by Colin McComb
My name is Trembling Crow. I am the son of the south wind and the Following Star. My cousins are the five wolves of the hills and the four sharks of the whirlpool, and I am the slayer of my brothers. My master was the Ocean Fox, who found me riding a straw mat in the currents of the southern sea. I was not born in these lands, but I will die in them. I have seen this in my dreams. That is why I have come.
I will tell you my life, so that you may understand why I seek my death. I want you to understand why I command the flame.
I remember nothing of my mother, nothing of my father. I remember only the sea, the sun, the gulls circling above, and my master standing at the rudder. I worked. I tied baskets. I caught fish and cleaned them. I learned runes and sat at his feet as we sailed from island to island. He sang songs to the wind spirits to fill our sail. He chanted the fish into our nets. We slept in our vessel, a cog twenty feet long. On blazing days we took shelter under the canvas. During storms we took shelter in the leeward bays of the countless islands of the Island Sea. We swam often.
He told me: “You were born of the sea. I found you as we find driftwood on the shores. You came floating to me on a woven mat. The sea gave you to me. You gave it your childhood.”
I did not question this. It was only strange to me later. But I will explain shortly.
Our kind have sailed the Island Sea since before the Upheaval. We were there before the islanders fled the Burning Sky. We were there before the rise of the empire to the east. We were there before the rise of the empire to the south. These soft and pale captives call them the Sjuri. We carry ancient wisdom. I was consecrated to the four elements in this tradition.
My first consecration was to the sea. I stood on the deck of our small boat, struggling, as the old shaman gashed my arm with an obsidian knife. He held my wound over the sea. My blood mingled with the water. He chanted as I fought him, as the sharks gathered around the boat. He stopped chanting and I stilled, watching the fins like teeth. Then he pushed me in.
Water washes away our sins. Water washes away our knowledge. All we know is water, its ebb and flow. Our bodies are water. Water is eternity, full of terrible depths and the bones of countless sailors.
I do not remember what happened next. I do not know why I was not devoured by the sharks. I do not know what the currents of the sea whispered in my ear. The price of my wisdom was my childhood and its memories. This is why I remembered no parents but the Ocean Fox. I was given the memory of that moment on the boat by a gull circling above our craft when I gave myself to the wind.
When my head broke the surface for air at last, the wound on my arm had closed. This is when my memories begin. I had no fear of the sharks brushing my legs: my new brothers. I dove beneath the surface and swam for minutes to reach our cog. I rose from the water into a new life.
We cast nets and sailed about the Island Sea. I spoke already of my earliest memories. This is when they happened. I listened to the chanting of my master and learned. He gave me stories of the people who are lost. He sang songs of the vanished age, he told me of their wonders. Enough food for everyone, he said, and sickness a dream. I took the lessons of these stories to heart and cast aside the myths: bring bounty to others, and heal their injuries. We could restore this time in our hearts, if not in reality. This was to be our mission. This was the mission of our forefathers. This was the tradition we carried.
We sailed among the island towns. Some of them sat in low-lying harbors. Some climbed cliff faces. Some islands were ruled by a single leader. Independent towns were scattered across other islands. Some towns sheltered pirates, but the pirates did not prey on the other islanders, except in times of famine. So many different people. What they had in common was need: need for us.
They asked us for our blessing. They wanted fish swept into their nets, or their sick made well. They wanted old wisdom and spells for their everyday pains. We gave to them what we could. They accepted it, and it worked. They came back to us when we came back to them.
Always, always they rowed to us when we cast anchor in their bays. They rowed to us because the Ocean Fox does not set foot ashore. The sea provides him with all he needs, and what the sea cannot provide, the islanders do. I went to the village markets for him, and they soon learned to recognize my face. They treated me as a shaman. I was younger than the adults, but they respected me for my master’s sake. It may have been the knowledge of water tattooed behind my eyes.
Once the other children asked about my parents. They were my age, but they feared me. I told them, as I told you, that my master was my only father and my only mother. The eyes of the children went wide. They did not understand, and they laughed at me behind their hands. I did not know what to do with the wave of anger and shame that welled in my heart. I wove a leash of water around the throat of one of these children, and I gathered our supplies to return to the boat. I led the child to the wharf, where the Ocean Fox read my face from our mooring spot in the harbor, and he shouted his question at me. I shouted back to him: Sacrifice.
He laughed and brought our cog closer to the wharf.
“Son,” he said, “we do not sacrifice children for our pride.” He addressed the cowering boy. “Who are your parents?”
The child answered him, and the Fox said, “Bring your father and the headmaster of your village to us.” When those two came to us, bowing low, the Fox asked them, “Which is greater, the life of one or the life of the many?”
“Why, the many, of course,” they replied.
“And if the many should be threatened, is it permissible to sacrifice the life of one to preserve them?”
“Yes, absolutely,” replied the headmaster.
“The shaman’s mind must be clear in all things,” said the Fox. “If it is cluttered with pride, shame, or fear, he becomes worthless. My apprentice has been shamed by this man’s son. It is not the boy’s fault, of course. Nonetheless, my apprentice’s mind is crippled with shame, and this shame must be removed. I know of only one remedy.”
