Tales of Noreela 04: The Island

by Tim Lebbon

“No one from Noreela,” Namior whispered.

  Kel searched around for a reason: blue blooms on a tree they had not noticed; heavy spiderwebs casting a hazy blue light. But there was nothing.

  Namior shivered and leaned into Kel, craving contact. “This is all so wrong. I just can’t imagine …”

  “It’s harsh,” Kel said. “But many of the great thinkers have said there must be more than just water across the seas.”

  Namior shook her head. “It’s just more than we can think about, more than we know. Thinking they might exist and meeting them are … two very different things.”

  “I knew a Shantasi,” Kel said.

  “O’Peeria.” Namior said her name with no inflection; Kel had never been open about his lost love.

  “Even though she was Shantasi, and they bestow great importance on their ancestral heritage, she found the idea difficult.”

  “Shanti wasn’t very far away, so the stories say.”

  “Close enough to sail to in ten days.”

  “Maybe we should leave,” Namior said, but when Kel looked at her he knew she did not mean that. There was fear and dread, but her eyes also glittered with an excitement he knew was reflected in his own.

  “We must be close to a settlement by now,” he said. “Once we’ve seen that, it’ll be time to leave. I need to see as much as I can.”

  “For the Core?”

  “And for myself.”

  “I can hear the songs they’ll sing already,” Namior said, smiling softly.

  They moved on much more carefully, conscious that they were on land where Strangers were known to tread. Kel wondered whether the lizard was one of their own; a Komadian more unusual than simply a human wearing blue skin. He wondered so much …but safety was his prime concern. He could not risk Namior, and more important, he could not risk himself. The weight of Noreela’s future pressed on his shoulders and weighed in his pocket, and he had spent too long losing strength.

  At last the forest ended, trees fading away into a beautiful grassland that stretched along that flank of the island. To their left, perhaps a mile up the slope, more trees began, different varieties from those they had come through, the spaces between trunks clogged with a dark green shrub. To their right, down the slope, was the sea. And across the sea, for the first time since they had landed, they could see Noreela.

  The sun was heading across the head of the island, and soon the grassland before them would be in afternoon shadow. A mile ahead of them, where the grassland ended and buildings began, a tall, dark structure curved up at the sky.

  Kel saw movement, and halfway to the structure were the people they’d seen in the forest. The blue-skinned man was in the lead, following a rough path across the hillside toward the coastal village.

  “What is that thing?” Namior asked, but Kel already heard recognition in her voice.

  It was tall, perhaps a hundred steps. Its surface was a dull black that gave out no reflection. Its pinnacle was pointed, its base square, and it curved gently over the village whose boundary it seemed to mark.

  “Protection?” she said. “From the things in the forest, maybe?”

  “Maybe. But do you see what it is?”

  Namior nodded. “Same as the thing they’re building above Steep Hill.”

  “So what are they protecting Pavmouth Breaks from?”

  Namior shrugged, barely able to take her eyes from the huge construction.

  “Let’s wait and see them pass it,” Kel said. “They’ll be there soon. Then maybe we can go up into the tree line there, curve around above the village, take a closer look.”

  “Closer,” Namior said, nervous. But she did not object. She had not yet taken her eyes from the tall black structure.

  The Komadians walked casually across the grassland, pausing just once when the blue-skinned man pointed out something on the ground. They gathered around, looked and went on. Just four friends out for a walk in the wilds. Kel had not seen any weapons, though it was possible that they carried knives and short swords beneath their flowing clothes.

  As they approached the black monolith they climbed a set of steps, negotiating a ragged ridge in the land that seemed to mark the village’s extremes, the levels beyond all slightly higher. Without seeming to acknowledge the tall structure, they disappeared into the village.

  The sea shushed against the shore to their right, the beach out of sight. Below the village, Kel could see the edge of a harbor, and a few unrigged masts bobbed here and there.

  “Some of those buildings seem strange,” Namior said. “It’s too far to see properly, but …”

  Kel agreed, but he could not make out what made them unusual either. “We’ll get closer.”

  They moved back into the forest, and when the trees and undergrowth were deep enough to hide their movements from the village, they turned uphill. They moved much more cautiously now, and the forest never felt safe. Things could be hiding from them, waiting to pounce. And Komadians walked here.

  Everything was strange, and Kel felt that he should be noting things, remembering certain leaf shapes or plants’ stem structures, consigning to memory the sweet birdsongs and scratching sounds that reverberated between the trees. But he was a soldier, not a man of study. If the time ever came, then the artists and book writers could make the place their own.

  They came to a place where the land lay open, a deep wound dark with shadows and hazy with steam. Pausing at its edge, Kel felt a low rumble in his stomach, rising through his feet and legs from the ground. There was a rhythm there, like the signature of subterranean drums. He felt queasy, and Namior touched his arm, her face pale, skin slick with sweat.

  Leaning over, feeling Namior grab his belt and pull back, Kel looked down into the pit. His view was mostly obscured, but between the mist and darkness, he caught a brief glimpse of glinting metal, and the orange glow of intense heat. Perspective was deceiving; it could have been ten steps deep, or something immense half a mile down.

