“You stay there,” he said. “No running. I must do things, then sleep.”
I howled, screamed, hurled myself against the bars, raged at the top of my lungs. The world did not hear. The maggot man sat at his table with a carefully trimmed candle and for a long time poked a narrow stick into a little packet of papers sewn together within leather sheets. Every now and then he smiled at me, somewhere between indulgence and mirth.
My bell for the day was unsewn. I did not have my silk or my needle. I knew then that I was little more than an animal to him. Caged, kept, to be taken over the mallow-filled waters of the gray sea to whatever dead land the maggot called his home.
I cried until sleep claimed me, though his candle flickered and his stick scratched and scratched against the paper. In my dreams that scratching became the claws of a mangy wolf, pale as death, jaws set to drag me away through a frog-filled ditch the width of the world.
I was awoken by words I did not understand. The maggot man had opened the door of my cage and held a plate with fried dough twists and slices of yellow fruit I did not recognize. He spoke again.
“You utter the tongue of demons,” I told him.
“Very soon I will speak to you only in the language of your new home,” he said in my words, “except at extreme need.” He shook his plate at me, then repeated whatever he had said before.
I did not want to come out within reach of his hard slap, but my stomach had other ideas. The dough smelled good, and the fruit looked sweet enough. I followed the growling of my hunger from the cage.
“Eat,” he told me. “Then we will go find our boat.”
The dough tasted every bit as delicious as it had smelled. Likewise the fruit-sweet and fleshy and sour all in a single mouthful. This was as fine a morning meal as my father had ever made for me.
When I had finished my food, I looked to see that the maggot man had gathered up a fat leather satchel. He held out his hand with the green twist of silk already around his wrist.
I could have fought harder. Perhaps I should have. I do not know what good it might ever have done. I am still fighting even now, so perhaps I only began the resistance slowly and never stopped. That day my curiosity overtook my anger as I willingly bound my hand to his. Decent food and a weariness of struggle were all it had taken to break my young spirit to the maggot man’s desire.
“Come,” he said, “let us see to our boat.”
“I do not have to swim?”
“No, you do not have to swim. We shall sit easily as we pass across the sea.” He added something in his words, which I of course could not then understand.
We set out into the bright morning along a muddy street in a village larger than I had imagined could exist. We passed amid a cacophony of men and horses and dogs and ox-carts as we headed for the water’s edge. I even heard the clop of ox bells, but none were the tone of Endurance’s. No one remained to call me back, while this strange, pale man continued to push me forward on the path he had chosen for me.
I followed him into the future.
My memory is a curious thing. Though I was quite young, I clearly recall these early conversations. They were of necessity in the tongue of my birth, for I spoke no Petraean yet. I even recollect Federo-and how young he was then-looking for words he did not know, such as boat . I did not know what a boat was either, not in those first days. My memory supplies the substance of the conversation rather than the specifics, so as I think back to that time, it seems to come back to me in the language of my enslavement rather than the language of my cradle.
Likewise with the memory of my first ship. I know from recalling those days that she was named Fortune’s Flight, for those are among the first words of Petraean that I learned. Years since, I have looked in the ship books at Copper Downs, and so I know that Fortune’s Flight was an iron-hulled steam barquentine. She was built on the shores of the Sunward Sea, where the princes of the deep water have foundries to make such things. This knowledge fuses into my memory so I can recall the arrangement of her masts and sails and smokestack as she rode at anchor offshore, even though at the time they must have seemed to me nothing more than strange trees, while the mysteries of steam would have passed beyond any understanding I could have summoned.
Fortune’s Flight rises white-hulled and gleaming on the waves of recall. A cloud of gulls circles her fantail, crying their soulless lament. Swabbies move about her deck, and whistles blare orders in those codes that all sailors know. She is lean and beautiful, her narrow stack streaming pale smoke. She is a house upon the water, a hunter’s courser set to carry his prey back to the manor hall to be dressed and hung.
I must have then seen her as a white building with a treed roof, for I cannot imagine another view to my youngest eyes. Now that I know her power and her purpose, I cannot look back on the ship of my captivity with less awareness than I possess today.
How we were transported from my first view at the water’s edge to her decks is clouded by forgetfulness. There must have been a boat. Whether it was a local man earning a tael for his ferry work or one of the ship’s company come to fetch her passengers, I cannot say.
She was crowded with drums and bales and capstans-all the furniture of navigation and its intents. We looked back at the shore from the rail. Much water stretched between us and land, a river wider than all the ditches in all my father’s fields laid together. I tried to imagine how many rice paddies could be flooded from this sea that was kept so far from my home.
The look of the water desert was alien, strange as if the sky had been bound directly to earth. Shore was more familiar. The houses and barns seemed so small. They were built with mud walls, just like Papa’s hut, except here in this place people washed their buildings over with pale colors. Some bore painted designs, flowers and wheels of lightning and lizards and things I did not have names for. The land rose behind the town, bearing with it the single road we had walked down the night before.
“You brought me far to test my strength,” I said.
“Hmm.” The maggot man did not lend any words to his answer.
I had walked that distance. I could walk the same distance back. I stared at the land so brown and gray above the ragged colors of the town at the edge of the sea. After a short time, he tugged gently on my shoulder. I turned to the chaos of the ship. The maggot man and I headed for a little house amid the jumble of men and equipment and cargo.
“Here,” he said as we pushed within. “Here we stay.” This was followed by another burst of his Petraean gabble.
My first thought was that the floors were wood, not dirt. The place was handsome enough, lit by a round window filled with glass. There were two beds, each larger than any I had seen in my life until then. A table with a chair before it clipped to the floor. A black mounting gaped in the ceiling, from which a chain depended, holding a small oil lamp with a hooded glass.
No cage waited in the middle of the room.
I had never seen such a wealth of space and privacy. Not to be shared, surely as our room the night before was, but dedicated to one man and his needs. One man and his girl.
The iron rail at the base of the bed was firm and cold to my touch. The paint was textured with generations of repetition, layers over layers of flecking and pitting. “What do we do here?”
He answered in Petraean.
I whirled on him, my voice rising as my dignity slipped away from me. “What do we do here?”
The maggot man smiled, his mouth tight and sad. He answered once more in Petraean. He then added in my words, “We journey across the Storm Sea to Copper Downs.”
I seized on petulance, the last refuge of children. “Don’t want to go to Copper Downs. Want to go home.”
His smile shrank to nothing. “Copper Downs is your home now.”
This I considered. We had not brought my silk with my thousand bells. “Papa will be there? And Endurance?”