The Fire Sermon (25 page)

“I’m guessing you won’t accept this as an excuse to get out of rowing?” Kip asked, looking down at his empty left sleeve as he descended the ladder from the jetty to join me in the boat.

“You’re guessing right,” I said, bracing the boat against the jetty while he clambered in, and taking from him the rope that he’d untied from the pier. “By rights I should make you do it all, as I’ve got the job of navigating, but since we don’t just want to go round in circles, I suppose I’ll have to row, too.” I threw the rope to the bottom of the boat, where it curled at Kip’s feet. “Anyway, if the wind picks up, and we can work out how, we’ll use the sail.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” he said. “The less wind the better, in this tiny tub, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Give it an hour of rowing and then see if you feel the same way.”

I’d always loved water, growing up by the river. This felt different, though: even on a calm night like this, the ocean’s swelling beneath us was more insistent, more forceful, than the river’s current had ever been.

The sound of our maneuvering and scraping between the other boats seemed raucous to me, but no lights appeared on the path above, and after only a few minutes of rowing we found ourselves at the mouth of the harbor, where the swell was higher. I was reminded again of Zach, and the river. There was a game we used to play, dropping opened seed pods into the river and watching from the bridge to see whose would win the race downstream. Now I felt as though Kip and I were setting out in one of those tiny seed pods, lost in the enormity of water.

chapter 17

The instinct that had pushed me to leave that night had been a good one: the weather held fine and the moon’s light was so strong that we could see the land behind us even hours after setting off. Later, beyond the sight of land, the swell rose waist high above the boat, but it was steady and regular. We found that if we kept the boat facing head-on to the swell and didn’t let ourselves turn sideways, we could negotiate the waves well enough. After some grappling we managed to raise the sail and learned to steer a zigzag course to travel against the wind. Kip kept glancing back at the absent shore, but he seemed reassured by my certainty as I guided us. At one point, an hour or so before the first hint of dawn, I cautioned him to slow the boat. “There’s an outcrop of rock here, not far—we don’t want to go aground on it.” I could feel it, like an eyelash in my eye, or a piece of gravel in my shoe: small but impossible to ignore.

Even by the moon’s constant light we couldn’t see anything, straining our necks in all directions while trying to keep the boat head-on to the mounting swell. Then I shouted at him to throw the tiller hard left and dug my oar in, too, for added traction. As the boat shuddered to the right, we saw it, not two feet from the other side of the boat: the different shade of darkness among the black water. It was swallowed by the subsequent wave, but in the next trough we could see, again, the saw-bladed silhouette of rock.

After that, Kip stopped asking me how far I thought it would be and left me to my squinting concentration. We endured the whole day, rationing the water in meager sips. When night came it gave us respite, though the sea around us seemed to expand with the gathering darkness. The last dregs of the water were gone now, but the moon, at least, was bright enough to see by, just. When dawn had begun to break and the swell was lower, we tried to take shifts at sleeping. I went first but couldn’t manage even my allotted spell. I’d hoped that sleep might distract me from my thirst, but when I closed my eyes my mouth felt drier than ever, my tongue too large for my mouth.

When he took his turn, Kip fared no better, shifting awkwardly in the bottom of the boat where he’d tried to stretch out. “Even the worst of the swamps and rocks we’ve slept on since we escaped didn’t bounce about like this,” he said. “I can hardly stay awake, but damned if I can sleep, either. Move over.” So he resumed his spot next to me and we pushed onward, the sun continuing to rise behind us.

It was well after noon on the second day, the salt spray making my lips raw, when we came to the reef. My visions had taught me to expect it, but I hadn’t realized how daunting it would be: that vast expanse of water from which the rocks jutted unforgivingly. Some emerged six feet from the water; others lurked just beneath the surface, the sharpness visible only in the trough of each swell. The reef spread as far as I could see, reminding me of the boulder-strewn plain surrounding Alice’s cottage and the settlement.

