No Present Like Time

They picked him up and threw him over the side like a parcel. He splashed in, curled fetally, the loose rope snaked about him in the water. He bobbed to the surface, waggling his head and gasped, screamed.

Fulmer gave the order and a team pulled the other end of the rope that ran under the hull. The Plainslander’s yells cut short as it tightened and he sank under. His body was drawn down a long way, still thrashing and bubbles rising all around. He disappeared from view.

I heard knocks as his body scraped over the rough, barnacled hull. Blood swirled up, it looked black. I hoped that he had exhaled the air from his lungs and breathed brine in before the scraping started.

The wet rope coiled onto the deck, water ran from the hands of the men pulling it in. Behind them a team of men paid the dry rope out. Halfway through, Fulmer wanted to stop the teams and offer each man a tot of rum, leaving the body under the boat while they drank Queen Eleonora’s health. But the rope snapped. It went slack. Fulmer said, “Lads, reel him in, yes?”

The men pulled the rope up fast, hand over hand. They dragged a pale pink and shredded mass to the surface. The cable hadn’t broken, his body had. His arms were worn through, nothing was left of them. The noose had protected his ankles and feet but his legs were bare to the bone. Tiny waterlogged pieces of muscle tissue floated off, into the depths as fish food.

I saw his face had gone, just eyeballs in a fleshy cranium. His back teeth showed in the gums. Tufts of wet gray hair still stuck to the skull. His back was flayed.

This wet skull on a spinal column dropped to the deck. Fulmer made sure every man of his crew saw it before they washed it overboard.

Mist is still furious, and rightly so. I hope I live till god-comes-back, but if I die, I swear it will be by steel or chitin, and not by Morenzian law.

I was in my cabin, putting the finishing touches to A History of Tris, when the Petrel raised a series of flags. Mist was asking Wrenn and me to come across for a meeting. I found Wrenn talking uneasily to Fulmer. We were all three thinking of the mess she had made of diplomacy with Tris, although only I had witnessed the worst of it. Fulmer said, subdued, “She’s making preparations for landing. We want to avoid pirate vessels as we cross the trade routes, yes?”

I flew and reached the Petrel long before Wrenn’s boat rowed over the gently purling water. “It’s July the tenth,” Mist said. “I’m confident that sometime today we’ll have sight of the Fourlands. Watch for the coast, it’s heartwarming to see it appearing. It feels like the first time a newborn babe is placed in your arms.”

I sipped water that was faintly brackish, owing to the habit of refilling seawater ballast casks with drinking water. Mist watched the big, gimballed compass in the binnacle dipping as if it was dowsing for land. The morning sky was a slightly powdery pale blue that meant it was going to be a hot day. The haze had burned off by mid- morning and the temperature was so intolerable that I climbed the rigging and clung there, a black-clad starfish in a giant net, with my wings spread as a shade. When I opened my eyes the bright world was tainted blue.

Thick white salt dried on the stern carvings, encrusting them like the lumps of salt that fyrd throw into trapping ponds to immobilize Insects. It smelled as dirty as flotsam; I could practically hear it crystalizing.

Whale fins gnomoned all over the ocean. Seagulls trapezed in the sky. We came in slow. The lookout in the Petrel’s crow’s nest used his own feather as a plectrum to strum his guitar. He gave a false shout of “Land!” twice and Mist snarled that if he did it again she would slice his tongue out and fly it as a pennant. It must be her time of the month. There were tiny glossy plaques of severe suntan on her shoulders. A sweat sheen covered the golden-brown skin above her breasts, startling with her cream clothes. She had cut her platinum hair short and ruffled like dandelion fluff. She squinted at the sun glare and when she relaxed the folds at the edges of her eyes showed white.

Evening set in, and dry, porous ship’s biscuits were dealt out among the crew. Heat was radiating back out of my sunburned skin to fill the cool air. A thin black line began to rise on the horizon, becoming a part of the night sky where there were no stars, but nobody dared say anything until Wrenn strolled over and said, “I might have heatstroke, or is that land?”

“Aye, that is land,” Mist admitted, tiredly. She raised her voice. “Land, ho! We’re home, boys! Send a signal to Master Fulmer.”

The Melowne’s sailors read the series of flags. They took up the shout and jubilation broke out all over the ship, in the topgallants and below in the galley. From the Petrel’s half-deck I heard them shouting and cheering Mist. We had been on our own so far from anywhere that sighting the Cobalt coast was like seeing an old friend. We surveyed it with unbridled joy but, because we had been self-sufficient for three months, with slight trepidation.

“Drinks all around,” I said.

“Order!” Mist snapped. “We return as we left. Clear the decks shipshape and Sute fashion. Wait till you have your feet on dry land before howling with your hounds’ tongues, or by god I’ll separate them from you now.”

I was obsessively trying to judge the distance to the coast-the moment that I could safely fly back. I wanted to travel under my own power, at last! More important, I had to catch up on six months’ worth of news. I was desperate to know the latest, and even more keen-as a Messenger should be-to give San my report of Tris. I was also determined to face Tern and demand the truth from her about Tornado.

Mist observed me hopping from foot to foot at the prow. She collapsed her telescope back into its casing with a snap. “You want to fly?” she asked.

“I need to know the news.”

“Please don’t leave us. I need you to deliver my account of Tris to San. I’ve just finished writing it.”

“I intend to give my own; it’s Comet’s duty.”

Mist scratched her fluffy head. “Since when were you objective, Shira? You and your stupid eyeshadow.”

“It’s not eyeshadow it’s late nights. Look, Ata, I’ll come straight back. I only want to buy a newspaper.”

She looked at me closely. “If you go to land, promise not to breathe a word about what happened on Tris. Aye, god knows I can’t stop you, but I’m trying to contain this discovery and you can see how important it is not to blab.”

“I’ll just bring you the news, I promise.”

“Then off you go. And buy me a couple of bars of chocolate, as well.”

I landed on the dark strand, and jogged up the beach from the hard wet sand to the dry sand, then climbed some steps to the promenade. I looked back and laughed to see my footprints appear from nowhere at the point where I touched down. The days were already getting shorter; I somehow felt cheated. It was ten P.M. and the Artists’ Quarter, that reputedly never sleeps, was just beginning to wake up. One seafront kiosk was open. A gray, hircine old man chortled when he saw me. I asked why, and he pointed to the headlines.

I said, “Oh, fuck,” and bought a copy of every newspaper he had. I jammed them into my satchel. I gave the man a handful of pound coins and for my fifty-pence change he used a pair of clippers to cut the last one along the line stamped on it. He returned half the coin.

As instructed, I also picked up some chocolate but I had eaten most of it by the time I reached the Petrel. I called Mist, Lightning and Serein to Mist’s office and spread the newspapers on her table:

REBELLION POISED TO STRIKE THE CASTLE

Troops raised by Gio Ami are proceeding toward the Castle itself. Lady Governor Eske has, of her own accord, given over the first four divisions of General infantry and more than thirty Select Fyrd to his cause.

Gio Ami has also commandeered Insect-wall-breaking machines from Eske. They include two battering rams and seven catapults, probably midsized trebuchets although it is difficult to specify the exact type. At the time of going to press, the engines are en route along the Eske Road.

Gio Ami’s volunteer force and noncombatant supporters are extremely varied in background and opinion but are strongly united by their discontent at the Castle’s role in the slow recovery of the Empire from Insect damage. Gio Ami will address them in his second meeting, to be held at midnight on Thursday at the Ghallain Fencing Academy in Eske.