Tales of Noreela 04: The Island

by Tim Lebbon

  “Help us rebuild.”

  Kel looked back along the mole to the harbor, the Noreelans digging there and the terrible ruin that much of the village had become. “You really think they can help us any more than we can help ourselves?”

  “I really think so, yes.”

  “Already under their spell, eh, Luceel?” He smiled at her but without humor, and she did not return the smile. “So, can’t I have a look?”

  Luceel sighed and stepped aside. “Like I said, Kel, it’s just a boat.”

  He walked past her, eyeing the militiaman. He knew the man’s face, but not his name. He looked down at the hand on his sword, back up, and grinned.

  The militiaman glanced away, and his sword hand went up to pick his nose.

  Glad to see I’ve still got it, Kel thought.

  As Luceel had said, it was just a boat. The sail had been folded and the boom tied straight, and it was secured to the mole fore and aft. The mooring posts had been ripped out, but the militia had tied ropes thrown by the visitors onto the ripped remains of two metal ladders on the mole’s seaward face. The vessel was old, battered and obviously well used. The deck had several areas where new boards had been nailed in, the cabin that stood toward the stern was sun-bleached and pocked, and the ropes scattered across the deck were ragged and worn. There were two hatches leading below, both of them closed but not obviously locked, at least on the outside.

  Kel was not all that familiar with boats. True, he lived in a fishing village, but he had never taken a keen interest in seafaring. He often talked to the fisherfolk who frequented the village’s several taverns, and he had befriended many, but he was more likely to listen to their tall tales than ask questions. And all fisherfolk had good tales to tell. There were giant sea lizards and pirates of renown, missed catches and surreal sea monsters, humanesque rock dwellers singing their songs to lure boats to destruction, wraith ships crewed by the ancestors of those now living in Pavmouth Breaks, and occasional stories of loves lost to the waves and found again. So he tried to view the visitors’ craft with an innocent’s eye, rather than the gaze of someone who saw boats every day but had no interest in them. He was looking for things that seemed wrong, or perhaps things not there at all.

  He walked along the mole for the length of the boat, then back again. He was aware of Luceel and the militiaman watching him, but when he glanced up it was Mygrette he saw, casually touching her machine as it probed for survivors, yet her attention was fixed on Kel.

  It was a sailing boat, sail now tied. It was obviously used for fishing, as it had a few nets folded in a wooden box toward the bow, long ropes trailing from them and wrapped around a rope drum. The cabin’s windows were of rough glass, and he guessed that any image viewed through them would be badly blurred and deformed. They offer us a gift of wonderful technologies, he thought, and they can’t cast glass?

  It was a working craft, not one built for leisure and pleasure, like some vessels he had seen when he spent a difficult few moons in Long Marrakash ten years before. There, some people virtually lived on the river, spending their free time afloat and only coming ashore to work. They harnessed river rays and used them to tow their craft, competing to see who could go fastest. Kel could not imagine this boat ever building up much speed.

  He strolled back and forth a few more times, then headed back toward the harbor.

  “Keep your trust precious,” he muttered to Luceel as he passed her by. She did not respond. He hoped that was because she was considering what he had said.

  Mygrette was waiting for him, as he knew she would be. She still stood by her machine, but her gaze called him over, and she began to question in lowered tones.

  As he started lifting splintered roof timbers from the silted guts of the fish market, he told her what he had seen, trying to make clear things he had not seen as well.

  “Just a boat,” he said, lifting a chunk of masonry and seeing the dreadful paleness of a hand beneath. He sighed, caught someone’s eye and stepped back for them to see as well.

  “Just a boat?” Mygrette said. “Huh!”

  The rescuers talked in low tones, working to uncover the body. Kel stepped back. He had started shaking, unexpected and frightening, and he had to fight the urge to run. Back to Namior, back to her home with her mother and great-grandmother, and away from death for a while.

  “And what was this boat’s name?” Mygrette asked.

  Kel frowned, hugging himself to bring the shaking under control.

  “Every boat has a name,” the witch said, leaning in close so that no one else could hear.

