On the Isle of Sound and Wonder

by Alyson Grauer

  Dante watched Aurael seethe for a moment, steam curling up from his pale brow and vanishing into the air as he began to fade from view. “Yes,” he growled.

  “Yes . . . ?” prompted Dante.

  “Yes, my lord,” hissed Aurael, and then he was gone like breath upon glass.

  With a grunt of faint satisfaction, Dante turned away from the wreckage and began his slow walk back to the caves on the south end of the island, his book under one arm, his staff in hand. If Mira wanted to meet people from beyond their island in the sea, she might meet these castaways, and then she would know the true depth of his purpose. Then she would know why he sought revenge.

  In his dream, Karaburan was hunting a man. His dream—like most of his dreams—was dark and full of smells and uncertain noises, like that of a blind creature of the earth that burrows and sniffs and growls to see its surroundings with its ears rather than its eyes.

  Karaburan crawled forward into the darkness on his belly, scenting the man he sought. The earth was velvety cool against his rough skin. Some parts of the ground were warm from where the sun had shone down, and some parts were cool from shade. He could hear the heartbeat of the island all around him, pulsing as quietly as though he were underwater. Far off, he heard the chime of birds singing, the faint whispering of old magic, and the gentle hum of the ocean.

  He stopped, smelling the soft earth, the world around him gradually growing more and more quiet. He inhaled deeply and moved forward along the ground, still sniffing and turning his blind head this way and that, as a mole does deep within its tunnel.

  His hands touched something warmer than the dirt. Skin? He hesitated, almost drawing back, but could not help himself. He moved forward, closer, feeling long and slender legs along the ground in front of him. His eyes traveled over faint shapes in the dark, his vision a limb that had been asleep and now tingled with new feeling.

  Delicately, he brushed his hands along the smooth, lush skin of the legs he’d found in the dark, moving up, along the curve of what must have been hips, to a slender waist. It had not been a man he had been tracking at all, but a girl. He trembled, disbelief and anxiety blurring together as he slowly regained his sight and began to make out the vision of the girl before him, lying asleep on the ground.

  She was so beautiful, her hair spread wildly out like seaweed. Her breathing was steady, her clothes utterly missing, though she was still much concealed by shadows in the darkness.

  Karaburan breathed heavily and shivered, ashamed of how close he was to her and of how desperately he wanted to hold her, to crawl over her, to do something terrible that his brain could not quite understand. He wanted to press his skin against hers, but he did not know why.

  The girl stirred, making a faint sound in her sleep, and he moaned in reply, terrified of his impulses. He clapped his hands over his mouth in fear, all six fingers of each hand pressing together as if to take back the sound, but she had heard him. The girl woke as suddenly as an animal, her impossibly blue eyes flying wide open in the dark and a hoarse shout issuing from her throat.

  “No!” she cried out, scrambling back, but he reached his huge arms to her and yanked her close to him. “No,” she repeated, louder and louder. “No! No!”

  Karaburan squeezed her against himself, a strange mixture of sorrow and desire blossoming within him, as she struggled and screamed, beating at him, her eyes wider than a fish’s, her mouth flapping as she begged him to stop. Just a moment more, just a little longer . . .

  Then the girl’s eyes went white-hot, like sunlight refracted sharply on the sea. The brightness blinded him, and he felt his entire body pierced by lightning. He recoiled, howling and burning, and the girl was gone. He was blind once again, weeping and shuddering in the darkness.

  Thunder rolled loudly somewhere nearby, and Karaburan woke from his nightmare with a start, tears pouring down his uneven, bulging cheeks. He bolted upright, still shaking from his dream, and found himself in the small outcrop of rocks near Dante’s cave where he had lain down the night before. He was glad to find himself in the same place—it meant he hadn’t walked in his sleep. But the dream . . . The dream was one he’d had over and over for years, and every single time, it brought him to weeping shamefully in the darkness for what he’d done.

  A storm was raging off the coast of the island. Karaburan watched the lightning flash through his tears for a moment before curling up again on the rocks, barely sheltered from the light rain that fell outside his makeshift room.

