Altered Tides

Excerpt

Altered Tides
Harry F. Rey © 2021
All Rights Reserved

Chapter One

The girl lifted her eyes over the dry, dusty horizon bathed in a sandy haze. She blinked through the pain, through the dryness, as she always did. On the shore of an ancient seabed, the girl kicked clumps of dust heaped on the ground like forgotten eggs that had never hatched. They fell apart with barely a touch. There was no water to hold the dust together. No rain fell to fill the sea nor waves to break against the shoreline.

She’d last had water two nights ago. Her father gave her and her four sisters their one allotted teardrop of stale, salty liquid. Two for the baby; although even her mother, Sanhelda, said it was a waste. The baby would not live till the rains came—if they ever did.

Out here by the cliffs along the empty shore, she could at least get away from the cries of thirst that haunted the village throughout the baking days and stuffy nights. Their settlement was not a wealthy one. They lived far from the city with its water vats. Although her father’s brother had returned from the city a few nights before with the news even those had run dry. Rations had fallen to one teardrop per day. Hoarders went without. Soldiers patrolled the dusty streets, but they couldn’t prevent the nightly gatherings outside the palace of the She-King. The people were thirsty, and they were starting to blame the drought on her.

The girl knew this was nonsense. The king did not control the rains. According to the clerics, the goddess Aquina sent the rain from the blue moon in the sky. Although her mother, always a practical woman, said the rains came when their world was perfectly aligned with the blue moon. The king didn’t control the movement of stars and moons, the girl knew that much, nor was the gender of the King stopping the clouds from forming and the rains from filling up the cenotes, the water pits and boreholes, despite what most people now thought.

The girl bent over and scooped a clump of dust from the ground. Gazing into the hazy sky, she rubbed the dust into her cracked lips, soothing the broken skin. The girl wondered what she would do if she were king. She’d never wondered that before she knew a woman had taken the throne.

The rains came once in forty years. The entire system of life on these dusty plains depended on this climactic event. When it did rain, the water filled the vats and boreholes, every drop saved and stored and rationed because everyone knew the water had to last another forty years. Whatever was wasted evaporated in the stifling heat. Whatever was used disappeared into the dusty ground the clerics expressly forbade any person to dig into. Disobeying the clerics meant going a week or more without a teardrop to drink.

The clerics spoke with the gods and calculated each family’s allowance of bottles. Families planned the children they could have and the crops they could grow with the aqua supply front of mind. Donating a little bit extra to the clerics was never a bad idea, though. If the gods pronounced, speaking through a cleric of course, that a person was destined to die before the blue moon rose again in the night sky, the water rations of the condemned individual would be cut to nothing. There was no water to waste on the dying.

It had happened to the girl’s uncle a few years back. He’d had an argument with their local cleric over something obscure that old men passed their time by squabbling over—the price of beets, perhaps. But the cleric won the argument by foretelling her uncle’s sudden death within the month. The family fretted; his wife and children terrified their provider would have a sudden accident. They drastically cut their own rations to keep him alive and at home, even as their crops rotted in the field. Eventually, after much scrambling and scraping and late night discussions on how much the wider family could afford to spend, they managed to sell off a valuable young calf at market in the city in exchange for a bottle of fermented beet wine. The cleric dutifully accepted the sacrifice to the gods, and after returning one night from the sacred temple, his lips stained red and speech slurred from the beet wine, had pronounced to an anxious family that he had interceded with the gods on their behalf, and her uncle would not fall foul to an accident after all. His rations were restored, although their crops went to ruin and the calf they had been counting on to provide milk for three new babies had been sold off for tender meat, but at least her uncle would live. Could live, indeed, now he had water to drink. Such were the petty tyrannies of life under the clerics.

But life was not all terrible. In the thirty-ninth year, a great celebration was held in advance of the coming rains in the fortieth year. A diligent population suffering from a generation of thirst had their rations increased. The clerics and their influential friends would feast and crack open vintage bottles of beet wine as soon the rains would come and replenish their cisterns and water bores.

That had been two parched years ago.

