On the Isle of Sound and Wonder

by Alyson Grauer

  “As long as it’s just you and me,” Aurael told the little girl, “I’m happy. Just you and me and your doll, and the island.”

  “And Father,” added Mira cheerfully. “Father’s here, too.”

  “Right,” agreed Aurael. “But I don’t want to visit with him. I only like talking to you.”

  Mira beamed at him, patting the trunk of the tree with one small hand. “I like talking to you too, Orryell.”

  “It’s Aurael,” he said dryly.

  “That’s what I said,” she answered, and began to draw in the sand again.

  A few days later, he startled awake just before dawn, feeling some sort of buzz along the trunk of his tree. The roots of his prison hummed with the echoes of something powerful nearby, and Aurael remembered the way he had felt the magic resonate when Corvina had been nearby. This felt similar, but amplified, as focused as light passing through a magnifying lens.

  “Who’s there?” he called, defensively. “Who are you?”

  The birds had not yet begun to sing in the woods, but there was a rosy glow in the east that reflected across the clouds and the tops of the waves. Something moved beyond his tree, in the shadows. Aurael pressed against the tree bark, trying to see more clearly.

  “I can hear you, you know,” he growled.

  “I know,” answered a man’s voice, and Mira’s father came walking out of the dark, the staff in his hand covered in faintly glowing sigils and signs. The dim gleam of bluish magic reflected in the man’s eyes, his expression bemused.

  Aurael shut his mouth, a chill sweeping through him.

  “An elemental,” mused the man, “trapped in a tree. Fascinating. I suppose you’re not in there by your own choice.”

  Aurael said nothing. If this man was as powerful as the vibrations would have him believe, Aurael did not want to confess anything that might prove to be useful against him.

  “That’s all right, you don’t have to speak. Yet.” Mira’s father came closer, studying the tree. “Hm. Someone quite strong put you in there, I see. Someone old. And . . .” His eyes fell to the ground in front of the tree, the exact spot where Corvina’s body had fallen in death. The man raised his eyebrows. “Ah. Interesting.” He turned to face Aurael’s tree with a wrinkle at the corner of his grayish eyes. “Very interesting.”

  “Who are you?” said Aurael, his own eyes narrowing.

  “Someone who thinks we might be able to help each other.” The man leaned on the staff thoughtfully.

  “Oh, really,” answered Aurael flatly.

  “Yes, really,” replied the man. “You’ve been stuck there a long time. You’d like to get out. And I’d like to let you out. In fact, I’m quite certain I can free you. But in return . . . I’d need your assistance with something. A long-term sort of project.”

  Aurael was silent, his eyes fixed on the man’s face. “You want to hire me,” he said, slowly. The man smiled, and it was a kind smile, which made the coldness in his eyes all the more chilling, even to Aurael. But he was desperate.

  “I’m listening,” said the spirit, and the man with the staff smiled a little wider.

  Stephen Montanto lay face down in the dark, the earth beneath him warm against his skin. One by one, his senses came back to him from the blackness of sleep, the first being the feeling of the hard ground and the hot sun bearing down on him.

  He felt as though his entire skull had been detached, used as a bocce ball, and reattached haphazardly in something of a rush. By and by, feeling returned to the rest of his limbs and torso, along with the aches and pains of the worst hangover he had ever had in all of his fifty-some years. His body felt simultaneously hollow and full of sharp nails, prickling with discomfort as he fought to shake his mind free of the dark and remember what had happened to him.

  After clearing away the trays from the king’s supper, Stephen had found that the door to the wine closet was not only unlocked, but partly open. This room had strictly been forbidden to all servants except Stephen himself, and he pushed the door wider to peer suspiciously inside.

  “How the—?” Stephen frowned severely down at Truffo Arlecin, who was on the flop cradling three or four bottles to his chest as though they were a litter of puppies. “Truffo, lad, you know you aren’t allowed in here. How the devil did you even open the door?”

  Truffo looked mournfully up at him and sighed. “I nicked your key when you told me to sing them a song.”

  “Why?” Stephen tried not to look impressed by the pickpocketing. “I told you I’d fetch you a nightcap myself.”

