He turned away. He blinked his eyes a few times to let them adjust and then began to pick his way forward. He heard the mate come to the door of the cabin to stare after him.
‘Puppy will probably complain to his daddy, I don’t doubt,’ Torg called mockingly after him. ‘But I think he’ll find his father expects a man to be tougher than to snivel over a few spots on a blanket.’
Perhaps, Wintrow conceded, that was true. He wouldn’t bother complaining to his father to find out. Pointless to complain about one night’s discomfort. His silence seemed to bother Torg.
‘You think you’ll get me in trouble with your whining, don’t you? Well, you won’t! I know your father better than that.’
Wintrow didn’t even bother to reply to the man’s threatening taunt. At the moment of deciding not to argue further, he had given up all emotional investment in the situation. He had withdrawn his anma into himself as he had been taught to do, divesting it of his anger and offence as he did so. It was not that these emotions were unworthy or inappropriate; it was simply that they were wasted upon the man. He swept his mind clean of reactions to the filthy blanket. By the time he reached the foredeck, he had regained not just calmness, but wholeness.
He leaned against the rail and looked out across the water. There were other ships anchored out in the harbour. Lights shone yellow from these vessels. He examined them. His own ignorance surprised him. The ships were foreign objects to him, the son of many generations of Traders and sailors. Most of them were trading vessels, interspersed with a few fishing or slaughter-ships. The Traders were transom-sterned for the most part, with after-castles that sometimes reached almost to the mainmasts. Two or three masts reached toward the rising moon from each vessel.
Along the shore, the night market was in full blossom of sound and light. Now that the heat of the day was past, open cook-fires flared in the night as the drippings of meat sizzled into them. An errant breeze brought the scent of the spiced meat and even the baking bread in the outdoor ovens. Sound, too, ventured boldly over the water in isolated snippets, a high laugh, a burst of song, a shriek. The moving waters caught the lights of the market and the ships and made of them rippling streamers of reflection. ‘Yet there is a peace to all of it,’ Wintrow said aloud.
‘Because it is all as it should be,’ Vivacia rejoined. Her voice was a woman’s timbre. It had the same velvety darkness as the night, with the same tinge of smoke. Warm pleasure welled up in Wintrow at the sound of it, and pure gladness. It took him a moment to wonder at his reaction.
‘What are you?’ he asked her in quiet awe. ‘When I am away from you, I think I should fear you, or at least suspect you. Yet now I am aboard, and when I hear your voice, it is like… like I imagine being in love would be.’
‘Truly?’ Vivacia demanded, and did not hide the thrill of pleasure in her own voice. ‘Then your feelings are like to my own. I have been awakening for so long… for years, for all the life of your father and his father, ever since your great-grandmother gave herself into my keeping. Then today, when finally I could stir, could open my eyes to the world again, could taste and smell and hear you all with my own senses, then I knew trepidation. Who are you, I wonder, you creatures of flesh and blood and bone, born in your own bodies and doomed to perish when that flesh fails? And when I wonder those things, I fear, for you are so foreign to me, I cannot know what you will do to me. Yet when one of you is near, I feel you are woven of the same strand as I, that we are but extensions of a segmented life, and that together we complete one another. I feel a joy in your presence, because I feel my own life wax greater when we are close to one another.’
Wintrow leaned on the rail, as motionlessly silent as if he were listening to a blessed poet. She was not looking at him; she did not need to look at him to see him. Like him, she gazed out across the harbour to the festive lights of the night market. Even our eyes behold the same sight, he thought, and his smile widened. There had been a few occasions when words had so reached into him and settled their truth in him like roots in rich earth. Some of the very best teachers in the monastery could wake this awe in him, when they spoke in simple words a truth that had swum unvoiced inside him. When her words had faded into the warmth of the summer night, he replied.
‘So may a harp string, struck strongly, awaken its twin, or a pure high note of a voice set crystal to shimmering as you have wakened truth in me.’ He laughed aloud, surprising himself, for it felt as if a bird, long caged in his chest, had taken sudden flight. ‘What you say is so simple, only that we complement one another. I can think of no reason why your words should so move me. But they do. They do.’
‘Something is happening, here, tonight. I feel it.’
‘As do I. But I don’t know what it is.’
‘You mean you have no name for it,’ she corrected him. ‘We both cannot help but know what this is. We grow. We become.’
Wintrow found himself smiling into the night. ‘We become what?’ he asked of her.
She turned to face him, the chiselled planes of her wooden face catching the reflected gleam of the distant lights. She smiled up at him, lips parting to reveal her perfect teeth. ‘We become us,’ she said simply. ‘Us, as we were meant to be.’
Althea had never known that misery could achieve perfection. Only now, as she sat staring at her emptied glass, did she grasp how completely wrong her world had become. Things had been bad before, things had been flawed, but it was only today that she had made one stupid decision after another until everything was as completely wrong as it could possibly be. She shook her head at her own idiocy. As she fingered the last coins from her flattened pouch, and then held up her glass to be refilled, she reviewed her decisions. She had conceded when she should have fought, fought when she should have conceded. But the worst, the absolute worst, had been leaving the ship. When she had walked off Vivacia before her father’s body had even been consigned to the waves, she had been worse than stupid and wrong. She had been traitorous. False to everything that had ever been important to her.
She shook her head at herself. How could she have done it? She had not only stalked off leaving her father unburied, but leaving her ship to Kyle’s mercy. He had no understanding of her, no real grasp of what a liveship was or what she required. Despair gripped her heart and squeezed. After all the years of waiting, she had abandoned Vivacia on this most crucial day. What was the matter with her? Where had her mind been, where had her heart been to have put her own feelings before that of the ship? What would her father have said to that? Had not he always told her, ‘The ship first, and all else will follow.’
The tavern keeper appeared suddenly, to take her coin, ogle it closely, and then refill her glass. He said something to her, his voice unctuous with false solicitude. She waved him away with the refilled glass and nearly spilled its contents. Hastily she drank it down lest she waste it.
She opened her eyes wide as if that would clear her head and looked around her. It seemed wrong that the folk in this tavern shared none of her misery. To all appearances, this slice of Bingtown had not even noticed the departure of Ephron Vestrit. Here they were having the same conversations that they’d been having for the past two years: the newcomers were ruining Bingtown; the Satrap’s delegate was not only overstepping his authority in inventing taxes, but was taking bribes to ignore slave-ships right in the harbour; the Chalcedeans were demanding of the Satrap that Bingtown drop their water taxes, and the Satrap would probably concede for the sake of the pleasure herbs Chalced sent him so freely. The same old woes, Althea thought to herself, but damn few in Bingtown would stand up and do anything about any of it. The last time she had gone to the Old Traders’ Council with her father, he had stood up and told them to simply outlaw it all. ‘Bingtown is our town,’ he’d told them determinedly. ‘Not the Satrap’s. We should all contribute toward
