Three True Norths
Featured in The Copper Press, 18 October, 2095 A.M.
The dream always began the same way.
He is standing on the deck of the Spring Wind in the flat grey hour before the sun fully commits to ending the day, and everything is ordinary: the creak of the ropes against the envelope overhead, the smell of the gunpowder and the hydrogas and the dry desert air. The particular vibration of the deck plates that he has felt through the soles of his boots when the cannons fire. He has felt that quake so many thousands of times it has become a kind of second heartbeat. Miranda is below. He knows this without seeing her. He knows it the way you know things in dreams: completely, without evidence.
Then the light comes.
It rises fast and wrong, catching the underside of the envelope in a blaze of amber that has no business being that bright. He raises his arm against it. There is a sound. Not an explosion, not yet, just a sound, like a finger dragging across the skin of a drum and then the Spring Wind begins to dive.
He has had the dream a hundred times. Perhaps two hundred. He stopped counting in the second year after he buried her.
What he has never been able to see, in hundreds of dreams, is what moves against the light. There is a shape. There has always been a shape, hovering at the bright edge of the glare, but the dream will not resolve it. He wakes before it does. In some dreams he willfully stares directly into the sun to try an make the shape of it but he can't. He has come to believe this is simply the nature of trauma: that the mind protects itself by leaving certain frames dark.
He had stopped expecting the dream to tell him anything new.
I. Kyoto
Kyoto received him the way port cities receive men who arrive without explanation and ask no questions of anyone: with complete indifference. The city was old and layered, built on itself a dozen times over in the centuries since the Meteor. Its waterfront, the Lantern district, with piers stretching into the cold grey of the bay, had the permanent smell of fish oil and coal smoke and the particular human residue of a place where people have been passing through for so long that nobody expects anyone to stay.
He had intended to stay a month or two. That was almost three years ago.
The boarding house was on a lane called Kishi Row, three streets back from the water, above a chandler's shop. He had the corner room, which had a window that faced east and caught the morning light in a way he had not expected to find comforting. He was not a man who had historically placed value on windows.
Hanae lived in the building. She had been there first, had in fact been there for two years before he arrived, subletting the room below his while she worked contracts for the Manchurian aerostat fleet that came through the Kyoto basin on the northern trade runs. She was Ryukyuan, trained as a mechanic, and she had the particular competence of someone who has spent years working in conditions where incompetence kills people. She was also, he had discovered gradually and against his initial intentions, someone he could talk to.
Before he met Hanae he had not talked to anyone, really talked, not transacted, in a long time.
It had begun the way things begin when you are not paying attention: she had knocked on his door one evening to ask if he had a spanner of a particular size, and he had handed it over, and she had looked at it and then at him and said, very directly, âYou have the eyes of a man chased by the devil.â, and he had said to her âThat's an unusual thing to say to a stranger.â, and she had said âI'm a mechanic, I look at things and say what I see.â. And they laughed, actually laughed, which both surprised and scared him because he knew the last time he laughed from his belly like that was with her. So he invited Hanae in.
Miyake came 10 months later. Barnaby had been present for the birth, which was not something he had planned or anticipated being present for, and had stood in the corner of the room feeling entirely useless while the midwife worked. When Hanae finally held the child up and Miyake opened her eyes â dark, furious, already seeming to have opinions about the situation, something in his chest had moved that he had not felt move in a very long time.
He had not known what to do with that. He still didn't know.
Miyake was fourteen months old now. She was learning to walk which meant she had learned to walk toward things and reach for them, and what she reached for, most mornings, was Barnaby. He had developed the habit of sitting on the floor of the room while she pulled herself upright against his knee, and he would put his fingers within hers to steady her, and she would look up at him with an absolute divinity that he recognized from somewhere but couldn't place. He would feel two things at once: the warmth of her small weight against his hand and the familiar grey ache underneath it, He didn't know what to call either.
II. Sorn
Victor Sorn came on a Tuesday, in the rain.
Barnaby didn't recognize him at first. Sorn had aged in the way that military men age: rapidly and then apparently not at all. Like they've reached some plateau of weathered competence and then just remain there. He was sitting at the table in the downstairs tea room when Barnaby came in from the pier, and he looked up and said, simply, âYou're harder to find than you used to be, Cap'n.â, and Barnaby sat down across from him without taking his coat off.
They had served together in the Guardians, before any of the rest of it. Sorn was Lemurian, like him, and had gone a different direction afterward. Deeper into the intelligence work, the kind that had no official name. They had not seen each other in six years. That Sorn had found him in Kyoto meant either that Sorn was very good, which Barnaby surmised he probably was, or that someone wanted to be found and had left enough thread to follow. He suspected both were true.
