* * *
Feather pursed her lips and glared at a restless child in the crowd, who swiftly fell silent. “That’s better,” Feather sniffed.
She dropped her voice down. “ ‘I will set you free on one condition,’ Fathom said. ‘From time to time I may be angered, or playful, or simply bored, and I will drown you beneath cold waters.’
“ ‘One moment! I must consider your offer,’ Seven said. For, you see, he meant to learn the secret of the sea. So lying there in the dark, barely able to move in his tiny cabin, he took the extra rope his friends had given him, and wove it into a slipknot. And when the knot was ready he called out, ‘Very well! I am of the sea. I accept your offer.’
“So then Fathom lifted up the hatch and tore back the planks above the cabin and said, ‘Now you are free!’ But before he could do anything else, Seven, who was the mightiest warrior of all the islanders, leapt up and dropped the slipknot over his head.
“ ‘What do you want?’ Fathom cried. ‘How dare you?’
“ ‘I dare anything,’ Seven replied. ‘And I want to know the secret of the sea.’
“ ‘Ha! No mortal can force my secrets from me!’ Fathom cried. They wrestled then for nine or maybe eight hours, and even though Seven was the mightiest warrior of all the islanders, he grew very weary. But his slipknot held fast and the more Fathom struggled, the tighter the knot closed, until finally he had to stay still just to breathe, and a calm fell over the sea.
“ ‘Very well,’ Fathom whispered. ‘You have bested me. What do you want?’
“And again Seven said, ‘The secret of the sea.’
“ ‘And if I tell you, will you let me go?’
“ ‘If you promise to tell the truth, and not to hurt me after I set you free.’
“Fathom was very angry, and his face turned as purple as a storm-cloud, but ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I have no choice. The secret of the sea is this: to stand is to lose. Ride the wave, or drown beneath it.’
“ ‘That’s it?’ Seven said.
“ ‘That’s it.’
“So Seven took the slipknot off Fathom’s neck, and the Hero left in a very bad temper. And Seven said, ‘It is good to have plenty of rope,’ as he stored it back in his tiny cabin.
“He sailed on through the Mist for nine or maybe eight days. Sometimes his ghosts went away for a while, but usually there were some with him, and he had to learn to get along with them as well as he could. He could even look at them, if he had to, but he could not bring himself to listen to their voices.
“One day, as he sailed on through the Mist, he saw a spark on the horizon. It leapt from wavetop to wavetop, running like fire toward him. Before he could think to do anything, he saw Sere standing before him, a flat dancing figure like a shadow of flame. ‘Hello!’ Sere cried, with a voice like a hungry volcano. ‘You are Seven. Fathom told me about you.’ And he reached out with jerky arms to devour a passing porpoise.
“Seven said, ‘Could we carry on this conversation at a slightly greater distance? You are burning a hole in my boat.’
“ ‘Oh. Sorry about that.’ Swaying and dancing, Sere held out his own right hand and gobbled it up with a crackling laugh. ‘You have something here that belongs to me!’
“ ‘I do?’ Seven said, feeling his right hand begin to burn. Fire danced over the fingers he had taught so well to kill.
“ ‘Mmm, yes. The ashes of your dead love.’ And then Seven realized that Fathom was getting his revenge by sending Sere to take away the thing that meant the most to him in the whole world. Now his heart too began to burn with his love for Pond who was dead.
“But he could hardly try to wrestle with Sere as he had with Fathom. So he said, ‘One moment. I keep the ashes in my hold.’ He reached into his tiny cabin, pulled up the casket of pepper that Foam and Shale had given him, and gave it to Sere. For he knew as well as you do that Sere has eaten far too much to have any sense left of taste or smell.
“Well, Sere opened the lid and found the casket full of tiny black grains like ash. ‘My thanks,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I expected you to be more troublesome, after what you did to old Fathom.’ He winked at Seven and sniggered.
