She was troubled by dreams out there on that prow, she who had always slept soundly and deeply, and – as far as she had ever been aware – dreamlessly. If she had ever dreamed before, she had never remembered the dreams when she woke. But now she did, and they came thick and fast, and some were of the lost past and some were simply dreams, unknown, unexplainable, impossible to interpret or understand without context, which, as yet, she completely lacked. Sometimes there was nothing but voices – her grandmother’s, for instance, reading some familiar passage from a poem or a genealogical line, or uttering those last words of hers that were so much a binding laid on Amais by a dying woman; or an unfamiliar voice, a woman’s, calling, I’m lost, I’m lost, come and find me, come and set me free…There were weird dreams of almost frightening focus, sometimes a single phrase or even a single word written on scarlet pennants in gold calligraphy, things she could not quite read but knew were written in jin-ashu, the women’s tongue her grandmother had taught her, and that they were very important, if only she could get close enough to see them clearly and understand them. And sometimes there were dreams that were almost complete stories in and of themselves – she dreamed of strange skies, as though something far away, something vast and distant, was on fire. Once she woke from a vivid dream where she stood under such skies with a child, a little girl, both of them dressed in a manner described by Tai in her journals, their hair in courtly style, standing on a shattered piece of stairwell with only a shattered city around her – and she thought she knew what was burning then, but that didn’t seem quite right either.
It was then that she started keeping her own journal, not meticulously and neatly and every day like Tai had done all her life, but haphazardly, whenever the mood took her, using a half-filled notebook she had found abandoned on the deck after one of the beautiful people from the forbidden salon had passed that way. She had not believed that the precious notebook, with all those inviting blank pages waiting to be filled, had been simply dumped – and she had spent an entire morning stalking it, wandering around that part of the deck, waiting for somebody, anybody, to come and claim it. Nobody had done so, and Amais decided that the Gods of Syai must have sent her this gift, and took the notebook with a completely clear conscience. She wrote her journal half in the language of Elaas, which was the language of her father and her childhood, and half in graceful but oddly formed and unsteady characters of jin-ashu. Amais had been taught how to read the women’s tongue, but the calligraphy of it, writing it herself, was something that baya-Dan had only begun to teach her in earnest a few years back. She was quickly beginning to realise that she had barely scratched the surface of jin-ashu, that there were so many more layers there than she had believed. She was using Tai’s journals partly as inspiration and partly as a manual to teach herself more of the secret language, forcing herself to write it using the coarse lead of a broken pencil instead of the delicate brush and ink in which the characters ought to have been inscribed, finding it hard work but in general quite pleased with her progress.
But the journal proved to be a stepping stone for something quite different. She soon found that she was not as comfortable in the journal format as her ancestress had been. She started writing down her thoughts as long poems. Initially they were pastiche, no more than clumsy copies of the classical poems her grandmother had read to her and those she found in the pages of Tai’s books, but even to her own untutored eye they improved with daily practice until she was quite proud of what she could do with the old and glowing words of the classical high language that had been her grandmother’s gift to her. The poetry, however, turned out to be another stepping stone, to something else again. She started writing down stories, casting her own dreams into fiction, writing about her hopes and fears and expectations as though they were happening to someone removed from herself, finding it easier to conquer and understand them that way.
The notebook she had found on deck soon ran out of room to write in, thickly covered with what was a remarkably good calligraphy for having been produced by someone of Amais’s age, without proper implements, and with the added constraint of having to be smaller and smaller as the space to write in grew more and more cramped and valuable. One of the ship’s officers found her sitting cross-legged in the sun one morning, squinting morosely at her notebook, trying to find a margin she had not yet written in.
‘Hey,’ the man had said in a friendly manner, smiling at the picture of the intense little girl bent over her words. ‘Much too nice a day for that long face. Looks like that’s pretty much all your book will take – what are you doing, writing a diary? Could you use another of those?’
It was impolite to answer in the affirmative; one never asked for gifts. But Amais looked down at her notebook, and then up at the officer, and nodded mutely.
‘Then I will see you get one. There are plenty of notebooks in the back of the storage cabinet. I’ll see what I can dig out.’
‘Thank you, sei,’ Amais said, using the old form of address. The officer wasn’t even one of the higher ones, hardly a ‘lord’. But he was offering a precious thing. That entitled him.
He didn’t understand the honour, naturally, and merely smiled as he tipped his cap at her. ‘I’ll find you,’ he said.
And he did. He came up with two partly filled and discarded notebooks and – the greatest treasure of all – a completely blank notebook of substantial proportions, bound in thin leather.
‘The captain’s log is far more boring than what you might want to use it for,’ he said.
‘This is the captain’s book?’ Amais demanded, too impressed to be polite.
‘Yours now,’ the officer said. ‘He’ll only think they forgot to load his usual quota. You’d better keep it out of sight, though. You know.’ And he had winked at her in a conspiratorial manner.
She didn’t know whether to believe him – taking one of the notebooks destined for the official log of the ship’s journey sounded entirely too outrageous, but she did it anyway, keeping the book hidden even from her mother, no small achievement given their cramped and untidy cabin.
Vien and the girls changed ships after they crossed the big inland sea, and loaded themselves into another even bigger vessel sailing east, all the way to the Syai port of Chirinaa, familiar to both Vien and Amais only as a lost city of legend. On the first night of this, the last leg of their journey, Vien felt well enough to leave Aylun sleeping in the even more cramped cabin, if that were possible, than the one in which they had travelled on the first ship, and joined her older daughter on deck.
It was evening, and the sea breezes were cool. Vien wrapped her shawl tighter around her and leaned her elbows on the railing to look down into the water below.
‘Soon,’ she said to Amais. ‘Soon