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I. The Dahlak archipelago, 1304
The noontime prayer was late. The overseer at the docks wanted to finish setting the posts for the new jetty first, so there they still were, Nicolò and the rest of his work crew, up to their chests in seawater under the glaring sun.
So it went.
Nicolò held his post straight and waited. The sun was merciless on the back of his head, a palpable pressure despite the white headscarf he'd been issued after he'd been fished out of the sea. In the water below one of his fellow unfortunates splashed around anchoring the post into the sea floor, shouting abuse at the overseer every time he surfaced for air.
It had been not quite three weeks since their ship had foundered. A ship out of Dahlak had found him clinging to the wreckage nearly a full day afterward, and pulled him out. They made a business out of it, he found, while he was still flat with thirst on the deck -- they sailed out after storms to rescue whomever and whatever they could find, and then cheerfully took a fee.
So Nicolò was waiting, and the Sultan of Dahlak was waiting, for Nicolò's friends to turn up and pay the fee for his rescue, and in the meantime Nicolò was working to earn his keep. In case his friends did not come.
The prayer was finally called. Nicolò had learned the hard way to grab his lunch first, and took it down to the thin shade of the customs house while the Muslims bent to pray. He finished quickly enough and leaned his head back against the rough coral bricks. The waves ran up the beach and fell back, and the shore birds scurried after them, again, again. In the distance he could just spot a sail.
Surely Andromache and Quỳnh and Yusuf had come out safely through the storm.
Surely he would know, if Yusuf were gone. Surely he would know if whatever grace preserved them had been taken back, if Yusuf were not in the world. He could not be walking around with half of his self ripped away and fail to know it; after the first quickness of the moment left them, men knew when they had taken mortal wounds. He and Yusuf had come into this strange undying life together, they would leave it together. He had to believe that.
As the sun sank they were set to work again. Nicolò was lashing planks to the posts with a rope spun of coconut when a ship came in.
It was flying the Dahlak pennant, tacking smoothly into port. Perhaps there would be news, perhaps even -- Nicolò stood staring at the ship long enough for the overseer to bark at him. He lowered his head and went back to work.
He lingered around the docks after the work crew was dismissed, hoping to spot one of the newly-arrived sailors, or failing that, pick up some news. But the docks emptied fast after sunset, and he had little luck.
"Here's one," said an official right behind him. Startled, Nicolò turned, just as the official seized his elbow.
"I've done my work for the day," Nicolò protested.
The official dragged him down toward a small single-masted dhow moored at the far end of the docks. "This ship is short-handed. It runs short trips, you'll be back soon enough."
Nicolò opened his mouth to object -- he couldn't go, he had to make it easy for his friends to find him – and then the ship's captain straightened up from where he, no, she had been leaning on a post, and he knew.
"This is what you've got for me?" Andromache drawled. The official pushed Nicolò forward and down, so that he stumbled forward to land on hands and knees at her feet.
"He's strong and healthy. You just needed one?"
"Yeah, he'll do," Andromache said, looking him over, all slow disdain. Nicolò gave her a sarcastic stare back, the expression floating lightly over the joy welling up in his chest. "Thanks, yeah, God be with you, good night." Then, to Nicolò, "You'll sleep on board tonight, I don't want you trying to run off -- "
Nicolò followed her as sullenly as he could manage up the gangplank, and then once they were on board, the official gone, he took a deep breath. "Andy -- "
"It's just us," she said, and threw her arms around him. "Shit, Nico! At least you aren't still drowning." He held her closely to him, heart singing.
"Now, Quỳnh!" she called after a moment, pulling back, and Nicolò couldn't hold it in any longer. He started, "And Yusuf, is he -- "
The sail started unfurling just as Yusuf crashed into him. "Oh thank God, thank God," Nicolò said, staggering around with the force of it, with the heavy hot solidity of Yusuf in his arms. He pounded his hands on Yusuf's shoulders, cupped the warm familiar curve of Yusuf's head and held it to him, laughed with how tightly Yusuf was squeezing him back, how all his carefully banked dread was exploded into joy. Yusuf was murmuring something into his neck, and he couldn’t tell whether it was poetry or prayer.
"I made him wait in the back," Quỳnh said. "I knew he wouldn't be able to keep up the act."
"And you too," Nicolò said, reaching for her.
She took his hand and pressed it, eyes dancing, but shook her head. "Help me with the sail first, Genoa, we've got to make the open water fast."
"What," Nicolò said, moving in almost automatic habit to turn the sail into the wind, and then as the port slid away from them, he said, faintly scandalized, "You're stealing a ship from the Sultan of Dahlak!"
