The two sailors with the log and sandglass had seen it, too, and paused to watch.
Its submerged body, rolling out of the water now and again, scales glistening, was immense, but it was the vane itself, like a sail twice as tall as the Nemora’s mast, that would glide through Marghe’s dreams for years afterward. It flared between the sky and sea like an enormous stained-glass window, with slender supporting ribs like the great vaulting arches of a cathedral roof. Sunlight streamed through the transparent webbing and was split into soft, shimmering azures and indigos and golds and greens that cycled through the spectrum, over and over, endlessly, like a Gregorian chant.
The wind direction altered slightly, and the ribs splayed open like the fingers of a fan, turning the sail, stretching it tight enough to show for a moment the vascular system, like a filigree of tarnished silver among the amethyst and aquamarine, before it picked up speed and hissed through the water away from them.
The Nemora swung out of the deep channel onto a more westerly heading. The weather changed again, cooling a little, clouding over. By the time the shoreline lay on the horizon, the world had turned gray. Marghe was not looking forward to making landfall; it would be a long, hot walk to Port Central, and she was not sure Danner would welcome her opinion of the Mirror’s actions.
High Beaches was a forbidding place, all bleak, liver-colored cliffs and rocky promontories rearing from a choppy and restless sea. The Nemora weighed anchor, and Marghe and Thenike took the Nid-Nod in to a steeply sloping pebble beach. A woman with the same liver-colored eyes as the cliff rock met them. She was thin, with lank brown hair rising from a high widow’s peak and the kind of sallow complexion that made her look grimy. She introduced herself as Gabbro.
“The viajeras Marghe Amun and Thenike, sa?” Marghe nodded. “I’m to be your guide through the burnstone to the west,” she said, and set off up the beach in a ground-eating stride. “If we hurry, we can make a good start today.”
They did not follow her. “We can use the skiff,” Thenike called. Gabbro turned; reluctantly, Marghe thought. “The wind should be steady enough to take us upstream faster than we could walk. That is, if the spring rains were heavy enough.”
“Sa, sa. The river’s deep enough.”
“The skiff will save time,” Marghe said.
“Sa, sa.” Gabbro headed back down the beach toward the Nid-Nod.
“But we’ll need to eat before we set out.”
“We can eat on the way. The silverfish shoals are due before the end of the moon. I have to be back by then. Come, we’ll need ropes.”
After so long aboard ship, Marghe struggled to keep up on the sliding pebbles, and she was sure she would be sick of hearing sa, sa before dark, but she said nothing. This had been her own idea.
They were four days on the river Glass, four lazy days of trimming the sail, sitting at the tiller, and watching the banks go past. Marghe spent endless hours trying not to think about how she would persuade Danner to honor trata, concentrating instead on the variety of plants and animals they saw: nutches, knobby dark reptilian predators sunning themselves on stones; sleths, which Marghe at first mistook for bunches of reeds until one exploded into motion as a swarm of boatflies hummed past, catching half the cloud in its sticky fronds; pelmats, slow green amphibious things that crawled on the riverbed, and sometimes up onto the hull of the Nid-Nod.
In the evenings, they tied up on the bank and Gabbro caught fish for their supper.
Sometimes Thenike told a story.
Marghe hardly tasted the fish, barely listened to the stories. Her stomach felt full of rocks. The closer they came to Port Central, the more she lost herself in trying to find a solution to her problem: how to make Danner do the right thing. How? Danner would do as she thought best for her personnel. The difficulty lay in persuading the Mirror commander that honoring trata was the best thing, in the long term.
Marghe went over and over in her mind that original report on trata to Danner, searching for flaws. She found none. It was all there: long-term and short-term benefits. What more could she add? She had no idea, but she knew she had to try.
She just had to hope that presenting the arguments in person would carry more force. The queasy weight in her stomach told her otherwise. No. The problem was not in her arguments, her initial reasoning: something was happening that was forcing Danner into this decision. Something of which Marghe knew nothing. What? She could only assume some kind of Company threats. What had Sara Hiam said? That cruiser out there isn’t hanging around for the view. The Kurst ’s a military vessel…
Every time I wake up, I wonder, Is this going to be my last day?
Marghe picked absently at her fish. It was almost cold, but she did not notice.
What had changed to turn that ever-present threat into something more urgent, something that made Danner believe trata should take second place?
The only thing she knew of was the fact that she was no longer protected by the vaccine. But that would not precipitate Company action, not of and by itself. If the vaccine had been proven ineffective, maybe. But her message had been quite specific: she had chosen not to continue. As far as Company was concerned, that decision would only result in unpleasant consequences for her personally. It should not affect Company’s attitude toward Danner or Hiam. In the long term, Company would be philosophical and simply try the vaccine again with someone else. After all, it was not as though the damn thing did not work…
“Amu? Marghe?”
“Um?”
“That fish is beyond eating.”
Marghe looked at it. Thenike was right. She threw it onto the pile of leftovers that they would bury in the morning before they set sail again. Gabbro was toasting some gram roots in the embers. They smelled sweet. All of a sudden, Marghe was restless.
“I’m going to walk for a while,” she said, scrambling to her feet and brushing sand from her legs. She faced west, where the last bloody rags of sunset lay scattered on the tops of the distant hills.
“Do you want company?”
Marghe nodded. They walked in silence, occasionally stopping to skip stones on the river, or to listen to the steady, reassuring flow of the water. It was warm, and insects hummed and buzzed. The evening gradually seeped into Marghe, loosening her shoulders, straightening her back.
“That’s better,” Thenike said.
They walked farther, then Marghe stopped to watch the last of the dark red slide from the sky. Inky clouds swept across the sky, and the air stirred with a warm breeze from the nttls. “I have seen dawn and sunset on moors and windy hills,” she quoted quietly, “coming in solemn beauty like slow old tunes of Spain.” A viajera’s memory was good for remembering poetry.
They walked back hand in hand, and ate hot, charred gram roots with Gabbro.
On the fifth day, at the foot of the Yelland hills, they beached the boat.
“From here, we walk.”
Port Central lay southwest, but they had to detour through the Yelland hills, zigzagging northwest then southeast to avoid burn-stone and the possibility of triggering a burn that might smolder for a generation. It would add two or three days to their journey, Gabbro said.
Marghe walked behind Thenike, trying to imagine how it would be to feel the ground suddenly split between her feet, hot gases exploding, sending them tumbling into rocks; the eerie silence while they lay stunned, then the molten burnstone bubbling up through the turf, forming pools and sinks, setting the grass on fire…