“Whoah there, easy tiger!” I exclaim, dancing back out of the way of Lotan’s sword without dropping the covered dish I’m carrying.

“Whups-a-daisy, missed-ya,” Lotan replies, grinning and saluting with his sword. He’s not wearing his tunic, and is all shiny musculature. Probably impressive if you’re into that sort of thing.

“What’re you doing anyway?” I ask, still getting myself back together. For a big guy he’d turned so fast to the sound I made behind him. His sword seemed almost to dart through the air at me.

“Practicing.”

“Ri-ight.” I carry on with bringing the dish to the table. Kerilas and Sam are already sitting there.

“God, he’s such a wanker,” Sam mutters as I set the dish down. She doesn’t even look up, supporting her head with her hands at her temples.

“Headache?” I ask.

Sam nods, still not raising her head.

“He just likes playing with his weapon,” Kerilas observes dryly.

“I heard that!” Lotan’s voice reaches back towards the table.

“Well, you can stop now,” Kerilas calls back. “Breakfast is up. What is it?” he asks me.

I lift the lid. “Sautéed mackerel and sweet potato, sort of. Various herbs. Help yourselves.” I take my seat and start loading up a platter.

“Smells good anyway. Could almost be home,” he says, scooping up his share. “Not that we’ve really got the climate for al fresco breakfasts back home.” He grins at Sam, who’s mostly unresponsive.

“Not that I ever had mackerel for breakfast back home,” I add. “Sort of thing my grandparents used to do. Or kippers or something. I was never a seafood sort of person, you know?”

“Hey, you find out what this no-meat thing’s about yet?”

I shake my head and pop a piece of fish in my mouth. “Not yet. Jalese didn’t know; just says Neri don’t eat land animals. I ask why, she looks at me funny.” I shrug. “God, I could kill for a burger.”

“Mmm.”

“Or bacon.”

“Bacon burger!”

I shake my head. “Bacon sarnies and ketchup and sausages and a fried egg.”

“And black pudding.”

“Oh yeah!”

“That a little smile I see?” Kerilas verbally prods Sam.

She raises her head. There is a little smile, slightly pained. She says one word. “Pizza.”

“Pizza,” Kerilas and I repeat, like an invocation.

“You know, that’s got to be doable with local ingredients,” Kerilas begins.

“Pizza?” Lotan’s voice drifts over.

“Oi, you having any of this then?” Kerilas calls back. “I mean, if you don’t want your share–”

Lotan puts his sword back in its scabbard and trots over. “Oh, I thought you meant you’ve got pizza.”

“Ew, put something on your top, you smelly barbarian!” I admonish him.

He stops, thinks for a moment, then says “I’ll be back,” in a thick Austrian accent and trots back to where he’d left his tunic.

Kerilas is looking at me and smiling about something. “What?” I ask.

“Nothing.” Smug bastard. “Sami, you having anything?”

Sam shrugs. She’s been staring vacantly at the food. “I’m not really hungry.”

“Well you should be. And actually this is pretty good,” Kerilas reports.

Lotan returns, having pulled his clean tunic on over his sweaty body. Lovely. He takes a place on the other side of the table, thankfully, and starts pulling food onto his platter.

“I said I’m not hungry,” Sam says, her voice tight. Next to her, I notice her hand pressing against her abdomen.

“Did you get any sleep last night?” Kerilas asks her. She looks like she didn’t. “Sam–”

“Just leave it, all right?” Sam snaps. “I don’t need this.” She gets up, abruptly, starting towards the inn door. “You’re not my mother, don’t try to be.”

Kerilas sighs.

“Must be the time of month,” Lotan observes wryly around a mouthful of fish and potato.

The reaction from Samila is instant and extreme. She turns back and barges right at him and starts hitting him, aiming blows at his head.

“Hey!” Lotan objects. A couple of blows land before he starts blocking her. “Hey hey! Stop that!” He grabs her tiny wrists and shoves her away from him easily, and she lands hard on her back-side a few feet away. “What you do that for?”

“Just shut your mouth!” Samila screams back at him. “Shut your fucking mouth!” She’s crying through it. She scrambles to her feet and it looks like she might run at him again, fists balled ready to punch, but she backs away and runs back into the inn.

I look where she’s gone, not sure what to do.

“You see that? She bloody attacked– Ow!”

I look back at Lotan, to see him put a hand to his head.

“You’re an arsehole,” Kerilas says simply. “Why are you an arsehole?”

“God, I was only joking– Ow!” Kerilas jabs at Lotan’s head with a finger. The movement is so fast Lotan can’t catch it or dodge it.

“Why are you an arsehole?” Kerilas demands again. “Tani, will you please go and see if Sam’s okay?” he sounds irritable, as if he shouldn’t have to ask.

“Uh… Yeah,” I stammer, and head for the door almost at a run, to get away from the tension between the two men.

“Look, it was just– Ow!”

“Why are you an arsehole?”

I escape inside the inn and follow the sound of crying to the clothing store-room, but Jalese meets me suddenly at the door.

“I will deal with this,” she tells me.

“I–”

“It’s all right, Miss,” she says, reassuringly. I can see Samila crying in the corner behind me. Jalese smiles apologetically. “This is for humans,” she says. That hurts. It’s not as if I’m enthusiastic about dealing with Samila right now, but to be excluded like that, because I’m not human now. That hurts.

