My farewell to sweet Alees had gone well, I thought. Her tears had died down to a faint weeping as I bade my mother good-bye at the entrance to my family’s home.
“I will return hence safely, mother – and no more tears, please, for I have chosen this course with utmost deliberation,” I told her nobly. “After all, it is but a trifle of a journey, all told, and one that shall secure my fortune. As for my safety, why, it’s all but guaranteed, and I fear not for it.”
“I know.”
“Why, such ships barely founder one time in twelve these days!”
“I know.”
“Truly, were I in your shoes, I should not be surprised to find me back on your doorstop before the conclusion of our orb’s next circling of the su-”
“I know. Be a good fry and don’t do anything stupid.” And with such wise warm words to counsel me and keep the warmth in my bosom, I departed for the docks amid a great school of fellow-passengers that grew thicker, ever thicker the closer I drew, until at last the shoreline was in sight and with it my vessel, titanic in scale before me, infinitesimally tiny before the distance it was yet to traverse. I signed aboard with trembling voice, stowed my meager belongings, and there – the calls, the cries, the bell – we were outward bound! The gangway was stowed, the ship (her name was Willifret) lurched forth on its gigantic legs, and so away we went, up, up, up, up away from the surf of home and through the long sands of the beach and into the vast uncharted vastness of the deep land.
***
It is a strange and fearsome thing, to be out of sight of water and know that whichever direction you sighted, it would be weeks travel hence before you reached it. It makes one feel very small.
Luckily, this matter was not immediately on our minds: for the first three days ashore many of the more unsalted of the crew were laid low by the lurching of the ship. I’m ashamed to admit that I was one of them, and more ashamed to admit that I would’ve remained so if one of the older and more seasoned landsmen hadn’t taken me aside and given me sound (if unsolicited) advice.
“Look up, not down,” he said, scarred fin brushed firm to my side. “You ken? Up – no, higher, yes – at the tops of the trees. See how they blow in the wind, as waves might roil on the surface above you? Watch them, and feel your stomachs settle.”
His name was Kiminol, and he was utterly correct. He became my best friend, and from him I learned to ask my questions rather than avoid them through pride. From him I learned of the many curious habits of the creatures of the land – not just the delicious ones we caught in our nets to supplement our evening rations, which were familiar as the wares of the birdmarket, but the low-voiced and mighty mastodons that drifted through the depths of the woods; the fierce-mouthed wolves (the so-called ‘sharks of the land’) that slunk behind our wake and scavenged the scraps of our passing; the high-soaring vultures that sat so effortlessly above us; the many strange chitinous creatures that coated our ship’s hull and had to be painstakingly scrubbed clear with hours of hard finwork.
And it was he that taught me of the harsh vagaries of landbound weather – how to tell a sunshower from a thunderstorm, a gust from a gale; a calm summer day from a fierce fall storm – and all the little things that might be changed or altered by it.
“I’m not comfortable with this,” he said on a beautifully still afternoon as we waded through a crunching carpet of sticks, near ankle-deep on the ship’s stilts. The two of us were sitting in the lower rigging of the vessel’s belly, checking for ants and woodlice. “See those branches? That underbrush has been building up for some time, and this is the driest I’ve seen these woods in decades. One stray lightning bolt in the wrong place and we could be trapped in a forest fire.”
“What’s a fire?”
“’The combustion of matter in the presence of air’ is what the doctor told me when I was your age,” said Kiminol. “Me, I say it’s hard to describe until you’ve seen it.”
It was a great tragedy that this was the last thing he ever taught me, and that it was as true and precise as anything else he’d ever said.
***
The smoke confused me, but not as greatly as the reaction of the unsalted hands to it. Such scream and fuss for a vague particulate in the currents of the air? The first sparks puzzled me nearly as much, hazy as they were – but then they were bright, and red, and oh so colourful even by the standards of the many sights of the land, and then they were vivacious and leaping as keenly as my little pet childhood prawn, and then they alit to the ship’s stilts and legs and clambered into the rigging and oh, but oh, then I began to understand our peril, just as we began to list hard-a-starboard, and at last we collapsed and I was foundering, drowning in the air, gasping and shaking as water spilled aimlessly and the screams of my fellow travellers became distant and small. What of them escaped the flames met more gruesome ends; I saw Kiminol founder in the crotch of a burning tree and suffocate; and our captain – Cod rest his soul – was taken in the opportunistic teeth of a wolf and dragged away to a demise I shudder to think at.
