I have been sitting by the Stone Ship for hours. The air is cooling rapidly and the sun is dipping behind the modest hill that rises behind the village. I am stiff and aching from sitting motionless, but I have no recollection of the passing of time. I force my memories to resurface. Ang Fromah’s funeral rites, yes. Then the old man with the ladders. An oar-boat without an oar. Then…something came into my mind, I cannot determine what. There is a gap in my memory for the time I was sitting here oblivious to the world. I touch the ground beneath my legs, but there is no sign that the gods beneath the ground have reached up to me. Did I slip out of joint? I don’t know.

I stand, muscles complaining. I’m a young man, more than twenty summers but I think no more than twenty-five. I should be strong and lithe, but my strength has been seeping away while I have been biding my time with the fishing people. It’s too comfortable here, I’ve made excuses to myself: I want to understand them, find out who they really are. That’s why I have lingered. But the truth is that I’ve lost sight in my pilgrimage to understand myself, and it’s been easier to let myself sleep beneath an upturned boat and eat the preserved fish that is left out for me each day, like some kind of house-bound animal.

I had told myself that I would see out the cold months and recommence my journey when the weather warms, but I see now that it would be all too easy to hesitate, delay, wait another week and another, and find myself still here a year later. I should move on.

The place where I first saw the fishing village is a few minutes’ walk away, at a spot where the path divides at the summit of a bald, round hill. I wheel around, getting my bearings. It’s that hill, right there, dark in front of the setting sun. I stride towards it, determined to rediscover the place where I paused my journey and make a promise to myself to begin again soon.

The ferns that soften the hillside are dying back, making the climb easy. Halfway up I turn to look, and I can frame the village, the quayside, the boats, the people, the river-mouth and the Stone Ship without turning my head. Such a small place, but such full lives. Perhaps I’ve lingered through jealousy, envious of their simple riches, or maybe I hoped that by staying awhile I would absorb something to fill the strange gaps inside me. Then I laugh at my weak excuses. “You’re just lazy, Toren. You like fish and good company more than the open road. Get on with you!”

I complete the climb. The sun is little more than a sliver of gold, but there’s enough light to make out the worn path that traverses the gently rounded peak. Facing the Inner Sea with the sun behind me, I spread my arms as if to embrace the vast, horizonless body of water. The path to my left is where I came from. The path to the right is where I will continue. I drag a line in the dust with my shoe, marking my starting point.

I freeze, motionless. Slowly, slowly, I lower myself to the ground, belly-down. I rotate myself until I am looking sunwards, and peer into the shallow valley on the far side of the hill. The faint smell of dried meat and a distant metallic clang was all it took for my sense of self-preservation to take over and collapse me to the ground. Neither the smell nor the sound have any place being here. The fishing-people don’t hunt or preserve meat, and there is little good hunting in these lands either. Neither do they have much use for metal, apart from scavenged wire that they make into fish-hooks and a handful of precious knives. So who is here?

I slow my breathing and open my senses. Now would be the perfect time for the gifts that the gods of soil bestowed on me to spring to life in a useful and predictable way. Let go, I tell myself. Let it happen.

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I flicker out of joint for a moment. A brief image of well-armed men in quiet, urgent debate appears in my mind. From them comes a sense of hunger, and something else…desperation, maybe. A need to control? I don’t understand what my senses are telling me.

I replay the vision in my mind. Cloth-covered plates of scavenged metal bound with leather straps over travel-stained jerkins. Heavy boots. Blades, hand-axes. A longbow. How many of them? I’m unsure. A small crowd. More than ten. I try to picture them in turn so that I can count them, but they slip beyond my mental grip.

Then I know, just as if one of them had turned to speak to me. Twenty. We are the Fighting Twenty. None may stand against us and live.

I inch backwards, slowly, slowly. Only when I am some way back down the hill do I turn and run towards the village.

The funeral has become a celebration. Poddick, a foul brew of bitter fruit and fermented seaweed, is being drunk. Songs are becoming bawdy. Children are running here and there. These people make music with their voices, and have no need for stringed or blown instruments, but they love to drum, and several of the wooden barrels used to store salted fish have been pulled together, and an unruly group of drummers are building a complex rhythm to accompany the song. The group is dynamic and constantly changing, with new drummers joining as others leave, the complex rhythm evolving in response.

I had fully intended to share the news of the nearby warriors with the most senior people in the village, but my intent drains away as I watch them variously drinking, drumming, laughing, and singing. What did I think I was going to tell them anyway? “There are men in the valley!” Who, they would ask. What do they want? “I don’t know!” Did you sing a question to them? “No…” What do they smell like? This is a common question for these people. People like me coming into the village from the hill path smell of dust and sweat. These people smell of salt and sea and fish. “I didn’t smell them,” I would have to say. Why? Because I only dreamt them. The smell and the sound were just figments of my imagination. Too long on the road, imagining brigands and cut-throats lurking around every corner.

I am at the edge of the village watching the celebrations, and a feeling of isolation and loneliness overwhelms me. These people are not my people. I don’t know who my people are. I don’t know who I am. All I know about myself is this: I woke up in a forest clearing almost buried beneath leaves and dirt, and I have no memory of anything that came before, or why I was there. I had no injury, no clothes, no possessions. The nails of my hands were long, as if I had left them untended and unused for a month. My skin was soft, like that of a newborn child, and my hair long. I was lean and unfed, but healthy.

I left that place, begged and stole until I was shod, clothed, and less hungry, and began walking. To where, or for what reason, I know not, but I am haunted by visions of decay, of burial, of rotting in the ground and being eaten by worms. In these dreams I am transformed into something without flesh that is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, stretched into a skein of glowing thread deep within the soil, and it is at these moments that I hear the gods of the soil speak to me. I wish I knew what they were saying.

I walked to show myself that I am alive, and vital. I walked in the hope of finding a wise one who could touch my forehead and explain my past. I walked in the hope of finding someone who recognises me as one of their own, someone who would take me into their arms and call me brother.

My name is not even my own. Toren simply means “outsider” in one of the common Inner Sea languages. It’s the word that the children shouted to the adults when I stumbled into their settlement a few days after emerging from the forest.

I retreat to my upturned boat on the quayside, abandoning the idea of warning the villagers about the nearby warriors. I probably only imagined them anyway. My mind plays tricks on me that I don’t understand. Why should I drag these people into my strangeness? They have left me a meal and a cup of poddick. I will leave them to their lives and the sea. I resolve to depart the next morning.