  He cried until he fell asleep again, then dreamed another dream. This time, he was playing in the springy green moss of the forest at the heart of the island. His mother was there, picking herbs and singing quietly in the language of her people.

  As he drifted off into the gentle warmth of this new dream, a chill wind fluttered past Karaburan’s rocky shelter, whipping grains of sand into tiny maelstroms which died down again shortly after they began.

  Aurael paused at the entrance of the crude outcrop of rock that served as the monster’s shelter for the moment. It was not deep enough to be called a cave, but it was just enough to keep the deformed young man dry from the rain. Aurael wrinkled his upturned nose at the fishy smell of the monster’s closeness. Even after all this time, he was not used to Karaburan’s unique stench, and although there was no one to complain to about it, he still pulled faces to himself.

  He watched the blank sleeping face of the monster and pursed his lips in thought. It hadn’t been long ago that the monster first gasped for air, pulled from his mother’s womb by Aurael’s own hands. And it was the fault of this ungrateful, foul-smelling wretch that Aurael had been banished to this isle himself, trapped in that godsforsaken tree by Ouberan as punishment.

  Aurael’s face contorted with disgust, and he tiptoed toward the sleeping Karaburan, placing an invisible finger against the monster’s bulbous forehead. I’ll help you sleep, Aurael thought with a grimace, and slipped inside the monster’s mind.

  * * *

  “Karaburan,” mused his mother, walking barefoot on the damp moss. “What do you wish for?”

  “I wish for a playmate!” cried Karaburan, who in the dream was but a child.

  “And what else?” Corvina smiled, her white teeth seeming even whiter against her dark skin.

  “I wish for a father!” answered the child, whose fingers waggled in the air like so many worms peeping out of the soil after rain.

  His mother’s expression faded into one of hard apology. “You have none, child,” she told him, somberly. “And none you shall have.”

  “But why?” The child put his webby hands to his mouth.

  “For that you are a misshapen, ill-inclined, unlikely thing,” replied his mother, with great seriousness, “and that you were forced upon me as a curse, and now here we are upon this quiet and lonely isle with only the trees and the birds for company.”

  The child Karaburan did not know what to make of this, but his mother looked quite distraught, so he crawled across the moss toward her skirts, which were tattered and torn and faded from the sun.

  “You are a poorly formed thing, my son,” said the witch, with a sigh, crouching and setting her herbs and flowers aside to embrace him. “And yet, here we are, we two. The only two oysters in the bed.”

  “The only two birds in the sky?” asked the boy, putting his uneven, bubble-skinned face against her hair.

  “The only two crabs on the beach.”

  “The only two people in the whole wide world?” laughed the boy. His mother drew back from their lopsided embrace and looked her deformed son in the face squarely then.

  “Karaburan, we are not the only two people in the whole wide world,” she said firmly. “You know this. I have told you many times.”

  “I know, but it is much more fun this way, Mother.” He reached for a stick nearby that looked like a snake frozen in mid-slither, but could not quite reach it from where she held him still.

  “There are others out there, my boy,”
fretted the witch. “And I do not know how long it will be before they find us. Or before we find them, as the case may be.” She looked worried and distant. “But someday, I feel they’ll come here, and stand on our shore, and know this isle as we do. I don’t know when . . . or who. But I have a feeling, Karaburan, and you’ll have to be ready.”

  “Ready for what?” asked her son, still reaching for the stick.

  “Listen, Karaburan!” she rebuked with a scowl. “Look at me, and listen carefully. Someday it will come to pass that a man may come to these shores, and he will be a very bad man. Do you understand? Many men are bad, but this man will be very bad indeed. You will have to be ready.”

  “But you’ll be there, won’t you?” Karaburan looked up at his mother’s scowling, worried face, his own uneven blue eyes blinking.

