A Respite From Storms Read online

  Jasen would have liked to try. Between the ship’s lurching and rolling and his fevered dreams of revenge, he had gotten little rest.

  Kuura thumped the door again. He said something in his native language, four or five words in quick succession. Irritation was creeping in now, it sounded like. He knocked again, harder. “How deep do you kids sleep? Anyone would think—”

  Alixa had hopped off the bed. Now she pulled back the bolt, and threw the door open.

  Kuura stopped mid-sentence. He looked down at her a peculiar expression on his face—the faintest trace of amusement, maybe—then he let his arm drop and his fist uncurl. A over-wide smile spread across his face.

  “Good morning,” he said cheerily, all hints of annoyance gone. “So nice of you to answer the door. And so sorry if I woke you!” He cackled hard for a solid five seconds before cutting off abruptly and resuming speaking. “I’ve come to take you to breakfast, if you are hungry. And to the doctor.”

  He was unaccompanied, but he turned his head to the side and barked a word that sounded like “medley.”

  Another man appeared. He was short but bulky. His head was shaved. Perhaps he’d been joking with someone down the hall, for he waved someone off with a grin as he arrived in front of Jasen and Alixa’s cabin.

  When he looked at them, Jasen saw his eyes were different colors: left green, right brown.

  “Medleigh will observe you for illness,” Kuura said to Jasen. Then he spoke to Medleigh. A couple of sentences were exchanged between them, then Kuura said, “He will take good care of you. I will be back shortly.”

  Medleigh came into the room and pointed at the bed. He said a word Jasen did not understand, but which he took to mean “sit.” He obliged, and Medleigh commenced a brief physical exam. It wasn’t much like visiting the village doctor back in Terreas. The language barrier was a problem, for a start. Now and again, Medleigh would say something, and look at Jasen as if expecting an answer. Jasen’s only answer was a blank look.

  He wished Kuura were here.

  Kuura did return some five minutes later. Medleigh was assessing Jasen’s head—Jasen thought. Each side was clamped in a painful grip, and Medleigh rotated it back and forth with sharp motions. Each sent a jolt of pain through Jasen’s neck.

  “Stop,” he said.

  Kuura grinned. “He is quite the doctor.”

  “It hurts,” Jasen grunted.

  Kuura let Jasen’s manhandling continue for a few long seconds more, then spoke to Medleigh. It must’ve been an instruction to cease, for Medleigh did, stepping away. He wiped his hands on his tunic and began conversing with Kuura in a mostly one-sided conversation, him the informer and Kuura the informee. Mostly he looked at Jasen while he talked, punctuating occasionally with a thrust of a finger at him.

  When he was finished, Kuura said to Jasen, “Yeh’re diseased, boy.”

  If he hadn’t been fully awoken by Medleigh’s assault, that did it. Wide-eyed, Jasen exchanged a frantic look with Alixa. “Wh-what?”

  Then Kuura bellowed with laughter, so intensely he clutched his stomach with one hand and braced against the door frame with another.

  When his rumbling had decreased to a low, but continuing, chuckle, Kuura wiped a tear from his eyes. “Oh, I got you good. You should have seen the look on your face.”

  “Uh …”

  “You are not diseased, Jasen. Medleigh has given you a clean bill of health.”

  Jasen blinked in a daze. He glanced to Alixa.

  “All that talk …” she began, “just to say that … Jasen is fine?”

  “Oh, no. That did not take long. He was questioning your brains for sleeping in your wet clothes! Did neither of you look in your trunk?”

  Another exchanged look between Jasen and Alixa. “Err …”

  Kuura laughed and stepped through. He thrust open the lid of the crate at the foot of the bed—and there, in the bottom, were changes of clothes. Doubtful they were put in here specially—but they were in here. Which made Jasen feel stupid … as well as still damp.

  “Um,” said Alixa, peering into the chest, “thank you.”

  “Get dressed, and I will take you to eat,” said Kuura. “I’ll wait outside.”

  “Me too,” said Jasen quickly, and he hurried out.

  “Thanks,” said Alixa. She closed the door behind him and bolted it.