  “Because!” Truffo’s pink cheeks flushed darker as he rubbed one eye with the heel of his hand, trying to hold all of the wine bottles in the crook of one arm as he did so. “It went horribly. The entertainment last night went horribly. The night before went terribly. The wedding was a joke, especially compared to the damned dancing girls and fire-eaters Prince Kahlil hired for the floor show.” Tears were welling in his eyes. “I’m not even a good fool. I embarrass myself. All I wanted was to stay home and be boring, Stephen. I didn’t ask to be brought along.”

  “No, you didn’t ask for it,” agreed Stephen sternly, “but the king requested your presence. That’s the kind of recognition that can make a career, you know. Come on, put the bottles back and let’s get you to bed.”

  “I am not a child,” sniffed Truffo, disdainfully. “I am a grown man, and I want to drink this wine.” He wrestled with one of the corks.

  “Good luck opening that without this,” said Stephen, brandishing the corkscrew he kept on his person during mealtimes. Truffo’s expression melted so quickly that Stephen almost laughed at him. “Now, lad. Put back the bottles, and away with you.” He reached his free hand out to take a bottle from Truffo’s arms.

  “Please,” whimpered the dejected fool. “Just one bottle, Stephen! Just one. Just one bottle, eh? For the end of a miserable trip?”

  Gods pity him, thought Stephen, shaking his head as he took the other bottles and put them back into the crates where they belonged. “Truffo,” he chided. “This is the king’s wine.”

  “And he’s got plenty to spare,” Truffo spat. “Please?”

  “You’re a terrible nuisance, you know.” Stephen shot him a look. Truffo folded his arms tightly and scowled. “Really. This sad clown routine is a little maudlin sometimes, Truffo.”

  “It’s not a routine,” moaned the fool, immediately unfolding his arms and raking his fingers through his hair angrily. He made a sound of frustration, like a teenager on the verge of a tantrum.

  “All right, all right, quiet down.” Stephen reclaimed one of the bottles from the crate and reached for his corkscrew. “I’ll let you have a little as long as you promise to calm down and go to bed afterward.”

  “I promise,” hissed Truffo, as he fixed his shining eyes on the bottle.

  But he hadn’t gone to bed after that, Stephen now realized. Truffo had drunk a considerable bit of the wine before insisting that Stephen drink some, too. Stephen was normally a man to drink but a few sips of the stuff before putting it aside; he was far from the lush that Truffo apparently was. He wasn’t sure what had caught him off-guard that night and convinced him to keep drinking—whether it was the taste of the wine itself, or the pleading of the young fool.

  That first bottle had soon become two, then three, and Stephen’s normally calm, restrained nature had given way to the bumbling, brash-tongued man he’d been once in his youth—a persona released by the sweet and burning wine. Toward the end of the fourth bottle, the ship had begun to experience some turbulence, which turned into a full-on alarm of distress in the middle of the night. The ship’s power was failing, and they were falling out of the sky, into the deep.

  Truffo cried into his hands, hugging a bottle of his own as he sat on the ground with his knees pulled up against his chest.

  “We’ll die, we’ll die, we’ll surely die,” sobbed the sad fool. “Never more to touch the sky or ask a balding eagle why, or eat my mother’s
homemade pie, or never fall before we fly, we’ll die, we’ll die, we’ll die . . .”

  “Hush lad,” slurred Stephen, already feeling blackness at the edges of his senses. “Keep drinking. We’ll go out on the wings of Dionysus together. Be brave, now.” He drank from the bottle again, as though summoning the last of his own courage there.

  Truffo, his boyish face tear-streaked and ruddy, looked up bleakly, mid-sob. “Dionysus hasn’t got wings,” he moaned. “We’re going to die!”

  The Brilliant Albatross jolted sideways, throwing both men to the floor, wine bottles clattering and rolling and breaking all around them. The lights in the wine closet stammered and went dark, and there was a scream from somewhere else on the ship as the Albatross plummeted toward the sea. Stephen had slipped into unconsciousness before they hit the water.

  Now, on an unknown beach, Stephen Montanto opened his eyes, though the light of day was painfully bright, causing tears to slide down his sand-scratched cheeks. He tried to roll over onto his back, but an exquisite, lightning-sharp pain lanced through every single nerve in his body.