It was to fortune and little more that I credit my own escape from those fates and others still fouler, because shortly after witnessing them I fell at last from my tenuous perch in the failing innards of the stricken Willifret and landed hard against some obstruction and knew no more.
***
When I awoke my gills were immersed within cool water and my head in hellishly hot pain. Above me floated a land-creature of such startling and powerful ugliness that I broke into a scream the very moment I became conscious – its body was as thick and ugly as a grouper; its tail a monstrous parody of a fin; its gigantic protruding teeth square and chiseled. I wailed and begged for salvation and after some time of this the creature gently reached down into the water and turned me about so that I could breathe out of both sides of my gills, relieving me of some small discomfort.
I attempted to apologize after that. It went poorly; ask though I did in common Finglish, gesticulate though I may with my tail and dorsal sail, I may as well have been speaking the tongue of the moon and stars to such a benighted beast of the dry places of our world. It did utter some guttural croaks and whines, but none of them intelligible, until at last our mutual dissatisfaction caused us both to lapse into the same sulky silence. My gratitude did not wane, but I did, perchance, attempt to test my own ability of locomotion. Alas, though I could swim, there was little to swim to – a small and tepid creek, surrounded on all side by timbered and insurmountable dry land, miles and miles from any known shore! I gave up in despair, and it was at that moment that my host, with a sigh of deepest irritation, grasped me up and carried me away in a tree-bark satchel slung across its back, immersed in a scanty sum of precious, life-giving water. I would have objected had I the strength or – as previously proven – the linguistic capability, but alas and alack, and so I spent the following hours of our travel immersed in miserable imaginings of my potential fate – to be eaten whole, or perhaps fileted, or imprisoned, or executed, or fed to the wolves, or all manner of such wretched ends. I was in the midst of imagining if it would be painful to be diced alive or if all sensation would fade quickly enough to render it merciful when I was tilted, shaken, and tipped out into – oh, holy of holies – water, good, clean, deep water, and there I found myself thrust from stultifying fibrous confinement into the bustle and confusion of a large downtown.
But not that of any town I had ever seen.
Rather than being shaped from good, solid pebbles, these strange land-creatures had built their houses of tree carcasses! Their foundations yet lay upon the deeps, but they stacked their dwellings so terribly high that their roofs soared free into the air itself like unto a dockyard, and it was here that they lived while down in the sensible and kindly heart of the water they worked and built yet more to greater heights.
Mind you, these observations took some time, and several only occurred to me that night, after reflection. At the moment I was principally concerned with startlement and panic, which emerged in the form of a most undignified and impious blubbering plea to Cod for understanding and grace and mercy before I passed – once again! – into a swoon.
***
When I was once more conscious I was placed into the continuing custody of my rescuer, who appeared to be willing to commit to my wellbeing in the long-term – perhaps endeared by my apparent frailty. It found a suitable home for me in the submerged portion of its own home, in an excavated cavity used otherwise to store bark-coated tree carcasses. These, I was astonished to realize at dinnertime, were my host’s food – I was being kept in a larder, albeit not in a manner as my fears had led me to believe. My own meals had to be scavenged by fin – there were many small and idle little fish that patrolled the settlement, and though I was at as first disgusted at the notion of eating them unseasoned as the populace were disgusted at seeing me at table, I soon found that extremity was the king of spices.
Thus fortified, I spent my days exploring. My rescuer’s people were, it transpired, trapped on a tiny body of water surrounded by the unending hills of land – its depths were shallow, its waters bordered by encroaching reeds and trees. I might never leave this place without a ship, and as such, I took my salvation into my own fins and began at once to labour mightily under the curious gaze of the locals, beginning with such parts as I could salvage from my host’s food supplies.
My first escape vessel was ambitious: the span of a ship’s-dinghy in scope. Alas, when it came to slicing planks to fit the capsule so that I might breathe safely, I found that the slim timbers my host’s people kept as food were unsplittable without a great deal of splintering, and so this came to nothing but a great deal of pain and prickles. As I wept disconsolately over the ruins of my dreams of ever returning home and grasping dear sweet Alees to me once more, my host happened upon my moribund form and, taking pity, treated my wounds with various poultices, fashioned and secured with gluey sap.