  Jasen waited. Kuura conversed with Medleigh, leaving Jasen out—though Jasen could hardly blame him; translating back and forth must get frustrating in short order. Jasen just leaned against the wall, hands in pockets, waiting for Alixa to open the door again. A couple of sailors went past, but none of them said anything, gracing him only with suspicious looks.

  When Alixa unbolted the door, her old clothes were gone. In their place she wore the same garb as these sailors: a richly patterned, deep blue tunic, which was oversized on her small frame and so wrapped her much more thickly than any of the men under Burund’s command, and black trousers. Those, too, came up very large on her, and had to be fastened with a belt.

  Kuura laughed. “You really are—what do your people say? A fish out of water.”

  Alixa’s lips were a thin line. “I gave you the bigger pair. Sorry if they’re a bit wet …”

  He went in and closed the door, locked it. As promised, another set of clothes lay out for Jasen. Slightly crumpled—and slightly damp inside—he found himself dwarfed in them. He assumed they had been cleaned prior to being left in this box, but whoever had done it had not done the best job; they smelled, a ghostly trace of animal clinging to the fibers.

  His old clothes, he placed in a pile in the corner of the room, with Alixa’s.

  Medleigh had gone when Jasen opened the door again. Alixa was silent, hands gripped in front of her. Kuura whistled. He’d been watching her, at least when the door came open; then he turned to Jasen and beamed, with far too many teeth on show.

  “Now then,” he said, clipping the vowels in both words in that way he kept doing, “why don’t you come to the mess hall and eat, and I will tell you about where you find yourselves.”

  The mess hall was maybe midway along this deck, corridors to either end depositing into it such that if you wanted to travel from a fore to aft cabin—more terms slowly coming back to Jasen from storybooks—you would need to pass through the mess hall.

  There were six tables in all, with benches. Everything was affixed with thick steel screws—smart planning, if last night’s storm was anything to go by. A strong enough wave could send the tables flying. And although these men, musclebound as they were, might not fare poorly under the impact, someone of Jasen’s build would be smashed to a pulp.

  Five of the six tables were empty. A lone man occupied the last, someone Jasen recognized from last night. He puzzled for a moment as he locked eyes with the sailor, scooping something hard and dry out of a bowl. Then he remembered: he was one of the two battling with the sail when Alixa had to goad Scourgey into following inside.

  Kuura said something to him. The man with the bowl looked stony, answering with a single word, as he did to Kuura’s next remark. Monosyllabic though his reply was, it elicited a laugh from Kuura.

  There again, damn near everything elicited laughter from Kuura.

  Kuura had Alixa and Jasen settle on one side of a table. He dropped himself heavily opposite. Hands on wood, fingers spread against its grain, he appraised them both with a cheery look.

  “Right then. Yer breakfast.”

  He dug into a side pouch, apparently tucked beneath the ridiculous folds of his tunic. Deep green, almost black, the pouch was scaly and opened to a square of fabric. Kuura unwrapped it on the table.

  Inside were sticks of something very dark in color, knobbly and uneven. Beside them:

  “Crackers?” asked Jasen, peering.

  “Never seen someone get excited over those before,” said Kuura. “Daresay I won’t again. Yeh’re welcome to ‘em, if Alixa don’t want any.”

  Alixa pointed at t
he dark sticks. “What are those?”

  “Biltong.”

  Blank looks.

  “Cured meat. Dried. Yeh never had that where yeh came from?”

  “Yes,” Jasen said slowly, “but …”

  But it didn’t look like that. Cured meat in Terreas had been delicious, cut into thin slices, a purplish-pink color if it came from pigs, reddish-brown if it were beef. Its seasoning was precise, mostly salt.

  This biltong, on the other hand, could only have acquired its dark color from a dye of spices. The meat was practically dehydrated, by the look of it. And although Jasen would cede that this point was the least important, aesthetically biltong was not pleasant. Whoever cut it must’ve hacked it off without any care whatsoever.

  “Eat,” said Kuura, pushing the roll of fabric, with its biltong and crackers, toward them.

  Jasen tentatively reached out a finger for the meat. Better to get that done with first. He knew crackers. If biltong tasted terrible—and he suspected it did—he could try to expunge its flavor with the biscuits.

