restaurant was rolled down, leaving a stripped rectangle of ground soon churned to mud. Even the ceiba tree in the courtyard had netting thrown over it and staked to the ground.
“Where is Vai?” I shouted.
“He is gone down to the jetty!” shouted Uncle Joe. “We shall go as soon as we is done here. Got to move people inland. The Angry Queen come. Someone have offended her. Listen.” A deep dull boom rolled in the southeast. “Her herald speak. Then the flood-bringer shall come.”
I did not ask permission to go to the jetty with them. I simply went. After they had asked me twice to go back, they gave up and let me walk with them if you could call walking what was really leaning into the howl and shuffling forward as against a hand that kept trying to sweep you back. We passed groups of people trudging inland hauling belongings, trundling carts, or carrying cages with bedraggled birds. The city hunkered down like an animal hoping to survive.
When we came to the wide avenue that fronted the jetty, the wind-lashed waters greeted us. Waves clashed and roiled out on the churning brown waters of the bay. Clouds towered along the horizon, as dark as an angry heart.
The wind screamed, blowing my braid parallel to the ground. I could scarcely stand upright as I struggled in the wake of the men toward a damaged building shoreside-one of many boathouses-where folk were trying to hoist a fallen beam. Carpenters had brought tools to cut and split, working beside the wardens they had fought last night. By the evidence of their frantic activity, they were aiming to free people trapped inside as waves pounded at the shattered plank flooring.
A man was laughing.
A lofty shape strode across the bay, flinging shafts. These insubstantial spears ghosted past, curling to become the wind that tore through the streets. The man stood not taller than me, and yet his shadow spanned the sky. His long beautiful black hair writhed, its tendrils growing to engulf every building, every tree, every frail struggling person.
“Run, little sister,” he called mockingly. “I’s the storm’s herald. The Angry Queen follow close behind me. Run if yee can.”
Waves rushed up over the revetment and the wharves and onto the avenue, sizzling around my ankles. He stepped out of the air beside me. His face was scored and scarred by zigzag lines so scintillant I had to look away lest I be blinded. A shaft drove into my flesh, and I found myself on my knees in the rising water. The wave that washed around me sucked out, pulling me toward the sea. By the time I struggled gasping to my feet the shadow had walked at least half a Roman mile west along the shore.
A shout rose from the boathouse as three men were carried out of the building, injured but alive. I ran over. Straddling the fallen beam, men were arguing over whether anyone was left inside. The floorboards had cracked to create a splintering hole in the floor beneath which soughed seawater. An arm appeared, tossing a saw and an axe up into the light. A head appeared, and Vai levered himself up to sit on the edge.
An older man shouted to someone still below. “Kofi-lad! Come up! The flood is coming.”
I pushed through men stowing their gear.
Vai looked up. “I should have known you’d walk straight into danger,” he shouted at me. Then he looked into the hole. “Kofi! You’re the last one. Come up!”
In a wreckage of shattered boards and boats below, Kofi slipped and cursed. “I’s coming. ’Tis just that he is like my uncle.”
“Is someone missing?” I yelled.
Vai said, “The owner is missing. We only found his nephews and the hired boatman.”
Before anyone could stop me, I swung my legs over and dropped. Vai swore, and I had no sooner gotten my balance atop a sliding mass of planks than he hit beside me, the heap shifting. I slid. He caught himself on a hand. A bulb of cold fire cast a glow across the carnage. A wave bubbled up from beneath broken boards. Kofi turned.
“Get out of here, gal!” His contemptuous grimace brought me up short. “Yee’s not impressing any man except Vai.”
With the water coming up, I had no time. “Quiet!”
I balanced across the back of a smashed boat and in a crouch crept up into the nether shadows where the back part of the boathouse had collapsed. I set my hands against one of the ground stilts and leaned there as another wave hissed in, swirling my pagne up to my knees. As the wave subsided, I drew the threads that bind the world into my heart and my ears. And I listened. Nails creaked and groaned as the wind slowly pried at them. Soon the whole edifice would tear loose. Waves slurped beneath the debris. Kofi muttered a complaint, but Vai shushed him.
Human breathing had a distinctive flavor that might flow fast or slowly but that could not be mistaken for a cat’s prim proud air or a dog’s slovenly panting. Another body dwelled here. Blood tainted the air like a sliver of salt. A heart’s erratic pulse cast a fragile line into my hands.
“He is here. Still alive.”
I crawled over the wreckage until I found the spot. I began to pull out boards. The bauble of cold fire drifted down to light my way, for Vai had taken no effort to make it appear like a lamp. Kofi and Vai appeared with an axe and a pry bar. We cleared boards to find another overturned boat beneath, with which we grappled until it became clear it was stuck.
“His head is up under the bow,” I said.
With four powerful swings, Kofi smashed a hole in the half-buried stern, then used the pry bar to clear out the splintered boards. Vai clambered back over the debris to shout up at the remaining men, asking for rope and a net.
“I’ll go,” I said to Kofi. “You’re too big.”
After a hesitation, Kofi stepped back. I squeezed through and crawled up into the marrow of the boat, up beneath the ribs to where a man lay unconscious. I felt along a skinny body to a sunken chest which barely rose and fell. A sticky mat of blood covered his hair, but his skull seemed intact. The ribs of the boat shuddered as Kofi axed a bigger hole in the stern.
“Cat!” he shouted. “Water is rising! Can yee hear me?”
“I’ve got him!” I tugged him through a slime of mud down to the opening. They got hold of his feet, so I shimmied back to cradle his head as they started to pull him out.
A wave poured in, dragging at Kofi and Vai as they braced to hold on to the old man. I lost hold as water surged into the cavity and slammed me into the ribs of the boat.
Then it sucked out. My foot caught and twisted on the rower’s bench above, trapping me under the boat. Spewing and choking, I freed my foot and pushed up to hands and knees. A skin of grime coated my lips. When I breathed in through my nose, a spike of salty water lanced up behind my eyes in a hot knife of pain.
“Cat? Cat!” A shadow blocked the hole. “Throw me some cursed rope, Kofi!”
I heaved, lungs spasming.
Barely heard over the rough tearing rumble of the wind, men cried out in warning.
The whole building rocked as the flood slammed into it and boiled up underneath, filling the entire overturned boat, which was my prison. I had time to suck in one gasp of air before the slippery grasp of the water embraced me. Its moist mouth fastened over my lips to inhale the breath out of my lungs. A liquid voice murmured in my heart: “Let go, little sister. Walk with me and me brother who is the thunder. Walk with us into the storm.”
I open my mouth to call for my mother, for it is her hand clutching mine, but the furious water wrenches her away and I am drowning in the churn of the flood.
My head hit a corner and my knee scraped up splinters like a nest of prickling burning bites. I fought, but fear tore out my courage as water streamed through my parted lips.
Then Vai’s arms held me, and he dragged me out. Foam popped at my nostrils. My head breached. I gasped in air. Vai hauled me up. I hung on him as a dead weight, for I was a quivering frightened drowning child who had lost her papa and mama to the flood.
He carried me over the wreckage of the under-space, slipping and sliding. Kofi had already gone up with the old man. Distant shouts barked a warning.
Another huge wave slammed into the building, shuddering the structure half off its stilts as the entire building groaned. Water gushed into the under-space, rushing up to engulf everything including us.