  Dead people can’t be in this much pain, he posited to himself, and breathed heavily in order to try the roll over once more. He was successful this time, but the movement made him cry out in a ragged, hoarse voice, and more tears sprang forth from his eyes.

  Stephen lay on his back, panting for air, and choked with pain and sorrow as the sun beat down on him. Then he slowly started to realize that he could hear the waves and the birds and the gentle wind through the trees and grasses. An island, he realized, and tried to look around, shielding his raw eyes from the sun with a heavy, sunburnt hand. I’ve been washed to some desert island. Perhaps I am not dead after all.

  He reflected that he had been considerably intoxicated when the ship went down, and added in the fact that, even when sober, he was not much more than a barely-competent swimmer. He let these thoughts marinate for several minutes and concluded that if he was not dead, it was by a miracle alone that he found himself on this beach. As there was no sign of anyone else nearby, he further concluded that he must be the sole survivor, and all the others had surely drowned.

  Stephen gave a wordless sob. He had failed his king in the hour of true need. It was not right that he should survive—even by accident—only to know that his king was dead, and all the others aboard the Albatross, too. And Truffo, the poor lad. And Prince Ferran! Stephen’s heart ached nearly as much as his body did.

  It was too late for such thoughts. He drifted back into a kind of sleep, too pained to get up and seek out shade, and aimed to let himself be burned to a crisp by the boiling sun above.

  * * *

  Truffo Arlecin woke to a strangely colored bird walking on his leg. It chirruped and cawed to itself, muttering like a nosy housewife investigating a new neighbor, and taking no notice of him whatsoever as his eyes opened bleakly and his brow furrowed in concern and pain. His body throbbed dully with the soreness of one who has fallen from a great height and lived to tell the tale, and his clothing was ragged and damp.

  The bird, which was yellow on top, blue on its bottom, and orange in the middle, with a sharp black marking like a mask over its face, stood about the size of a house cat. It ruffled its tail feathers as it stalked up and down Truffo’s legs, poking at his clothing and cocking its head this way and that as it muttered. It did not weigh much, but its spindly feet were as prickly as a briar patch, and after several minutes of squirming, Truffo could bear it no longer.

  “Hey, hoy, get off of me,” he exclaimed, his voice torn and sore from salt water. He tried to shoo the bird away, but his arm was quite heavy, as though it had fallen asleep, and his shoulder screamed with pain. He abandoned the attempt, groaning in agony.

  The bird clicked its long beak at him, ruffling its neck feathers and hopping from one of Truffo’s legs to the other. The young man gritted his teeth.

  “It hurts!” he told the bird as it tutted its way slowly up his body, prodding him gently with the sandpiper-like beak. His voice was brittle and dry. “It’s unbearable.”

  He closed his eyes, remembering the steep pitch of the Brilliant Albatross as it plunged toward the waves, the clattering of glass wine bottles crashing and rolling about them, and the explosion of the airship’s engine as it hit the cold sea. He knew only darkness thereafter.

  Truffo opened his eyes to find the brightly colored bird settling down on his chest, staring at him with feathers shimmering. “Don’t get comfortable,” murmured the fool. “If I don’t die in the next few hours, I’ll be starving, and I’ll have to eat you. Probably raw, since I don’t know how to build a fire. Feathers and beak and all. Oh, gods, I hope it doesn’t get cold at night,” he realized, a note of panic creeping into his voice. “I’m going to need a fire. Even if I knew how, I probably couldn’t . . . my arm . . .”

  He craned his neck to the side, peering at his injured shoulder—a considerable amount of dark blood had seeped through his shirt, and the sleeve of his motley coat had been torn off. It felt like an arrow had buried itself in the muscle, though he could see no certain evidence of what was causing the pain. It hurt like hell.

  The bird cocked its head almost disapprovingly, and Truffo frowned at it. “I told you, it hurts,” he insisted through his teeth. “It hurts a lot.”

  The orange-yellow bird fanned out its blue tail and gave a trilling series of whistles and chirps. Then it leaned over and jabbed its beak directly into the wound in Truffo’s shoulder.