“Seven bowed deeply, feeling again the hungers that had driven him to practice, and love, and kill. ‘You made me,’ he said. ‘The good and the bad together.’
“The flaming puppet danced and grinned, feinting as if to eat the masts, and then darting suddenly away. ‘I have done worse.’
“Seven sailed for nine or eight more long days, not knowing what he waited for and not sure if he would like it when he found it.”
Feather stopped to cough and take a sip of water.
“Then one morning his boat began to rise. He was on a pinnacle of rock, growing like a mountain from the sea. Oh no! he thought. I shall be stranded in the air, and never sail out of the Mist and back to the islands! What shall I do?”
* * *
Seven saw then that he was held in the palm of an old man, enormously tall. His massive feet were bare and grey, his legs carved into stiffly moving muscle. His chest was hidden in a mat of curling white hair that blended with his beard and the hair on his head, and all this hair was wonderfully fine, finer than cotton-wood down, tremulously wavering.
“Mountains turn to cloud,” Seven said.
“Hello,” Stonefinger said, in a voice as soft as fog.
Seven bowed deeply. “It is said that stone lasts forever and its master has power over death.” He was a cloud inside; dread left him drifting, unanchored. He took his life in his hands. “Can you give my beloved back to me?”
Stonefinger shook his sad, cloudy head. “No,” he said. Ocean waves curled about his knees.
Never give up, Seven told himself. Never give up. But something inside him pulled into tatters, mist shredded by the wind.
Stonefinger sighed, a long, gusty breath, and shook his head. “I grieve for you.” His eyes and mouth were obscured by drifting coils of hair. A bar of sunlight shone through him, leaving a circle of misty gold on his brow.
“Will you do nothing for me?”
“Death is sudden and reckless and unpredictable. It has all the qualities of the sea. Had you noticed?”
Stonefinger flipped his fingers in the cold sea and ripples raced from them, quickly created, quickly gone. “Death is closest to the people of the sea. They stand impossibly upon it, walking on water until the inevitable happens, and they slip.” He took his fingers from the sea and dried them on his beard. The hairs writhed and drifted like the spines of a white sea anemone. “I have often wondered how you bear it. To live in a world that is always changing, held above the sea’s grasp only by shelves of stone that could be flooded in an instant. Such is the perilous existence of the people of the sea, for the sea is their god and the Gull Warrior their champion, that evil spirit who destroys all I create.”
Seven tensed, but Stonefinger ignored him. “It is only now that I am old, older than old, that I begin to feel a need for change, a need to let go. Some time, in another eon or so when I have gathered all I can from the stone which is my first love, I will surrender, and drift where the wind directs. Then, perhaps, I will visit the sea and learn the secrets that it kills to teach.”
Stonefinger considered. “You islanders must be a very wise people, for you must learn in fourscore years what I have not yet mastered in a long age of the world.”
“I do not feel wise,” Seven said. “I feel only pain.”
“I grieve I cannot give you back your loved one. You have made a hero’s journey. I will offer you this, that I have never before offered to any people but my own. Stand with me on the mountain’s peak. Perhaps you will find wisdom there, of a sort, and relief from pain.”
Then Stonefinger lifted up Seven’s boat far, far above the sea, while Seven clung to his mast and looked out in wonder. “Stand,” Stonefinger said. “Stand and look upon the world.”
Islands of white cloud hung down from the deeps of the sky, chan
geful as rivers, solid as mountains. Seven stood, blinking, as Stonefinger held him up to the dawn of the world, looking east to the crawling sea. Looking south, grasslands gave way to forest, and eventually to a ribbon of fire below a pall of smoke. In the north, the grass was splintered by rivers. Then a barren place, and beyond that a desert at the fingertips of vision, where a web of dancing ice rose hard and white above the land.
To the west, towering mountains, immeasurably vast, crested at last into a spume of cloud. A stone hymn rose through Seven, ringing against the sky.
Feel
the
grandeur
of
the
living
world!
