Roseilda's Tale
by Alex Dally MacFarlaneMatishka bound the first coils of paper into Roseilda's hair on her twelfth birthday. Roseilda sat very still on the bed of white flowers, so that only the ever-present rocking of the garden ship and a salty breeze stirred her hair. With deft fingers, Matishka wove curling strands of her hair through the tiny holes in the paper-coils, securing them into place with bows and knots. A few brushed against Roseilda's bare arms and they felt thick, glossy, so different from the flimsy sheets of paper traded occasionally from other vessels.
A dozen priests stood in a circle around her, their voices layering the ritual words upon the air like an aural picture of the rug Roseilda's sister had woven and traded to one of the other floating towns a year past. With each intonation Roseilda was bound tighter into servitude of the goddess.
She kept enough of her attention focused on the proceedings to know when she must echo particular words, but thoughts of the coils' gift dominated her mind. The power to control winds, to make them and bend them. She savored the thought, delighting in the flavour of it, so different from the years of formal training she would have to endure. Countless rituals, tests, prayers. Already she had been through so many. The winds are sacred, and must be treated with reverence, she reminded herself. But if only I could just have fun with them, just sometimes!
A sudden silence summoned tremors of panic through her. Had she forgotten to say something? She looked up quickly and saw a gentle smile on Matishka's old face, like the creasing of stiff fabric.
"Rise, Roseilda," he said, his tone suggesting that he had already invited her to do so. "Rise, and enter the service of the goddess."
With all the grace she could muster around the quivering in her limbs, she stood and walked to him. His gnarled fingers traced a pattern in black ink across each of her cheeks; she would wash it off the next morning, her first morning living on the temple ship.
His inking complete, Matishka bowed his head and said, "Roseilda Nesika, we embrace you as a sister."
The bell woke her. Its terrible pounding resonated through the temple ship, shaking Roseilda's hammock and stirring her from an unclear dream. Blinking sleep from her lashes, she tugged her blanket down from her face and peered into the darkness of the initiates' dormitory.
She shivered, and tried to imagine that she had dreamed the sound. But when the bell rang for a second time, she couldn't deny its meaning.
They were under attack.
Seconds later, as she and the other initiates scrambled to dress, the door to their dormitory was flung open by a young priest who shouted for them all to follow her. Still barefoot and her hair uncombed, Roseilda hurried to keep up with the other youths as they ran out onto the vast central deck.
"There!" whispered a boy, pointing. Roseilda followed his arm and saw in the low moonlight the outline of a small, un-sailed ship rounding the far edge of the floating town and heading towards them. His voice carrying a distinct conspiratorial tone, the boy added, "Pirates!"
Roseilda stared at him. How could he be excited, as if this were just a game?
"Now," the young priest said, her strong voice grabbing and holding the initiates' attention, "remember what you've all been taught? We need as much wind as possible to push those pirates away. They've got their sails furled and good oarsmen, so all of us are needed. Do your best!"
The several dozen priests and old masters stood in a disorderly cluster on the deck, already uncurling coils of paper in their hair and whispering the goddess' words. Roseilda's fingers trembled over the coil hanging by her right shoulder, the one that created a simple pushing wind. Mere yards away the sea lashed against the temple ship's side, and beyond it she could see the pirate ship drawing ever closer. It shook, straining under the summoned winds, but did not capsize or turn to flee.
A moment later it began firing its cannons. The multiple bangs, the sound of crunching wood and a rising chorus of screams filled the spaces of quiet in between the bell's ongoing rings. Roseilda felt the deck tremor beneath her feet, and stumbled two paces before she caught her footing; shaking, unable to tear her gaze from the approaching vessel, she finally managed to uncurl the coil and whisper the words she'd been taught after her initiation. From within came the same brief sense of tugging and release as when practicing, but faced with the pirate ship's apparently unstoppable approach she felt desperately ineffectual.
The next wave of cannon fire threw her to her knees, and she heard splintering and the gushing of water. They've hit the temple ship! She looked up and saw several masters and older priests cursing and fumbling with their hair. The blasts had interrupted their more complex efforts, the ones essential to repelling this attack.
"Don't give up!" Matishka shouted, fingers flying through his silver curls.
Cowering on her hands and knees, Roseilda watched with tear-pricked eyes as the pirate ship drew so close she could pick out the people aboard it -- silhouettes with death-dealing swords against the horizon-stuck moon.
The next blast struck seconds later, tearing and crashing into her ears; its force hurled her high into the air and then down, dizzyingly fast down into the hard, cold sea.
