"Jason taught me to ride and drive. I grew up here. He's as much of a fixture of the place as the commodore. His father saved my grandfather's life way back when. He's a bit of everything: bodyguard, driver, interpreter. He knocked together my first boat, a little clinker-built toy I learned to
sail. He also made that," she said, pointing to a flag that fluttered from a corner bell tower on the building, built to cover the door as well as the road coming up the hillside from the sea. "It's dark so you can't see it. Our flag is half blue and half green, with a sun in the center, kind of like the old French sun-king design. Do flags mean anything anymore?"
"Flags? They're not much used up North. Maybe nobody in the Free Territory could figure out what color represents survival. I'll have to have a look when it's lighter."
Valentine's night vision could pick up the emblem, even if the colors were muted, but he said nothing. The physical gifts of the Lifeweavers aroused suspicion in some people, as if he were no longer human. To this woman at least, he wanted to be a man rather than some kind of curiosity.
He sometimes wondered what exactly the Lifeweavers did to their human creations. The nearest thing he could compare it to in human experience was puberty, a sudden shift into an entirely new body type, complete with changed abilities and desires. Would any of it be passed on? His own father had been one of the Lifeweaver's elite, but apart from a remarkably healthy childhood-despite several bad falls, he had never broken a bone, nor could he remember a serious illness-he had not been the most athletic of the young men growing up around him. Only his ability to sense the presence of a Reaper, as a cold shadow appearing on the fringes of his consciousness, distinguished him from the others in the Lifeweavers' service.
"Mr. Valentine?" Carrasca said, calling him back to the present from his contemplation of Jamaica's night sky.
"Sorry, my mind wandered," he said, turning to the door she held open for him.
"That's the only way it ever finds anything," she said, following him into the wood-paneled entry hall.
A boy took them down the hall to another plant-filled courtyard. Valentine paused at the tile surrounding the door at the other side. Each piece had been painted with delicate tropical blossoms.
"Beautiful," he said.
Carrasca turned. Her eyes arced up and across the span of tiles around the portal. She looked oddly wistful. "You like them? That's my work. I spent a few years obsessively painting. When I was a teen."
"I was an obsessive reader. I was-"
He had started to talk about his parents, his brother and sister, but stopped himself. He needed to watch his mood tonight.
She took a step closer, lowered her voice. "Orphaned? I know."
"Same with you?"
"The same."
Valentine read the hurt as if he were looking in a mirror. He extended the crook of his elbow, and she took his arm. "What can you do?"
She gave him a gentle squeeze with her forearm. "Go to sea. That's what finally worked for me. But let's change the subject. Tonight's a state dinner."
And they passed down a hall to a dining room. The furniture in the Governor's House, richly covered and well carved, did not match-the collection was perhaps pieced together from various recovered antiques on the island.
The man standing in the dining room did not match the elegant furniture either: a stumpy, tanned man bristling with energy and heavy white sideburns. The latter first traveled down his jaw, then turned up to join his mustache. He was broadly, powerfully built, and stood with the ready stance of a judo sensei. Perhaps because of the thickness of his chest, his arms seemed stunted by comparison, dangling afterthoughts on his barrel frame like the forelegs on a Tyran-nosaurus rex. He stood beside a sideboard, over which a hand-inked map of Jamaica hung in a gilded frame. Behind him, pairs of French doors opened out onto a balcony filled with fragrant white jasmines and red ixoras. According to Carrasca's account, her grandfather had served as an officer
in the Old World's Royal Navy, which had to put him close to his seventies.
"Sixty-eight, my son, sixty-eight," he said, turning to the young people. He slapped his broad belly, the gesture cracking like a pistol shot in the enclosed room. The expanse of stomach, which hung out from a gaily colored shirt over sus-pendered canvas trousers, did not ripple from the impact, demonstrating still-firm muscle beneath. "Everyone always wonders that when they see me, but are too polite to bring it up. Thought I'd save you the trouble. Am I right, Left-enant?" he asked, buttoning his shirt to preserve some formality at the meeting.
"And they always guess 'not a day over fifty,' sir," she said, suddenly transformed into a young girl amused at her grandfather's antics.
"The next question, at least to any young man who sees the two of us together, is where did she get her height and her looks?" Jensen said, apparently reading Valentine's mind again. "Maria-my daughter-was even shorter than I was, may she rest in peace. It's her father's doing. Tall, handsome Cuban man he was, hair like yours-Mr., Mr.-"
"Valentine," Carrasca supplied.
"That's the problem with age, my son, and it's a real bugger. What happened thirty years ago is bright as the island's sun, but what you talked about just this morning disappears into a fog. But there was more to Eduardo than looks. As brave and as sharp as they come. Also dead, by the way. Should fair fortune be with you and you see long service, Valentine, you'll see too many of the best ones die."
Valentine's memory, always too ready to parade the faces of the women and men he had known and lost, rose to the occasion. Jensen gathered as much from the expression on his guest, and he changed the subject.
"Let's eat, the cold dishes are already served," the commodore said, moving to a chair. "Come down by me, you two, no sense shouting at each other over twelve feet of
table. That American President Eisenhower used to take dignitaries out on his back porch and talk to them, said he 'got a better measure of the man' or some such. I do the same thing over the dinner table. Cook tells me the chicken turned out well, and no one does a glazed ham like he does. Cook!" Jensen bellowed through the wall. "We're ready when you are."
By the time they were seated, one of the picture-framelike carved panels on the wall opened, and the sweating cook appeared with a tray. He began to arrange dishes before the three: chicken swimming in orange sauce, some kind of peppery-smelling stew, corn and potatoes surgically carved and neatly arranged. A second man followed, bearing a thick ham glazed with slices of pineapple and something that looked like black cherries.