The Ancient. Muriel Gray
gave a light laugh. ‘Well, since you ask, funny thing is, sure, I thought it was just a way to buy me some academic time. Stuff I thought my whole life I wanted to do. Kind of always dreamt that it was education could let me escape. Know what I mean? But when I went to advance training camp? You know, I found I had an aptitude for it I never knew I had. Surprised the living shit out of me.’
‘Aptitude for what?’
She picked up her coffee cup and looked him square in the eye. ‘Combat.’
Matthew looked at her, smiled weakly, then returned to his breakfast.
She knew he didn’t believe her. He knew nothing about her, but she could practically read his thoughts.
He’d picture some white-collar home, see her playing at being a soldier, getting off on the masculinity of holding and firing a semi-automatic weapon. How could he know she’d been shooting guns since she was nine? Dogging off school with Henry-Adam Shenker to go to the wasteland of scrub willow a mile away from the trailer park, and shoot at everything that moved and everything that couldn’t with his big brother’s hand gun. The same gun that eventually helped put him and his other two drug-dealing, store-robbing siblings behind bars. And how could he know she’d spent her teens fighting with her fists and her teeth, against almost every kid at school that called her trailer-trash, or asked after her daddy with those shit-eating smug grins?
All that until the autumn term when Mr Sanderson took over as her grade teacher and discovered, like some lion tamer with the magic chair of academia and genuine concern for her, there was a brain in there, under that wild animal that tore and kicked and bit anything that got in her way.
Matthew Cotton couldn’t know any of that, and frankly she didn’t care. She was civilized now, a tamed creature that read philosophy and studied culture, and that was all that mattered. She would give her best to the US army, and then see what life held at the other end. But that was enough. It was Matthew’s turn for spilling the beans, she decided.
‘What about you?’
He stabbed some bacon. ‘What about me?’
‘Well where you from?’
‘Nowhere special.’
Esther pursed her mouth. She was a private person by habit, and it annoyed her to have shared even a tiny part of her life with him when he was plainly so reticent to do the same.
‘Oh pardon me. Did I say I came from anywhere special? Texas sure ain’t frigging Arcadia.’
‘You sail, you live on ships. There’s nowhere else.’
‘So I guess you were born and raised on a bulk carrier? Cool.’
He looked up and the pain behind his eyes made her regret her tone. He wiped his mouth. ‘I was born and raised in New York. I lived for a time in Atlanta. Now I don’t live any damn place. Okay?’
Esther held his gaze, embarrassed, then nodded.
‘Sure.’
He got back to his meal.
Esther waited until a decent amount of time had passed to let the dust settle from his inexplicable ire, then pushed back her chair and stood. ‘If I run tomorrow, I guess I’ll wear the hard hat.’
Matthew nodded down into his eggs. ‘You do that.’
She nodded back to the top of his head, cleared her throat and left. As she walked back up the corridor to her cabin, Esther let out the breath she’d been holding in for nearly a minute. A peal of laughter burst from the crew’s mess hall, and she rubbed at her hair with an exasperated hand. Right now, Esther Mulholland wished she’d majored in languages. Namely, Filipino. Life ahead for the next five days would have promise to be a lot more entertaining if she had.
Fen had been keeping out of the bosun’s way all morning, when he finally caught up with him on the main deck, crouching in front the accommodation block, staring at the long perspective of holds in front of him.
‘What the hell are you up to?’
Fen looked up at Felix Chadin from the bucket of unused water he was squatting beside and blinked. ‘Deck,’ he said, standing and waving a hand weakly at the surface as if he had just named it. ‘I was scrubbing the deck.’
‘For the whole of your watch?’
‘Eh, no. I was helping cook move some crates.’
Chadin crossed his arms. He was in a bad mood. Sleep had evaded him last night and he was grouchy.
‘Well isn’t it convenient that I find you just as your watch is over, particularly when the derrick cables need checking?’
‘I can check them. I don’t mind.’
Chadin looked at the man. It was not the answer he expected from a rating he suspected of skiving. It threw him.
‘No. Go on.’ He dismissed Fen with an imperial wave that was peculiarly Filipino, used liberally by foremen, mothers-in-law and dictators alike in their homeland.
‘I want to know exactly where you are on the next watch though,’ he called after the hastily-retreating figure. Fen disappeared into the block’s door, and Chadin looked down at the bucket. It was clear that the man had not been scrubbing at all, yet the eagerness with which he’d offered to extend his watch was confusing. Chadin looked up along the open holds and squinted against the low sun, then went to find someone else he could make suffer for his poor night’s rest.
Fen entered the crew’s mess room, went to the coffee machine and punched in his command. The whining machine pissed a spiralling stream of brown liquid into a plastic cup that was too flimsy to prevent it burning any inexperienced hand that attempted to hold it. He waited until it had finished its business, grabbed the cup by its thick rim, and went to join the four men, three of whom sat smoking, one sulking, at the Formica-covered table nearest the serving hatch.
‘Ah, now then, the very man,’ exclaimed Parren the storekeeper, slapping the table top. He pointed at the surly sixteen-year-old cadet, Hal, and laughed. The other two men laughed in a snickering kind of way, childish, but entirely unkind.
‘This little shit-eater wants to know if his girlfriend’s being faithful.’
Fen looked from face to face, then sipped carefully at the nasty coffee. ‘So?’
‘So you’re the guy to tell him.’
Fen scowled. ‘Yeah, well not today. Okay?’
Hal emerged from his sulk. ‘Aw come on, Fen. I’ll pay you.’
‘No.’
The boy snorted and picked up his own white plastic cup. ‘Yeah, well it’s a load of bullshit that stuff anyway. It doesn’t tell you anything you don’t know.’
Fen’s face darkened and he lowered the cup. The three older men looked at each other with eyebrows raised gleefully in anticipation of an explosion.
‘You want to be careful, kid. Stupider people than you have fallen foul of Saanti. The dumber you are the harder it is to take the truth.’
The boy made a face, pretending he was scared, then laughed. Parren leant forward, trying to break the iron rod of gaze that Fen had fixed on the boy. ‘Do it for us then, Fen. Come on. I wouldn’t mind asking a couple of things.’
Fen looked round slowly at the storekeeper and frowned.
‘Yeah,’ added the steward who sat slouched to Parren’s right. ‘Why not?’
Why not, indeed. Fen knew why not. Because when he had scattered the Saanti bone-dice last night and laid out the alphabet cards, reading them for himself instead of for someone else for the first time in fifteen years, they had terrified him. He would never normally cast those dice for himself. It had been the dream that had made him do it. The dream that had made him doubt what was real and what was not when he awoke in a sweat. But he had