A fourth fit of shivers wracked her body.
When they finally passed and her limbs obeyed her commands once more, she clutched the thin blanket tighter and wished, for the twentieth or thirtieth time, that when she opened her eyes again she'd be lying in her hammock, wrapped in warmth.
Rain drizzled in a light haze from a low, gray sky, undeniably real. The sea, as gray as its cloudy mirror, lapped against the pirate ship's hull, the sound of it weaving between the oars' rhythmic splash and the creak of the dark sails.
Occasionally Roseilda looked up at the great canvases of material and contemplated using the coils in her hair to turn the wind against them, but she feared the two men standing over her too much to try. And a small part of her doubted she would be any more effective than if she pursed her lips and blew.
Heavy footfalls drew her gaze to the stairs leading down from the poop deck. Accompanied by the thud of boots on wood and the jangle of coins woven into his shoulder-length dark hair descended a man whose casually proud demeanor immediately identified him as the ship's captain. With a shark's languid grace he walked to Roseilda, around the masts and cordage, storage crates and other cluttered paraphernalia, and stopped when his boots nudged her pale legs.
"You look cold, girl." His voice was warm like rich tea, but it only made Roseilda shiver. "Come, I've some dry clothes and hot food for you."
She wanted to defy him. For attacking Ikitina-town, for taking her prisoner, she longed to wreak some act of vicious refusal upon him. But the shivering was taking hold of her again; when callused hands gripped her wrists and hauled her, surprisingly gentle, to her feet, she thought only of warmth.
He led her back across the deck, to a door set behind the poop deck's ladder. Before she stepped inside, Roseilda stole one last look at the grey horizon -- empty of her home, as it had been since she awoke on the pirate ship's deck.
The cabin's warmth sang to her bones, banishing the chill nestled deep inside and returning a flush of color to her skin. Still clasping the blanket tight to her body, she walked further into the room and looked around. The captain had a bed, a desk coated in papers held down with clips and weights, and a small table decorated with several bowls of steaming food -- and there was no doubt that the cabin belonged to him, even before he draped his jacket over the bed and plucked a half-empty bottle of dark gold liquid from under the pillow.
"Please, take a seat," he said, gesturing to the table. "Eat as much as you like." She settled on one of the stools, the captain's gaze resting uncomfortably on her shoulders and hair, and reached for roasted gull meat and spiced rice to heap into her bowl. When the food's warm smells filled her nostrils, the day's hunger coiling in her gut made her forget uncertainty and she ate eagerly.
With a jingle of the coins in his hair, the captain sat on a stool across the table from her and picked up a clump of dried seaweed between thumb and forefinger. "What's your name, girl?" he asked, and dropped the dried, twisted green into his mouth.
The food in her stomach and warmth in her body chased away the worst of her fear; driving her nails into her palms to distract herself from the rest, she said, "How many people did you kill? And what do you want from me?"
Rich laughter bubbled between the captain's lips. "You aren't a trembler, are you? All the better, I say; makes you more interesting." He took a swill from his bottle before continuing in a marginally heavier tone. "I don't know how many people died, but probably not too many. We aimed to damage your floating town enough that it wouldn't have any chance of chasing us, even with your people's powers to control the wind, not to destroy it. And what we need you for is to help us take back something that was stolen."
"What if I don't help you?"
"Then we'll kill you," he said matter-of-factly.
Roseilda felt suddenly cold. Everything in the man's calm statement and casually predatory pose told the truth of his threat.
When he laughed again, she almost jumped from her stool. "Girl, if I killed you I'd just have to go back to your bloody town and pit my ship against those bloody winds all over again." He took another pinch of seaweed. "No, you'll do it because it's fun."
She stared at him, unbelieving.
"How did I know?" Gold flashed as he smiled. "You're not the first person I've met from Ikitina. The ritual bores more than a few of you wind-controllers, especially the younger ones, and I only need someone with the most basic skills to help me. When I saw you fall into the sea, I figured Lady Fortune was finally stepping back onto my side."
He speared a chunk of gull meat with his knife and bit into it, his dark eyes fixed on Roseilda. After a moment she ducked her gaze, frightened and confused, and reached for a cube of chocolate with a trembling hand. On Ikitina chocolate was prized and rare, and she couldn't pass the opportunity to take some; the rich, bitter-edged sweetness helped steady her mind a little.
"Well? Will you help me, girl, or grow fat on my supplies until I have to throw you overboard lest you sink us?"
That time she heard the joke, and a weak smile slipped unbidden onto her lips. "What's your name?" she said in a quiet voice.