  “What can this…?” Kel could not finish the sentence. Neither of them knew what the crack in the ground could be, and whatever lay below was a mystery. The gentle mist rose, and where it touched Kel’s skin it left a warm, slightly oily residue.

  “I can feel it in my bones,” Namior whispered.

  “Let’s move on,” Kel said. “This might not be safe.” They headed uphill away from the rent in the land, and the irony of his words was not lost on him. It hung with him like the echo of a warning.

  This place is the greatest discovery in Noreelan history, he thought, but he could not welcome that idea.

  There had already been bloodshed, and many deaths. And “greatest” could easily mean most deadly.

  NAMIOR WAS AMAZED. Everything was new, and every few beats she wanted to watch a brightly colored butterfly, mull over a spiked seedpod on the end of a plant stem, listen to the birds. But with each new wonder came a feeling of dread, and her heart was confused.

  Several times she pierced the soil with her ground rod, listening for the language of the land. Each time the result was the same: nothing. So she tried to open her perception, searching for a language she could not know or understand, but which she could hear and feel. Still, there was nothing. The land was dead to her, without magic, and that made her sick to her soul.

  The blue-skinned man had scared her. The hole in the ground spoke of deeper mysteries. Everything she had ever believed was shaken, and the shaking continued with every step they took.

  She could feel Kel’s tension and the fear that kept his muscles warm and his limbs loose. But she could also sense his strength, and with every beat that strength seemed greater. He had a purpose in mind, a mission to perform, and she could almost taste his determination.

  They edged uphill through the forest, pausing now and then to assess their surroundings. Namior looked for spreads of leaves in the tree canopy that did not move in the breeze, bark on their trunks that did not change shade as their aspect altered, and shrub limbs t
hat remained motionless as insects and hand-sized butterflies lifted from their flowers. She felt observed every step of the way, but whatever watched kept to itself.

  Kel altered their route slightly, peering down through the trees at the village and the monolith at its boundary. That terrified her. They were building its cousin across the sea, its base set in the Noreela she knew and loved. Protection, subjugation—whatever its intent, she feared it. The tidal waves might well have been unintentional, but the metal-clad Stranger was a thing of war.

  Kel paused, and she almost walked into him. “Pond,” he said. But even before she looked, she knew from his voice that it was so much more.

  It was quite small, no more than fifteen steps across. Around its circumference several carved logs provided seating places, none of them occupied at present. Stout, long plants grew at its edge, hanging plump blue fruits out across the water. As Namior watched, a sticky limb erupted from the pond, plucked a fruit and disappeared again.

  It was pink and slimy, and the width of her arm.

  “What is that?”

  Kel shook his head and stepped closer.

  “Kel—”

  He held up his hand, still not taking his eyes from the pond, and Namior had to follow.

  The water’s surface rippled, calming as they approached and stood at its edge. It was shaded by the tree canopy, its depths unknown, but here and there she could make out a pale shape huddled just below the surface, motionless. The sense that the pond was full of something other than water was strong.

  Dozens more fruits hung just above the pond, and many more stems had been relieved of their burden, springing upright again and already showing the bulbous signs of fresh fruit growths.

  There was an acidic odor, and the tang of something sour on the air. Namior was not sure whether it originated from the pond or the fruits growing above it.

  Kel knelt and drew his sword, but Namior put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t.”

  Kel ignored her. Where the blade touched the water, ripples spread, and they were interrupted by ripples from elsewhere as the pond seemed to shift. There were several splashes that Namior was too slow to see—she witnessed only the disturbed aftermath—and she tried to focus on what Kel was doing.

  I can run, if it takes him or hurts him I can run back to the boat and—

  Kel probed deeper and lifted something with the blade. “Gills,” he said. He stood and backed into Namior, turned and grabbed her arm, then started walking quickly away. His grip tightened, hurting, and she had to follow.

  “What was it?” she asked.

  “Gills. It had gills.”

  And when he let go she walked silently with him, because she remembered his description of the Strangers he had met and killed in Noreela.

  As they fled up the slope, she heard the distinctive sound of something splashing in the pond behind them, its echo pursuing them between the trees like mockery.

  SHE DID NOT mention the pond again. That would come later. There would be plenty to talk about later.

  As they drew closer to the village, still hidden away in the forest, they began to make out the shades of other large structures in the distance. They seemed to match the first tower, though much farther away, and at first Namior thought they were tree branches close by. But it soon became clear that there were other tall spires around the village, and that some of them were connected.

  “Chains?” Namior asked.

  “Maybe. Or ropes, or wires. What in the Black could they be for?” Kel’s concern was magnified in Namior, and she stayed close, enjoying the heat and smell of him.

  Lines stretched across the village from one structure to the next. Some of them must have been many hundreds of steps in length, yet they did not sag.

  “I see five,” Kel said. “Can you see the tip of that one down there? Must be close to the harbor, or in it.”

  “Do you think they’re building one on Pavmouth Breaks’ harbor right now?”

  “Remember the woman telling us they’d seen something strange in the water?”

