The sun was coming up, and just in time too. The little mudbeetles were at my wrists again, mouthing where the rope had scabbed them.
Not biting yet, just considering. But the less time they had to puzzle over it the better. The light sent them away, cringe by cringe, until at last they were vanished into their little mud-burrows and I had the entirety of the flats to myself again.
Wonderful. All the mud I could see.
The tide was coming back in again; I could see the little blur on the horizon becoming more assertive. Soon the water would come, the buoy would rise, and somehow my body would be made of lead weight and I’d get some fresh blood at my wrists and ankles where the ropes sat and gnawed in their stubborn way.
By then I’d be hoping the sun I’d just welcomed would go away.
All day long I’d bob on the blue, fingers and toes clenching and unclenching as something-or-other bumped the buoy and I wondered at how much my digits must look like bait before the ache in my tendons led them to dip back into the cool relief. I’d stare at the world half-turned, still-turning. Upside down trees far up the shore. The faint splash of waves over a distant shoal. A worrying flick of a dorsal fin. A horizon split between the water and air turned on its side, so that each eye saw a completely different shade of blue.
Then the night would come, and the buoy would sink, and I would be left slumped on blackened mud with the receding roar of waves.
By then I’d be asleep. Until the mudbeetles came out.
I should’ve counted the days. I was sure I’d tried. I must have. It was a very important thing to know – how long had I been without food? Without water? Without rest, real rest?
But it was also useless because I wasn’t going anywhere ever again. As a compromise, I had quickly and carefully forgotten the order of sunsets and sunrises. I was here, that was all, and that was all there ever would be.
It was because I hadn’t counted the days that I didn’t know when this happened.
I was staring at the shoreline, watching the strange short-legged little lizards pick at the tide’s scraps, when something held my hand.
Firmly. Not roughly, but no softness to it. I didn’t even know it was happening until it was done and I could feel the water against my fingers again.
I looked. It hurt my stiff neck, it made my head swim, but I looked.
There was nothing there.
Relief. Strangely disappointed relief. I sagged with it, and black spots floated in front of my eyes as my spine screamed at me. They really could’ve tied me more carefully; at this rate my head felt like it’d explode before the thirst got me. What was a death sentence worth if I was too dead to appreciate the agony?
But they’d been in a rush.
They’d all been in such a rush.
Sometimes when the current bobbled at me I swung around and thought I could see the vastship still squatting there, perched off the reef’s edge – left behind like me. But it was only my imagination outgrowing my eyeballs.
All gone. Such a rush.
A soft, insistent rush. Shh-shh.
Ssh-shh.
*
Shhh-shhh. Waves against the bow. Sshhh-shhh, strong and fast. They said we shouldn’t stay out too long today, but oh no, we had to show off. Oh no, couldn’t lose now. Doscy and Huks, the fastest fishers aboard the Barebonnet, the ones that brought back more food faster, the ones that came back with more teethmarks in their hull than you’d find in a good steak flung into Redbrow waters.
We’d hunted them. We’d taken glow-eels. We’d pulled up Kanavi crabs. We’d taken everything with fins or gills or both and then because we were curious and invincible and bored we’d come hungering for something new. Come here, to Afar, where the land was sour and shrouded and the food was hard to come by without a boat and a net and a line and a prayer. And a good gaff-hook.
But what good were any of those without a good right hand?
There was Doscy, screaming, but quietly, between his teeth. All the rest of his lungs on his arms, on that good right hand holding his good gaff-hook, clutched against the side of the boat. Kicking furiously, dangling in spray and water and trying to get just that last inch of purchase back into the boat.
He had it.
Then it had him. I saw his expression change just a little, before it took him down.
After that I was on the deck of the Barebonnet, and I was throwing up. Nothing in it but water, nothing in me but water, and all of it spilling everywhere, everywhere.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” I told them, as they dragged me off, to dry, to heat, to feed –fix the machine, stop the damage. “I shouldn’t have told him to stay.”
I shouldn’t have said that.
*
I woke up to searing pain. A mudbeetle had grown ambitious, and had decided to take the measure of my thumb. The thrashing hurt more than the actual bite, and I started to wonder about blood poisoning. Maybe what was inside me would kill me faster than what wasn’t after all.
