Tales of Noreela 04: The Island

by Tim Lebbon

  He shrugged on a heavy coat, a scarf, and a hat made from furbat skin, and strapped a knife to his belt. Storms reminded him of that terrible night in Noreela City. With every blink he’d hear the screams and see the children dying, and if there was lightning, it would imprint those memories on his mind even more harshly. He’d once told Namior that he hated storms, though he could never tell her why, and she had laughed as she asked why he chose to live next to the sea.

  Same reason I fell in love with a witch when I don’t trust magic, he’d responded. I’m a man of contradictions. She had smiled as though he’d made a joke, but he often spent deep moments considering this, and thinking that he’d been hiding for so long that he no longer knew himself.

  PAVMOUTH BREAKS WAS a fishing village on the western shores of Noreela. It was built on either side of the River Pav where it merged with the sea, extending up the slopes of the valley on both sides: a gentle rise to the north, with a slow fall to the sea; and a steeper rise to the south known as Drakeman’s Hill, ending with a sheer cliff into the sea on that side. The harbor was natural, enclosed and expanded centuries before with a long, curving stone mole projecting out into the sea. The river was spanned by bridges in two places. The first, oldest stone bridge stood closest to the sea at the harbor throat, while a mile upriver was the newest crossing known as Helio Bridge—a hundred steps high and half a mile across, spanning between the sides of the steepening valley inland.

  Namior Feeron lived in the northern part of the village, her family home perched on the shallow hillside and built so that it had views both out to sea and across the narrow river mouth to the south. From Namior’s room on the roof she could see far up Drakeman’s Hill, though Kel Boon’s rooms were hidden from view by other buildings. Still, she liked to sit at her window sometimes and imagine him descending the steep paths and steps to reach her.

  She’d climb, but that sometimes seemed too eager. Eager sends them away, her mother told her, and she should know; Namior’s father had sailed west with nine others two moons after her birth, never to be seen again. Give them a chase, her mother would say. And sometimes, give them a catch.

  Namior stared out at the darkening, rainswept village, feeling violence in the air of the storm yet to come, and she knew that tonight she would be happy giving Kel several catches.

  Her mother and great-grandmother were in the main downstairs room, gathered about the groundstone, still scrying to see whether they could assess the coming storm more accurately. They’d excused Namior when her nose started to bleed—she still had much to learn about magic and its gentle, deep manipulations—and her mother knew that soon she would be going out. I’ll take care, she had told her, and her great-grandmother, blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, had said in one of her less troubled, saner moments, Find a secret each day, and in a few years you may know him. Namior knew that her great-grandmother did not approve of Kel Boon. Eyes the color of blood, she had once complained. But like all witches in the Feeron family, past and present, Namior was blessed with freedom and gifted with choice.

  A machine drifted up the narrow path below her window, reaching out jointed metallic arms to relight oil lanterns that had gone out and turn up their flames. She saw rain patter down in a hundred spots across its gray-stone hood, and it sped up as though to escape the downpour.

  She should dress. Kel would not be down for a while, but she’d like to be at the Dog’s Eyes before him. Trakis and Mell would be there already, downing Neak’s stormy brews and debating whether to spend some of their hard-earned on the Ventgorian wines he kept in his cellar. A storm like this one seemed to raise the village’s blood; partly excitement and partly, she suspected, the idea that they were defying nature. The sea would rise, the rain would fall and the wind would blow, but Pavmouth Breaks clung to the coast, boldly facing the tempest and waiting for morning to arrive.

  She frowned, remembering her great-grandmother’s sickness that afternoon. Her mother had administered ceyrat root, but it had perturbed them, and set a chill in the air that Namior had still not shaken. The old woman was subject to periods of madness—she called them her crazes—brought on by age and the stew that time made of the brain, and such a sickness was usually the beginning. She’s just old and ill, she thought. Bad meat for supper yesterday. Too much scrying.

  A blast of wind gusted in from the west, and Pavmouth Breaks seemed to shudder beneath its force. Namior stood and moved back from the window. The glass flexed slightly, distorting the village and warping her own reflection so that she looked to be in pain. She turned away and went to wash and dress.

