accusation.
'Yeah.' He looked down suddenly. 'I guess it is.'
'Sparks—'
'But only partly!' He straightened. 'You know that it's true, I've always felt this pulling me, Moon.' He faced northward, toward Carbuncle at the back of the wind. 'I have to find out what I'm missing.'
'Or who?' She bit her tongue.
He shrugged. 'Maybe.'
She shook her head desperately. 'After I come back from my initiation it won't be different, we can still be together!' I can have both, I can— 'It can be like it always was again. Like we always wanted it to be—' not even convincing herself.
'Hey, boy.' The voice rose from below, breaking into echoes off the jetty wall. 'You coming? The tide won't wait all day!'
'In a minute!' Sparks frowned. 'No, it won't, Moon. You know that. ‘Death to love a sibyl...’' His voice faded.
'That's just superstition!' Their eyes locked. And in that moment she knew that he shared her understanding of the truth; as he had always known, and shared, everything: It would never be the same again.
'You'll be changed. In a way that I can never change, now.' His fingers whitened on the rail. 'I can't stay here, stay the way I am now. I have to change, too. I have to grow, and learn ... I have to learn who I really am. All this time I thought I knew. I thought-becoming a sibyl would answer all my questions.' His eyes darkened with the new emotion that she had seen first as she came back to him there in the hidden cave, on the Choosing Island. The thing that envied her, and accused her, and shut her out.
'Then go, if that's really why you're going.' She challenged the darkness, afraid to retreat. 'But don't go out of bitterness, because you're hurt, or because you're trying to hurt me. Because if you do you'll never come back.' Her courage broke. 'And I don't think I could stand that, Sparkie—'
His hands came up, but as she reached out to him they dropped to his sides again. He turned away, shaking his head, with no forgiveness or understanding or even sorrow. He moved to the gangway, started down the ladder.
Moon felt Gran come up beside her, watch with her as Sparks dropped to the boat's cross-deck where it rose on the water to meet him. He disappeared into the cabin on the broad platform that joined the double hulls, and though she kept watching he did not come out on deck again. The deckhands cast off the mooring ropes, the crab-claw sails fell jingling down the masts and filled with moist wind.
The fog was lifting as the world brightened. Moon could see as far as the channel leading to the open sea, and she watched the trader's catamaran grow smaller as it angled out into the bay, reaching for the gap. She heard its engines start, once it was well away from the Summer docks. At last it reached the channel entrance and merged with the wall of fog, snuffed out in an instant, like a ghost ship. Moon rubbed at her eyes, her face, wetting her hands with mist and tears. Like a sleeper waking, she turned to look at her grandmother, small and stooped with sorrow beside her. She looked beyond her at the silhouetted nets and winches along the dockside; the ancient, sea worn storage house at the foot of the steep village street. Somewhere further on was their own cottage ... and her outrigger lying on the beach, waiting to carry her away from all that she had left in the world. 'Gran?'
Her grandmother patted her hand firmly; she saw a determination to keep hope and belief foremost fill the deep-set gray eyes. 'Well, child, he's gone. We can only say a prayer that he finds his way home to us again. Now the Lady's waiting for you, too. The sooner you go, the sooner you'll come back to me!'
She took Moon's arm and started along the pier. 'At least that mother lorn old crackbrain won't be around to see you off.' Moon glanced up, realizing with some relief that Daft Naimy had gone his way. Gran remembered herself and made the triad sign, 'Poor soul that he is.'
Moon's mouth twitched up briefly, made a firm line as she felt her strength come back. Sparks had gone to Carbuncle to spite her ... damned if shed drift with the tide. She had her own destiny lying across the water, one shed waited half a lifetime for; the calling beauty of it filled her again. She began to walk faster, hurrying her grandmother along.
Chapter 4
Sparks stood on the deck, pressed against the mast by the force of the frigid wind from behind him, listening to the ship's engines strain against the heavy seas. Gazing straight ahead, he saw Carbuncle lying at the sea's edge like the incredible fragment of a dream. They had been approaching it for an eternity across the white- flecked sea, as they had sailed north forever along the boundary of this endless island's shores. He had watched the city grow from the size of a fingertip into something beyond the range of his comprehension. Now it seemed to spread like a stain across the sky, filling his awareness until there was nothing else in the world.
'Hey, there, Summer.' The trader's voice broke open his reverie; a gloved hand cuffed his shoulder lightly. 'Damned if I need another mast. If you can't find anything useful to do on deck, get inside before you freeze.' Sparks heard the high laughter of a deckhand; turned to see the smile on the trader's heavy face that took the smart out of the words.
He pulled back from the mast, felt the crackle of resistance as his gloves broke away from the ice film. 'Sorry.' His breath rose up in a cloud, half blinding him. He was bundled in heavy clothes until he could barely bend his arms, but still the northern wind cut him to the bone. Carbuncle was protected from being totally ice locked only by the presence of a warm sea current following this western coastline. There was no feeling left in his face; he couldn't tell whether his own smile still worked or not. 'But by Lady, it's all one piece! How could anyone even imagine a thing like that!'
'Your Lady had nothing to do with it, boy. And She's had nothing to do with the people who live there, ever since. Always keep that in mind while you're there.' The trader shook his head, looking at the city, and pressed his wind-chapped lips into a line. 'No ... nobody really knows how Carbuncle came to be. Or why. Not even the off worlders I think — not that they'd tell us, even if they did.'
'Why not?' Sparks glanced around.
The trader shrugged. 'Why should they tell us their secrets? They come here to trade their machines for what we have. We wouldn't want them if we knew how to make our own.'
'I guess not.' Sparks shrugged, flexing his fingers inside his mittens. The Winter trader and his crew ate, talked, and slept trade, as they sailed from island to island; it had worn thin very quickly. The only thing that had impressed him — until now — during this interminable voyage was the fact that they dealt as freely with Summers as with Winters, as though the differences between the two were unimportant. 'Where are all the starships?'
'The what?' Laughter shook the trader. 'Don't — don't tell me you were expecting a skyful? By all the gods! Did you think there was one for every star? And after all the tech stories you've wormed out of me over the years. You Summers really must be as thick headed as everyone claims!'
'No!' Sparks frowned, humiliation prickling his numb face. 'I just — I just wanted to know where the star port was, that's all.'
'Sure you did,' the trader wheezed. 'It's inland, and forbidden territory to us.' He sobered abruptly. 'Are you sure you know what you're doing, Sparks, going to Carbuncle? Are you sure you understand what you're getting into?'
Sparks hesitated, glanced out over the water. Moon's face at parting drove the distance out of focus; he heard her voice in the calling of seabirds, in the air. Death to love a sibyl. Cold pain lodged suddenly in his chest, like a dagger of ice. He shut his eyes, shivering; the voice, the vision were gone. 'I know what I'm doing.'
The trader shrugged and turned away.
The trader's ship nudged the floating pier where Sparks stood; a skater on the calm, dark water. It was dwarfed on every side by larger, taller, longer ships, dwarfed in turn by the expanse of the moorage like a mat of floating weed. And reducing it all to insignificance, Carbuncle itself, crouching like a great sheltering beast overhead. Pylons whose girth would swallow a house rose barnacled from the sea, a strange forest crowned by the city's underbelly, trailing festoons of chain and pulley and incomprehensible appendages. The smell of the sea