“Uh…” I start. Jalese starts to turn back into the room. “Wait,” I say. “She… You remember I said we’ve forgotten stuff?” I say quietly. “Like, I forgot how to play box-harp?” Jalese comes back and nods, looking at me. “She may not remember what to do,” I gabble out. “So she’s afraid, and ashamed about it.”

“Why would she be ashamed?” she asks, honestly puzzled.

How to begin? “She’s a Mainlander, isn’t she?” I point out, inventing furiously and hoping the facts as Jalese knows them won’t contradict me. “They’re taught to think it’s dirty.”

Jalese sighs and nods. “Okay.” Good guess.

I blink. “Okay? You said ‘okay?’” Despite everything that’s going on I notice that.

“That was right wasn’t it? I’ve heard you say that?”

“Uh, yes. That’s right.”

She smiles and backs into the room and closes the door in my face.

After clearing up the remains of the abandoned breakfast — Kerilas and Lotan have gone, presumably to whatever jobs they’re doing — I go out shopping again; or that’s what I tell myself. I’m not really in the mood to buy anything and I want to stay clear of the Neri ship, so I end up wandering along the quayside all the way to the harbour mouth to sit on the low, wide wall and look at the sea.

In fact, I’m distracted by the boys and girls playing on the rocky shore just beyond the harbour. I can’t see any adults keeping an eye on them. Naked and bronzed, the children clamber around the boulders and shale and rock pools with utter self-assurance, each absorbed in whatever fluidly-imagined game or scenario they’re playing at any given moment, or distracted by something found in a pool, or a pattern in a rock, or a new shell. One of the girls is a Neri, I think; from this distance distinguished only by her long cloud-grey hair, like my own, incongruous on a child’s form.

I think they must be mostly marketeer children, arrived with Market and taking the opportunity to run around where there’s space to do so, and to re-establish friendships usually separated by the water between the ships at sea and the longer, slower relationships with those left in port, that might only meet for a few days twice or three times a year. It’s all familiar to me, as if, years ago, Taniel must have been like that Neri girl running half-wild with the human children on a landfall. But I remember, the human children Taniel would have played with would be geriatrically old now, those that were still alive.

“Hey, Tani-baby!” Sam calls lazily across the bar when I step back into the cool of the inn’s interior. “You’re back.” She’s lounging on a comfy chair near the stove with something in her arms.

“Is it all right?” I ask, feeling catty. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to intrude on a human thing.”

“Aw c’mon, don’t be like that! That wasn’t my idea, was it?”

I sigh and cross over to where she’s sitting. “I s’pose. Not as if I was going to be any use anyway. Where did you get that?” I ask, seeing the small baby sleeping in her arms.

“Ah, funny you should ask that,” Sam extemporised. “Come on, sit down.”

I sit in one of the other chairs.

“It’s Beni’s little one. In’t she the sweetest thing?” Sam twisted fractionally so I could see the baby’s face. “She and Jalese just went off to talk to Hethan about stuff. I think Jalese’s looking to get her old job back permanently.”

“Can’t say I blame her,” I say.

“So muggins here got left holding the baby.”

“Well, what can I say?” I say. “You look very maternal.”

Sam sticks her tongue out at me. “I’ve always been a softie for babies,” she says, looking at the baby’s face. “Put me in a girlskin and drop someone’s baby in my lap and suddenly people say I look maternal. I’m not doing anything different. Go figure.”

“Ew, girlskin? That’s an image I didn’t need.”

“Bit Silence of the Lambs innit.” She flashes one of Lee’s grins at me. “I dunno, feels a bit like that sometimes. Like I’ve been sewn into this skin and now that’s all anyone’s ever going to see.”

I can only stare at her, for expressing in so few words what I’ve felt my whole life. “Yeah, I know what you mean,” I say quietly. Let her think I’m like her; feeling this only now. “So how are you feeling now?” I ask, feeling awkward about it but thinking I probably should. “You look better.”

“Mmm.”

“And you didn’t go to work!” I add, suddenly realising.

“No, well, Jalese basically threatened to get Hethan to tie me to my bed if I tried–”

“What?”

“And then she made this nice tea, see?” She points to an empty cup on the table next to her. “She said it would help me relax, which is a hell of an understatement. After the first cup I could hardly stand, and she just keeps it coming. I dunno what’s in it, but it does exactly what it says on the tin.” She smiles wryly. “They were both drinking it too. We were having a right laugh. Maybe it’s just recreational. Anyway apparently it’s normal for women to not do physical work while they’re, you know…”

“Oh, no, I didn’t know that.”

Sam shrugs, carefully so as to not disturb the baby. “Good for a skive, innit?” she says.

“So it’s started then,” I say.

She shakes her head. “Anyway, it’ll be an interesting experiment, won’t it?” she says brightly. “You know how women like to say ‘oh you men, you couldn’t handle it.’ I guess now we’ll know.”

“I thought that was childbirth,” I point out.

“So not gonna happen.”

“Well, you never know,” I say, possibly not helpfully.

“Look, if I get pregnant it’s ’cause I’ve been raped. And I’ll get rid of it first chance I get. Got that?”

“Um–”

“Got that?” Sam follows up insistantly.

“Okay, I got it.”

“I’m not into guys, okay? Not now, not ever.”

“Okay. I didn’t mean–”

Sam sighs. “Yeah, I know. I’m just…” She trails off.

“Yeah.”