Yusuf, still plastered to his back, put in, laughing, "I know, I know, we won't be able to come back through the Red Sea for decades."
"Eh, so what?" Andromache grinned, broad and fierce. "It's a big world out there. Lots of other places we can go."
II. Several miles outside Porto, Portugal, 1828
And now it was raining.
It needed only that. Sebastien shot a glance up into the oak tree where Josef was perched with his spyglass, trying to guess how much longer they would have to stand around damply in the forest.
"They're safely off," Josef announced breathlessly as he slithered down, Nicolas's hands helping him land easily on his feet. "Wind's in their favor, Dom Miguel won't be able to catch them now."
"Well, that's something at least," Andrea said, and squinted up at the sky. "All right, not much else we can do now. Let's get out of the rain."
Thank god for that, Sebastien thought, and stuffed his pistol into his shirt in an attempt to keep the powder something approaching dry.
Josef and Nicolas exchanged one of their little looks. Josef said, "There's an inn a few miles ahead, Andy."
Andrea blinked at them for a blank moment, but then she said, "Sure, I could do with a hot supper."
Sebastien could read the undercurrents in that well enough, and fine: he was grateful. He'd been on more than his share of disastrous campaigns before, but those hadn't ended in a dry bed and a real dinner.
"So that was a fiasco," he said conversationally to Nicolas while they were picking their way down a gravelly slope turned treacherous in the drizzle.
Nicolas' eyebrows lifted in surprise, and Sebastien said, "Oh, I see -- you do a lot of lost causes in this business, do you?"
Nicolas said, measuredly, "Not exactly. Causes, I have come to think, are like rivers."
Sebastian ducked under a low-hanging branch and snorted. "What, because people get swept up by them?"
Nicolas gave Sebastien his ghost of a grin. "Well, that too. But I meant -- something much greater than people. Something that changes its course on longer and wilder scales. Today, for instance -- this uprising might have been crushed, but this doesn't seem like the kind of cause that is going to be lost quickly or easily. It will come back."
"You think that's comforting?" Sebastien said after a moment.
"I know it is not," Nicolas said. "I have some hazelnuts, though, if that would help."
Josef did better, at the inn. They had one room for the four of them and it was drafty, but it was also dry, and Sebastien was hardly going to complain.
"If it helps," Josef said, "I counted at least five people whose lives you saved, and who knows how many more when our explosion distracted Dom Miguel's loyalists. Those are men who will live to see their families again -- or to raise the banner of liberty again some other time. Maybe both."
"Is that how you count your wins?" Sebastien said.
"It's how I do, anyway," Josef said, bright eyes very sincere in the fading light. "Life by life, how else would you make the measure of man?"
How else? How else -- Sebastien knew plenty of safe, everyday ways to measure men. His -- he didn't know what to call them, his comrades in arms, he supposed -- they did not do too badly for dinner companions, now that they weren't awkwardly shifting around in their chairs and avoiding his wife's eyes. The food was hot and the wine was surprisingly decent, and the common room was bustling with people. It was comforting at first, and then as the evening drew on it began to feel dislocating, out of step: how here in this little inn it could have been any easy evening, full of the unperturbed everyday business of people in and out, and yet the usurper king of Portugal had just brutally crushed a revolt not ten miles away.
"I think we'll turn in," Nicolas said softly, when the last of the sunset had faded. Josef hugged Andrea, and clapped Sebastien on the shoulder. Sebastien didn't know whether that meant they wanted some privacy – he was still getting used to that part of things – and it was inconceivable to ask Andrea to explain. He muttered something vague and took himself and the rest of his wine off outside, where wandering up a little ways from the stable yard brought him to a bluff that overlooked the sea.
The rain had long stopped, and now a few of the brighter summer stars were shining out in between the dim ragged clouds.
Andrea came out after a while. Sebastien waited for her to say something, but she only nodded a hello and settled down beside him in silence.
"So," he said. "Is this how it usually goes?"
"Mmm. It's not unusual, anyway. We take some hits, we save some lives. Are you saying you didn't have fun?"
"Well, it was more fun than I had in Russia," he said, and she laughed. Dear God, it was so good to have someone who could laugh at his jokes.
"The thing is," she said -- "the world is so full of people now. So many people, so many fights. And there's only four of us." She was looking out to sea, the shape of her face just outlined in the dying evening light. "We don't do glory. Or glorious victories. We just try to help one small way at a time."
"Being a nail," he offered impulsively. She gave him a blank look. "You know. For want of a nail...?"
She smiled, and even in the darkness he could see how it made her face warmer. "Something like that."
He cleared his throat. "I'll think about it."
"You do that," she said. "It's only going to get harder for you to stay in Marseille, you know that, right?"
