E. P. Beaumont

Akiko and Sita played a game of Worst Case (this time it was a cargo-landing disaster) while Yasmin tied off the knots, over and under. Jehen, who could read now, told her that the sailors of Karis and the Original World made things fast with knots.

Sailors – not the star-kind, but on water. 

Yasmin thought of the morning ablutions, and the sacred ration with which one washed out the eating-dishes and saluted the Groves. She could not imagine so much water that one traveled over it.

“But it’s true,” Jehen said.

“It’s a story,” Yasmin said. “Like the land of everything you want to eat.”

***

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“Crow’s wing, they call my sort of hair, on Karis,” the Ship’s Doctor explained, “and yours, little sisters and brother, they call storm-cloud or lamb’s-wool.”

All those names were poetical borrowings from the vocabulary of the Original World, archaic and melancholy. On Sarronny, there were neither crows nor sheep, and the atmosphere did not make clouds that one could see from the ground.

“With those leaf-and-water eyes,” he told Jehen, “you’ll have an Astok in your family tree, somewheres-a-back. That eye color is recessive, but they stitched it into their genome for fancy’s sake.”

Yasmin laughed aloud at that. She and Ferenc looked at each other, brown eyes to brown, and Jehen frowned as they burst into giggles together.

“Or it could have been chance,” the Quartermaster said. “The Astokka haven’t an exclusive claim on everything, though to hear their own legends, you’d think they invented the sunrise. And sex, too, into the bargain.”

***

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Between the tall windows of the refectory hung panels showing robed figures fishing from reed-boats. Yasmin spooned up pea-and-bean stew (“your third serving!” Jehen had said, “just how are you going to dance?”). The panel opposite their table showed an androgynous figure in many layers of sea-green and sky-blue and violet-white mist, as if she were clothed in sea and atmosphere. She stood in the reed-boat, one foot on either side of the plank seat, with the oars hanging loose in their locks; she smiled slightly, her palms upturned and thumb meeting forefinger; from each hand stretched a silver thread as thin as a weaving-spider’s guy-wire; at the other end, in the water, fish swarmed about it.

“‘She fishes neither with pole nor hook, and catches wisdom,’” quoted Genubi.

Yasmin frowned, focusing on the absurd image but not losing her attention to the delicious food. So that was the Goddess of the Ancient Sea. She had imagined the whirling dance of ocean, polar ice, and forest, not this rather absurd aristocrat standing in a boat in a way, what’s more, calculated to tip the vessel. 

***

POV Yasmin, age 17. From novel-in-progress, Ship’s Heart. 

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