Chapter the Eleventh,
The Night Before the Last,
In which waves move a man.
I. Telltale Signs
The boat ascended slowly, dwindling in circles. The children saw no light of stars or moon. It was beyond their wits to estimate how far they had already risen in the stifling chasm.
They dared not speak; the creature that was lifting them had not acknowledged their presence and the children thought best not to startle it, lest it drop them to their deaths. Jai felt like his stomach was imploding as he imagined what such a fall would feel like in the dark.
A voice peeped out, “Where am I? Oh no—I’ve died! Darn it all! Well, here we go aga—”
“Calm down, Why,” Jai whispered, pulling the butterfly out of his satchel, “we’re still alive, now be quiet.”
“Then why is the air so thick? I can hardly move my wings!”
Jai took a deep breath and gagged. Why was right—inhaling the pulpy air felt like swallowing stale water.
“Where are the stars?” asked the butterfly, growing hysterical. “Where is the sky? I’m suffocating!”
Jai was soaking wet, his tunic tight around his chest. He pulled the sticky cloth away from his neck, struggling to draw a breath. The silent, serpentine creature drew them higher and higher, showing no sign that either Jai’s voice or the inhospitable air affected it in the least.
The muted silence was dispelled by a distant rushing noise. Simultaneously, the darkness above them suddenly swam with spiraling shards of white light, faint at first in their blurring velocity, but clearer and brighter with every passing second.
“Ceder, get down,” said Jai, choking, barely audible. “We’re going up through ice!” He sprawled as low as he could and took one last deep breath before the air was altogether too thick to inhale. He was certain the approaching lights bore the telltale signs of an element he had heard about in Sorid’s stories, treated with as much scorn as the old magician could muster. Jai recalled one verse in particular:
Ice, like the lice in your hair, will tickle.
Ice, like mice on your skin, will prickle.
If the sea brings the reaper, then I think it not fickle
To fear me when I swear to you that ice is his sickle.
The air was cold. Jai let out his breath, unable to hold it any longer. Bubbles burst from his mouth and rose into the darkness like tiny balloons. He gasped, he retched, his mouth was full of water. Water? Up here? Bubbles?
The boat spun like a coin on a table and then it crashed into the spiraling shards of light. A frosty wind tore at the children, cutting to the bone.
Jai lay shivering in shock. It was Ceder’s voice that brought him out of his daze: “Are you all right?”
He sat up. The boat was filled with water—that was the first thing he noticed. He breathed in and out slowly and took stock of their new surroundings. There was no ice anywhere and the enormous creature that had just saved them was gone without a trace.
Deformed trees created a secluded and deeply shadowed grove all around, black branches aglow with small, luminescent orbs as white as the moon. Directly below the pink boat was a whirlpool, tamer than the one they had just escaped and half the size. Did we get pulled up through that? Jai asked himself. Am I crazy? Was the ice nothing more than the stars seen from under the water? But how could that be possible? The water should be falling down to the first whirlpool far below.
The whirlpool was surrounded by a ring of tight stones which kept the spinning vortex neatly separated from the rest of what was an otherwise peaceful lagoon. The water was perfectly black but for where it reflected the comet above. The rainbow colors of the shooting star looked like fireworks on the calm surface of the lagoon.
Turning back to the boat, Jai and Ceder saw that where the shimmering creature had been wrapped around the middle bench, now there was only the fishing line they had seen far below. They hardly understood what they beheld, for the line was made of flowing water, running like a stream as thin as a strand of hair, never spilling out of its slender form.
Following the watery line with wide open eyes, the children saw that it ran to the tip of a wooden fishing pole. The liquid line ended at an iron reel set beside the handle of the pole, which was held in a pair of large, strong hands gloved in black leather.
II. Staring at the Moon
The fisherman sat on a stumpy log floating in the lagoon, casually bobbing up and down. His legs dangled underwater. The purple cape draped over his shoulder trailed into the pond like the train of some ghoulish wedding dress. His long-sleeved shirt was black with hints of silver lace leaking out at the cuffs. His fingers, like his arms, were long and lean, but he had a certain strength about him, a supple and unbreakable power, much like the thin pole he held, which, although bending severely, somehow held up the boat without snapping in twain.
He wore a purple scarf, frayed at both ends. On his head was a black hat with a brim as wide as an umbrella, giving the impression he was forever being rained upon. Between the top of his scarf and the bottom of his hat, shadows coved his face. He held the boat aloft without any sign of strain, contemplating what he had caught. No one said a word.
At last he exhaled a long, low whistle—the note he hit was downright sorrowful. Then he swung the fishing pole to one side of the small whirlpool and gently deposited the pink boat on the still waters of the lagoon.
“Thank you for catching us,” said Ceder.
The fisherman stared at her then shook his head, startled, realizing he ought to speak back. “Oh! Let me see,” he stammered. “You’re welcome, certainly. But who…?” He lifted the brim of his drooping hat in order to inspect the children more clearly.
