Sisters in Fantasy

by Edited by Susan Shwartz

  Then the swirl of a comber cascaded over her boot-tops and foamed up around her chest, and her gasping shudder killed thought. The castaway born along by the tide tumbled under, and the weight of him slammed her in the knees.

  She dropped, clutching at a shoulder whose shirt was all tatters, and skin underneath that was ice. As the rough sands scoured under her shins, she hooked his elbow, and braced against the drag of the ebb.

  Her head broke water. Through a plastering of hair, Sabin huffed what she hoped was encouragement. “This way. The beach.”

  His struggles were clumsy. She labored to raise him, distracted by a chink of metal: iron, she saw in the flash of bared moonlight. He was fettered in rusted chains, the skin of both wrists torn raw from their chafing.

  “Mother of mercy,” she blasphemed. He had found his knees, an old man, white-haired and wasted of body. His head dangled with fatigue. She said, “Nobody could swim pulled down by all this chain!”

  “Didn’t,” he husked; he had no breath to speak. He thrashed in attempt to rise, and fell again as the water hit and dashed in fountains around his chin.

  She gripped him under his flaccid arms and dragged mightily. Despite her best effort, his head dipped under the flood. He swallowed a mouthful, gagging on salt, while she grunted in tearful frustration. The wave sucked back. He dragged his face free of its deadly, clinging currents with the dregs of his failing strength. His feet seemed fastened to the shoaling sands as if they were moored in place.

  Belatedly suspicious, Sabin kept tugging. “Your ankles. Are they in irons also?”

  He made a sound between a laugh, a sob, and a cough. “Always.”

  His floundering efforts managed to coordinate for a moment with hers. Together they stumbled a few yards shoreward, harried on by flooding water. Again the wave ebbed, and he sank and bumped against the sand. Panting, Sabin locked her fingers in his shirt. She held him braced against the hungry drag of the sea, desperate, while her heart raced drumrolls with the surf. Something was not quite right, she thought, her stressed mind sluggish to reason. The incoming tide carried no flotsam, not a stick or a plank that a shipwrecked man might have used to float his way ashore. “You never swam,” she accused again, as he regained the surface and sputtered.

  Weak as he was, her sharpness stung him. He raised his chin, and eyes that were piercingly clear met hers, lit by the uncertain moonlight. “I didn’t.” His voice held a roughness like harpstrings slackened out of tune. “I begged help from the seaborne spirits that can be called to take the shape of horses. They answered and drew me to land, but they could not see me safe. To lead one even once from the water dooms it to mortal life ashore.”

  The interval between waves seemed drawn out, an unnatural interruption of rhythm like a breath too long held suspended. Even disallowing for chains, his weight was too much for a girl; but it was a spasm of recognition like fear that locked Sabin’s limbs and tongue—until those cut-crystal eyes looked down. As if released from bewitchment, she blurted, “Who are you?”

  She thought the wind took her words. Or that they were lost in the grinding thunder of the sea as she scrabbled the last yards to dry sand. But when, safe at last, he collapsed in bruised exhaustion, he answered. “I am a wayfinder, and the son of a way-finder.” His cracked tone broke to a whisper. “And I was a slave for more time than I care to remember.” He spoke nonsense, she determined, and said so. He was a madman and no doubt a convict who had fled in the shallows to hide his tracks from dogs. A denial she did not understand closed her eyes and her heart against the logic that argued for him: that the road ran high above the cliffs, and those few paths that turned shoreward were much too steep for a captive to negotiate in chains. Had he come that way, he should have fallen, and broken his legs or his neck. Through teeth that chattered, Sabin waited. Yet the refugee stayed silent. She poked him in the ribs with her toe and found he had succumbed at last to the beating the sea had given him; either he slept or had dropped unconscious. The wind bit at wet flesh, made cruel by driven spray. The tide rose still, and the sand where he lay would very soon be submerged. Forced by necessity, Sabin arose. The jacket she had left on the dory would have to serve the old man as a blanket until Uncle Ciondo could be fetched from his bed.

  Sabin awakened to sunlight. Afraid of her uncle’s gruff scolding, she shot straight, too fast. The blood left her head. Dizziness held her still and blinking, and she realized: Uncle Ciondo was shouting. His voice drifted up through the trapdoor to the ladder, though he probably stood in the kitchen by the stove, shaking a fist as he ranted.