The old king refused to believe anything was wrong and ordered the populace to continue swigging and feasting because the rains could not be far off, the clerics had assured him. That king was dead, and his daughter now sat on the clay throne.

The girl couldn’t believe people could be so shortsighted as to blame someone who was only trying to do her best. The She-King diligently slashed the rations of the clerics and soldiers down to the same as the general populace: one teardrop per day. She’d banned all travel and commerce to prevent thirst, and called on all pregnancies to be prevented while the world remained dry.

Otherwise, there was little else that could be said or done except to gather each night and stare into the clear black sky and pray for it to darken with clouds.

Standing on the bone-dry shore, the girl could only hope. In the distance, something caught her eye. A fiery flash in the sky blazed a trail of false clouds across the blue moon rising from the horizon. She blinked away the haze in her vision, not understanding what she saw, and took a step closer to the edge of the empty sea.

Whatever it was sliced through the dusty atmosphere and left a trail of smoke in its wake. Was this rain? She did not know what rain was meant to look like, but from the stories her parents and grandparents had told her, this didn’t seem like rain.

The dusty rocks underfoot dislodged and crumbled down the cliff edge, and she held back a bare foot in caution. Yet something drew her forward. She needed to know what this fiery thing shining like a metal star was. Had their god Calini returned? Perhaps he had come from the blue moon after forging a peace with the goddesses Aquina and Terrina, and ending this long drought. The gods were fighting, so the clerics had quickly explained as to the reason why the rains refused to fall, and they must all be diligent in their prayers and listen to the men lest the evil goddesses seep into their minds and turn them wicked.

The girl glanced back at the open plain, but there was no one else around. Not in the heat of the day, at least. Biting her broken lip and tasting dust, she decided to climb down the short distance and make her way toward the streak in the sky, tumbling ever closer to the ground.

By the time she got close to the bottom, the bright shiny streak had nearly disappeared from view. As her foot landed onto the cracked ground, a shudder rumbled through the rock. Or even through the very world.

The girl peered forward, tracing the rock line of the other side of the sea shore, looking for lumps or sites of impact. Then she saw it, a plume of dark black smoke snaking into the hazy sky. It looked to be just beyond the cliff edge. Glancing back once more, the girl wondered what to do. What would the She-King do? Would she rush back to the village and alert the sleeping elders? They would just bring more people from the city to come and investigate, priests and soldiers, people who would need to drink.

She could ignore it and turn back now. Pretend like nothing had happened. But her curiosity would never forgive her. And that was a coward’s way out. The She-King would never ignore a mystery such as this.

Suddenly her throat did not seem so dry. Her vision cleared with a flush of cleansing tears, and a spurt of energy rushed through her muscles like she’d just swigged a whole bottle dry. Without trepidation, without fear, the girl put one foot forward on the scarred and empty seabed and walked toward the mystery beyond.

*

Sarlord’s gills flapped as fresh air rushed through three slits on either side of his neck. Watery blue waves broke over the bow of the underwood ship, twisted fibers of green-blue wood harvested from the ocean floor riveted together to construct the great vessels of the seafolk. He sucked in the scent of dominion over his kingdom and whipped back matted coils of braided hair across his whaleskin clothes. He held on to the thick woven rope that wrapped around the bow and whipped up through the wind gusting behind hundred-meter sails of ink-black squidskin. Sarlord, king of all which was wet, didn’t need to look back to know his fleet was following in a perfect V-formation, twenty ships on either side. By now, the landsfolk would have seen the dark black line grow ever closer on the horizon. Throughout all recorded history, such a sight raised cries of terror in the lungs of the landsfolk. But not today. Today, they came in peace.

The water grew darker and dirtier. Not only from the reflection of the swollen, blood-red moon now obscuring half the sky, but because dry land was near, or what the landsfolk could claim of it these days. Beneath frothy waves stood the tips of mountains and washed out cities; farms and forests, riverbeds and plains. All of it under sea. All of it the rightful domain of Sarlord the Sea-King. For now.