"Sashi. And yours?"
"Roseilda."
Moving with a fluid grace she had never managed to master, he slid from his stool onto one knee and took her hand. Stubble and wind-chapped lips grazed her knuckles, and the coins in his hair jingled. "A pleasure to make your acquaintance," he said, smiling. Close-up, she could see the square holes cut into the coins' center and the knots of his hair that held them in place. "Will you help us?"
She didn't know how to answer, but the vacuum of her not-reply pressed quickly and uncomfortably upon her. "Why do you have coins in your hair?"
Her hand dropped from his grip as he returned less elegantly to his stool. "There's magic in hair, girl, and in the things bound into it."
"Magic?" she asked, the unfamiliar word strange on her tongue.
"Think of it as part of anything -- coins, air, water, paper -- that's gone a little strange, and in that strangeness is something we can learn to control. My coins can help me in battle. Your ink and paper let you summon and direct winds."
She pulled her hair around her, the coils of paper thick and glossy against her skin. "It comes from the goddess."
"Makes no difference to me where you think it comes from, girl. And you still haven't answered my question."
Her gaze drifted to the broad windows behind Sashi, to the gray horizon where her home floated irretrievably beyond sight, and she sighed. "All right."
Sashi stood at the helm, one broad hand on a wheel-spoke and the other resting on Roseilda's thin shoulder. Every man and woman of the Malkin's crew gathered on the main deck, arms folded and weapons glinting in the sun's final rays.
"You all know what we've lost," Sashi said, loud and clear against the rising wind. "Our ship was the fastest, most feared on the sea! Tales still tell of how we slipped invisible into harbours and pillaged under cloaks of unnatural and impenetrable mist. We took what we wanted! When we wanted! And no one could stop us!"
But someone must have stopped you, Roseilda thought as cheers surged from the pirates, filling the deck with raucous noise.
When they quietened, Sashi said, "We were tricked, and now those tales are fading." He paused for a moment, taking the time to look at each man and woman in turn. Then, shouting, he finished, "It's time to bring the tales back! Tonight we set sail for Retyelnen!"
Across the sea they raced, through placid blue and storm-whipped gray, suffering days of unbearable heat and others of snow-lashed cold, until finally they reached the Effequ's estuary. Still riding winds from Roseilda's hair, they sailed up its length until they saw Retyelnen, greatest city in the world, so vast she thought for a moment that it must be a god.
Buildings rose up from either side of the river, step-like, as if climbing towards the pall of yellow that hung over the vast city. Everywhere Roseilda looked, she saw new shapes and sizes beyond anything her imagination could have conjured. One construction, tall and thin, reminded her of a spindle's gleaming limb, while two others coiled around each other like mating gulls; many more netted no comparison, could only be stared at. And the smells: some sensually pleasant, others sickeningly vile, while the sounds were louder and more varied than anything Roseilda had ever heard on Ikitina.
But most overwhelming of all was the size of it.
In dawn's first light they had entered Retyelnen, the sky bleeding blue to yellow. Ten hours of slow sailing had slipped by, yet as a maw of silhouetted buildings swallowed the day-weary sun they had still not reached their destination.
"Almost there," Sashi murmured above her. He leaned against the railing, hair-coins murmuring in their metallic way as Roseilda's wind bore them steadily onwards. On the riverbank nearest to them, a team of well-muscled men unloaded crates from a large ship and placed them in several bizarre metal contraptions that rested on four wheels. To Roseilda they were things of fancy, yet undeniably there across mere yards of air.
They rounded a gentle curve in the sludgy river, the Malkin's prow slicing through fragmented waste and bright pink petals that floated up from the murky depths. Lanterns winked to life along the Effequ's sides as night turned the sky a darker shade of yellow.
"There," Sashi said, pointing.
Following the length of his dark-skinned arm, Roseilda saw a ship almost identical in size and design to the Malkin moored against the riverside. No lights burned from its deck or portholes and not a suggestion of movement crossed any part of it.
"You'll feel it soon. The way the wind moves."
Moments later the wind changed, subtly enough that she might not have noticed without Sashi's words. When she slid a hand into her hair and unfolded a paper-coil hanging by her left hipbone, she felt it more keenly: a gentle pressure against her skin, the beginning of an encouragement to move away from the silent ship, and behind it a greater strength waiting to be unleashed upon those who ventured too close.
"Can you move those winds?"
"I think so." With her right hand she reached for a small coil beside her ear, unfurling it, whispering the words she had been carefully practicing since her first day aboard the Malkin, and she felt the winds around the silent ship begin to slip away.