Feel
it
turn
beneath
your
feet.
Feel
it
swing
above
your
head.
It
is
vaster,
older,
kinder,
crueler.
“Does it fear nothing?” Seven whispered.
Time.
Wind-toothed
time
it
fears.
“But it keeps fighting.” Seven felt something revive within himself. Bereft and destroyed and directionless, his indomitable will still breathed. “It keeps fighting.”
But the mountain said:
Perhaps.
Perhaps
the
sea
struggles,
or
the
ice.
The
stone
endures.
Only
endures . . .
until
the
forest
is
desert.
Until
the
sun
goes
out.
Until
the
fire
freezes.
Until
the
earth
is
mist.
Until
clouds
end.
Dazed and frightened, Seven clutched for his rails. Through a rift in the cloud overhead he could see the stars growing closer. “Spit!” he whispered. He was humbled by the stone’s voice, but he could not endure. He was of the sea: he must struggle, or perish.
Then he thought of the bag Foam and Shale had given him. “It worked for Chart,” he muttered. “It can work for me.”
Feverishly he grabbed the extra biscuits, crushing them in his strong hands. He threw crumbs on the deck and on the ground and down the mountain’s sides, all the time fearing he had gone too high for rescue.
Then a speck, a dot, a fly—a bird flew out from behind the moon’s silver face. It drifted down to him as gently as a snowflake and landed on his transom. It was a gull.
Shrieking, it gobbled bits of biscuits.
As if that first quarrelsome cry had been a long-awaited signal, other gulls began to scream, wheeling and screeching above the boat. Seven threw biscuit crumbs madly into the air. The more gulls there were, the more tightly they pressed together, fighting, banking, carving the air with incredible grace. A form began to emerge, building from the gulls as Seven’s ghosts had built from the Mist. . . .
* * *
“The Gull Warrior!” Feather cried. Several children cheered; the rest had fallen asleep. Behind Feather, a small fire hummed quietly to itself, a little song of sparks and embers. Outside the sun had long since set, and the winter moon had begun to rise.
“And then the Gull Warrior chopped at the mountain, pecking and slashing and biting and beating it back down to size, as he always did when Stonefinger tried to grow too tall. At last he had that mountain pecked right down below the surface of the water, and Seven wisely shipped his oars and pulled away as fast as he could.
“The two Heroes fell to fighting. They battled for seven or maybe six days, and in the end the Gull Warrior was victorious. Spotting a weakness in Stonefinger’s defense, he aimed a mighty blow and shivered the stone man to splinters.”
* * *
It was over. Bits of shattered rock rained from the sky. More than one piece bounced off Seven’s shrouds and onto his deck. He reached out and touched a fragment. Red marble. Still warm.
He remembered what Stonefinger had said, about the evil Gull Warrior destroying everything he tried to build. He was not sure what he should be feeling. Even Sere who was allied with the forest people had treated him better than Fathom.
“Quite the show, eh?” said a sweet, weary voice by his elbow.
Seven jumped almost out of his skin. “Singer!” he whispered.
“And you are Seven. We have met.” She reached out and picked up a fragment of warm red marble. “He does explode nicely.” She held the piece of stone up to her lips and breathed on it. Then she held it in her hands and started rubbing it and stretching it and molding it this way and that.
“Hey! I can talk. You must not be telling a story.”
“But I am, right now, even as we speak, everywhere the wind blows. You are in the story, you see.” And all the while she spoke, she was shaping the stone into the form of a small man made of rock.
The figurine was larger now. It moved fitfully in the Singer’s hand. “This is a fine boat you have here,” she said. “I appreciate good work. I see you brought along plenty of rope, lots of biscuits, and a good supply of pepper.” The Singer nodded approvingly. “Always wise.” The figurine in her hand was now—Seven could not explain this—the size of a normal man, even though Seven and the Singer were still sitting on the foredeck of his small boat, and the figure still fit comfortably between the Singer’s palms.
