Page 31 of The City in Glass

The new people of Azril laughed, embracing one another, and someone came up with the last bottle of liquor they had brought from Igomto. They passed it around, and eventually it came to Vitrine’s hand. She took a curious sip, and then a deeper one at the green and herbal taste. They could duplicate it to some extent with the plants grown on the mountain slopes. Perhaps she would wander up tomorrow and see what she could find.

She passed the bottle on, and then the music changed again, and she jumped.

How did they learn the ganli, she wondered, but of course they hadn’t. The beginning measures were the same, but the tune hopped like a rabbit, becoming something other so quickly that she made a face. Still it was a good song, and she watched as the crowd rearranged itself, dividing into pairs before taking hands to face each other.

“Do you dance?” the angel asked.

She almost said yes, because this was close, so close to what she had danced before the fire. She would pick up the steps right away, she would kiss her partners and give them dreams and nightmares that would live in them forever. Then she shook her head proudly, leaning back as if the fallen column were a throne.

“Better than anyone you have ever seen,” she replied. “But not with you.”

The angel might have responded, but a girl came up to kiss his cheek, whirling the angel away. He was not quite as hopeless as Vitrine had guessed he might be. The girl made up for his lack of grace with her own, kindly slowing for him when he stumbled, muscling him through the paces where his knowledge was incomplete.

In the morning the girl would remember that she danced, but not with whom. The work of her hands would be good, and when a pot was thrown perfectly or a kid birthed healthy, she would think of that person she couldn’t remember and wonder.

Vitrine watched them spin, all of them, and her toe, all on its own, tapped on the ground. She refused to heed it. It wasn’t the ganli, and she wasn’t ready to dance something that wasn’t the ganli yet.

SIXTEEN

Jinan grew up and grew well, if more reckless than anyone liked. From her father, she learned the writings of what he called their home, and from her eimi, she learned about the weapons that had been used to drive them away from it.

The bread and fresh water brought her people across the river to live in the city, but they did not wander within it, muttering about ghosts in the old lanes and peering at them from around strange corners.

Jinan, on the other hand, went running through the city as often as she could, and as the well-loved daughter of the whole community, the hope of a world to come and the first sign they had that they might be allowed to continue, she was indulged even when she came back with tales about a cat-eyed woman who told her the best stories.

When Jinan was sixteen and her people had built stone houses as well as ones from wood, three ships came up the coast, raiders who were sometimes traders, bearing wealth from cities across the sea. Vitrine followed them in the guise of an osprey, flitting from one bow to the next for almost four days before she made her decision.

The wind whipped up out of a calm night sky, and the sailors found their ships pushed across the rough waves as if by some giant hand. When they tried to sail crosswise out of the edge of the storm, the winds tore their sails to rags and the hulls shrieked as if the wood had learned to fear pain.

The storm broke the ships to bits, another world smashed to birth something new, and in the dawn, the sailors came dazed to shore, clinging to barrels, to spars, one to the mermaid figurehead that had broken cleanly from her ship.

On a sandbar, neither land nor sea, Vitrine stood next to a figure who loomed over her, his skin the cool gray of a sky wondering whether it should storm, his teeth the sharp splinters of broken masts.

“Well, will this do?” he asked as the woman clinging to the wooden mermaid stood up and stared warily at the people coming down from the ruined city.

“It might,” Vitrine said, ignoring the baleful glare of the angel who watched from up the beach. “They are good-looking people, don’t you think? And strong with the possibility of being generous.”

“I hardly trouble myself with such things,” her brother said loftily. “I have taken my allotment into my navy, and I am content. And you?”

“Oh, it’s a little early to be thinking about navies,” Vitrine said absently, but she was suddenly taken by the idea, ships in the harbor equipped with battering rams made from smoke-hardened wood and laminated bone, underwater spikes affixed to innocent-looking merchant vessels.

“No, I meant to ask if you are content or could see yourself to becoming so. You have been quiet for some time now, keeping too close to yourself.”

“Not everyone wants to be one face in a crowd,” she retorted, an old argument, and her brother laughed.

“Then come be one face at a coffeehouse or on a burning rampart,” he said. “I know I am not the only one who has wondered at how you have been.”

When she hugged him goodbye, she could hear the bells inside him, enormous sonorous things that rang even deep beneath the water. His own city had sunk, she remembered, and she hugged him a little tighter.

“Maybe,” she said.

The people from the sea were a motley lot, some from Combes, some from Mato Lorno, a scattering from the broken states of Brokkslevan, and one rather confused cleric from the distant land of Tuyet, a talking shrike their only companion. Some of them were eager to set off for home, the shores of Azril-that-was too strange and haunted for them, but more decided to stay. The goods on the ships had been promised to wealthy men who did not easily forgive, and Azril’s ghosts and her resident demon were not so very terrible.

Jinan took for her lover the woman who had come to shore clinging to the wooden mermaid. At first Juana’s stories of the sea and of the distant lands that lay beyond them were only meant to charm the laughing girl with the long braids into her bed. Soon enough, though, she was drawing maps and teaching her new woman the traders’ tongue, which would let her bargain for a bag of iron ingots and insult someone’s mother almost anywhere she could sail on the White Sea.

At first Juana thought Jinan’s interest was only a girlish fancy, and then she thought it was an obsession, and then one night as she slept on the beach, after a demon came to whisper in her ear, she caught the dream herself. Ambition was contagious, she decided, and she threw in with Jinan and some of the others, children of the first settlers who craved different skylines and different ghosts, people from her own ships who missed their homes.

They had no true shipwrights, but between logs hewn from the forest and the remnants of the ships that had brought them, they crafted something seaworthy. Juana’s mermaid was proudly placed on the prow of the ship, and before they set sail, Vitrine reminded one of the sailors that a sacrifice of a small life to the sea would smooth their passage. The sailor wrung a chicken’s neck and threw it into the water, and after that, they were on their way.