Another nod, and he stepped past her to the kitchen, and slid out the back door into the alley. A look both ways: nothing.
The others clattered out the front. He started loping down the alley toward the back road up the hill, feeling the crunch of each step in his old bones. At least I still run up to the masthead ten times a day, he thought, squinting through the darkness toward the golden glow of cottage lights on Lookout Hill.
The Harbormistress reached the cottage that twelve generations of Bedithas had called home not too long after Ran Nalved. Ran and Beditha Ten stared at Lenzet Arbic in silence, as Wende, new queen, watched them all.
The three oldsters had been friends since childhood. They’d all done their ten years in the Patrol together, Di and Ran coming back to visit Lenzet while she did her second ten years as a Patrol Leader. Beditha Ten and Ran had served as Second and First Mates on Lenzet’s first ship, and they’d both managed to be there to celebrate when Lenzet was elected Harbormistress, a job that no one under fifty could even be considered eligible for, the requirements being so stringent.
In all those years they’d rarely seen her weep. She was weeping now.
“Six of my boys and girls are dead,” she said hoarsely, leaning against the door. “Six. And as many with bad wounds. From only two of them. And they enjoyed it. Good sport, that’s what Lovit said—they was laughing an’ jokin’—before she passed out from loss of blood.”
“They lookin’ for me and Twelvie?” Beditha Ten asked.
The Harbormistress dashed her wrist across her eyes. “So it seems. For whoever has some object. Lovit said they questioned Chass hard before they killed him, but she couldn’t hear it all.” She straightened up. “Voz got one of ’em in the back w’ a cross-bolt.”
“Good!” Beditha Ten declared. Then frowned. “You won’t fry ’im for it?”
Lenzet nodded wearily. “There’ll be no inquest for shooting a 11 from behind without challenge. I consider six dead challenge enough. These rotted fish-guts in gray don’t play war by our rules. Now.” She drew in a breath. “I’m gonna assume young Chass lied like a rug before he died, because I knew him good, but still, the one still walkin’s gonna find his way up here.”
“Then Twelvie has to slip her cable,” Beditha Ten declared, turning to her granddaughter. “You and yon object.”
Wende had been sitting on the hearth by the fire, her toes spreading the mesh of a net tight, her nimble fingers busy at mending, as she listened. She finished off her work with a few quick, automatic movements, for children learned to weave rope and mend nets as soon as they learned to dress themselves. She stood up, face blanched.
Lenzet nodded at her, and turned to the others. “I thought it out on the way up here—while I was makin’ sure no shadow was behind me. Ran. You get her down to the harbor, and get her on any boat going out. Don’t tell us how, or where, or when. And you get out right after.”
Ran Nalved gave a nod. “At once.” He held out his hand to Wende, who rose, but didn’t move.
“Gran?”
“You go, child. I’ll be fine.” Beditha Ten reached into the corner cupboard and pulled out a bottle. “So he comes. I’m an old woman, and everyone knows the old have sprung their masts. Especially—” She uncorked the bottle and splashed the contents down her front. The pungent smell of distilled liquor filled the room. “Especially when they’re drunk. It’ll take two watches t’ find out anything.”
“And I told my Patrollers, nice and loud, so half the street heard me, that you two was hidin’ out on the west side,” Lenzet added.
The adults nodded in satisfaction. The west side of the island was thick forest, dotted with old caves and caverns. The ancient retreat during times of war, it was nearly impossible to search even for islanders.
Wende gulped, flung herself into her grandmother’s arms for a fierce hug, and then left with the old sea captain.
While the two old women laid hasty plans, Ran and Wende hurried down the mountain, neither speaking.
When they reached the back route to the harbor, Ran stopped, and Wende stopped with him. They stood behind an old sail maker’s house.
“I’ve got it,” he said, staring down at her dim-lit form in the candle light from the window. “Here.” He pulled his pocket-knife. “Gimme that braid.”
