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They hid the dead body deep down in the hold of the ship,
where the stink of the books would mask it. There was no need. The body of the
boy named Grettir, who a week ago had been alive and fourteen and annoying, did
not rot.
It was somewhere around a thousand years after the death of
the god that Franks called the White Christ, though there were no Franks aboard
this ship, which had a dragon prow. The ship's name was Maria, because its
owner had spent her girlhood as the daughter of wealthy silk traders in
Byzantium, where everyone named their ships Maria. She had converted when she
ran away with a beautiful boy, who was now a grumpy old man from Iceland who
sold books.
The booksellers normally dropped anchor near the shore at
night, but this night they were sailing grim-faced by the stars and the
occasional faint lights of shore towns on either side of a turbulent strait.
One of their number was wanted on the island to their right for murder: the
boy's murder, and the murder of the late emir of the island emirate of Sicily
itself.
The accused killer's name was Ketil Wynnsdottir,
and she was a bit of a bastard, it was true, but she was not a killer. And yet,
in the wake of their fleeing ship, all across the
great walled city of Balarm, woman after woman was
explaining to interested authorities that she had not known that the magician
girl who sailed with the booksellers was a murderer. They had met her once, in
the bathhouse, and she had carried a long silver rod and sold spells.
All of that, at least, was quite true.
The dark waters of the Mediterranean should have their
bellies full, but they never do. The way they eat is like a miracle, or like a
miracle turned inside out with its skin the wrong way on:
instead of hundreds of loaves or fish, it makes impossible numbers disappear,
of fish and body alike.
Somewhere on that whale-road, on the sea-path from Balarm to Constantinople, Ketil Wynnsdottir
fell overboard.
She had been perched atop the dragon-prow of the ship,
because it was high up and a northern magician of a certain type must do their
work from high up. On land there were small stone towers and platforms which
rose from bluffs or over trees; a sharp hill could work in a pinch. But at sea
there was the mast or there were the tall double-prows at each end of the ship,
and from one of the these she must have slid into the surf, thumped gently
against the bottom of the hull, perhaps dodged the steerboard
if she were lucky, and became immediately invisible in the wake of the ship
which plowed through the late summer sea.
It was discovered quickly, in half a minuta,
which was more than enough time for someone to drown.
"She can swim, though," said a black-haired boy with a
pinched face and a big nose, named Basil Ragnarson. He was crowded along the
railing at the stern like everyone else. The sea anchor was dropped, and half
the rowers were at their posts, bringing the ship to the closest thing to a
halt one can do at sea.
A few more people stumbled out of the tent over the deck,
which was where most of the crew slept to keep off the dew. One of them was a
huge man with tightly curled blonde hair. The other was a woman with a silver
ring on every finger and long curling dark hair. She was dressed like a Persian, but spoke a tell-tale dialect of Arabic which
placed her much further West. As far West as one could go, in fact: to Al Andalus.
"Shutter all the lights," the woman barked in the only
Frankish language she knew. Everyone turned to peer at her.
"She says to blow out all the fires," the young boy named
Basil translated in Norse, for everyone who did not speak English well.
"Do it," the big blond man said, from behind the woman's
shoulder. Everyone on deck, faces lit with the greasy faint light rushlights
and oil lamps, hesitated. They all knew the big man hated the woman with the
rings, but none of them knew why. They didn't understand why, now, he was
supporting her order. She was not a sailor; she was a guest on this trip.
The head rower squeezed through the crowd. The ship had all
but halted, thanks to the efforts of the young men on the benches. "What?" the
head rower said. He was short, black-haired, and was carrying his son, who had
been feverish since the flight from Balarm. The boy
was too old to be carried, pale-faced. The head rower
said again: "What? No. We're the only thing lit up for miles. That's the only
way she'll see us, if she's swimming. No, Harald."
He may have been younger and smaller, but he was the head
rower. The big blond man named Harald looked at the woman, who was pacing. She
was only one of them that did not know how to go still
when the worst was happening. It was making her look
nervous and shaken, in the eyes of the northern rowers. That did not matter to
her at all.
"Do as Eskandar says," Harald
repeated from the shadows. "Shut the lights."
"Harald—" the head rower said, eyes darting to the woman
named Eskandar, who ignored them all. The sound of the water against the oars
was so loud. The sea, somehow, which had been soft as
night felt so loud. The breeze was only gentle.
"Do it."
The woman with the rings, Eskandar, ran to the stern, where
the tall dragon's tail and weathervane made it hard to peer into their
wake.
"Douse the lights!" Egil yelled.
One by one, every flame on the ship went out. The rushlights
which so many had lit in the confusion of the alarm were plunged into a bucket
of seawater kept to put out fires.
And there, off the starboard side and behind, was a faint
and strange glow to the sea. It was not whitewater; it was like
phosphorescence, but only in one spot.
The rowers at their benches turned the ship about. A boy
struggled to pull up the sea anchor. It was caught on something.
"Cut it," the head rower said, which showed how badly
everyone wanted to find Ketil Wynnsdottir alive. But
he had forgotten that the new anchor was not on a rope but an iron chain,
bought with the money of the book-buyers of Balarm.
It could not be cut. The large man went over and hauled. Slowly the sea anchor
came up, dragging some bit of seafloor with it. He hauled both onto the deck
and left them there, careless, in a splatter of silt and a strange metallic
clang.
The rowers moved the ship quickly, but when they drew close,
they eased up to the glow with the nervous care of a new lover. No one wanted
to strike Ketil's head, if by some miracle it was still above-water.
In the dark, avoiding her would be impossible.
Eskandar was on the deck again, busily tying a rope around
her waist, and the other end of it around the mast. No one on this ship liked
her that much, and she was a guest and had none of her own people here. She
figured the mast was better than asking someone to hold the other end.
