“I can help,” Shale said. “I often foraged for the Witness at home. There’s bladderwrack on the beach, and I saw skullcap and crank-weed on our way up from the shore, if you use those.”
Glint nodded. “Elder leaves and yarrow and meadowsweet too, if you can find them.”
“Rations are short here,” Pond said, eyeing Foam and Shale. “As I am sure you noticed at breakfast. In Delta we go to the market to find our food. Could you teach us to live better off what Thumbtip offers?”
Foam grinned. “Why, Shale prefers her food with the dirt still on it!”
Reed stirred. “I too need a boat. I should carry the story of Delta’s fall out of the other islands. With the Singer’s help I may even send back some volunteers to swell your navy.”
Seven nodded. “Good. We will need all the hands we can get.”
Later that morning Shale gathered her detail of Deltans around an old stump and pointed to where a ring of mushrooms peeked through the grass. “These you can eat. See how the caps are small and round, not flat and floppy?” She picked a couple and gave them to her audience. The Deltans studied them suspiciously, wiping their hands after the sample had gone by, and Shale sighed inwardly. She shouldn’t have shown them the bad ones first.
One of the mushrooms reached Pond. “Thank you,” she said, popping it into her mouth. “Mm. These are better fresh.”
Shale smiled gratefully. “I always thought so.”
Rose edged forward. “What about this kind?”
Shale examined the high, peaked hood and wrinkled skin. “You can eat these, if you don’t have anything to do for the next day.” She grinned up at Rose. “Downing one of these is like swallowing Mist.” Shale looked over her charges. “If you don’t even recognize dreamers, what do they teach young women in Delta?”
Rose colored delicately. “Deportment, arithmetic, account-keeping, cooking, medicine. Everything that must be done on land with something other than strong arms and a weak head.”
Women laughed.
“We do not go to the mainland picking mushrooms,” Pond added dryly. “Most of us cannot even swim.”
“You don’t swim!”
Pond shrugged, embarrassed. “In Delta it is not good form for young women to get wet.”
Shale’s shark-tooth danced as she shook her head in amazement. “Is anything useful good form?”
Pond laughed. “Probably not. That is what makes it good form!”
“In the capital it is more useful to figure accounts than to recognize slugs,” Rose said somewhat testily. Her eyes flitted up to give Shale one sly smile. “Although, if you could show me an edible slug, I would be much in your debt.”
Shale sighed. She had never imagined she would be grateful for the afternoons she had wasted minding the children of Clouds End.
The next day was more of the same. While Foam went out fishing, Shale’s crew left the wooded part of Thumbtip to scour the beach. “Now, the thing with clams is to walk along the shore until one squirts, and then dig,” Shale explained. “There are three kinds you can eat. The most—” A jet of water clipped her on the ankle and she dropped, burrowing furiously and spraying sand onto Rose’s legs. “Aha!” she cried, raising a shell triumphantly skyward. “See this red mark, like a ribbon tied around the back of the shell? These are good in spring, but by summer they become poisonous. If you’re not sure, avoid them.”
Rose squeaked as water spurted across her foot, then dropped and began to dig. She got her clam, but broke a nail doing it. “Hard luck,” Shale drawled. “That’s the wilderness for you.”
Their second dinner was a good deal more filling than their first breakfast had been. After it was over, Seven announced that he, Brine, and Foam would captain the boats in the raid on Delta, each with three other crew.
“Brine!” Shale said.
“Shush!” Foam muttered, wincing. “If you must be rude, can you do it quietly?”
Shale didn’t shush. “Seven’s the leader, and you and I have sailed all our lives. But why Brine of all people?”
The plump Deltan glanced at her over the campfire. “Surprised?”
Shale grimaced at Rose. “Isn’t sailing a bit too much like work for you?”
Brine’s sister smiled without meeting Shale’s eyes. “On the contrary. Boats are a way to avoid getting wet.”
“Brine and Rose are racers,” Pond explained. “You have to do something when your family is rich. Seven chose to be a warrior. Brine and Rose have been winning regattas for years.” She smiled sweetly at Shale. “You see, there are some things we learn, even in the city.”
