Empty except for themselves.
The boat drifted on the surface of the sea like a child's forgotten toy.
Trying to follow her mental image of a leader's behavior, Kesair had taken a place in the prow. There she spread her blankets for the night. She meant to sleep but lightly, just enough to restore a measure of energy.
The sail was lowered, the oars were in their locks. She had decided there was no point in trying to make more headway. They might as well drift during the night.
Tomorrow would be soon enough to decide on a course and begin a serious search for land.
But in which direction?
Kesair closed her eyes, but she could not sleep. Her eyeballs felt grainy against her lids. She opened them again and stared into the darkness.
The sides of the prow rose, curving, above her, like walls looming over her. Like waves about to crash down on top of her. She felt suffocated. She sat up abruptly and bunched her blankets behind her back, so she could lean against them without lying down.
Time passed without definition. Kesair tried to fight back the fears that kept surfacing in her mind. Her fists clenched with the effort.
A delicate, questing touch drifted across her face.
“What?” She glanced around, startled. She could make out only faint shapes in the darkness, but no one was anywhere near her.
There was no wind to have blown a strand of hair across her face.
Her mouth went dry. Don't panic! she told herself sharply. You're tired, that's all. You're imagining things.
She was touched again. This time the pressure was more pronounced.
Gooseflesh rose on her arms. Her frantically groping fingers found nothing in the air around her face.
She started to get up and was touched a third time. She froze, knees bent, one hand outstretched. The touch trailed lingeringly down her cheek, explored her lips, cupped her chin, then circled around below her ear, crawled up her hair, across the top of her head, down over her forehead, pressed her eyelids closed.
The thudding of Kesair's heart shook her entire body.
The pressure on her eyelids eased; she opened them. She was aware of a presence, unseen but palpable, beside her. The nearest human lay sleeping several paces away.
Something else was with Kesair in the night.
The night seemed endless. Byth's years weighed heavily on him. He stayed awake during his turn at watch with the greatest difficulty, and gladly surrendered his post to Kerish when she came to relieve him.
“What should I watch for?” she asked him.
“I don't know,” he replied honestly. He shot a look in the direction of Kesair but she was only a shadowy shape in the prow, unmoving and unspeaking.
Byth was asleep before his head was pillowed on his arm.
Kerish shivered in the night and wrapped her cape more snugly around herself. She wished Kesair would come back and talk to her. Kesair was always so practical, so reassuringly full of common sense. But she seemed oblivious, sitting up there in the prow alone.
The night lasted for an eternity or two, then faded into a dull grey day. The sun never penetrated the clouds. The sea looked cold and sullen. And terribly, terribly vast.
Kesair came awake abruptly, surprised to find she had been asleep. Her muscles were stiff, her joints locked. When she tried to move she felt like a plant that had been frozen and would break rather than bend. She got to her feet slowly, holding on to the side of the boat.
When she stood and looked back at the others, she saw their faces turn toward her as flowers turn toward the sun. They sat waiting for her to tell them what to do next.
Seeing them waiting like that was a bit of a shock. I have to say something positive, she thought. They need it.
I
need it.
“We've passed safely through the night.” She sounded pleased. “Perhaps we should offer a prayer now.”
“A prayer?” They stared at her. Kesair had not been known as a fanatic before. Religion was unfashionable, an outmoded superstition. They believed Man was supreme in the cosmos, a belief Kesair had seemed to share. Before the catastrophe.
“I wouldn't care to pray to any deity who would let this happen to us!” the woman called Barra said angrily.
A murmur of agreement rose from the others. On their faces, Kesair read a threat to her newfound authority. If she tried to force the issue they might reject her.
She shrugged, and changed the topic to the distribution of food and assignment of tasks. After an uncertain pause, the group reverted to obedience. It was already becoming a comfortable habit. They were silently relieved that the embarrassing suggestion of prayer had been dropped.
Day wore on, became night, became day again. And again. They sailed this way and that, found no land, no people. Nothing. More and more, they simply drifted. It did not matter.
Social conventions were abandoned. Men and women openly relieved themselves over the side. Quarrels sprang up. The people were nervous, irritable, and apathetic by turns. Friendships were formed one day and broken the next.
Their food stores dwindled. The sea waited.
