The Storyteller: Demise of the Horizons

[annarti.livejournal.com]

Thirteenth Birthday

A year later, on a bright, breezy day dotted with a few puffy clouds, a magnificent ship slid up alongside Jita’s dock. It looked very old, with a classic design only the few elderly residents of Jita recognised, and they said such a style had been old even when they had been children. Written on its hull, in letters carved of long-lasting dark wood in place of modern paint, was the name Emprades.

Sen tried to appear nonchalant as she sidled up the jetty to the new-old face in her village, but she needn’t have bothered. No ship so beautiful had been to Jita before. Not even the Horizons had this level of old-world class. Everyone in the village had turned out to admire the Emprades.

The sailors, when they disembarked, didn’t seem so different from any others. They wore the same undyed pants and shirts, the same bandanas, the same look of quiet pride in their ship.

Sen headed straight for the captain as soon as she caught sight of him, a short but thickset man with a short but thick blond beard. Sen was as tall as he was, and she hadn’t anywhere near stopped growing yet.

‘Excuse me, captain?’ she chirped. ‘I’m Sen, daughter of Jin and Uti.’

The captain folded his arms and somehow managed to look down his nose at Sen despite their eyes being at the same level. Sen could see why he was the captain. ‘Ratsa, son of Gani and Thasi. They said in Netsu you were eager.’

Sen wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or an insult, so she ignored it. ‘I need to ask you about the Horizons. They said at the taxation office that you were the last ship to see it afloat.’

Captain Ratsa shrugged, his strong arms still folded. ‘And now you know the whole story.’

Sen’s heart sank, and she was sure it showed on her face. She didn’t know where to take the conversation now. It seemed over. ‘But I just—’

‘We were crossing back across the gulf from Raykin,’ the captain interrupted, voice clipped and brisk. ‘The Horizons was going the other way.’

‘Oh.’ What could she do with that? ‘Thank you, Captain,’ she said.

Captain Ratsa grunted and stepped around her on his way up the jetty.

Sen stared at his retreating back—or glared at him. How could he be so rude? She was only asking after her friend. It wasn’t as though she was truly inconveniencing him. She kicked at an empty crab shell that had found its way onto the jetty, hunched her shoulders and began walking back to the beach. She had been waiting a year for this, six years if she counted the five it had taken her to learn about the Emprades in the first place, and now the beautiful ship’s ugly captain had dashed everything for her. She didn’t know anything more than she had known five years ago.

Someone was waiting for her at the end of the jetty, a tall young man with a long face and the first attempts at patchy facial hair. ‘Sen?’ he asked.

‘That’s me,’ Sen answered, caught off-guard while her thoughts had been circling in anger at the captain. ‘Who are you?’ One of the crew, obviously.

He smiled, partly relieved, partly cheeky. ‘Kalas, son of Tsuto and Ren.’ He nodded once towards the retreating captain. ‘Don’t mind the captain. Ship got robbed when he was last in Ryas, over a month ago, and he’s taking it out on everyone he encounters. That or he’s just an arse.’

Sen gave a smile at Kalas‘ lopsided, confident grin that somehow reminded her keenly of Tu.

He waved a dismissive hand. ‘Doesn’t matter. He’s not my captain,’ he said with a wink.

Sen frowned. ‘You’re a passenger?’

‘Of sorts,’ Kalas replied with a one-shouldered shrug. ‘I paid an obscene amount of money to make him come here. Well, my captain did. There’s far more to the Horizons’ story than Captain Ratsa knows.’ Sen’s heart skipped a beat as he stood back and gave a florid Llayan bow. ‘I come on behalf of my skipper: Captain Tu, daughter of Hask and Tiseh and captain of the Orana.’

Sen’s hands went to her mouth as tears flooded her eyes from nowhere. ‘Orana?’ she repeated, and the word suddenly untapped all the questions she had wanted to know the answers to for years. ‘Where is she now? What happened? Why hasn’t she come back for so long?’

Kalas laughed as he held up his hands in defence against her tirade. ‘Hold on, hold on! Can I start at the beginning, maybe?’