  Alixa joined him, taking her own piece.

  They lifted it to their mouths, in sync.

  Already wincing, Jasen bit—

  Alixa spat hers out barely after it had connected with her tongue. She twisted sideways on the bench, as if to get away from it as she hacked.

  Kuura laughed, hard.

  “It’s not funny,” she coughed. “It’s—horrible.”

  “And how d’you find it?” he asked Jasen.

  Jasen chewed slowly. The flavor was … peculiar. Herbs and spices like these did not exist in Terreas. Maybe not anywhere on Luukessia. They were sharp, warming, like embers on the tongue. Like peppers, only stronger. It was also incredibly salty.

  But it … wasn’t bad. Vinegary, some bites … but not awful.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  Kuura beamed. “Yeh have a fine palate.”

  “And me?” Alixa demanded.

  Kuura laughed again. “You will be eatin’ hardtack. None of the men here are fond of it, so we have plenty.”

  “Lucky me,” Alixa said flatly, eyeing a cracker miserably. The crackers were the opposite of the biltong in flavor—utterly bland and tasteless—and they were even drier than the biltong was. Only halfway through, Jasen had to ask Kuura for water, or he would not have been able to swallow the crumbs absorbing every drop of saliva in his mouth. After giving them a cup of water each, Kuura began to fill them in.

  “This boat is called the Lady Vizola. We are a cargo runner, bound for the Aiger Cliffs.”

  “For where?” Jasen asked.

  “It is a port city,” said Kuura, “to the east of your Luukessia. It is a very green place—like your lands, yes? The locals there, they call it the ‘City of Lightning,’ because it is also a very stormy place. Perhaps this is not like Luukessia.”

  He seemed to be fishing there. So Jasen confirmed simply, “Yes.”

  That was enough to satisfy Kuura, for he went on. “It is a prosperous place though, where many people meet to do business.”

  “What cargo do you run?” Jasen asked.

  “You saw yesterday: the animals below us.”

  “People trade them?”

  “Of course!” Kuura’s face lifted in amusement. But then he saw that Jasen’s question was serious, and he said, “Did your people not?”

  “Our village trades, but not animals really,” said Jasen.

  Traded, he thought.

  It hollowed his stomach. He dropped his piece of biltong.

  “They … they can—could—rent an animal, but…”

  He couldn’t bring himself to finish. Just picturing them was like drawing from a well of sadness. The farmland he’d meandered alongside for every year of his life, watching people tilling, harvesting … watching Aunt Margaut as she tended to the crops that weren’t quite enough to feed Terreas’s population, which increased year after year as if to spite the scourge that had forced this last bastion of humanity into a wretched corner, to prove to them that they would live on, growing stronger even in the face of those creatures …

  The memories hurt to look over. And so he pushed them down, aside, like closing a book.

  If Jasen’s mental anguish showed on his face, Kuura did not comment. He simply went on, oblivious even to the fact that both Alixa and Jasen now had stopped eating, letting their last half-chewed morsels fall.

  “Well, plenty of folk trade ‘em, and Aiger Cliffs is where we’re goin’ to trade.”

  “For other animals?” Jasen asked.

  “No, nitwit! Keep up!” But there was no malice in this, for Kuura belted another great belly laugh, tilting back so far that Jasen thought for a moment he would topple off the bench. “Money’s what we’re after. The sailors on this boat want payin’, and feedin’.”

  “Right.”

  “We’ll maybe buy another pig while we’re in port, or a cow, if time comes to slaughter our own. Stick around, and someone’ll maybe show you how we cure that biltong you’re making haste through.”

  Jasen looked down. He’d eaten half of it already. After the first few confusing bites, his taste buds adapting to this strange new heat and spices, it was as if his body remembered that it needed to eat, and for the past few days had not been doing very much of that whatsoever. The meat was chewy, kind of hard, even the thinner strips—but he made short work of them.

  Alixa hadn’t touched a bit more. A half-eaten cracker lay in front of her.