Byth droned on and on, listing an increasing catalog of physical complaints. The formerly brisk and bustling woman called Leel began sleeping the day away like a creature in hibernation.
Staring morosely at the sea, Ladra swore at the water bitterly, continually. He was inventive with profanity. Against her will, Kesair found herself listening to him. Once she laughed aloud.
He turned toward her, scowling darkly. “What are you laughing at?”
“Not at you. I was just enjoying your use of the language, that's all. You're very original.”
He gazed at her for a long moment, then went back to cursing the sea. But after that he seemed more kindly disposed toward Kesair. That night when the food was distributed, he ate sitting beside her.
From his place opposite them, Fintan noticed the change in Ladra's attitude. He realized he was looking at Kesair differently himself. Before the catastrophe, he had paid her no attention. Women outnumbered men in the colony and he had always had his choice, which did not include Kesair. She was too tall, too fair, and he liked small dark women. More damning still, she was a loner. She did not seem to need a man. Fintan, who liked his women dependent, had ignored her. She was an exceptionally good weaver and did her share of the work, and beyond that he had no interest in her.
Before.
But now ⦠he could hardly ignore the one person who had been able to take charge when he and the other surviving men were weary and defeated.
Surreptitiously, Fintan eyed the other female occupants of the boat. Old Nanno, two prepubescent daughters of a man who had been killed, an infant girl in her mother's arms. And forty-six
women of childbearing age, including Kesair. Kesair, to whom the others deferred.
This gave Kesair an attractiveness Fintan had never noticed before.
Under his breath, he said to Byth, “Look at Ladra over there, trying to curry favor. Can't she see through him?”
“You sound jealous.” Once Byth would not have commented on another man's emotions. But everything had been changed by the catastrophe. Byth stroked his chin, wondering when he had last shaved. None of the men shaved now.
“Jealous?” Fintan snorted. “Don't be ridiculous.”
“Under the circumstances,” Byth warned, “it wouldn't be a good idea to get too fond of any one woman. Think about it.”
Fintan ignored him.
Byth shrugged. Arthritis bit deep into his shoulder and he rubbed the joint automatically, wondering how much damage the sea air was doing to him.
The color of the sea gradually changed. From slate-blue it became a warm, dark green. Kesair was the first to notice. She lifted her head and sniffed the wind.
“What is it?” Elisbut asked. Elisbut was a cheerful, chubby woman who made pottery and talked incessantly. “What do you smell?”
“Change in the wind,” Kesair said succinctly. She did not want to encourage a flood of conversation.
Anything was enough to set Elisbut off, however. “I don't smell anything unusual, Kesair. Perhaps you're imagining things. I used to do that all the time. My motherâyou would have liked herâmy mother used to tell me I had too much imagination. Now I never thought a good imagination was such a liability in an artistic person like myself, but ⦔
Kesair was not listening. “We're going to change course,” she shouted abruptly to her crew.
Within half a day they caught sight of a thin dark line on the horizon and knew they had found land.
Sailing in from the northwest, they made landfall on the rocky coast of what seemed to be a vast island. It was hard to be certain; most of the land was shrouded in mist. The boat ground ashore on a beach of white sand studded with black boulders. After dragging
their vessel as far up the beach as they could, they secured it and set about exploring the immediate area.
“No sign of people,” Ladra reported after scrambling up the nearest cliff and back down again. “But there is a sort of wiry grass up there, and I'd say we could find fresh water if we go in just a little way. We've been lucky. So far,” he added darkly. “This could be a bad place. I wouldn't be surprised.”
Kesair assigned armed scouting parties to explore the area more thoroughly. All brought back similar reports. Thin soil, unsuitable for farming, but a lushness of wild vegetation. A pervasive mist that rolled over the land, blew away, returned with a will of its own. Glimpses of distant grassland bordered by forest. Outlines of mountains beyond.
“If we have to start life over,” Fintan said, “I would say we've found a good place for it.”
They built a bonfire of driftwood that night on the headland above the beach. When Kesair found some of the women throwing the refuse from the boat into the sea, she ordered them to put it on the fire instead.
“What difference does it make?” they challenged. They did not want to carry armloads of rubbish up the slope to the fire. “One load of garbage in an empty ocean, what difference?”
