Mating Dance
Chapter 13
We sailed northwest, a compromise between getting as far away from the Marian coast as quickly as possible on the one hand, and sailing toward a friendly destination on the other. Jak took a long turn at the tiller after I showed him the pole star and where to keep it in relation to the crosstree of the mainsail. “I guess we should sleep in shifts until we find a safe anchorage,” I said. “Why don’t you sleep first?” I felt him relax, his neck going loose as I weighted the command phrase, and then I felt him shake it off, with a little panic in his mind.
“You go ahead,” he said. “I don’t feel the need just yet.”
“You’ve had a very strong potion run through your body,” I said, “and a very hard twenty-four hours.”
“I’m all right. You go ahead,” he said again. I went below.
I gave myself a suggestion to sleep for just two hours, and to wake if I sensed any disturbance to the boat. When I woke up, everything was quiet. I threw on a cloak and climbed the ladder to the deck quickly.
Jack was still sitting as I had left him, wide awake. He was shivering slightly; he hadn’t left the tiller even to put on a cloak. I put mine on him.
“We can’t have you catch a chill,” I said. “It’s my shift. Get some sleep.”
He actually shivered harder. “I don’t really feel like it,” he said.
I put my arms around him from the back, laid my hair against his neck and jaw. “Would you like me to help you with that?” I murmured into his ear, already kneading the thick cords between his neck and shoulder with my fingers. He stood up, hurriedly, I thought.
“I’ll go below,” he said. “Two hours, right?” Going down the little ladder to the cabin, he kept his eyes on the rungs. His emotions were a roiling mass of half-images and sounds, but the dominant one was fear.—Of me.
Jak:
I’m not sure that the dreams were the true reason why I decided that I could never let any woman inside my head again, but they seemed so.—The one where Leila was whispering into my ear, and the whisper turned all my muscles to jelly, and she laid me, alive, in a box and began to seal it, to seal me forever in a darkness where I was conscious but couldn’t move or make a sound—that was one of the first. It wasn’t hard to see where that one came from, of course. Then there was the dream where I was running through the woods toward my home—the farm where I grew up. I had to get there quickly because it was on fire, but as I came to the gate I would hear someone shout, “Sleep, my friend Jak,” and find myself back in the woods, and I had to run the distance all over again, into the thickening smell of smoke on the wind.
I wasn’t sure that Jess was personally to blame for any of this, although I could not feel sure that she wasn’t. Either way, when she came up behind me and put her hands on my neck, my body remembered the strangle hold that had ended the Duel, and the muscles through my whole upper back locked up. I muttered something and fled below, where I lay on the cot for two hours, but every time I dozed off, I snapped back into waking, gulping at the air, my heart pounding.
Jess:
After Jak scuttled down the ladder as if I were a loose silkseal on his deck snapping at his balls, I had a lot of time to sit with my thoughts, which were not good company. We were not in a very good place way back in the forest after he had stitched my artery, and after that was my enchanting him into abject remorse for having wounded me, Leila’s re-enchanting and then seducing him, the loss of his ear, his execution, the loss of consciousness that he thought was his death, waking in a coffin with Leila bending over him. Now the nightmares; small wonder. I ached to comfort and heal all these pains, not solely because I had caused most of them, but I couldn’t reach through the cold fear that was wrapped around his image of me.
Jak:
Trying to navigate at sea was less like wayfinding on land than I thought. On land you took a bearing on a landmark and walked toward it, and while the terrain might put obstacles in your way that you had to go around, that very necessity had applied to people who came before you, and so the trails around the obstacle were usually reliable. You checked your bearings again, of course, but did not have to do it that often. At sea, everything was in flux. You set a compass heading, but you have to keep correcting your rudder and sail settings to allow for changes in the speed and direction of the wind and for unseen currents in the water through which you move. I had never sailed a boat through even an ordinary storm at sea, and I didn’t think this one was ordinary.
Jess:
First we tried to run straight before it, a course that took us well south of the silkseal waters that we sought, south down into the Spice Islands, some of which had oligarchs who had made extradition agreements with Mar. We kept shortening sail, hoping to avoid being driven under by these insane winds, which were building breaking waves taller than a moderate house. Finally, remembering something that I had heard, I took the chance on bringing her about, which almost capsized us. I shouted to Jak to set the jib against the mainsail, so that the two sails would cancel each other out. “Heave to,” I had heard a captain of our trading fleet pronounce solemnly, “Just heave to and wait it out.” “Waiting it out” turned out to be much more laborious and dangerous than it had sounded. It worked for as long as we executed every tack into the wind perfectly. Eventually, we didn’t. A wave came over the gunnel and knocked me flat just when I was about to haul in the yard that would reset the mainsail. We “missed stays,” as the long-voyage sailors call it. Immediately we shipped the top half of a large wave, the mass of water sweeping me out of the boat. Jak dove after me—and if that sounds like a heroic act of love, consider that the boat had capsized before he found me in the water.