Sunday, August 2, 2708, continued

And then suddenly, gazing up at the half-built church through the canvas-edged triangle, I remember who I’d left out of my litany of the dead.  Jesse, my late friendclan brother.  And my mother.  And something in my breast just sort of crumples, that I should ever forget.

And yet I should.  I did well, didn’t I, to let everything outside of this country slip away from me?  Why does my heart sicken that I should do such a thing, and also when I fail?  Why do I feel damnable whichever way I go?

Til agents should never dwell on whatever came before a mission.  That might lead to feeling homesick, and we can’t have that.  Wherever we land, that becomes home.  These mountains, these steep climbs, the biting kiss of the ice wind on my face, I must love every rock and scree of it as if nursed by a mountain-maiden, as if I grew up on Damien’s sweet and haunting songs, and never knew another country.  I have my friendclan here, in Kiril and Lufti and Damien and Kanarik and the rest; my heart should yearn for nothing more.  And yet, right this minute, every bone of me longs for the ocean that I grew up with, longs to toss on a boat on a rough and thrilling sea with my Fireheart siblings…

(“Whoa!”  Water slaps into my face as a wave curls over the gunwale right into me.  Not the nice, warm waters of home, either, nor the still warmer waters off the coast of Istislan from which we’d embarked, but the icy, stormy surge much, much farther north than that, to which we’ve spent considerable time sailing.

“Sorry,” Don says absentmindedly.  “I tacked too soon.”

“Well, keep your mind on your sailing!” I snap, looking for something not yet soaked with which to dry myself, licking the salt off my lip as the boat rolls under me.

“He was distracted,” Jake murmurs, lying on a lounge on deck, the bill of his downturned cap shielding his face from most of the spray.

“I was distracted,” Don says, not having heard Jake over the ocean’s increasingly loud surge.

“He’s getting married,” Jake adds in an undertone, while the lounge slides yet again across the deck as the boat continues to toss, carrying my lazing giant with it.

“I’m getting married,” Don says, as if that explains everything.  Indeed, we hardly ever get a word out of him that doesn’t soon move to that sentence–not when we gathered together at the Shuttle, not throughout the flight from Novo Durango to Istislan Station, not on our way to the docks.  I thought it cute for the first few days.  Then it became hilarious.  Now it just aggravates me.

I go into the cabin and find a towel.  What sort of madman proposes marriage to a woman on his way out the door, to a mission of some months, anyway?  I towel my head off vigorously.  Don probably pictures Lisa greeting him on his return with a big bouquet of roses.  I picture her thrashing him with them.

The tiny shaving mirror sways more and more expansively on its nail as the boat rocks with increasing vigor.  I regard this fragment of my reflection, my curly red hair standing up from toweling.  Young enough to infiltrate a boy’s school?  Well, close enough; the Tilián do tend to age slowly at first; better knowledge means better health habits, and not knowing one’s birthday also inclines one towards a psychosomatic youthfulness–until (as sometimes happens) it works the other way, in the context of a hard agent’s life.  But I do have boyish features to begin with, don’t I, freckled and everything?  Though the jutting nose, I fear, makes me look a bit like a parakeet.  Assuming I’m not, in fact, still in my teens.

“Can’t be,” I tell myself, patting down the remaining damp spots.  “Suppose–worst case scenario–I was, oh, twelve years old when I came of age...”  I feel pretty sure I wasn’t, but how the devil could I say what a normal twelve years look like?  “That still happened at least a decade ago, which would make me twenty-two.  I’m probably older than twenty-two.  Much older.”  Almost certainly.  Almost.

“Randy, where are you?”  Jake’s voice booms through the thin walls.  I come out to find both Don and Jake fighting to pull the jib where they want it to go, against a wind that has built up much, much harder in a matter of minutes–quite impressive, considering how much above the average the two men stand in both height and muscle, albeit on the rangy side, especially ectomorphic Don.

“Got it.”  I run and skid to the tiller and brace it against my body, holding it as steadily as I can while my buddies wrestle the sails into place.  Right job for me at a time like this–we all know our best roles in all aspects of sea-travel, since our boyhoods together, bobbing around the Altraus Coast.  Sure, I don’t have Don’s level of sailing expertise (who does?) but my shorter, stockier build best suits me to holding this danged thing steady against my low center of gravity.  Merrill, though slimmer, would have served even better, but he has his own mission in someplace called Dhurba right now, or soon.