But soon, the red moon would recede from the sky and take with it, as it always did, half the water of their world. The great spout of ocean would rush upward into the sky. For forty days and forty nights, typhoon twisters like the legs of giants would turn the red moon a dazzling purple as it stole half of Sarlord’s kingdom. The lands of men would glisten back into life as the waters receded. Mountains became mountains, cities became cities, rivers became rivers. For twenty years thereafter, their world would be at peace. The landsfolk would sow their crops, plow their fields and raise their cattle. For a generation they would provision and store and cultivate on what should be the grazing grounds of the bluefish and algae. The seafolk were forced to retreat to the ocean floor, where at least they might be safe from the hunting spears and fishing nets the landsfolk so loved to catch his people in.

But a generation later, the world would tip again. The red moon would no longer be only a speck in the night sky, but each night loom ever larger. Step-by-step, the throne of the Sea-King, which for twenty years would stick out above the waterline in the middle of an empty ocean, would slowly submerge into the deep. Day by day, the waters would rise, and all the peoples of the sea would emerge from their caves and coves and gather in the great ravine, treading water as the ocean slowly rose. Once the Sea-King could sit fully upon his pearl-white throne, then the time would have come. The time again for yet another war. As the landsfolk gathered up provisions they’d spent a generation preparing and dispersed to higher ground, the seafolk would mount their underwood ships, sharpen their coral swords, and head for the retreating shores.

So it was, so it had always been. Ever since the dawn of time when the great mother had birthed the twin goddesses Aquina and Terrina. The two sisters had fought so bitterly over the god Calini, whom they both wanted for a husband, that he disavowed them and departed to build a new kingdom upon the red moon in the sky. To the waves Aquina went, and to the land Terrina fled, forever to make war upon each other, jealous and bitter and angry that Calini no longer wanted either of them.

But that was about to end. Twenty years before, as the waters started to rise once again, Sarlord took the pearl throne from his old and war-weary father. He looked around his watery kingdom and issued a declaration, one which echoed across the ocean floor. The message was carried on the backs of great sea turtles, pictographed in schools of fish, marked in seaweed, and whispered in bubbles of conversation across every trench and in every cove. This time, the war would be their last. For after they had attacked the landsfolk, taking whatever goods and tools forged and grown in the domains of the Sea-King which the landsfolk occupied, the seafolk would turn their attention to the greatest of enemies: Calini himself. He sat up there in his bloodred moon, soaking up their ocean generation after generation, laughing as the children of Aquina and Terrina forever warred. Well, no more.

Sarlord had been raised to hate the landsfolk, as had every Sea-King before him. But he knew who the true enemy was. And he would be the king who would end the endless conflict once and for ever. Sarlord would sail into the heavens themselves and, with his sword of sharpened coral in hand, strike the face of a god.

“My king,” said Vergon, his first mate. “We have nearly reached the floating city.”

From the deep pocket of his whaleskin coat, Sarlord pulled out a telescope of pearl, polished till it was translucent, and held it to his beady black eye. There it was: the floating city of the landsfolk. Wrapped around the peaks of the ten tallest mountains, or what was left of them above the waterline. Specks of dry land on an otherwise endless ocean, with tens of thousands of floating chalets wrapped around the horizon, anchored to the mountain peaks so they would not float away in the storms. The city looked unruly, even from this distance. Masses of floating pontoons haphazardly rigged up to the otherwise sturdy enough floating homes. But the waters should have receded nearly two years ago. And the frustration was visible even from here. The floating city was bursting at the seams. More like a floating wreckage with the survivors making do.

“Good,” Sarlord said with a grunt, slipping the telescope back in his pocket and retreating from the bow and back toward the deck. It teemed with activity.

“Sarlord,” the rig master Galit, wrapped in woven rope, said, “I’ve double bound the rigging. It’ll survive whatever Calini can throw at us.”

“Good man.” Sarlord clapped him on the back with a big, heavy hand. “How’s it looking up there, Sangar?” he yelled up to the lookout atop the mast, busy making sure the ink-black squidskin sails were tightly fastened. The lookout gave him a thumbs-up.

“I’ve ordered every ship of the fleet to double their spare sails,” Vergon said as Sarlord paused to inspect the fresh, writhing catch of the day being hauled up the side of the ship.