The wind had dropped, but still made precise steering difficult, and impossible with the sail up, so we lowered it and rowed haltingly among the rock-studded waves. Often the passage between outcrops was so narrow that we had to draw in the oars. If I lost concentration for an instant, the rocks clawed at the base of the boat. After two hours, the island itself became visible: as sharp as the outcrops of the reef, but towering conical and high. In some ways having the island in sight made the travel more frustrating, as we couldn’t proceed straight toward it. Instead, we were forced to follow the painstaking paths of the reef, sketching an intricate route that seemed as often to take us away from the island as closer to it.

After hours of this, I lost my way. I could feel the rocks massing beneath the boat, but seemed to have lost the thread that had guided me this far. I lay at the front of the boat, one hand on the surface of the water, and groped through the shapes the water made in my mind. For almost an hour we just drifted, Kip nervously probing the water with an oar, fending off the outcrops of rock piercing the ocean’s surface. The scraping of rock on the bottom of the boat was an interminable grinding of teeth. The boat’s base, those few inches of wood, seemed now like such a fragile membrane to keep at bay a world made of rock and dark water. I tried to drag my mind back into focus, but the demands of my body were distracting me. The sun had been doing its cruel work above, and my headache seemed to pulse in time with the waves. My lips were so parched that they split with each grimace, seeping blood that did nothing to assuage my thirst.

A larger wave sent us lurching to the side, where the prow lodged on a barely protruding rock. With the front of the boat raised, the back was forced downward. Kip, standing quickly, was already calf-deep in water, and more was thrusting in with each wave. The boat groaned on its rock fulcrum as Kip scrambled to join me at the front. It took both of us, shoving our oars against an outcrop to our left, to dislodge us from the rock. When freed, however, the boat was still half-flooded and low in the water. Every wave pushed it again against the hungry rocks.

I tried to force my mind clear, ignoring the water massing at my ankles, the rasp of the hull on stone. Remembering how I’d mastered my thoughts in the Keeping Rooms, under the Confessor’s interrogations, I pictured again the mussel knife in my mother’s hands, all those years ago. I made my mind the knife.

And there it was: the route once more opening up for me, meandering between the shards of the reef. As I took up my oar to direct us once again, I heard Kip exhale in relief as he grabbed the bucket and began bailing out the water.

Even when we’d penetrated to the heart of the reef, where the island loomed, it was hard to see how we could land. The island punctured the sea steeply, its walls sheer and black. There were no signs of habitation, no hint of a spot where we could safely draw close, let alone land. It took about an hour, straining my exhausted mind, for me to guide us around to the western side where, when we rowed close enough, we could make out a fissure in the steep sides, barely visible until we were twenty feet away. Yet when we rowed through, under a natural archway and into the shadow cast by the steep walls, the fracture in the stone widened into a small harbor. A fleet of boats, in a mismatched collection of colors, nodded in rows. A stony beach curved around the bay, where a blunt tower squatted. On the pier, in the late-afternoon light, two children were playing.

Kip turned to me. His skin was mottled brown and white with sunburn and salt spray, his lips cracked. He barely looked like himself, until he grinned.

“It’s real,” he said.

The journey had been hellish enough for me, and I’d known that the island awaited us. For him, I realized, it had been an act of faith. Faith in the island, or in me. As the harbor encircled us, I looked up at the peak jabbing defiantly at the sky. I matched Kip’s smile, which turned to a laugh, and we were laughing together. The laughter was raspy, our voices scoured with salt, but they rang out unguarded. For the first time since our escape from Wyndham, we didn’t care if we were overheard. The gulls on the masts of the moored ships took off, and the children turned to stare at us.

Something’s wrong with the children, I thought, as we rowed up to the pier, where they had drawn closely together and were staring at us in silence. It wasn’t the children’s deformities that struck me. They were obvious, though not rare: the little boy was a dwarf, his limbs short in comparison to his strong torso. The girl’s fingers, still holding her fishing line, were webbed, and her bare toes, too. I’d seen such things many times. Why then were these children so unsettling? It was only when we’d looped the rope around the pier and climbed the metal ladder, and the little girl raised one webbed hand to her face to swipe away a fly, that I realized the children were not branded. The rush of pleasure it gave me to recognize that unblemished skin made me forget my thirst. When I looked at Kip I saw that he’d noted it, too: his own hand was unconsciously tracing his own brand, while he stared at the children.

