Page 31 of Prima
She hasn’t given any thought as to how she ought to continue with her flatbread.
He probably senses that, and returns with not only a clean chopping board, but a straight-edged bottle that she can use for a rolling pin.
She looks uncertainly at the bottle. He laughs softly. “Should I prepare some rice rations anyway?”
“No, let’s eat handmade food.”
“Some people’s handmade food is why we have rations in the first place.”
She cackles and presses the bottle into her ball of dough. After a minute she realizes that he is standing right next to her, watching her work. She glances over her shoulder at him. They gaze at each other for two seconds. Then he points at the chopping board. “Handmade food doesn’t get made if hands aren’t moving.”
She laughs some more.
Her unskilled but strong hands flatten the dough without too much problem—the dough has rested enough to become soft and pliable. But what next? “My aunt rolled sheets of dough into tubes, coiled the tubes into fat rounds, and then flattened the rounds. But how does that create layers? Wouldn’t it just return to being a solid disk of dough?”
The boy looks at her in incredulity. She has no choice but to bat her eyelashes at him, a damsel in grave culinary distress.
In response, he lifts a tin of oil and pours liberally onto her sheet of dough. “I don’t know what your aunt does, but to laminate dough, some kind of fat must be involved.”
“But her dough didn’t look greasy.”
“Then she used solid fat, which I don’t have.” And then, after a moment, “At least I was trained at the palace kitchen; you would be wise to listen to me.”
She cackles again. “I don’t have much of a choice now, given that you’ve already poured oil all over my dough.”
She adds salt and the rehydrated scallion, then copies what her aunt used to do to the best of her ability. While she does her work, he removes the soup pot from the portable stove, stir-fries the calamari at high heat, then sears the scallops.
“I decided to do my dishes first. Your giant flatbread will take some time to cook through.”
She grins down at her giant flatbread. She made enough dough for five or six flatbreads but she can’t be bothered to repeat the process five or six times.
He offers her a piece of the freshly sautéed calamari.
“Yum. So good.” He’s cooking on a professional level.
Then she tries a scallop and is speechless. Now this is cooking on apoeticlevel. It’s a scallop. It tastes like a scallop, yet it is also the ocean itself, made juicy and sweet. It is sunset, sea breeze, soft, still warm sand—and adventure.
“Wow,” she murmurs after a while. “You really are qualified to find fault with my cooking.”
He laughs briefly, places the pan, freshly cleaned, back on the stove, and pours in a generous glug of oil.
“That’s right,” she says. “My mother always says that for me, since I lack good culinary instincts, I should just use more oil. I see you’re already applying that here.”
He laughs again, puts down the oil, and stands in place to watch her, half a step to her left and about that much behind her. If she leans back, will he remain where he is and allow the contact?
“Isn’t the pan—and the oil—hot enough?” he reminds her.
Well, that’s why she’ll never be a great cook—she’s always thinking about other things when she makes food! She slides the thick slab of dough into the pan. He immediately takes the chopping board to scrub it with sand. When he comes back—does he stand even closer?
“Your silent judgment makes me nervous,” she says, even though it’s not at all what he might think about her cooking that agitates her.
A beat of silence. “Why do you even cook? Surely, as the future Sea Witch, you have better ways to use your time.”
The average resident of Dawan might not have heard about the leadership structure of New Ryukyu, but he must know that there is no real Sea Witch, that the big-direction decisions are made by the Secretariat, a seven-member body whose members serve overlapping seven-year terms, a new one rotating in every year, the longest-serving one rotating out.
That said, two centuries ago, Dawan attempted to invade New Ryukyu. The Prima who not only successfully expelled the invaders but took one sixth of Dawan’s territorial waters for New Ryukyu got so carried away on her popularity that she refused to relinquish power when her time came. It took fifteen years and a civil war to finally push her out and the damages to the rule of law and civil society needed decades to repair.
It's not difficult to imagine how the Potentate of yore, defeated and humiliated, made up the story of the monstrous Sea Witch, rather than admit that he was bested by a country led by a woman. It is a bit surprising the myth has endured for so long, but then again, the fantastical is always more fun to believe in than the mundane.
