Then I was drowning in a wild wind-capped sea under a hot bright blue sky.
14
I had always been too frightened of water to learn how to swim. Salt water streamed into my nose and mouth, its taste foul and warm. My feet were weighed down by my winter boots, and my legs tangled in my skirts. The salty brine caressed my face.
It’s all over. Give up. Let go.
A solid object thumped into my legs. The force of its impact lifted my face above the water. I sucked for air, inhaled more water, and sank. From beneath, I was pushed up again. I breached the surface flailing while being dragged sideways by my skirts.
My hand scraped across the gray-white flank of an aquatic creature with a massive fin and dead, flat eyes. Its viciously sharp teeth were caught in my petticoats and skirt. Thrashing and mauling, it dragged me along as it tried to get its jaws out of wool and linen.
The thought of becoming supper for this monster concentrated my mind wonderfully. I fixed my hand around its fin and hauled myself over its wide body. Part of the skirt ripped free, strips of fabric fluttering like ribbons through the water. My cane caught against its teeth but did not break. I punched its eye. It peeled away more quickly than I could move.
I floundered toward a curtain of white and green and blue that bobbed above the waves. A drop of blood stained my sleeve. Had it bitten me? Oh, Gracious Melqart, let me not be bleeding to death here in the unkind sea! But then I remembered the crow tearing at me to draw blood to open the gate.
A shadow circled beneath me in the water.
My boot scraped a prominence. I braced on the excrescence as the monster streaked toward me with astonishing speed and breathtaking decisiveness. My sword was again a cane, so it was no use. As the cursed monstrous fish drove in with its maw widening, I fisted a hand.
Look for the opening. Do not flinch.
I punched its snout. The impact sent me floating back. To stop myself I dug my boots in among the knobs of the underwater shelf. The monster sheared away. I stood with head and chest above the wind-whipped wavelets. Land lay a short swim away through waters more green than blue: a long stretch of white sandy shoreline backed by lushly green trees swaying in a strong wind. Above, the hard bold blue of the heavens spanned existence. Was that the peak of a tower jutting above the trees to the right?
Two shapes moved out of the trees. Human shapes. People!
Blessed Tanit! I might be saved if I could just reach land!
I scanned the waves but spied no gliding predator. Kicking and stroking, I paddled clumsily through the water until my boots touched sand. I did look back then, but saw nothing except a school of fish flashing away. As I walked out of the sea, water streamed from my hair. My skirts and petticoats wrapped in tatters against my legs.
I dropped to my knees on cool white sand as fine as the sugar we tasted at festival days. The warmth of the wool riding jacket toasted my skin, making heat prickle down my arms and across my back. I fumbled with the buttons and yanked it off. My tightly laced linen bodice and the loose linen shift plastered my body. Sucking in air made me retch. I coughed up seawater and my dreams and hopes and fears until my throat was raw. But I was pretty sure I was going to live.
Two people limped toward me across the beach, a male in front and a female behind. He wore a dirty sleeveless shirt and loose trousers unraveling at the hems. She had on a patterned skirt tied around her hips and a loose, sleeveless shirt that exposed her brown arms from shoulder to hand, a sight rarely seen in Adurnam except in high summer.
As the man lurched up, I rose warily and spoke in a friendly way but without cringing.
“Greetings of the day to you, Maester. Maestressa. Salvete.”
He extended a hand in the radicals’ manner of greeting.
I reached out in answer, and only then did I think to wonder why his skin had an ashen cast instead of being brown and healthy; only then did I notice the dead, flat shine of his eyes.
He grabbed my wrist and yanked me toward him.
The woman screamed.
And he bit me.
He bit me.
I shrieked. I kicked him in the knee hard enough to topple him as I yanked my arm out of his grasp. I freed my cane and began pounding him over the head and shoulders. Yet he kept trying to get up. He grasped for me with my blood on his lips, smacking them together as if I were water and he parched.
“Let up! Let up, yee!” The woman stumbled to a halt out of range of my cane, holding her side as if winded. She was my age, with black hair twisted into locks and dusted with sand.
I leaped back, cane raised. She crouched beside the man. My blood smeared his hand, and he started licking it.
From the direction of the barely-seen tower, a high sweet bell tolled over the island like a warning call.
“He bit me!” He had bitten right through the sleeve of my undershift just below my elbow, leaving a tattered edge.
She jerked her chin sideways, and the spasmed blink of her brown eyes made me recoil. “Reckon yee wait. Dey come quick.”
My blood spotted the sand. When I glanced toward the green-blue sea, I was sure I saw a finned shadow churn the depths. I raised my bitten arm toward my lips.
She said, “Yee don’ want a touch dat. Let dey behiques suck it. Or yee become he.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Where yee hail from, maku?”
She had a firm grip on the man’s ankle. He was sniffing the air and groping toward me, but she was strong enough to hold him down.
A greasy slime of fear slid right down my spine. “What’s wrong with him?”
“He a salter.”
“A salter? Like salt plague?” I reeled backward. His dead flat eyes skimmed over me, looking not at me but at what lay beneath my skin: my hot, pumping, salt-laden blood. “Are you saying he’s riddled with the salt plague? The salt plague which makes your mind and body rot? The salt plague for which there is no cure?”
“Owo,” she said, which meant yes in one of the Mande languages.
The urge to retch rose so strongly I ran to the shade where vegetation probed the sterile sands. On hands and knees among the stiff-leafed plants I vomited up bile. My arm throbbed as if hot needles had been jabbed into my flesh and were engaged in a frantic dance aided by a swarm of impatient wasps. His flat, mindless gaze, as dull as an imbecile’s and less cunning. His lurching gait. The salt plague ate your body and your brain. There was no cure, no palliative, no hope, only a slow deterioration into living death.
The thud of footsteps made a counter-rhythm to the fear and pain drumming in my head. Maybe I was going to die, but I wasn’t dead yet. I shoved myself up. Figures swam into my vision.
“Salve. Salve, Perdita.”
Greetings, lost woman. The formal Latin soothed my ears.
A person moved toward me with palms outstretched in the sign of peace. “By Jupiter Magnus! It is Catherine Bell Barahal. How in the unholy hells you got here I cannot imagine.”
I brandished my cane. I wasn’t going to get bitten again. “Don’t come closer. I’ll kill you.”
“Catherine Bell Barahal. Look at me. We’ve met before.”
Five people stood in a cunning circle around me, so I couldn’t bolt. Behind, still on the beach with the sun’s glare washing their skin to the color of rotting corpses, the young woman was tugging on the thing that had bit me, trying to drag it away as it strained toward me. Three men and two women faced me. Four of the strangers were foreign. They had thick straight black hair very like my own and they looked a little like Rory but a lot more like
