Drowned Worlds

by Jonathan Strahan

  I saw my Gods, and my gut went sour.

  It’s fine. It’s not your responsibility. You asked another Watcher to take your shift.

  But she was a drunk, and everyone knew it. And if the warning didn’t sound—if boats were boarded while They were in the water—people would die. And it would be on me. And the village that had taken me in, sheltered and fed me in spite of my missing arms, would cast me out.

  I watched my Gods, and I could taste the bell rope between my teeth. Plastic and bracken and the sweat of the other Watchers, men and women with hands. My head jerked, acting out the signal even though I was shirking my duty. Two tolls, then three, repeating: the signal that said They are here, Their formation indicates They mean us no harm, but no boats may be boarded. My neck ached. My jaw burned. And my face went red and hot, because I wasn’t in the tower, because I was skulking from the town like an outcast unbeliever. I watched the Gods, the beauty of Them, Their black implacable bulk, the white patch above and behind the eyes, and my whole body tingled with joy. And with shame.

  The bell would sound. It had to. The village would come awake. Fishermen would scrape away ice and mutter prayers, and fling offerings to the Gods. Fires would be kindled, voices and laughter unleashed. This was a day like any other.

  Except... not.

  Because Kelb had come to my cabin last night. Knocked at my window. Told me to meet him at sunrise outside of town. Told me he was going... somewhere.

  I told him yes. Even though everyone knew there was no Somewhere. Nowhere left on land to go. No animals still living, no cities away from the water still inhabited, nothing but icy poisoned wind and scorched rock. I told him yes, even though I knew I risked losing everything. I told him yes because I could not tell him no, not ever, and that had been true when I was eight and he was ten, my maimed foster brother’s only friend. I told him yes because everything Kelb did was rough, brutish, beautiful. Every morning I watched from the tower as he stumbled from his cabin, peeled off his shirt, scooped cold salt water over his black-furred torso. Kelb was oblivious to the cruelty of it, this display of fine muscled flesh and limber arms, oblivious to the hunger in my eyes, oblivious to me as anything other than the sad armless little sixteen-year-old sister of his dead best friend.

  Our town looked so tiny, standing outside of it. I hurried, into the landscape of snow and sharp black rocks and bent sticks that people said had once been trees. I wanted to be out of earshot, so that if I didn’t hear the bells it might have been because I was too far away. And not because my replacement had failed miserably, and my life was over. My stomach tightened with the same old empty lonely feeling that always followed the ecstasy of a visit from our Gods.

  But this time the emptiness did not go as deep as it could have. Because strapped to my back, cold and sharp and heavy, was the cymbal of Summoning. Burdening me down and buoying me up. An egregious sin, and a source of salvation. I had taken it on mad reckless reasonless suicidal impulse, lifting it off the wall with one expert foot and placing it on the floor atop my torso wrap and lying on top of it and tying it tight with my feet, but feeling it there I was glad I had.

  Over the hill, in a down-swoop of land that could have been the cresting of a wave, was Kelb. A dark blur at first, swelling into a man as I approached. Squatting, his bare red hands assembling from snow something forbidden. Hearing me, not looking up.

  “Stop that,” I said. I kicked the little house apart and he laughed.

  “Oh Adze. There’s no ocean in sight. Your precious Gods can’t see what we do.”

  “They see everything,” I whispered. His blasphemy never failed to redden my cheeks with a mingling of fear and desire.

  He hugged me hello, then stepped back. Put his hands on my shoulders, and then on my stumps. A gesture somewhere between brotherly and… not. And it occurred to me, for the first time, that maybe he did know how I felt about him. Maybe he counted on it.

  “Eat,” he said, pressing a square of bladderwrack jerky into my mouth.

  Around his neck he wore a thick plait of braided seaweed, studded with shards of broken glass. Not the worn-down, safe, pretty sea-glass that most of us used as jewelry. This was jagged stuff, cruel and dangerous, salvaged from the factory wrecks to the south. Only thick, strong skin and superhuman confidence kept it from cutting him.

