Child of a Hidden Sea

by A. M. Dellamonica

  It was a silly thought. Frail as he was, one good swing of the camera case would snap him in half.

  These people are poor, but the stuff in his trunk, the hobby tools, they’re finely worked—expensive. She looked at the purse. The weird alphabet goes hand-in-hand with premium stuff.

  Which was maybe a decent observation, if it proved out, but what did it get her?

  The outer surface of the conch shell was brown, a complex mix of sand and driftwood hues. Bastien had scored through to a deeper layer, revealing creamy calcium beneath.

  Sophie closed the satchel, watching it zip itself yet again. What could do that? Nanotech? Robots? That was the stuff of science fiction. She opened it, stuck her fork half in and half out of it, and tried to close again. Its lips curled, closing on the stem, delicately pushing it out onto the table. Then it clamped shut.

  Bastien scraped at the shell, scritch, scritch. It seemed to be getting louder.

  Everything was getting louder. The creak and the groan of the wood walls of the shack as it shuddered in the wind were multiplied. She realized she could hear the shack next door rattling, too—and the one beyond that. Sand grains gristled, rubbing each other as they passed through the neck of Bastien’s egg timer. His breath gurgled.

  Outside, stones clattered, thrown up the beach by the surf outside. She heard the whispers of mothers, comforting their children, the whimper of a storm-scared dog, air popping in lantern wicks. Out in the insufficiently sheltered bay, a ship’s sail was tearing.

  And now a light, squeaky rub—Bastien was polishing the shell with fluid from the black bowl. The liquid he’d mixed was a waxy yellow substance, and the carved letters glowed copper as he filled them. The surface of the shell buffed up to a deep walnut glow.

  So much sound.

  Sophie touched Gale’s pouch again and the reptile-leather lips over the zip pulled back, like muscles flexing, no wires, and the thought she’d been holding back broke through: It’s magic, has to be magic, you’re not in Kansas anymore, Sofe.

  She pushed the pouch away, clutching her camera case and Gale’s cell phone, hugging them to her chest, as if they could help.

  Bastien finished rubbing in the last drop of lambent beeswaxy ink. The text on the conch shell glowed. The cacophony cranked up another notch. Sophie heard shouts and the bustle of sailors, far out at sea, the fishing fleet trying to get their ships in, fighting to save the crew of one rattletrap boat that had already gone under. “Grab this, grab this!”

  It hurt. She closed her eyes, breath hitching in a sob.

  Then the cries—all the noise but for the storm outside and the crackle of the fire in Bastien’s clay stove—faded.

  “Kir Sophie? Do you understand me now?”

  Her eyes flew open. “You bastard! You do speak English!”

  Magic. She clapped her hand over her mouth. What had come out of it, in an enraged yelp, was this: “Zin dayza Anglay!”

  “No, no, it’s you,” Bastien said unnecessarily. “I’ve taught you Fleetspeak.”

  CHAPTER 3

  She understood him. It wasn’t English, or Spanish: Bastien was speaking the same language he’d been using all night, and now Sophie understood every word.

  She leapt to her feet, quivering, torn between outrage—this snaggle-toothed stranger has rewired my brain!—and excitement—that is so cool—when he spoke again. “Zophie, Sophie, yes? I apologize for inscribing you, but we must talk.”

  “Yes, of course. Right. You’re right. Wait—inscribing?”

  Before Bastien could say more, there was a quick tap at the door. A bent, rain-drenched woman let herself in.

  “This is Dega,” he said. “Our herbalist.”

  “Hi,” Sophie said. At first glance, Dega seemed ancient, but as she shed her cloak, Sophie decided she might be no older than forty. Maybe she’d been prematurely aged by hardship. Sanded down.

  “You guys have magic powerful enough to teach me a language,” she said, “But it must have serious limits, or you wouldn’t be living on pickled moths.”

  “Stele Island is no wealthy nation,” the woman agreed.

  “We keep our place in the Fleet,” Bastien added with an asthmatic wheeze. He sank down by the stove, shivering, and Dega handed him the hunting knife that had been in Gale’s chest. He examined it with an expression of deep concern.

