Skeen's Return (23 page)

The stump was ugly with ooze and suppuration, the blood vessels leaking blood with a freedom that prophesied disaster if nothing was done to check the blood loss. Skeen examined it with an eerie detachment that upset Timka more than the appearance of the arm. “Give me one of those pads.” Skeen's voice was brisk though weakness produced a few breaks in it.

“Skeen, why don't you let me do that.” Timka suppressed a shudder and reached for the pad Lipitero was holding. “I've cleaned your hand, I can clean your stump.”

Skeen started to protest, then she scowled and nodded, a tight, grudging dip of her head. “Petro, hold that righthand cylinder with the pinhole thing facing the cloth, push on it for a second, let it go. Timmy, hold the cloth steady till the spray wets it.” She gave Timka a sour smile that told her she'd meant to be irritating, using the nickname Timka despised.

Timka ignored that bit of byplay and cleaned the stump, then Lipitero sprayed it with a generous coating of the antiseptic; at Skeen's bidding she also sprayed the skin of the arm up to the elbow. By that time the arm was shaking and Skeen was near exhaustion. Her eyes looked glazed, her jaw was trembling, she was leaning most of her weight on Timka. “The other cylinder,” she said, her voice slow and wavering. “Uncap it and spray it over the stump, cover all of the exposed flesh, bring the spray around and do the same for the arm skin, about two inches from the end. That should do it.” By the end of this long and difficult speech, her voice was a thread that Lipitero had to lean close and flare her mobile ears to catch.

The second cylinder produced a film that immediately hardened and went opaque; it was tough and flexible as a layer of real skin, porous enough to let air reach the healing flesh. Skeen gazed at the grayish film, sighed. “Help me down. I'll sleep now.”

For two days Skeen let them keep her in the cabin—well, it might be better to say she hadn't the energy to argue. On the morning of the third day, she got out of bed and gave herself a thorough sponge bath, ignoring Timka's protests. If she sat rather heavily on the bunk when she was finished, she ignored that also. She managed to pull on the tunic and press its closures the way she liked them, a little open at the neck, but she had to let Timka help her with the trousers, something that snapped her temper into shards. When she was ready to leave, she wouldn't let Timka hold her arm, and when Timka tried to walk beside her, she hurried ahead. The ship rolled over a swell, she overbalanced and smacked her arm against the side of the corridor, crashed onto her knees. When Timka hurried to help her up, she swore fluently in at least a dozen tongues, pushed Timka away and staggered on toward the rectangle of brilliant light where the deck door stood wide to facilitate the flushing of old air in crew and passenger quarters. Gritting her teeth, resolved to endure what she knew was going to keep happening, Timka followed her out. She hesitated, then climbed to the quarterdeck and stood beside Pegwai and Lipitero, watching Skeen greet the Aggitj, who danced in circles about her, laughing, throwing questions at her, hardly waiting for her answers, noisy enthusiastic energetic mob of four masquerading as four dozen. Maggí joined the mob, her Aggitj heritage overcoming her usual calm; she whistled Rannah to her, shooed the boys away and introduced her daughter to Skeen. Chulji came swooping down, winged in wide circles over Skeen's head, screaming a seahawk's greeting, getting a wave and shriek from her before he sailed off to return to his highwatch duties.

Timka watched Skeen take a step, misjudge her balance and fall sprawling before any of those around could catch her; she made a joke of it, exaggerating her clumsiness, made another joke out of accepting help back onto her feet, got those around her laughing with her. Timka sighed. Not so bad as she thought it might be; Skeen had plenty of experience protecting herself, but bad enough for me and anyone else she knows she can't fool. Me and anyone else who has to help with the things she can't yet do for herself. Two days till Sikuro? Three? I suppose I can last that long without—she smiled grimly—killing her or myself. Pegwai coughed, touched her arm, startling her as he seemed to read what she was thinking. “I imagine it's not so funny for you, Ti. Give me a whistle when it gets too bad.”

“What makes you think she'd let you do for her?” Timka heard the bitterness in her voice with its tinge of jealousy and bit down hard on her lip. Lifefire, do I think I own her? She remembered some things she'd surmised about the relationship between Skeen and Pegwai and had the grace not to question him further. “Don't mind me—that's irritation speaking. Thanks. I've got a feeling I'm going to need a respite now and then.”