Sen nodded and wiped away tears, unable to keep the grin from her face. ‘Sure. Um. Come back to my house.’ She didn’t know what feeling was foremost in her mind as she led Kalas up the beach. Relief that Tu was still alive. Fear about what had happened to her to keep her not only away from Sen for so long, but away from the whole world. Wonder at the new ship, Orana. Jealousy for Kalas for having spent, she assumed, the last six years with Tu while Sen had been left in the dark. Anger at Tu for not even sending her a message to say she was alive, and for only finding out now through one of her crew.

She tried to bottle them away at least until she heard Kalas’ story. She had been fair for six years. She could be fair for another half an hour.

Kaiji and her parents were all home eating a lunch of dried fish and seaweed with just one mouthful of fresh fish from the morning’s catch. It hadn’t been a good morning for Jita’s fishermen.

‘This is Kalas, son of Tsuto and Ren,’ Sen introduced, finding a huge grin on her face. Apparently joy was her strongest emotion, then. ‘He’s one of Tu’s crew!’

Kaiji squealed and leaped straight from her seat in the sand and up into Sen’s arms. Sen laughed and cried wordlessly into her friend’s shoulder as Kaiji hugged her tight enough to lift her off the ground in a spin. When she finally put her down again, Sen could see tears in Kaiji’s eyes, too, along with the biggest grin she had ever worn.

‘Wow,’ Kalas said over their laughter. He had already taken a place in the sand, resting back on his hands. ‘Imagine what you’ll be like when you finally see the skipper again.’

Sen laughed again as the image of running into Tu’s arms played in her mind. After so many years of waiting, it hardly seemed possible. She wiped her hands over her eyes then sat down with her back to the white wall of their dome, legs outstretched. Kaiji lay down between them, head back under Sen’s chin. ‘So! What’s the story?’

Kalas took a deep breath. ‘Ooh, pressure! I don’t know that I’m as good a storyteller as my skipper, but I’ll try. The most important thing to remember is that the rumours are almost all false. The only true one is that Horizons is, sadly, no more.’

Kaiji stiffened and gripped Sen’s knee with one hand. Sen bit her lip to avoid giving anything away. Stories were always best when you didn’t know the ending before they had begun.

‘We were sailing through completely open ocean, no land in sight but for a few distant islands, weather much like today, until dark clouds started to develop. Now, I’ve never put much stock in sea dragons, but let me tell you, storms just don’t naturally develop like this one did. There was something monstrous down in the depths, long and dark, but we were mostly paying attention to what was going on over our heads. It was truly out of nowhere. Imagine if, no more than a quarter of an hour from now, the sky was completely black with cloud except for where it was flashed with lightning and you were being lashed with rain and hail that just kept getting bigger and bigger, first little pellets, then chunks of ice the size of—of a baby’s fist. I don’t know why that was the first thing that came to mind. That was a stupid comparison, Kalas. But they were just that size! And they weren’t just falling from the sky, they were being thrown.’

He pulled down the collar of his shirt to show his shoulder, where a scar was still left, six years later, from one of the giant hailstones had struck him.

Sen’s eyes widened to see it. ‘I didn’t know they could get so big!’

‘It wasn’t natural,’ Kalas agreed. ‘And they hurt. That wasn’t the only one that hit me. A few of the crew were knocked unconscious by the hail, the sails were shredded, even the deck was starting to splinter. Apparently, though, we weren’t being destroyed fast enough for the dragons. Before we knew it, we were caught in a whirlpool. We could see them clearly now, swimming around and around in circles, long and slick, dark greeny-brown like kelp, just breaking the water’s surface. Then the biggest one started ramming the ship. It felt like we’d hit a rock, it was so solid. Then there was a shout from below, to say we were taking on water fast. Another bang like another rock, and we were sinking.’

Sen hugged her arms around Kaiji’s chest. Kaiji’s fingers dug tight into her arm.

‘Didn’t you fight back?’ Kaiji almost scolded.

‘We tried,’ Kalas said with another lopsided shrug and a regretful sigh, ‘but how can you fight a storm? Because that was the true threat, not the physical dragons themselves. We fired at them with everything we had, but they’re far more cunning than any sea creature has any right to be. Once they had made up their minds to sink us, I don’t think anything could have saved us. How do you fight a creature that can conjure a storm from nothing?’

