watched Hyakiyako shrink slowly, steadily, rounding upon the horizon until the whole length of it and of the span north of it—which they would not know hereafter—lay upon the sea like the body of a great dark snake, with the towers that divided the two spans projecting like horns, but even this image dwindled and soon only the tops of the towers remained, illusively rising and falling, buoyed upon the choppy sea until, finally, they vanished and with them the sense of the continuity of her life. Disconnected, she could not mask the pit of terror this opened in her, that everything had now been abandoned and she was lost in a way she’d never been, even when turned from Bouyan and the haven of home.
When finally she pushed away from the lost view, the tillerman, seated beside her with one arm up and pressed to the rudder bar, looked her up and down as if not sure what he made of her.
She walked unsteadily toward the ship’s prow—for all that she’d ridden a sea dragon and lived upon an island that fished for its livelihood, she had never set foot in a boat before, and this one seemed determined to throw her to her knees. It was a shallow-bottomed craft and felt much too small and flimsy to undertake journeys across vast stretches of open water—especially with no one but the tillerman seeming to pay the slightest attention to how it sailed.
In the middle of the deck and butted up to the mainmast stood the only shelter the boat afforded, a small shack—at least, that was her opinion of it. The crew called it a “house.” Soter had ducked into its dark recesses before they’d even left the span, along with the remaining three crewmen, and he hadn’t come out since. He’d been unusually reticent this morning, mostly nodding or shaking his head in response to questions, and more than once as they’d waited to cast off she had caught his gaze at the other boats moored along the two quays that projected from the side of the span, as though he expected something to come from them. When she looked, the boats were empty. No one was paying them any mind at all.
Like Soter, Diverus sat in the shadows of the shack. He had his arms wrapped about his knees and was trying very hard not to be ill. She would have liked to have confided in him, asked him what he thought of Soter’s behavior, but clearly he was in no condition to discuss anything at the moment.
The two undaya cases were secured to the side of the little shack, surrounded by more crates and baskets of amphorae packed in straw. She steadied herself against them as the ship abruptly lurched. Then she took hold of one of the sail-control lines and swooped beneath the woven main sail and toward the second mast. A control line ran from that smaller sail to the side of the boat, and she caught it and swung beneath it with her feet up and was a child again for a moment, free and untethered. She let go and landed beside the mast, almost kicking what she took to be an enormous yellow cable, as big around as her waist, that encircled the base of the mast. The cable flinched, and Leodora caught herself against the mast, leaning forward precariously over the cable. In the middle of it an eye opened and a thin reed of a tongue flicked into the air. The cable’s color changed then, yellow becoming brown, darkening to viridian. It was not hemp rope at all, but an enormous snake. She backed away from it, then scurried to the prow of the boat, and once there glanced over her shoulder. The snake hadn’t moved. Its color was blending with the deck again, until she was looking once more at a coil of rope that had no apparent eyes or tongue. The snake had gone back to sleep. It didn’t care about her.
In the vee of the prow, ahead of the lugsail, a small step boosted her high enough that, gripping the side tightly, she could lean over the stem head of the boat to look down into the water as it parted beneath her. She saw a fragmented reflection in the ripple, a face split into shadowed halves topped by a burnished cowl of hair that flared with the late-afternoon light. The water was a deep blue, almost