Nightmares. That night, then the next and the next.

Timka had sucked more than language out of Skeen.

A compacted darkness inhabited the back of her head. Images peeled off it. Each dream pared it away a little. Gradually it was being absorbed into her consciousness. As she had momentarily become one with Skeen's body, the dreams were making her one with Skeen's history.

Images of Skeen's appalling uncle, her scarcely less appalling aunt whose capacity to not-know surpassed anything Timka had ever seen even among those champion not-knowers, the Mountain Min. Image of a skinny battered child murdering the man and with that image a volcanic rage that terrified Timka. It was beyond anything she'd experienced before; she was unsure she could hold it inside her skin. It passed off and left her feeling gray and lifeless as a handful of ash. Image of Skeen and the old man Harmon, affection binding them, but so twisted and strange Timka could hardly recognize what it was. Skeen being punched out when Harmon was drunk or drugged or feeling destroyed by circumstances so impossible it seemed impossible anyone could endure them. Harmon also taking endless pains with Skeen, protecting her from dangers Timka could only half understand, in the end giving his life for her. Image of Harmon dying. With that scene, a grief so shattering that it could not be endured; Timka was catapulted out of sleep, sobbing, tears flooding from her eyes. Image of Skeen as an unwilling laborer in a fish cannery, one of a cohort of street teens swept up by an amorphous and much hated authority and thrust into indentured servitude that was supposed to train them and give them a means of making a living other than thievery, begging or whoring, though the authority was careful not to educate them beyond the mechanical motions needed to complete their assigned tasks. Reading was far too unsettling, numbers made a pauper uppity and contentious. When she woke from that dream, Timka understood far better what Skeen was groping to express when she spoke of Angelsin and herself being on the same team, the Scum Team. She still couldn't agree with Skeen's self-assessment, but she understood better why Skeen felt that way. As if to counter the dark images of the first spate of dreams, she lived with Skeen her first flight in Picarefy, shared with her that transcendent joy. The other dreams on the days while they were crossing the Halijara were ranged somewhere between the misery of the childhood scene and the joys of her flights in Picarefy, her intermittent happiness with an assortment of lovers, the other sort of happiness she found in her work. Timka felt something of a voyeur, but she met sleep eagerly those nights, wanting more and more of Skeen's life spread before her.

The dreams did more than narrate through sometimes grotesque images and symbols a sketchy history of Skeen's life. They started Timka reassessing her own; she'd thought herself unhappy, but compared to what she was seeing most nights her childhood had been close to idyllic. Except for Telka. She considered Telka and the Holavish, went over what she and the Poet knew of them. A small group, cohesive and fiercely determined to impose their views on the rest of the Mountain Min, a group far more diffuse and disorganized, without much leadership and generally unhappy with what the Holavish intended. They needed someone willing to stand up to those twisters … I've got to go back. The thought startled her so much she exclaimed aloud the single word
back
without a hint of a question to it. No. No. That's nonsense. Didn't they drive me out, at least, let Telka nearly kill me without defending me from her and do nothing, nothing at all, to stop me when I ran? Even Carema didn't try to help me stay, only to help me run. No, no, be fair, Timka, I wasn't ready then to face Telka and her lot. She knew that, she knew it was better to get me away until I grew up enough to protect myself. Took my time about it, didn't I. No, no, it's absurd, I can't go back, I don't belong there, not any more. Lead them? They wouldn't follow me to a mating feast, what hope they'd follow to a fight? No, forget that. There's another life waiting for me on the other side. I'll see that before.… Before I make up my mind? Lifefire, it's ridiculous.

During the day she called Pegwai to his promise and retreated into a corner of the main hold where she meditated and practiced the ancient skills of the mind duelist for the clash she expected at the Stranger's Gate. Telka would be waiting there, no doubting that. Surprising how soon the skills came back, how quickly the creaking in her brain subsided. But she had no illusions about the outcome of a duel between her and Telka. A few days of practice and contemplation could never compete with years of discipline and experience, no matter how great the raw talent. And there wasn't that much difference between her and her sister. She was a little quicker, a little more fluid in her thinking, had a broader range—that was all. In everyday living that might be an asset, in the more specialized world of the duelist, it was a weakness, a diffusion of forces. Were there mind duelists in Skeen's world? If you ask her, Telka will know. Somehow she'll know. Sometimes I think the wind itself breathes news of me to her. Better she doesn't know I'm trying to train, better she keeps despising and underestimating me. I don't understand her, I never have. She despises me, she knows she can wipe her feet on me, but she's so afraid of me she won't let me alone. I don't understand her. Go back? Nonsense.