That, he did not want to think about. He made a face.
"Don't sit out all night," she said, not ungently, and left.
That left him and the wine and the dimly shifting sea. And somewhere out there, in the unfathomable darkness, the fifth one. He didn't have to deal with the dreams about being stabbed or shot or blown up anymore, but he was always going to dream about drowning. But then again, he still dreamed about being hung, too.
He thought about dying in the crushing darkness, again and again, and with each new waking battering urgently against the confines of prison -- the coffin rusting underwater; the chains of tyranny weighing down the people of Europe. One desperate gasp back to life, one tiny shift, one death closer to freedom.
"Well. Cheers," he said, and tipped the wine out into the ocean below.
III. Outside Nabran, Azerbaijan, sometime mostly now
After the fourth or fifth time Nile tried to quietly shift around only to discover different lumps in the bed, she got up. The sun was already up, anyway, so perhaps it was time to cut her losses.
Andy's side of the bed was vacant, the pillow cold. Nile felt very tired, contemplating that.
At least she hadn't kept Andy up with all the tossing and turning. She trudged out into the dinky little kitchen to make herself coffee.
This was apparently one of Andy's favorite houses. "Not that she'll actually admit it," Joe had said, on the train earlier, his eyes crinkling with amusement.
"But you'll learn how to tell," Nicky had added.
Nile had braced herself for an indefinite stay in some sort of ancient hut that was acquainted with the notion of electricity only through thunderstorms, but it turned out to be a rundown little house in the middle of the forest, with a little boxy refrigerator and some alarmingly visible wiring. There was running water and the beds had actual mattresses, so Nile figured she would save her complaints for something else.
Joe was already up, leaning on the counter. His hands were cupped around a mug of something hot, and he was listening to the radio, turned down low.
"That coffee?" Nile said.
"Good morning! It's tea, but I can make you some coffee if you like."
"Nah, I got it," Nile said. There wasn't a real coffee maker here, just an off-brand Moka pot they'd picked up for her in the closest town, but she was getting used to it. At least it made something more drinkable than the swill they'd had on base. "You seen Andy?"
"Not this morning," Joe said. He smiled at her, but she could see the tightness at the corners of his eyes. "Why, does she have you on some training exercise or something?"
Nile snorted. "If she does, then vanishing without warning is part of it." She swirled milk into her coffee and leaned back on the counter next to Joe to drink it. The radio sang something plaintive and twangy in a language she didn't understand.
Andy disappeared at odd times, without a word, and just as unpredictably came back. When she was here, Joe and Nicky kept giving her hushed wide-eyed looks, soft and sad, so Nile could see why Andy might want some space.
"There's an overlook she likes not far up the north trail," Joe suggested a little conspiratorially. "You might try that. She's very good at not leaving any trailsign, though I'm afraid we've all gotten a bit sloppy about that nowadays."
It was a nice morning for a walk, at any rate, and between the exertion and the caffeine she was feeling more awake after a mile or so. The north trail was a glorified deer path, a faint dirt scratch that wound up through the forest as it rose into the hills. She was too busy picking it out to spare any attention to look for Andy's footprints or whatever, which she had written off as a nonstarter.
Anyway, she could hear music.
She followed the track up one more rise and came to a granite outcropping. The view was beautiful; a stark drop below them, and in the bluer distance lush steep hillsides sweeping down to the sea.
Andy was sitting crosslegged on the rocks, picking out a winding kind of tune on something too pear-shaped to be a guitar. In the middle of it she stopped.
Without turning around, she said, "Nile."
"Didn't know you played." Nile climbed up to sit next to her.
"It's a song for that bird," Andy said. She jerked her chin toward a nearby tree, where a small red-brown bird was hopping around doing the usual sorts of birdy things. "Or it was." She ran the melody through again, and stopped in the same place, leaving the phrase hanging. "I can't remember the rest of it."
"Huh," said Nile. She wrapped her arms around her knees. "Don't know about you, but stuff like that, you know, it'd always come to me two days later in the shower."
Andy made the small huff of air she sometimes passed off for a laugh. She shifted her left hand up on the neck of the not-guitar and the melody turned into something else, faster and – Nile didn't now how to put it. Squarer. Something that fit into a more familiar beat. Then that song too trailed off.
The bird flew away, a sudden flurry of motion, a quiver of the branch, and gone. Andy sat silently with one hand flat on the strings.
"Thought you were going to hand me my ass in barehand combat today," Nile said.
Andy shot her a sharp sideways look. "Were you waiting for that?"
"Are you kidding me? Yeah."
Andy looked up into the sky. She was smiling, something small and quiet. "Yeah, okay. It's a beautiful morning. We've got plenty of time."