Strange Noises Fiction by Rachel Greenham

Sam burps, unseen, near my head.

“Ew, that’s not ladylike!” I protest.

Sam does it again, much louder and more expressively.

“Honestly, can’t take you anywhere.”

A quiet chuckle. We’re lying on the deck head to head under the furled foresail, watching the stars through the rigging, feeling the deck alternately push at and pull from our backs.

“Gotta admit,” Sam says, “elves know how to party.”

“You made a pretty good show, I reckon. I think they liked Queen.”

“Oh God, I really did that, didn’t I?”

I chuckle.

“But of course, I was very, very, drunk,” Sam adds. “With a retuned box-harp accompaniment. God knows what they thought of that. Probably sounded all out of tune.”

“I think they liked it,” I say again.

We fall silent. Then I hear Sam’s voice, quietly singing.

There’s no place for us There’s no time for us
There’s only one sweet moment set aside for us.

I join in.

Who wants to live forever?
Who dares to love forever?

“Elves never promise forever,” Sam says. It’s a proverb she picked up in Port Sahan a couple of months back. I can’t answer it. “Haven’t you thought about it?” she asks me. “What it’s going to be like living forever?”

I sigh. “Not really, it’s…”

“Too big,” she supplies.

“It’s not forever, it’s just a long time. Sooner or later something’ll get me.” There’s another saying. Elves don’t die quietly in their beds. Given time and nourishment we can regenerate to a full recovery from anything that doesn’t kill us outright, so when elves die, they die quickly and in violence, or of cold or starvation or thirst; and given enough time something like that is statistically almost inevitable. That’s the part I don’t want to think too much about.

Sam’s mind is obviously on a different track. “I’ll die of old age and you’re still going to be a stroppy teenager.”

“I’m not stroppy!” I strop. “I’m not, am I?”

Sam cackles.

“D’you ever feel like…” She starts, then she trails off, as if changing her mind about what she was going to say.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, come on.”

Sam sighs. “Don’t take this wrong, okay?”

“Now I have to hear it.”

It’s a little while longer before she speaks again. “Most of the time it’s nothing. I don’t think about it. It’s just every now and then I get this weird feeling, like I’m surrounded by… aliens.”

I don’t answer for a moment. Then Sam continues.

“I mean, it’s just sometimes. Funny moments, you know? The eyes, the androgynous thing, apart from you and the Satthei.”

“I don’t get that,” I say.

“No. Well, that makes sense, I guess.”

“I think I know what you mean though. It must be hard for you.”

I can feel her shaking her head, where it touches mine. “On the other hand I can go days without seeing my own reflection and almost forget, you know? No-one’s shoving it in my face or anything. No-one’s saying I have to be girly-girly or anything like that.”

“Well, they expect their own kids to take thirty or forty years to figure out if they’re girls or boys. Exactly the sort of thing you want to get right before—”

“You two are still talking!” Ateis complains, suddenly standing over us. Ateis is the Neri child I saw clambering the rocks with the other Marketeer kids just outside Port Denhall.

“Talking of which, I think this one’s a girl,” Sam says, looking up at the little figure in a pretty full-skirted party dress, like a miniature version of my own. Her eyes shine in the dark, cat-like, reflecting the few lanterns still lit on deck.

“You sure?” I ask, joking. “I think it’s too soon to tell. What d’you think, littlest-one?”

“’Course I’m a girl, silly!”

“Shouldn’t you be in your bunk asleep by now?” Sam asks.

Ateis makes a noise. “So should you.”

“It’s a nice night. Cabin walls are boring. Look, we can see the Milky Way from here.”

Ateis looks up at the sky for a while, and turns around, deliberately making herself a little dizzy. She looks like a human child of three or four years, and in fact is not much older. One theory we’ve had is that the relationship of elf ages to human ages might be exponential, and the reason we don’t see any elderly-looking elves is simply because the species isn’t that old yet.

We three are the youngest people on the ship, by a large margin, and the shortest. I suppose it’s to be expected that Ateis would attach herself to us. A Neri child this young isn’t so different from a human child, and finds the ageless grace of the adults as remote and mysterious as we do, I suppose.

“Hey teya,” I say, looking up at her upside-down face, from my angle. She waves, then she drops down and snuggles up presumptively next to Sam.

“Oh I see,” I mutter. “It’s not fair, Sam. You get all the girls.”

There’s a muffled giggle from the child nestling in the crook of her arm.

“Well, come here then,” Sam invites. “My other side’s getting cold.”

I don’t have to be asked twice. I shufty round and snuggle in on Sam’s other side. One advantage of being a child in everyone’s eyes, and increasingly my own: This doesn’t have to be complicated. “Sami’s warm,” Ateis says, from the other side, summing it up.

“Sami also gets cold more easily,” Sam says, “so snuggle up tight. Hey, did we get the smell of fish off the deck or am I just too drunk to notice?”

“’Course we got it off,” Ateis says. “Satthei wouldn’t stand for it otherwise.”

“Meh. True.” Sam takes a breath. She’s so at peace tonight. I want to cling on to every moment. “You know, if you’d told me a year ago I’d be lying under the stars on a sailing ship at sea with a beautiful elf maiden on each arm… I would’ve got completely the wrong idea.”

Ateis giggles again sleepily. “Story!” She demands.

“Aw no, isn’t it Tani’s turn?”

“No,” I murmer. “I did The Little Mermaid last week.”

“Disney version?”

“What do you take me for?” I smile, hidden, and nestle in closer. “I might’ve done the song,” I admit. Someday I’m sure the Satthei’s going to start asking questions about where we’re getting all these stories.

“All right, which one do you want? I’m not making up a new one this hour of night.”

I give Sam a little poke in the ribs for that lie.

“Cinderella!” Ateis decides.

“Again?” I complain. There’s something about that one, it seems.

Sam sighs overdramatically. “Oh all right.”

“Disney version?” I ask.

“What do you take me for? All right. Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived alone with her father, and her name was…”