WAITING FOR WIND IN SIKURO, ROOD SAEKOL

Sikuro was a city set in a temperate paradise, a smallish sunny valley cradled between two sets of cloud-raking peaks, cultivated by folk who managed three harvests a year, with three separate crops grown from the same earth. This is how it is: start with a reed-like plant (upper level) that produces a silky tough fiber they sell mostly to the sedentary Chalarosh for their world-renowned looms; in the same mound plant a berry vine (midlevel) for jams, cordials and brandy, and a tuber vine (ground level) that is a nitrogen fixer and produces a tuber with sweet yellow flesh that can be baked, roasted or fried, whose peels can be fermented and distilled into a colorless alcohol smooth as white velvet and strong as a simoon. On the mountainsides the Sikurose ran herds of rock leapers and wiry mountain cattle; they made cheeses from their milk, sausages of their flesh, tanned their hides, spun the leaper hair into worsted they dyed and knitted into bulky sweaters, most of which they kept for their own use. The valley was a quiet peaceful place; the different Waves who lived there kept more or less to their own areas but maintained comfortable relationships with each other. The mountains protected them from land raiders (if there were Mountain Min here, they kept very quiet and only the herdsmen and women knew they existed), and the long sinuous neck of the harbor took three days to traverse and was so narrow in places that any ship traversing it was completely vulnerable to attack from the cliffs that hung over it. There were small stone watchtowers built at each of these narrows, with signal arms on each raised high enough to be seen from the next. Each ship that entered the Neck was announced by a staccato leap of jointed arms along the neck and the Five Families who ruled Sikuro and Sikuro Valley prepared for the visitor. Should the visitor be a known person, that too could be flashed from tower to tower; the Families liked to know who they dealt with. There were the standard bribes to be solicited, the perquisites of each office, there were the official fees to be collected—and there were merchants to be notified. The Families gave as well as took; they kept the peace, often by drastic means, they facilitated contacts for the captains of the trading ships that called at Sikuro, they arranged dinners and other entertainments and they policed their merchants; a Sikuro tag on an item meant top quality. Their name was a valuable asset and they meant to keep it that way.

Maggí set down her wine glass and looked around at her guests. Skeen, Timka, Pegwai, Lipitero, the four Aggitj, The Boy (Beast curled sleeping at his feet), Chulji, and her daughter Rannah. “We will be lifting anchor shortly before dawn if the wind's on time. We'll be tying up at Sikuro's wharves before the morning is half over. You know Sikuro, Pegwai? Good. You can add your voice to mine. Lipitero, I'm sorry to say this, but you'll have to stay aboard and keep off the deck, even robed and even at night. If you thought the Funor of Fennakin were hard to get on with, believe me, they're children compared to the Families when they want something. These aren't exiles—they left home because they had too much energy and intelligence to be comfortable there. A more ruthless set of bastards you'll not find on Mistommerk, and I don't except the desert Chalarosh or a Nagamar shaman on a vengeance quest. But if you don't stick temptation under their noses, they'll contrive to ignore it for the long term advantages they get out of not antagonizing each other. They won't want to compete over who gets you, at least, I think not, if you don't flaunt yourself.” She cleared her throat, took a sip of wine, waited a moment, but there were no questions. “Next thing, winds. Even with a favorable tide flow, the current isn't strong enough to carry a ship the size of my Goum Kiskar against a fairly heavy wind. You'll remember, I hove to outside the Neck waiting for sunup before starting into it. It's early autumn here south of the equator, that's the best time to catch a good wind; five days out of six morning winds blow south, evening winds north, it's something you can usually count on. There's something you should be prepared for, though. A few years back I was stuck at Sikuro for a full month waiting for a steady wind blowing the right direction. When the wind did blow, it came out of the north, the other days we had useless puffs. That was autumn too. It's something to think about. I'm planning to be here four days. Chances are there'll be no problem leaving when I want, I just catch the evening blow and ride it north. But.…” She spread her hands.