The Book of Flora Read online

  “Connie,” Alice repeats. “I have some books, if you find yourself bored on board.” She smiles a little at her own joke. “Of course, I’ve read everything we have at least twice.”

  “I can’t read,” Connie says tonelessly.

  Florda is a hard place for books. They bloom and rot if they’re not kept carefully, so many villages have none at all, or just a few. I’m not surprised they can’t read, but it does hurt me a little.

  “Well, then, I know what we’ll be doing at sea.” Alice smiles.

  Connie scowls in response.

  I take them down into the hold with me and search for those other hammocks. That’s no problem, but there is a shortage of pegs and nails where a hammock can hang. I string one end for them on the same nail as mine, but run it in the opposite direction. On the other side, I pause for a minute to figure it out.

  Eddy comes tromping down the steps. “Help you with that?”

  I turn around. “I wouldn’t think you’d want to.”

  He looks at Connie a little guiltily. “I was hasty. I just worry. Of course I want to.”

  He helps me tie some knots, since we lack the hardware. I think it will work.

  “Hop on in,” I tell Connie. “I’ll hold it still.”

  They don’t trust me. They still don’t know what to make of us, or what to expect. But they let me steady it. They climb in. And it holds.

  Florda is swamp to the sea in every direction. There are islands now where there was solid coastline. Sailors we encounter say that no map works and they redraw what they know of fishing villages every season. We know when we make the Gulf because the current resumes.

  No one packed anything for them. Not a change of clothes, not a little bread. They were turned out as though they were nothing.

  I ask them later how that could be. They won’t even look at me.

  CHAPTER 28

  THE URSULA

  The small boat bobbed through choppy waters, leaving a rippling wake as it passed.

  Connie walked the length and breadth of the ship. It wasn’t much, and it was already feeling cramped with five people on board. They found that they loved the crow’s nest, once they had made the climb. They hunkered down belowdecks only when tired or cold; they preferred the open air and the view whenever they could get it. This occasionally meant getting run off by Bodie or Alice when the pair wanted privacy. Connie didn’t mind, for the most part. They found their own ways to pass the time.

  In Connie’s former life, they had hoarded art supplies. There had been a few precious old-world tools in their collection, a trio of paintbrushes, tied together with a little yarn. A dip-pen, though Connie had made their own ink, experimenting with berries and leaves, never really achieving anything they thought was worthwhile. Paper was hardly made at all in Florda, so Connie drew on walls and stones and anything they could.

  They did the same aboard the Ursula, though they had lost their tools in another life. Connie began with small burnt sticks, sketching in the dark belly of the ship by the light of a little candle. They drew pieces of their old life, caimans and people they had known. They scratched the moon as it changed and the fish they saw at sea.

  Flora found these later, brushing some of them into black smudge with her shoulder without realizing what they were. When she looked closely and saw that they were drawings, she knew at once they would be Connie’s work. Eddy had never drawn and would barely write in his book. Alice could sketch botanicals but did so in a cursory manner, as part of her own record-keeping. Flora inspected Connie’s drawings carefully, noting the grace and lifelike qualities of the living figures. She copied a few into her book, determined to preserve them but saddened by what they lost in translation.

  Connie resisted all clear attempts at conversation, preferring their own company at all times. When Flora found the game on board, she felt an idea come into being.

  She took the cloth sack with the pieces to Bodie.

  “Bodie. Hey, Bodie.”

  Bodie looked up from his maps of the coastline, where he was making corrections.

  “Mmm?”

  “This is a game, right?”

  Bodie’s weathered face scrunched and worked as he focused on the bag. “Aye, that’s a game. Picked it up in trade years ago. Haven’t played it in the longest.”

  “Do you still know how?”

  Bodie sighed. There was never enough to do on board, and he couldn’t fault Flora for idleness. Games and books were the best for boredom, and he knew that better than any of them. He set loose the tiller and walked over to her.