  NAMIOR DESCENDED THE twisting staircase at the heart of the house. She’d changed from her loose witch’s robe to a pair of tight canvas trousers, soft sheebok-wool shirt and a long leather coat, and she felt ready for the night. She could still hear her mother’s voice chanting softly as she sat by the groundstone, and she slowed to listen to the words. There was something not quite right, and it took Namior a dozen heartbeats to figure out what that was: her great-grandmother was silent.

  “Namior,” her mother whispered. “Come down; come in.”

  Namior descended the last few stairs, not surprised that her mother had been aware of her presence. The two women had sat around the groundstone for most of the day, her mother touching surfaces smoothed by hands for decades, gathering strength from the land’s magic and using that strength to try to discern things yet to happen. Namior’s senses still felt heightened from the time she had spent with them. Noises rang inside her head, and she could smell the anger of the sea.

  Her great-grandmother sat across the room from her, huddled down in a mass of blankets. She twitched and mumbled in her sleep.

  “Sit,” her mother said, patting the floor cushions beside her. Namior sat cross-legged and lowered her head, paying respect to the groundstone.

  “Storm’s getting harsher,” Namior said.

  “Yes. There’s something …” Her mother shook her head, setting her many earrings jangling.

  “Wrong?”

  Her mother nodded. “A blank spot in the storm. There are waves and rain, breakers smashing the shore, and a waterspout farther along the coast that may touch land.”

  “I saw most of that, too,” Namior said, and she felt a brief flush of pride in her expanding abilities. They exhausted her—if it were not for the lure of Kel, she would be happy staying in and sleeping for the evening and night—but they also excited her. Her mother and great-grandmother knew that, and they encouraged it, though the older woman was always the one to urge caution. Life’s too short to rush, was one of her favorite sayings, and it had taken Namior a long time to see the sense in that. Life was short, so she needed to do things right.

  “And we should have seen more,” her mother said. “There’s something missing. A weight. Something out to sea.”

  “A weight of what?”

  Her mother frowned, staring at the groundstone. “I’m not sure.” Then she smiled. “Probably just the storm stirring the magic. It happens sometimes, especially when there’s lightning.”

  Namior looked at the groundstone—as high as her chest, planted deep in the family home generations before, polished and smoothed by centuries of her ancestors’ contact—and she almost reached out again. But there was still a gentle throb behind her face, and her nose prickled at the thought of communing with the land’s magic again that evening. A dribble of blood ran down to her top lip.

  Her great-grandmother shuddered awake and looked up. “No more for you tonight, Namior,” she said, her voice weak and tremulous.

  Namior nodded, dabbing the blood away.

  “Don’t go too far,” her mother said, leaning in close enough to kiss her daughter’s cheek.

  “Only the Dog’s Eyes,” Namior said. “Kel is coming down.”

  “There’ll be damage to clear up in the morning. Stay in the heights, away from the harbor.”

  “I will.” Namior was becoming unsettled by her mother’s
concern. “You know I can look after myself.”

  The woman nodded and smiled, but her eyes were still clouded by whatever was missing. Namior could hear it in her voice, and she was unused to the sound of fear. “You’re a good girl,” her mother said. “And you’re growing to be a great witch.”

  “I’ll be away,” Namior said, smiling, then glancing pointedly at her great-grandmother. “Don’t forget you both need sleep!”

  She felt them watching her as she left the main room and stood in the hallway behind the front door. Closing the hall door was almost a relief. Alone again, listening to the wind batter the door in its frame, hearing the whistle of a machine rumbling by, she cast her mind back to her own visions from that afternoon. She had sensed a storm coming, as had they all. She had seen the waves and rain, boats swaying and bobbing in the upset harbor, and cloaked shapes pushing against the wind as they navigated the dark streets, steps and winding paths of Pavmouth Breaks. She had not been aware of any absence; no void where there should be something; nothing to disturb.

  She sighed, hoping that her great-grandmother would not descend into one of her crazes.