  “I may be, but I may not be. I cannot tell, my son.” She smoothed back his tuft of dark, unruly hair, which grew only on the right side of his head, thick and shiny. “But if I am not, you will have to be ready to protect yourself. This is your island, Karaburan. I will leave it to you, in your hands, and you will care for it and protect it, and it will keep you safe and alive. Do you understand? You are king over this island.”

  “A king, a king!” exclaimed the boy, slapping his webbed hands together excitedly.

  “Yes, and a king must have a queen,” Corvina went on, lifting her son’s chin proudly with one finger. “When you find a woman, Karaburan, you must make her your queen.”

  “What do you mean?” asked her son, his head lolling heavily to one side in curiosity. “What do you mean, a queen?”

  “The birds have their mates,” said Corvina, “and so do the fish, but you will not have one who is your true match. You must find the one who is, and you’ll know her when you do . . . Eyros’ arrow will pierce your heart, and all you must do is take her for your own. All of this shall be when you are older, of course,” she added.

  “A queen,” echoed Karaburan, pushing his hands into the dirt. “A queen for my island.”

  “Yes,” agreed his mother, turning back to her herbs. “A queen for Karaburan.”

  Then the dream shifted, veering into pitch darkness from that light-filled clearing in the woods, and Karaburan cried out in the dark. His hands splayed wide to protect himself, but he could see nothing. His heart pounded and thundered inside his chest, but for several moments more, nothing happened. He dropped to all fours, no longer a child, and began to crawl forward. He crawled slowly, bit by bit, trying to get a better sense of his surroundings.

  He caught a whiff of something on the air. Man! No, he thought, sniffling in the shadows, a woman. A queen.

  Karaburan moved forward, slowly as any predator bearing down on his prey, and inhaled the smell of the woman somewhere up ahead.

  * * *

  Aurael released his grip on the monster’s head and smiled to himself. It was the one delight he took in his life these days, creating new and terrible nightmares for Karaburan. The monster didn’t even know he existed, poor simple soul; all he knew was that there were some strange foul forces at work that pinched him and prodded him and beset him with visions. Aurael enjoyed it overall, as it reminded him of his early days in the world, mocking the superstitious men of ancient times.

  Nowadays, men of the modern world were more likely to press through uncertainty with scientific thought and reasoning than explain things with supernatural phenomena; but here on the island, Aurael found great success in delivering torments to the simplest fish-skinned monster imaginable.

  Round and round and round we go, he thought, and with a chill gust of wind, he vanished from the shelter, soaring out over the beach toward the wreck of the ship.

  * * *

  1858

  Aurael was not certain what happened to Corvina’s corpse.

  Her son, the deformity she called Karaburan, did not come looking for her. Stupid thing, Aurael seethed to himself, pressing angrily against the bark of the tree. He probably hasn’t even realized she’s gone. Or if he has, he’s too stupid to leave their cave, pathetic child. If only I’d finished my work before Ouberan arrived.

  His sore and angry heart beat out the words, ‘Oh, if only!’ a thousand times over those days that crept by like snails on the sand, and his misery never abated. He began to think he should not have tried to take advantage of her forgiving nature; now, he did not even have a soul to speak to.

  After several days, she vanished, and he had no idea how. There were no footprints nor drag marks in the earth where she had been, and it frightened him to see the unbothered ground where she had lain.

  After the tenth day passed, Aurael presumed the child Karaburan had died from lack of food and water. How long does it take for a child to decompose? wondered the airy spirit. He had no context for the matter, and indeed was robbed of his ability to observe the afterlife first hand, as Corvina’s body had been politely removed from sight. It spooked Aurael right to his core, not knowing where it had gone, and the peculiar noises that sometimes came from the woods punctuated his thoughts with primal utterances and unusual song.

  Aurael began a sort of hibernation, then, drifting in and out of consciousness as the tide does. It felt like years had passed as easily as hours, when a new voice interrupted the endless summer quiet of the island.

  “There’s a face!”

  The little voice emerged from Aurael’s dark and dreamless slumber, tickling his ears. He stirred restlessly, wanting to return to the darkness, but there was a replying shout from further off—a man’s darker tone.