  “You’re the doctor, Dega?” Sophie said. “Can you tell me how my aunt is doing?”

  “The Verdanii is your kinswoman?”

  What’s a Verdanii? “She’s my mother’s sister.” Sophie waved the magic satchel. “The name on her Amex is Gale Feliachild.”

  Dega scowled. “That is a government courier pouch.”

  “It’s Gale’s. Can’t you tell me if she’s okay?” Maybe I just think I understand them. Maybe I’m standing here jabbering.

  Dega said: “You hold the Feliachild pouch?”

  “You can see I am,” Sophie said.

  “It opens for her,” Bastien put in.

  “Will she live?” Sophie demanded.

  The woman’s expression softened. “It’s not certain yet, I’m sorry. As her kinswoman, you may have to say whether Bastien should scribe her. If she worsens.”

  Kinswoman. That sense of being dishonest, an imposter, washed through her again. “Bastien can heal her?” Why were they even asking? “Would that be a problem?”

  “If she can recover normally, it is better.”

  “Why?” A dozen questions occurred to her, among them, OMG, seriously, magic? But she made an effort to stay on point. “Does magic have … side effects?”

  Dega nodded, as if this was obvious.

  “One can only bear so much intention,” Bastien said.

  “There’s a limit on how much you can take?”

  “Yes.”

  Magic with a … would you call that a load limit? Wow. “This is why you apologized for … scribing me, was that what you called it?”

  He set the knife aside gingerly. “This is an emergency.”

  She thought that over. “It was a first for me.”

  “You’ve never been scribed?”

  “I’m not from around here,” she said, adding the worrisome question of magical limits and side effects and how soon could she get an MRI to a growing list of things to follow up. “But you think Gale has been? Scribed? And if you heal her—”

  “We can’t know unless she wakes and tells us. And there are other urgent matters,” Dega said.

  “Matters?”

  “I must assist the others.” Bastien had brewed himself a hot drink. He broke a white egg with dark brown speckles into it and gulped the whole thing down. Taking his tools and a small, leather-bound book, he wrapped himself in Dega’s sailcloth poncho and disappeared outside.

  As he closed the door, Sophie settled at his ramshackle table. “What’s the issue, Dega?”

  “Who stabbed Kir Feliachild?”

  “You don’t think I stuck that—” she indicated the hunting knife “—in her chest?”

  The woman shook her head. “If you wanted her dead, you’d have let her drown. What happened?”

  “Two guys attacked her about a block from my mom’s place—”

  “On Verdanii?”

  “Uh. San Francisco.”

  Blank expression.

  “Not the point, okay? There were two of them, both Caucasian. I noticed their clothes first: they were cut like medical scrubs, almost institutional, but the fabric was heavy and their pants were pressed. Good quality, you know?”

  “I don’t know scrubs, or Caucasian. They were wealthy, these men? That blade … it is outlander material, I think.”

  “It’s just steel.”

  Dega shuddered a little, as if Sophie had said “radioactive.” “Did the ruffians say anything?”

  “Not in English.” Sophie shook her head. “I caught a few words. “Tempranza … Yacoura? And Gale laughed. That’s when everything got all brawly.”

  “Yacoura
is lost.” The woman looked outside. The storm had abated as suddenly as it began. “You should rest. I’ll come for you if she wakens.”

  Sophie eyed Bastien’s filthy-looking cot and then checked her watch. It was barely evening in San Francisco. “Isn’t there anything I can do to help out?”

  “Our fishers were caught in the storm. We’re sending boats out to assist them.”

  “I can sail. I can row. I’m a great swimmer.”

  “No, Kir. Your aunt may want you.”

  Fat chance of that, Sophie thought. “I can gut fish, cook, tie nets, gather specimens, pound nails … um, hang-glide. Come on, you’re in a jam. You must need able bodies.”

  At length, Dega nodded. “Come with me.”

  She led Sophie down to the mud flats by the beach. The teens they’d put ashore earlier were prepping a flimsy-looking fishing boat for launch, loading up tools, rope, and buckets of steaming violet-colored goo—to patch leaks, Sophie guessed. As she and Dega appeared, their already sober conversations stopped. Silent anger raked at her.

