184 - Stranger's Island

We gave Kaninjer one more night for preparation and a farewell party with his family, and left the next morning.

Though it was sweet to have the green ribbon untied—albeit with caveats—it was hard to leave Alchaen, knowing I would likely never see him again. He knew me as well as my mother did, and in some ways better.

He knew my foreknowledge, since the fly on the wall had told him about my truth-drug scraping. He didn’t credit it, though, recommending that I seek out a psyche-healer and have myself assessed at the age of twenty-five. Haians are healers, inclined to see all pain as illness.

We went on a privateer frigate. Krena Salhalil had been elected general commander of Yeoli privateers on the Miyatara and Krero had sent to her asking her to scare up a cormarenc for us, but she hadn’t managed it yet.

“Niah-lur-ana?” said Krero, when he heard me direct the captain. “That’s the chocolate people? They’re tiny, hardly a good ally, what do you want there?” I couldn’t say, “You’ll see!”, not yet, though I lived in a world of yearning to. Nor, though I had told them many stories of the Mezem, had I mentioned that I had fallen in love with a Niah there. I’d felt at first in my madness I couldn’t weather what Esora-e would say—she was the second brown-skinned woman in a row—and then secrecy became a habit. I was hoping things might go better if he could actually meet her at the start.

“Krero… while I was away, I learned a few things, including some that might be very helpful to us against the Arkans,” I said. “Why the A-niah, I can’t tell you yet, and maybe never, depending on how things go. But there is very good reason.”

“This isn’t some… leftover delusion?” he said. “You had a few.” The captain with his hand on the tiller looked from me to him and back again.

“Niah-lur-ana,” I said, hardening my face. “That’s an order.” They both said “A-e kras.”

I know that if they had known all, my people would have preferred me to take a precaution I thought of: to write the secret of the wing in a sealed envelope and leave it with Denaina, with the instructions to open it if I did not leave Niah-lur-ana alive. Then I would tell the A-niah as soon as I got there that I had done so. In the end, I decided to trust Niku instead. Esora-e would have had apoplexy if he’d known.

The weather was fair and the wind behind us, and we made Niah-lur-ana in two days, skirting well around Ro and the Arkan base there. Niku had written me that foreigners were only welcome on one of the A-niah’s islands, and our captain knew the way.

Giant cormorants are common in this part of the Miyatara; I remembered Niku’s tales of tormenting them on dares with her friends as a child. To get into the port on Stranger’s Island, as they call it, a ship must thread through the rocks that are the birds’ nesting grounds. They hate noise, and they’ve been known to gang-attack ships, so the captain said to us, “Let’s just say, this is one harbour where you don’t go in singing or cheering.”

At least I got to see one, borrowing the captain’s far-lookers. It was at least five man-heights long, its huge feathers black with a sheen of brilliant green, and a yellow beak as long as a sword; it pulled itself ponderously up onto a rock and looked back at me with one baleful crimson eye, as big as a mamoka’s. “Yes, they’re impressive, Chevenga,” the captain said, “but not as much as the birds that prey on them, which do fly. The sea-eagle; it has a wingspan half again as wide as the cormorant is long. I’ve never seen one close, just circling high in the air; you see them a lot around here, actually… look, there.” He pointed up.

I hid my smile in a quick pursing of my lips. I’m not so sure that’s a bird. The A-niah liked to scout. For all I knew, they’d tracked us all the way from Haiu Menshir.

The port of Stranger’s Island is in a sandy lagoon fringed with the same kind of trees that you see on Haiu Menshir. Yeoli captains call them paila trees, from the Haian word for tree. Among them stood houses not unlike those on Haiu Menshir, except many are roofed not with paila fronds but giant cormorant feathers, and every post and beam is brilliantly painted, in every colour imaginable. I began to understand why Niku always bought the brightest bolt of silk she could find in an Arkan shop.

We were still outside the spit of sand when a swarm of tiny brilliant sails bore down on us. She had told me about the wind-board, a tiny flat boat with a single mast that one person sailed standing; they liked to attack Arkan ships with masses of them. I ran to the bow and climbed up on the figurehead. One whose sail was white painted with a black lightning bolt pulled ahead of the others, its rider leaning lower against the wind than the others, clad only in a scarlet hip-pareo. I knew that figure. I yelled her name in my battlefield voice, and she yelled mine back in hers.

What’s she going to do, I thought for a moment as she streaked towards the ship, ram us? I sprang down to where she was aimed, where the side was lower; in the last instant she turned the board hard, dropped the sail and leapt up, expertly using her momentum. I caught her hands, she scrambled up and then we were pressed together from tongues to toes, our arms all over each other. Well, Esora-e, I thought, now you know. I snuck a peek. My people all looked as if they’d been pole-axed.

“Look, omores,” Niku said as we came into the lagoon, pointing her beautiful brown arm to the longest of the piers. “You see that woman in the bright blue pareo, who looks like she’s holding—”

“Vriah!” I was suddenly blinded with tears. “Our Mezem child… our miracle… we are both out and we are both free and she is too and…” We both dissolved in tears, then, clinging to each other. “I think they’re acquainted,” I heard Sachara say drily to Krero.