Shale grinned and spat. “Suck an eel,” she said.
Those chosen to sail to Delta gathered near Seven’s tent at sunset. Here they listened to Brine detail every shoal and rock in Delta’s lagoon. “Study the chart. Especially you, Foam. Remember, you will have to know this in the dark.”
Foam stirred. “We should agree not to run for the same channel if things go badly. That way if the woodlanders start throwing fire we won’t make one easy target.”
“Also, about the fire,” said a Deltan named Keel. “It burns hot and fast. Don’t waste time trying to put it out! If you get hit, jump ship and make for shore.”
“We will make our raid on the next cloudy night,” Seven said. “If no clouds come soon, we will sail anyway, with the Gull Warrior’s grace.”
Foam winced, but Shale beckoned to him with an evil gleam in her eye.
Reed raised one eyebrow. “You want me to sing Seven as a Hero of Legend?”
“Like he just stepped out of the Mist,” Shale said solemnly.
“It would help the rebellion!” Foam cried. “Everyone loves a hero, someone to look up to, to admire. People will rally the faster if great songs are sung of our leader.”
Shale leaned forward. “A young man dedicates himself to his craft. He has an almost holy mission.”
Foam’s hands sketched greatness. “He seeks the revelation that comes from perfect self-knowledge! Strong, fast, graceful as a gull in flight! . . . Heroes of Legend are made not by their deeds, but by their singers,” he prompted. “You know that.”
“And he is amazing,” Shale said. “You’ve seen him. You know.”
“Oh, yes. Seven is an extraordinary man. I think he will seem less comic to you when you realize how hard he strives to achieve his ideals, and how close he comes.” Reed’s face softened into a smile. “But he does go on about the Gull Warrior, I admit. And if he gets more praise than he bargained for, it will not be more than he deserves.”
“You’ll do it, then?”
Reed nodded and went to finish packing.
Content, Foam looked up at the stars above the campfire, white-blue sequins in rich black velvet. “There’s the Ship,” he said. “The war hasn’t scuttled her yet! Strange to come so far, and still see her up there.”
Shale looked up. “I wonder who else is looking up at the Ship tonight?”
“Rope will blow like a walrus when he finds out it was fellow islanders that scuttled his precious Salamander.”
Shale didn’t laugh.
Foam reached out to give her hand a squeeze. “If they fared badly, you would know.”
She was so tremendously alive, sitting there, just next to him, just touching. Her hand in his was small and hard.
Above their heads the stars were scattered with vast prodigality. “The world is so big,” Foam said. The great sea murmured beyond the pines. And arching overhead, a second sea, midnight black, still greater than the first. We too, Foam thought, are points of light, and our campfires are stars, and something up there sees us, looking down, and wonders, and feels itself part of a great mystery.
Some time later they bedded down for the night. Shale was instantly asleep, but Foam lay staring up at the stars, greeting them like old friends: Tool’s Box and the Ship, Kettle’s Hook and a score of others. Each was motionless for as long as he stared at it—and then, when he glimpsed back later,
each would have sailed on through its night journey. Emptying his mind, he fought sleep, staring up until at last he thought he had slowed himself to the pace of the wheeling world; thought he saw the majestic stars in the moments of their moving.
His eyes widened in triumph; focused against his will; he started; the sensation was gone, slipping away like water between his fingers. Perhaps he had never seen the stars move, perhaps it had been only the island shifting, turning slowly like a boat upon her anchors, rocked to sleep by unseen waves.
Rocked to sleep by unseen waves.
CHAPTER 12
THE RAID ON DELTA
AS REED sailed his dinghy eastward, taking Seven’s story to Thistle and beyond, summer came maddeningly upon the islands. Three long days Seven’s troops sweated in the hot sun, and three cloudless nights the moon waxed in a clear sky. Foam and Shale fished in the mornings, and foraged in the afternoons. They even pitched in to help the Deltans finish their barracks; apparently they didn’t have building parties on Delta. “This is wonderful!” Foam gasped, fitting a foundation stone into place. “Apart from Brace, these people make me look halfway toolwise.”
