“What is it?” she murmured, straining for a clear sight of it.
“It’s childbane.” He met her gaze directly at last.
She felt the last embers of hope die inside her. “Birth control—?” she asked numbly; not needing to ask, or to have it explained to her.
But he nodded. “I almost lost you this time, Jerusha. You nearly bled to death. I don’t want to take that risk again … I don’t want you to take it.”
“But Miroe—” She tried to sit up, fell back again, as her body pressed the point home. “I’m forty-three. I don’t have much longer—”
“I know.” She saw a muscle stand out as his jaw tightened. “The risk will only grow, for you or for a child. Maybe it’s time we faced the truth, Jerusha: we’re never going to have any children. Not here, not in this lifetime together.”
She stared at him bleakly. “You know I don’t believe in that—in reincarnation, in another chance. This isn’t a dress rehearsal, Miroe, it’s my life, and I don’t want to stop trying!” She broke off, clenching her teeth as something hurt her cruelly inside, through the layers of deadened flesh.
He tensed, and shook his head. “I love you, Jerusha. I love you too much to kill you, or let you kill yourself, over something that’s impossible. If you won’t use the childbane, I won’t sleep with you anymore.”
“You don’t mean that,” she said, her voice thick.
“I do.” He looked away, pushing to his feet. “I can’t take this anymore. I’m sorry.” He crossed the room, and went out the door.
She watched him go, unable to get up, to follow him, to confront him; without even the strength to call after him. She looked over at the bedtable, at the bottle of herbal contraceptive he had left behind. She knocked it off the table with a trembling fist. She fell back again, staring up at the ceiling; felt the numbness at the center of her body spreading, filling the space that held her heart, filling her mind until there was no room left for thought…
“Commander PalaThion! What are you doing here?” Constable Fairhaven straightened away from the grayed wooden railing of the pier, with surprise obvious on her long, weathered face.
“Just doing my job, constable; the same as you.” Jerusha returned her salute. Fairhaven’s salute was sloppy to the point of being almost unrecognizable, like most of the Summers’ salutes were; but she was a calm, shrewd woman, and those were qualities Jerusha had come to realize were far more important than discipline, in a local constabulary where the police and the people they watched over were frequently neighbors and kin. Jerusha leaned against the rail next to Fairhaven, breathing in the heavy, pungent odor of the docks, the smell of wood and pitch, seaweed and fish and , the sea. The maze of floating piers was lined with fishing boats and transport craft |from all along the coast.
“But so soon—?” Fairhaven said. Her frank curiosity clouded over with > concern, at the look Jerusha felt come over her own face.
“I’m fine,” Jerusha said mechanically, looking away, down at the pattern of , ropes and chains, of shifting light and shadow on the water’s surface. She looked up again, at the ships. Miroe had sailed from here yesterday, going back to the plantation, leaving behind the city he hated, and the pain of their shared loss, her pain. Leaving behind the frustration, the recriminations they had shared too, as they had turned anger at the random indifference of an uncaring universe into anger at each other. Avoiding all that: their dead child, their dying dream. Her …
“Forgive me, Jerusha.” Fairhaven put out a hand, touching Jerusha’s arm, a gesture that was somehow both apology and the comfort of one woman reaching out to another. Fairhaven had never addressed her as anything but “Commander” before; the combination took her doubly by surprise. “But I suffered my share of stillborn babes … three I lost, out of seven I bore with my pledged. It was hard, hard. …” Her mouth tightened, although Jerusha knew her children were all grown; the memories of her losses must be old ones now. She looked up again, sighing. “The Lady gives, and She takes away… . We had a saying in the islands, you know, that you should let nine days pass before you took to your work again. Three for the baby’s sake, three for the mother’s sake, three for the Lady’s sake.”
Jerusha smiled, faintly. Her head was still buzzing from the native painkillers she had been chewing the past few days. They had used up their own small stock of offworlder drugs, on her previous miscarriages and other small disasters. “But I don’t worship the Lady. And as for me, I’d rather work than brood. So I’ve taken time enough off.”
Fairhaven shook her head. Her graying, sand-colored braids rolled against her tunic with the motion. “It’s still good advice, you know. To take time to grieve is only right. Otherwise you suffer more, in the long run.”
Jerusha forced herself to control the sudden annoyance that filled her. And she remembered, unexpectedly, the face of one of the men under her old command—her assistant, Gundhalinu, on the day he had received news of his father’s death. She remembered his stubborn Kharemoughi pride; his refusal even to acknowledge his loss, until finally she had ordered him to take the rest of the day off to grieve… . She rubbed her eyes, turning away.
She was saved from having to make a further response by a sound like thunder that echoed through the underworld of the docks. She turned back to Fairhaven, meeting her stare. “A ship’s fallen—” Fairhaven said, as the sound of voices shouting filled the stunned silence that followed the crash. They turned together, not needing words; started to run, as others were running now, toward the site of the accident. As they approached she heard paincries, before she could even make out what had happened through the wall of milling bodies.
She pushed through the crowd until she had a clear view, taking it all in at a glance: the ship that had been winched up for repairs, the chain that had snapped and let it fall sideways onto the dock, the two men pinned beneath it. As many workers as could press their backs against the hull were already straining to lift it; but one of the catamaran’s large floats was wedged beneath the pier, and they could get no leverage.
Jerusha looked from the broken length of chain lying on the dock to the pulley high up beneath the city’s underbelly. She looked down again. One of the workers lay unconscious or dead in a pool of blood; the other one, his legs pinned, was still moaning. She tightened her jaw, trying not to listen to the sound, trying to keep her mind clear for thought.
She pulled loose the coiled length of monofilament line she had carried at her belt, ever since her Police-issue binders ceased to function. She knotted one end of the line through the last solid link of broken chain, while the workers looked on, uncomprehending.
She flung the coil of line upward, feeling something half-healed pull painfully inside her; watched with relief and some surprise as it passed through the pulley overhead on her first try. The rope spiraled down to the dock and lay waiting, but nobody moved forward to pick it up. “Come on!” Jerusha shouted. She picked up the rope’s end. “Wind it up!” They stared at her, muttering and shaking their heads.
“Commander,” Fairhaven murmured. “It won’t hold. They know it will snap, it’s too thin—” She nodded at the broken chain, as thick around as Jerusha’s wrist.
“It’ll hold!” Jerusha called sharply, with the sound of the trapped worker’s moans grating inside her like a broken bone. “It will! Winch it up!”
Two deckhands moved forward, looking at her as if she were insane, but having no other alternative. She watched them fasten the line to the winch and begin to crank it. Their motions slowed abruptly, their muscles strained, as the line suddenly grew taut. They went on turning the winch; the line sang briefly as every last millimeter of play was drawn out of it and it began to take the full weight of the ship.