Wende winced inside, but she was far too frightened to argue. “Yer makin’ me into a boy?”
“Well, on the outside, anyways,” he replied with a faint chuckle, and she turned her back, and felt the knife saw away at the back of her scalp. A few moment later her head felt lighter, and cool on her neck. She stood while fingers tugged and sawed around her head. “Good thing about a knife job,” he said after a time, “is that it don’t look recently cut.”
Wende resisted the urge to finger her hair.
“Now, we’ll stop somewhere’s and get ye some gear, and once we got you changed, get ye signed onto a fisher, I think. The crew manifest is goin’ to be all nice and legal.”
Wende nodded, taking out the strange silver-gray object and looking down at it in puzzlement. How could this thing cause so much trouble?
“That there thing is some kind o’ magic object, I collect.”
“That’s what Gran said. We found it a couple days ago, when I got made into the queen, and we inspected the palace—”
“No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know any more. Magic’s enough. Put it away.”
Wende dropped it into her pocket.
“What you got to do is talk to someone who knows about magic.”
Silence. Wende waited, still looking up into Ran’s old, trusted face. She’d played with this man’s granddaughter before she shipped out on her first crew. Meanwhile, Ran was thinking about the fact that Wende hadn’t ever been shipped out along with her age-mates. It seemed odd, just as odd as it had seemed for Di to have hired an expensive tutor to teach the child not just reading, but reading in foreign tongues, when Beditha Ten herself could barely write her own name and make out a crew manifest.
But Di had always had them Dreams.
Ran turned his mind to magic. He—and most of the islanders—did not see the world in map-images, but in charts, complicated charts that showed currents and wind patterns and coasts, and rarely any details inland. But over the years you picked up things about various lands.
“I think the very best place for you is right west o’ here, in Mearsies Heili. Yep, I’m morally convinced that’s best. Last I heard, their queen was about your age, maybe summat older now, but she’ll listen. And she’s a right one—got the treaty agreements goin’ again for us, after a long lapse, which is how we got our cleanin’ frames and so forth workin’ again, back right before you was born.”
Wende gulped and nodded. She was afraid, and aggrieved at the sudden separation, but she’d been raised to do her duty, and the idea of a child queen appealed to her very much.
“Now, what me and you are gonna do is get your gear, and make up a good story. See, I’ve got some friends among the fish fleets, and I think I know just the boat. Those da—those enemies is going to be lookin’ for a girl, so you gonna sign on as a boy. Got it?”
Wende nodded again.
And so it was.
Just before dawn, as rain fell steadily, numerous ships lifted anchor in order to make the ebbing tide. Among them was a sturdy fishing smack much like the five others in its fleet. The crew of the Eel was all male, just as the crew of the Ray over yonder was all female, because the syndicate that owned this particular fleet felt that the hands paid more attention to their work and less to one another that way.
So on board the Eel, as the crew topside tacked slowly southward, a tall freckle-faced boy conducted Wende on a tour below decks. “And here’s where you sling your hammock,” he was saying. “You happened into a good watch—you got day watch, which means you sleep nights.”
Wende nodded, though she wished she could sleep now, for she’d been up all night, first following Captain
Nalved around to trade for items she’d need, while he spun stories about replacing gear for a ship’s boy, and then waiting on board his own ship while the last of his crew reported in.
“Hey! Pay attention now!”
The sharp voice brought Wende’s tired mind away from that last boat ride from Captain Nalved’s Delcey over here to the Eel, and Wende trying to pick out the cottage lights on Lookout Hill, but the rain had been like a curtain. Was Gran all right?
“... store your gear here. What’s yer name again?”
“Pol.”
“C’mon, Pol, I’ll show you the galley, and then we’ll get you started on what’s what, and how the skipper likes it done.”
Six: Deirdre Makes a Discovery
Back to Earth again.
As it happens, though the times seldom correspond so neatly, a day had also passed there as well.