But this time Kesair was adamant. Grumblingly, they obeyed. The tongues of the fire licked at the rubbish and a dark smoke rose from it, stinking of the old life.
Blue twilight settled over them. Down on the shore, the red boat gleamed dully in the last rays of the setting sun, then turned grey, like a beached whale dying at the edge of the sea.
As they ate their first meal on dry land, some people talked compulsively about their recent experience, retelling the boatbuilding and the battles and the flood, incidents which were already taking on a mythic quality in their minds. Others sat silently, simply trying to comprehend. Trying to realize that they were safe at last.
Kesair was not so certain of their safety. Any sort of danger might await them on dry land, on what seemed to be a very large and unknown island. They could die a more horrible death in the jaws of wild beasts than they would have suffered by drowning in the sea.
The next morning, Kesair organized work parties to build huts for the people and pens for the livestock. The men and women
were to be housed separately, for the time being, and as leader she ordered a hut built for herself alone.
“Why don't we go farther inland?” Byth suggested.
“Not yet. We don't know what may be waiting for us. It's better we stay here for a while until we are established and used to the place.”
The truth was, she was reluctant to leave the sea. But she did not say this.
They worked hard, bringing timber from the distant forest. They met no savage beasts, but twice they reported hearing a howling in the distance, as of wolves, and they were overjoyed to sight a herd of deer beyond the trees.
The group settled into a domestic routine not unlike the one they had known before the catastrophe. “We're lucky,” she told Byth, who had become the closest thing she had to a confidant. “Among us we have most of the skills we shall need. We can make our own tools and clothing, we can build and repair.”
She set up her big loom in the lee of her hut, where the morning sun supplied a clear yellow light.
Not everyone was ready to settle down. Some seemed devoted to grieving over what they had lost, hampering the work of the colony. Kesair learned she could rely on Elisbut, Fintan, Kerish, and the women called Ayn and Ramé to do what must be done, and enlisted them to help her encourage the others.
On a chill, damp afternoon when rain blew in from the sea in curtains of silver, Fintan came to Kesair's hut. He paused in the doorway, stooping, peering in, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. “Are you in here?” he asked uncertainly.
“I am,” she said from a bed made of piled blankets. “I was just resting, listening to the rain.”
Without waiting for an invitation, Fintan entered the hut. He gave off a smell of wind and water. “We need to talk.”
“Sit there.” The thought skittered across Kesair's mind that she should offer him food, or drink, but she was a solitary creature by nature and had never practiced the skills of hospitality. “Help yourself to whatever you want,” she said lamely, making a vague gesture in the direction of her stores.
“Talk is what I want, some sort of plan. We can't just stay like this, Kesair. Winter is coming on, we probably need to go farther
inland to avoid the worst of the weather. We don't even know how bad winter gets in this place.”
“So how do we know it might be milder inland?”
“It stands to reason. And there's another thing ⦔ His eyes were used to the dimness now. He could see her leaning on one elbow, watching him, her long legs stretched out beneath a blanket. Suddenly the hut seemed very small and intimate.
“What?” she said.
He swallowed. “We need to get on with our lives. We've been tiptoeing around this for weeks, but we must face the fact. As far as we know, we may be all that remains of the human race. If we don't reproduce ourselves, it could be the end of mankind.
“Of course, it could be too late already, I know that. But I feel an obligation to try ⦔ He ground to a halt. She was looking at him intently, with an unreadable expression.
He picked up the threads of his thought. “People look up to you, Kesair. The other women follow you. If you were to urge them to, ah ⦔
“Mate,” she said.
He had not expected her to put it so baldly. “Ah, yes. Mate. Have children, a lot more children ⦔
Kesair sat up, clasping her knees with her square, blunt-fingered hands. She locked his eyes with hers. “Fifty women alone on a large island with three men,” she said in an expressionless voice. “Just imagine. Every man's fantasy.”
He said huffily, “I'm not proposing an orgy, Kesair! You're an intelligent woman, you know exactly what I'm saying. You understand thatâ”
“âthat you hope to use my mind to get at my body,” she said flatly. “If you can. If I let you.”
Stung by the truth in her accusation, Fintan retorted, “You don't have a very good opinion of men, do you?”