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Stollo bustled back in, looking offensively healthy and unimaginably cheerful. “Well, you look as wretched as a man might be!” he exclaimed. “Here, I’ve brought you something to drink.”
The very thought made Pietro’s stomach rebel. “I couldn’t possibly.”
“This will make you feel better. I promise,” Stollo said, sinking to his knees and holding out a mug of some herbal concoction. “Come on. Just have a few sips.”
Reluctantly, Pietro took the mug from his hand and lifted it to his face. In the rising steam, he thought he recognized the scent of ginger mixed with unfamiliar ingredients that made him think of woodlands or garden dirt. “If I throw up all over you, you have only yourself to blame.”
He managed a few cautious swallows. The liquid was hot enough to burn his tongue, but its salutary effect on his stomach was almost instantaneous. He took another sip.
“And stick out your hand. Palm up. This should help too.”
Obediently, Pietro extended his left arm. Stollo balanced a small, thick metal disk on Pietro’s wrist and bound it in place with a tightly wrapped strip of cloth. “Now your other hand.”
Pietro transferred his drink and held out his right arm. “What are you doing?”
“Old sailor’s trick. Putting pressure on certain spots helps with the queasiness.”
When Stollo was done, Pietro finished off the concoction, then leaned back against the curved wooden wall with his eyes closed. “I feel a little less like dying,” he admitted. “But what a very romantic journey this is proving to be.”
Stollo laughed. “It gives me an opportunity to prove my devotion.”
“I have to think you had hoped for different opportunities.”
“Well, it’ll be a long trip. There might still be some of those opportunities after all.”
The first two days were rough, but after that Pietro found himself feeling remarkably well and ravenously hungry. By this time, he could stand at any spot on the ship’s deck and stare out at a limitless and absolutely empty landscape of water. No point of land was visible in any direction. No other ships gave a sense of scale to the horizon. They were entirely alone on the rocking blue waves under a cloudless and infinite sky.
This was the moment, Pietro thought, when a devout man might find himself most acutely aware of the might and presence of the god. When the distractions of mortal demands dropped away—when the world offered up nothing but the primal materials of existence. But Pietro had never felt farther away from Cordelan, less convinced of his divinity.
Yet the ocean itself seemed imbued with sentience; even the air he breathed had a weight and consciousness to it that he had never noticed when he was on solid land. He couldn’t have said that the elements were benign, but they were present, they were real, and they were powerful. He closed his hand around his cherloshe charm. The Zessin people believed Zessaya ruled the oceans, had carved the islands from her bones. Maybe hers was the hand that roiled the waves, or stilled them; maybe she would listen if he prayed.
He bowed his head and touched the amulet to his forehead. His lips moved, but he made no sound. If the goddess heard, she gave no sign.
Once his appetite returned, Pietro made himself useful by taking over the cooking duties from Danner’s younger son, who was only too happy to relinquish them. There wasn’t much to choose from in the galley, but the crew seemed appreciative anyway.
“You ever need a job, I could recommend you to half a dozen captains,” Danner told him.
“I’ll keep that in mind. I’ve been casting about for what profession I should pursue next.”Assuming the world doesn’t end. Assuming I have anything left to live for.
By late afternoon of the sixth day, they could spot widely spaced smudges on the eastern horizon, gradually taking on more size and substance as the ship moved closer. Stollo joined Pietro at the bow as the shapes were slowly lost to the gathering darkness.
“The ruined lands,” Stollo said. “And what will we find here?”
In the morning, they were close enough to make out details of some of the closest land masses. Two were so small that Pietro could trace almost the entire perimeter, so flat that he could see over them with a glance. Both of them were nothing but irregular black surfaces, stretches of uneven rock intercut at intervals by gullies as smooth as glass. Here and there, patches of weeds clung to shallow crevices, defiant stalks of faded green, but for the most part, each island looked empty and uninhabitable. Ruined, indeed.
“It’s not all like this,” Danner informed them late in the afternoon. “All the flat lands, they’re just barren stone, but some of the bigger islands, the ones with hills and high land, they’re just as fertile as Marata.”
Not until the next morning did they reach one of those larger islands, divided down the middle by a formidable array of tall, notched peaks. Everything on the western edge was the same dreary expanse of unrelieved black stone—but then they sailed past the demarcation line of the mountains.
And it was a different world. It was as if every surface had been claimed by a different shade of green as moss, grass, shrubbery, and low tropical trees competed for space in the soil. Pietro gazed in amazement at great masses of flowers in brilliant reds and purples, and fancied that he could catch perfumed puffs of air drifting through the salty breeze. It was ridiculous, but the air felt warmer, thicker, heavier against his skin.
“Do many of the ruined lands have this same configuration?” he asked Danner, who stood with Pietro and Stollo at the railing. “Black on one side, green on the other?”
“Some of them,” Danner answered. “And people live on the green side.”
Stollo split a look between the other two. “And we’re planning to talk to some of these people?”
“I’ve never stopped at this particular island,” Danner said. “Water’s not deep enough to get close. But there’s a place about a day from here that I’ve been to a few times.” He glanced at Pietro. “If that’s good enough for you.”