  Now, Jasen realized: she had gone quiet, had been for some time without his noticing. He glanced to her face. She was staring into the table, past it, her share of the biltong and crackers ignored. She looked as if she might cry. Perhaps already was; pinkness tinged her eyes again, though they were dry, as was her face.

  He touched her wrist. She looked up at him. He did his best to smile, but Alixa did not return it and cast her gaze down once more.

  Kuura was still talking. “… course, not just livestock. Always a market for that, but—well, you saw some of the things we’ve g’t down in the hold. That grabby little drak-flinger, he’ll do someone as a pet, maybe a servant if they c’n train him up. I wouldn’t bank on that personally—always with the hands. Obsessed with that bloody sow, he is.”

  Jasen looked blank.

  Kuura shook his head. “Not going in at all, is it?”

  “It is,” he said.

  “I suppose you’re still muddled from your …” Kuura waved a hand vaguely. “Well, what it is you said you been through. My, my. Luukessians. I’d never believe it.” The expression on his face was suddenly serious. His wide eyes drifted back and forth between Jasen and Alixa.

  Then he slammed an open palm against the bench.

  Jasen jolted. Alixa flinched.

  Kuura broke into a wide grin. “Why don’t you come out on deck?”

  Jasen was allowed to fish up the last of the biltong. Kuura offered him the dry biscuits, but Jasen took only one, and purely out of obligation. Alixa was offered some too, but she declined with a short shake of the head, her eyes downcast. Kuura shrugged and led them up. Jasen tried to keep an eye on Alixa, to try to draw her out of the dark hole she seemed to have slipped into, but with Kuura’s relentless conversation, it was hard for him to focus on her.

  Jasen had imagined the sea almost all his life in Terreas—or the beaches, more often, as they were more graspable. He couldn’t quite picture the sand—only yesterday had he first experienced it—or the smell of the air, or the way the waters stretched endlessly on and on. There was one thing he could imagine though, and that was the sky. It was always endlessly blue in the stories he’d read or been told, a pure, soft sheet of it overlaying the horizon, unbroken except for the blinding white of the sun. But as Jasen stepped out on deck behind Kuura, the blue was streaked with cloud. It looked as if it had been painted over with a soft brush, or perhaps a glob of paint dabbed and then pulled across with fabric, till the paint was stretched thin and would go no fa
rther.

  Toward the horizon, it clumped, darker.

  “Never been out to sea before, have you?” asked Kuura.

  Jasen stepped away without thinking, feet carrying him almost to the edge of the deck. He looked out in wonder. So much water everywhere—Jasen had never seen so much of it. And it was so blue! Deeper in hue than the morning sky, it reminded Jasen of the sky at night.

  Waves bobbed the Lady Vizola up and down. They were far apart and not very tall, so the ship’s rise was gradual, its descent just as slow. These waves were unmarred, but farther out Jasen glimpsed larger ones, crested with a strip of foam—like a reflection of the clouds, he thought.

  No spray this morning. But the tang of salt was strong in the cool air, and it filled Jasen’s nose like nothing else had—save maybe the smog as his house burned in Terreas, or the even thicker smoke that turned the air noxious and heavy when the mountain exploded and rained molten fire upon his village.

  That thought sapped the wonder from him. His face fell, his interest lost.

  He turned, sweeping the horizon as far as he could see.

  “What are you looking for?” asked Kuura.

  “Luukessia.”

  “We are far from it now. Even the ash from your volcano has disappeared.”

  Oh. Jasen drooped.

  But what did it matter, really? Whether Luukessia were a couple of miles distant, or the whole world away, Jasen and Alixa were not going back. Their homes were gone. The pathways they had walked all their lives were buried.

  Their families were dead. Let the Lady Vizola carry them far, far from that place. Baraghosa was certainly not stalking its ashen lands any longer.

  Luukessia held nothing for him now.

  Kuura was talking again—he was always talking, Jasen was quickly learning—but a shirtless sailor with shaggy black hair and a mane of a beard meandered across the deck. Whether it was for instructions, gossip about the new blood boarding with them, or simply to chat, Jasen could not make out.

  He did find the transition to their native language jarring, though.

  He hesitated by Alixa. She’d not moved far. She grasped her left wrist, watching the sea morosely.