Child of a Hidden Sea (3 page)

Sophie's relief at being in port—despite all evidence to the contrary, she had been imagining a hospital for Gale, phone service and Internet access—was short-lived. The people coming out to meet them looked as emphatically poverty-stricken as the sailors. Their village—a collection of shacks made of scavenged ship beams and driftwood, mortared with seaweed-colored muck—ringed the rise of land sheltered by the bay. There wasn't a single electric light or cell tower; what illumination there was came from crude torches. Gaps and breaks in their teeth suggested they had little access to modern medicine.

The skipper had Gale transferred to a lifeboat, and gestured to indicate that Sophie should follow. The others were unloading, packing seaweed, fish, and barrels of brined moths into other boats. They were careful but hurried, moving with an air of urgency.

Sophie didn't need to speak the language to know they were spooked by the storm—it was blowing up out there—and concerned about the other fishers. The kids were ordered ashore. A couple protested, and were overruled.

Hostility brimmed in the glances everyone was giving her.

The skipper grasped Sophie's hand briefly before she clambered aboard the rowboat. “Feyza Stele kinstay,” she said. Gibberish, but her tone was reassuring.

“Thank you,” Sophie replied. She put her hand on her heart and the message seemed to get through. Straightening, the captain replied with a formal-looking bow. Then she was on the choppy waters of the bay, in a rowboat with her injured aunt and four burly sailors.

“Do you want me to…?” Tapping the nearest sailor, Sophie mimed a willingness to row. He pointedly set his foot on the spare oar.

Face it, sofe, nobody wants anything from you.

“Be that way. My arm's hurt anyway.” Behind them, the preteen kids were rowing themselves ashore. People were waiting, on the beach, to meet them.

They pulled up onto the sand, the sailors leaping out to tow the rowboat up beyond the reach of the waves. The biggest of the men lifted Gale like a baby.

“Watch her injury—” But one of the others had clamped onto Sophie's elbow, manhandling her in the opposite direction.

“Ow! I want to stay with her! Where are you taking me?”

No answer. He hurried her along, up to a boardwalk, then a crude staircase cut into the rock. His grip on her elbow was like a granite cuff; struggling just ground her bones against each other.

What now?

Not drowning had been such a relief she hadn't even thought about who her rescuers might be, what they might want. She fumbled for Gale's pouch—
if I flash that badge, or offer him the coins …

She stumbled as her escort jolted to a stop in front of the biggest of the shacks.

“Bastien,” he boomed.

Sounds from within. A willowy man with limp flaxen hair and gapped, soft-looking teeth opened the door, spilling candlelight out into the rising breeze.

The man looked from the sailor to Sophie, then past them to the sky, the signs of the rising storm. He uttered a single phrase, in a soft voice, and the sailor let Sophie go.

She didn't wait for an invitation, plunging past them both on shaky legs, collapsing onto a bench on the far wall. The men conversed in the doorway; then the sailor left, and she was alone with the blond.

Him I can fend off.
Even by the starved standards of these islanders, he was twig-thin, unhealthy looking, pale where they were weathered.

He looked at Sophie, assessing her. After a moment he opened a trunk, pulling out a slate and a piece of chalk.

“Bastien,” he said, pointing at himself.

She felt a trickle of relief. “Sophie.”

“Bastien,” he said again, and now he wrote it: “Bastien Tannen Ro.”

He offered her the chalk.

Sophie wrote her first name.

“Sophie…?” He tapped the two names after his first.

“My whole name?”

He tapped again. “Zhillscra.”

Feeling stupid, fighting tears, she wrote: Sophie Opal Hansa.
Age twenty-four, lost at sea,
she added mentally.

“Tanke, Sophie,” he said. “Din sezza—”

“No, I don't know your damned Flitspak,” she snapped. “I've got three languages, bits of anyway. You can't speak any of 'em? I mean, you look like you're the educated guy, right? Teacher? Scientist? You should be speaking English and applying for foreign aid and … I'm ranting now, aren't I?”

Why not rant?
She wasn't in danger of drowning anymore. She was lost, miserable, and, apparently, a prisoner. Gale might be dying.

