Septemius came to think of himself as a clot of flotsam on a restless channel full of sucks and eddies, each as unforeseeable and reasonless as the next. After a time, he learned simply to float on this turbulent flow of demands, sometimes touching this shore or that, not fighting them as he was wrenched away and twirled around and dipped and sucked at before being thrust toward another bank or tree or bed of reeds. He did not learn this, however, until after Octobra came, and she came too late to save him.
He had been about ten. Just outside Abbyville, a tall, wordless man had brought a little girl to their wagons and had delivered her to Genettia with a note. The girl was Octobra. The child of an old friend. Parentless now, and homeless unless Genettia would take her in. Of course Genettia did take her in. The troupe took her in, called her Octobra Bird. Another child for them to badger.
And they tried. They caught her up in their net of confusion and demanded of her, too. “Isn’t that right, Octy? Don’t you agree with me?”
She never answered. Never seemed to notice. Melted away from them like snow. After a time, they stopped, as though they stopped seeing she was there. Not Septemius, of course. From the moment she arrived, she with her bottomless eyes and hair like sunset, he never lost sight of her for an instant.
He remembered lying face to face with her in the back of a painted wagon, the moon falling in slender arrows through the shuttered window, touching fingertips. Thumb to thumb, finger to finger, pubescent children making magic.
“Don’t ever change,” he had begged her. “Don’t ever let them catch you. Without you, I’d go crazy. Don’t ever change, Octy.”
“I never will,” she had promised him, pressing her fingers five times against his own to signify an oath. His adopted sister. His lover. The only steady shore in a sea of molten disorder. And in the end, she, too….
He had never learned what solid ground was like.
It hadn’t been only the chaos of the conflicting emotional demands on him but the rootlessness of constant travel as well. Nothing to hold to. No one to cling to. As time went by, various of them left the troupe or died, but those who were left had gone on badgering him until the very end. Even when Bowough and Aunt Ambioise had been the only ones left, they had still kept him in the unquiet middle of things, “Isn’t that right, Septemius? Don’t you agree with me? Tell him he’s crazy, Septemius.”
Only now that Old Bowough was the last had the appeals for his approval stopped. Now his approval didn’t seem to matter anymore.
Septemius had learned to navigate the inconstant sea of his life by intuition and indirection. By signs and omens. By never saying either yes or no. He still avoided definite answers to anything. Even though Women’s Country now sometimes seemed very solid to him, with observable permanencies about it, he still stayed alert, sensing hidden currents, a fluid flow, with trickery and deceit swimming beneath the surface. If he settled, begged admission, would everything stay the way he thought it was? Or would it change, suddenly, leaving him awash, circling once more, like a chip in a gutter?
Until this very hour, it had seemed wisest not to take the chance, wisest to use charm and evasion whenever permanence was suggested, keeping free, just in case. It had seemed foolish to attempt assurances. “By five,” he had always told himself. “Don’t you fall for their blandishments, Septemius!”
He drove the wagon down from the market to the warren of alleys which extended eastward from the plaza, toward the hostel he remembered, built around an extensive yard, with capacious stables for the animals. He drove silently, scratching at his cheek where the drying ink made a small itch, lost in old memories.
“She was very distressed about something,” Kostia said. “Tonia and I both felt it.”
“Who, girlies?” He had lost track of the immediate past. Who? Not his sister, not Mama or Grandma? No. “The medic back there? Now what could a pretty woman of that age have to be distressed about? What is she, twenty? Twenty-two?”
“That, about,” Kostia affirmed. “There is a man in her mind, Septemius. A warrior.”
“Oh, by the Lady of the Cities. Is she worried he will not keep an assignation, perhaps?” Septemius knew it was more than that. He merely wanted his own perceptions confirmed.
“More than that,” said Kostia. “Something interesting, Septemius. Something very interesting. All complex and knotted together, like some tapestry where the pictures are only half drawn, yet….”
He gave her a quizzical look but did not pursue the matter. Kostia and Tonia found many things interesting, and they would undoubtedly enlighten him if the time proved propitious. As for him, he spent a good deal of time forcing himself not to think of them as if they were Octobra, come back to him again, never mind they were as like her as twins. They were, he reminded himself, themselves. He prayed he had built a strong enough island for them that they could live on or around it, never feeling like flotsam, driven by unknown eddies. If so, he had done all he could expect of himself. All Octy could have asked of him if she had lived long enough to ask.
At the hostel he obtained stable space for the donkeys as well as two adjoining rooms for his family, paying for a week in advance because he knew this made it less likely they would have someone else
