The Storyteller: The Treasure of Tisadez

[annarti.livejournal.com]

Third Birthday

It was a harsh, hot morning on the day of Tu’s third visit. Sen was on the beach early, cockling with Kaiji and Sula before the sun got too hot to deal with, though the day promised to be harsh. Nak was already out on the fishing boat. Sen could see it, away out of the mouth of the bay with the other three boats from the village. Closer to shore, anchored halfway to the island at the bay’s mouth, floated the Horizons, white sails painted pale mauve in the morning light. The sun rose slowly back over the dunes behind the little village, smearing pink and orange streaks across the wisps of cloud over the ocean. The sea was glassy flat and barely a ripple made it to shore. It was perfect for cockling.

The three of them wore bandanas tied loosely around their heads to keep the sun off once it got higher. Sen stood with her feet in the wet sand, just on the edge where the water lapped up to her ankles, but no deeper. She twisted on her toes, wiggling back and forth, arms flailing for balance and digging her feet deeper into the wet sand, until she could feel the hard cockle shells against her toes. Sen squatted down and dug up two more cockles, rinsed them off in the sea and dropped them into her bucket. She already had a good amount, but Nak would need more than that. He ate a lot when he came back from fishing, and besides, this gave her the perfect excuse to watch Tu row in.

She looked out again to the Horizons anchored in the bay. The sea was so flat today that she fancied she could hear the lapping of Tu’s oars as she rowed the little dinghy to shore.

‘Well,’ Tu cried as she ran the dinghy up the beach. ‘This is most unseasonable. It was pelting with rain the last time I was here, do you remember?’

Sen shook her head, then nodded and held out her bucket for display. ‘Look! Cockles!’

‘Yum, yum,’ Tu agreed. ‘Are there enough for me?’

Sen looked into her bucket, then peered over at Kaiji’s and shook her head. ‘Not yet,’ she said sadly.

‘I’d best help out, then. It’s been a long time since I went cockling. Will you show me?’

‘Yeah!’ Sen set her bucket on the sand and picked another spot on the beach. ‘Like this. You go wiggle, wiggle, wiggle! And then the… then the cockles. Um. They bite my toes.’

‘They bite you? Doesn’t it hurt?’

‘No,’ Sen answered, like it was obvious. ‘Then pick them up and wash them, or else the—or else the—the sand. The sand gets in your teeth.’

‘We don’t want that.’

‘No. So you have to wash them,’ she said, as stern as when Sula had told her.

‘Understood, tiny Captain,’ Tu said with a salute.

Sen frowned, not sure whether to be flattered at having been called ‘Captain’ or insulted to have been called ‘tiny’. She decided to se the record straight. ‘I’m not tiny! I’m a big girl. Bigger than Kaiji, even!’

‘I’m still older than you!’ Kaiji countered.

Tu looked between the two in surprise. ‘You are a big girl, and so you should be,’ she said, half to herself. ‘Your papa was very tall.’

Sen’s eyes glowed. ‘Papa?’ she repeated. Nak was Kaiji’s papa, not her own. Only Kaiji called him ‘Papa,’ but to everybody else, Sen included, he was Nak. Sula had told her precious little about her own papa, but she knew she had one—and a mama, too—and Sula said that was very special to have. ‘Papa was tall like me?’

‘He was,’ Tu said with a smile. Sula and Kaiji had both come closer to listen, now. ‘And so was your mama, but not as tall as papa. You have eyes like your papa, too, bright blue like the sky, and a big, big smile like your mama.’

Sen looked into the bucket of cockles. ‘Sula never talks about Mama and Papa. Only they, um, they died before I was—when I was a baby.’

‘That’s right,’ Tu told her, then sighed. ‘I promised I’d never say this to you, because I remember how I hated it, but I’ll tell you when you’re older.’

Sen made a face. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard that phrase. ‘Why not now? I’m a big girl! I’m three years old!’

‘Because it’s a scary story,’ Tu answered, ‘and I don’t want to scare you because that’s mean. Am I mean?’

‘No,’ Sen answered, shaking her head, then her face brightened. ‘You’re nice, because you bring presents!’