“So let me get this straight,” Frederic said when they met next. “You mom says there’s a way to another world? Somewhere here?”
Deirdre nodded. “She went through it once. It had something to do with her family, way in the past.”
“Well, why doesn’t she just do it again?”
“Because she’s not a mage. You have to know how to do magic to open those Gates, and apparently they don’t always work. Or, they work for one world but then shift to another, or something like that. I don’t really understand it.”
“Okay,” Frederic said. “Go on.”
Deirdre turned the book rack with her toe, and watched the garish covers to the paperbacks blur as it spun. “I have to finish, because—well, we’ll see what you think when I get there.”
o0o
“Blehk Junior made a noise today,” Deirdre said, dropping her books onto the kitchen table that next day. “Ugh! It’s freezing! I thought I’d never get back!”
Thunder rumbled across the sky, and hail clattered against the bedroom windows.
Deirdre went into the bedroom to get her bathrobe. She flipped her damp hair outside it. Her mother had followed her. “So what happened?” she asked as she fixed her hair up into the bun she wore to her waitress job.
“I pressed the buttons on that little Man From U.N.C.L.E. thingie. Weird, that thing. I thought it was some kind of spy gadget until I picked it up, and then it felt like a toy. Just a block of wood, just kind of painted over, and the buttons don’t even press in.”
“Does it work?”
“Well, the man was back in, oh, a minute or so.”
“Maybe he was down at the end doing laundry.”
“Yeah, that could be, except he wasn’t wet from the rain, and he hadn’t left with a basket. He was breathing hard, like he had to run, except he wasn’t red. His face was kind of pale, if anything. Even paler, I mean.”
Elian Weiss frowned. “So what noises did you hear?”
“It sounded almost like a groan. You know, like this.” Deirdre tried to copy what she’d heard. “Like someone with a stomachache or something. But no words or anything. Think his kid is really crazy, and not just sick?”
Elian Weiss pursed her lips. “I don’t know what to think.”
They returned to the kitchen, where her mother put on her waitress shoes and picked up her purse. Ursel sat in her playpen banging toys around, her world confined to the apartment and the toys in it—those made sense, unlike all the words Mama and Deirdre gabbled—and Deirdre helped herself to the waiting Cuban rice and chicken her mother had simmered all day.
Deirdre frowned down at her rice, yellow from saffron, which ordinarily she loved. “He sounded hurt,” she said finally. “That groan didn’t sound like someone about to barf, it sounded like someone who’d just got the nastiest knock on the shin, or something.”
“What did Mr. Blick say when he returned?”
“He said, Why did you summon me? and I said, I heard noises, like your kid is sick. He just gave me all this money and opened the door for me to go, and so I went.”
Elian stared down at the apartment keys in her hand. “Was the groaning definitely a child’s voice?”
“I think so.”
Elian winced.
“What is it, Mom? Think we should call the police or something?”
“No.” Elian shook her head. “Well, maybe.” She sighed. “I don’t know what’s right. If the child is the man’s son, then no one will interfere unless there’s evidence of terrible violence. And you didn’t hear any violence, you only heard groans, which could be just the result of a nasty stomach bug.”
“Right. Except it seems kind of mean to go out and leave your sick kid.”
Elian nodded. “But not against the law. Especially if he’s going to work, and has hired a sitter, so it’s not even child neglect. Then again, if they really are from the other world, and if we do call the police, they’ll just vanish. Nobody gets helped, and we find out nothing.”
Deirdre nodded slowly.
Her mother moved to the door. “In any case, he doesn’t seem to welcome questions, so you can try a couple of easy things, just for our own peace of mind.”
“Okay.”
“Since this man seems to want you every day, it’s good that it’s only for a few hours.”
Deirdre nodded as they both looked at Ursel. Elian Weiss supplemented their meager income by waiting tables at the coffee shop at the corner on four nights a week, four nights that Deirdre babysat at home, rather than away. So far, at least, Mr. Blick had returned well before Mom had to leave.