Outside, the wind howled, louder now.

“Seriously. You need Yankee dollars,” she told him. “Those leaky, scavenged-wood tubs … nobody should be out chasing fish in this weather.”

He gave her bad shoulder a sympathetic pat, then threw a brick of what looked like pressed kelp on his smoky, makeshift hearth. He made a thin tea, putting it before her in a shallow black bowl.

She took a sip. Whatever it was, it was bitter enough to make her sputter and spit it back. Bastien promptly took it away, setting the bowl on a marble table next to his trunk.

“Look, I—”

He held up a hand—wait. Then, opening a tiny larder, he came up with a carved wooden cup of water and an earthenware jar of pickled moths.

Sophie shook her head. “Not hungry.”

He pointed at a rough bed in the corner. “Fezza dorm?”

She retreated there, curling up near the stove. Bastien fussed with her confiscated tea, dropping in dust from a vial of saffron-colored powder, then grinding golden, beeswax-scented granules into the mix.

Could be worse. He doesn't seem to want to “fezza dorm” together
. She checked the cell phone she'd found in Gale's purse. Still no service. She punched in Bram's number, an oddly comforting ritual, and composed a text message:

Losing my mind. Send doctors with straitjackets and Haldol. LOTS of Haldol. Sofe.

The phone generated an immediate reply:

Message will be sent when you return to service area.

She'd last seen her brother five days ago, after the two of them put their parents on a plane to Italy.

Sophie had decided their vacation was a chance to take another good look through Mom's stuff, to see if she could find any clues that might lead back to her birth family. She had assumed Bram would want her to drop him off so he could go dive into the latest pile of research.

Instead, he'd just finished a paper and was restless.

Bram in a mood to play was too much of a temptation to pass up. They'd gone for burgers, and then he'd wanted her opinion on a mountain bike he was thinking of buying, and by the time they'd chewed over the pros and cons of that he'd run into a couple friends who were doing a stand-up comedy show as a benefit for a neighborhood family who'd lost their house in a fire.

The two of them had agreed to be the comedy test audience for the show's final rehearsal. That turned into Sophie getting pressed into providing musical backup—she'd taken guitar for a while, in school. They were at the comedy club all night, with her strumming and Bram alternately waiting on tables and “playing” the tambourine.

Wind slammed the flimsy wall of the shack with the strength of an angry bear, jolting Sophie back to the here and now. The storm was building.

She traced a finger over her case. There was no point in taking the camera out: the light was bad. She could click through her shots from the past three days, two hundred stalker pics of Beatrice, her husband, and Gale. But that would waste battery power. Tomorrow—if she didn't get put to sea in a raft or forcibly married to the King of the Starvelings—she might get a shot of one of those moths in its pre-pickled state.

Power down.
Years of hiking, sailing, caving, and climbing had taught her to catch up on her rest when there was nothing else useful she could do. She closed her eyes, made a halfhearted attempt to meditate, and drifted into dreamless sleep.

Clinking woke her. She opened her eyes to see Bastien had finished measuring and mixing the contents of his tea bowl. He flipped an hourglass-shaped timer and stared at the chalkboard with Sophie's name on it. Humming, he sketched letters from the unfamiliar alphabet below the letters of her name. Translating it? His lips moved as he worked. “Zooophie. Nuh. SSSSohhhfeee.”

When he was satisfied, he dug in the trunk, this time coming up with a conch shell about the size of a softball and a tool—was it made of ivory?—that reminded her of a dentist's pick. He lit two lanterns, brightening the room around the table. Then, taking a deep, meditative breath, he began to carve.

Great. Now it's hobby hour?

“Bastien—”

“Shhh!”

She took out Gale's purse again, touching the zipper and watching it open itself. She dumped its contents, examining the seams, looking for wires or magnets, feeling the weight of it, listening to the purr of its teeth locking together. She'd have to cut the thing up to figure out how it worked.

She examined the gold coins. They were a set, of sorts—each had a ship on one side and an unfamiliar flag on the other. Words, too, in the Latin alphabet: Sylvanna, Tiladene, Redcap, Ualtar, Wrayland …

Land
, she thought.
Names of states? Towns?