“You are making Stonefinger again.”
The Singer nodded. “I need him to keep things exciting.”
“Is that all the Warrior’s struggles are to you? A trifle? An amusement?”
The Singer gazed at Seven then with her ancient eyes. For the first time he beheld a strength and a will more terrible than his own. “Fathom does not rage nor does Sere burn with more passion than I tell my stories.”
He could not bear to meet her eyes.
The Singer considered. “A ship like this, a ship with character—it needs a good name.” She rose, and placed Stonefinger in the water. The man of the mountains waved peevishly and sank below the water. “May I suggest Clouds End—port of leave and call. You must sail there twice from different sides that are, after all, the same, to make a proper one twist ring.”
She stepped over the side of the boat to stand, rocking gently on the waves. “I would love to stay and talk,” she said, “only, I am telling a story right now, this instant, even as we speak.” Seven saw lines of weariness around her eyes. “Wherever the wind blows, I am telling stories to the grass and to the clouds. It is a great labor. Too great, I sometimes feel. But there is no use complaining. One must persist. To give up is also to lose. But then,” she said, gliding away in long, smooth strides, “you knew that all along, didn’t you?”
Seven sat a long time in the Mist after the Singer had gone, thinking of how he had become a man of stone. How he had held stiff before Pond’s death and let himself be broken. And he thought of the Gull Warrior, ceaselessly circling, dodging, feinting. Patient and fierce and playful.
There was a balance, then, between struggle and despair. The balance that let the Warrior ride the wind. The balance every islander knew who dared the waves in a well-built boat, poised between the unreachable sky and the unfathomable sea.
At last Seven took the silver-stoppered bottle and opened it and shook Pond’s ashes overboard, weeping. Then he cleaned off his deck, and shook out his sail to catch the wind, and turned his white-winged ship for home.
* * *
When the story was over, a daunting silence hung in the me
eting hall.
“Never give up,” Jo said.
Everyone was staring at Feather. “Um, that’s all,” she said, in a small, meek voice.
Brook touched her daughter’s hand. “Where did you hear that story?”
Feather looked at her brother for support. Boots shrugged. “The wind told us,” he said.
CHAPTER 28
WHERE ALL THINGS ARE TRUE
ON MIDWINTER morning, eight years to the day after Brook’s wedding, a single white gull beat up from Clouds End, heading east. As it rose, the low roar of the waves faded; the patient thoughts of the old stone went dumb as well. The gull was free, as free as the air and as alone. Voice after voice fell mute as she pulled away from the world, away from its pain and blood and fire—flying back into the soft white breath of morning.
The wind blew through her ribs, touching the secret places in her heart. It poured through a growing emptiness and set her whole body helplessly singing; and a silver voice whispered, Come with me.
But Jo said, Not yet.
* * *
Brook too had left Clouds End, sailing for the last time from its shores to make her vigil on Shale’s island, her final act before becoming Witness.
She sat on a large rock in the middle of the stream she had named after old Stick, watching the water sweep endlessly toward her. It was deep here but clear, running over clean stone. Splinters of sunshine glinted on the surface. Farther down, coin-colored fish darted out from the banks or held themselves against the current for many heartbeats before sliding back into the shadow of her rock.
She loved running water. After all, she had taken a stream’s name for her own: Brook. There was much of herself here. So she had chosen this place to wait for the island’s name.
Shandy expected her to find the name, of course. That was why she had been sent here for her first Witnessing. So she waited, wondering if the Singer would find her again.
But the more Brook thought about the Singer and Sere and Heroes and the Mist, the less they meant to her. The island was not some story; it was itself: leafless birch-limbs and the cool winter sun on her back and the smell of cold water. She had been here all day, listening to the wind hiss through barren branches. Sometimes the water seemed not to be pouring toward her at all, but to be still, and it was she who moved, sailing upstream, while just below her dangling feet foam curled out from a stone prow.