“Aha!” Foam cried. “The fire Sere is bringing to Delta!”
Rope frowned, touching the wheel to keep their sails full. “But does that mean a real fire is burning on the mainland? If so, how could that hurt an island?”
“But it’s the forest people who are carrying the spark. Maybe they mean to burn Delta down,” Shale said.
Rope’s frown deepened. “But why? What could woodlanders want from the sea?”
Jo’s face was grim. “The people of the air are drawn from every place,” she said slowly. “From sea and desert, wood and plain and mountain. All are of the air, and yet colored by their birthplace. In the islands we are shunned: praised to our faces and cursed behind our backs.
“But in the forest, now, there is a different role for some of those the magic touches, neither Witness nor wanderer. They may be Bronze. A Bronze listens not to the world, but to the hearts of men. And the one who is strongest, the Bronze with greatest guile and stealth and ruthlessness, this one becomes Emperor.”
“Marvelous,” Foam muttered. “A people ruled by ruthless haunts.”
“However you may hate us, there is an honesty in the voices of wind and wave that is lacking in the hearts of men. Bronzes live by twisting others. I think you will find a Bronze burning at the heart of Sere’s fire.”
Shale stood scowling with the mainsail sheet still wrapped around her hand. She looked curiously at Jo. “So where did you come from?” she asked. “Which people, I mean.”
Jo stared back at her with a look, part sad, part dreamy, part defiant. It was so exactly one of Brook’s expressions that it took Shale’s breath away. “Me? Why, I am one of you. I too was once of the sea.”
“Funny name for an islander,” Foam said. “What’s a Jo?”
“A Jo isn’t anything,” the haunt said. “The name I bore in the world of men has long since been lost in the Mist.”
“You made up your name?” Rope asked, faintly scandalized.
“I chose not to be named after a kind of crab or a piece of fishing tackle, if that’s what you mean.”
And Shale said, “How old are you?”
“How old . . . ? I am older than . . .” Jo faltered. She seemed suddenly smaller, and weary; her face was smeared with soot, and showed red where the fire had come too close. “I do not know,” she said.
All her mystery had gone. It seemed to the islanders then that they saw her for the first time: not a spell-weaver but only a woman, a woman who once had lived on an island very much like their own. Who perhaps had been tended, and taught to gut fish, and braided knots in a sister’s hair.
Shale nodded, leaning on the forward rail and looking out over the sea. “How long have you been travelling?”
“I do not remember. But it seems like a very long time since I was home.”
Shale nodded again, staring west. “Going to Delta!” she breathed. “I always wanted to go. Of course they tell you that a girl can’t expect to, that even the Trader goes only as far as the fostering islands. Harp or Trickfoot.” She gripped the gunwale and rocked her weight onto her toes. “But I always knew that I was meant to journey. That I had been given the gift to go.”
Foam sighed. “We’re going to Delta as fast as we can,” he said. “I just hope someone has a gift for getting us back.”
CHAPTER 6
THE STORM
ROPE’S CREW drove themselves hard over the following weeks, passing Three Elbows and Stump, Sharp Feather and Driftwood, Beachwood with its white sands, and Telltale, where the people were such terrible liars. By then they were well beyond the fostering islands, into waters never sailed by any man born on Clouds End.
At first the islanders were deeply suspicious of Jo, watching her every move and making doubly sure she never spent time alone with Brook. But as the days passed, drawing them beyond Ringwold and Terrace, Tansy and Bitterwood and the Midline Cluster, where the dolphin trainers lived, their vigilance dwindled. The islanders treated the haunt like a bad wound: first as a threat, then as a nuisance, and finally as a fact of life.
Meanwhile the islands came closer together, the wind blew more fitfully, and the late spring days grew ever hotter. Life on board became more and more cramped. Rope pored over his charts, studying them for insights or correcting their mistakes. Other times he played with Net, the little Mist-thing living in his sleeve like a pet mouse.
Foam tinkered with the bag of oddments he had collected on Shale’s island. He kept his fingers busy to calm his heart, for as the days turned into weeks he began to feel something for Shale he had never felt before. It caught him when she talked of travelling, or pulled their sails taut, or stood on the foredeck at dawn, eyes sparkling, looking forward into the new day. Sometimes after supper they would all sit together on the tiny foredeck to watch the day gutter and go out, and he would be painfully aware of Shale, long and warm and tremendously alive, lying there, just next to him, just touching. His elbow would brush, very lightly, against her leg, moving with the gentle roll of the waves, and he would be whelmed with her nearness.
He wanted what Rope had with Brook.
One morning early in the voyage, something shook Rope as he lay pillowed on the foredeck. Swell must be coming abeam, he thought sleepily.
The shaking grew stronger. Groaning, he opened one glassy eye. A slim pink light was in the eastern sky. Brook’s fingers were in his chest hairs. She tweaked them.
“Hey! Ummggh. ’S not even dawn yet.”
Brook’s fingers tickled their way down his short ribs toward his belly. “The others will be asleep for hours.”
“Good idea.” Rope struggled upright and peered from gummy eyes.
“Salamander is right.” Brook was alert, dressed and smug. “There is something lizardlike about you when you first wake up. A heavy, brainless look that says, ‘I’d kill you. If I could move.’ ”
Rope replied with a ponderous flick of his tongue.
Brook said, “You are beautiful, you know.”
Rope blinked.
Brook grinned, stroking his bearded jaw. “You’ll be a wonderful lover some day.” Then she lunged forward and knocked him over on his back. “You look so helpless!” She planted her fists in his stomach and bounced up and down a few times.
“Groooo!” he moaned. “You’ll squeeze the water out of me.”
“Take care of it, then.” Brook squashed him extra flat, then leapt up to wander the deck. She dawdled at the transom, watching the East blush. The light broadened. Trees became visible atop a nearby island, taking off their blankets of shade. Brook sniffed the pinescented morning air.
Rope peered at her suspiciously. “You look smug.”
“Who, me?”
“Hmm.” The deck creaked beneath his feet as he walked over to the hinged gate on the starboard rail. He slid his feet into the leather shitstraps bolted to the deck and unlatched the gate behind him, thinking for the thousandth time how undignified he looked squatting bum-first over the edge of his ship. Brook had modestly turned away.
The cabin doors creaked. Great, he thought. The crew chooses now of all times to come on deck. Blushing, he hiked up his tunic and hunkered down.
The leather footstraps gave way.
Rope yelled and clutched at the rail, but it was too late. His tunic billowed up around his ears as he tumbled helplessly over the side and crashed into the sea below.
“Somebody cut the straps!” he spluttered, coughing out a mouthful of salt water.
The other islanders were leaning over the rails. “By the Singer’s perky breasts!” Foam said, “Isn’t it a little early for a swim?”
“If this was your idea, Foam you louse, I’ll pack you in a pickle jar and heave you overboard, you leech-infested crab-catcher!”
Brook stood beside Foam, sniggering. Both of them turned to look at Shale, who lay helplessly across the rail, whooping with laughter.
Rope caught his breath. “I should have known.”
For revenge he set Shale the
task of sewing up every little pinhole burn in their sails. He watched with satisfaction as her thimble-finger turned slowly blue with bruises.
Brook spent her days amusing Shale by telling stories and allowing herself to be thrashed at every game they knew and a few she made up. “It’s that or have her murder us all out of sheer boredom,” she said, and Rope had to agree.
Jo, of course, could always take wing and soar over to a nearby island when she needed a change of scene. The islanders admitted they would do they same if they had the chance, but they still resented her for it.
And around the Salamander’s tiny world stretched the sea, its very vastness making their prison more unbearable. In the wide light of day every rock, every island, every cloud and circling bird was made plain to the end of vision. A sail luffing gently as they came around, the wash fanning out behind their stern, an osprey crying overhead—each thing had its form and sound and movement. Clear, sure, particular: this was the islanders’ world, the world of the sea that made them and shaped them and would call them home again.