  “I’m still young,” she whispered. She touched the stone charm that hung around her neck—a shard from the same rock that had gone to make her family’s groundstone—and breathed in the energy it gave her. “Still young, and I trust their word.”

  Vowing to be careful, she pulled the door open and went out into the storm.

  STAY IN THE heights, away from the harbor, her mother had said. But upon leaving their house and taking the short, cobbled path down to the wider street, Namior looked right, down the small slope toward the harbor, and in the dusky light she saw the sparkling glare of spray as the sea struck the mole.

  Storm’s not anywhere near its height, she thought. So she turned right and walked along the hillside, heading toward a lower path from which she knew she would be able to view the whole harbor. It wasn’t every day a storm like that came in, and Namior reveled in the power of nature.

  The path curved slowly around the hip of the hill, exposing itself to the sea winds, and with every step Namior felt the power of the gale increasing. She hugged the jacket close across her chest and lowered her head. It was raining so much that the water was not draining away fast enough, and her feet sloshed, leaving wakes like those of small boats. She winced as a gust of wind threatened to unbalance her, driving rain horizontally against her face, stinging her exposed skin, soaking her trousers. Still the storm felt young, and she sensed that it had yet to find its rhythm.

  She walked on, passing a couple of people going in the opposite direction. They offered her a brief nod, and she nodded back, unable to identify them in their storm gear. Their faces were covered. They could have been anyone.

  The path sloped down toward the harbor, and once it was free of the buildings crowding it, Namior could hear the roar of the sea as it broke against the land. It was immense, shuddering through the ground and into her feet as well as shaking the air. She paused in the lee of a tall retaining wall to watch, sheltered from the worst of the rain but still with a good field of vision. Waves broke against the mole and pushed their spray right over, and the water of the harbor itself was in turmoil, tossing boats against each other. The front was awash, the swell lifting against the harbor wall and occasionally surging across the ground. She could see a few hardy people struggling here and there, dashing from one building to the next, but mostly the streets were sensibly deserted.

  Worse to come, she thought, and for the first time she felt the twinge of concern she had seen in her mother’s eyes. There would be broken boats to fix when the storm had spent itself, and perhaps more.

  She turned and hurried back up the hillside, and when she drew level with the narrow path to her house, a transport machine rolled down the street toward her. It stopped before her and lowered itself on wooden wheels, and she climbed onto its back, touching the control stone beside the metal seat and casting her thoughts. The machine turned, trailing limbs stroking the ground as it drew power from the land, and started along the hillside toward the Dog’s Eyes Tavern.

  WHEN KEL BOON entered his favorite tavern, a score of faces turned his way. He smiled and received a dozen smiles in return, but some of the older men and women barely nodded. He’d only been there for five years, and it would take a lot longer than that for him to become one of them.

  Such was the atmosphere in a small fishing village. Even on a day like that, when the skies were opening, the sea was battering them and the rest of the world felt very far away, Pavmouth Breaks’ residents feared the stranger.

  His attention was grabbed immediately by the small tone-bone band playing in the large window bay. There were two men and a woman, the same three who regularly supplied music in the tavern in return for drink and food. And though he’d heard much of the music before, it never failed to stir his soul. The woman had caught a fresh whistle fish that day, and she had it draped across her lap, stroking its scales and passing her fingers across the many bony protuberances on its back and sides. A whistle fish took days to die out of water, and its death sounds could be manipulated into hoots, clicks and whines. The two men played a variety of instruments, ranging from a whalebone harp to a large hollow bone around which much legend had been built. No one knew where it came from, but these were fisherfolk; there were a thousand tales of its origin, and all of them true.

  “Kel!” Trakis called from a smoky corner. The big man stood and waved his arms and Mell, sitting beside him smoking a pipe, nudged him in the ribs.

  Kel looked around quickly but saw no sight of Namior. Maybe the witches had held her back, after all.

  “You look like a drowned furbat!” Trakis said. As Kel drew closer, his friend’s face grew stern. “You need ale.” He strode toward the bar.

  “Hello, gorgeous,” Mell said. “You’re dripping on the table.”