“Oh, you’ve always known how to do everything,” Shale said briskly, running Brace’s plane over what would become a rafter. “You were just lazy.”
“So were you! How many times did you wriggle out of minding the kids!”
“True. But I learned early to make others mark what I did well. You made them mark what you didn’t do at all.”
“Mm. More fool I.”
The barracks were finished in three days. At last they had a roof above their heads in case it rained. Now everyone prayed for rain.
At first Foam and Shale felt daunted by the Deltans, who seemed rather aloof, but Foam made friends quickly, and in a camp full of hungry city-dwellers, Shale’s foraging skills made her instantly popular. She also struck up a friendship with Seven’s fiancée. There was a line of steel in Pond that surprised Shale; she respected the way the Deltan could stay quiet and unruffled and yet mistress of a moment. For her part, Pond admired Shale’s boldness. Pond also wanted to become one of Delta’s Witnesses; she was impressed to learn that Shale was a Witness’s daughter.
Along with Keel, the one Deltan fisherman in their camp, Foam and Shale each took a boat out in the early morning and again at nightfall to fish. The morale of Seven’s troops was markedly the better for it.
Soon Foam and Shale were important people in the rebel camp, and their opinions were sought on many questions. “And why?” Foam said to Shale as they were going to bed one night. “Because we’re backward barbarians, that’s why.”
“Lucky us.”
When a fourth day dawned without cloud, Seven decided they could wait no longer. Their three swift four-man sloops sailed from the harbor at twilight, hoping to reach Spearpoint before the moon rose. Catching the landward breeze, they spread white wings and banked, graceful as gulls, heading for Delta.
Sunset drained like blood from the sky and dusk fell over the ocean. At the tiller of the Arrow, Brine glanced nervously from his sails to the horizon to the big jars of oil between his passengers’ knees. “Be careful with your flints!”
On the thwarts Nest and Perch, old racing companions, laughed softly; but Rose’s young face was drawn, and she did not smile.
Seven laid his sword in the bottom of the Dolphin. Belted at his side, it would get caught under the thwarts; sheathed on his back, it would snag when he tried to duck under the boom, an embarrassing lesson he had learned years before. “We are making good time.”
“I have never raced the moon before,” Shoal remarked, letting out his sheet a fraction. “She has the advantage of knowing the course.”
“True enough,” Seven replied, “but she does not know she is in a race.”
Shoal shrugged. “Let us hope Hazel Twist, too, is feeling complacent.”
“Pfaah!” Keel spat over the thwarts, looking at the oil pot between his knees with disgust. “This stuff stinks. We’ll be dead from the smell before we get to Delta.”
“Could be worse. We could have Sere on our tails,” Foam remarked.
“Mm?”
“We were caught out in the Mist, see, up beyond Clouds End, and . . .” He paused to look at Keel and Bramble. “Nah. You wouldn’t believe it.”
“Even I don’t believe that story,” Shale said. “And I was there.”
“Will they remember about the Middle Beach shoal?”
Rose’s fine features were tense and there was a knot in her belly like at the start of a race, only far worse. “We will be lost if they forget about Middle Beach. If they ground, the noise will wake—”
“Tighten that sheet,” Brine whispered. “We are too far ahead of the others. I hope the moon is kind enough to wait for them.” His plump white hand rested on the tiller, light as a puff of Cottonwood down. “They will remember.”
Waves hissed and curled beneath his bow. For the sake of quieting his wash, Brine would have to slow down when he got to the lagoon, though every nerve would be screaming for speed.
They ran on into a lengthening darkness. Brine could no longer make out the hump of Spearpoint. But he had sailed these waters a hundred nights before. If he held the prow still, aiming for the Ship’s stern lantern, the dark world would slide by him on every side until Delta’s lagoon rushed around their flanks.
“And what about the Dagger? Will they remember the Dagger? And the Saw. Remember when we hit the Saw?”
“Rose!”
Waves slapped against the hull like children’s hands. She wasn’t looking at him. “What if they forget?” she whispered.