  “If I ever needed any more proof that the Gods hate us, bladderwrack jerky would do the trick,” he said.

  “Shh,” I said. “You shouldn’t say things like that. Where are we going, anyway?

  “To see someone,” he said, stepping faster to keep pace with me. Armless as I was, no man had legs to match mine.

  “No one lives on land,” I said. “And anyway what do you need me for?”

  “Does it ever get frustrating?” Kelb asked, after putting another square into my mouth. “Having to depend on other people?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know. No arms. Not being able to do anything for yourself.”

  I laughed. “No. That’s what it means, to be part of a community.”

  “But they landlocked you. Stuck you in the tower—”

  “They took me in,” I said. “A crippled orphan—they gave me a place. A role. And I’m not stuck. I rotate shifts with three other women. And anyway they’re considering me for the Priesthood.”

  Or they were. Before this.

  “Pssh,” he said, and I didn’t know if he was scoffing at the idea that they’d ever extend such an honor to crippled unworthy me, or at the idea that anyone would want to be part of the Priesthood in the first place.

  Of course he didn’t understand. Kelb’s weirdness was part of why I liked him so much. He thought like most of my neighbors think, only more so. He was hungrier. His dad had been different too. The Gods killed him, for making a net. Nets are one of the many things men are not allowed to build. Cages are another. We still see birds, sometimes—scrawny, sickly things, flying lost from some faraway place where there still might be insects or seedplants—but the last time someone succeeded in catching and caging one, the Gods destroyed her home before the day was done.

  I was lucky, in a way. My maiming marked me as forever outside, locked me away from their greed and their blasphemy. I could not share their constant, crippling hunger for more.

  “Who is this supposed someone we’re going to see?” I asked, when the bladderwrack was done and Kelb seemed to have nothing else to say.

  “A trader.”

  Two days before, out on the ocean, our fishing party met another village’s. I had heard the Priesthood whispering about it. Different towns had different Priesthoods, different customs, and contact frequently spread crazy ideas. I wondered if this fictional trader was one of them.

  “Look,” he said, scooping up a fistful of snow. He held it out to me, palm up. Poked it with a finger of his other hand, showed me the scraps and flakes of colored plastic. One was larger than the others, showed what might have been a hand. “Snow is different on land. It keeps things.”

  “That’s why we shouldn’t be here,” I said, giving his hand a swift kick to spill the snow back to the ground.

  “I always forget what a devil you can be with those legs,” he said.

  We walked faster.

  Travel over land wasn’t explicitly forbidden, but the Gods frowned upon it. The inland cities were swallowed when the seas began to rise; all that was left was high frozen barren land poisoned by war and waste. The coastal cities still stood, huge buildings rising rusting from the sea, home to humans so barbaric the Gods would not allow them even the smallest of boats.

  “I’m surprised you came,” he said. “And happy. Always held out hope that Schoon’s sister would have a little of his rebel spirit.”

  Schoon’s rebel spirit got him killed, I did not say, because the name still hurt in my mouth.

  We walked between high drifts of snow. We crossed smooth patches of ice, and treacherous stretches of sharp slippery stones. I shivered a
nd prayed, thinking back to that last glimpse of my village. How the smoke rising from our homes looked thinner, flimsier, like our fires could not keep out the cold for long. The bunkers had been built back when men still thought they could outsmart the sea, find a safe place to carry on the sinful lives that had displeased the Gods so much that They made the sea swallow up all that we had. Those men never finished their safe place. They vanished like sand under the waves, fighting and clawing for the last little bit of land. Only a handful learned that the only way to survive was to make peace with the sea. And with the Gods. And that meant a Priesthood to learn what behavior angered Them, and keep each settlement in line. Because Gods never gave warnings. If we displeased Them, we died.

  “Used to be the land was as rich as the sea,” Kelb said, as we entered a wide snowless space, pointing out to the blasted ash-colored hills.