I mustn’t let this little patch of turbulence frighten me unduly.  So I amuse myself by picturing different members of my friendclan at the tiller.  It would probably rip right out of Lisa’s weaker arms, but she’d just grab it back again and again, cursing like the sailor she’d become, till it hardly made a difference.  If left to Deirdre, she would have held on like a limpet even if a sea-monster had tried to claw her off, but with her faint weight it would have swung at the storm’s whim anyway, carrying her along.  (But didn’t Jonathan, her mentor, promise to feed her up at the bounteous tables of The Charadoc?  I try to picture a zaftig Deirdre, but it’s like trying to picture dry rain.)  Now, Merrill’s wife, Zanne, might have done better, as she has some curves to her, and muscle underneath the softness, and she would have made it look easy if it killed her; she might even have yawned.

But Zanne, too, has work elsewhere, in nearby Vanikke; a slight tweak of the timing and she might have shared part of our journey. (and it troubles me mightily that Merrill and Zanne work in two different countries, though far be it from me to interfere) while Deirdre, as considered already, has gone off to help her mentor settle into retirement as an ambassador to the Charadoc—Jonathan Sulieman Kaskin-Drury has certainly earned the right to “waste” such talent on pure sentiment, and it gladdens my heart that the old gent has gotten away with it.  Deirdre could use an easy mission for a change, anyway, if mission you could even call it–that girl always overdoes the sacrifice-for-duty thing.  And Lisa...well, Lisa’s not here, either.

Rocking everything in severe, slow swings, the storm blows Jake’s long chestnut locks into his face despite the hood now raised to trap his cap in place, nor does it spare Don’s chin-length blondness from flying in the wind.  I study them as objectively as I can—another distraction from the imminent threat of drowning.  Their more rugged features might make it harder for them than me to pass for schoolboys (Jake handsomely so, but poor Don is just plain homely—though in a nice way) yet the two do carry a certain innocence about them (despite everything!) that makes them look sort of like youths who’d led a hard and weathering life.  And that happens a lot in this world, so precariously home to humankind even after centuries of occupation.

The now-unoccupied lounge slides back and forth, water rushing around its skittering tube legs, till an especially steep slough tips it completely over the side.  Jake won’t like that, but oh well.  He'd bought the stupid thing cheaply enough; maybe he can pick up another for the return trip.

Wild gray sky and wilder gray waters seek to merge in a chilling passion, what with waves tossing up and rain pounding down.  I think I wasted my time with the towel.  The tiller jerks in my grip, but I pull it hard against me again.  Being pudgier and less strong than my two friends does not actually mean either pudgy or weak by any other standards.  I keep telling myself.  Water rushes around my ankles, testing the quality of my boots.  Istislan cobblers know watertight (I hope) though they could use some practice in making things warm.  My toes feel like little pebbles of ice.

Ah, Don and Lisa.  Okay, so maybe the proposal wasn’t all that badly managed.  Maybe I tend to get just a wee bit overprotective of Lisa’s heart sometimes.  We have, admittedly, a kind of a complicated relationship, but Don has no reason to be jealous of it…because neither does Jake.

Don doesn’t know, exactly, about me and Jake.  Oh, he’s had clues a-plenty, even some embarrassingly blatant hints from a certain enemy now deceased, but never anything quite certain (we’ve all tacitly agreed) and he is much too much the gentleman to pry.  (Aren’t we all?  And what is up with Merrill and Zanne, anyway?)  Which suits me just fine, because Jake and I want our career to include plenty of missions in countries that do not approve of our sort of relationship, and if we can keep it even semi-secret from our own Friendclan (excepting Lisa, of course) then Archives counts that as abundant evidence of our discretion.

Oh, who knows less about each other than a friendclan full of secret agents?  Of the important stuff, that is, not who can best wildcraft a dinner or hold a tiller in a storm.

Icy saltwater gushes down the back of my neck, and then the stern rides up again on the next swell.  At least I can pretend that all the secrecy suits me.  Jake wants it more than me, when it comes right down to it; if forced to a choice, I would have picked Jake over any career.  How many hours have I gushed to Lisa about the man, after all?  And who the devil ever stays in the closet in freewheeling Til Institute, anyway?  Except for the agents.

So why shouldn’t it delight me to learn that it’s my dadburned duty to pose as Jake’s lover and Don’s brother, to explain why the three of us will hang together so closely?  Don, about to marry the only female lover that I’d ever known.  Ah, the bittersweet experiment!  Short-lived and doomed, of course, discarded years ago for lifelong friendship, but fun while it lasted.

“Mind the tiller!” Jake shouts as the boat drifts broadside of a wave and practically capsizes.

“Sorry,” I call back, “I was distracted.”  Then I murmur to myself, “Don’s getting married.”)