07.31.04 - 3:05 p.m.
[And now, the final product, or the previous entry fitted into a final product, or really, a product-in-progress I never got around to finishing. Maybe this can be my NANOWRIMO project. That's not a half-bad idea, except, well - still, not half-bad!]
The most southern of the major islands, and the most insignificant, Aes is a craggy isle tossed far to the southwest of the main archipelago like an afterthought. The smallest of the major islands, Aes lacks sufficient soil to support any but the most subsistence agriculture. Most storms vent their first rage on Aes, stealing what little topsoil remains and flinging it to the northeast. Imperial citizens might think them barbarians, but Everend has been settled and paved longer than the Empire itself and most cities offer comforts and entertainments equivalent to other the larger provincial cities in the central Empire. Except for stink of fish and restive natives, it is not a bad posting for a young Imperial soldier: entertainment enough, with most of the comforts of home, a free hand with the local ladies and exile pay to boot. No, Everend is not a bad posting, all in all.
Not so, Aes. The harbor is barely sufficient to warrant the word, and the cliffs rise steeply from the ocean on every side, a natural protection from more than the thunderous waves. Not that anyone would ever actually want to take the island over, for it offers little more than a few clusters of stone houses, a dank tavern or two, and a pair of small forts, one long since abandoned. Where the other islands are often pretty thickly populated, Aes is sparsely settled about its coast, and wild in the boggy interior. Elsewhere in the archipelago, the sentinel pines grow to staggering size, but on Aes only their stunted and wizened cousins remain. Nevertheless, the temple of the Drowned God on Aes is the most sacred building in the islands, and the Nameless � it is whispered � haunt the high cliffs on moonless nights, calling to their lost lovers in the wind.
The islands are peppered with shrines and temples to a hundred other gods, whose worship has been imported from a hundred other lands, and now that the Empire has come, every island has shrines to the Sun and Moon. The Everendii agree on few things � least of all their gods � but whichever deities they honor, all still remember the Drowned God and the Nameless, particularly on long, dark nights when the earth moves and the sea is a river of stars and the shadow world comes closest to the realm of men.
Stormchaser sailed into the Aes harbor just after dawn, when the light was pale and the shadows long and the first shadows just awakening, and the sun was still hiding behind the cragged peaks of the interior. With the fishing fleet out to sea, making the most of the fine, clear weather, the little town of Aes was already largely deserted. A few old men were sitting on the wharfs at the narrow waterfront, nimbly mending fishing nest or braiding rope for rigging, and a few gangs of children too young to be of use on the sea ran laughing through the quiet streets. Here and there was a sleepy-eyed goodwife was tossing grain to her little flock of chickens or carting somewhat brackish well-water to her narrow garden plot. The forge, however, was still dark, and so too the taverns, fishmongers and butcher, and not a stall was yet open in the little Market Square.
The Harbormaster welcomed them and accepted a handful of silvers in place of the necessary permit Bribery, after all, is the currency of bureaucracy, and bureaucracy is the currency of the Empire even in the middle of the wild Western Sea. By the time the full disc of the sun was visible above the unnamed ridges and peaks of the interior, the priest had arrived, swift as rumor.
He spoke with Danel first, alone, at the edge of the quay.
And then he spoke with Jaione, alone, in her narrow quarters.
And then he went away.
His words were few enough. He did not attempt to dissuade her from her pledge, but neither did he offer her encouragement. He simply stood in the center of her perfurmed quarters, a tall, wiry man is roughspun wool damp from the spray and stiff with salt, and asked her if this was her choice, her decision, and her desire.
She nodded once, in affirmation, watching him boldly, as if the appearance of indecision could quell her doubts. It had been years � far too many years � since she remembered the old gods, even in passing. She had cocooned herself, deliberately, in the luxury offered her lover, returning to the lonely rocks of her home only when she was spurned, at the last. Even this folly � for it could be nothing else � seemed little more than a spiteful gesture, far too little, far too late, far too futile. In the end, would it amount to anything more than an aside between fish and fowl and a snort of half-irritated laughter?
His questions answered, the priest left then, left her alone in the narrow berth to sleep or fret the day away as she choose. He would come for her at dusk. And she would be ready to meet the god.
The raucous calls of gulls mingles with the querulous chatter of the other shorebirds - the sandpipers and plovers, stilts and yellowlegs, snipes and godwits. They are all gathered on the narrow mudflats beneath the cliffs, revealed as the tide rolls out, casting long, elegant shadows by the light of the dying sun.
Just beyond, surf foams a dirty white, still seething among all the broken spines, the coves and valleys, the hidden fissures and well-worn caves of this tiny spit of land - if it even deserves such a title. Her feet � bare and slashed to ribbons by her scrabbling journey down the cliffs and across the crabbed finger of land - bleed freely, but her blood does not even begin to stain the foam crimson. No, the setting sun does that, and blinds her in the bargain.
She crouches, leaning half-forward to balance on the balls of her feet and ease some of the pressure from her abraded heel. She lost half-a-nail on her big toe, and split two fingernails to boot, scrambling down the worn limestone cliffs to the spit of land unnamed on maps(unnoticed on most), and nameless to natives as well.
