This I considered. We had not brought my silk with my thousand bells. “Papa will be there? And Endurance?”
“Your new home.” This was followed with another burst of his alien words.
Lies. All was lies. He had lied to Papa; he lied to me. Endurance had tried to warn me, but I’d followed my father’s words in coming with this man.
Had Papa lied to me as well?
I resolved I would go home and ask him. It only waited for my moment. I gathered myself on one of the beds and watched the maggot man carefully.
Soon enough he tired of watching me in return, and set to his little table. He brought papers from a box and made more of his scratches. Once in a while he glanced at me, but his heart was in his reckoning, not in being my guardian.
The floor groaned and swayed like a tree in a storm, though the window’s light was bright with a clear sky. The yip-yip of the sailors seemed unexcited. The boat shifted, I realized, like Endurance settling in for the night. Below the floor, something huge chuffed and squirmed. Perhaps they had a giant ox to tow them through the sea?
It did not matter to me. I was leaving soon. Though I could no more stop my mind wondering than I could stop my lungs breathing, I did not care.
This game was over.
I waited until the time between each of my captor’s glances at me was more breaths than I could count. It was easy enough to occupy myself studying the latch on the door to this little house. A great shiny lever was placed below a handle which was obviously meant to be grabbed. When we entered, the maggot man had used it to close the door.
