IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE

by

Dolores J. Nurss

Volume I: Welcome to The Charadoc!

Chapter 2

SARGEDDOHL HARBOR

Wednesday, February 12, 2708

Strange dreams trouble me, all night long. “Something has gone wrong” Jake keeps telling me, gravely. Maps melt and merge, the continents of Novatierre warping to those of Earth and back again, along with others I don't know about. Boundaries dissolve; I should feel glad, I tell myself, but I don't.

(Randy doesn't understand. And it hurts. We know so much about each other, my chubby little redhead and I, and yet this one, crucial thing about me he just can't grasp.

“Jake, are you all right?” he asks. “You haven't touched your dinner.” I poke at my noodles and crab dutifully.

“Nice caper sauce,” I tell him. Lamely. It's no use; he knows me too well...in all matters save one.

"Someone your size needs about three times the food you eat, you know," he says, primly wiping his mouth under that jutting, parakeet nose of his.  I force down more food and try to smile at him.  I didn't ask to be so ridiculously tall I have to shop for clothes in specialty stores.

I've tried, sometimes, to explain my connection to Deirdre, but then Randy worries about my oraclism shattering, telepathy surfacing as just one shard of the broken whole. It's not telepathy, and it's the opposite of shattering. I don't know how to make him understand, so I just keep my mouth shut. Except to shovel in more noodles and crab, till I meet his expectations on what a man my size should eat—more accurate for me than for himself, usually. I suck up the last slippery bit of pasta, and then shrug on my coat to go outside and appreciate the sunset. Deirdre will have to wait awhile yet for dawn, wherever she sleeps, in or near the Charadoc. Southern hemisphere, like us, same season, but so far, far away.

In his wisdom Randy gives me space to go out alone.  He doesn't say a word when he helps me brushes back my long hair to straighten out my collar and then tuck in his own olive kerchief in my pocket (he likes that it goes as well with my own ruddy-brown locks as his lighter ones) and then steps out of the way of the door.  Oh yes, he knows me well indeed. Almost.)

Dread rises like a dark and chilling tide. I know that I dream, and yet I don't. Everybody talks at once. Nobody's there, and everyone. A moth flits in and out, and Jake tries to catch it, saying again, “Something has gone wrong.” Past and future and far-off present merge and separate and merge again, coming perilously close to unraveling. Images flash and flash and flash, like that horrible time when Alroy's minions dosed me with an hallucinogen. Through it all skips and dances a rat-faced teenage boy, strangely handsome despite his buck teeth, but when his eyes meet mine I suddenly see someone else, someone who ought to, has to have died.

(It looks like blazing hellfire out here—beautiful, in its own disturbing way. I remember how Deirdre used to cling to every sunset, and every dawn, in those terrifying days of our selfmade Hell, when we set our nerves on fire with the Black Clam toxin. So now we have gained, from that ordeal, the faster reflexes, the speeded learning capabilities, the heightened perceptions, all that, which we thought we wanted, and dearly bought. My heart aches, all over again, for Jesse, who didn't survive the gift.)

Not him! He couldn't have survived—shouldn't, when so many better in the world have died. I hold fast to the bond, the hidden sharer, intermeshed with me and yet not of me, for protection.

(Years ago, on that grim island, when the neural changes threatened to shatter me indeed, she stepped in. Deirdre Keller. Soul-sister. Somehow, by some unprecedented combination of my shredded oraclism and her mutation of telepathy, catalyst-transmuted through the toxin in our blood, she merged with me, she healed the rifts with her own spirit-substance, and yet remained whole. For both of us, whole.)

I wake up sweating in the humid tropic night, rocking with the ship. I press my hands to my solar plexus. Something quivers inside, but I don't think it's in my body. An old connection twanging. I feel it and I don't, somewhere between sleeping and awake. I never perceived it stressed like this before.

(The sunset fades down to moody purples and blues, and a chill breeze stirs. I turn back indoors, to warmth and light and the man who knows me better than anyone else alive. What does one gap matter? We can't ask for perfection.)

And I cannot, for the life of me, remember what I dreamed, what frightened me so badly. Somebody risen from the grave? But who? Some sense that something had gone wrong with space and time?

(“Something has gone wrong,” I tell Randy as he takes my coat from me. “I can feel it. Big time, somewhere in the north of the world.” In the same time zone as Deirdre, but in the opposite season. And something tells me that I'll have to protect Deirdre from it. And from me. And me from her. And I can't make sense of it all.)

I can't make sense of it all. No use even trying. I turn my pillow over to the cooler side and go back to sleep.

Thursday, February 13, 2708

(We, his old comrades, watch eagerly for Jonathan on the docks of Sargeddohl, the smell of the sarged fish as thick as the oil pressed from it, the ladies lifting up their skirts fastidiously to step over pools of fish-blood and bits of heaven-knows-what, their fingers pink and dainty and glittering with rings where they peep from under all the lovely layers of silk. We laugh to each other, reckless about what friends will brave for friends.)

As the ship glides towards Sargeddohl Harbor the sailors take ropes in arms and haul, lamplit muscles dark with shadow, sleeves rolled up as gentlefolk never do. They move as one, as in a dance, to the rhythms of ungentle chanteys that stir my maiden blood and make my face feel hot with gladly shocking words.

(As the twilight deepens the lamps light golden up and down the coast. And out there lamps flare up on ships, reeling orbs of gold like tipsy stars in the violet-blue, where only ripples distinguish sky from sea save for a last rim of coral on the horizon, left after the sun's departure like a melon nibbled sweetly to the very rind. One of those ships bears Jonathan--dear, kind Jonathan, who alone of all the Tilián truly understood us in his sojourns here!)