  He recalled walking back and forth, looking at the boat’s hull, the cabin, the squared stern and pointed bow. He shook his head. “It has no name.”

  Mygrette stared at him, then turned away and went back to her machine. She touched its smooth back, and it grabbed a tumbled timber-framed wall in its delicate limbs and lifted, something inside creaking with the effort. Then it froze, and it took several touches from Mygrette before it would move again.

  Beneath the wall, a corpse with sea worms squirming in hollowed eye sockets.

  “Mother!” someone screamed, loud enough to wake the dead.

  Kel looked up at Drakeman’s Hill, misted with the smoke of a fire lit to defy the sea. It was time for him to climb.

  AS KEL MADE his way to the base of Drakeman’s Hill, he was amazed that anyone had survived at all. But he saw two people being dragged out of flooded cellars. They had survived the destruction of their homes, falling masonry and roofs, the scouring power of the waves, drowning, the deluge of mud and the cold of the night. The look on a young boy’s face as he saw the sun lit a fire inside Kel’s chest, and he turned away as his eyes watered. Noreela can be so strong! he thought, and felt a sense of proud responsibility that had been missing for so long.

  When he had fled the Core, it had taken him a long time to come to terms with that desertion. Such dereliction of duty did not sit well with him. But once gone, he could not go back, and he had slowly come to believe that he had done the right thing. He’d been involved in a botched mission that had caused two Core and eight civilian deaths, and after that he could surely never be as sharp, prepared and brutal as was sometimes required.

  But things were changing.

  As he neared the foot of Drakeman’s Hill, he saw in more detail where the waves had undermined the ground. A great wedge of land had gone, taking many buildings and paths with it and leaving behind a bare earth cliff between twenty and thirty steps high. In several places in the new cliff were unearthed hollows, each the size of a person and speckled with the glint of crystals. Perhaps they had been precious once, but not now. Not when their exposure came at such a cost.

  Against the cliff, people had already built a rough pile of rocky debris and strung a rope ladder. It was busy, with survivors being helped up the ladder and rescuers taking turns to come down. Those coming down bore waterskins and food parcels, medical supplies, and tools to aid in the rescue-shovels, hammers and nails for shoring, lanterns. It was not until he’d been watching the ladder for a while, waiting in queue to climb up, that Kel noticed how many people also descended armed.

  He felt a swell of confidence, a flush of pride. Yes, Noreela can be strong.

  Glancing back at the harbor, he saw the masts of visitors’ boats waving in the swell once again as they turned and sailed in toward Pavmouth Breaks. Walking out along the mole, visible even from a distance, he saw Chief Eildan still carrying his heavy harpoon and Keera Kashoomie walking tall be side him.

  The talking was over. The landing had begun.

  HE CLIMBED THE paths up Drakeman’s Hill, and the gradual change was striking. At the bottom, many of the buildings had shattered windows, wrecked doors, stripped roofs, and sometimes blocks missing from wall corners and window surrounds. He could see into many of the buildings, and most of them were all but stripped of character. Furniture was broken and strewn across the street, clothing mixed in, and here a
nd there thick pools of mud and silt had collected. Some of the pools were crawling with sea things, though most of the creatures washed up with the wave were dying. Their deaths added to the stink.

  Around one corner, a boat had been deposited between two houses. The path there was narrow, and the boat—hull holed, mast missing, wheelhouse gone—was resting across the two roofs. It had crushed the roof structures when it hit, burying itself in the buildings as though they were sandbanks. Kel had to duck to pass beneath the shell-encrusted hull, and he splashed through a puddle of seawater.

  There was an old man sitting beside the path just beyond the boat. Kel recognized him as a farmer from the plains atop Drakeman’s Hill—one of the oldest men from the village and someone trusted and revered. He leaned back against a stone wall, looking at his hands as though they were guilty of a terrible crime.

  “Kel Boon,” the man said. “I like your carvings. They are always fine and detailed, and more importantly, they have soul.”

  “Thank you,” Kel said. He waited, expecting more, but the man went back to staring at his hands, as if waiting for them to act.