âYou look like hell.â, Sorn said.
âYou look like a man who wants something from me.â, Barnaby said.
Sorn ordered a sake. He didn't speak again until it came, which was a habit Barnaby remembered: the deliberate pause before anything consequential, a way of establishing that what followed had been considered.
âThere is a manâ, Sorn said. âA Cordoban internal affairs officer. His name is Castellan Voss. He has recently surfaced in Panama City running a black site for the Cordoban brass. Looks like he washes gold made outside of official military channels, going back twelve years. I have a contact who has seen the ledger. There are entries corresponding to dates I think you will find significant.â
Barnaby said nothing.
âThe Spring Windâ, Sorn said.
The tea room was very quiet. Outside, rain tapped against the window glass.
âVoss didn't issue any orders. He processed the payment.â, Sorn continued. âAnd, a payment means there was a contract. A contract means there were boots on the ground. Whoever they brought in for that contract was there when your ship went down. The ledger is in Panama City. Voss is there with it. My contact can get you a meeting, but the window is short. Voss' exposure means he's going to be on the move soon and if he goes back into the interior we lose the thread.
Barnaby picked up his cup. He put it down without drinking from it.
âWhy are you bringing this to me?â, he said.
Sorn looked at him steadily. âBecause it's yours.â, he said. âAnd if I were in your shoes, I'd kill a man for not sharing it.â
III. Hanae
He didn't tell Hanae that night. He sat with Miyake on the floor of the corner room while the rain continued outside and the lamp burned low, and Miyake fell asleep against his leg with her fist wrapped around two of his fingers, and he looked at her sleeping face and felt the two things again â the warmth, the grey ache â and beneath both of them, something new and colder that he recognized as the specific gravity of a decision already made.
He told Hanae the next morning.
She was at the workbench she kept in her room, fitting a coupling on a valve housing, and she didn't stop working when he came in. He stood in the doorway and told her about Sorn, about Voss, about Panama City. About Miranda. Not all of it. She knew the shape of Miranda, the loss of her, but not the full weight of it, and he didn't try to give her the full weight now. He gave her the facts. He was good at giving people facts.
When he finished, Hanae set down the coupling and the wrench and turned to look at him. She had a smear of machine oil on her forearm. She looked at him the way she always looked at things. Directly, assessing, saying what she saw.
âYou've already decided.â, she said.
âI..â, she cut him off.
âBarnaby.â Not unkindly. Just plainly.
He stopped.
âI know..â, she cleared her throat, âI've known for a while. There's been a part of you that was already gone when we met. I thought..â, she swallowed and looked at the work on her hands.
He understood that she was not going to perform the easier version of this. Not for his or anyone else's benefit. âI thought it might be something you could put down eventually. I don't think that anymore.â
âHanae..â
âI'm not angryâ, she said. He believed her, which was somehow worse than if she had been. âI'm not going to pretend it doesn't cost something. But I understood it when I first saw the hell in your eyes. She meant something I never will. Whatever happened to her, you were there, you survived it, and that kind of thing doesn't justâ, she made a gesture with her hand, the way she moved when words ran out, âbecome something else.â
Miyake was in the corner, sitting on the floor, pulling herself upright against the leg of the workbench. She found her feet, wobbled, held. She looked at Barnaby with those luminously dark eyes.
He crossed the room and crouched down in front of her. She reached for him immediately, both hands, and he took her hands in his and she gripped his fingers with the absolute conviction of someone who has not yet learned that things can let go.
âI'll come backâ, he said. He said it to Miyake. He was aware that he was saying it to Miyake because he could not say it to Hanae with the same certainty, and Miyake could not yet understand the difference.
He felt Hanae's hand rest briefly on the back of his head. Light, certain, the touch of someone who knows exactly what she's doing. Then she went back to the workbench and picked up the wrench, and the conversation was complete.
IV. The Pier
He left two days later.
He spent those two days in the ordinary business of departure. The Wind's Revenge was in the commercial gantry south of the Waning Lantern Pier. Hargrave and Rufus were aboard her and making ready. There were still provisions to check and charts to review and the dozen small logistical facts of a ship preparing to move. He did these things. He was good at these things. The doing of them kept the other things at a manageable distance.
