"Carry her till the sun goes down."
The two men looked at each other. "Very well," said Perig. "But if anyone comes, you'll have to hide in the marsh."
Leweli agreed. The two women changed clothing, Ahl binding all four of her breasts. Leweli, however, left her upper pair free and used the binding strip to make a sling for Dapple. "If she wakes, I can feed her."
They rejoined the men, and Perig said, "Another thing has occurred to me. By the time we reach Sorg Harbor, you are going to smell of milk and the baby."
"This is true," said Merhit, who was still on her tsin, watching everything.
"I also have a solution to this problem," Perig said. "Or rather, Cholkwa does."
The young man looked puzzled.
The older man smiled. "He likes perfume and always has a jar. We'll pour it over Leweli -- "
"What?" cried Cholkwa.
"When we reach the south, dear one, I'll buy you more."
Cholkwa opened his mouth.
"You can argue on the way," said Merhit. "Be careful! And be lucky!" She turned her tsin and rode off, leading Ahl's animal.
The journey to Sorg Harbor was uneventful. They met no one. Only a fool would travel through weather like this, Perig remarked. Late in the afternoon they took shelter against the heat, resting in the shadow of a half-grown atchul tree. Sister trees stood in the distance, but Ahl couldn't find the mother. Had
it fallen? Was this an omen? Would she ever see her mother again? Imagining the matriarch's fury, Ahl decided she might not want to.
At sunset the four continued on their way, trudging through the long summer dusk into a starry night. By the time they reached Sorg Harbor the buildings were dark.
They stopped. Leweli put her baby in the wicker chest and, with Ahl's help,strapped her upper breasts. The two men went off to relieve themselves. When they returned, Perig got out the perfume and dowsed Leweli.
"Too much," said Cholkwa. "You know what she smells like now."
"Like a man who sells the use of his body to other men," said Perig cheerfully.
"Better that than a mother. In the future, please remember to use the male pronoun when speaking of Leweli or Ahl. They are men now."
"With a baby in a box," said Cholkwa.
"As you say," Perig agreed in the same cheerful tone. He looked toward the women. Ahl could see starlight shining on his eyes. "You need new names. How does Lewekh sound? And Ahlin?"
"Good enough," said Ahl.
Perig led them through dark streets. A few dim lanterns shone in the harbor, aboard docked ships. One was the Taig Far Traveler. A sleepy male voice asked,
"Who?"
"The actors," said Perig.
"Come on board."
Tired and half-asleep, Ahl helped unfasten the chest. She and Leweli carried it into a cabin. A lamp hung from the ceiling; the still air stank of burning fish oil. Ahl forced open the cabin window. "It'll be better once we're under way."
"Good," said Leweli.
The men followed with bags, then left again. The tsin had to be delivered to its new owner. Ahl searched the cabin. A row of cabinets went along one wall. Inside were five hammocks, neatly rolled, and five pots of fired clay, good-sized and glazed inside. The lids fit tightly. One was clearly for urination. She could tell by the shape and the emblem drawn on the outside. She didn't know the purpose of the others.
Leweli spread her bedroll on the floor, but Ahl -- a sailor -- hung up one of the hammocks, fastening it to iron hooks in the cabin walls. Along with the lamp and the cabinets, these were the cabin's only furniture. A spare folk, the Taig.
Lying in her hammock, she regarded the lamp, which was iron and shaped like a fish with bulbous glass eyes. Light shone out the eyes and through a hole in the fish's back. Taig art. The Sorg would never make anything so grotesque. Thinking this, Ahl went to sleep.
Waking, she felt the ship in motion. The fish was dark. Daylight came through the window. She could make out Leweli, sleeping next to the wicker chest, one hand on it. The men were not present. Had they slipped off in the night? Were she and Leweli alone among male strangers? A disturbing idea! She rose and used
the pot-for-urination, then went on deck. Perig and Cholkwa were there, leaning on the ship's aide, watching blue waves go past.
"Good morning, Ahlin," Perig said. "Cholkwa is a little queasy. I thought he'd be better up here."
"And you?" asked Ahl.
"No kind of travel bothers me."
She stayed a while with the men. For better or worse the journey had begun.
There was a kind of relief in simply beginning. As to the end, who could say?
With luck, she'd find Ki.
The first two days of the voyage were bright, with a strong wind blowing out of the north. Nothing could be better! They sped toward Helwar over foaming water.
Leweli stayed in their cabin, afraid that the Taig sailors would see through her disguise, afraid as well to leave the baby alone.
"A good actor and a bad traveler," Perig said in explanation. "Poor Lewekh is often queasy, but if you could see him play a matron mourning the death of her male relations! A stone would groan and grieve!"
"I would like to see this," said the Taig captain politely.
Ahl preferred to be on deck, listening to Perig tell stories about his acting career, though he never mentioned the trouble that had left him with one companion.
At night they had to share the same cabin. The two men slept on the floor, keeping as far from the women as was possible. They were not perverts, Perig said in a reassuring tone. "Neither one of us has ever touched a woman, except for close relatives when we were children. Nor will we. Men like us are never used to fulfill breeding contracts. What lineage would want the kind of traits we have?"
This was true, as Ahl realized. The most important male virtue is directness.
How could an actor have this quality? Surely-- to do his work -- he had to be devious. Nor did it seem likely that an actor's life would encourage loyalty, the second male virtue. Always traveling, living a series of lies, how could men like Perig and Cholkwa be loyal, except possibly to one another?
In thinking this, Ahl showed the prejudice of her time. Now we understand that honesty can manifest itself in more than one way, and that people can travel long distances from home without becoming disloyal.
But it wasn't simply prejudice that made her think of actors as men of doubtful virtue. In those days acting was a trade halfway in shadow. Many actors were runaways; and not a few were criminals: thieves and prostitutes, usually, though there had been one famous acting troop which supplemented its income with
banditry.
"Understandable, given the quality of their acting," Perig said when he told Ahl about this group. "Eh Manhata caught them finally and told them to put on a play. Maybe they thought he'd leave them alive, if they could please him. They did their best, and he had them all beheaded. It wasn't a judgment on their
acting, but it could have been."
Were her two companions thieves? Ahl wondered uneasily, then remembered that she was a thief and beyond question disloyal to her family. In addition she was pretending to be a man. Hah! She was most of the way into darkness! Maybe she ought to finish the job and become an actor, though women never did.
On the third day the wind shifted, blowing out of the west. Black clouds loomed there, lightning flashing around them: the first autumn storm. The Taig men reefed their sails. In spite of this the ship's speed increased. The waves grew taller and changed color, becoming dark green with thick white streaks of foam.
The air filled with flying spray. "Get below," the Taig captain said to them.