I'm out of joint again. I'm here, sitting on the damp, rough stone jetty amongst the fish guts and screeching sea-birds and the men unloading the catch, with my bare feet dangling above the gentle slap-slap of sea water against the rocks, and at the same time I'm there, enveloped in moist soil, forgetting how to breathe, becoming less human and more like something soft and organic that spins hair thin roots like an earth-bound spider. Worms glide across my skin, waiting for me to decay. Burrowing insects gnaw at my body, lay eggs in the chewed holes. Pupae emerge, and eat me from the inside. I’m yellowing and mould-ridden, flattening and defleshing, my blood all soaked away. Darkness spreads inside me, and silence. Then my nerves awaken once more to minute pin-pricks that ripple across the rotten stain of my hollow carcass. The gods of the soil have found me, and their hair-like fingers invade me, spreading and splitting and multiplying until I am suffused with their hyphae. I am woven in their embrace once more. I listen, straining to hear their words.

“Toren…” 

The sensation snaps away and I'm back, a whole body in the hard, cold world once more. The shrieking of the birds is somehow more strident, and the painted reds and blues and yellows of the fishing boats are garish and painful to my eyes. The fish guts stink just the same. There's something about fish guts that cuts through any trance. I draw in a deep breath all the same, to make sure I haven’t forgotten how to breathe.

The tide is on the turn. A chill onshore breeze shaves the peaks off the waves and blows the water into a mess of confused interlocking patterns.

“Tell us a story!” The women mending the nets sing as they work, their shuttles flying like a wooden fish, in and out and around, knots springing into existence in their expert hands. “Tell us a story! Tell us a tale!”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Their language is not my language. It's like no language I've heard, and I've heard a few. Every sentence is a rhyme, every phrase a song, every conversation a chorus. Don't try to learn it, just sing along.

I felt understood by these people long before I understood them. I arrived in the cold part of the year clad in furs and bone-thin, and they fed me and let me sleep beneath an upturned skiff in a nest of blankets and old sail fabric while they just carried on with their lives.

Even now, with the long hot days of mid-year well behind us, with the sun rising later and climbing only halfway into the dark blue sky each day, I know them only a little more. Their words are clear to me, just as the words of any language become clear in my mind without any apparent effort on my part, a skill that has been bestowed on me for no purpose I can divine. But knowing the words of a language doesn’t mean you understand the people any more than feeling the roughness of a road beneath your feet reveals what lies beneath the ground.

“Eels a-plenty,” sings a man, “eels by the river-mouth.” He’s old and lean, skin coarsened by cycles of salt water, wind, sun, and rain, but he smiles as he sings and the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkles. They’re like a map of his happiness, those lines.

Another few fishermen repeat the song. Their intonation tells me that they're challenging him. “Eels a-plenty? Eels by the river-mouth?”

The old man sings the line again, and makes a flat palm-down gesture with both hands that means “Yes, I swear it.” He has to drop a fish knife in order to make the gesture, which only adds emphasis to it. The knife is polished and bright, with an elegantly carved bone handle. Valuable, maybe a knife that was made by an ancestor. Maybe an Old Earth knife. All the same, he drops it and makes the gesture. The other men repeat the line once more, but this time the tone is one of agreement. At least, I think they’re agreeing with him. They’re not quite in harmony. I wonder if this means most of the men are convinced about the eels but one of them is still uncertain. I can’t quite unpick the nuances in their song. Another year here by the waterside drinking in their songs, and I’m sure I’ll understand everything. But I’ve been here too long already.