“It’s a waste,” Sarlord said, leaning over and grabbing a flapping fish from the net. With one great bite he ripped off its head and chewed loudly. “We won’t need them over there.”

“But…my king, the skies are volatile,” Vergon quickened his pace to keep up as Sarlord took another bite from the half-eaten fish. “A ship that high with a ripped sail and no replacement… What will they do?”

“They’ll die,” Sarlord laughed deeply, spitting out the spine and tail of his snack. And he knew they would die for him. Each man could have remained under the ocean, tending to his flock or his family, but they chose to be here. They chose to follow him. They gave him their loyalty, their labor, and their blood, and in return he promised the spoils of war. But in this coming war, the spoils would be different. Not material things, but everlasting glory. And still, tens of thousands of them, chose to follow. And he was proud of all of them…save for one.

“Ready the boy. We’re going ashore.”

“Aye-aye, captain.”

Sarlord snarled, but at no one in particular.

“One more thing,” Sarlord said. “Make sure the boy is…presentable. We have an alliance to forge.”

His old friend nodded quietly in agreement. Vergon’s gills, chapped and open, flared with a snort, and he flapped his dreadlocked mane away from his silver-haired chest. The forest of glass and pearl beads in Vergon’s coral-white beard clicked together in the wind as he started to head below deck.

Sarlord stayed above, surveying the workings of his ship, of his fleet, as they edged ever closer to the landsfolk’s floating city. All the plans were laid, all the men ready to call to arms, even the old priest he kept locked below deck was ready to lift the curse that had held back the great spout for nigh on two years now. But the very last detail was not in his hands, but the boy’s. The boy would have to marry the Lands-King’s daughter one day. The boy would have to keep the alliance, and the engagement, together long enough for the fleet to set sail into the sky. It should be the very next morning, but with Malar in the equation, who knew. Sarlord sighed then burped up an eye of the fish. Curse the gods who gave to kings a son with nothing but water in his veins.

*

Prince Malar stood tall and shirtless in his cabin, flecks of light from outside the ship sneaking in through the rivets and knots in the blue-green underwood. The cabin was small, but at least it was private. Stavlan lay back on the prince’s hammock, not just shirtless, but bootless, too, admiring the prince as he admired himself in the dull mirror of polished oyster shell.

“You know you look good, Malar,” Stavlan said, swinging on the hammock with a sly grin.

Malar flexed his arm muscles, built up from hauling fishing nets, about the only thing his father let him do on the ship, and then finally let out the epic breath he’d been holding. Immediately, his chest deflated, and the slight pudge around his stomach returned to its resting state of normality.

“Not the worst,” Malar said, “but nothing compared to you.”

“Oh please.” Stavlan flicked his dreadlocks away from his bare, chiseled chest and played with the beads inside his beard. “You’re the handsomest man in the entire ocean.”

Malar turned away from the mirror and rolled his eyes with an obvious grin, knocking Stavlan in the side and sending the hammock swinging violently against the underwood walls.

“I can’t even grow a proper beard.” Malar stroked his smooth cheeks. Not a wisp of hair on them. A man of his age, not to mention his position, was expected to have a good four or five centimeters of braided beard. Stavlan had thirteen shiny beads of jade in his, indicating he’d circumnavigated the ocean thirteen times in his life. Malar had been around the globe more times than he could count. But counting he could not do. He had no beard to place his beads, and the king wouldn’t even entertain the idea of letting the prince put the beads in his hair or around his neck.

Malar turned back to the mirror and clenched his strong, square jaw, investigating the dark skin of his upper lip for the slightest sign of stubble or hairs ready to pop through. But there was nothing. Like his chest, his arms, his legs, Malar was a prince among men, yet his complete lack of body fur caused nothing but sighs of disappointment from his father. Malar stared longingly at Stavlan, swinging gently in the hammock. It was a testament to the strength of an underwood rope that it could hold a man as large as Stavlan. The strong, powerful man of the sea rubbed a hand through the thick, matted hair across his torso, and Malar shivered at the memory of being drawn into Stavlan’s gruff chest and held tightly between strong biceps. There were worse fates than being stuck on his father’s fleet.