  “Don’t wander, Mira. Stay close to me. I have to bring up the rest of my books from the shipwreck. It will take a while, but I need you to stay close.”

  Shipwreck? Aurael thought. I didn’t hear anything crash.

  “Father, there’s a face in this tree!”

  Aurael cracked one eye open like a cat checking to see who was creeping up on its napping place. There was a child, a little girl, sauntering up the sandy hill toward his tree, her eyes bright and startlingly blue-green, like lightning over the ocean. Her golden-brown hair was long and handsomely done in braids and curls, and her traveling gown was a bright russet red with gold and ivory silk sleeves. She seemed a little windblown and damp from the sea, but all in all, quite well and merry. She might have been three or four, though it was hard to tell with mortals.

  She saw him looking at her and gave a little gasp, stopping in her tracks as though it were part of a game. Aurael felt something strange break open inside of his sleepy, icy soul. He heard her take a few steps closer, and, after a pause, he let both of his eyes open wider by a fraction. The girl stopped again, pressing her mouth into a line to prevent her giggles from escaping.

  Aurael shut his eyes again, heard her venture even closer, and then, silence. The breeze was gentle in the branches of his tree, but he heard no sign of her. After several moments, he opened his eyes fully, puzzled, and found that she had vanished. He frowned, the bark of the tree shifting to accommodate his furrowing brow.

  “Are you a nymph?”

  The girl was sitting on the ground at the foot of the tree, leaning against the trunk like a kitten pressing against the legs of an unsuspecting stranger.

  “What?” Aurael replied before he could stop himself. “No. No, I’m not a nymph.” The word tasted like evergreen sap to him, acrid and disgusting. A nymph indeed! He pulled a grimace in the tree bark. The little girl was tracing the patterns on the bark, deeply interested in every line.

  “Are you a fairy?”

  Aurael tried not to gag audibly. “No, I’m not a fairy, either.”

  “But you can talk. Trees don’t talk.” The girl looked up at him with a very serious expression. “So you must be something other than a tree.”

  “Are you certain this isn’t in your head?” Aurael inquired, trying to see past the leaves and toward the beach, where the voice of the man had sounded. “Where did you come from, anyway?”

  “A ship,” rep
lied the girl, drawing circles in the sand.

  “And before that?” Aurael could hear the man walking about on the sand, and the sound of the waves, but he remained out of Aurael’s eyesight. “Where before the ship?”

  “Home,” answered the child. “That’s a silly question. Of course we came from home.”

  Aurael’s frustration ground against the bark of the tree as he gritted his teeth, but there was something so endearing about the girl’s expression as she looked up at him that he could not bring himself to snarl a reply. He sat silently for a moment, considering the new development.

  “What’s your name?” she asked him after a few moments. “My name’s Mira.”

  The spirit hesitated, but the earnest expression on her face was too much. “Aurael,” he murmured back, softening against the tree bark. It was against his better judgment to give up his name so easily, but she was enchanting, and he had been alone for so long.

  “I like that,” the child said agreeably. Aurael tried not to smile.

  “Who came with you?” he asked her.

  “My father,” the child said brightly. “He’s on the beach trying to retrieve our trunks.”

  As if on cue, the father called out. “Mira! Come here. I’ve found your doll.”

  Mira gasped delightedly and scrambled off down the sandy hill toward the beach. Aurael strained his branches to get a look, but could not see where she’d gone. He sighed, the branches of his tree shuddering and swaying about him, and waited for her to come back, but she did not. The airy spirit dozed in the warm sun, and slept again.

  The little girl, Mira, did come back eventually to sit by his tree several times over the next few days. Often she did not speak more than a few sentences at a time, but sat quietly and drew in the sand, or played with her doll, or built stick monuments with twigs and leaves in the soil. Aurael was enchanted by her singleness of purpose, serene countenance, and unobtrusive way of simply keeping him company. It was so unlike anything he’d ever known before, and he felt as though the cares of his recent times were fading away.