And after that the young brake-boy began telling Emi everything.
In the time of plenty the ancestors had always thought the next generation would see more, live longer, create greater, better, bigger things. Mara had read some of their books in the scholar’s area of the Wal-Mart her people had grown up in. They’d assumed that growth was inevitable, due to them, a destiny granted to them that was obvious.
Even as they pursued things that would end that same prosperity. All civilizations lived among the ruins of the ones that came before. That was the standard reality of human history. The Romans marveled at the pyramids and the great civilization that had constructed them. The peasants of Europe marveled at Roman roads and thought giants had made them.
Mara knew who made the interstates. Although the old giants of transportation built them cheaply from asphalt and didn’t intend their work to last for eternity like the Romans had, so most of the ancient American roads had long since faded away from weather and use.
The Zephyr’s massive wheels were built to trundle over anything, though. The dilapidated roads were eaten up as the trading ship slowly crossed the midwest.
The landship had shaken and shivered as it crossed the miles after the second mast broke, sometimes lurching violently this way and that. And the great masts, shaped like wings to ride the winds even over the treetops, swayed wildly. One of the masts had already shorted out the motors that turned it to grab the wind just right. Now a second one had failed.
Mara had watched as mast-girls got winched up on bosun’s chairs to start work on trying to rerig the lower the mast for repairs. All the Zephyr’s masts were stepped—so that they could be lowered to pass under bridges, though Mayor-Captain Sun Shah preferred to sail around the old, rotting structures wherever she could.
“Nothing lasts forever,” Evgeny had said to her.
“But this ship is freedom,” Mara said. They moved with the winds and freeways, trading between the plaza towns and city remnants. “What happens when we stop?”
“Come with me to the quarter-meeting,” Evgeny grunted. “Share your ideas.”
“How do you know I have an idea?”
Evgeny had smiled, and turned to walk down the companionway into the heart of the ship, where the section chiefs all met around the Mayor-Captain’s great table for an update on the situation.
There was nothing good to report. They didn’t have the resources to fix the third mast, and of the two remaining masts, one had serious cracks beginning to appear. Three of the mast sails were carbon fiber, and one aluminum. They couldn’t patch the one that just shattered. The shredded pieces couldn’t be knitted back together because the ancient piece of technology had been cast as one unit. And no one had the tools anymore to build a replacement, wing-shaped mast.
“We can weld the aluminum,” Evgeny reported. “But it’ll require us to use most of the battery reserves for the work, and we’ll use up almost all of our wire.”
If they did that, the next big break on the ship wouldn’t be fixable until they found a town with the resources to help them. And they would gouge for the price.
“We need to build a new sail,” Mara spoke up. “Or this is just delaying the inevitable.”
At that, the Mayor-Captain—her thin, mohawked hair gleaming in the oil-lamp light—leaned forward and looked at Mara with a squint. Mara swallowed. Here she was in the captain’s quarters, lamps swinging and spilling faint trickles of smoke, with all of the ship’s chiefs staring at her.
Well, she hadn’t run away to be a mouse, had she?
She was an adventurer, now. A traveler. One of the crew of the Zephyr. There was nothing Mara wouldn’t do for the ship that had saved her from being trapped behind the barricades of her old home.
“It’s about the honey,” Mara said.
Emi frowned and leaned back to look at Mara. “Honey?”
If Mara could have cut Gillem’s tongue out she would have. Or at least, that’s how she felt. That was just anger, and even though she imagined it she knew it was just the frustration in her.
She bit her lip and tried to match Emi’s stare.
But Emi wasn’t going anywhere, and Mara had to think. The woman already knew about the Zephyr. It was coming. And there was some debt here. Particularly if Emi was just the leader of a friendly village, another group of people just trying to survive out here.
“The Zephyr delivers mail, and news. It knits the world together. It helps them trade.” Mara described the great ship in glowing terms, emphasizing what it could do to help them. Also, she subtly mentioned how well defended it was. The gun mounts, the spearmen, the grenade throwers.
“But what about the honey?” Emi asked.
“Sweeteners are some of the most demanded trades when we sail into town,” Mara said. And the prices at the Legacy Mall had been amazing, far below the usual trades. There’d been beautiful paper there as well, which she’d purchased for sketching out machines on.
What the honey had been stored in had caught her attention. Brand new, shiny, aluminum cans. The Mayor-Captain was old. There was gray in that strip of hair that ran down her dark-skinned scalp. Some said she was born to a collapse mother, who’d told her what the dark times had been like, and that’s why Sun Shah would never stop the ship. Not until the day it died. She was always running from the memories of the world that was.
But after Mara had talked about honey, Mayor-Captain Sun Shah had given Mara a sail cart and told her to ride ahead to find who had made those cans.
And she had promised to do something the Zephyr almost never did: turn around and follow an unfamiliar road.
Emi took them into one of the larger yurts and gave them some kind of beef stew from a pot simmering away by a fire in the heart of the round, tent-like building. The walls were made out of a thick wool, but panels had been opened to allow a steady breeze to waft through. It carried the smell of charred wood and wetness.
Gillem all but drank the stew from his bowl, and Emi smiled slightly to see it.
“Growing boys,” she said to Mara. “Where do they put it all?”
There were fur-lined blankets for them to sleep in, and Emi made sure Gillem was tucked away. Mara waited, and watched the open panels move this way and that in the wind.
She felt very alone in the dark, far from the familiar creak of the Zephyr.
“I see you watching me,” Emi said softly in the dark. She sat by the embers of the cook fire. “You can leave, if you want. Go to your ship. I won’t stop you.”
“Some of your people looked angry.”
“Can you blame them? We’re still not sure how badly your fire set us back. All of our hard work, our planning for the winter… it might be all for naught.”
Mara looked down and bit her lip, a prickle of shame and fear passing through her.
“I didn’t mean to…” she trailed off.
“You have a quick mind,” Emi said. “You were in chains and scared. I should have paid closer attention, but my mind was elsewhere.”
“On what?” Mara asked.
But while Emi had thus far been quite open with Mara, the woman kept her troubled thoughts to herself, instead watching the coals. She poured water over the last of them and listened to the hiss as the mild red light ebbed away.
“Kites,” Gillem said.