Places she hadn't heard of. Coins she'd never seen before. They had the weight and softness of real gold, but who minted with gold these days? How remote would these places have to be—Viemere, Tiladene—for her to have never heard of any of them?

There was so much here she didn't recognize—wildlife, cash, these place names, if that's what they were. She knew what Sanskrit looked like, and Arabic; she could recognize Cyrillic text and Chinese characters even if she couldn't read them. But Bastien's alphabet—the one stamped onto the satchel, the alphabet he was using, even now, to score beautifully calligraphed words onto the conch shell—she'd never seen those characters.

She saw he'd inscribed the translated version of her name onto the shell.

That can't be good.
Maybe it was a bridal gift. She eyed the flimsy wooden fork he'd stuck into the jar of moths. That nice sharp pick might make a better weapon if she had to defend her virtue.

It was a silly thought. Frail as he was, one good swing of the camera case would snap him in half.

These people are poor, but the stuff in his trunk, the hobby tools, they're finely worked—expensive.
She looked at the purse.
The weird alphabet goes hand-in-hand with premium stuff.

Which was maybe a decent observation, if it proved out, but what did it get her?

The outer surface of the conch shell was brown, a complex mix of sand and driftwood hues. Bastien had scored through to a deeper layer, revealing creamy calcium beneath.

Sophie closed the satchel, watching it zip itself yet again. What could do that? Nanotech? Robots? That was the stuff of science fiction. She opened it, stuck her fork half in and half out of it, and tried to close again. Its lips curled, closing on the stem, delicately pushing it out onto the table. Then it clamped shut.

Bastien scraped at the shell,
scritch, scritch.
It seemed to be getting louder.

Everything
was getting louder. The creak and the groan of the wood walls of the shack as it shuddered in the wind were multiplied. She realized she could hear the shack next door rattling, too—and the one beyond that. Sand grains gristled, rubbing each other as they passed through the neck of Bastien's egg timer. His breath gurgled.

Outside, stones clattered, thrown up the beach by the surf outside. She heard the whispers of mothers, comforting their children, the whimper of a storm-scared dog, air popping in lantern wicks. Out in the insufficiently sheltered bay, a ship's sail was tearing.

And now a light, squeaky rub—Bastien was polishing the shell with fluid from the black bowl. The liquid he'd mixed was a waxy yellow substance, and the carved letters glowed copper as he filled them. The surface of the shell buffed up to a deep walnut glow.

So much sound.

Sophie touched Gale's pouch again and the reptile-leather lips over the zip pulled back, like muscles flexing, no wires, and the thought she'd been holding back broke through:
It's magic, has to be magic, you're not in Kansas anymore, Sofe.

She pushed the pouch away, clutching her camera case and Gale's cell phone, hugging them to her chest, as if they could help.

Bastien finished rubbing in the last drop of lambent beeswaxy ink. The text on the conch shell glowed. The cacophony cranked up another notch. Sophie heard shouts and the bustle of sailors, far out at sea, the fishing fleet trying to get their ships in, fighting to save the crew of one rattletrap boat that had already gone under. “Grab this, grab this!”

It hurt. She closed her eyes, breath hitching in a sob.

Then the cries—all the noise but for the storm outside and the crackle of the fire in Bastien's clay stove—faded.

“Kir Sophie? Do you understand me now?”

Her eyes flew open. “You bastard! You do speak English!”

Magic.
She clapped her hand over her mouth. What had come out of it, in an enraged yelp, was this: “Zin dayza Anglay!”

“No, no, it's you,” Bastien said unnecessarily. “I've taught you Fleetspeak.”

CHAPTER
3

She understood him. It wasn't English, or Spanish: Bastien was speaking the same language he'd been using all night, and now Sophie understood every word.

She leapt to her feet, quivering, torn between outrage—
this snaggle-toothed stranger has rewired my brain!
—and excitement—
that is
so
cool
—when he spoke again. “Zophie, Sophie, yes? I apologize for inscribing you, but we must talk.”