  “Aye, I remember. I’ll show you.”

  The game was very simple. The board was wood, with depressions carved into it in two long rows. The pieces were shiny little stones, colorful and clear, smooth to the touch. Flora thought they looked like jewels.

  “Here, it’s simple.” Bodie began to show Flora the movements of the game. “You can play it with someone who shares no language. It’s that simple.” Once Flora grasped the mechanics and knew the object, she saw how that could be true.

  She looked up to tell Bodie she got it, but she saw the genuine pleasure in his face. He was having a good time.

  She picked up her jewel-pieces and played him back. They were both grinning before long. They played it through to the end, and Flora beat him, but just barely. One last bright-red stone remained, as she had cleared her lane completely. He beamed at her.

  “You’ve got it!”

  “I’m going to teach it to Connie, but you ought to teach Alice, too. It’s a good one.”

  “I have some others, as well,” Bodie said, smiling still. “Fancied them more when I was a younger man. But I’ve not had this many passengers in a long time. Good time to remember. You’re right, of course.”

  Flora neatly tipped the board back into the sack and the pieces rained down softly into its folds. She tucked it under her arm and went to find Connie.

  Connie was in their hammock, working hard at reading a book for children, brow furrowed.

  “You’d do better with that on deck, in the light,” Flora said.

  “I’m fine,” Connie gave back in a bored monotone.

  “Want to take a break? I found a game.”

  Connie turned their head to look. “What game?” Suspicious.

  “It’s called jewels,” Flora decided. “I’ll show you, if you’d like.”

  As before, Flora set the game before her on the boards of the lower deck. In the low light, the stones were not as beautiful but instead looked like flawed secrets. She put the stones where they belonged. She waited.

  Connie came at last, sinking to the floor with their book still in hand, as if they did not want to commit to playing. “How does it go?”

  Flora led them through the moves of the game, taking care to explain what the object of it all was.

  Connie watched carefully, nodding, picking up the steps.

  “So the last jewel has to go here?” They pointed to the well nearest to themselves.

  “That’s it. So if I do this . . .” Flora pulled a handful of jewels from a divot and dropped one in each that she passed, bringing the last one home to her base. “Then I did it right, and I get to go again.”

  Connie nodded again, focused solely on this one thing.

  Flora won the first game, and the second. By the third, Connie was ready.

  “Watch this. Watch.” Connie reached out and made a perfectly effortless first move. Then a second and a third. Before long, they had cleaned out the entire board, leaving nothing for Flora and not letting her move once.

  Connie looked up, beaming. “There’s an order to it. A way to do it perfectly, so that you never lose.”

  Flora sat stunned. “You’re right. As long as you go first, you can’t lose.”

  Connie nodded, looking back down at the board. They looked back up, stricken. “I guess it’s not much fun this way.”

  Flora smiled encouragingly. “It was fun to figure out. How about
we work on reading for a bit?”

  Connie was agreeable in that way that children are when they realize they’ve annoyed a good and generous caretaker, and they want back into good graces. They sat with heads together over a thin children’s book with gold foil peeling off the spine. Painfully, slowly, Connie began to sound out each word. Patiently, lovingly, Flora helped them put it together into meaning.

  The sea rocked the two of them, alone in the belly of the ship.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Book of Flora

  The Ursula

  Fall on the sea

  104N

  I have been trying to get Connie to tell me more of their story. Some of it they’ll tell me with no problem. Other things are more delicate.

  They remember their parents, before they died. They can tell me that their father helped them learn to tie a knot, or that their mother never wore skirts if she could help it.

  “Did your mother teach you about getting your blood?” I ask, trying to gently get at the time when Connie was raised as a girl.

  “She mentioned it,” they tell me, already dodging away from the question. “I didn’t really expect it to happen. It didn’t seem like a real thing.”

  “It is, though. Alice deals with it all the time.”

