“Passage?” The beard waggled in disbelief. “Let’s see, then.”
Clo felt the slip of paper pulled from her hand.
The bearded man grunted. “Half. Half.” Reaching over Clo, he slapped a thick palm against the bosun’s forehead. “Half passage. You should have left her, you boil-brained limpet. Half. You brought me a half passage. Half.” Each utterance of the word half sounded like bellows at a fire. He glowered at Clo. “How’s that, then? How came you by half passage?”
“I…”
“Yes?”
“I don’t… I’m not…” Clo could not seem to form sensible words in the presence of this greasy-bearded figure. “It’s… my father, he…”
“Never mind. However you came by it, you have it, and we shall have to accommodate it. Take her.” He waved at the dinghy. “Row her out. Put her… put her in the locker. We cannot have the others with a half passage. But bring them, too.” He gestured over his shoulder at a small family huddled by a stack of ropes and barrels. “Our departure is already too much delayed.”
The pebble-toothed man took Clo by her shoulder again. “Come on then, girly.” He pushed her toward the dinghy. “An’ come on, you lot,” he called to the huddling family. “It’s yer time, too.”
“Are you Haros?” Finally finding her tongue, Clo turned back to the bearded figure. “Do you know my father?”
“Girly.” Pebble-mouth pushed her again. “He knows everyone.”
“But”—twisting in desperation, she wrenched herself free of the bosun’s fingers—“are you Haros? Do you know my father?”
Haros, if he was Haros, gave a slow nod.
“Yes, you are Haros? Or yes, you know my father?”
“Girly—” Clo felt herself gripped again, but the Haros-figure held up his hand and stepped forward. He loomed over Clo, his gaze lingering over her shorn hair, her leggings, her boots. Again, his eyes seemed too bright.
“I know the knave,” he said finally.
Clo felt her cheeks grow hot. “Not—” she began, but the man nodded firmly.
“Knave,” he repeated. “I know his tricks. His thievery.”
The bundle under Clo’s arm felt suddenly heavy. She flushed again. “Well,” she said. “Well. It may be…” She hesitated, unsure. “It may be he has something for you.” She made her words firmer. She raised her eyes. She had seen her father sell stolen paintings before. “Something he wants to trade with you. Or sell to you. It’s valuable.”
She removed the rag-wrapped painting from her bundle and peeled back a corner. The frame glimmered in the light.
The beard cracked widely at the mouth. Plucking the object out of Clo’s fingers, the Haros-figure lifted the rags and guffawed loudly. “I see it! The thievery! Hah-hah! Haw-haw!” He twisted a pearl deftly from the frame and held it to the light. “Hah-haaa!” he laughed again, flipping the pearl into the ocean. He returned the rags and frame to Clo. “Worthless.”
Clo’s cheeks burned. “But—”
“Worthless!”
“But perhaps he means to buy passage on your boat with it!”
The Haros-figure gestured at the bosun and turned his back to Clo. “The knave has been on my manifest these many years.”
Clo felt herself propelled along the dock. She turned, struggling.
“Your manifest? Is he a passenger on the boat? Is he to come on the boat?”
“Of course yer father’ll come, too, girly,” the bosun said, pushing her onto the rocking dinghy. “You’ve no need to worry on that.”
Clo allowed herself to be guided onto one of the rowboat’s low benches. Her mind worked feverishly as the bosun began to row them out into the open water. Manifest. She repeated the official-sounding word. He was on the manifest. He would meet her. She was meant to meet him on the boat. Certainly. Always.
Across from her, gray-faced and mute, sat the little family the bosun had been instructed to take aboard. A boy, a girl, a mother, a father. They stared at Clo, expressionless.
The sounds of the shore died away as they pulled farther into the water; after a time, it was just the echoes of shouts and the sound of the oars in the waves, a gentle splashing. The little boy coughed, a sad, empty-sounding hee.
“No more o’ that,” said the bosun with a phlegmy grunt of his own. “Jus’ habit now.”
A pale something dangled from the little boy’s fingertips. Clo watched the wind tug it away so that it fell on the damp floor of the boat. She picked it up. A lacy handkerchief. She held it out to the boy. “Here,” she said.
Somber-eyed, the boy looked at the handkerchief but did not take it.
Clo tried again. “You dropped this,” she said quietly. The delicate lace fluttered in her fingers.
The boy did not take the handkerchief from her. No one from the family took the handkerchief from her. They stared blankly ahead while Clo, cheeks burning, held out the offending square.
“Ah, well. If they don’t need it now, I do,” said the bosun, grabbing the lacy cloth and running it under his nose.
Discomfited, Clo turned away from the family’s vacant gaze and hugged her bundle closer to her chest. Only one or two large ships floated here; the water stretched wide and open around them.
Water that is full of salt and has no edge, she thought.
She felt herself full of salt.
She rubbed a knuckle across her eyes.
The manifest. Many years. It was an official document. She was meant to be here. Her father must have arranged it so. She slipped her knuckle across her eye again, then raised her chin. Manifest.
“That’s us.” The bosun tipped his head in the direction of the largest boat. “The three-master there. She’s a beauty, no? An’ a good voyage she’ll give you, too.”
Clo followed his gaze, her skin prickling with cold.
No, beauty was not the word she would have used to describe the ship. A dark shadow rising out of the water, its sides greasy and scabbed with barnacles and seaweed, it listed as though it were already half sunk. Even without knowing anything about the harbor or the sea or the vessels used to navigate it, Clo could imagine no good voyage coming from that gloomy craft. No, she thought, not this boat. This can’t be right.
The gray-faced family turned their heads just enough to look. Nothing—no flicker of emotion or knowledge crossed their faces.
Hee. The little boy coughed an empty cough again. Hee.
Clo, turnip-lugger, wall-jumper, found herself now a boat-climber; the bosun maneuvered the little dinghy under a rope ladder that draped over the side of the ship and instructed his passengers to climb it. The family ascended ahead of her, and as Clo waited her turn in the bobbing dinghy, she wondered at the ease with which the mother and children in their skirts—for the little boy, too, was in a lacy, delicate gown—ascended. Even the father, who carried a small trunk, moved seemingly unimpeded. But when Clo grasped the rungs, the ladder swayed and tilted under her weight. Panicked and trembling, she was sent swinging against the side of the ship. The bosun yelled from below, a man leaning over the edge of the ship yelled from above, but Clo could not control the thing, and the two men were obliged to balance it for her, pulling it tight against her motions. She reached the top breathless and shaking. A trio of straggle-bearded crew members grabbed and pulled her into a somber line of passengers where the staring family also waited.