  “That’s what they say,” I said.

  “You don’t believe it?”

  I shrugged. “It’s one of those things where even if it’s true, there doesn’t seem to be much point in mooning over it.”

  “Still. It’s nice to think that once there was food other than fish and seaweed. You know they used to call this place New Jersey.”

  Shushing his blasphemies got tiresome after a while, so I said nothing. But naming things implied ownership, conquest, and it made me shiver. He turned to take in the landscape, and for the first time I noticed the sealskin bag he carried on his back, so full it bulged.

  “What’s in there?” I asked.

  “You might have been born out here,” he said. “One of the land settlements.”

  “There’s no such thing.”

  They say I was four when I came, the cauterization scars on my arm stumps still raw and weeping. I had no memory of my life before the village took me in, handed off from another people that met ours at sea, on the hunt—people with no fixed village, who traveled with the ice by canoe and slept in temporary homes. They hadn’t spoken what we speak, but they offered goods to reward the family who took me in. My father was good-hearted and hungry, and had taken in Schoon the same way. He said I wasn’t one of the people who had handed me off—the skin tone didn’t match—and I wondered for the millionth time who my people were, whether they were holier than we, what they did with my arms when they chopped them off, how strict and wise their Priesthood, whether my deep love for the Gods and my lack of thing-hunger came from them.

  “There’s a man,” Kelb said, yielding to the pressure of my resentful silence, “who lives out this way. He has something I want.”

  “What?”

  Kelb kept walking.

  “How does he live?” I asked. “On land. What does he eat?”

  “People bring him food. They want what he has.”

  “Is it something forbidden?”

  “Let’s just say the Gods wouldn’t like it.”

  A net, a cage, a metal blade? Kelb saw my face, and laughed. “Wake up, little sister. There are plenty of people who think like me. Who think the Gods are just a bunch of dumb animals, and that if we ever want to have a shot at a real life for our people, we have to get over this fear of Them.”

  I shut my eyes and prayed. I prayed that the Gods would forgive his blasphemy, and I prayed that he was wrong. I knew not everyone shared my reverence, but could people seriously think they could act in opposition to the will of the Gods? That kind of craziness could anger Them enough to wipe us all out.

  I prayed for strength, too. Because somehow his blasphemy made him more beautiful, and echoed inside my head, seductively.

  I should have cared more, about who this man was we were visiting and what he had. But I didn’t. Because I didn’t ever want us to get there.

  We passed buildings, bare wood against the earth. Some in shambles, some still standing.

  “Sorry you’re too big for me to carry on my shoulders,” he said, slowing down at my thousandth stumble.

  “Like you were so good at it,” I said. “You weren’t that much older than me.”

  “True, true. If Schoon had lived—”

  Kelb didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t ask. I could imagine dozens of ways it could have ended, some wonderful. As long as he left it unfinished I could hope it would have been one of the wonderful ones. I was almost startled to see that some small part of me really believed we could be together. That he wanted me the way I wanted him.

  Eventually we reached a wide flat swath of ice. Black and clear of snow. The going here was easier, although I could see Kelb was uncomfortable. His head darted around like a minnow, watching for cracks and soft spots and sudden eruptions of divine vengeance from beneath.

  Sunset surprised me. Had we really been walking so long? We left the ice, crossed sand. I whispered the twilight prayer and let the dark come upon me, enter me, take away my sight and return me to the primal union of all with all.

  “I can’t navigate without the sun,” Kelb said. “We need to stop and get some sleep.”

  We found a cabin quickly enough, one of the empty and decrepit ones. The familiar freezing wind sliced through where a wall had been, but we had furs for warmth, and we were both exhausted.

  But once we were laid out on the floor Kelb fell instantly asleep, and I found I could not follow. My mind swam dolphin-fast, circling truths I didn’t want to arrive at. What he was—what he really was, this boy I loved, this strange and twisted man. What I was—the kind of person who would steal the cymbal of Summoning, the kind of person that saw Kelb for who he was and wanted him anyway.

