When Lao Jia called me down to help with the dinner, I begged his forgiveness. “This is my home,” I told him. “I have not seen it since I was very small. I must watch the shore.” My Seliu had improved under Srini’s tutelage.
“You were to make potato leek soup for the captain’s table tonight,” he grumbled.
“Just go easy on the salt, and none of those red peppers. They will like it well enough.”
He stumped away again with a shake of his head. The black eyes of the dragons winked at me from his wooden leg.
I stared at the shore, as if somehow I thought I might glimpse Endurance through some gap in the trees I could not yet make out. This has ever been a weakness of mine, looking ahead to what I could not see, but at that time, it still smacked of honest ignorance and rising hope. Somewhere there was the house where I was born. If I looked hard enough, I would recognize something-even just the shape of the crown of a tree. I wanted a sign that my home would welcome me back.
Unfortunately for me, darkness fell before the shore was anything more than a thickening line on the horizon. The smells from the galley were good enough that I would not be shamed. I let the rising breeze pluck at me and wondered how much time the walk from Little Bhopura to my papa’s farm would take. It had been a long road in my memory, but Federo had put the distance at a pair of leagues.
I would walk across the water if I must, to get to shore.
“In the morning, you will see the forests along the beach,” Srini said behind me. “This far to the east, they are mostly wild palms and some pine-nut trees. The soil on the ridges behind the shore is too salty and stony to be of use, so no one lives here but bandits.”
Being of a practical mind, I wondered who those bandits preyed upon. “Will Little Bhopura be the first port we pass?”
“Yes. I spoke to the navigator. He will plot a course that takes us closer in than we might normally go. It is safe enough from reefs, but the wind is chancier.”
“What will Captain Shields say?” I’d been feeding the man at least once a day in the almost-month I’d been aboard Southern Escape, and I still had not met him.
“With luck, he will be saying nothing. If he asks, the navigator will tell him that we are checking the charts. Sometimes that is even being true.”
“Who am I to the navigator?” Another man whose name I did not know.
Srini smiled. “The woman who makes honeyed smelt. Besides, the navigator is being my lover.”
“Ah.” Mistress Cherlise had discussed that, in more detail than I’d really cared to hear: how two men might be lovers together. Love among women I thought I could understand, but men were such careless brutes that I did not then see how two of them could love without someone to soften the blows and dampen the curses. This opinion was a legacy of the Factor’s house, I now know, but many of those habits of thought were years in the erasing.
“Thank him for me,” I told him softly.
“Never fear.” He sighed, then switched to Seliu. “I do not yet know how to land you without causing far too much comment.”
“The shore will not be far.” I felt dreamy, drawn so close to home, as if Endurance were before me, flicking his ears. “I shall stride across the waves like a goddess returning.”
“I shall find a need for something in the market there,” Srini muttered. “And be taking you ashore to help me select it.”
“Will the captain not become angry when I leave your company?”
“He will be cursing you for a ship-jumper, once he knows that the new cook’s mate is gone.”
“But I never took his tael.”
Srini smiled in the gleaming starlit dark. “Of course not. I was never asking you to sign the ship’s book, was I?”
I hugged him. He hugged me back. “Go forth and be a man’s daughter a little longer, if the turning of your Wheel is allowing it.”
“Yes.” I went below to pack my very meager belongings and explain myself to Lao Jia.
Two days later, the ship put in close to shore. The navigator was violently ill belowdecks. It had been widely put about that the purser needed a certain fresh fruit from his native land to effect the most immediate cure.
I watched the waters curl and spit along the hull of Southern Escape. This part of the Selistani coast boasted clay hills covered with scrub, lined with palms where they descended to meet the water. The port that held the first real buildings I had ever seen in my life now seemed a run-down collection of garden sheds. No dock stuck out into the water, just logs making steps down to the beach.
Nothing looked familiar to me, though I had seen this place before. I now have two layers of memory, like lacquer on an inlaid table, obscuring the grain of the truth that lies beneath.
Children waved and shouted and pointed at Southern Escape. Her sails were reefed as she glided to a rest. Anchor chains rumbled when the weights were dropped, while the bosun already had men putting a little boat over the side.
I would go ashore as I might well have left this place, rowed by pale men who cursed their oars at every stroke. With my belled silk rolled tight in a sailcloth bag, I dressed in the worn duck trousers and shirt I’d been given. Underneath, I’d wrapped my chest tight, so the emerging bumps of my breasts would not betray me.
Lao Jai touched at my arm as I prepared to descend to the dory bobbing alongside. “A moment,” he said. “I will miss you.” He added something else in Hanchu.
“I will miss you, as well.” My face bent into a smile even I hadn’t expected. “I am going home. Thank you for the lessons in your cookery.”
“May the gods carry you where you wish.” He frowned. “If home is not what you think, please to keep looking.”
I hugged him, then scrambled down the ladder. We rowed ashore, bouncing in a surf I did not recall from my departure so long ago. The children anticipated the boat’s arrival. Screaming, they fought with the sailors to draw the keel up the beach. Srini and I tumbled ashore as the bosun’s mate began arguing with children who did not share a language with him.
Privy to the curses and taunts flying both ways, I parted company with my friend the purser and walked up the few steps from the beach, as if I were going to market for Srini’s fruit.
The town was even less than I recalled, a bedraggled collection of buildings on one side of the muddy track, huts and stalls on the other. I marched into the struggling market as if I knew my way, ignoring the little clicking calls from the stallholders. I understood. I looked the part here, with my skin and patchy hair, but my clothes marked me out as not local.
I will fit in at home, I promised myself. Papa and Endurance will take me in, and it will not matter how I look.
That was a lie, of course, and I knew it even then. But I had to see the truth for myself before I could understand the difference.
Passing through the rotten little bazaar, I remembered this walk. I could find the farm. The Dancing Mistress had trained me very well in retracing my steps. That the gap between memory and re-creation was a decade long should not stop me.
Passing beyond the last few buildings and a rank pen of bleating goats, I quickly climbed the road that sloped up north and west out of the miserable little town toward the dry upland I remembered from years before. A league or two, and I would be home. In my father’s arms again, where I belonged. A few more furlongs, and I could claim my life back for good and all.
The ridgetop was as desolate as memory had made it out to be. I watched for the wayhouse where Federo and I had stopped to eat more than nine years before, but never saw it.
Perhaps it had been a building at the edge of the town, and I had misremembered the distance.
Wooden fences straggled back and forth across the landscape. The plants were a combination of low, scrubby bushes and spiked explosions like balls of thorns. Though I could name a hundred flowering plants and herbs of the Stone Coast, I had no words in Petraean or Seliu for what grew here so close to my home. A few herds of goats as worn and threadbare as their fields eyed me suspiciously when I passed. Otherwise, I could have been on the moon for all that I saw signs of people.