Chapter 13: Aoife (part 1 of 2)

  On the day before her departure from Calais, Aoife Griffin sat reading on a sandy beach. The thin Gallic blouse that her great-aunt had bought her upon arrival in the port town now fluttered in the summer breeze. It was the first piece of clothing she owned that had compelled her to stop in front of a mirror. The effect had been to her satisfaction, though she kept that thought to herself.

  Ahead of her, her siblings and Samson the tailless sheepdog frolicked in the gentle waves. The last time any of them had a chance to play in the sea, Niall had been just a babe and Liam and Fiona hadn't been born. The children took full advantage of their last day of peaceful bliss as they laughed and ran in their soaked day clothes, paying no heed to the locals in swimsuits who watched curiously.

  Every once in a while, Liam would stray too far into the water, undeterred by Clodagh's warnings or his own clumsiness. One of the adventurer guards would then call him back with their amplified voice. Aoife would look up when she heard this but she would quickly go back to her reading, content to let her siblings play under professional supervision.

  Today, she felt almost completely relaxed, a sensation that was so rare that it felt entirely new. Here in Calais, she didn't have to worry about anything—not about Ma, not about money, not about secrets and sneaking... and not about Art Carmichael, though that particular worry still took some effort to overcome.

  Instead of worrying, she focused on the loosely bound paper in her hands—the manuscripts that had travelled with Ma since before she had learned to speak. Now that they were about to be on the road for months, and now that Ma could be mentally present more often than not, Aoife had set herself a new goal. She would read to Ma everything that was written in the manuscripts, the words they now knew had been left behind by her Temasekian grandfather. Ma never learned her letters yet had held onto this stack of paper through thick and thin, as if she had known that this was her sole connection to who she had been before she became Asha Griffin. Aoife now took it upon herself to relate the contents to her mother, to help her get to know her own father through his writing.

  First though, she had embarked on her umpteenth reread on her own, better to frame it with the new appreciation of who the author was. Once she started the work, she was quickly absorbed, taking to the task even on a lazy afternoon while her siblings played on the beach.

  This undertaking had its fair share of challenges. Sections of the manuscript that seemed to be a diary or memoir were easy enough to digest, and they had been her favourite parts to go back to in her previous readings. But there were also numerous drafts of what she guessed to be academic writing. These parts she had only skimmed or skipped entirely on past attempts, and she now forced herself to peruse and try to make sense of them.

  Even now, she found herself re-reading a particularly verbose sentence several times without registering anything. She pulled out a notebook and jotted down the words she needed to look up later. Some of the purchases Lucy made on her behalf also included a pair of dictionaries—an Anglish-Gallic one to look up the words themselves and a Gallic-Anglish one to translate the definitions. Try as they might, they couldn't find a purely Anglish dictionary in the markets of Calais. It would of course be infinitely faster to simply ask Lucy or Michael about the words, but Aoife preferred not to pester them or reveal her own ignorance. Besides, time was something she now had plenty of.

  "Ah, the correspondence from 1642."

  A brisk voice sounded from behind her and Aoife looked up at her great-uncle. Michael Tao was a tall, thin, and balding man who dressed in the local Gallic style, a white button-up shirt tucked into pants with suspenders. This contrasted her sister beside him who still preferred to wear what Aoife learned was called a qipao, though this was a lighter airier version than the one she had sported in Thameside. Lucy's legs, both the natural and the mechanical, were covered in loose-fitting pants.

  Michael crouched down and took a seat beside Aoife, and Lucy sat down next to him. He looked over at the page in Aoife's hands and smiled broadly. "I was a co-author on that one. Rui didn't try to pass it off as his own, did he? Although... looking back on it now, I kind of wish we could retract some of the stuff we said."

  Michael's Anglish had a fainter accent than Lucy's, and he also wasn't as prone to mixing up or inventing his own aphorisms. From some of the more personal writings of her grandfather, Aoife had expected her great-uncle to cut a stern intimidating figure, but the real person had been nothing but cheerful and affectionate with her entire family, quick to laughter and fond of wry humour. If anything, she found him easier to talk to than Lucy, who still seemed stiff and guarded at times.

  "Why? Did you guys say something wrong?" Aoife asked, frowning slightly. She herself hadn't detected anything untoward in the article, though she supposed it more than likely that her understanding of it was incomplete. Michael shook his head, and for a brief moment, his expression oscillated between a smile and grimace.

  "No, we didn't say anything wrong. At the time. But a lot of things have changed since then, some of them not in the ways we would have expected or hoped."

  He fell silent, even though it seemed to Aoife there should have been more to his story. She followed her great-uncle's gaze toward the sea, where her siblings still splashed about loudly. When she looked back at him, his face had settled on a fond yet somewhat wistful smile.