  He screamed, an infantile shriek that echoed off the flat beach and the rocks beyond, startling some sparrows out of a shrub. The prodding of the bird did not cease, and Truffo continued to cry out loudly, voicing his excruciating displeasure. It wasn’t until he lurched upright and tried to scramble to his feet that the bird trumpeted and flapped its wings, trying to cling to him.

  “Get off, get off of me,” Truffo sobbed, the pain in his shoulder a flaming spike of agony that nearly caused his knees to buckle, even as he stood. “Stop, just stop it!”

  The bird trilled and cawed and clucked in a myriad of different voices. Its orange and yellow wings spread and flapped and ruffled at him, its dark little claws clutching his torn shirt and jacket, and its sandpiper beak poked at his wound, causing the dark blood to flow once more.

  Truffo staggered forward, still swatting at the bird, but the pain shot deeper into his body and he stumbled to his knees in the hot white sand. Black shimmering dots swam at the edges of his vision, and Truffo wondered if he had survived the shipwreck only to die at the beak of a tropical bird on a desert island.

  What a punchline, he thought bitterly. Then he felt the bird grasp something deep in his shoulder and yank hard. Truffo sucked in air so quickly that he was utterly silenced from shock, and the bird hopped back from him, beating its wings. Much of his pain left with the bird, like a candle blown out, and Truffo sagged as blood trickled down his shirt.

  The odd sandpiper dropped the offending object onto the beach beside him, and Truffo saw that it was a twisted splinter of metal, slick and shining with his blood—shrapnel from the shipwreck. His arm throbbed, as though it had been asleep and had just begun to regain feeling.

  Truffo gasped for air, pushing himself up on his good arm to stare levelly at the bird, which poked at the metal on the sand once, twice, and then cocked its head at him.

  “That,” he panted, “was a bit clever of you.”

  The bird cocked its head the other direction and gave a shrill echo of Truffo’s previous shriek. Truffo winced at the noise.

  “Yeah, yeah, all right, that’s enough of that now . . .” He hefted back onto his heels, sweat shining on his brow as he shifted his tingling, sore arm into his lap, looking down to wiggle his fingers one by one through the pain. At least this was progress.

  The bird was cleaning its own feathers now, as if pleased to have been right about the shrapnel, but it looked up at him from time to time and its tail feathers flicked up and down.

&n
bsp; “Oy,” breathed Truffo, leaning forward a little. “Is there anyone else here, birdy? Scary natives maybe? A rich millionaire with a private retreat?” The bird fluffed itself as if it had no interest in him. “What about water?” His throat was painfully dry, and it was quite hot in the sun, out here on the open sand. The thought of sucking down seawater was revolting, but he was terribly thirsty. And if the bird was smart enough to have pulled a piece of metal out of his shoulder. . . .

  Truffo whistled faintly to catch the bird’s attention. “Yoo hoo, then,” he prompted. “Polly want a cracker? Polly where’s-the-water? Promise I won’t eat you after,” he added.

  He stared at the bird as it continued to preen. After several moments, the bird clucked to itself and hopped along the sand a little ways, poking its beak in and out of the ground in search of something. Truffo groaned, pulling himself to his feet, and shambled after the bird as it picked its way down the beach.

  “Go on, go on,” he urged the bird, “don’t mind me, but don’t waste time, neither . . . You’re smart enough to do surgery, you’re smart enough to find water . . . or some shelter. Or help.”

  Truffo’s dark eyes cast out toward the ocean for a moment, wondering how far away the shipwreck was from him, and how long he’d been unconscious on the sand. He tried to focus again on the bright orange bird, which had wound its way up the beach with quick little steps and turned toward the rocky upper dunes.

  Truffo’s feet slid about in the sand, his vision growing spotty around the edges again, but the bird’s cheerful plumage was a considerable target.

  Good old bird, Truffo thought. Some men have dogs and others cats, but my life’s been saved by a strange and hitherto undiscovered species of sandpiper. He wondered if their new friendship would be his utter salvation, if he could teach the thing to speak—it could mimic well enough—and if it could help him survive on this spit of land.