Jai and Ceder recoiled in shock. His face was dark glass, the color of smoke underwater, but it was no mask, they were sure, for it moved as fluidly as molten metal when he raised one brow questioningly and then lowered the corners of his lips in a sad smile. He had no eyes, but only two vacant depressions where his eyes should have been.
Jai reminded himself of his own strangely tattooed skin and repressed the urge to judge the mysterious stranger by his face alone. “Who are you?”
There was a long pause, a wordless moment as attuned to the quiet lagoon as the hum of the whirlpool or the buzz of crickets in the trees. “I am gold without silver.” The children tried to look inside his mouth to see what was behind the dark glass, but all they saw between his lips was a bubble of black air blocking the light. “I am a poor fisherman.”
Jai and Ceder had not forgotten the Coralute’s final warning: Do not follow the fisherman. They looked at the stranger suspiciously. He gave no sign that he intended to try to lead them anywhere.
“Do you have a name?” asked Ceder.
“If I did before I came here, I have forgotten it. Perhaps that is why I came here in the first place—to forget.” He took a moment to think, staring at the moon. “You may call me the Dangler.”
“The Dangler?”
“I…” He seemed at a loss for what else to say. He fumbled with his fishing pole, idly reeling in the line.
“Did you know we were down there?” Ceder asked at last.
“No.” Another pause. “This is rather unexpected.”
“What was that thing that saved us?” asked Jai.
The fisherman jolted at the abrupt question. “What thing?”
“What thing?” repeated Jai, stupefied. “How could you have missed it? It was big enough to fit around this whole grove! A gigantic, glistening snake with a head like a… a—” Jai curved his fingers in the right shape, trying to find the word for it, “—a hook.”
“There are no lost monsters in this lagoon,” said the Dangler. “There is only water, here.”
“You’re lying!” said Jai. “Something big—something humongous—just pulled us out of that whirlpool. It was alive.”
“Alive?” echoed the Dangler. “That I do not doubt. How much life there is in a single drop
of water!”
Jai glared at him distrustfully.
“Down there, where your line is hanging,” Ceder pointed to the whirlpool, “there are no fish down there. They aren’t even allowed in the river.”
“Ah,” sighed the Dangler, “that explains much.”
“You mean you’ve never caught a fish?” asked Jai.
The Dangler shook his head.
Ceder hesitated before asking, “How long have you been trying?”
“Oh, three or four hundred years, I suppose.”
Jai and Ceder turned to each other with a start.
“And I thought I was old,” said Why, stroking his wispy beard.
The Dangler frowned. “Yet I fear I am far older than that.” The children remained silent. The fisherman pulled the brim of his hat down again and swung his pole back over the whirlpool, letting the line of pure water glide into the swirling vortex. He stared serenely into the rushing water. “Waves can move a man more than you know.”
The children considered this and found it uninformative. “Why are you here?” asked Ceder, surprised to find her words stretching into a deeply satisfying yawn.
“It seems I was waiting for somebody, once, long ago, but so much time has passed and I never had a very good memory to begin with.”
“I have a feeling you and Why will get along famously,” said Ceder, rolling her eyes.
“You’ve been waiting for someone for three hundred years but you don’t even remember who?” Jai asked as though he was the one slighted by this offense.
The Dangler nodded feebly. Jai stared at the strange fishing line, mesmerized. “Is that magic?” he asked, absorbed in the line’s perfect elegance.
“What is magic?” asked the fisherman.
“Don’t you know?”
“Don’t you?”
Jai was not sure what to say. He thought he saw a flash of color behind the fisherman’s opaque visage, but it was gone in a heartbeat.
“If there is magic in this line,” said the Dangler, “and I were to cut it in half, would I have twice as much magic as before, half as much, or none at all?”
“I’m not very good at counting,” said Jai. “Shall I just guess?”
The Dangler stared at his line. “Often the world seems to pass like a dream.”
Jai looked around the lonely lagoon. “Yeah, I expect it would, spending all your time holed up in a place like this.” He noticed something odd as he looked around—there were no exits, no passage to the river. “Hey,” he said to the Dangler, “how do we get out of here?”
The fisherman took his good time to reply. “I will lead you out in the morning.”
Alarmed, Jai looked to Ceder, but she was fast asleep. Astray sat on her stomach, wide awake, staring at the comet. Why was snoozing atop the cub’s head, lying against one fuzzy ear. When Jai looked back to the Dangler, he was leaning over his pole staring into the whirlpool as though he might catch a fish at any moment. Jai sighed and sat down next to Ceder, determined to keep watch throughout the night.
“I am an island,” the fisherman said to himself, “but here are two children in a boat, washed up on the shore.”
That was the last thing Jai heard him say.
The Year One,
In the river east of the foggy forest a silver fish smaller than any other eye could see waited for someone who never arrived on time. The fish swam in small circles, hour by hour, day by day, a spinning top in a world without gravity, until one day it bored a hole into the water itself and therein vanished.
In the river west of the forest an identical silver fish waited in vain for that same someone whom fate would surely delay. The fish swam in small circles, hour by hour, day by day, until it bored a hole into the water itself and therein vanished.