  Kel considered asking whether he needed help, but the old man did not appear to be in distress. Not of the physical kind, at least. Emotionally… Kel was still too concerned about his own state of mind to start worrying about others’.

  He went on, panting with familiar exertion, pressing down on his knees to help the climb. The path twisted and turned between buildings constructed at varying points during the village’s history. Stone houses stood between timber constructions, and here and there were old mud-and-seaweed homes, their thick walls still standing solid. The stench of the sea lessened so far up, and he realized how sickening the smell of mud and death was down in the ruins.

  He passed people going down, glanced at them all, and saw a mixture of shock, concern and wonder in their faces that did not sit well with him. All were emotions strong enough to cause change, and change was always dangerous.

  Here and there, where the spaces between buildings offered views down to the harbor, he paused to see what was happening. Some of the visitors’ smaller craft had moored along the mole, and from so high the movement of people disembarking was little more than a blur. A few boats had passed around the end of the mole and entered the harbor proper, but they seemed to have anchored away from the harbor or mole walls. The harbor was full of debris and dirt, and it moved like thick soup instead of seawater.

  The larger ship was moving closer under oar power. Waves broke against its hull as it headed in. As Kel watched, the huge booms started to swing around, the ship began its turn, and launches were lowered all along its port side. The launches were full of people.

  How many? Kel wondered. A hundred? More? Pavmouth Breaks had maybe two thousand inhabitants, both down in the harbor and valley, and up on the hills surrounding them. The waves had killed many, though it would be a long time before they knew the exact numbers. But the odds still seemed stacked in the Noreelans’ favor.

  Is this the way I should be thinking? Kel leaned against a wall to catch his breath. Could they really be here to hurt us? He closed his eyes and welcomed the cool breeze coming in from the sea, and he noticed a hint of something mysterious and unknown—a fruity scent he did not recognize. As he looked out to the island the idea crossed his mind, for the first time, that it was a place he had to visit.

  A chill of anticipation went through him, a thrill of excitement.

  He turned and started climbing again. The closer he drew to his rooms, the calmer he felt. There was even a selfish, dreadful part of him that still entertained the idea of escape.

  No, not escape! Retreat. But only to come back stronger.

  Yet as he reached the door to his rooms, in the long, low stone building where eight others lived, he realized that he did not yet know enough to run.

  He unlocked the door and entered, and inside, last night had not happened. The sculpture he was carving for Namior sat covered by its blanket, and the unlit fire was speckled with wellburr shavings. He paused for a moment and breathed in deeply, relishing air untainted by the disaster beyond the door. Glancing at the voice carrier tucked away in the corner of his room, he thought of Namior, working at the Moon Temple to heal people injured by the waves, perhaps thinking of him, wondering where he was and what his intentions were. Wondering who he was. He had said too much, but not yet enough, and they had plenty to talk about when the time was right.

  Kel sat at his carving table and pulled the cover from his latest work. The cliff hawk was beautifully wrought, yet it meant nothing. What was such a copy, when he could walk up to the top of Drakeman’s Hill and see the real thing? What was the purpose of trying to capture nature in art? Was it appreciation, or arrogance?

  “So many dead,” he whispered, and the hawk stared back at him with unfinished eyes. He thought of the cries he had heard that day, the tears he had seen, and the sun was barely at its zenith.

  Kel rubbed his face and looked at the dirt on his hands. There had been blood there many times before. As recently as that morning, he had been ready to spill some more. And if the situation called for it, he still was.

  He had lost his knife, but no Core soldier was ever far from his or her weapons.

  The floorboard beneath his carving table came up with a brief squeal. He drew out his weapon roll, the weapons wrapped in oilcloth, sharpened and cared for regularly since he had been there. Beneath the roll lay the bag of things he liked much less. He picked up the bag, opened the sealing string, and carefully pulled them out.

  They were communicators, but far more effective than Namior’s voice carrier. Perfected by the Core’s greatest witches, they looked like small, thumb-sized nuts trailing long, sinewy tails. When the tails were breathed upon, they grew incredibly hard and sharp, and their tips could pierce stone. Once plunged into the ground, the magic of the land flowed into the round head. Crushed, a signal would be sent to all Core members across Noreela, as though the nut itself had taken root and bloomed a desperate call for help.