On the last afternoon he walked Miyake along the pier while Hanae worked. He carried her against his shoulder and she looked at everything with the ravenous attention of a person for whom everything is still new. He told her the names of things: the bollard, the capstan, the stays of a moored brigantine, the particular birds that circled the fish market at the pier's end. He told her the names of things as though the naming were important, as though she would carry them for her lifetime.
She would not remember this. He knew she would not remember this. She was fourteen months old and the pier in Kyoto and the names of rigging and the weight of his hand on her back would be gone before she was old enough to know they had existed.
He knew this, and he kept telling her the names anyway.
V. The Dream but Different
That night he dreamed the dream again.
The Spring Wind. The grey hour. Miranda below. The tattoo of gunfire. The excitement of a ship that does not yet know it is about to die.
The light came. Amber and wrong and too fast. He raised his arm. The sound. The finger across the drum. The Spring Wind beginning to fall.
And then he was back on the pier. Miyake on his shoulder. The sun catching the water the way it had caught the water that afternoon, and then some guardsman walking the far gangway with his rifle slung barrel-up over his shoulder, and the morning light glinted off the bayonet. Glinting just so.. just at that angle.. just enough to make him squint and.. something in Barnaby's chest went completely still.
The memories of that day resolved all at once.
Not into faces. Not into names. Into a shape. Into the silhouette that had been blurred for four hundred repetitions, finally given definition by the glint of light off a bayonet blade: the particular way the wings caught the glare and held it.
A winged man. Hovering at the apex of the Spring Wind's envelope. Perfectly concealed by the amber blaze of the setting sun. Rifle raised, bayonet already descending.
He shot up in the dark of the corner room. His hands were shaking. The lamp had burned out and Kyoto was quiet outside the window.
He didn't sleep again that night.
He lay in the dark and turned the shape over in his mind. The wings, the rifle, the bayonet. He could not put a name to it because he had not been looking, he had been shielding his eyes, he had been in shock, and the man on the Kyoto dock had only been a soldier going about his morning. Barnaby had no name. No face. Nothing except the shape of a thing he had been trying to see for years.
It was enough. It was not enough. It was all he had.
He dressed in the dark. He picked up his coat and the document case with Sorn's information. He lingered in the doorway of Miyake's room for a long time. She was asleep on her back with her arms thrown wide in the absolute surrender of a sleeping child. He watched her breathe.
He didn't go in. He told himself it was because he didn't want to wake her. He knew that was only partially true.
VI. The Wind's Revenge
Hargrave was on watch when he came aboard. The big man looked at him once and said nothing, which was one of the things Barnaby had always valued about Hargrave. The seasoned old man understood when silence was the correct response. Rufus was below, asleep, and Barnaby didn't wake him. He cast off the forward line himself, then the aft, and the Wind's Revenge drifted out into the pre-dawn dark of the gantry under her own momentum while he went to the helm.
Panama City. Voss. The ledger. The shape of a winged man against the amber sun.
He didn't look back at Kyoto. He had looked back before. At Havana, at Lemuria, at Caracas, at every place that had briefly become something. It had never made the leaving easier. It had only made the image more precise, more available in the nights that followed.
He looked at the horizon. He set the course. He let the Wind's Revenge find herself in the cold, dark, stillness above the clouds.
Below him, somewhere in the wake, a city he had not meant to stay in was beginning its morning. A woman he had not meant to love was going to wake and find the other half of the bed empty. She may have known it was coming, but that didn't mean it wouldn't take is toll. He couldn't bring himself to hold both of those facts at once. His mind was too crowded. His heart too heavy. His thoughts turned to his daughter that he had not planned for, and could not stay for. How she was going to reach for him in the morning with her absolute certainty and find him gone. She would not understand it. She couldn't. She was young enough that she would eventually stop expecting him to be there, and that was the most honest accounting of what he was doing. He made himself hold the feelings that thought demanded: he was choosing to leave her. He was choosing. Again. The dead over the living. He was choosing Miranda's ghost over Hanae's warm and present hands. He was choosing the shape of a winged man in the glare over the shape of his daughter's sleeping face.
He knew in the cold precise way of a man who has been honest with himself long enough to know what that honesty costs. That the choice would follow him. That it would accumulate. That someday, somewhere, a young woman with darkly luminious eyes would find him. That she would have been carrying the weight of this morning for untold years without knowing exactly what it was. That she would not be kind about it.
He accepted that she would be right not to be.
The Wind's Revenge found her wind. The sails took it. Kyoto fell behind in the dark.
Captain Barnabus Harrier set his jaw and sailed toward the men who had taken his wife, and didn't look back.