As they drew close, they began to see what it was: a little
strange bait ball made not of normal fish but of a small breed of shark. It was
called a lanternshark, for its small glowing belly.
They were swarmed around a dark body in the water.
Another body entered the water: Eskandar, with a soft
splash.
She could swim, though not well. She fumbled through the
water fully clothed, which a better swimmer would have known not to do. The
little bodies of the lanternsharks began to bump against hers.
Eskandar bint Muhammad al-Isbili got an arm around Ketil Wynsdottir,
who was floating face-up, somehow breathing. "What?" Ketil mumbled from the
circle of this arm, perhaps stunned somehow. Eskandar looked up at the sky,
where they seven sisters throbbed in their tight bunch and the stars domed the
world, and from the Pleiades the first of the summertime shooting stars
spurted. Briefly, she found God. She tightened her arm around Ketil's waist and
began to swim back through the gentle nudging of the lantern sharks, keeping
Ketil above water.
"What?" Ketil murmured again. The little glowing sharks were
following them.
"It's Eskandar," Eskandar said, getting her mouth above
water.
"Eskandar," Ketil slurred, "I sometimes still dream about
you."
Before Eskandar could say anything to that, there was a tug
on the rope, and suddenly she did not have to swim anymore, because the two of
them were being carefully reeled in by many pairs of hands.
Ketil was put down in the warmest part of the ship, which
was the hold where the body was hidden. It was out of sight, and Ketil was laid
out on the bed which was made down here out of packing crates, on which the
owner of the ship and her husband the bookseller slept.
The woman who owned the ship was in her sixties,
black-haired and very beautiful. She had lit several oil lamps and was weaving
something on a very small lap loom, which was the only kind that could be used
on a ship. She allowed Eskandar the dignity of not watching her very closely.
Eskandar sat on someone's seachest.
Her own chest was, deeper in the belly of the little ship, and was the bed she
had rested the boy on, as gently as she could.
She watched Ketil sleep until there was a sound on the
stairs: the other guest on the ship, but one everyone liked.
He was older than most of the rowers but looked younger, with messy hair and a
long flowing aba with a crooked collar, over which he wore a northern coat,
gifted by one of the rowers. Sulayman came down the stairs, tripped once, and
emerged from the warm night above to the anxious little space below, lamplit.
He said in Arabic, "I think the boss is going to sleep on the deck if you stay
down here."
"I'm coming," Eskandar said, and followed him back up the
stairs.
They emerged into the tent and then out under the sky. The
thin moon was setting and the stars were crisp and
distant. To the west the horizon occasionally glowed with the torchlight of a
small town. It was still the Emirate; they could not risk coming too close.
Sulayman followed Eskandar to the railing. She looked up; he
looked up.
"Have you read Boethius?" Eskandar asked.
"Who?" said Sulayman.
"Guy from the Balkans," Eskandar sighed. "It doesn't matter.
He wrote about what it would be like to fly up into, you know—" she gestured up
at the night sky.
"The… ether?" Sulayman said.
"Whether or not there's ether depends on which translation
you read," Eskandar muttered. "But yeah, up through the space between the
planets, and then the heavens."
"Like the Night Journey," Sulayman said.
"Like the Night Journey," Eskandar agreed.
Quiet descended.
Eskandar fell asleep on the deck, her arms folded on
someone's rowing bench, squinting at the faint glow of towns she would never
see against the black.
When she woke she thought she was
still seeing the same, but then she realized that it was the gray of pre-dawn,
and what she was seeing instead was the glow of a fire on that distant shore,
reflecting on the underside of a cloud of smoke.
She blinked. Ketil was sitting down on the bench behind
Eskandar, peering out across the sea. "Have you seen a volcano before?" Ketil
asked. Her hair was still damp, slicked back. She was awake, alive, talking.
"No," Eskandar said, making room for her without looking at
her.
"Hm," said Ketil. "I always liked going to see them, when I
was little."
"On Thule?"
"You can just call it Iceland," Ketil said.
Their swim had not made them friends again. It did not
matter: Eskandar looked at her, damp-haired and tired, and found God again for
a moment.
Ketil squinted at her. "Your soul's jumping around," she
said.
"Sorry," Eskandar muttered, reflexively, and touched her
throat. Then: ‘What happened?"
Silence. She hadn't really expected an answer. Everyone on
the ship liked Ketil, and the huge man with the frizzing blond hair was her
younger cousin— younger by nine years, in fact, only twenty to Ketil's
twenty-nine. If anyone kept Ketil's secrets now, it was probably him.
Ketil's foot kicked out at nothing— or something Sarai could
not see.
"Eavesdropping luck soul," Ketil said. "Off you get."
Ketil had once, seven years ago, told Eskandar that
luck-souls looked a little like cats.
Then Ketil said, "I fainted."
"You fainted?"
"Yeah, I think I stood up too fast. But I was up on the
headpiece—" she meant the dragon prow "--and I guess I fell off."
Eskandar pinched her nose. She looked out at the volcano
along the dark edge of the horizon: a mountain with a mouth, a cauldron, an
alchemist of the first order. In the distance, it just looked like a mountain
with a top that glowed.
"And the sharks?"
"No idea," Ketil said. "Lucky."
This was maybe a joke. Ketil did not have a luck-soul. Neither did Eskandar, but she wasn't supposed to
have one; Eskandar had only one soul, in fact. The one in her throat.
"The sharks," said Ketil. "Harald said you guessed that the
sharks would find me. How?"
"Luck," said Eskandar, instead of admitting that she
remembered anything at all about Ketil Wynnsdottir.
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