“Are you strangers?” asked the boy.

Kip squatted next to him conspiratorially and jerked his head at me: “I am a bit strange, I suppose. But she’s stranger.”

The girl laughed, but the boy kept his face stern. “If you’re strangers I should tell Owen.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “Why don’t you take us to him?”

The children led us along a path that climbed steeply up from the beach, but we hadn’t gone more than twenty feet when we saw three men in blue rushing down the path from the tower. Kip raised his arm in greeting, but the men were approaching rapidly and, I noted with alarm, bearing swords. Kip turned back to me.

“There’s nowhere else to run,” I said. I was too exhausted even to cry. So we waited, Kip’s arm still raised, but his gesture of greeting now a sign of surrender.

chapter 18

The men were quickly upon us. I’d raised my arms, too, but found myself, like Kip, forced to the ground, where one man held me down, his knee in my back. The tallest man turned my head to the side and quickly, efficiently, traced my brand with his finger as I coughed sand from my mouth. Next to me Kip was spared the same investigation, his empty sleeve speaking for itself. All of this took place in silence, with no noise other than the panting of the men. The man’s kneecap was jammed against my spine, his hand still holding my face against the sandy earth.

The tallest of them now spoke, but he addressed himself to the children. “How many times have you been warned about strangers? Any boat, any person you don’t recognize, and you’re to call the watchmen.”

“We were coming for you,” protested the boy. “I knew they were strangers.”

“He’s not stranger. She’s stranger,” added the little girl helpfully.

The children’s unconcerned manner seemed to calm the man. “We saw them from the lookout post,” he said to the girl. At last he turned to us. “And we make it our business to greet strangers.” With a toss of his chin he gestured to Kip to stand, which he did, half hauled upright by the grasp of the other men. “You came all the way from the mainland in that?” He shot a look at our dinghy. “How did you get through the reef?”

Kip glanced down at me. My face was still pressed sideways against the ground, but I managed a slight nod.

“She knew where to go.”

“Who told you?” demanded the man. “Who gave you a map?”

“Nobody,” I said.

One of the men emptied the sack that had fallen from my shoulder, using his foot to spread its sparse contents over the ground: the empty water flask, the knife and matches. The blanket, damp from the bottom of the boat.

The tall man bent to me, pulled me upright himself, and looked me over curiously as I brushed the sand from the side of my face. The men were all Omegas, all branded. One was a dwarf, like the boy; the dark-haired one held his sword in a malformed hand, fingers fused into a single broad digit. The tallest had a twisted foot, though it seemed hardly to slow him down. I could see him searching out my deformity.

“You’re a seer,” he finally said. It wasn’t a question.

“I’ve dreamed about the island,” I told him.

“Dreams are one thing, but to find your way through the reef—you dream maps?”

I couldn’t explain to him how it had been. I remember when Mom had needed to put a nail in the kitchen wall to hang more pots, how she’d rapped along the white wall until the sound changed, the lack of reverberations revealing the wooden beam behind the plaster. My mind’s probing of the water and the reef felt like that: a sounding out. But how could I, parched and shaking, explain that to these strangers as they stood over us, weapons drawn?

In the end what put a stop to their questions was our evident exhaustion. I was stumbling over my words. Beside me, Kip was dazed and thick-tongued with tiredness and thirst. The dark-haired man nudged our interrogator, said quietly: “We’re not going to get anything more out of them tonight.”

The tall man looked at us for a moment, then spoke swiftly. “All right. We’ll lock them up for now, send word to the fort, and take them up at dawn. But I want extra watchmen out tonight, at all posts.”

We hadn’t the energy even to object when we were locked in a low hut by the base of the tower. Our bag had been taken, but we were given food at least, and fresh water, which tasted sweet on our salt-parched tongues. When the candle was out and the gulls had settled down on the rooftop, we lay on the straw mat and pulled the single blanket over us, relishing the stillness of a world no longer rocked by the sea. Outside, in the harbor, the boats held their evening conversation: the creaking of bows, the straining at buoys.