AllFreeNovel
Share Us
PS. I hesitate to write this, but—I’ve noticed my letters run long. If you’d rather I grow more concise, I can. I don’t want to presume.
PPS. Apologies for the imprecision of my salutation—I think salutation’s what Mrs. Leavitt calls that? I forgot what name the Strand 8 C19 Londoners gave that shade of blue on imported porcelain. Would have used it if I remembered.
PPPS. We’re still going to win.
* * *
As the prophet says: Everybody’s building them big ships and boats.
The emperor reigns uphill, flanked by his mummified co-rulers’ temples, each served by their own high priest. Stone steps and highways link peak to peak along the ridge. Great cities grow and glow. Downslope spread the farms, and beneath those, against the shoreline, unprecedented as pomegranates in local logic, a seaport.
Coastline trade occurs, of course, and reed boats ply the highland lakes. Quechua sailors and fisherman know the shapes of the wind, can sail through any storm, rate themselves equal to any wave. The western ocean’s horizon has always seemed a wall to them: Beyond this rests the world’s end. But a genius who has spent his life counting the paths of stars and collecting bits of storm-cast wood and weed upon the beach has a theory that another land waits across the water. Another genius, a decade older than the first, has discovered a method for knotting reeds far stronger and more durable than any her mothers made; with it, a team under her direction could build a boat large enough to carry a village.
What good is a land across the water, young men asked the first genius, when we have no way to get there? As soon grasp for the moon.
What good for coastal fishing, young men asked the second, is a boat that can carry a village?
Fortunately, geniuses understand that young men are often fools.
So they sought the wisest being they knew: Each, separately, climbed the many thousand steps to the mountain peak, and on audience day they knelt before the current emperor’s great-grandfather, mummified upon his throne, gold- and jewel-bedecked, radiant with age and command, and offered their gifts to him. And the secret priests who wait behind the emperor’s thrones are not young, nor are they all men, and they can frame two points into a line.
So the great-grand-emperor’s word goes out, and so a port is built, and sailors flock, beckoned by adventure. (Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.) They will sail together, to a new world. They will sail, together, to a land of monsters and miracles. Currents will bear their massive fish-tailed ships across, freighted with silver and tapestries, with knot work and destiny.
Red knots reeds with fingers callused as wood. She was one of the second genius’s earliest students, she nudged her to seek the great-grand-emperor’s aid and held her elbow as they climbed. She is no warrior here, no general; she is a woman taller than usual, who emerged from the woods one day naked and alone and was sheltered. She knots and weaves well, because she has learned. When she has finished this ship, the production model, large enough to hold two villages at least—then it will sail, and she will sail with it, because someone needs to tend the knots if they break.
She plays a tenuous game, this strand. As she knots and thinks to herself, she decides she would describe it using terms from Go: You place each stone expecting it may do many things. A strike is also a block is also a different strike. A confession is also a dare is also a compulsion.
Will the people of Tawantinsuyu brave the ocean their murderers will one day cal
l the Pacific, and, finding the swift currents, travel to the Philippines, or even farther, as others have traveled before? Will they, crossing waters so unfished that all a woman need do to eat is dart her hand beneath the waves and pull the fish up wriggling and silver, find new civilizations and make conquest, or common cause? Will this alliance and trade, stretched across the Pacific, save Tawantinsuyu when Pizarro’s grotesque sails belly up from the south? Will, at the least, early contact with Eurasian plagues strengthen these people against them?
Or: Will the tradesmen make it so far as a China ruled by the Ming, soon to reel from an enormous currency crisis that will bring the empire to its knees—a currency crisis brought on by the shifting exchange rate between copper cash and silver, of which the people of Tawantinsuyu sport an ample supply? Stabilized, will the Ming duck the four-century cycle of empires’ rise and fall, and endure, growing, transforming, expanding to keep pace with the West’s slow Enlightenment and its overweening Industrial Revolution?
Perhaps. Small likelihood—but we must seize each chance. The Agency is not happy. Other agents have been caught or killed, cleansed from the weave or marooned in strands of which it’s better not to think. Not Red. Not yet. But she must work faster.
Red’s hands slip on the knot. She is not thinking to herself. She is explaining. And to whom is she explaining? Well.
She looks out to the meeting of sky and sea.
Stands up.
Walks away.
She feels observed. Might Commandant be watching her? And if so, for what? She has been so careful. She does not even think the sky’s name, often.
An old man catches her pacing on the beach and offers cloth for the sails: sample after sample. She flips through them: too weak, too weak, too weak, too rough, and this one—what even is it? Bunched and uneven, more crochet than weaving.
“This one,” she says.
As the sun falls west, she perches on a rock and rolls the language of the knots between her oak-hard fingers. She feels each letter and word and wonders how long the sky and sea spent winding this cord, and who taught her the knot code in the first place, whether the iris bit her lip in frustration as she worked through a difficult passage.
When the sun’s set, she takes the unraveled thread, snips it into lengths, and throws each length into the receding tide.
Stars shine, and the moon. A dark shape slips along bright waves and dives. One by one, the seeker gathers the strands and ties them about her wrist so tight her fingers pale and stiffen. She makes a fist, tenses. Her skin splits beneath the cord and closes over it again.
Red, who’s waited motionless on the shore since sundown, sees something like a seal against the waves of light, and wonders.
* * *