The hammock was the only place in the small cabin to sit—that or the floor. Malar leaned against the wooden wall, watching the bootless, shirtless Stavlan on the hammock. The silence was like an undercurrent pulling them in closer. The taste of Stavlan flooded Malar’s mouth. His damp skin, wiry hair, carved muscles stretching out on the tethered ropes. Slowly, Stavlan slid his hand across the dark hair smothering his stomach muscles. Fingers which Malar knew very well. Those fingers of Stavlan’s he’d licked, fingers which had flicked his gills and penetrated places no man was meant to touch on the body of another. Those very same fingers now edged under his whaleskin trousers. The rubbery material stretched out, exposing the prickly bush which turned Malar from a prince of men to little more than a starving animal, desperate to gorge on the feast in front of him before it would all disappear.

Stavlan’s dreadlocks smacked against the underwood wall as he threw back his head and stretched out his leg so the sole of his webbed foot landed right onto Malar’s smooth chest. Hips wriggled out of the whaleskin. Dark, tempting skin sprang forth, aching to be touched, torn, twisted. Stavlan slipped the trousers farther down, powerful hips bordering flat flesh rough with hair like the prickle on a seashell. Malar felt himself drawn toward Stavlan like a great-winged albatross found its way to the singular rock in the ocean. Farther he fell down this dangerous whirlpool. Closer to Stavlan whose eyes never left the one thing Malar wanted more than anything.

“Days I’ve waited,” Stavlan whispered.

“You didn’t indulge with those women when we dropped anchor at the lagoon?”

“Not for me,” Stavlan said, stroking Malar’s smooth-as-shell cheek and edging him closer. “I cheered the lads on, but I’ve only got eyes for you.”

Malar grinned at the words, the touch, the scent drawing him in. The memory was real. Of those stolen moments on the ship. Only here, safe from prying eyes. Only above the waterline and far beyond the laws of the kingdom, safe from the reaches of his father’s wrath. Although Malar knew a technicality would not save his hide should they be caught. But he didn’t care. He would swim a thousand kilometers through waters infested with saber-tooth sharks to even have the chance to get close to Stavlan. To watch from the side of the ship as he and the other men stripped off their land clothes and dived headfirst into the ocean. To gasp in quiet awe as Stavlan emerged above the white-crested waves, flung back his thick dreadlocks with a splash, and shot Malar the special wink reserved only for him.

Just like he was doing now. Stavlan swinging gently on Malar’s own hammock, a hand gripping the base of his greatest asset, flinging back his dreadlocks and shooting Malar the longest wink he’d ever had.

“Prince Malar?” said a voice outside accompanied by a thump of a fist on the cabin door.

“Aquina’s grave,” Stavlan swore, stuffing himself back inside the whaleskin trousers, flying off the hammock, and smacking onto the underwood floor with an unwise crash.

“Malar, what’s going on in there?” The voice called out again.

“It’s Vergon,” Malar said breathlessly, spinning around the room to find their land clothes. Stavlan looked close to crashing through the very walls as he hopped from side to side in the cramped space trying to squeeze his feet back inside his boots.

“Nothing,” Malar called out. “I’m just…changing.”

“Well be quick,” Vergon replied, not sounding altogether convinced. “Your father is ready to go ashore and wants you with him.”

“Uh, I’ll be right there.”

“Go ashore?” Stavlan mouthed. Malar shrugged. It didn’t surprise him that his father wanted him by his side as he brokered terms of the next peace. One day Malar would be Sea-King and would have to negotiate matters of war and peace with the landsfolk too. Best to learn now, while the tide was still high, and the kingdom of the sea covered all there was.

They waited quietly, without moving as Vergon stepped away on the creaking underwood floor.

“I think he’s gone,” Malar said, listening for the familiar sound of nothing to return outside his cabin, tucked away between the sleeping dens for the rest of the crew where they slept in shifts, ten apiece. Stavlan wrapped his woven shirt around the toned, taut muscles of the body Malar had been so close to tasting, put an ear to the door and nodded in agreement that now was the time to depart.