No clouds. Days of the fairest weather I’d seen in six years off this coast, and here I was in a position to broil from it. Skin was starting to do interesting things, not that I could see most of it – but I could feel it, inch by inch. I hadn’t imagined that I could grow more leathery.
Worn skin or no, I felt it then, and I made a nasty noise inside my throat.
Something wasn’t touching me.
Something was very close to me and not touching me, and it wouldn’t stop.
Go away go away go away go away go away.
My fingers and toes were curled into evil little knots, my joints creaked with panic as every bit of me tried to raise itself up, to get away from the blue.
There was a little fluid noise – too smooth to be a splash – and the texture of the water around me changed again. Something was gone.
The feeling passed, and everything hurt. I fell into a heap and wished the sun would burn the brain out of my head.
*
A day off.
An unspeakable luxury, a horrifying punishment. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I nagged the cooks in the galley and got underfoot in the hold and finally was sent to check through the catch just to stop me from driving everyone insane.
The fish reassured me. They were ugly, strange things, and even now half of them nobody had seen before. But their stares were empty and honest.
Next day, next dawn, I was ready again. I held the engine, I entrusted my gaff to a stranger. Not Doscy, never again Doscy, but one of those other ones, the ones we’d mocked with thrice the catch.
He looked at me with sympathy. I remember that. He felt bad for me.
I hated that. I wanted respect. I remembered the respect. Not this.
And I hated it even more by day’s end, when he leaned over the rail to haul up a fat sheener and it took him over, just like that.
I never had anything to remember him by but that sympathy. And oh, that hurt even more when I came back to the Barebonnet and told them.
*
Something wasn’t touching me again.
It wasn’t touching me, and when at last my muscles gave out and my feet and hands slumped into the water, I saw just how much it wasn’t.
Swirls of current tease me. Something big enough to drag the whole buoy back out to sea is here. Something big enough that it’s a miracle it can fit this close to shore. Something big enough that I have no idea why it cares about me.
Why is it looking at me? Why isn’t it touching me?
It touched me.
Yes, it had definitely touched me. One ankle was in contact with something that wasn’t water.
It stayed there until the water began to ebb, then left. I didn’t know how I’d ever sleep again and then I did.
*
Twice is coincidence, but coincidences still make people uncomfortable.
This time I didn’t get a day off. Just ‘off.’ And they started showing me how to do scut-work, to please the vastship, to grease the hull, to clean the deck, to pick the bones free from the eviscerator, and all the other million tiny things.
The dead man had not only looked at me with sympathy. Many, many people resented me. Bad luck, and a bad shipmate. Two in a week? With one crewman? What was he doing? What had he done?
When the third woman vanished off the deck in front of me as I mopped, hands too full, feet too slow, mouth too slack? That was enough to settle it right there.
*
And there I was. Spine against cold metal. Eyes against the rising sun. Mind crawling back into its battered little envelope as the mudbeetles left me be.
This was a peaceful moment. No dreams. No water. Just the wet, flat mud and my eyes.
Something was toppling trees inland and eating them. It was slow and fearless and I admired that.
Still, I really wished the buoy was facing the other way. It must be waiting right there, silhouetted against the incoming waves. Waiting for me.
What was it?
Glimpses, that’s all I had. Three little glimpses spread over three different days and a touch against my hand, my ankle.
And a ripple.
You couldn’t use the land here, they said. People tried, they failed, they stopped. That which lived Afar knew of us, and it knew it was not for us. The mountains watched you. The swamps encircled you. And the mists… well. You couldn’t escape them.
How had we thought the seas were different?
They were with me now, I knew. Doscy and that sympathetic boy, that nameless woman. They were with it, and it was with me, and it would never stop. Not now that it had seen us.
Why would it? It was curious, and invincible, and bored.
There were wonders out there to see, if you had a strong will, and a strong right fin, and a jaw so long and strong that could snip sunworn hawsers like strands of spider-silk.
I sat there. Buoyed up, back to back, against scales that for all their endless age had seen much less sun than I had in just these past few dying days.
It was raining. Against my will, my mouth was open, and so I lived as we cruised onward.
They were with me, and I was with it, and we sailed onwards together in the vastship’s wake, ignoring the pull of the tides, hungering for something new.