  “A condemned man, what else could he be! Or why should anyone have chained him? Those fetters were not closed with locks. They were riveted. We cannot shelter such a man, Kala.”

  The castaway, Sabin remembered. She pushed out of bed, and tripped in her haste over the wet smock she had discarded without hanging last night. From the clothes chest she grabbed her only spare, and followed with the woolen britches every fisher’s lad wore to sea. She left her boots. Even if they were not drenched and salt-stiff, they would make too much noise and draw notice.

  Masked by the murmur of her aunt’s voice, declaiming, Sabin set bare feet on the ladder. At the bottom, the door to Juard’s room lay cracked open, beyond the stairwell, which tunneled the bellow of her uncle’s protest. “Kala, that’s daft and you know it! He could be dangerous, a murderer. I say we send him inland in the fish wagon and leave his fate to the King’s bailiff.”

  Sabin’s uncle was not hard-hearted, but only a sailor, and the sea rewards no man for sentiment. Ciondo would care very little if the rescued man could hear the rough anger in his voice. But as a girl not born to a fisher’s trade, Sabin flinched. She tiptoed down the hall and slipped through the opened door, a ghost with mousy, tangled hair and a sailcloth smock flocked at the cuffs with the rusty blood of gutted cod.

  The man the sea had cast up was asleep. Chain lay on him still, looped at wrists and ankles with spare line that tied him spread-eagled to the bedposts. Ciondo had taken no chances, but had secured the refugee with the same half hitches he might use to hold a dory against a squall. Still, the undyed wool of the blankets hung half kicked off, as if the prisoner had thrashed in nightmares. His rags were gone. Daylight through the opened shutters exposed a history of abuse, from the salt-galled sores left by shackles to a mapwork of dry, welted scars. He was not old after all, Sabin saw, but starved like a mongrel dog. His skin was sun-cured to teak and creases, and his hair bleached lusterless white. He looked as weatherworn as the fishing tackle on the sloop’s decks, beaten by years of hard use.

  Aunt Kala’s voice filtered through the doorway, raised to unusual sharpness. “Ciondo, I’ll be sending no man on to the bailiff before he finds his wits and tells his name! Nor will any needy stranger leave our roof hungry, the more shame to you for witless fears! As if anybody so starved could cause harm while bound up in metal chains! Now, be off! Go down to the beach with the rest, and leave me in peace to stir the soup.”

  A grumbling followed, and a scrape of boots on the brick. Few could stand up to Kala when she was angry, and since Juard’s death, none dared. She was apt to weep when distressed, and if anyone saw her, she would throw cooking pots at them with an aim that could flatten a pigeon.

  Cautious in the quiet after the door slammed, Sabin crept to the window. The sun threw slanting bars of yellow through gently tossing pines. Yet if the vicious, tearing winds had quieted, the sea mirrored no such calm. Beyond the spit off the point, the breakers still reared on the reefs, booming down in tall geysers of spray. The surge rushed on untamed, through the harbor gates where the round-bottomed boats rolled at anchor, an ominous sign. Sabin bit her lip. She squinted against the scintillant brightness of reflections and saw wreckage scattered amid the foam: the sundered masts and planking of ships gutted wholesale by the reefs.

  No one had shaken her awake at dawn because today the twine would not be cast out for fish. When the wrecks littered
the beach, men plied their nets to glean a storm’s harvest from the waves. Custom barred girls and women from such labor, lest the nets bring up dead bodies, and the sight of drowned flesh sour the luck of their sons, born and unborn, and curse them to the horror that had befallen cousin Juard, to be taken alive by the sea.

  The man on the bed had escaped that fate, just barely. He had come in on a ship that was now ripped to fragments, Sabin knew for a surety. He had not swam; not in chains. And horses did not run in the sea. Unwilling to risk misfortune by looking too closely at the waves, or what tossed and surfaced in the whitening tumble of foam, Sabin spun away from the window. She shivered in the sun that fell on her back, and shivered again as she saw that the man on the bed had awakened. He studied her, his eyes like fine flawed crystal broken to a razor’s edge.

  “You do not trust me,” he said in his rusty whisper. He flexed one wrist, and immediately grimaced in pain.