"No, not now," Sashi said, his fingers stilling hers. "We'll come back later, when it's fully night."
As the twin moons hung like fading lightbulbs in the yellow-dark sky they walked briskly along the embankment, leaving the Malkin moored behind them. A half-dozen men and women of the crew followed in the shadows; only Sashi and Roseilda took the lantern-lit path.
They approached the silent ship around a bend in the river, and when it came into sight Roseilda felt the guarding winds' first plays across her bare arms. She shivered, and not just from the cold. Sashi's curving sword swung from his left hip, engravings in its metal sheath casting winking reflections in the uneven light. The thought of the weapon and what it might do scared her. She didn't want to do this - and yet she did. For all the fear running blood-thick through her body, she felt strangely exhilarated.
"Now you can move those winds away," Sashi said quietly.
Before they left the Malkin he had tied her hip-length hair into a knot at the nape of her neck, leaving loose only the ropes of hair with the coils she needed. Without having to sift other strands aside she easily reached the coil at her left hip and the other at her right ear, and with whispers and the tug-release inside, she peeled aside the layers of wind.
She stepped forward and felt the deeper winds, the stronger ones wound tight around the silent ship. A coil of hair draped over her chest gave her strength enough to begin unravelling them, and as each strand of wind gave way she walked closer and dealt with the next.
Only paces before she could have brushed her hands against the ship's wooden hull, a strong wind sprang out of nowhere and knocked her to the ground. She cried out as her knees slammed into the stone pathway, and again when she felt the wind cup her and push towards the river. Sashi's helpless cusses and her own gasping breaths heavy in her ears, she fumbled with the coils in her hair; her fingers slipped, and she could hear the river lapping against the embankment. And then the second strength coil came loose in her fingers, the words fell from her tongue - and the wind stopped. Her legs hung precariously over the filthy water.
She scrambled back to her feet, shaking, and Sashi gently rubbed her arms while she regained her calm attunement to the remaining winds. "Hopefully that's the only trick," the pirate muttered. "The braid's not specialized enough to do wind-games any fancier."
A few minutes later she safely brought them the final steps to the ship. The other pirates remained in the shadows, waiting, ready to act should anything go wrong when they were aboard.
Waiting quietly at Sashi's side, Roseilda watched as he unclasped a crossbow from leather straps on his back and fired a pair of grappling hooks into the air. The hooks soared over the silent ship's rail and lodged in place with a faint clank. A rope ladder swayed from them in the light breeze.
Sashi went up first, curved sword unsheathed in his right hand, and Roseilda followed with the fingers of one hand twined around the coil at her hip. No winds whipped up to hurl them from the rope.
"Like I said," Sashi whispered as he pulled up the ladder after them, "the crew will all be onshore. Arisa likes her solitude, and assumes her winds will be enough." Which was a fair assumption, he had pointed out earlier, considering that almost all the people with Roseilda's power lived on her faraway floating town. "But best be quiet, just in case. I'd rather she slept through this."
Roseilda replied with a nod.
They crept across the deck, Sashi in the lead, to a door in about the same place as Sashi's cabin on the Malkin. It swung open at a nudge from his boot, and he stepped swiftly inside. The coins in his hair made only the slightest noise. Roseilda followed, taking care to shut the door quietly behind her.
When she turned to face the room, she saw Sashi's target lying atop the green-blanketed bed. Faint snores crept from the dark woman's mouth, in time with the rise and fall of her chest. Nestled among her thick, dark curls, Roseilda glimpsed a thick clump of sea-blue hair bound with stones and shells. Mermaid's hair, she thought, not quite believing her eyes. Capable of all the things Sashi said the Malkin used to do and more.
Sashi walked quietly to the bed and lowered his curved blade to Arisa's dark head. A very soft gasp slipped from Roseilda's lips, quickly stifled. One flick of his wrist severed the blue braid from Arisa's curls. He tucked it into his pocket, smiling, and slowly backed away.
"Thief."
Arisa was on her feet in an instant, drawing a curved sword of her own from beside her bed. Its tip drew a bead of blood from Sashi's neck.
"That's very rich coming from you, Arisa."
She shrugged. "It's not a lie, either. Now return to me what's mine."
"No."
The cabin door suddenly slammed open into Roseilda, throwing her aside; she saw white flashes as her head and shoulders rebounded from the cabin wall, and crumpled to the floor with a small sob of pain.
