Winter 75, 512
The Wharves of Zeltiva
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The coming spring still stirred only fitfully in the sea air of Zeltiva - the air had enough warmth to melt the ends of icicles into it, and leave it damp, and paradoxically colder against exposed skin. The morning and the last of night made love against the horizon of the harbor, the violet luminousness of them glowing across the black-blue sky. In this light, in the early morning of late winter, even the mast of a glorified fishing scow could appear sanctified, the spar of it tied tightly to a worn wood hawser. This was the ship, the ship that would carry Charm Wright off to... an end, of some sort or another.
Today was the day in which it would happen, in fact, and a few sailors were, as a consequence, already up and about, not because, so early, there was any need, Minnie was sure. Charm Wright had pulled together far grander and more complex voyages than this, and the ship would be, already, carefully packed, no doubt, the sails aired and fresh, the wood freshly painted, the ropes newly tarred. It was nothing like that that drew these sailors out, it was, simply, that call of a coming voyage, that ringing cry of the sea. Some souls, perhaps, could make peace with this voice, some sailors heard it as philosophers hear the call of Dira - as a friend, but one that one must meet only when the time comes. Some sailors, as the cry grows louder and nearer, are drawn inexorably towards it. It was a matter of temperament, more than anything, as far as Minnie had seen, not experience. She had seen fresh, green sailors on their first voyage traipse idly over the scuppers at the lost possible moment, and then she had seen captains of great experience who spent days before hand, tied to the ship as to a lover being roused from sleep.
She did not know which type Charm was. She had never come to see one of her voyages off. It had been something of a superstition, to her. She read about the woman's partings in the broadsheets, in ship logs, in the accounts of other writers, but she had never seen one. Minnie, herself, felt a stranger to the sea - she was, with the sea, as with most aspects of Zeltiva, both powerfully attracted and inescapably foreign. She had written poems about it, when she worked on the libretto of her great, unfinished opera - she had written them sitting on the stones by the key wharf, her bare toes in the summer water - but she had, even then, felt as if she were a bird writing letters to a fish. And so... watching one of Charm's ships part, felt... as if she would be out of place. Superstitiously, even, a bad influence, a sort of shore-bound Jonah.
Even today, she came so early partly for this reason - because when the ship parted, she wished to be tucked inside her chambers. Praying, perhaps, for Charm, not for her safety so much as for her satisfaction. Charm, in a way, was the last compatriot Minnie felt she had in Zeltiva. Lanie was long past, Kena gone before she was born. Hannah had been dead for years now, and Stephy Brooks, whom she had known only peripherally, never feeling particularly emotionally close to the hardbitten brave sailor, was past to her as well. Even Mara, her old friend at the library, was dead now, taken by the plague. And then, Minnie realized with the calm acceptance of one for whom death has become a familiar companion, she had not so long anymore either. Perhaps another circle of the moon, for the Tears of Rak'kelli, while they had slowed the disease in her hand, had not stopped it, and the acceleration of Minnie's own death had returned. She could feel it racing through her veins.
That was another reason not to come later. She wished the parting to be a celebration for Charm, and the presence of a woman now known, at least among many of her colleagues at the Guild and University, to carry the plague, would bring a black wind to the place. And Minnie genuinely wished to keep her illness to herself, to keep the spread of thing as small as possible, her conscience stilled into a box, but not entirely dead over the subject.
Mostly, though, Minnie knew, she had business with Charm before she left, and she wished it be personal. Intimate. Individual. A professor mounting a ship just before it parts with one of the heroines of Zeltiva on a dangerous voyage -- in public, that would be a ceremony. Minnie did not wish that. She did not wish her little gifts to come from her office as a recorder of things. She wished them to come as a friend. And, some little part of her Qalayan tendencies relented to this - this voyage, increasingly, felt to her like Charm's funeral. Death, perhaps, was something one could let a soul have to itself, something one could record from a distance. If Charm's feelings as she unmoored from her life out onto the sea that would carry her to her end were to be the first entries in a book that, Minnie confessed to herself, no one, quite possibly, would ever see again? So be it. She would finish the biography of the woman, if it came to that, with second-hand accounts. She would let that last embrace between Charm and Dira occur behind the curtain of unrecordedness.
Minnie herself was bundled heavily, a quilt pulled underneath her Mackintosh, a scarf tied around her face to leave only her glasses exposed. Her boots stepped carefully among the icy cobbles of the quayside. Her good hand gripped hard at a blackthorn stick, its copper ferrule seeking corners to brace her frail steps against.
The ship extended, just slightly, over the land, the long forward spar just a few feet over Minnie's head. She could, when she extended her fingers, almost brush against it. Had she been a more normal height, she could have firmly gripped it, felt the smoothness of the new paint. She passed it. Under her bad arm, she carried a little camp stool, and arriving near the gangplank, she unfolded it. She had used it far more often to sit across from the elder Wright sister's empty, spectral manor. The manor, now, Minnie had entered, had walked its halls, had spoken with the servants, had sat, shivering and lucid on the very seat that Kena had perhaps sat in.
Now, staring across the narrow plank at this humble ship, the parallels between the two sisters struck Minnie terribly, and the parallels between her own work - the work of sitting quietly outside the lives of beautiful souls, and watching - struck with a bittersweet sorrow. How sweet it was to watch the great do great and terrible things! And yet, how sad, to know that greatness always devours the great.
She waited. She would not interrupt, would not nose onto the ship where she did not belong, would not ask around to see if Charm was there. She had her quilt and coat. She had patience. She would wait. Charm would come when she came, or find her when she was ready. She rested her good hand, now, on her satchel, and softly sang to herself, pitchy and weak and hoarse, an aria from an opera she had not heard sung in Zeltiva for many years.
"Grown old am I,
A spirit born of fire.
Grown old am I,
Too old now to be the flame that once I was.
But while I live,
I'll burn, a restive, fierce, and rosy-hearted coal,
Refusing to extinguish in the sea."