  “My uncle thinks you’re a murderer.”

  He ground out a bitter, silent laugh. “Oh, but I am, though my hand has never taken life.”

  She frowned, a plain-spoken girl who dreamed, but had always hated riddles. “What is a wayfinder?”

  Riddles came back in answer, as he regarded the beams of the ceiling. “One who hears the sea. One who can read the earth. One who can travel and never be lost.”

  “I don’t understand.” She stepped back, and sat on the clothes chest that had once held the shirt she was wearing, when it had been Juard’s, and she had spent days spinning thread for her father’s loom. Now her hands had grown horny and tough, and fine wool would catch on the callus. But the incessant lapses of attention had not left her; she forgot to mind sheet lines as readily as she had faltered at spindle and wheel. She curled her knees up and clasped her hands to bury that recognition. “Anyone can be lost.”

  He stirred in the faintest impatience, jerked back by the cut of his chains. “Inland to the east, there is a road, a very dusty road with stone markers that winds through a forest. Beyond lie farmlands, and three villages, and lastly a trader’s town. Beyond brick walls are wide sands, called by the desert people who live there Dei’eh’vikia.” His head tipped sideways toward Sabin. His eyes now were darkened as gray sapphires, and he considered her as though she should be awed.

  She was not. “You could have spoken to someone who passed that way,” she accused. “Perhaps you lived there yourself.” But she knew as she spoke that he did not. His vessel had broken on the reef, and never sought harbor in these isles. Few ships did, for the rocks gave hostile greeting to mariners from afar.

  He looked at her in sadness or maybe pain, as if he had offered riches to the village halfwit who had use for no coin at all. He kept staring until she twisted her fingers together, embarrassed as if caught at a lie. For all his foreign accent, he had pronounced the place-name as crisply as the nomads who made the desert their home. Townsmen and traders slurred over the vowels and called it Daaviki, in contempt for the troublesome native speech.

  He perceived that she knew this. He saw also that stubbornness kept her silent.

  He looked at her still, his gaze heavylidded, almost glazed as a drunk’s. The angle of his neck must have pulled at his shoulders and wrists, but he shed any sign of discomfort as he said, “Sabin, outside this room, there is a passage covered with braided rugs. It leads to a stairway that winds around itself twice. Downstairs, to the right of the kitchen lies a door that leads to a springhouse. Purple flowers grow by the path, and seven steps to the left lead to the sea cliff where there is a little slate ledge. You like to sit there on sunny mornings, in what you call your chair seat. But the people who inhabited these coasts before yours used the site as a shrine.” His grainy voice was almost gentle as he finished. “They left carvings. You have seen them, when you scratched at the moss.”

  Sabin jumped up with her mouth opened like a fish’s. He had been carried into this house, unconscious. Ciondo had brought him through the front door. Someone might have mentioned her name in his hearing, but there was no way he could have seen the springhouse, or have known of her fondness for that ledge. Her aunt and uncle did not know, nor her own mother and father.

  “I am a wayfinder,” he said simply, as if that sealed a truth that she realized, shivering, could not be other than magic. Her need to escape that room, and that compelling, mesmerizing gaze came out in a rush of speech. “I have to go, now.”

  The Wayfinder let his head fall back on the pillow. At a word from him, she would have fled; she waited, tautly poised on one foot. But he made no sound. He closed his eyes, and curiosity welled over her fear and held her rooted. “Still there?” he murmured after a while.

  “Maybe.” Sabin put her foot down, but quietly.

  He did not open his eyes. “You have a piece of the gift yourself, you know, Sabin.”

  She quivered again, as much from anger. “What gift!”

  His hands were not relaxed now, but bunched into white-knuckled fists. One of his sores had begun to bleed from the pressure; he was trying her uncle’s knots, and finding them dishearteningly firm. “You came to the beach at my call.”

  She stamped her foot, as much to drive off uneasiness. “You called nothing! I forgot my jacket. That was all.”

  “No.” His hands gave up their fretting. “You have given your jacket as the reason. But it was my call that caused you to forget it in the first place. When I asked the spirits for their help, you heard also. That was the true cause of the forgetfulness that drew you outside in the night.”

