Amais carried a similar bag. No concessions had been made for her size and on her the thing looked enormous, overwhelming, threatening to make her buckle under its weight. In hers she carried whatever her mother required but could not fit into her own luggage, as well as the thirteen precious red journals that had been left to her by Dan and – smuggled in as a last-minute sentimental impulse but already starting to be a subject for second thoughts – a couple of pebbles from the cove where her father had taken her to swim with wild dolphins.
The family’s break with the island seemed to be complete. Elena had not come to see them off at the wharf, and neither had any of Amais’s erstwhile bosom friends and companions. Those people who did happen to be there as Vien and her daughters departed seemed reluctant to meet their eyes, to look at them, even to acknowledge that they saw them. Many found something to be busy with, keeping their heads down. Only a couple of women offered a wan half-smile, and one or two children, probably too young to know better, waved goodbye as the boat carrying Vien and the girls pushed off from the dock.
Vien kept her back to the shore, clutching Aylun, occasionally patting the bag she carried with one hand as though to make sure it was still there. It was Amais who sat facing the island they were abandoning, and it was only Amais who saw Elena finally come running all the way down the wharf and then back again to shore, taking an awkward, stumbling leap off it onto the pebbled beach, her customary headscarf clutched in one twisted hand revealing black hair streaked liberally with grey and falling in untidy strands about her face and neck. She was calling something, but either they were already too far to hear clearly or else her voice was very weak – it was impossible to make out what she was saying. Vien sat with her back straight, without turning her head. She must have heard that voice, must have recognised it, but she gave no reaction to it at all, and Amais could see nothing on her mother’s face except a glint in her eye that might have been either determination or a concealed tear. But Amais, for her part, could not find it in herself to leave without a word, without a thought – even though she had been the despised and ignored one ever since her father had died and her sister had been born to take his place in Elena’s heart. Amais had never forgotten the early years and the fact that her father’s mother did love her, long ago, once upon a time. And Elena was the last link with that other world, the world with her father and his dolphins, the world where she had suddenly been put on trial and declared a stranger.
With a final glance at her mother, half guilty and half defiant, Amais lifted both hands and waved back to the grandmother she was losing, waved back hard, as though that single simple motion alone could convey all that now would never be said.
Elena had stopped stock-still as Amais’s hands came up, and for the longest moment she stood frozen, immobilised by this farewell. And then she lifted one of her own hands, very slowly, and allowed the black kerchief she carried to be stirred by the breeze. They waved to each other, in silence, grandmother and granddaughter, for as long as they could see one another, until the boat slipped around a promontory and turned towards the mainland and blotted out the small beach and the woman standing alone upon it, with the memory of Amais’s childhood dissolving in the white sea foam as waves lapped and whispered at her feet.
Everything was bigger on the mainland. It was the first time Amais, nine years old, had seen a human dwelling bigger than anything to be found in the village in which she had grown up, and where she had known every face, from the newest babies with eyes barely opened to the world to the wizened ancient widows who sat in the sun outside their houses and blinked at the cerulean Elaas sky all day, counting clouds like sheep. Amais watched round-eyed as the bigger pieces of their baggage were hauled onto the shoulders of burly men naked to the waist, burned bronze by the sun under which they toiled, and carried onto the larger ship on which they would continue their journey. She watched other passengers stream on board, people wearing strange clothes, the men in buttoned-down jackets and patent leather shoes and the women wearing white gloves and large lace-and-ribbon-trimmed hats that cast their features into alluring half-shadow. She thought they were all beautiful.
But their own accommodation was not shared with the beautiful people – Vien and her daughters had a tiny cramped inside cabin with no view and no air, just four bunks stuffed into the smallest space into which they could possibly fit and a platform that served as both table and nightstand screwed firmly to the wall in between them. The only other fixtures were a cubbyhole that was supposed to serve as a closet, into which one of their smaller trunks that still didn’t quite fit inside had been crammed, and a small porcelain basin in one corner. They were to share a bathroom and toilet with five similar cabins that surrounded them.
Amais surveyed all this as she paused in the doorway, and her expression must have betrayed something of her appalled dismay, because Vien, pushing in behind her with the toddler she carried, now waking and fretful in her arms, clicked her tongue at her eldest daughter and schooled her face into a stern expression.
‘We probably could have done better, yes,’ she said, answering an unspoken question. ‘But it’s a lot more expensive, and our means are limited right now. We must save our gold for when we get home – we will need it there. Besides, it’s ours – we don’t even have to share that fourth bunk with some stranger. There’s more room than you think.’
‘Yes, Mother,’ Amais murmured obediently, but her heart quailed at the prospect of spending weeks, possibly months – she had no idea how long the journey was going to take – in this claustrophobic space.
‘You can take the top bunk,’ Vien said, inspecting the accommodations. ‘Aylun cannot sleep up there, and I must be where I can attend to her at night if I need to, so the two of us will sleep in the lower bunks. Now, help me sort this stuff out so that we have room to move. Some of it can go in the other top bunk, the one you aren’t using; it will give us a bit of space.’
‘May I go and see the ship, Mother?’ Amais asked, anxious to escape the confines of the cabin, grasping at whatever excuse she could muster.
‘Later,’ Vien said implacably.
So Amais spent the best part of an hour soothing her fractious sister and playing finger-games with her, sorting out the stuff in the trunk and hauling out things her mother considered necessities so that they could be better accessed atop the free upper bunk, and then squashing the trunk in as best it would go between the basin stand and the foot of one of the lower bunks, allowing free space to stand up and turn around in the midst of the cabin. She had not even noticed that the ship had actually started to move until her mother, satisfied with the arrangements in the cabin as best they could be made, took Aylun in her arms again and told Amais to lead the way up to the deck.
They were already a couple of ship-lengths away from the shore. A crowd of people stood shouting and waving, and the railings on that side of the ship were thronged by passengers who were waving back. Vien, with nobody to bid farewell to, simply turned her back on them and took her children to the opposite side of the ship, where there were fewer people and the view of the sunlit sea was unimpeded.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘Over there, somewhere, is Syai. We’re on our way. We’re going home.’
But it was her father’s dolphins that Amais searched for in the waters that quickly turned from sapphire to deep cobalt blue, her father’s dolphins and her father’s spirit, wanting to say her farewells to them, wanting to assure them that she could not bid them goodbye because a part of her would never leave them. She thought she saw a silver fin break the surface of the water, once, a long way away – but she could not be sure, and, although she stayed at the railings for a long time after her mother grew bored and a little seasick and retired below with Aylun, she did not see the fin again.
And the sun rode across the cloudless sky, and dipped towards the horizon, and then beneath it; and the quiet stars came out; and the first day was over. Already Amais was alone and adrift upon the open sea; the land of her birth was lost behind