The sea is the land and the land is the sea. These people, when they step onto the shore they’re counting the moments until they’re on the water again. Their houses are afterthoughts, ramshackle wattle and daub cells that lean one next to the other like a hive made by drunken bees. I’ve seen inside, there’s little more than bedding, hearths, and a few drying herbs hanging here and there. They don’t even sleep in the same bed from one day to the next, but just drop into a convenient space when they grow tired of weaving nets and mending sails.
They sing one another to sleep. Parents sing stories of the great sea-farers of Old Earth for the children, then when the little ones are asleep they sing the currents and the tides to one another. They’re never all asleep at the same time. There’s always one or more standing watch, singing a breath-song that sounds like waves lapping slowly against shingle.
Their boats are brightly painted marvels, elegantly shaped planks of wood slotted together in such a way that the tension of the timbers against one another seals the boat against the water. The smallest are the oar-boats, needle-like vessels with barely any draft that skip over the waves. These are powered by a single long oar, and they are fiendishly difficult to control as the oarsman must be standing. The young people race one another in oar-boats, paddling out when the seas are rough and challenging one another to mount ever-greater waves.
More numerous are the sixen-boats, wide-bodied and fat-bellied, keeled, with a high prow. They have a crew of six men, but that half-dozen does the job of twice that number when a sixen-boat is under sail. Every man on the crew must be able to row, raise sail, cast net, reel out lines, navigate, haul in catch. A sixen crew at work is like a flock of starlings at sunset, a constant stream of coordinated movement with no need for a leader to shout commands.
Sixen crews bond for life. Their boat designs are unique, like tattoos in wood, each colour and shape telling something of the men, the boat, and their history together. I cannot explain more, because the people lack the words to explain it. “The voice of the boat is colour,” they sing.
Many days have passed since Ang Fromah died. Long enough for the weeping to have stopped but recent enough for the memories to be fresh. She was toothless-old and her song had faded to a quiet whisper, but in her prime she had been the best at everything, and she made sure everyone knew so. The loudest singer, the fastest net-maker, the best oar-boat rider (until she was dashed against rocks and broke a leg), and the most argumentative and difficult woman the village had ever known. Everyone loved and feared her in equal measure, and promised her that she would have the death that every one of her people desired, dying upon the sea.
These people believe that they came from the water, and that after they die that is where they return. The most perfect death, they assert, is drowning. To be enclosed in the cold embrace of the sea, to replace the air in the body with salt water, to sink to the bottom and gently settle into the sand, that is the most direct way to the afterlife.
Most of them do die at sea, that is certain. There are a hundred ways to die at sea, none of them pretty, but Ang wanted the brightest sixen-boat to sail her out to the deepest waters so she could slip beneath the waves with an anchor-rock in each pocket. She’d been demanding this end for more than a season, but her daughters had hesitated. “Next tide,” they sang. “Wait for the neap tide, wait for the blue skies, wait for the orcas to return.”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
They waited, and Ang grew weaker. Then on the eve of her last voyage, while her feet were still on dry land, she breathed her last. The weeping was all the more bitter because her dying wish had not been granted. So the villagers tied up their boats, placed Ang’s lifeless body into her old oar-boat, and carried her to the Stone Ship.
This vessel is the strangest boat of all. It is built of smooth, finely carved pink stone, and sits on a small island upstream of the river mouth. It is ancient, made - so they say - by the ancestors, using tools and knowledge that was lost when the Old Earth passed away. Fully three hundred strides long, it is shaped like no boat I have ever seen on the Inner Sea, geometrically perfect. The prow is a triangular prism of solid stone, the main body of the vessel constructed from vast blocks of stone with edges so clean that the joints between blocks are all but invisible.
The Stone Ship does not sail, but when the river is in spate after the late-year rains or when the snow melts from the mountains, the water runs high against its flanks. The people say that long ago, in the early days of the Old Earth, the Stone Ship sailed across the Outer Sea, nudged along by a great whale. When the Outer Sea broke through the Great Gap to fill the dry basin that became the Inner Sea, the Stone Ship was thrust through in a great torrent, and finally made its way to the furthest reaches of the Inner Sea and finally to their village.
Before they carry Ang into the Stone Ship, I wade out across the river and place my hands on it. The stone speaks to me in the way that only stone can speak, which is a series of ticks and groans and low rumbles, and it tells me that it had rested on this spot for some little while. By stone reckoning, it means the ship has been in this spot since Old Earth times. I had thought the tales of the Stone Ship sailing the seas somewhat fanciful. I’m no boat-builder, but I can’t see how a ship of unmortared stone could float. Of course, I will share neither my suspicions or my insights with the villagers. Why pollute their beliefs with mere facts? Instead I sit respectfully by the riverside beneath the fronds of a great fern and watch as the people carry Ang Fromah in her oar-boat up the ladders and into the Stone Ship.
“Take the wheel, Ang,” sing the people. “Take the wheel and sail, the wind blows straight and the sea shows grace, take the wheel and sail.”
I watch Ang’s daughters carry her oar-boat back to dry land, and the funeral party move away to the quayside. The tidying of the long wooden ladders is left to one old man, who lifts them away from the Stone Ship and places them on the ground as if they were as light as willow-switches.
“Where go oar-boat?” I ask, trying to inject a note of song into my spoken words. The old man nods appreciatively, recognising my efforts at communication.
“Ang’s oar she holds, for when the seas rise again all ancestors must heave to and row away,” he sings in a high, somewhat shaky quaver. “An oar-boat without an oar is driftwood, we give it to the sea.”
I nod. The words make sense, if not the intent. He lifts the ladders beneath strong arms and starts the walk back to the village. I make to rise and follow him, but something catches my mind’s eye and I sit back down again to wait for it to come into focus.