  “Ralo!” Dega summoned a stringy teenaged boy with a leg splint and crutches. “This is Kir Sophie Feliachild of the Verdanii.”

  “Actually, I’m not sure—”

  “She’s to help you today. San can go out with the boat.”

  “Zophie,” the boy said. Sophie noted, with a thread of amazement, that he sounded to her ears as though he had an accent. Did she speak better Fleetspeak than he did?

  “Go with Ralo, Sophie. He’s in charge, nuh?”

  “I understand.”

  “I’ll fetch you when your aunt wakes.” With that, Dega toiled away.

  This is me, pitching in. Sophie gave the boy a bright smile. “So—Ralo. What are we doing? Coordinating the rescue boats? Signalling for assistance? Breaking out the emergency supplies?”

  “Over here,” Ralo said. He led her down the beach, over the wrecked remains of driftwood houses and the storm-thrown flotsam on the sand. Gulls—mining for edible bounty—swirled and scolded as they passed.

  They reached an open hut that was as ragged as all the rest. The seaweed weave of its roof had been shredded by the wind. In the shade of the one relatively intact corner, a young woman rocked a bundled infant. A quartet of heartbreakingly thin little kids, maybe three or four years old, ran up and down the beach under her supervision. The children were scavenging, competing with the seagulls for whatever protein had washed up on shore.

  “San,” Ralo called. He gabbled incomprehensible words.

  Was the Fleetspeak spell wearing off? Did that happen? No, she decided; this must be a local dialect. The language Bastien had taught her must be a trading language … something sailors and merchants might use?

  She hoped that was a good conclusion, and not merely wishful thinking.

  The woman handed Sophie the baby, then stalked back to the wharf. The child immediately began to scream.

  “We’re babysitting?” she said. Its mother didn’t turn back.

  “You, me, we watch littles,” Ralo agreed. He started gathering the broken pieces of the shelter roof.

  This is what I get for saying I’d do anything, she thought glumly. “I don’t think this kid likes me.”

  “Walk with him,” he said. “Bounce.”

  She did as he suggested, snuggling the tiny body against the shoulder that didn’t hurt. “You don’t scare me,” she whispered. “I’ve done dives in sharky water.”

  Baby notched up the wails. Sophie put more boing in her step, pacing the beach, making what observations she could, if only to stop her inner monologue from running where am I, where am I where the hell am I? in an endless, anxiety-cranking loop.

  The kids first: They were tanned, and their hair ran the gamut from nearly blond to strawberry roan. No blue eyes; she’d characterize their skin as olive.

  She’d seen children elsewhere in the developing world, in places as poor as this one seemed to be. They’d been clad in T-shirts provided by aid workers, their little bodies serving as billboards for donor NGOs or Coca-Cola or, lately, trendy cartoon characters. But these kids wore hempy-looking tunics, clothes hand-woven from unbleached, undyed fabric, same as the sandpapery blanket the baby was wrapped in.

  The baby who was, finally, quieting.

  If someone out in the wider world was giving aid to these islanders, there was no obvious sign of it, Sophie thought.

  She bounced her way to a tidal pool. It held two familiar-looking hermit crabs and a proliferating anemone. She could identify one broken piece of coral—large polyp stony coral, she thought.

  There was a second anemone species she didn’t recognize, but that might not mean anything. She’d dived a lot of reefs, but that didn’t make her a search engine.

  Across the water in the direction the boats were taking, the sun was just clearing the horizon. Sophie turned her back on it, studying what she could see of the darker sky to the west. The sun was just high enough to have blotted out the stars.

  But it had been light last night; Sophie remembered wondering about the moon as she hauled Gale through the waves.

  As if they’d caught her thought, the thinning clouds separated, revealing a pale, familiar disk.

  Tears pricked her eyes. “There’s the Sea of Tranquillity.”

  However far off the beaten path she’d come, whatever magic had been used to move her here, she was still the same distance from the moon. The thought was comforting.

  “I wish Bram was here,” she whispered.