  "I was going to call you guys back, but looks like the kids haven't tired themselves out yet, eh? Maybe we'll leave them to it for a while longer."

  "Do we have much more packing left to do, Michael?"

  Much of their last several days in Calais had been spent hunting the markets for provisions. Theirs were to be a frighteningly long voyage—around the coasts of Gallia and Iberia, across the Mediterranian and out through the Red Sea, then heading into the open waters that would eventually take them to the shores of Suvarnabhumi. There would certainly be many stops along the way, but the travellers would be responsible for their own supplies, and theirs was a large party to provide for. Aoife knew that Ma and Aunt Cara would currently be in their rented apartment, going over the lists and double-checking the mountains of food and equipment they had accumulated over a week.

  "No, that's all taken care of," Michael said, keeping his wrinkled eyes on the children and chuckling softly. "I just thought everyone should turn in early tonight, get a good long rest. But maybe I prefer to keep my position as everyone's favourite great-uncle for a few more minutes, hmm?"

  He turned to Aoife, eyes twinkling. On his other side, Lucy glared at him jokingly.

  "Oh, don't you dare wait this out until I have to go over there and tell them," she said, and gave her brother a playful slap on the back. Watching this exchange, Aoife started to smile. "You better start getting used to playing the villain sometimes. You're not going to have me on the ship to bail you out."

  Aoife's smile faltered. Had she misheard? But beside her, Michael too looked unhappy, his smile threatening to turn back into a grimace. But at least he seemed unsurprised by his sister's remark. Aoife leaned forward to catch Lucy's eyes. "Wait, Lucy, you're not going on the ship? Why?"

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  The smile that her great-aunt flashed at her was a muted and thoughtful one. "I will be on a ship, just not the same one as yours."

  Aoife was lost for words. She hadn't entertained the thought that her enlarging family could... split up, once again. Her great-aunt had succeeded in her mission to find and reunite with Ma. What more could Lucy possibly want to do, so far from home and on her own? But Aoife remembered their conversation on the alleyways of Enfield as the two of them escaped from St Marcus. Lucy had said then that Michael and Bateer would look after Ma on the journey back to Temasek—not Lucy herself. Even then, her great-aunt had known that she would not be joining the family on this voyage.

  In answer to Aoife's deepening frown, Lucy went into her satchel and pulled out a tattered piece of paper. She reached across Michael and handed it to Aoife. The paper had a tough coarse textsure, but was heavily wrinkled and breaking down in parts. It looked like it had been unfolded and refolded countless times over many years. On it were foreign characters in faded ink. Though she couldn't read the writing, Aoife thought the words had a terse look to them, as if whoever wrote them had been in a real hurry. At the same time, she was overcome with a bizarre sense of familiarity, as if she recognized the handwriting. Surely, that was impossible; she had never learned to read anything other than Anglish.

  "What is this?" she asked, her outrage partially giving way to curiosity.

  "It's a prescription, written in Luoyangese. A doctor telling his patient how to mix herbs for back pain."

  Aoife looked up sharply. It was clear that neither Lucy nor Michael had written this prescription. In her mind, the fact that her great-aunt wanted to show her this could only point to one other possibility. Lucy leaned over and fixed her with keen solemn eyes.

  "I debated whether I should tell you all this. But the truth is, I wasn't only looking for your mother the last two years. The last time I passed through Gallia, I met a ship captain in Antwerpen who claimed he carried a Huaxian man on a return trip from Rupert's Land, back across the Atlantic. I knew the chances of this man being Rui were slim to none, but I still managed to track him down.

  "The man turned out to be a former servant to some Luoyangese general who'd gone across to stake his claims on—how do you say it?—a piece of the cake. This servant hurt his back while he was in Rupert's Land, and before he left, he managed to see a doctor there that could speak Luoyangese. Said he had a kind of funny accent he didn't recognize and that the doctor seemed to be pressed for time, like he was in the middle of a move. Scribbled down this prescription on the same paper he used to package the herbs. I pressed the man for more information but he couldn't remember the doctor's name and wasn't any good with descriptions. But this handwriting... both Michael and I are fairly confident it's Rui's."

  Aoife suddenly knew why the foreign writing looked familiar. The characters looked nothing alike, yet she had seen the same angular corners, the same flourishes on downward strokes... in the Anglish writing of her grandfather.

  "According to this man, he saw Rui about ten years ago, but you know what this means, Aoife? Your mother wasn't the only one that survived that shipwreck forty years ago. She and your grandfather got separated, and he somehow made it all the way across the Atlantic. At least as of ten years ago, he was still alive and active in Rupert's Land."