The woman in blue Niku introduced to me as Beshan, though she generally went by the nickname Baska, “my heart’s sister, you’d say.” Beside her a man carried an older woman on his back; Niku’s mother, I guessed. I fairly ran down the gangplank, to hold my daughter. She was a delicate brown, but her eyes were unmistakably mine, the same deep brown and with the same shape. She had only wisps of hair, but they were as bright blond as my father’s.

I peeked back onto the ship. They all looked as if the pole-axes with which they’d been transfixed had been bolted to the deck. “Very… well… acquainted,” Krero breathed back to Sach.

Look into a baby’s eyes, and you and she become all there is in the world. Vriah stared at me, fascinated, smiling from the moment I took her in my arms, then reached for my nose with her tiny soft hand. Tears blinded me. Another arm besides Niku’s tightened around my back; my mother’s. I tried to introduce them to each other, but my tongue locked up, so they introduced themselves, and then it was scores of introductions. No doubt all the Yeolis immediately forgot all the Niah names but Niku, and all the A-niah forgot all the Yeoli names but Chevenga. I felt stripped by their eyes, knowing their thought: This is the one who knows.

We’d have to switch soon to formality, Niku told me, so I pulled myself together. They had indeed scouted us; in the sand under the trees between the first house and the spit, tables and blankets and rugs were set out, and in the centre was a great mound of sand. “There’s a very large pig under there, along with many maoloas—bundles of earth-apples and other fruit—baking with it,” Niku said. “And wine, though perhaps you all want to start first with”—she said a Niah word which I guessed meant a fruit—“juice? Ah… there they come.”

A procession of A-niah approached, headed by an ancient woman being carried by a middle-aged man. She wore a winged headdress and cape of blue-white feathers so tiny and light that the cape fluttered and floated around her naked brown shoulders with every motion. The other three who were clearly official wore similar headdresses and shorter capes, but in different colours. They were the clan heads, or Speakers to Sea, as A-niah call them. “Taekun, my sept, is red,” Niku whispered to me. “Maekun is the blue; Daeka green.” The ancient woman was the Wasteega Foa, the Oracle.

Their faces were solemn, and I felt three times as stripped by these eyes, even those of the Oracle, though they were clouded so white she must be blind. The woman in green looked at me with undisguised anger; she was the main naysayer that Niku had written about, it seemed. They had guards, wearing armour of some steely-grey leather I didn’t recognize—shark skin, perhaps, since Niku had mentioned that in Arko—and two apiece of the same axes I knew from seeing Niku wield them in Arko. Of course we weren’t unarmed. I wore no armour, only Chirel, to show trust, but everyone else except Kaninjer was fully-geared. I had the thought that is natural, though you never voice it: in a pinch, we could take them. But we’d likely never leave their waters alive; it wasn’t as if we’d only have to outrun the wind-boards.

“Chevenga, do these people worship birds?” Kunarda whispered. “Everywhere it’s feathers and wings, and, have you noticed, every single one of them has a tattoo of a bird somewhere?” Of course I knew Niku’s, which was on her calf, with my lips; now I noticed them on others. One man had a stunningly ornate pair of half-folded wings covering his entire back; a woman among the guards with relatively fair skin had a bluebird tattooed across her eyes like a mask. “The little feathers on the wrists, too,” he said. “I wonder what that means?”

That I had an answer for, since Niku had mentioned it. “That they’re married. It’s the couple’s pledge to each other.” I would end up with one, if Niku and I had our way. Luckily he didn’t persist with his first question; I quickly thought up a story about cormorants and sea-eagles in case someone else did.

The procession came to a halt, and someone presented Niku with insignia: a headdress of the same feathers, shaped and coloured like a breaking wave, but tipped with red, and a belt with plates of shell painted with the same pattern and holding two axes in sheathes. She put them on. I was formal as I could be without a demarchic shirt or seal, the long sleeves making me sweat in the south Miyatara heat.

She made an announcement in Niah, then in Yeoli. “I speak now as Speaker to your General, or Speaker to Armies, as we also say. Welcome to Niah-lur-ana, all of you, but you in particular, Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e.”

“I ask you to translate to your people for me, Speaker,” I said formally. “On behalf of all of us and myself, I thank you for your welcome and your hospitality, which we—I in particular—take as an exceptional honour.” In other words, I understand why you’d want to kill me and appreciate that you haven’t tried. She translated, and the Oracle said something, which Niku translated back. “Honour to all of us, then, for we will be close as kin, she says. It is what she sees.” The lips of the clan head in green tightened, and she said something, which Niku translated grudgingly. “Speaker to Sea Riahla nar sept Daeka doesn’t like the fact that this is taken as an already-finished debate, but she says she will accept your thanks, for what they are worth.”

“Please tell her that my understanding is that the debate isn’t finished,” I said, “and I mean to enter into it in good faith.”

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