  Kel stepped back and shed his coat and hat, hanging them on a hook set into one of the tavern’s many rough timber columns. It was one of the oldest buildings in Pavmouth Breaks, so the landlord Neak said, and he also claimed it was home to the most wraiths. Kel always smiled when he heard Neak telling that to a visiting fisherman or a newcomer to the village: Most haunted place in Noreela! Kel had visited a dozen places in Noreela City itself that also laid claim to that dubious title.

  “No Namior?” Mell asked.

  “She’s coming. I spoke to her earlier.”

  “Storm from the deepest Black,” Mell said, taking another draw on her pipe. She gasped, then exhaled a stream of pure green smoke. “You can almost hear the wraiths screaming in the wind.”

  “No wraiths out there,” Kel said, perhaps a little too harshly. “It’s just weather.”

  Mell nodded and stared at him a little too long. Of everyone in Pavmouth Breaks, she seemed most suspicious of his past. Sometimes he thought she could see deeper than he knew.

  Trakis returned and lowered a tray of drinks carefully to the table. Four jugs of Neak’s Wanderlust ale, and a tall, dark bottle. “I’m splashing out,” Trakis said. “Tonight it’s us against the world.”

  “A militiaman who can afford Ventgorian wine,” Mell said admiringly. “You must be corrupt.”

  “Eat sheebok shit, fisherwoman.”

  Kel raised his jug and offered his squabbling friends a toast. “Us against the world.” He drank, closing his eyes as the initial bitter taste changed into something sweet and wonderful. Neak swore that he brewed naturally, without the help of magic or machines, and Kel believed him. Nothing that tasted so good could be so false.

  The tavern door opened, conversation stopped and Kel joined with everyone else in looking at the newcomer. Namior Feeron entered, slamming the door behind her and shaking water from her long hair. She spied Kel immediately and smiled. As she came across to them she swapped greetings with most of the tavern’s patrons, and Kel looked away. Seeing how well she knew this place sometimes stung him, because he also knew ho
w much she wanted to get away. She was desperate for travel, exploration and adventure. She craved to see Noreela City, Pengulfin Heights, the islands of The Spine, which curved out from the north of Noreela, and she even dreamed of a journey far enough south to see the dangerous mountain ranges of Kang Kang. But every time she mentioned this, Kel Boon told her no. He was staying there. I’ve had my adventure, he would say, and however much she pressed, he could tell her no more. That was the dark space between them—a gap that seemed, at present, unfordable.

  “The harbor’s mad,” Namior said even before taking a seat. “Boats are crashing about, and some of those waves are breaking over the mole.”

  “There’s been worse,” Mell said. She had been a fisherwoman for almost eighteen years. She’d been involved in three wrecks, seen two friends drowned and one taken by sea creatures, and nothing seemed to disturb her anymore. At almost forty—just younger than Kel, and two decades older than Namior—Mell had lived enough to fill many lives. We’d have such tales to tell each other, Kel sometimes thought. But if he wanted to stay in Pavmouth Breaks, he could never speak of his past.

  Not if he wanted to stay alive.

  “And what do you say, young witch?” Trakis asked Namior.

  Namior’s eyes darkened for a beat, then she smiled. It lit up her face. “My mother says there’s to be a waterspout just along the coast.” She glanced at Kel, the smile slipping so slightly that he thought he was the only one who noticed.

  “I’ll drink to that!” Trakis said. He raised his mug, and the rest of them joined him in toasting the storm.

  Namior sat on a bench close to Kel, and it only took one mug of ale before she pressed herself against him. He slung his right arm loosely around her shoulders and drank with his left. She looked at him frequently, her ale-tainted laughter a welcome addition to the tavern’s underlying noise. Kel drank slowly; he had never enjoyed the sensation of being drunk and the loss of control it brought on. But he had always enjoyed watching Trakis and Mell drink together, and that night both of them were truly in form. Conversations turned to bickering, bickering to full-blown arguments, then they would hug each other, laughing and swearing undying friendship. Kel supposed this was just one of many taverns filled with such people, but these were special because they were his friends.