  Aoife's head swam as she tried to make sense of the revelations. The evolving picture she had formed of her family was now fractured again but with an additional piece. It was a lonely piece, one that was somewhere in the wilderness of the New World, with no way of knowing that his family still looked for him—and didn't know that his daughter still lived.

  "I'm not going back to Temasek," Lucy reiterated, and her intentions couldn't be clearer. "I'm going to sail across the Atlantic and continue my search. For my brother. And I'm going to bring him back. Back home... back to your mother. And Aoife, I think you should come with me."

  Aoife stared, jolted out of her imaginings of her grandfather's plight. She had anticipated Lucy's plan but not the invitation for her to join. Her immediate thought was one of panic, as though she had been asked onto the stage with no script from which to read her lines. What use would she be on the other side of the world where she knew nothing and no one? And what of her family? Wouldn't she be needed by their side?

  "Are you out of your mind?" it was Michael who responded on her behalf with a loud exclamation. For the first time, Aoife saw some of that righteous indignation her grandfather had complained about in his writing. "It's bad enough that you're going off on your own. Now you want to take Aoife with you? She's just a child! Can we all get everyone safely to Temasek first? Then we can talk about what we'll do about Rui."

  "By then it might be too late," Lucy remained calm and turned a steady gaze on her brother. "It might already be too late. We've lost so much time already; we can't afford to lose more. If you've been paying any attention to the local chatter on your travels, you also know that the explorations into the New World have met with... resistance. I don't know what Rui's got himself mixed up in but whatever it is, it's keeping him from coming back or trying to contact us. Maybe he has tried, unsuccessfully. Whatever the case may be, I won't rest until I find my brother... or find out what happened to him. If I have my way, I won't bring just Aoife. I intend to ask Clodagh to join me as well."

  Michael breathed out loudly through his nose, threw his hands up, and looked to the sky. Lucy turned her gaze back on Aoife. More panicked and contradictory thoughts jumped at her. It's too dangerous; I can't let her go. But maybe I shouldn't be deciding for Clodagh. Besides, I don't even know what I want to do...

  "Consider it, Aoife," Lucy leaned in closer, poking her head in front of Michael's. "You and Clodagh both have strong attunements. Probably stronger than mine or Michael's... certainly different to most of the attunements I've seen. You ought to have someone help you train, and I can be that person unti more permanent arrangements could be made. Michael's right about one thing. It would be risky for me to go alone, and I think I do need your help."

  "Do you hear yourself right now?" Michael interrupted, incredulous and frustrated in equal measure. "You're asking two teenage girls with no formal training to be your bodyguards on a transatlantic wild goose chase!"

  "We were about their age when we started our own training. You and I both know there's no better teacher than practical experience. Besides, it's not a—what was it?—wild duck chase. We're looking for family."

  "A grandfather they've never met! That they didn't even know existed until a few months ago!"

  "Stop!"

  Aoife was immediately mortified by her own outburst. She hadn't meant for it to be quite so loud. Both her great-aunt and -uncle turned to her in surprise, and some bystanders shot them looks. She started packing the manuscripts and her notebook, more to cover her own embarrassment than out of any real urgency, and stood up quickly, causing sand to spray around her.

  "I think it's wonderful that Granda Rui might still be alive," she announced, red-faced and subconsciously sweeping the sand off Michael's shoulder. "And it's brave of you, Lucy, to want to continue your search. But... I think I just need a little more time to think about it. And I also think... there are a few other people that need to know about this before I can make my decision."

  Michael patted the hand on his shoulder gently, and Aoife stopped what she was doing. Lucy eyed her for a moment, a soft smile returning to her face.

  "Of course, my dear," she said and laid a hand on Michael's other shoulder in a conciliatory gesture. "I'm sorry to have sprung this on you so suddenly. For a long time, I couldn't decide whether I should tell you... whether I should tell Asha. My ship leaves after yours, so you have until the morning to decide. If you still couldn't make up your mind then, I'd suggest you do the sensible thing and go with your family to Temasek. And you're right, Aoife. This evening, we'll sit down and have another chat about this, with everyone."

  Aoife nodded, gaining a small measure of relief to her jumbled thoughts. She remembered the manuscripts in her arm and held them closer to her chest. It turned out that these hadn't been the last known words of the author; he had gone on to discover and experience much more of the world. Was it some insurmountable force that kept him chained to the land across the ocean, unable to send word to his loved ones? Or was it some sacred mission he couldn't let go, one he was determined to see to its end? In any case, there was more to his story, and she started to think, perhaps her project ought to be put on hold until she recovered the rest of the manuscripts.