And though I know we sail on a modern, state-of-the-art vessel, scientifically tested in wind-tunnels for optimum speed and maneuverability, shaped from materials unknown to our forebears, I feel that I witness something so ancient that only the cells in my bones know its name, something as alive and old as the sea beneath us. The wind in the sails knows all this. The ocean, sister to our first planet's waters, remembers as a family secret shared.

Then, with the last sail furled, the engines kick in to guide us to our dock, their precious fuel hoarded for just this moment, fine-tuning our approach. The sailors belay the ropes in tidy loops and laugh among themselves. They rub their arms and roll their sleeves back down, and I feel so good just to watch them happy, I feel all my doubts of recent days slip away from me like the breezes through my hair. I want to laugh, too, though I haven't heard the joke.

Doubts? I don't even know quite what I doubt. Certainly Charadocian values differ from those my teachers taught me, but my most important value schools me to respect the customs of other lands. Yet ever since I set foot on this vessel I have felt as though I have stepped onto a painting of a ship, a sheen of pigments on the air, nothing real between me and a plunge to unfathomable depths.

I shrug it off. I have always been prone to strange moods and imaginings. Everyone tells me so. Long past time to grow out of it.

But now, no more of moods! All things draw together into a harmony of happiness as this ship settles into dock, as sailors put the gangplank out (as we see our loved ones crowding to the brink, waving and blowing kisses, holding up the children. Soon will come the home-cooked meals so garden-fresh that they taste like life itself. Soon will come hugs so welcome-home warm and strong that it's like you not only will never let go but you never have, you have always held her, held him, held them, in arms stronger than cables, all the voyage but a dream.)

My heart sings to see the joy leap into Jonathan's eyes as he recognizes friends in the crowd--bright ripples of merrily clashing colors jostled and startled and laughing at it all. The jest varies from soul to soul but the laughter makes them one.

Jonathan lifts me up, engulfed in my new dress, like I had never grown up, like I weighed no more than when he carried me back from my initiation so many years ago. All the strange petals of Charadocian silk flutter around me as he passes me into the briefly, daringly revealed arms of a rouge-cheeked old woman with apricot-dyed hair, her limbs drawn quickly back into fabric as soon as my feet hit wood, but with most of her bosom exposed to the world, the soft kiss of the fog rolling in, and the golden glow of lamps.

"Oh, you little darling!" she squeals as she envelops me in wings of cloth. "Jonathan has written reams about you, and now I get to see you face to face--you're even prettier than he said!"

Somewhere behind me I hear someone mutter, "She looks a bit like Mountainfolk, if you ask me."

"Hush!" another whispers. "She's Jonathan's daughter--sort of. I'm sure he would have nothing to do with anyone who wasn't nice."

I suddenly feel darker than the night. I feel my eyes must slant grotesquely, demon-strange.

"She's Tilián, remember--they can be anything. She isn't raised like Mountainfolk around here, you know."

"Ah, but blood will tell."

"Hush, all of you! She's adorable."

* * *

(They don't see me slip away from the crowd, they all have people to greet them here. Papa can't come, the boss shoots runaways, but he would if he could, I know that.

The sea-stone street feels strange and knobby as I scamper into the dark beyond the pier, after a year on decks of thickly painted wood. I run like a drunk all over the place; the buildings pitch at me like they'd try to stop me, the street reels like it tries to pull out from under me, because I do a bad thing here to run out on my contract.

Papa, I can't do it anymore! My chance at a better life just didn't work. You didn't know about Cook when you signed me over to the Captain. You didn't know how frustrations build at sea and even the biggest ships becomes smaller and smaller till the big men and women crammed into them take it all out on the littlest of the crew. And “initiation”--you didn't know, Papa, you couldn't have--you would never have let go of me if you did, I would have lived happily with you even if we starved, I would've starved safely in your arms with no cruel hand to touch me, even death gentle when I got too hungry to feel.

I cling to a wall, panting. Running doesn't work either. My legs wobble under me as I catch my breath. I dig my elbows into my sides to hold down the cramps, my arms chill with the sleeves torn off. I know I shouldn't run after eating so much, but I might not eat for days, now, so while nobody looked I prepared for that. I watched till Cook secured the fire and went up on deck to watch the shore draw near, then I stuffed myself with everything I could grab, I didn't even taste half of it. So now I have to work to hold it down, to not waste my efforts.

I push myself away from the wall, and walk. It must be safe to walk by now. Nobody will follow me.

I know I can't go home again. They'd hurt Papa for harboring a fugitive. I scan for a hidden spot to be my new home for the night, for at least a few hours, searching the darkness between the squares of light that windows cast. I planned for this. I may never see Papa again. Down this alley looks likely; I don't think people come here often.

So. I'll have to find Cyran, I guess, become one of Cyran's Children. There, under that building--a culvert opens up its mouth, still half-clogged, from the monsoon's last deluge, with straw and soft leaves. The weather report on the ship said we'd have a break in the rains, so it's safe--I think.

I hesitate. I look at the bandages on my arms, then at the culvert again. Not sanitary. But the cuts have pretty much closed up already; they never went very deep. If I'm careful, if I prop up against the sides to sleep, and cross my arms over my chest, looping the thumbs in the cloth so that they'll stay put, the bandages won't soak up anything dirty. Papa always said that I could figure out a solution to anything, given half a chance, and he'd have surely sent me to school if he could have found the money.

Sometimes, they say, Cyran will teach recruits to read, if they show promise. I've heard things about Cyran. I crawl into the culvert. It doesn't smell too nice, but then neither do I, I guess, not after all that running. I think I can find Cyran. I curl up to sleep. I think I'll figure how.

Are those rat's eyes?)