Ship of Magic

Perhaps, Wintrow conceded, that was true. He wouldn't bother complaining to his father to find out. Pointless to complain about one night's discomfort. His silence seemed to bother Torg.

“You think you'll get me in trouble with your whining, don't you? Well, you won't! I know your father better than that.”

Wintrow didn't even bother to reply to the man's threatening taunt. At the moment of deciding not to argue further, he had given up all emotional investment in the situation. He had withdrawn his anma into himself as he had been taught to do, divesting it of his anger and offense as he did so. It was not that these emotions were unworthy or inappropriate; it was simply that they were wasted upon the man. He swept his mind clean of reactions to the filthy blanket. By the time he reached the foredeck, he had regained not just calmness, but wholeness.

He leaned against the rail and looked out across the water. There were other ships anchored out in the harbor. Lights shone yellow from these vessels. He looked them over. His own ignorance surprised him. The ships were foreign objects to him, the son of many generations of traders and sailors. Most of them were trading vessels, interspersed with a few fishing or slaughter ships. The traders were transom-sterned for the most part, with aftercastles that sometimes reached almost to the mainmasts. Two or three masts reached toward the rising moon from each vessel.

Along the shore, the night market was in full blossom of sound and light. Now that the heat of the day was past, open cook fires flared in the night as the drippings of meat sizzled into them. An errant breeze brought the scent of the spiced meat and even the baking bread in the outdoor ovens. Sound, too, ventured boldly over the water in isolated snippets, a high laugh, a burst of song, a shriek. The moving waters caught the lights of the market and the ships and made of them rippling streamers of reflection. “Yet there is a peace to all of it,” Wintrow said aloud.

“Because it is all as it should be,” Vivacia rejoined. Her voice was a woman's timbre. It had the same velvety darkness as the night, with the same tinge of smoke. Warm pleasure welled up in Wintrow at the sound of it, and pure gladness. It took him a moment to wonder at his reaction.

“What are you?” he asked her in quiet awe. “When I am away from you, I think I should fear you, or at least suspect you. Yet now I am aboard, and when I hear your voice, it is like . . . like I imagine being in love would be.”

“Truly?” Vivacia demanded, and did not hide the thrill of pleasure in her own voice. “Then your feelings are like to my own. I have been awakening for so long ... for years, for all the life of your father and his father, ever since your great-great-grandmother gave herself into my keeping. Then today, when finally I could stir, could open my eyes to the world again, could taste and smell and hear you all with my own senses, then I knew trepidation. Who are you, I wonder, you creatures of flesh and blood and bone, born in your own bodies and doomed to perish when that flesh fails? And when I wonder those things, I fear, for you are so foreign to me, I cannot know what you will do to me. Yet when one of you is near, I feel you are woven of the same strand as I, that we are but extensions of a segmented life, and that together we complete one another. I feel a joy in your presence, because I feel my own life wax greater when we are close to one another.”

Wintrow leaned on the rail, as motionlessly silent as if he were listening to a blessed poet. She was not looking at him; she did not need to look at him to see him. Like him, she gazed out across the harbor to the festive lights of the night market. Even our eyes behold the same sight, he thought, and his smile widened. There had been a few occasions when words had so reached into him and settled their truth in him like roots in rich earth. Some of the very best teachers in the monastery could wake this awe in him, when they spoke in simple words a truth that had swum unvoiced inside him. When her words had faded into the warmth of the summer night, he replied.

“So may a harp string, struck strongly, awaken its twin, or a pure high note of a voice set crystal to shimmering as you have wakened truth in me.” He laughed aloud, surprising himself, for it felt as if a bird, long caged in his chest, had taken sudden flight. “What you say is so simple, only that we complement one another. I can think of no reason why your words should so move me. But they do. They do.”

“Something is happening, here, tonight. I feel it.”

“As do I. But I don't know what it is.”

“You mean you have no name for it,” she corrected him. “We both cannot help but know what this is. We grow. We become.”

Wintrow found himself smiling into the night. “We become what?” he asked of her.