Sen could only shake her head. This was the sort of story she had come to know sea dragons for, not the whimsical dancing coral dragons Tu had first told her of. They weren’t as big as the leviathans or kraken of the deep, but they were just as terrifying.

‘How did you survive?’ Kaiji whispered.

‘We all dove overboard as soon as the ship started sinking,’ Kalas continued. ‘Of course, the water was no safer, but at least we wouldn’t get tangled up in ropes or shredded sails. The hail stopped instantly and the clouds cleared back to the bright blue we’d had before the dragon attack, but of course the dragons were still there. I could see their shadows under the water. And, of course, we had no ship. Horizons, my home for barely a month, just disappeared under the waves. Skipper shouted at us to swim for the islands away in the distance, just in case any of us might make it.’ He took a shaky breath and wrung his hands, showing fear for the first time.

Sen rested her chin on Kaiji’s head and gripped her hand.

‘They followed us all the way.’ Kalas’ voice was small, almost strangled. ‘They just picked us off, one by one. I would’ve given up if Skip hadn’t been yelling at us not to. Hard to ignore her when she’s in a mood, you know? Even when you just want to sink under the water. The dragons must have filled themselves up, though—or maybe they wanted us to reach the shore, who knows?—because we who were left finally washed up on the beach of one of those islands, exhausted, severely depleted, hopeless, but somehow alive.’

‘How many?’ Kaiji whispered.

‘About half the crew,’ Kalos said with a bitter grimace and a heavy nod. He gave a wry laugh and shook his head. ‘Things just went bad to worse, because it turns out that group of islands were the Pirate Isles. They captured us—if “captured” is even the right word. I mean, we were half dead—and held us in their prison for… I don’t know how long. Years? I guess?’

‘I knew it,’ Sen whispered. ‘Pirate prison.’ Kaiji patted her arm in silent congratulations.

‘Anyway,’ Kalos said with a shake of his head and another single-shoulder shrug. ‘To cut it short, Skip managed to bargain our way out somehow, though we still didn’t have a ship or any provisions, any cash, even. Just… nothing. And they wouldn’t let us leave, since now we knew where the Pirate Isles were. Skip only just recently acquired the Orana, but a lot of the original crew moved on. Some went pirate themselves, some got onto the crews of the merchant traders that trade with the pirates, some wanted nothing to do with any of it and agreed to go blindfolded back to Ryas. Only a handful of us stayed loyal to Captain Tu. She’s sent us all off to the four winds now, hunting down the old crew to see if they want to join back up.’

Kalos looked straight at Sen. ‘She mentioned you, specifically.’

Sen drew in a long, sharp breath. Kaiji spun to look up at her.

‘No,’ Sula snapped in answer.

‘What?’

‘No,’ Sula repeated, more firmly. Her face was dark as she faced off against Tu’s crewman. ‘There are too many holes in your story. You just happened across the Pirate Isles, somewhere nobody has found without directions? Captain Tu recently acquired the Orana, after having been penniless only five years ago and without a ship to earn an income? No. I won’t let you take her.’

Sen could feel tears in her eyes again as she looked pleadingly, hatefully at Sula. ‘How could you? You know how much I’ve wanted this!’

‘And I indulged it, because I never expected it to come to pass.’ She sighed. ‘Think of how far you’ve come all on your own, without Captain Tu. You could sign up for the crew of any ship that came to port—earn a respectable living.’

‘You can’t do this!’ Sen shouted. ‘You—you’re not my mother.’

‘No,’ Sula agreed, smoothly, ‘But I’ve been here for you when that pirate pretender was not.’

STUFF

o THE MYSTERY IS SOLVED. Except now there are just more questions.

o Orana is the most expensive, awesomest restaurant in Adelaide. I had expected, when I was naming all Tu's ships writing the outline back in July, that by now I would have eaten at Orana. That was going to be the crowning glory of our 30th birthday week with my three besties, but then the Sydney bestie got blood clots and couldn't fly, so we went to Sydney instead. ANOTHER TIME, ORANA. WE WILL VISIT FOR SURE.