“What is that?” asked the father.
“Blood. Your blood or the blood of your son,” said the Fox. “Without that cleansing, we will not return to this town.”
The headmaster understood that he meant the town would die. The father understood it as well. He did not fight his fate with any great strength. I cut his throat in the harbor myself. What we did not eat, we fed to the sharks.
We brought many fish to the town in exchange, and the children never bothered me again.
When we left that town, the Ocean Fox said to me, “It is time you learned the wind. We will go to the isle of Ourmagh.”
For the next week, we tacked and veered. He told me of the birds and asked me to identify them from their shapes far above. He steered us into contrary winds and made me choose paths between rocky islets using only the sails. Through all of this, he chanted and chewed dried fish. At night when we dropped anchor, he lay awake singing softly. Those songs lived in my head for the next days, and I found myself singing them softly as I worked. He did not let me eat that week, nothing except for a few bitter weeds and some fresh water, and by the time we reached Ourmagh I was faint with hunger.
Ourmagh is a black and rocky finger outstretched from the depths of the sea, hundreds of spans tall and as wide around as many trees. It is covered with crags, small outcroppings, and the nests of birds. The rocks are sharp and splintered. We moored out in the leeward harbor, and the Ocean Fox said, “Climb it.”
“What do I do when I reach the top?” I asked.
“Wait until you receive a vision,” he said.
“What if I don’t?” I asked.
“Then you will die,” he said simply.
I swam to the base of Ourmagh at dawn, riding the waves around the treacherous rocks at its base. Sea lizards and crabs fled the pounding breakers, and they escaped my hands when I tried to snatch them for food as I dashed past. I would have caught one eventually, but I had no time to hunt. I needed to reach the top of the
spire by nightfall, or I would surely die.
The waves tore me from my feet more than once, and if I had not clutched at the rock, I would have been tumbled against it or swept out for a more sickening plunge on the next wave. My friendship with the water was for nothing here, for the places where the elements meet are never kind.
At last I climbed beyond the reach of the water, and though I was exhausted, I continued to climb.
The day wore on. Every inch I climbed was a knife. My hands and feet were slick with blood within an hour, and sometimes handholds crumbled between my fingers. The ocean beat furiously on the jagged rocks below, jealous of this stronghold. Gulls clouded my head with their wings, trying to drive me from their nests. The winds howled around the spire, and though I was on the far side of the mount, the air pried at me with thousands of little fingers.
I do not remember how high the climb was. It was my entire life. All that came before was small, small as the boat bobbing in my shadow. All I had ever been was this bleeding insect clinging to this wall. I felt no anger, no happiness. All was desire and cold.
Some time later, I could look down and see my progress, but the top was no nearer. The peak withdrew ahead of me, the mountain growing as I climbed. An hour later, I came to a flat ledge, and my body begged me to stop. I paused there for a moment, drinking the stale water from the puddle in the center of the ledge, and I could climb no farther. Night would fall on me here, and I would not learn the songs of the air. I could not move.
But I found myself on the wall again. Sweat poured into my eyes. Another handhold crumbled beneath my hand, and I swung from my fingers while I struggled for a better grip. I found it, black stone cutting into my fingers, and I heard the cry of the magpie. I heard the cry of the magpie, I say, and I let go, falling backward toward the sea. The shadow of the magpie crossed my face as I looked into the sun. The flap of its wings brought the wind’s words into focus. I had been hearing them all day, but I did not have the ears to listen. I listened now.
Wind is time. Wind is the future and the past. Wind is language and memory. Wind has seen all things. We need but listen. I listened, and wind filled my head with dreams.
I saw many things in those dreams. I saw cities of metal and smoke. I saw distance as an illusion. I saw the world that is gone. I saw that the ancients paid no heed to the spirits of sea and sky, and so they suffered their doom. I took visions that none would believe.
I woke curled on top of the spire of Ourmagh, the edges within my reach. The morning sun bathed my face. The feathers of magpies lay scattered around me. I wove some into my hair and dove into the water so far below me. The Ocean Fox welcomed me home.
I will not tell you how I came to know the chants of the earth. The lords of the earth have a home in caverns streaked with gold and minerals that men consider precious. They are jealous of their privacy and their power. I will not speak of them. I will say this, though: even the Ocean Fox, who is as fearless a one as I have ever known, fears them. The reason he does not set foot on land is fear of them. When he was young, he was simply the Fox, and he traveled wherever he pleased. He found doorways to worlds behind our world, the spaces between space. He was bold in his power, but he offended the lords of the earth. He took to the sea in fright, and he says that touching land again will mean his death.
He knew of the chants of the earth, and he taught me to be humble before the earth lords. They taught me strength and patience. I will not tell you the secrets they taught.
The gift they gave me was the knowledge of my birth. When I emerged from their cave and returned to our vessel, I told the Ocean Fox, “I want to go to Suryat.”
“We will go to Suryat,” he replied.