The shrine rises above twenty, thirty feet above her and another thirty yards out yet, set on a small plateau atop a watereaten spire of rock. Its pale columns are flecked with seaweed and other debris, but still luminous as the moon above the dark facing of rock and sea where it is cast in shadow. Where the sun's rays slant across the milky stone it washes crimson-dark as old blood. Crimson as the bloodied footsteps she left behind her. Crimson as the moon-blood that has not flowed for three turnings.
She hunches there, crouched forward, watching the level of the outrushing tide, waiting for the few short moments when the retreating water will reveal the rest of her path. In another life, in another lifetime, she might know the way well enough to dare the hidden holes and broken ledges even when covered by calf-deep water, but no longer. Unconsciously, she curves a hand across her stomach. The clothes she wears were made for another, and the scratchy woolen tunic outlines only her shoulders, before falling shapelessly to her thighs. Though a shade too short, her breeches are otherwise overlarge, secured at the waist by a loosely tied bit of rope. She did not wish to expose finer garments to the spray and sea, and these are warm enough. Only the short cloak of oiled sealskin is her own. And anyway, everyone who comes to the gods comes to them a beggar.
Concealed by her garb as it is, her early pregnancy is not apparent. But she can feel the faint, taut swell of her stomach, and somehow she is certain that the priest knew. He did not try to stop her, did not counsel her against folly as Vidala � close to hysterical � did before the priest finally sent her away.
Perhaps...But no, she chose this path - for both of them - and there is no turning back. Above � away on the heights � the priest and the captain will be watching her slow progress and shivering in the spray. Even when the heat of summer simmers over the leeward islands, the spray and wind on the windward cliffs can make a man wish for fur-lined gloves, and fire.
She has no such gloves, and she has no such fire. She has only the dying sun and another short, ungainly scrabble of a climb, and then she has a night and day in the house of the Drowned God.
Jaione shivers again, and not from the wind.
-What else could I have done?- Her doubts are not so much articulations of her fear as they are wordless sinks of black despair. The glassy surface is easy to understand, and even reflective, but beneath black whirlpools await, ready to drag her down to some personal hell the moment she skims the surface.
There. Now.
The sun is now but half-a-disc, bloated and baleful on the horizon. It reminds her of the hunter�s moon � the blood moon, they call it � rising above barren fields as the days shorten and the nighthag claims the land. She has no more time for reflection, though. The tide is well out, and the dangerous traverse to the god�s land is as close to revealed as it will ever be. After a moment�s hesitation, she seeks out a handhold and turns, lowering herself over the lip of the rock blindly seeking the rib of rock she eyeballed a moment before with her bloodied feet.
The drop is too far to be so easily had, with two hands and her ass safe above. In the end, she must slither carefully over and let herself fall, trusting that she has not misjudged the distance or the path. For a moment, she has the sickening sensation of falling and a vision of her body broken on the rocks flashes through her mind�s eye. The ball of her foot strikes spray-slicked rock, but somehow her balance is off, her center of gravity too far forward to keep from flailing, windmilling her arms against wind and rock alike with the effort of finding her balance and she falls back against the windrotted spike of stone and starts to slide before catching herself at the last possible moment as her right foot finds purchase.
There is no time to catch her breath or reflect upon her close call for the water still surges around her ankles and the treacherous tide has turned and she only has a few short minutes to scramble across the last traverse to the god�s land. Her heart is in her mouth for the entire passage, but there are no more mishaps.
Then she is climbing again, her pulse pounding twice as fast as the onrushing waves, climbing alone to the house of the drowned god.
It will be a long, wet and lonely night.
The clapboard tavern is narrow-framed and suffuse with the stench of fish and pinesmoke and the odor of humans packed too closely together, as in a hold for weeks at sea. The clientele is varied: soldiers from the one Imperial ship at port, and a few from the small fort that �guards� the harbor, along with smaller groups of sailors from foreign whalers and traders at port. There are also more than a few Everendii: rough-hewn fisherfolk from the larger junks who ply the outer banks to the south and west of islands, sprinkled here and there with locals and natives � the hardscrabble farmers, the traders home to port, fisherfolk from Aes itself, fishing the near banks rather than the great sea fields to the west.
For the price of a few well-scraped coins, they were able to escape the common room in favor of private quarters in the ramshackle hulk hard behind the tavern. The double doors and a second floor that is more loft than anything else betray its origins, but any animal scent is long gone. Sure footed mules and shaggy-haired donkeys had been the beasts of choice on Aes. There had never been much call for the prettier sort of horseflesh that the wealthy pretended to enjoy on the other islands here, where the wild interiors had been but barely mapped and left thus � by tradition and decree of the Nameless � for a thousand thousand years. And now the better of the two taverns had turned its small stables into something (barely) fit for human habitation.
Throughout their mostly silent meal, Jaione daydreams of a steaming bath, the steam rising from the surface into the cool night air, the water sweetly scented and mercifully free of salt. Flowers float in the water, nameless, and their scent mingles headily with the clean fragrance of the mineral oil in the water. Two days, and two nights did she spend on the cold marble floor of the Drowned God�s shrine on that narrow finger of rock that usually remained above water � except when the tide was high, or a cold wind blew from the north, or a hot wind from the south, or a storm raged to the west, or when a child dropped three pebbles in the surf on the distant, distant continents that framed the wide bowl of the ocean.