Tu grinned, relieved. ‘Always presents,’ she answered with a wink. She turned back to her dinghy and carefully slung a small canvas bag over one shoulder. She pinched her fingers to her lips as though buttoning them closed. ‘This one you have to keep very, very secret,’ she said in a harsh whisper. ‘Can you keep a secret?’

Sen nodded vigorously. ‘I can!’ she whispered back. ‘I can keep a secret! Kaiji, you can’t tell anyone. Not even the fish, all right?’

Kaiji nodded and buttoned her own lips closed.

‘All right.’ Tu looked up at Sula, standing with arms folded, her own cockle bucket hanging from her elbow. ‘Let’s go back home and open it, shall we?’

‘Yeah!’

Sen grabbed Kaiji’s hand and ran away with her up the beach to the sailcloth that sheltered their home. It had been hot for three days in a row now, so they had spent almost no time inside. Sen collapsed onto the sand, lying on her back with all her limbs spread out like a starfish as she caught her breath. When Tu and Sula caught up to them, Tu ducked straight through the front door.

‘Phwew!’ her voice called from the gloom. ‘Hot in here, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah,’ Kaiji said, as through it was obvious. ‘It’s been hot—it’s hot over—for days.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Tu poked her head out the door. ‘How many days?’

Sen looked down at her hands, flexing fingers until there were enough that looked right. ‘This many! This many days.’

‘Wow!’ Tu said, mouth wide with shock. ‘Seven days?’

‘It’s been three,’ Sula corrected, ‘But it might as well be seven at this rate. We must be due a cool change soon. I’m sure summer’s never lasted this long before.’

Tu shrugged and sat down in the doorway. ‘This’ll help.’ She carefully laid the bag on the sand, reached into it, and drew out something that almost looked like another piece of coral, but this one was bright, shining gold. Even in the shadows of dawn, it sparkled.

Sula gasped a word harsh word under her breath and dropped to her knees. Sen had only ever heard her use that word once, when she had smacked her thumb with a hammer fixing the fishing boat, but Nak used it more often, usually when he thought Sen couldn’t hear him. They both told Sen off when she tried to say it, though, so she and Kaiji only used it when Nak and Sula weren’t around. She didn’t know what it meant, but she knew it was naughty and that made it fun to say in secret. Hearing Sula say it now made her exchange naughty giggles with Kaiji. Her friend covered her mouth with her hands to try and hide her own giggles.

‘This is real gold,’ Tu told them both. The misshapen chunk of metal sat neatly in her palm, bright gold against her rich brown skin. ‘From the island of Tisadez.’

‘No,’ Sula said, her voice cracking on the word. ‘We can’t possibly accept this. How much is it worth?’

‘It’s the weight of eighty-three gold pieces,’ Tu answered. Sula said the naughty word again, making Tu grin with the girls. ‘And it’s not just for you, or just for Sen, either.’ She held it out for Sen to take. It was heavy, much heavier than Sen had expected it to be, and she nearly dropped it.

‘This bay is perfect for a dock,’ Tu said. ‘It’s sheltered not only by two headlands, but an island, too. It’s deep and with a very short dropoff. It’s a wonder nobody’s built a town here before you.’

‘We’re too far from Ryas,’ Sula explained.

‘But you’re closer to the rest of the world,’ Tu argued, her smile as bright as the gold in Sen’s hands. ‘The only reason people won’t dock here is because there’s nowhere to dock. This will easily be enough to buy your town the jetty I promised, wood and labour and all.’

‘Story?’ Sen asked. Tu’s presents always came with a story.

Tu grinned and made herself comfortable in the doorway, knees up, elbows hooked around them and hands clasped. Sen handed the gold to Kaiji and imitated Tu with a grin.

‘I felt a little guilty after last year,’ Tu admitted with a sheepish shrug of one shoulder. ‘Sula had the right of it; what does a piece of dragon tail do? Nothing. So I made up my mind to make that right. We sailed all the way up to my old nursery waters around Tisadez, when I was back on the treasure-hunter ship, Tranquilo. It’s a tropical island, lush with so many trees and vines and plants of all kinds that the whole island is like one giant, living bush, but that’s not all that’s there. There’s one village, almost primitive in the way they live, except for one thing: gold. Tisadez is famous all over the world for their gold, but the villagers guard it most jealously. I don’t know why; they have nothing to spend it on. They just think it looks pretty so they make jewellery from it, mostly to wear, but sometimes they’ll need something from outsiders and trade for it.’