My second was a wild innovation – if I had not the means to create a proper boat, then why not create an improper one? Necessity was the matron of creativity! So rather than seeking the stoutest of trees portions, I endeavoured instead to weave the slenderest of twigs like kelp, producing a basket-like capsule that could form a watertight seal to safeguard me against the perils of the open land. This, unfortunately, suffered from frailties at every turn, and my most successful basket was barely bigger than my own body, which would have been maddeningly cramped to roll myself in back to the creek I had been rescued from, let alone the long sail back home to mother and Alees. Seized in despair I allowed myself to clutch its frame too tightly, whereupon a second defect was made apparent in that this crushed it as unto a shellfish within the jaws of a horn shark. Once again I was rescued from the pits of hopelessness by the attentive and sensitive actions of my host, who brought me to a sort of work-party organized by its peers – they were crawling into the air, felling trees with their teeth, and dragging them back safely home. Although I was of little assistance in the cutting, I gave what aid I was able in moving the timbers to their dwellings, and fancied that I saw myself becoming considered less of a burden than a blessing, for the day at least.
My third escape blossomed from my subconscious fully-formed as I saw the timbers stripped of their bark – the bark that had formed the container with which my rescuer had saved me from the ruins of the Willifret ‘s final voyage! I secured some of this stuff – which took some truly thorough pleas, valuable as it was to my hosts – and at once began to work on fashioning it over a branch framework, which nearly worked over and over again until I realized that even if I completed the capsule I had no notion of how to manufacture proper stilts or secure a crew of able-swimming landsmen to run it and went mad with grief and ate most of my work.
Once more, my rescuer made a visit to me, this time to bring me to lunch with its family for some sort of celebratory event. I was just on the verge of giving up, settling down, and marrying it for the sake of appearances (surely it was uncouth to spend this long in someone’s larder without wedding them?) when I realized the occasion being feted was the arrival of a ship – a real, honest, land-striding ship, which disembarked a crew of my own kind! Oh, I had given up all hope of ever witnessing another legless creature again, and so overcome was I that my introduction, was, perhaps, perchance, perforce, a trifle unsophisticated.
“Hello!” I blurted out, sensibly.
“Augh!” snorted the captain at my words. “Finglishman! Do you not speak the beautiful language?” and thereby he jabbered at me in the most uncouth way in his foreign gobblydegook – only, to my great shock – to be interrupted by my host, who spoke at him in what I was loathe to realize was the very same tongue, which I’d ostensibly spent half the most torturous days of my schooling acquiring fluency in. Oh mother! You always said I was the worst student of Loach (and Merman, for that matter) you’d ever known, and for you to be proven right in such a thorough way in such a faraway place was enough to fill me with joyful tears and a tiny bit of utter shame.
“I must return home!” I begged. “My family believes me lost, and-”
“Yes, yes, you can pay your way in labour,” said the Loachman captain in the most barbarous callous way, “but it will be of no great hardship to accommodate you. It is but a trifle of a journey, all told, and its safety all guaranteed. Fear not for yourself. Why, but one ship in twenty is lost these days!”
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
After four days of feasting and trading and careful negotiations in Loach that I didn’t understand a word of, I departed, leaving my personal effects in the custody of the one who’d rescued me. Her name, I’d discovered through the (amused) captain, was Nancy, and although she was happy to hear of my gratitude she was also even more glad that I wouldn’t have to marry her.
***
I tell you as one who has lived this in truth: there are few blessings more sound, kindnesses felt more tenderly, joys more true, than to see the waters of home rise on the distant muddy horizon of the land. And with each step of the ship closer, the emotions stir more strongly, until by the conclusion of docking you are a mad thing, a howling waste of tears and shaking hands and trembling heart, ready to cast yourself against the city streets like discarded scraps if such would bring you to your home’s door a single moment faster.
I did not knock. I did not pause. I opened it without hesitation and spoke like the words burned my mouth to be held within it.
“I have returned safely, mother, in the face of all of the peril of the land and the tumult of fortune!”
“That’s nice,” said mother. “Alees married a crabs-herder down the way two months ago.”
And such was the glory and fullness of my relief that I didn’t even mind that until the next morning.