Page 3 of Prima (After the End #8)
Did she show up equally naked across the paths of his brothers, representatives of the other two factions?
To shock? Or was that the fastest way to find out whether any princes of Dawan, not a realm known for allowing women in the public sphere, are capable of working with a woman who might not only decide their fate, but do so without a stitch on her person?
She smiles again. Her dimples reappear, deep and alluring. “In that case, I opt for a wash first, before I sample your other delights, Your Highness.”
* * *
Before Lady Sun proceeds to her wash, she springs back onto her raft, opens a hatch in the middle of it, and descends into an unseen understructure.
The raft, though primitive-looking, is the size of a small room.
And until it slowed as it neared his boat, it traveled at nearly the same speed as The Blue Sampan, going against the wind.
He knows it must possess a hidden propulsion system, but he’s not sure he suspected this large of an underwater hull.
She reemerges with a large valise and tosses it at him—it’s heavy. Then she detaches the line that binds the raft to The Blue Sampan and returns aboard.
“It’s…blue,” she says as she descends below deck. “I thought The Blue Sampan a bit of a misnomer for a grayish vessel. I see now that it is, in fact, truth in advertising.”
Mostly the interior features neutrals and muted blues, but one curtain and the striped cushion on the bench pop in the most vibrant possible shade of nautical blue.
She glances over her shoulder. “Is blue your favorite color?”
“In general I prefer green.”
“Yet your boat is blue, both in name and in reality.”
Every watercraft that matters in his life is blue. “We all contain multitudes, I suppose.”
She laughs softly and asks no more questions on the décor.
He shows her to the cabin—perfectly clean because he hasn’t had time to sleep in it—and then to the wet room.
Once the shower inside turns on, he slips back into the cabin to investigate her heavier-than-it-should-be valise, which she has left open, as if deliberately inviting scrutiny.
Most of the weight can be attributed to a compact beige device that has only an on/off button and a dial that goes from min to max. There are no other words, numbers, or markings anywhere on its smooth, porcelain-like surfaces.
The device was protected by a knitted blanket. There is a similarly wrapped item, which turns out to be an adjustable ring approximately thirteen centimeters in diameter, its exterior fabricated from the same beige, fragile-looking material. A collar?
Unease grips him.
The shower in the wet room turns off. He swears.
Excessive consumption, in no small part, brought about the End and waste of any kind has been abhorred in the near millennium since.
But he made sure to tell her that his solar batteries and desalinated H2O tanks are both full, practically asking her to be lavish in her water use.
Hasn’t worked.
He put everything back the way he found it and clears out of the cabin. By the time he steps on deck again, her raft is more than a klick away, disappearing into the last shimmer of twilight.
Scholars, engineers, and laymen alike squabble over the technological re-progress of their era.
Some deem that they have reached a comparable level of development to that of the interwar period of the twentieth century.
Others insist that, except for the absence of nuclear weapons, their time is at least as advanced as the early years of the Cold War.
Still others scoff at the validity of any such intellectual exercises, pointing out that while in terms of materials science and renewable energy their technologies rival those of the early twenty-second century, they lack anything on a par with the globe-spanning telegraph networks of the Victorians, let alone the fast and furious advances in communication in the ensuing decades.
The world, the debaters are often forced to conclude, is fragmented into much emptier and more localized places than it was at those moments of history they like to trot out as points of reference.
Without easy and constant transmissions from the other side of the planet, knowledge tends to be regional.
But even inside a given region, along the western edge of the Pacific Ocean, say, neighboring realms may know little of one another.
Certainly the general population of Dawan has long regarded New Ryukyu as a bacchanal of an improbability, a place where women run free that somehow hasn’t collapsed under the weight of that very degeneracy.
But few ever bring up the fact that the founders of Dawan and New Ryukyu came from the same great Pacific flotilla; the majority-female engineers and agronomists, after falling out with the militarists, went north to establish their own realm.
Perhaps their descendants do hold orgies nightly, but only after they’ve spent their days in workshops and laboratories.