Elian gave a short nod. “Tomorrow, take our bedroom key and try it in their lock.”
“Unlock the bedroom door?”
“Well, if it works. And it ought to. Those locks were cheapo in the 1880s, when these buildings were first put up, and I’ll bet anything you can use one key for any of the locks that haven’t been changed.”
“So what do I look for?”
“You just look. If you see a sick child sleeping, and everything is normal, then I was wrong and that’s that. But if there’s anything odd, you’ll know at once. Want to try it?”
Deirdre thought of Mr. Blick, whose flat, soft accented voice gave no clues to what he thought. He seemed sort of odd. The whole situation seemed so unreal, right down to that pile of money she’d stashed in her drawer, tucked inside a sock. She went often to touch those bills, just to see if they’d disappeared—meanwhile both she and her mother expected him to discover how much he’d overpaid and demand the money back. So they didn’t dare spend it.
“I’ll try it tomorrow.”
Her mother nodded, looked at the time, and let herself out. Deirdre locked the deadbolt.
Next day, at least it wasn’t raining out, but the wind off the lake was cold. Deirdre hunched over her books and leaned into the wind as she emerged from the access way in the middle of Building B and crossed diagonally behind the B garages to Building C. She had the bedroom key in her jacket pocket, but she still wasn’t sure she’d really use it. This had to be the weirdest babysitting job ever!
“At least I get all my homework done—and get paid for it,” she muttered to herself just before she reached the outer door.
The door was hard to open because of the wind, but once she was inside, she stopped shivering. Little sounds from the apartments on either side: in one a baby crying, in the other, a sports program on someone’s radio. Up the stairs. No sounds from 10, across from Mr. Blick—and the usual noise of the TV from 11. It was always on the same channel, too, as if Mr. Blick never turned it off.
She knocked. Mr. Blick opened the door. “He will be silent today.” That was all he said. He slung a long black coat over his shoulder, passed by, shut the door and was gone.
Deirdre turned around. This situation was so very, very weird.
She set her books down on the crummy coffee table—just like the crummy table in their own apartment. Probably left behind by previous renters, too. She eyes the weird little button thingie sitting there next to her books, and closed her hand around the key in her pocke
t. Okay, time to snoop.
Well, first weird thing was the coffee table. Every one she’d ever seen, even theirs at home, had magazines on it, and maybe the newspaper, and in most houses at least one disgustingly stinky ashtray full of cigarette butts. Here, there was nothing except that thing with the buttons.
How about the rest of the place? Everything was neat and tidy, as usual, including the clean dishes stacked on the counter next to the sink. She went into the kitchen and looked around. Water splashed a little here and there, and the dishes were wet. Two plates, two cups. Two forks.
She opened one of the cupboards.
Nothing in it.
She opened the other one, and saw some bags. No cans. Cloth bags only. She touched one: rice. Touched another: what felt like some kind of vegetable. Beside that one was a little stone canister, about the size of a half dollar, with no label or anything. She cautiously pulled it out, lifted the lid, sniffed—and a strange sort of herbal smell came out. Her brain felt weird for a moment, and she hastily slapped the lid back down. Yuk! It almost made her dizzy, or like someone put cotton around her thoughts.
The next cupboard held a loaf of bread, butter on a plate. Below that, a wooden bowl with peaches and apples in it.
On the stove sat two cooking pots, very old-fashioned-looking ones. One was dry, one wet, like the dishes.
She opened the fridge, sending a guilty look behind her. She was being incredibly nosy! Pretend this is a spy assignment, she thought. You’re an U.N.C.L.E. agent on an adventure. You have to find out information for a purpose.
The fridge had more bags in it, and another stone jug, this one with some sort of drink in it, otherwise was nearly empty. She shut the fridge. Silence.
Bathroom next. It was completely empty—no toothpaste or brushes, even. She peeked at the shower, and saw that it was completely dry. Then she realized no towels were on the rack.