  None of the weird devices had ever been used, but every Core member was in possession of several of them. Use one of those fuckers, and Noreela’s at war, he remembered O’Peeria once saying. Even she had been afraid of them.

  “I pray to the Black, the moon gods, the Sleeping Gods, and every cursed deity anyone in Noreela chooses to call their own that I don’t have to use one of these,” Kel said. But though faithless in religion, he had even less faith in himself. The prayers felt like nothing.

  He rolled the tails away, tied the three objects back in their bag and slipped it into his pocket.

  It took him a while to stow the weapons about himself. A knife into the sheath on his thigh, throwing knives tucked into the belt on the inside of his trouser waist so that their hilts were hidden, acid dust in leaf pouches in several pockets, and in his jacket pocket went the small crossbow he had used to kill his final Stranger. When he blinked, he saw O’Peeria dying beneath the thing’s disintegrating corpse.

  The only weapon he could not hide was the short sword he hung from his belt. No one would question that. He had seen many people descending into the valley armed, and if questioned, he could claim a fear of what had been washed up with the sea. I saw sea-wolf tracks, he would say.

  The final thing he picked up was the carving. It was not finished, and not quite perfect, but he liked that. It spoke of potential in a safe future to come.

  As he closed his door and prepared to go down into Pavmouth Breaks once again, Kel thought of O’Peeria, and how she had never assumed any future at all.

  HE’S ABOUT FIVE hundred years old,” O’Peeria whispers. “He must be. He knows so much, and he stinks like a fucking corpse.”

  Kel cannot help smirking. They have been drinking rotwine together all afternoon in a rough old tavern on Conbarma’s waterfront, on the northern shores of Noreela. Frequented by fishermen, rage-shell dealers and visitors from the islands of The Spine, the mo
st essential item of clothing is a knife. O’Peeria draws a certain amount of attention because she’s Shantasi, but she is able to deliver a stare of such withering strength that they are left alone.

  Somewhat drunk and tired and with Kel almost certain he will try to make love with O’Peeria later that night, they have to gather their senses to listen to the oldest Core member still alive.

  They are sitting on the deck of a large, seagoing sailing boat. The old man lives on one of the distant islands of The Spine, so it’s said, and it’s alleged that he’s watching for Strangers from the north. He has stated that this is his last-ever visit to the Noreelan mainland, so the Core has brought as many members together as they can to benefit from his experience.

  It’s the first time in his life that Kel has ever been on a boat, and the sea’s gentle movement does not sit well with a stomach full of rotwine.

  “I’ll share your joke, Shantasi,” Verrin says. Rumor has it he’s changed his name sixteen times in his life, each change following his killing of a Stranger. He is bald, his scalp scarred with a network of fine, spotted wounds. His eyes are a piercing green. He claims to be over a hundred years old, and as Kel swallows his laughter, he can well believe that.

  “My name’s O’Peeria,” she says, “and the joke’s on you.”

  Verrin smiles. “I’ve suffered much worse. But I’m here, O’Peeria, because I know more about Strangers than all of you chunks of sheebok shit combined.” A murmur passes through the dozen Core soldiers sitting on the boat’s deck. “No whispering,” Verrin says. “And nudging your neighbors. I’ve earned the right to call you all what I want, although … you know I don’t mean it.” He sits on an upturned box before them, like a teacher facing a room of unruly children, and holds up his hands. “There’s blood on these.” He points to his head. “Bitterness in here.” He sighs and looks down at his feet, and after a few beats Kel starts to think he’s fallen asleep.

  The Core soldiers are completely silent. No sense of mockery remains, because Verrin has begun, and they all know his history. There are no books, no images, no poems or songs in print, because nothing can hint at the Core’s existence. They are people who all know too much. Noreela is not alone… The four words that would change their world forever. But word is always passed down, myths have their own impetus, and Verrin has become a legend among those Core members active across Noreela.