“Your new home.” This was followed with another burst of his alien words.
Lies. All was lies. He had lied to Papa; he lied to me. Endurance had tried to warn me, but I’d followed my father’s words in coming with this man.
Had Papa lied to me as well?
I resolved I would go home and ask him. It only waited for my moment. I gathered myself on one of the beds and watched the maggot man carefully.
Soon enough he tired of watching me in return, and set to his little table. He brought papers from a box and made more of his scratches. Once in a while he glanced at me, but his heart was in his reckoning, not in being my guardian.
The floor groaned and swayed like a tree in a storm, though the window’s light was bright with a clear sky. The yip-yip of the sailors seemed unexcited. The boat shifted, I realized, like Endurance settling in for the night. Below the floor, something huge chuffed and squirmed. Perhaps they had a giant ox to tow them through the sea?
It did not matter to me. I was leaving soon. Though I could no more stop my mind wondering than I could stop my lungs breathing, I did not care.
This game was over.
I waited until the time between each of my captor’s glances at me was more breaths than I could count. It was easy enough to occupy myself studying the latch on the door to this little house. A great shiny lever was placed below a handle which was obviously meant to be grabbed. When we entered, the maggot man had used it to close the door.
Though I had seen few doors in my life, animal pens had gates. This was no different. I had been wrong about the lack of a cage, I realized. This cage was bigger, the bars less visible.
At his next glance and return of attention to his papers, I was ready. I leapt from the bed, grabbed the handle, and threw open the door. Head tucked down, I sprinted past the knees and thighs of the sailors toward the rail. I was faster than any of them suspected. The floor of the boat was just as crowded as before, with more ropes coiled as great cloth sheets were raised snapping into the wind.
Men shouted, but it was less than a dozen steps to the edge. No one had been waiting for me. No one had been watching for me.
How far could we be from the shore?
But when I vaulted the fence and dove for the sea, I saw there was no land nearby. Water was water. I could swim here as well as in a ditch at home. Unfortunately, this ditch had grown to the width of the world, too far to reach the other side.
Then I was in the sea. The water was colder than I had thought, and stung my mouth terribly. This was the taste of the sweat of the earth. Everything beneath was dark and gray. I could see nothing.
I found the surface easily enough and began to swim away from the boat.
Behind me they shouted. I rolled to my back and looked as I continued to swim. Angry men lined the side rail, pointing and yelling. I smiled at their discomfort even as one raised a great spear.
With a flash, a silver arrow sped toward me. I started to scream as it passed above my head. I turned again, almost slipping beneath the water.
For a long moment I could see the end of everything. I don’t imagine death meant anything sensible to me at that age, but I knew people did die, and once dead they did not return.
A triple arch of jagged teeth yawned above my head. This monstrous thing was the very mouth of hunger loosed in the sea. I could see the pale curves of its maw behind its teeth, narrowing to a dark throat that could take me down whole. A chilled stench of blood and filth shivered my spine.
That dart flew into those pale geometries and embedded itself in the roof of the monster’s mouth. A blue spark exploded in that darkness bright enough to sting my eyes. I heard a shriek like a woman in pain.
With an enormous splash, the mouth closed. It sank beneath the water, dragging with it a rough, gray head larger than Endurance. For a long, slow moment, somewhere between one of my heartbeats and the next, a black eye stared at me. It was ringed with flesh as pale as the maggot man’s skin, and had the filmy hue of the dead. Though this glaring orb lacked the wisdom of Endurance’s brown eyes, or even the simple flickering life present in the eye of the smallest birds, still I felt the sea-beast place my name among the secret hatreds graven into its frozen heart.
I kicked in place a moment, my heart chilled as cold as the surrounding water. The monster had nearly taken me. Worse, there was no land to reach, no matter how far I swam. The boat creaked and groaned behind me, men calling out as it turned to fetch me from the waves.
Water at home had held only snakes, frogs, and turtles with knife-sharp beaks. The sea held every kind of throat ready to swallow me whole. When they threw the ropes down to me, I grasped readily enough at the rescue.
The tears I cried for my home were mixed in with salt spray when they hauled me aboard. Once more I went willingly into the house of my captivity. If I did so a third time, I knew I would be lost to myself forever.
Federo handed me back the slate. “Write the letters once more, girl,” he said. In Petraean.
Despite my resolve, his language was sinking into me like dye in cloth. Many of the deckhands spoke it, as did all the officers. Federo used the tongue almost exclusively with me. He gave me no name at all except “girl” which would serve to call half the world.
“I have written them a hundred times,” I said. “Snake,” I muttered in my own tongue.
He slapped me hard across the top of the head. The blow stung, but little more. I did not cry out. I never cried out, not where Federo or any of the sailors could hear me, which was everywhere on this ship.
“Then you will write them a hundred more.” He leaned close. “Without letters, you are nothing in the world where you will be moving. People’s lives and deaths are written in polite notes that must be passed among the powerful like dance cards.”
These words. I had no writing to master at home with my father. I had never even heard of letters. You talked, people listened, or they did not.
Letters were a way of talking so anyone could hear you at any time. Like standing on the corner repeating yourself forever, but without the endless effort. Their shapes were strange, though, bearing no resemblance to their sounds-bent trees and stumbling drunkards and the wanderings of chickens. “Whoever made up such a thing?”
He slapped me again. “In my language.”
I clenched my fist around the chalk and tried again with his words. “Who made these things up?”
“I do not know a name, girl. I do not know. Much like fire, the gods gave letters to men.” His smile was crooked. “Some might say they were the same gift.”
We had no gods back home, not really. Just dead people who watched over us, and the tulpas who moved among the dust and clouds and hid their faces in the ripples of the water.
If I had a god, that was Endurance. But he was as real as me, while gods were more of an idea. Like letters, really.
“What if the gods are in the letters?”
Federo opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again without speaking. He sat heavily on his bunk. “Your mind is a jewel, child.” He sighed. “Hoard it well. Others will be jealous of the way your thoughts sparkle. Mark me”-he waggled his finger-“play the dullard a bit and you will live a happier life.”
I refused to be distracted. “And what are gods?”
“Gods are…” He paused again, gathering his thoughts. I already knew that Federo chose his words for me with care. I resolved to learn what lay in the dark spaces between the light of speech. “Gods are real. More real in some places than others. In Copper Downs we… Ours were put aside for us a very long time ago.”
“They are dead?”
“No. But neither do they live.”
“Like a tree,” I said. “Cut to make this ship. It moves as if it were alive. It is not dead on the ground.”