The raft that is gliding away—Ren strips off his clothes and dives overboard.
In the water he can discern the mass of the raft’s understructure.
It seems too small to hold an operator inside, after he subtracts the space needed for Lady Sun’s valise and Lady Sun herself, when she was down in hatch.
So the raft is either being steered remotely or traveling autonomously—the latter Dawan’s engineers can’t manage yet and the former, nowhere as well.
He turns his attention south, the direction he came from. Ten klicks behind The Blue Sampan, a submarine is on its tail. And has been since before he reached Dragon Gate. Does the minister plenipotentiary know—and should he say something if she doesn’t?
He vaults back aboard. The air cools with the arrival of night and the sea grows choppier; he unfurls more sail to punch through the waves.
After checking the autosteering, he rinses himself off under the deck shower, scanning the horizon every few seconds even though now that Lady Sun is aboard, they should be safe—from sharks as big as his boat and suicidal sea serpents, at least.
For his meeting with the envoy, he puts on some clothes befitting a diplomat negotiating a tricky new alliance—or a prince about to be sacrificed to a sea monster: Most Dawani, including a fair number of his brothers and perhaps the High Potentate himself, do not believe in the existence of the Secretariat.
They view that as fiction for the gullible, crafted so that the population of New Ryukyu would not panic at the thought of being ruled by a centuries-old monster.
Ren is agnostic on the rumored gruesomeness of the Sea Witch. What he knows is that every year hundreds of Dawani—women and girls, especially—risk their lives to cross the Disputed Waters into New Ryukyu. There is no similar flow in the opposite direction.
He has just set a plate of nibbles on the small table in the lounging area when he hears Lady Sun.
She emerges wrapped in a—for her—surprisingly modest dress.
It has a slightly scooped neckline but covers her upper arms and reaches down to her calves.
Yet its unusual color, somewhere between warm peach and light brown, stirs up a carnal heat that turns him lightheaded.
Not that the hunger from his first sight of her ever dissipated.
He gathers himself and murmurs the requisite greetings; she returns the expected platitudes.
He offers her a seat and steps aside for her to squeeze past him in the confined space.
She smells of still-damp hair and expensive silk.
As she pivots to sit down on the bench, the hem of her dress flares out in a near-perfect circle.
He stares at her a moment too long before pulling up a chair for himself. She lifts the cup of tea he pours for her. With the rise and fall of the boat, the light overhead picks out flecks of glitter and gleam on her dress at just the sort of random frequency to further distract him.
“I recognize this tea,” she says after two sips. “Jasperdew. In my younger days, I carried it with me on a long journey. Very costly, is it not?”
He seizes the opening. "Five, my esteemed brother, tried to tell me that it’s mostly the uninitiated who drink Jasperdew, to impress other uninitiated. I trust his judgment in just about everything, but on matters having to do with tea I’m afraid I’ve deferred to my own taste.”
Five, the rare individual to emerge from an upbringing in the Potentate’s Palace with his soul intact, is the man who should accede to the throne of Dawan.
But Lady Sun does not turn the conversation toward Five. “I still drink Jasperdew. Then again, I’ve never heard such a pronouncement against it. What made you persist, Your Highness?”
“Please, call me Nineteen.”
“Very well then. What made you persist, Prince Nineteen?”
This isn’t a question about his choice of tea, is it, but about his suitability as Five’s advocate? His mental fitness as an amnesiac.
He tastes the pale brew in his cup. Perhaps the tea does lack depth, but he finds its verdant brightness comforting—and haunting at the same time.
“Six years ago, I was rescued at sea. When I regained consciousness a fortnight later, I couldn’t remember anything that led up to my mishap.
One of the few possessions found with me was a packet of Jasperdew, already spoiled by humidity.
I don’t know why I had it with me, but”—he shrugs—“I took it to mean that I always liked this particular tea.”
Her expression is a combination of a smile and a raised brow, as if she likes his answer yet disagrees wholeheartedly. He is tempted to smile back at her.