Suryat is one of the southernmost islands of the Island Sea, and one of the most haunted.
Let me tell you a tale of Suryat.
It is closest to the northern deserts of the southern empire, and so it brushes the winds that howl from that wasteland every ten years. This wind carries death. It is like a plague, but is not. When these winds have blown through their season, they leave behind nothing deadly. The crops grow strong then, their fields covered in light ash.
The southern shores are guarded by black pyramids. They are covered in soot, and the spirits of the land and sea shy away from them.
Like all islanders, the Suryati know the cycles of the weather. They watch the wind and tide. They count the fish in their nets. They watch their fields and the flights of the birds. They know the cycles of the days and the years. When the time of the plague winds comes, the Suryati board their boats and flee to northern islands, far outside of the darkening clouds of the south.
In between these years, they tend to their lives, as do any people. In the fall, they bring their boats ashore and tend to them, so that the ocean will not destroy them with heavy waves and storms.
It was in the fall that the winds shifted for the first time in hundreds of years. The plague winds were coming early, and there were not enough boats ready for all the people to flee. The black clouds loomed on the horizon, and the parents made a heartbreaking decision: they would pack as many children and infants as they could on the seaworthy boats, with a pair of adults to man the oars or rudders, and the rest of the Suryati would have to find their own way.
Some of the others tried to make boats of their own, but there was not enough time. The trees on Suryat were not old enough to make strong vessels.
If the Suryati had been other than they were, they would have despaired. They would have made themselves rich from the homes of their neighbors for a brief time. They would have killed, raped, and robbed. They would have taken their lives, the lives of their children.
But they did not despair. Hunna the weaver wove as many mats of reeds and grasses as he could, and made them as watertight as possible, before he could do no more. He and his wife went to the parents of the children who remained behind for lack of ships and offered them a risk: let the children breathe of the plague winds or take their chances at sea on these rafts. All who could said yes. Their children had seen five or six years and were too young to be of use around the village, too young to understand why the others must go.
Tukka, one of the fishers, brought his dried fish to the launch of the rafts. Tors the smith carried twenty jugs of fresh water from the mountain spring to the beach. Hansil the tanner wove leather scraps to make shelters from the blazing sun.
The seas were already rough with the coming storm. The children cried and screamed as their parents pushed the mats into the heaving water. Two of them leapt from the mats and struggled back to shore to die with their parents. The other eighteen stayed aboard and drifted into the current. Some of them grasped the mats of the others, that they might float together into the unknown.
When the children had disappeared, the parents climbed the tallest hills of Suryat and awaited the storm. They greeted their fates with open faces.
When the storms had passed, those who had fled returned and buried their dead.
These were the Suryati.
We came into sight of Suryat in the early days of summer. We anchored in the northern bay. I swam to shore, riding the small waves to the pebbly beach. Gulls took to their wings as I came up, great flocks of them darkening the air. Out in the bay, I heard the Ocean Fox call one down to him. He speaks their language well.
As soon as I set foot on the island, I felt the fear from the ground. I almost turned around to go back into the sea. I had never felt this before. Something had risen that took no part in the laws of the land. It was a force like a black wall. A black wall dripping blood. It pushed me back for a moment, and I staggered in the surf.
I leaned forward into it as if it were a wind. It stretched before me. I vomited before I took five steps. I wanted to stop. I wanted to leave. But this was the reason I had been called to Suryat. This was as clear as the stones beneath my feet and the birds in the sky. After five more steps, the strength of the sickness lessened, but it was all aroun
d me, like fog.
I found the reason the gulls had gathered. I climbed the hill above the tide line and up to the small village. It was empty, quickly emptied. One house had burned. Doors were open. Clothes were spilled across the floors. And blood. There was blood everywhere. It was not an evacuated town—it was abandoned and massacred. Death and her maidens had walked through these narrow streets, riding the winds to destroy.
The fog of plague was thicker here, but it was not my destination.
I walked through the village and found steps carved into the lightly wooded hillside, planks set into the ground to hold stairs leading upward, stairs of mud and gravel. Even as I ascended, each step took me deeper into the heart of the illness. Each step whispered to me that I would fall and be consumed by beetles. Every breath told me of the grave. Every smell was dust and decay. Dead hands slowed me. Dread grew with each step. Although I climbed, I felt the weight of the earth upon me.
At last I reached the top. A small monument to the dead parents of Suryat stood there, as tall as I am. Surrounding it, head-sized white marble stones marked the spots where each of those devoted parents fell. A slender flame the size of my fist danced atop the monument. It beckoned me closer, and when I took a step toward it, it swelled and wrapped me in arms of fire.
I fell in pain and woke from blackness in a small dark hut. Six waist-high fires danced in six of the eight corners. The fires gave off no smoke. The ceiling was twice my height, wood-beamed and charred. In the center of the floor, under a ragged hole in the ceiling, sat a cage. The cage was of woven fire, thin strands of orange and gold. Inside it sat a … thing.
It was a carved figurine, the size of my forearm. I could not look at it for long. In flashes, this is what I saw: