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“What about signs of Insects? Any Walls? Paperlands?”
“No.”
“Fortresses?” Lightning asked. “Bastions? Châteaus?”
“It’s too big,” I said defensively. “You have to see for yourself. There are plantations, vineyards, and goats on the mountainside.”
“Typical Jant, always thinking about sex,” Mist smiled, looking into the distance. A crosswind tangled her fine hair. The waves were reflected on the ships’ sides as a moving mesh of light.
I returned to the Melowne in time to hear Fulmer complaining. The billows tossed the caravel every direction but forward. She ran headlong down a steep wave and pitched into the next rising roller. Puffs of spray burst off her keel and splattered back. We went up and down, up and down vertically on an irregular seesaw. Wre
Fulmer leaned against the wheel’s kicks. He was having a lot of trouble steering. Melowne jerked sideways every time she struck and wrenched the wheel from his hands. The broad ship had a massive drag; he couldn’t keep her from sliding aslant into the troughs of the swell. “Damn it,” he wheezed. “Mist will just have to slow down for us, yes? Shit, she makes it look effortless. Get the flying sails in. Sea anchor back there and see if I can keep her prow half as straight as Petrel.”
From the poop deck we could see the back of Fulmer’s head. Not a brown hair was out of place. As usual, and against all the odds, he looked pristine, still a court dandy three thousand, eight hundred kilometers from Queen Eleonora’s entourage. Fulmer’s genteel ma
Wre
“In the next couple of hours you’ll find it is huge.”
Up to the deck came barrels of wine, and bar silver was stacked in quadrilaterals. A forest of colorful pe
Mist brought the ships in. She yelled commands to her crew, keeping them moving. I heard her from the Melowne three ship lengths behind; the tension in her voice made me nervous. In contrast, Fulmer gave his orders in a quiet, assured style, politely addressing the hands. They copied every movement of the Petrel’s men, furling the sails in completely synchronized maneuvers. Fulmer’s ship sailed slick as fiddly clockwork in the Stormy Petrel’s wake.
The harbor walls pincered together on our left and right and formed a strait about five hundred meters wide. Dead center of the cha
Fulmer called, “Jant, do you see?”
“Yes, I do!”
“It’s the most glorious thing I’ve ever seen.”
I muttered to Wre
I wore my purple scarf wrapped around my waist as a cummerbund, stripy black and white leggings under cut-off denim shorts. A black kerchief kept back all my locks and albatross feathers. The swell was making Wre
“Fascinating…”
“And lower it on parr-”
“Oh, shut up!”
He stared forward at the bow, which pointed like a pike at the town. “Do you think there are ladies in Capharnaum?” he asked.
I glanced at him. “Well, obviously.”
“No. Whores, I mean.”
“Oh. That kind of lady. They’re human, well, they look it to me,” I regarded my fingernails in a secretarial gesture. “So they’ll have wine, women and song.”
CHAPTER TEN
As we crossed the harbor our ships fell under the lee of the mountain. The lagoon’s surface was mirror-still; it reflected Petrel and Melowne’s images from waterline to masthead. Their sails went slack and they coasted in very slowly indeed, on the last of their momentum. Fulmer ordered the last sails furled and I looked up to see clear blue sky between the masts for the first time in three months.
Trisian men, women and children poured out of the town’s façade and rushed to form a crowd on the sea wall and all along the corniche. The men’s clothes looked quite plain-white or beige linen or silk tunics with colored borders, and loose trousers underneath. Some of the girls wore pastel-dyed stoles over their double-layer dresses but none of their garments looked embroidered or rich.
Men pushed out dark wood canoes and jumped in, paddling toward us. The canoes had outriggers; blue and white eyes were painted on their prows. They moved very swiftly and were soon clustered around our hull. The Trisians shouted and pointed, held up all kinds of food and objects. Dozens of hands reached to the portholes, waving spiny fruit, enormous seeds, stoppered jars, dead fish on skewers, silver flasks. Our sailors hung over the railings eagerly offering anything to hand on the deck. They passed or threw down belaying pins, hatchets and belt buckles, the plumb line from the bow.
Fulmer’s composure broke. He yelled, “No trading! Stop it, fools, before you give them your vests and pants! No barter, till Mist gives the word! Hacilith law and punishment applies from now on.”
He glanced at me. “The rash bastards will swap anything for curios. They’d pull the nails from the futtocks and even trade our instruments away if I don’t watch them. We must beware of thieves, yes/no? Even a fishhook from Tris is a novelty that will fetch money in the Fourlands now. Still, at least Capharnai are friendly.”
The Petrel, in front of us, glided through the reflections of Capharnaum’s first houses, came alongside the harbor wall and docked. Our ship’s salt-stained prow stopped just a meter behind the ornate windows of Petrel’s stern. Then two gangways slipped down and simultaneously locked into place. Wre
There were no mooring loops on the wharf so Mist made her crew unload the stern and bow anchors of both ships and place them on the pavement with the ropes drawn taut.
Mist and Fulmer descended the gangways of their respective ships and met on the quayside. They shook hands politely in front of the astonished townspeople. “We did it!” she said.
“I had every confidence in you, Eszai,” said Fulmer. He smoothed a couple of invisible wrinkles out of his suit sleeve with a spotless hand. The breeze opened his jacket and I saw a dagger swinging from his belt.
I descended to dry land at the same time as Lightning disembarked from the Petrel. He carried his strung longbow over his shoulder; arrow nocks protruded from the quiver at his waist. He glanced at the windows of every villa fronting the quay.