He laughed. “Except that we do not use our gods for much in Copper Downs. The Duke has found better ways to occupy the spirits of his people.” Leaning forward, he tried his best glare. “Now, you owe me some letters, young lady.”
I could not escape. There was nowhere to go but the ship itself. At the same time, it was clear to me that rebellious silence would serve nothing except to make a point my captor already understood quite well. He looked less like a maggot to me as the days went by, and more like a man. He spoke; I listened. I asked; he answered.
His words sank further and further into me every day. Now that I had some decent Petraean, Federo refused to acknowledge me if I spoke in my own tongue. His was a language of ideas, thoughts bigger than a barnyard or a rice paddy or a frog-filled ditch. I felt guilty at finding any pleasure in my captivity.
Just as true was the fact that I now ate better than I ever had before. I slept on sheets, a thing unheard of at home. Simple dresses covered me from shoulder to knees, the first time in my life I had not mostly been clad in sunlight. I had soap. Whatever god had given these maggot people that boon had indeed granted a blessing. I had never imagined what it was like to be utterly clean. At home, we were washed so thoroughly only at birth and at death. The rest of life was for living amid the dust of the world.
When he was not at his figuring and scribbling, or mastering me at lessons, Federo would read to me. He skipped past the little box of simple books for children, instead picking from his personal collection of texts on trade, geography, the engineering of steam power, the working of metals. Most of it meant little to me, but there was always a harvest of new words, and questions piled on questions, which he would answer as best he could.
Maps were my favorite. At first, making my mind understand that a picture on a sheet of vellum could be one and the same as the land and sea around me was like forcing myself through a small box. Once understanding dawned, I saw how I could travel without ever getting up from my seat on the bed.
Federo showed me distant places-the channel connecting our Storm Sea to the Sunward Sea, which ran below the ironbound overwatch of the Saffron Tower, far to the east; the Rimerock Range and its endless northern majesty; the extents of empires so long vanished that their cities were remembered only as rock quarries. The entire plate of the world could be scribed rock by stream on papers. We looked at everything he had to show me, except my homes old and new.
“Why will you not show me Copper Downs?”
Federo set his lips. “I am forbidden.”
“By who?”
“By whom.”
“By whom?” I muttered in my own tongue: “Stupid words,” then continued. “Why can I not see the pictures of my home?”
“You are to be unspoiled.”
“You have said you take me to Copper Downs, but you have never said why.” My chest shuddered at a memory of Endurance’s placid gaze. There would be no bells for me in Copper Downs, neither my silk nor the ox’s.
“You are to be raised up as a great lady. Every moment will be a lesson. Hush now, and let me show you what I can.”
A few days into the voyage, as Federo and I settled in to our routine of living, I begged a length of cloth from the sailmaker. He gave me a stretch of poplin torn from a wrap for sails, and two old needles nearly blunted. These I hid beneath my bunk while I considered the problem of bells. I picked threads out of my sheets, and sewed a knot for each day of my captivity, vowing to add the bells when I could, and to make up once more the thousand bells sewn at the start of my life by my mother, then my grandmother, then me.
Pleasant as he might pretend to be, I would not allow Federo to steal this from me.
Once the bosun conceded that I wasn’t likely to jump the rail again, I was permitted to be on the open deck. There were at least a few hours each day where I was doing little enough, so I wandered about Fortune’s Flight in small stages to watch the crew at their business and look for something that might serve me for the tiny bells I required.
The sailors mostly found me amusing. Some growled, others gave me long, cold looks, but many merely smiled and showed me their work. We had an easy voyage, unusually free of storms, as I later came to know. The great steam kettle at the heart of the ship did most of the work of our passage. The master set the sails to gain the extra push the winds might lend her progress.
I watched ducks being herded from their pens to the fantail to take the morning air. I watched the ropemaker splicing and braiding his hemp. I watched the deck idlers shift cargo as the quartermasters sought better trim, or just for the practice. I watched the gun crews work their pieces, though they never actually fired. In time I wondered if the guns functioned or were just for show. I watched men fish off the stern and cast harpoons from the waist of the ship. I watched the carpenter rebuild braces. I watched the smith hammer out hinges.
From him I found something to serve as a bell. Clearly I did not want any actual ringing in my cloth, for Federo would know in a moment I had some small treason afoot. But the smith had nails and scraps, and a dozen kinds of iron slivers and shims.
“I am playing at soldiers,” I told him the third day he’d tolerated my presence at his forge.
He was a huge man, in the manner of smiths everywhere. His hair was pale, though always slicked dark with sweat, and his eyes the cutting blue of a gemstone. “Aye, and is yer winning, missy?”
“No one wins at war,” I told him primly. “Some lose less than others, if they are lucky.”
The smith chuckled. “And I am seeing why the dandy man has taken such a liking to yer.”
Dandy was a new word to me. I set it aside for later consideration. I understood even then that I should not ask Federo why the smith had called him so.
“He is good to me,” I lied. “But he will not play at soldiers.”
Another chuckle, then a storm of metal noise as the smith hammered at an iron collar meant for some cross-tree high above us.
“Can you give me a few soldiers, sir?” I finally asked. I looked him in the eye as I spoke-that directness seemed to work best with these pale men from across the sea.
He paused his work, wiping sweat from his brow with his right wrist while still holding the hammer in that hand. “I do not have the casting of lead for toy men, missy. T’ain’t no one on board for that, ’less one of the gentlemen of the stern plays with little men in his bunk at night.” The smith snorted with laughter. At the time, I did not take any of his meanings.
“Just shavings or scraps or nails, sir,” I said quickly. “That I might march them in martial array.” That was a phrase from Federo’s reading the evening before, an epic poem concerning a battle that seemed to consist largely of a competition of colorful uniforms.
“A bag of sharp, pointed oddments the missy wants.” He gave me a long stare, a spark of inner shrewdness rising from the well of his usual bluff density. “Well, yer not loading a cannon, nor running from foot nor horse.”
“No, sir,” I said quietly.
He leaned close, hammer still clutched in his hand. “Don’t call me sir, missy. Iron you wants, iron you shall have.”
Later I stole some pliers from the carpenter’s mate, to bend the nails and scraps with. So it was that I began to affix bits of metal to my poplin, to stand in for the bells and silk of my home. I would sew quickly when I knew Federo to be at the captain’s table, or late at night when his breath was slow and even. I pretended the clanging bells that marked the hours of the watches were Endurance watching over me, that the rumbling of the steam belowdecks was the bellows of the ox’s great lungs.
So I marked the days of my passage across the calm sun-drenched waters of the Storm Sea in learning everything that my captor could put before me. My nights I observed by pricking my fingers in remembrance of a home that already seemed infinitely dim and distant in my recall.