  Carrying that kind of hate inside, he would not last long. Nothing in his life could ever eclipse his anger at the Gods. Not love, not me, not ever. And still, I wanted him. Even though I knew he was doomed, knew he was out of balance with the world, still I hungered for him.

  “Kelb,” I whispered, wanting hands more than I had ever wanted them before. There was no end to the places I could have put them. People did so many things with their hands, to the people they desired. Instead I snuggled under his fur blanket, spooned my body in behind his. “Kelb,” I said again, lips against his ear. He turned, awake and alert and erect. My beautiful, damned boy. He did not need me. How could he know need, with hands like that? They moved up and down me, insatiably hungry. He was separate, savage, alone. And as my mouth gnawed desperately at his chest and stomach, arms and hands, I saw, for the first time, how my own hunger exceeded his.

  In the morning he kissed my forehead, helped me dress. Kelb showed none of the shame and contempt that I knew men often had, after showing someone such a secret part of themselves... but he still avoided eye contact, and said little.

  “What’s up with that?” he said, tapping the cymbal strapped to my back. “Gonna summon your Gods to come make everything better? Gonna hold an impromptu solstice ceremony?”

  “Just felt like having it,” I said. “You never know. Doesn’t the sound of the cymbal cheer you up?”

  “Risky business,” he said, covering his goosepimpled torso with a shirt. “Get caught taking that out of the village and they’ll kick you out for sure. Maybe offer you up to Them for good measure.”

  I tried to think of something to say that would be remotely true and at least a little funny, but since I still didn’t know what my reasons were for bringing it I said nothing.

  “Must be nice,” he said, gruffly, but also tenderly, wincing as he shouldered his bag. “Not to ever have to carry things. Not to be burdened down.”

  “It is nice,” I said. He waited for the follow-up, where I complained about how hard it was, but I had no complaints. Having hands made you put your faith and love in what you could hold to yourself and whisper Mine. And I was different. Or that’s what I had been telling myself. Until last night. Until I saw how deep my own wanting went.

  “What’s in the bag?” I asked, mostly just to shake loose a train of thought that was taking me nowhere nice.

  “Trade goods,” he said. “He’s not going to just give me what I
want.”

  By the time we got to the cabin with smoke curling up from it, the sun was high above us. An old man sat outside, in a bright ridiculous purple plastic chair. The sea-scroungers sometimes came back to the village with that kind of plastic absurdity—long pink birds and green pigs and giant balls—but representations were forbidden and we’d shred them in the gear wheels and melt the flakes in a vat to make waterproof sheeting and crude work clothes.

  “Greetings, travelers,” he said.

  “Are you Zimm?”

  “I am,” he said, and stood, and bowed. “And you must be Kelb. The one who frowns all the time, and wears glass shards like an idiot, and wants to kill the Gods.”

  Of course it was all bluff and bluster, standard man-talk to make himself seem strong. But how could such ugliness be mistaken for strength? The Gods swept fat seals and whole schools of fish into the reach of our hunters; They kept us safe from storms and kept our Shore clear of toxic animals. Perhaps I was spoiled, having been spared the society of men.

  Zimm asked “You come to trade?”

  “I do.”

  He ushered us in. The cabin was packed with hundreds of boxes, different sizes and shapes and colors. At a table, he set a small metal cylinder. Then he stabbed at it with a queer sort of knife, until the top lay raggedly open. A sweet, funny smell filled the room.

  “Corn,” he said, tilting the top to show us. Small triangles, the brightest shade of yellow I had ever seen. Bright like the sun was supposed to be, behind the toxic forever-clouds.

  “Cans,” Kelb said, picking up a cylinder from the stack. “I’ve never seen them like this.”

  I marveled at it too. The rusted husks of cans were everywhere; I had never imagined them in any other state.

  “I’ve got a lot of things you’ve never seen before.”