They sailed while the new moon waxed, aged, and withered. When it came again, it brought a season of killing heat. One day after lunch Brook and Jo went into the stuffy cabin to hide from the sun.
Coming out of the bright spring day, the cabin seemed murky and uncomfortably intimate. Sunlight slid in pale bars through the shuttered doors. Silver-eyed Jo sat on one bunk, thin fingers setting out the cords Rope had given her for knot practice. “Bowline . . .” She made room for Brook.
“Once around and up through the hole . . .” Brook prompted.
“Behind the tree and down the hole again. I remember.” Jo held up her knot. “Will it pass?”
“My standards.”
“And Rope’s?”
Brook laughed. “Has he been drilling you?”
“Mercilessly.”
Brook smiled. She looked with pleasure at Jo, admiring her beauty. The haunt was not graceful, but she was aware of her body, its movements and form.
The haunt made a comic face. “The bowline is the only knot I can remember.”
Brook leaned forward beside Jo, almost touching her. She sorted through the bits of cut line until she found two pieces of the same thickness. “Then I shall teach you another.”
“Ecstasy! What is it, and what is it for?”
“Reef knot. For joining ropes of the same size. Also the knot we use to tie our bootstrings,” Brook added, putting one foot up on the locker to demonstrate. Her tunic slid up her leg, two hands above her knee. She felt Jo watching her.
“I see.”
Brook unlaced her boots and tucked them under her bunk. She smoothed out her tunic and wiggled her toes. “The reef knot is very simple.”
“It should appeal to our sailors.”
“Right over left, then left over right,” Brook said, demonstrating. Jo’s hair hung loose and fine as spider web, drifting around her shoulders. She smelled of cool flowers. “Or the other way around. Why do you say that? Do you think us simple?”
“Not you.”
The light coming through the shutters barred them both in stripes of light and darkness. “Good knot,” Brook said.
“Good teacher.”
Again Jo looked steadily at Brook, and again Brook looked away. She remembered the hollowness she had felt within Jo the day she found her on the beach. Sitting there in the cabin, alone with her, Brook felt Jo’s emptiness like a riptide, dragging her out to sea. Jo was powerful. She had let herself become more than human. She could go anywhere, dare anything, be anyone . . . because she was nothing inside.
Something in Brook longed for that freedom. She could almost touch the sky-wide emptiness. But she was held back, entangled by Rope and Shale, Finch and Shandy, Otter and Stone: her friends and family and life on Clouds End.
Beside her, the haunt’s long white fingers plaited line, weaving a knot between two cords, binding them together. Brook shivered in the stifling heat. She saw herself in Jo’s empty eyes, and she was afraid. “Good. Good reef. Here’s another one you’ll need.” Brook picked out two pieces of line, one thick and the other much thinner. “This is a sheet bend. For joining two strands of different size. Use the stronger piece to make the loop.”
Jo shifted closer. Cloth rustled against cloth as their legs touched. They bent over the knot. Strands of white hair slid over brown.
“There. See?”
Brook felt a pause, as when a boat trembles on the top of a wave, about to sweep down into the dark sea.
Reaching for the knot, Jo touched her hand. A wildness dilated through Brook; weakness and strength, a confusion in her blood. Jo held the touch until Brook was forced to turn her head, to face Jo’s hooking nose, her silver eyes. They were alight, mocking, tender. She was very beautiful.
Jo smiled and dropped her eyes to study her sheet bend. “A thousand thanks! Now I can help out. I hate to be a burden.”
“You are not a burden,” Brook said. “You are the voyage. You are Sere’s prey and a thread in the Singer’s braid. It is we who are merely sailing in your wake.”
Jo fingered her handiwork, two cords locked together, one great and one small. “Either way. The future will take care of itself.”
“The future,” Brook said dryly, “will take care of all of us.”
Two days later they were becalmed. The sea glistened like oiled glass under a hot white sky. Brook stood by the transom, fighting to breathe. The sea, the sky, the remorseless sun—they were so big, so inhuman. The world cared nothing about her.
Planks creaked as Jo came aft. “Thinking, I see. Bad habit. Ruins your skin and makes you bald.”
Brook’s eyebrows rose. “Tell that to Foam. It would comfort him to know why he is losing his hair.”
Shale swam around the bow and waved up at Brook. “Taking a dip to cool off!” she called. And keeping an eye on Jo, no doubt. Brook felt a little shiver of gratitude.
“This heat is unbearable.”
“Melt into it.” Jo stretched languorously. “The secret to weather is not to mind it. The more you mind it, the more it hurts.”
“You aren’t gulping like a fish,” Brook said crossly.
A tired fly circled Jo’s head.
Gulping like a fish, Jo snapped the luckless fly out of midair and swallowed it. She grinned. “Think of it as a new experience. It will broaden you.”
Brook said, “You like to scare people.”
“Haunts aren’t given many other choices,” Jo snapped. She looked away, embarrassed.
“Hey!” Shale yelled. “Hey, you! Foam!”
Foam roused himself from the shady spot beside the cabin. “Me?”
“Yeah, you. Help me back into the boat.”
He squinted out into the glaring sea. Shale’s head and naked brown shoulders showed above the hull. He gulped. “Are you sure you don’t want me to get Brook? Or Jo?”
Shale shook her head impatiently. “They’re playing at Tool and Wit astern. Just glance over. If the haunt hasn’t got her fingers around our girl’s throat, help me up.”
Foam put out his hand. “Rope is eavesdropping from his hammock, pretending to sleep. Up you come, then.” Not for an instant did he let his gaze stray from her eyes.
Shale clambered up to stand nude and dripping on the deck, her straight black hair plastered to her cheeks. “Thanks. Say, remember how Rope looked when I loosened the shitstraps?”
“You have nice eyes,” Foam remarked. “Sort of a pale grey-green. Quite unusual.”
“I can’t stand the idea of putting my tunic back on in this heat.”
“With goldish flecks near the center.” Sea-green eyes alight with life.
“I’ll dry off first.” Shale lay belly down on the foredeck. “Oh, Foam?”
“Yes?”
“You can stop nodding now.”
“Right,” he said briskly. “Just so . . . You know, Shaley-fish, you turned out all right.”
“Oh! Well.” Surprised, Sha
le jiggled her ear to get the water out. She felt pleased, but now, suddenly, rather embarrassed about having come aboard naked. “Don’t call me that.”
Foam grinned hugely. For the first time in many days, all was right with his world.
“Have you ever listened to the sea?” Brook asked. “I mean really listened. Not just to the wavetops, or an inlet, but to the whole thing?”
Around Jo the waves murmured, and high overhead the world-riding wind offered her its cold companionship. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I would drip through the planks and float away.” Jo looked back over the ocean, to the east. “My people know not to listen too closely. Do you know the story of Holdfast?”
Brook shook her head.
“Holdfast was a mighty haunt, very talented. It was said he could follow the conversation of one ripple down the length of a stream. He married a forest woman when he was still young. One summer he determined to understand the speech of the great peak above his home. As he listened to the mountain his skin became as hard as stone. He stayed this way for many days.
“Now it so chanced that a fire—Sere’s fire—began to devour the woods around his cabin. Holdfast suddenly realized that his wife and child must be in great danger. Without thinking he sprang up to save them.” Jo paused, looking out over the lifeless sea.
“And?”
“He shattered into a thousand pieces.”
Brook imagined it: the statue stirring, splintering, spraying into shards of rock.
Jo shrugged. “Haunts never die. But sooner or later we are caught in the web of the world. Overwhelmed.” She glanced at Brook. “What sort of story is that?”
“A sheet bend. A mortal caught up by Heroes, or the world—that’s a Sheet-Bend story. There are many of them.”
“How many have happy endings?”
Brook said, “How will this one end? This sheet bend you have made between us?”
Jo did not answer.
“The ocean broods,” she said, some time later. “The sky, the sun, the haze—none of them are speaking. All are silent. Waiting.” Jo glanced around at the Salamander, tiny in the immensity of the sea. “I hope we are ready for whatever they are waiting for.”