  “I’ve been scolded for carelessness all my life,” she protested, “and my jacket was forgotten at twilight!”

  “And so at that hour I called.” He was smiling.

  She wanted to curse him, for that. He seemed so smug. Like Juard had been when he teased her; and that remembrance called up tears. Sabin whirled violently toward the doorway and collided headlong with her aunt.

  “Sabin! Merciful god, you’ve spilled the soup.” Kala raised the wooden tray to keep it beyond reach of calamity, and her plump face dimpled into a frown. “What are you doing here anyway? A sick man has no need for prying girls.”

  “Talk to him,” Sabin snapped back. “He’s the one who pries.”

  “Awake, is he?” Kala stiffened primly. She glanced toward the bed and stopped cold, her chins sagging beneath her opened mouth, and the tray forgotten in her hands. For a moment she seemed to breathe smoke as she inhaled rising steam from the soup bowl.

  Then she exploded. “My fool of a husband! Rope ties! The cruelty and the shame of it.” She stepped sideways, banged her tray down on the clothes chest, and in a fit of total distraction, failed to bemoan the slopped soup. “Sabin, run out and fetch our mallet and chisel.” She added to the stranger on the bed, “We’ll have you free in just minutes.”

  For an instant, the Wayfinder’s cut-crystal eyes seemed to mirror all of the earth. “Your good man thinks I’m a murderer.”

  “My good man is a fool who thinks in circles like a sand crab.” Kala noticed that Sabin still lingered in the doorway. “Girl, must you always be idling about waiting for speech from the wind? Get along! Hammer and chisel, and quickly.”

  Kala had matters well in hand before the last fetter was struck. “You’re taking up no space that’s needed,” she insisted with determined steadiness. “Juard’s bed is yours, he’s dead and at rest in the sea, and if you care to lend a hand at the chores, we could use the help, truly. Sabin belongs home with her family.”

  She ended with a strike of the mallet. As the last rivet sheared away, and rusted metal fell open and clanged in a heap on the floor, the Wayfinder raised his freed wrists. He rubbed at torn skin, then looked up at Kala, who stood over him gripping the tools with both fists braced on broad hips. In profile, Sabin saw the stranger give her aunt that same, heavy-lidded gaze that had earlier caused her the shivers.

  “He’s not lost, your Juard,” the broken voice announced softly.

  Kala went
white. She dropped the tools with a clatter and clapped her palms behind her back to distract bad luck, and avert the misfortune of hearing false words. “Do not spin me lies! Respect our loss. Ill comes of wishing drowned men back from death, for they hear. They rise in sorrow and walk the sea bed without rest for all of eternity.”

  The Wayfinder cocked up his eyebrows in sad self-mockery. “I never lie. And no such lost spirits walk the sea, nor ever have.” At Kala’s shocked stiffness, he thumped his marred fist on the mattress in frustration. “Your boy is not dead, only washed up on a beach, as I was.”

  Aunt Kala turned her back, which was as near to an insult as anyone ever got from her. The Wayfinder glared fiercely, his ice-gray eyes lit to burning. Then his jaw hardened until the muscles jumped and his speech scraped out of his throat. “Your son fetched up on the Barraken Rock, to the west. At this moment, he is gutting a fish with a knife he chipped from a mussel shell.”

  “My son is dead!” Kala snapped back. “Now say no more, or when Ciondo comes back, you will go trussed in the wagon to the bailiffs. I’ll hear your word.”

  The Wayfinder sighed, as though sucked down in a chasm of weariness. “Woman, you’ll get no word from me, but neither will you hear any, either, if that is your desire.”

  “It is.” Kala stamped out through the doorway without looking back. “Sabin,” she yelled from the threshold at the head of the stairwell. “You’ll see that yon man eats his soup, and bring down the tray when he’s finished.”

  But Kala’s bidding was impossible to carry out, Sabin found. On the bed, the Wayfinder had closed his eyes and fallen deeply asleep.

  The house stayed quiet for the rest of the morning, with Kala beating quilts with a ferocity that outlasted the dust. At noon Uncle Ciondo returned from the beach, swathed in dripping oilskins, his boots caked to the ankles with damp sand. The bull bellow of his voice carried up through the second-storied window where Sabin kept vigil with the invalid. “Kala! Where is that man?”