Had things gone according to plan, she would have disembarked at Diamond Harbour, changed out of her disguise and slipped away with the trusted men she had planted at the dock. Instead, she was stuck rowing to a harbour where there were no known Kalingans, with no coin to her name, and arms that felt like to lead from all the rowing. Fortunately for her, the Fat Mistress was no acrobat. The time it took her to turn her bow, gave Mati a fine headstart. As the salt waves propelled her boat onwards, she passed the stone-throwing engines of the watch-towers. They could reach across the sea with forty loads of fire-oil or rock, and burn or sink anything in no time. These towers stood on the outer-most island, their base white from a millennium of salt spray. Outbuildings clung to it like cockles on the rocks, where on-duty soldiers of the Kalingan Harbour Guard lounged, bored. In the last years of peace after the Magadhan conquest, the most action they had seen was the occasional plague ship.

Mati approached the quays where she could see the masts of a myriad of foreign vessels – carracks out of Anga, trading galleys from Pragjyotisha, wine cogs from Madurai, and pot-bellied whalers from faraway Lanka. Being on a dinghy allowed her to squeeze and zig-zag past the queue waiting to drop anchor in the harbour. She soon saw the checking post ahead, where all incoming vessels were required to show their documents and declare their cargo to the port officials.

Must get off before the checkpoint. Mati turned away from her study of the quays, where the sinking moonlight turned the sea into a purling sheet of beaten pearls, and frowned at the sudden odour. The acrid stench of burning seaweed, used by wenches to bream the bottom of a vessel, filled the air. She turned to see workers scurrying over cogs, like ants on a sack of sugar, to mend the ships on the sealane to the left of the watchtowers. The ferry berths and little piers on the side were made for shrimpers to moor, but for now they lay empty, save for the cleaning folk who worked on the ships that looked like injured elephants, lying on their side. Mati grunted, and oared her dinghy into the shadow of one of these. She jumped onto a nearby plank without even anchoring her ride. With the workers in a rush to wind up work for the day, no one noticed an unmanned dinghy crash into the side of a cog or the red wig on its bow, till it was too late.

II

The murky water showed her a vivid but wobbly reflection of her face. She was glad to feel the cool breeze on her neck. She had never understood how women kept their hair long. The ends of her own hair tickled the nape of her neck as she placed a crescent-shaped bindi2 on her forehead to relieve her fatigue. Time to escape.