A whirr in the air - and a tall, blonde-haired man fell to the floor in front of her, one of Sashi's knives sticking from his neck. Red ran from him in rivulets across the gently rocking floor. Screams tore from Roseilda's throat -- she pressed herself against the wall and wished she could move even further away, away from the blood and from the fight in front of her.
Sashi sidestepped from a second man's sword and parried, but took one step too many backwards to avoid a cut throat from Arisa and tripped over a stool. Swearing, he rolled and swung his sword, catching the man in the legs but not deeply enough. Arisa kicked out, just missed Sashi's groin and hit his leg instead; he swore again and, pushing himself from the floor, head-butted her in the stomach.
The dead man's blood was warm against Roseilda's skin in the moment before she half-crawled, half-rolled away. Cool air brushed her hands and she looked up, saw the door mere feet away. She staggered to her feet and reached for it; with it half open she turned back and saw Sashi lying on his back, Arisa's sword-tip pressed against his chest. "I said," and the woman smiled, "give me back what's mine."
The man crouched down and pulled the blue braid from Sashi's pocket, and pressed his sword against Sashi's throat. "Are we going to kill him, Captain? Take his life in return for Tev's."
The clang of steel-on-steel rang suddenly through the night air. Whirling around, Roseilda saw Sashi's half-crew climbing up rope ladders and swinging onto the deck to face Arisa's men and women. More swords than she could count winked and gleamed in the moon- and lantern-light; blood splattered the deck and a man fell, his guts sliding over his hands. Choking back screams, she looked back into the cabin and saw Sashi struggling to free himself from the threat of Arisa's sword and the other pirate's fierce kicks at his chest.
She wanted to help Sashi, she really did, but she couldn't stay, she couldn't. But maybe...fingers trembling, she pulled at the paper-coil by her right shoulder and managed to whisper. A gust of wind sent Arisa and the man staggering; without seeing if Sashi was free Roseilda ran, ran as fast as she could across the deck to the other side where the river lapped waste-thick against the hull, and she launched herself over it and down, away from the battle and the swords.
Dripping sludge and petals, shivering against the night, Roseilda ran through Retyelnen's narrow, labyrinthine streets; and she was lost, stumbling blindly forwards, her passage marked by leering men who didn't have the effort to pursue her.
When the moons were finally sinking below the horizon of jutting, too-tall buildings she found herself in a courtyard, and behind her was one man who had bothered to follow. Laughing, he crooned for her, said, "Come here little girl, I've got something to show you," and she backed away towards the only shape in the courtyard.
The reek of waste filled her nose and mouth. Gagging, she jumped up, grabbed the rubbish-crate's lip and tried to pull herself higher, but the man yanked her down by her hair. Tears in her eyes, she lashed out with her hands and knees; one knee connected with his groin hard enough to have him stagger back, cursing, and she pushed him harder, hoping he'd fall.
His next words came with blood, gurgling between his thick, scarred lips. With a grunt he collapsed sideways.
Sashi withdrew his sword from the man's back and wiped it against his trousers, just below where the tip of the blue braid poked from a pocket. "You shouldn't have run," he said, a softness to his matter-of-fact tone. "Retyelnen is too dangerous for someone so young."
She started crying. Too much, too much for her, and she hugged herself tight as if her arms could blanket out the city.
"I'm sorry this happened to you." Sashi's voice penetrated the thick mess of emotions and soothed her, just a little. Enough that she looked up at him. "Come with us," he said. "You'll be safer on the Malkin than here, and I'll take you to someone who knows your magic, who can teach you in years what it'd take decades through all the ritual on Ikitina. I know it won't be an easy life, but there's far worse to be had."
Shivers and fading sobs shook her body. She thought of home, of the extended community-family, and she thought of the future she would have had there.
In a weak, still-shaky voice she asked, "No rituals? No prayers?"
"Just learning and the use of it." He offered her his hand. "Will you come with me, Roseilda? Back to the sea?"
The stinks and sounds and cloying chill of Retyelnen crept over her, and shivers threatened to consume her once more. "Back to the sea." With a fragile smile, she took his hand.
©Alex Dally MacFarlane
Alex Dally MacFarlane has been writing ever since the discovery of computer games made her think that if stories could be found on a 32-bit cartridge, why not in the mind of an eleven-year-old girl? Now she has finished her BA in War Studies and History at King's College London and from June will be working as a non-fiction editor. Her short fiction has appeared in Behind the Wainscot and Crimson Highway, and is forthcoming in the Sporty Spec anthology edited by Karen A. Romanko. You can find her lurking around Livejournal under the name of Alankria.