  At the mention of Alice, Connie pressed their lips together. They have quite the little fire simmering for her, and they don’t want me to know about it.

  “Well, what about Tona? What was it like there?”

  Connie shrugs. “I got work cutting cane or picking oranges. It was always hot and there were always bugs. I didn’t like it there, but I had never been anywhere else.”

  “Were you hungry? Lonely?”

  “Sure,” they say, picking up a piece of charcoal and making hash marks against the hull of the ship. They don’t elaborate, and I don’t know how to push it without them pulling away.

  “Did your parents call you ‘she’?”

  “Yeah, of course they did. They thought they had a girl.”

  “Did it happen all at once? The change?”

  They don’t want to look at me. They turned their back, but they keep talking. “Overnight,” they say, in almost a whisper.

  “Did they see?” I ask. “Or did you have to tell them?”

  “I told my mother,” they say. “I didn’t understand what was happening. She had told me so many times I was going to go through changes and become a woman, so I thought I had. I hadn’t ever seen a man naked. I didn’t know.”

  “How did she react?”

  They don’t answer me. I can guess not well.

  I drop the subject. They keep sketching hash marks, closer and blacker, resembling nothing at all.

  I think about the Midwife and the curious way that she wrote in her book. I’ve read many other diaries, and hers is still peculiar among them. She omits all kinds of words from her sentences, but I still understand what she means. I sometimes look at the way she writes and think that it’s so much easier to talk without articles or pronouns, because it takes the question of whether she’s being a man or a woman, whether she’s talking about a man or a woman, out of my head entirely. Why should it matter?

  I try to show this to Connie, to talk to them about being a they instead of a he or a she, and how freeing I think that is. They won’t talk to me about that at all. Instead, they want to know about the Midwife.

  “So she was like me?” they ask. “A girl until she became a boy?”

  “Not exactly,” I say. “She was more like Eddy.”

  They look up at me, not understanding. “Isn’t Eddy like me?”

  “Not exactly,” I say again. “There are lots of ways this can happen.”

  They cock their head like a puppy and I smile at them. “I’ve never known anyone like you,” I tell them.

  “Have you ever known any frags?” they ask.

  I shake my head. “I think they’re only a legend,” I say. “I don’t think people can do that.”

  “But you don’t know,” they insist. “Just like you didn’t know that a guevedoces could exist until you met me.”

  I nod slowly. “That’s true. It’s a strange world. There are plenty of things in it I don’t know much about or understand.”

  They seem satisfied with that. I feel a little closer to them every time we talk like this, even as they resist me.

  CHAPTER 30

  THE URSULA

  They had been nearly a moon upon the choppy, shallow seas around Florda as it gave way to the Gulf. They had seen sharks and beaver. They had gone ashore and gathered fruits: coconuts and funny hand-shaped citrons, as well as the fat oranges that grew everywhere.

  “I remember these from when I was little,” Flora said, licking the juice as it dripped down her wrist.

  Connie silently ate two in a row, staring out at the lapping waves.

  Alice scratched at the citrus fruits’ skins. “I could extract oil from these. With enough time and the right tools. My lab . . .”

  She trailed off, clearly frustrated without the lost wonders of her labs, both in Nowhere and in Ommun. No one offered her any comfort on that subject. They had none to give.

  Eddy pulled the fruit into sections with quick fingers. “It’s so sweet. Tastes like sunshine. Can we dry it and keep it?”

  Flora shook her head. “It doesn’t dry well. It rots. You’ve got to eat it fresh or make jam. That’s all there is. You can dry the peels, if you hang them up. They smell nice, and you can throw them in tea.”

  Eddy smiled a wry smile. “Like my mother did with dried peaches. She loved that peach mint tea.”

  Connie’s head came up at that. “What was your mother like?”

  Eddy looked the child over. “She was old when she had me. Almost too old. She had given up hope of ever having a living child and was studying to become a Midwife. I was a surprise.”