“Six years ago,” she muses, sliding a fingertip over the cream-and-blue cushion that covers the bench. “Word on the street is that you can’t remember anything from before your rescue. Is it true, prince?”
All desire to smile at her flees. She is as dangerous as any of the sharks that attempted to capsize The Blue Sampan the night before—and he can’t use a tranquilizer dart on her.
“If it’s true, then that means you’ve known Prince Five for only six years,” she points out. “Which makes you less persuasive of a champion for his aspirations to the throne.”
He exhales. Shouldn’t she be more concerned about Five’s own merits than the true length of the two brothers’ acquaintance?
“That I can’t remember anything from before the incident is what I’ve always maintained.
But that isn’t entirely true. What is true is that I can’t recall the events leading up to the near foundering of my vessel. ”
“Or the people involved in it?”
A frisson jolts up the inside of his arm. “I was told later that my mother and my sister had received special dispensation to travel outside the palace, to see the sperm whales at their nursing ground, a tradition my mother’s people observe on major birthdays—she was to turn forty that year.”
“You accompanied the two of them?”
“My mother’s maid came along too.”
Something gleams in Lady Sun’s eyes, something wavering between sympathy and clinical curiosity.
His inability to get a proper read on her—he thought it was due to his own inner disequilibrium.
But now he wonders if it isn’t also because she has yet to make up her mind whether he pleases her—or the opposite.
“You were the only one who was found, I understand,” she says. “The other three disappeared without a trace.”
An old fear grips him. On a good day he can convince himself that they escaped and now live free and happy. But the truth is he doesn’t know. He might never know.
She waits until he is forced to give an answer.
“That is correct. There was a search, but nothing was ever recovered except the tracking devices my mother and sister once wore, chewed into pieces, on the ocean floor. We held a memorial for them and built cenotaphs.”
And he visits those empty tombs several times a year, as befitting a bereaved son and brother.
His interlocutor picks up a small pastry from the offerings on the table. “Mooncake?”
The oscillation of topics—the swerving from the momentous to the utterly insignificant—gives him whiplash. And sets him even more on edge. “Yes.”
She glances at him, a heavy-lidded look, and takes a bite. At the sight of her teeth sinking into the mooncake, a fresh upswell of desire wars with his wariness.
Pain flickers across her features—no, pain and pleasure both. “Jackfruit, my favorite. Are you sure these were not prepared especially for me?”
At Dragon Gate, when he was given the edict concerning vessel size and weapons of war prohibition, he was told—much to his astonishment—that an envoy would meet with him when it was his turn.
He was then promptly stripped of all communication devices and couldn’t have found out anything about the envoy’s identity, let alone her tastes and preferences.
“I can only chalk it up to a happy coincidence. These jackfruit mooncakes happen to be what my cook prepared for my journey.”
Although his cook makes these year-round, not just for the Mid-Autumn Festival. And come to think of it, six years ago, when he was finally well enough to return home from the hospital, they—along with a pile of layered scallion flatbreads—were what his cook brought to the table.
I used to like these? he asked, a little astonished. Has he ever cared for sweet things?
Yes, Your Highness. You enjoyed them often and sometimes made them yourself—the mooncake and the flatbread.
Again, Lady Sun seems to both like and dislike his response, her expression a strange mix of upturned lip corners and a grimace.
Does she feel as off-balance as he? He can’t get their conversation to flow where he needs it to. Is she having some similar yet inverted difficulties?
What does she want from him?
Why is she here at all?
In the window behind her, the last vestige of sunset has disappeared. Against the darkness that now cloaks the waves, the windowpane reflects a half-moon of exposed skin on her back—and more distantly, his features, schooled in a stoic endurance that he does not feel in the very least.
He feels like a piece of paper caught in a windstorm, blown every which way.
“But we digress,” she says after a moment. “Prince Nineteen, what I really want to know is how well you know your brother, the aspirant to the Crown. And before you answer, know this: In sending you here, Prince Five has made a gift of you. You are now mine to do with as I wish.”