‘What did you trade?’ Sula asked, voice somehow dark, ‘For this much gold?’

Tu’s face broke into her cheeky, half-threatening grin. ‘We didn’t trade.’

‘Oooooh,’ Sen gasped. Trading was everything to a Tsaythi.

Tu’s grin grew broader, then she gave an immodest shrug. ‘You know me; I’m an adventurer. Why do something easy and boring when I can make it an adventure? So we sailed around to the other side of the island, where there are far fewer locals to fight, but where the reefs are also far more treacherous.’

‘Dragons?’ Kaiji asked, half-hopeful, half-fearful. Since Tu’s last visit, both she and Sen had asked for all the stories the villagers knew about sea dragons. Every one of them had been scary, about dragons tearing ships apart in storms, or circling and circling to make whirlpools that would capsize a ship, or lying in wait for a storm to wreck them so they could feast on the crew. Even so, Sen still remembered Tu’s first tale of them, leaping and dancing in the water.

Tu laughed and shook her head. ‘Not this time, though they might have been useful! No, just a whole lot of tropical fish, brightly-coloured jewels under the water, and a few reef sharks—mostly harmless little creatures. I do have an excellent navigator these days, though. He guided us beautifully to a safe harbour, right in between two towering cliff faces where half of us got into dinghies and rowed ashore to a tiny hidden beach I knew about from my childhood. The sand there is black, not white.’ She tilted her head thoughtfully. ‘I should have brought a jar of it, just to prove I’d been there. Not to worry.’

‘Is this safe for the children?’ Sula asked, concern in her voice.

Tu winked. ‘I’ll try my best,’ she said. ‘We did meet up with some of the locals on the beach, but my crew and I are all well-trained.’ She flexed her left arm to show off one bulging bicep. ‘We fought them off and continued up the beach, then began climbing the cliffs that surrounded it. There’s a cave, high up in the rocks, that we used to come to often on the Tranquilo. It’s dangerous to climb up to, because right below, the water is very shallow and the coral below it is very, very sharp. Almost every time we went, someone—usually one of the newer crewmates—got too greedy, carried back too much gold and fell off the cliff face.’

Sen gasped and covered her eyes. ‘No!’

‘Sorry, kiddo. Nobody fell off this time, though. My crew now doesn’t know the way up the cliff, so I was the only one to climb it, and I only wanted one piece.’ She gestured to the gold Kaiji was turning around in her hands.

‘You risked your life for one gold nugget?’ Sula pressed. She sounded doubtful, even sceptical.

‘If you want to put it that way,’ Tu said with a shrug. ‘I know my way around there, though. I grew up on that cliff, and anyway, I love the danger. It’s a thrill for me. If you still think I was risking my life, though, then I did it for you.’ She smiled tenderly down at Sen. ‘Build a jetty with it,’ she said, ‘and you’ll make me proud.’

STUFF

o I know how chapter titles work now! Cos every chapter will, of course, have a story about Tu in it, so that'll be the chapter title now. Seems more relevant than Sen's age, which I'll just stick in as a subtitle. Still don't know what the title of the actual NaNo is, though.

o These are cockles. The eastern states call them pipis, which is equally adorable, but idk why since the overwhelming majority of cockles in Australia exist around Goolwa and the Coorong. Which is South Australia. But shit knows there's no convention in the naming of shellfish around this country anyway, so whatever. I frequently went cockling with Grandpa as a kid, then we'd take them home and cook them up in boiling water, and inevitably get sand in our teeth.

o Lookit Captain Tu, living up to her promises and all. Isn't she a good girl?

Comments

[annarti.livejournal.com]

Cockles are yummy, though I don't reckon I've had them since Grandpa died. I should go cockling.

She learned he was tall! And that's about it. WATCH THIS SPACE.

They get heat in summer but I'm imagining this is like, the month before winter. Three days of hot in May/November (depending on your hemisphere) is UNSEASONABLE.

Tsayth has swear words! Swear words are exciting.

Shiny-now is FAR more important than... whatever Tu was talking about. SHINY.