The Sable City, Book I of the Norothian Cycle

The Sable City, Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve

It had been so long since Zebulon Baj Nif had slept in a bed that when he awoke he had no more idea of what he was lying on than of where he was.

Something lumpy but soft, yielding in some places but firm in others. Zeb hoped faintly for a woman before realizing it was only a mattress, irregularly filled.

He opened his eyes one at a time, and blinked in the faintest light. There was a curving wooden wall on one side and a coiled hammock hanging above him, though he was on a bunk. Zeb became aware that his whole world was gently rocking. Hospital wagon, he thought. But no. The constant sound in his ears was not the creak of wooden wheels or the whine of an axel needing grease. It was the slap of waves on a hull. The roll of the sea.

“Fatch ipi thrajipi,” Zeb muttered in Minauan, a phrase it would not do to translate. His voice cracked and rasped dryly.

Wood scraped wood, and Zeb craned his neck sideways. On the other side of the narrow room beneath a high porthole, a figure stood but remained indistinct in the meager light. Two steps brought it bunk-side and Zeb narrowed his eyes as it, she, knelt.

“Drink,” a vaguely familiar voice said, female and accented. A tin cup touched Zeb’s lips and he pushed himself up to his elbows to gulp the metallic-tasting water. When the swallow of water was gone, the figure withdrew and rummaged around somewhere. Sparks were struck, a candle flickered to life, and the Far Western woman with the long, black, unkempt hair stood on her tippy-toes in the center of the room to pass the flame to a lantern swinging from the ceiling.

Memory trickled back to Zeb more than it flooded. He raised his right arm and stared at the inside of his right elbow. Not a scratch. When he moved it though he saw the scarring to either side of the joint, faint white spider webs on his tan skin. The movement was painless.

“It is well?” the woman asked in Codian, returning to kneel beside the bunk and grasping Zeb’s wrist without asking. She manipulated the arm some more, bending the joint and moving it side to side. Zeb could not have stopped her had he wanted to, as he presently felt about as powerful as a sickly kitten. The woman peered at his elbow as would a carpenter who had just blown the sawdust off a fresh piece of work.

“Who are you?” Zeb asked, mouth no longer dry but his voice still rough. The woman blinked at him.

“You do not remember?”

“I do,” Zeb said. “But I never got a name.”

The woman let his wrist go, and Zeb’s arm flopped limply back to the mattress. She stood, wearing her trousers with the patched knees and a long shirt with a rough, thigh-length hem, likewise beige and equally shapeless. She bowed from the waist.

“I am called as Amatesu.”

“And you still say you’re not a priestess?” Zeb croaked.

Amatesu straightened and looked thoughtful, giving her small mouth a pretty purse.

“I am not a cleric in the way of Noroth,” she said. “Not dedicated to a single god of your Ennead. I am shukenja. I am…a talker. With the spirit world.”

Zeb had no idea what that meant, though if the arm which he had thought was sure to be an amputation job was healed, he was fine with whatever Amatesu wanted to call herself.

“But you did fix my wing here, right?”

Amatesu blinked. “Wing?”

“Arm, I mean. It is just a…manner of speaking.”

“You do not have wings.”

“No, I know that…” Zeb sighed and with a grunt he managed to sit up slowly and turn sideways on the bunk, shaking bare feet out from under a coarse blanket and placing them on the deck flooring. He extended his right hand.