  Namior nodded, and realization came. “So they could be doing all this under our noses.” A sinking feeling of defeat weighed her down.

  “Yes, or beyond the sight of most villagers. And at the same time, they tell Chief Eildan that they come in peace, and offer samples of their steam technology that will blind most people to what’s really happening.”

  “We have to get back,” Namior said. She thought of her mother, suspicious but still open-minded, and her great-grandmother, subject to her worst craze yet. “We have to go, warn Eildan, tell everyone what we’ve seen here and—”

  “What have we seen?” Kel leaned against a tree and wiped a hand across his face, dirtying his skin even more. “They’re building that thing above Steep Hill, and they have the same here… but maybe they’re sea defenses. Maybe, when the island shifts, Komadia is also under threat from its impact on the sea, and these things form some sort of barrier?”

  “You believe that?”

  “No. But hundreds in Pavmouth Breaks would. It sounds plausible, doesn’t it? They destroy half our village, and think they can help by replicating the defenses they themselves use.”

  “Not everyone will believe lies like that.”

  “They don’t need everyone’s belief. And we can’t fight this with half a village of survivors.”

  “What about the pond? Those things?”

  Kel shrugged, his expression growing dark. “Unless anyone else has seen a Stranger, that means nothing.”

  “So it’s all down to the Core,” Namior said. “But what if you can’t contact them, even when we get back?”

  “We have to assume I will, somehow. And when the time comes, we’ll need to tell them as much as we can.”

  She nodded, smiling with little humor. “I’m scared to shitting death, Kel, but yes. I want to see more. It’s amazing and …” She shook her head.

  “And horrible.”

  They moved nearer to the village, and when they were as close as they could go while remaining under cover of the trees, they paused and sat in the shadows.

  Namior had never seen buildings like them. The walls seemed to be made of metal, colored and curved into many shapes and forms. The colors were mostly subdued, autumnal tones, and most were gently curved, not sharp and spiked. But there were exceptions. A building lower down the slope toward the sea was much higher than most others, its conical roof steep and spiked with vicious-looking arrowhead shapes. The roof was lined up and down with different-colored metals, and some of the colors hurt Namior’s eyes to look at; not because they were so bright, but because she did not know them.

  Her blood ran cold. She looked up at the sky, and it seemed just like any sky she’d see above Pavmouth Breaks. But when night fell on the place, she wondered whether she would know the stars?

  “Namior, that temple in the middle …” Kel said, trailing off.

  “It’s just the light. The way the sun’s striking it. I know spells that use the sun to dazzle and confuse, and change the way you see things.”

  “Spells? I thought you sensed no magic here.”

  “None that I know,” she said, “but we know they have their own.”

  The closer Namior looked, the more she started to make out a few differently styled buildings. There were several two-story houses made of wood, their angles and edges lined with folded metal panels. Another building, close to the edge of the village, was a low, domed structure of mud and reeds, windows carved through its thick walls and surfaces bleached almost white by sunlight.

  “I can’t see anyone,” Kel said.

  “No. I have the image of movement everywhere I look, but …”

  “Those things surround the village. They never quite intrude… always built just out from the village’s edge.” He pointed, drawing an imaginary line between the tall structures.

  “Strange.” Namior stared down the slope, across the rooftops to the sea. The ocean appear
ed as it always had, with no odd colors to confuse, no textures to scare. She concentrated on the swells and white-crests, taking comfort in the sea’s constant existence. Then she looked up slightly, and across the sea lay Noreela. Pavmouth Breaks was a smudge in the River Pav’s valley, and though she could pick out no individual buildings, still she could place her home. If she could see so far, perhaps she would meet her mother’s gaze returned her way.

  “We should go,” Kel said.

  “I thought—?”

  “Down into the village. Just the edge. Go past those things, see what’s different, see if they cast anything across the village that might help us.”

  “What if we’re seen?”

  “We need to make sure we aren’t.” His eyes softened, and he leaned forward to plant a kiss on her lips. Namior closed her eyes, shutting out the alien place for a blissful beat. Then Kel pulled away, and when she looked again he was pointing down the grassy slope.

  “From here to that boulder,” he said. “Then from there, through that long grass to the ridge just outside the village. Over the ridge, across to that domed mud-built building. Only a couple of windows pointing this way. Then we listen and watch, and try to get a feel for the place.”

  “I’m not sure I really want to feel it,” Namior said. “It’s not a place for us, Kel. Not for Noreelans.”

  “And Noreela is not for them,” he said firmly. “It never will be. I need to know more, Namior.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “You can wait,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Namior, I’m faster than you, and—”

  “No! Someone’s got to look after you.” And I don’t want to be alone.

  “Right. Follow me.”

  Without any more talk, leaving no time for contemplation and doubt, Kel broke cover and ran.

  TIME SEEMED TO flex. It took a while to work their way carefully across the open ground, but it felt like a few beats. When they reached the ridge that ran around the perimeter of the village, Kel climbed, using rock outcroppings and exposed roots as hand-and footholds. Namior followed, and as she cleared the top it felt as if they were climbing into the village from underground.