* * *
“The Mist churns into sea, the sea hardens into stone, then islands, then land. The land leaps into mountains and the mountains fade into clouds and Mist; for change is the way of the world.
“This is a story of the Mist-time, where all things have their truest shape and nothing is what it seems. It is a story of Clouds End, for I had it from my uncle, who had it from his father, who had it from one of the first settlers, who had it from the Singer one autumn night when the Mist rolled over Crabspit Bay.
“This story is a Round Turn and Two Half-Hitches, which is a good story for tying up your boat, or maybe fastening your dinner to your dreams.”
“Scared?” Seven said. “Of course. But fear tells me that I am still alive. You will learn more about yourself tonight, I promise you, than you would in years on Delta. Everything has its own reward, even danger. Remember the story of Stonefinger’s Thumbtip!”
“The stranger smiles, all friendly, and stamps her feet. She’s got no braid, and her straight black hair hangs around her bony face, fluttering like rags of shadow in the breeze. Her eyes are deep as the night sky, and the hand she holds out to Clam is clear and cold as starshine.
“ ‘You got some sort of lie coming to pass the night away?’
“And the stranger looks at Clam, very serious, and says, ‘There’s no lie so big as the truth.’ Then she looks back into the fire, and she whispers, ‘There’s no lie half so big as the truth.’ Finally she mutters, ‘Neighbor, there’s no lie that can even see over the truth’s kneecaps: that’s how big it is.’ And all this time there’s a cloud of Mist bumbling around Clam’s house like a big wad of cotton from a cottonwood tree, and the boards are warping, and the stove’s turned yellow, and there are fish swimming in the chimney. The unwelcome visitor leans forward and she pins Clam against the back wall just with her eyeballs and says, ‘I’ll tell you a true story, neighbor, ’cause I can’t tell any other kind. It was like this—’ ”
“But the Gull Warrior was as agile as Stonefinger was strong,” Seven was saying. “He slid below the hollow rock and held his breath until his lungs were bursting, swimming through lightless caverns that only the sea had seen before.”
“If they go right of the Foot, they must keep close to the Spearpoint bank, or they will ground on the shallows. And the current, don’t forget
the current. You can still feel the Vein there . . .”
“Ever-crafty, always watching, the Warrior is never twice the same. He feels each breath of wind, each tremor in the earth, each ripple in the sea. He knows that in change lies his strength, and that doom lies in becoming a man of stone.”
“Spit.” Shale swore suddenly in the gloom.
“Something wrong?”
“There was a better way to do this. We should have swung wide around the outside edges of Delta’s islands, then crept into the lagoon from the bottom, using the Vein to push us. That way we could have kept the sails furled until after the rafts were lit.”
“Right you are,” Foam murmured. “But we didn’t. We had better take down the jibs before we enter the lagoon. We’ll lose speed, but we can’t risk them luffing.”
“If we abandon ship, that means swimming. I say we doff boots now on the chance we have to dive.”
“Good idea. Noses upwind, crew, and boots off.”
“Dagger, Saw, Middle Beach . . .”
“Shut her up, Brine!”
“Spearpoint!” Shoal hissed.
“And there’s the moon. She’s going to make a race of it. Hear that? Brine is taking in his jib. Wait just long enough to catch up with him, and then do the same. Whisper time, my friends.”
The moon was one third clear of the horizon when the Arrow ghosted through the wide strait between Spearpoint and the Sock. She was running slower without her jib, and slower still as Brine tightened his sheet to keep her quiet. He gave the Saw a wide berth and risked a quick glance behind. Seven’s boat was bending nicely into line; Foam was hidden in the dark. So far, so good. Rose leaned back from the middle thwart, fingers like antennae on the sheet.
The Dolphin came even with the cluster of lights that marked Red Alley on the Sock. Seven edged to port, giving the Dagger extra room, to kill any chance of Foam running aground. The moon was mostly hidden behind Spearpoint now; all light came from torches and stars. A thousand pairs of eyes were watching them: hungry red stares from Delta, dispassionate white-blue scrutiny from the sky.