  Connie did not ask for more, but their face was so hungry that they didn’t need to.

  “She was forthright. Never got around the truth if she could tell it instead. Very strong, and a good teacher. Never let me get away with shit. She had a huge Hive, her whole life long. Always wanted to have her options. Have her choice.”

  “And she loved you?” Connie asked this as if it were the detail on which hung all others.

  Eddy sat silent for a moment. “More than I deserved. Isn’t that what Mothers do?”

  Connie nodded but said nothing. “Did you know your father?”

  Eddy shrugged. “Who cares? Any man can father a child.”

  Connie looked down a moment before stalking away and climbing back up into the crow’s nest.

  It was Connie who saw the ship first, but they didn’t know what they were seeing, or that there was cause to raise an alarm.

  They only said something out of surprise, blurting, “Oh.”

  Bodie’s head jerked up, knowing the importance of surprise. His eyes tracked the movement on the horizon, and for a moment he just stared.

  “Get belowdecks,” he said to Alice. Then he looked around. “You, too. Both of you. All of you. Get below.”

  Flora’s eyes widened. “What is it?”

  “Slave ship,” Bodie said, his mouth settling into a line. “Get below and don’t make a sound. Boy! Get down here.”

  “Call them Connie,” Flora said urgently, stepping forward to take Bodie’s arm.

  He waved her off. “Not today we don’t. Today he’s boy, and he’s the only other person on this ship besides me, you got it?”

  Connie climbed down swiftly, hard with new muscle.

  “Where do you want to be?” Flora searched their face with her eyes. She didn’t want them in danger, but they knew how much moments of choice like these might mean to the child.

  Connie looked at the ship that approached them. They licked their wind-chapped lips. “I’ll hide.”

  Flora patted them gently on their shoulder. Alice reached out and did the same. Connie put their hand on top of Alice’s small freckl
ed one.

  The three of them slipped belowdecks. They had talked about this before, all of them knowing that there must always be a place that women can hide.

  Eddy stayed on deck. “I’ve dealt with slavers before.” He checked his guns and touched his binder.

  Once it had been spotted, the ship took forever to approach. It was bigger than it had first seemed, looming larger and larger as it came fully into view.

  Men swarmed the deck in every direction, pulling the sails and climbing the rigging to get a better look at the small craft as they closed in. It was impossible to count how many, silhouetted as they were against the sunset. They were man-shaped black holes against the sky, each bearded face lifted at the angle of a predator as it scents prey and searches for its weakest point.

  Bodie pulled up both poles and oars. He let his sheets hang slack. The ship drifted sideways, unmoored and without propulsion. He did not drop anchor.

  “Allo there! Qui qui?” The brass-voiced call came from the prow of the larger ship.

  Bodie held very still. He assumed the caller had a spyglass on him, though he could not see it.

  “Soy Bodie. Ma ship Ursula. Sans cargo. Sans crew. Solamente me, et first mate Eddy. Sans mujeres. Savvy?”

  He spread his arms wide as if to expose himself and invite scrutiny of the women he did not hold in his pockets.

  Eddy lifted his chin behind its balaclava. He counted men on the ship, counted bullets and how long it would take to reload each time. There was no land in sight. Swimming was not an option, but failure was all but assured.

  “Pare to be boarded,” came the reply.

  Bodie ground his jaw. He trudged to the anchor and threw the crank, letting out the chain.

  Eddy looked up. “You’re just going to let them come aboard?”

  “They could outrun us. Plow right through us. Might have long guns aboard. This isn’t up to me.”

  Eddy touched his gun again. “What do they want?”

  “Never can tell,” Bodie said, spitting on the deck of his ship.

  The slave ship came alongside them, turning broadside before dropping its anchor. Planks and ladders dropped from above, connecting one deck to another. Bodie blanched, but smiled afterward, his weathered brow making an attempt at serenity.