  The baby had drifted off. She returned it to its pallet. Ralo was plaiting dried seaweed into rope.

  “I could help with the roof,” she said.

  He shook his head; why would he believe she was capable when nobody else did?

  “Just watch them.” he indicated the little ones, who were running up and down the beach turning over branches and scooping up the occasional mollusk.

  Sophie opened her camera case. It was shockproof and waterproof: a fine scratch marked the path of one of the daggers across its surface, but smashing one of Gale’s attackers across the face with it hadn’t done any real harm.

  She’d never been in anything resembling a fight before.

  That wasn’t a fight, it was attempted homicide.

  It was the fight that had caught her attention. She’d seen Gale go into Beatrice’s house and hadn’t noticed the two older women’s resemblance; hadn’t thought much of her at all. Even when she’d spotted the two men loitering across the road, watching the house and muttering, it was Beatrice and her husband she’d worried about.

  She was debating whether to call the police, was imagining explaining to a 911 operator: Hi, I’ve been parked outside my birth mother’s house for a couple days. Now someone else seems to be stalking her too … and I hate competition.

  When Gale had come out, heading down the street, the two guys had perked up and begun following her. It had been an Aha! moment: Hey, that woman looks like Beatrice! And hey, those guys are after her!

  Knife-wielding, grim-faced men … She shuddered.

  “Don’t obsess,” she muttered. “Stick with the here and now.”

  The DSLR camera inside the case was undamaged, as was the housing that let her shoot underwater. Easing it into the housing, Sophie tipped the lens into the tidal pool, taking a few shots of the unfamiliar anemone. The snapped-off bit of coral went into the case itself, next to Gale’s magical courier pouch. She shot an image of the moon and then the mud village.

  Look at the beach, Sofe! Not one candy wrapper, no plastic bottles or grocery bags, not even a scrap of a condom.

  How remote would this island have to be for there to be no litter, no SAT-phones? Her battery warning came on and Sophie powered off the camera immediately. The spare was in her car, recharging. She’d shot over two hundred frames of her birth mother, and suddenly she regretted them all.

  She’d have to restrict herself to species she didn’t recognize; if she was careful, she might coax thirty
more shots out of the battery. She took one frame of a bat sea star, because it had a fine spiderweb pattern in black on its back, something she hadn’t seen before in Asterina miniata.

  “If I wanted one of those moths, would I be able to get one?”

  “You’re hungry?”

  “Hungry? Oh, the pickles. No, I want a live one.”

  “They’re sour when they’re fresh.”

  She wasted a few seconds of battery power to show him the photos she’d taken so far. The little kids crowded around, asking questions.

  “They ask if your lightbox is magical.” Ralo indicated the camera.

  “It’s a machine.”

  “Mummery?” Ralo said.

  At the word, two of the eldest kids stepped back, putting some space between the camera and themselves, and tugging on the younger children. The expression of distrust on their faces was much like Dega’s had been, when she was eyeing up the steel hunting knife.

  “It’s a completely safe and pretty cool machine, as it happens,” Sophie said. Was it silly to be insulted?

  “Then you’re not a spellscribe?”

  “What? Like Bastien? No.”

  “Or Sylvanner?”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  A little kid tugged on her skirt, offering her an ordinary clamshell and pointing at her camera.

  “Only if I don’t recognize it,” Sophie said firmly. “That’s a ribbed limpet.”

  “Children don’t Fleetspeak.” Ralo said a few words and the children sprinted back to the beach, chirruping and scanning the sand.

  Suddenly I’ve got an itsy bitsy research team, Sophie thought. “Ralo, can you explain about … Sylvanner?”

  “They like to write new spells,” he said, swinging a repaired mat of thatch onto the shelter roof. “Earn coin.”

  “They’re a … people? A corporation?”

  “Sylvanna is one of the great nations.”

  “Oh! Dega asked if I was Verdanii. Is that another nation?”

  He nodded, clearly amazed at her ignorance.

  Nations she’d never heard of. She pondered that. If Stele Island and Sylvanna and the others were part of an archipelago of small islands, tucked into … which ocean was most likely? She wouldn’t have believed they could escape notice, but for the magic.